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Notes from English Food: A People’s History

June 22, 2023 – 5:58 pm

P. 42 A poem of 1635 celebrated the longevity of Thomas Parr of Shropshire, aged over one hundred, who ate nothing but “coarse maslin bread”. In Cornwall, rye was grown only on ground too infertile for whieat and the poor in 1602 also used barley “grown into great use of late years” and in the dear [famine] season past…. existence of two bakers’ guilds in medieval London, the white bakers and the torte bakers…The latter are usually equated with brown bread bakers by historians, but the 1440 Bread Assize Ordinance says “the white shall bake all manner of breed that they can make of wheat”…torte bakers were not allowed to own a sieve, but they may have been defined less by this than by the ability to bake with grains other than wheat. Rye, for example, and barley, are exacting and difficult because they lack gluten, and to this day German rye bakers are specialists and often bake nothing else.”

P. 32 “with their wheaten bread, the Romans came the first (of very many) immigrant groups to attempt, with mixed success, to reproduce a food from the parent culture… installed their preference for white wheat bread, and installed it as a status symbol. In West Yorkshire, sites with more wheat remains also had posher pottery fineware. But the problem for the Romans, and for Roman wannabes, was that their wheat did not grow as well in the damp British Isles as it did in the North African grain basket of the Empire…. saw barley as fit only for horses, but it was still popular in some places, partly because Roman garrisons were themselves diverse – the Catterick garrison from the Danube brought a taste for barley and barley bread with them. The South and Midlands also rejected wheat for spelt. But the heard-to-get wheaten loaf left its mark. Even long after the legions had withdrawn, golden-crusted white bread was still an object of desire .. into the Anglo-Saxon era.”

P. 33 Archaeology shows that the Anglo-Saxon bread often included ground and kneaded barley, rye, oats, buckwheat, dried beans, acorns, hazel and alder seeds, and in particularly lean times, even weed seeds and tree bark, which would have added layers of taste and nutritional value…tenderising or scenting role. The idea that impurities in bread helped health had not been unknown to the Romans, whose dieticians supported the consumption of brown bread, and they are also shown to be effective by evidence provided by skeletal remains from the time of the Domesday Book, showing no signs of the scurvy and rickets that bedevilled later populations. But this might have been because porridge had ousted head … bread ovens became rarer in new houses.”

P. 46 “average male height, having risen from 165cm to 172cm between the Mesolithic and the early medieval period, fell to 171cm; Britons had become taller under Roman occupation, their average height increasing from 167-170cm. This coincided with the Roman’s improved water and sanitation systems and a more varied diet. Height decreased from 600AD and then began to climb again, increasing to 173cm in the 1100s, very close to average heights in the 20th century. But after 1200 men became shorter in stature … there were shortages of crop seeds as temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more changeable until the early 1300s. Heigh decreased again after 1650, reaching just 169cm in the late 1600s – a decline that continued until the early 1800s. Average life expectancy declined too, as infant mortality soared; people born between 1650 and 1750 could expect to live just 35 years – down from 40 years in the late 1500s.

P. 63 The failure of the Irish potato crop and the mass starvation that followed forced Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative government to reconsider the wisdom of the Corn Laws. In January 1846 a new Corn Law was passed that reduced the duty on oats, barley and wheat to the insidnificant sum of one shilling per quarter. Aware of the recent crisis, the food advice experts stepped up to the plate. Unfamiliar grains and pulses were imported, and recipes for rice bread circulated, while ladies wondered why the cook couldn’t make a decent loaf from rice … all parochial relief after 1799 was to be via rice, potatoes and soup. Rice was cheap, still cheaper from India via the East India Company than from the recently independent American Carolina’s. Rice, said nutritionists prompted (as they so often are) by the food industry, was just as good as bread  … the poor were advised to mix ‘a little morsel of Cheshire cheese’ with rice to ‘greatly improve the flavour”. Rice could be cooked over a very low fire, the experts said, during the working day, but the Manchester cotton workers were unconvinced. The experts felt that drinking too much tea made them demand bread and butter, a convenience food for the idle. Bread, it was opined, was a lazy substitute for cooking, and since the poor could boil a kettle for tea they could have made a pudding with the fuel instead. So in the guide of helping the poor, experts were able to explain that the fault lay with the poor and not with the law. Even after they had been repealed, the Corn Laws’ effect lingered; they had helped to undermine rural self-sufficiency, and as households ceased to be self-sufficient, they had become more subject to the whims of the marketplace. Provincial authorities had no respect and bakers and great, even inordinate respect for the free market – as “little skill and no capital are required in the trade of baking, competition will prevent inordinate profit”.
P. 64 London in 1822 the Assize of Bread and Ale was abolished as archaic … transformed baking into an even more precarious trade. Freed from the old guild structure, thousands of new bakers set up shop, and all of them tried to undercut one another. Elsa Acton noted that in 1851 the number of bakers in Paris was limited to 601, which meant that they were all sure to sell plenty of bread, whereas Britain’s free trade had pushed the official number of London bakers to 2,286 (the unofficial number may have been as high as 50,000) These bakers may have had commercial liberty but they had no peace of mind. To make a loaf they could sell at a price at which they could find buyers, they were forced to reduce the quality of ingredients to a minimum. A witness to the Committee on Journeymen Bakers commented that “They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of the men for the next 12 hours.”

P. 86 In Maldon, in 1629, a hundred or so women and children, led by one ‘Captain’ Ann Carter, the wife of a butcher, boarded a Flemish grain ship and removed some grain in their caps and gowns. A local court lowered corn prices, and Captain Ann toured the area drumming up support among clothing workers. A further riot took place on 22 May, which was taken more seriously by the authorities, and Captain Ann was handed. The style of Captain was adopted ny a number of other activists during the 17th century: there was ‘Captain’ Dorothy Dawson, who who organised a protest at Thorpe Moor and ‘Captain’ Kate who was recorded at an election meeting in Coventry.”

