A critical response to: Bruce L. Benson’s, "Enterprise of Customary Law"

          Although Bruce L. Benson’s, Enterprise of Customary Law was an informative paper full of useful information, it failed to address several key issues concerning mercantile law. For example, by conveniently omitting the role of religion in mercantile law, Benson missed an important lynchpin that should have been addressed. Additionally, by completely ignoring the banking and mercantile roles of both the Catholic and Jewish religions, Benson then missed the opportunity to better discuss how and why middlemen developed. Instead, Benson restated the over simplified thesis that middle men developed because extreme distances meant it was unlikely buyers and sellers would meet in person, and therefore would never develop lasting and trusting relationships. However, that oversimplification ignores the relationship between the Christian and Jewish faiths and the role of the government. Additionally, by ignoring those relationships, Benson failed to show how that relationship not only changed over time, and how it directly led to the demonizing of the Jewish people. 

Benson could have addressed that demonizing issue quite easily by stating the basic premiss of exchange was an exchange where both parties expected something of more value than what was given up, Benson stated those distances made exchanges more difficult. While true, the argument completely ignores the question of why middle men should spring up at all? Christian laws made lending money at a profit illegal. However, the laws were circumvented by merchants and others using Jewish merchants and bankers. 

Benson’s text only coved the first two chapters of his book, and for al I know, Benson could have ultimately addressed the issue later, but by failing to make mention the role religion played in the mercantile industry during the first two chapters, not only did Benson miss an important opportunity to discuss the Jewish question, but also the opportunity to show how the mercantile exchanges of Church medallions ultimately bifurcated the Church, while simultaneously causing the Jewish people to be seen as evil within the Christian and Muslim worlds, ultimately leading to the many atrocities against the Jewish people. 

However that was not the only historical issue Benson also failed to make note of. In his treatment of England, Benson failed to recognize the mercantile role in the war between Spain’s Philip II, and Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen of England. By completely failing to show how merchants in the latter half of the sixteenth century not only led to the destruction of the Spanish Armada, and ultimately led to the emergence of England as an important naval power and mercantile trader; Benson failed to adequately explain how both changed the world outside Europe. 

In conclusion, Benson claimed Merchant Law “evolved into a universal legal system through a process of natural selection.” Although he correctly stated merchants transacted business across international boundaries, however, without also examining the roles of both the Church and State, Benson’s first two chapters failed to make use of helpful and important discussions that should have been addressed. Instead, Benson chose to keep the discussion secular. While can be good from a scientific review, from a historical perspective it weakened his overall conclusion because, as demonstrated by Philip II, who declared bankruptcy several times while Elizabeth I did not, merchants supported Elizabeth I and simultaneously turned their collective backs on Philip II. Therefore, by not addressing the historical significances that change the world, Benson missed opportunities he should have exploited. 

WWII Code Breakers: The Unsung Heroes of Bletchley Park

It began with the Poles. Polish Codebreakers began breaking the German unbreakable enigma codes by December 1932. According to official histories at Bletchley Park, the three Polish mathematicians who first broke the German military Enigma codes over that 1932 Christmas, continued to break the codes until as late as 1938, when the Germans changed the number of coded wheels on their Enigma machines. When that happened, the three Polish mathematicians knew they did not have the amount of resources needed to overcome the mathematical obstacles. So by July, 1939, the Poles decided to quietly get information about how the German military codes to British and French codebreakers. With the British and French codebreakers in Warsaw, the Poles explained their techniques of how to overcome the Enigma machines. 

They also explained what they knew about the current German Enigma machine and gave their counterparts sheets of paper, called Zygalski sheets, that worked like mathematical cheat sheets, designed to force a solution for every setting of the Enigma machine. The Poles explained, using the Zygalski sheets,  given enough time and numbers of people running the equations, every German code could eventually be broken. However the problem was that given the way the Zygalski sheets were set up, it could take years of work just to break one code of the new German Enigma machines. 

Then, after Warsaw fell to the Germans in 1939, the Polish mathematicians managed to flee to Chateau de Vignolles, near Paris. They continued their work and sent copies of Zygalski sheets to British hands. Alan Turing took the sheets to a private home, about an hour by train from the outskirts of London, called Bletchley Park. From there, he quietly gathered some of the most brilliant minds available. They join him there and worked the problem of how to break the new Enigma machine codes. Unfortunately, just as progress was being made,  the Germans made a major change to the Enigma machine on May 1,1941. The new changes rendered the Zygalski sheet method of breaking the German codes completely useless. The new enigma machines had added two extra wheels and extra plug-ins too. Now the cheat sheets were worthless because instead of tens of thousands of combinations, there were now tens of millions of combinations.

