The
Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project
- Updated 23 March 2010 The
Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project
- Updated 23 March 2010 
A project seldom if ever developed for the Internet ... a website to return to ...
A website intended to be of greatest use for anyone interested in economic history ... maritime history ... This file is an update section.
For 2010, for any website navigation question here (depending on which page you landed on via a search engine if you did not land on the index page), go first to the sitemap. The sitemap presents a complete and hyperlinked list of files comprising the website in alphabetical order - Editor
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
The approach of this website is to examine merchants in terms of the networks they are part of, where concentration on individual merchants is reduced. Merchant networks tend to work in an organic way. They behave, they adapt or die. They expand or contract, or change in response to new opportunities, in response to the loss of old opportunities. They can act to exclude members who behave badly. They can actively recruit new members or passively ignore those who want to become new members. They can fade away as technology changes. Members of networks can engage in political activity to advance their interests. Merchant networks can also, as shown by The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars (circa 1839, as those tragedies have been called), cause serious conflict on the world stage, if not prevented by the responsible foreign policies of their home nation(s).
(This series still in development - continued from previous file)
It also appears, that LaRouche and his ilk, suffering outrageously from moral outrage, have never found the time to read Furber's concerted, dedicated and useful work on the East India Company! (Note 40) (Note 41)
Note 40: One might have thought that any North American interested in the British East India Company would first turn to Furber's excellent work, which any interested English or Australian writerwill turn to early in their reading. But no. LaRouche's Dope Inc. does not cite Furber. This is partly it seems as the compilation of Dope Inc. started from a conviction about modern drug trades, and then works back promiscuously through history in search of "evidence" for initial propositions. In British history writing, it has never, ever, been a secret that British merchants dealt in opium. It also seems that American writers and readers of all description, more so those interested in Sino-American relations. have remained disturbed by the history of opium trade for a century or more.
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Note 41: Holden Furber, 'American Traders', New England Quarterly, June 1938, pp. 255-256. Holden Furber, The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, 1783-1796', The Economic History Review, Vol 10, No 2, November 1940., pp 138-147. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c.1976. Holden Furber, 'The Beginnings of American Trade with India, 1784-1812', The New England Quarterly, June, 1938., pp. 235-265. Holden Furber, John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948.
And why is the EICo given such attention by such writers? Partly due to the role of tea in the Boston Tea Party, which for writers in this popular history genre, sparked the American Revolution. LaRouche's writings in particular take up this anti-EICo theme due to his wish to damn opium traders, since nineteenth century American opium traders loom large in his critique of American outcomes. To the extent that American opium traders followed the lead of Britishers associated with the EICo and opium traders, a near-hatred of the EICo seems permissible, and the Boston Tea Party remains as a convenient springboard for such discussions. Unfortunately, this genre in American writing remains oblivious to the fact that a good many British historians have critiqued the EICo. The EICo had such an extensive field of operations, the historian finds that it is simply inescapable in the periods in question.
LaRouche is not the only US conspiracy writer to enjoy strolling his anti-East India Company pathway. Epperson also expresses profound distaste for the EICo and its influences. (Note 42)
Note 42: Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History. Tuscon, Arizona, Publius Press, 1985. Thirteenth printing of 1992.
(This article is continued at a next file in regular series.)
Unfortunately, such writers give their readers no appreciation of British Imperial History, no information on the appearance of anything new, such as “Australia” in the ambit of the British Empire. No properly done maritime history. So here, we will refer to their writings as “the US conspiracy theory in history”. In the context of which, LaRouche can be seen as providing not just an inward-looking critique of US policies to almost the present day, but a meta-history posing as an informed critique of capitalism. Again, unfortunately, the LaRouchian pathways for such discussions tread in only one nation, the USA – it is almost as though no other country exists in the world in any real way. The result is that this genre in American writing, ostensibly concerned with international trade, is without any real awareness of internationalism. It is Isolationist. So it remains as a species of American self-absorption.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
Still, the meta-history provided by LaRouche remains ambitious. For LaRouche, who in his youth flirted with Marxism, Modern Capitalism had its roots not so much in the upper levels of European Catholic society, as is suggested rather diffusely in Deepak Lal's book, Unintended Consequences, it began more with a specific kind of “compact” worked out between European rulers, notable merchants and bankers, and the explorers usually named as the age of European colonial expansion began.
(And for the writers of “the American paranoid conspiracy theory”, slavery and/or its legacies also remains a useful target for abuse, partly as such writers, as “popular historians”, seek to recruit readers (if not followers) drawn from today's US population of Afro-Americans.)
But a problem can easily arise for LaRouche's meta-history here, on the origins of Capitalism, and capitalism's links to the ugly institution of slavery. LaRouche's views pitch matters to the early years of The Age of Sail. However, a quite insightful US historian, Philip D. Curtin. has tied the origins of Europe's later use of slavery in colonies to the end of The Crusades, as indicated in earlier chapters of this book (though not given on this webpage). (Note 43)
Note 43: Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Essays in Atlantic History. Second edition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. (The present writer, Dan Byrnes, is grateful to Paul Burns of Armidale NSW for drawing attention to Curtin's essays here.)
That is, at the end of the Crusades, Crusader Guy Lusignan, from a lineage associated with the kingship of Jerusalem, departed Holy Land conflicts and bought the island of Cyprus from The Templars. Lusignan set up sugar planting using ideas gained from observation of Moslems cultivating sugar in the Holy Land and in Southern Italy. Lusignan planted the seeds of what became “the plantation complex”. One thing led to another, and after Europeans had sailed to the Canary Islands, and further, and further, the tragedies of slavery unfolded in The New World. This happened about the same time as Italian bankers of Genoa, Venice and other Italian cities were using more sophisticated methods to conduct business - precisely those operators or their cities as noted by LaRouche et al, in fact.
Curtin's analysis far better fits a methodology for work on merchant networks across centuries than LaRouche's meta-history. Curtin's views are also far more compatible with what Deepak Lal has to say regarding the origins of individualism in European economic endeavour, on the rise of "the family firm” in Genoa, and about Catholicism in general as a promoter of what became, Capitalism, in Unintended Consequences. Suffice to say, LaRouche's analysis enjoys no support from serious scholars.
