Samuel Dolbee's "Locusts of Power"

Samuel Dolbee is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. He is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with interests in agriculture, disease, and science. He teaches courses in the Department of History and as part of the Climate Studies major.

Dolbee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East, and reported the following:

Page 99 [below left; click to enlarge] of my book details a number of disputes between nomadic pastoralist groups whose sheep and camels were where in 1898. Counting sheep may well have a soporific effect on some, but in this case, the place these disputes occurred—in the Ottoman Empire in a place that is today on the border between Turkey and Syria—and the way these disputes were articulated is quite meaningful with respect to the way people think of this region’s past. A conventional history of borders and space in southwest Asia typically presents the smooth and fluid space of the Ottoman Empire giving way to rigid and narrow post-Ottoman nation-states. A corollary is the idea that nomadic pastoralists simply wandered, and paid little heed to state institutions or demarcations of territory.

But the fights over sheep in 1898 contradict this point. Not only do they reveal how borders mattered within the Ottoman Empire before its end. They moreover demonstrate how nomadic pastoralists were quite aware of territorial demarcations. Their leaders explicitly invoked “our borders” in an effort to compel state officials to intercede on their behalf. State officials attempted to crack down on the movement of people into other districts, but they could not because the borders were so vast and pastoralists always had the excuse of needing to pasture their animals.

In capturing a dispute over movement on the political and ecological margins, the page showcases some of the key themes of the book, but also leaves some of the book’s key forces out, perhaps most notably locusts. While the swarming insects are absent from the page, they nevertheless helped shape the arid yet fertile region of the Jazira, in which it made quite a lot of sense to raise sheep and camels that could move in response to the seasonal verdure and ravenous locusts alike. The broader goal of the book is to explore the complicated ways moving people and moving insects became entangled as the region transformed from a site of nomadic settlement in the nineteenth century to the killing fields of the Armenian genocide during World War I to the most agriculturally productive lands of Syria in the late twentieth century.

Learn more about Locusts of Power at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sharon Ann Murphy's "Banking on Slavery"

Sharon Ann Murphy is Professor and Chair of the Department of History & Classics at Providence College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Even in substantiated cases of fraud, if the wife could portray herself as an unwilling victim of the husband’s misdeeds, court rulings became much more unpredictable. A bank often had to prove not only that the husband had acted fraudulently, but that the wife had knowingly participated in the fraud and was not an innocent victim. Or, it had to prove that the (usually now-deceased) husband had not acted in bad faith, and that the wife’s assertion of a prior claim on the enslaved individuals was instead truly fraudulent. The courts’ moral concern for the impact of these loan contracts on financial dependents ignored altogether both the contractual rights of the banks and the ultimate fate of the human collateral at the center of these disputes.

In 1808, Ann Cross had received in trust four enslaved people as a gift from her mother for her personal use during her lifetime, a life estate that would descend to Cross’s children upon her death…. The trust deed legalizing this transaction was recorded eighteen months later in Louisa County, Virginia, where Cross resided with her husband Oliver…. The mother-in- law allegedly purchased three more bondspeople from her son-in- law Oliver in the early 1830s, and then willed these enslaved individuals to her daughter upon her death in 1834, with the same stipulations. Ann Cross added these three individuals to the same trust deed. Yet there was no concrete evidence that a valid sale between mother and son-in-law had ever taken place; the Crosses could produce no bill of sale and their neighbors never saw any change of ownership of the enslaved people in question.

In 1835, the Crosses relocated first to Tennessee and then (in 1836) to Mississippi with these seven enslaved individuals. At that point, Oliver solicited a loan from the newly chartered Northern Bank of Mississippi (1837), offering Ann’s human property as collateral but representing them as his own. Ann was present for the appraisal of the property, and thus was later unable to deny her knowledge of the loan. Yet when Oliver died in 1838, Ann still protested the claims of her husband’s creditors, contending that the enslaved individuals were her own property and thus out of their reach. Despite her clear knowledge of the loan, her lawyers asserted that she had been under no obligation to reveal to the bank the true status of the property as protected by a trust deed.

