THE WORLD SINCE 1492
a glossary of some key terms
Please note: this glossary contains only the the key terms for which
we are providing written definitions and explanations. For a complete
list of the key terms, navigate over to Key Terms by Lecture.
Select the first letter of the word from the list above
to jump to appropriate section of the glossary. If the term you are looking for
starts with a digit or symbol, choose the '#' link.
ABSOLUTISM -- Most abstractly, absolutism
is a term for the political theory that argues that a ruler over a realm or
state should have absolute power. But the term is used more specifically,
and concretely, to refer to political theory that supported the project of
state centralization and state-building under monarchs that occurs in
Christendom/Europe, from the late 16th through the late 18th centuries.
This absolutist political project of monarch-centered state-building and
state-centralizing was quite expensive, and taxation in its support was a
central factor in the 17th-century English "civil war" and the late
18th-century French Revolution. English and French absolutist political
projects were both reactive to the expansion of Hapsburg power, which in turn
was heavily financed by silver from New Spain. Louis XIV's famous
statement, "L'etat c'est moi" (or 'the state is me'), is often taken
as emblematic of absolutism.
ALLEGORY -- An allegory is a story that is also
about "something else," meaning something other than what a given
story is most explicitly or literally about. For example, histories or
ethnographic accounts of particular persons often make assumptions about--and
thus are also about--human nature more generally. Indeed, since
almost all stories suggest other things to their audiences, and since almost
everyone who listens to or reads a given story makes connections between it and
other matters, almost all stories and readings of them are
allegorical. Finally, when a word or phrase tells a story that is not
part of its explicit or literal definition, we can speak of that story as an
allegory or as an allegorical dimension of the word or phrase.
ALTERNATE
YEARS AT COURT -- Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, most daimyo were
required to spend alternate years at the shogun's court in Edo. Before
the establishment of a centralized state under the Tokugawa Shogunate (in the
second half of the 16th century and first decades of the 17th century), the
Daimyo had been quite autonomous, local lords. The institution of
alternate attendance was one of a number of means used by the shogunate to
weaken the daimyo and make them dependent. The institution of alternate
attendance lessened any opportunity for daimyo to develop a local base of
support in their own territory, since they had to be away every other year.
It also weakened them financially, since both the second household (in Edo) and
the processions to and from Edo were costly. The institution of alternate
attendance was made compulsory after 1635.
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BALTIC
AMSTERDAM GRAIN TRADE -- Particularly during the second half of
the 1500s and into the 1600s, agricultural production in the "low
countries" (or the Netherlands) gradually shifted from the production of
grain, which had supported both the subsistence needs of agricultural households
and supplied food to Amsterdam and other cities in the low countries, to luxury
goods (notably tulips and rotting, coagulated milk). This might well have
involved both significant profits for those who owned the production of the new
luxury good and a decline in living standards for most persons in the
low countries, had there been no new source of grain, to replace the loss of
grain production. But something else happened. Significant
quantities of grain began to be imported into the Netherlands from Baltic
ports. This grain was grown by unfree serfs on large estates in Eastern
Europe, as for example in the countryside outside of Warsaw. With this
relatively novel trade in grain, Amsterdam (and other Dutch cities) imported
enough grain annually "to feed well over half a million people" (De
Vries, 161). This continuing "bulk trade" in a non-luxury good
"over such a distance" marked a significant, if gradient, departure
from the economy of late Christendom (De Vries 162). (The quotations are
taken from J. De Vries, The Economy of Europe in the Age of
Crisis, 1600-1750 [1976]).
BIOSPHERE -- The part of the earth that supports
life. For some purposes, it is useful to divide the biosphere into the atmosphere,
lithosphere, and hydrosphere.
