The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis

    The Quartet was an excellent book and exactly the sort of thing I was looking for to answer questions about why a constitutional convention was held and how the Constitution was formed during those months. Starting with the negatives, I didn't enjoy when Ellis got polemical about his problems with originalism, which I thought were heavy-handed. At first, I thought he had good perspective, writing about how this was "an exercise in anthropology over time rather than space," but it became too much for me. I also just looked him up and see that he lied about having seen combat in the Army in Vietnam. Not great. But the book speaks for itself. It is a concise, step-by-step history of the drafting, signing, and ratification of the Constitution, told through the perspectives of George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, all prominent federalists.

    The Articles of Confederation had the critical flaw of failing to collect taxes during and after the Revolutionary War. One problem was that taxation was based on the value of land, as South Carolina threatening to withdraw from the Articles of Confederation over the counting of slaves for taxation purposes. The Articles solved the problem by making land the basis of taxation, not people. John Dickinson had led a committee that presented a drafted Articles of Confederation to Congress on July 12, 1776, which was ratified in 1777. But in the ensuing debate, the already weak-federal-government proposal became even weaker, removing Congressional authority over foreign policy, the western borders, and any semblance of sovereignty, which was explicitly given to the states. Most problematic of all was that taxes were voluntary, resulting in a massive debt. In 1781, for example, Congress asked for $3 million from the states and received only $39,138.

    

    Alexander Hamilton made the first major call for reform of the Articles in July 1783 while a delegate to the Confederation Congress, and then drafted a resolution calling for a convention to amend the Articles. He listed major defects, most prominently that there needed to be stronger executive and judicial branches, that the legislature needed to be empowered to tax (not just request money from the states), and the foreign policy and treaty-making power should be given to the national government. But he found no support at that time for his proposals. And for two more years, several proposals to amend the Articles were floated by never got any steam, including proposals by James Madison and Charles Pinckney. It wasn't until September 1786 that a breakthrough came at the Annapolis Convention which the Confederation Congress approved as a way to discuss rules regarding interstate commerce. Only five states showed up: Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. They were without a quorum. Hamilton seized the opportunity to call for a more national government. It was obvious that there was a failure of government at this point, as they could not even gather a quorum to discuss interstate issues, and Hamilton would claim that there was unanimous support within the Annapolis delegations for a future convention with a large mandate to discuss all the most salient issues in Philadelphia in May 1787, which the Articles Congress endorsed in February 1787.

    

    This time, a quorum would arrive, with only Rhode Island not sending a delegation. It was probably helpful to the national cause that Shays' Rebellion, fought over a lack of payment for service in the Continental Army from August 1786 to February 1787, showed the weakness of the Confederation. Meanwhile, Madison spread the word that Washington would attend the Constitutional Convention. It wasn't true, but it helped build pressure for it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Washington had not refused to go out of any disagreement with the national cause, but only because he preferred retirement. Indeed, his presence was critical, as he was the most popular statesman in the country and was also radically nationalist/federalist.

    

    Jay and Madison both had much stronger ideas for the power of the federal government than what actually came to pass. Both wanted the national government to have a veto over all state laws, and both favored the supremacy of national authority, rather than the mix that we ended up with. They also favored totally proportional representation, not equal representation by the states. Additionally, instead of having state legislatures elect their senators, the Virginia Plan would have allowed them to propose candidates among whom the House of Representatives would have chosen. In the process, Madison invented federalism. Writing to Washington, he said, "I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities when they can be subordinately useful." This fallback position would be adopted, and then Madison would come to vigorously support it during the ratification debates of 1787-88.

    Critically, the Constitutional Convention unanimously adopted the one-state-one-vote structure of the Articles Congress, which, in retrospect, all but guaranteed that the most radical national plans would fail.  Another important procedural decision was that the proceedings occur in absolute secrecy, without journalists or spectators in attendance, even posting sentries at the doors and prohibiting delegates from discussing the debates in public or in correspondence. The national cause was favored, however, by an anti-federalist boycott of the process. In mid-July, the Convention hit a wall when it became clear that the small states would block the federal veto of states laws and proportional representation in the legislature. The Connecticut Compromise made representation proportional in the House and by state in the Senate. Madison was initially pessimistic, but Washington was alright with it, writing to Lafayette that "it was probably the best that could be obtained at this time."

    Importantly, the Confederation Congress silently accepted Article VII of the Constitution, which declared that the new government would go into effect after nine states ratified the Constitution. This was in direct violation of the rules of the Confederation, which required unanimous approval from the states. But it would have been impossible to get Rhode Island to ratify, and there were other states like Virginia and New York that were no guarantees. But they just did it anyway, as Rhode Island boycotted the ratification process just like it boycotted the convention.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Constitutional Convention met in the old Pennsylvania State House, the same place the Declaration of Independence was signed, now known as Independence Hall.
• The 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention were on average 44 years old, with 29 having college degrees, 29 having law degrees, 35 having served in the Continental Army, and 42 having served in the Continental or Confederation Congress.
• By 1789, Madison was so influential that Washington asked him to draft a letter to the members of Congress, expressing his desire to work closely with them. And Congress, not knowing Madison had really been the ghostwriter, requested that Madison write the response.
• Madison didn't stay a federalist, and became much more in favor of states' rights in his continued representation of Virginia in his career.

