Unravelling the Reality of China Today

The other day I read a sensationalist article by Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel in Foreign Policy. Fogel argued that based on his projections China's GDP would grow to $123 trillion/year by 2040, amounting to 40% of the world's economy. In other words, the coming decades will be defined by the emergence of a hegemon fielding a relative global influence to match America's in its post-WW II heyday.

Fogel is an economic historian who won a (ridiculous) Nobel Prize for introducing quantitative data into history well after it was first attempted by members of the French Annales school. He has argued in typically simplistic fashion that the only real factor behind Europe's 18th and 19th-century modernization was the increasing nutrition available to industrial labourers. It is therefore not surprising that his article is riddled with the same teleological reductionism, rigid economic determinism and exaggerated dependence on quantitative data that taint his other works. It is reminiscent of a raft of articles that appeared in the 1980s prophesying the inevitability of Japan eclipsing the US as the world's dominant economy. In crafting such a rosy future for China's economy Fogel ignores, among many other factors, the growing contradictions and instabilities in China's production and export-orientated, partially foreign-owned economy. He ignores the massive environmental toll (and future risks) that accompany China's economic growth, the growing potential for political instability or conflict at home and abroad, the limits of China's university system, the escalating and almost unprecedented social inequalities created by China's capitalist economy, the lingering and, in some respects, growing repression of a dictatorial government, the twin demographic threats of an aging and increasingly masculine citizenry, the potential for economic growth elsewhere in the world and, perhaps especially, the raw environmental, Malthusian limits of a planet that can probably only support about 2.5 billion people at an American standard of living.

Ultimately the greatest problem besetting Fogel's projection of future Chinese power is that it obscures the reality of China today while confusing the essence of modern power. Although China's economy is roughly a third that of America's today (half, according to the controversial purchasing power parity technique), its other forms of soft and hard power are much more impressive. China's demographic scale, cultural influence, its economic growth and the perception of its inevitable rise, coupled with its sprawling, geopolitically influential geography mean it is already a power of the present, not just the future. The important question is not whether or to what extent China will surpass America, but rather whether an empowered China is necessarily something to be feared in the West.

As a historian I naturally turn to the past for perspective, and it is at first glance troubling that perhaps the best historical parallel with China today is Wilhelmine Germany of the late-19th century. Among other similarities, both states were authoritarian yet also capitalist, both experimented with limited democratic systems, both were among the demographically and territorially largest states in their immediate surroundings, both were wedged between other great powers, both laid claim to disputed territories, both were rapidly modernizing in a patchwork manner that produced vast social inequalities, both were arming, both aspired to the model established by a dominant power removed from their immediate geographical surroundings (Britain for Germany; America for China), the governments and populations in both mingled a developing nationalism with an obsession with national humiliation, both were forged by military conflict. Fortunately, China today is distinguished from Wilhelmine Germany by its long tradition of unification, its arguably more muted (if still serious) internal conflicts and especially its profound lack of desired or historic expansionism.

The twin pillars of the Chinese regime's domestic policy are economic growth and political stability. Its foreign policy trends towards the acquisition of "respect" and the incorporation of China into the global economic system. The overall goal is to buttress and legitimize the regime's claim to authority at home and abroad while (ideally) minimizing social unrest. The Chinese regime is concerned by the prospect of excessive nationalism and terrified of any form of conflict that might jeopardize the state's growing economy. Meanwhile, unlike Germany China has for thousands of years existed as a continental empire or state, so large and self-contained that any expansion would be largely superfluous. Nor does China actively seek to export its economic or political ideology, like a modernizing Soviet Union before and after Joseph Stalin. A communist China once accepted, then rejected the Soviet political and economic model; later, it increasingly accepted the American economic model while, to a degree, retaining the Soviet political model. China's government has not been passive, of course, but it has imported rather than exported ideology. Hence, with the notable exception of the Taiwan issue - which China's regime considers an internal matter - for the moment the West has little to fear from Chinese territorial or ideological expansion, still the most serious grounds for conflict in the 21st century.

