This blog’s intellectual foundations

  A friend in the Philippines, looking over the blog, concluded that it seemed all over the map.  And that’s true!  I put up plenty of personal stuff and random musings.  But there is a core set of interests that parallels the evolution of my academic work over the past few years.  The geographic focus is on Latin America, of course, but it goes beyond that.

(1)  Instability.  This is what I started out studying.  I was intrigued that Mexico had a pretty well-developed banking system by the 1930s, despite having gone from a dictatorship to bodies-bloating-in-the-sun chaos and back to dictatorship.  It also had steel mills and copper mines and produced a boatload of oil.  How did that happen?  You might say that most historians who get interested in Latin America start by asking the following:  “This place is much poorer than the United States!  Let’s look for the malfunctioning institutions and ask why they’re malfunctioning.”  I took the opposite approach.  “Man, stuff doesn’t work well here at all.  Property rights are all messed up. Why then is it so much richer than the DRC?”  In other words, how did businesses work around the lack of functioning political institutions?

(2)  Empire.  Now that’s a loaded word!  Let’s just define as the violation of one state’s Westphalian sovereignty by another.  In extremis, the violating state can end the sovereignty of the other. If it doesn’t then proceed to make the conquered population full citizens and create a legitimate shared political community, then you’ve got an empire.  In the other extremis, one government can tell key political actors in another, “Do this thing here and we’ll bribe you, otherwise we’ll sanction you.”  My interest in empire, thus defined, grew right out of the aforementioned interest in political instability.  The U.S. mucked around in Mexico for some time.  In some industries, U.S. mucking was key to compensating for the negative effects of domestic instability and political violence.  The general questions, then, became impossible to avoid.  Can foreign governments (or other supranational authorities) substitute for poorly-functioning domestic institutions?  When and why will they try?  What effects will they have?   Others have developed interest in empires and imperialism from a very different direction, of course.  The serious ones write good books about the rise and decline and collapse of empires.  The unserious ones wind up writing strange novels about worlds where meteor showers wiped out civilization in the 1870s, or some such.   Me, I come at the same interest from another direction:  curiousity about the economic causes and economic effects of the widespread phenomenon of strong states violating the sovereignty of weaker states. 

(3)  Energy.  Whaa? you may ask.  Well, what industries are most affected by political instability?  Oil and gas:  the resources are where they are.  When institutions fall apart, they remain viable.  (This applies to other hard-rock mineral resources as well, of course, but they tend to be less profitable.)  What industry has prompted (over the last century, at least) the most violations of sovereignty?  Once again, oil and gas.  (No, I am not suggesting that most such violations are over resources.  They are clearly not.  But if you limit yourself to economic motivations, you wind up again and again looking at the energy business.)  In the course of writing about issues (1) and (2), I got more and more interested in (3) ... and not just how it related to questions of instability or empire.  It is a fascinating business!  The economics of energy are just so weird, the politics are weirder, and it affects everyone’s life.  Moreover, the future of the planet is tied up in the future of the energy business.  Can we move away from fossil fuels?  What will we need to do?  Can it be done politically?   In short, my growing interest in the energy business came naturally, ever since that article on Mexico in the 1920s. 

Thus the progression:  Latin America --> Instability --> Empire --> Energy.  And thus the big theme tying together much, if not all, of this blog.  Even much of the random travelblogging falls into those categories.  Not all, of course.  I enjoy posting random political blather, talking about New York or Miami or elsewhere, and putting up pictures of my wonderful wife.  But here, at least, you have the three big themes of the blog, and why I believe that they fit together.