Stalin (Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928) by Stephen Kotkin

    Something disappointing in the book is that there is so little information about Stalin's internal life as a young person. We get a good amount of information, but I think that a lot was censored by Stalin himself or information was otherwise destroyed. One interesting comparison the author makes though is that like Hitler, Stalin nearly joined the church as a young man, and became a nationalist as a teenager. But unlike Hitler, Stalin abandoned Georgian nationalism for socialism. Stalin was a good student, but became a troublemaker. He didn't publish widely until he was a grown man. Kotkin points out that Lenin and Trotsky spent the First World War writing extensively, but that Stalin left no wartime thoughts. 

    My notes in the book tended to be more about the events of Russian history than Stalin's actual life. The main events of his young life seem to be his journey into becoming a communist, joining Lenin's Bolshevik faction, committing various crimes to raise funds for Lenin, and being internally exiled to Siberia during the First World War. While there, he impregnated a thirteen-year-old who he vowed to marry when police intervened, but then betrayed his promise and did not marry her. The child died shortly after birth.

Maybe I will come back to this, but I am going to just publish without any serious notes because I am too busy for this right now.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Over more than four centuries from the time of Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, Russia expanded on average fifty square miles a day.
• As of 1719, Russia was 70% "Great Russian" (a term that excludes the "Little Russians" we call Ukrainians. and more than 85% Slavic, but by the end of the 19th century, Russians were just 44% of the empire and Slavs 73%
• At its height, the Russian Empire had several million more Turkic speakers than the "Turkish" Ottoman Empire due to its sheer size.
• "Bolshevik" means majoritarian and "Menshevik" means minoritarian. This was a big propaganda coup that Lenin achieved after losing a vote at the 1903 Russian socialists' congress, in which he refused to accept the outcome of a vote he lost.

Part III: Collision, page 586

Notes to Page 244

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze

Germany's Economic Conditions Before the Nazi Rise to Power

    Under Otto von Bismarck, Prussia united the German states into Germany and defeated France in 1871 to become the country in charge of continental Europe. With France defeated, it faced three other international "big dogs." To the east, the Russian Empire was undeveloped, but controlled massive tracts of land that it was settling and also had a very large population. To the west, the United Kingdom was a not-very-large island, but it controlled land all over the world and was the world's largest empire. And across the sea, the United States loomed large as the nation that was not yet a superpower at the end of the 19th century, but was clearly fated to be. At the time of German unification, Germany and the United States had approximately the same size populations and America was only about one-third more productive than Germany despite its far greater bounty of land and resources. By the late 1930s, US output was twice that of Germany's and by 1943, before allied aerial bombardment started to really pummel Germany, the US was producing almost four times as much as Nazi Germany. But who should we compare Germany to? In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger convincingly argued that Germany was actually fated to become the strongest power in Europe, but that in its haste to do so, it delayed itself with two world wars. Indeed, as soon as Germany reunified in the 1990s, it was once again the largest economy in Europe. But Tooze points out that German leaders were not only unsure that this would happen, but that they compared themselves to the United States, not to other European powers. To make Germany a country with a US-size economy would require a Hail Mary (or a Heil Maria?). Moreover, what has been unstated, but I am thinking of now, is that part of Germany becoming the biggest economy in Europe is that it could do so only once the structure of the EU/EC was created, along with NATO, providing economic and military security. Anyway, what is important to note is that Hitler was thinking about an epic struggle with the United States, not just the United Kingdom. 

    In the spring of 1930, Germany's social democrat-led government was toppled, having chosen to continue to try to pay off Germany's Versailles-debt by enacting budget cuts. This was unpopular, and Hermann Mueller "was to be Germany's last Social Democrat chancellor for almost forty years." The new minority government was a right-wing government led by Heinrich Bruening. The Bruening government was forced into deflation to pay off the debt by the logic that a more valuable Reichsmark would make debt payments more manageable. This plus budget cuts and tax increases crashed the economy. Between June 1930 and February 1931, unemployment rose by 2.1 million, double the normal seasonal increase, and in the September 1930 election, Hitler's Nazis raised their share of the vote from 2.5 to 18.3 percent, gaining 107 seats to become the second largest party in the Reichstag. At this time, French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, flush with gold, offered Bruening a way to comply with the Young Plan for debt repayments- long term loans to replace the short-term that could cripple Germany. But Bruening refused, instead announcing an attempt at an Austro-German customs union in March 1931. Without a foreign loan, Bruening forced through another round of deflation, and then announced in June 1931 an aggressive demand to end German reparations for WWI, which spread fear in international markets that Bruening would announce a unilateral moratorium, precipitating a bank run. Even more deflation came in December 1931, and Bruening also ordered mandatory cuts in wages, salaries, prices, and interest rates along with further decreases in government spending and increases in taxation. In the winter of 1931-32, bankruptcies increased dramatically.

    Seeing this crisis, Britain and France agreed to end Germany's reparations payments on the condition that the Americans cancel the debts that Britain and France owed to the United States in July 1932. This was done without US consent. Britain made one more payment in December 1932, but France, Belgium, Poland, Estonia, and Hungary just defaulted on their US loans. In January 1933, Germany still owed 19 billion Reichsmarks to foreign creditors, with at least 8 billion owed to the United States. In July 1932, the Nazis won their largest electoral triumph (after Bruening was ousted), winning 37.2 percent of the vote. Despite this, they remained in opposition, and declined to 33% of the vote share in November 1932, the electorate disappointed by Hitler's failure to take office. Nazi timing was good, however. Hitler would finally be handed the keys to government in January 1933, as the economy was starting to improve. With German reparations already forgiven the previous July, demand for German bonds strengthened, opening up new means to get cash into the German economy. Indeed, in December 1932, the Berlin institute for business cycle research declared that at least the process of contraction was over, and The Economist's Berlin correspondent reported that Germany was making its way out of the economic doldrums at that time. The editorials that ran on New Year's Day 1933 were mostly optimistic about the German economy. But due to the miscalculations of ultra-nationalist conservatives, Germany would be sent down a different path- an economic recovery would come, but so would a war that would destroy Germany. Embittered by being ousted from government in December 1932, ex-Chancellor Papen worked with the agrarian lobby and the more aggressive elements of the military to pressure the aged President Paul von Hindenburg to form a new government founded on National Socialism, giving Hitler the Chancellorship.

