Funmurphys: the Blog

Social Cooperation

I have one last interesting bit from historian Willaim McNeil's Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797. Of course there is a lot more there, but you'll just have to read the book yourself.

It is more than passing interest to understand the rise and fall of particular civilizations, and to wonder at how Europe, once a backward part of the world, rose to world dominance in recent centuries. There was a time (i.e. the age of imperialism), not too long ago, that Europe pretty much ruled the world, either directly, through proxies, or through colonists. Now I'm sure there is more than a single explanation; I've thought about it before, and even wrote an essay stressing the importance of the political disunity of Europe, in effect, competing political firms in Europe beat monopolies in the two other great cultures of the time - Islam and China.

There is another strand to consider - social organization within Europe. Specifically, the ability of individuals to form organizations at a level other than family. McNeil addresses this phenomenon:

All complex societies develop ad hoc corporations. What was unusual about the Italian trading cities of the eleventh century (and northwestern Europe generally after about 1000) was the number and effectiveness of such arrangements. As compared to other peoples, the inhabitants of this hitherto rather backward portion of the globe proved strikingly capable of transcending kinship groupings and cooperating smoothly with persons who were not blood relatives but were recognized as belonging to some sort of wider in-group -- whether that in-group comprised the inhabitants of a village, the citizens of a town, speakers of a common mother tongue, or even the bearers of a common tradition of high culture, i.i the culture of Latin Christendom. These broader groupings rarely came into play; the operationally imporant transfamilial in-groups for medieval Europe were the inhabitants of a village and citizens of a town.

One of the results of this ability to cooperate, according to McNeil, was the rise of Nothern Italian trading corporations, mainly from Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The ability to form large corporations beyond family groups led to the displacement of the prior traders, mainly Islamic and Jewish, who relied on kinship ties for organization and thus remained small, family operations. These non-family operations could scale up to a large size yet retain the trust normally found within families.

How was such an ability formed? The claim is that the moldboard plow, which was extensively used in Northern Italy and North Western Europe, forced non-family cooperation in those who used it. It was too big for a single family to use, so within the villages of the time people were forced to cooperate across family lines or lose out at plowing. This in turn fostered a culture that looked at cooperation across family lines as routine and expected in the context of another connection. This is not the case in many parts of the world, and generally in the poorer ones.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at September 14, 2006 11:02 AM | Culture