Overall the perceptions of many in the West regarding a rising power like China are burdened by two fatally flawed concepts: first, the idea that a unipolar world is necessarily more stable, and second, the notion that democracies are less aggressive and easier to incorporate into the international system than other regimes. The latter notion is patently absurd considering the aggressive, expansionary aims of democracies from Athens to imperial Britain to the modern American superpower. Although most people are usually loathe to participate in war, the aggression of a democracy can be partially explained through the practical limitations of the democratic concept. In more modern democracies especially the demos is inevitably constrained by a network of soft power sources, from corporations to cultural norms, and so power is still wielded by a minority. There are of course many other, possibly more insightful reasons for the aggression of democracies, but that subject deserves a blog post of its own.

The first concept - that of the unipolar world's inherent stability - is somewhat harder to topple. Still, the means of a global hegemon seem to trend inevitably towards dominion and conquest, while the reign of the American superpower has certainly not reduced the glaring global social inequalities that so powerfully influence much of the world's current instability. A new Cold War would be a disaster, but a check to American expansionism and an alternative to American financial institutions or military entanglement could prove a net positive for most of the world.

These are all big questions, and China's future remains clouded in uncertainty. In the coming decades its relationship with the West will take many paths, from confrontation to cooperation. These divergent roads will reflect a complex network of interests among governmental forces and corporate forces in many different regions and countries. Predicting the future, therefore, is probably pointless.

What is certain is that China's rise is, in many respects, already complete. For the first time in centuries China counts among the world's great powers, with influence far beyond its borders, and that may be a good thing for the rest of the world.

Why the Stars Remain so Distant

Astronomy, space travel, the idea of the limitless, unexplored frontier . . . these combined have represented a passion and, to a degree, a hobby for me since childhood. Even now I regularly read whatever I can find about the universe and our place in it, even with my telescope broken, even as I live in Canada's light pollution capitol. That's why the policies of the world's space agencies - NASA in particular - never cease to annoy and exasperate.

NASA deserves special criticism because it is granted far more funding and, with the possible exception of the ESA, has greater political autonomy than its rivals. However, for many decades the agency's policies have drifted, caught by the fickle winds of would-be Kennedys or, worse yet, the desire to make a splash in the public eye. Hence the space shuttle, the ostensibly reusable, cost-effective ferry to space which, when finalized, was not only bereft of a cosmic port - Skylab had long-since plummeted to earth - but was in large part not reusable at all and so cost a fortune with every launch. The International Space Station, planned in the 1980s, was an excellent conceptual fix to this problem. Initially designed as a construction port as much as a scientific research station, it would give the shuttle a reason for being while facilitating human exploration of space. However, as so often happens with NASA, cost requirements resulted in the removal of its critical component - the construction facility - and the station's creation began so late, lingering so long, that the shuttle will be out of commission at roughly the moment the station is complete. The station's scientific contributions have hardly justified its astronomical price; in fact its prime use has simply been to solidify, if not dramatically expand, existing knowledge of building in space.

Then there is the new lunar program, launched with pomp and circumstance by the late great president Bush. The mission is to construct an American base on the moon using existing technology - a bigger Saturn V, basically - but with funding that when adjusted for inflation pales in comparison to what financed the first lunar expeditions. Ironically international cooperation, perhaps the major breakthrough in space exploration since the 1980s, has little part in NASA's next step forward. Ultimately, even if fully successful this vastly expensive endeavour will likely achieve little more than the International Space Station, expanding our knowledge of building and operating in space using existing technology but contributing little to humanity's understanding of or presence in the universe.

To me, these policies and programs have represented a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars that, if properly invested, could have dramatically expanded humanity's presence in space while improving our lives on earth. Space agencies should be the vanguard of human exploration in space, but true expansion into the cosmos can only be realized outside of government. Take an earth-bound example from another of my passions: history. While many European voyages of discovery in the medieval and early modern period were financed by governments, the resulting expansion of the European presence overseas, while certainly accompanied by political consolidation, was largely a function of private initiative.

