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<DIV>In a message dated 11/24/2004 7:41:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, ff10@txstate.edu writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT face=Arial>HB, if you need any research done, I am pretty much free until Saturday...... <BR>Hope you are well.... Ive been quite busy for about two months now.... but <BR>during the holidays it slows down for us.....</FONT></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV>hb: here's a question still puzzling me for reinventing capitalism. Is my hypothesis about the rise of the plantation system correct? Did monocropping and the obsession with genetic engineering--or what was called "breeding" at the time--begin with the tree plantations Henry VIII needed to build the ships he'd helped invent--Baltic Sea-like cog ships, big-bellied ocean-capable cargo ships that could be outfitted with dozens of canons and could make the long, thin, one-cannon war galleys battling in the Mediterranean obsolete?</DIV>
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<DIV>Had England run low on wood when Henry came up with his naval innovation? When Henry tossed the church out of the third of England that the Vatican controlled, when he gave that land to his ambitious, modern friends, and when he turned these enterpreneurial masters of new estates into a squieroquracy, did he tell them to raise pine for the hulls of his ships and straight, tall oaks for his masts?</DIV>
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<DIV>Did the new obsession with raising--and upgrading--just one crop on a piece of land lead to similar mono-cropping and gene-enhancing approaches to the industrial-level farming of sugar and of cotton in the newly discovered territories of the Caribbean--the West Indies?</DIV>
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<DIV>Did the tree plantations Henry needed to build his navies lead to the wealth of plantation clans like the family of my friend and former client Chris Blackwell in Jamaica? The Blackwells were once famous for their line of canned and jarred food products, products that appeared under the name of "Cross and Blackwell".</DIV>
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<DIV>Then Chris took the family fortune and used it to reap and to popularize another harvest of the Caribbean's English master-and-African-slave culture--reggae.</DIV>
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<DIV>Do we owe Bob Marley's mix of the Bible, Haile Selassie, a cargo-cult, and a magical beat to Henry VIII?</DIV>
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<DIV>Here are some books that helped me build this hypothesis:</DIV>
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<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calisto MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Thomas, K. (1983). <I>Man and the Natural World: A History of The Modern Sensibility.</I><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>New York: Pantheon Books. </SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calisto MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calisto MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">I believe it's this book that illustrated how London began to run low on wood as early as 1150.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calisto MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calisto MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: .25in .75in 1.25in 1.75in 2.25in 2.75in 3.25in 3.75in 4.25in 4.75in"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'News Gothic MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></P><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'News Gothic MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">A.L. Rowse. <I>The Expansion of Elizabethan England</I>. London: MacMillan, 1955. A book that shows Henry turning his back on Europe and looking for an Empire in the Americas--particularly in the part of America the Spanish didn't want, North America. It also shows Henry building the squierocracy and, I believe, demanding trees.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'News Gothic MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt"></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'News Gothic MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">the ships Henry helped conceived may be in</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'News Gothic MT'; LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">G.M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">England, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1959<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">(originally published 1942).</FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3></FONT></SPAN> </P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>And the obsession of squires--and of just about every other sort of English person of property--with breeding shows up in, of all places, PG Wodehouse--especially in <!--StartFragment -->Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth and his obsession with pig-breeding and pig gene-tweaking, an obsession that leads to his love for one thing above all else in the world, the model of porcine perfection, the prize pig know to Wodehouse readers as the<!--StartFragment --> Empress of Blandings.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 12pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-hyphenate: none"><SPAN style="LETTER-SPACING: -0.15pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman"><o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN> </P></SPAN></SPAN></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>