Ginzburg Latitude Slaves Bible Microhistory CI 2005

Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in MicrohistoryAuthor(s): CarloGinzburgSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 665-683Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/430989 .Accessed: 05/11/2013 13:17

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Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005)

2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3103-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.

665

Different versions of this paper were delivered in Istanbul (see Carlo Ginzburg,Kuresellesmeye Yerel Bir Yaklasim: Cografya, Koleler ve Incil, in Tarih yaziminda yeniyaklasimlar: Kurellesesme ve yerellesme, 2 vols. [Istanbul, 2000], 1: 1739); and at the departmentof History, UCLA; Central European University, Budapest; the University of Pennsylvania; BostonUniversity; University of Oslo; University of Sao Paulo; Columbia University; Facolta` di Letttere eFilosofia, Siena; Universite Libre, Brussels; Rossiskii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet,Moscow (see Sciroty, raby, i Biblia: Opit mikroistorii [Moscow, 2003]); and the University ofChicago. The lecture was given as the annual Nexus Lecture in 2002, organized by the NexusInstitute in Tilburg, the Netherlands; see Ginzburg, Geografische breedte, slaven en de Bijbel:Een experiment in microgeschiedenis,Nexus 35 (2003): 16784. Many thanks to Carlo AguirreRojas, Perry Anderson, Pier Cesare Bori, Alberto Gajano, Stefano Levi Della Torre, MartaPetrusewicz for having helped me, either directly or indirectly, with their comments andsuggestions; to Albert de Pury for his generous help; and to Samuel Gilbert for his stylisticsuggestions.

1. See Jacques Revel, introduction to Giovanni Levi, Le Pouvoir au village: Histoire dun exorcistedans le Piemont du XVIIe sie`cle, trans.Monique Aymard (Paris, 1989).

Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experimentin Microhistory

Carlo Ginzburg

My essay could take as itsmottoMies van der Rohes famouswords Lessis more. By knowing less, by narrowing the scope of our inquiry, we hopeto understand more. This cognitive shift has been compared to the dilationand constriction of a camera lens.1 One might call this approach micro-history, but labels are ultimately irrelevant.

1. My approach to microhistory has been largely inspired by the work ofErich Auerbach, the great Jewish scholar who spent his most creative yearsin Istanbul in exile from Nazi Germany. At the end of his masterpiece,Mi-mesis, written in Istanbul during the Second World War, Auerbach wrote:Beneath the conicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural


666 Carlo Ginzburg / Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible

2. Erich Auerbach,Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.Willard R.Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1953), p. 552.

3. See Auerbach, Philology andWeltliteratur, Centennial Review 13 (Winter 1969): 117.4. Auerbach,Mimesis, p. 552.5. The parallel is explicitly drawn a few pages before; see Auerbach,Mimesis, p. 548.

leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life ofmankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.2

Half a century later one hesitates to describe the so-called globalizationthat is taking place under our eyes as an economic leveling process. Onthe other hand, the cultural leveling, the erasure of cultural specicities,which Auerbach looked at with growingworry, is an unquestionable reality,although dicult to grasp. In an essay published in 1952, Auerbach re-marked that Goethes concept ofWeltliteratur had become increasingly in-adequate to our endlessly expanding gaze. How can a philologist from asingle cultural tradition approach a world in which so many languages andsomany cultural traditions interact? Auerbach believed that one has to lookforAnsatzpunkte, that is, for starting points, for concrete details fromwhichthe global process can be inductively reconstructed.3 The ongoing uni-cation of the world, Auerbach wrote in the conclusion ofMimesis, ismostconcretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exteriorrepresentation of the random moment in the lives of dierent people.4

Auerbachs strategy, the collecting and elaborating of Ansatzpunkte,wasbased on the cognitive model he had previously detected in the work ofMarcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.5

2. I will return to this symmetry later. Some time ago,while Iwasworkingon a separate project, I came across a tract bearing the following title:Me-moire sur le Pais des Cafres, et la Terre de Nuyts, par raport a` lutilite que laCompagnie des Indes Orientales en pourroit retirer pour son commerce (Re-marks on Karland and the Land of Nuyts, considered from the point ofview of their usefulness to the trade of the East India Company). The copyI consulted at the UCLA research librarya photocopy of the original edi-tionis bound with a Second Memoire sur le Pais des Cafres, et la Terre deNuyts, also issued in Amsterdam in 1718. At the end of the two tracts, theidentity of the author is revealed: Jean-Pierre Purry, a name I had never

Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian RenaissanceStudies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include The Cheeseand the Worms (1980), Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1989), Ecstasies(1990),History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999), No Island Is an Island (2000), andWooden Eyes (2001). His email is [email protected]


Critical Inquiry / Spring 2005 667

6. See L.-E. Roulet, Jean-Pierre Purry et ses projets de colonies en Afrique du Sud et enAustralie,Musee Neuchatelois (1994): 4963 and Jean-Pierre Purry explorateur (16751736), inDe Saint Guillaume a` la n des Lumie`res, vol. 1 of Biographies Neuchateleoises, ed.Michel Schlup(Neuchatel-Hauterive, 1996), pp. 23742; Arlin C. Migliazzo, A Tarnished Legacy Revisited: JeanPierre Purry and the Settlement of a Southern Frontier, 17181736, South CarolinaHistoricalMagazine 92 (Oct. 1991): 23252; and Lands of True and Certain Bounty: The Geographical Theoriesand Colonization Strategies of Jean-Pierre Purry, trans. Pierette C. Christianne-Lovrien andBioDun J. Ogundayo, ed. Migliazzo (Selinsgrove, Pa., 2002). See also H. Jequier, JacquesHenriod,andMonique de Pury, La Famille Pury (Neuchatel, 1972). None of these studies analyzes thereligious arguments for colonization put forward by Purry. The spelling of the family name varies(Purry, Pury, Puri, Purri); see Recueil de quelques lettres et documents inedits concernant David dePurry et sa famille (Neuchatel, 1893), p. 11 n. 1. I chose Purry, the version Jean-Pierre consistentlyused.

7. See Recueil de quelques lettres et documents inedits concernantDavid de Purry et sa famille, pp.7375.

8. See Archives de lEtat, Neuchatel, Archives de la famille de Purry, G. XII; see also Roulet,Jean-Pierre Purry et ses projets de colonies en Afrique du Sud et en Australie, p. 51.