Before such expansion can occur, however, two developments are critical. The first concerns the strengthening of existing pulling factors, and the discovery of additional pulls beckoning humanity into space. It may be, of course, that these factors will grow automatically as our planet runs out of resources in the face of relentless human demographic and economic expansion; then again new technologies - like the European fusion project - may mandate the exploitation of new resources only rarely found on earth. Ideally, however, these pulling factors will be of a more positive nature, developing not because we have over-exploited our planet but because our future lies in the stars that ultimately enabled our creation. This is not to say that tremendous material wealth should not be used if it exists outside our atmosphere, but rather that our expansion into space should be about more than the largely capitalist exploitation that threatens our environment.

In any case pulling factors will not be discovered and cannot be effectively realized without the development of new technology to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, improve its safety and reliability, and preferably shorten the distances involved by increasing the velocity of spacecraft. This is where our space agencies have failed most egregiously. When it comes to manned spaceflight in particular NASA and other space agencies have preferred to recycle existing technology with only minor improvements in the hopes of inspiring the public - and governments loathe to grant money - through a series of largely superficial achievements. What is really required for the opening of space, however, are significantly investments in the service of a greater scheme to improve the technology and infrastructure behind our access to space and its major attractions. The tens of billions of dollars poured into, for example, the space shuttle, the space station and now the new lunar program would have been infinitely more useful were they invested in the attempted construction of an international space elevator, for example, or quicker, more effective means of propulsion (such as the nuclear-powered orion spacecraft planned by NASA engineers in the 1960s, pictured above).

The world's space agencies, working together, ought to serve as a vanguard for our expansion into space. They should develop the technology and undertake the initial exploration of space. Their purpose should not be to endeavour the entirety of human expansion beyond our atmosphere. Such expansion, currently justified by space agencies with lofty catch phrases and grandiose time charts, will never prove worthwhile or lasting if it is carried out only by space agencies. Without technological daring and the rise of new factors drawing us into space our species will remain largely confined to our atmosphere. Until we learn to live with our environment and with one another on earth, however, this may in fact be fortunate: we may not deserve the wonder of our universe if we can't preserve our home.

Wrestling with the Decline and Fall (of Western Civilization)

Isaac Asimov's Foundation was one of the books that shaped my childhood. It is probably Asimov's most celebrated work, a collection of short stories inspired by reflections on the fall of the Roman Empire. The book is underpinned by two very simple and intriguing questions: how can we detect a civilization's decline, and what can we do about it? Foundation is set thousands of years from now, when one man - Hari Seldon - has pioneered a science - "psychohistory" - that allows him to predict the future. To his horror he learns that his galactic empire is destined for a calmitous fall. In order to shorten the dark ages he realizes will inevitably follow, Seldon launches an outpost - appropriately named the Foundation - composed of his society's leading academics. In a far corner of the galaxy they craft an encylopedia to preserve society's accumulated knowledge, ultimately developing into a political power that in due time blossoms into another galactic empire.

Asimov was a scientist, so it is not surprising that he often expressed the decline of his imaginary civilization in technocratic terms. Older starships were more powerful, for example, and again Asimov's interest in the fall of Rome is obvious: classical ships were indeed more capable than those of the early medieval world (even if they required more time and capital to build). But there are other paralells - one far more immediate. A few weeks ago I was in Leiden - a town near Amsterdam - speaking to an engineer for the European Space Agency. I was told that the ESA has been having so many problems which its launch vehicles that Russian Soyuz rockets using technology some fifty years old were now routinely employed to hoist satellites into orbit. Even NASA's best rockets - for all their advanced technology - are not nearly as reliable as a hand-crafted Soyuz. For half a century our scientists, institutions and governments have been unable to improve that most basic aspect of modern civilization: the reliable control of large amounts of energy, in this case for the purpose of transportation.

As I was riding the train back to Amsterdam I couldn't stop thinking about that conversation, especially pertinent in the midst of our current economic downturn. Sure, we're cutting margins: cars are far more efficient; jets use less fuel; trains are much quicker. But where is the next great breakthrough? Where are the space elevators? Where is the Mars colony? Where are all those fantastic sci-fi vistas, so common in those old books? Is our failure to improve on old technology a symptom of the gradual decline and fall of Western civilization?

