[{"id":55606,"date":"2026-09-03T05:12:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T05:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55606"},"modified":"2026-09-03T05:12:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T05:12:59","slug":"dont-use-a-gmail-com-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/03\/dont-use-a-gmail-com-address\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t use a gmail.com address"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment. So, for the moment, I’ve set our spam filter to delete everything from gmail.com<\/p>\n

If you want to post a real comment, just give a spurious address like anon.com and use your existing name\/nym. Although we ask for an email address, we almost never check that it’s real. If you have trouble with that, email me at john.quiggin@icloud.com<\/p>\n

Hopefully, we will find a way around this soon.<\/p>\n

Also, Google is Evil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment. So, for the moment, I’ve set our spam filter to delete everything from gmail.com If you want to post a real comment, just give a spurious address like anon.com and use your existing name\/nym. Although we ask for an email address, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55607,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55606\/revisions\/55607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55603,"date":"2026-09-03T04:38:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T04:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55603"},"modified":"2026-09-03T04:41:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T04:41:37","slug":"taylor-swift-the-good-billionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/03\/taylor-swift-the-good-billionaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift: The Good Billionaire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton\u2019s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away.<\/p>\n

Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given away over 300 million books.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t leave Parton poor. Her estate was estimated at $400 million, mostly tied up in property rights of the kind discussed below \u2014 copyrights and her theme park, Dollywood. She lived well, in a substantial house on 60-odd acres of land just outside Nashville. But lots of people have substantial houses and, at least for an Australian, 60 acres doesn\u2019t sound like much. More notable was her ostentatious, but deliberately cheap, self-presentation \u2014 rhinestones rather than diamonds.<\/p>\n

Now for a repeat of the Taylor Swift analysis.<\/p>\n

The claim \u201cEvery billionaire is a policy failure\u201d is pretty widely accepted these days, formulated most clearly in Ingrid’s case for limitarianism<\/a> (a hard cap on the maximum wealth anyone can have). Looking at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world (one woman in the top 20), it\u2019s hard to disagree. Most are thoroughly objectionable, and even those who aren\u2019t personally appalling mostly made their money from monopoly (for example, Warren Buffett) or inheritance (members of the Walton family).<\/p>\n

But what about the good billionaires, a category for which Taylor Swift (ranked about 2000 in the list) seems like the ideal example? Before her, there was J. K. Rowling, but look how that turned out. Swift seems to tick all the boxes. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee\u2019s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart<\/em> is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that\u2019s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.<\/p>\n

So, if there\u2019s a problem with Swift\u2019s wealth, it\u2019s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift, that comes about in several ways.<\/p>\n

First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of \u201cintellectual property\u201d (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks). Unlike many entertainers, she\u2019s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.<\/p>\n

Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.<\/p>\n

Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g<\/em> point made by Piketty a while back.<\/p>\n

These compounding effects would be greatly reduced by a more progressive income tax system (a top marginal rate of 70 per cent) and by wealth taxes, capturing the excess returns to high wealth. In combination, these would make it very difficult to become a billionaire by entertaining people. Other measures would be needed to deal with the massive accumulations of corporate wealth represented by the multibillionaires.<\/p>\n

Given her dependence on the society that made her wealth possible, Swift can have no legitimate moral objection to a tax system that shares it out more evenly. But is there an economic cost here? The standard story is one about incentives and effort. But it\u2019s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. And, as I already observed, most of the ultra-rich have made their money in actively harmful ways. Even where there is an actually useful product involved, the super-profits have come mostly from monopoly or speculation.<\/p>\n

In summary, in a society which produces billionaires, there\u2019s no reason to object to Taylor Swift becoming one. But we could have all the music we need or want in a society without billionaires. Indeed, with policies like a participation income or livable income guarantee<\/a>, we could see a lot more people making music, some of which might turn out better than what the industry currently gives us.<\/p>\n

* In support of my fundraising for the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride against cancer, which was hugely successful. Thanks, everyone!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton\u2019s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away. Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55603"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55605,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55603\/revisions\/55605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55592,"date":"2026-08-31T19:49:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T19:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55592"},"modified":"2026-08-31T19:49:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T19:49:35","slug":"teaching-pluralizing-political-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/31\/teaching-pluralizing-political-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching pluralizing political philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable timezones joined us literally in the middle of the night. I have always been very grateful to the contributors for running the extra mile under those circumstances, and some of the contributors gave the book what I am suspecting have been their darlings – papers on which they either had been working for a long time, or else papers that contained really original ideas. The book also includes a separate part with discussions of the main papers.<\/p>\n

