VICTOR BENJAMIN TURNER

MSFS 507-01
DR. PATTY O’BRIEN

ESTABLISHING PURPOSE BEYOND THE PRESENT

GLOBALIZATION PAPER #2

In Stefan Tanaka's New Times in Modern Japan, he quotes Inoue Enryo as saying,
"There is a thing called will in humans, and when one possesses will there is definitely
purpose." Tanaka expands this to say that "will is that source of progress that separates
human nature from nature," and quotes Inoue again, that "when the complete human
being is not led by will, there is no development as a human being."1
In speaking of European colonialism and imperialism, the relentless human will
and lust for hegemony were compelling factors behind the push outwards from the
cramped, competitive European nation-states to new colonies worldwide. Such pressures
did not exist in potential nation-state rivals such as China. In order to ensure their
domination, perhaps subconsciously understanding the power of human will, the
European colonists perfected human domestication by destroying and suppressing the
human will of other peoples so that they would not and could not resist the destruction of
their cultures and assumption of their lands. But it speaks to the power of the human will
that those who were colonized eventually broke out of the manacles of mental inferiority
and enslavement and re-established their own identities as a "complete human being".
Thusly, the human will must be discussed from multiple perspectives of the colonial
equation: the will to expand, the will to dominate, and the will to be free.
In the pre-colonial era, Europe was essentially balanced enough that its highly
competitive states, with no room to expand geographically or economically, had reached
a stalemate. Also, according to David Abernethy’s The Dynamics of Global Dominance,
"in cultural, economic, and geographic terms [Europe] has long been relatively unified," 2
so the different states competed with strikingly similar goals and abilities to adopt

1
Stefan Tanaka. New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 161.
2
David B. Abernethy. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415-1980
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 9.
advancements in military technology and economic and political theory from each other.
As a result, the "nervous energy"3 to develop first-user technology in military and naval
projection was high among the European states, and pressures to colonize new lands and
exploit their resources to shift the balance of power were too great to ignore.
Contrast this with China, whose recalcitrance to pursue global imperialism was
probably in some subconscious level related to its disperse population and plentiful land
and labor. China's different philosophic and political goals alienated it from the European
homogeneous competitive mindset. As Pomeranz points out in The Great Divergence, in
China "none of the changes that combined to arrest Western Europe's ecological decline
during the nineteenth century was operative."4 Such competitive energies did not exist in
China and therefore it did not have the will to change its situation, and therefore had no
purpose to expand. It should be noted, however, that China was still an influence upon
the colonial expansion in its ravenous demand for silver, which created a world market as
silver (which continued to be found in new deposits, thus inflating its value
economically) was exchanged for other goods which could be used to purchase raw
materials elsewhere for Europe. Pomeranz sums up:

"Not only were the land and labor that produced New World resource exports very
much the fruits of extra-market coercion, but it took the unique arrangements of
Caribbean plantations and of mercantilist policies throughout the New World to
escape all the forces that caused core-periphery exchange within the Old World to
plateau."5

European "overseas aggression became attractive as a way of easing, though

never ultimately resolving, a metropole's security dilemma."6 The balance of power in
Europe had expanded to the international stage, and the potential of finding new colonies
and resources could mean survival for the insecure European states. And Europe had
reached the limits of what it could produce at home, having "little chance of expanding

