March, 2025 - Bob Croft

Irrigation and despotisms

Here’s a review I wrote for Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotisms.

Hydraulic economies (Those based on huge water projects, either irrigation or flood control) require large corvees of labor, generally require autocrats to organize them, and morph into monumental constructions and armies. Farming tends to be high intensity and productive; peasants often have control over their own farming practices, but little else. Intensive agriculture allows very high productivity (per acre), so creates high populations. The state, originally managed (save in conquest situations) by the technical elite, demands total subservience. (Exceptions featuring cooperative, not forced, labor, and hence non-totalitarian societies are Venice, Salt Lake City and the Netherlands.)

Most land is rented or allocated by government or by (usually palace connected) landholders; peasant ownership occasionally occurs. Hydraulic Despotism would be a better title (and was the author’s original choice, but the publisher apparently thought “Oriental” would sell better): examples include Central America, the Pueblos, Spain under the Muslims, and Hawaii, in addition to the expected Egypt, India, the near east and China. Despotisms are often exported sans hydrology, as in Rome (via Sicily), Russia, the Byzantine Balkans.

Which leads me to a suggestion from elsewhere, that the US might well have emerged as a totalitarian state rather than as a liberal democracy had we been settled from west to east, rather than the reverse. Much of the west requires large irrigation projects to support population; little of the east does.

Will the real Will Huff please stand up?

Played euphonium Friday night in a concert with the Phoenix Pioneer Band, a re-creation of the turn of the century Phoenix town band. We opened with a rag, credited to Will Huff, and published by Fillmore brothers. And there-in hangs a tale.

Henry was the son of one of the two Fillmore brothers, a firm of religious music publishers in Cincinnati. As a youth, Henry mastered piano and violin, and then the slide trombone. His religious family tried to wean him from the trombone, viewed in the day as an instrument of the Devil – it was prominent in the music of dives, honky-tonks, and places not mentioned in polite company. Henry was not to be dissuaded, continuing with the trombone and eventually doubling down: he took up with an exotic dancer, and together they ran away to the circus, Henry playing trombone and soon conducting and composing music for the circus band, and the dancer…. dancing.

Eventually, Henry and family reconciled; he and the exotic dancer (now his wife) moved back home, and Fillmore Brothers publishing an extraordinary volume of Henry Fillmore compositions. So many compositions, in fact, that Henry used at least nine pseudonyms to avoid suspicions of his trying to corner the market.

One of those pseudonyms was Will Huff.

Then Henry chanced to meet the real Will Huff. Who turned out to be himself a musician and band composer, living nearby and published by a rival house in Henry’s own Cincinnati. One imagines a somewhat awkward conversation, but seemingly they worked it out, for Fillmore Brothers soon began publishing music by Will Huff as well.

So when one encounters music by Will Huff, published by Fillmore Brothers, one might not know for sure who wrote it.

(If this isn’t arcane enough for you, the one-time E-flat tuba with the Brass Band of Columbus, Paul E. Bierley authored (after much research) The Music of Henry Fillmore and Will Huff, as well as Hallelujah Trombone!, a biography of Henry. Paul sorts much of it out.)

Breadwinner vs Homemaker

Caught a panel discussion on gender rolls the other day; a comment not remarked upon during the discussion got me cogitating. It involved the “waste of talent” when a wife foregoes a professional career in favor of being “just a housewife”, raising the kids.

To be sure, if one is to have any division of labor in a two-parent household, an obvious one is between that of homemaker and that of breadwinner (though, clearly a good deal of overlap between the two, in most families). Our modern consumerist society, needing ever more income to acquire ever more stuff, values the latter over the former. But is that just?

From several viewpoints – Darwinian survival, religious imperative, societal continuity – the point of existence is in properly bringing up the young, so that they can produce and properly bring up the following generation. Thus the vital role is the homemaker; the breadwinner fills a subsidiary, supportive role only. Add to that the not uncommon observation of the difficulty of making the home (properly raising the kids), and one might better say that trading the homemaker role for a professional one is, in fact, a greater and more consequential waste of talent.

To some extent, we note that in remembering the departed. David Brooks (I believe) usefully distinguisher between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. On an (ephemeral) resume, we list accomplishments, jobs held, degrees and so on. On a eulogy (meant for the ages), we more proximately enumerate the “warm fuzzies” – how kind, giving, understanding, virtuous, and indefatigable the departed was. Sounds rather like the distinction between the required virtues of the breadwinner and the homemaker.