Monthly Archives: February 2011

Books Environmental politics Politics

The culture of the bicycle

February 24, 2011 – 10:39 am

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

As an occasional participant in London’s Critical Mass, as a regular “it’s the best way to get around” cyclist on the streets of the British capital, and as a campaigner who thinks that cars get far, far too much consideration when it comes to town planning, when I saw One Less Car in Edinburgh’s bookshop, I just had to pick it up.

It’s the first history that I’ve seen of the politics of the bicycle, and while I know quite a bit about the late 20th century and early 21st-century campaigns around cycling, I knew little of what came before.

I now feel far more informed, although I was glad as I read of my sometimes too close knowledge of cultural studies and associated jargon, for the author, Jack Furness, his field as assistant professor of cultural studies at Columbia College Chicago, and it shows. Although to be fair, it’s pretty hard to talk about the Situationists, as Furness does, without using their jargon. He quotes Pierre Canjuers and Guy Debord: “A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile … S essentially means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the centre of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market.” (p54)
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Politics

Launching my London Assembly List campaign

February 23, 2011 – 9:54 am

Today I’m launching my campaign for the Green Party selection for the London Assembly List. My campaign website is here.

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Books History

Shining light on what really aren’t the Dark Ages

February 21, 2011 – 11:32 pm

A shorter version of this post was first published on Blogcritics.

I find the post-Roman period of European history fascinating. Today we live in a world in which the idea of progress – that next year’s computer must be better than last year’s – is all-pervasive. Yet for many centuries Euopeans lived in the shadow of buildings far greater than anything they could hope to build, with crumbling technology they couldn’t hope to replace, in societies whose institutions were visibly degrading. it was a very different world, and one that I find psychologically fascinating.

So when mediaeval history e-mail list came up with an almost unanimous recommendation for Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, I had to lay hands on a copy. And I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty of detail in his account, including an introduction to some great women of the period, (and lots about Burgundy, where I have a special local interest) but where this book really shines is in its analysis of general trends and explanation of the big changes of the period. He’s always trying to answer the “why” question – always I think the most interesting one.

And he’s looking for the big picture. So one of his big themes is the importance of land tax collection for the maintenance of a centralised, complex administrative state, and a sophisticated economy. That’s what Rome had in spades, but it fell apart quickly in the west, with aristocracies and societies becoming much more localized and usually poorer.

Another big theme is the relative power of royalty, aristocracy and peasantry. “A strong state essentially depended on peasant exploitation. We cannot easily say which peasants would have preferred: the security most powerful rulers ould give them (a security which was only relative; the reigns of Justinian, Charlemagne and Basil II have all left clear evidence of local violence and oppression); all the autonomy, and lower rents and tributes, which most peasants had in the small and weak polities of Britain or the Slav and Scandinavian worlds before the 10th century; and autonomy which was risky if stronger invaders came through on rating enslaving expeditions…. ( I think they would have preferred autonomy.)” (p. 559)
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Books Women's history

The women of early medieval Europe – not such ‘dark ages’

February 21, 2011 – 12:15 am

I’ve been reading Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, and found some wonderful women, most of whom I’ve not previously encountered.

Some of the earliest he’s able to introduce are the Frankish aristocrats of the Merovingian period.

“The few women in the Merovingian period who made surviving wills without the participation of a male relative (because they were widows all consecrated nuns, like Erminethrudis or Ermintrude in Paris around 600 and Burgundofara in Faremoutiers in 634) also possessed much less land than the aristocratic norm; autonomous female actors were, once again, in a relatively fragile situation. Aristocratic women could nonetheless choose to consecrate themselves to virginity and found monasteries, as numerous saints lives tell. These lives tend to stress the opposition of the fathers to such a choice (as opposed to one of marriage the vantage of the family), and the support of their mothers. As Regine Le Jan notes, this has to be a topos, a narrative cliche: in reality, such female monasteries were very much part of family strategies, and women like Burgundofara of Faremoutiers or Gertrude of Nivelles, and the monasteries they founded, prospered and faltered as the families (respectively the Faronids/Agilofings and the Pippinids) prospered and faltered.”

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Books Environmental politics

Drought, El Nino and famine – then and now

February 8, 2011 – 7:30 pm

A much shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

It’s an odd recommendation, but a strong one: the copy of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis is quite the most battered book I’ve ever picked up from the London Library, and the fact that this is down to wide use rather than accident is attested to by the large number of date stamps on the inside cover since its publication in 2001.
And having completed the text, I’d entirely concur with that recommendation, as well as that of Raj Patel in the Guardian, who put me on to it.

