© Natalie Bennett (Gel plate print)

Events

Looking forward to finally making it back to the wonderful Diss Publishing to talk Green Thinking on Friday September 11. (The first date had to be postponed due to one of the heatwaves.) And on Tuesday, September 29 I’ll be joining Leeds Green Party to talk about both Green Thinking and Change Everything at the Kurdish Community Centre. (All welcome and tickets available now.)

Anyone seeking to find out more about Green Thinking can hop over to the Greenhouse Think Tank website for a review by Prashant Vaze. Yes, I’ll happily take “an intellectual tour de force, gliding eclectically across academia (anthropology, biology, economics, and history), science fiction, esoteric sources (indigenous Australian beliefs) and political speeches and writings”. There’s also details there of the Greenhouse bookclub online event, on Sunday September 13, discussing the book. (I’ll be there to answer questions.)

And if you’d like to catch up with an excellent discussion on my Nature’s Rights Bill, you’ll find it on the new edition of the Nature in a Nutshell podcast with the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management.

‘Chamberlain claimed falsely that Britain had agreed to provide a mediator at Prague’s request’

Last week, I explored the early modern links between England and Czechia. This week, it is on to the modern era, and what might well be taken as a cautionary tale, and certainly is a shameful tale for Britain, of geopolitical betrayal. You might say the Czech state was naïve, but London was certainly dangerously weak and disastrously unprincipled.

I’m relying, as last week, on the Richard Fidler’s The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague.

Unusually, in the long duree, Prague was mostly unscathed by the Napoleonic Wars, emerging still as a Hapsburg possession, and a provincial capital. But that did not bring calm and stability. Under the weak emperor Francis I, and his foreign minister Prince Kelmens von Metternich:

Bohemia’s reputation as a nation of malcontents and troublemakers brought it under particularly tight official scrutiny. In Prague, networks of police spies wormed their way into public gatherings, bookshops and other potential nests of subversion. Charles Sealsfield, a Czech-American writer, described the stultifying climate of suspicion and bad faith created by Metternich’s legions of police informers in Prague: ‘Every footman in a public-house is a salaried spy,’ he wrote. ‘There are speies paid to visit taverns and hotels, who take their dinners at the high table. Others will be seen in the imperial library for the same purpose, or in the bookseller’s shop, to inquire into the purchases made by the different persons.’” (p. 223)

Plus ca change…

But Czech nationalism was stirring, and one of the key figures – in the top floor rotunda of the National Museum, amid scores of solemn male busts there is a single female, Bozena Nemcova, nationalist icon and author of a nostalgic novella Babicka (The Grandmother).

“She was the very prototype of the 19^th-century urban ‘bohemian’ woman: brilliant, impulsive, unconventional and intellectually emancipated. Her depiction of rural life was drawn from happy memories of her childhood in a small Bohemian village, where she grew up as the daughter of a coachman and a laundry woman. At 17, she was forced into an arranged marriage to Josef Nemac, an aggressive and occasionally violent Czech patriot, a soldier almost twice her age. … encouraged Bozena to put aside her German romances and read Czech literature instead… When Babicka was published in 1855, it was quickly recognised as a classic … but it did nothing to pill Nemcova out of poverty and illness…. Died in poverty at the age of 41. Her funeral was a great pageant of Czech nationalism, attended by huge crowds. Her hearse was decorated with garlands of flowers, followed by a procession of young girls holding candles. Today, her image is printed on the Czech Republic’s 500 crown note.” (p.227)

Bozena in the National Museum, in a room otherwise only occupied by men

Britain comes back into the tale in the late 19^th-century through the local character of academic, politician and polymath Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, “the son of an illiterate Slovak coachman and a Czech cook who once worked at one of the Hapsburg’s Moravian estates, who while studying at Leipzig met and eventually married an American student Charlotte Garrigue, whose influence made him a firm early supporter of women’s suffrage and equal rights for women.

Masaryk’s mind was wonderfully wide-ranging: he was one part 15^th century Hussite; another part straitlaced Victorian; and yet another part seemed to live curiously in the future. In 1929, when talking pictures first appeared, Masaryk was bold enough to envisage wireless transmission of video images. ‘Just imagine … you could observe from your place, say in your sitting room, the jungles of Africa and what the beasts are doing there. You could see and listen the jungles of our society! Every man then would be forced to be honest, and there would be no secret plotting anymore… Wonderful, no?”(p. 227)

Oh well, prophets aren’t always spot on…

Entering the Austrian imperial parliament in 1891 for a tiny Czech Realist Party “he was attracting a growing legion of admirers in Britain and the United States. Over time, these friends took up senior posts in the British foreign office, The Times of London and the White House”. (pp) His ideas caught the attention of Albert Einstein, who came to Prague in 1911. At the outbreak of war, however, Masaryk slipped out of Prague “and reappeared months later in Paris, as leader of the Czech liberation movement in exile”.

“The final year of the war, 1918, opened with Germany and Austria launching a last great offensive, which ended with their forces in full retreat. The empire’s Czech, Polish and Hungarian regiments mutinied and decided to go home. On 6 January 1918, a group of Czech parliamentarians met at Prague’s Municipal House to issue a declaration demanding independent, which was recognised by the French on 29 June; the British on 8 August; and the Americans on 2 September. The war came to a close, as Winston Churchill quipped, with a drizzle of empires falling through the air. Karl I, the last Hapsburg emperor and King of Bohemia, never actually abdicated, he simply became the ruler of nothing at all as the empire’s constituent nationalities made their bids for independent nationhood.” (p. 255)

But many people who spoke German and regarded themselves as German Bohemians were left out in the cold.

“The German Bohemian deputies in Vienna moved quickly to declare their own autonomous German-Austrian state, as four separate islands on the borders of Bohemia and Moravia. But they received no international support, and when Czech troops took control of the German borderlands on Armistice Day, they met almost no resistance from the local populace.”

The monument to the Virgin Mary in the Old Town Square, and seen as a totem of Hapsburg dominance and the strangling of their culture and language, sharing it with that to the martyr Jan Hus. The former was torn down by a group of firefighters. Would be defenders of it were held back by the crowd. “The Czechoslovak Republic had 13 million citizens; of these, half were Czech, a quarter German, roughly a sixth were Slovak, in addition to smaller populations of Ruthenians and Hungarians…. Masaryk was a realist about inter-ethnic harmony, proclaiming: ‘You don’t necessarily have to love one another in order to live together in peace.” (p. 258)

The Hus memorial in the Old Town Square. (The Virgin Mary one is also back, in a replica erected in 2020)

The economy boomed in the mid-1920, with Czechoslovakia having inherited 60-70% of the former empire’s industrial capacity, combined with relatively cheap labour and excellent education. Here it was, by Karel Capek, that the term robot was invented in 1922.

But there were threats.

“The castle’s intelligence network was closely monitoring Russian-directed communist activity, but Masaryk was more troubled by the rise of a Mussolini-inspired movement calling itself the Czech National Fascist Community… had infiltrated elements of the armed forces and the rightwing parliamentary parties, were pan-Slavist, anti-German and anti-Jewish. Masaryk denounced them as ‘pathological scum’. … Masaryk suppressed their activities with a mix of legal and extra-legal methods. In parliamentary elections, the Czech fascists never won more than 2 per cent of the national vote.” (p. 262)

Hitler was another scale of threat.

“In the first decades of the 20^th century the symbols of modern Prague had been the Skoda automobile, the Art Nouveau café, the Barrandov movie studios and the electric tram. The totems of the next era would be the tank, the cramped deportation train, the propaganda broadcast and the unmarked secret police car.”

Masaryk mentored his successor, Edward Benes (“pronounced Ben-esh”), incorruptible, dodged and self-educated, if far from smooth. He was not seen as ideal, but there was no one else.

“The foundation stone of Czechoslovakia’s national security was a Treaty of Mutual Assistance signed with France in 1925. There was no corresponding pact with London but Benes fully expected that if France went to war on Czechoslovakia’s behalf, then Britain would inevitably be drawn into the fight – a powerful deterrent for any would=be invader.” (p. 266)

Masaryk and Benes had not done a good job in managing relationships with the German minority.

“Found its voice in a somewhat mousy former gymnastics instructor named Konrad Henlein. In October 1933, Henleign formed a movement that became the dominant political forces in the region: the Sudeten German Party… careful at first to declare his loyalty to Prague; his stated wish was not for integration with the German Reich, but for greater autonomy within the republic, a reasonable demand on the face of it. Henlein made frequent visits to London where he cultivated the good opinion of Britain’s elites in a conservative suit, but at home, he took to addressing public rallies in the style of a Fuhrer, with banners and uniformed supporters.” (p. 268)

After Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles by invading the supposed demilitarised Rhineland, the weakness of France was exposed “the French General Staff were mired in pessimism and warned the civilian leaders than an intervention would lead them straight back into the misery of prolonged trench warfare.

“The whole edifice of Czechoslovakia’s national security rested on a stable and resolute France … Benes’s expectation that Britain might stand with him against a newly militant Germany was also ill-founded. Although there was no defence pact between the two nations, Benes, the indomitable optimist, expected that in the event of a German attack, the Anglo-French relationship would work like a string, tugging Britain along to defend Czechoslovakia. But he had it exactly backwards: it would instead act as a leash that the British would pull on to restrain France from drawing the both of them into a new war with Germany … Although Benes might have seen Britain as a natural ally in the club of European democracies, the sentiment was not widely reciprocated in Britain’s Foreign Office, which regarded Czechoslovakia with a cool, unsympathetic eye… Benes, irritating and unsociable, was widely disliked in Whitehall, even by opponents of German appeasement, one of whom described Benes as ‘a blind little bay, who has done a lof of flapping in his night”. (pp. 274)

The ambassador in London was Jan Masaryk, the former president’s son.

“Walking past No 10 Downing Street one day, Masaryk pointed at the black doot and told his companion, ‘I spend most of my official time in there, explaining to the gentleman inside that Czechoslovakia is a country and not a contagious disease.’”(pp. 275)

And the view of Britain does not improve.

“In early November 1937, Hitler told his general staff he was ready to create that ‘steel-hard power centre’ in central Europe, by engulfing Austria and Czechoslovakia. He told his generals he believed the British were ready to give up on the Czechs. The generals were sceptical, until Lord Halifax arrived from London two weeks later and confirmed it … told Hitler that a variation in national boundaries would be acceptable to Britain, provided it was not based on force… Halifax penned an optimistic assessment of the meeting for Chamberlain. He felt sure, he wrote, that Hitler was sincere when he said he did not want war. Several months later, Halifax was promoted to foreign secretary.” (p. 281)

And so Hitler pushed on.

“On 20 July [1938] … the British ambassador to Prague, Sir Basil Newton, suggested that an ‘independent’ mediator be brought in to negotiate a solution between Benes and Henlein’s SdP…. When Newton threatened to publicise the offer of mediation alongside Prague’s rejection of it, Benes backed down. Chamberlain promptly announced the mission to the House of Commons, but claimed falsely at that it was Britain that had generously agreed to provide a mediator at Prague’s request. It was one of the many acts of British cynicism and treachery that Benes would remember after the war. The mediator chosen by the British, Lord Runciman of Doxford, was an aristocrat in a winged collar and a top hot, who undertook his mission in a fog of ignorance, arrogance and naivete… When the correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph glimped Runciman [at Prague station], he muttered a line from Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. ‘The hangman with his little bag came creeping through the gloom.” (p. 286)

I won’t run through the better-known phase of Chamberlain seeking, in person, again and again, to appease Hitler… but the Czech part of the story might be ended with preparations for war in London.

“But the prime minister confessed to Halifax ‘I’m wobbling all over the place.’ That night, on 27 September, Chamberlain famously expressed his anguish in a BBC radio broadcast: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” (p. 293)

The Czechs could be forgiven for holding that against us.

And particularly the Czech Roma, for with a Hitler-friendly government in power in 1938:

“A law was passed to establish two labour camps to intern the Czech Roma people, who were characterised as ‘nomadic vagabonds who avoid work’. Only one in 20 would survive the coming cataclysm.” (p. 299)

I don’t generally focus much on WWII history. It is such well-trodden territory. And I don’t subscribe to theories that we are in the 2020s engaged in some kind of inevitable 1930s replay. History is not prewritten, but made by the actions of people. But in that useful formulation, it does often rhyme.

And in 2026, it is impossible to think there are not some lessons and useful reflections here.

Britain is no longer perceived to be the powerful decider of European and global futures. The Empire is gone. Rather it is, in its relationship to the US very like that supplicant position that Prague occupied in 1938. As I reflected at the start of last year, a view that I now feel even more strongly, “Why assume that the alliances of the later 20th century would continue into the 21st?”

The historian Peter Frankopan, for whom I have enormous respect (if you haven’t read his The Earth Transformed, a foundational piece of earth system history, you should) has reflected on last week’s visit to Moscow of John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA. There has been rampant, and wildly various, conclusions about the reasons for this – and were I Volodymyr Zelenskyy I would be seriously concerned, but Runciman comes up with an explanation I haven’t seen elsewhere: that Washington is concerned that the Putin regime may be tottering, and instability in this major nuclear power is obviously a major concern.

I don’t think it is possible to know today – historians may be picking over this in 50 years’ time, as historians, with the release of papers decades after events, have long been picking over WWII actions for many years.

But the lesson of the Czechoslavak Republic is clear (and I haven’t gone into, although the book does, their efforts to win backing from Moscow, a gesture of desperation).

If you are a middle-ranking (or smaller) power, don’t put all your trust in the big guys. Their interests are not your interests; their promises or gestures are not to be counted on. Other routes have to be found to security.

But giving in to the vicious and power-hungry is no answer either. As a book I pointed to yesterday highlights, many actors can play a positive role in genocide prevention. And I’d extend that to saying many actors, state and non-state, can play a role in protecting vulnerable states from voracious neighbours. Which is why the UK needs to be finding a new place in the world, one as a positive, constructive, engaged middle-power actor, something I focus on in Change Everything.

Almost the end

I think that’s just about enough for now; planning on a midweek “picks” Substack since there’s a lot of train journeys (to and from Lisbon) in my coming week.

So finally, not to be too depressing, but if you want a demonstration of the interlinked nature of planetary boundaries, from climate and biogeophysical flows to biodiversity collapse, the account of this year’s disastrous (almost non-existent) giant cuttlefish mating season off the coast of South Australia deserves highlighting. “Just 1,811 cuttlefish turned up to mate this year, down from 63,000 last year.”

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Revisiting personal and historical ties with Prague

I was last properly in Prague in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall had come down. I caught the sleeper from Berlin just before the official border controls between West and East German were ended, so had the memorable moment of, having been deeply asleep on my couchette bunk, experiencing a torch thrust into my face and “Achtung Passport” yelled at me.

But Prague itself was magical in 1990 - not just the architecture and history, but the enthusiasm of the people for new ideas, the pop-up art galleries on every corner, the discussion at the bus stop. After I revealed my Australianess to a couple of women about my age we had a wideranging debate, about different models of childcare provision around the world, about the nature and practice of democracy.

The food as I recall had a distinctly Soviet bloc flavour - indeterminate slabs of stewed meat in runny gravy with mashed potato, slopped on a plastic tray. (I had a moment of cognitive dissonance when I saw a similarly arranged restaurant on this visit, but now serving tofu salad and macha latte.) And the hostel I stayed in back in 1990 had clearly been rapidly assembled to profit from the influx of backpackers - my bed was a sofa from which the back had been ripped.

And I remember still emotional power of the informal memorial to Jan Palach, the student who self-immolated in 1969 in protest at the Soviet occupation, a giant pile of flowers and candles. There’s now a formal memorial.

This visit I couldn’t resist when I found a book by an Australian, Richard Fidler, who was in Prague roundabout the time I was back then, The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague. It has a few personal reflections, some memories that reflect my own, including a thought that I also recall: “I hoped Prague might somehow evade having its face stamped with the same generic corporate logos as every other city in Europe.” Spoiler alert, it hasn’t. Although it does still run to high quality, what seem to be independent, bookshops.

One of the reasons I haven’t been back since is that the city went through a phase as the hen and stag do destination of choice, and I really didn’t want to see that. But it seems that is less the case now, happily, although it can’t be accidental that this sign warning against street drinking is in only in English.

But back to the book, which is pretty well a straight retelling of Prague history. And what struck me overall about it was the accounts of how English (and later British) history is surprisingly closely intertwined with Czech, a reminder of the essentially European nature of our islands. Of course we might be able to go back far further, but a good place to start is the 14th century.

Taking the Sorbonne as his model, in 1348 Charles [IV] founded a university in the Old Town to provide a caste of educated officials for his administration. Prague University, later renamed Charles University, was the first of its kind in central Europe. It gathered a community of scholars from as far away as England, Scandinavia and the Balkans into the heart of Prague and infused the city with science and philosophy. (p. 79)

One striking thing about Czech history, although about most history when you look into it, is the prominence of women, and women defying Victorian-style mores:

Charles then engineered a fourth and final diplomatic marriage to Elizabeth of Pomerania. Empress Elizabeth was forthright and possessed enormous physical strength: she was said to enjoy entertaining dinner guests by bending swords and horseshoes with her bare hands. She and Charles would have six children together, including Sigismund, a future emperor, and Anne, who would one day become the queen consort of Richard II of England. (p. 85)

But the interaction was usually below the level of royalty. Fidler mentions an English writer who deserves more attention, Elizabeth Jane Weston. Taken by her mother to Prague as a child in 1583, with an Englishman taking up the post of court alchemist, she had a good private education, and when family fortune collapsed after her stepfather killed a man in a duel, she started writing to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, letters published as a book that started her on a writing career (in Latin), which flourished - recognised across Europe — until, the mother of seven, she died in childbirth at the age of 31. (Which reminds me to point again to one of the most brilliant books I have ever read, Women Latin Poets - there were a lot of them.)

Fidler reports how Weston experienced at least one of what were regular floods of the city. She “described the weird spectacle of river water rushing through the streets: “Here is a man, here is a bed, and here his wife swims. You see beams and pine trees, you see houses swimming along; monstrous things are tossed in the rushing channels.” (p. 85)

But well before Weston, with Charles IV’s successor Wenceslas IV (Known as “the Idle” - 1363-1419) on the throne, and everything going badly, including the Catholic Church having two men contending to be called Pope, in residence at Avignon and Rome respectively, and as Fidler reports, indulgence pedlars running wild: “Inventive theologians, acting like hedge-fund managers, came up with new angles, such as the sale of indulgences to help the souls of the already dead. … Indulgence hawkers sharpened their sales pitches. In Saxony, a Dominican friar sang from town to town, ‘When a penny in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.’” (p. 92)

In Oxford, the master of Balliol College, John Wyclif, saw how far the church had wandered from its lean and muscular origins. He called for clergy to divest themselves of their fine robes, their sumptuous palaces and vast property holdings, and rededicate themselves to Christian poverty. Wyclif shocked the curia still further by rejecting the concept of purgatory and the need for clerical celibacy. (p. 97)

Fidler reports how Czech students at Oxford made copies of his works, and brought them back to Prague, where they were read by Jan Hus, a university scholar from a humble background:

John Wyclif’s writings delighted him. ‘Wyclif, Wyclif,’ he scribbled excitedly in the margins, ‘you will unsettle many a man’s mind.’(p. 98)

There’s considerable modern scholarship (and controversy of course) on Wycliff’s influence across central Europe (see here for eg), and also an interesting thesis on Hus and Wycliff’s links to early Quakers.

Wycliff was more than a Bible translator, he was a sophisticated philosopher, so no wonder his works appealed so much across Europe. As this academic outline explains: “The Early Modern rejection of scholastic philosophy as needlessly complicated sophistry meant that the milieu in which Wyclif thought and wrote would be forgotten for centuries.” Which ties into (as I discuss in Green Thinking) how subsequent scholars have too often fallen into the predjudiced revisionism of their forebears. There’s so much still to do to recapture respect for the Middle Ages.

Which includes rescuing the amazingly radical politics of Hus and the Hussites. Back to Fidler on Hus:

Hus also encouraged women to take on a greater role in public life, reminding them that as creatures made in the image of God, they were the equals of men. (p. 99) In most medieval societies, women were brought into combat only in the most desperate circumstances; at Tabor, they were trained to fight as frontline soldiers. A woman, as the crusaders would soon discover, could wield a flail more or less as lethally as a man. (p. 111)

Of course it is all going to end with Hus at the stake, but before that - and I’m surprised (well perhaps not) that more is not made by military historians - of the success of the Hussites’ general.

Zizka was a military leader of genius, the most innovative European commander of his era. Forced to improvise with meagre resources, he invented a fluid new style of warfare that shocked and baffled his enemies for years. A former mercenary, Zizka had already lost an eye in battle and was slowly going blind in the other one. Nonetheless, his mind was able to envision the contours of a field of combat so vividly that he won victory after victory, often against much larger forces…. Wooden agricultural carts were remade into primitive tanks with slatted walls and hinged flaps; some were designed to hold infantrymen, others to hold lightweight gunpowder cannons.” (pp. 111-112)

Religious conflict continued with Rudolf II as the Holy Roman Emperor (1576 to 1612), but he was not a man to tackle the issue, retreating to his private obsessions, which are reminder of how the world was already linked up.

Rudolf kept a menagerie of living wonders within the castle grounds: birds of paradise, crocodiles, a cassowary from New Guinea, a dodo from Mauritius, and a special enclosure full of big cats – lions, tigers and leopards. Exotic creatures from distant climates were unlikely to last long at Prague Castle, but such concerns failed to move the compulsive collector in the castle. ‘What he knows,’ wrote Archduchess Maria of Styria, ‘he feels obliged to have.’ (p. 137)

There’s plenty more English people floating around Prague at this time.

In early August 1584, word spread through the city that the famous English magus Dr John Dee had come to Prague along with his companion, the Irish seer and alchemist Edward Kelley. Tadeas Hajek, who had long corresponded with Dee, invited them to lodge with him in his House at the Green Mound and offered them the use of his alchemical workshop….Rudolf’s Catholic advisors feared that Dee was consorting with evil spirits, and suspected he might be acting as an English spy on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham.

Right at the start of the Thirty Years War, 1618, - indeed the trigger for it there’s more involvement from our islands:

The Bohemian rebel barons took the fateful step of deposing Ferdinand as their king, and offered the vacant throne to a young Protestant prince, Frederick V of the Palatinate of the Rhine. They hoped both he and his glamorous Scottish bride, Elizabeth [daughter of James VI of Scotland and James I of England], would rally all of Protestant Europe to their cause. (p. 186)

But there were more later, intellectual connections. In 1829 the Bodleian Library bought the massive collection of books and manuscripts of the Prague rabbi David Oppenheim, the foundation of its Hebrew collection.

Finally: You might have thought I’d be tracking more modern history in looking at the interactions between London and Prague, and that might be the next Substack. Spoiler: London doesn’t come out well. (And if you are wondering how to get to Prague, there’s an excellent sleeper train from Basel.)

Picks of the week

Reading

Described as a novel, Beasts of the Sea, by Finnish writer Iida Turpeinen in my view might be better described as an historical re-imagining. The facts of the existinction of the harmless, gentle, and giant herbivore known as Steller’s sea cow, which could weigh up to 11 tons, are told through a narrative based on the historical facts about the first marine mammal hunted to extinction by humans.

The four surviving (just barely) examples of sirenians - dugongs and manatees - live in tropical waters, but this species had come to specialise in the sub-Arctic waters of the North Atlantic. According to often starving sailors, it tasted - with thick layers of insulating blubber - wonderful. Which was to be its very rapid doom, slaughtered at scale with only a small percentage of the flesh actually used.

But while underlying this is a tragedy, the book also vividly recreates the worlds of generations of people who exploited, and sometimes loved, nature, while facing up to the challenging - often life-threatening - conditions of the Bering Strait and Siberia. It finishes with the account of how egg collecting came to be (largely) ended, potentially crucial to preventing feathered animals following the sea cow to extinction. I read it in a single session, so captivating did I find it.

Here’s the Guardian review.

Listening

On the New Books Network, the indefatigable Miranda Melcher talks to feminist anthropologist Dr. Meena Khandelwal about her book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, focused on research the academic did in Rajasthan.

It caught my attention because back a quarter century or so, when I was enmeshed in the international development community, supporting “efficient” cookstoves was a big thing. But as Khandelwal explains, attempts to replace traditional methods have been a litany of failure, unsurprisingly when they were far too often driven by ignorant, arrogant outsiders (often male), trying to tell what they regarded as ignorant and uneducated women how to conduct a major part of their day.

The anthrologist powerfully unpicks the term “drudgery”, as used unthinkingly for the work of fuel collection for wood stoves, pointing out powerfully that this is a social, even pleasurable activity, that if the women weren’t doing it, they might instead be for miniscule wages carrying bricks at a kiln, or breaking rocks for a road. The assumption that working for wages is more “efficient” or “productive” than caring family is something deeply embedded and that we so need to unlearn.

But there’s more reason to listen: as I hope is slowly starting to take root in academia, the experiences of the Global South are being used to draw general conclusions about human societies: there’s a commentary about how the Rajasthan example is usefully linked to how “labour-saving devices” just changed the work of US “housewives”, rather than reduced it. As is discussed in the podcast, these women’s experiences as just as universal as those of women in the Global North. (Something I also reflect on in my book Green Thinking.)

Thinking

A fascinating, deep and detailed exploration of a question now surely settled - for all but the most anthropocentric thinkers - how sophisticated were Neanderthal societies? By one of the world by Gianpiero Di Maida, scientific manager at the Neanderthal Museum in Germany.

The conclusion: They

“Were not only cognitively capable of syntactic communication and possessed a complex social life (likely including social coordination) as well as a moral sense, politics and religiosity … [with] an immanent cosmology that bound together the us-community, the community of other beings (humans, animals and most likely non-humans too) and the landscape.”

Which led me to more fascinating reading on post-Cartesian (oh please!) approaches to thinking, known as 4E.

“Cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures …they constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain-body-world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self-regulating system.”

Researching

Photo by Julian Schneckenburger on Unsplash

Fascinating work on capuchin monkeys, known for their intelligence: their culture can be transmitted over time even without contact between individuals, only with their cultural products.

They understand what types of rock are good for anvils and for hammers to use to crack open nuts, but they will also be influenced by signs that rocks have previously been used for each purpose.

Fascinating, although frustrating in its anthropocentric direction:

“The study provides a fresh perspective on interpreting early hominin archaeological sites, where the accumulation of used stones may have attracted repeated visits and reuse.”

How about we instead say many species have complex cultures and methods of learning? We are nothing special in that regard.

Almost the end

The repression of creative subjects and the exercise of creativity is a common practice among autocratic regimes - and even those just seeking to maintain the status quo. See the downgrading of such subject in British education over recent years, without even starting on Trump’s US.

Why? Well one reason is that art can be a means of scathing critique. And there can have been few more effectively scathing pieces than Georg Scholz’s German Small Town by Night (1923), which I saw in the Kuntsmuseum in Basel (a spectacularly good - if very male-dominated and 20th-century-shaped collection).

No wonder Hitler called it “degenerate art”, even though you could not get more realist, or realistic, a critique. A few details (which need to come with a trigger warning as some may find disturbing) …

The power of satire should never be under-estimated, as Indian’s “cockroach” movement has just shown.

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Book news

Little reminder that if you’re taking a country walk (hopefully in the relative cool of morning or evening, given current conditions), Change Everything is available wherever you get your audio books, as well as of course from Wilton Square for the print version.

What’s your ‘poison’: Saloop, spruce beer, orgeat or capillaire?

No, it can’t all be deeply serious reading over the summer, so I’ve been enjoing consuming Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London by Peter Ross. Although I do have to make the point that it is a reminder how many foods and varieties we’ve lost from general consumption in the Great Homogenisation of global cultures.

And also how many people came to London and brought new food traditions from across Europe and beyond these hundreds of years ago, including the fascinating saloop/salep. Which sounds just the thing to finish an evening. (Got to try it some time, apparently it can be made from orchids in the UK, so this could be a domestically grown substitute for tea and coffee - food security in action!)

There’s also a reminder of how much the globalisation of cafes and restaurants has been its homogenisation also in the setting. My heart always sinks finding yet another identikit “posh coffee shop” in yet another city, rather than something speaking to its history and traditions.

Who wouldn’t love to visit Don Saltero’s Cofffee House, located on what would later be Cheyne’s Walk in Chelsea, which “curated an impressive collection of curiosities”.

“Catalogues of Salter’s collection survive, and list an array of fascinating items displayed in 17 glass cases, as well as attached to the wall and hanging from the ceiling. Thse included tiger ‘tusks’, the skeleton of a guinea pig, a piece of the True Cross, the Four Evangelists’ heads intricatedly carved into a cherry stone, an Eskimo canoe, Mary Queen of Scot’s pin cushion, Queen Elizabeth’s prayer book, and a pair of nun’s stockings. In 1756, at the opposite end of London, Adam’s Coffee House near Shoreditch Church displated… over 500 objects… some satirizing the relics to be found in Catholic Europe, including the very comb used by Abraham on the heads of his sons Isaac and Jacob, and, most amusingly of all, Adam’s keys to the front and back doors of the Garden of Eden.” (p. 68)

Those who think social media can be nasty about different cultures and traditions might be reminded that the past had its own ways of so behaving.

Lunch in Georgian London typically would not involve meat in any quantity (although it might include eels or in hot weather whelks, when the standard fare of pea soup was less attractive).

“Green pea soup, made from fresh peas, would have been a seasonal dish… Soup made from dried peas could be prepared year-round, making it a more versatile and probably cheaper option. Another popular Georgian soup was gravy soup, … the process involved simmering shin of beef, dried peas and onions to create a rich stock, to which diced vegetables were then added. [The cook at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street] Richard Brigg’s recipe suggests finishing it with crisp French bread croutons for added texture. Onion soup was also well regarded, with Briggs including five different recipes for it in his book. Soups featuring pasta, such as vermicilli or macaroni, were also popular. In 1815 Signor Pagliano’s moderately priced establishment near Leicester square offered vermicilli soup for 6d a bowl, with herb soup and broth available as more economical options at 4d a bowl.” (p. 81)

While women’s chances to eat respectably in public were limited, they did exist.

“When Louis Simond made a visit to Britain in 1810-11 he described a ‘lunch’ [still quite a new idea] that ‘decent persons’ could obtain from pastry shops, typically ‘a slight repast of tarts, buns &c with a glass of whey; it costs 6 or 8d sterling. A young and pretty woman generally presides behind the counter, as in the coffee-houses of Paris’.” (p. 82)

Soft drinks go back a long way, and not so soft, include spruce (made from new growth) beer and ginger beer.

“Non-alcoholic options encompassed soda water, natural mineral waters, orgeat, lemonade and capillaire… the English scientist Joseph Priestley published a paper on his process for “impregnating water with fixed air” in 1772…. men like Johann Jacob created successful businesses bottling soda water. Schweppe moved from Switzerland to London in 1792 … Orgeat is a drink that mixes barley water with a syrup prepared from bitter and sweet almonds, sugar, lemon rind, and rose water or orange flower water. The resulting cordial could be dilued with water or added to other drinks. Capillaire was a syrup made from maidenhair fern. Ann Shakelford gives a recipe for the drink in her cookbook of 1767, which involves infusing 1 ounce of the best maiden hair fern leaves, (probably dried) in boiling water for 12 hours before adding soft brown sugar. The mixture is then filtered and orange flower water is added. The writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson frequently enhanced his glass of port with some capillaire.” (p. 86-87)

There was some help, sometimes, for those who struggled to feed themselves, although with an all-too-common through the ages strongly expressed desire to separate the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor.