3
Abernethy, 206.
4
Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 239.
5
Pomeranz, 274.
6
Abernethy, 207.
its supplies of clothing fiber and wood from within its own borders, given its relatively
non-intensive agriculture and limited labor supply."7 When the Europeans arrived in the
Americas, they had little idea that North America would become the economic
powerhouse of the world a century later because of its plentiful land as well as plentiful
imported labor. In the meantime, however, "it turned out to be possible to address these
shortages through long-distance trade"8 through specialization in the colonies.
In a very realist operating environment in Europe, the will to dominate other
countries superseded all. Except for France, which showed some ambivalence towards
colonialism9, Europeans did not hesitate to subvert newly discovered cultures and indeed
expressed their arrogant superiority in doing so.10 Abernethy describes two of Europe's
methods: the "explore-control-utilize" syndrome11 and the triple attack.12
The "explore-control-utilize" syndrome consisted of the affirmation of "the
importance of curiosity and the value of satisfying it"13, the feeling of entitlement "to
exercise collective property rights abroad"14, and the "realization of imagined potential"
through perpetual restlessness15. The will to dominate extended through this syndrome
even to controlling nature, to "realize nature's untapped potential,"16 changing it to suit
man's purposes and to improve upon it. It is easy to see how this mindset led to the
mental ease in dispatching foreign civilizations and enslaving them to do their bidding.
In a competitive world, might makes right.
While the "explore-control-utilize" mindset provided validation of colonialism,
the triple assault was the insurmountably insidious method in which institutions were
brought in to overwhelm colonized peoples. The public sector "[obtained] compliance by
heavy reliance on the use and threat of force" while the private profit sector rewarded
producers with imported consumer goods. To give everything an aura of timelessness
and righteousness, missionaries "specialized in what Émile Durkheim terms 'normative

7
Pomeranz, 238.
8
Pomeranz, 238.
9
Abernethy, 216.
10
Abernethy, 12. Tanaka, 97.
11
Abernethy, 185.
12
Abernethy, 227.
13
Abernethy, 185.
14
Abernethy, 186.
15
Abernethy, 186.
16
Abernethy, 187.
pacification.'"17 The colonized peoples would be recruited to assist the colonizers in
running their sectors, incorporating them into western customs and institutionalizing their
families into the system, alienating them from their past. In fact, sometimes the
colonized would be tricked into violating their religious principles18, subverting them and
making it easier for them to abandon their beliefs. When it was more difficult to subvert
people, a colonizer could rely on pure profit motives: "a chartered company was able to
penetrate other societies more readily than public sector agents acting on their own" as,
"if rulers believed they themselves could profit by trading with the company they might
tolerate its troops on their territory as a minor strategic risk outweighed by economic
gain."19
Colonizer techniques were under a constant state of improvement. To keep the
people cowed, western powers would divide and rule. Using segregation of people and
groups, unity among the suppressed was impossible. Different groups were encouraged
to compete against each other instead of cooperate. It was not in their mutual interest to
combine their forces, and physical separation from each other reinforced the desire to
take advantage of each other.20 For instance, the fact that Africans were actively and
ignorantly complicit in the massive Atlantic slave trade has yet to be fully absorbed in its
entirety as a scar on human history. How was it that the west was able to exploit the will
of the African princes, kings, and merchants so that they would be major participants in
the enslavement of their own people? David Brion Davis elaborates, in Inhuman
Bondage. By appealing to the greed of these people, offering them "textiles, liquor,
hardware, bars of iron, guns and gunpowder, tools or utensils of various kinds, and cowry
seashells"21, western companies exploited the fragmented cultural and national groups
and played them against each other. Their will to receive luxury products outweighed
interests of unity and resisting foreign influence.
Thus, in the face of this bombardment of influence and interference within the
triple assault, it is more interesting to remark on those civilizations that were able to repel

17
Abernethy, 236.
18
Abernethy, 237.
19
Abernethy, 239.
20
Abernethy, 285.
21
David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 89.
the west. Abernethy mentions briefly the examples of Japan, Thailand, Afghanistan,
Abyssinia. Both Afghanistan and Japan benefit from defensively advantageous
geographies and have repelled invaders for centuries, as securing all the different
mountainous regions or islands is a near impossible task. This somewhat negated the fact
that neither country benefitted from strong, unified rule until Japan did much later in
history. For other resisters, having a unified, strong federal government was the key
against the westerners -- the westerners found it easier to divide and conquer by playing
tribal chieftains against each other. The westerners altogether tried to avoid lands
populated by Muslims, as they considered the Muslims incontrovertible from their
religion.
But even if a region or state managed to fend off the Europeans, it still suffered
the merciless effects of contact whether through disease or through western ideas.
Tanaka's New Times in Modern Japan, for example, strikes the reader as an extremely
saddening book in discussing the effect of assuming the solar calendar in place of the
lunar calendar. The mechanical impersonality of modern time forced an abstract
perception of reality upon the Japanese, who found no soul, fervor, or festiveness in
"invented traditions"22. "The old holidays were celebrated because the people felt them to
be festive occasions."23 Myths, eternity, and the story-telling nature of Japanese life had
been invalidated by the Japanese government. The Japanese people felt that "things were
becoming important because they were old, not because they were tied to some form of
belief or spirituality."24 How much different is this from physical colonial rule, when
your culture is replaced with one that doesn't coincide with your agrarian schedule or
cultural history? One can consider time to be an enslaver, forcing people to live by its
never-ending ticking, its tireless will to reach an infinite future.
Domination of people and the triple assault eventually became a liability to the
Europeans. The brash, rebellious personalities sent by Europeans to implement
institutions abroad eventually sought their own independence, writing at great length on
the subject of personal liberty. The requirement for work skills and the false
magnanimousness of Europeans brought some degrees of literacy and higher education to

