of previous decades, van der Zwaan argued against pursuing growth in enrollment for 11. A crisis of imagination?
the sake of growth itself and in favor of selection, thereby opening the door to those who
Notes on interdisciplinary hauntologies
are strongly motivated to make a success of their education. In a sense, one could say
he embraced the basic principles underpinning Adriaansens University College model
when he claimed Utrecht s decade-long leadership in academic renewal.
The success of an educational model should also be measured in terms of NOT con- Kacper Pobłocki
tributing to the growing socio-economic polarization of society. It would be rated suc-
cessful if all with the capacity to benefit from the education and to contribute to society
would be able to participate, and not only the  haves ; the individuals who are already One of the new genres of academic writing to emerge in the post-2008 era is the
in an advantaged position. To make certain that a liberal education becomes widely ac- one in which authors claim that the research they have been doing over the past (often
cessible it is not enough to increase the number of colleges; there should also be suf- dozen) of years is particularly pertinent in the age of financial (social, cultural, political
ficient financial support for students  from the lower classes to participate, to reap the and so on) crisis. This is particularly visible in introductions or prefaces to volumes pu-
benefits, and to make their contribution. In the case of the Liberal Arts Colleges in the blished after the fall of the Lehman Brothers, despite the fact that  given the time lag in
Netherlands, the implication is clear: the institutions have to be inclusive. That can only the publication of scientific research  in many of the cases the research (and most of the
be ensured by continued funding for scholarships. This would help prepare the students writing) had been done long time before 2008. I would not like to dismiss this as merely
for the real world, by ensuring a social as well as an international mix in day-to-day en- an academic fad.
counters on campus, in the classroom, and abroad. Then truly the expense of providing That the 2008 meltdown could become an intellectual watershed in the first place
education would not be  thought to be extravagant by anyone with a humane and gene- is largely due to the fact that it came, nearly universally, unanticipated. In a letter to the
rous mind. British Queen, who was perhaps at greater liberty than most pundits to ask the obvious
yet uneasy question during her visit to the London School of Economics, eminent British
economists frankly admitted that  the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity
of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the
collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to
understand the risks to the system as a whole. 1 This letter can be read as an indictment
of the global academia that has for the past decades done a great deal to stunt the  col-
lective imaginations.
Its revival is, arguably, one of the most important challenges facing higher educa-
tion right now. The highly specialized, commercialized and professionalized academia
has generated a tunnel vision of the world that more than often fails to  see the obvious.
The fulcrum of this revival of imagination can be found in the practice of interdisci-
plinarity that has been the buzzword of the last decade but that, unfortunately, is still un-
der siege from entrenched disciplinary practices and discourses. Of course we should be
cautious with every  buzzword; and as I showed elsewhere, interdisciplinary more than
often has been a term that veiled ever greater competition between academic disciplines
and was linked to the increasing commodification of knowledge.2 This is, however, not
to say that the concept, or rather the intellectual practice, should be rejected out of hand.
Quite the contrary. Many of the  objects of inquiry can only be understood by an inter-
disciplinary approach.
This is perhaps most pertinent in the nascent discipline of  urban studies. As one
1
 Queen Told How Economists Missed Financial Crisis, The Telegraph, July 26, 2009.
2
Kacper Pobłocki,  Whither Anthropology Without Nation-state? Interdisciplinarity, World Anthropologies
and Commoditization of Knowledge, Critique of Anthropology, 29 (2009): 225-252.
100 101
of its towering figures famously argued, the city has been a  blind field for decades. morphology and, ultimately, fate. Each was opened and closed by a period of a  financial
Back in the early 1970s Henri Lefebvre argued that  what is needed is a department that expansion, that bracketed a protracted phase of  material expansion. The latter was
can focus existing disciplines on the analysis of the urban phenomenon such as mathe- driven by trade and/or production of commodities, whereas moments of financializa-
matics, history, linguistics, psychology, or sociology.  This would require a change in tion were marked by a withdrawal from  tangible economic activities into the realms
our ideas about higher education, for such discipline would be based not on a body of of finance, speculation, banking, real estate and conspicuous consumption. Financial
acquired knowledge (or what passes for such knowledge) that it can dispense but on a expansion was hence a mark of a cycle s  autumn  being both its belle époque and the
problematic. 3 harbinger of a new order. Capital flight from the outgoing hegemon to the ascending one
Today the problem of mustering all the necessary intellectual disciplines for focu- made the closing phase of financialization of the former coterminous with the opening
sing on a particular problematic is further compounded by the closer inspection of what one of the latter.  Autumn of the old regime was the  spring of the new one. The mel-
it actually means to do  urban studies. For quite some time the so-called  spatial turn ting-into-air of  real economies facilitated, hence, profound geographical relocations
has focused on what has been dubbed  place-making. We have, for instance, a vast array of world economy s epicenter.
