Category Archives: History

Books Early modern history History Science

Podcast: Medieval eastern medicine

August 28, 2021 – 8:02 am

Another fascinator from the New Books Network: Goldsmith’s academic Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim on her new book ReOrienting Histories of Medicine – “it’s been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world”.

We think of Mongol period as of desctruction, but – what a great setting for historical novel, but Yoeli-Tlalim tells of the now Iranian city of Tabriz, the Ilkhanid Mongol court deliberately set up an intellectual hub, drawing in scholars from far afrield, where knowledge from Tibetan medicine was exchanged with “Islamic medicine”, both having been informed by Greek and Roman medicine. The city had active contacts with Byzantium and the Chinese court, and also with India. It was also a centre for astonomers and agronomists.

The author also makes an interesting point about the “mythical” elements in ancient medical texts. Rather than dismissing them, ask “what are they trying to tell us” – lots of understanding of the body, the nature of an individual etc can be gained from taking seriously. And divination or “magic” is a way of making a decision when you don’t have enough “scientific” knowledge to make a choice. And “superfoods” go a long way back – see triphala.

Talks also of Uighur medicine, from a document found in Turfan/Turpan.

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Books History Politics

Notes from Crucible: The Year that Forged our World

August 11, 2021 – 4:53 pm

“In the Philippines, which gained independence from the US in 1946 and gained $620 million aid package, despite sharp economic and social disparities, it was not until 1950 that the Communist Party decided that a “revolutionary situation” existed. Communists in Malaya did not operate under Soviet guidance and drew more support from the Chinese community’s resentments than from ideology. The British High Commissioner, Malcolm McDonald, concluded in 1948 that there was “little sign” of Soviet activity in the region, noting that “if you suppress a nationalist severely enough, you find him tending to communism”.

In the US, the state played a bigger role in helping business than free-market zealots would like to admit, while the heritage of government research during the war acted as a catalyst for peacetime technological development.”

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather

August 7, 2021 – 8:28 pm

p. 6 “Every woman easired to own one. Watever your outlay, a plume would retain its value as an investment, as well as an adornment, kept wrapped in tissue in a box, clearned and re-curled once a year, then passed down to your daughter. Working girls saved up and clubbed together for a plume, taking it in turns to wear it on their best hat”.. In the early years of the trade, each feather had come from a wild bird, hunted down and killed in the Sahar Desert. But since ‘the Exlipse’ egg incubator was patented in 1864, ostrich farming in the arid Western Cape of southernmost Africa had taken off. Birds could not be raised in their hundreds and clipped or plucked every eight months or so, flooding the western market with so many plumes that it was hard to imagine there were enough heads left”

p.6-7 As demand for ‘plumiferous’ fashion accessories soared from the 1870s onwards, importers, brokers, auctioneers, wholesalers and feather handlers grew by the hundred. Most were concentrated around one tight area in the City of London, bordered by Aldersgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and Old Street… the feathers would be shuttled through a cascade of treatments by Abraham Botibol’s workhands. They would be strung, dyed, washed, dyed again, dried, thrashed, trimmed, finished, parried, willowed, fashioned and curled. He might sell a single item to a millinery wholesale warehouse for 7 shillings, or direct to a customer for 30 shillings. Once attached to a ladies’ hat by a milliber and displayed in a Bond Street shop window, its value could be anything up to £5 (£500 in today’s money).

p. 37 Miss Maria Umphelby’s school for girls was filled with children who needed a substitute home or family. There were children of the British Empire, children of the Raj, orphaned children, girls somehow surplus to requirements when gentlemen fathers were widowed or remarried.Unlike the newer, more academic girls schools (North London Collegiate School, Cheltenham Ladies’ College), Hill House was run along an older, family0style model with no dormitories and many “siblings”. The 30 pupils, aged 6 to 16, all called Mrs Umphelby “Maimie”. She was the cloest to a monther most of them had.. a Revivalist Evangelical: a woman of 60 who infused her curriculum with the celebration of God’s glory. Countryside walks were done at the march while shouting out Revivalist hymns… it was hoped they would go on to become indomitable women, “a band of admirably trained daughters” who would “go forth over the wide world”. Missionary work – a home or abroad – was the unspoken subtext of their education.. Etta retuned to Blackheath aged 16 and was immediately sent abroad – to a finishing school in Lausanne… she remained impervious to the fashion manuals of the day, to the absurdly time-consuming ritual of the VIctorian ladies’ toilette and to those fashionable, constructing constumes. She returned at 18, proficient in French, to face an uncertain future.”