The Page 99 Test does a pretty good job of highlighting one of the critical parts of my study. The expanding banking infrastructure, with its emphasis on large, long term loans, backed by land and enslaved property, was critical to the development of the frontier South during the 1820s and 1830s, and marked the pinnacle of the financialization of slavery in the United States. Southerners had found a way to monetize their human property. Enslaved labor had always been an input in production, generating profitable crops for a global market. With the closing of the international slave trade, enslaved people became a store of value for their owners—particularly given their positive rate of natural increase in North America. Slaveholders could not only buy and sell people as needed like any other asset, but they could literally grow their wealth by breeding enslaved children. Yet this substantial investment in land and human property was not very liquid; it tied up capital and limited further investment in the region’s economy. Frontier banks, however, solved this problem by allowing slaveholders to leverage their stored wealth in enslaved people. Slaveholders could now borrow against the market value of enslaved bodies in anticipation of repaying the debt either from future profits or the appreciation in value of the enslaved life itself. Like a home equity loan, they could tap into the value of their human property while still enjoying the full advantage of their profitable labor, natural increase, and appreciating market value. Even more, enslaved people became abstract, fungible assets as part of bond instruments that could be bought and sold on the world’s most modern financial exchanges. But banks also discovered the downsides of accepting enslaved lives as collateral. When it was necessary to foreclose on debtors (especially after the Panic of 1837), these lawsuits were often complicated by the claims of multiple creditors, and the confusing counterclaims of widows like Ann Cross, but also newer difficulties such as the release of a debtor’s obligations through federal bankruptcy proceedings, and the movement of debtors with enslaved people to other states or to the Republic of Texas.

Follow Sharon Ann Murphy on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Other People's Money.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Chapman Sharpe's "The Art of Walking"

William Chapman Sharpe is professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Art of Walking does not fail its test! The image on that page is a stereoscopic view of New York in 1859, Broadway on a Rainy Day, photographed by Edward Anthony. The image appears halfway through my book’s tour of walking’s visual history, and it could hardly involve a more decisive moment. For the first time ever, technology made it possible to stop a step in mid-air and freeze it forever on a photographic plate.

What artists, scientists, and the general public discovered was how peculiar walking really is. It’s a “perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery,” wrote Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Physiology of Walking,” an essay published in the same year. Holmes himself had invented a stereopticon, which gives photos a three-dimensional quality, and he studied thousands of stereoscopic pictures, especially Anthony’s, to figure out what goes on in a single stride. Deciding that walking was actually “balanced vertical progression,” he declared that “no artist would have dared to draw a walking figure in attitudes like some of these.”

What he and Anthony’s audience found was that walkers raise the heel of the trailing leg almost vertically as they push off from it. They bend their knees significantly as the unweighted leg pendulums forward, while the head dips at the same time. Then as the heel strikes the leg straightens and the body surges not just forward, but upward, too. Holmes hired a professional illustrator, F. O.C. Darley to do line drawings of the photo-captured walks, so that artists and anatomists could study them.

This photo-frozen walk is just one of the 100 images that my book analyzes as it attempts to tell the story of human locomotion, from cave art to moon walks, from peripatetic Plato to the locked-down victims of the COVID pandemic. On the deepest level, what page 99 really shows is the inception of gait recognition systems and total pedestrian surveillance. With the stop-motion photo, the age of the Watched Walker had begun.

Learn more about The Art of Walking at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: New York Nocturne.

The Page 99 Test: Grasping Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Mann's "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU"

Robert Mann holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. He is the author of critically acclaimed political histories of the U.S. civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and American wartime dissent. His book, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater and the Ad that Changed American Politics, was named by the Washington Post as one of the best political books of 2011.

Mann’s essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Politico and Smithsonian. He has discussed his research and appeared as a political analyst on numerous national television and radio programs, including MSNBC, CBS News, ABC News and National Public Radio.