9. See Recueil de quelques lettres et documents inedits concernantDavid de Purry et sa famille, p. 8.

heard before. After a glance at the two texts I was immediately intrigued,for reasons that I shall discuss later. Then began a research project that isstill far from its conclusion. This essay is a preliminary report on my workin progress.

3. Jean-Pierre Purry was born into a Calvinist family in Neuchatel in1675.6 His father, Henry, a tinsmith (like his father and grandfather), diedwhen Jean-Pierre was one year old. The following year Henrys widow,Ma-rie Hersler, bettered her lot by marrying the well-to-do Louis Quinche.While in his late teens, Jean-Pierre was appointed tax collector of Boudry,a little town near Neuchatel; after one year, for unknown reasons, he gaveup his post. On 26 September 1695, Jean-Pierre married Lucre`ce Chaillet,daughter of Charles Chaillet, the pastor of Serrie`res. Between 1696 and 1710eight children were born to the couple; four of them died at an early age.7

In 1709 Jean-Pierre was appointed mayor of Lignie`res.8 Two years later, hisprecocious political career ended abruptly when hewas compelled to resignthe mayorship. Personal misfortunes were mentioned: a re had damagedhis house; a two-year-old venture selling wine to England had ended in -nancial disaster.

Given that for two thousand years the slopes surrounding Lake Neu-chatel had been covered with vineyards, Jean-Pierres involvement in thewine trade is not surprising. Neither is the support he received during thatcrisis from his family and his wifes; after all, three marriages connected thePurrys to the Chaillets.9 Yet in hindsight these events take on a remarkablesingularity, the lineaments of a destiny. Jean-PierrePurrys lifewouldunfolditself under a constellation whose dening stars were wine, England, and apropensity to take great risks followed by great failures.



10. Leur curiosite naturelle les porte [Neuchatels inhabitants] la plupart a` voager dans les pasetrangers (D. F. deMerveilleux, La Parfaite Introduction a` la geographie universelle, 2 vols.[Neuchatel, 1690], 2:515).

11. On this, I follow Roulet, Jean-Pierre Purry et ses projets de colonies en Afrique du Sud eten Australie, based on a lecture given by C. C.Macknight in 1993. I am very grateful to Albert dePury, who sent me a typewritten version of Macknights unpublished lecture.

12. The land was named for Pieter Nuyts, extraordinary councillor of India, who discovered itin 1627; see J. E. Heeres,Het Aandeel der Nederlanders in de Ontdekking van Australie, 16061765(Leiden, 1899), p. 51.

4. By the time the people of Lignie`res were informed that their mayorhad stepped down, Purry had left his birthplace behind and set out into afar larger world.10 On 26 May 1713, he embarked as a corporal on a shipowned by the Dutch East India Company, the instrument of Dutch eco-nomic and political expansion in Southeast Asia. In his position as leaderof seventy men, Purry may have had some knowledge of Dutch. The shipmade a halt in Capetown and reached Batavia on 2 February 1714. Purrywas to spend four years there, working as an employee of the Dutch EastIndia Company. On 11 December 1717, he left Batavia, embarked as an ac-countant. After the usual halt in Capetown, his ship reached the Nether-lands on 17 July.11

These factual data provide the context for the writings from which Istarted, Purrys twoMemoires sur le Pais de Cafres et la Terre de Nuyts. Letus now take a closer look at them.

5. In the rst tract, addressed to the Assembly of the Seventeen, theboardthat led the Dutch East India Company, Purry tried to convince the gov-ernor of the company either to colonize Karland (todays South Africa)or, alternatively, the Land of Nuyts (todays western coast of Australia).12 Inhis secondMemoire, dated 1 September 1718, well after his return to Europe,Purry replied to the objections raised by his opponents and made a strongcase for the colonization of the Land of Nuyts.

Purrys projects were rooted in a theory about climate, which he ex-plained at length in his rst Memoire. He rejected labels like temperateor cold as exceedingly vague, and as absurd the standard praise showeredon Frances geographical location in the middle of the temperate zone, be-tween 42 and 51 degrees of latitude. The grapes that grew at 51 degrees oflatitude, he objected, produced undrinkable wine, after all. The best climatein the world was found at 33 degrees of latitude.

Purrys theory was that of a former wine merchant, born in a regionnoted for itswines. But his seemingly supercial remarkshadmorecompleximplications. He provided a list of countries located between 30 and 36 de-grees of latitude: Barbary, Syria, Chaldea,Candia,Cyprus,Persia,Mongolia,the middle part of China, Japan. But, he explained, those that are closer



13. Surpassent de beaucoup la fertilite des autres, ainsi quon peut remarquermeme au pas deCanaan, dont la Galilee etoit lune des meilleures provinces (Jean-Pierre Purry,Memoire sur lePais des Cafres, et la Terre des Nuyts, par raport a` lutilite que la Compagnie des Indes Orientales enpourroit retirer pour son commerce [Amsterdam, 1718], pp. 1718; hereafter abbreviatedM).

14. See Roulet, Jean-Pierre Purry et ses projets de colonies en Afrique du Sud et en Australie,p. 55.

15. SeeMichaelWalzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985), p. 123.

to 33 degrees of latitude far surpass the others in fertility, as one can seeeven in the land ofCanaan, ofwhose provincesGalilee is one of thenest.13

This passing and underplayed allusion (even, meme) was a crucialreference to Numbers 13, and it gave Purrys argument a sudden twist. Letus make explicit the biblical reference, which Purry quoted in full in hissecondMemoire.

6.And the Lord spake untoMoses saying, Send thoumen, that theymaysearch the land ofCanaan,which I give unto the childrenof Israel.Obeyingthe command,Moses sentmen from each tribe of Israel to spy out the landof Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go upto the mountain: and see the land, what it is. . . . And bring the fruit of theland. Now the time was the time of the rstripe grapes. The spies come toHebron, and then unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence abranchwith one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between twoupona sta(Num. 13:12, 1718, 23).

Grapes and wine, once again. The enormous bunch of grapes broughtby twomenupon a sta symbolized the extraordinary richnessof theProm-ised Land. Thanks to the reference to Canaan, the hidden core of Purrysproject emerges.14 There are two basic types of quotations in his two Me-moires. On the one hand, seventeen references to the Old Testament (plustwo implicit allusions to it) as well as a single quotation from Pauls rstletter to the Corinthians; on the other, fteen allusions to contemporarygeographical and historical accounts. But the biblical references provide akey to the secular passages. The perfect latitude was, rst of all, the latitudeof the Promised Land. Purrys plans for colonial settlement were based onthe biblical Exodusalthough his reading of the Bible was, as we will see,exible enough to allow him, for instance, to look for the perfect latitudeof 33 degrees in both the Boreal and the Austral hemispheres.