of literature that shows, from all angles possible, how  places (neighborhoods, com- Moreover, every financialization, including our own, is a deferred repetition of a sce-
munities or whole cities) are  made. Some of these studies are very illuminating. Yet, nario rehearsed first in medieval Florence. This is where and when, according to Arrighi,
there has been, however, very little spatial analysis of this; instead, it was, pardon the haute finance was  invented. Initially, it was servicing the Florentine cloth industry. At one
maladroit neologism, a  placial and a not spatial turn. point competitive pressures  provoked a major relocation of capital from the purchase,
Only very recently has David Harvey insisted on the ontological supremacy of space processing, and sale of commodities to more flexible forms of investment, that is, prima-
over place.4 The problem is that space is even more elusive a subject than place. It has, it rily to the financing of domestic and foreign public debt. 6
seems, no bounds. Or the bounds (rather than boundaries) are difficult to fathom. This Between 1338 and 1378 Florence heavily deindustrialized. As its economy had been
is why in this essay I weld together a number of recent works that first try to explain why based upon a  modern wage labor relation  one-third of its population, around thirty
the current crisis is only a harbinger of a deeper world-historical transformation, and thousand people, lived off wages paid by the cloth industry  this culminated in the cloth
second, offer a comprehensive analysis of the role of  space in these deeper historical workers revolt of 1378, yet did not halt financialization. Florentine elite turned into a
transformations.  rentier class, sponsoring arts, construction, and conspicuous consumption. Former
cloth workers became the main labor force behind the  informal Renaissance building
Hauntologies of capitalism boom.7  Such seemingly  unproductive expenditure, argued Arrighi,  was in fact good
In a truly seductive tour de force of historical interpretation, Ian Baucom suggested business policy. 8 This is how Florence became the home of High Renaissance.  These
that at the deepest recesses of  our long contemporaneity lies a relatively minor event are the fruits for which we remember them; but autumn is the season when fruit comes. 9
that occurred on the Atlantic Ocean in 1781. After careful consideration, the captain of a Although the origins of capitalism are typically associated with the British Industrial
ship named Zong ordered to throw overboard the one hundred and thirty-two slaves he Revolution, the real historical breakthrough, argued Arrighi, came with the Florentine
was to deliver to Jamaica. The Zong massacre, in all its gruesomeness, was an economi- divorce, rather than marriage, of capitalism and industry.10 This was the very first time
cally rational act. The  cargo was sick. If the slaves died onshore they would yield no when capital seemed to have been liberated from the necessity to meddle into the mate-
profit. If, however, they died at sea, insurance would redress owners with thirty pounds rial world in order to reproduce itself.
a head. This incident  and the rationality behind it  betoken, according to Baucum, the The Zong massacre occurred precisely when capital went  footloose again. Just as
late eighteenth century  financial revolution. It returned  through a variegated series of Renaissance Florence before, and Edwardian Britain and Reaganite America later, Uni-
oscillations in the final phase of our  long twentieth century  that neoliberal financia- ted Provinces in their  autumn years, the so-called  periwig period, underwent sharp
lization that triggered in the late 1960s and early 1970s.5 deindustrialization. In the 1770s cloth production in Leyden was under a third of what
Baucom weaved his narrative into Arrighi s theory of historical capitalism. The four it had been a century before. Likewise, shipbuilding had contracted: instead of several
consecutive  cycles of accumulation, argued Arrighi, the Genoese/Spanish (1450-1650), hundreds, there were merely thirty ships in the stocks at Zaandam. The Dutch turned
Dutch (1560-1780), British (1750-1925), and American (1860-2008) shared a common
6
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso Books, 1994), 100-101.
3 7
Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Mineapolis: University of Minessota Press, 2003), 54-55. Ibid., 181.
4 8
David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Ibid., 105.
5 9
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke Univer- John Hicks quoted in: Ibid., 95.
10
sity Press, 2005), 26-28. Ibid., 180.
