in 1609 Hudson was an unremarkable English seaman working for Dutch masters, doing the unremarkable (to them) English/Dutch sailing captain’s job of finding the Northwest Passage to Fabled Cathay. He failed of course but everybody did at that job, and they didn’t mind; they kept hiring him anyway. In the short and medium term, the real job of these voyages was the job of finding new wijk ports to extend the English-Dutch common trading network. As we know, Hudson’s inestimable success was in finding the Valley that bears the River that today bears his name. The North River, as the Dutch called it, has a perfect configuration for a wijk, or indeed, for many. It has deep harbors in a wide central bay at its mouth; for a long way upriver, there are vigorous tides for the effortless ebb and flow of traffic; and it is directly adjacent to willing and eager trading partners. The City, the cities, built on this estuary made the Hudson River the New Money River in the world, supplanting the Rhine. Hudson didn’t build New York, but he and his men did bring back plenty of extraordinarily soft beaver pelts. In Mokum they sold for a pretty stuiver soon after landing, to the keen-eyed merchants who crowded the Damraak and maybe slipped the Half Moon sailors and stevedores a little something to get a peek into their cargo. Several of those merchants immediately chartered ships of their own, and there were Dutch traders smoking with Mohawks at Albany and Raritans on Staten Island from 1610. What made the amazing pelts so soft, what made them valuable, what gave them the perfectly trimmed nap, was that they had previously been worn by the Indians as their clothing. The most important and successful wijk trading city of them all, was built on carving the percent out of dealing in the Native Americans’ own second-hand jewelry and their own second-hand rags. Both industries, of course are still huge in New York. But if we take the Half Moon as a metaphor — Hudson certainly did find a route for Dutch-English trade to illuminate, penetrate and dominate the distant hemisphere, through the traders who built in his wake. It just took The Whirligig of Time, and a Gold Rush, and a whole lot more capital, for the wijks to open the passage to Cathay.
Full Disclosure: Bait and switch. The wise homily above was merely a ruse, to get Patient Reader to click on Michael Hudson’s latest interview on Nakedcapitalism.com. It is a sharp non-jargony reading of the China Question. He is that rare economist in America who actually seems to know and follow, and who cares about, where China is actually at…versus, where America is at, and how where we’re at is so far out into the Swamp of Ignorance, that the rest of the world has not only stopped following, but has given up even waving and calling out from the shoreline. Hudson explains why America’s plutocracy is just not where it’s at, for China, or the world, or the wijks, anymore. In other words, Hudson explains why China has de-monetized the Money River of Hudson.
Here is a link to Mr. Hudson’s excellent blog, full of the best of modern economic thought.
The Valley Village View 