P. 13 The tea the Austen family drank would almost certainly have been China tea. Tea was a Chinese monopoly. But the British were not content with being middlemen. Tea cultivation in British India and other colonies exemplifies the way in which cash-cropping fuels capitalism, and capitalism fuels empire. Tea was not grown in India until the British introduced it – because they ruled India but not China. An Andean strain of tea was discovered growing wild in Assam; it was used by local tribesmen and given to Major Robert Bruce as a drink sometime in 1823.. The tea workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, and all the profits went back to England – and to Scotland, since the majority of Indian tea planters were Scots. The Indians themselves did not start drinking tea widely until the 1930s.”

P. 174 From 1889, the mass deployment of bottom trawlers led to ever-increasing catches – in that year more than twice as many bottom-feeding fish such as cod, haddock and plaice were caught in British waters as we catch today. The peak came in 1938, when the fishing fleet landed over five times more fish than we do tnow. For every hour spent fishing today in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishermen land just 6 per cent of what they did 120 years ago. He reason for this is the effect of fishing on fish size… when you exploit a population, the average size of the animals get smaller. Most fishing methods are size selective … fishing alters the balance between large and small, lung and old, in a population. This was always the case. In the ancient shell midden of California, were mussels were found to have decreased in size by over 40 per cent during a period of more than 9,000 years, we see the same picture.”

P. 305 “When John Betjeman wrote that “life was luncheons, luncheons all the way” – equating the midday meal with elegance and sophistication, he was making a distinction between post-war Oxford and the Victorian era that in other ways he so revered. ‘Open, swing doors, upon the lighted ‘George’\And whiff of vol-au-vent!’ Like the crisp layers of puff pastry, the Betjeman lunch was a sign of freedom, sitting lightly to life, having time to spare, and avoiding a solidly understood as old-fashioned, rural, even backward. The hourly to a life of lunches was a long and halting one, and only the top 10 per cent ever reached Betjeman’s destination.@

P. 210 “One difference between French and English cooks after the war can be exemplified by Michel Roux’s mother. When eggs were scarce, she made crepes that were mostly flour and water, it as eggs became more readily available and milk cheaper, she increased the quantity of these ingredients until the crepes were light and lace like. For this to happen, she must have retained a memory of what good crepes were like. Her English couterpartys might have struggled to do so precisely because the Depression was so very bad for the English urban poor, associated with a hunger assuaged only by potatoes and rice pudding, soaked bread and the occasional piece of cheese. .. interwar English cuisine could not survive wartime rationing as French cuisine did. It had nothing to do with the sunshine – and everything to do with class…. Betjeman … never took his Oxford degree, even after he had downgraded it from an honours degree to a pass degree. As he heads off to another lunch at the Liberal Club, women students pass him, their bicycle baskets heavy with books on Middle English. Betjeman runs away.”

P. 329 The first English cheese factory began operation in 1870. … Factory cheeses were correctly seen as inferior, but nevertheless, their low price, and the arrival of french imports from Canada and New Zealand, meant that by the mid-1920s more than 70% of the cheese consumed in England was imported – although at the same date, of the cheese consumed that was still made in England, farmhouse cheese accounted for an impressive 75%…. unfortunately the crisis of the Great Depression and then the Second World War put an end… by the late 1950s around 95% of total domestic production consisted of factory-made cheese.”

P. 384 Beef was once so foundational to national identity that it had a political face. The beefsteak clubs exemplified English conceptions of lively – male, red-blooded, jolly, given to jokes and japes. The first was founded early in the 18th-century to be a meeting place for actors and politicians. When it failed, it was replaced by the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, established in 1735, which was to number Samuel Johnson and the Prince of Wales among its members. Members wore bright blue coats and buff waistcoats with brass buttons, sporting a gridiron motif and the words ‘Beef and liberty’. They celebrated the beefsteak as a symbol of liberty and prosperity. A ‘Rump-Steak or Liberty Club’ (also called The Patriots Club) of London was in existence in 1733-4. It was revived in 1966 and meets annually at White’s Club in St James’s, where its members are able to fine at the earlier society’s 19th-century table and where it also keeps the original ‘resident’s Chair’, which Queen Elizabeth II gave to the current society in 1966.

P. 428 By 1955 with rationing over, the English were eating four eggs a day, rising to five in 1970… consumption dropped to two by 2000.

P. 457 IT is not coincidence that tinned food arose as European empires expanded. Imperialism meant tins could be a staple of expatriate communities, and meant new markets for Western staples. Canned and powdered milk made its way to the farthest tip of south-east Asia, while in Belize, British settlers could eat what they were used to. … (Indians in London meanwhile struggled to find vegetarian fare; the young Mohammad’s K Gandhi was driven to write a guide book to vegetarian London for students like himself.) Just as the Famous Five ransacked shops for prepared food while at large in alien lands. English memsahibs patronised the Army and Navy stores in Bombay for mail-order tinned foods. From Victorian times, ‘native’ food had been seen as inadequate and even unhealthy. Adventurousness was halted by the easy familiarity of tinned foods.”

P. 459 Coloniser could also learn preservation methods – gingerly, often desperately, hungrily – from the foods of those they colonised, and one such learned food was pemmican. Pemmican is what the children in the Swallows and Amazon books call tinned corned beef….learned by European fur traders from the Native Americans who’s sold it to them. Pemmican devices from a word in the Cree Indian language, pimithkdn, or fat. To make pemmican, native Americans began by cutting meat into thin slices or strips and drying it either in the sun or over a fire. After the meat was dried, it was spread out on stone-headed implements and then pounded…. then mixed with melted fat and marrow; this was crucial to the preservation. Sometimes a paste made of fruits or berries was added… stored in folded rawhide containers called parfleches, greased along their seams to keep out air and moisture. In this way, it could be kept fresh for years. Three quarters of a point (340g) was a sufficient ration, although a hard-working traveller might well eat more.”