Against that background, I felt a little sad that (to the extent that I have been able to find out) the book hasn’t been picked up much. The first and so far only book review (in the Erasmus Journal of Economics and Philosophy<\/em><\/a>) came out last week. But now one of the contributors, Krushil Watene, wrote to say that she has been teaching a course on the book, which is wonderful. If her students read this, they are very welcome to let us know their comments and impressions of the various chapters, including whether they think the book works for teaching (my assumption has been that it should be really useful for teaching, since it basically has all these different perspectives and arguments on why to pluralize political philosophy and how to do so, also if one is still on square one. But, as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.) And the book can still be downloaded for free<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4,345,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-books","category-inequality","category-political-theorypolitical-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55592"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55598,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55592\/revisions\/55598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55586,"date":"2026-08-28T05:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T05:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55586"},"modified":"2026-09-12T21:12:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T21:12:24","slug":"gold-and-myth-in-the-australian-blue-mountains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/28\/gold-and-myth-in-the-australian-blue-mountains\/","title":{"rendered":"Gold and Myth in the Australian Blue Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing a bushranger named Govett, leaping off the cliff with gun in hand and bags of gold strapped to his horse. How gleeful is he? Ecstatic with \u2018you\u2019ll never catch me alive\u2019 liberation – short-lived though (what with gravity and the considerable depth of the valley) his life or liberty from here on must surely be. Also RIP horsey.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Image: mural of Govett\u2019s Leap at Blackheath railway station.<\/h5>\n

That is\u00a0not<\/em> a period weapon, said Matt, ever expert on colonial Australia. And I dunno, I answered. If I were carrying bags of gold I don\u2019t reckon I\u2019d label them with GOLD in big black letters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55586"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55626,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55586\/revisions\/55626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55564,"date":"2026-08-25T21:43:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T21:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55564"},"modified":"2026-08-25T21:43:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T21:43:17","slug":"why-ceuta-is-european-and-what-came-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/25\/why-ceuta-is-european-and-what-came-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Ceuta is European, and what came of it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately.\u00a0 And I’ve seen a couple of articles mentioning that Ceuta has been a Spanish possession since 1668.<\/p>\n

Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually<\/em> Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not 1668.\u00a0 And also, Ceuta has been under\u00a0European<\/em> control for even longer, because the Portuguese conquered it way back in 1415.\u00a0 That’s knights-and-castles time, most of a century before Columbus.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[a long day of street-fighting with swords and axes]<\/p>\n

So why 1668?\u00a0 Because in 1560, Spain took over Portugal and all Portuguese possessions.\u00a0 Then eventually the Portuguese rebelled against Spanish rule.\u00a0 Which led to a protracted war of independence that wasn’t resolved until 1668 when, as part of the final treaty \/ divorce settlement, Spain got Ceuta.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Alaska, archeologists have found about a dozen glass beads of European origin.\u00a0 They’re either Venetian glass beads, or French copies.\u00a0 What makes these particular beads interesting is that, depending on which group of experts you believe, they are from sites that date either to the late 15th century<\/a>, or the late 16th century<\/a>.\u00a0 Either way, these beads were in Alaska long, long before any European.<\/p>\n

\"Venetian<\/p>\n

[around 500 years, give or take]<\/p>\n

These two facts — the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta and the Alaskan glass beads — are related.\u00a0 What connects them is, of course, deflation.<\/p>\n


\nApparently economic historians have been aware of the Great Bullion Famine<\/a> since at least the 1970s.\u00a0 But for some reason it doesn’t seem to have penetrated into popular history much.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n

Here’s the short version: by late medieval times, Europe had been running a trade deficit with the rest of the world for well over a thousand years.\u00a0 Not kidding!\u00a0 Back in classical times, you had Roman pundits wringing their hands over the relentless flow of gold and silver eastward towards India and China.\u00a0 The underlying issue was that India and China had a bunch of stuff that Europe wanted, while Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted.\u00a0 So European buyers had to pay with bullion: gold or silver.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, most of the stuff that Europe wanted from India and China consisted of consumables, like silks and spices.\u00a0 They were luxury goods that got used up or worn out.\u00a0 So there was literally no end to the outward flow of bullion.<\/p>\n

For a while, Europeans were able to deal with the situation by just mining more gold and silver.\u00a0 (Although the outflow may have contributed to the relentless debasement of the Roman currency from Nero onwards.)\u00a0 But by the late 1300s, Europe was hitting a wall.\u00a0 Europe isn’t that big a continent.\u00a0 There were only so many places to mine gold or silver, and existing mines were coming up against hard geological and technological limits — for instance, Europeans hadn’t figured out how to mine below a water table yet.\u00a0 So Europe began running out of gold and silver.<\/p>\n