Mann applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU, and reported the following:

I'm not sure the Page 99 Test works with Kingfish U. Page 99 is the beginning of a discussion of Huey Long's relationship with his handpicked LSU president, James Monroe Smith:

Long could be brutal with Smith and others, which was not so much a matter of showing his displeasure or reprimanding them but dominating them. Richard Leche, a Long ally and appeals court judge who became Louisiana governor after Long’s death, observed Long’s response to a friend and supporter who entered the governor’s office one day. When Long saw the man, Leche recalled, “Huey’s face just clouded over, and Huey just gave him down the country. The fellow was completely crushed and finally left with his shoulders sagging.” When the man left Long’s office, Leche said, “Huey’s face became wreathed in smiles again.” Long turned to Leche and explained, “Did you ever see a [man] driving a mule down a country road? The old mule will just be going down the road and all of a sudden, the [man] will say, ‘Whoa.’ And the mule will stop and the [man] will get off and go over to a fence and pull a picket off, and he’ll just whale the daylights out of the mule. And then he gets up and off they go. Now, that mule wasn’t doing anything, but the [man] knows the mule and knows the mule might do something if he don’t teach him a lesson. Now, that fellow hasn’t done anything, but I got to do that to keep him a pretty good guy, which he is.” Leche concluded, “That’s how [Long’s] mind worked.”

For all his meddling in LSU’s affairs, Long found, in Smith, an able administrator and competent university leader. “In my humble opinion,” Fred Frey later asserted, “the best all-around and most effective president during all that time [Frey’s forty years at LSU] was James Monroe Smith.” Frey and others remembered Smith as a consummate politician, who knew how to manage Long and the legislature, who enjoyed great rapport with faculty, staff, and students, and who cared about research and graduate education. “His office door was always open to everyone,” Frey recalled, “from the top people to the bottom people, including the janitors. He was always glad to see anyone and to try and help them.” As further evidence of Smith’s capabilities, Frey submitted Smith’s personnel decisions, which included hiring three successive, respected deans of administration....

The page is as much about Smith as Long. One might not understand from this page, alone, that the book is about Long's domination of LSU from 1930 through September 1935. Long's relationship with Smith is an important aspect of the book, but it's only one part of the picture. It does not, for example, touch on how Long took over the football team and the band and presided over construction projects and other initiatives, large and small, at the school.

What this page reveals is important to the book. It discusses Long's innate understanding of human nature and how he used and manipulated people to achieve his goals. How Long established his dominance over officials at LSU was a microcosm of his domination of Louisiana government and what he likely had in mind for the rest of the country. However, I think it doesn't begin to explain the outrageous and unorthodox nature of Long's involvement with LSU, which is the purpose of the book.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Harrison's "Secret Leviathan"

Mark Harrison is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins a story about secrecy, fear, and bureaucratic behavior. The context is this: in 1947, Stalin was enraged to find that Soviet biochemists had shared a potential cancer therapy with American scientists. The Soviet scientists thought they had official permission, but their superiors had failed to ask Stalin properly. The Soviet Union was already a super-secretive state, but now the dictator ordered a clampdown, directed not against spies but against all accidental, negligent, even well-meaning disclosure of state secrets. With ever more complex and demanding secrecy rules and harsher penalties for unintentional violation, a wave of fear rippled through the Soviet bureaucracy.

Among the top secrets of the Soviet Union were the names and locations of its forced labor camps. As far as the economy was concerned, each labor camp was just a business that was allocated supplies (like food and fuel) and delivered products (like timber or construction services). The effect of the new rules was to make labor camps so secret that their commandants could no longer communicate with suppliers and purchasers, or make and receive bank payments, without breaking the law.

A gap between rules and realities was not unique to this moment or this context. Generally, rigid adherence to rules might have made the entire Soviet system unworkable. All Soviet managers were compelled to break rules for the sake of their job, even those that aimed to do only just enough to be left alone to ‘sleep peacefully.’ They were used to an environment in which rules came into conflict with realities. Their skill lay in knowing which rules they could break and how much they could get away with. The evidence of our story is that Soviet managers saw the gap between secrecy rules and realities as particularly dangerous.

