Ruth Benedict, "Patterns of Culture"

"A very little acquaintance with other conventions, and a knowledge of how various these may be, would do much to promote a rational social order." -Ruth Benedict, "Patterns of Culture," 1934, 10.

LP Hartley, "The Go-Betweens"

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." - L.P. Hartley, "The Go-Betweens," 1963

Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques"

"Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at a cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind."
-Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques," 1973.

Three Books on the Favelas of Rio de Janerio

     In 2010, the Brazilian GDP rose a staggering 7.5%, the fastest rate of growth the nation has seen in 25 years.  Indeed, Brazilian economic prospects have rarely appeared better, especially given recently discovered off-shore oil reserves.  A recent New York Times article "Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of the $35 Martini" described the effect which this upturn has had upon one of Brazil’s most important cities, Rio De Janerio.  The currently bullish climate has encouraged highly skilled immigrants to make Rio their home, helping to make the city one of the world’s most expensive places in which to live.  Despite these economic gains and important future prospects, Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, with Rio again leading the way.  The three books under review in this article help to explain this disparity, and just as importantly point to possible ways in which to militate against the worst of the socio-political effects of Brazilian capitalism.

     The curious geography and particular history of Rio have created a city in which the disproportion in wealth can be quite jarring.  Foreigners with Ivy League degrees are merely the most recent group to arrive to this city famously situated by the beach; for decades, and in increasing numbers, poor Brazilians from the interior of the country have arrived in search of the work lacking in their origin communities.  Limited finances coupled with discrimination from Caricios (as the residents of Rio are called), led these intrepid peoples to form their new communities on the steep hillside overlooking the downtown and beach districts.  These residences often began illegally, as squatters built on vacant land.  After a great deal of struggle, many of these favelas have since gained varying degrees of official sanction and government services.  And yet they provide a striking demonstration of the inequality to be found in Brazilian society.  Indeed, the US$10,000 a month apartment mentioned in the above New York Times piece most likely offers its inhabitants amazing views of both the ocean and this grinding poverty.

     Few academics would seem to have a better understanding of Rio’s favelas than sociologist Janice Perlman, a thoroughgoing knowledge much evidenced by her 2010 book entitled Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.  The forty years of the title refer to the period Perlman has spent studying and living in various favelas, work which has resulted in several publications.  The most important of these works, often described by specialists as a “landmark,” is her 1976 The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janiero.  Perlman argued in The Myth of Marginality that Rio’s slums were not inhabited by backwards, lazy, or pre-modern peoples, as was often the contemporary viewpoint. Rather, she wrote, these peoples were integral components of Caricao society.  The poor worked exceedingly hard for paltry rewards, while being subjected to state sponsored repression.  Without this labor, Perlman showed, the wealth of Rio society at large could never have been generated.  The stigmatized slum dweller was thus every bit a Caricao as the wealthy of the central portions of the city.

     Favela represents this sociologist’s recent work upon her return to Rio’s poor districts in an attempt to follow up her earlier research.  Perlman labors quite hard to meet with the people she had known from the 1960s and 1970s, while continuing discussions with the contacts she did not lose.  As such, her book represents a singular chance to see how poverty is and is not transmitted between generations.   This sociologist is also able to follow up her earlier hypotheses regarding the “myth” of marginality.  Finally, the reader is presented with the changes, both positive and negative, to be found from the time of the Brazilian dictatorship to the today’s democracy.  This is done through exhaustive research of actual individuals in various stages of life, a remarkable source of evidence.

     Perhaps most importantly, Perlman discovered just how effective community solidarity can be.  Many of the areas she returns to study in Favela have changed a good deal only after such activism, with such essentials as plumbing , electricity, street lighting, and so on to be found in areas in which in such things were previously absent.  Further, many children of her first subjects had been able to effectively use programs fought for by their forerunners to improve their economic positions.  The legality of property ownership in favelas had also been seen to have become somewhat more officially recognized.  Further, the unrelenting work by residents to improve their environs had led to more stable places of residence, with brick, mortar, and concrete replacing less stable materials.  Unfortunately, Perlman discovered just how persistent the prejudice against residents of favelas continues to be.  Favela outsiders still often see their impoverished neighbors as criminals, or potential criminals, to be refused the full rights of other Caricaos.