The the Germans took Paris. Once again, the Polish mathematicians escaped, this time to the south of France. However, as the Germans took over France, the Poles had no choice. They ultimately reached London in August 1943, long after the Americans joined in the fight to defeat Germany and the Polish help was no longer needed or wanted for security reasons. 

Seeds of the UK and US relationship germinated at Bletchley Park almost a year before the US officially entered the war in December, 1941. In February of 1941, the Americans brought a “Purple” machine to Bletchley Park. The “Purple” machine was specifically used to break the Japanese diplomatic messages and it was hoped the machine would also be useful in breaking the German codes. (Note: Many conspiracy theorists claimed over the years that this “Purple” machine had broken the Japanese diplomatic and military codes in plenty of time to warn the Generals and Admirals in the Pacific of the impending Japanese attacks. This included military in Hawaii, but conspiracy theorists claim President F.D Roosevelt intentionally held the information back to allow the Japanese to attack. They state FDR did this so the American people would be outraged and want to go to war against Japan and the Germans. Of course, military historians have disproven the accusations enough times that the matter should be put to rest, but every so often someone else comes along to muddy the waters again. Consequently, I will not address these conspiracy theories in this short history, other to say the historical record proves these charges are unfounded.)

While the “Purple” machine did help the Bletchley Park wizards figure out how to break the Japanese codes, major advances did not take place until 1943 because it was not until then that the two important machines had been built and were being used successfully. The first was called the “Turing Bombe.” 

These six machines, called Bombe’s, looked like upright pianos with wheels turning and whirling than any great new code breaking machines, but in reality each Bombe contained twelve to twenty-four Enigma machines that automatically and systematically tried every one of the wheel combinations that the German military could use for their Enigma machines. Although the machines were very fast, there were literally thousands, and later millions of possible combinations for each of the messages the Germans sent, so that meant it might take up to six or seven hours just to figure out the correct wheel combination for just one important message. However, the Bletchley Park wizards did have several things in their favor. 

The first was that the Enigma machines were set up every month on the first day of the month, and the Germans never used the same set up twice. Second, the Germans always used the same format for their messages. This meant German messages for one unit always started out with the time, then the weather and so on. However, not every unit used the same format for their messages. Therefore, once the format was recognized for each military unit, then the messages could be deciphered using scientific guesses which sometimes worked out, but more often did not. For many months, it meant Bletchley Park had some messages it was able to break, but other times they struggled for any messages they could break.

However all that soon changed. The biggest break in 1943 occurred when a German code sender accidentally sent out the same message twice, using two different wheel combinations on the machine. He sent the message out in the clear, or uncoded, the first time, and then realized his mistake and sent the message a second time correctly encoded on the machine. When he did that, the Bletchley Park wizards broke the code, using the first message as a crib. With the crib, the code breakers knew at once how the wheels would then be changed every day until the end of the month. The result was spectacular for British Intelligence, for that month anyway. 

Additionally, about that time, British and American Naval forces had made their own important scores. It turns out that German Submarine commanders were required to make position checks. They sent the position checks using their own Enigma machines. However, on several occasions, British and American ships had “special information” telling them where to find the waiting submarines. Instead, the UK and US Navies were waiting for the German subs to surface. When they did, the navies successfully forced the German Subs to surface. Once surfaced, the Marines got on board the submarines and secure Enigma machines and the code books telling the German operators how to change the wheels every day for three to four months ahead of time. The naval attacks were daring and dangerous, but successfully managed to snare enough intelligence from the submarines to keep Bletchley Park breaking codes until well into 1944. 

In the autumn of 1943, despite the huge numbers of US codebreakers needed to break Japanese military codes in the US, the US managed to send three companies of US Army Signal Security Agency forces to the UK. One company was set to Y Station at Bexley, with the other two companies, including over 200 staff with two women, to Bletchley Park. At first the Americans were looked at by the British as a curiosity, but after the Americans began proving themselves, the British soon accepted the Americans as their equals. By then, Bletchley Park had almost 20,000 people working in the compound. The codebreakers were forced to find housing wherever they could in the surrounding villages. Only one family lived in Bletchley Park, and that was the family of the man who was head of security. 

By 1944, as additional military and civilian personnel arrived at Bletchley Park, it became harder to keep everything hush-hush. However, because the codebreakers, intelligence staff, and the linguists knew better than to ask any questions or to answer any questions, security remained so tight that one female driver, who had transported people to and from the area villages said she did not know who she was driving, or what  was done in Bletchley Park during the war, until 1972 when the first book about the Enigma and Bletchley Park was released! Even then, the security remained so tight that it took the Queen’s signature to allow the book’s publication.

