Siep Stuurman: Global Equality and Inequality - Notes for a New History 

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

I am an intellectual historian and my starting point was the history of equality. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I taught the history of political thought at the University of Amsterdam, feminist students demanded the inclusion of woman authors in the syllabus. I responded by delivering a series of six two-hour lectures on Mary Wollstonecraft. To contextualize her feminism I had of course to retrieve the discourses of male supremacy and the subjection of women. Rousseau, a favorite butt of Wollstonecraft’s critique provided the means to insert early-modern feminism in the canon of the history of political thought, in particular because Rousseau himself had defended the equality of the sexes as a young man (from the 1730s to ca. 1748).

In the mid-1990s I began a research project on François Poulain de la Barre, a Cartesian social philosopher who in 1673 published A Physical and Moral Discourse on the Equality of the two Sexes, in which one sees the importance of getting rid of prejudices. Let me quote one sentence to give you the flavor of the argument: “Popular views hold that Turks, barbarians, and savages are less adept at [learning] than Europeans. Nevertheless, should five or six of them turn up with this ability, or with a doctorate … this opinion would be definitely corrected, and we would concede that these peoples are human beings like us, with the same abilities.” Here we encounter a truly universalist discourse of equality, covering gender, rank and cultural difference.[1]

Working on the Poulain book, I became more and more dissatisfied with the canon of the history of political thought. It was a Eurocentric collection of “great thinkers” and its linchpin was the history of liberty. Equality was mentioned from time to time, but it was definitely the stepchild of the canon. Moreover, I was surprised by the virtual absence of book-length treatments of the history of equality.[2] So I decided to write the missing book myself. To avoid getting mired in a “history of everything” I focused on the problematic of cultural difference. At that time, around 2006, a committee of historians appointed by the Dutch government published a new canon for the teaching of national history in elementary schools and high-schools. I was among its critics. I argued for a world-historical approach to revise and reframe our national history in its global connections, in an essay published by Kleio, the review of the Dutch Association of History Teachers. Which my Rotterdam colleague Maria Grever, I edited a book about the canon-debates.[3] The controversy about the history syllabus was part of broader acrimonious debate about the significance of the nation between leftwing critics of the traditional nationalist narrative and right-wing populists. All of these inputs went into the writing of my book The Invention of Humanity.[4]

⬤ What is global inequality?

I would like to reframe the question: When, where, by whom, and why was global inequality put on the political and intellectual agenda? The shortest answers to the first three questions I can think of are: in the eighteenth century, in the trans-Atlantic space, by the enslaved Africans and by a minority of white Europeans. The eighteenth-century controversies about slavery present us with the first instance of a debate about global inequality.

The question about the why is not so easily answered. The traditional justifications of slavery slowly lost their credibility, but this was a highly uneven and contested affair that would last deep into the nineteenth and twentieth century. Several ex-slaves residing in Europe published life-stories that recounted the horrors of slavery, the longing for freedom and several of them demanded its abolition. In the white camp, several political theorists spoke out against slavery. Louis de Jaucourt, the workhorse of Diderot (of the 72,000 entries in the Encyclopedia, Jaucourt signed 17,000) authored the entry on equality as a concept of natural right, defining it as the equality “that is found among all men solely by the constitution of their nature.” In another entry, on the slave trade, he declared that the capture of black Africans to sell them into slavery “violates religion, morals, natural law and all the rights of human nature.” This is strong language, but it stops short of abolitionism.

Generally, the eighteenth-century white debates on slavery are uneven and contradictory. Montesquieu is an instructive example. In the thousand pages of annotations and comments that he always had on his desk, he stated that the war waged by Spartacus was the “most just war in the history of humanity”, but that comment did not make it to the pages of the Spirit of the Laws (1748). What we find there is an ironical dismissal of slavery but not a vindication of its overthrow by armed slaves. However, Raynal and Diderot, in the Histoire des deux Indes (1780), one of the great bestsellers of the late Enlightenment, countenanced the violent overthrow of slavery: and voiced their expectations of a new Spartacus who would “shatter the sacrilegious yoke of oppression.” In the same period, the American, French and Haitian revolutions created the first states in human history which enshrined equality in their constitutions. This was a world-historical turning point: Henceforth, equality had the benefit of the doubt, while inequality had to be justified by reasonable arguments.

Even so, the nineteenth century inaugurated the global color line that only became disreputable after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But racism did not disappear and today we witness a new upsurge of it, despite the civil rights victories in the United States and the decolonization of Africa. This is a dimension of global inequality that time and again seems to fade away only to rise again from its ashes. Race is transposed into the cultural superiority of “the West” and anchored in a genetic determinism (the “selfish gene”) that has meanwhile been deconstructed by the new theoretical venture of “systems biology”.[5] Of course, global inequality also has economic foundations to which I will come back in question 4.