A Marxist influence shows in LaRouche's writings, useful perhaps with some readers for buttressing his (allegedly) pro-conscience, anti-establishment stances, although LaRouche finally abandoned Marxism. One of LaRouche's propositions is that at some time before the appearance in Tudor times in England of explorer Sebastien Cabot "and all that", various proto-capitalists in Europe invented a novel kind of "patent" or “compact”, somewhat unspecified, which gave capital a kind of invincibility to the blows and shocks of fate, or to chance-and-contingency, such that those who control this capital can go on and on, accruing wealth and power, bequeathing it to their heirs, and so we might end up here with the alleged 500 or so families which allegedly run the world today – (as a variety of late twentieth century conspiracy theories have tended to suggest since the end of World War II). (Note 44)
Note 44: See for example, Dr John Coleman, Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300. Carson City, NV, America West Publishers, 1992.
Moving along, heavily punishing his nation's mainstream historians as he goes, LaRouche notes that the British East India Company (almost as though it was new information) was involved with running opium to China, which in turn morally perverted US traders from about the mid-1790s, about a decade after Americans merchants (including financier Robert Morris) from 1784-1786 had sent their first ship to China, The Empress of China
In brief, the allegations are that named Americans merchants began to run opium, which gave them bloated profits large enough to enable them to successfully begin manipulating the developing US economy, as land sales and railroads were promoted. Trends were set up, some traceable back to the EICo. US traders trucked with the evil bankers of London, some of whom backed treacherous Southerners during the Civil War. So cruise on the US conspiracy theories.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
It may indeed, well be true, that the EICo set up opium-running so well, that overshoots of their system lingered on into what became the post-World War Two drug trades, except that La Rouche begins suggesting here that the present Queen of England, and her ilk, all believers in what the EICo gave as legacy to the world, are at the head of the world's drug cartels of today, as in Dope Inc., The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy.
All up, LaRouche becomes so confident of his historical theory, he starts slandering most of the leaderships of nations of the Western World since WWII for their morally-craven partnerships with the evil "patent-holders", and it all sounds by now like a somewhat Marxist-Leninist/Trotskyite revision of the legend of The Beast of the Apocalypse, 666, redecorated with fresh tales of The Anti-Christ in modern guise, trying to control the entire world.
Suffice to say, La Rouche is quite against a lot of matters in Western Culture since WWII, including, The Beatles, whose lyrics and phenomenal success encouraged the counter culture and allegedly were coded messages to drug users, which lyrics were in the services of aforementioned drug cartels and their lackeys, and so on, and on it goes.
The views of the US conspiracy theorists unfortunately serve greatly to intensify US self-absorption-in-moralism, partly by a tendency to reinforce views on American Isolationism. Many such US conspiracy theorists share an inability to consider matters of world trade, since world trade encourages thoughts which conflict with American Isolationism. (Quite a circular argument!)
But there is nothing new or even conspiratorial about US Isolationism, it is a deep feeling or orientation that arose as the War of Independence was won by Americans. As Egnal's work indicates, Isolationism is a native, post-Revolutionary feeling that never arose rationally in the first instance, and which became inbuilt in American political culture. It was a political feeling that simply welled up in some rebellion-winning Americans, and never departed. (Note 45)
Note 45: This is a major finding discussed in Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution. London, Cornell University Press, 1988.
And so, the very idea of the existence or survival of the capitalistic "compact" or a "patent" and its influence on scenarios will tend to annoy American Isolationists, who are very numerous, as non-Tory voters in the UK are numerous, we suppose. We think that LaRouche teased-out these elements of American populism a long time ago and as he exploited them to mount his paranoid critique of the contemporary USA.
We might say, that Larouche proposes a meta-history very "tight" in the way looks at things, as well as being invalid. We think that with the aid of views from Phillip Curtin and Deepak Lal it's possible to suggest views, or theories that are much less tight, more diffuse, and breathe easier without denying unpleasantries; views which discuss the same subject matter but also encourage far more accuracy about world maritime history, to the point of more accurate genealogical detail, to the point where such views could make good headway from the time of The Crusades, to the point where we could even discuss today's problems of “Crusaders” against Islamo-Fascism.
We find that Larouche's theory inadequately treats one region as one of many - the Pacific. But here, even mainstream US historians can be remiss in a book, now old, such as Dulles, America in the Pacific: A Century of Expansion (1938). Where Australia does not even warrant a mention in the index.
Dulles seems here to have a book written for propaganda purposes on the eve (1938) of a major war. The USA it seems with the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898, had “established a Pacific Empire”. Its object was to protect its trade and commerce, “the primary objective of its overseas advance”, not unaided by the imperialism of European nations. One might here pause and wonder just how anti-Spanish were the American acquisitions of Texas, California, and the Philippines – as though they were a continuation of old, Protestant-held. post-Spanish Armada, Elizabethan and anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic prejudices, reborn and continued in the Anglo-American New World?
At the time he wrote, Dulles correctly foresaw problems with rising Japanese imperialism. He writes of the thread he takes up (pp. 1-2), “An ambition to win mastery of the Pacific and control its rich commerce runs persistently through the entire history of the United States. The ambition to dominate the Pacific was first awakened by the old China traders whose ships discovered the Western Ocean for the seaports of the Atlantic Coast in the early days of the Federal period.” Dulles early on, in his second chapter, treats fur trading on the north/west American coast, but quite ignores Australia. Which is to say, that today's 2009 crop of US conspiracy writers merely deepen old grooves already writ in the US history mudslides. (Note 46)
Note 46: Dulles: America in the Pacific: A Century of Expansion. 1938., pp. 1-2.
A genealogical survey of US presidential origins
Follows results a survey genealogical (not political) backgrounds of the US presidents: what arises here in terms of the contentiousness of Larouche's own argument? Have de facto dynasties (oligarchs) arisen in American political life. (Unexceptional means “no” to such questions.) (Note 47)
Note 47: This survey was prompted by a reading of a history-from-below book, Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. London, Pimlico/Random House, 2006.