The buildings, known as huts, were numbered and positioned so that no one had any idea what was going on in the other huts. Everything was on a need to know basis. For example hut eight was where the German linguists translated the broken codes from German to English, but they had no idea how Bletchley Park broke the German codes. Nor did they know what happened to the messages after they translated them. Instead, all they knew was that there was a little window between their hut and the hut next door. The window had a board and a box connected by some ropes along with a bell. When the message was decoded and then translated, they put the message in the box, rang the bell and it disappeared into the next building. Where it went, the linguists had no idea. All they knew for sure was that they were making a difference.

Where it went depended on what the message was. In 1943, for example, the British and Americans were fighting the Germans in North Africa. In North Africa,  armies fought and died on petrol. This was important because the German transported petroleum from Italy to North Africa by ships. However, they also transported blankets, food, and supplies for Allied POWs. Allied Command knew it was important to sink the ships with fuel, but not the ships with food and blankets for POWs. However, they also knew they could not just sink the ships with German military supplies like ammunition and petrol because the Germans would get wise about it in a hurry and would probably then change their codes making the Bletchley Park effort worthless. Luckily for the British, the Germans allowed the Italians to set up the ship transportation and Italian communication skills were not nearly as regimented as the Germans would have liked. Consequently, as their harbor pilots navigated ships out of their harbors, their radio communications were intercepted and retransmitted to Bletchley Park, where the code breakers quickly broke the Italian codes. Then, to cover up the fact that the British had broken the coded messages, the ships would be “spotted” by allied aircraft in the area. The German captains would then radio in they had been “spotted” and minutes later, as they were trying to race to the protection of the North African ports, British or American fighters and bombers would attack the specified ships that carried weapons, fuel, and ammunition. Ships carrying POW supplies would not be spotted  by Allied aircraft, and the majority of those ships carrying the POW supplies would make it safely across the Mediterranean Sea. The same thing happened with the broken German codes. If valuable targets were found in the broken German codes, cover stories, including fictitious spies and double agents, were created to convince the Germans they had been betrayed by people, not their own codes.

However, in 1943, the biggest secret was yet to be exposed. This secret was so secret that it was not ultimately exposed to the world until 1983! Its name? Colossus.

No matter what IBM and Bill Gates may claim, Colossus was the world’s first fully programable electronic computer. Built at the Post Office research department at Dollis Hill and named after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines, Heath Robinson, it was slow and unreliable, but its design was good enough to prove the idea. Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office Electronics Engineer used the idea and then built Colossus. 

Colossus used telephone switchers and radio tubes. It arrived at Bletchley Park in December 1943, just in time to break the new German “Lorenz” code. Lorenz no longer used dits and dots. Instead, it used teletype machines for communications and the old style computations were again worthless. Instead, because Colossus could read paper tape at 5,000 characters per second on wheels that traveled at 30 miles an hour, its computer capabilities meant it could also break codes in hours, that had originally taken weeks or months. On average, Colossus was so fast that it was able to break the new German Lorenz codes in six hours or less. 

As fast as the first generation of Colossus was, it was upgraded and replaced in early June 1944, just in time for Eisenhower to make his decision for the D-Day invasion on June 4,1944. The replacement, called the Mark II Colossus, proved Hitler and his General Staff had swallowed the deceptions orchestrated for them that Patton would attack land his army in the northern France. Instead, as the world now knows, it was Montgomery who led the invasion in an area to the south, known as Normandy. 

Eventually ten Colossus computers were made and used during WWII. However, Colossus remained a secret until 1986. As it turns out, Colossus was breaking codes long after WWII was over and was reading Soviet Union diplomatic codes until 1968, when it was replaced with then faster “supercomputers.” 

In 1968, ten Colossus Mark II’s were dismantled and destroyed because neither the UK or US could allow the Soviet Union to know its codes were vulnerable to Western attack. Consequently, all that remained after 1968 was one set of secret prints which detailed some of how Colossus was constructed. Even so, much of the information was lost forever. 

However, in July, 2011, the Queen and King of England visited Bletchley Park. While there, they Colossus and its rebuilder, Tony Sales. It took Tony Sales eighteen years with the help of hundreds of graduate students. The now retired and knighted computer genus, Tony Sales now is the curator of the computer museum that houses Colossus. It is a working display in its original Bletchley Park home, and open to the public.

Bletchley Park is also open to the general public for guided and unguided tours. It was here that the codes were broken. Many of the buildings are run down and falling down, but the excitement is still there for anyone looking to see for themselves where the brilliant mathematical minds went in the UK during WWII. The Polish mathematicians have not been forgotten either. In one end of a courtyard is a Polish monument. Next to it are the names of the three men that helped jumpstart the decryption techniques needed to break the German Enigma codes. 

So what would have happened had the codes not been broken? Would the war have been lost? Most likely, no. However, historians calculate that if the codes had not been broken, the war probably would have lasted another two years and a half. In that time, Hitler’s scientists might have succeeded in building jet aircraft, better rockets, and even a crude atomic weapon or two. Furthermore, in two an a half years of total warfare, no one knows what might have happened. 

