Star Wars and History

by Nancy Reagin

  Often, when we think about Western imperialism in Asia, our minds jump to images of the British Raj in South Asia or perhaps French Indochina or even the Dutch East Indies. That is to say, we immediately tend to think of conquest on a massive scale or even “spheres of influence,” as in nineteenth-century China. This picture, however, is accurate only after the mid-nineteenth century.

  Western involvement in Asian cultures during the period when the great trade companies were emerging was very different and much more limited.33 Western powers, led by Portugal and Spain and soon followed by the Dutch and the English, were able to establish only relatively small footholds in various strategic ports along the coastlines of South and Southeast Asia; their trading companies were the means by which they accomplished this. What measure of real control the Western powers did hold in Asia was determined not by great territorial possessions, but rather by occupying strategic centers of commerce, as well as port cities that happened to straddle commercially strategic waterways. In the same way, the Trade Federation also increases its economic and political power not by large-scale territorial conquest, but rather by monopolizing the strategic trade routes that criss-cross the galaxy.

  Even after the VOC was dissolved, its effects lingered, as evidenced by this depiction of Dutch ships and a Dutch family in nineteenth-century Yokohama.

  This essay has pointed out the parallels between the Star Wars galaxy and the chaotic and dramatic commercial competition in the South China Sea region and the Indian subcontinent that began in the sixteenth century. Between the dramatic decline of the Chinese Ming dynasty and the chaotic, war-torn situation in the Japanese archipelago, there arose a group of pirates/entrepreneurs who took advantage of the chaos to carve out for themselves exceedingly lucrative networks of trade, which were later incorporated into the first of the great East India companies. This resembles the state of affairs described on remote planets such as Tatooine or Cloud City over Bespin, where the power of the center does not hold sway, gangsters and smugglers are free to operate with relative impunity, and even a giant, charismatic, slug-shaped smuggler can, with the right attitude and the right family background (the Hutts, in this case), get ahead in a cutthroat world of opportunity. In all of these settings, political instability and warfare could make for good business: opportunities that lured in groups of merchants from far away, who formed their own networks.

  Just as the Trade Federation is an entity that blurs the lines between commerce, politics, and war, the British and Dutch East India companies were willing and able to employ a number of tactics to increase their power and profits in Asia. They gained enormous political influence “back home,” while combining commercial strategies with questionable, often violent, tactics to gain a foothold in the “Outer Rim,” manipulating local rulers and populaces—or using their own armies or armed ships—in a way that was advantageous to the company. Both companies, much as the Trade Federation did, began to resemble not so much a commercial enterprise but rather another territorial player in the unfolding history of South and Southeast Asia, becoming sovereign in the areas they controlled. In the long run, however, the metropolitan powers in the “center” ultimately absorbed the merchant states within a state: in all three cases, they had outlived their usefulness.

  Notes

  1. Augustine of Hippo, City of God (New York: Penguin, 1984), Book IV, chap. 4.

  2. This idea is briefly touched on in an article for slate.com, posted on May 24, 1999, titled “The Economics of the Phantom Menace,” http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/1999/05/the_economics_of_the_phantom_menace.html.

  3. Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 6.

  4. For a comprehensive overview of the South China Sea in this period, see John Wills, ed., China and Maritime Europe 1500–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Volume II: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

  5. For Japanese pirates, or “sea lords,” as he calls them, see Peter Shapinsky, “With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan,” in Jerry Bentley, Kären Wigen, and Renate Bridenthal, eds., Seascapes, Littoral Cultures and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 221–238.

  6. Probably the best description of piracy along the Chinese coast in the sixteenth century is in Robert Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley: University of California Institute for East Asian Studies, 2003).

  7. Kenneth Swope, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009).

  8. Derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

  9. Richard Cocks’s fascinating diary and a selection of his letters were edited in two volumes by Edward Thompson, Diary of Richard Cocks: Cape Merchant in the English Factory in Japan, 1615–1622, with Correspondence (London: Hakluyt Society, 1883).

  10. John Wills, “Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History,” in Jonathan Spence and John Wills, eds., From Ming to Ching: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 216–218.

  11. Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  12. Om Prakash, Precious Metals and Commerce: The Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean Trade (London: Ashgate-Variorum, 1994).

  13. Probably the best comprehensive account of the VOC in English is Feeme Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company (Zutpen: Walburg Pers, 2007); see also Els Jacobs, In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea: The Story of the Dutch East India Company (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1991). A good comparison of the various European trading companies can be found in Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976).

