Category Archives: Arts

Books History Politics

The Levellers and the Agreements of the People

April 21, 2013 – 8:38 pm

In a minorly curious coincidence, this week’s Radio Four’s In Our Time was on the Putney debates, just as I finished reading The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, by Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon eds.

It’s a highly academic collection of essays, but some of them I found fascinating even as a lay reader…
In D. Alan Orr’s chapter
p. 76 “the tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the 17th century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English- speaking world. Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very written-ness has suggested them as important precursors to the US constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the 18th century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process as the printed and written word.”

There were a number of versions of the Agreements … Says “the key to the success of the Levellers’ Agreements was political accountability, and they had a much more developed sense than most of their fellow radicals that this required not merely elections and the rotation of officers, both at a national level and a local level, nor even merely political and financial accountability. It also required active popular participation.” (p61, Jason Peacey’s chapter)

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Books History

A little glimpse into Bronze and Iron Age mindsets

March 29, 2013 – 8:30 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

One of the fascinations of history is trying to understand the mind of people who lived long ago, and how the societies they lived in were organised. That’s particularly true of prehistory, when we have no written texts to guide us – just physical objects.

In How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Visions, Patterns and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times, Peter S. Wells uses one of the most original approaches I have come across in trying to understand the minds of Bronze and Iron Age Europe by thinking about the shape of their world.

I came away from it thinking that an awful lot of archaeological theory ignores the fact that the world these objects were used in is very different from our own. For example, Wells stresses how different objects look by lamplight or candlelight compared to under electric light, as we usually see them in the museum. If we’re going to understand how they were used, how they were understood, the social context, you’ve pretty well got to look at them in the same way.

It’s also fascinating to think how few human-made objects Bronze Age people in particularly would generally have come across – and how they would have stood out against the natural environment. One spectacular object would probably have lingered in the mind, been talked about for decades – whereas we’re bombarded with human-made images every second. And before writing, interpretting objects – perhaps an object that arrived from abroad, with little “story” attached to it would have relied on detailed interpretation of the object itself – much as an archaeologist has to do today.

Or think about landscape. Wells says Bronze Age people (probably 98 per cent plus of them) were involved in ploughing, digging, cultivating, harvesting, threshing, making fences, and constructing buildings… They perceived a physical world with a directness and an intensity that most of us can only try to imagine. .. he or she would have seen the features of the landscape – the fields, trees, fixes, and hedges – as a product of intensive labour, direct bodily engagement, and also as a potential source of the raw materials for sustenance and trade.” (p. 38)

He uses the concept of “ecological psychology” – the idea that an individual’s perception is directly dependent upon the environment in which the perception occurs. “We see things by interacting with them – touching them, handling them, carrying them, using them. The same principle that applies to our perception of landscapes … Somethings to act in – to walk-through, to collect wood in, to harvest cereals in.” (p. 23)
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Books Feminism Politics

Matchwomen – founders of New Unionism…

March 29, 2013 – 12:09 am

First published on Blogcritics

Even if you have never studied history, you probably have some vague awareness of the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 in London – and think of poor waifs, frail girls and young women, victims of vile Victorian exploitation. If you have studied history, you were probably taught that the strike was led by middle-class Fabian, Annie Besant, who provided the leadership that the uneducated East End women simply could not have found from their own ranks.

In either case, what you should do is read Louise Raw’s Striking A Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History , a spectacular but very readable account of epic original research that has uncovered a very different story from the traditional tale.

It is astonishing that so long after this iconic event no one before Raw had seriously tried to research it, and very sad that no one recorded the participants’ own views before it was too late – as Raw found had been for the Melbourne tailoresses’ strike of 1882-3 (which has considerable parallels with the later strike).

In fact to find out very much at all, Raw had to engage in some serious detective work, and find creative ways to recover knowledge apparently lost in the mists of time. A lot of her information came from the grandchildren of three of the matchwomen – two of the probably strike leaders, Mary Driscoll and Eliza Martin, and Martha Robertson. Raw combines this with census data and a close examination of contemporary accounts of the strike, to paint a picture of a spontaneous, but well-planned and executed, walkout by the women – their own choice, their own action.

Besant played a role, before the action, in attacking the management, which led them to try to force the women to sign letters attesting good treatment – which when the women resisted led to the sacking that precipitated the strike, and afterwards, in helping to collect strike pay (although the workers also found some of their own from their own community), but she was in no way a leader of the strike, and in fact, Raw shows convincingly, was actually opposed to the whole idea of a strike.