The question behind the survey is: have there been any tendencies in the genealogical histories of the American presidents, to date, that tend to support an argument that dynastic influences have unduly influenced the selection of American presidents. The answer is no, at least, not till President Ulysses S. Grant, who had a by-then uncommon number of Northerners in his background. This however would hardly be surprising, Grant did much to help the North win the Civil War. That is, as far as Northerners were allegedly influencing American presidential politics to any undue extent, a deep influence from the North did not appear till say the 1860s. Long after the Essex Junto Myth had first surfaced. If the North (which was anyway more industralised) began to dominate American politics and affairs from the 1860s, this would hardly be surprising given the outcome of the Civil War.
President No1. George Washington, perhaps the wealthiest man in the American colonies prior to the Revolution, use of slavery, from a large Washington family, the genealogy of which presents the names Dandridge, Fairfax, and Lee of Virginia.
President No2. John Adams, he had a descendant Catherine marry Henry Sturgis Morgan of JP Morgan bankers and see below re John Quincy Adams. The Adams line had links to Joshua Johnson (who is noted here in citations of work by Jacob Price), In his background is Mayflower pilgrim, John Alden (re names Peabody, Adams, Wadsworth, Crowninshield) and the names Downing and Winthrop.
President No3. Thomas Jefferson, Virginia-based, use of slavery, large family of Jeffersons, with background names Wayles and Randolph of Virginia, Nicholas.
President No4. James Madison, of Virginia, a cross-reference to Washingtons, and Taylor and Coles of Virginia, Payne of North Carolina.
President No5. James Monroe, author of the Monroe Doctrine on guidelines for the pursuit of American self-interests, his background has a substantial number of New Yorkers, and New Netherlanders via his wife Kortright. Also the name Aspinwall; his daughters married to names Gouvenour and Lawrence. Monroe is remembered re a Slave Trade Act of 1820, need more re Kortright (blut do not forget re Kellogg).
President No6. John Quincy Adams, Massachusetts background, Alden the Mayflower pilgrim, Smith and Quincy of Massachusetts, Norton and Mason of Massachusetts., Boylston, Gardner and Smiths of Massachusetts.
President No7. Andrew Jackson, unexceptional, son of a humble new migrant, an early military career.
President No8. Martin Van Buren, re wife Hoes and New Netherlanders names such as van Alstyne, descendants of name Duer.
President No9. William Henry Harrison, background has noted Virginia planter names Churchill, Ludwell, Randolph, Carter, Lee, Claiborne, Grymes, Byrd, Page, Washington, Ambler, Turbeville and re Bollings (though rather confusingly, some descendants of Pocahontas.
President No10. John Tyler, nil to report.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
President No11. James Knox Polk, his background has the names Childress of the Carolinas.
President No12. Zachary Taylor, military career, his daughter Sarah Knox married president of the Confederate States, Jefferson Finis Davis (against whom, strangely, treason charges were dropped).
President No13. Millard Fillmore, nil to report.
President No14. Franklin Pierce, his background has the names Appleton, Means, Hubbard, Birdstreet, but there is little to report.
President No15. James Buchanan, unexceptional, nil to report.
President No16. Abraham Lincoln, his background has Virginia planter names Herring and Harrison. Noted regarding the American Civil War, etc.
President No17. Andrew Johnson, unexceptional, little to report.
President No18. Ulysses S. Grant, military career, in his background are names such Grant, Delano, (Huguenots), Delano-Warren, Grant-Huntingdon-Lathrop, a preponderance of Northerner names.
President No19. Rutherford B. Hayes, in his background are names such as Russell, Trowbridge, Marshall, Parmalee (Parmelee).
President No20. James Abram Garfield, connected with Northerner names, and with Garfield the background names representing old Southern/Jeffersonian legacies seem to be fading generally in presidential genealogical scenarios.
President No21. Chester A. Arthur, military career, unexceptional.
President No22. Grover Cleveland, in his background are names including Cabots, Savage, Folger, Parmalee, Sewall, and some Massachusetts names. Cleveland became a banker (failed).
President No. 23, Benjamin Harrison, see Harrison above.
President No24. Grover Cleveland, see above.
President No25. William McKinley, unexceptional.
President No26. Theodore Roosevelt, substantial in terms of New Netherlander (often New York) names, Bulloch, his wife had a background with names Carow a shipping merchant and a Brigadier-General; in his background are Northerner names such as Livingstons of New York; his wife Alice Hathaway Lee brought in northerner names such as Lee, Cabot, Higginsons and Boardman, and Lee-Perkins of connections with the family of T. H. Perkins.
President No27.
William H. Taft,
Unexceptional except for a possibly strange irony here. The
name arises in genealogies here of incumbent (2007) US vice-president Dick Cheney,
who has been
a substantial war contractor with Halliburton (and/or its
subsidiaries). The genealogical background of President Taft is
mostly unexceptional, except that it contains one or several names
Cheney. From later than Taft's time, the Cheney background (seen from
the VP's present-day perspective) invokes quite a number of
more-C19th names that the conspiracy artists love to excoriate, such as
Sheldon-Lyman,
Lyman-Robbins, Lyman and Warren Delano Jnr, Roosevelt, Pierpont, JP
Morgans, Cushing, Sturgis, and a Du Pont or two, with some British for
conspiracy writers to
complain about as added spice, the Viscounts Harcourt and some of the
Barings. Whether this irony deserves deeper examination, an Australian writer finds hard to say.
President No28. Woodrow Wilson,
Unexceptional except as with
Wilson above, some links to the name Bolling and descendants of
Pocahontas.
President No29. Warren G. Harding,
Unexceptional,
President No30. Calvin Coolidge,
Unexceptional, except that his wife
imports the surnames Brown and Putnam into pictures.
President
No31.
Herbert Hoover, unexceptional, background as a young mining engineer who once
did surprisingly well in Western Australia.