In my political science studies I’d encountered the theory that underdevelopment was a process, not a “natural” state of being of certain countries but a degradation inflicted on them by force and geopolitical circumstances, but what Davis does in this book is brings that reality vividly, painfully, awfully to life. But what’s more, he debunks many of the traditional claims of the imperialist apologists – that the crises in India and China were Malthusian in original – the product of uncontrolled human reproduction. And as we hear a lot these days about El Nino and La Nina, he gives them a history back at least to the 17th century (and in a very detailed chapter containing a lot of physics an explanation of them).

Furthermore, much of this history has sharp, frightening relevance today. One of his key points – obvious when you think about it, yet I’ve never previously seen it discussed, is that globalisation of food supplies means globalisation of prices – which means a shortfall in supplies doesn’t just affect one specific area, but the whole of the globe. If prices rise sharply, famine – an inability to buy necessary food supplies – hits the poor everywhere.

So here’s Davis’ picture of India in 1876, a picture that looks in miniature awfully like the world we have today: “The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production of the rest of India … had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England… The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise, the telegraph ensued that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. … food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants. ‘The dearth,’ as The Nineteenth Century pointed out a few months later ‘was of money and of labour rather than of food’.” (p. 26)
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Books Feminism Women's history

Down to earth – the real life of women in 20th-century Scottish cities

February 6, 2011 – 11:48 pm

Article first published on Blogcritics

Life since the Second World War in Britain has changed a great deal – the steady, productive and necessary growth in the first two decades after the war, and in the mad orgy of consumption that developed after that, and particularly in the two great Scottish cities that were known for their crowded conditions and poverty.

It was women who by hard labour and careful calculation held together lives that today we’d consider near impossible – 13 children in a “room-and-kitchen”, what we’d call a one-bedroom flat today, or half a dozen in an “end”, a studio flat, living on mostly bread and potatoes, with a smattering of meat, margarine and vegetables to create a survivable diet. It was a life of endless handwashing, scrubbing and cleaning, nursing the sick and caring for children.

In 1911 66% of the houses in Glasgow and 41% of those in Edinburgh had only one or two rooms. About the same time 43% of the single-room houses shared a sink (and water supply), consisting of “made over” older properties., while 94% in Edinburgh and 93% in Glasgow shared toilet facilities.

The lives they lived is the subject of She Was Aye Workin’ Memories of Tenement Women in Edinburgh and Glasgow by Helen Clark and Elizabeth Carnegie, (aye meaning “always”) which uses primarily oral history sources to give a vivid picture of tough, resilient women, and communities.

There was a strict gender division in most communities in both of these cities, which meant jobs and roles were clearly allocated as male or female. “Alex Kellock, growing up as one of eleven children in the 1920s, does not remember having to do ‘as much as boil an egg’ as he had older sisters who did everything for him and his seven brothers, even making their beds. He left the family home for marriage and never had to do anything in the house until he was widowed in his 70s.”

Women developed high level domestic skills to keep clean impossibly crowded, and frequently old and decrepit homes, and feed large numbers on a tiny budget. Isa Keith describes one of her mother’s specialities: “They would give you a sheep’s heid, they would cut it in half and it had tae get a lot of cleaning before you actually cooked it. She’d clean and clean it, and then she’d leave it overnight in salt water to make sure it was absolutely clean. She used to tae take the tongue and cheek, she would press it in a plate, ken, a dish, and then a plate on top and maybe the iron, and press it. And that was potted head… and it was lovely. And you’d have that with beetroot for supper.”

Girls were expected to contribute to the family income as soon as they could (or else to take over the housewife’s role if their mother had died or become ill) – school leaving age was 14 through much of the period and many had part-time jobs before that. But on marriage, the assumption was that a woman would give up paid employment and not go back to it.

This is Mrs Gardiner, born in 1882: “ I didnae want to work after I got married and ma husband didnae want me tae work. I did go and get a job though, when the children were off ma hands. An’ I went an’ got a job, cleanin’, cleanin’. So I came hame an’ told ma husband. He was mad, flamin’ mad! He says: ‘What’ll the men in the boat say aboot ma wife goin’ oot tae work? I says: ‘You ask the men if they’ll come an’ pay the rent.’”

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