ALBERT

Notes: One would expect from the relatively sophisticated industrial society into which Britain had developed by the 1860s a complex reaction to the immense crisis which struck the United States in that decade, euphemistically described in the British press as ‘the American Difficulty’. The enormous heterogeneity of economic, ideological, political and group interests involved in the English response – together with the spectrum of issues raised by the break-down of the Union – should enforce caution upon the historian who wishes to paint his Civil War scene in bold and simple strokes. During the war itself it was natural that Americans of both sections should make the simple demand of European opinion ‘is it pro-North or pro-South ?’ But the continuation of this tradition by later historians lasted too long, and has ended by befuddling rather than clarifying the situation. The search for partisan alignments too often provides a kind of distorting mirror through which events are viewed, or becomes a Procrustean device by which the data is chopped or stretched into the required form.

Notes: The development of work incentives has been a perennial problem in planned economies. In China's countryside the pendulum has swung from emphasis on non-material and egalitarian incentives under Mao to the more individualistic incentives of the post-Mao era. In the late 1970s, China's new leaders introduced the production responsibility system (shengchon zerenzhi) which sought to motivate farmers by rewarding them for completing specific tasks. Both old and new measures have been used to implement this system. Cadres have borrowed certain work measurement methods attached to the old labour-day work payment system, operating since the mid 1950s, which fixed responsibility for tasks and awarded labour days when work was completed. But cadres have also adopted an entirely new work-payment system in which households negotiate with production teams to farm given parcels of land. These households agree to return a certain quantity of their crops to fulfil collective and state obligations and are then permitted to retain the surpluses for themselves. This new system is called baogan daohu (“full responsibility to household,” hereafter referred to as the baogan system). Sometimes the system is also referred to as the jiating lianchan chengbao zhi or the household responsibility system.

Notes: It is, no doubt, a journalistic cliché to assert that Côte d'Ivoire is ‘in crisis’. It is both undeniable and obvious that the world's largest cocoa producer, dependent for the majority of its foreign-exchange earnings and for the livelihood of the majority of its working population on the export of cocoa and coffee, is severely affected by the collapse in commodity prices which has occurred since 1980. With the exception of the false boomlet of 1986, cocoa prices have fallen throughout the decade, from a peak of £3,500 per ton in 1977 to the £670–750 range of the 1989–90 season. In real terms the dollar price of cocoa is now only 25 per cent of its 1977–8 value.

Notes: Conclusions It may be concluded that Mitchell's peace evolutionism incorporated most of the features of the cooperationist and Novicovian traditions. He questioned the conflict paradigm that underpinned biological militarism, and reinforced a holistic and more peaceful model of nature by reference to the emerging discipline of ecology. His “restrictionist” objections to the deterministic tendencies of much prevailing biosocial thought combined philosophical with biological arguments to assert that human history was sui generis, based upon the unique development of human consciousness and the cultural transmission of knowledge. Mitchell's opposition to biological militarism reflected Victorian anxieties about the legitimacy of evolutionary ethics. However, he introduced an innovatory note, linked to the “modernist” intellectual milieu of the time, when he put objections to the use of analogy on the grounds (1) that the Darwinist paradigm had not been properly established, and (2) that scientific laws themselves were uncertain and subjective. The first objection related to the bitter controversies that racked the biological world in the 1900s when mutation theory thrust the Darwinian concept of natural selection into temporary disrepute. In this respect Mitchell encoutered continuing Darwinist orthodoxy, not least from peace biology itself, while confusion was added by his personal devotion to Darwinism and his sociopolitical suspicion of Mendelian hereditarianism. The later triumph of a new Darwinian synthesis under men like R. A. Fisher made Mitchell's criticisms seem outmoded. In the second respect, Mitchell's attack on the primacy of naturalistic science echoed the epistemology of the “new physics” and movements such as German neo-Kantianism. However, positivism was still deeply embedded in Britain, indeed enjoying a resurgence from the last decade of the nineteenth century.79 Mitchell's critique of the Darwinist version of it seems to have been too novel and puzzling to influence a generation still convinced of the soundness of the science. Mitchell made more impact when he put his objections to the use of analogy on the grounds of professional methodology. As a naturalist, he could argue: It is impossible to make correct comparisons even between an insect and spider, two creatures so closely allied that only zoologists would separate them, unless we could trace the qualities of the insect and of the spider respectively down to their common ancestor, and in so doing we should almost certainly lose all that made the comparison interesting and significant, and be left with little more than the qualities common to all protoplasm..., It is quite true that the whole web of life is in physical and physiological community, but considerations drawn from any part of it require so much modification before they can be applied to any other part, that they become merely verbal.80 This type of criticism was to have a more lasting heritage. Chalmers Mitchell is worth remembering as an articulate early spokesman of a persistent, if often embattled, modern tradition that has resisted interpretations of human nature and history based upon genetic determinants or immutable biological laws, or upon the use of animal analogies to generalize too freely about human aggression and war.