“In 1979 the Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Coluquoun, who also served as a magistrate in London, documented an initiative to provide affordable meals to some of the East End’s improverished residents. Coluquoun led a committee formed at Lloyd’s Coffee House to establish what became known as the ‘Meat and Soup' Charity’. Its mission was to distribute tickets to the ‘deserving’ poor across several East End parishes, enabling them to purchase hot meals at a reduced cost, Applicants for these tickets underwent careful vertting by local parish officers to confirm their eligibility, with particular scrutiny to avoid those struggling with alcohol addiction. Widows and infirm men received single tickets, while families were allocated up to four. … The committee believed people would not value comething given for free, but also wanted to ensure that the poor received the same quality of food as full-paying customers.” (p. 93)

There were also ulterior, supposedly educative if patronising, intentions.

“Colquhuon envisioned that, over time, those taking part would come to appreciate the nutritional value and cost-effectiveness of leg-of-beef soup, understanding that it was far cheaper and healthier than spending their limited funds on roast meat once a week. In a more ambitious effort, the charity sought to promote better financial habits among the poor, helping them break the cycle of pawning their work clothes and tools each work to retrieve their Sunday clothes from ‘hock’ and pay for some food. By encouraging budgeting and saving, the goal was to enable individuals to gradually escape this fragile and precarious financial situation.” (p. 93-4)

But no new funders emerged and the programme ended after five months. But its a reminder of how many struggled in Georgian London, a situation that would only worsen into Victorian times.

Street food was the norm for many, including costermongers, who had their own culture and customs.

“For 2 pence, costmongers could buy half a pound of ‘black ornaments’ - small pieces of meat that were discoloured and dirty but not spoiled, usually sold from a butcher’s block. These would be taken to the taproom of a public house to be cooked. Alternatively, they might purcahse a hot pie, either savoury or sweet, to eat on the street or in the pub… Other costermonger dinners included tripe, cow heel, beef sausages or soup from an inexpensive cookshop… A typical meal might consist of a saveloy … paired with a pint of beer or a glass of gin.” (p. 95)

And the semi-equivalent of internet ordering ahead was available.

“At the Cheshire Cheese in Wine Office Court just off Fleet Street - a venue that still exists, though now called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Rylance tells us: ‘The moment you enter, you give your order to the waiter, he calls to the cook below with the voice of a Stentor. So great is the afflux of diners in this house, between noon and six in the evening, that many persons find it convenient to call and order their dinner an hour or two beforehand, go out to transact business, and then on returning, their dinner is instantly served up smoking, and their porter foaming.” (p. 103)

But Londoners have long had a sweet tooth, for which we can’t forget slavery was delivering the ingredients.

“A wide variety of sweet treats were … available from street sellers. These included raspberry biscuits, conkeys (mincemeat baked in a crust), Dutch butter cakes and Jew’s butter cakes (both may have been shortbreads), Dutch biscuits, Bowlas tarts (made of sugar, apple, and bread), jumbles (crisp cakes made of treacle, butter and flour), jam tarts, Coventry's (three-cornered puffs with ham inside), plum cakes, sponge cakes, flay cakes (using cheap sheep or pig fat instead of butter), along with muffins, crumpets, cheesecakes and pastry pigs. This impressive array does not include the numerous varieties of gingerbread.” (p. 121)

Although a Guildhall Library post explains some of the troubles sellers could get into.

They might not have been able to make ice, but they sure did store it.

“Gould’s ice house in the basement of Grantham Place would have been stocked with lake or pond ice collected during the winter months … Gould may have sourced his from Grange & Moore in Piccadilly, who delivered ice at a rate of 7 guineas a ton. Private visitors to the shop could also buy a pound of ice for two pence. However in 1789-90 the winter was unusually mild, sparking concerns among confectioners and pastry cooks about a potential shortage of lake and pond ice. In January 1790 a group of worried confectioners petitioned Parliament for permission to import ice from Greenland and other distant sources. Anticipating the need, they had already begun outfitting three or four shops to fetch the ice.. In June, the St James Chronicle reported that one of the vessels had already returned with 100 tons of ice, which was rapidly sold at £10 a ton, including import duties of just over 27 per cent.” (p. 128)

If all this looks rather richer and more prosperous than our ideas of Victorian times, there may well be reasons for that. (Not to mention the relative ecological richness.)

“Because oysters were so plentiful and inexpensive in Georgian London, oyster warehouses and stalls could also be found in the East End… Like many street foods, shellfish sold best on Saturday nights and Sundays. In the 1820s and 1930s one oyster seller reported strong sales, making a good profit at a penny an oyster. But by the early Victorian period his earnings had dropped - he now sold three oysters for a penny. This decline, echoes by many street sellers interviewed by Mayhew, reflected broader changes. By the late 1840s the same seller observed that the poor - his main customers - were even worse off than in the late Georgian period. Those with just a penny to spend were more likely to choose bread and cheese over oysters for supper.” (p. 198)

Picks of the week

Reading

Thinking a lot about security, I’ve been enjoying a neat little book The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World, which starts with the widely covered, massive disruption in Tonga when a volcanic disruption broke its one digital connection with the outside world, and the connection between two of its main islands. And covers the grave security concerns that affect the UK, and the world, given the fragility of our digital connections.

What I learnt that was new, however, was how crowded the “historically optimimum routes” - often those taken by the first telegraph cables - are becoming: the need for a gently sloping beach to bring the cable ashore, the desire to avoid offshore hazards like undersea canyons, and above all the continuing focus of internet traffic on what were colonial metropoles, mean a concentration of routes.

Listening

The explanation of The Real St George and the Dragon on Dan Snow’s History Hit won’t come as a surprise to most readers: I suspect you mostly know that he was a Roman soldier in what is now Turkey. You might also know that the dragon was not his contemporary, but a figment of medieval imagination.

But I didn’t know that his countrywoman who we know as St Margaret - to which a church just opposite parliament is dedicated - was also a dragon-slayer. And a very famous and celebrated one in medieval times: one more female character once central who now has almost been forgotten.

The podcast is an interview with Jasmine Elmer, author of Slay: Ancient legends of female slayers and the hidden mythology of dragons. Which is definitely going on my reading list.

Source

Thinking

I have recently been engaging with campaigners for the rights of Antarctica campaign, which says that current protections are inadequate. Which led me to look into the evisting framework through another handy little book, The Antartic: A Very Short Introduction by Klaus Dodds. Published in 2012, it helps demonstrate how fast this area is moving, for it tells the current Antarctic Treaty primarily as a success story.

“Why has it endured? I think there are three fundamental reasons, aprt from all the original parties getting something tangible from the 1959 negotiations. First, the 12 parties produced an attractive creation myth: they used science and scientists to portray themselves as political visionaries seeking to introduce peace and harmony to a remote continent. … Second, the treaty endured because there were provisions (and opportunities taken) to not only accommodate new members but also to deal with issues such as conservation, environmental protection, and living resource exploitation as they arose. … by inviting some of the most powerful critics such as India and China to join the treaty and by signing a Protocol on Environmental Protection, which banned all forms of mining in the Antarctic Treaty Region… The earliest any review conference can be called in 2048. Third… the provisions of Aricle IV [sovereignty claims] were sufficiently vague to allow competing positions to co-exist.” (pp. 86-7)

It is a measure of how fast the global position has changed that the climate emergency barely gets a mention in the book. Instead it says:

“Human impact on the Antartic’s terrestrial and marine ecosystems derives principally from the exploitation of living natural resources such as seals, whales, fish and krill… the Antartic bears witness to the capacity of humanity to exploit massively non-human populations in ways that have proved anything but sustainable.” (p. 109)

It notes that seal populations had largely recovered at the time of writing. Sadly, that’s no longer true, with the climate emergency having major impacts. As for whales, recovering after “changing public opinion in Europe and North America” combined with the rise of commerical alternatives in the form of tropical vegetable oil plantations [which of course has just transferred the biodiversity destruction elsewhere], is its explanation for the end of commercial whaling. Not in the book but now of considerable concern is the impact of krill harvesting on their food availability.

Researching

You probably know about leaf-cutter ants farming fungus, but this is not an isolated practice. Other ants, multiple species of them, sometimes in cooperation, farm Squamellaria, a plant that grows high in the canopy of tropical forests in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

The ant plants seeds on tree branches and then cultivates the plants, by fertilizing and defending them from herbivores, and finally harvests them, too.

A researcher has uncovered the plants’ secret to maintaining harmony (build a separate home for each ant). But some species of plant are specialist, only hosting one species, which - and I bet you can see this coming - is now a problem.

“On Fiji, there is an invasive ant species — the white-footed ant — that sometimes replaces Philidris colonies. Within six months, the plant dies. That cannot happen to generalist plants, because they benefit from any species of ant, including the invasive one.”

What a mess we are making of this planet; how many more mutalisms like this might we be disrupting without evening being aware of them?

Almost the end

But the good news is there’s evidence across the primates that we do as a group want to - sometimes at least - make friends with other species. A survey article finds:

“Heterospecific sociality … may be more widespread among primates than previously recognized.”

But oh the way this article is written is frustrating… based on the assumption that everything an animal does must be essentially an economic calculation of benefit to itself, a form of utilitarian calculation.

Maybe - let’s be radical here for a second - a monkey simple enjoys playing with a puppy, and sharing food when you’ve more than you need (or even if you don’t) is a satisfying gesture of altruism beyond our species.

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© Natalie Bennett (Gel plate print)

More than a lively account of ivory tower conflict

How do we understand the world? Who does the interpreting of relationships between states? Who helps explain their home nation’s place in international hierarchies and the ways in which its internal structures impact on global actions? Having had extensive exposure over the past year to a range of the academic field broadly called International Relations (IR), it has been striking how traditionalist, how narrow, how limited its understanding, and practitioners, largely remain. Which was why Oxford professor’s Patricia Owen’s text Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, leapt out at me on the library shelves.

A work of what Owen describes as “recovery history”, in tracing a century of academic politics, manouevring and intellectual endeavour (all too often down dead-ends), it is more than a lively account of ivory tower conflict. It helps us see why so much thinking – which still guides international policy - has failed to engage with 20th-century realities, let alone 21^st, has sought to maintain failed, broken models of relationships between states. And why, in many years of exposure to history, sociology and political economy, I’ve encountered few texts and writers labelled as IR scholars who seem to have made an impact outside their field. Owen explains:

“This book is both a recovery history and a critical history of a scholarly field. It turns out that much of the history of ‘British IR’ is a story of men who hated women, and the intellectual and institutional legacies of misogyny and racism in its earliest institutions, including Chatham House, the British Coordinating Committee for international Studies (BCCIS), founded in 1928, the Department of International Studies (later Relations) at the London School of Economics (LSE), founded in 1927, and the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, founded in 1959… Not all the men were mediocrities, misogynists and racists. However, one figures stands out as all three. He also happened to do more than anyone to shape 20^th-century British IR. Charles Manning (1894-1978) was a white supremacist South African legal scholar who held the most senior position in Britain’s largest IR department for 32 years, the Montague Burton Professorship of IR at LSE. … published little but devoted himself to establishing international relations as a separate university subject. Under his influence an interdisciplinary field that included disciplined and trained historians, lawyers, anthropologists, classicists and others was transformed into a field with no specialist methodological training at all. He conceived the new IR specialist as a ‘Superman’, meaning an expert in no one scholarly method or discipline, rather an amateur in all of them. British IR’s intellectual standing and even legitimacy never recovered, and its relation to its two closest disciplines, political science and history, never settled. Some of Manning’s modes of thought are still present in the norms of the field today.” (pp. 11-12)

Of course British IR has its own origin and development story:

“One of the most widespread and now obsolete claims about IR’s intellectual history: that the main story of the field is progression through a series of ‘great debates’ beginning in the 1920s between so-called ‘Wilsonian idealists’ who sought to reform great power politics through international institutions and hard-headed ‘realists’ more ‘directed towards building up an empirical or causal science’ to study the relations between great powers. This was followed by a debate between social science behaviourists and more historical traditionalists in the 1950s and 1960s; an ‘inter-paradigm debate between realists, liberals and Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s; and between rationalists/positivists in the 1990s and 2000s.”

A field of prominent women, now almost written out

Despite the misogyny and prejudice, many white middle-class women were the prominent figures in IR, many of them shaping it in ways now little acknowledged. Although sometimes they were expelled, or stepped out.

Owen takes us to Aberystwyth in 1919, where French music scholar Lucie Barbier, a “trailing spouse”, of French scholar Andre (arrived in 1909) had taken control of musical affairs as part of a cultural and geopolitical mission to grow international understanding and peace.

“Long before the world’s first IR professorship was founded through the Davies’ patronage, Barbier persuaded the sisters to donate £75,000 to fund a new Department for Instrumental Music… later, in 1951, she told an interviewer that music and world politics were ‘her life’ and ‘closely allied’. ‘Both Arts of movement – they are meditation put into movement, and are almost always truthful.” (p. 24)

Those who think universities now are unusually riven with infighting and conflict might want to read this chapter, to encounter the extremely rhetorically violent conflict when Barbier broke off with her husband and married holder of the Wilson Chair in IR Alfred Zimmern (already divorced) “in the conservative and Methodist town”. “Matters were ‘raised to a high pitch’ when the Zimmerns, now married, took rooms in the Queen’s Hotel on the seafront and met with students. … One anxious local wrote to [David, college vice-president] Davies that ‘there would not be the same objection if Prof Zimmerman came alone’.. Yet, replied Davies, Zimmern had just as much right as anyone to stay at the hotel. ‘I am not a Trade Union leader. I cannot suggest any means of prevention as I presume that picketing would hardly be dignified.” (p. 25)

Yet the couple were eventually driven out, and moved to found the Geneva School of International Studies, often referred to as the Zimmern School, in 1923. It continued until 1939. Yet, “in contemporary IR historiography… if referred to at all, Lucie Zimmern is usually only mentioned as the cause of Alfred’s resignation from the Wilson Chair… IR historiography has scarcely moved on beyond centring the singular white male canonical thinker.” (p. 27)

“One of the numerous internationalist educational initiatives of the 1920s, the Zimmern School was the most influential during its time. The Zimmerns attracted numerous high profile figures to lecture, including John Maynard Keynes, Jane Addams, Halford Mackinder, Arthur Salter, Rachel Crowdy and Lewis Mumford. They also invited junior academics associated with the new IR field including Lilian Wranek, nee Friedlander, assistant lecturer at Zimmern’s erstwhile department in Aberystwyth and Agnew Headlam-Morley, later Alfred’s successor as Oxford’s Montague Burton Chair. … The school’s Executive Committee was based in New York, with a large proportion of women members, including Virginia Gildersleeve, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, with her partner, Caroline Spurgeon…. The deputy director was Yale Professor Nicholas Spykman, a ‘decisive’ figure in the dominant realist approach to American IR after World War II.” (pp. 28-9)

“While students were taught ‘the technical aspects of international relations, including international economics, law and organisation, the school was also ‘devoted to the culture and institutions of the various nations”. In Lucie’s classroom, this incorporated gender, race, class, religion, history and culture. Students were expected to examine their own prejudices, asking how their ‘qualities of thought’ were ‘traceable’ to their national histories and cultures… attended evening lectures on ‘Eastern thought’, focusing on Chinese and Indian intellectual traditions.” (p. 31)

It was ahead of its time from our perspective (although perhaps rather standard in its own), but still had the prejudices of its time. “Cultural, not political Zionism was Alfred’s model for imperial reform and a new world order led by the English-speaking peoples.” (p. 39)

A field for the management of empire

Owen then moves on to what is now Chatham House, which has, Owens reports, its origins in the Second Boer War (1899-1902)

“Britain’s elites grew increasingly anxious about the quality of what was perceived as Britain’s racial stock, continual rebellion in the colonies, and increasing geopolitical competition from Germany, Japan and the United States… Imperial frontiers were closing; colonial administration and inter-imperial relations had to be managed on a worldwide scale…Lionel Curtis famously proposed a series of affiliated institutes for the scientific study of ‘international relations’ at the sidelines of the Paris Peace negotiations in 1919. .. the new intellectual field was obviously and intimately connected to the management of empire.” (p. 25-6)

This was all, of course, heavily male-dominated in the historiography, yet as Owen reports, often taught by women.

“The leading white British thinker on empire from the 1930s to the 1970s, is Margaret Perham. She first made her name and reputation as a respected interlocutor and gentle critic of the Edwardian generation of imperial men … By the late 1940s and 1950s, when Perham’s ideas on imperial government had superseded that of the Round Table generation, she became mentor and patron to one of the most revered international theorists of post-war Britain, Martin Wight, influencing his ideas on trusteeship and international society…. The Australian Mary Bull, another ‘IR wife’ was Perham’s longterm researcher, collaborator and later expert on the historical figure of Perham herself, as she followed her husband Hedley Bull from Sydney to Oxford in 1953. Mary Bull’s personal copy of the catalogue of Perham’s voluminous papers was advertised and sold (to me) from the ‘library of Hedley Bull’.” (p. 47)

You can still listen to Perham’s Reith lecture from 1961.

“Perham was official Britain’s enlightened and knowledgeable conscience on empire. As postcolonial scolar Priyamvada Gopal has recently observed, in this role she actively engaged with anticolonial critique, all the better to reform the empire, to increase its virtue and longevity. In no sense was Perham a model white interlocutor. Yet her erasure from IR … also indirectly delayed IR’s reckoning with Black internationalism and anticolonial thought.” (p. 47)

Her academic power and influence was considerable.

“By 1939, Perham had dispensed entirely with undergraduate tutoring, becoming the first Official Fellow of Nuffield, a graduate-only college in Oxford which ‘was built around her’. During the war, the British information service tasked Perham with shifting opinion on the empire in the United States. She duly toured the US speaking at universities and luncheon clubs and writing for Foreign Affairs. Perham played on white America’s racial anxieties to explain and justify Britain’s predicament in Africa. She evoked white stetler fears that if Britain removed its ‘arbitral power’, then this would lead to their ‘utter submergence … under a vast flood of barbarism,’ evoking witchcraft, tribal war, ‘cannibalism and the ritual murder and the pawning of children’”… The British Empire was ‘a setting and a training ground for weak and immature groups’ that would all need to be incorporated into a new world order after the war.” (p. 51)

For her, however, anticolonial demands and calls for immediate self-government came from refusal to grant respect.

“Content enough with British rule for fifty years, Perham claimed, Africans were now told that their status was ‘shameful’. For African nationalists ‘it was not so much that the British had come to rule over the Ibo or the Luo… No, it was white men who had mastered black men all over the Africa and all over the world… The quality of colonial government, lamented the tutor of colonial administrators, ‘seems to make no difference to the violence of the new rejection’. This was Perham’s explanation for why Britain was such a target of reaction. Framce had given educated Africans greater social and political status. More than once, Perham pointed to the transnational Francophone literary amd political movement of the 1930s, negritude, and its notion of a special African personality, suggesting there was nothing comparable in the Anglophone anticolonial tradition.” (p. 200)

Back at Chatham House, the Royal Institute refused all government finance “though it received funding from banks, corporations, and philanthropic organisations like the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Endowment.” Its claim to being “non-ideological” – always beware such claims! – rested on its assertion that what it was doing was gathering and disseminating reliable factual information on which others could make judgement. So, Owen says, Margaret Cleeve, head of its Information Department, was a key, arguably THE key, figure.

Owen says she has to talk about the men, and she does. Bluntly.

“It was not very clear what a ‘separate’ IR had to offer intellectually… three leading advocates for IR as a separate subject in 1950s Britain, all based in London. The most influential was Charles Manning… assisted by another LSE man, his successor as Montague Burton Chair, the British economist and Foreign Office mandarin Geoffrey Goodwin. German Georg Schwarzenberger, professor of international law and relations at University College London, was the third, another outlier in reaching IR with no historical training… these men, two lawyers and an economist, became obsessed with distinguishing IR from history, with disastrous intellectual, gendered and racialising effects…. Manning envisaged a field filled not with supermen but covetous dabblers… fetishised the norms and rules of the white ‘society of states’, erased the history and politics of imperial domination, and authorised empathy for racial apartheid.” (p. 103-5)

But next in the impressive array of women assembled by Owen is Eileen Power.

“She was Britain’s best-known medieval historian in the interwar period, as well known during her lifetime as her contemporaries RH Tawney and Marc Bloch…. Pioneering in the fields of economic and social history, founding the Economic History Review and co-founding the Economic History Society. She was also at the forefront of establishing women’s history as a core university subject and in collaborations across historical and social science… a public historian and intellectual, committed to writing internationalist textbooks for children and broadcasting regularly for the BBC. .. Social and economic history as practiced by Power was international and world history, crossing countries, civilisations and periods… a world-historical vision that – unlike her contemporaries HG Wells and GP Gooch – was not rooted in a view of universal progress towards ‘Western’ modernity.”

And that lack of theory had a distinctly gendered perspective.

“Did not identify with any theoretical ‘school,’ nor did she seek to found one… nonetheless… comparable to the first generation of the Annales School in France, particularly the work of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. … The ‘new’ historical writing of the 1920s and 1930s, of which Power was one of the leading practitioners, reflected a conscious shift away from the political and constitutional history privileged by new scientific historians in the academy during the 19^th century. As historian Bonnie Smith has shown, … established in opposition to so-called amateurism. This was a gendered opposition defined against and considered superior to the historical work of ‘amateur’ women historians.” (p. 125)

Yet another prominent woman now appears: Agnes Headley-Morley, Oxford University’s first woman professor (appointed 1948) and longest holder of British IR’s most prestigious chair, the Montague Burton Professorship. Her appointment:

“Is said to have sent shockwaves in certain circles, taken as evidence of a ‘disastrous decline’ not only of IR as a scholarly enterprise, but the fate of the Anglosphere itself.” Unmarried, her academic and teaching interests were assumed to have been inherited from her father, “famed diplomatic historian, Foreign Office advisor and propagandist Sir James Headlam-Morley.”

Deputy director of studies at Chatham House, Roger Morgan, claimed that Oxford’s ‘purely historical approach’ was ‘notorious’… in 1988 Susan Strange repeated the claim that international relations at Oxford consisted of the history of the League of Nations and the diplomatic history of the inter-war period and it is only only recently that this has changed’.”

Owen’s defence:

“Like most mid-century international relations scholars in Britain, Headlam-Morley counted herself among the historians rather than a pioneer for a new ‘discipline’ without a method. After three years in the Montague Burton Chair, historian EW Woodward did not create a separate IR graduate degree either… She had no shortage of students writing on international relations, Merze Tate among them, and she taught and wrote far more widely than her critics suggest… for most IR scholars the contemporary alternative to diplomatic and contemporary history was to import theories and methods from the functionalist sociology, behavioural social science, and/or so-called ‘realist’ theory from the United States.” (pp. 161-2)

Owen adds:

“Agnes Headlam-Morley is in now way deserving of hagiography. But when read properly she emerges as far more interesting; and certainly no more flawed than contemporary men and women of similar racial and class position: author of right-wing counterpoint to Eileen Power and F. Melian Stawell’s left and liberal pro-League writings for wider publics and schoolchildren; an experienced political campaigner, party activist and would-be Tory MP; a lifelong supporter of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, with ‘no secret shame in being half German’, nor in arguing for Germany’s fair treatment after both world wars; a figure who strategically deployed her position as daughter of an intluential diplomat, but whose politics was more influenced by her mother, Else Sonntag, than her father; a shaper of post-war Anglo-German relations; translator of Bertolt Brecht, and author of a novella that prefigured attempts to represent German civilian suffering during World War II; a famed salon hostess, considered one of the ‘best known social and academic figures in Oxford’.” (p. 165)

Avoiding the elephant of empire

Neither the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, founded in 1959, nor, outside Oxford, IR, including at the LSE and Aberystwyth, was empire considered a core subject. “By 1972 and the publication of The Aberystwyth Papers, the discussion of empire was transmuted into an essay on the “Problems of the Developing World’ written by economist and journalist Barbara Ward.” (p. 186)

“Consider what some regard as an ‘iconic’ text of mid-century British IR, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight’s 1966 edited volume Diplomatic Investigations… assembled at the height of decolonisation, there is nothing on the British Empire, its history, current form, and legacies. Yet numerous essays use secondary sources to generalise about the medieval ‘universal empire’, the Holy Roman Empire, the empires of Alexander the Great, the Ts’in, the Moguls, the Swedes, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, and Imperial Germany, the Krupp empire, and Lenin’s theory of imperialism … only a constitutive erasure could sideline something of such historical and political importance for the context and supposed content of this ‘seminal’ piece of work.” (p. 188)

Yet at the same time, Owen identifies Claudia Jones as one of the most influential international thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s. “If CLR James is ‘the magisterial, world historical intellectual of the 20^th century anglophone Caribbean,’; then Jones is the even more impressive ‘female political and intellectual equivalent’. As a Black Marxist feminist woman from a British colony who worked through journalism, political essays, organising and campaigning, Claudia Jones’s absence from British IR’s intellectual history is entirely over-determined… She was internationally renown during her lifetime, received by Chairman Mao on her last international trip to China. Diplomatic delegations from Africa, Asia and Latin America attended her funeral in 1965, which was ‘the first really big Black funeral that London ever saw’. .. She was laid to rest at Highgate Cemetery in the plot immediately to the left of Karl Marx, which, her biographer notes, literally and figuratively represents Jones’s historical place in the development of radical left thought in the 20^th century.” (p. 210)

She founded, edited and wrote for “Britain’s most important organ of Black journalism”, the West Indian Gazette. And was key to the foundation of the West Indian (later Notting Hill) carnival. “Jones rekindled ‘an indigenous black British political leadership’ at a time of anti-Black riots across England and pervasive discrimination in employment, housing and everyday life.” (p. 210)

While traditional analysis of West Indian migration focuses on Britain’s need for labour,

“For Claudia Jones, the most relevant context for mass migration was the continued economic subordination of the West Indies. Despite living in territories rich in natural and mineral resources, Britain’s looting and deliberate under-development of colonial territories meant that most Caribbean people lived in poverty. The entire regional economy, Jones wrote, was “distorted to serve the interests of an accumulation of super-profits” by the “big imperial combines and trusts”. In addition to the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act that restricted Caribbean migration to the United States, Jones argued that the demise of the West Indian Federation also forced people to migrate… Jones vigorously supported the attempt to establish a new postcolonial political federation across the Caribbean islands ‘ in which freedom of movement would have absorbed swome of our disinherited, disillusioned and un-filled people…. With ‘illusions’ about the ‘mother country’, Jones thought many West Indians were shocked at their treatment. They had been taught in Caribbean schools that they too were citizens of the Crown. But the only British workers allowed to enjoy the new welfare state, employment and spoils of empire were the so-called ‘white working class’. ” (pp. 218-19)

Source

Coming to terms with a global world

Back at Chatham House after the War, Owen focuses on Australian Coral Bell, preparing The Survey of International Affairs under the hands-off overview of Arnold Toynbee.

“Though she became quite the intellectual insider herself, Bell claimed to have shocked some of the ‘old hands’ at Chatham House by placing ‘two non-European issues’ at the centre of the Survey. She wrote about the significance of the battle of Dien Bien Phu in the Vietnam War… and included a section ‘Atoms and Strategy’ on the implications of nuclear weapons for international relations. The profound intellectual and political conservatism of Chatham House … Bell could pose at least as ‘very radical and daring’ for suggesting in the mid-1950s that nuclear weapons would be central to the superpower relationship and ‘most of the sources of trouble might be in the Third World’.” (p. 239-240)

Perhaps one of the biggest figures Owen covers is Susan Strange, celebrated today by LSE as “easily the most influential figure in the academic field International Relations (IR) in late twentieth-century Britain”. Owen notes she “derided the attempt to establish an intellectual geneaology for IR ‘spanning allegedly from Thucydides to Machiaevlli, Hobbes, Rouseau and Morgenthau.’”(p. 281)

She thought “the study of international (that is intergovernmental) relations was only a branch of international political economy, as diplomatic history had been a branch of international political economy… her legacy of an intellectually open and ‘eclectic ‘IPE’ faltered, especially in the United States, ignored in the contemporary fad for hypothesis testing.” (p. 282)

She “mocked Britain’s pretensions after the end of empire and had little time for the Commonwealth (‘a kind of methadone to the heroin addict’) yet she loved the United States, supporting its leadership role in world politics…. She was not outside the ‘Establishment’, but, like Perham, she was helping to reform it. Perham most successfully reconcited British popular and intellectual opinion to the realities of the loss of empire. She took the anticolonial claims at the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 seriously, all the better to counter them. Susan Strange was writing at a time when these movements were largely defeated. However, she was the Perham of Britain’s international economic decline, the acceptable dissenter, a figure representing reformist improvement of the international economic and financial architecture against the radical transformative demands of those calling for a New International Economic Order…In distancing herself from feminism, the mother of six also became the perfect alibi for others in the field who were resistant to analysing or radically changing the gendered hierarchies of IR.” (p. 289)

So while there’s lots of interesting, important women’s intellectual history here, there is not, beyond Claudia James, much of an offering of alternatives. For that, looking elsewhere is clearly essential. I’m open to suggestions in the comments!

Almost the end

Understanding and recovering tragedy: Important work on the smallpox epidemic that the First Fleet invaders brought to indigenous people in Australia.

“Elders, children and pregnant women were especially vulnerable, meaning that knowledge, language and culture suffered deep harm alongside population loss. Even survivors were severely compromised and could often not care for the country in the same way as before the infection.”

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Mansa Musa: a lot came before, and after

I’m going to begin controversially. (Yes, you may say, when do I not?) But here, I’m reflecting on history writing. There are so many fascinating periods and places on which we have only the scantest knowledge, but the possibility, with current research techniques and resources, of knowing a great deal more. So why is that we have so many more books about the causes of the First World War, or the fall of the Roman Republic? If you have something genuinely original to say - perhaps including women where they haven’t been before or putting the more-than-human into a story that has only previously covered the human, well fine - but that’s not the case of most books.

Which is why, if you present me on the library shelves with a new, detailed, heavily based on original research, particularly from papers from Timbuktu that might tragically recently even have been lost, history of Early and Medieval West Africa, I’m going to find it irresistible. Even if this is detailed, brilliant, complex research of a world of which I knew almost nothing, at a level at which I’m going to sometimes struggle to keep up. So I’ve been carrying around for some time Michael A. Gomez’s African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa.

The basics that I did know was that Mansa Musa, the Malian emperor, in 724/1324 (dates throughout the book are given in Islamic then Gregorian calendars) made a pilgrimage to Mecca, accompanied by such treasures, and such an enormous retinue, that he stunned the world (and still provokes comparisons that suggest he might rival Elon Musk - except of course in the emperor’s case the wealth was down to Earth and real).

What I didn’t know was why Musa made that journey.

Gomez puts it in not just a regional but a global frame, one of a major reshaping across Eurasia and beyond.

“Ethnically, racially, and culturally myriad, a Muslim world whose political unity had long ended stretched from Iberia to China to Indonesia. Muslim innovation, largely responsible for linking European and Asian lands and all points in between, served as the conduit through which European medieval thought reconnected with that of ancient predecessors, and as the technological basis for Europe’s “discovery” of Mesoamerican Aztecs and Andean Incas.” (p. 3)

In Africa, Musa certainly knew of the successful religious militancy of the Berber Almoravids, from right up to his borders into Europe, political upheavals in the Maghrib, and how the Mamluks had taken over in Egypt.

Whether in response to these developments, or as an expression of aspirations largely internal, Mali attempted to connect with the outside world, to touch that world directly, without the mediation of Saharan middlemen. Mali was itself in an expansive, transcontinental frame of mind. (p. 3)

There’s also a bit of fascinating alternative history possibilities here. For as Gomez notes, when Musa made his pilgrimage military technology had not significantly changed for centuries. Had it been a century or so later, with gunpowder weapons taking off, he would have had the wealth to scoop up and deploy such technology, which would have meant very different European encounters with West Africa. (p. 5)

The foundation of his empire went back a long way, as far as most of the other Empires with which our traditional historical accounts are filled.