     The most dangerous change Perlman describes is the rise of the drug trade in Rio, a form of criminality which became increasingly evident as the 1980s progressed.  Sociologist Enrique Desmond Arias makes this shift the topic of his 2006 work Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security.  In many ways, Rio’s shanty towns represent an almost over-determined location of drug related violence.  Geographically, the city provides a site of international shipment quite close to Andean centers of cocaine production.  Further, Rio’s wealthy inhabitants and tourists make for ideal consumers.  Finally, the maze of unnamed streets and the easily defended steep avenues of the faveleas coupled with a lack of a local police force represent ideal conditions for the drug trade.

     Much like Perlman, Desmond Arias argues that the current climate of drug fueled violence to be found in so many faveleas is integrally related to the citizenry found in the rest of the city.  He meets with a variety of individuals, from community and political leaders to those plying the drug trade, to better portray the relationships which have contributed to the violent social landscape.  Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro describes, for instance, how one community leader uses his ties to drug gangs to augment his power in relation to outside politicians while also using those very same outside ties to try to control the dealers.  Desmond Arias further displays the problems created by a corrupt, prejudiced, and violent police force whose actions often are by turns counterproductive and murderous.  Unfortunately, the violence is an outcome of power-elite machinations, something which again seems to argue for community based activism as the only effective solution.

     The final book here under review is an autobiography authored by Benedita da Silva, a favelea resident turned community activist turned senator.  In An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love the reader is treated to a life story which should be recognizable after a reading of the two previously discussed books.  Da Silva was born into an extremely impoverished family, living in a house made of cardboard, going to bed hungry, seeing her sister forced into prostitution, having a botched abortion; all of it depressingly familiar.  However, she was able to attend classes and begin a political career with the help of a supportive husband and her obviously extremely high intelligence rate.  Interestingly, she was also an earlier member of the Worker’s Party, which would go on to become the recently successful party of former President Lula De Silva and current President Dilma Rousseff.

     An Afro-Brazialian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love is of course a political work, however, and it does speak to some rather particular scandals involving Senator Da Silva.  There is also a great deal of material on her work, from fighting for indigenous people’s rights to her vocalization of feminism in a sometimes quite misogynistic society.  Surprisingly for a political leader, or at least surprising to a US reader, there are some fairly intimate familial and sexual details included in this piece.  Overall, though, the book once again speaks to the effectiveness of political activism and solidarity on the part of favelea dwellers.  Da Silva herself has benefited from the effects of such political consciousness, with her own political work continuing this positive influence.  Indeed, it would seem that little would change in Rio’s faveleas if it were not for such involvement. 

     These studies of Rio’s impoverished areas demonstrate the interconnected relationship between poverty and wealth; there are no wealthy without many more poor supporting their lifestyles.  In Rio, so far the only relatively effective way of countering this has been for the poor themselves to collectively fight.  This need not be the case, however.  Allowing poverty and violence on the scale experienced by favelea residents ultimately endangers the stability of the entire socioeconomic system, an especially dangerous outcome for those wealthy few benefiting most from that system's continuance.  It should likewise be pointed out that the case of this Brazilian city is aberrant relative only to its recent economic boom.  As environmental historian Mike Davis has shown in Planet of Slums, the growth of impoverished urban areas is a global phenomenon as “cities will account for virtually all future population growth…”  Thus, the residents of shanty towns should not be left to demand their rights as human beings alone; we should join them in their struggle for the good of all, in Rio and the world generally.

David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World"

"The only uniquely significant thing about humans...is our ability to create new explanations."
-David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World," 2011.

Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6"

"Truth- and life too- can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor."
- Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6," 1951

Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands"

     "The local manager, a relation of Raoul's, was a friend of mine. 'It's wonderful stuff,' he said. 'The locals adore it. It keeps them off the rum.' It's true. An increasing number of the inhabitants of Fort-de-France circulate the capital in a permanent state of stone-cold sobriety, their insides awash with this strange brown liquid. The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization- the Coca-Cola age, yoke fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.
     The bottles, when they are emptied, are sent back to be refilled, but the tin can capsules that seal them are littered everywhere. They clatter against your shoes in the dust and pile up in rusty drifts in the gutters. Bit by bit they will form a metal humus all over the western hemisphere, so that centuries after the bomb has done its work and made way, perhaps for a nobler detritus, archaeologists will be able to put a date to our buried remains with the help of this stratum of small round lids."
-Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveler's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands," 1950

