The return of History

I was having lunch in a Persian restaurant in London with my Nigerian friend Obi the other day when I had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn't a realization about globalization, though by the opening line of my post it could very well have been. Rather, a lightning bolt struck when Obi described to me the qualities he looked for in potential recruits for the unusual investment firm in which he is a partner. His company is "the largest - and sometimes only - foreign portfolio investor in many of the markets of sub-Saharan Africa." Obi and his colleagues spend their time analyzing corporate, economic and political information in that area of the world, in the hopes that this will help them make money for their clients.

I should point out at this juncture that Obi is not your normal investment analyst or fund manager. Far from being maniacally focused on making money, he is more of a Renaissance man of rare ability and kaleidoscopic interests. Obi is a medical doctor who can extemporize for hours about politics - from the sub-Saharan variety to Britain and America's arcane political systems - who discovered a zeal for corporate finance while doing an MBA at London Business School. We met there, and I've enjoyed his company tremendously - and been enlightened by his broad ranging insights - ever since.

While he and I chatted over lunch that day, I asked him what types of people he sought out to join his firm. After all, few people had his rare combination of medical, business and geopolitical knowledge; surely, there weren't many other 'Obis' out there to snap up for the company. Given that, I expected him to say that they hired either people familiar with Africa and its' public companies to whom they could teach corporate finance skills, or clever manipulators of the Black-Scholes options pricing model (an abstruse corporate finance tool) who could be instructed in the ways of the Saharan continent. To my great surprise, Obi responded that while both financial analysis abilities and knowledge in African affairs were valued assets in a potential recruit, the most critical requirement for him was an appreciation for ... history.

I was astounded, and it must have been apparent by my reaction since Obi went on to explain why. It all made perfect sense after he did, too. In a nutshell, the landscape of public companies in Africa today resemble, in an approximate sense, the state of corporate America at the beginning of the 20th century. The uber-corporations that stand astride the globe today began the last century as family-owned companies started in small towns (such as Sam Walton's Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart). As they grew into the behemoths they have become, they passed through predictable - and well documented - stages of development and growth. As Obi pointed out, looking at Africa in 2007 is not unlike looking at America in 1907. Consequently, predicting the commercial 'future' in Africa - identifying the right companies and industries in which to invest - has a lot more to do with history and less to do with finance or, to a certain extent, local realities. Obi punctuated his point by adding matter-of-factly, "face it, Ion: there is very little today that is actually new." Cue the lightning bolt here ...

Of course, he was right, and not just about history's applicability to business but to all aspects of life. Every generation tends to think - often through an intoxicating combination of naivete and self-absorption - that the challenges they face are completely unique and unparalleled. While most people concede the existence of historical antecedents, few actually accept the proposition that progress is more of a wheel than a line - that when we experience change it is more often than not as a repetition of history rather than a completely new story.

Take globalization, for example. Authors have written reams about the impact of this 'new' phenemenon. One of my favorite authors, Thomas Friedman, wrote two excellent tomes on the subject, The Lexus and The Olive Tree and the more recent The World is Flat. Both books gained renown for performing the literary equivalent of capturing the lightning of globalization in a bottle. Friedman - and authors like him - have done much to help the lay person understand globalization, but they have also contributed to the common misperception that somehow this is a new development. Globalization - even as we know it - has been a rising tide of change at least since Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the architect of Mercantilism, imported Venetian glass and Flemish tapestries to France in the mid 17th century. Some more imaginative historians trace its' roots all the way back to the Mongol Empire and the cross-continental capital and culture flows that stemmed from the Silk Road trade. Regardless of its' actual starting point, globalization is neither new nor a particularly revolutionary phenemenon. However, the concept is often denuded from proper historical context and portrayed in the media today as both unfamiliar and unprecedented.

The vast majority of 'analysis' about the Internet is another example of a-historical hyperbole. Don't get me wrong: I'm obviously not one of those deluded souls who believes that the Internet is a passing fad. However, I do submit that the changes wrought by the Internet are both more familiar and less fantastical than the conventional wisdom would have us believe. The Economist's recent survey on the Internet and new media (http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6794156) correctly put the Internet 'revolution' in perspective. Far from rejecting its' legitimacy as a revolutionary force, the survey made the point that we've experienced such a revolution before and that this one would follow a similar pattern. The magazine likened the Internet's arrival to the emergence of moveable type in the middle 15th century, an era where a new technology democratized knowledge (the Gutenberg Bible), "turbo-charged an information age" (The Renaissance) and set in motion forces that would reverberate centuries later (the modern ubiquity of mass media).

What The Economist did was to root a contemporary event or phenomenon into proper historical context. In effect, it subjected the Long Tail to the Long View, and in so doing gave us a critical and much-needed perspective on the present. As both the examples of globalization and the Internet show, what society perceives - and anoints - as new and never-before-seen is often neither. What too frequently is lacking is the intellectual reflex and rigor to look at the 'new' through the prism of the 'old'. Society would benefit, it seems to me, if more futurists acted as archeologists and the past informed more of our knowledge of the present.

Fortunately, History has been staging a bit of a comeback lately. With many of the complex conundrums that confound us today - from terrorism and the degradation of the environment to the war in Iraq - people appear to be turning to history to help make sense of it all. Little by little, historical perspectives weave their way into the public discourse on our modern maladies. Al-Qaeda is less and less seen as a terror cell that came to life on 9/11, but more properly put into context as a movement that arose from the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and catalyzed again by the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia at the end of the first Gulf War. The phenomenon of global warming was catapulted into the public consciousness by Al Gore's powerful documentary An Inconvenient Truth because it demonstrated that the Earth's temperatures were rising at a rate unseen in human history. The civil unrest in Iraq was once viewed as either the death throws of a recently-toppled totalitarian regime or the desperate final match strikes of a foreign-backed insurgency seeking to enflame the country. Today, it is seen through the prism of a millenia-old schism in Islam between Sunni and Shi'a - the contemporary boiling-over of a sectarian struggle that simmered for decades under Saddam's iron rule.

Even self-avowed anti-historians and current affairs columnists are looking to the past for answers now. The famously anti-intellectual George W. Bush was recently reading, at Henry Kissinger's suggestion, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, about France's experiences in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algeria in the mid 1950s, to help frame his foreign policy towards Iraq. In a stark illustration of how 'hip' historical analysis has become, New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof recently reached as far back as Virgil and the travails of Thucydides to offer the appropriate historical analogy to W's Iraq adventure (http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/opinion/23kristof.html?th&emc=th).

History, like the height of hem lines, comes in and out of fashion. After all, it wasn't that long ago (1989) that Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the 'The End of History'. George Will more recently mused sardonically about the Fukuyaman viewpoint - and the atypical period of peace, progress and prosperity that spawned it - as our collective 'vacation from history.' That holiday ended abruptly, on or about September 11, 2001. Thereafter, the world faced sufficiently chilling and complex challenges that we have increasingly turned to history for context, comfort and courses of action. This is as it should be. George Santayana's famous dictum that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is as true today as it was a century ago when it was written. These days, however, his aphorism could be updated to say that those who do not listen to the past are condemned to misunderstand the present. Simply put, yesterday gives us perspective on today and a chance at properly explaining tomorrow. After all, as my friend Obi put it so well, there is very little that is truly new anymore ...