At first, fear paralyzed the labor camp officials. Then, they began to look for ways to work around the new rules while appealing to superiors for protection. That’s the story that begins on page 99.

Would going straight to page 99 give the reader a fair impression of my book as a whole? Yes and no. Yes, the story that begins there illustrates a core theme: secrecy was fundamental to the communists’ monopoly of power. But secrecy also carried large and varied costs that made their power less usable. That doesn’t mean they took secrecy “too far.” It simply means that Stalin was willing to pay a great price to guarantee security. (It’s probable that his successors did think he had gone too far. After he died, they let up on secrecy to a small but significant degree.) The story also illustrates that a monopoly of power and secret decision making do not endow authoritarian rulers with decisiveness and the ability to cut through red tape. What follows page 99 is the unfolding of a saga of bureaucratic time-wasting and indecision that went on for years without resolution. Eventually those involved just had to get used to living with absurd rules.

But no, page 99 doesn’t give the reader a full sense of what my book is about. For one thing, the story that begins there may be canonical, but it’s also one of the drier (dare I say boring?) stories in my book. Other stories in the book that might be more fun for the reader arise from the secret uses of the personal information that the secret police held on anyone who came to their attention, how secret police informers spread mistrust through society, and the frequency with which secret police officers lost secret documents by getting drunk in bars and forgetting their briefcases.

For another, my book is not just a collection of stories. It also offers a framework for understanding the different roles that secrecy has played in authoritarian states compared to modern democracies.

Visit Mark Harrison's Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Huaping Lu-Adler's "Kant, Race, and Racism"

Huaping Lu-Adler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western philosophy (particularly epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and logic). She is the author of Kant and the Science of Logic (2018).

Lu-Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a good window into this book. It begins with a question: “What are we to make of this picture?” The preceding page depicts how Kant relates to racism both as a prominent scholar and as a lecturer with a decades long teaching career. As a scholar, Kant developed a groundbreaking scientific theory of race. He dedicated three essays to that task (1775/77, 1785, 1788). Meanwhile, Kant the lecturer would drop racist remarks here and there in his popular courses on anthropology and geography, which he taught in alternate semesters for decades. He claimed, for instance, that the race represented by Amerindians were incapable of any culture whatsoever, whereas the race of “Negroes” (a special term referring to the Senegambian Africans) were suitable for none other than the “culture of slaves.” It is worth adding that Kant intended his anthropology and geography courses to equip his white students with the pragmatic world knowledge (Weltkenntnis) they supposedly needed in order to navigate the world as their “stage.”

Page 99 then describes how a typical Kantian today would respond to the above picture. The response makes the following basic assumptions. First, racism is a matter of personal prejudice on Kant’s part, which should be separated from his philosophy. Second, racism directly contradicts Kant’s “moral universalism,” understood as the view that fundamental moral laws—particularly the law that one ought to treat every human being respectfully as an end and not as mere means—apply to all humans without exception. With these assumptions, a typical Kantian would admit that Kant was a racist individual, only to insist that his philosophy is stronger than his racism and can—or even must—be read independently of the latter. Meanwhile, insofar the majority of Kant’s racist remarks are found in texts like student notes of his lectures, a typical Kantian would decline to give much weight to those remarks for the reason that they might not accurately represent his considered position. Furthermore, there is a tendency to think that Kant’s claims about race are simply ignorant and that he was mostly regurgitating what he gleaned from travelogs. He was, so to speak, just being a child of his time (Kind seiner Zeit).