It was during the period of the Shang, Chou, Shin, Han, and Tang dynasties of China, the Vedic period in India, and the Mayans in central America, that another urban-based civilization flourished in West Africa, in the Middle Niger region. From the late first millennium BCE into the beginning of the second millennium CE, a series of communities were nurtured by a floodplain that at its apex covered more than 170,000 square kilometres, comparing favorably with Mesopotamia’s maximum range of cultivable land of 51,000 square kilometres, and ancient Egypt’s 34,000 square kilometers. Spanning the Iron Age (from the first millennium BCE well into the first millennium CE), the region was dotted with literally hundreds of urban sites characterized by a variety of crafts and productive capacities, constituting a collective center of human organization and activity, deserving its rightful place among world civilizations customarily acclaimed. (p. 13)

Iron-working was of particularly high quality, rice was the primary crop, and trade is attested by beads coming from Southeast Asia in the age of the Han Dynasty, with as Gomez remarks, much still certain to be uncovered by archaeology. (p. 16)

As the complexity and size of political units grew, there were, Gomez asserts, several important centres, but 20th-century scholarship is, Gomez asserts, far too obsessed with Ghana and Mali, as a predecessor of the predominate late Songhay Empire.

This, despite the testimony of al-Ya’qūbī, who in 259/872–3 wrote, “The kingdom of the Kawkaw . . . is the greatest of the realms of the Sūdān, the most important and powerful. All the kingdoms obey its king.” … al-Ya’qūbī makes clear it was centered on a town, as do contemporary al-Khuwārizmī and al-Mas’ūdī and al-Bakrī in the following two centuries. In 548/1154 al-Idrisī wrote that Gao “is large and is widely famed” with “many servants and a large retinue, captains, soldiers, excellent apparel and beautiful ornaments,” with warriors who “ride horses and camels”—an allusion to the cavalry as the basis for Gao’s military power. … Gao emerges as a city-state projecting power and influence, an important model of statecraft in the early Middle Niger.” (p. 21)

Settled as early as 2,000BCE, Gao was at the centre of trade with Egypt and Tripoli. That is attested to by luxury imports of pottery and glass, with exports apparently including hippopotamus tusks, but the predominate one being salt, which filled the king’s treasure houses. (p. 23) From the 9th to the 12th century it was at the centre of Sahelian trading relations, with close contacts - particularly for the trade in slaves, with the Kanem kingdom on the shores of Lake Chad. That, however, comes with a fascinating story.

Slaving’s importance is reflected in Ibn Sa’īd’s comments during the reign of Mai Dunama Dubbalemi (599–639/1203–42), and concerns “Berber followers who were converted to Islam by Ibn Ḥabal the sultan of Kānim. They are his slaves. He uses them on his raids and takes advantage of their camels, which have filled these regions.” Ibn Sa’īd discusses the familiar notion of slavery in a most unfamiliar way, as Berbers are usually depicted as enslaving and converting “blacks.” (p. 28)

In Gao itself, however, while there is, in the start of the ruling dynasty with a child of an enslaved girl, some evidence of slavery, it seems not to have been a major part of the economy. Instead the sources list livestock, rice, sugar cane and sesame as the principal bases for its wealth, together with its position at the centre of transregional commerce. (p. 44-5)

But Ghana did of course arise as a major power, while closely linked with Awadaghust, which controlled the flow of salt from Awlil on the Atlantic Coast, while Ghana had its hands on the gold from Bambuk in the southwest. It took about ten days for a caravan to get between the two, and the coming and going was constant. They were expansionary, and multiethnic societies. Awdaghust in 350/951 pillages Awghan and killed its king, reportedly with a camelry that was 100,000 strong, while Ghana in taking on the town of Sila along the Senegal River reported had 200,000 men in the field, 40,000 of them archers. (This may or may not have includeed Awdaghust’s cavalry.) (pp. 32-35)

As Ghana lost control of the gold trade, however, in the 8th/14th century, slavery became more common and central to the economy. This while the importance of Mali rose. And an intellectual framework of justification arose.

“The Lamlam, itself an invented term, seems to have represented a range of non-Muslim groups with whom writers were unfamiliar but who, according to al-Idrisi, specifically occupied the space to the south of Ghana (although Ibn Sa’id’s locates them principally along the Atlantic Ocean. The ‘Damdam’ initially appear as a mere permutation, but are then distinguished in that ‘they eat men’. … differentiated by their cannibalism [of foreigners] and powerful state, while the Lamlam were ‘stateless’ fish-eaters. This begins a process of categorisation critical to the machiney of enslavement, as it becomes increasingly important to determine who could be enslaved. Entho-linguistic groupings in West Africa would eventually become akin to juridicial categories, at least in principle if not practice.” (p. 45)

Yet ironically, this was an area, viewed as a heart of darkness, that had actually been urbanised for thousands of years. (p. 67)

The reality of slave life comes vividly, if unintentionally, from the complaints of a slave-owner.

“The badari [or urban dweller, returning north after his purchase] was exhausted with his slave women and men - this woman has grown thin, this one was hungry, this one was sick, this one had run away, this one was afflicted by the guinea-worm.” (p. 47)

The displacement of Ghana by Mali is attributed to the first great king, who this author calls Sunjata (also Sundiata). This book focuses on his place in the ending of female political power in a “place and time when the relationship between political power and gender, once fluid, was in the process of becoming a masculine preserve…. Mande traditions in other areas where Islam becomes significant include discussions of women who assume the mansaya or rulership, with accounts from the Gambia region asserting the very first mansa of Niumi was a woman, Mansa Mama Andame Jammeh, who was succeeded by another woman, Mansa Wame. Niumi in fact boasts 12 women whose consequetively held the mansaya, while states all along the Gambia claim female rulers, from Baddibu to Wuli. Perhaps this was characteristic of Mande society (at least astride the Gambia) before Islam.” (pp. 71-2)

But on Gomez’s account the change started to come before Islam, with women allocated instead power as sorcerers and reification as mothers.

“They became alternative sites of power. The origin accounts reveal a strategy of reconciliation.” (p74)

We are almost back now to Mansa Musa, or at least to his predecessor, about whom there is a great mystery. The travelling king told the governor of Old Cairo:

“The king who was my predecessor did not believe that it was impossible to dicover the furthest limits of the Atlantic Ocean and wished vehemently to do so. So he equipped 300 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water and provisions enough to last them for years… one shop returned and the captain was asked what news they brought. He said: ‘Yes O Sultan, we travelled for a long time until there appeared in the open sea a river with a powerful current… The [other] shops went on ahead but … they did not return…. Then the sultan got ready 2,000 shops, 1,000 for himself and the men whom he took with him and 1,000 for water and provisions. He left me to deputize for him and embarked on the Atlantic Ocean with his men. That was the last we saw of him and all who were with him.” (p. 101)

Gomez acknowledge the lack of other accounts or evidence of these voyages, which make it seem this might be a cover for dynastic intrigue and even murder, perhaps a reason, in guilt, for the pilgrimage. But … the survivor’s account has oceanographic evidence in the form of the Canary Current. (p. 102-3)

Soon after Musa’s reign, however, Malian fortunes declined, as attested by the account of the fascinating traveller Ibn Battuta, who complained that Mansa Suleyman (Musa’s brother) was a miserly king. Instead of fine robes and money, he was given “three loaves of bread and a piece of beef fried in gharti and a gourd containing yoghurt”. Although this might also have reflected changing political interests, and a studied insult to Battuta’s patron. (p. 147-8)

Suleyman had troubles within his own household, however, in the tale with which Gomez starts the book and later expands, when he tried to displace his chief wife (and first cousin) Qasa, replacing her with the non-royal Banju. Qasa was put under house arrest, but released after protests by her female relatives, while not being restored to her position.

“She responded by undertaking the decidedly political performance of riding daily with enlaved men and women in tow, dust on their heads, after which she would stand veiled at the gates of the mashwar or council place. As this became a much-discussed scandal, one of her ‘slave girls’ was summoned before the mansa and the Grand Council, where she confessed she had served as Qasa’s envoy to the mansa’s paternal first cousin Jatil, who had taken refuge from the mnsa for some offence. Qasa alledely encouraged Jatil to ‘depose the sultan from his kingship,saying ‘I and all the army are at your service.’ Upon hearing this, the farariyya exclaimed Qasa had committed ‘a great crime and for it she deserves to be killed!’ Qasa would seek sanctuary with the khuqib and nothing more is recorded of the affair.” (p. 148-9)

So female political agency had certainly not entirely been displaced.

But the Malian Empire would be, by the final great historical empire of the region, Songhay, at its peak in the reign of Asia Muhammad (898-1493-935/1539).

“Songhay’s cosmospolitanism reached a height of sophistication never before witnessed in the region. … a variety of ethnicities - Songay, Hai Pulaaren, Mande-speakers, Kel Tamasheq etc - undergo a process through which their allegiance to the state behins to supersede group loyalties, resulting in the formation of a new political identity… a novel political porject that reified the state while seeking the full incporation of its constitutive parts. As an experiment in pluralism it was unprecedented.” (p.220)

The great mosque at Djenné Source

But Songhay peaked, and fell quickly, in 1591 with Moroccan invasion. But what fell was a shell of its former self. Civil war in the royal family, ineffective kings, sibling rivalry was maytched with enslaved people stepping up within the palace while famine led to increased plantation slavery, heavily disruptive of the social fabric. (p. 367)

That’s a very quick run through a very detailed, heavily referenced book, far richer than I can really do justice here. It is telling that I struggled to find reasonable web links for many of the names and places; there’s so little available about these stories and places. We need to know a lot more to understand the world we’re in today, where Africans make up 20 per cent of the global population, and by 2060 could make up 30 per cent. Respect for the places and traditions from which those - far younger than global average - people come, should be taken as standard.

Picks of the week

Reading

Particularly when I am speaking to groups of creative people, I always stress that we have far too many pictures of approaching disaster: zombie movies, apocalypse novels, videos about climate disaster. What we really need are far more depictions of 30 or 40 years hence when it all worked out pretty fine. Ideally perhaps a classic Hollywood RomCom - boy meets boy, boy gets boy, boy loses boy, then they get back together and live happily ever after.

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift is that kind of novel, in that it follows two well developed female characters through a lifetime of campaigning for nature in Britain - by direct action, classical campaigning and a bit of guerrilla importation, and seeing that pay off in a gradual rewilding and political embrace of the importance of nature to human wellbeing.

As the Guardian reviewer said, it “inspires as an argument for rewilding in Britain.” I am perhaps being overly picky when I point out that we need to go far, far faster than Britain does in the novel, but this still would make a nice, encouraging summer read.

Listening

Back on the New Books Network, this time on the Military History channel, a really interesting, and critical in the best possible sense, interview with Chiara Libiseller, author of Reconceptualizing War The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies. With Miranda Melcher, whose interviews are always particularly worth listening to - and handily she now has her own, wideranging, channel bringing them all together.

Libiseller looks at how in Strategic Studies fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of meaning. And at the same time they marginalize alternative perspectives. She looks at three fashionable terms —revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare. All fields are susceptible to this to the dominance of fashionable concepts to some degree, but Strategic Studies seem particularly prone, and given its impact on practical politics, it is certainly something to keep in mind.

Thinking

An important warning: beware reactionary futurism: “the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects”.

It uses the chrome-plated aesthetic of the new to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past – 19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets, and rejection of democratic governance, but armed with 21st-century drones and algorithms.

This often involves a simplistic (and intentional) misreading of the texts that it draws on, which critique and show as dystopian nightmares the futures the Silicon Valley tech bros are embracing. So the term cyberspace, from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set in “a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion”.

But there are also positive alternative visions IN science fiction.

“Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) imagines an anarchist Moon colony built on mutual aid rather than extraction. Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993-98) depicts communities surviving collapse through adaptation and care rather than escape to Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-96) shows planetary settlement as collective democratic project, not billionaire venture. These are not naive or utopian texts – they are demanding, difficult and honest about the costs of building anything new. They refuse the consolation of the lone visionary and insist, over and over, that the future is made by people working together.”

Researching

A highly disturbing, if unsurprising, conclusion from a study of Hawaiian corals: exposure to pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, as well as other human waste products, reduces the health of coral reefs - not just some but all of the complex, amazing organisms that build them - and makes them more vulnerable to ocean acidification and rising temperatures. One more reminder that the climate emergency and nature crisis are intimately interlinked.

Fragile life: Photo by qui nguyen on Unsplash

Almost the end

Homo naledi, the species of hominin only relatively recently discovered, and hugely controversial when their relatively small brains and apparently complex culture are put together, have thrown up another surprise: strong evidence suggests that all of the remains found thus far are female, suggesting gender difference in burial practices.

John Hawks, a blogger (and researcher of H. naledi), sets out why we shouldn’t be, but are surprised - the limitations in our own thinking:

Assuming that every sample is a random assortment of individuals is a bias. Assuming that the typical or most complete skeletons are males is a bias. Assuming that cultural phenomena did not apply in past societies is a bias. It’s a challenge to reexamine your biases, but it’s essential to scientific understanding.

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Book news

Have you been thinking about buying a copy of my latest book, Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics? Routledge is now offering 20% off the paperback, 25% off the ebook here.

And I’ll be talking Change Everything at the Bristol Folkhouse, Tuesday July 28. If that’s your patch, hope to see you there. Before that, on Friday July 24 I’ll be back at the lovely Read on Sea, in Leigh-on-Sea, talking Green Thinking. Tickets here.

And just a reminder that the audiobook of Change Everything is out now (12 long hours to record it!), available wherever you get your audiobooks.

Whole-of-ecosystem resilience

Resilience is suddenly a buzzword in UK politics. It has been discovered by the other parties, although the Green Party has long been talking about it. I look back through a search for #Resilience on my Twitter feed and find many hunrdreds of posts over the years. (Sometimes doing a little stirring of comfortable complacencies, like in 2022 when I was suggesting we retrain financial workers to grow fruit and vegetables.)

The oldest post there is from 2016, when I was linking to reflections from my visit to Lancaster after Storm Desmond, which drove home to me the fragility of so much 21st-century life, from hotels with only electronic door locks to petrol stations without pumping capacity and ATMs not working.

I still talk about today how the city in recovering realised that what it needed most was community capacity, the ability to people to have the knowledge, skills and empowerment to do what needed to be done when the systems broke down, as was discussed at a Green House think tank event I chaired a year later.

I was back on the subject last week, in a House of Lords debate on titled “Defence Readiness Bill” (and yes that’s legislation the government says it is going to deliver, sometime, but there’s little sign of progress). Having been secured by Labour’s Lord Harris of Haringey, who is chair of the National Preparedness Commission, the debate was more broadly defined as about the need for a “national resilience and defence readiness Bill”, something broadly agreed around the House.

And it was a quality debate, which the House on its good days does well. Crossbencher Baroness Wheatcroft summed up the widespread scepticism about the government’s resilience efforts with a dry reflection:

In the Government’s latest incarnation of the National Risk Register, 89 specific areas of risk are identified. I wonder whether the Government are in any way confident that each of these is being addressed.

But the contribution that really helped crystalise thinking that I’ve been working with Green MP Adrian Ramsay on was that of Baroness Neville-Jones, a Tory peer who was chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the 1990s, as well as several other security roles and a former career diplomat.

She raised “the question of what we mean when we talk about the whole of government, or for that matter, more ambitiously, the whole of society, which is phraseology about resilience that has taken hold in the last couple of years. There is a great question mark around what it really means.”

And she’s right, at least in the UK. It’s a buzz-phrase borrowed from Finland and Sweden, not a plan.

More than that, when we speak about society, we are generally talking about the humans and the structures and institutions we have created. Yet our security depends enormously - totally - on the more-than-human world.

Whole-of-ecosystem security

So talking about whole-of-society approaches really isn’t enough. I’m still thinking about the terminology here; on the fly last week I called it “whole-of-system” approach. Maybe that should be a “whole-of -ecosystem” approach (although I fear many still don’t understand that we are human animals that are as much a part of ecosystems as the birds and the bees). Alternative suggestions welcome!

But it helped to crystallise something I and Green MP Adrian Ramway have been working on for Green Party conference in the autumn, a motion to ensure it is clearly and explicitly written in our policies that human security is entirely dependent on health of the natural world. (Which is, of course, in a terrible state.)

This is something the government has been trying to conceal from the public, suppressing a report from the Joint Intelligence Chiefs (no, not your typical ‘greenies’) about the food security risks presented to the UK by the collapse of key global ecosystems. Astonishingly, although multiple freedom of information requests forced the report into the open, what was released has still been heavily redacted. No, there can be no security reason for this (ecosystem collapse isn’t deliberately trying to sneak up on us), only an attempt perhaps to not scare the public. But as I said in the debate, hiding things is only going to increase fear - and anger - openness with the public, together with demonstrating real action to deal with the threats, has to be the way forward.

Rights for Nature are a route to greater resilience

Elsewhere in my day job I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks working on my private member’s bill on Nature’s Rights, written by Mumta Ito of the Nature’s Rights charity. I wrote about it on Yorkshire Bylines, and (about the debate) for The Ecologist.

The whole structure of the bill is built around the understanding that human rights (and economic rights) need to fit within the umbrella of nature’s rights. That making it an agent able to protect its own future protects all of us. And so it fits very much within a whole-of-ecosystem approach to security.

Chasing growth means reducing resilience

I finished my speech in the Lords last week by focusing on the fact that chasing economic growth (the sole and only aim, he said, of Sir Keir Starmers’s government) was taking the country in the wrong direction on resilience.

As the perhaps unlikely source the Financial Times nodded to earlier this year…

… “efficiency” has been understood as cost-cutting, GDP growth coming in mainstream economics from greater “productivity”, sweating the assets, both in terms of the human (literally) and more-than-human. That’s the foundation of many a terrible MBA course.

Asking, what is sustainable? Asking, what will survive in an Age of Shocks? Is going to produce very different directions.

As I said in the House, while many fellow peers might have agreed with what I said in the House up to that point, it was here that I split from them. (Something with which Tory peer Lord Harlech (mainstream, conventional, originally hereditary), who spoke after me, concurred.) As did, of course, Lord Coaker for the government.

Green thinking - we need a lot more of it. And it is still all too rare.

P.S. Recently when I was writing about resilience on social media recently, one reader complained that I was focusing on individual behaviour. That’s certainly not what I mean, so to make it very clear, when I am talking about building resilience, I am talking about systems, not people. As always, I stand against rightwing approaches that blame - very often - individuals for the plights in which they find themselves, when it is our systems that have put them there.

Picks of the week

Reading

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a fantasy plan to allow humans - or rather giant multinational corporations - to keep burning fossil fuels and engaging in other high carbon activities - with the claim that all of tha planet-warming gas can handily be locked back into the earth. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years pointing out that we don’t need CCS, because nature’s already done it for us, if we just leave the oil, gas and coal in the ground. And its free and zero-risk.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

But it is handy to now know, if sadly unsurprising, that the origins of the fantasy lie with the fossil fuel companies set to benefit from it: particularly a paper coming out of a BP-sponsored Princeton University research centre, the production of which was “coordinated with the oil company’s executives”. Authors “showed them multiple drafts”, politely described in the Propublica article as “a departure from academic norms”.

Known as the “Wedges” paper, it made “fixing” climate change seem simple, just a matter of expanding the use of varying already existing technologies.

One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.

Listening

Mary Doherty was a 14-year-old maidservant in 1844 when she was murdered. The fate is a far from uncommon one, but her life has been both remembered in local folklore (if imperfectly) and now as comprehensively recovered as possible by historian Angela Bryne, interviewed by Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network. Almost inevitably, it is possible to recover more about the life of her murderer, a young ne’er-do-well named Daniel McKeeney, than Mary’s, or that of her brother, an emigrant to America whose letter might have precipitated the robbery and murder. But still a poignant tale, and one highly informative of the life in an apparently isolated Co Donegal small village, that was also tightly connected with a changing world. Globalisation is less new than we think.

Thinking

This lead article in the New Scientist (sorry £, but your library should have a copy) asks why humans sleep considerably less, allowing for all other variables, than other primates. And why we keep a comparatively high percentage of energy-sapping REM sleep.

The conclusion is that it happened when about 1.8 million years ago our ancestors moved to sleeping on the ground, as almost no other primates do.

“From the perspective of a chimpanzee nest, the ground looks like a terrible idea. On the savannah or woodland floor, sleepers become more accessible to predators and more exposed to hostile rivals.”

It was cooperation, society, that made it possible.

“At some point in the evolution of early Homo, the place where bodies slept became a collective technology: a defended patch of ground, a firelit perimeter, a shared shelter, a zone of lowered risk created by many individuals at once. That shift matters because sleep is never just a trait of a brain in isolation. It also depends on the environment. And in early humans, that environment increasingly became something they built together.”

How we got to anatomically modern humans often involves a focus on environmental, genetic change and body morphology. But this thinking helps us see that behavioural change - collective reshaping of societies and communities - must have been an important part of that too.

“Sleep site isn’t a footnote to human evolution. It is one of its hidden engines, creating a nighttime world within which humans could survive and then prosper. Out of that shell came not just safer sleep, but also a platform for cognition, innovation and expansion.”

Researching

We are, finally, starting to switch on to the importance, opportunities, and threats of fungi. I was speaking at the 12th International Congress of Cyrptococcus and Cryptococcosis, a session that wide rangely over both technical information, politics (I got the audience very fire up when talking about the collapse of official development assistance funding), food security and public health, all with the climate emergency very much in mind. (It was a joint session with the parallel Climate Conference - which was hit by a significant controversy over its sponsor.)

Picture: Theo Moye

That’s me with Professor Robin May, chief scientist of the Health Security Agency and Professor Matthew Fisher from Imperial College. Our chair, Chair of Food Security at Exeter Sarah Gurr, did a huge amount of work to pull it all together.

This while a significant study (although perhaps a little overblown in this Wired Report) attempting to produce a global map of fungi.

The researchers estimate that the underground fungal network has a total length of approximately 110 quadrillion kilometers. They also calculate that it contains about 300 megatons of carbon in biomass—equivalent to roughly four to six times the total mass of all living humans.

According to the study, these fungal networks transport the equivalent of around 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the soil each year, representing approximately 11 percent of annual human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.

Interesting that Wired, very much a tech-focused publication, has got interested in fungi. Perhaps some elements of that world are starting to get real about biological reality, that we are human animals, an immensely complex set of nested, interactive systems, operating within a planetary system of those. (Although I note that it originally appeared in the Italian language edition and was translated, reflecting different US and European perspectives.)

Almost the end

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) does a lot of good work charting the (parlous) state of the sector in the UK, which is reflected throughout the marketised neoliberal sector across the Anglosphere. This piece, by Nick Hillman, its CEO, does a fine, if depressing, job of summarising its current state.

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Book news

Had a lovely discussion about my book Green Thinking on The Educated Guess podcast with Dr Dan O’Hare and Dr Cora Sargeant. As you might expect from two educational psychologists, they were particularly interested in my (very critical) take on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which really, as I set out in the book and podcast, based on the flimsiest of foundations, yet still running rampant in rightwing thinking and the self-help world.

And thanks Claudia Waller for this lovely review on Goodreads covering both Green Thinking and Change Everything!

Humans v microbes: a long story

Some 5,000 years ago, Europe saw a period known as the “Neolithic decline”, when populations of humans collapsed. When they recovered hundreds of years later, genetics now tells us, the population was from entirely different stock. Genetics also tells us that in the older population – in which otherwise apparently healthy younger people are represented in far larger numbers than average -- there were infections of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria behind the Black Death, and Borrelia recurrentis, which causes the serious louse-borne relapsing fever.

As historian Peter Frankopan reminds us in his brilliant world history The Earth Transformed great changes in human societies – including collapses – are seldom unicausal, or unidirectional. Some societies survive a shock due to their deliberate or accidental choices of resilience and stability, others go under, some recover, some do not. But there is no doubt that until the 19^th-century Global North expansion of public health measures, combined with the 20^th-century development of antibiotics and a limited quantity of anti-fungal drugs, as well as better systemic treatment, that all societies were vulnerable to bacteria, viruses and fungi that could overwhelm individual and communal systems of immunity, cutting a swathe through societies, overturning great empires or humble villages alike. Authors in the great Roman capital of Constantinople in what we call the Justinianic Plague (Y. pestis again) “describe the plague killing upwards of ten thousand victims a day, in a city with a population of perhaps half a million … roughly half of whom may have been wiped out before the first onslaught … abated”.

There were probably people venturing out of their houses then saying, as an Italian photojournalist did as her country went into lockdown in 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic, “Let’s go and see what the end of the world looks like.” In our times there was, for a brief period in 2020 and 2021, a real sense of shock, an understanding that we remain, for all of our technology and knowledge, vulnerable to apparently simple microscopic organisms and agents, as our ancestors were before us. But then, mRNA vaccines in particularly were invented and widely used (at least in the Global North), and for the general public at least, but also the political establishment and some of the policy world, a lesson was learnt that while there might be some frightening times, “modern medicine” will win through, technology will find a solution.

That is not, however, the reality of the 21^st century. While stock price-boosting Silicon Valley Tech Bros and their friends claim that popping pills, chugging supplements and indulging in dubious treatments such as hyperbaric chambers will solve any microbial challenge, indeed conquer mortality itself, the experts that in the House of Lords I encounter regularly are fearful. Microbes have been around for about four billion years, and the fact that we have only just discover the way they can collectively behave in highly sophisticated ways (such as in biofilms) only reflects the level of 20^th-century scientific ignorance.

The dangers

(a) Emergent natural diseases

The World Health Organisation, and others, have been seeking to popularise the understanding that “Disease X” is the next threat – an unknown disease whose nature should not be guessed at. It might seem that an influenza virus is the top candidate (pandemic preparations pre-Covid having almost entirely focused on it and with highly-pathogenic avian influenza continuing to rage not just in wild avian and mammalian species but also dairy cows and some humans that version, and many others, including those found in pigs, remain a serious concern). But the SARS-CoV-2 virus delivered a reminder that there are many potential disease threats, particularly as humans encroach increasingly into previously relatively isolated disease reservoirs, the likely source of the pandemic virus. Covid also helped to rewrite the rulebook of how zoonoses spread into humans, the previous theory that they needed a period of “pre-evolution” before they spread into humans being overturned. As recent large-scale analysis has shown: “Rather than requiring rare, finely tuned adaptations in animals, many viruses may already possess the basic capacity to infect and transmit between humans. What matters most is human exposure to a diverse array of animal viruses.”

But it is worth stressing that Covid was not “the big one”, the civilisation-killing disease of Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant novel Station Eleven. It primarily killed older and already vulnerable people, and while it has left a huge trail of long Covid, the prevalence of which has helped raise the issue of the broader problem of post-viral chronic diseases, it was less infectious than diseases such as measles if comparable to active, untreated tuberculosis.

The post-World War I influenza pandemic (misnamed the Spanish flu) offers some clues to what a global system-threatening Disease X might look like. It killed 50 million people (the war itself killed an estimated 16 million), infected one fifth of the global population, and saw average US life-expectancy fall 12 years in a year. The “big one” would, like the Spanish flu, would likely kill particularly the relatively young and fit. It was a disease affecting those from their 20s to 40s – a key part of the workforce. That would be particularly threatening, as individuals understandably decided to privilege their own survival over social good, even though post-WWI there were many tales of heroism and self-sacrifice. Miss Condell, a nursing student in Boston, reported: “The self control, the endurance, and the splendid willing spirit of all the nurses were marvelous.”

Most human pandemics, like Covid, are zoonoses, diseases spread from animals. That makes the still-expanding level of factory farming, where large numbers of animals are kept in extremely concentrated conditions, a cause for great concern. Of which there is some acknowledgement, in the form of the establishment of the AMR in Agrifood Systems Transdisciplinary Network network and the some limited animal welfare reforms. But the public health threat from factory farming – particularly as a source for new influenza viruses – remains acute. (Anomaly, 2014)

(b) Resistant diseases

In many recent centuries, fear of “the clap”, gonorrhoea, affected the most intimate of human relationships. When the famous libertine and writer John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote “I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap, I spend in her hand” he was only accounting for a fear that extended far beyond his court lifestyle. With the rise of multi-drug resistant gonorrhoea, human relationships are again being marked by a similar fear. When the Ineos Oxford Institute conducted the Not In Our Lifetime campaign to raise awareness of antimicrobial resistance, in a Shoreditch nightclub it summoned social media influencers and journalists with the suggestion that sex might end by 2040 as a result. It claimed to have almost doubled awareness of AMR among 18-29-year-olds.

Far more pervasive – and a rightful cause of fear – is multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is “estimated to cause 13% of all antimicrobial resistance-attributable deaths worldwide and is driven by both ongoing resistance acquisition and person-to-person transmission”. Aid agencies rightly tell positive stories about how persistent attempts to identify patients, ensuring they get the right treatment, and stay on the treatment – one case study reports on two aged five and four being treated at an MSF clinic in Gujranwala, Pakistan, facing a nine-month course of treatment, which must not be interrupted. That one case study – in 2024 there were estimated to be 10.4 million new infections – helps demonstrate the difficulties of finding patients and ensuring they comply with the usually long courses of treatment, with great risks of AMR is treatment is only partial.

Most attention is on bacteria, but fungal diseases are some of the areas of fear about which a number of experts this author has encountered have the greatest concern. During the height of the Covid pandemic in India, the explosion of cases of mucormycosis, a fungal infection that can cause the skin to turn black and has a fatality rate of up to 50% remains something of a mystery, even if some limited understanding of the mechanisms enabling the commonly occurring Mucormycetes fungus to infect vulnerable patients is emerging. The HBO 2022 drama The Last of Us, adapted from a hit video game, in which rising temperatures allow the spread into humans of the real‑life Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, often called cordyceps or zombie‑ant fungus, was fiction, and not biologically realistic, but the existence of widespread resistance in Apsergillus fumigatus is keeping many doctors awake at night. (CDC, 2024)

C. Accidentally created diseases

“Synthetic biology” is the creation of new organisms or organic structures that do not exist in nature. Its boosters suggest that “advances in AI and DNA synthesis are pushing biology toward an engineering paradigm—one in which scientists can generate new genetic sequences and eventually build organisms to order”. (Strickland, 2026) They are treating DNA as “predictive engineering material” (ibid) But that is embedded in an outdated idea of genic supremacy, an often repeated phrase being that the genome operates like a machine blueprint, something that our growing understanding of the sophistication of living beings (even apparently simple microbes) is making it obvious is a claim of great 20^th-century hubris. As former Nature editor Phillip Ball wrote in 2023, with exasperation: “looking to the genome for an account of how life works is rather like … looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works” We are messing with systems that we barely understand.

Most efforts to build “new life” will not start with basic amino acids, but rather synthetic nucleic acids—custom-made strands of DNA and RNA – that can be bought at present from suppliers without statutory controls, relying only on voluntary action. An important and practical step in preventing accidental (or deliberate) engineering of organism of potentially enormous threat is to ensure that suppliers are obligated to screen all sales, considering both the nature of the order and the bona fides of the customer.

There are also growing concern about the creation of “mirror” organisms, “ self-replicating organisms composed of non-natural-chirality biomacromolecules” (molecules the reverse shape to what occurs naturally) could be synthesised in officially condoned, or non-condoned, experiments, and on escape would have no natural controls. One study (in pre-print) showed that most of our antibiotics would fail to bind to “mirror” bacteria. (Concern about the dangers of “engineering” mirror organisms – and potential controls on such research – are the subject of continuing international debate.

While, as will be discussed below, the government speaks of engineering biology as an area of great potential, it is clear that there are significant risks of generating (or re-generating, something to which researchers have come close with smallpox – dangerous organisms.