7. The long-term impact of the Exodus narrative is well known. Manyyears ago Michael Walzer argued that the journey of the children of Israelfrom slavery to freedom, from Egypt to the Promised Land, had provided,down through the centuries, a revolutionary model devoid of messianicconnotations, which inspiredas Walzer remarked echoing GershomScholemthe modern Zionist movement.15 But those revolutionary inter-



16. See EdwardW. Said, MichaelWalzers Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,Grand Street 5 (Winter 1986): 86106. A further exchange between Said andWalzer has beenrepublished byWilliamD. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Eects of Culture (Cambridge,2000), pp. 18799 (kindly brought to my attention by David Landes).

17. SeeWalzer, Exodus and Revolution, pp. 78. A comparison between this Jewish theme andthe Christian hermeneutic tradition brilliantly analyzed by Pier Cesare Bori, Linterpretazioneinnita: Lermeneutica cristiana antica e le sue transformazioni (Bologna, 1987), would berewarding.

18. Davanti al Muro capivo perche la leggenda americana, quella della frontiera e deimassacratori di indiani, si fosse nutrita del libro dellEsodo (Franco Fortini, Extrema ratio: Noteper un buon uso delle rovine [Milan, 1990], p. 67).

19. Quandmeme on ne trouveroit point de laboureurs, on pourroit en ce cas la` faire cultiver laterre par des esclaves. Les Romains ne labouroient pas les leurs autrement (M, p. 69).

20. See Robin Blackburn,TheMaking of NewWorld Slavery: From the Baroque to theModern,14921800 (New York, 1997), pp. 6476, on Noahs curse, with an extensive bibliography.

pretations, Walzer admitted, ignore a section of the Exodus narrative: theconquest, the war against the Caananites who inhabited the land. As herejected the reading of the Exodus oered by right-wing Zionists, Walzerimplicitly alignedhimselfwith themottoof liberalZionism: apeoplewith-out land [the Jews] found a land without people [Palestine]. In this read-ing, Caananites are silently deleted from the biblical narrative; likewise,Palestinians have been bracketed from the ocial version of Israeli history,which over the last few years has been the target of a new generation ofIsraeli historians.16 On a more general hermeneutic level, two questionscome to mind. First, is it allowed to bracket the conquest of Canaan fromthe biblical narrative simply because one dislikes the way inwhich that con-quest has been symbolically used in contemporary political debates? Sec-ond, is such bracketing compatible with Walzers principle (also derivedfrom Scholem and certainly open to discussion) that the meaning of thebiblical narrative ultimately coincides with the full range of its interpreta-tions?17

Purry implicitly regarded both theCanaanites and thewarwagedagainstthem by the children of Israel as a crucial feature of the biblical narrative.In his reading, the journey toward the Promised Land became amodel anda justication for the European conquest of the world.18

8. Purry tried to convince the Dutch East India Company to send im-migrants either to SouthAfrica or toAustralia. But the relatively smallnum-ber of Europeans likely to immigrate to that area drove him to consider adierent alternative: whenone is unable even tond laborers, one canhaveslaves work the soil. The Romans did not work their own soils otherwise.19

WhydidPurry justify slaverywith a secular precedent insteadofquoting,as he usually did, a passage from the Old Testament? Possibly because thecurse Noah set upon the children of Ham, who had seen his nakedness,seemed to connect slavery to an inborn stigma.20 Purrys attitude was dif-



21. Ne sont autre chose que des eets de lhabitude et dune exercice continuel. Ainsi je ne voypas pourquoi des esclaves ne pourroient pas apprendre la science de lagriculture (M, pp. 6970);Mais, dira-t-on, quand cela seroit, la justice ni lequite ne permettent pourtant pas quon putsaller etablir dans la Terre de Nuyts au prejudice de ceux qui y sont deja` de pere en ls, depuis,peut-etre, quelquemilliers dannees, ni quon put chasser de leur pas des gens qui ne nous ontjamais fait aucunmal (M, pp. 7071).

22. La terre apartient toujours a` Dieu en toute propriete, et nous nen avons que lusufruit, a`peu pre`s de meme quun pere de famille qui fait servir quelque plat a` ses enfans ou a` sesdomestiques, il nassigne pas a chacun sa portion,mais ce dont chacun se saisit honnetement est a`lui, quoi quauparavant il ny eut pas plus de droit que les autres; et quoi que ceux ci ne lui aientpas donne la permission de prendre tel ou tel morceau (M, p. 71).

ferent. He dismissed the idea that slaves had limited learning capacities. InJava he had seen slaves of both sexes working as tailors, carpenters, andshoemakers. They played musical instruments at weddings; they danced.Those things are nothing but the eects of habit and continual practice. Ican see, as a result, no reason why slaves should be incapable of learningthe science of agriculture. At this point an imaginary opponent suggesteda graver impediment: It will be objected that in this case justice and equitywill bar us from setting ourselves up in the Land of Nuyts and lording itover those who have been there, father and son, for as long as several thou-sand years, and will also bar us from evicting from their land people whohave never done us any harm.21

9. Here was a striking and quite straightforward objection to Europeancolonization as such. An even more striking rebuttal followed. There wasno injustice in this, Purry replied, for two reasons. First of all,

the Earth belongs to God in perpetuity, and we have but the use of it,something like the father who has a dish set before his children or hisservants: he does not assign a portion to each, but rather that whicheach fairly seizes for himself belongs to him, though before that he hadno greater right to it than the others, and though they did not grant himpermission to take this or that piece.22

A large family meeting around the table, children or servants cheerfullytrying to grasp their meal. This patriarchal scene was an implicit commenton Leviticus 25:23, a biblical passage quoted by Purry: The land shall notbe sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojournerswith me.

Only recently I realized that Purrys words had been also silently inspiredby a dierent text: John Lockes Second Treatise of Government. In the be-ginning all the World was America, Locke wrote; God gave theWorld toMen in Common. But property, being based on industry, was legitimate;



23. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett(1689; Cambridge, 1963), pp. 319, 309, 307. For the French translation, see Locke,Du gouvernementcivil ou` lon traitte de lorigine, des fondemens, de la nature, du pouvoir et des ns des societespolitiques, traduit de langlois (Amsterdam, 1691).