P. 465 The Woshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London … responsible for introducing strangeness to the British palate. Originally it was known as the Guild of Pepperer, whose earliest records date from 1180. The company was formed as a religious and social fraternity of merchants tradining in spices, fold and other luxury good from Byzantium and the Mediterranean

Notes from English Food: A People’s History

P. 42 Apoem of 1635 celebrated the longevity of Thomas Parr of Shropshire, and over one hundred, who ate nothing but “coarse marlin bread”. In Cornwall, rye was grown only on ground too infertile or white and the poor in 1602 also used barley @grown into great use of late years@ and in the dear [famine] season past…. existence of two bakers’ guilds in medieval London, the white bakers and the torte bakers…The latter are usually equated with brown bread bakers by historians, but the 1440 Bread Assize Ordinance says @the white shall bake all manner of breed that they can make of wheat”…toasted bakers were not allowed to own a sieve, but they may have been defined less by this than by the ability to bake with grains other than wheat. Rye, for example, and barley, are exacting and difficult because they lack gluten, and to this day German rye bakers are specialists and often bake nothing else.”

P. 32 “with their wheaten bread, the Romans came the first (of very many) immigrant groups to attempt, with mixed success, to reproduce a food from the parent culture… installed their preference for white wheat bread, and installed it as a status symbol. In West Yorkshire, sites with more wheat remains also had posher pottery fineware. But the problem for the Tomans, and for Roman wannabes, was that their wheat did not grow as well in the damp British Isles as it did in the North African grain basket of the Empire…. saw barley as fit only for horses, but it was still popular in some places, partly cause Roman garrisons were themselves diverse – the Catterick garrison from the Danube brought a taste for barley and barley bread with them. The South and Midlands also rejected wheat for spelt. But the heard-to-get wheaten loaf left its mark. Even long after the legions had withdrawn, golden-crusted white bread was still an object of desire .. into the Anglo-Saxon era.”

P. 33 Archaeology shows that the Anglo-Saxon bread often included ground and kneaded barley, rye, oats, buckwheat, dried beans, acorns, hazel and alder seeds, and in particularly lean times, even weed seeds and tree bark, which would have added layers of taste and nutritional value…tenderising or scenting role. The idea that impurities in bread helped health had not been unknown to the Romans, whose dieticians supported the consumption of brown bread, and they are also shown to be effective by evidence provided by skeletal remains from the time of the Domesday Boo, showing no signs of the scurvy and rickets that devilled later populations. But this might have been because porridge had ousted head … bread ovens became rarer in new houses.@

P. 46 “average male height, having risen from 165cm to 172cm between the Mesolithic and the early medieval period, fell to 171cm; Britons had become taller under Roman occupation, their average height increasing from 167-170cm. This coincided with the Roman’s improved water and sanitation systems and a more varied diet. Height decreased from 600AD and then began to climb again, increasing to 173cm in the 1100s, very close to average heights in the 20th century. Bu after 1200 men became shorter in stature … there were shortages of crop seeds as temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more changeable until the early 1300s. Heigh decreased again after 1650, reaching just 169cm in the ate 1600s – a decline that continued until the early 1800s. Average life expectancy declined too, as infant mortality soared; people born between 1650 and 1750 could expect to live just 35 years – down from 40 years in the late 1500s.

P. 63 The failure of the Irish potato crop and the mass starvation that followed forced Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative government to reconsider the wisdom of the Corn Laws. IN January 1846 a new Corn Law was passed that reduced the duty on oats, barley and wheat to the insidnificant sum of one shilling per quarter. Aware of the recent crisis, the food advice experts stepped up to the plate. Unfamiliar grains and pulses were imported, and recipes for rice bread circulated, while ladies wondered why the cook couldn’t make a decent loaf from rice … all parochial relief after 1799 was to be via rice, potatoes and soup. Rice was cheap, still cheaper from India via the East India Company than from the recently independent American Carolina’s. Rice, said nutritionists prompted (as they so often are) by the food industry, was just as good as bread  … the poor were advised o mix ‘a little morsel of Cheshire chees’ with rice to ‘greatly improve the flavour”. Rice could be cooked over a very low fire, the experts said, during the working day, but the Manchester cotton workers were unconvinced. The experts felt that drinking too much tea made them demand bread and butter, a convenience food for the idle. Bread, it was opined, was a lazy substitute for cooking, and since the poor could boil a kettle for tea they could have made a pudding with the fuel instead. Do in the guide of helping the poor, experts were able to explain that the fault lay with the poor and not with the law. Even after they had been repealed, the Corn Laws’ effect lingered; they had helped to undermine rural self-sufficiency, and as households ceased to be self-sufficient, they had become more subject to the whims of the marketplace. Provincial authorities had no respect and bakers and great, even inordinate respect for the free market – as @little skill and no capital are required in the trade of baking, competition will prevent inordinate profit@”.
P. 64 London in 1822 the Assize of Bread and Ale was abolished as archaic … transform baking into an even more precarious trade. Freed from the old yield structure, thousands of new bakers set up shop, and all of them tried to undercut one another. Elsa Acton noted that in 1851 the number of bakers in Paris was limited to 601, which meant that they were all sure to sell plenty of bread, whereas Britain’s free trade had pushed the official number of London bakers to 2,286 (the unofficial number may have been as high as 50,000) These bakers may have had commercial liberty but they had no peace of mind. To make a loaf they could sell at a price at which they could find buyers, they were forced to reduce the quality of ingredients to a minimum. A witness to the Committee on Journeymen Bakers commented that @They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of the men for the next 12 hours.”