Jean Paul Sartre, "Nausea"

"I do not think, therefore I am a mustache." -Jean Paul Satre, "Nausea," 1938

Salmon Rushdie, "The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey"

      I asked my well-worn question: "What do you think the government should do, then? Should it try and make peace with the Americans?"
     "You said 'Americans'," she reproached me.
     "I'm sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians. Them."
     "It's alright," she forgave me quickly. "When I first came to Europe from Nicaragua, it would shock me to hear the US called 'America.' I wanted to protest, But we are America, not just them. But now I say it too: America, Americans. Europe teaches you a different perspective."
     "Yes," I agreed, "it certainly does."
-Salmon Rushdie, "The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey", 1987

Three Books on Native Americans in the US-Mexican Borderlands, 1700-1900

     In the early 18th Century, the Comanche Indians first began to enter the plains and desert regions of what would later become the southeastern United States and northern Mexico.  These indigenous peoples quickly adapted to their new home, transforming themselves in a matter of decades into one of the most dominant groups in the region.  By the 1800s, the Comanches had become successful traders, exchanging goods and raiding their neighbors for profit as part of the period's international capitalist system.  They had also been able to subjugate first Spanish colonists as well as later Mexican and US settlers.  By the later 1800s this extension of indigenous power had precipitously declined, but for a period lasting generations the Comanches had successfully wielded enormous power over the area.

     This is not the standard story of Native American decimation at the hands of various imperial powers, a story much engrained in US popular historical consciousness.  Even those quite sympathetic to the plights of indigenous peoples have often followed an account of their supposed irredeemable march towards socio-cultural doom, what more recent historians of the period have termed “declensionist” narratives (for a classic example of such a declensionist framework see Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History).  Beginning with the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, historians began to complicate earlier ideas of inevitable indigenous dissolution, even in some cases quite refuting declensionist conclusions.  The three works here under review represent very impressive recent contributions to this continuing revisionist project.
     Historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s 2008 The Comanche Empire demonstrates the kind of surprising conclusions provided by such different historical frameworks.  Hämäläinen’s exciting argument is that the Comanche Indians not only resisted outside pressures, but that they actually were able to implement a “reverse” or “indigenous” imperialism.   He begins by portraying the Spanish colonial settlements of southwestern North America as being so harried by Comanche raids as to be willing to submit to a tributary system.  While these Bourbon Spanish settlers believed that their “gifts” might have a “civilizing” effect on their Indian advisories, the Comanches successfully maintained a great deal of power over their supposed overlords.  In fact, Spanish sources of the period often testify to the superior armaments and political organization which the Comanches wielded over them.  And, when the tributary system broke down, the Comanches began to use these Spanish settlements as a source of horses, food, goods, etc. to be raided at will.  Indeed, the Spanish were effectively allowed to remain by the Comanches, according the Hämäläinen, merely to serve as a source of trade-able commodities like horses and cloth. 

     The Comanche Empire holds similarly shocking material regarding the 19^th century, as well.  After Mexico had gained its independence, government officials in Mexico City proved unable and unwilling to maintain the earlier tributary system.  The Comanches proceeded to use their superior strength to take what had formerly been given, leading to decades of serious fighting and the semi-depopluation of northern Mexico.  So great was this prolonged crisis that several Mexican territories, most notably New Mexico and Texas, began to work actively against the central government’s policies.  Indeed, these state governments often worked against one another so great was their desperation.  And into this breach marched first US nationals looking to trade, and later the US government itself.  Thus, the US-Mexican War in many ways was prefigured by the Comanche form of “indigenous” imperialism.

     What factors impelled the Comanche subjugation of first the Spanish and later the Mexicans?  Hämäläinen provides several possible motivations, from raids as an outlet for ambitious young men to prove themselves, to environmental factors pushing the Comanches to locate ever larger sources of fodder for their huge herds of horses, to the economic incentives of trading stolen goods for foreign manufactured materials.  Most importantly, though, was the Comanche conception of goods; if one had a surplus of goods needed by another party, and if that surplus was denied a good faith request, then simply appropriating the products in question held no social stigma.  Thus, Comanche raids were not seen as thievery, but rather as a kind of socially sanctified leveling.