There’s much more to this book too than rewriting a colourful fragment of history – Raw says that New Unionism, a major part of British political history, should be dated back to the matchwomen, rather than the dockers’ strike the following year, as is traditional. The two were closely linked by more than geography – Raw makes a detailed case for the ties of marriage and community (both groups having large Irish continents) between matchwomen and dockers. And Raw quotes from a contemporary account of the dockers strike which has John Burns telling a mass meeting: “The matchgirls had formed a union and had got what they wanted, and so had the gas stokers at Beckton, and surely the Dock Labourers could do the same” to cries of “hear hear”. (p. 166)
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Books Environmental politics

Eating meat and starving men

March 27, 2013 – 11:09 pm

Notes from What It Means to be Human by Joanna Bourke

This is a fascinating read, as ever, from this Birkbeck historian, but I’ve no time for a full review so here’s just some interesting points…

“The great expansion in meat-eating in Britain and America only occurred after the 1860s… According to one estimate, meat consumption in Britain almost doubled between the 1860s and the 1890s, and had increased still further by 1914. .. in 1909, Americans consumed on average 51 kg of boneless trimmed meat each year…. by the late 1960s the average person was eating more than 70 kg of such meat a year — or the equivalent in animal flesh of his or her own body weight… Today, the average American consumes a staggering 125 kg of meat a year.” (p 278)

Historically of course what most people ate as meat varied widely. Bourke comes up with a fascinating list from early West Coast America: ” Teal, summer and mallard duck, plover, lark, robin, prairie grouse, quail, snipe, wild geese, swan, wild pigeon, while turkey, grey and white cranes, white and black tailed deer, antelope, beaver, black bear, hare, raccoon, opossum, grey black and fox squirrels and bison. If especially hungry, they might also tuck into the flesh of blackbirds, bluebirds, buzzards, crows, doves, dippers, Eagles, owls, hawks, mockingbirds, ravens, mice, gophers, prairie dogs, panthers, skunks, foxes, wildcats, coyotes, wolves or mustangs.” (p. 277)

Now of course, we’re down to cows, pigs and poultry – with a heavy stress on the last.

“At the turn-of-the-century, only around 10% of the world grain was fed to animals… In America today, around 60% of the grain is fed to animals. This shift is even more remarkable when it is noted that the animals being fed grain in 1900 were primarily those working in the field … As opposed to animals raised dissatisfied people’s carnivorous appetites.” (p278)

And in echoes of today … “A highly publicised incident of alleged cannibalism took place in Hampshire. at the Andover workhouse male paupers had been put to work crushing bones use as fertiliser. In 1845 a local farmer and member of the board of guardians discovered that the paupers was so hungry that they were fighting over the bones in order to eat them. To great consternation, it was revealed that some of the bones came from the local cemetery. The gruesome story caused uproar, forcing the government to institute a Parliamentary enquiry into what happened. The scandal was a godsend for people protesting against the stringent new Poor Law… The master … was accused of introducing increasingly harsh measures to prevent the workhouse from becoming overcrowded by the growing numbers of unemployed men and women. The English gentleman said every person in Britain was ” entitled to food – it is his inherent right, as much as the air he breathes but he is bound to burn it honestly. If we cannot employ him – if we cannot accept his Labour – or if he is incapable of work – still he is one of us, and must not be shut up to gnaw the bones of dead men. policy and Christianity teach us otherwise”. ” (p319)

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Books History Politics

Some notes from Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order by Philip Coggan

January 24, 2013 – 5:05 pm

p. 31 ” In a Second World War debate on monetary systems, Lord Addison, a Labour peer, remarked that he was not convinced that ‘to dig gold out of the ground in South Africa and to bury it, refined in a cellar in the United States, in fact adds to the wealth of the world’.”

p. 58 “Industrial workers also required credit. A house in town, however humble, required furniture – bed, table and chairs. Few could afford the expense upfront… Cowperthwaite & Sons, a New York furniture retailer, was one of the first to adopt the practice. The Singer sewing-machine company took up the idea with enthusiasm later in the century. The idea of instalment plans was far from new … John Law sold shares in the Mississippi Company in instalment form. But a system based on regular payments was suited to an industrial age where workers received regular income. Instalment selling greatly widened the potential market for a retailer’s goods, and the financing charges more than offset any bad debts. … when they did default, buyers had usually made several payments, usually ensuring loss was limited.”

p. 71 “The [gold] standard ‘worked’ in the sense of keeping prices stable. … outside times of war, long-term inflation did not exist in the British economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, although prices did fluctuate, usually in response to changes in the supply of food… In The Death of Inflation, Roger Boodle cites the cost of a Hackney carriage. In 1694, the same year the Bank of England was founded, the cost was set at one shilling a mile. Two centuries later, the rate was at the same level. In 1932, the average level of prices in Britain was slightly below what it had been in 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars. … Low inflation also meant low interest rates …. What the gold standard also helped to create was the first great era of globalisation. This was particularly true in Great Britain … Low yields on British government debts gilts caused the prosperous middle classes to buy bonds in Argentine railways in search of higher incomes (an early version of the ‘search for yield’ that would be seen in the current era).”