On the next page, I challenge the assumption that racism is simply a matter of personal prejudice. This assumption is ubiquitous in the discourse on Kant and racism, which often dwells on whether or for how long he was a racist. This individualistic or atomistic approach, as I call it, ignores the fact that Kant was a social actor who occupied highly influential positions of power—both as an eminent philosopher and as a university professor. By writing and lecturing repeatedly about race from those positions, he must have played a crucial part in the formation of modern racist ideology. Chapter 2 of the book, which includes page 99, reconceptualizes “racism” as racist ideological formation to capture that observation. Chapters 5 and 6 then explore the far-reaching impact of the resulting ideology.

I challenge other assumptions behind the typical Kantian response elsewhere in the book. For instance, Chapter 1 shows how Kant’s lofty moral philosophy is in fact compatible with the racist claims he made about non-white races. The main thing to know is that, for Kant, it was not enough simply to articulate a highly abstract vision of humanity’s moral destiny—as he did in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He must also explain—as he did in his anthropology courses and writings—whether or how humanity, as a species, is equipped to eventually realize that vision here on earth. Even more specifically, given his views on how the various human races fundamentally differed from one another in temperament, talent, and other morally relevant characteristics, he wanted to know which of those races could work as agents to propel humanity toward its moral destiny. Needless to say, his conclusion was that the white race alone could play this agential role. And he would see no contradiction between this racist conclusion and the moral claims he made at an extremely abstract level in the Groundwork.

Meanwhile, Chapters 3 and 4 reject the view that Kant was a mere child of his time on the issue of race. To the contrary, Kant was a key player and pathbreaker in the process of racial knowledge production that extended from the 17th through the 18th century. This process implicated well-known natural philosophers from Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle in the 17th century to Carl Linnaeus and Georges Buffon in the 18th century. While those philosophers paved the way for Kant, he went beyond them in putting forward his own scientific account of “race” as a hereditary biological character. He was perfectly aware that his account was unprecedented and controversial. Facing criticisms, he defended it with a great deal of ingenuity and sophistication. I show how some of his signature philosophical ideas were deeply implicated in this endeavor.

Overall, the goal of this book is not to call Kant out as a “racist.” Rather, by uncovering Kant’s role in the formation of modern racist ideology, I hope that Kantians today will recognize that they have a special burden to help undo the lasting legacies of that ideology through their research and teaching alike.

Learn more about Kant, Race, and Racism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jerry Emory's "George Meléndez Wright"

With four decades of conservation experience, Jerry Emory has written dozens of articles on the environment and science with a focus on Latin America and the Western United States. His books include San Francisco Bay Shoreline Guide and Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide.

Emory applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks, and reported the following:

Page 99 of George Meléndez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks not only announces the birth of Wright’s second daughter, but it also has a poignant quote mid-page, and then introduces a key issue he and his wildlife team worked on in the early 1930s in the western National Parks.

The page gives a clear, yet partial, snapshot of the book, covering some central themes, but by no means all. It highlights his family, which was very important to Wright. It displays his writing. And, the page ends with the topic of overgrazing in the parks.

Wright lost both of his parents by the time he was 8, and his brothers were sent to El Salvador to be raised. Wright was adopted by an elderly great aunt and stayed in San Francisco. “Auntie” died when he was 24, and Wright wanted to create his own family. His marriage, and the births of his two daughters, were monumental events for him. Wright died tragically at 31, but his young family eventually thrived and kept his memory alive.

The Wright quote demonstrates his close friendship with colleague Ben Thompson. Wright penned a note to an acquaintance in Yosemite lamenting the fact that he, Wright, couldn’t be in the field. “But next to being there myself it is nearly the same having Ben there,” he wrote. “We think and work so nearly along the same lines that it is like one person divided.”

Wright, Thompson, and another colleague, Joseph Dixon—all from U.C. Berkeley—were ground-breaking biologists in the Park Service in the 1930s. Wright created a Wildlife Survey for the western National Parks in order to introduce science-based management into the parks. At the time, feeding bears garbage for “shows” was common. Ramshackle zoos were kept by some parks, and large animals were corralled for easy viewing by visitors. Hundreds of thousands of predators had been killed in and around the parks by the government between 1916 and 1930, including over 8,300 wolves and 325,000 coyotes. Wright wanted to end that practice. The national parks were out of balance, and Wright knew it. Another major management problem, introduced on page 99, was overgrazing. Countless sheep and cattle were allowed to roam in the parks untethered. Wright’s effort to address all of these issues, and more, were mostly successful, though many persist to this day.

