I’m reading my departmental colleague Ada Palmer’s new book on the Renaissance, and I am happy to report she's given me The Key.
It's all about power.
Specifically, it is all about the language of power, the language invented in the Renaissance (a powerful label) by the humanists (more precisely, umanisti) to control the world with words (mea culpa, Ciceronian rhetoric).
We talk about Machiavellian politics, but what we really mean is people using words to convince other people that they are powerful when in fact it is all a smokescreen of marble, bronze, and naked butts (I'm thinking of Donatello’s David, what did you think I meant?!!) to get them to hand over their gold.
Or alum. Or, you know, spices like cobalt and lithium. Or guano.
You think I'm kidding, don't you? In Ada’s own words: “The more unstable a state, the stronger the motive to adopt new tools for projecting legitimacy.” Florence in the fifteenth century was a massively unstable state, its citizens subject to betrayals and exile at every turn, caught in the interminable tug-of-war between the Empire (aka Germans, although they called themselves Romans) and Papacy (sometimes in Rome, having returned at long last from Avignon), with nothing at their disposal but the capacity to build ENORMOUS DOMES and write letters in impenetrable faux-Ciceronian Latin.
So they invented "the Renaissance" as a giant bluff (Ada puts it more eloquently: “The Renaissance was like the Wizard of Oz: great and terrible, and desperate for us not to look behind the curtain”), and for some reason, the whole of Europe went along with them, so much so that that Enormous Dome is still there! Along with various other pieces of marble and naked buttery. (You've seen Michelangelo's David, right?! We've got the magnet on our fridge.)
“Free trade” is an even more genius level of Oz-wizardry. Back in the seventeenth century, Britain (having absorbed England and been taken over by the Welsh and the Scots) was still flexing its pirate sails, hoping to take over the shipping lanes from the Dutch (who, by the by, were even more embarrassingly good at projecting legitimacy, just ask King William-and-Mary), when along came the Civil War(s) and the accompanying Great Migration to North America. We might call it an English diaspora, except the Brits at home were mainly embarrassed by their colonial cousins, so much so that when they wanted to fight the French, they taxed the cousins and claimed it was their fault for not fighting hard enough.
Okay, I'm riffing, but it's all true. Trust me. I've got the footnotes to prove it. Here's one: the final battle of the so-called American Revolution was fought, you guessed it, in India (specifically, off the coast of India at Cuddalore) against the French because the whole thing was never about “freedom of speech.” It was about the freedom of the British Empire to control the raw materials, and there were far more of those in India than in North America, even after the British attempted to keep control of the South's cotton production by egging the Confederacy on to secede.
I'm telling you. Power. Legitimacy. Word spells to keep you thinking that that black slave is your enemy, Mr. White Indentured Servant. Word spells to make you think that your brother across the Ohio River is the enemy, not the British agent who has been whispering in your ear about tariffs and “free trade.” Word spells to make sure that the workers of the nations never unite because they are all fixated on fighting the Commies! The Fascists! The Commies!! The Fascists!!! Because you, as the British Empire, want control of the guano.
Pardon my Quechua. Of the batshit.
It all came clear to me this past weekend, when suffering from one of my monthly post-menopausal migraines, I was seeking relief in binge-watching Jim Carrey movies, specifically his Ace Ventura series. The second one is, of course, most memorable for the rhino-birthing scene (ask the Internet), but it is the disappearing chessmen in the scene with Ace and the British Consul that is the real shocker. No, it isn't (only) the animal heads stuffed and mounted on the walls of his library. It's the Callow-way the consul admits to having hired the Australian Outbackers to steal the Wachati's sacred white bat so as to drive the Wachootoo to fight the war against the Wachati he claims to have hired Ace to prevent—because he wants control of the guano.
Machiavelli, move over. The British are in the room.
(I just looked up the writer of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. According to Wikipedia, his name is Steve Oedekerk. He grew up in Huntingdon Beach, went to Mater Dei High School, and is of Dutch Frisian, Irish, Hungarian, and Lombard descent. His mother is from Magnano, Italy, and his paternal grandfather is Afrikaans. I'm guessing, but I think they might have family lore about the British. Just saying.)
Spoiler alert: they still are. The British. In the room. Except, having studied their Machiavelli, honed their Greek and Latin, and invented (thanks to, you guessed it, John Stuart Mill, aka administrator for the East India Company from 1823 until its annexation by the Crown in 1858, after which he penned his manifesto On Liberty based on conversations with his recently-deceased wife Harriet—do you think I'm making this up?!!) LIBERALISM, they went on to word-spell the “free” world into believing in “free trade.” Okay, it wasn't only Mill, but I haven't been wrestling my students through On Liberty for the past thirty years to be wizarded by the batshittery into believing that Trump is the one who has lost his marbles this past week when he challenged the Empire of Lies over their trade imbalances.
Word spells. So as to cast a net of sails over the seas. The British mastered the art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so successfully that when they took over the world in the twentieth nobody even noticed. They called it “the Cold War,” but in fact it was pitting the Wachati (the United States) against the Wachootoo (the Soviet Union) so as to guarantee that they could keep control of the “free trade.”
Ahem. And you wonder why we are constantly egged on to fight the Russians. Again.
On the umanisti’s Word Lab and their language of power: Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (London and Chicago: 2025)
On the last battle of the American Revolution, fought off the south coast of India: Brad Lendon, “Was the last battle of the American Revolution fought in India? A growing number of historians think so,” CNN World, July 4, 2023
On the British scheme to beat the Yanks and keep all the cotton: Richard Poe, “How the British Caused the American Civil War, December 30, 2021
On “liberty” and keeping it for the liberals: Fencing Bear at Prayer, “Free Speech Fundamentals FAIL: J.S. Mill,” March 28, 2017
On starting batshit wars: Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, written and directed by Steve Oedekerk, November 1995
On the difference between “free trade” and the balance of trade, with or without penguins: Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, “Balanced Trade: Understand the Method behind the ‘Madness‘ of the Liberation Day Tariffs,” April 4, 2025
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