102 103
from  nation of traders into a  nation of rentiers. 11 This ushered in, or rather brought commodities: money, labor and land.16
back, an excessive rationality disinterested in the long run. The order of the day was;  it Baucom provides a suggestive reinterpretation of how money turned from a measu-
will last my time and after me the deluge! as one Dutch pundit wrote in 1778.12 Like all re of value of  real goods into a commodity itself. But his conclusion that the  modern
the others, such a decadent moment of financialization was a step backward. But it was subject stems directly from the eighteenth century  financial revolution is too swee-
a step forward as well. The British dislodged the Dutch from the commanding heights ping to hold water. Rather, I suggest, if we can speak of a  modern subject at all, then it
of the world economy not only by depleting their capital, but also by introducing new comprises the subjectivities betokened by the rise of all the three fictitious commodities.
financial instruments tightly embedded in a novel geographical formation. While Baucom argued that Liverpool was one of the capitals of our long twentieth
In his insistence that marine insurance, slave trade, and the circum-Atlantic geo- century, I suggest that Manchester, the  shock city of industrial revolution, deserves
graphy of exchange rose in close association, Baucom radically sharpened the edge of such credits too. As Arrighi has pointed out, British supremacy rested on her being si-
Arrighi s model. Financialization, he argued, unfolds not merely through the emergence multaneously the  workshop of the world and the  entrepôt of the world. Both func-
of an abstract space-of-flows of capital but also generates a new tangible geography. A tions, here symbolized by Manchester and Liverpool respectively, were  the obverse and
number of distant entrepôts scattered around the fringe of a vast ocean suddenly became mutually reinforcing sides of the same process. 17 At least from 1772, when both cities
parts of a new whole. Unlike the Mediterranean space-of-flows, described by Braudel, were linked by a canal, they constituted one economic organism. Ships dispatched from
and based mainly upon trade in commodities, the Atlantic space-of-flows was deeply Liverpool carried Manchester textiles to be exchanged for slaves.
 hauntological, argued Baucom. Insurance  transform[ed] the irregularity and unpre- Furthermore, as Craig Muldrew has brilliantly shown, the origins of the  financial
dictability of a single slave voyage into a  regular, successive and even network of capital revolution are not to be sought in the slave trade, but are much deeper, and reach to
circulation. Slaves were involved not as commodities, but rather  flexible, negotiable, the networks of interpersonal credit that spanned English textile-producing households
transactable form of [interest-bearing] money. 13 after 1540. It also ushered in the germs of  speculative culture, whereby credit  referred
Having sold the slaves, local  factors in the Caribbean or Americas remitted the to the amount of trust in society, and as such consisted of a system of judgments about
profit back to Liverpool in the form of an interest-bearing bill of exchange.  This bill trustworthiness; and the trustworthiness of neighbours came to be stressed as the para-
amounted to a promise, or  guarantee , to pay the full amount, with the agreed-upon in- mount communal value. 18
terest, at the end of a specified period. He therefore  not so much sold the slaves on the This sixteenth century financial revolution therefore paved the way for paper mo-
behalf of the Liverpool  owners as borrowed an amount equivalent to the sales proceeds ney, central banks and slave trade insurance.19 And once textile manufacturing became
from the Liverpool merchants and agreed to repay the amount with interest. 14 an urban and not a rural activity, it too produced its own specters. Although Mancunian
As result,  what looked like a simple trade in commodities was actually  a trade in  hauntology was different from that of Liverpool, it nonetheless remains part and parcel
loans. The slave bodies hence were not only commoditized but above all financialized, of  our long contemporaneity.
serving as  a reserve deposits of a loosely organized, decentered, but vast trans-Atlantic To appreciate this we need to venture into the backyard of the  trans-Atlantic factory
banking system. If not for this system, there would have been no incentive for Zong s of debt. Baucom s line of reasoning rules this out, however. He followed Walter Benja-
captain to throw slaves overboard. By doing so, he was  not destroying his employers min s remark that the nineteenth century was a repetition of the seventeenth, and argued
commodities but hastening their transformation into money. 15 that the twentieth century was a repetition of the eighteenth. What distinguished these
two (or four) epochs was that the former were  commodity-centered whereas the latter
Genealogy of the present were  speculative.
This is how, Baucom claims, the geography of the Atlantic space-of-flows engende- Commodity was, according to Benjamin, a  practical allegory, and this is why alle-
red a new form of subjectivity: financialized body. This is why, he insists, the Zong mas- gorical consciousness of the seventeenth century intensified as the dominant genre of the
sacre is so haunting: we recognize a part of ourselves in the drowned, financialized, sla- nineteenth. Both allegory and commodity do not  signify themselves, but some super-
ves. Yet, this is only a fraction of our contemporary identity. Baucom s genealogy is merely ordinate  value, and their  concrete, thingly nature is hence  temporarily extinguis-
a partial reappraisal of Karl Polanyi s account of the emergence of the three  fictitious hed. Benjaminian, and also Marxian, critical projects were hence  counterallegorical,
16
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon paperbacks 45 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), chap. 6.
