Chris Smaje, in the preface to what promises to be an excellent book:
Before long, the self-reinforcing cycle of interlinked trading, raiding, slaving and adventuring built a vast economic and military Viking diaspora stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from the edge of North America to the western Eurasian Steppe. The access of some more than others in Viking society to the fruits of this extractivism-fuelled social stratification within it. The gap between lord and peasant widened.
Eventually, the Vikings embraced Christianity and their story merged with the development of a relatively unified medieval culture in northwest Europe, woven out of more disparate earlier strands.
But it retained a combative edge. William, Duke of Normandy — a Norse settler culture in northern France, Norman meaning Norse or Northman — famously invaded England in 1066 and installed himself on its throne. The Domesday Book he commissioned was a colonial document prefiguring many later ones. It asked, in enormous quantitative detail, exactly what the country could yield, and in what quantity, with a view to appropriating as much as possible to the Anglo-Norman exchequer. The Norman conquerors bequeathed to England a centralized and extractive state apparatus that arguably prepared the ground for England’s own expansion much later as a global power, helping to spread this predatory mindset across the Earth.
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TODAY, WORLDWIDE, our societies and governments are still asking exactly what our countries can yield, and in what quantity. It’s too easy to see this as benevolence — lifting the poor, feeding the world and so forth. It’s as much because they’re still conquest societies — Viking societies. The trading-raiding-slaving nexus of Viking-era globalization is our world, directly paralleling the globalization of modern centuries.
The modern style of globalization has sometimes been tamer and more rationally framed than its medieval precursors. Nowadays, it’s typically expressed through an implausible universalism: everybody can aspire to being a Viking, organizing a flow of trade goods and labour services to their personal advantage, while nobody has to be disadvantaged and reap the consequences of this plunder. Or else it manifests in an embrace of a ‘Viking’ warrior or winner-takes-all attitude, typically among social-media-saturated young men who are not very plausible candidates for effecting it.
Either way, these implausible positions reveal the beating dark-age heart of our modern age of enlightenment: a world built on slavery, colonialism, labour exploitation and the levelling of nature in pursuit of a relentless material throughput.
From the introduction:
In any case, the livelihood model … is not a technological fix like nuclear fusion that you don’t understand and have no agency over, but that the government uses to keep the lights on so that you can carry on getting to work, paying the mortgage and taking your mind off things with Netflix in the evening while your wider culture trumpets its manifest destiny. The model is that you yourself can learn the skills to live well in the place you call home by working to generate your livelihood, and that this work, this way of being, is your culture, of which you are an important bearer.