  14. Although it is in Dutch, a concise description of this process is to be found in Femme Gaastra, “De VOC in Azië tot 1680,” in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederland 5 (Bussum: Unieboek, 1980).

  15. Niels Steensgaard calls this moment a “metamorphosis.” Niels Steensgaard, “The Dutch East India Company as an Institutional Innovation,” in Dutch Capitalism and World Capitalism, edited by Maurice Aymard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 239.

  16. For Dutch ship production, see Charles Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

  17. According to The New Essential Chronology to Star Wars, the Trade Federation was created in 350 BBY “to represent the needs of major shipping corporations.” See Daniel Wallace and Kevin Anderson, The New Essential Chronology to Star Wars (New York: Del Ray, 2005), 31. See also Steve Miller and J. D. Wiker, Secrets of Naboo (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2001).

  18. Jan Pieterzoon Coen was responsible for locating the capital of the VOC in Asia at Batavia on the island of Java and was extremely influential in laying out a vision of comprehensive trade throughout Asia, using a network of several factories. He has also been criticized for his often violent and inhumane treatment of natives. See Steven R. Bown’s accessible account of Coen’s life in Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600–1900 New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009), 7–56.

  19. Kristof Glamann, Dutch Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958), 6–7.

  20. Eiichi Kat, “Unification and Adaptation, the Early Shogunate and Dutch Trade Policies,” in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra, eds., Companies and Trade (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981), 220–221.

  21. Niels Steensgard, in Blussé and Gaastra, eds., Companies and Trade, 55–56.

  22. For a list of Dut
ch blockades of Portuguese ports, see Ernst van Deen and Daniël Klijn, A Guide to the Sources of the History of the Dutch-Portuguese Relations in Asia (Leiden: Institute for the History of European Expansion, 2001).

  23. For a good firsthand account of the combined fleet at Hirado, Japan, see Thompson, ed., The Diary of Richard Cocks.

  24. Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, 7.

  25. A good source for the history of the EIC, based on extant primary sources, is Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 2002).

  26. Sushil Chaudhary, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000).

  27. This trade network is described in Femme Gaastra, De Geschiedenis van de VOC (Zutplen: Walburg Pers, 1991), 124–127.

  28. Kees Zandfleet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002), 159.

  29. See, for example, Victor Enthoven, Steve Murdoch, and Eila Williamson, eds., The Navigator: The Log of John Anderson VOC Pilot-Major 1640–1643 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 68–69.

  30. Mary Lindemann, “‘Dirty Politics or Harmonie?’ Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 587.

  31. Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 5.

  32. For a good, accessible overview of Dutch policy vis-à-vis the islanders of the Spice Islands, see Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2000), chap. 11.

  33. For a helpful discussion of Western power in South and Southeast Asia, see P. J. Marshall, “Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 13–28.

  Chapter 11

  Coruscant, the Great Cities of Earth, and Beyond

  Katrina Gulliver

  “I saw a city in the clouds.”

  —Luke Skywalker, The Empire Strikes Back

  Cities have an important role in human society. They house our centers of education and government, become points of contact for diverse populations, and foster new cultural development. As one scholar wrote, “The city has thus historically been the melting-pot of races, peoples, and cultures, and a most favorable breeding-ground of new biological and cultural hybrids.”1 Cities generate their own culture, and their development in history has fueled advances in technology, education, and communication.

  In the galaxy of Star Wars, we see a variety of townscapes, from Otoh Gunga, the luminous underwater city of the Gungans, to the elegance of Theed; from the low adobe houses of Mos Eisley, to the industrial Cloud City and the glittering diversity of Coruscant. Such bright urban centers have long been a lure for people from rural areas, especially young people looking to broaden their horizons—such as Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, wanting to leave and attend the Academy. In A New Hope he even says, “If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet it’s farthest from.”

  Although cities have lured people from the country who want to pursue opportunities, tales of urban danger for the unwitting rural visitor have also been common in cultural history. Even the earliest recorded cities had a tinge of danger, or sin, as Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–AD 117) commented in his Annals: “All thing atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.”2

  Part of a city’s attraction is the freedom and range of options it offers. As urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote, “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.”3 Urban life can offer conveniences and access to services not available elsewhere. Cities can allow for freedom in other ways, in anonymity, as when Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala hide their marriage while living in Coruscant. They are hiding in the crowd, safe in the knowledge that in a big city their relationship will not be noticed.