11 17
G.R.R. Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe, 1648-1780 (London: Routledge, 1985), 412-413. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 213.
12 18
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 173-174. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New
13
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 60-62. York: St. Martin s press, 1998), 148.
14 19
Ibid. See also: Deborah M. Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New York: Cambridge University
15
Ibid. Press, 2006), chap. 8.
104 105
seeking to recover the  thingly life of objects, restore or  awaken their meaning. Hence urban penury, Frederick Engels noted that  the most crying abuses described in this book
Benjamin s Arcades Project, and Marxian labor theory of value.20 An identical point was either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. Drainage has been introduced or
raised long ago by Karl Polanyi.  Nineteenth century consciousness, in his view, was improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst slums I had to
racked by the insight that  economic society was subjected to laws that were not human describe. 27 This, to be sure, was hardly an outcome of mercy. Rather, in 1848 Europe fell
laws, and the  reintegration of society into human world became the persistently sought in the throes of a profound political, as well as economic crisis, that ultimately altered the
aim of the evolution of social thought. Marxian economics & was essentially an unsuc- face of cities.
cessful attempt to achieve that aim. 21  From their inception writes Harvey,  cities have arisen through geographical and
The key development that set the stage for the nineteenth century was the  discovery social concentration of a surplus product. 28 Whereas in the pre-capitalist city surplu-
of poverty engendered by early industrialization. This was first acknowledged during ses were  mobilized (for political and symbolic ends), and in the industrial city they
the debates on the Victorian  shock city of Manchester. The watershed moment given were  produced (but never put to further use), during what the Lees called the  era
by Polanyi in his genealogy of the present is curiously congruent with Baucom s, and oc- of reconstruction (1850-1914),29 surpluses became  absorbed, and hence urbanization
curred  somewhere around 1780, with the publication of Townsend s Dissertation on the was fully  internalized by capitalism.30 This was first tried out in Second Empire Paris.
Poor Laws.22 The heritage of the phases of  financial expansion is not wholly separated Following  one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus
from that of  material expansions, and Baucom s strict separation seems unwarranted. capital and surplus labor, 31 Baron Haussmann hired by Napoleon III in 1852, employed
The  reiterative twentieth century, 23 as Polanyi shows, does not bracket, but fully incor- some of the surplus and developed a  proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infra-
porates the nineteenth and its three fictitious commodities. structural urban improvements, and  bludgeoned Paris into modernity. 32
Before that even the most spectacular urban projects might have  stood out by virtue
Capitalism and space of their scale and aesthetic pretensions [but they] had little effect on the city as a whole
A real watershed, as far as the European urban tissue is concerned, came during the and on the lives of most of its inhabitants. 33 Instead of  collections of partial plans of
period dubbed by Andrew and Lynn Lees the  era of disruption (1750-1850). For the two public thoroughfares considered without ties or connections, Haussmann developed
centuries prior to it, European urban network had remained  remarkably stable. Cities a  general plan which was nevertheless detailed enough to properly coordinate diverse
grew gradually.  When more buildings were needed, contractors filled in back gardens local circumstances. Now urban space was perceived and treated as a totality in which
or built upwards. When Amsterdam expanded in the seventeenth century,  new circles different quarters of the city and different functions were brought into relation to each
of canals were added to the older core. 24 The pre-industrial city  was mostly concerned other to form a working whole. 34
with administrative, commercial, craft-related, and religious matters and hence  domi- Further, Haussmann revolutionized the scale of urban investments. When  plans
nance of the town was externally imposed. for a new boulevard [were presented to Haussmann, he] threw them back & saying:  not
Only after the British, as Arrighi had put it,  internalized production, and centra- wide enough & you have it 40 meters wide and I want it 120.  35 Between 1852 and 1870
lized it in a place like Manchester, the city started being  reproduced as part of the ac- the length of Paris street system increased by twelve per cent, average street width dou-
cumulation process. 25 This triggered an avalanche of criticism. Moral considerations bled, and the sewer system expanded fourfold. Supplies of water per inhabitant doubled.
notwithstanding, such growth, it was pointed out, was simply unsustainable. So did the number of trees along streets. While municipal parks skyrocketed from forty-
If industrialization continued unabated, noted a publicist in 1844, then cities like seven to 4,500 acres, industry was driven out of the center, as the latter turned into a site
Manchester will not  keep up their own populations. Cut off suppliers of laborers of splendor and consumption. This is how Paris became the  city of light, a center of
from without, and these towns, in sixty years, will be without inhabitants. Hence, he consumption, tourism and pleasure;  the cafes, department stores, fashion industry and
stressed, the necessity to introduce  paved streets, covered sewers, ventilation, and a
supply of water. 26
26
Robert Seeley in: Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, 121.
