"'...we want to trade, and you can't trade during a war.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 77-208 AT p. 202.
Can't you?
Can't one arms dealer sell to both sides?
Did Napoleon's soldiers wear British-made boots while blockading Britain?
Did a German subsidiary of IBM make punch card sorting machines for the data management of the Holocaust?
Did Coca Cola make Fanta inside Nazi Germany?
Does the global economy not continue to function during international conflicts?
Can building firms not plan to profit from post-war reconstruction?
Do some Polesotechnic League companies not profit by selling spaceships and nuclear weapons to barbarians in exchange for the exclusive right to mine and industrialize their planets?
In any case, Falkayn works for van Rijn who, we know, finds peace not only more profitable but also more morally acceptable than warfare.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Did you have in mind how the Seven in Space helped Babur, in MIRKHEIM, to modernize and start making attempts at interstellar aggression?
And Old Nick was a better man than he loudly claimed not to be! (Smiles)
Sean
Sean,
Not just the Seven in Space. The men in "A Little Knowledge" were up to no good.
Paul.
During the Anglo-French wars of the 18th century, several Bordeaux wine dealers "lost" cargos of wine to British "privateers" whenever the two countries were at war.
Regularly.
Always at the same time and place.
The wine was then auctioned in London... and the price, minus commission, was remitted to the Bordeaux dealers via neutral bankers.
They probably couldn't have gotten away with this if it was iron or wool or gunpowder, but wine didn't affect the outcome of the war, so a broad wink was administered.
At that time, it was also common for tourists, scholars and others from Britain and France to visit each other's countries during wartime. It was considered a barbarous innovation when Napoleon arrested British civilian travelers and locked them up for the duration.
Wars aren't usually "total". They're a continuation of politics by other means, and there's no point in going overboard about it. This attitude was easier to maintain back when wars were affairs between kings -- "cabinet war", as it was called. It was also easier to end a war when the balance of results became obvious; a province or colony changed hands, a minister resigned to his country estate or got a new title, and everyone changed diplomatic partners and prepared to dance.
It got much harder to wrap things up, to admit defeat, when the emotions of the people were involved -- that's when losing a war started to be associated with a change of regime, which gives everyone a much stronger incentive to drag things out in the hope there will be a last-minute miracle.
BTW, the incidents of foreign subsidiaries doing business during the World Wars don't count as "trade"; they can't -not- operate, since they're under the sovereign jurisdiction of the government of the country where they're operating and subject to its punishment if they don't.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul, I did think of "A Little Knowledge," but the rascals in that story were only three men, limited to what they could achieve by their wits alone.
The problem was, in MIRKHEIM, the rise of CARTELIZATION, of the state trying, de facto, to take over private companies, and those companies being too willing to go along with that (on Earth and the Solar System). By contrast, the Seven tried to take over or control the gov'ts of various colonial worlds. But, private companies are not good at running gov'ts, because the two are very different. That, along with the Seven's meddling with Babur, eventually backfired on them.
And so we see the stage being set for the anarchy of the Time of Troubles, about a century later. As both the major planetary gov'ts and the Polesotechnic League irretrievably collapsed.
Mr. Stirling: Thanks for making some very illuminating comments! I've known of much of what you said here. Such as how 18th "cabinet wars" were fought for limited ends and were not life and death existential struggles. That came with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Congress of Vienna managed to so arrange matters that 19th century wars were, by and large, limited conflicts seeking limited goals. World Wars I and II changed that!
Sean
There's always a temptation to kick over the table and pull a gun when you're not getting what you want out of the chess game. Germany united and industrialized late, and felt cramped and confined in a world largely dominated by the first players, who were determined not to have their applecart upset; they were rich and strong but got only the geopolitical leftovers. The older players saw this and moved to contain them, which in turn made them feel encircled. This is not a game with any happy outcomes.
Britain spent about 300 years making sure France couldn't break out of the bounds they set for it, and the 20th century doing the same to Germany, to put it another way.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree, a great power, as Germany became after 1871, with ambitions of her own, would feel cramped and hemmed in in a world which the other powers, such as the UK, France, Russia, even Austria-Hungary, had pretty much divvied up to their satisfaction. I don't know what Germany could have done in such a situation that would have had a different ending from what we've seen. Bismarck seemed to have thought the best policy for Germany was to avoid angering and alienating the UK and Russia. Being friends with Russia and the UK would have made it extremely unlikely France would try for a war of revenge.
Yes, England/the UK's policy since at least Francis I's time was to prevent a powerful France from conquering or dominating Europe. And France eventually did give up such ambitions, after Waterloo. But she still managed to acquire a big overseas empire, starting with Charles X's conquest of Algeria.
Sean
Post a Comment