The German Economic Recovery with Hitler in Power

    On April 19, 1933, the United States unilaterally abandoned the gold standard and allowed the dollar to depreciate. The UK and most of the world would go on to do the same, inflating their currencies to save domestic industry. From April to August 1933, the dollar fell by 30% against the Reichsmark. Germany decided not to follow in the path of inflation. This would make Germany extremely uncompetitive on the world export market, but would seriously reduce the debt burden that German confronted. Germany maintained the gold standard for this reason, but also for the symbolic reason that it showed a certain reliability and a break with the hyper-inflationary recent past. Hitler set out a policy in August 1933 to fight unemployment through civilian work creation, but the main focus would be rearmament, the central objective of nationalist politics.

    Germany's recovery under Hitler would be based on refusing to pay debts while using that money to rearm itself. In December 1933, Germany unilaterally announced reductions in payments to foreign creditors from 50% (it had already done this before, halving what its burdens really were) to 30%. Britain and the US temporarily brought Germany back to making its payments in full by making threats in January 1934. With tentative agreement reached, Germany refocused on arms. By the second year of Hitler's government, over 50% of German central government expenditure on goods and services was dedicated to military spending, rising to 73% by 1935. At the same time, Germany pursued work creation schemes that were responsible for 30% of a reduction in unemployment of 2.6 million people from February 1933 to March 1934. Rearmament was most successful in aeronautics. In 1932, the German aircraft industry employed just 3,200 people producing no more than 100 aircraft per year. Less than ten years later, the industry employed a quarter of a million people who turned out over 10,000 of the most sophisticated combat aircraft in the world every year. Germany pioneered the process of turning planes from skeletons with canvas over them into full metal machines. German radio production also doubled from 1934-42.

    On Monday, February 20, 1933, Goering and Hitler invited 25 of Germany's top businessmen to a private meeting to "explain his policies." In the meeting, Hitler gave his view of the political situation, and told them that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy," and that a new phase in his struggle would begin after the election on March 5. Hitler did not take questions, but he left no doubt that he planned to put an end to parliamentary democracy, crushing the German left by physical force. Hitler left the meeting, and Goering made the ask for money, clarifying that this sacrifice was not so bad since it would be the last election "for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years." Seventeen large business groups would make large donations to the Nazi cause, the largest coming from IG Farben, Deutsche Bank, and the mining industry association. This large cash injection came at a time when the party was severely short of funds an enabled the Nazis to win the election on March 5, increasing their vote share from 33% to 44%, which they could combine with their allies, the German National People's Party, to reach 52%. It came just six days after the Reichstag fire, and it was the last election in unified Germany for over sixty years.

    Tooze argues that agrarian policy served as the economic justification for Lebensraum. Germany was more densely populated than other developed countries and less agriculturally efficient. This created a natural decision to move more people to the cities and use technology to increase efficiency in agriculture. But seeing great moral virtue in being farmers, and being aggrieved at the results of WWI, the Nazis instead decided that what they needed was not to be more efficient but to get more land. Germany refused to accept its place in the world as a medium-sized workshop economy dependent on imported food. Instead, the Nazis sought to become a self-sufficient economy, which could not be done in such a small area as Germany was. Indeed, if Germany wanted to redistribute all its farmland, there would only be enough to provide each of Germany's 3 million farming families with just 13 hectares. Germany was just not large enough to support such a large farming population at the standard of living of people living in cities without some major change. German agronomists at the time determined that to achieve full self-sufficiency at the current standard of living, Germany would need to add 7-8 million hectares of farmland to the 34 million already within its borders. So Germany was forced to choose two of the following three: peace, a high standard of living, and self-sufficiency. It chose war, which Hitler had always wanted.

War in Europe

    Tooze contends that by the late 1930s, it was inevitable that Germany would start a European war, since otherwise the entire rearmament would be meaningless. The internal pressure for Germany to go to war only compounded as Germany felt the effects of raw materials shortages. These shortages, themselves caused by the intense rearmament, increased the desire to go to war in order to gain more raw materials; additionally, if Germany was running up against the limits of its industrial capacity, that meant that it was peaking in its power, and should take advantage in a war at that moment of peak production, and not wait until it had a lesser comparative advantage. Shortages meant that by 1937, the Luftwaffe was reducing its aircraft expansion program, and that aircraft production trended down from April 1937 to the summer of 1938. Germany was stuck in a balance of payments issue, and simply did not have the funds to purchase more raw materials from abroad.

    One way that Germany attempted to resolve its balance of payments problem was by confiscating Reichsmarks from those who emigrated from Germany. But this just conflicted with its policies attempting to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. While many did, many others chose to stay rather than have all their wealth confiscated as they left. But they got more creative. After Kristallnacht, the Nazi government demanded that the Jewish community pay for the costs of cleanup, forfeit insurance claims, and also pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks, presumably for having provoked the rioters by existing. The Nazis then banned Jews from economic life- no more retail, no more crafts, no more trade fairs, and no more holding any positions of authority in any firm. At the Evian Conference, the European states debated what to do about this issue, but there was no appetite for actually resolving the issue by taking Jewish refugees, since those refugees would have all their property confiscated when they left Germany, arriving in their new homes with nothing.