(d) Deliberately created and spread diseases

In 1346 during a battle for the port of Caffa on the Crimean Sea, Mongol-Tartar forces reportedly catapulted plague victims into the city to spread the disease. It is commonly cited as the first use of biological weapons, although it reflects something that must have occurred earlier in human history. As part of the general push to establish international norms after the Second World War, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) was established in 1972, in a world in which human capabilities to do produce harmful organisms was far less developed than today.

While 183 states are party to the convention, which categorically bans the development and production of biological weapons, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, prions and rickettsiae, a significant number of states have been alleged to have violated the treaty. Non-state actors have also sought to use biological weapons even before the recent decades of technological development: Al-Qaeda made unsuccessful attempts to develop biological weapons and the Rajneeshee cult used Salmonella to cause many hundreds of cases of food poisoning in Oregon in 1984. That the concerns about private activities discussed above is of growing urgency is demonstrated by the recent discovery of thousands of vials of suspicious materials, some labelled as pathogenic bioagents, and laboratory equipment, in a private home in Reedley, California.

Perhaps the greatest protection from the development, and certainly use outside the laboratory of infectious agents comes from the obvious risk of spread being uncontainable. But that may not influence many non-state, and possibly in extremis some state, actors. There is general agreement that, as one author put it, there is a “clear and present need for a revised, robust, and operationally relevant iteration (and interpretation) of the BWC that explicitly addresses these emergent risks and threats”.

(e) Other stresses multiplying the impact of diseases

As a leading article in the medical journal The Lancet said at the start of this year, “Peace is not adjacent to health—it is foundational.” That was written of course in the context of multiple both entrenched and new lighted conflicts around the world and more since that was penned. From the poor citizens of Caffa in 1346 to the post-WWI influenza pandemic, war and disease have always come together. But beyond the obvious impacts of injured, starved and traumatised people being more vulnerable, there has grown increasing understanding of the links between AMR and war.

Recent wars have seen Acinetobacter baumannii emerge as a major driver of hospital-acquired infections, first multi-drug resistant, then extensively-drug resistant, and pan-drug resistant. Only in the past few years has the understanding developed that the effects of the weapons themselves, in the form of heavy metal contamination is a driver of such resistance in its own right.

The climate emergency (increasingly also seen as a health emergency), the threat of biological collapse, and the weakening of human bodies through exposure to a rising cocktail of novel entities, from the so-called forever chemicals (PFAS), on which a House of Commons Select Committee has just expressed grave concern to pesticides, pharmaceutical residues and micro and nano-plastics that together form a “chemical cocktail have the potential to also open the way to the spread and greater impact of infective agents.

3. Countermeasures: capacity and incapacity

(a) Identifying risks and threats

Identifying risks and threats is clearly the starting point for countermeasures. The UK Microbial Forensics Consortium (UKMFC) was established on a One Health framework in 2023, linking frontline biosurvellience laboratories from the clinical, veterinary, plant, food and aquaculture sectors across the four nations of the UK incorporating genomics and bioinformatics - the generation of genetic information from samples and the use of computational tools - to interpret this information as a core UK strength. In this, the UK has a rare genuine argument for being at the forefront of global efforts, but in some of the areas of highest risk there are serious concerns about continuing capacity and the risk of collapse of existing capacity with ageing facilities, notably the high-containment laboratories in Porton Down in Wiltshire, and Colindale in north London. In a case study that might be taken as an exemplar for the weaknesses of the British state, more than £400 million has been spent to no effect, and the predicted cost of the project has ballooned to £3.2bn, more than 500% higher than the initial estimate.

At the core of domestic attempts to reduce and prevent AMR are antimicrobial stewardship schemes (AMS) in the medical and veterinary fields. This is an area in which the UK is genuinely seen as globally leading, but also affected by institutional limitations. As one author noted reflecting on another House of Commons Select Committee study, “AMS programmes built for stable conditions cannot survive disruption, whether from pandemics, workforce shortages, or estate failures … the normal operating environment of the NHS.”

(b) Political risks

As we saw during the height of the Covid pandemic, with perhaps the now most infamous example being the “eat out to help out” scheme, political leaders are subject to multiple pressures, of which public health is only one. With the dominance of the Treasury in UK political structures continuing over decades, guided by an ideology that understands only money, not physical and biological reality, the Green Book model of judging government spending does not have an effective formula for judging or dealing with biosecurity risks. It assumes society continuing much as it is now.

Public fear, and public resistance to necessary action – whether vaccination or quarantining – is also a political risk. Which is nothing new. As a contemporary academic reflecting on the 1918-20 influenza pandemic noted: “Though willing to accept public health officials’ guidance in the early weeks of the crisis, as weeks and months passed and these officials proved unable to contain influenza, Americans grew restive under their control.”

(c) Social weakness

UK society is marked by poor levels of public health, with healthy life expectancy falling on average two years in the past decade, to well below what are regarded as peer countries low levels of institutional capacity after now approaching decades of austerity, and high levels of loneliness, which might be taken as a measure low levels of social connection.

A “whole-of-society” approach to resilience, modelled particularly on Scandinavian approaches, has recently become part of policy framing in the UK, with the creation of the UK Resilience Academy and Framework. Whether, however, that is adequate to counter the threats faced has to be doubtful, given all of the concerns outlined above. A different kind of crisis, but I visited Lancaster after Storm Desmond in 2015, and what was in global terms a quite minor incident left a city in shock following the collapse of its critical infrastructure networks. And that was just one small city.

Conclusion

The UK is at risk today from biothreats, infectious agents that would most likely occur in pandemic form through naturally occurring disease outbreaks (albeit ones that might be related to biodiversity collapse and climate breakdown). Although the threat from intentional or accidental creation of infective agents by state or non-state actors is also significant. The UK’s vulnerability reflects the reality that the world is at risk, and as we were powerfully reminded during the height of the Covid pandemic, in today’s interconnected, world of fast movement, no one is safe until everyone is safe.

This is not the story often being trumpeted by new bio-engineering companies, or promoted through the government’s 10-year life sciences growth plan. There the plan is one of solutionism, cures and treatments to be found, spun out often of university research with the hope of generating the next mass-selling drug. But that bears no resemblance to the careful, endless task of monitoring and checking, preparing for potential infectious dangers and strengthening the biological and social health of society to reduce the risk and ameliorate the effects.

But that the UK government and institutions have not truly grasped the vulnerability of UK society – not a unique vulnerability but one that is higher than might be expected given the nation’s wealth and strong scientific history cannot – and must not – be ignored. The assumption that solutions can be found – through brandishing the magic talismans of artificial so-called intelligence and biotechnology and with that assumption comes a dangerous complacency and inaction on the measures that are needed to deal with the inevitable threat. Disease X, however it comes into being, through AMR, zoonoses spillover or hostile action, may well not wait for the development of a new mRNA vaccine, or the frantic uncovering of an existing drug to blunt its effects, let alone the hunt for a new antimicrobial to which it is not resistant. The disease itself might not come into being if sufficient preventative efforts are taken.

In antimicrobial resistance the UK has been a genuine leader, but the unexpected ending of the Fleming Fund, with its support for research and diagnostics in the Global South, is just one sign of the inadequacy not just of funding but attention. More broadly, there have to be questions about diplomatic capacity to play a claimed leadership role (and one which many states hope to see). That is in light of the state of disarray in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, hit by staffing cuts and the Mandelson scandal. That means that while the UK has signed up to the WHO Pandemic Agreement to strengthen future preparedness and response, and is not inactive in efforts to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, its relevant ambassador saying last year: “We need to strengthen international cooperation and review science and technology, as well as agree on stronger verification mechanisms to address potential risks.” But here, as in domestic preparations for biothreats, the delivery far understates the rhetoric, through no fault of the individuals involved.

With Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation, with vaccine-hesitancy rife in the UK and around the world just being one sign of general distrust in current governmental institutions, the world is now undoubtedly in a worse place than previous years in preparing for biothreats. The UK has a responsibility to its population to be far more prepared, and has a global duty, particularly given the post-colonial legacy of Global North states that look to it for assistance and support in dealing with these issues (see for example multiple outbreaks of ebola in Africa – although that scheme is being cut). That can only start with a realistic assessment of the threats, and the inability of solutionism to deal with them. Being honest with themselves, and with the public, about that needs to be a foundation for building a more biosecure future.

Final note: You might think this tone is slightly different to usual. Yes, it did start life as an academic essay, but I hope it is still readable and justifiable to share here.

And I’ll be talking about some of these issues on Tuesday at the Exeter Climate Forum, covering the intersections of fungal disease, climate, and health.

Picks of the week

Listening

I’ve long been aware of the exquisite collages of Mary Delany, but confess that I had thought of her as something of a one-off, or at least the art as something of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the media available to women were severely restricted. I’ve now been set straight on that point, with a New Books Network interview with Fiona Rogers, Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography at Victoria and Albert Museum and author of Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage.

I was particularly taken - and will definitely pursue further - the work of Hannah Hoch, of the Dada movement, She had retrospectives of her work in Paris and Berlin in 1976 and definitely deserves more attention.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919 Source

Researching

What does it feel like to be an otter in a river when a train shakes the earth as it rumbles over a bridge? Or a kestrel seeking prey over a landscape in which only tiny patches are available for use amidst humanscaped prey deserts? Fascinating research saw humans trained to understand, and as far as possible feel, in the umwelts of different animals around the River Tome in Somerset, England.

“The whole point was … to be in the world as if you had taken that imaginative leap into otterhood, and see what happened.”

And it’s really informative. And an overall conclusion:

“It was hard to feel how we’ve made the world a really hostile place for all these individual creatures. When that’s you, you really feel it. It was quite galvanising.”

Almost the end

Got to point to this stunning example of detachment of mainstream economics from reality/sense:

"With log utility it is optimal to take 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence for 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by factor of 55."

Reported by the Financial Times, that’s from Stanford economist Chad Jones, who’s just been hired by Anthropic, which “likes to portray itself as the AI industry’s conscience”.

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Events

On Tuesday this week I’ll be joining Merton Greens in London talking Green Thinking and Change Everything, and on Friday I’ll be at the brilliant Diss Publishing Bookshop in rural Norfolk ditto.

When a country sells itself off

Sitting on the library “new books shelf”, Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, by Angus Hanton, was an irrestible volume. It wasn’t going to be this week’s subject, but a report from the Financial Times, “Buying Britain: overseas buyers pile into UK companies” pushed it to the top of the pile, with the "value of acquisitions by foreign buyers now up to £128bn this year, “more than triple the level in the same period in 2025”. As ex-City minister (appointed by Gordon Brown) Lord Paul Myners said in 2021: “Britain is open for business in the same way that a car boot sale is open for business.” (p. 106)

Among the “highlights” reported by the FT:

“Tate & Lyle, a stalwart of the London market for close to 90 years, last Monday agreed to a £2.7bn takeover from US rival Ingredion. Days later, FTSE 100 energy group DCC said it would recommend a £5.7bn bid from US buyout firm KKR and Energy Capital Partners.”

And with those sales goes large amounts of tax revenue. They are robbing our society blind.

“Of the world’s top 50 countries, the UK has been losing more tax from the offshoring of profits than anyone else. One way to quantify the loss would be to say that, typically, US multinationals make 10% profit on their turnover, so that their combined UK turnover should be generating declared profits of about $70 billion. With the UK’s 25% corporation tax rate they should be paying $17.5 billion in UK tax, but typically in recent years they have been paying less than $10 billion. But this does not take account of the sales to the UK made direct from tax havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which may well be more than double that number….When British politicians say they cannot afford to reduce hospital waiting list or that they are compelled to increase personal tax rates, some of this is a direct result of their failure to collect tax from multinationals.” (p. 124)

But it is not necessarily only their shareholders who benefit.

“As soon as the barely taxed revenue of US corporations leaves UK shores, often via tax havens, and enters the US, the IRS intercepts the cash and demands its share. The result is that profits which were not taxed by the British are then taxed by the Americans - effectively creating an ongoing transfer of wealth from the UK government to its US counterparts…. A similar loss is being suffered by all other national collectors around the world, and much of it is happening through the eight British-controlled tax havens. So Britain is not just losing tax revenue; it is acting as the Americans’ hand maiden in moving multinationals’ tax money from around the world into US government coffers.” (p. 133)

From the some 1,000 multinationals operating in the UK.

“They make up about 30% of the UK’s trading economy but the tax they pay on their profits makes up little more than 1% of the government’s total tax take. This is even more striking considering that US companies tend to be the most profitable ones. The problem has been steadily growing. According to Gabriel Zucman, a leading tax researcher at the University of California, in recent years at least 55% of foreign profits of US multinationals were redircted to tax havens, whereas in 1970 the rate averaged only 7%. A studying using HMRC data over a 15-year period showed that foreign multinational subsidaries were paying half the rate paid by comparable purely domestic companies in the UK.”

And yep, there’s private equity sucking up cash and destroying businesses again and again - and that means “US private equity”.

“Of the top 20 private equity companies, 17 are from the US. Virtually all of these are active in the UK… there are a host of ‘boutique’ private equity players often owned by the big US banks, such as the subsiduaries of Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America. Even within this wide group of a couple of hundred playters, three-quarters are American. And in the last 20 years the UK economy has welcomed them to a feeding frenzy that has transformed by the UK’s commercial landscape … increasingly, Britain’s most successful businesses are private equity-owned, which means they are more cut-throat, less accountable and usually highly tax efficient. One study by the universities of Harvard and Oxford showed that, on average, during the first two years of owning a company private equity managers cut one in seven staff, reduced wages and raised prives in a process financiers call ‘margin expansion’.” (pp. 103-4)

For 2024, Hanton tallies some of the household name companies controlled by US private equity: “Morrisons, Travelodge, the AA, Alton Towers, Gatwick Airport, Biffa, Center Parcs and Burger King.” During the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020-22, he lists some of the sales: “housebuilder St Modwen, aviation supplier Signature and Bourne Leisure … owns Butlin’s Haven and Warner Leisure Hotels… infrastructure group John Laing (KKR), defence contractor Ultra (Advent), waste company Viridor (KKR) and housing developer Beechcroft (Carlyle).” (pp. 106-7)

Blackstone, infamous for its enormously destructive purchase from the state of 5,000 railway arches when as the Public Accounts Committee concluded the “government took a short-term decision to sell a profitable asset to plug a funding gap”, is a name that keeps popping up again and again.

“Including the staff at acquired companies, Blackstone employed around half a million people around the world by 2024. It contols more than 200 large enterprises, and within that collection the UK offered a rich seam of bargains: listed companies, government assets and family firms. Blackstone has had a hand in the purchase and sale of scores of UK enterprises, including Legoland, the NEC in Birmingham (the UK’s largest event space), Madame Tussauds and Blackpool Tower.” (p. 102)

Yes that’s the Blackstone that built the Southern Cross chain of care homes into England’s largest provider, with 31,000 residents, through “agressive expansion”. Five years after it ended its association, loaded down with debt through ‘sale and leaseback’ of homes, saddled with endlessing rising rent contact, the company went down. By that time, one in three of its 581 centres had been served with improvement notices by the Care Quality Commission. (pp. 104-5)

Another typical private equity purchase was of Sophos, a British (formerly controled from Abingdon, Oxfordshire) cybersecurity business sold to Thoma Bravo in 2020 for £4 billion. “Almost as soon as Sophos was bought the job cuts began… reduced the overall headcount, with claims that more jobs disappeared in the UK than elsewhere…. Just like many other private equity purchases, a premium had been paid and that was best justified by making the company leaner, and maybe a little meaner.”" (p. 102-103)

So who benefits from all the cash?

“Private equity groups use other people’s capital and charge heavily for their efforts. The traditional model was dubbed ‘2 and 20’, meaning they took an annual fee of 2 per cent of the funds under management and on top of that they got 20 per cent of any profits. In recent years that means their total fee has worked out annually at 6 per cent of the funds they control. Although the level of those fees has come under pressure, private equity is still phenomenally profitable - but largely for the owners of the private equity companies themselves. While bosses such as Schwarzman [Blackstone] have amassed huge personal fortunes, their investors - who are mostly pension savers - have done much less well. According to Oxford professor Ludovic Phalippou, rewards for outside investors in private equity funds are often the same as, or lower than, returns from owning traditional listed shares, mainly because of the high fees.” (p.115)

And the UK loses huge amounts of tax revenue that it should receive from these multinational companies.

So how do they dodge taxes? Tax havens of course. Take US multinationals out of the Swiss GDP figures and they fall by about 27%. Singapore drops from 32nd to about 58th on size of economy similarly, and Ireland from 26th to 57th, cutting the scale of the supposed economy by about two thirds.

“The economies of Luxembourg and the Netherlands are similarly bloated by US corporations tax manouevres. Until 2021, the 14 million UK residents who subscribed to Netflix were invoiced from the Netherlands, and the billions of pounds of Apple’s UK sales continue to be routed through Ireland… US multinationals represent 25 of Irelands top 50 companies and even at low tax rates they contribue 80% of Irish corporation taxes… they employ a large chunk of the population, about 172,000 workers, or one person in 14.” (p. 122)

It is astonishing how much the UK, like a baby sister turning always to her elder for solutions, turns to the US under pressure. Take Covid:

“Britain’s government spending after six months showed that American companies were picking up over half of all the Covid-19 contracting…. In May 2020, Honeywell of Charlotte, North Carolina, won a deal to supply 70 million face masks. Hologic of Marlborough, Massachusetts, won a £150 million contract for testing kits, and another £68 million was given to Thermo Fisher of Waltham, Massachusetts. When the ‘Test and Trace’ scheme required call centres, these were operated by Sitel of Miami Florida. Testing kits were largely delivered by Amazon and ID checks were made by the consumer credit company TransUnion, of Chicago, Illinois. Brake Bros, owned by Sysco of Texas, shared a £205 million untendered contract to deliver food boxes to vulnerable people who were isolating during the pandemic. The company also received a £600 million government loan at 0.5% annual interest under the Covid Corporate Financing Facility.” (p. 140)

And that only reflects what happens from day to day in the NHS. Hanter provides a long list of diagnostic, recordkeeping, pharmaceuticals, as well as actual healthcare, in which again and again US firms dominate.

“Very roughly, then, about 40% of UK health spending, apart from staff costs, is already with private suppliers, and around half of that is with North American companies… A future of medicine involving big data, AI and genetics will, very likely, be dominated by US companies…. It will be easy … to click into the NHS network because it has already been reshaped to fit more neatly with American business models.” (pp. 152-3)

And that’s a cross-government problem particularly with IT that, slowly, is starting to get more attention, after in 2011 a House of Commons Public Administration Committee report Government and IT, a recipe for rip-offs, noted how the UK was already “over-reliant on a small ‘oligopoly’ of large suppliers, which some witnesses referred to as a cartel.” It went on to say: “The government needs to break out of this relationship. “ But of course since then the situation has got much worse: “The problem with too much foreign procurement is that this lack of resilience becomes self-perpetuating: if you have not given contracts to domestic companies, they will not be there when you most need them.” (p. 160)

But it goes well beyond IT. The Crown Commercial Service does a huge amount of government buying, £27 billion annually (about £1,000 per household) but has no UK-supplier preference and does not even record the national source of purchases, unlike the US (through the Federal Procurement Data System) and the EU, which makes it a requirement for member states. (p. 169)

Then there’s UK employment. Hanter dispels the common claim that the number of Brits working for US firms matches the number of Americans with British bosses, usually put at about 1 million each. He reckons the figure for UK workers is double that.

“Look at the IRS statistics for other European countries, which show that American countries employ more Brits than the total of all of those whom they employ in France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. As well as a loss of control, British workers are significantly less well paid than German or French workers.” (p. 187)

In trying to keep up on islands in which public services have been slashed away by austerity and companies extract wealth instead of paying their workers fairly, a lot of the cost is born by individuals just struggling to survive.

“The most expensive mainstream borrowing is by credit card (typically 22 per cent annual interest) and the British have much more credit card debt than the Europeans: the French have half as much, the Germans two-thirds and the Italians only a quarter. These debts are mostly via American corporations such as Visa and Mastercard….Average debt as a percentage of disposable income may seem high in the US at 101 per cent; for Italy it is 110 per cent, and in Germany it is 11 per cent. But the UK takes the prize for personal indebtedness,with an average debt of 149 per cent of disposable income. The British consumer is quick to latch on to new forms of borrowing, of which the latest is ‘BNPL’ - ‘buy now pay later,’ - dominated by market leader Klarna. The company is owned by US investors, led by Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, California.” (p. 97-8)

Hanter concludes with the thought that much of this is a Thatcher legacy, but, although an ardent Atlanticist, “she might be horrified to see how her idea of ‘popular capitalism’ with citizens as shareholders, has collapsed, with private shareholdings shrinking year by year. In her second full year in office, 1981, only 3.6% of UK shares were owned overseas. By 2020 that number was more than 56%.” (p. 223)

Picks of the week

Listening

A hashtag I find myself rolling out again and again is #WarOnTidiness. In the anti-biotic 20th-century we wanted to stop life existing altogether (lichen on pavements, ivy on walls, “weeds” - or rather wildflowers - in monoculture fields), and to create straight neat lines when nature flourishes with curves and uneven edges. The cultural basis of this prejudice - and a colonialist, racist prejudice it often is - is beautifully set out by Jeffrey Hoelle, author of Cultivated Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control, on the New Books Network Anthropology channel. What’s really innovative about the book is how he links the treatment of the Amazon with the way in which we are pushed to treat our bodies - particularly how women and people from minoritised communities are pushed to “tame” their bodies. “Cultivation” is an ideology, an imposition of control, and understanding that has to be a start of resistance. (Something feminists of course have long understood.)

Thinking

A fascinating account of yam cultivation in Papua New Guinea, which in traditional understanding (as so many places) the effort is seen as cooperative, between the planet and the human animal.

“Working there involves a careful choreography of movements, observations, and tactile engagements—twining vines around tutors, harvesting ripe plants, transplanting shoots—all mainly with the hands, interacting gently with every one of them individually. Tools like digging sticks and bush-knives are used minimally; the human body itself is the primary interface. Actions that invite plants also include speaking, singing, blowing on vines, and applying special substances on the path of the growing tuber.”

You might call it mindful growing, that respects the plant, rather than extracts its output. And its not hard to see how it might well produce better results, and a better life.

Researching

Oil crops - particularly palm oil and soybean - have spread around the world like a virulent rash at terrifying speed, industrial monocultures often replacing rich biodiversity. Yet apparently for the first time, researchers have tallied the combined costs of crops that mostly go to wholly unnecessary, and frequently unhealthy uses, from factory farming to cosmetics. "Between 1995 and 2020, biodiversity loss rose by around 80%. But this is not primarily caused by global population growth....EU, China, US together account for >80% of impacts"

Photo by allPhoto Bangkok on Unsplash

Almost the end

A positive note, long after other countries did it (Wales and Scotland 2023, Australia 2013), England is to make a full formal apology to the women and children affected by forced adoption, which until 1976 saw an estimated 185,000 babies taken from unmarried mothers. Campaigning works, eventually: I worked with some of those affected to make this apology Green Party policy in 2011.

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Events

Looking forward to talking Green Thinking at the wonderful Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, North London, on Wednesday. Tickets here.

The following week my diary secretary (ie me) has got really out of control. I am at the lovely Verey Books in the Lake District on Wednesday and on Thursday at the magnificent Five Leaves in Nottingham, and yes I have to go to London in between to chair an AMR event. Yes, I believe in a work/life balance, I just don’t have one.

The City of London - excessive political influence

One of this week’s books is the handily small but richly informative The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet by Ann Pettifor. Timely for me, as I joined with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services to launch a survey on the future of the City of London Corporation. Please do take a minute to fill it out - we want a wide range of perspectives. The City, and its role in promoting the financial sector, has impacts on all of our lives!

As I told journalist Ben Lynch, “the constitutional anachronism is one element of the financial sector’s excessive political influence, so evident in policies of successive governments, which cannot be allowed to continue. Too much finance in our economy is a major threat to our security, as we saw in 2007-8.”

Multiple layers of ugliness. Photo by Tadas Petrokas on Unsplash

The financial sector has long had far too much influence over our politics, the waves of its dominance rising and (sometimes) retreating. Pettifor quotes President Roosevelt as saying in 1936: “business and financial monopoly, specualtion, reckless banking…had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We now know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.” (p. 6)

But now, we’re back, globally, with one system of capitalism based on wild inequality and collapsing trust (as I argue in Green Thinking). As Pettifor notes, in 1971, as Nixon dismantled the Bretton-Woods order, US workers shared 51 per cent of GDP. By 2023, that had collapsed to 42.6 per cent. Meanwhile in apparent rival China:

“The top 10 per cent of the population hold approximately 67% of China’s wealth. The top 0.001% own 5.8% of China’s total wealth, roughly equaivalent to that of the bottom 50%. The share of China’s national income earned by the top 10% of the population increased from 27% in 1978 to 41% in 2015, while the share earned by the bottom 50% (a group that includes 536 million adults) dropped from 27 to 15%.” (p. 13)

Is it any wonder Presidents Trump and Xi appear to get on surprisingly well?

Money demands trust

And all of this is based on financialised assets, and that is founded on money, “something ephemeral, a social construst… all money is credit - an obligation, a ‘promise to pay’: a series of human obligations and claims on both present and future human and ecological resources.”

“Credit money in turn is based on trust, upheld by regulation and law. The grave danger posed by the globalised financial system is that it is largely lawless and unregulated. Lawlessness undermines trust - the very thing that gives money obligations value.” (p. 15)

And the US has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted, something the world would do well to remember long pre-dates President Trump.

“By pegging the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar, to a finite supply of gold in Fort Knox, both the American delegation at Bretton Woods and their friends in the orthodox economics profession presaged the collapse of the system under President Nixon. By 1971 and the Nixon TV announcement, the costs of both the Vietnam War and the building of ‘The Great Society’ had caused the United States to build up a deficit in trade and to empty Fort Knox of its holdings…. In the 1960s, well before the Nixon Shock, French President de Gaulle knew the US had insufficient gold to uphold its promise to convert paper dollars to gold,… in 1971, France’s President Pompidou sent a battleship to repatriate gold stored in the vaults of the New York Fed. These accelerating outflows of gold and follars … prompted Nixon to suspend gold convertability… the biggest-ever such sovereign default, although it is seldom defined as such by economic historians. If the IMF had been called in, the US would have had to adopt a ‘structural adjustment’ programme … Given American power and dominance, that was out of the question.” (p. 25)

But it is this snap imposition by Nixon - not really so long ago - and contingent on US military power and global aquiescence - that led to the financial world we have today:

“He and his successors presided over the removal of the global financial system’s guard rails, the increasing mobility of capital (1974), the creation of large, opaque and unbalanced global markets in goods, services and money; and a global export-led growth model that resulted in the largest, most-persistent trade deficits in history. Not to mention the environmental impact of that growth model… the Nixon Shock catalysed changes to the way Wall Street did business… thus began the slow but inevitable construction of the Global Casino.” (p. 37)

It’s not that there was much to praise about the Gold Standard, as Pettifor explains.

“Governments were expected to increase the nation’s holdings of gold by neglecting the domestic economy and reorientating economies towards international markets in money, goods and services. Then, as now, the export orientation of economies is necessary to ensure countries earn hard currency … for the purpose of repaying private and public foreign bankers and creditors and for purchasing vital imports like medicines and oil…. the central aim of the gold standard was to wrest power away from the state over the issuance of paper money, the pricing of money (interest rates) and the valuation of the currency and to transfer those powers to private financiers.” (p.57)

Fast and dirty flows

And now we’ve added technology to speed up their accumulation, so that the world in 2021 lost $144.8 billion in tax revenues to tax abuse related to offshore financial wealth, while the amount of undeclared offshore wealth was was in 2024 around $13 trillion (about 9% of global GDP).

“The ability to move capital across the world at lightning speed is largely thanks to technology that, as Susan Strange explained in 1998, had changed the world’s structures of power … by shifting power over trade and production from governments to firms. …According to Strange ‘ in the post-war decades and for much of the Cold War, technology was led and directed by states. By the 1990s, it was led and directed form the private sector.” (p. 65)

Pettifor gives us a useful explanation of the oft-heard term shadow banking.

“The unregulated $239 trillion market in money - a system of banking known as market’based finance’. This globalised market exists, metaphorically speaking, in the dark space that is the mesophere - the layer of atmosphere above the stratosphere…made up of ‘the whole alphabet soup of levered up non-bank investment conduits, venicles and structures’ to quote McCulley… the creation of money, the pricing of money (interest), the lending and borrowing of money - undertaken outside the scope of regulatory supervision… also tethered to the world’s ‘main street’ (that is, local) banks and, in that way, pose risks to us all… in 2023, traditional banks in their sample [Levin and Malfroy-Camine] had extended £300 billion, or 14% of their total lending, to those funds… big US banks have raised their lending to private capital firms approximately 30 times over, from about $10 billion in 2013 to $300 billion in 2023.” (p. 67)

Threatening food security

And the threat is not just to finance, but very much grounded in the real world. Pettifor talks of the “hunger of 2005-8”, when over three years “global food prices rose by a whopping 83% as speculation in financial markets accelerated. Between January 2005 and June 2008, maize prives almost tripled, wheat prices increased 127% and rice 170%…. at the same time, demand for food was falling as the global economy weakened and then collapsed from August 2007 onwards… caused by the greater participation of financial speculators in food deriveratives markts. That in turn was a direct result of the Clinton administration’s 2000 change to the Roosevelt administrations 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, changes which removed quantitative restrictions on speculative positions in agricultural futures contracts.”(pp. 111-12)

These, under the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, were devised, Pettifor explains, by Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers. (p. 115) (Yep, same villains keep reappearing.) If you are looking for opposition names at the time - and yes there were plenty, Professor Stout and Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Both women. Somehow not surprising.

A few did very nicely from the change.

“According to analysis by Societe Generale, the speculative strategies by a group of hedge funds active on the CME [Chicago Mercantile Exchange - where most speculation takes place] were able to make a profit of $1.9 billion based on the price spike in wheat, mazine and soybeans following the start of the war in Ukraine… When a wall of speculative money is aimed at limited supplies of an asset like grain, prices rocket upwards.” (p. 118-9)

So also with oil.

“The economists Carlotta Brennan and Servaas Storm have set about trying to show just how influential speculators are in the market for ‘black gold’ - and how much that speculation impacted on inflation in the US… speculators… acitivity has raised the volume of oil transactions far above the volume warranted by ordinary commercial transactions… they concluded… that excessive speculation in the crude oil market was responsible for 24 to 48% of the increase in the WTI (West Texas Intermediate) crude price from October 2020 to June 2022… increase of around $18 to $36 a barrel and an increase in the US inflation rate of 0.7 to 1.5 percentage points in that same period.” (p. 129)

Then Pettifor turns to housing, noting “just as in the 1930s, the world’s people clamour for protection from the ruthless governance of markets. Their appeals for, among other things, a safe and affordable roof over their heads are frequently dismissed as ‘populism’.” (p. 138-9) She turns to the work of Ian Milheirn, now chief economist at the Department of Transport.