P. 86 IN Maldon, in 1629, a hundred or so women and children, led by one ‘Captain’ Ann Carter, the wife of a butcher, boarded a Flemish grain ship and removed some grain in their caps and gowns. A local court lowered corn prices, and Captain Ann toured the area drumming up support among clothing workers. A further riot took place on 22 May, which was taken more seriously by the authorities, and Captain Ann was handed. The style of Captain was adopted ny a number of other activists during the 17th century: there was Captain Dorothy Dawson, who who organised a protest at Thorpe Moor and ‘Captain’ Kate who was recorded at an election meeting in Coventry.”

P. 13 The tea the Austen family drank would almost certainly have been China tea. Tea was a Chinese monopoly. But the British were not content with being middlemen. Tea cultivation in British India and other colonies exemplifies the way in which cash-cropping fuels capitalism, and capitalism fuels empire. Tea was not grown in India until the British introduced it – because they ruled India but not China. An Andean strain of tea was discovered growing wild in Assam; it was used by local tribesmen and given to Major Robert Bruce as a drink sometime in 1823.. The tea workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, and all the profits went back to England – and to Scotland, since the majority of Indian tea planters were Scots. The Indians themselves did not start drinking tea widely until the 1930s.”

P. 174 From 1889, the mass deployment of bottom trawlers led to ever-increasing catches – in that year more than twice as many bottom-feeding fish such as cod, haddock and plaice were caught in British waters as we catch today. The peak came in 1938, when the fishing fleet landed over five times more fish than we do tnow. For every hour spent fishing today in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishermen land just 6 per cent of what they did 120 years ago. He reason for this is the effect of fishing on fish size… when you exploit a population, the average size of the animals get smaller. Most fishing methods are size selective … fishing alters the balance between large and small, lung and old, in a population. This was always the case. In the ancient shell midden of California, were mussels were found to have decreased in size by over 40 per cent during a period of more than 9,000 years, we see the same picture.”

P. 305 “When John Betjeman wrote that “life was luncheons, luncheons all the way” – equating the midday meal with elegance and sophistication, he was making a distinction between post-war Oxford and the Victorian era that in other ways he so revered. ‘Open, swing doors, upon the lighted ‘George’\And whiff of col-au-vent!’ Like the crisp layers of puff pastry, the Betjeman lunch was a sign of freedom, sitting lightly to life, having time to spare, and avoiding a solidly understood as old-fashioned, rural, even backward. The hourly to a life of lunches was a long and halting one, and only the top 10 per cent ever reached Betjeman’s destination.@

P. 210 “One difference between french and English cooks after the war can be exemplified by Michel Roux’s mother. When eggs were scarce, she made crepes that were mostly flour and water, it as eggs became more readily available and milk cheaper, she increased the quantity of these ingredients until the crepes were light and lace like. For this to happen, she must have retained a memory of what good crepes were like. Her English couterpartys might have struggled to do so precisely because the Depression was so very bad for the English urban poor, associated with a hunger assuaged only by potatoes and rice pudding, soaked bread and the occasional piece of cheese. .. interwar English cuisine could not survive wartime rationing as French cuisine did. It had nothing to do with the sunshine – and everything to do with class…. Betjeman … never took his Oxford degree, even after he had downgraded it from an honours degree to a pass degree. As he heads off to another lunch at the Liberal Club, women students pass him, their bicycle baskets heavy with books on Middle English. Betjeman runs away.”

P. 329 The first English cheese factory began operation in 1870. … Factory cheese were correctly seen as inferior, but nevertheless, their low price, and the arrival of french imports from Canada and New Zealand, meant that by the mid-1920s more than 70% of the cheese consumed in England was imported – although at the same date, of the cheese consumed that was still made in England, farmhouse cheese accounted for an impressive 75%…. unfortunately the crisis of the Great Depression and then the Second World War put an end… by the late 1950s around 95% of total domestic production consisted of factory-made cheese.”

P. 384 Beef was once so foundational to national identit that it had a political face. The beefsteak clubs exemplified English conceptions of lively – male, red-blooded, jolly, given to jokes and japes. The first was founded early in the 18th-century to be a meeting place for actors and politicians. When it failed, it was replaced by the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, established in 1735, which was to number Samuel Johnson and the Prince of Wales among its members. Members wore bright blue coats and buff waistcoats with brass buttons, sporting a gridiron motif and the words ‘Beef and liberty’. They celebrated the beefsteak as a symbol of liberty and prosperity. A ‘Rump-Steak or Liberty Club’ (also called The Patriots Club) of London was in existence in 1733-4. It was revived in 1966 and meets annually at White’s Club in St James’s, where its members are able to fine at the earlier society’s 19thcentury stable and where it also keeps the original ‘resident’s Chair’, high Queen Elizabeth II gave o the current society in 1966.

P. 428 By 1955 with rationing over, the English were eating four eggs a day, rising to five in 1970… consumption dropped to two by 2000.

P. 457 IT is not coincidence that tinned for arose as European empires expanded. Imperialism meant tins could be a staple of expatriate communities, and meant new markets for Western staples. Canned and powdered milk made its way to the farthest tip of south-east Asia, while in Belize, British settlers could eat what they were used to. … (Indians in London meanwhile struggled to find vegetarian fare; the young Mohammad’s K Gandhi was driven to write a guide book to vegetarian London for students like himself.) Just as the Famous Five ransacked shops for prepared food while at large in alien lands. English memsahibs patronised the Army and Navy stores in Bombay for mail-order tinned foods. From Victorian times, ‘native’ food had been seen as inadequate and even unhealthy. Adventurousness was halted by the easy familiarity of tinned foods.”