p. 74 “In a sense this was all a confidence trick. Britain’s gold reserves rarely exceeded £40 million, a figure that was only 3 per cent of the country’s total money supply … Had foreign creditors demanded the conversion of their claims into gold, Britain could not have met the bill… there were some hairy moments. When Baring Brothers, what was then called a merchant bank, came close to failure in 1890, the Bank of England had to borrow gold from France and Russia in the face of a run on its reserves… what kept the system going’ there was international cooperation between central banks.. Central bankers were generally of a similar class (the upper or creditor classes) … the Reichsbank in Germany borrowed money from Britain and France in 1898.. they did not compete for funds via interest rates; the level of rates in the big countries tended to move in tandem. … the gold standard was accompanied by general prosperity so countries were keen to see it last. Or, to qualify that statement, the leaders of those countries were keen to see it last … sound money has a price. Maintaining a sound currency often required a central banker to push up interest rates, or find some other way of restricting demand, when gold reserves were falling. The lack of democracy insulated politicians and central bankers from the anger of those thrown out of work in the resulting recessions.”
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Books History Women's history

Disappearing into late Rome

January 3, 2013 – 10:50 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome and the making of Christianity in the West, 350-550AD has been hovering around the middle of my to-read pile for some time. Fascinating topic, fascinating period, but 530 pages of text, 758 pages with all of the accoutrements, made it just a bit daunting. Perfect for the holidays though, and so gripping that I ripped through it in three rainy days.

This is a period of the history of the West of Rome that we’ve tended to regard as dark and mysterious, but Peter Brown reveals that there’s a huge amount known. By starting with a theological debate, which has ripples and echoes throughout Christian history, he’s create a frame that doesn’t particularly grab me personally, but it creates a logic for exploring all over the western empire, primarily through the lives of prominent Christian figures, but in the process shedding lot of lots of obscure but fascinating corners that usually barely get a mention.

One key theme running through it is the persistence of what the Romans called Amor civicus, as embodied in the endowment of improvements: “At Calama for instance (modern Guelma in Algeria, which stood at the head of the Seybouse valley on the edge of the plateau of Roman Numidia, Annia Aelia Restituta received no less than five statues, and one of her father, so as to render thanks for her exceptional liberality to her fellow citizens in adding stateliness to her home town.” (p64) This continues, Brown attests, with bounteous evidence, well into the fourth and fifth centuries, and was a cause of considerable angst to Christian leaders, who thought the money should have been going into the church. Even in 421 the nobles of a blackened Trier sought from the newly created emperor Constanitius II funds to celebrate his accession through circus games – this was what was though to hold the city together in tough times, not the prayers of saints. (p. 452)

Another concept that proved both persistent but also malleable was otium. “It had unmistakable aristocratic overtones. Symmachus [one of Brown’s key characters] and his friends enjoyed long periods of otium in the countryside outside Rome or in Campaniea. ‘Tired of the affairs of the city’, they liked to ‘tame their great minds in solitude’ on their estates. ‘Turning over the learned writings of the men of old’ in the well-watered gardens of their villas, they renewed their allegiance to the culture that was supposed to make them truly noble.” When Augustine was seeking to encourage his followers, he put forward a programme for such a period – of Christina writings and reflection, aiming to show it was “possible to enjoy, through contemplation, the supreme happiness of a life lived in the presence of God”. (p. 164)

After Symmachus, Ausonius is one of the next key characters in Through the Eye of the Needle. “His family nursed a claim to ancient nobility that had been lost a century before in the civil wars of Gaul of the 260s. Ausonius’s grandfather had come to Aquitaine as a refugee from Autun … In reality, he and his family were little more than local landowners and town councillors who had risen by their talents. … One suspects that Valentinian I looked on favor on Ausonius in part so as to establish a comfortable relationship with Bordeaux and with Ausonius’s pupils, the landowners of Aquitaine. [How the empire had come down in the world.] In 379 he even became consul for the year. The old professor (now in his mid-sixties) was put on display. He was dressed in the same set of heavy, gold-stitched consular robes that had once been worn by none other than the emperor Constantius II.” (p. 188)

Otium gives him the chance to explore in a poem his “little family estate” – one of the most precise pictures we have from antiquity of what wealth was. Sounds pretty pleasant really – about 650 acres, of which 430 were woodland, a source of timber plus pitch for ships and wine amphorae, 124 for the plough, 100 for vineyards and 50 for meadows. Its warehouses could hold two years’ store of food. It was an account of what he saw as modestly appropriate wealth – which would have brough in around 1,000 solidi a year. (p. 191)

As both those sets of details of show, this is no dry theological tome; Brown is seeking to present a complete, detailed picture of his characters’ lives and those of their contemporaries. Not a time machine, but almost as close as we are likely to get.