“He has challenged the commonly held claim that Britain has failed to build enough houses to meet the demand for places to live… since the 1996 nadir of house prices, the English housing stock has grown by 168,000 units per year on average, while growth in the number of households averaged 147,000 per year… there were 660,000 more dwellings than households in England in 1996, this surplus grew to over 1.1 million by 2018. … even in London and the South East, the number of houses has grown faster than the household count… The increase in housing stock has had a minimal impact on prices. .. When the fuel of the Global Casino’s mobile private capital is matched by easy if costly mortgage credit and money from both commercial banks and the Bank of Mum and Dad - and in turn supplemented by government subsidies and tax breaks - house prices rise.” (p. 142)

What to do? Among Pettifor’s recommendations are a Tobin Tax, a property speculation tax and/or land value tax, incentivising banks to lend into the productive economy rather than property. “It is possible to decommodify land.” (p.146)

And she says “restraints on capital movements must be used by states to tax all citizens fairly… Above all, taxation must be applied to the super-rich… unlike wages, which are taxed when they are sold, or ‘realised’…. The rich, therefore, do not sell their assets. Instead they use their assets as collateral for additional leverage or borrowing. The loans are not considered income … so they are not taxed.” (p. 181

As I do in Green Thinking, Pettifor finishes with a return to the inspiration of nature. "

“Decentralisation is vital for building the resilience of societies and economies faced with climate breakdown and eocsystem collapse. As Phila Back argues, all life is a unity - a fundamental concept of ecology. Fungi, part of the wood-wide web, are entirely decentralized and essentially unbounded branching threads that intertwine and bond with other organisms to exchange and transmit substances as well as information across extensive underground networks.’ … they can detoxify contamination, accelerate regeneration of devastated landscapes and sequester atmospheric carbon on a pontentially very large scale.’ The economics profession has a lot to learn from fungi.” (pp. 191-2)

To finish, I’ll note how Pettifor quotes Keynes: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves to some defunct economist.” (p. 62) What we might just do is throw out all of the orthodox economists - a whole defunct field, and start with heterodox approaches like those of Pettifor.

Picks of the week

Reading

I don’t read a lot of fiction, have been thinking I should read more, but I find it hard to get engaged in novels. But I loved The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It has a fantasy, steampunkish kind of setting, nicely done, and in many ways is a traditional coming-of-age story, but what makes it for me is the politics - a person learning to do politics in the most desperate (for him anyway, but perhaps also for his society) circumstances of being made emperor without any real preparation, or any allies but those he can make as he goes along, in a highly dysfunctional, corrupt polis.

Given the chaotic state of our politics today, it has an odd timeliness, but it also is an exploration of what has been a surprisingly common event in history. I was at the same time listening to the latest Byzantium and Friends podcast about the emperor we know as Julian the Apostate, who got dumped with the junior emperorship, and military command in Gaul, without any preparation at all, because all of his other relatives had been killed off in internecine struggles in the imperial family.

There’s a brilliant, shocking twist moment at the end of The Goblin Emperor, when the Emperor meets one of the men who killed off his father and brothers, which I won’t give away. But a really gut punch moment.

Listening

The brilliant Gastropod podcast is nothing like a cooking show. It’s about the politics of food, and this episode, about the long-term white/brown bread debate, demonstrates what a highly political argument that has been over centuries. From racist arguments for white bread, to the way in which brown bread can be exclusionary (and not just for financial reasons). The latter is why there’s now an “approachable bread” movement in the US. (Which reminded me of a recent discussion with a French activist, who said that there is a political reaction against organic food there, because it is seen similarly.)

Also staying on the food side, I have just discovered the very varied The Delicious Legacy podcast, with archaeological and contemporary food stories with politics as more than a condiment. Particularly enjoyed the accounts of artisanal production of Asin tibuok (whole salt) in the Philippines, a reminder of the sophistication of so many traditional technologies, and cultures’ capacity to use all resources (coconut husks are used to soak up the salt, then burnt during the process of extraction). It is, sadly no surprise, listed on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

Thinking

It isn’t easy reading, but an article written by Zoë Sofia in 2000 in the feminist journal Hypatia has produced much subsequent fertile discussion about what she called the “philosophy of container technologies”. Among those is a book, handily freely available online, titled Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking edited by Marie-Luise Angerer, Ingrid Richardson, Hannah Schmedes and Zoë Sofoulis.

It seeks to look more broadly at “containment”. The editors note that this is not “going beyond” the container, but incites readers “to situate the container-as-object as part of a broader set of containment techniques and functions…. "the ‘holding’ performed by a container, which usually means ‘holding within’ but can also mean ‘holding together’ is the primary technology of containment that comes to mind, but it is not the only one. ‘Filtering’ is another kind of containment, where the emphasis is on discriminating between what is let in and what is excluded, and the container functions as a permeable membrane, a fence, or a gateway. ‘Leaking’ implies a movement from inside (a container) to outside of it… may be a constitutive and essential - though often hidden and denied - operating feature of systems and protocols that are ostensibly designed to contain and hold.” (p 9)

One of the examples cited is “failure of containment protocols to prevent non-native ocean farmed salmon from escaping into wild rivers, where they compete and/or hybridize with native species”. (p. 11) One of the many reasons for concern about factory fish farming.

We should surely assume that no containment will every be perfect, whether due to temporal changes or pressures it was not designed for. (See this week’s Russian bombing of a facility at Chernobyl used to store spent nuclear fuel - luckily not in use at the time.)

This is work drawing on feminist understandings - I think of my mother’s Tupperware parties, containers have traditionally been a chiefly female concern - although you might see the shift to ultraprocessed products as one more male (corporate) takeover of a traditional female concern and skillset. The academic base is also the history of technology approaches, as well as Heidigger’s philosophy.

But as I wrestled on the train this afternoon with a nearly unopenable small plastic container of guacamole, while wondering just how much microplastics and non-plastics it was shedding into the food and air, it is a useful reminder to look around us and think systemically, about how containers and containment are not dull and technical issues, but something about which we need to think critically and systemically in all areas of life.

Researching

If you’re a regular on this Substack, you’ll know that I find microbes, and microbiomes, absolutely fascinating. Four billion years (more or less) of continual evolution, a degree of sophistication that we’re just starting to glimpse, and a central place in our world that it is essential we come to terms with, (see The Probiotic Planet).

Yet more evidence of that in fascinating research about ecologically essential processes in fish.

“Symbiotic gut microbes may work in tandem with marine fish to produce a form of calcium carbonate that influences overall ocean health and serves as a key carbon sink. This process, long attributed primarily to fish physiology, may in fact depend on a previously unrecognized microbial partnership.”

Source (Also to note that the males of these fish “sing”, using their swim bladder)

Almost the end

No, the videogame and HBO series The Last of Us is not - exactly - a realistic scenario; Cordyceps is unlikely to be able to switch from arthropods to humans.

But fungal diseases are a real, serious and under-considered danger, and resistance to the relatively few drugs we have available to treat them a fast-growing problem. So I was pleased to contribute to this academic article calling for stronger policy measures:

1. a cross-government fAMR body, 2. mandatory environmental and clinical surveillance, and 3. for fungicide approvals to look beyond crop pathogens and integrate risk assessments for potential hotspots of resistance selection in human fungal pathogens.

You can find a more accessible summary of the article here.

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Events

Looking forward to returning to the wonderful Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, North London, to talk about my new book Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics on June 10. That after a great event at the University of Swansea with the Medical Humanities Research Centre and Climate Action Research Network; it was billed as a public lecture but an almost entirely academic audience. Really enjoyed it and would love to do similar events at other universities and colleges.

And my other big book news is that, after years of telling people the audio book of Change Everything, my first book, would be out “soon”, it finally is! (After some 12 hours of recording - yes reading your own book to professional standard is quite a slog!) It should be available anywhere you get your audio books, and if you’d like to give the format a go, here’s one place offering a free trial.

What this Substack is not

No, I decided not to enter the (mostly Labour-Party) Substack “duel of the essays”. I’ve written a book on the Green vision. And as I said on Instagram, why get so excited about the words of a lobbyist for the fossil fuel and IT sectors (what Tony Blair has been for the last 20 years), who happens to have been prime minister before that.

The Fifties weren’t - always - like you think

Deadening conformism and “respectability”, identikit suburban culture built around consumption, rigid gender norms and fears of “Reds under the bed” - these are the stereotypes of the 1950s, in the UK and elsewhere. Their continuation were what my mother was rebelling against in early 1960s Australia. (Although for her that meant going out with boys and following pop stars; nothing in her experience pointed to political activties or collective organising.)

But that crunching repression of difference of the Fifties may be seen as a reaction against questioning of the status quo by many whose lives had been torn asunder by the Second World War, and acute awareness of the last violent spasms of Empire in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus and the fearsome shadow of the A-bomb and H-bomb.

In The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain, Sophie Scott-Brown finds there was plenty of interesting, and occasionally impactful, radical politics going on through the period, presenting perspectives that might sound surprisingly contemporary to modern activists of the Occupy movement or those promoting prefigurative politics.

There are many fascinating stories of lives of the time, such as that of Colin Ward (remembered here by the Town and Country Planning Association), who after leaving school in Ilford at 15 worked under Sidney Caulfield, an architect who had trained under William Morris but ended up doing bomb repairs.

“In 1942, his talent as a draughtsman led to a posting with the Royal Engineers (where he spent time drawing latrines), and to Glasgow. One Sunday afternoon on Glasgow Green, he watched Eddie Shaw taunting communists in public debate and was hooked … drawn into the orbit of the GAG [Glasgow Anarchist Group], fascinated by what they had to say about Allied hypocrisy in the War, the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, the limits of unionism, and the vitality of genuine workers’ control. Ironically, his involvement with the London FP group was only truly securied when he was called as a witness for the prosecution in the Freedom trial case (he was an example of a soldier who had been incited to sedition). When finally demobbed in 1947, and back in London,he joined the group as an editor. Ward had three objections to both [Herbert] Read and [Dr Alex] Comfort’s intellectual anarchism and faith in science. First, for an ideology preoccupied with liberty, he found it strange to define freedom as obedience to natural laws. Second, he doubted the capacity of science to determine those laws definitively, let alone extrapolate models of living from them… anarchy had to remain an aspiration of the heart… Ideas could be tools to encourage people, but they must not be instructions to compel them … the popular movement had to be anarchism’s moral and intellectual anchor; if not the whole enterpirse fell into the hopeless contradiction of forcing people to be free…. As he understood it, anarchism began from the assumption that people were capable of self-organization. They could resolve problems without force or intervention if given the chance to do so. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902) offered one account of cooperation as a driving factor in human evolution but there were plenty of others: the Jura watchmakers in La-Chaux-de-Fonds in the 1980s, the spontaneous formation of the Paris Commune in 1870-71, the leaderless communities of the Mexican peons in 1910-20, the Maknovist rebels in Ukraine 1917-22, the anarchists in Barcelona in 1936.” (pp. 23-5)

Ward’s view on education feels awfully relevant today. (Including a podcast I did this week with Teacher Talk Radio.)

“He believed cooperation was a human capacity but not an instinct. It required training through education. Unfortunately the formal education most people received taught and rewarded the most uncooperative, even anti-social, principles that people could have … from what was taught to how, a young person learned obedience and dependency: how to follow instructions, carry out allotted tasks, defer to those with more power. Instead of expanding students’ horizons, schools channelled them into a niche in the labour market. Even the comradery of classmates was tainted; instead of collaborators, children were competitors vying for grades, praise and attention.” (p. 99)

As do his social views.

“While it was true his own generation had ‘retreated from aestheticism into philistinism’, Labour’s modernizers were wrong to believe they would be satisfied by consumer power alone. Young people might be less sensitive to what was ‘cruel or wicked’, but they cared very much about what was ‘bogus or phoney’. The nuances of this mood escaped the politicians, but the period’s artists understood it. The cold rage of John Osbourne and Alan Stilltoe, the frankness of Samuel Selvon, and Doris Lessing, the prickly wit of Clint McInnes and Iris Murdoch, all captured the instrinctive nonconformism that made young people like him so wary of ‘normal’ politics. (p. 110)

But it was hard to keep optimism about change in a society seemingly focused on ploughing forward with a system of more of the same with a little added social mobility. So Scott-Brown reports on one contemporary view:

“Why do governments fail at change, even when they set out to achieve it? From his position as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, Douglas Cole surveyed the mid-fifties world uneasily. For the veteran socialist, it was not just the mounting tension with Russia, the escalating nuclear programme, or the incessant fighting on colonial frontiers. It was not even the fact that the Conservatives were back in power and Labour stranded in the wilderness. What worried him most was the lack of any serious left-wing alternative anywhere. The socialist imagination seemed drained, spent from ushering in the welfare state… In a New Statesman and Nation pamplet Is This Socialism? (1954), Cole assessed the situation. He was not writing for Labour Party supporters but for those who ‘feel a sense of frustration because Socialism means to them something radically different from the managerial welfare state’. The problem was that Labour had attacked unequal incomes but not property, which remained enshrined in the political system … the welfare state did not threaten the class system: it only generated more laters of stratification. Mobility had increased between the upper-lower and the lower-middle levels, but the structures of power at the top were unchanged."… Cole believed any Labour government worthy of the term should attack large inherited fortunes, constrain high incomes, abolish titles and promote comprehensive education that integrated academic and technical work. Above all they must revive industrial democracy.” (p. 56)

Sounds rather familiar in 2026 - if rather radical by today’s standards in any part of the Labour Party.

There were plenty of contemporary critics too of the place being envisaged for women in this new consumer society, one that my mother and her friends continued to suffer under in early 1970s Australia, when they’d describe themselves, without any irony, as “only a housewife”.

“As Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein argued in their study, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (1956), since the Industrial Revolution, work had become increasingly separated from home life with the effect of traditionally female forms of labour - crafts such as home baking, soap-making, or skills such as budgetting and thrift, losing both economic and social status. … Every time the housewife was urged to buy a kitchen appliance, a sliced loaf, or a can of soup, when she was encouraged to acquire something on hire-purchase rather than making do or budgetting accordingly, the ‘cash’ value of her contribution to the household economy diminished….As researchers at the Institute of Community Studies found, slum clearance initiatives, including relocation to New Towns, reduced the family to a core ‘nuclear’ unit… which, writer Jacquetta Hawkes remarked, made ‘fearful demands on human beings caught up in it; heavily weighted for loneliness, excessive demands, strain and failure.” (p. 33)

From the US: Betty Ford with Gerald (future president after Nixon), modelling family life. Source

And then of course there was the development of The Bomb, and the impact of nuclear testing.

In 1957 “the issue of fallout topped the political agenda. With an international test ban agreement on the horizon, the government was anxious for Operation Grapple - the testing phase of the British nuclear programme in the Pacific - to get underway quickly. Campaigners hopes rested on Labour, and indeed Labour MP Barbara Castle obliged by opposing the test in light of the probably harm posed to human an environmental health from radioactive fallout. But Castle spoke as an individual, not as a Party spokesperson. .. In October 1957, the Party rejected proposals to adopt unlilateral disarmament as policy at their annual conference. Aneurin Bevan - who formerly opposed the H-bomb but changed position after becoming Shadow Foreign Secretary - mobilized the Union members of the Party’s National Executive Committee … For activists, the idea that peace could be approached through conventional political channels, namely the Labour Party, was discredited. (p. 53-4)

A run through opinion polls shows a great deal of public concern, and understanding, although it “appeared to change according to what was asked and when… Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, polls reported high public concern about the use of nuclear weapons. In May 1954, the hydrogen bomb was ranked as the British government’s main problem, with people widely agreeing that an atomic war would destroy civilization... In February 1958 over half of poll respondents rejected a complete end to British nuclear testing, but by May 1958 over half believe US and UK tests should be stopped immediately or at the end of their present cycle. In May 1957 polls suggested widespread support for miltilateral nuclear disarmament and a cessation of testing but a lack of support for unlateral disarmament in Britain alone. At the same time, polls confirmed a majority believed that fears about the impact of radioactive fallout on human health were well founded.” (p. 88)

Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb test Source

Mention the nuclear facility at Aldermaston, and I immediately think of an action a decade ago of wrapping a handmade pink scarf around it. (It was the first crocheting I had done in some 30 years - mine was the really lumpy and uneven one), but it was fascinating to read about the tentative, brave first moves to develop a direct action campaign against nuclear weapons. And to hear so early the suggestion that the UK could have a special place in moving the world away from the nuclear weapons age.

“New Reasoner editor Edward Thompson echoed [Bertrand] Russell and [JB] Priestley in calling for Britain to take an international moral lead. ‘Every pointer indicates Britain as the nation best placed to take the initiative which might just succeed in bringing down the whole power-crazy system like a pack of cards. We are not a world power in terms of death dealing fireworks, but in terms of world influence.'“ (p. 78)

In the first march on Aldermaston, in Easter 1958, organised by people with no experience of similar events, and no real idea of how it would work out, there was an eclectic mix of people.

“Alongside CND founders Canon Collins and the Rev Michael Scott, there were other religious leaders and delegations from different faith groups. Trade union and guild groups, cooperative societies and the Women’s Institute all sent representative. Labour MPs Frank Allaun, Harold Davies and Stephen Swingler marched as did the Independent Labour Party MP Fenner Brockway…. Some were ‘eccentric’, dressed in ‘outlandish’ clothers (sandals and duffle coats!) and sporting long hair and even beards, which older organizers worried damaged the march’s respectability.” (p. 81)

I doubt many Extinction Rebellion participants knew about 29 April 1961, when the Committee of 100 held a second Whitehall sitdown, involving 2,500 people. “Squatters flatly refused to move onto the pavement when ordered to do so by police,. Holding their ground, they went limp when hauled from their positions and were duly packed into vans brought in for the purpose. In total 800 arrests were made; protesters filled up local custody cells overnight and magristrate courts in the morning.” One commentator said “It points to a new attitude to political action… it challenges the social democratic frame of mind which sets everything in terms of parliamentary manoeuvring.” (p. 136)

Saying that we need a world in which everyone makes politics what they do, not have done to them, is not new.

But Scott-Brown sees, as we have in recent years, the focus on activism shifting with events.

“The test Ban Treaty in 1963 allayed the worst of public fears, dropping nuclear weapons down the political agenda. Regional committees expanded to other campaigns - solidarity with Vietnam following the American invasion in 1965, solidarity with Greece following the 1967 - before finally dissolving themselves into the new grounsdwell of activity in 1968.” (p. 166)

A final thought from the book: we might learn again more broadly from the History Workshop movement.

“Although academically inexperienced, students had a practical knowledge of economics which, if cultivated, could illuminate or even challenge conventional interpretations of hits history… the Workshop was devised to encourage students to become ‘the producers, not merely the consumers, of their own history… proved immensely popular; by the end of the seventies they attracted hundreds of attendees without losing their happily makeshift atmosphere. Colin Ward described them as more like ‘carnivals of history’ than traditional academic conferences.” (p. 164)

The History Workshop wide-ranging online blog continues, as does an academic journal.

Picks of the week

Listening

Enjoyed the episode of the Common Descent podcast on Burrowers, especially the focus on one of the great changes in history, at the boundary of the Ediacran and Cambrian, when burrowing started (in the sea floor). A huge change that opened up massive ecological opportunities, and also recycled nutrients that would previously have been buried and lost. But demonstrating how much ideas can change fast in paleolontology, just after I’d listened to the episode, I came across new research suggesting what had been thought to be some of the earliest evidence of worm-like creatures may in fact be structures created by bacteria and algae.

Also learnt about the paleoburrows of South America, constructed by now extinct megafauna, only recently really understood and yet to be properly protected. A reminder that humans are far from the only species to have engaged in mammoth construction projects.

Researching

Continuing on the theme of non-human animal capabilities, researchers have been looking at how tardigrades can survive astonishingly high temperatures. They adjust their thermal conductance, so the heat doesn’t reach their core. It is suggested this might be a model human inventors could try to replicate. No, we still can’t match the creativity of nature in many areas.

Thinking

Got to comment, at least obliquely on this entirely unseasonal, record-smashing heat. With the thought of what it is doing to the high-altitutde cryosphere, specifically some stats from Switzerland, where “between 1973 and 2016, more than 1,000 glaciers vanished. Twenty major Swiss glaciers have lost one quarter of their volume since 2015.” That has major implications for the stability of mountains, and the survival of communities. (As it does in many other areas, often without the capacities Switzerland has to at least protect human lives.)

Almost the end

Was talking this week about the need to learn from historic farming and land-management practices in the UK, as we look to learn from continuing indigenous practices in other parts of the world, so was particularly taken by this History Workshop article on farming practices before the Highland Clearances, “many of which would now be described as ‘agroecological’… attuned to local conditions and informed by centuries of knowledge-making”. And how “modernisers” complained many of the practices reduced profit, even as they increased sustainable and farm security.

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Events

On Wednesday I’ll be at Swansea University at a public talk with the Medical Humanities Research Centre & Climate Action Research Network, talking about both Green Thinking and Change Everything. All welcome! Book (for free) here. (And please share with anyone you know in the area.

And the following Tuesday, I’ll be returning to the wonderful Caper bookshop in East Oxford to talk about Green Thinking. Book here.

Kate Raworth and I talking Change Everything on my last visit: Photo: Hugh Warwick

As central to human history as the Med?

Having just spent a week in Norway and Sweden on the Royal College of Defence Studies strategic studies course, my reading has slanted that way, particularly an excellent, varied volume edited by Peter Haldén, The Baltic Sea: A Geopolitical History. He’s from the Swedish Defence University, which we visited, reflecting the current military and political focus on the High North, and the place where trade, culture, and military strategy have continually interacted, as is highly evident today. And an area that has been intimately tied up with British history - much more than just the Hansa, or Hanseatic League (for which see an In Our Time podcast)

But also an enormously challenging sea, known for short high waves and the advantage, and risk that you are never more than 67 nautical miles (130km) from land, at a sailing speed of five knots only about 13 hours. And then of course there’s the cold and ice: “In 1403 the Hanseatic League introduced a ban on all shopping between 11 November and 22 February.” (p. 126)

Nonetheless, although not in the period covered by this book, Scandinavia has not been isolated from the rest of Europe for a long time. The amber trade in the Neolithic, and the bronze trade that followed, both had long trade links.

Not part of the Roman empire, but certainly plenty of contact: an Empire-era glass drinking horn, probably made by an Egyptian or Syrian glassblower, found in the grave known as that the man from Oremolla

Perhaps my favourite chapter in this book, for its intimate peek into lives both highly local and deeply global, was by Johan Rönnby, on the history of the remote island of Gotska Sandön, now an uninhabited national park but in the Middle Ages a key strategic site, something that is only gradually being understood, and important since the early Bronze Age around 2000BC, despite the fact that its waters were notoriously dangerous.

We mightn’t think of piracy in the context of the Baltic, but for much of its history the island was a natural haven for illegal, and quasi-legal (privateering) attacks on shipping.

In a letter to the city of Bruges from the year 1428, merchants and skippers going to Reval are warned of such attacks and urged to stick together for protection. The document also tells us that no fewer than nine ships loaded with salt were captured at Gotska Sandön in the summer of 1427…. In 1460, the new Danish governor on Gotland, Olof Axelsson Tott, complained that outlaws on ‘Sandaw’ had taken seven barrels of cod from him.” (p. 131)

But right at the end of its habitation, what a lovely piece of women’s history;

“Johanna Söderlund… came to the island in 1854 to work in logging with her husband. After his death and when the last private owner of Gotska Sandön, Jacob Paterseen, had closed down the business in 1857, everyone moved from the Gamla garden area to the new lighthouse village on the norhtern tip of the island. However, Madame Söderlund,as she came to be known, chose to stay at the old place, alone with her two youngest children. In addition to occasionally helping with certain chores, Madame Söderlund made a living collecting goods from wrecked ships. The small timber cottage where her sons grew up must have been full of peculiar foreign objects found along the island shore. The older son, Ferdinand, became a sailor when he grew up and travelled the great oceans, finally settling in Sydney Australia. The younger son, Hjalmar, stayed on his home island, became a lighthouse keeper and spent his free time diligently collecting old artefacts on the sandy beaches. The different fates of Madame Söderlund two sons thus reflect the dual nature of the remote maritime crossroads.” (p. 135)

While some today would seek to divide the world into “cosmopolitans” and people rooted in place, there’s a case study of how no one today is truly isolated and unconnected, a truth for centuries.

There’s a lot to be re-written too in our understanding of the medieval period.

“In Anglocentric Viking scholarship, the Viking age is often portrayed as starting with the raid on the monastery on Lindisfarne, on the coast of Northumbria, in 793. It is high time this notion is laid to rest. The first tangible, archaeological evidence of a Viking raid comes from near the Estonian village of Salme. It is dated to about 750, two to three generations earlier than the Lindisfarne raid. The finding consists of two boats, one presumably the first identified sailing ships from the Baltic Sea or other Sandinavian waters. Buried with the ships are 41 bodies, four of which are brothers and a fifth a close relative… Ample evidence of violence and violent death are present. All the bodies are males, ranging from adolescence to their thirties. Much care had been taken in the burial, indicating that they were buried not by the Balts they had raided but by their own… developments around the Baltic Sea from about 600 to 750 prefigure the Viking Age and apart from the intensity and scale of raiding and trading, there is not much to distinguish the Vendel and Viking periods from each other.” (p.27-28)

A sailing vessel on the Volund stone in the Stockholm History Museum. Recent historiography (and experimental archaeology) has started to acknowledge the enormous amount of female labour that went into the sails.

The political and military chapters are not perhaps the easiest to follow for the layperson, but the general overview is useful for today’s perspective. Even if sometimes the influences were very different.

“Before and after the 1649 Peace of Westphalia, England saw Swedish strength as an essential element of a pro-Protestant foreign policy that sought to protect the autonomy of the Protestant German princes. The parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell even remarked that England and Sweden were the ‘two columns’ of the Protestant cause on the continent and that a combination of the Royal Navy and Swedish land power together ‘might hold Europe in subjection”. (p. 275)

Sweden at various times has swallowed up Finland, Norway (although never completely, a bit like Scotland and England), and sometimes large parts of the facing Baltic Shore. While of course there was a period when Poland-Lithuania was dominant in the region, while Muscovy was long seeking to establish at least a strong foothold. But royal and aristocratic bickering, and religious and cultural differences, always got in the way of a single hegemon. So for example in the late 16th century:

“A lasting Polish-Lithuanian-Swedish union could have brought the dominion of the new empire over the Baltic region and that entire part of Europe. However… Sigismund III Vasa succeeded his father on the Swedish throne in 1592 but lost it due to a conflict with the Swedish aristocracy and with his uncle, Carl, Duke of Sodermanland. Furthermore, in 1600, the dispute over Estonia precipitated the outbreak of what became not a single war, but rather a whole series of Polish-Swedish conflicts. These hostilities emerged as pivotal events in the history of early modern Poland-Lithuania and undermined the Commonwealth’s international standing and significance.” (pp. 81-2)

Later, Russia scored a military victory that still resonates there - and is cause for contemporary concern.

“At the Peace of Nystad in 1721, Sweden lost Estonia, Ingria, Livonia and parts of Karelia… to Russia… Russia had gained a secure bridgehead into the Baltic and decisively emerged on the northern European scene. The victory at Poltava echoed long into the Russian historical consciousness. One of the major sections of the majestic Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg consists of paintings of episode from Russian history. In the first room of that significant showcase of national identity and pride hangs a gigantic canvas that signals the start of the journey. It is Alexander Evstafyevich Kotzebue’s The Victory at Poltava. In the painting, Peter I is respolendent on his war horse, while the Swedes lower their banners to the dust and, their heads bared, bow before the victorious emperor. In the foreground two Ukrainian Cossacks - allies of the Swedes - lie exhausted.” (p. 110) [Longterm close historical ties between Sweden and Ukraine is something we kept noticing again and again.]

But control of the sea was what really mattered.

“Looking at the history of the Baltic Sea region over the cerntuies we can see its history as a succession of powers that tried to control and close the sea: the Hanse, Denmark, Sweden, Imperial and then Nazi Germany, and finally the Soviet Union … [while other] powers … wanted to maintain an open sea, the Dutch Republic and England/Britain… essentially a conflict over the control of trade flows and maritime lines of communication. As memorably stated by Knud JV Jespersen: ‘In the 17th century, the Baltic played the same role for the two trading and shopping nations of western Europe, the Dutch Republic and England, as the Persian Gulf with its oil reserves plays for the industrial nations of the western world today.’ The region was a crucial supplier of timber, tar and hemp - resources upon which the maritime powers depended.” (p. 103)

Pine tar as a vital commodity was not something I’d come across before, but the material, derived from Pinus sylvestris, waterproofed ships, sealed rigging and preserved maritime infrastructure. It was produced in earth kilns by peasants in Finnish territories under Swedish rule. They also produced huge quantities of charcoal for iron production: “producing 1 ton of wrought iron required 80 to 100 forest acres”. (p. 182)

Politically, Muscovy was in many ways copying the Swedes, the “Swedish model” not just being the social democracy of the 1980s that led me to visit as an Australian backpacker with some kind of real expectations of equality and democracy in 1990. (With which I was rather disappointed. The level of expected social conformity seeming to me to be highly repressive, particularly on refugees.)

“Peter’s aim was to create a Russian administrative structure that was similar to the Swedish one. Peterson quotes the historian Klyuchevskii’s designation of Peter’s rule as ‘the epoch of Swedomania’: Russia was dressed up in a Swedish uniform. … Peter sent to Stockholm one Heinrich Fick from Hamburg, who had been in Swedish service from 1700 to 1710 and then had gone into the tsar’s service. Fick socialised in Stockholm’s upper circles and was able to receive detailed information about the Swedish administrative structure. He managed to acquire a book that contained 800 Swedish statutes from 1528 to 1701. He visited the Swedish administrative boards - ‘kollegier’ - and copied a great many documents… When he travelled in Europe in 1716-17, Peter studied the state structure in Denmark, Sweden, France and elsewhere … Many of the administrative developments in Russia were linked to the police regime and the custom of cruel punishments for breaking the new laws.” (pp. 120-121)

And this was whole-of-society repression.

“Peter abolished the patriarchate [severing from Byzantium] and supplanted it with the Holy Synod, a state institution… According to a decree from 1722, priests were obliged to report to the Secret Chancellery if a member of the community said something in confession that might be a crime against the state. From Peter onwards there were two Russian worlds, the dynamic, western Europe of Peter and the aristocracy - and from the 19th century the intelligentsia - and the stagnant Orthodox world of the people, the peasants.” (p. 122)

That takes us chronologically to two battles between the British and the locals that are almost totally forgotten in London, but not locally. So, the first battle of Copenhagen:

“When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France in November 1799, relations between Britain and her allies in the Second Coalition against France were deteriorating. Trade restrictions imposed by Britain were a particular point of contention, and Britain’s demand to search shipping in the Baltic Sea ultimately contribued to Russia’s departure from the coalition. Neutral powers were also angered by Britain’s increasingly broad definition of contraband and concomitant searches of their ships. This led to the formation in late 1800 of the League of Armed Neutrality, compising Russia, Prussia, Denmark-Norway and Sweden. In essence, the league was created to close the Baltic to Britain…. The vast majority of naval stores such as hemp, timber, pitch, tar and iron were imported to Britain from the Baltic region… The Royal Navy despatched 40 ships of the line to Danish waters and destroyed the Danish-Norwegian defences at Copenhagen on 2 April, 1802…the Royal Navy intended to extend its assault to Sweden. However the murder of Tsar Paul in St Petersburg on 23 March put the league in jeopardy; the Danish-Norwegian government seized the opportunity to negotiate a separate peace.” (p. 138)

Then the second battle of Copenhagen, as the tsar prepared to seize Finland from Sweden:

“The Royal Navy attached Copenhagen for essential the same reasons as six years previously. Suspecting that Denmark-Norway was about to cave in to Napoleon and leave her navy at his disposal to close the Baltic Sea to Britain, the Royal Navy was dispatched with nearly 30,000 troops. The charts made in 1801 enabled the British shops to cordon off Jutland, where the bulk of the Danish army was deployed. The British troops landed at Zealand on 16 August, whereupon they beseiged Copenhagen and bombarded the capital into submission. Following this ruthless display of force, the Royal Navy departed with the Danish-Norwegian navy in tow and 20,000 tons of naval stores, thus securing access to the Baltic Sea.” (pp. 140)

(The Bernard Cornwall novel Sharpe’s Prey is built around the siege, should you fancy a - well researched - fictional account.)