And indeed, in a preface written in 1892 to the classic work describing industrial
27
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 28.
28
David Harvey,  The Right to the City, New Left Review 53 (2008): 24.
20 29
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 7-8, 18-21. Andrew Lees, and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, 283.
21 30
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 125-126. Harvey, The Urban Experience, 53.
22 31
Ibid., 111. Harvey,  The Right to the City, 25.
23 32
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 151. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2-3.
24 33
Andrew Lees, and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Andrew Lees, and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, 103.
34
University Press, 2007), 13, 17. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 111.
25 35
Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 201. Harvey,  The Right to the City, 26.
106 107
grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through Waves of  internalization
consumerism. 36 The language of  internalizations employed above begs some explanation. Pace
Haussmann s aggrandizement of Paris,  the most famous of all of the efforts to Hardt and Negri, Arrighi s historical model of capitalism is not one where  everything
remake large portions of a major city undertaken anywhere during [the nineteenth] cen- returns. 43 On the contrary, he demonstrates how each cycle of accumulation, while
tury, made entire Europe  gush with admiration. 37 He demonstrated that it was  pos- being a step back in one way, is also a step forward. Braudelian ontology of capitalism,
sible to stave off crises & by transforming  a great part of capital into fixed capital which inspired by Arrighi, was one comprising of three  stories.  The lowest and until very
does not serve as agency of direct production,  such as housing, railways, canals, roads, recently the broadest layer is that of an extremely elementary and mostly self-sufficient
aqueducts and so forth.38 This had a number of short-term advantages:  if fixed capital is economy. Above this layer of material life there exists   the favoured terrain of the mar-
lent out rather than sold, then it functions as a material equivalent of money capital. As ket economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets.
such, it can circulate provided the value embodied in it is recovered over its lifetime and Then above all this, in the  attic of world economy, 44 there is a  zone of the anti-market,
provided that it earns interest. 39 where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This  today as in the
In other words, investment in urban expansion is not productive in the same way as past, before and after the industrial revolution  is the real home of capitalism. 45
investment in manufacturing of commodities. It is much easier to extract monopoly rent Likewise, for Polanyi the global market lays not within but without the economy.
from real estate than from commodities.  A rate of return on money capital can be had His narrative is precisely one of how local economies based upon the principles of reci-
by investing in old property as well as in the production of new. Idle money capital can procity, redistribution, householding (subsistence) and barter have resisted throughout
just as easily be lent out as property as it can in money form. Since a part of the use value centuries their subjugation to long-distance exchange and ravages caused by moneyma-
of property depends upon its relative location, money capitalists can even invest in the land king pure and simple.46 The grand transformation he described was precisely the descent
and in the future rent it can command. Hence,  money capital is now being invested in ap- of the  predators to the lower rungs of the world economy, whereby they appropriate its
propriation rather than in production. 40 elements, and reshape them in the image of their pecuniary rationality. For Polanyi this
The logic of the production of space is hence different from that of the production was the origin of the fictitious commodities, and the divorce of  man from money, labor
of commodities. Production of space Ä… la Haussmann is driven by the process of dif- and land.
ferentiation. It allows, for example, to value some areas higher than others, and hence Just as for Arrighi, every hegemony was based upon one such  internalization, in
extract monopoly rent. It is more akin to, but not congruent with, what Baucom dubbed Polanyi s account the picture is somehow more complex. Arrighi insists on this in order
 speculative logic. to highlight that every new  internalization expands the scale of the world economy.