(Once again I feel the lack of an abbreviation that signals “Yes, I am oversimplifying a complex topic, and I acknowledge this.\u00a0 That said, to the best of my understanding this brief summary is basically correct.”)<\/p>\n

\""Spherical<\/p>\n

The inevitable result of this was deflation.\u00a0 As gold and silver became scarce, they became more valuable.\u00a0 So the prices of goods and services that were denominated in gold and silver tended to fall.<\/p>\n

The effects of long-term deflation on the late medieval economy go beyond the scope of this blog post, but let’s just say that the bullion shortage and the accompanying deflation were causing all sorts of problems.\u00a0 So people went looking for solutions.<\/p>\n

Let’s talk about some of those attempted solutions: two from Portugal, and one from Venice.<\/p>\n

The Venetian solution involved technology and marketing.\u00a0 I said above that Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted.\u00a0 But “not much” is not the same as “nothing”, and there were a few European goods that could be traded east.<\/p>\n

One of these was Venetian glass.\u00a0 Venetian glass had always been good, but in 1291 the Venetian government took the key step of moving all the city’s glassworks to the island of Murano.<\/p>\n

This was partly for safety reasons — glassworks had an unfortunate tendency to catch fire or even explode, and glassmaking involved a number of toxic substances.\u00a0 But it was also to protect Venice’s technological edge.\u00a0 The glassworkers and their families needed special permission to leave Murano, and another special permission to leave Venice.<\/p>\n

If a glassmaker wanted to emigrate to another city, taking his trade secrets with him, the Venetian government could (and did) hold his family hostage.\u00a0 If that didn’t work, well,\u00a0 they would send a hit squad of assassins after the defector, to kill him.<\/p>\n

\"THE
\n[a forward-leaning posture on IP protection]<\/p>\n

As it turned out, one unexpected side effect of putting all the glassmakers in one place was that — when they weren’t busy setting themselves on fire or going mad from breathing toxic fumes or whatever — they started to compare notes and raise their game.\u00a0 Murano became what industrial analysits call a “cluster”, like Silicon Valley or Hollywood.\u00a0 So soon Venetian glass was not just good, but hands-down the best in the world.<\/p>\n

So the Venetians decided to leverage this technological advantage by cranking out lots of beautiful glass beads, and using them as trade goods — especially in trade with the East.\u00a0 These days we think of glass beads as something you pay a few pennies for at that one weird little shop that somehow survives at the far end of the high street.\u00a0 But 600 years ago, glass beads were luxury goods.\u00a0 And the Venetians embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to let the world know that Venice produced the best and most fashionable glass beads in the world.<\/p>\n

And it worked!\u00a0 Sort of.\u00a0 For a while.\u00a0 Venetian glass beads flowed into markets all over the world.\u00a0 Egypt and Persia, India and China, everybody loved these beautiful beads.\u00a0 The bead trade didn’t stop the relentless drain of bullion from Europe, but — for a time — they slowed it a bit.<\/p>\n

And one cool side-effect: there’s a whole cottage industry of classifying and dating these beads, because Venetian glass beads show up in archeological digs basically everywhere.\u00a0 \u00a0They’ve been found in the tombs of Indian princesses and as decorations in Chinese temples and as bling adorning Central Asian steppe warriors.<\/p>\n

And a few of them, somehow, got to Alaska.\u00a0 The best guess would be something like “China -> Manchus? -> Siberian tribes -> trade across the Bering Strait.”\u00a0 That may sound far fetched, but beads are small and very portable, and apparently there’s solid evidence for every one of those links.<\/p>\n

(And the beads aren’t a one-off; there’s roughly a shoebox worth of Asian artifacts that have been retrieved from pre-Columbian sites in Alaska, including a bronze buckle<\/a> that appears to have come from medieval China.)<\/p>\n

I said the beads worked “sort of, for a while”.\u00a0 Problem #1 was that unlike spices or silk, glass beads are quite durable.\u00a0 So,\u00a0 in spite of the best efforts of Venetian marketing, gradually the market got saturated and demand dropped off.<\/p>\n

Problem #2 was that while Venetian glass was better, it wasn’t so much<\/em> better that it was impossible to copy.\u00a0 By the late 1400s the French were making pretty good beads using Venetian techniques that they had either stolen or reverse-engineered.\u00a0 They got good enough that we’re still not sure whether the Alaskan beads are Venetian or French.\u00a0 A bit later, the Chinese did the same thing.<\/p>\n