24.Tous les hommes ayant donc naturellement le meme droit sur les biens duMonde en vertu delintention du createur qui ne leur a donne ce droit commun quan quils en ssent usage, onne concoit pas quune simple possession, quoi-que de plusieursmilliers dannees, puisse etrevalable en faveur de quelquun a` prejudice des autres, sans le consentement de ceux-ci, cest-a`-dire, sans quelque convention faite entreux a` ce sujet: et tant que chacun ne prend que ce quillui faut, il ne donne aucune atteinte au droit des autres, qui peuvent a` leur tour, faire valoirdune maniere ou dautre, le privile`ge du premier occupant. [M, pp. 7071]

25. See ibid. The central role played by natural right in Purrys argument emerges again inSecondMemoire sur le Pais des Cafres, et la Terre de Nuyts (Amsterdam, 1718), p. 52; hereafterabbreviated SM: Mais je suis tre`s persuade quon peut presque se promettre davance le succe`sdune bonne entreprise, lorsquelle na rien de contraire au droit naturel, et que le Ciel ne manquejamais daccompagner de ses benedictions des desseins qui sont fondes sur la Charite envers leprochain, aussi bien que sur lAmour de Dieu. On this issue, see Anthony Pagden,The Fall ofNaturalMan: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982).

otherwise, Locke argued, if an explicit consent of everyCommonerwouldbe necessary to any ones appropriating to himself any part of what is givenin common, Children or Servants could not cut theMeatwhich theirFatheror Master had provided for them in common, without assigning to everyone his peculiar part. Purry must have read Lockes Second Treatise in Da-vid Mazels French translation, published in Amsterdam in 1691, the yearafter the rst English edition, and then often reprinted.23

Purry gave an original twist to Lockes reections. Given that all men,Purry went on,

naturally possess the same rights over the goods of theWorld, thanks tothe intention of the creator, who bestowed on them this commonly heldright in order that they might exercise it, it does not seem reasonablethat the simple state of possession, albeit thousands of years old, shouldprivilege the claims of any individual over the others, without their con-sent, which is to say, without some agreement they havemade betweenthem on the subject. And as long as each person takes only what heneeds, he is not infringing on the rights of others, who could, in turn,claim the privilege of the rst occupant after a fashion.24

Purry answered an implicit question: was the European conquest of theworld legally justied? To raise such a question already impliedadistancing,if not perhaps a doubt. Purry articulated his answer in terms of a naturallaw, which he derived from a biblical passage, althoughone could alsoarguethe opposite, that a notion of natural law inspired by Lockes SecondTreatiseinspired Purrys reading of the Bible.25 Lockes passage on the human bond



26. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 295.27. Les gens sauvages et rustiques aiment la vie faineante par dessus toutes choses, et . . . plus

un peuple est simple et grossiermoins il est adonne au travail: au lieu quune vie dabondance etde delices demande beaucoup de soins et de peine. Ajoutons a` cela, que les pas qui sont habitespar ces sortes de gens sauvages et paresseux ne sont jamais fort peuples. Ainsi on a tout lieu decroire, que bien loin de causer du dommage aux habitans de la Terre de Nuyts, ni quon fut obligede les chasser chez eux, au contraire, letablissement dune bonne Colonie Europeenne leurprocureroit toutes sortes de biens et davantages, tant pour une vie civilisee que par les arts et lessciences quon leur enseigneroit (M, pp. 7273).

connecting a Swiss and an Indian, in theWoods ofAmerica who are per-fectly in a State of Nature, in reference to one another must have had aspecial resonance for Purry, a Swiss.26BeforeGod therewere nohierarchies;every human being had the same right to use the Earth. Local bonds werenullied by the invocation of God, a God distant and lonely in his unique-ness. Claims rooted in antiquity, in traditions thousands of years old, hadno validity whatsoever. No property could be held in perpetuity; only thepresent counted. The Earth was like a meal, and, in principle, everyonewasentitled to get a share of it, but there would be no orderly distribution; infact, there would be no distribution at all. In claiming a share, the childrenof God had to behave fairly, of course, but the reference to the rights ofothers does not suggest a brotherly relationship. The rights of othersrefers to a law governing all; the biblical word stranger dened not onlyrelationships between human beings and God but strictly human relation-ships as well. Everybody was a stranger to everybody else. This commonlyshared condition did not, in Purrys global perspective, elicit the compas-sion that inspired Exodus 23:9: thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for yeknow the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.When everybody can in turn, claim the privilege of the rst occupant aftera fashion,when each individual is tacitly entitled to take thisor thatpiece,natural law turns (we might conclude) into a law of mutual pillage. Mightbecomes right. At this point, Purrys second axiom, and morality, are in-troduced:

savage and rustic people love above all things a lazy existence and . . . themore a people is simple and vulgar the less it is given to work, while alife of abundance and pleasure requires a great deal of care and trouble.In addition, the countries inhabited by these sorts of savage and lazypeople are never very populous. Thus one has every reason to believethat far from harming the inhabitants of the Land of Nuytsand one isnot obliged to displace themthe establishment of a good EuropeanColony would provide for them all sorts of benets and advantages, asmuch because theirs would be a civilized life as because of the arts andsciences they would be taught.27



28. Lucien Febvre, Civilta`: evoluzione di un termine e dun gruppo di idee, Studi su Riforma eRinascimento: E altri scritti su problemi di metodo e di geograa storica, trans. CorradoVivanti(Turin, 1976), pp. 545, quotes Antoine Furetie`re,Dictionnaire (The Hague, 1690): La predicationde lEvangile a civilise les peuples barbares les plus sauvages; see also Emile Benveniste,Civilisation: Contribution a` lhistoire dumot, in Eventail de lhistoire vivante, hommage a` LucienFebvre oert a` loccasion de son 75e anniversaire par lamitie dhistoriens, linguistes, geographes,economistes, sociologues, ethnologues, 2 vols. (Paris, 1953), 1:4754.

29. Sans aprehender de faire sourir ses habitans, ni de commettre aucune injustice a` leuregard. De tels biens, qui ne donnent jamais aucun remord et quon peut acquerir sans donner lamoindre atteinte a` la qualite dhonnete homme et de Chretien, sont veritablement dignes de notreIllustre Compagnie (M, p. 73).