CHRISTENDOM -- A term for the aggregate
of realms that are under the rule of a Christian monarch (sometimes said to be
a "prince" or "king"). In retrospect, given our
knowledge of the geographic location of such Christian realms in the past, the
location and area of Christendom around 1500 corresponds roughly to what
we now know as Europe. Yet the correspondence is only rough and depends
upon modern knowledge of where Christian realms were located. One
disparity in the referent of Christendom (as it existed) and Europe (as it
exists now) is that for several centuries prior to 1492, the Iberian peninsula
was ruled by Islamic rulers and thus was not part of Christendom, though it is
today a part of Europe. In addition, many persons in parts of Christendom
that are now found in Europe believed in the existence of Christian realms
located in the geographic area of Africa and India, and they included those
(imagined) realms in Christendom. Moreover, while the two terms may, in
retrospect, refer to more or less the same areas of land (and thus can be said
to have quite similar referential meaning), they differ greatly as concepts
(and thus have very different significance). To start with the most basic
difference in the concepts: the lands of Christendom are identified by the
religion of their ruling groups, whereas the composition of Europe is defined
in relation to geography. In terms of this concept of Europe, however, it
is important to note that is not grounded in any objective facts about
geography, since we cannot find any distinct European land mass, given the way
"Europe" and "Asia" blur into one another. The
notion, or concept, of a discrete European continent developed, despite the absence
of any objective geographic boundary between it and Asia, along with the
emergence of the fantasy of a distinct "European" or
"white" race. This reveals that the shift from Christendom to
Europe involved two closely connected changes: one the one hand, a shift from a
practice of defining territories by their rulers to a practice of defining them
by the populations inhabiting them, and on the other hand, a shift from
defining territories in terms of religion to defining them by imagined racial
categories. On this view, the appeal to physical geography in defining
"Europe" is a fantasy that grounds and supports the division of
humanity into (imagined) races.
It is important to remember that Christendom was divided into multiple
"churches" which disagreed on many theological points. Two of the
most major "churches," Latin Christendom and Orthodox Christendom,
correspond roughly to two modern referents: Latin Christendom corresponds
roughly to what is today Western Europe and Orthodox Christendom corresponds
roughly to Eastern Europe, inclusive of Turkey.
One more point to note is that Christendom was splintered by the
Protestant Reformation that begin, roughly speaking, in the 1520s.
CITY -- an area of such dense inhabitation
that it cannot provide for its own subsistence, and vice-versa, as it were, an
area of such dense inhabitation that it produces more waste (human
particularly) that it is healthy to live with. If cities do not minimally
address the first of these problems, though do not exist. However, they can
largely ignore the second problem and continue, if in a distinctly stinky (to
our noses) and often unhealthy way. Because they must extract subsistence
from somewhere else, cities manifest a boundary between, or a separation of,
the city and countryside. With industrialization,
the above definition of a city comes to be too broad (it includes social sites
that are not recognized as cities), since with industrialization, huge parts of
the world cease being able to feed themselves, and thus this lack of capacity for
subsistence no longer distinguishes cities from, say, what emerges as
suburbs. But in the world of 1500ish, this is a good definition.
CIVILIZATION/NON-CIVILIZATION
BINARY -- see the following entry, on "Civilization,
Barbarism, and Savagery," from The Encyclopedia of World
History (2005), edited by William H. McNeill et al.
CLASS -- The
positions in (or the positions defined by distinct relations to)
capitalism. At a general level, one can distinguish at least three broad
class positions in capitalism: (i) owners and investors, (ii) salaried work
supervisors or managers, and (iii) those who do physical labor. More
thorough analyses of particular capitalist systems of production
will, however, make finer and more specific distinctions of class
positions, and it is worth emphasizing that class positions in different
capitalist orders will not be exactly the same.
Class is also used in a broader and less historically specific sense to refer
to the positions in (or the positions defined by distinct relations to)
any system of production, not just capitalist systems of production. When
used in this broad and cross-historical way, it is crucial to recognize that
different systems of production have very different class
positions. The manorial system of production does not have the class
positions of the factory system of industrial capitalism, for
instance. [And you should be prepared to explain and illustrate this
point if you are explaining this key term.]
In
analyzing class positions (whether in the broader or more historically
particular sense), it is often important to pay attention to the ways persons
are placed into different class positions, as when persons are positioned in a
system of production on the basis of imagined racial identity (to give one
example) or on the basis of “merit” (to give a second example).
One
potential confusion to note is that historians and social scientists sometimes
use “class” not to speak about positions in a system of production (or positions
in capitalist systems of production, if the term is being used in the narrower
sense), but for the set of persons who together occupy a given
position.
COMMODITY -- Any good or service that is produced
or exchange for the purpose of getting the most for the least in monetary
terms, that is for profit; see also money.