\"Temu<\/p>\n

[but sometimes, it rhymes]<\/p>\n

So while it was a great boon to future archeologists, the Venetian effort to work around the Great Bullion Famine wasn’t a long-term success.\u00a0 What about the two Portuguese attempts?<\/p>\n

Well, by 1400 Europe was running short on gold.\u00a0 But Europeans did have access — limited, intermittent access — to one source of gold from outside of Europe:\u00a0 Africa.\u00a0 Specifically, West Africa.\u00a0 West Africa had a lot of gold.<\/p>\n

And Europeans were aware of this!\u00a0 Here’s a detail from the 1375 Catalan Atlas:<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/p>\n

The guy at lower right — with the golden staff, golden crown, and holding a gold nugget — is labeled “Rex Mali”, the king of Mali.\u00a0 (He should be much further down and to the left, but I suppose that would have literally put him off the edge of the map.)\u00a0 History nerds may recall that Mansa Musa, the Emperor of Mali, controlled so much gold that he was arguably the richest human in the world up to that time.<\/p>\n

\"Civ4<\/p>\n

[also one of the more reasonable NPC leaders in the Civilization games]<\/p>\n

Of course, there’s another human figure there: a guy on a camel, wielding a scourge.\u00a0 Which was a neat graphic representation of a geostrategic problem.\u00a0 Because West African gold had to come north across the Sahara Desert, by caravan, passing through middlemen who were often hostile.<\/p>\n

So Portuguese Idea #1 was to seize control of that trans-Saharan trade route.\u00a0 Or anyway to grab one end of it. Because the main caravan route north from West Africa reached the Mediterranean coast at, you guessed it, Ceuta.<\/p>\n

So after months of preparation — unusually careful and methodical preparation, by the standards of medieval rulers — the King of Portugal launched a surprise attack on Ceuta.\u00a0 The Venetian attempt at a solution had involved technology and marketing; the Portuguese attempt would involve hitting people very hard with swords and axes.<\/p>\n

And — it worked!\u00a0 Ceuta fell.\u00a0 The Portuguese installed a garrison, fended off an attempt by the local emir to retake the city, and settled in for a long term stay.<\/p>\n

Let’s pause here and note that this was the first successful European expansion outside of Europe since the Crusades had petered out a couple of centuries earlier.\u00a0 For reasons I’ll get to shortly, I don’t view the conquest of Ceuta as the first baby step towards European global imperialism.\u00a0 But there are people who do view it that way, and I see their point.<\/p>\n

— Digression for a bit of deep-cut nerd trivia.\u00a0 When the Portuguese took Ceuta, they of course installed a guy to be the first Christian bishop there, or anyway the first one since the Muslim conquest 700 years earlier.\u00a0 The new bishop was a Franciscan monk from England.<\/p>\n

Why from England?\u00a0 Because he was the confessor of Queen Philippa of Portugal.\u00a0 And Philippa was English — she was the sister of Henry IV.\u00a0 Her sons, King Edward the Eloquent of Portugal and his little brother, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator?\u00a0 Were first cousins to Henry V, the guy who was winning Agincourt right around this time.<\/p>\n

\"Henry\"Prince
\n[Henry V and Henry the Navigator and it’s not just me, right? you can totally see it]<\/p>\n

This means that the next few Portuguese monarchs were actually Lancastrians, with a better claim to the English throne than either the Yorkist kings or the Tudors.\u00a0 However, by the time the Wars of the Roses were under way, the kings of Portugal had more interesting projects to pursue than chasing after the much-disputed throne of a chilly northern island.\u00a0 So they never sent their Lancastrian cousins anything but thoughts and prayers.\u00a0 End digression.<\/p>\n

Right, so: the Portuguese took Ceuta.\u00a0 And did this give them access to those desirable gold-carrying caravan routes?<\/p>\n

No, it did not.\u00a0 The local Moroccans, now more hostile than ever, simply shifted the caravan terminus 50 miles further west, to the port of Tangier. Which led to Portuguese Idea #1.5: attack and conquer Tangier!<\/p>\n

Except that didn’t work.\u00a0 This time the Moroccans were ready, and the attack on Tangier was a complete fiasco.<\/p>\n

So the Portuguese were stuck.\u00a0 Ceuta was a dead end, and they were no closer to that West African gold.<\/p>\n

Except.<\/p>\n

This is where Prince Henry the Navigator enters our history books.\u00a0 Because Henry got behind Portuguese Idea Idea #2: sail down the African coast, avoiding the middlemen entirely, and make contact with the West Africans directly.<\/p>\n