It also melded with the development of the credit system.  If housing is to be produ- Unlike Polanyi, Arrighi does not account for the commoditization of land, and, more
ced as a commodity, Harvey explained,  then renting or borrowing of money becomes es- importantly, for urbanization.
sential. Without the interventions of the landlord, the credit system and the state, capital Inspired by Charles Tilly, and his model of capitalism where accumulation of the
would be denied access to this realm.41 This fundamentally altered what used to be a rela- means of coercion (state-making) is contrasted to the accumulation of capital (city-
tively simple class polarization in the workplace. Workers, exploited by industrial capital, making),47 Arrighi developed a distinction between territorialist and capitalist  logics of
now became swayed and cajoled into the system by finance capital. As  workers savings power. Under the former,  control over territory and population is the objective, and
blend with those of money capitalists in ways that often render them indistinguishable, 42 control over mobile capital the means. Under the latter  control over mobile capital is
it becomes workers interest to defend capitalism, as it now provides them, via the credit the objective, and control over territory and population the means. 48
system among other institutions, with the means of reproduction such as housing, while For both Tilly and Arrighi, money and space are conceptually divorced. Just as during
it is growing, and hence maintains the rate of profit at the same time. the Iberian/Genoese and Dutch hegemonies this indeed was the case, in the latter part of
the British, and especially during the American supremacy, this separation was broken
apart. This is why Arrighi s model needs to be augmented to incorporate the narrative of
36 43
Ibid. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 238-239.
37 44
Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, 169. I borrowed this metaphor from David Harvey.
38 45
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, New Edition (London: Verso, 2009), 227. Braudel quoted in Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 10.
39 46
Ibid., 227-228. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chap. 4 and 5.
40 47
Ibid., 234, emphasis mine. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, Rev. pbk. ed., Studies in Social Discontinuity
41
Ibid., 230. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
42 48
Harvey, The Limits to Capital, New Edition, 230. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 33-34.
108 109
the urbanization of capital. Space remains in his account merely a  container wherein noa, resulted in a spatial transplant of first textile and then metal industries to England.
social action unfolds. For a long time, however, England remained  a trading [and manufacturing] vessel
I argue that until the British industrial revolution, space indeed remained external moored to Europe; her entire economic life depended on the mooring-rope, the rate of
to capitalist expansion, but with the advent of industrial cities, it had been internalized. exchange on the Antwerp market. 55 Only after her mooring-rope had been cut and the
Further, if under the British space was consumed in the process of production, from the Dutch were removed from the apex of world economy by losing the Atlantic space-of-
1850s space had become a  means of production of its own. flows to the English, the latent industrial potential of Britain could be deployed.
The American hegemony unfolded therefore not merely, as Arrighi argued, under The Dutch maintained supremacy in the Indian Ocean by simply controlling trading
the aegis of the multinational corporation (that  internalized transaction costs), but posts. In the Atlantic,  trade control over production areas was at least as important as
also under internalized urbanization and production of space. The long twentieth cen- control over trading ports. 56 Industrial revolution was, therefore, a simultaneous expan-
tury, therefore, was indeed a  century of geography. sion of both English textile and metal industries during the Dutch-led financial expan-
First, Arrighi argued, the Dutch, relative to the Genoese, internalized  protection sion, whereby industrial production was employed for achieving world supremacy on
costs. The conquest of the Americas, which was the fulcrum of the first systemic cycle an unparalleled scale.57 As steam and machinery  revolutionized industrial technology,
of accumulation, was executed through the  dichotomous agency consisting an (Iberian) industrial expansion itself became the main factor of integration of markets of the whole
aristocratic territorialist component  which specialized in the provision of protection world into a single world market. 58 Britain thereby became an  industrial sun around
and of a (Genoese) bourgeois capitalist component, that withdrew from trade into high which an agricultural hinterland revolved. All other countries were to become markets
finance due to their  ability to convert the intermittent flow of silver from America to for England s manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food.