President
No32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, surprisingly contentious for conspiracy theorists,
see Theodore
Roosevelt above, re the names Delano (Franklin's mother was a
Delano), Lyman, and Robbins; Roosevelt and an old American colonial name, Aspinwall,
Aspinwall-Howland, many New Netherlanders, one child married to Du
Pont. FDR's wife Eleanor invoked the names of New York Livingstons.
President
No33. Harry S. Truman, Unexceptional.
President
No34.
Dwight Eisenhower, military career, General during WWII, a grandson
married a daughter of President R. Nixon.
President
No35. John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated, his father contentious re
allegations of Prohibition Era liquor-dealing.
President
No36.
Lyndon Baines
Johnson, Unexceptional.
President No37. Richard
Milhouse Nixon,
Unexceptional, but administration so objectionable, he was threatened
with impeachment. (See re Eisenhower above).
President
No38. Gerald
Rudolph Ford, Unexceptional.
President No39. James
(Jimmy) Carter,
Unexceptional.
President No40. Ronald Reagan,
Unexceptional.
President41. George Herbert Bush,
ex-CIA official, genealogy points to some
mid-Western financier
names, Bush-Pierce, links to financier Walker.
President42.
William
Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, Unexceptional.
President43.
George Walker
Bush, contentious by contemporary standards, and see re his father
above. Possibly
accusations of a "presidential dynasty", electoral fraud, prosecution
of
Iraq War.
More generally, the Bush lineage speaks less of specific genealogies
than a general, later nineteenth century merging of interests
between financial
power and more modern industries, especially the oil industry, more
spread across the entire US than centralized as either Northerner or
Southerner. But of course, G. W. Bush is excoriated also by
anti-conspiracy websites as a one-time
member of Yale
University's Skull and Bones Club, the memberships of which
have been
much excoriated by today's conspiracy theorists as having hijacked
important sectors of the US political system.
Very
little is evident from a fresh survey, of distinct dynastic tendencies
in the US presidential system, though it might be agreed, that such
tendences as those which have become evident in recent decades,
do tend to controversially contradict the general tendencies
of
the idealisms and rhetoric of the US political system, generally.
Certainly, no conspiratorial
subversions of the American political system by any legacees of the
Essex Junto Myth are evident in any dynastic terms. It appears that if
certain name-able families (as commercial dynasties) have continued to hold considerable wealth,
this is the result of good management, not from engagement in
conspiracy.
At which point we can begin to rebut the writings of particular US conspiracy theorists from even deeper veins in history - back to John Ledyard, the American who sailed with explorer Cook (The page numbers given immediately below are from Dulles 1938 book (Note 49)
Note 49: John Ledyard is credited with inspiring the US to Nootka fur trade in Gibson, Otter, p. 38-39. Ledyard was once as earlier noted engaged by the English Africa Association (headed by Sir Joseph Banks) to go west from the Nile in search of the Niger River; and Ledyard died in Cairo. See Glynn R. V. Barratt, 'The Russian Navy and New Holland', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 64, Part 4, March 1979., pp. 217-234. See Boyd, Jefferson Letters, Vol. 9, TJ to Lafayette, Paris, 9 February, 1786, Jefferson provided a reference for Ledyard, who wanted to go through northern parts of Asia and America, to Russia. See Dickinson on Falklands sealing, p. 54. See also, information from P. C. F. Smith on Empress of China (to be much-cited in these articles). ... The vision of John Ledyard (p. 11), a corporal in the marines accompanying Cook’s third voyage. Ledyard was astonished at the prices fetched at Canton for furs from N/W America, and in his travel memoirs of 1783 he wrote of $100 being fetched at Canton for a skin which cost its purchaser sixpence. Ledyard tried to convince fellow-American of his dream of fur-riches, but only Robert Morris listened, and then did nothing, though Morris did later send the first US ship to China, Empress of China (treated in following sections here). Later, Ledyard in Paris tried to interest Jefferson in his dream of N/W America. Dulles (p. 12) says Ledyard’s vision helped inspire Jefferson to later promote the Lewis/Clark expedition across America.) (Note 49)
Note 49: Dulles, America in the Pacific, pp. 11-12.
Jefferson thought Ledyard somewhat too imaginative, but nor did he forget Ledyard’s views on possibilities. In the year Ledyard died, 1789, Bostonians sent two ships, Columbia and Lady Washington, to Nootka Sound (north-west America), in which year, Britain squabbled noisily with Spain over rights to the region, the diplomatic dispute called the Nootka Crisis from which Spain backed down. In London, one of the commercial men most-vocal about the Nootka Crisis was alderman William Curtis, noted as a player in the Greenland whale fishery, who had not long seen his ship Lady Penrthyn arrive home from its work as a convict transport with the First Fleet to Australia.
A viceroy of Peru became one of the few people to voice a prediction that for Spain, the presence of the Americans at Nootka Sound, which did not overly concern the British, was more threatening than British activity or opinions. Correct. He feared the Americans would create a Pacific colony on the coast of Oregon (where in 1792 on Columbia, Capt Robert Gray by discovering the Columbia River laid the basis for a trading centre he named for his employer, the New York fur trader, John Jacob Astor).
In 1790, Americans sent five ships to N/W America. (Dulles, p. 14.) British interests did begin to resent the following American endeavours ... In 1810 the Winship Brothers of Boston tried to establish a base on the Columbia River to take furs from Indians, who were hostile and uncooperative. Astor followed up next year, 1811, trying to establish Astoria, after establishing The Pacific Fur Company, which sent two expeditions, one overland, one sailing around Cape Horn. Astor’s men met competition from Britishers (Northwest Fur Company, Dulles, p. 20) travelling overland to the area from eastern Canada. When news came of the 1812 War between Britain and Americans, Astor’s men were induced to sell out to the Northwest Fur Company. At the government level, by 1818, when the war had finished, Britain insisted it had title to the Oregon area by right of Mackenzie’s expedition to the Fraser River of 1793, and by the discoveries of Cook and Vancouver, but America won sovereignty over the area. So arose the later American states of Oregon and Washington. (Note 50)
Note 50: Dulles, America in the Pacific, p. 14.