We are confronted with a series of overlapping, allegedly self-evidentop-positions: civilized and savage life; industry and laziness; abundance andscarcity. The establishment of a good European Colony will rescue thesavages from their sinful laziness and will provide for them a civilizedlife.28The change brought by theEuropeanswill have beenmoral andprof-itable for everybody, as long, Purry writes, as one acts gently and regardsthem as poor creatures who, though vulgar and quite ignorant, are none-theless members of human Society, as much as we are (M, pp. 7273).

Purry remarked that the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who treated theAmerican Indians as if they were animals, had been despised for their cru-elty and barbarity. His colonization projects, on the contrary, could be car-ried on without causing the [local] inhabitants any suering or in anywaywronging them. These sorts of benets, which never give rise to any regrets,and which may be conferred without in any way compromising ones de-cency and Christian spirit, are truly worthy of our Illustrious Company.29

To dismiss this kind of moral reasoning as either a mask concealing thefeatures of greed or as an out-and-out lie would be simplistic. Purrys eortto eliminate regret was in itself signicant. European colonization, at thisstage and in certain environments, could generate bad consciencea feel-ing to be silenced in the name of morality, civilization, and prot. The ar-gument based on natural law that every human being stood equal beforeGod and was equally amenable to civilization would contribute, in the longrun, to antislavery and anticolonialmovements of various kinds. Butbeforethat could happen it would serve as an elaborate justication for Europeancolonization.

10. Jean-Pierre Purry was accustomed to ocean crossings. He was bornin Europe, spent some years in Asia, visited Africa, and ended his life inNorth America after having vainly championed the colonization of NewHollandtodays Australia. Purry was able to view the Earth as a whole.Not many individuals before him possessed so global and comprehensive



30. Frederic Brandt,Notice sur la vie de Mr le baron David de Purry, suivie de son testament etdun extrait de sa correspondance particulie`re (Neuchatel, 1826), p. 1, writes: Mr J. P. Purry avoitfait de bonnes etudes. I have been unable to verify this information. The range of Purrys readings(which I will examine in detail in the expanded version of this project) is shown by, among otherthings, his reference to Issac Bullarts extensively illustrated in-folio work,Academie des sciences etdes arts, contenant les vies, et les eloges historiques des hommes illustres, qui ont excelle en cesProfessions depuis environ quatre sie`cles parmy diverses nations de lEurope, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1682).

31. See, for instance, Ginzburg,The Cheese and theWorms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-CenturyMiller (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 6265, on how a Friulianmiller, from a widely dierent time, space,and social background, read Genesis.

32. Car de dire que les hommes ne peuvent pas se resoudre si facilement a` quitter leursliaisons, leurs amis, leurs parens, tout cela ne sont que de niaiseries et des chime`res quon se metdans lesprit (SM, p. 19).

33. Du bon gout de leurs melons, du fumet de leur perdrixs, et de tant dautres choses quirendent la vie delicieuse (SM, p. 19).

a view; even fewer had the opportunity or the capacity to give written ex-pression to what they saw and what they thought of it. How did Purryachieve this?

While it is clear that he was a fairly cultivatedman, his educational back-ground is unknown.30 Above all, Purry thought with the Bible, an experi-ence he shared with innumerable individuals before and after him.31 TheBible gave him words, arguments, and stories; he projected words, expe-riences, and events into the Bible. Other books provided him with a lensthrough which to read the Bible and vice versa.

Let us consider a few examples. When objections were raised to Purrysplan to set up a large colony in South Africa, he scornfully rejected them:Because to state that men are incapable of resolving to give up their con-nections, their friends, their relatives, these statements are foolishness andchimeras that one gets into ones head.32

To prove his point, Purry recalled in a single breath two quite dierentgroups: the French immigrants to Canada, who spoke with regret of thene avor of their melons, their partridges, and so many other things thatmake life delightful,33 and the children of Israel, who murmured againstMoses and Aaron: Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord inthe land of Egypt, when we sat by the esh pots, andwhen we did eat breadto the full; for ye have brought us forth into thiswilderness, to kill thiswholeassembly with hunger (Exod. 16:3).

Purry explicitly sympathized with such a practical attitude. His passingallusion to so many other things that make life delightful sprang from adeep hostility towards all sorts of asceticism. To him, civilization meantabundance. But here a contradiction in hismind emerges.On theonehand,he insisted that abundance could be had only through industry and hardwork. On the other, he subscribed to the old myth of a land of easy owing



34. Pourmoi jentends par un bon pas, un pas qui abonde non seulement en laict et en miel,mais generalement en toutes les choses capables de ater la volupte et de nous faire vivredelicieusement; un pas de cocagne et de bonne chere, qui est fertile, et qui produict facilement,sans beaucoup de travail et a` bonmarche, tout ce qui est necessaire a` la vie; voila` en peu de paroleset suivantmes petites idees, ce que cest quun bon pas (M, p. 22).

35. SirWilliamTemple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening, in the Year 1685,Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel HoltMonk (Ann Arbor,Mich., 1963), p. 12: And tis greatpity we do not yet see the history of Chasimir, whichMounsieur Bernier assuredme he hadtranslated out of Persian, and intended to publish, and of which he has given such a taste in hisexcellent memoirs of theMoguls country. See also ClaraMarburg, Sir William Temple: ASeventeenth-Century Libertin (NewHaven, Conn., 1932).

36. Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, p. 18; Purry quotes from Les Oeuvres melees deMonsieur le chevalier Temple, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1694).

37. See Heeres,Het Aandeel der Nederlanders in de Ontdekking van Australie, 16061765,p. xvi n. 5.

abundance. What did men mean when they spoke of a good country?Purry asked during his discussion of the ideal latitude. Purry oered hisown answer: As for me, I feel that a good country is one that abounds notonly in milk and honey, but generally in all the things that appeal to oursensuality and ll our lives with delights; a land of Cockaigne and gorgeousmeals, fertile, producing easily, with little work and cheaply, all of lifes ne-cessities. This, briey and according tomy humble notions, is a good coun-try.34

But Purrys anti-asceticism and his praise of material goods were notrelics from peasant utopias, as the allusion to the land of Cockaignemightsuggest. Among the authors quoted in PurrysMemoires one nds FrancoisBernierprofessor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, philoso-pher, and travelerand Sir William Templepolitician, essayist, and pa-tron of Jonathan Swift. Both Temple and Bernier (who knew each other)35

contributed to the reappraisal of Epicurus, the paganphilosopheramajorevent in European intellectual history initiated by Pierre Gassendi in themid-seventeenth century. Following Epicuruss praise of pleasure, Templedepicted civilization, in his essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685),as the formof society benecially ruled by ambition and avarice: adetached,ironical description famously developed in Bernard Mandevilles Fable ofBees. Temples essays had a deep impact on Purry. One can see him pon-dering Temples remark that the best climate for the production of all sortsof the best fruits . . . seems to be from about twenty-ve, to about thirty-ve degrees of latitude.36 Purrys reading of the Bible, ltered by Templesessay and by geographical writings, led him to formulate his theory of theperfect latitude, located at 33 degrees.

