The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Towards an Economic History of the Trojan Women

 

"That the topless towers be burnt/And men recall that face,/Move gently if move you must/In this lonely place./She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,/That nobody looks; her feet/Practice a tinker shuffle,/Picked up on a street./(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/Her mind moves upon silence."

In spite of a good faith (says I, and would I lie?) effort, I woke up this morning, the last day of my vacation, without the spring numbers of The Economist, Flight, or Aviation Week. (Or Fortune, for what it's worth.) The library informs me that the situation is now remedied for Aviation Week, but it's a bit late to start working on April postblogging at this point! Oh, well. For a change I still have a full week of the month left. 

Fortunately, I am still digesting Robert Morrissey, and that Dark Knight guy has a movie out about Helen of Troy and her supporting cast. You might have heard about it. You might have seen Eric Cline dining out over it. You might have heard that the Late Bronze Age Collapse is in the news.

As usual, the Iron Age Revival of the State isn't in the news. Helen wasn't dancing the next morning. It might not be poetry to match widening gyres, but they still say that women's work is never done.

To begin with a completely relevant and on topic note, I reconstruct, largely from Morrissey, this outline history of the Ecotone region of the Illinois and adjacent basins. 

By the end of his long career, Samuel (de)* Champlain was all but the benevolent dictator of New France and reaching out to new horizons.  One of those was the mouth of the Green River on the Lake Michigan shore of Wisconsin in the "Bay of Stinking Waters," per one early source. Jean Nicolet, an interesting figure in his own right, arrived there in 1634, at the behest of Champlain, it is popularly supposed. There is, in fact, considerable room for myth making here and the distance from Montreal at this early date seems striking, although on the other hand the demand for an inherently limited supply of coat beaver probably extended deeply into North America. In any case this framing of the story makes it easy to explain how the city of Green Bay can claim a continuous history going back to 1635 when it disappears from the historical record for the next forty years. 

The late 1670s saw a resurgence of the French presence in the Northwest, and at the same time the Illini consolidated in the Grand Village of the Illinois in the centre of the basin. The Illini were enjoying considerable success with their pedestrian buffalo hunt, a tannery in Montreal was one of the most successful early capitalist adventures in Canada, and, in the person of Rene De la Salle, all interested parties had the assistance of an extraordinary adventurer. De la Salle took the 25 livre price of a dressed buffalo hide in Montreal and extrapolated it into Louisiana. Given the man that De la Salle was, it is more surprising than not that this actually worked out, although by the 1690s the supply of hides from central Illinois was collapsing, perhaps because of a shortage of firewood as much of the major factor that Morrissey emphasizes, labour for dressing hides, and, in particular, women's labour. This led to an even more spectacular effort from Canada in 1702 to establish a tannery in the interior of the Ohio country, probably at Vincennes, Indiana. The upshot was not a successful European-style quasi-industrial vegetable tannery, but rather 13,000 hides  produced by traditional brain tanning at a time when European demand for military grade leather must have been spiking due to Spanish Succession-era military mobilisation. 

There is no evidence that this enterprise proceeded as far as the successful delivery of the hides to market. We lose sight of Vincennes for most of a generation, all the more interesting because from French sources we know that "Carolina men" were all over the territory buying slaves for export to Caribbean plantations. That this trade was so successful in the early 1700s when it was a disaster in the mid-1500s is interesting, to say the least! The Illini moved down from the Grand Village to establish Kaskaskia and (re-?)establish Cahokia, and there begins the key period, per Morrissey, of the pre-Fox Wars era, an era of widespread slave raiding, some of it tit-for-tat. This era of violence, persistent disorder, and frequent lacuna in the records of important west country cities/settlements/nodal localities like Chicago, Green Bay, and Vincennes, eventually precipitated the French intervention that led, in turn, to the Seven Years War. 

Morrissey identifies the following drivers for this endemic slave raiding:

-The traditional cultural and socioeconomic imperative of "mourning wars;"

Abduction of Cassandra, Fresco at House of Menander, Pompeii, via Encircle Photos

-A search for labour, particularly female labour, to meet market demand for dressed hides;

--Diplomatic and domestic political imperatives, which sought replacement or additional tribal members from distant communities lacking disruptive personal connections while enslaving competitive near neighbours to offer to potential allies, embroiling them in the conflict on the slavers' side;

--The usual complex cultural need for hostages, intermediaries, and skill transfers. 