p. 52 “Particularly high prices were paid for the skins of unuaul birds, such as the King of Saxony bird-of-paradise, with its strange head wires, or Pesquet’s parrot, with its bright red chest feathers – both from the mountains of New Guinea… If a bird wasn’t, to a British lady, remotely familiar, then it had an otherworldly, innocent, storybook quality to it. It belonged to distant parts of the British Empire, which spooled like a nrightly coloured diorama through the Victorian mind. A bird-of-paradise, ascarlet tanager or tiny viridian hummingbird had no real back story. It wasn’t perceived as a specied with mating rituals, grooming habits, a distinctive call and hatchlings to feed. It was a commodity just liek any other – leather, ivory, tortoiseshell or ostrich feather.”


p. 84 George Frederick Watts – elderly and revered Royal Academician, considered by many to be the greatest artist of his day, produced a large, emotive oil known as The Shuddering Angel, dedicated ‘to all thos who love the beautiful and mourn over the senseless and cruel destruction of bird life and beauty”. Irridescent, lifeless plumage lies in a heap on a tombstone, over which an angel weeps, head in hands. The painting was exhibited in London’s New Callery in 1899 and caused an immediate sensation – warranting a leader in The Times.”

p. 147 “As the sun rose in the far distant Florida Everglades, a wearden on duty for the Audubon Society motored his little boat over still waters to confront a norotious egret hunter and his two sons. By the time he got near, the men were climbing back into their schooner, limp snowy egrets swinging from their hands. Guy Bradley shouted across the water that he was going to arrest them – and was shot at point blank range … Bradey’s murder made international headlines: America’s first martyr for the cause of bird protection. The same week … the playwright George Bernard Shaw took his seat at the Royal Opera House in Drury Lane for Puccini’s new opera, Madam Butterfly. He found himself behind a woman who was obscuring his view. “For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its hreast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to hear th operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person but the spectacle sickened me.”

p. 148 To many eyes, such preposterous headgear undermined the thinking woman. It made her look unconsidered, even stupid. What price emancipation if she remained enslaved by fashion. .. I was curious about the future lives of these Edwardian women, helplessly in thrall to the surface of things, and was surprised to discover that many of Fabbircotti’s customers went on to do extraordinary, brave and adventurous things, spurred on by the First World War. Of course, they were facilitated by huge private incomes. But these were not mere featherheads. On Thursday 3 May 1906, Mrs Asquith – brilliant wit and socialite, second wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer – was drawn irresistibly into the boutique on South Molton Steet and spent £2 17s (around £280 in today’s money). Two months later, she was back again, buying millinery worth £4 4s (around £415). Tall, big boned, with a long determined face, Margot Asquith understood the power of a good hat. “Clothes are the first thing that catch the eye,” she was fond of saying. Having absolutely no compunction about wearing feathers, Margot was painted by society portraitist Philip de Laszlo with a large dead bird on her head. The painting was commissioned in 1909 to mark her powerful new role as the Prime Minister’s wife.”

p. 287 “Among the many who gained from the campaign for the vote, it was particularly satisfying to discover that that Alice Battershall’s daughter Louisa, a feather worker like her mother, was also to benefit. Thanks to determined suffragist Clementina Black and her investigative team at the Women’s Industrial Council, a government trade board was created in 1919 for the oxtrich, fancy feather and artificial flower industry. A minimum wage was set, working hours monitored and basic comforts introduced. And in 1927, A Botibol and Coomapny, “the biggest in the feather trade”, was thoroughly investigated for emplower abused. Abraham’s son, Cecil, was found guilty of underpaying 27 of his 50 female employees and of keeping no wage records. Forced to pay £234 in arrears and £17 in fines (around £40,000 in today’s money), he threw up his hands and admitted that he deserved “to lose on all points”.

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Books History Podcasts Politics

Podcast: Neurodiversity Studies

August 6, 2021 – 11:16 am

Really interesting discussion of an issue of which I have only a touching acquaintance on the New Books Network.

“The neurodiversity studies paradigm is one in which autism, ADHD, dyslexia, aphantasia, and other forms of long-term neurological differences are “part of a broader spectrum of human diversity, rather than inescapably associated with deviance, disorder, or impoverished selfhood.””