Amid all of the political upheaval of 1809 (part of it in Sharpe’s Rifles), there developed a political theory that states had to be large enough to survive. Prussia too was expanding into northern Germany, presenting a further threat.

“‘If Russia takes Sweden, they will take Norway later. If both are united, they can resist the whole world,’ propagandised the Swedish general and politician Georg Adlersparre. Hence several Swedish decisonmakers saw union with Norway and/or reconquest of Finland as imperative to Sweden’s survival. Finland was granted autonomy as a grand duchy, which divided the Finns over the question of reunification with Sweden. At the same time, the Danish state was beginning to crumble.” (p. 142)

But the volume doesn’t just stick to older history, but also takes us right up to today, with a tour via World War Two and its aftermath.

“The Baltic Theatre did not see any major naval battles … the war in the Baltic was largely one of mines. Classic naval thought distinguished between two major strategies of ‘sea control’ and ‘sea denial’… the Baltic is particularly suited to mine warfare. It is a sea of narrow straits, choke points and locks at both ends. The major aim of any enemy of the Soviet Union was - and still is to prevent its fleets leaving port, particularly from Kronstadt and St Petersburg. Another legacy is the enormous quantities of ammunition that were dumped in the sea after the end of the war. Normal ordinance - shells and cartridges - are a major problem even today as fishermen risk catching them in their nets or setting them off by dragging the seabed. There are an estimated 300,000 tonnes of ammunition in the German waters of the Baltic. An even more heinous problem, however, is the vast number of German chemical weapons that the Allies sought to neutralise by simply dropping them into the sea. Over time the metal containers of both conventional and chemical weapons corrode and toxic chemicals will be realeased into the water.” (p. 170)

But today’s concerns remain those of history also. The Baltic represents just 0.1 per cent of global marine ecosystems, although one of the largest brackish seas in the world. But 15% of global merchant shipping passes through it. (p. 287)

Almost the end

Having been the first person to use the word “tardigrade” in Hansard, I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for them (who hasn’t really), so got to point to this lovely little post about the first-ever published image of one, from 1773. It was by German pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze, who called them kleiner Wasserbär, “little water bears”. “Tardigrade” came later in 1777, when Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani acknowledged how slowly they moved.

And a bit more fun from the Stockholm History Museum - Saint Olaf’s Spurs: oh no they weren’t: supposedly 11th-century but actually 15th-century. Certainly fancy!

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You might have expected a report on the fabulous Green Party election results from England, Wales and Scotland, but for that you can visit my website, or hear me pointing out to the media that a narrative constructed on Friday morning with only about one-fifth of the results in is now wildly out of date.

Events

On Wednesday I’m speaking on Nature’s Rights at the British Ecological Society. And on May 20th I’ll be at Swansea University for a public talk on Green Thinking and How to Change Everything.

And a little reminder that if after all those Green successes you want to find out more about our thinking Change Everything provides an accessible introduction to Green political philosophy, while Green Thinking delves deeper into how we need to unlearn so much in science, history, economics and politics to set the foundations for a stable future.

US and Britain in the Congo Crisis 1960-3

Yes, you might sense in this a slightly academic tone, the purpose for which this was originally written. But I think it is a fascinating case study in which echoes of which current debates, clashes and pressures are very obvious.

On Thursday, August 18 1960, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Douglas Dillon, the Undersecretary of State, and the only man in the room who had met the prime minister of the then Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, suggested that if the UN mission that had been hastily scrambled into the country was forced out, the newly independent African state might fall into sphere of the Moscow, a prospect “altogether too ghastly to contemplate”. The formal notes of the meeting failed to note it, but an informal contemporaneous record has the name Lumumba, with an X beside it: a record of what those present took to be an order from President Eisenhower to assassinate the first Congolese democratically elected president. Many writers have contested this account, but the most recent, widely applauded and comprehensive study of the death of Lumumba - The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (podcast with the author here) — concludes this is accurate. (And that reflected what a British Foreign Office official had also suggested as a “solution”.) Lest this should be thought an outlier among Western states, it has recently emerged that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden wanted Colonel Nasser of Egypt killed during the Suez Crisis.

“Too ghastly to contemplate” were words of the moment, but might be applied to the entire modern history of the Congo, from the direct reign of Belgium’s King Leopold from 1885 to 1908, when some 10 million people, half the population, were killed on a “crusade” to open the nation to “civilisation” to the state of the country today, suffering a severe food crisis and the internal displacement of 5.8 million people, driven often by “ massacres, abductions, rape and sexual violence, recruitment of children, and other attacks on civilians with near total impunity”.

It is not possible, of course, to hold the strategic positions of the US and the UK in the 1960s responsible for what came before, and only an alternative history machine could tell us how different the Democratic Republic of Congo could have been without the US and UK’s choices in the Sixties. Certainly the new state had been set up to fail by Belgium’s actions, and there is a case to be made that however fumbling and halting the actions of the United Nations were in 1960-63, they did create something of a workable frame out of a shattered land.

But the continuing consequences of Western nations actions cannot, in moral or practical terms, be ignored. Bad strategy can have extremely long-term consequences, and the US and UK actions were driven by short-term interests in their nations (particularly those of a few rich men in those nations), grounded in ignorance and reflexive, unthinking fear, based in part on pure, unadulterated racism. (Lumumba was described as a “witch-doctor” by the British Prime Minister, and before 1960 the US didn’t send Black American staffer to Congo because it feared they might sow ideas about independence.) While after World War Two “inevitability of decolonization was an accepted fact in nearly every corner”, the long-term benefit to all, in the US and the UK, as well as the rest of the world, of stable democratic states meeting the needs of their populations rather than being exploited for the continuing benefit of Western states was not within the strategic vision of either the US or the UK.

Underlying influences and balance of strategic interests

There is a voluminous literature around the forced reintegration by United Nations forces of the rebel province of Katanga and the “ill-tempered” Nassau Conference of December 1962, much of which concludes this “was a decisive defeat for the British government… a clear failure for [Prime Minister] Macmillan’s efforts to coordinate British and American policies”. This, however, can be fairly said to reflect an academic fashion of the early 21^st-century. As authors in an authoritative volume published in 2018 said “a revisionist tone has emerged suggesting limits to the extent that Kennedy and Macmillan’s personal diplomacy could deliver positive outcomes, reconcile underlying Anglo-American differences and mask consequences flowing from the growing asymmetry of the special relationship”. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same when it comes to US-UK relations.

A desire to run “compare and contrast” questions in commentary on US/UK relations from 1960-63 has too often failed to acknowledge how well aligned the aims of the unchallenged great power and the fast-fading one were: they both were determined to protect their financial interests and existing and potential geopolitical relationships and balances, and had no interest at all in the fate of the people or state of the Congo except insofar as that impacted on their own concerns. As one writer noted, the “sandwiching” of Lumumba between President Joseph Kasavubu and Katanga leader Moïse Tshombe was meant to guarantee the continuing Western European domination, and the US and UK had no objections.

“Realist” analysts might say that is inevitable, but those with a deeper vision will see how that approach, writ large across the world, guaranteed the impossibility of the emergence of a stable, secure community of nations. That became particularly evident once the “frozen” state of Cold War boundaries ended, but could, or should, have been predictable from the start. The US (and Belgians) were deliberately killing a democracy (no matter how vulnerable and fledgling it was) at birth. That the UK’s fingerprints were not directly on this killing does not absolve them from broader desire to protect their commercial and geopolitical interests at almost any cost.

The two key frames in which both the US and the UK viewed their strategic interests were their financial, commercial and resource-supply interests, and determination to keep the USSR from making gains in support from former colonial states in the context of the Cold War. Traditional analyses have sought to portray conflict, but while there was a different balance of interests, more united than separated the Western powers. That led to more of a spat than a serious conflict in the period leading to Katanga’s reintegration in the Congolese state in 1963.

It is true to say the Cold War perspective predominated for Washington, while as one author concluded, “for Europeans, achieving stability through ensuring that ‘moderate’ Africans assumed power was not mainly about containing the Soviets, or even communism (which never had significant appeal in Black Africa); it was about preserving British, French or Belgian interests”. One key factor, that had built a division between the two sides, was that the US was now no longer dependent, as it had been, on the Congolese uranium that had been used to make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The focus was on what Washington saw as the existential Cold War struggle. In 1960, presidential candidate Richard Nixon argued “in the struggle with the Russians, Africa is the most critical area in the world”. Soon after, then President-elect Kennedy claimed that Africa was the objective “of a gigantic communist offensive”. That was despite the fact there was essential no Soviet, or communist, threat in Congo. It might be said that Washington didn’t know any better in 1960, the Belgians until independence having denied access to foreign correspondents and most intelligence sharing, but they could have found out: the US had after all without much apparent difficulty inserted two spies into Katanga in the early 1950s, focused on the uranium mining. And the reality was that “Moscow was still unable to name any properly communist Congolese” and based on other events around the globe, they surely would have if they could have.

The US was also thinking about its relationship with Belgium, particularly in the Cold War context. At the time, the US administration was unaware that the Belgian cabinet had decided that any outside intervention in the breakaway region of Katanga would meet at least the threat of military resistance. (Yes, you might think of Trump and Greenland)

Also, Washington was acutely aware that following the recent example of France with Vietnam in 1954, the entire problem might be dumped in its lap. And even under the seemingly more anti-colonialist President Kennedy, Africa was still seen primarily as Britain and France’s responsibility. “The U.S. has quite enough commitments in the world, and there is no compulsion in the American Government to extend those commitments where our allies, much strengthened by their remarkable growth in the 1950’s can deal with the situation,” an internal administration memorandum said on 13 May 1961. As a later commentator noted: “The one constant thread … was Washington’s deference to the primacy of West European interests in its imperial and post-imperial playgrounds.”

That was a contributor to, and reflection of, US ignorance of Congo. As with much of the world, a situation that was to continue for many decades, the US suffered from a profound and deliberate ignorance about nations different to its own. A key element of American strategic culture, one which was to continue for decades is “insensitivity to local conditions”.

Britain’s interests were more obviously commercial, both directly and in terms of ensuring stability in the region. Congo, while it had never been in British hands, was economically closely enmeshed with the Tanganyika, Uganda and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Assets held in the colonies, valued at £1.45 billion in 1958, underpinned the UK’s global financial position, even though 75% of foreign investment in the colony was from Belgium. The British firm Tanganyika Concessions had a 15% share in UHMK (the successor of the enormous company created by King Leopold II), which produced 60% of the world’s cobalt (much of which went to the US) and 10% of global copper. The British owned the Benguela railway, which took UHMK goods from Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) to Lobito port in Angola for export. During the Second World War, only 15 years past, the Belgian government in exile, and the Belgian governor in the Congo, had worked hard to maximise palm oil exports for the Allied war effort.

But the commercial interests extended beyond Congo’s boundaries. Britain was the overriding power responsible for the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which awkwardly backed the breakaway province of Katanga, and had concerns about instability potentially spreading to the other Anglophone states surrounding Congo. She had some sympathy for Belgium as a fellow colonial power, while “being anxious above almost all else” to keep good relations with Washington. (Yep, history sure does rhyme.)

Balancing the commercial interests, with an eye to the Cold War, both states could not ignore the impacts of their policy on the emerging African and Asian nations, for, as one UN official put it, “to other African states their new found independence seemed at stake in the fate of the Congo”. This was a pressure that the UK might have been expected to feel more keenly, given the enthusiasm for turning Empire into Commonwealth. At least that is what the Commonwealth Relations Office kept saying, even though an expert commentator finds little sign of their lobbying have an influence, and some sign of irritation from the Foreign Secretary of being reminded of the perspective.

Fear of the Soviets influencing them also ran deep in London as in Washington, but also key was a desire to build a (false) narrative that the UK had always planned to set its colonies free. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan in 1960 said: “The great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West.” He continued by saying of the British Empire that “rather than conquest, the end goal had always been to lift the peoples of the world from poverty and ignorance to British levels of civilisation, and then to release them into happy independence.” London knew it would be judged on its actions in Congo against those words.

The reality, which was also reflected in Congo, was rather different. Metropole interests always came first. In its own colonies, Britain sought to employ what has been described as the “imperialism of decolonisation”, orchestrating a peaceful transfer of power to whatever local actors best suited the metropole’s continuing economic and political influence.

Relations between the US and UK would have been thought to have been scarred by the Suez Crisis, but the victorious Conservative Party in the UK, in its highly successful 1959 general election manifesto “betrayed few twinges of self-doubt and featured a foreign policy programme designed to [maintain] Britain’s influence in the world unimpaired. And maybe they were right, for perhaps there was less division between the US and UK than had appeared on the surface, in Suez as in Congo. The British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, later reported on his meeting with US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles:

“’Dulles said at once … “Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?” If ever there was an occasion when one could have been knocked down by the proverbial feather, this was it. Dulles was the man who had led the pack against us.” Dulles “said that the only difference between the Americans and the British and the French ‘had been over method’.”

Where were the differences?

Both nations at least theoretically supported the sovereign-state model of political organisation, as did African leaders, and the Soviet Union, as opposed to what might have been possible, more pan-African, regional or semi-imperial integration approaches, “that had many advocates and good prospects up to at least the late 1950s”. One of the many ironies of this period in Congo is that Lumumba’s aim broadly matched that of the Western powers, a highly centralised State.

Then, on 11 July, barely a month after independence, Tshombe, prime minister of the mineral-rich, financially vital state of Katanga, made a unilateral declaration of independence, declaring his former police force the “army”. He asked for military help from Britain and Rhodesia. The following day, ministers in the Congolese capital asked the United States to send 3,000 troops to restore its control, which President Eisenhower refused, but only on the grounds that African troops would be a more appropriate force. All of this was not nearly so clearcut as that outline suggests, however. It was never clear whether the Katangese regime “was trying to achieve… complete sovereign independence, a federal Congolese state with significant Katangese autonomy, or a Katanga-dominated, unitary Congo”. And it is worth noting where other support for Tshombe came from: Union Miniere paid its 1960 taxes, 1.25 billion Belgian francs, direct to the breakaway leader, when they should legally have gone to Leopoldville.

The obvious US/UK division began with UN Security Council resolution 143 on 14 July, which called on Belgium to withdraw its troops from the Congo, and authorised UN military assistance. The US (and USSR) voted for; Britain abstained, with France and China. The formal explanation was that the Belgians should not withdraw until the UN forces were in place, the general interpretation was London displaying solidarity with the Belgians. This was not a rejection, however, of the idea of sending peacekeepers. In the Commons, Prime Minister Macmillan said: “We feel that by far the best way of helping the situation is the United Nations method.”

Authors supporting the “conflicting stances” approach often describe the UN vote split as a “a portent of differences to come”. Still, by September 14, Macmillan and Kennedy were discussing the Congo by telephone, and agreeing that this was not the time for UN military action to force reunificiation, rather that the UN should secure a ceasefire. (It was during action on this that Secretary Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash.) Yet simultaneously, at the “siege of Jadotville”, Irish UN peacekeepers, ordered in by the senior UN man on the ground, were forced to surrender due to lack of supplies, and that official, would soon write in an angry book “all the high officials of the United Nations knew of, and strongly resented, the help and encouragement given by Mr Macmillan’s Government to Mr Tshombe”.

Apparently, the US was lined up with the UN and the central Congo government. The UK was on the opposition side. However, the politics within the two Western states should not be forgotten, and was surely understood by both capitals. Many actions, announcements and choices were directed as much to domestic audiences as far-off Congo. Politics often forced particularly Britain’s hand, and the US administration understood this. The US under-secretary of state for economic affairs, George Ball, in a memorandum for President Kennedy wrote: ‘the Macmillan Government should be able to free itself from the pressures of City and Conservative groups in the UK and the Rhodesias and join with us in trying to bring about a peaceful reunification of the Congo”. But Kennedy was surely sophisticated enough to understand this was easier said than done. He could hardly have avoided seeing that 80 Tory MPs had put forward a motion condemning the government over its “fecklessness” in the face of UN aggression in Katanga.

In the US, Congo was frequently prominent in the news, regularly on the cover of Time magazine. Pressing in the US in favour of Katanga, a source responsible to a considerable degree of what knowledge there was of the African, were evangelical missionaries. They saw and presented it as staunchly anti-communist. By contrast, for President Kennedy, by backing the UN and the Congo state there was the opportunity to politically get “cheap credit” with American liberals and blacks, with far less price than advancing civil rights in the southern states. “It was easier to find a sop for the liberals on the race issue internationally than it was domestically.” That was clearly a stronger force than the evangelicals.

Soon, in New York, the new acting UN leader, U Thant, was having a stagey collegiate meal with President Kennedy in US ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson’s official residence on the top floor of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which led to a swapping of cigars and recipes. This while in London, Macmillan was under rightwing pressure, with the Sunday Telegraph reporting the UN Secretariat had “tasted blood” in attacking Katanga and Viscount Hinchingbrooke, in the tabloid Sunday Express, described it as a “charging rhinoceros, tearing up the earth,” and a “monster of iniquity”. But ultimately, the UK, having dodged and weaved through the domestic politics, had no alternative policy but to back the UN forced restoration of Congolese unity. As one commentator astutely notes, “there was never any real prospect of Home following through on what was apparently his only alternative policy, namely to ter- minate British support for the United Nations – not least because of the uproar it would cause in Britain”. While a rightwing government was more immediately vulnerable to pressure from its own people – and in the Foreign Secretary, Earl Home, with close links to the Marquess of Salisbury, a member of the Katanga lobby they were right inside Macmillan’s government, there were strong forces within Britain supporting the United Nations, not least the hugely over-representative number of Britons serving within it.[49]

Conclusion

One traditional narrative about all these events is that it as an important “step along the road from the dominant and special position of genuine consultation on policy, to one dominated by receiving information and being ‘classed with the French’.” Butas two commentators said, and I concur, “looking beyond December 1962… [there was] continuing close Anglo-American cooperation in the Congo, which in turn suggests that the long-term effects of the crisis on the special relationship were less harmful than sometimes suggested”. Both Western states were subject to considerable internal pressures, which sometimes made their surface actions appear – and be – in conflict. But there was no rupture, no essential disagreement. And both the US and UK soon settled comfortably into supporting the unashamedly authoritarian and exploitative dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.

Almost the end

Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash

I’ve been in Norway and Sweden in the past week - one of the reasons, with the elections, why I’ve had a little Substack hiatus - and expect more about the region soon. But in the meantime, a taster of its fascinating history in a Gone Medieval podcast on the rise and fall of Greenland’s medieval walrus ivory trade. Okay, sounds obscure, if fascinating, but it is one early, if classic, tale of an extractive industry that killed, or at least greatly depleted it’s “golden goose”, and also saw its trade dry up when a different extractive source - African elephants - opened up as a new source for slaughter. (Their ivory being, unfortunately for the elephants, far whiter and brighter.)

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© Natalie Bennett (Gel plate print)

Events

For Lake District diaries: I’ll be talking about my new book, Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics, at the wonderful Verey Books in Pooley Bridge on Wednesday June 17. Booking open.

And a reminder about my event at the Milton Keynes Literary Festival on April 25.

Available now from publisher Routledge for just £15.99, including postage.

A book centred on border communities

You might call it “new history”, scholars who are discarding old, narrow constructions of “civilisation”, of “progress”, of rigid stages of history that flow forward in one direction, that acknowledge the sophistication of the deep past and nomad societies, who look into of the rich mixing of cultures found at borders as well as in capital cities, that incorporate the discoveries of archaeology that upturn old certainties. It’s exciting that long embedded propaganda – from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, from the Italian Renaissance about the medieval era, from the `19^th-century colonialists - that was swallowed credulously by 20^th-century historians who really should have known better is finally being swept aside.

The Far Edges of the Known World: A New History of the Ancient Past by classical historian Owen Rees - which I’ve really loved reading! - is very much part of this fundamental rethinking. It joins David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West and Naoíse Mac Sweeney's The West, a New History of An Old Idea.

It takes on attitudes still all too commonly found today in London, Paris and Beijing:

“To cultures that strongly believed in their own cultural superiority, such as the ancient Egytpians, the Athenians and the Romans, the further you were away from the core of that society, the further away you were from civilisation itself.” (p. 5)

The book also, I have to say, boasts many wonderful tales of adventurous lives (this is very much a popular history: I particularly liked that of Rhodopis (“the rosy-faced”), a hetaira who as brought to the Greek town of Naucratis in Egypt as an enslaved woman from Thrace, owned along the way by the Samos-based Iadmon, who also owned Aesop. Herodotus tells us she persuaded a wealthy trader to buy her freedom (who just may have been Sappho’s brother), then continuing her trade amassed considerable wealth, which Herodotus tells us she bought a mass of sacrifice spits for the sacred sanctuary at Delphi as an offering to Apollo, while Plutarch, writing centuries later, mentions numerous obelisks raised in her memory. (p. 116) (Please, someone write a fictional account – or tell me if there is one already!)

But it is communities, cultures and places that are the main focus. It is a wide-ranging work of multiple snapshots, covering Africa and the full width of Eurasia, and some 3,000 years, starting around Lake Turkana in what is now Kenya, where human communities were having to come to terms with the end of the African Humid Period. The lake was drying up, fishing stocks decreased, and land perfect for grazing animals was being left by the receding waters.

“Either the locals of Lake Turkana arranged an exchange market with pastoral groups to the north, or those pastoral groups migrated into the region. It seems it could have been a little bit of both, but either way, archaeological evidence shows a distinct migration of pastoralism as a way of life from the Sahara about 8,000 years ago and into the Turkana Basic approximately 5,000 years ago.” (p. 25)

As the climate fluctuated, often not in people’s favour, the nomadic pastoralists did not simplify their arrangements, but rather complicated them. For about 700 years, they built complex burial sites, sweeping away large quantities of sand, carving up the uncovered sandstone to form walls around the site, then digging pits for their dead. Rees takes as an example, although there are at least six others similar, what is known as the Lothagam North Pillar Site.

“The surrounding ground was paved with more sandstone, and then ringed with boulders. Over time, the original site was expanded to the east with nine stone circles built as well as six raised cairns…The original burial platform was 700 square metres, the additional stone circles and cairns contributing a further 700 meters. The evidence for planning can be seen in the finer details. The platform was cleared and dug out in one go … when it was filled and capped in its final state, there was still a lot of room for further burials… The site was then marked with basalt columns, no taller than 1.5 metres, sourced from up to a kilometres away from the site.”

And Rees makes clear how much it destroys long-held assumptions. Not only was it made by nomads, there is no sign of social hierarchy. “There is no distinction between genders, levels of affluence, or even age, with children and elders buried next to each other. There is no rich area, no poorer area; no clear leader burials…. This seems to be a communal grave monument, built by a community that considered everyone to be equal.”

Still in Africa, Rees next takes us to Lower Nubia (now Sudan) “filled with a variety of Nubian cultures who would have identified neither with the Egyptians nor with the Kush further south”, which may include nomads identified with the Pan Grave culture, and settled people who archaeologists know as the C-group. Although they don’t really line up with what the Egyptian sources call the inhabitants, “the Medjay”, but then colonisers, as Egyptians were under the Senusret I, Amenemhat II and Senusret II. (pp. 40-41)

Archaeologists help us to disabuse a common assumption of history here, as Rees explains.

“Visualising human interaction through the concept of national borders on a map has the potential to reduce the human experience merely to the political interaction between states. It creates the impression of firm lines in the sand between ‘us’ and the’them’, where one culture stops and another begins.” (p. 47)

But the cooking pots in the great fortresses built by the Egyptians in this space tell a different story. There was plenty of imported Egyptian pottery in the homes and other spaces, but the cooking pots are overwhelmingly local. “The pervading explanation for these Nubian pots is that they suggest a growing presence of Nubian cuisine inside the Egyptian homes along the frontier. Analysis of the residue of fats that remain on the pottery shows a distinct culinary difference in the food being cooked in Egyptian-style and Nubian-style pots. … the dominance of this cuisine in the archaeological record increased over time.” (p. 48)

So while Egyptian accounts of Nubians as barbaric and trustworthy are pervasive, they indicate the presence of many Nubian women inside trading posts and fortresses, as wives and partners. And that they were not forced to abandon their own cultural traditions.

Rees also adds to our increasing knowledge of the range of ancient trading routes particularly in his account of Megiddo, now in Israel, which was already well-known to be at the centre of links between Egypt and the Mediterranean. And shows how science is opening new possibilities, with the finding of banana proteins in the tooth of an individual buried in nearby Tel Erani, towards the end of the 2^nd millenium BCE. Which provides a bit of conundrum: bananas were first cultivated in Papua New Guinea in the 5^th millennium BCE, but not thought to have reached West Africa until the 1^st millenium BCE, and not generally found in western Asia at all in the ancient period. Perhaps we are wrong about that, Rees says, but it would seem to be surprising, with no other evidence of bananas known in the region for 1,500 more years.

“The second possible explanation is that this banana was grown in south, or maybe even south-east Asia, and the person found at Tel Erani was some sort of merchant or traveller…supported by the overall impression that we get of ancient Canaan … perfectly situated as a nexus between east and west, Europe and Asia, as well as between noth and South, Asia Minor and Africa … Similar studies of dental calculus … found evidence of turmeric and soybeans. The presence of turmeric pushes back our understanding of the spice’s presence in the region by at least 500 years… Soybeans on the other hand have no known presence in the region at all…most likely transported long distances as an oil.” (pp. 70-71)

But it is Rees’ account of Olbia, now in Ukraine, that perhaps most challenges long ossified but still transmitted accounts of history, ones based on claims of superiority that should long have been challenged.

“The Greeks believed themselves to be better than everyone else, much like the Egyptians before them and the Romans after them. But the Greek world was ever-growing and ever changing… spread far and wide. Our written sources, however, normally come from the Greek mainland or were heavily influenced by intellectual developments in classical Athens in particular… skewed by a very narrow focus… necessary to look at periods in which the Greek city states were not so overbearing, such as the Hellenistic period (fourth-first centuries BCE) and the Roman Imperial period (first-fifth century CE).” (p. 86)

Olbia was settled by Greeks from Miletus, in the 6^th-century BCE, at the edge of their world, with Scythians to the east and north, stereotyped as savage nomads, the complete opposite of the Greeks. The city exported salt fish as a luxury item, but also leather, salt, grain and enslaved people, while importing wine, olive oil and fine pottery from as far afield as Egypt.

And it has some fascinating sons, perhaps most notably Bion, a philosopher of the fourth-third centuries BCE. His father had been enslaved, but made a fortune and won his freedom trading salt fish, his mother probably an enslaved sex worker from Lacedaemonia in the south Peloponnese. But then his father got into financial trouble and the family were enslaved again, the son purchased by an orator who on his deathbed left his entire legacy to Bion. Who then travelled south to Athens to become a philosopher.

“He was known for his wit and would greatly influence the later satires of the Roman writer Horace. But in his own day his reputation was formidable enough to allow him to forge a close connection with Antigonus II, king of Macedonia, as his court philosopher.” (p. 92)

That might be taken as a not-atypical tale of provincial boy made good. But Rees provides us with many accounts of how the culture of Olbia became not just a blend of Greek and Scythian (reflecting also many families), but a creative, original model of its own. It adapted to the political winds, dealing with a period of Persian dominance and then the maritime dominance of Athens and the Delian league, and then facing in 330BCE the Macedonian commander Zophyrion with an army of 30,000 men.

“Olbia transformed itself politically from a tyrant-run state to a democratic one. Most notably, the city adopted the cult of Zeus Eleutherios (the liberator). … Personal names disappear from the coinage, suggesting there is no longer a single ruler in Olbia….[then] when Zopyrion was besieging Olbia, the people freed their slaves and gave citizenship to foreign residents; with the citizen-rolls thus redrawn, they were able to hold off the enemy.” (p. 106)

This was an extraordinary action for a Greek city, Rees remarks, but also made it possible afterwards for many Scythians to hold senior posts in the city. The relationships between Greek and Scythians was not hostile or standoffish, but one of close inter-relationships.

Naucritas (where we met Rhodopis) was different. When an older “arrogant” culture met the newer, the former tried to maintain separation.

“The Egyptians seem to rather successfully, and rather purposefully, separate the Greeks from themselves at Naucratis, stemming any real interchange of culture and social mores… perhaps this is why Naucratis was the only foreign trading centre that was allowed to have Greeks living there permanently, stemming a tide of Greek migration as best one could.” (p. 120)

The newer, still being formed, culture that would become Classical Greek had fewer inhibitions, albeit that Rees acknowledges “influence” is a difficult thing to pin down.

“The first appearance of Doric columns coincides with the prolonged exposure of Egytpian culture via places such as Naucratis. … this chronologically chimes with the spread of Egytomania throughout the Hellenic world … also corresponds with a wider phenomenon observed by art historians known as ‘the orientalising period” where the Greeks seem to draw much inspiration from culture to the east.” (p. 122)

For many centuries, Naucratis remained an intellectual hotbed, a generator of writers and essential stopping place for touring thinkers.

“Few of their works have survived the intervening years, but they come down to us as references made by other authors…. There was also Julius Pollux, an authoritative antiquarian grammarian of the second century CE who, it was said, was handpicked by the Roman emperor Commodus to teach rhetoric at the Academy in Athens. … also home to a prolific author by the name of Athaneus…[who] provides historians with a crucial catalogue of quotations from dozens of lost works… a fastidious researcher, a theorough notetaker and an obsessive collector of information from all branches of knowledge”. (p. 126-7)

At the other end of the Med, Massalia (Marseilles) had a remarkably similar, if possibly more moral reputation, particularly among the Romans, as an ideal place to send young elite men for their education, among them Gnaeus Julius Agricola, later governor of Britain. It also “lay claim to two great explorers of the ancient world”, Euthymenes and Pytheas.

It was the former that probably informed a voyage by the Carthaginian Hanno, who possibly got as far south as modern Cameroon, and coined a term that we still use – how accurately it is hard to tell, today.

“There was another island, full of savage men. But there were a lot more women with their bodies covered in hair: our interpretters called these people Gorillai. When we pursued them in the chase,; we were unable to capture any of the men; for they all fled to the high ground and kept us at bay by throwing stones. However we took three of the women, who bit and clawed at their captors and did not want to follow. So we killed and flayed them, and brought their skins back to Carthage.” (p. 142)

Such delights that happen when those who call themselves “civilised” travel into new spaces; that has a long history.

Far to the east of Massalia another border city, Taxila, in the region of Gandhara, in modern-day Pakistan, had a similar long intellectual pedigree, in one tradition being the first place the Mahabharata was recited, and appearing in both that text and the Ramayana.

Rees reminds us that a lot of the wealth of Achaemenid Persia came from this area. More, “the province of India was no far-flung place which bore no direct relevance to the Persian Empire, barring its revenue stream; it was an important and integral participant in Persian domination. We hear of Indian forces in the armies of Xerxes I during his invasion of Greece in 480BCE and in the armies of Darius III during his battles with Alexander.” (p. 255)

“The late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE also witnessed the rise of another powerful and influential person whose impact on history would supersede that of Darius: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Taxila appears in early Buddhist stories – the Jakatas, which detail the previous lives of the Buddha – and is described as a place of learning and contemplation. The city is presented almost as a university town, with ‘world famed teachers’ and a place where the Bodhisattva (the Buddha in his former lives) learned the principles of science, philosophy and theology. Taxila was also famous as a centre for learning medicine; one of its alumni was the famous physician Jivaka, who is said to have healed the Buddha himself.” (p. 255)

It was also in this region that figurative art, particularly images of the Buddha himself (despite iconoclastic forces), came – relatively late – to the religion’s artistic tradition “following the Indo-Greek style of sculpture which had established itself in the region… He is also sometimes depicted with the Greek hero Hercules as his protector. Such a deep cultural influence could only be achieved at places like Taxila where intellectual and artistic freedoms met with a merging of multicultural ideas and expressions.” (p. 265)

Going even further east, Rees takes us to Vietnam’s oldest city Co Loa, its origins by tradition being with a king displaced south by the expansion of the Qin. He notes that:

“Ancient Vietnam is not a common topic in our history books, but it should be. Surrounded by powerful cultures in India to the west and China to the north and east, and tapping into a growing global trade network via the Indian Ocean, Vietnam was a melting pot of ideas and technologies.”