COVENANT CHAIN -- An ongoing set of
councils and treaties between English colonies in North America and Iroquois
League. These treaties and councils covered such contentious matters as
trade, settlement, and the resolution of episodes of violence between
Anglo-settlers and Native peoples. The Covenant Chain operated from the
late 17th century until the middle of the 1750s. During most of its
operation, new York took the lead in representing the English colonies.
The Covenant Chain broke down when representatives of the different colonies
could not agree among themselves on a common position to take when meeting with
representatives of the League. After the breakdown in the Covenant Chain,
the English state took a much more active role in dealing with Native Americans
in the North America.
CULTURE -- learned (rather than biologically
inherited), collective (rather than either individual or universal) principles
that shape or organize human thought, habits, actions, and institutions. Persons that share a given cultural
principle, or cluster of such principles, are not necessarily a social group,
so there is no one-to-one correspondence between “culture” and “a society” or
“a people.” Just as cultural principles
are not natural or determined by nature, so too they are not functional or
determined by objective needs. The valuing of gold and silver—seeing them as
“precious”—is a cultural principle that defines the meaning of gold; in the
world of 1500ish, this understanding or meaning of gold and silver was a
cultural understanding dispersed widely across Afro-Eurasia, rather than a
cultural understanding of one specific group or society. So too, the practice
of using these metals, in the form of coined money (or “species”), was a
cultural practice shared widely across Afro-Eurasia. of
gold.
DAWES PLAN (1924) -- A plan for European
economic recovery developed by the United States. Under the plan, the U.S.
loaned the German government capital to finance recovery. Germany used the
money to pay war reparations to Britain and France and to redevelop heavy
industry. Britain and France in turn used the German war reparations to rebuild
and to repay their own war loans from the U.S. These war loans had been the key
contribution of the U.S. to the Allied forces’ victory in World War I.
THE DIFFERENTIATION (OR DICHOTIMIZATION) OF
COUSINS –Cousin, as you already know, is a kinship
term that refers to any child of a sibling of one of your parents. An alternative way to say exactly the same
thing is that Person A and Person B, are cousins if one of A’s parents and one
of B’s parents are siblings, so cousins are related by descent to siblings in
the parental generation.
Note, then, that
cousins include children of (i) your father’s brothers, (ii) your father’s
sisters, (iii) your mother’s brothers, and (iv) your mother’s sisters. What you likely have not considered previous
to taking this course is that (i) and (iv) have in common that the siblings in
the parental generation are of the same sex/gender (your father and his
brothers, and your mother and her sisters); and (ii) and (iii) have in common
that the siblings in the parental generation are of the opposite sex/gender
(your father and his sister, and your mother and her brother).
In our social world,
grouping cousins in this way – based on whether the siblings in the parental
generation are same sex/gender or opposite sex/gender – doesn’t happen. This makes it difficult to grasp, at least at
first, but you can in fact follow the distinction and absorb or learn it, if
you study it a few times. Also worth
noting is that this unfamiliar way of grouping or differentiating cousins is
fairly common in human social orders, across different times and places.
Note also that this
differentiation of cousins is not between cousins on your father’s side
and cousins on your mother’s side (paternal cousins and maternal cousins,
respectively). That’s a different
grouping or differentiation of cousins, and it is already familiar to you and
thus much easier to understand. In point of fact, it’s just a specific case
of distinguishing relatives on your father’s side from those on your mother’s
side. We, in our social world, make that
distinction on a regular basis—and teach it, of course, to young children as
they are growing up.
Anthropologists use
the phrase the differentiation of
cousins as a term for the other and unfamiliar way of grouping
cousins—again, based on whether the siblings in the parental generation are the
same sex/gender or are the opposite sex/gender.
And along with the phrase the differentiation of cousins,
anthropologists use the term “parallel cousins” when the siblings in the
parental generation are of the same sex/gender, and “cross cousins” when the
siblings in the parental generation are of the opposite sex/gender.
Many (but not all)
societies that group cousins in this second way also make use of this
differentiation in their ideals or norms for sexual unions (or marriages). In many of these cases, the cross-cousin is
deemed the ideal person to union with (or to marry), while union-ing with (or
marrying, or having sex with) a parallel-cousin is strictly prohibited and,
indeed, is equivalent to doing those same things with your full sibling (which
we term “incest”). Here it is important
to note that in regard to biological or genetic relatedness, there is no
difference in your relationship to the two sorts of cousins (cross- and
parallel-); statistically, all cousins are likely to share ¼ of your genetic
material.