My career has taught me to think a certain way; perhaps most fundamentally it has granted me an appreciation for complexity and semantics. The first questions I consider are consequently grounded in the techniques of my discipline. What do we mean by a word as vague as "decline"? Once we get past that issue, there are others: can decline be relative, or must it be absolute? How can we measure its beginning? What elements of a society can or must it incorporate? One could, of course, write volumes on the notion of the "decline" in historiography, not to mention the phenomenon itself. Since this is just a think piece in a pretentious blog, I won't delve into much depth, but some definitions are necessary for this topic to have any meaning at all.

A friend of mine once claimed that "decadence is the penultimate stage of degeneration," whatever that means. I'll say this: for me a civilization's decline, to be termed such, must be absolute and not just relative to the rise of other states (of course there is considerable debate among historians about this point). It is a long-term movement, even if it typically becomes glaringly obvious through short-term events (the fall of the Berlin wall comes to mind, for example, but it was merely the exclamation point at the end of a gradual rotting of Soviet power). The term "decline" is so difficult to define or measure that it is tempting to stick to more quantifiable realms - that of economics, for example - but to me a civilization's decline must incorporate multiple elements of a society's existence, all of which are related through the process sometimes referred to as co-evolution. For example economic weakness, even if long-term, therefore cannot be considered a symptom and/or reason for decline unless accompanied by a combination of stagnation in scientific development, political calcification, some form of cultural "de-vitalization" or malaise, environmental degradation, or a selection of these and additional factors.

All of these are difficult if not impossible to quantify, but then society or history or almost anything worth thinking about is nearly impossible to define and describe (of course the very term "West" is deeply problematic, but I'm avoiding that here). A more convincing argument against the notion of "decline" itself lies in its history: in the West especially the concept was often used by radicals on the left or right to attack democratic systems, particularly in the leadup to the Second World War. To me that has always been ironic, for I consider the rise of radicalism a function of, at the very least, the perception of decline - and probably a catalyst for it.

Definitions of a civilization's deterioration and a look at the idea's historical context all lead back to this (long) entry's basic question: are our Western civilizations (let us say America in particular) really in terminal decline? It is difficult to say, but from a brief look at the term's historical context it is obvious that the perception of decline has always been a part of our societies, from the literate few who predicted the end of days in the medieval period, to romantics who lamented the rise of industrialization, to communists and fascists who called for a new world order. Once again, the popular perception of decline - perhaps one form of cultural malaise - is certainly not a clearcut sign of decline in the first place.

Ultimately I think America today is increasingly marked less by decline -relative or absolute - than fragmentation. Academic disciplines - history, for example - are fragmented to the point of being difficult to define. Parties are hardly cohesive, and fringe movements combine with special interest groups at the political periphery. Multinational corporations form alternate poles of power; the internet vastly increases the diffusion of views while decreasing their quality (look at this blog, for example). Tremendous breakthroughs are made in computing or biotechnology; other fields languish. Whiggish views of progress through technological development have floundered on the shoals of environmental devastation, but the narrative of eliminating global warming through "green" technology gathers steam.

A final question: could one not argue that this fragmentation is a symptom of American - indeed Western, for the phenomenon is perhaps even more acute in Europe - society's decline? Maybe, but then the history of western civilization after Rome's fall in particular has been one of continual rise and fall, of constant regeneration and recreation, of enduring and fruitful fragmentation. Not surprisingly to the historian, what our generation sees as new might just be more of the same.

An Unoriginal Post about Originality

Two posts in two days?

Boredom strikes. Well, not boredom: instead the certain malaise that settles over me when I've finished one paper but the deadline for the second is still so far away. It's when I try to finish as much creative or personal writing as possible, until guilt wrenches me back to my work.

Today I turn to the great myth of originality.

It's a hoax. Or rather, an absurdity.