(I say much the same thing about its intellectual traditions of today in Green Thinking.)

“For many years it has been believed that the Chinese brought civilisation to the Red River Valley, thus making all later Vietnamese history and culture reliant on this early Sinification.” But, Rees says, the archaeology indisputably disproves this. There were invasions from the north, but they entered sophisticated, complex societies. (p. 272-3)

“There is evidence that the people of northern Vietnam were literate, or at least their social elite were. Imperial Chinese reports from the second century BCE mention that local population records existed that were written… [but] we know that the first emperor of Qin, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the destruction of all books and materials pertaining to the history of states other than his own.” (p. 276)

More so-called “civilisations” in typical action, which was also to be seen later, under Chinese colonisation, when an administrator called Su Ting by brutal repression that included the execution of a local leader Thi Sach, which led his wife, Trung Trac, and her younger sister Trung Nhi, to spearhead a brave and initially successful rebellion. A story still important in Vietnam today, and deserving to be much better known. (p. 281-3)

Rees finishes by crossing back through Eurasia to Africa, to what might be seen as the final flowering of the Ancient World, where the Greek language was maintained very late – the kingdom of Aksum, in modern day Eritrea/Ethiopia. Starting with the traveller Cosmos in the city of Adulis, who was minorly involved in an invasion of southern Arabia, possibly to help a persecuted Christian population there. But there was nothing new about its prominent place. Pliny the Elder described it as a source of ivory, rhinoceros horn and hippo hides, as well as live animals and enslaved people. (p. 294)

“His [Christian king Kaleb] success in the region brought the kingdom onto the radar of the Byzantine emperors… The emperor Justinian is said to have asked the Aksumites for their support in fighting the Persians, but we do not know if they did send any men. … Aksum’s reputation was such that the third century CE Persian prophet Mani famously remarked that during his time their were four great kingdoms on earth: the kingdom of Babylon and Persia, the kingdom of Rome, the kingdom of Aksum and the kingdom of China.” (pp. 296-7)

What Rees is working towards is an Afro-Eurasian history (and I’ve little doubt something similar might be written, if with fewer sources, for the western hemisphere) built around the movement and mixing of people, cultures and ideas, the generation of new ideas embedded in places on the edge of cultural blocs:

“They enabled the interaction of cultures that had no real concept of one another. If we did not look to the edges of the world, we would not see how Han China and Imperial Rome actually did interact (albeit not directly). They came together in the lived experiences of people in Vietnam and India, maybe even Aksum… If we focus solely on Egytpian empire-building, we miss out on the trade links between Canaan, Cornwall and Indonesia. If we obsess over the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, we ignore the continued trade links from Aksum to Britain during the same time period.” (p. 311-2)

Almost the end

I was lucky enough last week to be able to spend some time in the National Museum of Scotland. And was particularly impressed by their exhibition of early Scottish history, roughly up to 1,000AD, which avoids the traditional stadial displays of ages of stone, bronze and iron, and instead brings together material evidence of how people across some 7,000 years solved the same problems, whether it be feeding, housing, clothing, defending or deocrating themselves. So cases contain relevant objects from a wide mix of eras, showing sophistication and success right across the time period. (The scale in the front gives the dates.) The first time I’ve seen a major museum really catching up with modern scholarship. Well done!

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I’m not hiding or walking, but felled by a nasty lurgy, but that’s provided plenty of listening time…

Lost Women of Science: Inge Lehmann

Don’t know how I haven’t previously found this lovely, heavily researched but accessible podcast series out of the Lost Women of Science Initiative that is “dedicated to telling the forgotten or untold stories of remarkable female scientists and their groundbreaking work through history”. (The project also does books, theatre etc.)

It is American-based, but ranging widely, as with my favourite from those I’ve listened to thus far, about Dane Inge Lehmann, “the Woman Who Discovered Earth’s Innermost Secret” (in 1936) - a seismologist who explained there was a solid core at the heart of our planet, when scientific orthodoxy was that it was all liquid. She’s now finally about to get some of the recognition she deserved in her home country, with her image appearing soon on a Danish banknote.

Ottoman History Podcast: Miss Kitty Lord

Next to a very different kind of female character: An episode entitled “A British Burlesque Artist in Belle Époque Cairo” has got to grab attention, and that’s how I dived into the story of the discovery of a collection of postcards that Miss Kitty received from admirers, including a prominent local architect, during her working time in Cairo. She billed herself as ‘Etoile Excentrique Anglaise’. From what seems to have been a very modest background, she built from the British music hall scene a life of global touring.

Although the podcast suggests, as is perhaps the inevitable conclusion, that she ended her life in London in poverty. She doesn’t even seem to have a Wikipedia page - that would be a nice little holiday project.

Distillations: Agnes Pockels, surface science pioneer

Going back to science, and to another podcast (“Deep Dives into Science Stories, Both Serious and Eccentric”) I’ve just discovered, also from America. Distillations is out of the Science History Institute, and almost painfully careful in its “being balanced”, but still very listenable.

I enjoyed the exploration of the story of Agnes Pockels, who chose to work from home, but as the podcast explains, this was far from unusual in the late 19th and early 20th century (for men as well as woman). The podcast does a good job of dispelling tropes about “amateur science”, and provokes reflections on what has been lost with the institutionalisation of scientific disciplines in the 20th century. Although perhaps with citizen science we are starting to recover a little of what was lost by leaving discovery to “the professionals”.

Another episode on the Ames Test - even if that “carefully balanced” tone is much in evidence - is well worth a listen also, reflecting how far scientific understanding has advanced, while political understanding has barely kept up.

Past Present and Future: Political conversions

This podcast is one of my standard go-tos, David Runciman being very easy to listen to and informative, but I found particularly useful this episode from a series about political conversions, on Trotsykites who’ve become Neo-Conservatives.

Aside from applying the “politics ideology runs in a circle not a line” simplistic lens, I’ve not thought on this much - although in the form of Claire Fox, referenced in the podcast, I hear it almost every day in the House of Lords. There is a logic, although not one that I find attractive!

New Books Network No 1: Blang Mountains

From the Nordic Asia strand, a fascinating account of the impact of the intrusion of the Chinese state into southern borderland areas, specifically the Blang Mountains (a UNESCO world heritage landscape), part of what James C Scott called Zomia, where people had found ways “not to be governed”. Repressing the mountain gods (who had “managed” which land could be tilled and when) has made the land sick, researcher Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström has found.

It is one more place where industrial agriculture is doing enormous damage, environmental and social, while the traditional “slash and burn” tillage (which I was taught in school geography was destructive) was in fact a long-term sustainable system. (I report in my new book - have I mentioned it’s called Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics? 😊 - about a very similar system in Papua New Guinea).

New Books Network No 2: Health and Efficiency

Covering Britain between 1870 and 1939, but reflecting debates we hear around the world today, Steffan Blayney, author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body talks about the development of the "science of work”, as working bodies were framed solely as sources of energy and activity to fuel “the economy”. But also about how workers, and unions, resisted this framing - something I’d like to see rather more of today.

It also reminded me of some of the discussion of the campaign for a four-day working week as standard, which in parts is based on a claim of efficiency and productivity, with which I am less than comfortable. Why do we want healthy bodies? To have flourishing individual lives and communities, which is about a great deal more than “the economy”.

Lesche: Time and Ancient Textiles

What if we instead of talking about the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age instead labelled time periods by the eras of different textile technologies? I’m not a great fan of the model - assuming advancing progress through the ages in some form of directional march - but it does centre what was of enormous economic (and military - see production of Viking sails) in most ancient and medieval societies. See for example my recent reading on Mesopotamia.

The physical problem of preservation, and the fact that this was often “women’s work”, has combined to make this, until recently, a giant blind spot for most historians, but on the Lesche (mostly ancient Greece) podcast, Marie Louise Nosch talks about the role of textile production in that region and period. The kind of attention we need right across historical scholarship,

Instant Classics: What did the Romans eat?

On this Mary Beard vehicle (who can resist) a two-part episode, covering posh and not, but it was the second one, about everyday eating that I found most fascinating. Yes, there was a certain standard diet of grains, oils and much-transported goods like dried figs and wine - and lots of cabbage - but there was also huge regional differences: people ate what they could find or grow around them. And it was largely vegetable-based, and generally I suspect pretty healthy.

And finally, should you feel the need to engage this Easter with big, immediate issues…

Outrage and Optimism: Water, Wildlife, and Climate’s Hidden Trade-Offs

How do we talk about - and balance - the many physical and social aspects of the climate emergency? In this episode, Christiana Figueres points out that water is little mentioned in the Paris Agreement or Climate Convention, but it is central -sea-level rise, droughts, floods, pollution - to survival, particularly for the most vulnerable people, and for ecosystems and biodiversity. That’s part of a much broader discussion of how to talk about the climate emergency.

Almost the end

A little reflection from my visit last week to the brilliant National Museum of Scotland, on the interaction of nature, economics and advertising in the creation of Scottish whisky as a premium global product. The display explained that in the 1870s and 1880s widespread failure of wine harvest hit brandy production, and whisky and soda became a fashionable drink, driven heavily by advertising, which helped to create the stereotypical image of the Scots today.

The explanation featured possibly the least “truth in advertising” slogan ever: “Not a headache in a Gallon”, for Cambus Patent Still Grain Whisky, 1906

(Which gives me an excuse to point to another interesting New Books Network podcast, about Canada in the Age of Rum. Tied of course to West Indian slave plantations seeking a use for otherwise waste materials, but also to employers seeking to hold on to scarce labourers any way they could, it reminded me very much of the Australian Rum Corps period, although being further away from the source, the impact of the product in the antipodes was perhaps smaller.)

And now I can clean out my podcast queue by deleting all of the “already played” ones. Still plenty there though…

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Here it is …

Available now in paperback (with April savings now a bargain £15.99 with free global shipping) and e-book (£15.99 with discount) for delivery from April 10. (Academics can also request an inspection copy)

So what’s it all about?

Fundamentally this book is about unlearning, discarding damaging, outdated ideas deeply rooted in our societies. It seeks to “compost” the views of dead white men (René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Norman Borlaugh) and of some not white or dead (Francis Fukuyama, Richard Dawkins, Richard Thaler), and explores the flowering of probiotic Green thinking, and the rediscovery in the 21st century of powerful indigenous and other previously repressed thinking.

Starting with science, and the wonderful Lynn Margulis, it explains how the foundation of life is cooperation, not competition and that diversity is essential to resilience and health of systems, while industrial agriculture is the very epitome of reductionist, fragile, dangerously unresilient practice.

It explores how hubris has led us to hopelessly misunderstand the place of our species on this complex, rich planet, home to life for four billion years, while we’ve only existed for a blink of the eye on that scale: rather than being the peak of existence, humans are just one more species of animal, or, rather, holobiont.

Thinking philosophically, it argues that reductionism has to be replaced by relational thinking; life does not operate anything like a machine.

In economics, financialising society has destroyed – as it was meant to do – relationships essential to wellbeing; and, we have to draw on the knowledge and wisdom of indigenous societies that have maintained themselves and their environments in healthy balance for tens of thousands of years. This means acknowledging that the time, energy and talents of all life must contribute to a new way for humans to live in balance with the more-than-human world.

This book will appeal to fans of - and draws on the work of - among many others, David Graeber, Kate Raworth, Tyson Yunkaporta, Jason Hickel, Anna Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Le Guin, Bruno Latour, Wangarii Maathai, Merlin Sheldrake, Vandana Shiva and Kim Stanley Robinson.

It makes the intentionally provocative claim that we should be focusing - starting education from - books written in certainly the last 25 years (since the invention of the term Anthropocene, which marks a new, clearer understanding of just what we’ve done to this planet), and maybe particularly those written in the past five years, after the financial crash of 2007-8 and the Covid pandemic. Works written before then lack vital perspective.

Who does it take on?

Well, lots of embedded thinkers and political actors, but particularly the Silicon Valley tech bros, their “extreme reductionist, positivist social science”, the hubris and ignorance behind the “Don’t Die” movement, that assumes that by treating the bodies of human animals as though they were perfectible machines they can master the immense complexity developed by biological systems over four billion years. And their “solutionism”, the assumption that rather than seeking (and changing) the sources of the societal and natural dysfunction that dominates our world now, they can find a technical quick fix, while making billions of dollars in the process.

And that “hoary old but still much brandished myth of inevitable progress, the stadial succession that would eventually lead to “us”. I write: “Otherwise expressed as “development”, this is the altar on which so many successful societies have been destroyed in the colonial and postcolonial eras.”

Green Thinking explain how the logic of “plantation”, built on destruction of complexity in the interests of low productivity but high profitability, means conformity has permeated not just our diets and our clothing, but even our cityscapes and our homes. Yet we know that diversity is crucial to healthy ecosystems, and that we have built a dangerously unstable, non-resilient world.

The book also demands in understanding and restoring that recognition of more-than-human agency. It starts from new understandings of the sophistication of the Neanderthals and the “hobbits” (Homo floriensis), and explores how rodents, cephalopods and cetaceans have sophisticated mental lives of which we have scant understanding.

It concludes that “Green Thinking” in the Anthropocene means starting with the precautionary principle, developing post‑Covid pandemic humility into a recognition that we know little about how our own bodies, or ecosystems, or Gaia, work, being probiotic, supporting life’s flourishing, rather than seeking to discipline it to commercial ends, as we did in the 20^th century. “We should be guided first by overriding concern not to break what remains of working systems and functioning bodies after the destruction of the 20th century.”

Testimonial

I am chuffed about the many testimonials I’ve got for the book, but will start by sharing Peter Frankopan’s

“A powerful and timely call to rethink how we understand progress, knowledge and our place in the natural world. Written with clarity, courage and hope, Green Thinking challenges assumptions and inspires new ways of seeing the future.”

Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Worcester College, Oxford

Events!

I’ll be talking about Green Thinking at the Milton Keynes Literary Festival on April 25: Tickets here.

And on Wednesday 20 May, 12:00-1:30pm at The Mall in the Taliesin building on Singleton Campus, Swansea University, with the School of Culture and Communication.

With many more to come; watch this space.

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‘This House Believes Universities Have Forgotten Their True Purpose’

This was a topic I debated this week in the University of Edinburgh Union. And yes, you probably won’t be surprised to know I was on the affirmative side. This reflects, more or less, what I said….

I began with some caveats. What do I mean by “university”? I was not talking about the overworked, all-too-frequently insecurely employed academics, and support staff. And I was not talking about the students, this generation that my generation – I’m 60 years old – placed into such an unstable, unequal, damaged world – who are trying to find a forward in such difficult circumstances.

What I was talking about it was the institutions as a whole, as directed and controlled by a few extraordinarily highly paid, managerially orientated, competition-focused few, who have seized control, with the active encouragement and connivance of my class – the politicians (although not I would stress my kind of politics).

Made by late neoliberal capitalism, for late neoliberal capitalism

These are institutions of the status quo, whose sole purpose is to preserve the status quo that made them, focused on growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, interested only in scooping up fees, funding shiny buildings and justifying ever higher salaries, producing – ideally – STEM graduates who will probably enter the financial sector with their maths-focued PhD, quite possibly to create the next financial instrument to crash the global economy. They are transnational business corporations operating in a competitive global knowledge economy.

It is worth spending a second on the word “forgotten”. Of course there was never a perfect golden age of “the university”. It functioned often as an exclusionary, elite-preserving centre of privilege: yes I am thinking now the Edinburgh Seven – and I pay tribute to their pioneering entry to medicine in 1869, the first women to compete undergraduate education, even though the Court of Session did not hen allow them to graduate or practice medicine.

But from the 11^th-century student-led guilds of Bologna to the Autonomous University of Barcelona today, from the new universities of the 1960s to the New School of the Anthropocene, universities have demonstrated they CAN be a place of genuine leadership, genuine learning and genuine change, a community of scholars who are part of their community, grounded in place and time, valuing the contribution that all can make, but capable of looking back to learn from the past and forward to imagine different futures. To play their part in caring for the human and more-than-human worlds, to allow and cultivate their flourishing rather than extract and repress them.

Which is what I would argue is the true purpose of the university.

Culling the critical

What do we have? The managerialist university, one that assumed carrots and sticks are necessary for the recipients of bad MBAs to corral ivory tower scholars; the neoliberal university, aiming to get prepare students for maximum income potential while squeezing as many hours as humanly possible from underpaid staff at minimum cost; the heavily indebted, reliant-on-massive-overseas-student-fees university with shiny buildings, fat-cat bosses and whole schools of study being culled as thought they were cattle in the foot and mouth outbreak. I have to mention here the radical business scholars of the university of Leicester and the world-leading landscape archaeology scholars of the University of Sheffield, but those just happen to be two groups of which I know. I could spend my entire 10 minutes just listing the fallen fields and faculties of the past few years.

The majority, but by no means all, are in the humanities and social sciences. Yet where are many of our most pressing problems today, from the manosphere and the far right to acutely poor levels of mental health and loneliness – the last particularly British afflications? They are in society. Why are we not boosting the humanities and social sciences to tackle these evident problems?

Instead no, we have to focus on STEM subjects, as though more undergraduate degrees and post-graduate degrees are mysteriously, magically, going to create that elusive phantom of economic growth, rather than massively feeding the financial system maw, or leaving those determined to stick with real life scrabbling for fewer and fewer secure, permnanent research and teaching posts.

Unlearning Twentieth-Century Hubris

But I want to take a little time to think about the damage that does to intellectual endeavour, and yes, I have got an academic endeavour of my own to advertise here, in the form of a book, published by Routledge on April 10: Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics. The key word there is unlearning – and that should be the foundation of the university of today. Our current thinking has delivered this broken world, unpicking, reshaping, restoring healthy thinking has to be at the heart of the 21^st-century university.

Back as the Berlin Wall came down, an American academic called Francis Fukuyama posited neoliberal so-called democracy (life as lived in the US then) as the end of human history, the point we were all meant to get to, the peak of human progress and endeavour, at the end of stadial – staged – development of human history, an idea invented by thinkers in the Scottish Englightenment and last century – and this - still heavily embedded in Western thinking,

That looks pretty silly – entirely deluded -- now, as we look around the world and think of the people of Palestine, the people of Sudan, the victims of ICE in America and the children of the UK today living in adject poverty – but it is the thinking that lies behind our marketized, competitive university sector, thinking to which its administrators, its structures are wedded as the world burns around them, geopolitics, societies and ecosystems.

That is doing enormous damage to the students, the staff, the communities – think of English communities like Middlesbourgh, Hull and Sheffield that are heavily economically dependent on such fragile structures. And doing enormous damage – in the creation of planet-trashing spinout companies and reductionist, misguided understandings of human health.

Three alternative approaches

But what I am going to do is talk about three books about different ways of creating knowledge to the neoliberal university’s way.

First is Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, (if new to you think about the Slow Food movement and it operates on similar principles). He says academics (and others) should “do fewer things; work at a natural pace; obsess over quality”. I agree entirely. And I’d say that is essential for a purposeful university.

But in the algorithm-ridden, publish or perish world in which academics suffer today, it is extraordinarily hard to swim against the tide to do that. How much academic thinking is allowed to be truly productive, original and transgressive, genuine change-driving, in the neoliberal university. How much is driven by the competitive drive to survive?You only have to look at the Center for Scientific Integrity, which is behind the online reporting of Retraction Watch to see how much the pressure is causing damage to the quality of scholarship and knowledge.

The second book is from David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. Understanding that there are many ways to live, to flourish and survive, as humans have over 300,000 years on this planet, and millions of years if we count the Homo species before us. Telling the the brilliant sadly late David Graeber found it hard to find a place in the universities of today, just as so many heterodox economists – those thinking outside the stale, failed models of neoclassical departments – operate at the margins, funded often by their own independent efforts.

The third book I want to mention is Suzanne Bosh Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities. Her work seeks to escape from combative, extractive, and colonial ways of knowing and writing. She is committed not to claiming to have found answers but to asking questions, seeking not mastery but comfort with uncertainty.

Could such work survive in most university contexts? We know the answer to that. But doesn’t it need to, if the human species is to grasp its ignorance, the limits of its powers, the damage it has done, to this planet?

What about the buildings?

An intellectual “turn to practice” - thinking that started in 1980s in the study of the history and philosophy of science – is also essential in considering the damaging nature of the neoliberal university. That was something I reflected on back in 2020, when sat in the student union at the University of Leicester beside the frantically busy Starbucks. Students were lining up to buy often heavily sugared, over‑priced beverages in disposable cups, which were littered all over the expensive, office‑lobby‑style space. This is apparently what students are being encouraged to aspire to in the 21st century. Similar scenes could be found at most other UK universities.

This is the ideal presented in many a glossy brochure, but such social, health and environmental damage contained in one small space, no model for the future in the Anthropocene, but oh-so-profitable for a US-based corporation.

Change: there is no alternative

I invited all of the audience – and people far beyond the audience -- to get together to co-create a new kind of university, one that builds a new sustainable, caring, future for human animals and the more-than-human world.That means we need to get away from the idea of an education “market” – expel that failed model from our thinking - instead seek to build an education community, an education of care, compassion and flourishing, for the human and more-than human world. What does it need to be? Probiotic, democratic, healthy and secure for its members, contributive and generative for the world.

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Understanding the thinking of the Far Right

It is easy to dismiss the many Far Right voices we are hearing in UK politics, and around the world, as mere reciters of hate, recyclers of old racist tropes, misogynist stereotypes and religion-based repression. But there is a whole ecosystem of thought, of philosophy, of dialogue that largely circulates out of the general public gaze, which provides the foundation for the retail politics of significant political forces. In Against Post-Liberalism: Why ‘Family Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left, Paul Kelly sets out an account - not a definitive account but certainly a useful one - of the main names associated with this discourse and the origins and directions of their thinking.

That’s not his main aim. The overall intention, as the title suggests, is to take on forces that seek to remain economically progressive while embracing social conservatism and offer a revamped liberalism as an alternative. But it works as a useful exploration of what he identifies as opposition. (You can listen to the author talking about the text on the New Books Network.)

For him, post-liberalism is a negative ideology, “one that aspires not just to be an alternative to liberalism but to achieve its annihilation”. This is something he associates with JD Vance and “includes academics such as [Patrick] Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, as well as commentators such as Sohrab Ahmari, Chad Pecknold, and the political organiser Gladden Pappin, who have brought otherwise fringe debates about ‘integralism’ from the margins of Catholic Church politics and theology and US Catholic social media sites to the centre of the struggle for the soul of conservatism in the United States and to the centre of the policy agenda of the Trump presidency.” (pp. 102)

So what’s integralism? On Kelly’s account it “goes back to Late Antique and early medieval debates about the Christianisation of natural law and the Gelasian symbolism of the two swords of temporal and spiritual authority, or even to St Auginstine’s distinction between the two cities in his City of God Against the Pagans, and to the vexed question of the relationship between political and divine authority… after the Reformation and the slow emergence of political pluralism from the 17^th century onwards, that classical synthesis came under assault – most especially under the modern sovereignty articiulated by Hobbes and Bodin, both of whom rejected Pope Gelasisus I’s doctrine of the balance of two swords.” (p. 106)

“(Traditionalist) Catholicism is a clear candidate for an alternative political theology, as it denies the fundamental premise of popular sovereignty in politics and episemolgy. Its claims are clear and countercultural. The church is the deposit of an unchanging set of dogmas, which are true independent of their popular recognition and which do not fundamentally change across time, although they can undergo renewals.” (p. 111)

You can see this thinking in the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, and the politics of Viktor Orban. Such thinkers reject the US constitution because it gave rise to liberal rights such as Roe and Obergefell… the division between the domain of the private and the public, and the dominance of liberal reason.

“What is most striking about Deneen and [Matt] Goodwin [yes, of Gorton and Denton fame] is that they emphasise the revolutionary nature of the post-liberal project… analogous to Leninism, who see the crisis of ideology as a reflection of the more fundamental crisis in the material conditions of early 21^st-century capitalism – something that has become increasingly evident in their thought. … Both Deneen and Goodwinwho deliberately channel ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci into their political practices. They recognise how metropolitan liberalism has come to dominate the political, social and economic institutions of contemporary society through its function as a hegemonic discourse. The overthrow of the liberal hegemonic discourse requires a counter-hegemony to displace it, which is achieved by taking control of the dominant institutions of the political, social and economic culture of a society.” (p. 19)

“National populists tell a story about liberalism that differs from the one liberals tell about themselves: it is a critique designed to show that the dominant discourses of the present are not what they seem and have a darker side, as forms of domination and deceptionism… do not explicitly cite Foucault or Nietzsche, and many whould be shocked to be associated with the sort of project these two developed … but it is a strategy they employ… The point … is to show that all liberalism, and especially its egalitarian social democratic variant, far from being a strategy for emancipation and progess, is a form of elite domination that subjugates ordinary people – the majority of society. And it does this not by refuting liberalism’s validity but by rubbishing liberalism: this is the strategy of geanealogy.” (p. 22-23)

This is very much an ideology grounded and developed in the US, but there is a strong political strand in the UK that embraces it, the very opposite of one side of British conservatism that has been deeeply wary of, even hostile to, the US. A substantial thread of the UK Right desires, as a Guardian writer recently put it, “full ideological colonisation”.

It’s not that they are wrong about everything. This reflects what I often say myself about the loading down of a generation with student debt (albeit my answer is to cut the debt not in any way discourage the education). Take Danny Kruger, once a Tory, now Reform MP.

“Like Deneen, Kruger argues that the promise of university is access to a new elite class, but that is a false promise: echoing Goodhart, Kruger suggests that the graduate wage premium is diminishing and many who fall for the promise are rewarded only with debt, high cost of living in scarce accommodation in university towns and cities, and perhaps most importantly, separation from the ties of home, family and neighbourhood… This state of affairs further diminishes the ‘social capital’ that sustains the associations and organisations that hold together communities and enrich schools”. (p. 37)

There’s some I would agree with too in the communitarianism to be found in many of these thinkers.

“Our personality – and especially our moral personality and political citizenship – is a social and communal achievement. It always arises in the context of institutions, practices and relationship. The turn to the common good is communitarian, notwithstanding [Maurice] Glasman’s claim that his Blue Labour is not communitarian… The problem with liberalism is its individualism – in that individualism either fails because it is vacuous and cannot create complex social and political obligations or presupposes a background culture from which choices of value and principle must be made – in which case liberalism is not morally and politically fundamental. In place of the idea of the social contract, the post-liberals turn to the idea of the covenant. Pabst and Milbank use the term, as does Glasman and… so do Kruger and Hazony, two post-liberals who seek to resurrect conservatism.” (p. 54)

While associated often with traditionally conservative thinkers, there’s much too to agree on with regard to how humans are brought into being.

Drawing on Edmund Burke “as a major critic of social contract theory. He sets out to subvert and undermine its rationalism by recasting it as a way of understanding intergenerational obligations. … a conception of society as made up of a web of associations, relationships and small communities, out of which the broader political fabric of the nation is woven…. He sees family, school, workplace, village, college, profession, parish, county, town, and regiment as the ‘little platoons’ from which identity, obligation and values emerge. The ‘trustee’ model of the citizen and of political society has been a staple of conservative thought ever since”…. Taken up by then post-liberal heirs of the Big Society trend, both on the left and on the right. This is especially clear in the work of Maurice Glausman… makes much of the way in which the history of the British Labour movement grew precisely out of this conception of social order, where the Labour Party depended upon cooperatives, labour unions, various religions and church movements, both Roman Catholic (with Cardinal Manning) and Methodist, and intellectual movements like the Fabian Society.” (pp. 55-56)

Yet the views on the family are scarily traditionalist. And as to who bears the most “hardship and sacrifice”, well it is not hard to know the gender division of labour here:

Hazony’s image of the family … is not one of romantic self-expression but a community of obligation to those gone before and those yet to come, echoing Burke’s intergenerational covenant. Hazony emphasises the ‘hardship and sacrifice’ of sustaining marital relationships: marriage partners are not supposed to be happy, to find pleasure in each other or to enjoy themselves… intended to bolster opposition to liberalism by presenting a theory of the family that connects with religious and scriptural traditions but does not rely on the simple assertion of Bible or church teachings.” (p. 63)

This is a philosophy very focused on paid work. And scornful of benefits - something we hear all too often from Labour figures in the UK. (It doesn’t cope at all with the idea of universal basic income.)

Kelly, talking about the UK Labour MP John Cruddas, says “he saw the danger of an exclusive pursuit of welfare squeezing out other aspects of the moral economy of the Labour movement. His fear is that the strong utilitarian strand of Fabianism dominates the emancipatory agenda of social democracy through a narrow focus on redistribution and transfer parments – an approach strongly advocated by Gordon Brown and younger cabinet ministers with Oxford degrees in PPE who had been raised on a version of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. What is essentially a tool for social transformation became an end in itself: but, as communitarians have been quick to point out, this rapidly instrumentalises people, making them appear as benefit claims and recipients rather than independent persons with a dignity and identity shaped by work, community and place.” (p. 70 )

Donald Trump is not (only) ignoring international law because he thinks might is right. For many of these thinkers, “international law” is not a reality or a meaingful term.

“Hazony’s conception of the nation sits comfortably with libertarian views of the rights of private property and the restriction of political action in the economic realm, and would fit comfortably with Nozick’s model of the night-watchman state. A further implication of Hazony’s account of the political community … is the claim that there is a plurality of states in the providential order and there is no political authority beyond the state that can command obedience or be a source of universal or cosmopolitan law.” (p. 89

Which leads of course to Brexit.

“Pabst and Milbank are certainly Blue Labour critics of New Labour’s flirtation with globalisation and neoliberal political economy, and as such are hostile to much of the EU project. Yet, as ‘Catholic’ common-good communitarians, they are also suspicious of the treatment of the nation state as the sole manifestation of the political order: this would be a simplistic and modernist concession to Hobbesian secularism.” (p. 81)

The blessedly short book also covers the rise – and fall — of Carl Schmitt, whose reactionary thinking is linked to Nazism, with many of his key works written during the Weimar Republic.

“The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it subordinates the claims of the political order to economic interest and advantage, because it has no conception of order other than the constantly changing aggregate of economic interests of the individual…. The problem of nihilism, the idea of a world without meaning or values… where Heidigger seeks to confront the challenge of nihilism with an existential philosophy, Schmitt sees it as a political problem of order. The challenge, for both, is that the liberation of individual consciousness in Enlightenment philosophy dispenses with all the constraints or obligations that cannot be justified to this isolated intellect… The priority of the individual unleashes a world in which anarchy becomes the norm.” (p. 96)

A claim for authoritarianism being essential is the response.

“Schmitt, like many of the reactionaries – de Maistre, Donoso Cortez, de Bonald – whom he celebrates in Political Theology , takes a dim view of individual rationality and motivation, and therefore has a strong commitment to authority and coerced order. As in his fellow reactionaries, in him, too, this set of prejudices can be derived from idea of original sin; but we don’t need that theological filiation, as we can find accounts of the same attitude also in Marx’s theory of ideology, in Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents, and in the racial theories of the Nazis and others. What is clear in all these approaches is the idea that authority cannot be ascending, as it is presented in liberal social contract theory and arguments. Authority claims, whether epistim or political, are necessarily descending.” (p. 100-1)

Very handy for these thinkers is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, and therefore resistance to migration, which on this account “dissolves the bonds of society and weakens the common civilisations culture that supports our values… reject the claims of distant others, be they distant geographically or in terms of identity and culture, to be rightfuly included among the beneficiaries of liberal society… Post-liberalism replaces the liberal search for consensus with confrontation and conflict.” (p. 123)

Some thinkers see - rightly of course - current liberalism as a particular product of its time and place in the 20th century, an understandable émigré reaction to Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism.