22
Tanaka, 17.
23
Tanaka, 16.
24
Tanaka, 33.
the colonized and to slaves. Eventually the oppressed observed the movement within the
American colonies to free themselves from British colonial rule. That a slave named
Prince would, after hearing revolutionary rhetoric from his master, would say, "Master,
you are going to fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for,"25 exhibits a massive
awakening of the self among slaves. Frederick Douglass and other thinkers provided the
model and inspiration for slaves to pull away the wool (cotton?) from their eyes. Before
then, slaves were unaware that they were even slaves -- black children would play games
acting as slavemasters, not realizing the disgusting future ahead of them. Douglass
testified that "the shock of coming to terms with a slave identity was then devastating,
especially in a country that talked of liberty and equality and took such pride in
disavowing hereditary titles and aristocratic status."26 Former slaves sometimes even
became slave-owners themselves, and slaves would often, according to Douglass, think
that "the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves."27 One cannot
understate Orlando Patterson's perception that slavery is "the permanent, violent, and
personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons."28
And yet, despite the fear of death and intimidation and hopelessness, the enslaved
and the colonized began to fight back. Slaves in the US observed the bloody battle for
Haitian independence and the high-minded talk of American settlers -- India observed the
American Revolution and pursued it in its own country. Colonialism in many areas
began to be checked. Colonists tried to block this transfer of information and hope by
keeping slaves illiterate by law (for instance, in the Southern states after the Nat Turner
rebellion29). But the movement had already begun. Even the religious prong of the triple
assault was bent back upon its users, most poignantly as the Zimbabwean nationalist
Ndabaningi Sithole stated: "If the Bible teaches that the individual is unique, of infinite
worth before God, colonialism in many respects said just the opposite, and it became only
a matter of time before one ousted the other."30 This notion of individuality sprang from
the human will, and freedom and liberty became the purpose of the enslaved's will. This

25
Davis, 144.
26
Davis, 199.
27
Davis, 196.
28
Davis, 30.
29
Davis, 209.
30
Abernethy, 340.
will to pursue individual liberty was not coming from just one direction, either.
Justification for colonialism within European states had already begun to wane, and was
in fact banned as a practice in some European countries well before the anti-slavery
movement in the US hit its stride.
So all throughout the course of colonialism, from its initial curiosities and
competitive pressures to the domination and subjugation of foreign peoples, to the
awakening of the enslaved to their own "complete human being", the human will has
repeatedly changed the nature of the situation -- the human motivation continues to seek
to establish purpose beyond the present, to achieve a more promising future than what
life provides already. As Tanaka concludes, "Will establishes a horizon of expectations as
an inherent part of human beings."31 Looking forward, it will be interesting to see how
the will to control and the will to be free compete, how we as a society will marry the two
together equitably.

31
Tanaka, 162.
 VICTOR BENJAMIN TURNER
MSFS 507-01
DR. PATTY O’BRIEN

ESTABLISHING PURPOSE BEYOND THE PRESENT

GLOBALIZATION PAPER #2 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Abernethy, David B. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas

Empires 1415-1980. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

2) Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New
World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

3) Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of
the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

4) Tanaka, Stefan. New Times in Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2004.