P. 459 Coloniser could also learn preservation methods – gingerly, often desperately, hungrily – from the foods of those they colonised, and one such learned food was pemmican. Pemmican is what the children in the Swallows and Amazon books call tinned corned beef….learned by European fur traders from the Native Americans who’s sold it to them. Pemmican devices from a word in the Cree Indian language, pimithkdn, or fat. To make pemmican, native Americans began by cutting meat into thin slices or strips and drying it either in the sun or over a fire. After the meat was dried, it was spread out on stone-headed implements and then pounded…. then mixed with melted fat and marrow; this was crucial to the preservation. Sometimes a paste made of fruits or berries was added… stored in folded rawhide containers called parfleches, greased along their seams to keep out air and moisture. In this way, it could be kept fresh for years. Three quarters of a point (340g) was a sufficient ration, although a hard-workingtrveller might well eat more.”

P. 465 The Woshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London … responsible for introducing strangeness to the British palate. Originally it was known as the Guild of Pepperer, whose earliest records date from 1180. The company was formed as a religious and social fraternity of merchants tradining in spices, fold and other luxury good from Byzantium and the Mediterranean

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Notes from Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

June 21, 2023 – 7:09 pm

p 33 Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the tubes can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots… Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott (Beth, in 1985, a botanist in her 60s who at Monash University dedicated a garden to Aboriginal wild plants – she catalogued more than 1,000 different species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones pickled from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks) realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape.From the journals and diaries, it is clear Aboriginal people were aware of this, which is why some argue they should be considered the world’s earliest farmers.

p. 34 Fire also played a role. The plant needs direct sunlight, and so in the dry season Aboriginal people would set the bush alight. They did this with prevision, knowing exactly when and where to start a fire, and where the fire would end. This cleared away dead vegetation, but left murnong, with its tubers underground, unharmed. Harvesting was also easier on open ground, and the ash left from the fire would fertilise the soil… Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts … these sweet, nutritious roots were eaten with seeds, shellfish and possum… across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never ending.” BEFORe ” sheep started eating their way through the landscape… In the first decades of European settlement, farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years… the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hooves compacted the soil”

p. 35 “In 1839, just five years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tongeworong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. “Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],” Moonin said “plenty eat it myrnyong, all gone the murnong.”

p. 48 “In northeast India, close to the Himalayas and the border with Myanmar, Bangladesh and CHina, is the state of Meghalaya, home of the Khasi, a matrilineal tribe in which property and family names are passed down from mother to daughter. In this area of exceptional biodiversity there are orange-scented villages and forests of wild citrus … p. 49 over thousands of years, people from across Asia moved into Megha;aya and settled, creating an extraordinarily rich cultural diversity… Wild citrus holds a special kind of status: it is a medicine, a fruit to cook and preserve, and a sacred plant… Surrounding the Garo tribes are forests of a wild citrus they call memang narang (Scientific name Citrus indica), which means “the fruit of ghosts”. The name originates from the fruit’s use in a death ritual in which the freshly picked oranges are placed over the body of a dying relative… p. 50 “to most of us the taste would seem pretty extreme. “There’s an appreciation of sourness and bitterness in these communities the rest of the world has lost,” says Roy. In fact, we didn’t just lose sourness and bitterness, it was methodically removed from our food. Plant breeders in the 20th century, particularly after the juice industry took off in the 1950s, focused on producing larger and sweeter oranges that could be transported around the world. The orange varieties selected had low levels of phenols, bitter-tasting (but also health-giving) compounds. This meant they appealed to the increasingly sweet global palate, but left the global crop more vulnerable to pests and diseases, because the bitter chemicals … are a big part of the plant’s natural defenses. As we reduce these compounds in our quest for more sweetness, farmers have to compensate and protect the fruit with more chemical sprays.”

p. 85 “In july 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled “the Genetics of Disaster”… crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. … “We can survive if a forest of shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice or maize were to be destroyed. We are taking risks we need not and should not take.”

p. 87 Franklin Hiram King … Farmers for Forty Centuries – “In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the US DEpartment of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansioh the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientist in Washington, King left the US in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia ,…died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next 20 years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour.” in China now at the CEntre for Rural REconstruction crops and methods are being revived. 

p. 93 “The mulpa system has been described by the maize scholar Garrison Wilkes as “one of the most successful human inventions ever created”. To outsiders, a milpa looks like a busy hotchpotch of competing plants, but this mess of diversity is in fact a complex system that creates balance, not just notanically but also nutritionally. In the milpa system, maize is planted with its companions, beans and squashes, its stalks creating a frame for the beans to climb and the broad leaves of the squash giving ground cover, conserving moisture in the soil and suppressing weeds … below ground; the leguminous roots of the bean are host to microbes which fix nitrogen into the soil and help fertilise other crops. Combined on a plate, these plants also add up to a nutritionally complete meal. Maize provides carbohydrate, the  essential amino acids such as lysine and tryptophan (without which we’re unable to synthesis proteins) and the squash lots of vitamins. Once harvested, indigenous farmers would then take maize through an ingenious process call nixtamalisation…. evidence dates back 3,500 years.”

p. 95 At the beginning of the 20th century farmers were growing around 1,000 different open-pollinated varieties. After the Second World War, hybrids dominated. As the manufacture of explosives declined, a surplus of ammonium nitrate (an ingredient in fertiliser) became available and Fritz Haber’s invention began to plan a crucial role in the production of food. Applied to vast moncultures of F1 maize, the new supply of ferti;liser bolstered America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent exporter of grain. By the end of the century, American-grown F1 hybrids accounted for 50% of globally traded maize. From the tens of thousands of landrave varieties, just a handful now made up the commercial crop … Garrison Wilkes has likened this to “taking stones from the foundation of the house to repair the roof”

p. 96 After seed companies developed a new generation of hybrids, yields increased again. All the extra maize needed a home. This is whan maize started to turn up in the most unexpected places: as a sweetener in Coke, as a component in the plastic bottles containing that sugary drink; in toothpaste, soap, paint and shoe polish. It also helped fuel the revolution in livestock consumption: if you consume milk or eggs, chicken or beef, the animals is likely to have been fed maize. .. Even the cars people drive to buy these foods are partly fuelled by maize (around a third of the crop produced in the US is now converted into ethanol”.)