      Brian Delay’s 2008 War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican Border treats with similar material and themes as Hämäläinen’s work, but highlights other rationales behind Comanche raiding.  The period upon which Delay most focuses is that following Mexican Independence after peace between the Comanches and the colonists had broken down.  The resulting depopulated settlements became a "thousand deserts."  Delay highlights feelings of betrayal, and the cyclical and every increasing need for vengeance against the supposed betrayers, as one important source of Comanche violence.  While raids produced economic surplus, outlets for social pressure, etc., this historian sees the outsized violence as mainly a cultural byproduct of Comanche rage.
     Most helpfully, though, Delay makes the case that raids and warfare should be explained as political events with a history.  Rather than simply follow generalized sociological, economic, or ecological theories to explain Comanche and anti-Comanche violence, War of a Thousand Deserts attempts to explain the people and events behind systemic forces.  Seemingly an obvious historiographical tactic, but one not often enough employed when discussing indigenous peoples.  As difficult as it sometimes is, given the paucity of traditional historical source material, it is nonetheless important to rediscover the political figures behind Indian violence to truley understand the period.
     The War of a Thousand Deserts also makes an interesting argument regarding the differing reactions of US and Mexican citizenry to native deprivations.  Mexicans living in regions not directly in contact with the border regions often saw Comanches and other indigenous peoples almost as Mexicans that did not know that they were Mexican.  Theoretically, and contra contemporaneous US notions of who was "American", all those who were born within "Mexico" were officially "Mexicans."  While those who had experienced Indian violence often denigrated the notion, this theory of citizenship did much to limit Mexican counteroffensives.  Those from the US, however, held no such compunction and were therefore more amendable to ideas of violent "extermination."  Indeed, Delay demonstrates that the "thousand deserts" which northern Mexico had become served to reinforce US racist feelings both of superiority to Mexican inabilities to properly use the land and notions of Indian barbarity. 
     Finally, Karl Jacoby's 2008 Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History serves to demonstrate some of the reasons why conclusions like those reached by Delay and Hämäläinen seem so surprising to contemporary readers.  Jacoby takes as his subject an 1871 massacre of Apache Indians perpetrated by O'odham Indians, Mexicans, and Americans at a US military installation named Camp Grant.  Rather than create a single narrative, Shadows at Dawn presents the same story from four separate viewpoints; those of the perpetrators and the Apaches.  This is intended to reinforce the difficulty, or perhaps injustice, traditionally linear history can present in relation to mutually distinct conceptions of the same event.  The piece further highlights this theoretical concern with a quite nuanced use of language; the glossary at the back of the book is quite helpful, as Delay attempts to use his informants' languages as much as possible.
     Tracing the Camp Grant massacre to the present helps Delay show how the American viewpoint eventually triumphed, and from where later declensionist narratives partially originated.  This is of course much to do with power, as the US members of the raiding party successfully shaped the later depictions of this violence through a historical society, newspapers, etc.  Shadows at Dawn does depict the continued existence of dissident viewpoints, however, and perhaps even their proliferation in more recent times.  Lamentably, however, Delay does not focus more upon the trial of the perpetrators of the Camp Grant massacre.  The one point in which at least three viewpoints came together, and perhaps the initial mainstreaming of the US conception of the event, is given but a few pages.  Nonetheless, Delay has crafted an outstanding and very original piece.
      Taken together, these three works represent an exciting extension of work done in the past few decades upon the southwestern US and northern Mexico in 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.  This is an almost fractal period of confusion and socio-political reformulation, and one which holds great potential for new historical conceptualizations.  As such, a great many interesting works have been coming out of research into this time and place, beginning with works like David Weber's 1982 The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico right up to more modern works in the "Borderlands" tradition..  The pieces here under review represent an extension of that work into representations of a more forceful, "imperialist" indigenous population; a population yet poorly understood.
    