No great idea is ever wholly original. We do more than stand on the shoulders of giants; we are entangled in a web of shared culture and experience. Their mingling creates the conditions for similar thoughts within individuals. These thoughts are born not through lightning from a blue sky, not by our own peerless ingenuity; instead they slowly evolve in our minds, through our society, bubbling up in moments that only seem like revelations.

An example: Darwin's concept of natural selection and evolution did not spring forth in a vacuum. The fundamental concepts informing his theory had been stewing for decades, even centuries; Thomas Malthus or Adam Smith were only the latest in a long line of thinkers propounding ideas of invisible hands or selecting forces. Others, like Charles Wells, developed very similar ideas to Darwin's theory several decades before Darwin published, and Alfred Wallace independently conceived of the full principle of natural selection, albeit in less developed form. Yet Darwin remains a shining example of scientific genius; his work the definition of blinding creativity. He was, of course, a spectacular talent, but his name survives because he was a meticulous researcher, a major name, and he had the connections. Beyond that, and for a myriad of complex reasons, the time was ripe for natural selection.

I remain a bit of an optimist. I believe individuals are capable of unique ideas - but only to a limited degree, and only with limited utility. In the sciences – and by this I include all methods of inspecting our world and ourselves - the foaming crest of something different always travels on a deeper wave. In art originality is especially elusive. It is practically impossible to imagine something completely unique, something totally outside the realm of experience; we can conceive only composites of what we have already seen. There are only so many pieces, and thousands, millions of people have already arranged them in different ways. And again, what is remembered is often less original than it is especially well done. You can always puzzle something together that might seem special, but will it be worthwhile?

That is a critical point. I feel originality is progressively more possible as ideas grow less useful. I can imagine a history of the sociological impact of cactus needles; I can imagine writing a book and sprinkling its sentences at random across the pages. Such groping toward the immortality a truly original thought supposedly brings is perhaps most unbearable in music. Listening to Arnold Schoenberg's experiments in atonality is mind numbing at best, but are the soothing sounds of Indy rock clones much better? Are we doomed to struggle towards originality - to fail spectacularly, or to decay into comfortable mediocrity?

Perhaps, but this is not to despair. Rather, the foolish quest for absolute originality is merely a function of our own egos wrestling with the impossible. On a personal level originality ought to be an ideal, not a goal. Ultimately, what matters is the struggle – our struggle, as a society, a species, to develop new, hopefully more productive ways of thinking and doing. If we do this together, are we worse for it?

Lamentations

One of the fun things about a blog is that you can occasionally look back at a previous post and consider how the world changed since then. When I last wrote the financial crisis was still in its infancy; since then it's expanded into a deepening economic recession. From China to Europe to North America, there's no end in sight. Maybe the stimulus packages will have some impact; perhaps they won't. Here in Canada we don't have to worry about such things. Our sagacious conservative regime has its head firmly in the sand, its focus squarely upon agitating the opposition parties into a political crisis.

Either way things are bad, trending towards disastrous, and there's no end in sight. Meanwhile, I'm on strike. Yes, strike. Every few years at my university students and staff swap books and classes for rusty barrels. It has resulted in pretty decent contracts when compared with the rest of Canada, though we'll see what we get this time 'round.

Our demands are pretty simple. The union represents both graduate students and contract professors, many of whom must reapply for the same job every term, even if they’ve worked at York University for decades (as some have). Meanwhile, though our graduate student membership has grown by nearly a third since 2001, a shared pot of money has not increased at all. We need that money to fund our research; ultimately we must research to eventually earn jobs. We want our professors to have a little job security, and we want our shared funds to reflect an increase in membership.

In a sane world these issues would have been resolved quietly some months ago. However, university administrations across Ontario are standing firm this year, apparently because of a decrease in endowment funds they gambled on the stock markets. Never mind that endowments are used primarily to award undergraduate scholarships; never mind that our university is currently sitting on $150 million raised through fundraisers to improve the quality of York's education. The union has responded by picketing the seven gates to the university and withdrawing its members' labour, to which the university's senate reacted by closing the entire university. 50,000 undergraduates are out of school; 4000 contract staff and graduate students are out in the cold.