    Additionally, Germany ran into a labor shortage, especially in farming. In 1938, the German government negotiated with Poland to admit 60,000 harvest helpers. Once Germany invaded Poland, it used 300,000 Polish prisoners of war to help with the harvest. By 1940, it was using any unemployed Poles. These workers were made into a force of slave labor. And they were starved. While the Germans rationed 2,600 calories per German in 1940, inhabitants of Poland's major cities were allotted just 609 calories and Jews only 503. By the end of the year, the numbers for Poles increased to 938 calories daily while for Jews it was reduced to 369. 

    In the Phone War, it was still Hitler's goal to land a knockout blow quickly. Interestingly, Tooze notes that initial German war plans against France in 1940 involved limited objectives in a modified Schlieffen Plan. But in February, two officers were shot down over French territory with a briefcase containing the plans. The Germans then changed their plan to a bold encircling move through the Ardennes forest, proposed by General Erich von Manstein. Thus, the blitzkrieg victory in France was not some great plan but something improvised to solve a problem that would have gone unsolved if chance had not intervened. But knocking France out of the war was not enough, as England still stood against Germany at war. By September and October of 1940, German public opinion was turning against the war. Meanwhile, in the United States, the public was gaining confidence in a British victory.

    It was because of Germany's swift victory in France that American policymakers were frightened enough to start to seriously support England. At this point, Tooze argues, Germany's defeat was destined. Once American industrial might was brought to bear, Germany couldn't stand a chance. By the end of June 1940, London was expecting delivery of 10,800 aircraft and 13,000 aero-engines over the next eighteen months (in addition to Britain's own production of 15,000 aircraft). Meanwhile, Germany only produced 10,826 aircraft in 1940 and would only increase to 12,000 in 1941. In 1940, the US produced 6,019 military aircraft, of which 2,006 went to Britain and 557 to France. In 1941, the US produced 19,433 military aircraft, of which about 5,000 went to Britain. In 1942, the US production skyrocketed to 48,000 and then hit 85,898 in 1943. This trajectory was unstoppable. Hitler was lucid enough to understand this. On December 17, 1940, he proclaimed to his war leaders that they needed to resolve all continental European problems in 1941, because by 1942, the United States would be in a position to intervene decisively in the war. At that point he was correct, but still delusional in thinking that he could simply resolve his European problems before the end of 1941. In his most insane move, he would invade Russia in the summer of 1941.

World War

    Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. It did so without being ready. Because of low birthrates during World War One, 85% of those between 20 and 30 years old who were fit for military service were already in the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941, and 640,000 had to be granted draft exceptions due to their importance to the war economy. The best German manpower was committed, therefore, to the initial assault, and there would be no reserve to draw on if German could not win a swift victory in the East.

    The Germans planned a campaign of mass murder in the Soviet Union. Notes from a May 2, 1941 meeting record that "1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war. 2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that man millions of people will die of starvation. 3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake, and only then the removal of grain." German leaders were recorded expecting at least 20-30 million Soviet citizens to die. Initially, they thought they could starve the populace by simple requisitioning all available grain and "shutting off" the cities, but they soon found out that people don't want to be starved and will find a way to live. The only large groups that the Germans were able to kill by simply withholding food were those confined in captivity: urban Jews in ghettos and Soviet prisoners of war. Those Jews not immediately murdered by Einsatzgruppen were banned from food markets and from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat, and fruit. The Wehrmacht systematically starved its prisoners to death. By December 1941, the Germans had held 3.35 million prisoners, but only 1.1 million were still alive and just 400,000 in good enough condition to work. Of the 2.25 million who died, at least 600,000 had been shot and the rest died of natural causes. T

    he Nazis couldn't afford to both feed their prisoners and feed a massive army needed for conquering all of Europe. They were short on labor and food, problems that compounded each other. This would cost them dearly during the invasion of the Soviet Union, as the Nazis killed about 7 million potential workers over the course of the war. So the Nazis needed labor to run the economy with all their best men away at war. But they wouldn't accept Jewish labor in large numbers because of the genocidal program. These two ideas could have balanced each other out, but the Nazis were also short on food, and decided to work Jews to death while feeding them the minimum to slowly starve them. They decided to cut the Polish ration off in March 1943 while cutting off the Jewish ration months earlier in the autumn of 1942. By the end of 1942, only 300,000 Polish Jews were left alive, about ten percent of the prewar population.

    Meanwhile, Germany lost its manufacturing advantage over Russia during the course of the invasion. Despite suffering major territorial losses, the Soviet Union out-produced Germany in almost every category of weapons. In small arms and artillery, the Soviet Union out-produced Nazi German 3:1, in tanks it was 4:1, and in combat aircraft it was 2:1. This allowed the Red Army to withstand the second invasion in 1942 and then counterattack at the end of the year. This advantage was temporary--by 1944 Germany had closed the gap in every category--but it was critical in saving the Soviet Union from collapse and changing the battle lines. Tooze is also very down on Albert Speer's wartime "miracle" of armaments production. He argues that it wasted energies on tanks that were better spent on aircraft and that the positive results were largely delayed benefits from previous officials. The U-Boats created by the end of the war were extremely good, but they were not sea-worthy in time to actually fight in the war.