It was not long before Americans began to think hungrily of California, a Spanish possession (now the richest or the most-populated state of the USA). Dulles (p. 23), mentions Capt. Ebenezer Dorr, who in 1796 sent Otter, perhaps the first American ship to California, to Monterey. But he does not mention Dorr’s ships voyaging to Sydney, Australia. The Yankee seamen (p. 23) resorted to corrupting Spanish guards at whatever ports they visited, and kept this up regularly. (One wonders if they corrupted anyone at Sydney? Australians seem not to have asked.) Two American captains meeting trouble with the Spanish (pp. 23-24) were Capt. George Washington Eayrs and Capt. Richard Cleveland, who adopted a crash or crash-through policy to Spanish resistance, and succeeded with it. In time, it was trade in hide and tallow from Californian-Spanish cattle herds which tipped the balance the American way. The Boston name Dana surfaces for fresh inspection. Dana was later active in Hawaii, but the US conspiracy theorists are strangely uninterested in American activities on Hawaii (Note 51:
Note 51: Dulles, America in the Pacific, pp. 23-24.
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By 1812, Richard H. Dana Jnr, (originally from Boston, though his genealogy cannot be linked to the other Dana Bostonians), had perceived the potentials of such cattle trade. And while the Americans enjoined with the Spanish and were now largely free of British interests on their Western Pacific coast, they then had to deal with Russian aspirations. Here, Dana remains an interesting name, as he was also interested in trade via Hawaii to China. (Note 52)
Note 52: Unfortunately, Dana's own genealogy cannot yet be suitably connected to other, more well-known Dana genealogy of the Boston area. With the study of notable merchant names, it is not however uncommon to find a more-than-usually adventurous trader strangely detached from the normalities of their family history.
So Dulles, as have many American writers, ignored the interests of US shipping in Australia/Australasia before 1812. By 1846, five thousand Americans in Oregon wanted their own state and another 1000 of them urged the USA to annex California from Spanish possession, which aspirations coincided with the popularization by expansionist president James K. Polk, of the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny. All of which is fascinating, as Dulles here discusses styles of American imperialism to which certain leftists active on today’s Internet are opposed. And while Dulles ignored Australia, so do they. Interestingly, Dulles in his notes writes of how scattered the material was, that he digested before writing, and he had already written on America’s Old China Trade.
Dulles’ critics in cyberspace have not cared how scattered Dulles’ original material had been, and have set to attacking his propaganda line on US imperialism. One of the victims has been modern-day US maritime history. This is even as Dulles himself was happy to agree that with the way America had acquired the Philippines, the US had abridged its best principles. Today, a result of this American propaganda fracas is that US writers of any political persuasion seem not to understand their maritime history, nor the tribulations any nation has with conducting its international trade, vis-à-vis foreign US policy.
A common saying in today’s world is, “Only in America”. More so, and since the youth revolution of the 1960s, “only in California”. But why? With its wealth and large population, the USA has the ability to throw up an extraordinary number of oddball events, incidents, ideas, people, and beliefs. By 2005, the Internet had been saturated with most such oddball ideas from the US, such as belief in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), &c &c. For any historian, and amusingly, some of the most conspicuous websites from the USA are concerned with quite extraordinary conspiracy theories, on anything from the non-landing of US astronauts on the Moon to the notorious conspiracy-theory in history of Lyndon LaRouche, a multi-failed US presidential candidate, from obscure crevices in the US political system. LaRouche, born 1922, now aged over 84, began his career as a propagandist, as a near-Trotskyite Leftist attempting to subvert staid New England states in the US, and had ended – in jail. LaRouche’s slanderous legacy lingers on with websites inspired by his major propaganda effort, Dope Inc. (Note 53)
Note 53: See Lyndon LaRouche, (By The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review), Dope Inc. The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Washington DC, Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. From the Introduction, p. 8: "The fact that LaRouche also identified the powerful British Crown bankers as partners in the dope trade along with the Jewish crime syndicate, marked him as one of the most dangerous men alive in the eyes of [the personnel involved in] Dope, Inc." Wikipedia's current (2007) entries on LaRouche make for fascinating reading. It seems to the present writer – Byrnes – that LaRouche and his associates came to this particular conclusion due to a sadly misleading misreading of genealogical material relating to Britain’s royal family. As we hope to demonstrate below ...
Historians should by no means dignify conspiracy theories, but Larouche does at times become thought-provoking since while his propaganda efforts are contemporary, his conspiracy theory is clever enough to attempt to explain long-term trends in world economic since the times of Henry VIII and an early trans-Atlantic explorer such as Cabot. LaRouche's narratie gathers momentum from the earliest days of The Age of Sail as it is called in pre-Modern and Modern history. This ambition is capped by Larouche’s most impressive slander – that present Queen of England, Elizabeth II, heads possibly the world’s largest drug cartel or operation distributing illicit drugs such heroin. As is graphically suggested on the cover of his book Dope Inc.
How LaRouche deployed his theory-in-history to reach this amazing conclusion, or selling point, for his book, is darkly fascinating – because as he worked at developing his outlook, Larouche also forgot about the British settlement of Australia. We conclude, that any theory-in-history which excludes reference to an entire continent on Planet Earth may have serious flaws (?). His theory can be applied entertainingly, especially for its historical naivete, to much that has long been known about the British East India Company).
The problems posed by Larouche’s theory are not merely those of the usual flaws in historical thinking as usually demonstrated by conspiracy theories, such as ignorance, and mis-reading of the genealogies of upper-class citizens. The problems posed are, unfortunately, deeply rooted in North American culture, having been rooted since the time of the American Revolution. if not before. By today, such problems can often be reflected in movie-scripts written for Hollywood. so that these problems become endemic, spread world-wide as one kind of propaganda success Larouche's theory on the internet becomes a dire warning all concerned – that views of history have to be kept healthily in perspective (Note 54)
Note 54: It has even been suggested by a few movie critics, that the famed director, Stanley Kubrick, accepted LaRouche’s theory-in-history, and used its terms to develop the scripts, in particular, of his movies, Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. Both movies are regarded as masterpieces of their kind.
