India, Delhi through Raj

I never finished off the India series. Looking at my journal, it took me a while to finish reading, and my notes seem scattered. I seem to have made a note of female rulers mentioned, so we'll start with that:

Delhi Sultanate, Mughals
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultana Only lasted a few years, 1236-1240, but hey. Also note that her father's widow was effectively running things for a while, so two women for the price of one, as it were.
* "Arabs bring spinning wheel, paper." This would be in the Delhi Sultanate
* more muslims may have entered as refugees from Mongols than as Ghaznavid or Ghorid warriors combined
* art conflict: muslim vs. hindu, no representation vs. highly erotic temple art. Basic aesthetic incompatibilities; women's clothing too.
* Synthesis: Hindus adopt purdah, Muslims adopt caste. Way to adopt the worst of each world, guys.
* horses were always imported, Portugal choked trade
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_Ambar negro kingmaker and administrator

Tangential but interesting: a map of Eurasian (mostly Asian) polities before the Mongols swept through. Nice and complicated! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Premongol.png

* another woman leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahilyabai_Holkar regent. 30 years of firm and compassionate direction, giving southern Malwa peace and prosperity at odds with usual legitimized extortion. "moderate assessment and sacred respect for native rights of village officers and proprietors", styled avatar by people, sainted. Called a philosopher queen, compared to Catherine II of Russia, Elizabeth I of England, Margaret I of Denmark. Died 1795

The Raj

* Pax Britannica: more accurately called the Tax Britannica, or maybe the Axe Britannica for deforestation. As for Pax, the Empire was at war every year.

* Ranjit Singh, competent emperor of the Panjab, equal to the British, with French trained sepoys; the usual succession problem afterwards
* The conquest of the Sind actually outraged people back home in Britain, for being an unjustifiable blatant power grab. Punch put words in Napier's mouth: "Peccavi" (I have sinned/Sind)
* Apparently high caste Indians have taboos against traveling outside of India. Some did anyway, for the promise of loot and glory. Weren't so happy when Britain ran aground in Afghanistan.

* Afghan invaded by "politically insane" coterie around Lord Auckland in 1838; page 418; leapt from "we should support Dost Muhammad of Peshwar lest he turn to the Czar", to, well, mere suggestion of receiving Russian encouragement became proof of "his most unreasonable pretensions" and "schemes of aggrandizement and ambition injurious to the security and peace of the frontiers of India", leading to disaster of the First Afghan War, breaking reputation of invincibility.

* princely state of Kashmir, odd because a Hindu ruled Muslims, peaceful for a century unlike Sikh or Afghan rule.

* William Wilberforce rated missionary access to India more important than abolishing the slave trade. 1800 to 1850 saw a change: from respect for India and people urging prejudice in favor of native institutions, to contempt for natives, triumph of free trade, evangelism, contempt for Hinduism, ignorant utilitarianism

* suttee and thuggee supposedly rare and not central or peculiar to orthodoxy; but ban stigmatised Hinduism. converts to Christianity were few but British sense of moral superiority grew

* heavy taxation was traditional, but with periods of respite or relaxation; British demand was relentless, and new settlements led to dispossession when revenues weren't met

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rani_Lakshmi_Bai promising widowed rani, dispossessed by "right of lapse"; gov-general Dalhousie at work. Also annexation of Awadh, the most loyal native state. These go under the British breaking their own rules and treating allies like crap.

That seems to be it for my notes. I'm sure the book went up into modern times, independence and partition and all, but I have no notes... but wait! I have unposted notes from the *previous* book, K&R! Oy. And from earlier in the final book... okay, this was going to be the last India post, but that'd be too long. Or take too much work.

Obama to the right of Nixon? Part 2

Follow-up to previous post.

We should take no comfort from the fact that the level of unemployment in this transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy is lower than in any peacetime year of the sixties.

This is not good enough for the man who is unemployed in the seventies. We must do better for workers in peacetime and we will do better.

To achieve this, I will submit an expansionary budget this year--one that will help stimulate the economy and thereby open up new job opportunities for millions of Americans.

It will be a full employment budget, a budget designed to be in balance if the economy were operating at its peak potential. By spending as if we were at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment.

I ask the Congress to accept these expansionary policies--to accept the concept of a full employment budget. ...

With the stimulus and the discipline of a full employment budget, with the commitment of the independent Federal Reserve System to provide fully for the monetary needs of a growing economy, and with a much greater effort on the part of labor and management to make their wage and price decisions in the light of the national interest and their own self-interest--then for the worker, the farmer, the consumer, for Americans everywhere we shall gain the goal of a new prosperity: more jobs, more income, more profits, without inflation and without war.

This is an excerpt from Nixon's 1971 State of the Union address, lifted from part 3 of David Frum's savage takedown of Charles Murray's new book on working class values, about this more anon. But note how fully Keynesian Nixon sounds here, and how he assumes his audience understands and agrees with the concept of expansionary government spending, so that he merely has to urge them to commit to implementing it. He sounds like Krugman's dream president. As well he should: this is standard stuff from the leading textbook in economics for decades [Paul Samuelson], not left-wing nuttery.

And that's in response to unemployment of 6%. Six, not our 8 or 9. As Frum notes, if Obama tried this the Republicans would go totally spare, and half his own party would likely recoil as well.

Puts context on Krugman's claims of a modern dark age of macroeconomics, as evidence that ideas once accepted in the highest politics of the land are now outre.

What happened? The propaganda of the agents of the top 0.1%, mostly. But I'll grant that the history of the 1970s probably provided fertile soil. The long boom was followed by stagflation, stagnation and inflation, and management seemed to fail. Part of that might have been the borrowing for Vietnam, but I suspect mostly it was the energy crises (not just one!) and perhaps an oversell of Keynesianism. It's not a magic wand for getting out of depressions, it's a magic wand for getting out of liquidity trap, paradox of thrift, depressions, aka "your economy has the stupids". Depressions because the cost of energy, sine qua non, has gone up, are another matter. But if your central banks don't realize that and stay on the monetary gas pedal despite not actually being in a liquidity trap... inflation.

Mind you, monetary policy comes from the Friedmanite, monetarist, strands in the modern blend. I wonder if more pure New Deal government jobs policies would have worked better, i.e. create (hopefully low energy) jobs directly, rather than counting on money expansion to make it happen.

Plus failure of the War itself, general 1960s, etc., undermining past confidence in government. (As Frum admits, the Greatest Generation was a statist generation.) And the rise of the South, both from civil rights and the Southern Strategy and the vulnerability to migration of our flawed democracy.

But, anyway... yeah. On this issue at least, Nixon *way* to the left of Obama, let alone the modern GOP.

Which points to a flaw in the Poole methodology, assuming it's not hokum to begin with: they're averaging everything together, when a moment's consideration says that the modern world is socially to the left -- how many of even GOP House members oppose interracial marriage? -- and economically to the right. We've got partial gay marriage and a black president and realistic chances of a woman winning, but we've lost unions, progressive taxes, and acceptance of basic macroeconomics and what used to be standard policy.