Conclusion

    Tooze finishes the book by discussing why Hitler would choose to go to war with England and France and then with the Soviet Union and the United States. Coming from the perspective of armaments and the war economy, Tooze points out that by the summer of 1939, Hitler was aware that his long-term efforts to prepare for war with the Western powers had failed. Instead of making him deterred from conflict, it left him feeling that he had a short period to take advantage of the temporary edge he had due to those efforts that would not last. Therefore, he secured his eastern flank through a deal with the Russians and struck while he had a temporary advantage. Moreover, Hitler was ideologically motivated to go to war, since he felt that "world Jewry" was closing in on him, and he needed to strike first. This book was an astoundingly thorough examination of the German war economy, which in turn helped explain German decisions before and during World War Two. I would highly recommend.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The United States already accelerated the program that became the Manhattan Project before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
• More than one-third of the boys born in Germany from 1915 to 1924 were either dead or missing by 1945. For boys born from 1920-25, the number is 40%.
• The Allies extracted substantially greater reparations from Germany after WWII than after WWI. The Soviets dismantled 30% of East Germany's capital stock and forced the East Germans to pay the costs of occupation and reparations to the Soviet Union, which totaled 13% of national income in 1953. The West Germans were treated more leniently, but were forced to make payments until 1992 that totaled 90 billion Deutschmarks.

The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence

End of the Ming, Beginning of the Qing

    The book begins in the mid-17th century as the Ming Dynasty collapsed and the Jurchens (soon to re-name themselves Manchus) began to conquer territory in China's north, first under Nurhaci, and then under his son Dorgon. Dorgon decreed that all Chinese men would cut their hair into a queue, as the Jurchens wore it. This hairstyle required shaving the front half of the head and letting the back grow long into a ponytail. Ming Chinese men had prized long hair as a sign of masculinity, so this was especially resented. Dorgon also decreed that all Chinese would adopt the Manchu style of dressing with a high collar and a tight jacket fastened at the right shoulder instead of the loose-hanging Ming robes. Foot-binding was also banned, but this ban was flouted and eventually reversed, allowing foot-binding continue, especially in the upper classes.

    The new Qing rulers succeeded in controlling China by integrating Chinese bureaucrats into the new dynasty and adapting themselves to Chinese ways. The Qing retained the six Ming ministries to handle civil affairs, finance, rituals, wars, justice, and public works, but changed them by placing leadership of each in the hands of two presidents: one Manchu and one Chinese bannerman or civilian Chinese. The vice-presidents would be two Manchus and two Chinese. The Manchus also established a system of nine aristocratic ranks, by which a family automatically dropped one rung on the ladder with each noble incumbent's death unless the emperor re-promoted a member of merit. Qing rulers also perpetuated the Ming system of examinations, passage of which would grant a man exemption from corvee labor dues and from corporal punishment. It could also mean a lucrative post in the bureaucracy.

    The Qing dealt with several rebellions, many of which led by Ming sympathizers, before their rule was fully established. The one that seemed the most dangerous to me was the Revolt of the Three Feudatories against the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661-1722). Three princes managed to rebel and take most of China from the Yangtze River south, but lost in their war due to indecisiveness, Kangxi's ability to command his court and long-range strategy, the courage of Qing generals, the inability of the three revolting princes to coordinate with each other, and the princes' inability to appeal to loyal Ming supporters, who disliked the princes' for their previous cooperation with the Manchus. So the Ming revolts were not strong enough on their own, and revolts of Chinese who had cooperated with Manchus were unable to succeed because their could not win over Chinese who saw them as traitors.

The Heights of Qing Rule

    During Kangxi's reign, the Qing also conquered Taiwan. They were interested in Taiwan because Koxinga, a Southern Ming general, seized Taiwan from Dutch rule and hoped to use it as a base from which to promote a Ming restoration on mainland China. From 1661 to 1683, Taiwan (but really just some of it) was a thorn in the Qing Dynasty's side and managed to control some coastal areas of China, but Kangxi conquered it in 1683, leaving a garrison of 8,000 troops on the island permanently. Kangxi also expanded Ming rule into Tibet, drawn into a power struggle when the Dalai Lama was murdered and a successor improperly chosen. He managed to install a successor loyal to Qing.

    The Jesuits were successful during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor and served at the Imperial court, impressing the Chinese court with astronomy and mechanics. The Kangxi Emperor granted an edict of toleration in 1692. However, the toleration was contingent on the Jesuits abiding by Kangxi's stipulation that the Chinese rites of ancestor worship and public homage to Confucius were civile ceremonies, not religious ceremonies, and could therefore be practiced by Christian converts. Pope Clement XI decided to condemn the Chinese rites and the Confucian rituals and outlawed further discussion in 1704, and again in 1715, which was then reiterate by Benedict XIV in 1742. In 1721, disagreeing the Clement XI's decree, the Kangxi Emperor expelled the missionaries, and in 1724, the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1722-1735) banned the "Heavenly Lord Sect," as Catholicism was known in China at the time. It wasn't until 1939 that Pope Pius XII would decide that the Chinese rites were indeed civil in character. This period of prohibition on Catholicism, according to Spence, played a major role in preventing the spread of Western teaching and science.

    While the Kangxi Emperor's reign may have been the height of the Qing Dynasty, its failures were critical to the Dynasty's subjugation by European powers over 100 years after his death. Kangxi, like his father Shunzhi (r. 1643-1661) was unable to implement a national survey of landholdings. Land in the provinces remained registered according to the last good survey (done under Emperor Wanli in 1581), and the numbers of per capita units subject to tax assessment were henceforth frozen on the 1712 figures. This seriously impeded Kangxi's successors in rationalizing China's finances. When the Kangxi Emperor died in 1722, he had not publicly named an heir. His fourth son, who became the Yongzheng Emperor, announced that he was the dying emperor's choice, and was able to take the throne without much controversy.