This example of the
differentiation of cousins illustrates at least three key properties of culture:
(1) If a cultural distinction or
practice is not yours, it can be confusing or hard to grasp or hard to think,
especially to start with, when you first encounter it.
(2) Notice that despite (1), you are
not permanently incapable of grasping the differentiation of cousins into
cross- and parallel-cousins. The general
point here is that precisely because cultural distinctions are humanly made,
other humans—even humans unfamiliar with them—can learn or acquire them. We can say that as human creations, they are
knowable by the human mind. This is also
true about a “foreign language” (a language foreign to you). A foreign language makes no sense at first,
but humans can learn second and third and more languages. As human creations, languages can be known by
the human mind, and can thus be known by other humans. Cultural phenomena are not affixed to any one
set of persons; cultural phenomena can disperse and circulate, sometimes with
difficulty and sometimes more easily.
(3) Cultural phenomena are not determined
by biology or nature: in terms of biological relatedness, your cousins are,
again, the same. Culture is an invention
or fabrication, produced by the human imagination or intellect, not determined
by biology or a mirror of reality; it is rather, a reality that humans bring
into existence and project outward into the world.
To understand the
differentiation of cousins and this broader discussion, I recommend
rereading this glossary entry and, as you do, thinking in concrete terms about,
for instance, your own parents and their siblings, and the children of those
siblings or your cousins: Who are your cross-cousins? Who are your parallel-cousins?
A key source on the
differentiation of cousins is Claude Levi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of
Kinship (1969[1949); for a brief introduction to Levi-Strauss that places
this aspect of his work in the context of his entire body of work, click here.
DOCTRINE
OF PREDESTINATION -- The Calvinist doctrine that all human matters are
completely determined by God and have always been known by God. Thus, all
human matters--most importantly, whether or not one's fate is to be among God's
elect or to be damned for eternity--are predetermined from the beginning of
time, and cannot be altered by anything anyone can do. In a complex
fashion, this stark doctrine led to an intense psychological concern, among
early Calvinists, with the issue of knowing God's will. Precisely because
each person's fate was an already settled matter of fact, and because God was
regarded as being free of deceit (as a perfect being), it made sense to think
that one could discover and thus know what God had decided about one's own
fate. This interest in knowing God's will was central to the social
effects of Calvinism. Calvinism was an instance of Protestantism begun by
John Calvin in the mid- to late-16th century, after the founding of Lutheranism
by Martin Luther. In its early history, Calvinism had significant numbers
of adherents in the Netherlands (later the Dutch Republic), Switzerland, and
France.
ESSENTIALISM -- The practice of
explaining an observed social phenomena in terms of the essence, innate
character, or nature of a group or category of persons. For example, in
the United States today one finds that women do more infant care than do
men. An essentialist explanation would say that this results from the
distinct natures, or essences, of men and women. Women, it might be said,
are essentially--that is, by nature--more interested in and suited for the care
of infants. One can also have essentialist theories of humanity as
a whole, as when one says that a historically specific violent act (for
example, the holocaust) is due to the innate aggressiveness or cruelty of human
beings.
EXTERNALIST ACCOUNTS OF SCIENTIFIC CHANGE -- Go to INTERNALIST AND
EXTERNALIST ACCOUNTS OF SCIENTIFIC CHANGE
FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES
-- A term from Marx's analysis of capitalism. Marx observes that in
capitalist societies, such as his own, ordinary and well socialized habits of
mind (or consciousness) think
of profit in ways that attribute to money the power to make more money. For instance, the investor tells us that
“money makes money,” just as in our own world bank advertisements urge us to
“let our money grow”--as if money had the life-like capacity to grow and make
more of itself. The life-like property such phrases misattribute to
lifeless money is really not in the money, but in the labor people do,
according to Marx. It is labor, not money, which produces increases in
value. But this is what we banish from our mind when we treat a price as
the worth, or as a property of, the items in our stores, rather than of
the labor that produced those items. In
short, we mistakenly attribute value to things, instead of to their human
makers. As a result, having lost sight
of the fact that it is people who make value, we imagine that money is
self-perpetuating, that is, that it is life-like or animate. The mistaken
attribution of the productive powers of labor to commodities and to money (the
quantitative units of measure of the exchange value of commodities) is what
Marx calls the fetishism of commodities.