  This is demonstrated on a smaller scale by Padmé’s security practices in The Phantom Menace. Her makeup serves as a way to conceal her identity: she and her decoys all look similar, interchangeable. This allows her to accompany Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi unrecognized, as at least one of them does not know what she looks like without the elaborate hairstyles and cosmetics. Her makeup and style of dress also mark her cultural affiliation. We later see her successor as Queen of Naboo wearing a similar costume. Indeed, she also shows how cities lead fashion. Queen Amidala and later her daughter, Princess Leia, demonstrate the fashions of elite women in their cities. Padmé’s style of makeup and costume also bring to mind the geisha, whose elaborate costuming helped create the mystique geishas held in traditional Japanese society.

  Going to Town

  In medieval Europe, the biggest towns were often walled, built to be defensible against enemy attack. They would also be trading points, to which farmers and craftsmen would travel seasonally to sell their wares and buy their supplies. The calendar of such events followed the harvest year, and traveling to town could be a big event for a medieval peasant, just as traveling to Mos Eisley is an exciting prospect for young Luke. Major trading towns were often at the junctions of rivers or on coastal ports, allowing goods to be brought in and out. These trading customs were the forerunners of the modern financial network, when cities became centers of banking, as well as of commerce.

  The medieval European custom of the “freedom of the city” also meant that residence in the city for a year and one day could make a man free, reflected in the German saying Stadtluft macht frei: “city air makes one free.” At a time when peasants lived as vassals to landowners, this path to freedom was tempting and placed cities in a particular place in the cultural imagination. For slaves such as Anakin and Shmi Skywalker, such policies would have been welcome, but their frontier world’s laws offer no such hope.

  Cities were often sites of power, both secular and religious. They held the great palaces of kings and the most important religious buildings, which were designed to inspire awe in any who looked on them. They were also centers of knowledge and education. As the capital of the Republic, Coruscant holds a diverse population and offers services, entertainment, and business of all kinds. This includes education, just as medieval cities provided. The first universities in Europe were established in Bologna (1088), Paris (c. 1150), and Oxford (1167). These cities became cultural magnets in themselves, attracting not only scholars but all attendant support trades: tailors, bookbinders, vellum stretchers, and, later, paper makers and stationers. The kind of archive that we see in the Jedi Temple in Coruscant is like the great libraries of the ancient universities.

  The Jedi Library on Coruscant. The Jedi Temple also has the scholastic role of the ancient universities, drawing its pupils from across the galaxy. (Attack of the Clones)

  Radcliffe Camera, part of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

  With the coming of the Renaissance, ideas of urban design changed. Whereas cities before this point had developed organically, with no central planning, Renaissance thinkers idealized their views of the classical city and ideas of symmetry and balance in urban design. Buildings were made symmetrical; grand plazas were built for public gatherings.

  The beautiful Renaissance cities have long been part of the imagination of life in other parts of space in science fiction. Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell, astronomers in the late nineteenth century, became known for their theories about the existence of canals on Mars—Lowell, in particular, felt this was evidence of intelligent life on the planet. His books—Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908)—helped spark the imaginations of a generation of science-fiction writers who envisioned life on the red planet. Illustrations were drawn of their fantasized Martian towns. Their influence can be seen in the way the creator of Star Wars conceived of his canal city, Theed, on Naboo.

  Long before London rose to prominence, before Columbus headed for the Americas (thinking he was going to Asia), Venice was the most fabulous and exciting
city in Europe, and it remains our closest parallel to Theed. Elegant palazzos demonstrated the wealth and taste of the city’s residents. The canals were an engineering feat, providing transport. They shaped the expanding city to human needs, in keeping with a neoclassical aesthetic.

  Theed’s elegant architecture is reminiscent of Renaissance Italian cities. (The Phantom Menace)

  Renaissance Venice, as depicted by Bellini.

  Venice was also where some of our modern financial and banking concepts emerged, including share investment—partly as a tool for private merchants to help fund long sea voyages. Where previously someone might invest in a ship—and lose everything if that ship were lost—the notion of shares meant instead that it was possible to invest in a percentage of a fleet, rather than in one particular vessel. Whichever of the ships returned safely, the investors could get a return on their investment. This innovation helped spread risk and encouraged people to back such trading expeditions, which, in turn, contributed to Venice’s wealth and economic importance.

  Reaching for the Sky: Cities Go High

  Cities were centers of production in the Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of factories led to massive urbanization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with people seeking work in the fast-growing towns. At the same time, technology was making agriculture less labor-intensive, so many rural agricultural laborers became urban factory workers.