p. 106 BY the 1820s, seed merchants Messrs Sutton and Sons were publishing 100-page seed catalogues with prices and descriptions of cabbages (145 different varieties), peas (170 varieties) and onions (74 different kinds). In the 1830s, the US government saw it as a public duty to distribute diverse seeds “of the choicest varieties” for free through the US Postal Service to farmers and homesteaders. In the space of two decades, the Federal Government posted over a million seed packets to American farmers from a selection of 497 varieties of lettuce, 341 varieties of sequast, 288 varieties of beets and 408 varieties of tomato. BY the end of the 20th century, only a tenth of that diversity had survived.”

p. 134 “But in the 1970s, the soy boom reallyh intensified. This boom has a lot to do with a diminutive fish. For decades, vast shoals of anchovy were caught just off the Peruvian coast and used as the major protein in the poultry and cattle industries. But in 1972, a combination of overfishing and El Nino led to Peru’s anchovy harvest dropping by nearly 90%. A protein panic rippled across the agricultural world… the Nixon administration restricted exports of American soy. This in turn had an impact on Japan… there was no other big supplier to turn to, and so it had to create one. Brazil had been a marginal player in the soy business, but with Japanese investment and the clearance of virgin forest, including parts of the Cerrado, it became a giant. In 1960s, Brazil’s soy production was less than 300,000 metric tons. In the 1980s, helped by newly developed sot cultivars suited to the Cerrado’s acidic soil, this increase to around 20 million tonnes. The 2020 harvest, of 130 million tons, broke all records and exceeded the size of the American crop… By 2014, more than 90% of all soy grown in North and South America was GM.”

p. 258 “It’s 10,500 years since we first domesticated cattle and a watershed moment is approaching: the world’s dairy farmers will soon be producing more than one billion tonnes of milk each year. The sharp increases in world milk production seen in recent years are striking (from 690 tonnes in 2009 to 850 million tonnes in 2019”

p. 261 “In Burgundy, in the centre of the country, cheesemaking was for centuries the preserve of monasteries. Here, dark humid cellars, (places where moulds flourish) could be used for maturing cheese. Monks washed these cheese clean using alcohol and brine… IN the Ile-de-France and Normandy, in the north, people lived and farmed on more silty and sandy soils, where building cellars … was less practical. Instead, cheese were matured ion barns, where the flow of air introduced microbes that coated them in a fine, velvety mould. Because these farmers also lived closer to towns and cities, their cheese didn’t need to be hard and long-lasting. The results were soft, moulded coatded cheese including Brie and Camambert. Meanwhile, in the Loire Valley in western France, one of the legacies of the Arab conquest of the 8th century had been the introduction of goat farming … bite into a traditional piece of cheese and you will be eating into history, culture and an ecosystem.”

p. 263 “In the US for example, until the 1990s, most farms had fewer than 200 cows; today, the largest corporate dairies cabn house more than 9,000 cows… the industry focused on one breed: Holsteins. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the genetics of these animals was altered to such an extent that their milk yields doubled. Much of the cheese we eat today, wherever we are in the world, is made from milk processed by a smaller number of companies, sourced from the same breed of cattle, using bacteria created in a handful of labs. We are at risk of losing the diversity created by thousands of years of cheesemaking.”

p. 288 One in four beers drunk around the world are now brewed by just one company, A-B InBev (ABI), which owns Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona and produces more than 88 billion pints a year (it sells the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools of beer an hour – more than its three nearest rivals combined.) The company’s strategy of buying up breweries has seen it engulf big brands as well as seemingly independent ‘craft breweries’.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Cleopatra’s Daughter And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era

June 14, 2023 – 10:30 pm

p. ix Emphasis is on Cleopatra Selene of Mauretania, Glahpyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judea, Dynamis of Bosporus and Pythodoris of Pontos. They were contemporaries, related through marriage to one another, and were closely allied with the imperial family in Rome and its own women, such as Livia and the younger Antonia, who themselves took on many of the characteristics of Hellenistic queens. The most famous was Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII and the triumvir Marcus Antonius, but the others were also of great importance in their own territories. .. In modern diction they are called “queens” (with the exception of Salome), an inadequate translation of the Greek words basileia and basillissa. Their role models went back to the heroic age as well as various prototypes from the late Classical and Hellensitic periods, and the concept of ‘queen’ had developed an important royal dynamic int he generations before … The women could offer greater political stability and status than their husbands, who might be subject to sudden death while on campaign, and their closeness to the imperial family provided precedents for the role of Roman aristocratic women. Cleopatra Selene was a cousion of members of the ruling Julio-Claudian family and was thus related to three Roman emperors. Others had personal contact with the imperial elite in Rome. Cleopatra Selen and Pythodoris were patronesses of intellectual culture and implemented the work of major scholars. And the descendants of the queens held royal power on the borders of the Roman Empire for generations afterwards.

p. 143 “it was Octavia who noused the queen’s children after their mother’s death; Cleopatra may have nad some hint that this could happen, or even suggested it to Octavian, knowing that Octavia had taken in another royal refugee, Juba, for a number of years. Cleopatra Selene lived in Rome for only five years, but she did so from the ahe of 10 to 15, certaimly a seminal period in any young person’s development. In 25bc Octavia implemented the marriage of the two royal refugees and they were sent to Mauretania. With Greek, Roman and probably Egyptian blood, the young princess found that yher years in Rome well prepared her for her new role as queen.”

p. 99 “The most important royal woman of the later Augustan era was Pythodoris, who, for more than half a century, ruled much of central and northern Asia Minor and the eastern Black Sea littoral. She survived well into the period of Tiberius and became the ancestor of a line of royal women that extended past the middle of the 1sy century AD. Like all women in antiquity, she remains shadowy, but due to the euologistic comments of the geographer and historian Strabo of Amaseia, her career is better documented than that of many of her ruling colleagues.