 Morrissey doesn't cover the demand for portage labour that I have talked about in connection with the Grand Carrying Place and the emergence of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" community, but that's fair enough as textile work was, it cannot be emphasised enough, women's work, so that to enslave textile workers is to engage deeply in sexual politics, and the creation of a profoundly patriarchal (but not necessarily, Fenimore cooper reminds us, patrilineal) social order. 

Now, in the matter of slavery in the Old World, we run into one of the oldest arguments about what was what back in the day, to adopt the most strenuously precise technical language. We usually invoke Marx and Bernal on the side of the "ancient economy" as being a non-capitalist "slave economy" and find some critics to splutter, although the smart people like to cite Michael Polanyi, except for Canadians who are reminded of Michael Ignatieff and shake their heads sadly. The argument entangles the existence or non-existence of trade as opposed to gift giving and hospitality rituals, innovation or the lack of it in the ancient economy, and the problem of the organising of labour. 

This last seems more productive to me. The most coherent and rooted account of slavery in Classical Greece I take from Osborne in general and  Foxhall on oleoculture. They emphasize that in the absence of a wage economy, the household was the only way to organise labour, so that a larger and  more heavily capitalised enterprise that could support long distance, high value trade or industrial-scale production must necessarily must be a larger household. The many wives and concubines of a mid-Eighteenth Century Illini paramount household is before us in Morrissey, and the fate of the Trojan woman is before us in popular culture. 

Time to acknowledge the subtext!

And something very, very strange emerges. Morrissey perhaps downplays the bubble nature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Midwestern hide trade, but I don't think I am reading too far against the grain to insist on it. What do you even do with the 13,000 hides that  Charles Juchereau de Saint-Denis' load of trade goods sufficed to elicit from the Wabash in 1702/03? It is a question that immediately reminded me of Saro Wallace's report of sheep counts from Minoan Crete leading to the off-hand estimate that late Minoan Crete supported as many sheep as the island's documented Modern maximum, with Knossos running 100,000 sheep in 1380. Two centuries are a bit long to talk about a bubble, but there seems little doubt that managing such a large herd put heavy stress on the Minoan labour system, such as it was, whatever it was. The researchers I've picked up on via Google are interested in shepherds rather than the "combers" and "pluckers" and spinners and weavers needed to deliver wool pieces starting from sheep on the pasture. But that was a lot of women!

And here's the promised strange thing:

Morrissey makes the dynamics very clear. First, we should expect endemic slave raiding, destabilisation and disorder when pre-capitalist/pre-monetary economies are struggling to satisfy unmet demand. The raiding will collapse when the demand does. Second, we should expect the depopulation of major centres, not by long distance migration, but by radiation into new or neglected ecological/economic niches during the collapse period. This is the essence of Wallace's "successful collapse" model for Crete --the establishment of farming communities on centrally-located mid-altitude locations, perhaps previously monopolised as sheep pasture. Wallace makes a further clear distinction between Crete and mainland Greece, where communities continued to share large areas of arable and evolved democratic government to manage it. That doesn't really make for a satisfactory account of life in southern Greece at the time of the collapse when largescale drainage projects were abandoned, and, with them, certain formerly large and fertile arable areas. But perhaps in the new dispensation, wetlands were preferred for exploitation over artificially drained arable. 

But the counterfactual point is this: Slave raiding will have reached its peak at the height of the Late Bronze Age, not at its end.

Caleb Howells, embedded above, has a wacky theory that Homer was describing a near-contemporary Trojan War, his historical imagination stretching back to the limits of oral history, two centuries at most, and describing the political landscape of the northern Aegean circa 800BC. And I'll say this: If Morrissey's portrait of the Old Northwest is correct and paradigmatic, everything we know about the Iron Age Revival suggests that it was far more likely to have been a "Trojan War"-like era than the collapse of the Bronze Age.