But in the USA, cultural weaknesses of an inherent kind, and apart from weaknesses in the national education system, weaknesses in the political system, themselves almost conspire to produce enough impressionable minds to be influenced by such theories. For Larouche’s theory-in-history, originally conceived while the younger Larouche was influenced by Marxism as he developed critique of the US’ and the world’s capitalist systems, easily crosses over into a dangerous zone in American cultural life which derives from early Puritanism in America, a kind of religious fundamentalism … where what is to be feared in the affairs of humanity are – the works of The AntiChrist! Or, something very like such works.
We might well ask, what has this to do with Economic History? And what are economic historians going do about it? It is difficult to say, since these sorts of conspiracy theories, which often include material on old-style anti-Semitism now resurging (The Protocols of The Elders of Zion) purportedly amount to meta-history – they are explanations that attempt to be over-arching and all-inclusive. They are not works of history at all, and they relate badly to properly-researched history.
As was said often during the twentieth century, Marxism and its variants amounted to a kind if faith. Strangely , for a writer who was originally using an almost-standard Marxist critique of US capitalism and US foreign policy, Larouche tapped the same unease in the US population about current affairs, that the barely-educated but decently-believing Protestant Christian might have – if they believe in the influence of Satan and/or of The Anti-Christ. The political implications are heady to toxic levels! LaRouche became just one of a bevy of US propagandists who critique their own US history from a point of view of fear of the influence of an AntiChrist of some kind – a monolithically-operating but single-minded and highly successful moral/spiritual enemy. Being, then, “spiritual”, albeit in a deterministic way, this outlook produces the opposite of the dispassion and objectivity a historian should use when assessing events.
Also as a result of claiming a moral high ground of some kind and seeming “spiritual” at bottom, and so mixing in with a multi-dimensional mix of topics providing worry to any concerned citizen, the US writers deploying this way of working can wax heated about topics as diverse as opium trading by US international traders, merchants’ involvement in slavery, political and/or financial corruption at local, state or national levels, disgraceful adventures in national foreign policy, and the success of long-term – and conspiratorial – efforts to subvert the US Constitution and the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Worse, the works of “The Illuminati” and “Freemasons” entrench the evil effects of these tendencies in society- all allegations made, wonderfully free of using the disciplines of history,not to speak of common sense. (Note 55)
Note 55: More to come here
There is also an engrooved streak of xenophobia in these conspiracy theories. Consider the case with US shipping manager Lamb Snr (died 1813), his son Thomas named the ships he himself owned or part-owned in favour of international trade as follows - ships named Cabot, Moselle (Germany), Korea, Versailles, Marmora, Switzerland, Napoleon, Sultana. These ship names are precisely the kind “international words” the conspiracy theorists loathe, they speak of places which are sources of contaminating influences, untrustworthy foreign regimes, international pressures requiring political and commercial compromise - all parts of the fundamentalist Isolationism of modern US tastes in conspiracy theories.
It is no accident that when both Marxist-influenced and more “Christian” conspiracy theorists in the US so often agree about what has been reprehensible - even evil - in US international affairs, they are drawing on similar wellsprings in the American population of xenophobia, plus a similar ignorance to be shared with their unwitting readers; they are equally recommending an unrealistic Isolationism as an ideal and indeed the only pure-hearted response a decent-minded American could provide. Swiss financiers are particularly hated by these writers, the French are distrusted, and British financiers had benefited so much from the evil actions of the British East India Company, they and their entire social system, their rising British Empire, are also pure anathema. What becomes noticeable is that many of the the "Swiss" (whom LaRouche identifies as a variety of "Genevans") were not Swiss at all, they were displaced French Huguenots, who may or may not have become members of what can best be discussed as "the Huguenot internationale", a notable set of merchant networks, in their time a kind of third force in economic history.
Returning to the opium trade ...
From the late eighteenth century, the first broad problem to deal with regarding the opium trade is its internationalism. From 1421 or so, the year now made infamous by Gavin Menzies due to his book - 1421: The Year China Discovered The World. (London, Bantam Books, 2002) - Chinese mariners had begun to take home supplies of opium by sea. This opium presumably came from India, though a land route - The Silk Road - may have been used much earlier. Possibly, we can take it that Chinese medical men used opium to ease the suffering of dying patients - as part of palliative ccare. The Chinese also found opium useful against dysentery. If we assume then, that from some time, opium was used legitimately for medical/palliative care in China, then we need to ask: when did it begin to be used for recreational purposes? Purposes of self-indulgence, or hedonism? Problems of addiction.
Whatever happened, at some point, a moral corruption set in. The price asked in China for opium may have risen. In time, European merchants, already trading to China, began to bring in opium. For a merchant using ships, opium was a perfect commodity, low in weight and volume and high in profit. Smuggled supplies could be hidden or packed within other goods for later retrieval, though normally opium was transported in distinctive wooden chests. Equally, opium would have remained attractive to smugglers. It is hardly surprising that by the 1820s, merchants from Scotland, England, Spain, India, Turkey and the United States were involved. Also involved was at least one man with a Scots background who had been a short-term resident of colonial New South Wales, Australia, and who retained links with affluent people there - Walter Stevenson Davidson.