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

June 14, 2023 – 10:09 pm

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco Dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational POlitical History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Climate, Retreat and Revolution

June 14, 2023 – 10:05 pm


p. 7 “Criticism has tended to assume that literature’s engagement with environmental crisis must be a constructive one”
p. 8 “this book finds that much fiction of the near future better resembles Clare Colebrook’s odd one-out contribution to the volume Climate and Literature, which observes that “the 21st-century imaginary, especially by way of the trope of the Anthropocene, has become intensely counter-apocalyptic” in the sense that it imagines the “end of the world” as nothing more than the end of liberal and affluent capitalist urbanity.”

p. 9 “If the domestic near future is characterised by a desire to retreat to the rural homestead, at the centre of that enclave, generating and defining it, lies the individual bodies and its comforts … this emphasis on the sensorially rich individual body is part of the same movement by which the prospective of a broader collective is dismissed, occasionally demonised. Such a two-part movement is suggestive of Hannah Arendt’s account of how actions, the deeds and speech which constitute both individual freedom and the political realm, is occluded under consumer capitalism by labour – the realm of the household and the body. A more historically eloquent explanation is provided by Jameson who describes that contraction of politics to the circumscribed space and time of the body as a consequence of colonisation and the shocking exposure of ‘the security of the ego or the unique personal self’ to a ‘demographic plenianisation of … subjectivity’ … This “reduction to the body” is a symptom of “the death of historicity … the weakening of our phenomenological experience of past and future” as we remain pinned to our ephemeral time of individual experience. The domestic near future shows this body to be the root of all the other forms of the ‘local’ named by Bruno Latour as providing one reactionary response to globalisation: “a land, a place, a soil, a community, a space, a milieu, a way of life, a trade, a skill.”

p. 14 “The questions of what forms of human cooperation – or, to put it more simply, politics – might prove adequate to planetary climate disaster has been taken up by non-fictional writers. However, as acute as their analyses can be, the prescriptions for what might be done about the contemporary situation tend towards the hazy, and lack narrative pathways into the future. For instance, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s Climate Leviathan calls for ‘Climate X’ as an yet unrealised political model that would move beyond capitalism and concepts of planetary sovereignty, and be based on equality, dignity and solidarity. Jason Moor and Raj Patel’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things also looks towards indigenous movements and other traditions of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, but deliberately refrains from drawing a “road map for class struggle”; Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm calls, like Clive Hamilton, for a new seriousness about anthropic agency, but also accounes the “death of affirmative politics” and hopes for an “induced implosion” of capitalism dependent on a “political movement endowed with powers not yet on the horizon. From a non-Marxist perspective, Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth diagnoses the need for a “third attractor” that would move beyond the current split between an outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and a reactive but equally hopeless retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.A similar haziness characterises the titles in the Verso”Futures” series such as The Future by Marc Auge (2015), Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2015) and Deja Vu and the End of History by Paulo Virno (2015) – all of which deal with, to quite the website blurb, “the outer limits of political and social possibility”. 

p. 15 Frederic Jameson’s famous (in cultural studies, at least) cognate comment that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, a slight sense of impatience can sometimes be detected in the recent mention of such ideas, as if we’ve had more than enough of them and it’s time to move on. The association of a loss of a sense of history with postmodernity was made in what remains Jameson’s most famous work, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in 1989. However, in An American Utopia, published in 2016, he was still writing of the “waning of history, of historicity or historical consciousness” as the signal contemporary political problem, as if noothing much had changed … A reading od near-future fiction bears this out. This diagnosis might at first seem to contradict the notion that the zeitgeist is characterised by a sense of momentous change as inevitable and in part already here, but is is the collision and tension between these two that does much to make the headache-inducing weather of the near future. We know we need to change, we cannot change, nothing changes, change is coming, change is already happening. The struggle to locate an emergent near-future genre is the struggle to conceive of a novel of revolution for the Anthropocene.”

p. 30 “In the domestic near future, men as well as women can be primarily identified with the household, as we have seen in Clade and will see again in Her and Arcadia, reflecting the elevation of its economic and class significance over its gender connotations – men as much as women pine for their house in the country.”

p. 31 Mitch R Murray and Mathias Nilges have argued that ‘the arrival of cyberpunk in 1984 could be read … as an epitaph to the radical feminist science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, which includes landmark novels by Ursula K Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy and Octavia Butler, while Philip Wegner … has suggested a range of ‘dialectical rejoinder{s} to cyberpunk, many of them by women. In a similar vein, the domestic near-future might be read as an epitaphic successor or rejoinder to these radical ‘feminist fabulations’ and ‘critical dystopias’, and as dialectically engagde not jnust with the near-future novels of revolution … but also with work that falls beyond its remit, such as the global and postcolonial science fiction …. or the fantasy novels of authors such as N.K. Jemsin, Nalo Hopkinson and Shawntelle Madison that, as Sami Schalk puts it ‘challenges readers’ assumptions and understandings of (dis)ability, race, gender and sexuality through the defamiliarization of these categories”. 

p. 64 “the arts in near-future fiction often seem to be called forth by the prospect of totality, but their attempts to appear its scalar and spatial demands push them towards the static image that erases the very narrative from which the totality might emerge. The resemblance of these static images to theoretical descriptions of the symbol then allows them to be understood as part of a continuation of the oppositional relationship between symbol and allegory, as it was inaugurated in its modern form by the Romantics. Planetary ecological crisis is thereby placed in a direct lineage with that earlier period of disruption and transformation – of revolutions, incipient nationalisms, a changing relationship to nature, and a self-consciously historicist sense of a break with the past – such that it can be better understood as part of the longue dureee crisis of capitalist modernity, rather than as an unprecedented epistemic and representational rupture, of the kind climate change is often presented as being.”