    The Yongzheng Emperor was succeeded by his fourth son, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796). China's population crashed in the crisis years at the end of the Ming Dynasty and only recovered during Kangxi's reign. It then doubled under Qianlong. But the increase in China's population did not lead to colonization or emigration, as in other societies, since the Chinese divided land equally among all sons instead of mostly to the first son. In Europe, primogeniture or primogeniture-lite led to younger sons becoming adventurers and colonizers of far-away lands, while equal division in China kept China growing in population, but mitigated its influence on other lands.

The Decline and Fall of the Qing

    Spence is critical of the Qianlong Emperor as someone who "has been praised too much and has thought to little, [] someone who has played to the gallery in public life, mistaken grandeur for substance, sought confirmation and support for even routine actions, and is not really equipped to make difficult or unpopular decisions." The biggest challenge of Qianlong's reign was opium. Yongzheng had allowed for medicinal uses of opium, but banned "pushing" the drug to new users and running public opium dens. It wasn't until 1800 that the Jiaqing Emperor (r. 1796-1820) banned opium imports and domestic opium production and further banned smoking of opium altogether in 1813. I won't go deep into the Opium Wars here since I already did a whole book on it before. But we can say in short that the Qing were unable to keep opium or the foreigners who sold it out of the country. However, from another perspective, it is impressive that the Qing were able to survive opium/the Opium Wars and colonialism. The other major challenge of the 19th century, which the Qing also weathered, was the Taiping Rebellion.

    The Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850/51 and lasted until 1864, resulting in a death toll between 20 and 30 million people--about 5-10% of China's population. It was led by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka who proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ, which was revealed to him in a dream after failing the imperial examinations for a third time, leading to a two-day long nervous breakdown in 1837. In 1843, Hong failed the exams again, and reflected back on his dreams in 1837, read more about Christianity, and outwardly identified as a Christian, burning all the Confucian and Buddhist statues in his house and in local villages. He went and became a preacher and studied under a Southern Baptist missionary, Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts. He made his own translation of the Bible (with some changes convenient to adapt it to a Chinese audience), and developed a following that was between 10,000 and 30,000 people by 1850. Authorities ordered the group to disperse, and attacked them in 1851, but Hong's followers emerged victorious and beheaded the Manchu commander sent against them. The government then blockaded the rebels, but they broke through and seized Yongan in September 1851. The rebels were forced out again and were on the move evading government forced until they seized Yuezhou on the Dongting Lake in December 1852. This was the wealthiest place they had taken, and they gathered lots of loot, arms, and gunpowder. Then they had a string of successes, seizing Hankou in December and Wuchang in January 1853 (both now in Wuhan), culminating in the capture of Nanjing in March 1853, which they made their capital.

    After taking Nanjing, the former Ming capital, Hong gave up de facto power to his disciple Yang Xiuqing, who convinced the Taiping rebels that he was the Holy Ghost, and therefore he received his orders directly from God, which had precedence over Hong, who was merely the younger brother of Jesus. The Taiping required segregation of the sexes and absolute bans on opium smoking, prostitution, dancing, and the drinking of alcohol. Money was held in common and shared, which worked for a long time since they had seize so much of it from the cities they conquered. But being unable to escape the classical Chinese tradition, they still mandated examinations, but changed them to be based on Chinese translations of the Bible and Hong Xiuquan's revelations and literary works. They also divided land among all families based on family size, with men and women receiving equal shares.

    The Taiping ultimately failed, however. One reason for this was that they failed in collective leadership. Talented leaders were killed in the course of the rebellion, and the most brilliant of the survivors, including Shi Dakai and Yang Xiuqing, lost faith in Hong. Hong ended up assassinating Yang in 1856, and Shi, Taiping's greatest general, left Nanjing the same year after his wife and mother were murdered by feuding Taiping generals. He attempted to set up an independent kingdom in Sichuan, by was trapped and killed by Qing troops in 1863. Also difficult for the Taiping is that they were Hakkas, not Han Chinese, and were seen as just as foreign if not more so than the Manchus. Hakkas are largely descended from North Chinese who emigrated to the south but maintain a separate identity from the Han. My understanding is that their refusal to bind their women's feet was particularly appalling to their Han Chinese subjects. Critically, the Taiping rebels failed to gain foreign support, which went to the Qing, who had agreed to terms with the British in the Opium Wars. Having made major treaty gains and essentially having vassalized the Qing, the West supported the Qing just enough to defeat the Taiping rebels.

    These major treaty gains came from the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858. In the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing were also dealing with the Second Opium War from 1856-60. In 1860, they finally accepted the terms of the British, allowing a British ambassador to reside in Peking, the open preaching of Christianity, greater travel rights for foreigners in China, more trade further up the Yangtze (as far as Hankou/Wuhan), more ports along the coast, reduced taxes on interior trading, standard weights and measures, and for official communications to be made in English and to no longer use the term "barbarian" to describe the British.

    China's turbulent 19th century led to massive emigration, only sometimes voluntary. Others were literally kidnapped by procurers for plantation owners after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. Often the laborers were shipped off in cargo holds with less than six square feet per "passenger" and scores died on every voyage. Chinese travelled mostly to the Caribbean and California. But few Chinese arrived in time to strike gold in the rush of 1849, and mostly ended up in other lines of work.