With characteristic slowness, I'm working my way towards the point - or, in this case, the grievance.

Ignorance. We live in a culture where people are so swept up by the minutiae of their daily lives that they won't - or can't - consider larger, more abstract issues. A culture where undergraduate students hate their former teachers for locking them out of their classes because they have absolutely no idea how graduate school works, how contract professors live, or how a university is run. A culture where drivers seeking to cross a picket line would rather attempt to ram through strikers than consider the fellow humanity - and legitimate grievances - of those on the other side of the gate. A culture, more fundamentally, where Canadians reward a blundering, Machiavellian Prime Minister with increased support after his dangerous partisanship derails the government in a time of economic crisis. A culture where the majority of Americans (and Canadians) resist a bailout of "corporate fat cats" because they can't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of how their economy works. A culture and civilization ultimately governed by the few because the many don't deserve democracy.

On that note, it seems grim indeed that the economic and political model increasingly gaining currency around the world is that of China. This, too, is born partially from ignorance: China’s growth rates are absolutely necessary to avoid social chaos, and they are in part a mirage founded upon unsustainable environmental degradation. Still, one worries for the future of a supposedly democratic West where the demos can’t be bothered.

The running of the bulls

Apologies for any grammatical gaffes; I write with frantic urgency tonight.

Because this is bad. Actually, bad doesn't begin to describe it.

Greenspan calls it the worst economy in a century. Robert Peston of BBC News? "Meltdown Monday." The Associated Press summed it up in a word: "stunning."

That it is.

I'm a young guy. I've got some vague memories from the old Bush Administration rattling around in my mind; as a doctoral student in history I know my Americana.

But I was a Clinton kid. I entered and just about left my teenage years while Bubba ran things. I remember "it's the economy, stupid" (and my outrage over Clinton mocking an old man). I remember the late great Peter Jennings wondering whether computers had banished recession to the trashbin of history. I remember members of Clinton's administration lecturing the Japanese about their economic failings. And yes, I watched Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, when the biggest news week in, week out was just how high the stockmarket had climbed. I didn't know what it meant back then - but I did know it was good. The economic crises I learned about in those boring highschool classes? Ah, the folly of the ancients. The future was bright, the west ascendent . . . BORING!

What a difference a little George W. makes. Okay, it's not all his fault. It would be simplistic to assume that even a President has absolute control over the vast machinery of our global economy. So let's look at the past eight years from an entirely economic perspective, leaving politics aside for now.

The picture is pretty bleak.

Instability in the Middle East; skyrocketing fuel prices. Failing airlines; a teetering industrial sector (although, how's Halliburton doing these days?). The export not only of low-level manufacturing jobs to the third world but, increasingly, of high-level technical and scientific positions to Europe and Asia. Booming unemployment; plummeting consumer confidence.

The camel was overburdened, but it wasn't a straw that broke its back. Instead, a ten-ton boulder: the credit crisis or, more accurately, the subprime mortgage crisis. Essentially the U.S. housing bubble burst: risk was undervalued, loans given too easily. It's the sort of thing that could stagger a robust economy, let alone that dead man walking Bush had called promising (okay, I can't help incorporating some politics - especially when this is happening).

Is this a good time to mention that one academic who foresaw the crisis years in advance is called Toby Daglish? No?

In the last week things got worse. Credit is kind of important to a modern economy; among other things, it's what drives major purchases and powers the market. And Wall Street bankers discovered they had made their share of bad loans. On September 7 the Federal Housing Finance Agency formally took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, two firms that owned or guaranteed about $12 trillion dollars in the mortgage market.

And then today, for Wall Street "the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s." Merril Lynch, a financial services and insurance firm, swallowed by the Bank of America. Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, announcing bankruptcy. That's $700 billion . . . gone. And insurance giant AIG, teetering on the precipice of disaster. Oh, by the way: a nosedive in stock markets around the world not seen since September 11.

Through it all home values keep falling, and the subprime mortgage crisis continues, intensifies, a fire that can perhaps only end with the destruction of the forest.