11. Purrys projects were examined by the managers of the Dutch EastIndia Company and ultimately rejected on 17 April 1719.37This is not sur-



38. See Purry,Memorial Presented to His GraceMy Lord the Duke of Newcastle (1724; Augusta,Ga., 1880), p. 1.

39. See Roulet, Jean-Pierre Purry et ses projets de colonies en Afrique du Sud et en Australie,p. 55.

40.Il realisa la meilleure partie de son bien et courut a` Paris, ou` il specula avec tant de succe`s, quilpossedait un jour dans son portefeuille des eets au porteur pour plus de six cent mille francs.Jean Chambrier, son ami, plus tardministre de Prusse a` Paris, le conjurant de faire comme lui,et de realiser aumoins deux cent mille francs pour les faire parvenir a` sa femme et a` sesenfants, Purry lui repondit froidement: On ne parle ici que de millions, il faut donc aller auxmillions, puis nous realiserons. [F. A.M. Jeanneret et J.-H. Bonhote,Biographie neuchateloise,2 vols. (Locle, 1863), 2: 251]

See also Brandt,Notice sur la vie de Mr le baron David de Purry, pp. 12.41. See V. W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 16701732 (1929; Ann Arbor,Mich., 1956), p. 284 n. 8,

which refers to B.M. Add.MSS. 32,739 (Newcastle Papers, LIV), . 39, 41 f. (Purry, letter toWalpole,6 June 1724, andWalpole, letter to Newcastle, 7 June 1724).

42. SeeMigliazzo, A Tarnished Legacy Revisited, p. 237.43. See the letters of 11 May 1727 and 1 Jan. 1717,Recueil de quelques lettres et documents inedits

concernant David de Purry et sa famille, pp. 1617, 1314. On La Cernia, see ibid., pp. 1112 n. 3.

prising; the company preferred trade to colonization. More surprising isthe fact that immediately after, in unknown circumstances, Purry becamedirector general of the French India Company.38 By 1720 he was in Paris,fully immersed in the nancial turmoil generated by John Law, the Scottishnancier, and his system. Purry invested the money he had earned inBatavia with some initial success.39 According to a friend, Purry pursued aspeculators jackpot with utter determination, saying: Here everybodyspeaks of millions. Once Ill have a few millions, Ill cash out.40 The Mis-sissippi Bubble popped, and Purry lost everything.

He gave up neither his theories nor his projects. On 6 June 1724, hewroteto Horatio Walpole asking to be introduced to the duke of Newcastle;Wal-pole promptly complied, the following day.41 In a memorial addressed tothe duke, published in London that same year, Purry proposed the colo-nization of SouthCarolina by several hundred Swiss Protestants.Frustratedin his designs on the Austral hemisphere, Purry had shifted his focus to 33degrees north latitude.

His rst expedition to America ended in failure, andPurry returneddes-titute to his home town.42Hewas conned by his family to amountain farmnot far fromNeuchatel. From there Purry sent deferential letters tohis step-brothers requestingmoney for his little expenses: letters, tobacco. But, evenhere, he could not refrain from referring to his American projects.43 Purrymust have spent a number of years suspended between amiserable presentand the expectation of a grandiose future. Then something happened. Atlast, ocial patronage came. On 10 March 1731, George II signed a royalpatent authorizing Jean-Pierre Purry, colonel in the British army, to found



44. See the French translation of the original patent in the Archives de lEtat, Neuchatel,Archives de la famille de Purry, G. XII.

45. See Purry, Proposals byMr. Peter Purry of Neufchatel for encouragement of such SwissProtestants as should agree to accompany him to Carolina, to settle a new colony, 1731,ADescription of the Province of South Carolina (Washington,D.C., 1837), pp. 1415; see also Purry,Description abregee de letat present de la Carolinemeridionale (Neuchatel, 1732) andDescriptionabregee de letat present de la Carolinemeridionale, nouvelle edition, avec des eclaircissemens, les actesdes concessions faites a` ce sujet a` lAuteur, tant pour luy que pour ceux qui voudront prendre parti avecluy. Et enn une Instruction qui contient les conditions, sous lesquelles on pourra laccompagner(Neuchatel, 1732), p. 36.ADescription of the Province of South Carolina is partially republished inTracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Coloniesin North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, ed. Peter Force, 2 vols.(Gloucester,Mass., 1963). A much shortened version appears in Purry,Kurtze, iedoch zuverlassigeNachricht von dem gegenwartigen Zustand und Beschaenheit des Mittagigen Carolina in AmericaoderWest-Indien, welche Landschaft Georgien genennet wird, aufgesetzet in Charlestown oderCarlstadt von vier glaubwurdigen Schweitzern, und aus der Franzosischen Sprache anietzoverdeutscht.Welchem eine Nachricht von denen so genannte Bilden, welche in derselben Gegendwohnen, beygefuget ist (Leipzig, 1734), p. 16. For additional bibliographical references, see JonButler,The Huguenots in America (Cambridge,Mass., 1983), pp. 21720.

