Nation-states and ‘national character'
In his Discourses on Titus Livius of 1532, Niccol∂ Machiavelli suggested that ‘nations preserve for a long time the same character; ever exhibiting the same disposition to avarice, or bad faith, or to some other special vice or virtue’ (Machiavelli, 1950, 530).
For Machiavelli, as men were always ‘animated by the same passions’, they always acted in the same way, although this could be modified by ‘the nature of their education’. Is it so far from Machiavelli’s ‘national character’ to John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s ‘accepted standards of behavior’ within an ‘established order of society’ (1964, 41)? Game theory does not logically preclude the idea that the rules of a game may vary between different countries, as might the strategies commonly pursued within them. Consequently, one of the tasks of this volume is to investigate whether there are ‘national characters’ vis-a-vis economic understanding and business behaviour, to which no pre-ordained methods or structures have been applied by the editor. Each author was left entirely free to make their own judgments, and some very diverse conclusions have indeed been reached.A ‘naturalistic’ variant of this topic was considered by Thomas Brown in his myth-busting Enquiries into Received Tenets and Presumed Truths, a mid-seventeenth-century treatise promoting the application of an empiricist scientific methodology to natural history. Brown declared that what he called national ‘productions’ were:
... determined by the principles of place, or qualities of that region which admits them. And this is evident not only in gems, minerals, and metals, but observable in plants and animals; whereof some are common unto many Countries, some peculiar unto one, some not communicable unto another.
(Brown, 1672, 356) One example is the importance of precious metals in Indian culture, where gold and silver jewellery has for a long time had special significance.
J.M. Keynes recognized this factor, which had exerted an important effect on the level and direction of international demand for silver (Barnett, 2013, 41), and indirectly on currency issues in India. Keynes was well aware of national financial particularities, explaining in Indian Currency and Finance that ‘the British system' of currency operation was ‘peculiar and is not suited to other conditions' (Keynes, 1971, 11). As the chapter on India in this volume shows, some Indian economists disagreed with Keynes on this issue fundamentally.Consider another example, the Middle East. The Arabian Peninsula is a well-defined geographical entity including (today) the states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Yemen, but Arabia as a single regional entity now has only a historical reality. Overlaid on the Arabian Peninsula as a geographical region are cultural forms of expression such as Arabic as a language and Islam as a religion. One contributor to this volume uses the term ‘Arab- Islamic' to encompass and define a long-standing tradition in socio-economic understanding, which was perhaps most influential in a bygone historical era. Others have implied that this term is too wide-ranging, pointing out that some Persian (or even Azerbaijani) thinkers are sometimes illicitly included within this remit.
Persian scholars have certainly been influential in Arabic-speaking regions, in part because their works were translated into (or issued in) Arabic, but this does not make them more Arabic than Persian. Also some Muslim thinkers were neither Arabs nor Persians, writing in Turkish or even some Asian languages. In reality Persian culture is different from Arabic culture which can be distinct from Islamic culture, even though there is often a significant degree of overlap between these traditions.
It has been suggested that there is a ‘clear distinction between Arabic and Moslem science' (Taton, 1963, 385): the problem is clearly defining this distinction. Is it more than simply Arabic is a language whereas Islam is a religion? Although classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, it had emerged as the dominant language in the Arabian peninsular long before the birth of Islam. Hence Arabic culture preceded the birth of the Muslim religion by a significant period, during which the Arabian economy (and Arabic science) developed without any influence from Islam. For example Mecca was an urban trading settlement in pre-Islamic Arabia. Thus, the link between the nation-state, regional geography and national culture/thought is a complex and evolving one.