A statement of the obvious, but frequently neglected: we are all neurodiverse

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

August 3, 2021 – 3:08 pm

P. 22 Abyssal plains are not simply endless flat tracks of mud.  They are intercepted by undulating hills And winding valleys,  burping mud volcanoes and fizzing jacuzzis of methane bubbles;  and dusted across the plains  stand thousands of tall volcanoes,  active and inactive.  cone-shaped or flat-topped they were worn away by waves  in past times when they reached the sea surface.  Known as seamounts,  these isolated peaks  are distinct from the ranges of mid-ocean ridges,  although they can form nearby.  the biggest mounts are generally located in the  central regions of tectonic plates,  in places where chambers of molten magma  bubble up in hotspots  through the oceanic crust.  is tectonic plates slide over these hotspots,  chains of seamounts form one after another,  like cakes being made on a factory conveyor belt. 

Journey across the abyssal plain,  skirting the seamounts and facing away from a mid-ocean ridge,  and you will pass over gradually older and older sea bed  until eventually you reach the brink of the very deepest parts of the ocean.  tectonic plates Collide at subduction zones,  with one plate gets  thrust under another.  here, as old seafloor is dragged down into the Earth’s molten interior,  to be melted and recycled,  oceanic trenches are formed,  reaching to depths of 6000 meters and more.  principally formed from 27 trenches worldwide,  this is the hadal Zone,  named after Hades the ancient Greek god of the underworld

P. 26  many consider it likely that water was imported from the outer reaches of the solar system  when icy comets bombarded  the early Earth.  traces of water detected in dust particles from a peanut shaped  stony asteroid called Itokawa  indicated that half of Earth’s water supply may have come from this common form of space rock.   Earth may also have come pre-loaded  with some of its own primordial water,  bodged deep within rocks that coalesced  and formed the planet  4.55 billion years ago…  subsequently,   is Earth cooled,  the water vapour condensed,  clouds formed,  and it started to rain –  perhaps as early as 4.4 billion years ago –  beginning to form the oceans.  the ancient history of the oceans is difficult to tell  because the geological record is continually wiped clean.  oceanic crust is thin young and short-lived,  compared to the thick, primeval continents floating above the  rest.

P. 30 a total tally of the number of  deep sea species is,  of course,  a Long Way Out of Reach  given the deep’s  vast size,   and systematic surveys have revealed glimpses of what is still to be found.  in nineteen eighty-four,  two American  scientists…  used a box corer,   a tool like a giant cookie,  to extract chunks of mud from the Deep seabed  off the coasts of New Jersey and Delaware,  between 1500 and 2500  metres down.  carefully sifting through the mud and picking out every tiny living thing –  every worm crustaceans starfish sea cucumber clam and Snail –  they identified 798 species,  over half of the new to science.  based on an average of 3 new species per 2.5 sq km of seabed…  the abyssal planes  across the planet could be home to 30 million species.  the duo acknowledge that some regions of the deep may support a lower density of Species,   so they dialled down their estimate to a more cautious 10 million

in 2019 a team of 17  lead scientists  published the results of a three-year survey of the Pacific in an area of deep sea bigger than the state of California,  involving hundreds of hours of died time using remote operated submersibles.  in all,   they photographed 347000 animals,  and only one in five of them  were known species. …  the diversity of life is prolific in the Deep,  driving the shallow familiar seas –  and maybe even life on land.

P. 56 “A global moratorium on commercial whaling came into force in 1986, but before then, in the 20th century alone, hunters killed 2.9 million whales. Of these, 761,523 were recorded as sperm whales … the number of living sperm whales … roughly 366,000. In the 20th century, humans killed more than twice the number of sperm whales that remain alive today.”

P. 144 “When scientist sequenced the entire genome of the Mariana snailfish. They found it has multiple copies of genes that adjust the chemical makeup of its cell membranes, adding more unsaturated fatty acides, which keeps them pliant and less likely to crack – more like a layer of olive oil than butter – so cells don’t burst under pressure. A mutation in a gene that normally regulates how developing bones are hardened and mineralised leaves Mariana snailfish with bendable skeletons made of cartilage (like sharks), which seem to be more pressure-tolerant than hard, fragile bones.”

P. 145 The most common inhabitants of trenches are scavenging crustaceans called amphipods. They are supremely unfussy eaters and will devour anything that falls into a trench. Amphipods have been seen at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the pressure is so high it should in theory dissolve the calcium carbonate in their exoskeletons. In 2019, researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology discovered that amphipods cover themselves in alumnium gel (they consume metallic compounds from deep-sea muds to creat the gel) which prevents their shells from melting away. Snailfish take advantage of the crustacean abundance in the trenches and have adapted to a diet made up almost entirely of amphipods.”

