The Battle for Imperial Supremacy

“Who commands the sea commands trade; who commands the trade of the world commands its riches, and so commands the world.” Quote attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh (1553-1618).

Sabre-rattling in what is more and more looking like a phoney trade war, Donald Trump is threatening to undermine the established order of international trade, believing that the US is being taken for a ride by all its trading partners. Americans are importing more and more stuff, making less and less, and it is every body else’s fault.

A phoney trade war because the threatened high tariff rates are now being used merely as bargaining chips, fuel for an international arm wrestle with the principal targets being Asian nations who are exporting so much to the US and elsewhere in the world. The rest of the world is being swept up to ensure that every one knows that King Donald rules.

Crowding the room with Donald Trump are some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the world, seeking to consolidate their power and wealth. It is no accident that most of the main players, whether political leaders of the billionaires happen to be of European origin.

Nothing much has changed since the heady days of competitive colonial expansion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The quest for wealth and power has been a blood sport for over 400 years. The foundations included a changing religious, and political structures and technological developments in Europe. Part of the consequences of the insecurities of change included a thirty war in which about half the population of Europe was decimated through war and subsequent famines.

Religion, politics, colonial ambition and the quest for a male heir to the British throne collided in the bloodiest period of European history, the Thirty Years’ War.

The Catholic Church was the unifying influence over much of Europe, but Martin Luther’s disagreement with the church over several, sorry, 95 points of difference, discovered because the printing press had been invented and suddenly the Bible was more broadly available. Europe was not the Europe we know today, it was a fragmented assembly of fiefdoms, principalities, estates controlled by landed gentry, all under the loose control of The Holy Roman Empire and other royal houses, effectively the remains of an agreement delegating temporal power to Kings of England, France and Spain and spiritual power to the succession of Popes in Rome.

The beginning of the Reformation shattered the control Rome had over the northern parts of its influence, and with it the break down if the rule of Spanish and French rulers where religious disputation led to new divisions and power structures.

King Henry VIII’s divorce of his Spanish Queen, Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry Anne Boleyn, hopeful that she could bare him a son and heir to the throne, sent further shock waves through Europe. The alliance between Spain and England was broken and very quickly degenerated into a naval battle with English buccaneers raiding the Spanish Main and plundering the Barbary Coast of North Africa for its gold and ivory.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada saw the power of the Spanish and Portuguese diminish and the rise of British and Dutch dominance.

That included the rush of shipbuilding and technological advances in both the ships and navigation skills as the quest for speedier access to colonial outposts and the aggressive quest for more places to exploit for untold riches.

The rush for riches included exploring the north west passage through the Arctic Ocean, a shorter route to East Asia, a fool hardy endeavour which cost many lives and ships crushed in the unrelenting frozen ocean, and the Dutch sought a faster route to the East Indies, Indonesia taking advantage of the Roaring 40’s winds which drove their ships eastward from the Cape of Good Hope, and a turn to the left after several days sailing heading north along the West Australian coast.

As with the search for the North West Passage, the quest for riches was far more important than the lives of the sea fares who sailed the ships. There are many wrecks littering the coast of Western Australia, including the loss of the Batavia and the bloody consequences of the mutiny and its brutal aftermath.

Wealth attributed to colonial enterprises enriched the Royal families of Spain and England as well as the business elite of The Netherlands, but little trickled down to the peasantry. The wars which were sparked through control of the sea lanes and the religious difference cost the lives of about half the population of Europe through the Thirty Years’ War.

But that has always been the way in feudal and agrarian societies. The workers of the land are there to live lives of service to the land owners for a few crumbs. Sailors were press-ganged int service to explore the world, whether they wanted to or not. People who were prisoners, for whatever reason, were put to work in slave-like conditions or transported to far flung colonies in the Virginias to work on tobacco plantations, Guiana and Caribbean Islands to work the sugar cane fields or just to rot away out of sight and out of mind for sometimes the paltry crime of stealing a loaf of bread or perhaps a rabbit from the royal forest.

And if that supply of labour proved untenable, African slaves were brought in.

Life was cheap.

And today, life is becoming cheap again.

The tariff war, or tariff negotiating chips war is off and running as the wealthiest nation on earth has seen its economy threatened by a balance of trade which was caused by off-shoring so much of its productive capacity, is seeking to redress that perceived imbalance, to reassert its dominance as the pre-eminent world power.

Why was that productive capacity moved off-shore? Cheaper labour, new factories using production line technologies where an educated workforce was not needed, just a steady supply of willing workers, willing to work for subsistence wages without the safety nets demanded by American workers, the safety net of unions, of health insurance and safer working conditions, annual leave and other entitlements.

It is not just the President forcing this ‘negotiation’, forcing a realignment of economic power, the world’s richest people are in on the act, using their power to ensure that their wealth will grow no matter what happens to the American workers or the almost enslaved workers manufacturing cheap clothes and smart phones and every other bauble deemed necessary for the good life in the capitalist western world.

And yes, there is another kind of warfare being conducted, a power play which seeks to halt the ever increasing industrial might of China and its East Asian allies. It is no longer just a matter of controlling the seas as expressed by Sir Walter Raleigh so many centuries ago, it is now also a matter of controlling land, sea and air transport as well as the new communications and banking technologies.

The major players are not just nation states, but include the ever increasing reach of the richest people on earth as they build and expand their powers.

To counter the ring of US bases which hem in the South China Sea to monitor shipping out of China, the Belt and Road Initiative is connecting most nations through a network of road, rail, maritime, energy and digital infrastructure linking both imports and exports across the world. A development differing from previous colonial activities where the coloniser developed infrastructure and bore the cost, China is loaning the finances, leading to a ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ resulting in a crippling form of neo-colonialism and economic imperialism where the host nations are indebted to China, effectively handing over its economic independence.

Communications technology includes Meta, the corporation which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, a world wide network which is basically uncontrolled except in its ability to rake in adverting dollars at an unprecedented rate, enriching the elite tech bros who invested in it and have controlled it in its initial launch in February 2004. It initially restricted to students at Harvard, then progressively to universities throughout North America and ultimately dominating as a news and information source world-wide connecting anyone and every one with a mobile phone or computer, and able to target advertising and specific interests to people through the invasive forms of data collection on users.

Along with Google, a search engine developed in the late 1990s electronic communications and advertising have influenced the rise and power of these media giants to undermine the power of previous media organisations. The power is concentrated in very few hands. Much like the control of money through credit cards and payment systems.

New colonialism has the same mind set as old colonialism, basically that wealth should flow to those with the greatest power, and while the tools are different, the mindset is the same.

This was so succinctly put when Mark Zuckerberg was trying to take full control of land in Hawaii, when the owners did not want to sell, he launched lawsuits against them, quietly, through shell companies, to make it seem like it was not his doing, but when it became public, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser staled, “This is the face of neocolonialism.”

The attitude is the same as when asked what Facebook was about, it was described as a means to attain wealth, riches.

The neo-colonialism, the imperial objectives of the Trump tariff war is much the same really, it is about creating wealth, not for every day people but for the cabal of billionaires advising the President.

The battle for Imperial Supremacy does not care for the ordinary people, just as the quest for Empire Building during the expansion of European power in the 16th and 17th centuries had nothing to do with the ordinary people, but everything about enriching those with the greatest power.

 

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