Visit Jerry Emory's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antón Barba-Kay's "A Web of Our Own Making"

Antón Barba-Kay received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought in 2013. He was Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University from 2013–22. He is now Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College-a liberal arts college on a cattle ranch in the Eastern Sierra.

Barba-Kay applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, and reported the following:

From page 99 of A Web of Our Own Making:

But online communication does more than facilitate more-of-the-same. First, because there is an unstable distinction between the internet used as a supplement to offline relationships and the internet used as a substitute for them: There is an easy slope tending from the former to the latter. Reconnecting with an old friend, say, or speaking to grandchildren on Skype are extensions of existing relationships that are not primarily situated online. But even in such cases it is clear that, by allowing us to be in frequent contact at a distance, online associations make it easier to move away, to live at a distance from friends and family, to keep our neighbors at arm's length, to work from home, to spend more time entertained alone...The internet is, in this respect, a social lubricant, and therefore a social solvent.

If the Page 99 Test (as formulated by Ford Madox Ford) is meant to be diagnostic of the quality of the book as a whole, then I'm satisfied that nothing here embarrasses me. The most basic form of the book's thesis--the thesis regarded from nosebleed altitude--is also present here: that digital technology is not continuous with our analogue values, practices, and relationships, but qualitatively changes all of them to such a degree as to make it almost impossible to judge whether our lives are radically improving or deteriorating.

But this is (in itself) hardly news. There is also a hint in this passage of a theme that is better developed as the chapter goes on, namely, that digital relations are scrambling and disrupting the political goods that we've long taken for granted: democracy and liberalism, as well as the very idea of the nation state. While I don't indulge in much speculation about what the future of digital politics will hold (specifically), I try to identify the main trends that inhere in new media: a high premium on the exercise of individual choices and a low one on institutional legitimacy and personal authority, among others. And this, in turn, ties into the book's larger argument that digital media are a "natural" technology: a technology that is working to erase the boundaries between human nature and human design or programming. This erasure will come at the cost of the formative influences of earlier ways in which human beings have understood their identities (as in: tradition, convention, custom--all of which look merely "constructed" or "arbitrary" once regarded through a digital lens). To simplify my point a bit: tech will replace culture.

Writing a book on this subject has been flummoxing because I've felt all along as if I were aiming for a moving target; digital technology develops faster than print can write about it. (As soon as I had submitted the final ms. to Cambridge, Chat GPT appeared...) But my approach throughout has been to try to identify the deepest principles, trends, and biases that underlie the whole revolution in the long term. I doubt that Instagram or Chat GPT will be on anyone's mind twenty years or thirty from now. But I hope that my book still will be. (Assuming people are still reading books at all then!)

Learn more about A Web of Our Own Making at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Helleiner's "The Contested World Economy"

Eric Helleiner is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. His books include The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, The Status Quo Crisis, and The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History.

Helleiner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy, and reported the following:

My book provides a history of the deep roots of the field of international political economy (IPE) by analyzing diverse perspectives about the world economy that existed across the globe in the pre-1945 era. One of these perspectives was Marxism, including its theories of imperialism that were developed by Vladimir Lenin and others in the early twentieth century. Following a description of Lenin’s theory on previous pages, page 99 of my book describes his creation of the Communist International after the Russian Revolution, a body that he hoped would cultivate anti-imperialist movements around the world as a means of weakening global capitalism.