Even so, the people of Bletchley Park were heros that need to be remembered. Their efforts saved untold lives and considerably shortened the war. Well Done. 

Globalization and Economic Interdependency

          Ever increasing globalization and economic interdependence will not lead to a safer world so long as shortages of goods and services remain. Even so, some modern political theorists believe that the end of the Cold War and recent trends towards globalization - i.e. growing international economic interdependence and reliance on international organizations - will make traditional instruments of power, such as military force, alliances, espionage, propaganda, and economic and diplomatic pressure, less important in international relations. These modern political base this idea on Montesquieu’s original argument that commercial republicanism can be a key tool to overcome expansionistic foreign policies. 

While some, like Walzer and Montesquieu thought humankind could somehow end conflict using commercialism and moral behavior and thus stop being reliant on the traditional instruments of power, other political thinkers like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Kaplan all tended to disagree, saying interdependence and international organizations are not enough to end the threat of conflicts.

For example, Hobbes stated, “...I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”

 This referred to Hobbes belief that human happiness was dependent the attempts to gain power to offset future needs and desires. Our own United States Declaration of Independence refers to this idea with the phrase, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

 Furthermore, if happiness were possible on its own, then the phrase preamble would be meaningless. Therefore, since state leaders are human too, then they too must also have the inclination to pursue happiness through the acquisition of power. Consequently, not having a world government makes no difference. State leaders rely on power politics to pursue their own self-interests.

Machiavelli agreed, claiming in The Prince that most leaders try to gain more power,  adding the effort to is not necessarily a moral one. However, in The Prince Machiavelli also argued that once the power was gained, “He who does not properly manage this business will soon lose what he has acquired, and whilst he does hold it he will have endless difficulties and troubles.”

 This meant that vice and cruelty may be necessary to achieve a moral end because strict moral arguments lead to war and civil conflict. In other words, morals have little place in politics. They limit the possible state responses and only states with leaders willing to use anything in its arsenal, including traditional instruments of power, will remain strong enough, and survive long enough, to end up with a moral society. 

Kaplan makes a similar argument and points out all foreign policy should be treated as a permanent form of crisis management. Furthermore, he states it is not realistic to expect relations among states to become more harmonic even as technology advances, no matter what technology is available. Instead, while technology can be used in ways to verify what other States are doing, but not explain why they are doing what they are doing. Furthermore, even knowing what other states is doing is no guarantee that a solution to a crisis can be found because Kaplan claims there are often no complete solutions to international problems “only confusion and unsatisfactory choices.”

          However, not everyone completely agrees. Walzer, for example goes even further and says states must sometimes behave in immoral ways to end up with a moral outcome. He states while Realists claim that morality does not exist, Walzer says there must be morals. Even in time of war, we discuss and debate morality in the forms of “the rules of war,”  and therefore, if there were no rules of war, then discussions and debates about morality would be unnecessary because they simply would not exist. Consequently, morals must exist. Rules and conventions of war prove that morality exists. Furthermore, if morals exist in total war, then they must also exist in times of peace. This idea led Walzer to claim as the world becomes more civilized, and governments become more interdependent, then conflicts will be decided in ever more moral ways.

           Montesquieu, advocated a different view. He stated commercial republicanism and commercial interdependence were the keys needed to overcome expansionistic foreign policies. Of course, Hitler’s role in WWII proves otherwise, but Montesquieu would have responded by stating Hitler’s early great successes left him arrogant and ungovernable, leading to his willfully attacking other states, all because his power was left uncheck by the German people.

          However, whether you agree or disagree with the great thinkers, as long people and states manage to exploit economic shortages for their own self-interests, the use of alliances, espionage, propaganda, economic and diplomatic pressures, backed by military force to preserve their self-interests will continue unabated. Furthermore, as Machiavelli pointed out, only the meek allow themselves to be dominated. Therefore, to maintain sovereignty, self-preservation demands diligence and the knowledge of what potential enemies are doing. That means so long as economic shortages exist, not even the growing interdependence and trends towards globalization will not be enough to end the reliance of states on traditional instruments of power for use in international relations.

¹ Hobbes, Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, (editor Edwin Curley, Hackett Publishing company, Inc, Indianapolis, IN, 1994) XI, Sec 2, p. 58.

² Preamble, United States Declaration of Independence, July 4,1776.

³ Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Translated by W.K. Marriott, (Project Gutenberg) p. 73.

⁴ Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics, (Vintage Books, 2002) pp. 12-13.

⁵ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed (Basic Books, NY, New York, 2006). 

⁶ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by Cohler, Miller, and Stone, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 11.4. pg. 154.