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death"

     So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.
     Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
     American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
     The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
     When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, seperating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again. 
     The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", 1968

Thomas Henry Huxley, "On Agnosticism and Evolutionary Ethics"

    "When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis," -had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble..." - Thomas Henry Huxley, "On Agnosticism and Evolutionary Ethics", 1889

Hunter S. Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved"

    I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast and jumping my monster car back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the right exit. There is a slim chance, I thought, that I might be able to catch that ugly Britisher before he checked in.
     But Steadman was already in the press box when I got there, a bearded young Englishman wearing a tweed coat and RAF sunglasses. There was nothing particularly odd about him. No facial veins or clumps of bristly warts. I told him about the motel woman's description and he seemed puzzled. "Don't let it bother you," I said. "Just keep in mind for the next few days we're in Louisville, Kentucky. Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place. You're lucky that mental defective at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you." I laughed, but he looked worried.
     "Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin," I said. "If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace." I showed him the can of "Chemical Billy," resisting the urge to fire it across the room at a rat-faced man typing diligently in the Associated Press section. We were standing at the bar, sipping the management's Scotch and congratulating each other on our sudden, unexplained luck in picking up two sets of fine press credentials. The lady at the desk had been very friendly to him, he said. "I just told her my name and she gave me the whole works."
      By mid-afternoon we had everything under control. We had seats looking down on the finish line, color TV and a free bar in press room, and a selection of passes that would take us anywhere from the clubhouse roof to the jockey room. The only thing we lacked was unlimited access to the clubhouse inner sanctum in sections "F&G"...and I felt we needed that, to see the whiskey gentry in action. The governor, a swinish neo-Nazi hack named Louie Nunn, would be in "G," along with Barry Goldwater and Colonel Sanders....

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"

"In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency.  What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive." - Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Three Books on the Interactions Between the US and the Barbary Coast, 1776 - 1882

      

          George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, John Paul Johns; all of them amongst the more famous of the United States’ early power-elite, and all of them concerned at one time or another with the pirates of the Barbary Coast of North Africa.  While most of the contemporary population of the US most likely has a very slim grasp upon the historical import of North Africa in early North American history, the three books here under review demonstrate how very formative those interactions were during the period from 1776 to the mid to late 1800s.   

                In recent years, much of the historiography dealing with US history has shifted its focus outwards, "internationalizing national history" in one historian’s quotable formulation.  This emphasis has certainly picked up a great deal of speed since the 1990s, with the advent of “globalization” and the increasing spread of variously related socio-political shifts (the internet, the EU, the ICC, neo-liberalism, etc).  Thus, contemporary observers are perhaps more apt to place ostensibly localized events within a more totalizing, global context.  The seeming banality of this approach removes none of its utility, however; especially in regards to the US, certainly one of the most expansionist powers of the previous two centuries.  Barbary Coast privateering (also corsairing, or piracy) presented the US with an early, and quite formidable, obstacle to this commercial, military, and cultural expansionism.

                The Barbary Coast during the period in question was comprised most importantly of Morocco, Algeriers, Tunis, and Tripoli.  Officially part of the Ottoman Empire, by the late 17^th century the various governmental units of these regions had effectively gained their independence as well as a certain coherency as proto nation-states.   Their economies had also come to rely heavily upon both piracy as well as tribute paid by various states for protection against such activities.  A rather ritualized cycle had developed, whereby one of the Barbary states would declare war on an outside country, take a few of their ships hostage, then negotiate a return of the crew and goods in exchange for tributary “presents.”  Or, if negotiations failed, they might sell the crew into slavery and repurpose the ships in question for use in later corsair operations.

                Prior to US independence, these North African corsairs did not represent much of a threat to North American commerce.  Under the protection of the powerful British Navy, ships from the colonies did not much worry over piracy.  This temporary security allowed for a rapid and increasingly important commercial interaction.  After the break with the British, however, the newly formed US was left to face the corsair threat to their important Mediterranean shipping with neither a formal Navy nor the means to acquire one.  Thusly, one of the first geo-political problems that the US was to face took shape.     

                Historian Frank Lambert depicts these interactions as an early challenge to US sovereignty within the context of the “Atlantic World” in his 2005 work The Barbary Wars: American Independance in the Atlantic World.  The “Atlantic World” to which Lambert refers is a recent historiographical trend which argues for the existence of a semi-enclosed historical space roughly delineated by the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean.  Under this rubric, Bernard Bailyn for example has described how the settlers and slaves which came to live in North America brought with them cultural assumptions which proceeded to mutate in their new environments, mutations which then traveled back to their sending communities to effect change at home.  Thus, a large scale system developed, a context in which The Barbary Wars argues the early US had to demonstrate its ability to not simply operate effectively as a nation-state, but to exert a certain amount of control of events.  