The second problem is colonialism. Here, history is long, mixed, often depressingly violent, often depressingly racist, multi-national, multi-cultural – and always visited by ships. The opium trade was extraordinarily multi-national. The maritime cannot be ignored, but too often is ignored. By chance, recent world publicity on little-known aspects of China's maritime history aids understanding here, once we know more of the story of Chinese Admiral Zheng He's voyages as far as the East African coast. Zheng He's story leads us to ponder this question - compared to what we usually know, what might world history have been like, if China had not given up foreign contacts, and maintained and expanded the impetus she gave to her maritime industries and international trade from the fifteenth century, till long into the nineteenth century? The question of course, is unanswerable, but well worth thinking about ... (Note 56)
Note 56: See in the arena of sensationalised versus non-sensationalised history, a far more reliable treatment than Gavin Menzies' version… Louise Levathes, When China Ruled The Seas: The Treasure Fleet of The Dragon Throne, 1405-1433. New York, Simon Schuster, 1994. Menzies, incidentally, like LaRouche, is able to concoct a fanciful tale partly by ignoring the career of British explorer James Cook.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
The third problem is finding a way to view what the British in India called the country trade. The East India Company's attitude to the country trade was hypocritical, true, but this was also an answer to the long-term problems posed by Monopoly versus Free Trade arguments. Here, the US conspiracy theorists want to have it both ways - to damn monopoly because it is monopoly and fits badly with democracy. To damn free traders because they might behave either immorally, or be compromised by close proximity to monopoly. These damnations, both understandable, are then used to damn government, which either polices situations too much, or not enough! Maybe in history, a certain amount of hypocrisy is merely one way to manage various ongoing contrasts and dilemmas? But certainly, problems are harder to handle when large amounts of money are involved. Certainly, the US conspiracy theorists find it difficult to praise the virtuous. We wonder why?
A fourth problem is the cast of characters involved. It is with considering this cast of characters that writers in both Australia and the US have been rather uncurious, while British writers have tended to be candid. Admittedly, it is somewhat difficult to sort out which (British-Scots) merchants were mostly involved with the country trade, and which were not. From 1770 if not before, British country traders were free agents allowed to operate between India and China by the EICo. Some such traders floated in or out of official East India Company employ from time to time, the distinction between country traders and officially-acting EICo merchants was quite porous, but it is misleading to imagine the distinction did not exist. (Note 57)
Note 57: See for example, Anne Bulley, Bombay Country Ships, 1790-1833. London, Curzon Press, 2000. ISBN 0-7007-1236-4.
Confronting this difficulty leads to deeper consideration from the year 1770. Of course, between 1770 and 1775, many relevant history books become preoccupied with what led to the American Revolution. Australians tend to think of Capt. James Cook sailing north up the eastern Australian coast. It is British writers who provide the main clues in this fourth problem zone. But not as many clues as we might wish.
A fifth problem is with the American conspiracy theories generally, that today flit on the Internet so conspicuously, so nervously, like a well-meaning and outraged bat out of hell. One modern proponent of such views is sometimes said to be one (Dr?) Carol Quigley, who years ago in a book (Tragedy and Hope) supposedly accurately predicted many key events in what seems to be US foreign policy - as though events had been pre-determined, and therefore had not been as mysterious as they seem. Quigley's book is anti-British, and is rare to find, one can meet people who claim to have read it (and believe it), it has been remembered by a variety of later-written political-popularist books in the USA. Whether Quigley was the first US book writer to really sharpen a hatred of Britain is hard to say, but suffice to say, his treatment infected areas of US popular history. Several books; not so hard to obtain in second-hand bookshops, present or re-present aspects of such views. Such as:
Chaitkin's book on "treason", which carries an advertisement for the writings of LaRouche, and has a blurb reading, "Everything evil in America from Aaron Burr to Henry Kissinger, is a product of America's oligarchical "first families". Especially, the Boston Brahmins. The blurb continues - "Anton Chaitkin is a founding member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, the son of Jacob Chaitkin, an attorney who spent the 1930s fighting Nazi Germany's corporate and legal collaborators in the United States. Anton Chaitkin … in 1978 began a study of the history of the US' "Eastern Establishment" after becoming incensed at inaccurate historical material presented in The New York Times."
Chaitkin in his book has Lyndon LaRouche in a preface excoriating the American Dulles family, E. H. Harriman's influence over the Democratic Party, Schroeder's Bank, which allegedly helped bring Hitler to power in Germany, Henry Kissinger, as a tool of “the Eastern Establishment”. Chaitkin himself excoriates: the British East India Company, treason in America, as with Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, whose step-sister Peggy Shippen married Arnold; Adam Smith's theory of free trade, Albert Gallatin who instigated the Whiskey Insurrection (originally from Geneva) see above in the Ledyard genealogy). Gallatin's friendship with Etienne Dumont, who tutored the sons of Britain's Lord Shelburne, and translated the work of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (who is said to have been a Satanist); fur trader John Jacob Astor (noted as a senior New York Mason), the Pultney Association buying American land (which is admittedly hard to research), Henry Dundas (Lord Melville), the Holland Land Company, Burr's encouraging of the “British spy machine” which “nearly destroyed the USA” early in the nineteenth century, pro-English policies in general in America, pro-British merchant families, the “treasonous core-group of the British-Swiss secret service in America” (with many of the alleged agents listed); the leading merchant and banker families of The Boston Brahmins for forging the Federalist Party in New England, known as The Essex Junto formed from 1807 if not earlier. The Cabots, Lowells and Higginsons of Boston; the institution of slavery in general and the machinations of its major operators, American involvement in the opium trade to China (Elias Haskett Derby and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and so the firm Russell and Co. which was comprised of the names Perkins, Russell, Forbes and Sturgis), the rise of financier names such as Peabody and J. P. Morgan, “the Scottish Rite conspiracy of Freemasonry” in American affairs to the 1980s, the Swiss and the Jesuits (and their dabbling with the legacies of the earlier roles of Venice and Genoa in formulating a new style of banking (Lombard banking) from the tail-end of The Crusades, with influence of course from Catholicism; the instigators of the American Civil War; the developers of the Confederate Navy; the “Scottish fascist” Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and his circles in Britain. the later nineteenth century eugenics movement and its promoters (admittedly a crew of misguided thinkers).
Chaitkin also says (misleadingly), p. 51, that the Mediterranean's Barbary pirates, by 1801 or so, were maintained and supplied by Britain “as a terrorist auxiliary to the British navy”, which is a complete nonsense. [At the time, the Barbary pirates had been harrassing American shipping ever since it had first appeared in the western Mediterranean.] - (misleadingly) that the British China trade was financed almost entirely by Barings bank in London (which is ludicrously not true, though two sons of Sir Francis Baring were directly involved in such business in the east, one in India and one in China, hardly surprising if their father was a one-time Company chairman). But in short, the American Eastern Establishment is allegedly responsible for most of the evils to be seen in American life.
