Firefly and Early Modern State Formation

9-10-11

(You know, the date is in numerical order if you write it month-date-year. That's sort of cool.)

Okay, I like the show Firefly. I know there's only fourteen episodes (I own them) and I know that Fox screwed them over by not playing the first episode first. But that's not what's on my mind.

I'm in one of Diller's classes, Pirates, Captives and Slavery (also could be known as Early Modern State Formation), and the stuff we've been learning about pirates made me think of Firefly. (Plus, I just re-watched the first episode tonight; oh, the characterization in that show, the dialogue, so awesome.)

One of my teacher's special historical themes is modernity. Janelle spent all of History of England marking down how many times the teacher said it. Anyway, the best explanation for what modernity is, is a group/society/nation-state's way of being modern. I don't think that's supposed to be perfectly sensible, but whatever. So there's no one way of being modern in this view, blah blah history minor so I'm interested but you're not and that's the basic premise la de dah.

What we've been saying in this class is that pirate societies popped up on the fringes of other societies when the nation-states that those (usually) men were from were at peace, but not strong enough to police everything, particularly the high seas. Seems to me that pirates weren't really at the fringes, but at the frontiers of clashing modernities (I'm pretty sure Diller would squee over my use of a plural term for modernity. Moving on.). Pirates themselves usually came because they wanted off the naval ships and the merchant marine ships, if they'd gotten on the wrong side of the law, etc., Pirates thrived when there were weak governors who allowed the actions and people who created a black market for the goods they moved.

So, in Firefly, we've got a group of people living on a spaceship, ducking the laws of the biggest governmental entity. The captain is from the losing side of a war, and he doesn't want to bow to the winners. He has his own code of honor--and the Rim, the backwoods wilderness of space, well, it's the high seas, and the Alliance can't be everywhere at once. The people on the planets gladly are a market for the goods that the Serenity carries, and many places turn a blind eye to such actions.

It's not a perfect fit, but the idea's a bit shiny, at least. Besides, I've just started the class.

Oh, look, it became Sunday while I typed this. More later.