p. 70 “What the near-future resolution of The History of Bees reveals is the importance of the intermediary scales between micro and macro, which tend to be much less discussed by critical and theoretical accounts of literature in the Anthropocene. … some recent work on the challenges facing contemporary politics has zeroed in on it. For instance, in his study of contemporary democracy, David Runciman has described how “the space between the personal and apocalyptic which is where democratic politics traditionally plats out, has become a battleground for rival world views which are informed by personal or apocalyptic expectations of the worst that could happen. Mid-level politics is what’s missing… Bruno Latour has diagnosed the need for a future ‘third space’ that would lie between the outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and the equally untenable retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.”

p. 159 paradigmatically ‘strong’ form of the near future: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson “the novel cuts through the problems of historical legacy and revolutionary change .. by addressing them directly. A Marxist conception of global history replaces a submerged US regional imaginary, as the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances within this synchronic form: the US can then serve as an easily recognisable territory to house the revolution, and as a scalar fulcrum between planet and populace… The utopianism of New York 2140 consists of a dialectical movement between the convergent global history of modernity as it spans that ‘G2’ and its particular national instances. Other dialectical movements fuse with this: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fiction and non-fiction. .. involves characters working as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction between understood in the light of the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity, rather than by the planetary scale of climate crisis to which contemporary allegory is often referred. However the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class… the hint of a St Elmo’s fire of violence and sex playing around the allegorical ropes that hold it in place, suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution”.

p. 183 “a change in the historical timeline without a change in the relationship between violence, power and forms of identity such as gender, secuality and race, is no change at all. As we have seen, New York 2140 is cognisant of such issues and their importance, though its strategy is to act as if such propositions as gender, race and LGBT equality have been universally accepted, so that the struggle which might in our world join and direct these revolutionary forces, of the plural people against the oligarchy, can come overwhelmingly to the fore. In this sense the novel acts in the spirit of John Foran’s suggestion for a new kind of political party to ‘harness the people power, radical imagination and boundless energy of all these new actors of the future” such as “lack Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and many, many other rising voices, the vast majority of them not well known”. Nevertheless, the sense of strain we have also discerned within the allegorical structure suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual, or between ‘theories of the body’ and ‘theories of history’. New York 2140’s achievement is therefore not to somehow resolve this tension but to install it as a generative dialectic underlying the utopian impulse. As Jameson puts it – in a passage quoted by the novel … “”In this situation, what once can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the future produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (2023)

April 20, 2023 – 4:03 pm

p. 5-6 The first explicit statements about Sappho’s involvement in female homoeroticism date from the Hellenistic and Roman period… written four centuries or more after Sappho. Earlier testimonia portray Sappho as interested in men; in Attic comedies dating from the 4th century BCE, she is imagined to have had several male lovers at the same time. The earliest literary document that may reflect the reception of Sappho’s songs is a song by the Greek poet Anakreon. In this song, dating to the second half of the 6th century BCE, a male speaker complains that a girl from Lesbos, whom he desires, pays him no attention because of his white hair (a feminine noun in Greek) and instead gapes at another woman or another feminine object… the whole point of the song is that this is left ambiguous… How precisely the meaning of this verb or Anakreon’s girl of Lesbos relates to Sappho’s poetry is not clear, but they most likely reflect the reception of her poetry, which was very popular in this period. The Greeks at this time imagined Sappho to be hypersexual and equally interested in men and woman. … four Athenian vase paintings, although older than our written accounts, are also only indirect witnesses to Sappho. They date from the end of the 6th to the first hald of the 5th century BCE and associate Sappho with drinking parties (so-called symposia) or picture her in the private quarters of women, in which her poetry was apparently performed in classical Athens. We do not know how these performances relate to the original performance of her songs, let alone whether these portraits of Sappho resemble her real appearance in any way.”

p. 7 “Greek scholars from Alexandria edited around nine “books” (papyrus scrolls actually) with poetry of Sappho in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE… roughly 10,000 lines, of which only 650 survive. … the Suda ascribes the invention of the plectrum (string pick) to her. Sappho was indeed known not only as a poet but also as a musician. Like other lyric poets in this period, she performed her poetry to music or had other perform it for her… Of the melodies accompanying these songs nothing has survived.”

p. 15 “This may explain the mention of ‘pupils’ in the Suda and other sources; they are anachronistic references to the young women she trained in her choruses.”

“Another question is whether we can reconcile Sappho’s choral activities with the erotic relationships she sings about. Some scholars have suggested that Sappho had a homoerotic relationship with one girl in the chorus, which somehow would be the model for the whole group… They point to groups of boys that formed around one aristocratic boy and his adult lover on acnient Crete as a possible parallel. Another possibility is that the homoerotic feelings Sappho and the other female performers of her songs sing about do not reflect actual relationships, but are intended to be forms of public praise or statements about the general power of love.”

Four modern reconstructions of Sappho dominate the lierature about her: Sappho the chorus organiser, Sappho the teacher, Sappho the priestes, and Sappho the banqueter. Of these four the suggestion that she led young women’s choruses is the most plausible”

p. 17 However one would like to reconstruct Sappho’s life, above all she is a poet and the earliest Greek woman of whom at leasta substantial body of poetry is preserved. Other women poets date mainly from the Hellenistic period, and much less of their work has survived.”

p. 59 “My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age
[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].

My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle
that once would dance light as fawns

I often groan, but what can I do?
It is impoosible for humans not to age

For they say, [pierced] by love rosy-armed Dawn
went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time gray old age
seized him, even with a deathless wife…..

Yet I love the finer things. [Know] that passion for
the light of life has also granted me brilliance and beauty.”

p 88 The sweetest apple reddens on a high branch
high upon highest, missed by the applepickers:

No, they didn’t miss, so much as couldn’t touch.

Herdsmen cruh under their feet
a hyacinth in the mountains; on the ground
purple blooms…

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