46. Purry,Description abregee de letat present de la Carolinemeridionale, pp. 8, 28.47. See H. D. K. Leiding, Purrysburg: A Swiss-French Settlement of South Carolina, on the

Savannah River,Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina 39 (1934): 32; possiblybased on A. H. Hirsch,Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina (Durham,N.C., 1928).

a city in South Carolina, to be named Purrysburg. As Purry had proposed,it was to be inhabited by a settlement of Swiss Protestants.44

An advertising campaign mounted by Purry must have contributed tothe ow of immigrants to his colony. Purrys detailed descriptions of SouthCarolina were published in Switzerland and translated into German andEnglish.45 In the Eclaircissemens appended to a second edition of his pam-phlet, published in 1732, Purry responded to the murmurs of newly arrivedcolonists. Somebody, for instance, had complained about the regions cli-mate. Purry, who was always willing to air his theories about latitude,adopted a startled tone: To say that the region of Carolina is too hot forthe Europeans, and especially for the Swiss, is as absurd as it would be tocomplain about Syria, or, as it was formerly known, the Land of Canaan.46

Like Moses (a metaphor he would have liked) Jean-Pierre Purry was notallowed to see the promised land of industrial revolution. He died on 18 Au-gust 1736 in the city bearing his name.47 The city itself decayed andultimatelydisappeared. Jean-Pierres eldest son, Charles, wasmurdered in a slave revoltin 1754. Another son, David, who had stayed in Europe, became enormouslyrich. At his death, in 1786, he left his money, part of which had been earnedthrough the slave trade with Brazil, to the poor people of Neuchatel. Hisstatue is placed in themiddle of the citysmain square, which bears his name.

12. Jean-Pierre Purrys colorful life certainly deserves a detailed recon-struction. One could tell a story, even a good story about him. But the aim



48. SeeMaxWeber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons(1930; London, 1993); hereafter abbreviatedPE. (For the German, seeWeber, Die protestantischeEthik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 21 [1905]: 154, and its rev. ed. inGesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie [Tubingen, 192021].) Parsonstranslated innerweltliche Askese as worldly asceticism(PE, pp. 19394); in his introduction,Anthony Giddens speaks of this-worldly asceticism (PE, p. xii).

49. See E. Sestan, introduction toWeber, Letica protestante e lo spirito del capitalismo, trans.Piero Burresi (Rome, 1945), p. xlv.

50. I owe this suggestion to Alberto Gajano.

of my project is dierent. Since the very beginning of my research I tried toanswer the following question: can an individual case, if explored in depth,be theoretically relevant?

When I rst looked at Purrys two memoires I immediately thought ofMaxWebersTheProtestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism. In thatfamousessay, rst published in 19045, Weber argued that the emergence of an at-titude he called inner-worldly asceticism (innerweltlicheAskese), inspiredby Calvinism and its Puritan developments, played a crucial role in theemergence of capitalism by submitting economic activity to rational con-trol.48 Webers controversial thesis, which has been debated ever since, fo-cused on entrepreneurs as agents of change, stressing the psychologicalimpact of religious concepts like calling (Beruf ). But, as it has been noticed,individual entrepreneurs aected by Protestant ideas are, surprisinglyenough, absent from Webers essay. Benjamin Franklin, whose reectionsWeber repeatedly quoted, is a late and rather secularized case.49 Jean-PierrePurry seems on the contrary a perfect illustration of Webers thesis: a Cal-vinist entrepreneur, fully committed to the Protestant cause, extensivelyquoting the Bible to argue his colonization plans, and shaping his own lifeaccording to a geographic theory centered on the Land of Canaan. But, assoon as my research really began, its aim became less obvious.

As I immediately realized, to prove or to disproveWebers argumentwasbeside the point. On the one hand, Weber never argued his case as a clear-cut, clearly disprovable statement like all swans are black. A white swan,a non-Calvinist entrepreneur, obviously did not aectWebers argument atall. On the other, a Calvinist entrepreneur like Purry could never prove anargument like Webers, which had been formulated in an abstract, ideal-typical form. AsWeber repeatedly stressed, to speak in terms of ideal-types[Ideal-typen] means, in a certain sense, to do violence to historical re-ality (PE, p. 233 n. 68). Like Platos ideas, ideal-types are immune to con-tradictions.50 According toWebers denition, an historical individual [is]a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into aconceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural signicance (PE,



51. In his The Destruction of Reason (a muchmaligned book, in which ideological platitudes andprofound passages coexist) Gyorgy Lukacs wrote: German sociologysmain problem is theprimitive accumulation of capital, and the workerss violent separation from the means ofproduction (Lukacs, La distruzione della ragione, trans. Eraldo Arnaud [Turin, 1974], p. 612).Weber, Germanys foremost sociologist and Lukacss formermentor, was of course the main targetof this critical remark. On amore general (and less interesting) level, see Karl Lowith, MaxWeberund Karl Marx,Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Politik 67 (1932): 5399, 175214; trans. under thetitleMarx,Weber, Schmitt (Rome, 1994). Cest probablementMarx qui a exerce surWeberlinuence la plus profonde et la plus durable, writes E. Fleischmann, DeWeber a` Nietzsche,Archives europeennes de sociologie 5 (1964): 194, but without developing the implications of his ownremark.

52. KarlMarx,Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (New York, 1977), 1:87374; hereafterabbreviatedC.

p. 47). A human being is of course a more unpredictable, not to say con-tradictory, reality. The gap between Jean-Pierre Purry and the ideal-typicalCalvinist entrepreneur is part of Webers postulates. But Weber himself re-peatedly stressed that ideal-typical constructionsmustbecontinuouslysub-mitted to the test of empirical research.What canbe the result of a test basedon Purrys case?

Besides the convergences I alreadymentioned, some areas of equally ob-vious divergence come out: Purrys anti-asceticism; and his justication,based on his own reading of the Bible, and especially of the Exodus nar-rative, of Europes conquest (including slavery and the use of force) of theworld. The second point throws some interesting light over the genesis andmeaning of Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.Manyreaders regarded it as an argument against Marxism, positing a religiouscause to capitalism rather than an economic one. Weber strongly objectedthat his aim had not been to substitute for one-sided materialistic anequally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of his-tory (PE, p. 183). Webers polemical relationship with Marx was indeedsubtler and closer. I would argue that Webers The Protestant Ethic and theSpirit of Capitalism was written not only against the section ofMarxsCap-ital that starts with chapter 26, The Secret of PrimitiveAccumulation,butalso with it, reassembling and turning upside down some of its passages.51

Marxs discussion opens with the following sentence: This primitiveac-cumulation plays approximately the same role inpolitical economyasorigi-nal sin does in theology. According to this theological version, longagothere were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above allfrugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, inriotous living. . . . In actual history, Marx goes on it is a notorious factthat conquest, enslavement, robbery,murder, in short, force, play the great-est part.52

In a sense, Weber consciously elaborated a range of subtle arguments to



53. On the mutual exclusiveness between capitalist adventurers and intramundane ascesis, seeWeber, Antikritisches zum Geist des Kapitalismus,Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft undSozialpolitik 3031 (191011); partially republished in Eduard Baumgarten,MaxWeber:Werk undPerson (Tubingen, 1964), pp. 17391.