When I first spent some months in New York in 1988, I was shocked by the amount of destitution, poverty, dirt and homelessness on the streets of the most magnificent city in what I then believed to be the richest country in the world. At home in Europe we were already living through the first spate of spending cuts in welfare and social services, but that was peanuts compared with New York.

Likewise “race” and racism were far more visible. I still vividly remember taking the train to Princeton and noticing what was printed on my ticket: “Seating aboard New Jersey Transit vehicles is without regard to race, creed, color or national origin.” That an American railway felt the need to put that on their tickets told me something about the overwhelming presence of race more than 120 years after the Civil War. From then on, I took the category of race more seriously. Meanwhile, I enjoyed the openness and intellectual curiosity of American academic life. New York taught me a lot, both intellectually and politically.

Until my stay in New York my view of worldwide inequality—we did not yet use the term “global” —turned on the contrast between the poor “Third World” and the rich “West”. Now I began to be aware of the existence of raw poverty within the West. I had read a book on Latin America that explained that poor countries also harbored extremely wealthy elites, the “comprador bourgeoisie” as they were then called. The upshot was that henceforth I had to understand that worldwide inequality could only be analyzed as a composite of wealth and income differentials within and between countries.

Some twelve years later I spent some months at UCLA. In Westwood where I lived in LA, many white people had nice homes with large gardens. There also circulated cars of a security company. Those cars were driven by imposing African-American men, but the gardeners who mowed the lawns were mostly Latinos. At the university, however, many secretaries were Asian-American women. Here was a distinct pattern. What I learned was that race and racism were not just about individual prejudices but should also, and perhaps primarily, be investigated as organizing principles of a society.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

Before ca. 1750 CE, the economic disparities between continents, regions and countries were not spectacular. Parts of the world were much richer than the average, but these rich “islands” were not concentrated in the “West”, they were also found in Bengal and in the Yangtze Delta in China, and probably elsewhere as well. As the economic historian Paul Bairoch concludes: “Before the Industrial Revolution no country or region could be really rich … Richer regions of the future Third World appear to have been richer than than the average countries in the future developed world, and vice versa”.[6]

After 1750, and even more after 1800, the growth in productivity, both in agriculture and in manufacturing, accelerated quickly, notably in the Atlantic Rim of Europe and in the United States. Between 1800 and 2000 the gap between the “West” and the “rest” continuously grew wider. The explanation cannot be found in the pre-1750/1800 patterns of growth. I can think of three explanations:

1) The growth of productivity in the West, based on technology. market competition, and “productive” state intervention (think railways, roads, bridges).

2) The adverse effects of the forced liberalization of trade imposed by the West on economic development of countries of the future Third World. The West gained new export markets, but the producers in the “less developed countries” lost a sizable chunk of their internal markets.

3)  The counter-productive activities of predator-states where elites were more keen on conspicuous consumption than on productive investments.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

Without doubt, the most pressing challenge is the accelerating increase of economic inequality within and between nations diagnosed by Thomas Piketty. The new type of inequality is not only about increasing destitution and poverty but also, and perhaps primarily, about the crippling effects of neo-liberalism on the tax base of states. The great multinational corporations, high finance, and the super-rich are morphing into a new Global Aristocracy. This is a gold-blooded caste which manages the key sectors of the world economy, pressures states to lower taxes on an ad-hoc basis, sluices profits to tax havens, and lobbies for commercial treaties with special tribunals for Investor-State conflicts, thus by-passing ordinary courts of law. Many of these new Aristocrats live in compounds where they stay physically isolated from ordinary citizens (except for servants and prostitutes).

Right now, I have to admit that I don’t know how to deal with this huge and growing global inequality. Meanwhile, I am working on a global intellectual history of socio-economic and political equality and inequality, from antiquity to the present time. I will report back when the time has come.

References

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Siep Stuurman, “Global Equality and Inequality: Notes for a New History,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version August 21st 2020, http://global-inequality.com/interview-series-siep-stuurman/

⬤ What is global inequality?

I would like to reframe the question: When, where, by whom, and why was global inequality put on the political and intellectual agenda? The shortest answers to the first three questions I can think of are: in the eighteenth century, in the trans-Atlantic space, by the enslaved Africans and by a minority of white Europeans. The eighteenth-century controversies about slavery present us with the first instance of a debate about global inequality.