FUNDAMENTALISM -- A term coined in
1920 by the editor of a Baptist periodical to describe himself and a group of
conservative evangelical Protestants as militants willing to do
"battle" to preserve the "fundamentals of the Christian
faith" from evolutionists and biblical critics. During the twentieth
century, it has become a term used to describe forms of religious militancy in
which self-identified "believers" work in political and social
spheres to prevent what they describe as the erosion of religious identity and
the weakening of the borders of the religious community. They also seek to
create alternatives to secular institutions, behaviors, and states. In
contemporary discourse, fundamentalism is often described as in opposition to
"secular modernity." Examples such as rise of religious
nationalism with the partition of India and Pakistan demonstrate the ways in
which fundamentalist movements can gain political authority.
GDP
(OR GROSS
DOMESTIC PRODUCT) – The GDP is the total value, meaning the monetary
value (or in Marx’s vocabulary, the exchange value), of all of the goods and
services sold in a given period of time, typically a year. There is an important addition to that
definition however—which is that it is the total of what economists call “the
final value” of each good and service.
An automobile maker purchases steel but then sells a car to a
consumer. The steel is an intermediate
product, while the car is a final product. So only the sale price (or monetary or
exchange value) of the car is included in the GDP, not the sale price (or
monetary or exchange value) of the steel.
Because economists use and teach GDP, and because the government
and news media pay attention to economists, GDP is an important calculation and
construct in our world.
Importantly economic anthropologists,
historians, and left economists look quite critically at GDP as a measure of
the economy and growth; here, are two of these critical observations. First: If
someone sells $100 of tobacco cigarettes, which cause increased rates of death,
that sale of cancer-sticks adds $100 to the GDP. But if a parent does useful and productive
work caring for their children, it adds zippo to GDP. The take home point—and it is relevant to
your Marx reading for next week—the take home point is that GDP pays attention
only to the price of things and only to things that have a price. GDP thus misses a great deal about human
welfare: the tobacco sold increases the GDP but not human welfare; unwaged
childcare work increases human welfare but not the GDP. Second: because GDP
measures the size of the economy in terms of money, it is hard to apply to GDP
to non-monetary economies. This makes
comparisons between money-economies and non-money economies extremely
difficult; a useful alternative for such
comparisons is to replace GDP, the sum of the money values of all goods and
services, with measures of material resources that people have, such as how
many calories, or how much protein, people have; or how much of some other
useful good an economy produces. But
note that these measures are something other than GDP.
Still a third issue with GDP
involves comparisons over time of a given monetary economy. In the United States, for example, one dollar in 1950 is not worth the same as
one dollar in 2020; and the difference is not simple. In 1990, you might have
spent 1$ to buy a loaf of bread that today cost $2.50; that’s inflation, with
today’s dollar being of less value. So
economists adjust their GDP calculations for inflation, so that inflation—the
dollar being worth less—does not get reported as growth. But it’s not so simple: a computer as
powerful as the one I am using now would have cost tens of thousands of dollars
in 1990, so that looks as if our dollar can buy more not less—is worth more not
less. There’s no fully satisfactory
solution to this problem of making GDP comparisons over time, but that’s what
economists do.
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INTERNALIST AND
EXTERNALIST ACCOUNTS OF SCIENTIFIC CHANGE -- Internalist accounts of
change in scientific ideas argue that such change occurs from within science
itself. For example, an internalist account might claim that a scientific
experiment disproved or challenged a previous scientific theory, thereby
leading to the rejection of the old theory and the development of a new theory
or theories; or alternatively, an internalist account might claim that a great
thinker developed a new theory, but again as a result of thinking about
scientific problems and data. In general, internalist accounts argue that
scientists prefer a new theory for an older one only if the newer theory is
better; thus, the general cause of change in scientific thinking is the
development of better science. When better science is not developed, this
view implies, scientific thinking is unlikely to change. Externalist
accounts, by contrast, argue that the social and political context surrounding
science effects scientific thinking and the change in scientific thinking in a
variety of ways. Some externalist accounts argue that such
"external" factors shape the reception and selection for particular
research programs; other externalist accounts argue that
"external" factors shape the very ideas of science itself.
