The opportunity to talk to The Economic History Association is asflattering to an international lawyer as it is unexpected. I have never been entirely clear on how economic historians select their materials in order to distinguish their product from political history, a subject with which I am supposed to be more familiar. The future historian of the period in which we live will, I am sure, encounter unusual difficulty in making this distinction. America's foreign policy seems to center around economic aid to allies and economic boycott of potential enemies. The New Deal made economic welfare of the people a domestic policy until the outbreak of war compelled the national economy to become an instrument for achieving unconditional surrender of foreign enemies. It cannot be said that the present administration, with proposals for more social security, continued foreign aid, and continued agreements for reducing trade barriers, is moving very fast in unscrambling economics and politics.

In The first half of the seventeenth century the northern mercan-Itile nations of Europe followed Spain and Portugal in flinging their Ncommercial frontiers westward to the New World. By the end of the century they had surpassed the Iberian nations in western trade and made of the Atlantic basin a single great trading area. Their economic enterprises created not only a crisscrossing web of transoceanic traffic but also a cultural community diat came to form die western periphery of European civilization. The members of this community were widely separated, scattered across three thousand miles of ocean and up and down the coasts of two continents. But the structure of commerce furnished a communication system mat brought these far-flung settlements together. The same structure proved to be a framework upon which certain important elements in colonial society took form. My purpose is to sketch certain characteristics of the Atlantic colonies in die seventeenth century which relate to these social consequences of commercial growth.

The influence that short-time economic fluctuations in western Europe presumably had on the development of the Swedish timber trade during the latter half of the nineteenth century must, to an American audience, seem to be a rather specialized subject, and I think a few introductory words giving a background might be useful.

By The end of the sixteenth century, the tendency in the OttomanEmpire toward the expansion of timariote properties or military fiefs is reversed, and quasi-private properties begin again to acquire ascendancy in the Balkans. To understand die process of reversal, one must bear in mind the separation of die properties administered by die timariote into two distinct categories, die raya-čiftlik and the hassa-čiftlik The raya-čiftlik was die property over which die peasant tenant had rights of usufruct. The hassa-čiftlik was the private farm or “proprietary nucleus” of the timariote. Slowly the timariote expands his hassa-čiftlik at die expense of die raya-čiftlik. This is possible because certain peasants become indebted to timariotes, others sell dieir right of usufruct, some leave no legal heirs behind them, and others abandon dieir lands to escape plague or famine or to avoid a census, die collection of taxes, or armies on die march.

It is now five hundred years since the Byzantine empire was brought to an end by the Ottoman Turks, Scholars today quite justly reject Gibbon's assumption that the Byzantine empire was, throughput its entire existence, in a state of decline. They have come to rank it, instead, as one of the great empires in history. And this for good reasons. It endured for over a thousand years. Down to about the middle of the eleventh century it was the center of civilization in Christendom. It preserved the thought and literature of antiquity; it developed new forms of art; it held back the barbarians. It produced great statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats as well as reformers and renowned scholars. Its missionaries, aided by its diplomats and sometimes by its armies, spread the gospel among the pagan tribes, especially the Slavs, which dwelt along its frontiers and beyond. As a Czech historian has put it, Byzantium “molded the undisciplined tribes of Serbs, Bulgars, Russians, Croats even, and made nations out of them; it gave to them its religion and institutions, taught their princes how to govern, transmitted to them the very principles of civilization—writing and literature.” Byzantium was a great power and a great civilizing force.

Students of the Five Year Plans are familiar with the overreach. Sing ambitions, the inflated claims, die disputed accomplishments, die misleading statistics, and the appalling human costs of “socialist industrialization” in Soviet Russia. They have generally ascribed these phenomena to Bolshevik dieory and practice. It comes as a surprise then to find die criticism of die early Five Year Plans foreshadowed, in almost identical terms, in die attacks made upon die earlier policy of rapid industrialization in Russia which is linked with the name of Sergei Witte, the Czarist Minister of Finance, 1891–1903. He, too, paraded seemingly impressive results and dubious figures, and he, too, was forced to exact dire sacrifices from popular welfare: Despite the profound dissimilarities between the Soviet system and die Witte era (they must go unstated here) there exists, it would seem, an underlying continuity, pointing to more fundamental necessities and profounder tragedies that backward countries widi strong nationalist and imperialist tendencies must face in die precipitous development of their resources. One special difference, however, should be noted in diis context. The distaste for die bitter fruits of forced industrialization, muted in Stalinist Russia, could frankly, although not entirely freely, be expressed in die eighteen nineties, when Witte's policies attained their full effect. The subsequent discussion of Witte's policies and their consequence is drawn from that public protest.

In Veblen's own critique of other economists—andtion of his theory is just that—he relied securely on quasi-Marxist a major por-simplicities concerning causation. Other economists “got that way” because they were members of or sycophants of the kept classes, aristocratically disdainful of the actualities of production. Their theories, if they were classicists, were “superstructural” in the sense of being both above and behind the battle, for Veblen was one of the pioneers in the use of the culturallag concept which has done so much to confuse the understanding of the relations between technology and society. If they were American classicists, such as (in Veblen's view) J. B. Clark, diey were likely to couple a pallid reformism with their “fine-spun technicalities,” offering palliatives at the level of pecuniary theory for evils rooted in the very divorce of the pecuniary culture from its industrial base. And this reformism Veblen saw as a leisure-class product, along with female philanthropy, the arts and crafts movement, social work, and vegetarianism—the archaic by-products of the sheltered life of the better-off and the better-educated strata whose menial and hence life-giving work was done for them by others. Reformism was archaic because it was pre-evolutionary, pre-Darwinian; for Veblen, “A.D.” meant “After Darwin.” His emphasis on the datedness of economic theory—a charge to which Americans are especially sensitive since we like to be progressive and up-to-date—led Veblen to express recurrent hopes for the “younger generation” of economists, whom he wanted to make less literate and theoretical, less parasitic and less sanguine, less refined and more machine-minded. For Veblen as for Rousseau, what was young was less likely to be corrupted and spoiled.

If We are to have a discussion of fabian England, it may be well at the outset to specify what we nean by fabian, even though we take England for granted. Under present circumstances in the world, die German methodology, which dictates beginning with definitions, should perhaps be employed in its Russian variant, which requires that serious discussion of any scholarly subject shall be prefaced widi an indication of what Lenin had to say on the topic. Lenin was interested i n the Fabians, interested enough to translate Industrial Democracy into Russian. It is therefore with special authority that he was able to say, “The most perfect expression of opportunism and of liberal labour politics is undoubtedly the Fabian Society.” His opinion took on added weight because he was echoing “Engels, who treats Messrs. Sidney Webb and Co. as a band of bourgeois humbugs whose aim it is to demoralize die workers, to influence them in a counter-revolutionary direction.” Lenin did recognize that “the Fabians are more sincere and honest than Kautsky and Co. because they have not promised to stand for a revolution; politically, however, diey are the same.” As we all know, in 1915, in the heat of the effort to “convert the imperialist war into civil war,” nothing more damning could be said than diat the Fabians were the same as the “pseudo-Marxist renegade” Kautsky.