The question about the why is not so easily answered. The traditional justifications of slavery slowly lost their credibility, but this was a highly uneven and contested affair that would last deep into the nineteenth and twentieth century. Several ex-slaves residing in Europe published life-stories that recounted the horrors of slavery, the longing for freedom and several of them demanded its abolition. In the white camp, several political theorists spoke out against slavery. Louis de Jaucourt, the workhorse of Diderot (of the 72,000 entries in the Encyclopedia, Jaucourt signed 17,000) authored the entry on equality as a concept of natural right, defining it as the equality “that is found among all men solely by the constitution of their nature.” In another entry, on the slave trade, he declared that the capture of black Africans to sell them into slavery “violates religion, morals, natural law and all the rights of human nature.” This is strong language, but it stops short of abolitionism.

Generally, the eighteenth-century white debates on slavery are uneven and contradictory. Montesquieu is an instructive example. In the thousand pages of annotations and comments that he always had on his desk, he stated that the war waged by Spartacus was the “most just war in the history of humanity”, but that comment did not make it to the pages of the Spirit of the Laws (1748). What we find there is an ironical dismissal of slavery but not a vindication of its overthrow by armed slaves. However, Raynal and Diderot, in the Histoire des deux Indes (1780), one of the great bestsellers of the late Enlightenment, countenanced the violent overthrow of slavery: and voiced their expectations of a new Spartacus who would “shatter the sacrilegious yoke of oppression.” In the same period, the American, French and Haitian revolutions created the first states in human history which enshrined equality in their constitutions. This was a world-historical turning point: Henceforth, equality had the benefit of the doubt, while inequality had to be justified by reasonable arguments.

Even so, the nineteenth century inaugurated the global color line that only became disreputable after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But racism did not disappear and today we witness a new upsurge of it, despite the civil rights victories in the United States and the decolonization of Africa. This is a dimension of global inequality that time and again seems to fade away only to rise again from its ashes. Race is transposed into the cultural superiority of “the West” and anchored in a genetic determinism (the “selfish gene”) that has meanwhile been deconstructed by the new theoretical venture of “systems biology”.[5] Of course, global inequality also has economic foundations to which I will come back in question 4.

When I first spent some months in New York in 1988, I was shocked by the amount of destitution, poverty, dirt and homelessness on the streets of the most magnificent city in what I then believed to be the richest country in the world. At home in Europe we were already living through the first spate of spending cuts in welfare and social services, but that was peanuts compared with New York.

Likewise “race” and racism were far more visible. I still vividly remember taking the train to Princeton and noticing what was printed on my ticket: “Seating aboard New Jersey Transit vehicles is without regard to race, creed, color or national origin.” That an American railway felt the need to put that on their tickets told me something about the overwhelming presence of race more than 120 years after the Civil War. From then on, I took the category of race more seriously. Meanwhile, I enjoyed the openness and intellectual curiosity of American academic life. New York taught me a lot, both intellectually and politically.

Until my stay in New York my view of worldwide inequality—we did not yet use the term “global” —turned on the contrast between the poor “Third World” and the rich “West”. Now I began to be aware of the existence of raw poverty within the West. I had read a book on Latin America that explained that poor countries also harbored extremely wealthy elites, the “comprador bourgeoisie” as they were then called. The upshot was that henceforth I had to understand that worldwide inequality could only be analyzed as a composite of wealth and income differentials within and between countries.

Some twelve years later I spent some months at UCLA. In Westwood where I lived in LA, many white people had nice homes with large gardens. There also circulated cars of a security company. Those cars were driven by imposing African-American men, but the gardeners who mowed the lawns were mostly Latinos. At the university, however, many secretaries were Asian-American women. Here was a distinct pattern. What I learned was that race and racism were not just about individual prejudices but should also, and perhaps primarily, be investigated as organizing principles of a society.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

Without doubt, the most pressing challenge is the accelerating increase of economic inequality within and between nations diagnosed by Thomas Piketty. The new type of inequality is not only about increasing destitution and poverty but also, and perhaps primarily, about the crippling effects of neo-liberalism on the tax base of states. The great multinational corporations, high finance, and the super-rich are morphing into a new Global Aristocracy. This is a gold-blooded caste which manages the key sectors of the world economy, pressures states to lower taxes on an ad-hoc basis, sluices profits to tax havens, and lobbies for commercial treaties with special tribunals for Investor-State conflicts, thus by-passing ordinary courts of law. Many of these new Aristocrats live in compounds where they stay physically isolated from ordinary citizens (except for servants and prostitutes).

Right now, I have to admit that I don’t know how to deal with this huge and growing global inequality. Meanwhile, I am working on a global intellectual history of socio-economic and political equality and inequality, from antiquity to the present time. I will report back when the time has come.

References

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Siep Stuurman, “Global Equality and Inequality: Notes for a New History,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version August 21st 2020, http://global-inequality.com/interview-series-siep-stuurman/