Seville into a steady stream. 49 This proved inefficient. Expansion of the English industry on a global scale was possible only thanks to first in-
The Dutch learned from their foes mistakes. Their chartered companies  produced stitutional subjugation of the massive Indian textile industry by the British East India
their own protection& at costs that were lower and more calculable than the costs char- Company and its  subsequent destruction by the cheap products of Lancashire. 59 India
ged to caravans and ships by local powers in the form of tribute, fees, and outright extor- became the jewel in the English colonial crown, as  political control over large, captive,
tions. 50 The Dutch colonial brutality  matched or even surpassed the already abysmal and unprotected economic spaces became the main source of external economies for
standards established by the crusading Iberians& But this brutality was wholly internal British business. 60
to a business logic of action and buttressed, instead of undermining, profitability. Just The  underdeveloped hinterland became crucial also as a market for the British-
as the Iberian plunder of the Americas was driven by religious rather than pecuniary in- produced goods. This, however, had its limits. The globe had run out of  blank spots
centives, the Dutch economized warfare, and avoided military involvements that  had no where capitalism could move into and find easy markets for its productions. From that
direct or indirect justification in the  maximization of profit. 51 point onwards, and the rough watershed came with the final partitioning of Africa in
Both the Genoese and the Dutch specialized in long-distance trade and high fi- the 1880s, argued Neil Smith, space had been fully  internalized by capitalism.  Pre-
nance, and  as far as possible kept production activities outside their organizational do- capitalist space he writes  might well be described as a mosaic  a mosaic of exchange
main. 52 The Dutch global commercial supremacy urged their potential competitors to spaces (centers and hinterlands), constituted by a well-developed market system. 61 Back
build  autarkic economies. Both producers and consumers of commodities where thus then,  social expansion was achieved through geographical expansion; towns expanded
 liberated from the relation of dependency on the foreign (i.e. Dutch) intermediation in into urban centers, pre-capitalist states expanded into modern nation-states, and the na-
trade.53 tion-states expanded where they could into colonial empires. 62 Gradually  geographical
While space remained  external to Dutch imperialist pursuits, English territoria- space [was] dragged inexorably into the center of capital, as it became  in itself a major
lism became the expression of their ensuing subjugation of production  to the economi- way of protecting social and economic equilibrium and staving off crises. 63 The frontier
zing tendencies typical of [capitalist business] enterprises. 54
The deindustrialization that followed financial expansion in first Florence and then Ge-
55
Ibid., 191.
56
Ibid., 204.
57
Ibid., 209.
58
49
Ibid., 251.
Braudel quoted in: Ibid., 125-126.
59
50
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 263.
Ibid., 144.
60
51
Washbrook in: Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 155.
61
52
Smith, Uneven Development, (London: Verso, 2011), 135.
Ibid., 177.
62
53
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 141.
63
54
Ibid., 132-133.
Ibid., 177.
110 111
of capitalist expansion turned inward, and its energies were funneled into the remaking  American Lebensraum. 70 US capital  would refocus on controlling the flow of produc-
of spaces that have already been conquered. Henceforth  development and underdeve- tive and finance capital into and out of sectors and places that could remain technically
lopment were no longer sporadically related but functionally related. 64 independent  self-determining  but that would, by dint of US economic power, be con-
trolled, for all intents and purposes, by US interests. 71 The turn was from  geopolitics
The century of geography to  geoeconomics. 72
Dutch internalization of coercion into capitalist expansion ushered in the so-called The American twentieth century was, therefore, not only a century of multinational
Westphalia system whereby European political space was sundered into sovereign states. corporations and internalized transaction costs, but, as Neil Smith insisted, it was also
Now, even when sovereigns were at war, business between their subjects continued unaf- a century of geography. First, it was the indirect rule through a global empire. Second, it
fected. As politics became divorced from economics, property was now protected by the was through the production of urban space, and extensive haussmanization first of itself,
international inter-state system.65 and then of places important for its geoeconomic pursuits.
 This reorganization of political space in the interest of capital accumulation, ar- The runner-up in the rivalry for leading the long twentieth century was Germany.
gued Arrighi,  marks the birth not just of the modern inter-state system, but also of capi- From its unification in 1871, it pioneered what Arrighi called internalization of transac-
talism as a world system. 66 Within the Westphalia framework, space became external to tion costs, i.e. suspension of the free market in favor of vertically-integrated corporate
economic pursuits and was subject mainly to political activities and inter-state warfare. capitalism. If in the 1880s  family capitalism was still the norm in Germany as it was in
Just as the Westphalia system was based upon  the principle that there was no authority Britain, by the turn of the century a highly centralized corporate structure had taken its
operating above the inter-state system, the British introduced  the principle that the place. 73
laws operating within and between states were subject to the higher authority of a new, Germany was also the European leader in spatial planning and urban development.