Unfortunately, the Page 99 Test does not work very well in conveying the central goal of my book. My objective is to challenge the way in which IPE’s deep roots in the pre-1945 years are usually depicted. The conventional depiction in IPE textbooks focuses on a number of thinkers who are described as pioneering the three perspectives of economic liberalism (Adam Smith, David Ricardo), neomercantilism (Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List), and Marxism (Marx and Lenin). My book describes the ideas of these thinkers, including Lenin’s, but its central purpose is to show how IPE’s deep roots can be told in a much wider way.

This widening of the history includes a focus on many thinkers from other regions of the world than the one from which those well-known figures came. It also involves an analysis of perspectives about the world economy that go beyond the conventional depiction of three-way debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. By widening the history in these ways, this book shows how the deep roots of IPE are not just more interesting than textbook accounts suggest but also more relevant to many contemporary concerns about the world economy.

Learn more about The Contested World Economy at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.

The Page 99 Test: The Neomercantilists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bart Elmore's "Country Capitalism"

Bart Elmore is associate professor of environmental history at The Ohio State University and the 2022 recipient of the Dan David Prize. His books include Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future.

Elmore applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet, and reported the following:

I’m using an advanced copy of the book when applying this test, but page 99 of my book on my desk explores the backlash Walmart faced as it tried to break into new markets outside the American South in the 1990s. The point of this portion of the chapter was to explain how rurality proved both a key ingredient to Walmart’s business growth in the twentieth century as well as a weakness. In the preceding pages, readers learn how the unique commercial ecology of Bentonville, Arkansas, spurred Sam Walton and his executive team to make innovations in logistics that ultimately revolutionized our global economy. The fact that Walton decided to site his stores in small, rural towns of a few thousand people was an important factor in terms of how the company designed its retail system. For one, there was little initial competition from other big-box stores, such as Kmart and Target, in these rural communities, something Walton noted in his own biography when he said he could “hide there in the hills” of the Ozarks out of sight of his rivals (85). But more importantly, serving such rural and remote communities meant the firm had to make advancements in retail techniques. “We were forced to be ahead of our time in distribution and in communication,” Sam Walton said, “because our stores were sitting out there in tiny little towns and we had to stay in touch and keep them supplied” (90). In this sense rurality was a key asset that made Walmart the largest corporation in the world by the start of the twenty-first century. Yet, by page 99, we see that rurality could also be a problem for Walmart, especially as it expanded into towns that feared Walmart’s presence would change the very rural aesthetic many people valued. We see that battle on this page and in other sections of this chapter.

The Page 99 Test works here. This book traces the environmental history of five southern corporations—Coca-Cola, Delta, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—and explains how these companies came to have outsized influence on our economy and the environment. There are two chapters devoted to each firm, and each chapter answers different questions. First, I seek to understand how each business’s unique geographic position in the American South contributed to its growth in the twentieth century. In answering this question for each firm, I discovered a pattern that became embedded in the title of the book. What I came to see is that each of these firms from the American South grew big in part by servicing the countryside, by seeing rural and less urban areas as an asset. I call this strategy for making money country capitalism and make clear throughout the book that southern firms were not the only businesses making money in this way in the twentieth century (think Sears in Chicago, for example). Nevertheless, I emphasize that the American South’s rural character meant that southern businesses found country capitalism particularly attractive. After exploring this question of the ecological roots of southern business success, I then turn to examine what that success meant for the ecological health of our planet. For each firm, I explore how an emphasis on long-distance transport of goods to and from remote markets and an obsession with have-it-now, instantaneous consumer gratification led to huge ecological impacts. My big point is to suggest that we need a new era of environmentalism and environmental regulations that recognizes that retail, logistics, and banking enterprises have become the dominant players in our economy, replacing industrial giants of old. With that understanding, it becomes clear that if we want to solve a problem as big as climate change, we need to focus our energies on these conduits of capitalism—these firms that have found a way to ship goods, people, and money so swiftly across our planet. In the end, this book suggests ways we might do just that, cutting supply chains that are feeding pollution problems warming our planet.

Learn more about the book and author at Bartow J. Elmore's website.

The Page 99 Test: Citizen Coke.

--Marshal Zeringue