54. But he changed his mind on this just before his death, as I will show in the expanded versionof this project; seeWeber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and ClausWittich, 3 vols. (NewYork, 1968), 1:13738. After having stressed the rationality of capitalist productionWeber remarks:The fact that the maximumof formal rationality in methods of capital accounting is possible onlywhere the workers are subjected to domination by entrepreneurs, is a further specic element ofsubstantive irrationality in the modern economic order. The meaning of this remark is clariedby a later passage:

willingness to work on the part of factory labor has been primarily determined by acombination of the transfer of responsibility for maintenance to the workers personally andthe corresponding powerful indirect compulsion to work, as symbolized in the Englishworkhouse system, and it has permanently remained oriented to the compulsory guarantee ofthe property system.This is demonstrated by the marked decline in willingness to work at thepresent time which resulted from the collapse of this coercive power in the [1918] revolution. [Ibid.,1:153; my italics]

support the theological interpretation of primitive accumulation.On theone hand, he stressed the role of ascetic frugality in capitalist ethic; on theother, he traced a rm boundary between capitalistic adventurers andgenuine capitalist entrepreneurs. Capitalistic adventurers existed every-where, in all sort of societies: a curious remark, hardly compatible withthe gloss that in overseas policy they have functioned as colonial entre-preneurs, as planterswith slaves, or directly or indirectly forced labour(PE,p. 20).53 The last issue was crucial. In Webers view, genuine capitalist en-trepreneurs had nothing to do with force.54

Marx, on the contrary, pointed at the role played by the colonies in theprocess of primitive accumulation: the veiled slaveryof thewage-labourersin Europe needed the unqualied slavery of the NewWorld as its pedestal(C, 1: 925). After having recalled the frightening treatment of indigenouspopulations in plantation colonies, Marx noticed that even in the coloniesproperly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation wasnot belied. This claim was illustrated as follows: In 1703 those sober ex-ponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of theirassembly set a premium of 40 on every Indian scalp and every capturedredskin; in 1744, for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, 100 in newcurrency; for a male prisoner 105, for women and children prisoners 50,for the scalps of women and children 50 (C, 1: 917, 918).

To put such chilling punctiliousness under the rubric Christian char-acter of primitive accumulation is typical of Marxs sarcasm. In the samemode he evoked the spirit of Protestantism (C, 1: 882 n. 9) to describethe introduction of merciless, punctilious poor laws into Elizabethan En-gland. But inWebers use of spirit of capitalism (a somewhatpretentious



55. See Jacques Revel, Micro-analyse et construction du social, in Jeux dechelles: LaMicro-analyse a` lexperience, ed. Revel (Paris, 1996), pp. 1536.

56. A single case analyzed in depth will suce to provide the basis for an extensive comparison;seeMarcelMauss, Essai sur les variations saisonnie`res des societes eskimo: Etude de morphologiesociale [1906], Sociologie et anthropologie, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1966), pp. 389477.

phrase, he admitted) there is not the faintest trace of irony. His attempt todemonstrate the Christian (more specically, Calvinist) character of prim-itive accumulation was equally serious. Marxs ferocious remarks wereturned upside down and became the starting point of Webers essay. But,when he praised exact calculation (PE, p. 22) as a feature of rational cap-italistic organization,Weber probably did not recall the Puritan calculationof redskin scalps.

ThemodelWeber advanced inThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapi-talism by systematically erasing violence from the early historyof capitalismis greatly inferior to Marxs. On the other hand, Weber was certainly rightin focusing on the role played by agents inuenced by religiona crucialissue that Marx ignored. But which agents? Purry, the Protestant entrepre-neur who stressed the necessity of force to bring lazy, uncivilized natives tothe realm of abundance, is incompatible with Webers ideal-type. If I amnotmistaken, Purrys case compels us to reconsider from a sharply focused,unexpected angle the comparative strengths andweaknessesof the twomostinuential social thinkers of our time.

13. My approach to microhistory is strongly indebted to the work ofscholars like Erich Auerbach (whom I mentioned earlier) who developedinterpretations of literary and painterly artifacts based on clues others hadconsidered insignicant. This version of microhistory has been contrastedwith another version, more oriented towards the social sciences and thecritique of theirmethods.55Inmy view, the opposition is groundlessbecauseboth versions ofmicrohistory aim at the same theoretical target, albeit fromopposite directions. I know that theword theory cannotbe taken forgrantedin this context. In the social sciences, theory is often tacitly identied witha broad approach a` la Max Weber, and microhistory with a narrowly fo-cused attempt to rescue fromoblivion the livesofmarginal, defeatedpeople.If one accepts these denitions, microhistory would be conned to a pe-ripheral and basically atheoretical role that leaves the dominant theoriesunchallenged. The case of Jean-Pierre Purry, that early prophet of the cap-italist conquest of the world, stands a chance of knocking down someof thebarriers thought to divide microhistory and theory.56 A life chosen at ran-dom can make concretely visible the attempt to unify the world, as well assome of its implications.



57. Marcel Proust,The GuermantesWay, vol. 3. of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. ScottMoncrie and Terence Kilmartin, ed. D. J. Enright (New York, 1993), p. 450. Les niais simaginentque les grosses dimensions des phenome`nes sociaux sont une excellente occasion de penetrer plusavant dans lame humaine; ils devraient au contraire comprendre que cest en descendant enprofondeur dans une individualite quils auraient chance de comprendre ces phenome`nes(Proust, Le Cote des Guermantes, vol. 2 of A` la recherche du temps perdu [Paris, 1959], p. 330). Thepassage, which is on Francoise and the Russo-Japanesewar, has been quoted by FrancesoOrlando,Darwin, Freud, lindividuo e il caso, La rivista dei libri 5 (Feb. 1995): 21.

In saying this I am echoing Auerbach. But Auerbach was implicitly re-ferring to Proust. Let us allow Proust to have the nal word: People fool-ishly imagine that the broad generalities of social phenomena aord anexcellent opportunity to penetrate further into the human soul; theyought,on the contrary, to realise that it is by plumbing the depths of a single per-sonality that they might have a chance of understanding those phenom-ena.57


Ginzburg Latitude Slaves Bible Microhistory CI 2005

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