Remember when pundits and party hacks bickered about whether we were really in a recession? The question now is just how bad things can get. Just like I had a certain fascination in seeing how high the markets could go when I turned to PBS in the Clinton years, now I feel a morbid, sinister sort of curiosity when Wolf Blitzer's bearded mug flickers across my TV. How many billions lost today? What news from the front? And could this be the beginning of the end for America's economic hegemony?

I'm no economic expert - not even close. Actually, the most I know about these things concerns the pre-war state of the Nazi economy. So beyond this vague, nightmarish outline and my own surging worry I can't sketch a clearer picture.

But at least the politicians are keeping up to date on things. Right?

Quoth New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine: “I do not understand how we got into this situation."

Just what we need to hear.

Climate and Human History

My thoughts tonight turn to climate change, as often they do. My doctoral dissertation will examine the impact of the Little Ice Age on Dutch society, discerning whether the sudden, prolonged cooling of our planet around 1300 had any part to play in the simultaneous rise to power of Holland in the low countries - and eventually the world. The bigger questions are obvious: how do humans respond to climate change? How does - and did - such changeimpact history? What lessons can we draw - if any?

On a smaller level the questions are just as interesting . . . and significantly more innovative. Did the Little Ice Age have a greater - or, at least, more negative - impact on societies competing with Holland for regional dominance? Did lower sea levels facillitate efforts at land reclamation in the Netherlands? Did they improve access to peat, the driving energy source behind the Dutch Golden Age (and capitalist economy) of the 17th Century? Did increasingly ferocious storms - and the combined response they necessitated - serve as catalyst for the uniquely egalitarian nature of contemporary Dutch society?

Such a pronounced impact would not be unusual given the impact of the Little Ice Age elsewhere in Europe. After all, the Vikings were virtually extinguished as a major European power by the onset of climatological cooling. Greenland was obviously a lost cause (and the suffering there was truly apalling - "chilling," as an unfortunate, unpleasant former colleague would awkwardly announce). Iceland was surrounded by pack ice from the arctic, isolated from the rest of the Viking world. Of course, Viking colonization attempts further to the West were scarcely realistic now. More importantly, Sweden and Norway lost half their population - Denmark a third.

But the consequences were as pronounced a bit farther to the south. In the wake of period of great prosperity Scotland was particularly affected when cold winds first blew from the North; harvests failed beginning in the fourteenth century, farms in higher elevations were simply abandoned, and before long unrest swept across the country. In a cold, dry climate Scotland was increasingly eclipsed by England, which, while gripped by a climate so frigid that the Thames froze over during winter, nonetheless escaped devastation on the same scale. A union of the Scottish and English parliaments was arguably rendered inevitable . . . and it is no coincidence that it followed in the wake of the coldest period in the history of the Little Ice Age.

What consequences, then, across the channel? Strangely, little has been written about the cooling climate's impact on the Low Countries, a region undergoing tremendous change and uniquely sensitive to climatological fluctuations.

Here's another interesting caveat: during the "Little Ice Age" - the most significant cooling event to afflict our planet in 10,000 years - the world's average temperature dipped by 1-2 Celsius.

In 2007 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the belief of more than 2500 scientists from 150 countries: the Earth’s average temperature will rise by at least 1 Celsius by 2100. Scientists described in vivid terms the catastrophic and apparently inevitable results of such a deceptively small increase, warning of flooding, drought and intensified storms.

Perched on a rollercoaster just beginning its descent, that's what we worry about today - sweeping changes in the shape and nature of our planet driven by a rise of just one or two celsius. But it's happened before, with an impact lessened only by the diminished scale of humanity's presence on Earth . . . and, of course, the absence of a risk for runaway, out of control warming through the greenhouse effect.

Still, the point is simple: what is to come has happened before. That's what makes this project so interesting. If the world is undergoing potentially catastrophic climate change, shouldn't we examine those who thrived when it happened the last time? Thrived, it must be said, by creating an expansive, capitalist economy nearly two centuries before the Industrial Revolution?

It should be interesting. At least . . . as interesting as such research can be.