A fascinating and revealing book despite its age

Recently, through an accidental discovery, I have been heavily reading a 1989 book by still-active Professor Ronald Rogowski titled Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments.

Ronald Rogowski’s 1989 Commerce and Coalitions remains a widely-read and very revealing textbook despite its age and absence of updates

Rogowski, plainly, argues that trade affects politics by increasing the power of owners of abundant factors, and decreasing the power of owners of scarce factors. Contrariwise, falling trade benefits owners of scarce factors and hurts owners of abundant factors. He also demonstrates that, fundamentally, countries and societies divide in two ways into four groups:

1. land/labor ratio
2. endowment of capital

Rogowski argues then that political cleavages depend on:

1. whether capital allies with land or labor
2. chiefly, whether each group favour freer trade or more restricted trade
• Rogowski only considers cases where trade is restricted endogenously by tariffs or other controls, or unsystematically by dangers to travel. Instances of exogenous trade controls as found with Israel or Cold War-era Southern Africa are not discussed

Rogowski does a good job of illustrating his conclusions over varying periods since Classical Greece. The details are done well, and the necessary statistics of relation of population to productive land are explained very well. Commerce and Coalitions illustrates the contrast in development between humid Eurasia on the one hand and the Western hemisphere on the other, with militant socialism being confined to Eurasia. Rogowski argues that socialism cannot ordinarily develop in a land-abundant economy because workers lose economically from expanding trade and will tend towards nationalism and imperialism. Socialism ordinarily develops in labour-abundant economies where workers gain economically from expanding trade and (attempt to) translate this power into expanded political influence at the expense of landowners, mineowners and priesthoods. Rogowski contradicts Karl Marx when he says that militant socialist movements are extremely unlikely in advanced countries, because  labour either:

1. loses from expanding trade if land-rich or
2. is too allied with capital if labour-rich

Following John Kautsky’s Social Democracy and the Aristocracy: Why Socialist Labor Movements Developed in Some Countries and Not in Others, one might argue that in advanced labour-rich countries militant socialism can develop via opposition to land, as occurred in northwestern Europe in the late nineteenth century. However, Rogowski may be correct that without a significant priestly power to oppose, worker militancy is unlikely in a labour-rich advanced nation. Rogowski also believes militant socialist movements will fail to develop anywhere during periods of falling trade. This also opposes the predictions of many Marxists who see militant socialism as most likely during economic crises.

There are some interesting details that are not often heard — for instance how abolitionism in the United States was necessarily linked with protection and how Nazism and Fascism gained their primary support from landowners and peasants who gained via loss of competition from Australia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere.

Two flaws in the book are that:

1. it has not been updated to take into account the expansion of trade following the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, which was much larger and more widespread than after World War II, and
2. owners of mineral resources are largely neglected in favour of owners of farmland, although typically in land-rich economies owners of mines are more intensely affected by changing trade than those of farmland
1. in this context one wonders whether land/labor ratios could be adjusted to take into account the abundance of minerals as well as agricultural land
2. in most cases this will amplify differences in land endowment, but in a few — for example New Zealand which is very farmland-rich but very mineral-poor — there is opposition and this is extremely tough to quantify
3. it ignores that for most of history no regions have been abundant in both capital and land.
• this was the case throughout the period from before the decline of the Roman Empire until the late nineteenth century
  
• instead of Rogowski’s square-shaped Figure 1.2 (page 8), I would prefer a diamond-shaped spectrum that permits a reduction to the three-way division found in the long sixteenth century and declining Roman Empire of
1. capital-rich
2. land-rich
3. neither capital- nor land-rich
   
• the book also fails to discuss why capital- and land-rich, labour-poor regions were absent for so long
  

In addition to the several questions explained clearly in chapter six, one could add several more questions made easier to answer:

1. why negligible religion in humid Eurasia since World War II, and
   why has secularism triumphed over every religion except Islam (as per Be Careful with Muhammad by the late Shabbir Akhtar, almost perfectly contemporary with Commerce and Coalitions)?
1. religious institutions — a component of “land” as defined by Rogowski — lose from expanding trade in land-poor societies to workers who minimally resent religion’s power, and at worst see its mythology as primitive superstition holding workers back from political empowerment
   
2. Islam — unlike any other major religion —is based in extremely land-rich Saudi Arabia, and most Muslim nations in Central Asia and North Africa are also very land-rich. Thus rising trade has enriched and strengthened Islamic institutions even as it mortally weakens other religions
   
• the reactionary character of Christian churches whose power base in Europe was dependent on local agriculture’s isolation from world markets may have prevented Christianity gaining comparable influence in land-rich Australia and the Western Hemisphere
3. Rogowski’s thesis implies that religion cannot maintain significant influence in labor-rich societies except under falling trade, as occurred with Christianity in medieval Europe, Buddhism in pre-industrial Asia, and Judaism in Israel today
2. following from 1), why extreme isolationism in Tokugawa Japan and Korea during same era:
1. these nations were and remain the most land-poor and labor-rich in the world, thus any opening of trade will radicalise owners of labor much more than even in the European cases discussed by Alexander Gerschenkron in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
2. the ruling class(es)’ dependence on isolation from world markets was so great that strong states were needed to maintain the desired isolation
   
3. thus, in East Asia, a tradition of strong states was built up before forcible opening to the outside world
3. why did the black civil rights movement in the US emerge when it did?
1. as James Löwen showed in Sundown Towns, black Americans were de facto excluded from ownership of the abundant factors of capital and land by local laws effective everywhere in the United States
2. expanding trade, by decreasing the value of the only commodity blacks could own — labour — thus weakened black protest capacity and increased the ability of white Americans to discriminate against blacks
3. contracting trade thus strengthened black protest capacity by increasing the value of the products of their labour, which under free trade would be imported
   
4. the black civil rights movement can thus be viewed as a delayed by-product of the collapse of world trade following World War I.
• one can argue that the strength of any black civil rights movement is proportional to how rapidly trade declines
  
5. the gains of black Americans were for the great majority largely reversed once trade expanded rapidly — leading to mass incarceration and growing police brutality — further confirming the dependence of even a partly successful black civil rights movement upon isolation from the competition of international trade

Despite its flaws and lack of updates, Commerce and Coalitions is a very worthwhile read that makes somewhat mysterious facets of history easily understandable.

I intend to write two more articles, one interpreting the somewhat peculiar case of Cold War-era Southern Africa and one looking at the problems of capital- and land-rich, labour-poor economies.