Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • Trade Competition and American Decolonization

    A new working paper entitled “Trade Competition and American Decolonization” (PDF), prepared for the 2012 IPES meeting and the subject of several previous posts, is now available. I’m happy to be presenting a primarily qualitative paper at a conference that has a reputation for being quantitative—although I am on the last panel before social time on Friday afternoon, so while I’m rambling on about sugar cane and coconut oil my audience may be daydreaming of Nelson County wine and Virginia tobacco. Ah well. Comments welcome.

    I have always posted working papers online. Not everyone does this. The fear appears to be that posting articles online violates the anonymity of the peer review process for anyone who has access to Google. I used to do lame things like changing the title of my papers before submitting them to journals, but I do not think that has fooled any reviewers.

    There is one cost of not posting research online: it hinders discussion and engagement from a wider audience. Nate Silver recently told TechCrunch that a “lot of journal articles should be blogs.” Steve Saideman put it best: “no, but lots of articles shld be blogged.” He goes on:

    Journal articles r longer & more technical than a blog post, need to be more thorough, sophisticated. But articles should be summarized…summaries can and should be posted in non-gated places so that ideas disseminate even while research is still refined/vetted

    There is a long debate about the role of blogging in modern academia, centering around the idea that blogging competes with research (see Dan Drezner for one story). I think the opposite is true, although I do recognize that most academic bloggers tend to blog about life more than they do about their own research. Saideman is right that we ought to let our ideas out for some time in the yard before we imprison them forever in a journal.

  • Guess the Colonial Power

    As I polish up a first serious draft of a paper on decolonization, today I came across a discussion of “annexation.” I invite readers to peruse the following and imagine which tropical territory is being discussed.

    Many…who felt…that annexation was inevitable sentimentally opposed it. It would be far pleasanter, were the world constituted differently, for  many states, representing different planes of culture, different races, and differing attitudes toward life to exist beside one another in amity. But the world, simply, was not constituted that way.

    In the Nineteenth Century, as always before and always after, it was a realistic world, one whose separate parts continually came closer together. _____, potentially, had things that the world wanted. Left untroubled, the _____ans themselves clearly would not produce those things. Yet it could be fairly argued that they had no right to fail to do so. No one of radical opinions would grant the right of a private owner of great acres, of a factory, of a ‘means of production’ of any kind, to shut it off from common use merely because it was the owner’s whim or nature to do so. How then could it be argued that far greater proprietors under the name of race or nationality should exercise that right?

    Seems like something right out of the “enlightened” part of the colonial era, right? Say, mid-19th century on. Probably some Belgians talking about rubber in the Congo Free State. Or the British talking about rice in the Irrawaddy delta. The sentiment is not so much that the European should be enslaving the colonial subject, but rather that the colonial subject cannot be a proper member of the global economy without some direction. What is an enlightened European to do? (I love the use of the construction “it could be fairly argued” here.)

    Turns out, this quote is of more recent vintage, and it is not European. It is taken from John W. Vandercook’s 1939 book King Cane: The Story of Sugar in Hawaii (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers), pp. 42-43. Yes, this is a quote is referring to the annexation of Hawaii, so that those noble yet indolent Hawaiians could be directed to grow sugar.

    Americans owe it to themselves not to forget this chapter of our history. For more, I highly recommend McCoy and Scarano’s Colonial Crucible on the role of empire in the construction of the modern American state.