 

Brown also drops in an occasional fascinating comparison with Confucian China coming to terms with the arrival of Buddhism. He compares the 4th-century empire, with Christian taking hold, to “that of the Chinese mandarins …. An official of the Ming empire reported that the Buddhists in his province had shown great zeal for building bridges. This was a public venture of which any traditional Chinese gentleman was bound to approve. But the official learned that the Buddhists were building bridges for entirely the wrong reasons. They were acting on the belief that they would gain personal karmic merit in another existence by contributing to the building of such a bridge…. The mandarin was shocked…. ‘This is all contrary to the spirit of good works!'” (p. 90) And this dry note: “it is an observed fact that other-worldly religions … often manage to become very rich very soon. As Chinese observers noted … there was a lot of wealth to be gotten from fo-shih – “Buddha business”. (p. 523)

He’s also exploring big themes, such as the rise of the villa in Roman life. He doesn’t deny that these often show, and were designed to flaunt, great wealth, but he denies the certainty of this wealth and that there was a “lost middle” between their inhabitants and the poor. Country wealth was never independent of the cities and the government, he says. “Aquitaine was a rich agrarian region, which furnished supplies to the Rhine frontier … even if not all of its members had made their way to Trier to become courtiers as Ausonius had done. (p. 196)” Rich villas only appear, Brown adds, “in regions that served as corridors of empire”. This was the last flowering of a belle epoque he says – “the moment that the Roman state and its fiscal energy began to wobble, as a result of civil wars and barbarian invasions … many villas survived as economic centres. They served as places for storage and processing wine and oil. But they became faceless. Their owners left no strong impression on them. For they no longer served as the blazons of new wealth.” (p. 197) (McMansions anyone?)

As things fall apart, the need to hold on to a labour force happy to run when it gets a chance is another persistent theme. “The bishops who gathered at the council of Macon in 585 declared that slaves who had been manumitted on the estates of the church … could not be reenslaved…But … old Roman law had insisted that freed slaves should continue to render obsequiuum – personal service to their masters. This law was maintained with particular vigor in the church.” (p. 499)

Brown’s also big on trying to get into the heads of the ancient world, rather than accepting later, sometimes lazy, understandings. So, he says, the frequent complaints about religious ascetics, such as Priscillian, (an interesting character who welcomed women followers as the equal of men – bound to get him into trouble) were not for the same reasons that shocks us – not the self-mortification, the denial or marriage or the abandonment of social duties, but the fact that such ascetics built close links with wealthy donors. He quotes the pagan emperor Julian “They are men … who by making small sacrifices … gain much … from all sources … levying tribute on specious pretenses which they call ‘alms’.” (p. 214)

And he says the idea that wealth came from the Christian God was late in arriving. Around 400AD Paulinus of Nola was still trying to assert this, clearly against the view that wealth came through family, wealth came from nature, or the bounty of the emperor. But it could remain theirs so long as they followed the will of God. (p. 238)

Brown explores both the continuity of the period, and its shocks. So he finds that while Ausonius’s contemporary and friend Paulinus had renounced his wealth in the 390s, as late as the late 6th century a descendant of his brother, Leontius, the last of the line and bishop of Bordeaux, had refurbished his ancestor’s villa at Preignac, and lying back on the traditional Roman stibadium couch, was still referring back to Ausonius’s poetry. (p. 218)

He also looks at the various ways in which individuals came to terms with the collapsing of the empire. Prosper went for the irrelevance of the state: “his Augustinianism convinced him that nothing in the past contributed to what happened in the present, just as nothing – no social advantage, no cultural gift, no ascetic labour – could precede the workings of grace in the individual heart.” (p. 430) More practically, the super-rich noble families, with estates spread across the empire, could no longer control them, they had to settle down to one local region, one area where they could exert personal control – and so it was that the church, which hadn’t really got that rich in form terms, came to be one of the richest forces going. And families husbanded their recourses by dedicating girls to the church as forced nuns, to save on dowries, and boys pushed into the clergy, renouncing their family wealth, which didn’t please the church, which hoped they’d bring it with them. (p. 439)

There’s lots of fascinating women in this period – Brown explores in some detail the great widow Melaniia the elder, who supported the Nicene cause. “She arrived in Alexandria with a shop loaded with gold and silver to help the monks of the Nile Delta, whose lay support had been cut off by the repressive measures of the pro-Arian emperor Valens. Going on to Palestine, she helped feed 3,000 Egyptian monks in exile.” (p. 261) And many more… read more »

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