Coleman (claiming to be an American ex intelligence officer) similarly excoriates a great many matters, such as ... (Note 58)
Note 58: Dr John Coleman, Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300. Carson City, NV, America West Publishers, 1992.
The slightest possibility of the rise of any one-world government cum new world order (which is US conspiracy writer code for the UN), the Eastern Establishment families (as noted by both LaRouche and Chaitkin) involved in the nineteenth century American-China opium trade. Barings bankers of London. British merchants in the opium trade to China such as Jardine-Matheson, Cecil Rhodes for his activities in Africa, Henry Kissinger for destabilizing the USA via involvements in three wars (Middle East, Korea, Vietnam), drugs (modern, re biochemical mind control), a variety of institutions through which social control is cleverly exercised (many are named), the drug trade (heroin etc), the plutocracy controlling British banking prior to 1939, the British occupation of India and the Anglo-Chinese opium wars, abandonment of the gold standard (which allegedly protected society against the insecurities of merely paper money), money launderers (many are named), “the Committee of 300” (a supposedly "invisible government").
Coleman's book, so badly written, is a classic populist conspiracy theory, waxing indignant about post-1800 drug trading by US and British East India Co. merchants and the long-term implications for modern social history of the (illicit) drug trades.
Epperson's book seems to present typical views of this ilk in today's USA, and in particular, his bibliography seems a mini-encyclopedia on paranoid US writings which are mostly untranslatable to other cultures for reasons best known to the American psyche in areas west of the eastern seaboard – which of course, allegedly houses the manipulative, over-wealthy and politically-stealthy Eastern Establishment, whose adventures in international trade have been untrustworthy since the Boston Tea Party, more so if they truck with the British.
Epperson cites the allegedly pioneering work of Dr. Carroll Quigley, a one-time Professor of History at Georgetown University, who in 1966 published a 1300 page book claiming the existence of a secretive Anglophile network which “ran things”, to which he did not necessarily object, but which he thought should be less than secretive.
Epperson himself excoriates: power mongers (on the basis that as Lord Acton suggested, holding power will corrupt the holder), teaching of evolution in education, forces anti Right to Life, closet communists, what is called in the USA, “big government”, the little-understood powers of banking establishments, the US' (or, Roosevelt's) abandonment in 1933 of the gold standard for currency, secret societies (The Illuminati, Freemasons, etc); Marx as the father of Communism and an enemy of Christianity and Judaism; the Rothschild bankers; the banking problems of the US, the problem of the Federal Reserve, that is, a central bank which is allegedly “privately owned”; distrust of organisations ostensibly promoting non-violence; The Skull and Bones Club at Yale University as exposed in Esquire Magazine in September 1977 in an article by Ron Rosenbaum; promoters of anything like a new world order (the Bilderbergers).
LaRouche in Dope Inc. (seemingly inspired by the Chaitkin father-son team writing earlier) excoriates the following list of evil influences ..:
Today's drug cartels; the legacies of the Venetian-Genoese banking interests (since the tail-end of The Crusades), the old fondi (trust) funds inspired by the Bavarian Wittlesbach dynasty, the ancient Italian family Orsinis, the Jesuits in China as the original middlemen who linked Indian opium producers and Chinese consumers via Portuguese then British activities, British PM Lord Shelburne (William Petty, allegedly “the man behind William Pitt The Younger”) who allowed into power the British factions behind the Asian opium trade (Shelburne's plan being to use “the free trade trade banner” to drag Britain from the money-morass it was in due to losing its American colonies, to profit from the opium trade via India and to subvert American interests), the opium trade apologist Adam Smith (the Scots writer on economics), Britain's apostles of free trade (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, John Stuart Mill). British opium dealers Jardine-Matheson (and later the Keswicks and the Swires). Adherents of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Barings (as British bankers. John Jacob Astor an Anglophile and from 1816 an opium trader to China. the Boston Brahmins (especially Forbes and T. H. Perkins, the firm Russell and Co.). Britain's opium wars on China, from before 1846 (and its later alleged narcotics war on the USA since about 1951). British merchant interest in shipping Chinese (opium-addicted?) coolies to the US West Coast. British influence on the southern US cotton trade. Bankers J. P. Morgans by the later nineteenth century. Rothschilds bankers. Cecil Rhodes and the establishment of Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs. Bulwer-Lytton in Britain. The founders of P&O shipping line (Mackay/Inchape), the failure of the US' Prohibition Era (and the bootlegging activities of the father of the later President John F. Kennedy). Britain's Hambro Bank, the Anglophile Sassoon family, formerly India-based opium traders to China. The US' United Fruit Company (“rum and Coca-Cola”, its activities in South America). The post-WWII Bretton Woods agreements made in England vis-a-vis creation of International Monetary Fund (IMF). Canada (a British Commonwealth country) as a major conduit, due to the very old Hudson's Bay Company, for the entry of heroin into the twentieth century US. The Golden Triangle area south of China as a modern drug-producing region (and re the Vietnam War). The oligarchs behind modern politics, those behind the development of “the counter-culture” from the 1960s (LaRouche's very own war on pop music since the 1950s and the advent of Elvis Presley!). US secretary of state Henry Kissinger (“a British agent of influence”) ... and a vast variety of modern or late twentieth-century events, names, places, outcomes ...
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
And the present writer finds that what is common to, and objectionable in the terms of the conspiracy theories outlined above, is the ignorance of actual, detailed history, particularly British and Australian histories, that the writers assume their readers will be enthusiastically sharing with them. So in the next sections of this series I wish to present some information probably new to many such US writers and their readers. None of these US conspiracy writers seem to have the slightest empathy with how to sensibly approach, or not approach, the complex histories of international trading relations since the end of the American War of Independence in 1783. Which are reflected in the complexities of maritime history.
(Ends this item so far - this article to be continued in more files in series)
Re Merchant Networks through the Ages: See Mrs Aubrey Richardson, The Doges of Venice. London, Methuen, 1914. Also on the Doges of Venice, D. S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580. London, Thames and Hudson, 1970.
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