The End of the Qing and the Warlord Era

    The 1911 Revolution, also known as the Xinhai or Hsinhai Revolution, finally brought down the Qing. While some groups like Sun Yat-sen's Revive China Society (the future Kuomintang) had been agitating for revolution for years, it wasn't until a military rebellion broke out that the Qing were overthrown in 1911, while Sun was overseas raising funds in the United States. The revolutionaries elected Sun Yat-sen as the first president, but their position was weak, and negotiated to have Puyi, the last emperor of China, abdicate in exchange for naming Yuan Shikai, a major Qing general, as the new president. After elections in 1913 indicated a major victory for the Revive China Society, Yuan began arresting Revive China officials, leading Sun Yat-sen to flee the country and call for revolution against Yuan Shikai. Yuan then dissolved the government in 1914 and established several military governors, each with his own army, setting the stage for the future era of warlordism. Yuan attempted to proclaim himself emperor in 1915, but his military governors started to rebel, and he was forced to abdicate only three months later and died in 1916.

    The Warlord Era lasted from Yuan Shikai's death in 1916 until 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek achieved victory in the Northern Expedition and officially/nominally unified China. Warlords were engaged in a non-ideological competition in which they frequently balanced each other--when one got two strong, the others would scheme or ally against him. The group that would triumph over all was the former Revive China Society, renamed the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party. The Kuomintang had accepted members of the smaller Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in order to gain the support of the new Soviet Union, but tensions were never eliminated. After the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, the KMT began purging Communists, and captured Wuhan and Nanchang. This led to Communist plotting against the Nationalists, which was ended in the Shanghai Massacre in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek killed thousands of Communists, eliminating them from KMT ranks. With this purge achieved, he set out for the north and achieved another victory in the Northern Expedition, successfully reunifying China.

Chinese Civil War: Communists and Kuomintang

        From 1927-37, the CCP would be an insurgent group fighting against the KMT, which controlled a mostly-unified China. By 1934, the KMT had driven the Communists out of the more prosperous and populous eastern portion of China, forcing them onto the "Long March," a yearlong 12,500 km retreat that ended at Yan'an, where the Communists formed a rump government. It was during this time that Mao Zedong became the leader of the CCP, with only 7-8,000 Communists arriving in Yan'an out of nearly 100,000 that set out initially. However, this period of civil war ended in December 1936 when the commanders of the Northeastern Army, intending to convince Chiang Kai-shek to prioritize fighting the Japanese who were invading Manchuria instead of the Communists, kidnapped Chiang in what became known as the Xi'an incident. They were successful, and initiated a more or less united front between the Nationalists and Communists as they both focused on the Japanese until 1945.

    But Chiang was largely unsuccessful in fighting the Japanese. Throughout the Second World War, while the Japanese lost territory in the Pacific to the Americans, they gained territory in mainland China. The result was that Chiang won only a pyrrhic victory, and was critically weakened for the fight against the Communists. The Nationalists were totally outgunned by the Japanese, for example, in 1940, the Chinese had just 37 fighter planes and 31 old Russian bombers while the Japanese had 968 planes in China and 120 in Indonesia. The actual training and use of Chinese troops was worse too--of 1.67 million Chinese men drafted in 1943, 44% deserted or died on the way to join their units. Between 1937 and 1945, 1.4 million, or 10% of men drafted, died before seeing combat. Critically wounded, the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists immediately after the end of the Japanese, and were forced to flee to Taiwan. I'll end my chronology here.

Why Did China Fail to Modernize?

    First and foremost, China was a closed society, which rejected outside innovations. When outsiders' innovations were important, this meant China fell behind. Then, after failing to adapt to changing times, the Qing Dynasty succeeded in surviving about 100 years longer than it should have, being propped up by Western, imperialist governments abroad. During this time, necessary reforms were still suppressed. Then, after it finally did fall, no one faction was able to unify the country until almost four decades later, and China moved from one era of Open-Door Policy imperialism into the more straightforward Japanese conquest of portions of China. Then, the winning faction of the Civil War never successfully defeated Japan, instead relying on outside powers to do it for them, which meant that once Japan was out, that "winning faction," the KMT, was not strong enough to defeat the Communists. That's my one-paragraph explanation.

Miscellaneous:

• Just a crazy connection: Spence writes, "In 1741, the British discovered the importance of having a Far Eastern base (the Portuguese already had Macao, the Spaniards Manila, and the Dutch Batavia) when a commodore in the Royal Navy, George Anson, on assignment to attack Spanish shipping in the East, put into Canton harbor after his flagship suffered severe storm damage." What Spence doesn't mention, but I know, is that he lost several other ships as he crossed the Straits of Magellan, one of which was The Wager, which I read about in a David Grann book earlier this year.
• Something interesting about the influence of Catholicism in China is that it sort of rebounded back in Europe through the works of Voltaire. Attacking the Catholic church, Voltaire used information provided by missionaries in China to attack the church. After all, if, as the missionaries claimed, China was so moral, then it was attributable to Confucius, not Christ, so it was possible for a country to succeed without Christianity. Voltaire wrote poems in honor of the Qianlong Emperor.
• It is always funny to see a whole book I read summed up in brief in another book. This was written about extensively in Stillwell by Barbara Tuchman: "So while Stilwell made some progress in developing training programs for Chiang's armies, most of China's resources went into building up a line of airfields along the eastern edges of the territory controlled by the Chongqing regime, between Hengyang in southern Hunan province, and Liuzhou in Guangxi."

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

    This was another great shipwreck book, my third of the year. It tells the true story that would go on to inspire Moby Dick but is less about the actual whale attack and more about the story of survival afterwards. It is enhanced by the narrative of Thomas Nickerson, a teenage cabin boy who wrote his version of events as an old man, which was lost until 1984.

