Concerning the Bourgain $ell_1$ index of a Banach space

Abstract

A well known argument of James yields that if a Banach space $X$ contains $\ell_1^n$'s uniformly then $X$ contains $\ell_1^n$'s almost isometrically. In the first half of the paper we extend this idea to the ordinal $\ell_1$-indices of Bourgain. In the second half we use our results to calculate the $\ell_1$-index of certain Banach spaces. Furthermore we show that the $\ell_1$-index of a separable Banach space not containing $\ell_1$ must be of the form $ω^α$ for some countable ordinal $α$.