Henry funded a whole series of expeditions sailing south and southwest.\u00a0 One of these discovered the Madeiras, which was an unexpected windfall — the uninhabited islands could be turned into plantations of wheat and wine, helping fund further exploration.\u00a0 By 1445, the Portuguese had gotten past the Sahara and could interact directly with sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n

I say interact because the history gets complicated here.\u00a0 The Portuguese hadn’t reached the gold mines; it turned out that those were another thousand miles further east.\u00a0 So they tried slave raiding first.\u00a0 That didn’t work out so well.<\/a>\u00a0 The Portuguese were at the very edge of their force projection, and West Africa had a couple of centralized states that could rapidly deploy large groups of heavily armed men.<\/p>\n

It took the Portuguese a generation or so to figure out the formula: why raid for slaves when you could just buy them instead?\u00a0 Make friendly overtures to the local rulers, establish yourself as a good reliable customer, build a series of forts and trading posts.\u00a0 Unlike Indians or Chinese, West Africans were very interested in European trade goods.\u00a0 And in exchange, they were willing to offer quite reasonable prices on ivory, gold and slaves.<\/p>\n

— Yah, the African slave trade predates Columbus by about 50 years.\u00a0 By 1492 there were tens of thousands of African slaves in Portugal, and a sprinkling of black Africans could be found across western Europe.<\/p>\n


\n[Henry VIII’s trumpeter: famous, but far from unique]<\/p>\n

Anyway: once friendly trade relations with West African states had been established, the money started rolling in.\u00a0 And the profits got bigger as the Portuguese edged closer to the gold mines.\u00a0 When they finally reached the mining region they built a huge fortress — A Mina or Elmina, “The Mine” — and settled in for a stay that would last for centuries.<\/p>\n


\n[history’s first Bond Villain lair]<\/p>\n

And did this end the Great Bullion Famine?\u00a0 Well… the short answer is, it ended it in Portugal.\u00a0 Since gold moves around, it’s more complicated than that —<\/p>\n

\"Spherical
\n[hello again]<\/p>\n

— but it gave the Portuguese kings something that every early modern monarch dreamed of: a steady, reliable source of gold.<\/p>\n

Which led to the next chapter of the story.\u00a0 The Portuguese had gone to a lot of trouble to develop ships that could sail out of sight of land for thousands of miles.\u00a0 They had built up navigation techniques and a cadre of highly trained long-distance sailors.\u00a0 And it had made them rich!<\/p>\n

So… why stop here?\u00a0 Why not\u00a0keep going<\/em>, and see if they could reach the real jackpot: a sea route to India and the Far East?<\/p>\n

— One last digression.\u00a0 We all know the story of how the gold and silver of the New World first enriched Spain, and then led to Spain’s eventual decline and ruin.\u00a0 This tends to get spun as a finger-wagging morality tale: see how unearned wealth is toxic in the long term!<\/p>\n

Except that’s not always true.\u00a0 Portugal started accessing extra-European gold long before Cortez rolled up to Mexico City.\u00a0 And the Portuguese took their windfall and, for the most part, used it wisely.<\/p>\n

Yeah, they blew some on royal bling, prestige building projects and wars of choice, the macroeconomic equivalent of hookers and blow.\u00a0 But they also invested a lot of it — not just in further exploration, but in stuff like building bridges and aqueducts, dredging ports, and building up their merchant marine.\u00a0 For a very rough modern analogy, consider the difference between how Norway and the UK have spent their North Sea gas-and-oil wealth.<\/p>\n

Anyway, to bring it back: the Portuguese did eventually find a sea route to India.\u00a0 Which freaked out their Spanish neighbors so badly that they were willing to roll the dice on Columbus.\u00a0 Which led, eventually, to the conquest of Mexico and Peru.\u00a0 Which gave Europeans access to literally a couple of new continents worth of gold and silver, thus definitively ending the Great Bullion Famine.<\/p>\n

But not before that desperate scrabbling for bullion produced deflationary winds that blew the Portuguese into Ceuta, Venetian glass beads clear across Eurasia to Alaska, Africans into Europe and, eventually, Europeans all over the place.<\/p>\n

And that’s all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately.\u00a0 And I’ve seen a couple of articles mentioning that Ceuta has been a Spanish possession since 1668. Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,173,12,172,24,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-colonialism","category-economicsfinance","category-empire","category-history","category-world-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55564"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55583,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55564\/revisions\/55583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55562,"date":"2026-08-23T09:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T09:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55562"},"modified":"2026-08-23T09:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T09:13:08","slug":"sunday-photoblogging-jenisch-haus-hamburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/23\/sunday-photoblogging-jenisch-haus-hamburg\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday photoblogging: Jenisch-Haus, Hamburg"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jenisch-Haus,<\/a>