THE INVENTION OF NEWNESS --
Social life produces all sorts of arrangements, institutions, habits, and
knowledge. It also gives such things various statuses; for example,
one institution can be designated as “new” and another as “from past tradition.” What’s
crucial to understand is that these statuses can be attributed to particular
arrangements, institutions, habits, and knowledge, independent of what may or
may not objectively be true. In most cases, a given arrangement,
institution, habit, or piece of knowledge is in part “new” and in part “from the past,” and in such cases, the
status it is given is a partial or selective recognition. “The invention
of newness” refers to a case when something is given the status of “the
new.” In historical awareness,
the term "new" often has been used to mark a conceptual break or
separation between present innovation and tradition-bound past, which is now
left behind. Examples include “the new philosophy” and
“the new world.” [A fully successful answer should pick some one
example, either one of these or another one, and use it as an illustration of
the term.]
IDEOLOGY -- A system of ideas
that offers a way of understanding the world that is tied to the perspective
and interests of persons in a particular social position: to English settlers,
rather than Indigenous persons, in northeast North America of the 1600s, to
recall the example from our lecture.
You should think about the
relationship of this term, as we have defined it, to the key term culture; ideologies are all cultural,
but we might say that an ideology is culture when emanating from and shaped by
a particular and interested perspective, the perspective of persons inhabiting
a particular social position or location, in some larger system of social
relationships.
It is worth noting that while
ideologies are at times laid out in careful arguments, they are more commonly
found in stories, jokes, gossip, and—in our time—in mass media spectacles
(movies, athletic competitions, presidential debates are examples) as well as
social media posts. And when ideologies are embedded in entertainment and
spectacle in our world, we often fail to scrutinize them—precisely because they
are, for us, entertaining, not serious.
One can think here of how prolific Hollywood has been in dispensing
sexist ideologies, including unrealistic female body imagery, in movies
offering entertainment and various (ideologically-laden) pleasures to their
large mass audiences.
JANISSARIES -- The elite infantry troops of
the Ottoman state. Particularly after the conquest of Christian lands in
what is now Eastern Europe, many of the janissaries were converted Christian
slaves. For the most part, janissaries were used to rule in Islamic areas
of the state, where they lacked social ties to the subject population. The
janissaries were first organized in the 14th century and were abolished in the
early 19th century.
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LATIN CHRISTENDOM -- The
component of Christendom within which monarchs accepted the religious authority
of the Church of Rome. See Christendom.
LINGUISTIC STANDARD --
Mass schooling, as it emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries,
characteristically taught and used (as the language of instruction) a
standardized form of the dominant language within a given nation-state.
In France, this was "standard French"; in the United States, this was
"standard American English"; and so on. There are at least two
important points to note about this.
(1) Because they taught and used a standardized language, schools were
one of the main institutions that created linguistic homogeneity within nation-states,
thus forwarding the nationalist project of producing a population that
exhibited shared national traits (that is, traits characteristic of a
given nationality).
(2) It is also important to note that the language form adopted as the
linguistic standard, and taught in the schools, was always much closer to the
primary or home language of some children within each nation-state than
many others. Most often, the linguistic standard (or "school
language") was a formalized version of the speech of the urban
bourgeoisie. As a result, children from such households found the
language of instruction much easier to use and respond to than did other children.
In this important sense, mass schooling has never provided a "level
playing field."
MERITOCRACY -- A social order that assigns
social positions, particularly occupational positions, and/or status on the basis
of demonstrated performance in some activity, such as an examination or a
competitive race. Meritocracies generally have an explicit acceptance of
some possibility of social mobility, but they are by no means intrinsically or
necessarily egalitarian.
MONEY -- Tokens of quantitative units of value of
diverse goods and services—or more precisely of goods and services not in a
general, rather than a restricted, sphere of exchange. For example, in units of
money (dollars, for example), a certain amount of antibiotic is equal in value
to a certain amount of tobacco--or for that matter, some number of shoe laces.
In the absence of money, it is not possible to establish whether a given
exchange produces an increase in wealth measured in quantitative terms, that is
profits
.
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PROFIT -- A quantitative gain in wealth (or
more fully, a gain in the sort of wealth that is measured in quantitative units
of value).
In any particular circumstance or case, whether there are profits and
how great they are depends on what costs are included in the accounting of
quantitative units of value. For
example, the slave plantations in the Americas yielded profits for plantation
owners because their costs for productive labor were so low, since they paid no
wages to the slaves. The labor and associated suffering of the enslaved worker
were real costs that were not accounted for—and on this basis, these slave
plantations were profitable.