“In Liberalism against Itself, [Samuel] Moyn traces the problem of contemporary liberalism to the rise to dominance of what he characterises as ‘Cold War liberalism’, which he associates with the thought of Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt and others. What unites the members of this group is a hostility of political utopianism and the abandonment of any conception of liberalism as a vision of the good… feared that the liberal conception of the good would collapse into socialism and follow the slippery slope to totalitariansm and the overmighty state…. Left liberalism without the resources of the ambitions to defend itself as a fount of political value, and therefore as anything more than an empty conceptual holding position, which could be filled by anti-liberal forces such as neoliberalism and its aggressive foreign policy companion, neoconservatism.” (p. 129)

So what do they want?

“The post-liberal agenda of ‘faith, family and flag’ assumes we can revalue a communitarian and relatively static social order by cultural means and the rationing of opportunity.. It offers no distinct approach to the problem of social mobility and opportunity… offers no account of how we should overthrow capitalist modernity, so we are left with that social form – capitalism without social mobility. All it offers is nostalgia for a world gone by, and one that we left for a good reason.” (p. 167)

Kelly wants to find the solution within liberalism. I look elsewhere.

Almost the end

Sorry, but to continue with the exploration of the toxic political forces (in this case centrist as well as rightwing) - we really do have to understand them better - a podcast titled In Bed With The Far Right examines its attitudes to sex and gender. This episode considers particularly how Jeffrey Epstein was a focus for anti-#MeToo activism, at the centre of a network for abusive (sometimes we have to add allegedly) men and their female enablers. (Many in the American Democratic Party.)

Have to put a warning in here: predictably disturbing listening, with one of the presenters having been a serious target of these forces!

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A topical note: Beware privatisation of the international public sphere

I don’t usually mix my daily political work and this newsletter, but particularly on International Women’s Day, when I know there’ll be many events in the coming week marking it, I want to make sure anyone organising or engaging in one knows better than to fall into a trap many did in the House of Lords IWD debate on Friday.

The speech I gave was not the one I’d been planning to, but - as was first pointed out to me by Carmen Smith as we listened together to the minister’s opening speech - it was really important to call out a gross privatisation of the day, the hijacking by corporate interests.

There’s a website called: www.internationalwomensday.com. I’m not going to make it a link, but the .com element of that really should give pause.

It claims that the theme of IWD is “give to gain”, which as I said in the House is “a very neoliberal slogan, one focused on the individual—focused on making a sop to our current system, rather than acknowledging the need for radical change. … It is suggestive of the philosophy infamously promulgated by the cryptocurrency billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now of course in jail: so-called effective altruism. That has helped to build a political culture that practically invites the most egregious forms of capture of our public global spaces by the rich. The haves give; the have-nots receive. The have-nots have to avoid challenging the status quo if they are going to get a few crumbs from the table.”

I’m indebted to the Australian website Women’s Agenda for an account of the story behind the dotcom website.

The REAL theme for IWD is “Rights. Justice. Action”, which you can find on the dedicated page on the UN Women website, where it notes correctly that this year’s event“comes at a time when justice systems are under strain. Conflict, repression, and political tensions are weakening the rule of law”. Which is entirely in keeping with the day’s origins in labour rights, women’s activism carried out against great odds.

This seems an appropriate time too to mention the new(ish) podcast Her Voice in the House, on which Laura Dunn speaks to female House of Lords members about their past, present and future work. More about it this week on Politics Home. (And yes, I can offer a sneak preview; I will be appearing on it in due course, probably in April.)

When art was politics

As much a political as religious structure? Photo by Falco Negenman on Unsplash

The concept of “art” as an independent sphere of activity - both its creation and its consumption - a source of personal development, the supplier of a lucrative market, rather than being part of everyday life and personal display, of politics and, more obviously, religion, is a recent one. Some academic sources put its “invention” to the European colonial period, particularly when traders started bringing back masks and other materials from Africa, stripping of them of the organic materials and other decorations and displaying them as sculpture. Others suggest the development of industrial production is key. Oscar Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: “Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.”

In his time, there was still a lot of politically conscious art, but so much in recent times has been captured by “the market”, resistance cultures turned into product that we need reminders often like this from Bob and Roberta Smith, which I have on my wall.

One of the things we have to do today is recapture creative endeavours from the deadening hand of “the market”, and make them part of the everyday experience and activity, something I write about in Change Everything the book. That must be one of few political accounts that has an entire chapter on the importance of restoring artistic endeavours and surroundings in our lives, rather than the junkspace in which we have to spend so much time.

(An aside on the junkspace; it is a term coined by architect Dutch Rem Koolhaas: “We see it in airports, highway systems, shopping centers, office buildings, and apartment blocks. Its materials are concrete, sheetrock, stucco, tape, glue, and staples. Its surfaces are smooth, mirrored and polished, its interiors air‑conditioned, its formal logic one of addition, proliferation, successive transformation, and spatial continuity, opposing it to an architectural tradition of hierarchy, composition, permanence.”)

To put it in practical terms, we need far more art and creativity - particularly public art - in our lives. That would be a huge political change, and a driver of political change.

It takes a real intellectual wrench now, to imagine a time before the invention of the “art market”, when art was politics (and religion was also an important part of the state-building and shaping mix). The intellectual timeshift is done very successfully by Stefania Gerevini. I’ve been reading, and enjoying the sumptious pictures, in her Facing Crisis: Art as Politics in Fourteenth-Century Venice. (The author wrote a short piece for The Conversation on the same topic.)

The history of later medieval Italian city states has not been, I confess, a particular favourite of mine, although one that more than a few novelists have enjoyed exploring (from SD Skykes’ City of Masks to the set-century-later The Glassmaker). So I read this non-fiction account both as informative history, and analysis of the art.

It is focused on a time of massive change and development:

“The protection of Venice’s commercial interests, including its monopoly over the trade of salt, and its access to important fluvial and land routes, generated increasing tensions with the urban centers of northern Italy, leading to clashes with Padua (1304-5), Ferrara (1308-13) and Verona (1336-1339). The latter conflict concluded with Venice’s annexation of the ciry of Treviso (1339), the first noteworthy territorial conquest on the Italian mainland, and with the establishment of an informal protectorate over Padua… a new expansionist phase in Venice’s policy towards terraferma. Paused in the central decades of the trecento, when the war against Genoa, multiple rebellions in the colonies, and the need to confront the Ottomans were of more pressing concern, the enlargement of Venice’s possessions on the mainland resmumed in earnest in the early 15th century.” (pp. 15-6)

This all demanded a comprehensive programme of statebuilding by Doge Andrea Dandolo. On Gerevini’s account, one important aspect of this was the creation of books of public history, the Chronica Brevis, a list of names, dates and facts that could help administrators, and the much more expansive Chronica per extensum descripta.

“It recapitulated the names, responsibilities and honors of its leaders and enumerated and expounded Venice’s interactions and diplomatic relations with a range of ecclestiastical and secular powers across the Mediterranean. Finally, it offered a comprehensive assessment of Venice’s religious history, with specific focus on the holy treasures (relics and saints’ bodies) accumulated by the city’s government over time. .. a powerful means of political certification and stablization and a toolkit of public governance that reminded its readers - the Venetian governing elite and chancery officials - of the origins and constitutional values of their state when taking public decisions and actions in the face of changing problems and environments.” (p. 30)

The thesis is that the art of San Marco was part of the same work. It “did not merely reflect or illustrate the political and institutional realities within which it was created; it contributer to the formation of those realities in the first place.”

There’s gender politics mixed in with the national on the high altar. For the (relatively) humble congregation in the nave, the main image would have been the angel Gabriel and the Virgin apparently suspended (on dark pillars), but for the elite who could approach closely, they could see two small enamelled figures of obvious political import.

“The pala d’oro was refurbished between 1343 and 1345 only months after the financial agreement with Anna of Savoy. Although the two events were not directly connected, the recent diplomatic rapproachment more between Venice and the Byzantine regent to the throne — who had asked for and obtained Venice’s financial support to defend her son’s future ascent to the Imperial throne against rival pretenders — may have inflected contemporary understanding of the altarpiece, which conveniently juxtaposes the portraits of a doge and a Byzantine empress presenting them as equals in the conspicuous absence of any Byzantine male rulers.” (p. 50)

Saints and holy relics, depicted and contained within sumptuous creations, were an important part of the way Venice cemented its growing power, Gerevini says. They didn’t challenge the cult of St Mark, rather coexisted with and supplemented it. “A set of precious relics of the Passion, allegedly translated from Constantinople to Venice in or after 1204, were more vigorously promoted in the 14th century, particularly by Andrea Dandolo.” (p. 105) The chapel of Sant Isodoro (of Chois), “worked visually to persuade viewers of the worthiness of the Eastern martyr and of his real presence in San Marco”.

There’s a lot of success and sumptuousness here, but also a reminder that there was resistance to the oligarchy. Gerevini notes that the list of doges in a dedicatory inscription in the grand structure is incomplete. Therte’s Dandalo (1343-54) and Giovanni Gradenigo elected on April 21,1355. In the gap was Doge Marino Falier.

“Following his failed attempt to overturn the oligarchic government of the city, he was the first and only doge … to be publicly executed, and died on the monumental stairs of the ducal palace… The conspiracy generated huge tumult in Venice and the doge’s violent death became … a powerful reminder of the limits of ducal authority.” (p. 139)

And there was also serious political theory in this mix. Gerevini points to the traslation of Aristotle’s Politics into Latin by William of Moerbeke (at the request of Thomas Aquinas) in around 1260 as a key moment.

“It was no longer necessary to conceptualize temporal power as - exclusively - a remedy against human evil and depravity. Instead, medieval theorists were now able to embrace the possibility that living together in an orderly polity might be ‘altogether natural to mankind,’ as Aquinas put it, and that living in a city 'was ‘living in a perfect community’. … Aristotle had posited the existence of three types of government: monarchy and aristocracy… and the less familiar category of politia, a polity where ‘the body of the people acts in the name of the common good’. This category proved critical to contemporary understanding of the Venetian state, and it offers a useful matrix within which to situate the baptistry mosaic.” (p. 198-9)

All of this forms a useful reminder that the medieval period is not some stretch of dull misery, suffering and subsistence, rather - like all others - a time of sophistication, flourishing and change. That is the human condition for most of our history. Although you might argue how we’re doing now, creating junkspaces like this that I was considering from a hotel room in Manchester recently.

Almost the end

When, when, when, are researchers going to stop expressing shock at the sophistication of our ancestors, in this case in Europe from 6th to 3rd millennium BCE?

“Each culture had their own complex culinary traditions…. hunter-gatherer fishers were not living on fish alone; they were actively processing and consuming a wide variety of plants.”

They used cooking pots, they had recipes, they liked their food to taste good. Oddly, very like us. Indeed, when we think about more than half of British calories coming from ultraprocessed food-like substances, rather better than us.

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Today

I’m not going to write extensively on the Israeli-US attack on Iran, or its retaliation around the Middle East, (that may come) but if you are interested in “what next” for the long-suffering Iranian people, this is a clear-eyed, if not optimistic, analysis (£) about what’s most likely:

“Iran … left with an institutional vacuum, economic and infrastructural devastation, and no meaningful assistance from abroad. Trump could not care less about democracy, with exhibit A being Venezuela. He has no day-after plan for Iran, and most of the U.S. government personnel who might have once formulated such a plan have long since been fired….State failure and collapse into civil war is a more likely outcome than either democracy or a monarchical restoration.”

I did look back to a review I wrote back in 2006, of Iran Awakening, the autobiography of Shirin Ebadi, lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. Her story helps illustrate just how long the US has been disastrously meddling in Iran. Her father was a minister in the government of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, overturned in a CIA-backed coup in 1953. The US (and UK) then established in power what she describes as “the gilded court of the shah, whose officials cavorted with American starlets at parties soaked in expensive French champagne”. She initially - like many - welcomed the revolution, understandably after the repression and corruption of the Shah, but soon realised what a disaster it would be for Iran’s women. That review doesn’t cover, and I suspect most have forgotten, that the US backed (with billions of dollars, special forces training and intelligence sharing) Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980, leading to a war that claimed some 400,00 lives and left the two states at its end in exactly the positions they started.

An admin note

A reader last week asked about where to find the details of the books I’m referring to. What I do is the first time the title is mentioned it will be hyperlinked to the book’s details, usually the publisher’s website.

Picks of the week

Reading

More on the Congo, this time about British-linked exploitation: Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo, by Jules Marchal (translated by Martin Thom), which covers the exploits of soap magnate William Lever, whose company has morphed now into Unilever, known as something of a philanthropic owner in the UK. But that was not his role in the Congo. When the UK colonial authorities wouldn’t grant him control over already communally owned lands in their territories to scure palm oil supplies (yes, the product has a long and disastrous history continuing to today), he went to the Belgians. It became an empire that totalled 5.5 million hectares, almost twice the surface area of Belgium. (p. 19)

Lever first made contact with Jules Renkin, the Belgian Colonial Minister, towards the end of 1909. With Max Horn of Antwerp, Renkin’s emissary, acting as an intermediary, Lever obtained on behalf of his company, Lever Brothers, through a Convention signed on 21st February 1911, the option to purchase 750,000 hectares of natural palm groves at a knock-down price. He was free to choose them within five “circles” measuring sixty kilometres in radius, around Bumba and Barumbu on the river Congo, Lusanga on the river Kwilu, Basongo on the river Kasai, and Ingende on the river Ruki. (p. 1)

His agent was the Belgian Henri Dekeyser, infamous as “commandant of soldiers who, in Bumba region, had cut off the feet of a chief’s daughter, in order to seize the heavy brass anklets she was wearing”.

Lever (who would become Lord Leverhulme in 1922, needed labourers for the hard work of harvesting the palm nuts, but he was only prepared to pay a pittance. The alternative was obvious: forced labour.

“When in the Congo, Lever was able to ascertain for himself that the wage he was paying for the cutting of clusters was insufficient. Indeed, in a diary entry for Christmas Eve 1912, he noted that the problem of the cutters of palm fruit “has grown as an ominous dark cloud”, and that the people of Lusanga were no longer bringing fruit, after having done so for barely a year. From this Lever did not conclude that it was necessary to reduce the number of clusters to be cut each day. He did not want to devote money to ensuring the fair remuneration of Africans, who, given such circumstances, would have worked quite willingly. Instead, he adopted the method generally used during this period to make Africans work, namely, coercion. In mid-December 1912, prior to Lever’s arrival in the Congo, his agent general had anyway asked the governor-general of the colony to set up a State military post in the vicinity of Lusanga, with patrols travelling the length and breadth of the region.

It took some time to get the full forced labour system set up.

On 8th May 1922, Horn confirmed the good news announced in Moseley’s letter. He wrote that palm-oil production had risen steeply in the month of March, because territorial civil servants, apparently on the governor-general’s orders, had “applied themselves more to encouraging natives to work for the Company”. The governor-general in question was Maurice Lippens, an advocate of forced labour in the Congo—as is plain from his 1922 circulars… In the circular dated January 1922 he particularly deplored the fact that, in the course of his journey across the Congolese provinces, he had been compelled to acknowledge that the authorities were not always lending adequate support to the colonists, traders, agents and directors of the commercial and industrial firms, large or small. He added that all government agents and civil servants should realise that it was their paramount duty to uphold such efforts. (p. 19)

The Second World War brought only an intensification of the exploitation:

The Congo was cut off from Belgium, which was occupied by the Germans. The Belgian government, in exile in London, and Governor-General Ryckmans, in Kinshasa, gradually imposed harsher and harsher demands upon the Africans, in order that they contribute to the defeat of the Germans. On 21st January 1941, when Great Britain was alone in sustaining the struggle against Germany, the Congo concluded an agreement with London concerning the supply of raw materials. Palm oil was at the top of the list, and, as may readily be understood, that suited only too well the biggest oil producer in the country, Huilever, which was of course run by Englishmen. (p. 211)

So far as I’m aware (happy to be corrected) there’s no monument anywhere in the UK about the contribution of these workers to the war effort.

A leaflet from Port Sunlight Trust (PDF) (based in the “model worker” village built in England for the company) accessibly sets out the story. Alternatively, there’s an interesting global account from an architectural historian here, who finds the imprint of palm oil exploitation on the streets of Brussels and traces its modern-day place around the tropics.

As for today, eastern Congo in particular is now under the control of a “military bourgeouis”, with a system that has produced an “equilibrium of violence”, as academic Jason Stearns says in this 2022 podcast.

Listening

The latest episode of the Hansard Society Parliament Matters podcast is and interview with historian Nan Sloane, who’s just published a biography of Margaret Bondfield. Who? you’re very likely to say. In fact I did.

I know about Nancy Astor, of course, the first woman to take her seat in Westminster, and Constance Markievicz, first woman to be elected (but standing for Sinn Fein she did not take her seat), and Ellen Wilkinson, Labour secretary of education from 1945, but Bondfield just wasn’t on my radar.

Source

Sloane provides some understandable reasons why she’s largely been ignored - a shortlived government (dealing with extremely difficult circumstances), the fact that she was never a suffragette or suffragist (she was focused on the lack of universal suffrage for men as well), and she was pushed by the circumstance of the time into making some deeply unpopular decisions. (When Barbara Castle was made Minister in the department by Harold Wilson in 1968, she insisted that the name be changed to Department of Employment, so as not to be associated with Blomfield.) And having lost her seat in 1931 Blomfield never returned to parliament.

Also the first woman to be elected to the General Council of the TUC, in 1918, she operated for much of her life in otherwise all-male environment, and on Sloane’s account in that position was forced to fit into male cultures, rather than having any opportunity to really carve a different path. She was also very much a product of her generation, seeking to professionalise paid domestic work for women and girls, rather than seeing the attraction of escaping such an inevitably restrictive work environment. She was also intensely private about her personal life, unsurprisingly since she was - Sloane concludes - almost certainly in several lesbian relationships over her life (which Sloane explains would have been seen at the time - while not illegal - as a sign of having never properly matured, and thus deadly to her public standing).

But it was a fascinating life, from near-destitution in her childhood in rural Chard, to refusing, after one year of practice at the age of 14, to be pushed into teaching, the path to security her older sister had followed and the obvious one then for a smart poor girl, into shop work, and then unions.

Sloane offers a cautionary tale about getting law right: acknowledging the damage done to shopworkers bodies by 12 hours of standing, the parliament decreed there must be chairs in shops, one for each three workers. The chairs were duly provided, but then the employers decreed that they could only be used by customers….

This book definitely going on my to-read list, but whether or not you go that far, the podcast is definitely worth a listen.

Thinking

A short book by the Finnish president Alexander Stubb, The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing of the New World Order, beckoned me from the library “new books” shelf. A rightwing president, but still, I thought it worth a read. It’s Finland after all.

But while some of the general platitudes about countries working together and trying to maintain the rule of law was fine as far as it went, it was this passage that left me gasping. (And had it not been a library book might have been sent it spinning into the wall in disgust.)

“The technological revolution is changing science. Over centuries science has cut the risk of humankind’s two biggest killers, disease and famine, and helped us live healthier and longer lives. Yet humans have still been ‘subject to the same physical forces, chemical reactions and natural-selection processes that govern all living beings’, according to Yuval Harari. Not anymore. Humans are transcending biological limits. Bioengineering, bioinformativs, and genetic modification are challenging the laws of nature.” (p. 97)

Really, did this man not NOTICE the Covid pandemic? Has he ever heard of antimicrobial resistance? Has he read any of the multiple reports warning of the climate emergency’s threat to food security? Could his hubris be any more stuck in some 20th-century pulp science fiction novel?

You can in the writing see Stubb’s thinking has evolved since the 1990s in that he appreciates that not every state is going to transform into a liberal democracy, that’s why he calls for a reasonable model of “values-based realism”, which he defines as “a set of universal balues based on freedom, fundamental rights, and international rules, which take into account the realities of global diversity, culture, and history of the nation states, regions, and continents that make up the global order of international relations”…. stay true to your values but understand that the world’s problems will not be solved wiith the like-minded countries alone.” (p. 27)

Looking back to being a university student in 1990, he notes: “in my idealism, I fail to understand that the West’s ideological victory if going without global celebration. Many formerly colonial countries see it not as a liberation but as an extension of a past they hoped to leave behind.” (p. 33) He adds:

“Globally… the rules of critical institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation did not change. The UN reacted to events, but its power structure remained pretty much the same- only now without a counterweight to the preeminent power of the US and its Western allies. The nations that had been sidelined remained sidelined.” (p. 37)

He even manages to grasp, quoting a UK Brexiteer, that not everyone in “the West” has benefitted from the sunny uplands of growth that he applauds.

But he’s still stuck in the 1990s in saying like-minded countries, “the West”, include the United States of America. And okay, no doubt the text was finalised before Venezuela and this weekend’s events. But still, he’s very like Sir Keir Starmer in keeping his head in the sand with comments such as “revived unity could prove a crucial asset amid the present disorder, and we should strive to sustain it despite differences with the new administration in Washington”. (p. 56)

There’s a lot of unlearning to be done in so many quarters for people who formed their views in the last century.

Researching

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Fascinating research into aptly-named clownfish, finds that their social environment can alter their appearance - no not new “clothing”, but their actual bodies.

For tomato anemonefish, usually only one breeding pair can occupy a particular host anemone, with younger fish taking a subordinate role in the social structure. “We’ve previously shown that anemonefish count bars to recognize each other. So, we know that bars, the white vertical stripes characteristic of clownfish, are essential in communication.”

It had been thought that they’d keep a juvenile appearance when sharing an anenome with older fish, but it seems they develop faster so they are clearly at home, and can’t be displaced by other young rivals. Conversely, if they secure an anenome of their own, they keep their juvenile appearance, so if a bigger adult turns up, they have a better chance of remaining, if in a subordinate position.

What’s very clear is that there’s a lot more going on than their genome determining their phenotype, or even simple environmental factors influencing it. Social circumstances are key.

Almost the end

Love it! If I played computer games instead of writing newsletters, this would be one: Relooted, described as “Africanfuturist”, was created by a team from 10 African countries, and and involves a female hero recovering looted African treasure from Europe and the United States and returning them first to the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, before they are to be returned to their places of Origin.

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James Watson, Jack Horner and Epstein

I was unsurprised when the Telegraph reported the existence of a cringe-inducing photograph of “DNA pioneer” James Watson with three (identity-suppressed but certainly young) women at Jeffrey Epstein’s “New York mansion”. The paper reports: “It is unclear when the pictures were taken, although they appear to be from the mid to late 2010s – years after Epstein was released from jail on a child-sex offence.”

Watson’s racist, eugenicist beliefs were already well known. After comments about African people in 2007, which he doubled down on in 2019, he was stripped of honorary titles.

The Telegraph reports: “Epstein appeared to endorse Watson’s widely discredited views. In a 2016 email exchange with Noam Chomsky, an American academic, the financier claimed, baselessly, that “the test score gap . amongst african americans is well documented”. His email continued: “James Watson , had some of his private views made public and hence his dismissal from society. he told me that after one sentence he became an un-person. Making thigns [sic] better might require accepting some uncomfortable facts”.

Watson also had some well-documented dinosaur views about women, on the record as commenting about the unjustly uncredited DNA co-discoverer Rosalind Franklin: “The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.”

It was not just genetics in which Epstein had a perverted interest, and desire to use it to shape the present and future, providing a reminder that the past is not just “another country”; the studies of it have real political impact today. The science is political, as it has always been.

That helps explain why, as CNN reported, there is now “a reckoning in the paleontology community” about Epstein links, with a number of researchers being banned from DinoCon in Birmingham in July. This is covered in a special episode of the (female-presented) Weird and Dead podcast, which reflects more broadly on the sexism, racism and other discrimination still far too rampant in this (and other) science.

And as the New York Times is reporting, the desperate hunt for funding for universities was driving contact with Epstein, even after his 2008 conviction.

Mr. Epstein rarely followed through with the multimillion-dollar contributions he suggested were on offer, but he drew people in and appeared attentive to academia’s unending quest to pay its bills. Private philanthropy has long been an essential part of higher education’s business model, and some college presidents say they spend at least a quarter of their time fund-raising.

What does chasing dodging money (and possibly even worse getting it!) do to our key institutions of knowledge? Let’s face it, this is “academic-washing”: the people who have money on this scale have usually acquired it by exploitation of others and destruction of the environment, if not outright illegality.

An interesting editorial in Chemical and Engineering News comes up with an idea to partially address this situation:

Perhaps it is time that we have a statement of principles that funders should be expected to sign on to and that researchers could use as a de facto checklist for acceptable interest before agreeing to grants…. We would like to suggest three principles as a starting point: First, that the funder recognizes that the researcher and their work is under no obligation to endorse the politics or personal manifesto of a funder. Second, that there is an explicit encouragement to acknowledge fair labor practices as consistent with a body such as the International Labour Organization. Finally, that the researcher is expected to comply with calls for fiscal transparency. We might even consider making explicit the right for researchers to terminate their relationship without consequence should the funder have a criminal conviction.

Or we could tax rich individuals and companies adequately, in return for the benefits they’ve taken from society, and provide democratically controlled funding for the research. Just a thought….

Related reading: The toxic blending of extermination and extinction

This news took me to a book long on my to-read list, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi, which sets out how the deliberate attempted extermination of indigenous people was - cynically - muddled with the development of the understanding of extinction of non-human animals. That’s part of a broader exploration of how science is, always and inevitably, intensely political. But also, importantly, the author identifies how there’s always resistance, always people who see through the convenient myths. So saying “well that’s just what people thought back then” does not add up.

So yes, a prestigious journal can be held responsible for deadly guff like this:

“In 1924, Nature published an editorial about the ‘Primitive Races within the British Empire’ which confidently asserted: ‘Throughout the world, whenever a primitive race is brought into contact with European civilisation, the result is normally, though not invariably, for the inferior race to lose its vitality and to die out.’” (p. 81)

Such ideas had been challenged, often. Take the rightly angry irony of the German anthropologist Theodor Waitz accused American theorists of creating an ‘American School’ promoting extinction as something predestined by nature rather than a human choice:

“Originally published in Germany in 1859, and translated into English four years later, Waitz sarcastically observed: … it would appear that we must not merely acknowledge the right of the white American to destroy the red man, but perhaps praise him that he has constituted himself the instrument of Providence in carrying out and promoting this law of destruction. The pious manslayer thus enjoys the consolation that he acts according to the laws of nature which govern the rise and extinction of races.” (p. 75)

As the American nation drove indigenous people further and further West:

Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen delivered a long speech in the Senate opposing removal, and in support of the Native nations who had no desire to move. He maintained that ‘God, in his providence, planted these tribes on this Western continent … before Great Britain herself had a political existence.’ As such, he demanded to know, ‘in what code of the law of nations, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been extinguished? (p. 63)

Without the scant protection of treaties and recognition in Australia, the genocide was even more open, again given intellectual cover by the confusion of extermination and extinction, something that’s only recently started to be properly documented.

Defining massacres as the deliberate killing of six or more people, the project created a map pinpointing Australian frontier massacres across the continent between 1788 and 1930. By late 2024 the map showed 438 massacres, with more than 10,000 people killed. Of this total, 419 were massacres by colonists of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. The map also shows a broadly consistent number of frontier massacres from the 1820s to the 1890s, with a peak in Tasmania in the 1820s, and a peak across the continent in the 1840s. Even this partial archive provides important evidence for the violence underpinning claims of extinction in the nineteenth century. (p. 112)

Again, there were plenty of critics at the time.

An early campaigner for Aboriginal rights, Walter Malcolmson, wrote to the paper [The Times] on 8 April 1904 charging that Aboriginal peoples ‘have almost been civilized out of existence’. He believed local systems of indenture left Aboriginal peoples ‘worse off’ than formerly enslaved Africans in North America. He supported his claim with horrific examples of beating, starvation, and policing. (p. 122)

Back in Europe, the discovery of the fossils of Neanderthals provided new pseudo-scientific cover for dismissal of indigenous people as “primitive” relics. The founder of the major Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford was a typical so-called scholar of his time.

He used his inherited wealth to build an extensive personal collection of ethnographic artefacts, archaeological finds, and European folk art, … invented a system based on sequences of types to show evolutionary change. Crucially, he intended his typological system to exhibit progressive human development …Pitt Rivers’ bequest made his collection, and the evolutionary assumptions underlying it, publicly available for decades, perpetuating interpretations of colonized peoples as lowly vestiges of ancient pasts. (pp. 106-7)

Important reminder: any society existing now is just as modern as any other.

There were often signs of compassion for animals being made extinction, sometimes more than there was for the people.

In 1824 the Reverend John Fleming accused humans of indulging in ‘unremitting persecution … against the lower animals, during the long term of nearly 6,000 years’, ensuring the ‘geographical range of many species’ was transformed while the ‘weapons of the huntsman completed the extinction of many animals’. Fleming lamented the disappearance of birds such as eagles, bustards, and western capercaillie from across the British Isles, and expanded on his list of ‘extirpated’ and ‘extinct’ species in A History of British Animals (1828). (p. 144)

And by 1900, the “penitent butchers”, as they were labelled, were meeting to take action:

“In 1900 naturalists, gentlemen, hunters, aristocrats, and colonial officials concerned with the fate of African wildlife attended a specialist conference in London to deliberate over the future of threatened wildlife. After considerable discussion, the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa (also known as the London Convention of 1900) was signed by states with African colonial territories, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The convention was neither ratified nor implemented. Three years later, frustrated by inaction, many of the same men formed the British Society for the Preservation of Wild Fauna of the Empire.”

Qureshi follows a long train of such extinctions, finishing, almost, with the terrible tale of the baiji, Yangtze river dolphins, (which I wrote about almost two decades ago).

As you’d expect, Qureshi is far from complimentary about the activities of museums, while also noting, “our best hopes of knowing some lifeways ever existed lie entombed in museums and herbaria”. (p. 265)

She tells the story of the “Liverpool” pigeon, named after the only surviving (taxidermied) example known. Auctioned after the death of a collector who had travelled in North America and had contacts in the Pacific:

“The spotted green pigeon drew the keen eye and winning bid of the thirteenth Earl of Derby, Lord Stanley. In his personal copy of General Synopsis of Birds, where Latham notes the skin in Davies’ collection, the earl triumphantly scrawled ‘now in mine!’ Ultimately, Stanley’s collections were donated to the city of Liverpool, forming the core of a new museum and forerunner of the current World Museum. Despite the acquisitive glee of a satiated collector, Stanley knew almost nothing of the spotted green pigeon.”

And we still don’t really. DNA suggests its closest relative is the spectacular Nicobar pigeon, then the extinct Rodrigues Solitaire and dodo. It might be from Tahiti, where an early 20th-century records a bird the writer called titi, based on its cry, which was speckled green and he shadow of the mountain gods. Qureshi observes: “The mystery of the bird’s origins is compelling, but to know so little about any way of being consigns it to a remarkably miserable fate.” (p. 270)

That sad little preserved relic in Liverpool is of a non-human animals, but still, as Qureshi outlines, the remains of human animals are still in our museums.

Museums are far too often someone’s unwanted grave or prison. Countless people were taken, in whole or in part, without consent and incorporated into practices of trade, collection, acquisition, and display. (p. 57)

That’s something I spoke about in the House of Lords last year, tracing the story of the barbarous deaths, and treatment of the bodies, of Jandamarra, the Australian rebel leader, and Mangi Meli, in German East Africa.

Almost the end

Something nice to finish with! A technique of “language nests”, imported into Finland from New Zealand Maori practice, is making big strides in saving an endangered Sami language. Which means also of course saving knowledge, understanding and human lifeways otherwise gravely endangered.

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