    Clearly Philbrick is in love with Nantucket, and wrote either in the beginning of the book or somewhere else that he moved there. Nantucket was a very interesting whaling boom town, initially from the whales near its shores, and by the 19th century, with whalers sailing across the entire world. Whalers' journeys were marathons of several years. This meant that the women of Nantucket adapted to a three-years away, three-months-at-home rhythm. Apparently, many of them became addicted to opium. And life was hard and maternal mortality high, so many husbands returned home to find their wives dead and perhaps another child added to their plate. It is appropriate that the whalers had similar life patterns to the whales they hunted: young sperm whales leave the family unit at about six years old to make their way to colder waters, where they live alone or with other males until returning in their late twenties to warmer waters. In both whales and whalers, men spent their lives away from their families.

    Whalers knew whales incredibly well. They could tell you that before diving, a whale blew once for every minute that it would spend underwater, and that it would generally continue in the same direction and speed underwater as it had before the dive. The whale they hunted was the sperm whale, which had blubber, but more importantly, oil and spermaceti, named because it looks like sperm. Whalers would send out smaller, twenty-five-foot whaleboats from their large ship, and the men would row out to a sperm whale and stick it with a harpoon and hold on for a "Nantucket sleigh ride" that could last for several miles at fifteen knots, making it the fastest journey a human could take at sea at the time. The critical move was to use a lance to pierce through the whale's vital organs with a lance that would cause it to choke on its own blood, but often it took as many as fifteen stabbings to kill a whale. The killing blow could transform the whale's spout into a "fifteen- to twenty-foot geyser of gore." The whale was stripped of blubber and then decapitated. The sperm whale's head, which accounts for almost a third of its length, contains 500 gallons of spermaceti. And its stomach contains ambergris, an opaque, grey substance that is used to make perfume and is worth more than its weight in gold.

    While hunting several whales in a pod, the ship was suddenly bumped by a large male sperm whale. That one may have been an accident, but then the next hit was surely intentional, and managed to sink the already low-quality ship. The ship sank within hours, and then the survivors decided to head in three whaleboats for South America, ironically to avoid cannibals, which they would become after long weeks at sea. They would endure horrible hunger and thirst. They would reach a phase in which saliva becomes thick and bad-tasting and the tongue clings to teeth and the roof of the mouth. There is severe pain in the head and neck and many people begin to hallucinate. And then the tongue hardens, speech becomes impossible, and then the tongue swells, squeezing past the jaws. Eyelids crack and eyeballs weep tears of blood. Swelling in the throat makes breathing difficult, and the person dying of thirst enters a sort of living death, withering and blackening.

    Eventually, a few of the whalers will survive and make it to South America, where they are discovered just off the coast. What is craziest is that they all went back to whaling after. The captain, George Pollard, actually got shipwrecked again in another storm and then never served as captain again. The book is a great story and worth a read.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Galapagos tortoises can live for more than a year without any food or water.
• Whalemen were able to create post offices on the uninhabited islands that they frequented and traded mail when they passed other whaleships.
• The South Pacific Gyre is a "Desolate Region" where currents conspire to allow for very little life in that part of the ocean.

Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism

    This really good book feels like a strong response to Scalia and Garner's Reading the Law, which I started and now feel that I have to finish. As Breyer sees it, the traditional way that judges have interpreted the law over the course of U.S. history is by first looking at the text, but then by looking at the legislative purpose of the law, the context in which it was passed, social realities, and several other factors that could influence their ruling. His problem is that textualism seeks to eliminate many of these important factors in order to focus solely on the text of the law. Breyer focuses most on the legislature's purpose in passing a law without ignoring the text. What is interesting is that Breyer couches his argument in the basis that his way of interpreting the law is actually the traditional way, which is an interesting viewpoint. After all, was Marbury v. Madison a textualist, or originalist, decision?

    Breyer summarizes his issues with originalism by criticizing exclusive focus on the text for requiring judges to be historians, leaving no room for judges to consider the practical consequences of the rules they create, and for not taking into account the ways that a society's values evolve over time. I found him to be very persuasive. For example, one issue Breyer takes with textualists is that they seek to form hard rules with broad applications, contrary to the traditional common-law practice of setting up looser standards by which judges can rule narrowly on issues that come before them. Breyer's preferred analysis gives less power to the Supreme Court, and more power to the trial judge. Additionally, Breyer makes a good point when he writes that, "We do not automatically turn to dictionaries alone to resolve uncertainties about just what, for instance, the televangelist Kenneth Copeland meant when he uttered his sermon about how to behave during a global pandemic. When we learn from the minister that he is dispelling coronavirus by 'blowing the wind of God,' we do better to uncover his meaning by looking at his reasons for articulating his sermon in the way that he did than by consulting dictionaries for definitions of 'blow' and 'wind.'" However, I think originalists would consider the speaker's purpose in a situation like this as a means to understand how readers/listeners would understand it.

    All in all, this was a very interesting book. At times, it feels a little bitter since Breyer is relitigating old cases, many of which left him in dissent. It feels like a sort of ideological rearguard against an age of originalism that is upon us. But like many legal eras, Breyer believes that originalism will fade after a few decades. He quotes twice from Paul Freund, who said that the Supreme Court "should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably ... will be influenced by the climate of the era." I think textualism/originalism can have a strong appeal in a time when people want certainty out of the Supreme Court, but it seems unlikely to provide any more certainty than past systems of interpretation. I come away more convinced that there are no "right" answers, but that some ways of interpreting the law are better for particular times. I feel like we need more interpretations that promote workability, since our government has become so dysfunctional. The Supreme Court doesn't do us any favors by ignoring the consequences of its rulings. But then again, it can't go beyond what the law says. It's a hard job.

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 by Barbara Tuchman

 Life has gotten in the way! No post for this one.