From the 10th week of the semester on, we build on this
observation—and draw on the work of Marx—and narrow the definition of profit
to refer to the gain in quantitative units of wealth that is obtained by
capitalist classes (owners and investors) as capitalist classes, that is,
independent of any labor any of these persons may do in the production process
(which is activity outside of their position as capitalists). For a
summary of key points in Marx's analysis of where profits, in this sense come
from, click here.
(Note also, that Marx uses the term surplus value for profits, in this
narrow sense.)
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SETTLER COLONIALISM -- a term
used for instances of colonization in which large numbers of colonizing persons
settle in the area or territory they are colonizing, usually with the effect of
displacing the previous population (which is generally spoken of as "the
native" or "indigenous" population). The specific cases that are
most often labeled with this term are the United States, Canada, and Australia.
In all of these cases, large numbers of persons from Christendom/Europe settled
and displaced the previous inhabitants through events that were violent,
brutal, and, for those previous inhabitants, deadly.
SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY (OR DEVELOPMENTAL) STAGES OF
HUMAN EXISTENCE -- In addition to what was presented in the lecture, see
also, the entry, "Civilization,
Barbarism, and Savagery," in The Encyclopedia of World History
(2005), edited by William H. McNeill et al.
SUBALTERN RESISTANCE -- Subaltern
means inferior rank, and in recent scholarship has been used to describe those
who are subject to domination by ruling classes, particularly in colonial
relationships. Subaltern resistance is resistance by
these dominated people to the ruling classes. In discussions of colonial
contexts, "subaltern resistance" is a term used to speak about the
refusal of "subalterns" to accept or participate in imperial projects
of political or cultural "improvement." . For example, in twentieth-century
Soviet Uzbekistan under socialist colonialism, the Soviet Union
tried to gain local support and increase its authority through gender
policies, treating women as a surrogate proletariat. The Soviet state
promoted the unveiling of Central Asian Muslim women in a campaign to
"emancipate" and "civilize" these women. This legal and
social reform was intended to justify the Soviet presence in Central Asia; the
Soviets claimed that they were freeing these women from both backward men and
backward culture. Women resisted this argument, refusing to follow Soviet
policy. Instead, they adopted the veil in increased numbers as a symbol of
their political and cultural opposition to Soviet rule. This response can
be spoken about as subaltern resistance.
SURPLUS VALUE -- See PROFITS.
TARGET INCOME -- a finite goal or standard
for a person’s or household’s earnings. Each “target income” includes the
requirements for subsistence, biological reproduction, and social
reproduction. In addition, as a rule, each “target income” also includes
a finite component above these requirements, and this additional component, or
supplement, is tied to a person’s or household’s social status.
In principle (or as a matter of
abstract logic), a “target income” can be earnings either in quantitative units
of wealth (or money) or in non-monetized goods and services. As a
matter of historical record, however, target incomes are more often linked with
non- or less-monetized economies. It is for this reason that the wording
in the first paragraph speaks of “a finite component above these requirements”
rather than “a finite amount above these requirements”; notice that
"component" does not refer to a quantity, while "amount"
does.
That a target income is finite
means that pursuing a target income contrasts with the alternative goal of
acquiring indefinite or infinite amounts of wealth (in quantitative
terms). Such an alternative goal or pursuit, which may take a range
of forms, is distinctive of industrial or full-blown capitalism.
Historians and anthropologists (and other social scientists) thus use the term
“target income” to represent the many — and heterogeneous— economies other than
modern industrial capitalism.
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WHITE RACISM--An ideology serving
domination and exploitation that involves the following key features:
(1) the belief that there are biologically distinct populations which
differ in bodily appearance, intellectual ability, and moral worth; these are
called "races";
(2) the belief that each of these "races" has its own ancestral
territory (Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas);
(3) the belief that for most of human history each "race" has been
isolated and "pure"--i.e., has been inbreeding or racially
endogamous. [Note that point (3) depends upon point (2); and that point (1)
depends upon point (3)];
(4) the belief that all other "races" are inferior to the European or
white "race"; and
(5) the practical use of these beliefs both to assign persons to and to
organize positions in the system (or mode) production.
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