              And Lambert’s The Barbary Wars does successfully describe the challenges that the corsairs represented within this framework.  European states, particularly the British and the French, successfully sabotaged several rounds of US negotiations with the Barbary states as they saw the North Americans as potential rivals in the Atlantic economy.  Much of the US political elite saw the problem in the same light, concerned as they were with expanding trade in a fiscal system already dominated by the European imperial powers.  As Lambert points out, the various piratical crises with the corsairing states went a long way to provoke the creation of the US Navy.  Releatedly, and again pace The Barbary Wars, one important reason that the famously problematic Articles of Confederation were scraped for the Constitution was the need for the greater taxation powers necessary to pay tribute and naval expenses for the rows with North African pirates.

                Lambert rather brusquely argues in The Barbary Wars that religion played little if any role in these disputes; that they were “primarily about trade, not theology…” James A. Field, Jr.’s 1969 America and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 demonstrates how including non-governmental historical actors in this narrative belies this contention, however.  For example, Field shows how a 1787 treaty with the Emperor of Morocco might have come to a conclusion beneficial to the US based upon the entreaties of a Spanish Christian preacher, and his convincing of the emperor that “Islamic” Morocco and the “Christian” US had much common theological ground.  Field goes on to demonstrate the intimate connection between US trade and proselytizing, although he does do so on a longer time scale than does Lambert’s Barbary Wars.

                Field also places these events in a rather different geographical construct than does Lambert; that of the “Mediterranean World”, rather than that formed by the Atlantic basin.  The idea of a “Mediterranean World” began much earlier than its Atlantic counterpart, often seen as beginning with the publication of Ferdinand Braudel’s dense, masterful, and massively boring two volume 1949 work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World.  Much like the concept of the “Atlantic World” which it would later influence, Braudel’s theoretical construct posited an integrated socio-cultural structure bounded by geography.  It is Field’s interesting contention that the US should be included in this complex as well, an early extension of US history of which more recent historians like Lambert would certainly applaud.

                Former US ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco Richard B. Parker brings the story down from such heights, to focus upon the personalities involved in his Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History Rather than depict large scale trends like Lambert and Field, Parker’s narrative is a micro-history of “America’s first hostage crisis”; the 1785 capture by Algerian corsairs of two US merchant ships and their respective crews.  Parker highlights the importance of cultural assumptions and personality in diplomatic negotiation; for example, how a less than qualified, rather disorganized US envoy made this particular “hostage crisis” last much longer than it might have.  Uncle Sam in Barbary likewise demonstrates the constraints in which US diplomacy of the time operated, from communication difficulties to the poor credit of the early US government.  Unfortunately, Parker does this through the use of massive block quotes, many of which are more than a page and often difficult to navigate.  There are also several authorial slippages within in this piece whereby the US envoys become “us”, a lamentable assumption of the book’s audience. As a case study, Uncle Sam in Barbary does its job however, lending detail to the more overarching narratives of the previous two books described in this review.

                Taken together, these three works point towards a number of important conclusions.  First, US history should be considered a global, rather than a national, affair.  From its very inception, this North American state was part of an integrated socio-political complex in which seemingly domestic concerns like state taxation policies were very much affected by events sometimes quite geographically distant.  Secondarily, simplistic notions of the “West” versus the “Islamic World” found in works like Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of Global Order do a poor job illuminating US history (though they do a great job of promoting jingoism).  As we have seen, it is quite possible to write a history of the interaction between the Barbary Coast and the US without much recourse to the supposed inimicality of “Islamic” and “Christian” states.  Furthermore, where the interface between these two religions has had a historical role, it need not be one of confrontation.  Finally, although these events have been mostly forgotten in the contemporary historical consciousness of the US public, it should be clear that they still have resonance.  Indeed, Lambert’s The Barbary Wars goes so far as to depict these episodes as a continuation of the War of Independence from British imperialism.  While I might not recommend reading Uncle Sam in Barbary before taking a look at the other two works under consideration, I would certainly recommend taking the time to read more on this fascinating and little known contact between the early US and North Africa.