metaphysical entity: a world market ruled by its own  laws . 67 According to an American journalist Albert Shaw, because Germans had demonstrated
Just as the world was  discovered during the Genoese, and  conquered during  more of the scientific method than any other people, 74 the Germans have succeeded
the British hegemony, in the course of the  American twentieth century it was  consoli- in forging a city as welfare organism. German cities were in the forefront in the process
dated into a system of national markets and transnational corporations centered on the of  haussmannization of Europe (e.g. by 1880s, most cities in Germany had gas work),
United States. 68 The long twentieth century was, therefore, the  century of geography, and a vast bulk of the new utilities were publically owned,75 and, as  building entailed
as Neil Smith argued, in a twofold sense. First, direct territorial control, the hallmark of borrowing, the  indebtedness of local governments in Germany grew approximately
the British rule, was relinquished. After the project of internal colonization (by westward fifty-fold between 1850 and 1910.76
expansion) of the Unites States was completed in 1898, the logic of American expansion Yet, Germany did not have the American  gift of geography, and its Lebensraum,
rebutted European colonialism.69 as the two World Wars had demonstrated, was tight indeed. It was the United States that
Between the 1890s and 1919, a  closed global system comprising of nation-state- enjoyed a continental size, an island position, and was located between world s two ma-
bound markets emerged. The US strategy, as championed by President Wilson, was to jor oceans. These geographical characteristics tipped the scale in its favor in the quest for
 restructure the grammar of economic expansion, so a global political system would world domination.77
 absorb territorial conflicts while allowing economic business to proceed as usual. The When the German quest for Lebensraum failed, it was clear that the United States
world was no longer integrated merely by production and a global market. Now, it was had a clear path for world domination. Already during the war effort, a  lengthy evalua-
integrated by an empire  the very first one in human history that had a truly planetary tion of Haussmann s efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what
scope and ambition. he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputa-
The frontier of expansion was no longer outside of its borders. It was, as one of its tion as one of the greatest urbanists of all time.
architects put it,  on every continent. The entire globe was now reconceptualized as
70
Ibid., xiv, 27.
71
Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005), 69, 71-72.
64 72
Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith,  After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics, Anti-
Neil Smith, American Empire Roosevelt s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, California studies in critical
human geography 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 17. pode 41, no. 1 (2009): 22-48.
65 73
Sisan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), chap. 1. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 266-267.
66 74
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 44. Andrew Lees, and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, 169.
67 75
Ibid., 55. Ibid., 193.
68 76
Ibid., 219. Ibid., 200.
69 77
Neil Smith, American Empire Roosevelt s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, xvii-xviii. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 275-276.
112 113
 Its author was Robert Moses, who after 1945  did to New York what Haussmann 12. Computational geometry: a definition
had done to Paris. That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process
by  a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the
total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region. When Henk Meijer
 taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centers of the US  yet another transfor-
mation of scale  this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after
1945. 78 And it was that spatial strategy, based upon home ownership, suburbanization Foreword
as the model for development and the entire  way of life , that brought the recent fi- In a Liberal Arts and Sciences college you will find researchers of all types. At the
nancial meltdown and heralded the end of the long American century  the century of Roosevelt Academy I might be known as a computing scientist but to more precise I
geography, and, therefore, of space. would call myself a computational geometrist. We claim that in a Liberal Arts and Scien-
ces environment students should be able to understand what issues are relevant and have
knowledge in a wide variety of subjects. This short article shows that this also applies
to computational geometry. The field of computational geometry for example requires
knowledge of mathematics and computing. This introduction is written for founding fa-
ther and previous dean dr. Hans Adriaansens. This paper will give Hans some idea about
what a computional geometrist is, what problems (s)he studies and why this research is
relevant.
The first section is an introduction. Section 2 illustrates a problem and its solution
by explaining how Hans and Mart can cut a ham sandwich fairly, i.e. slice it in such a way
that both get the same amount of ham on an equal piece of bread. The second section
also explains the research that Marijke van Hengel and I did this summer as part of the
Sirius summer internship program.
Introduction
You may remember geometry as one of the subjects in mathematics in high school.
Geometry in high school deals with two dimensional objects that can be drawn on a piece
of paper. You might remember it as the topic that included drawings using a ruler and
a compass. Geometry deals with objects such as triangles, circles, lines, pyramids and
cubes.
Geometry can be seen everywhere. There are artists that specialize in making geo-
metric art. An example is the artwork of Mark Lombardi who draws circular arcs between
elements in a large (social) network.1 The drawings are beautiful, and at the same time
provide a visualization of the connections that help to uncover underlying structures.
Another example can be seen everyday in the street. The dish antenna is used by
many people use to pick up TV signals from a satellite. A dish antenna is shaped as a pa-
rabola. Any signal that hits the antenna gets reflected through the parabola s focal point.
So all satellite signals that hit the antenna pass through the focal point, which sits in the
little arm you usually see in front of the antenna. The receiver, located at the end of this
arm, receives all signals that hit the antenna.
1
Robert Carleton Hobbs, Mark Lombardi, Independent Curators International, Mark Lombardi:
78
Harvey,  The Right to the City, 27.
Global Networks (New York: Independent Curators International, 2003).
114 115