p. 161  snowfall in the deep –  formally known as the biological carbon pump –   varies across space and time.  spring Blooms of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic are triggered by warming seas and create great pulses of sinking carbon.   snowdrifts build-up on seamounts and abyssal Hills.  flurries of snow are channelled downwards by underwater  canyons.  in 2014/2015,  two massive phytoplankton blooms were detected in the Southern Ocean,  in a remote region that is normally a planktonic desert,  deprived of the vital nutrient iron. ( Continental  shelves and atmospheric dust blowing off land  are typical sources of iron for the oceans.)  Analysis of water samples revealed the iron  had welled up  from nearby  deep sea vents,  revealing for the first time the role that hydrothermalism can play in boosting the carbon pump

p. 162  sperm whales offer a similar service of fertilising the surface by bringing up iron from Down Below.  while diving in the Twilight and midnight zones,  all the whales non-essential bodily functions shut down;  there’s no digestion,  and they defecate only at the sea surface.  when they come up to breathe and void their bowels,  what comes out is a floating iron-rich slick of liquid faeces,  an ideal phytoplankton fertilizer.  every year,  sperm whales around Antarctica approximately 50 tons of iron from the Deep,  triggering phytoplankton blooms.  the resulting export of carbon from the atmosphere,  annually around  400000 tonnes,  offsets the carbon dioxide the whales exhale,   making them a net carbon sink,  although now on a much smaller scale than they once were.  before industrial whaling,  abundant Antarctic sperm whales fertilised enough  phytoplankton  to remove around 2 million of carbon  from the atmosphere every year,  equivalent to the annual carbon emissions the city of Washington DC

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Books History

Notes from The Book of Trespass

July 1, 2021 – 9:54 pm

p. 36 In the REformation, maths was God, and those who held the numbers held the land. Land owernship itself became a profession and supported a raft of other jobs – lawyers, surveyors, estate agents – each generating reams of paperwork to prove their own viability .. The fence lines that were rolled out across England were the manifestation of lines of legal prose, and each justified the other. .. what lay inside them was partitioned from the web of social ties and responsibilities to the communities that surrounded them and became abstracted into commodity alone – something to be bought and sold on the market. There was pushback both in governemnt and Church. In 1601, Edward Glascock rebuked Robery Johhnson, MP for Monmouth and a professional survetor, saying ‘I think the gentleman that last spake hath better Skill in Measuring of Land than Men’s Consciences.” The necessary displacement of people from within the fences, and their subsequent estrranement from the wealth of the land, was decried as an immoral act.”

p. 52 “The original meaning of the word acre was ‘open country, untenanted land’, but by Gainsborough’s time it had come to refer to an exact measurement of land, standardised across the country to facilitate valuations and sales… In feudal times, property meant rights in a piece of land, referring to the customs of permissibile actions and their reciprocal duties. Medieval lawyers never spoke of owning land, but, rather, of holding the land … yours to use, according to local custom, and to the ecology of what each particular site had to offer.”

p. 112 “In 1607 in what came to be known as the Midland Revolt, there were 11 uprisings, each with thousands of people, protesting the severe enclouse of the Midlands… Their communcal cornfields had been hedged and stripped to provide pasture for the sheep. The rent on their properties had spiked and their common rights, collecting wood for winter, allowing their pids and cows to fatten on the pasture had been removed. With nowhere else to go, many were now squatting on the side of the fields they had lived on a decdade earlier. In an enquiry in the August following the revolt, royal commissioners had investigated the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation in Rockingham Forest alone: 27,000 acres had been enclosed, 350 farms descryed and almost 150,000 people across 18 villages gad lost their homes.”

p. 117 “a line written over a miillennium ago by a poet soldier, keeping watch at an outpost on China’s Great Wall: The long wall is propped up on yellow sands and whitened bones/We have inscribed our achievements on the mountains of Mongolia,/But the land lies deserted, the moon shines for no one.”

p. 137 “Across England the wealth of the sugar plantations was being injected into English society, into buildings and infrastructure… until only recently the exact nature of this wealth and its effect on British landscape and society was locked away in the National Archives. But in 2009 a team of processors from UCL, led by Dr Catherine Hall, began a vast project mnapping the Legacies of Britain’s Slave Ownership … p. 140 when slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the slavers received a total of £20 million from the British taxpayer, estimated as anything bvetween £87 billion and £500 billion in today’s money. The slaves, of course, received nothing, and as part of the deal had to stay exactly where they were and work unpaid ‘apprenticeships’ for four years after their supposed release.”

p. 146 “When the East India established their first outpost in Calcutta, India’s share of the world economy was 27%… It was famed for its textiles, its architecture, its shipbuilding, its spices… In 1930, historian Will Durrant published The Case for India, in which he decribes the Company’s methods as a ‘conscious and deliberate bleeding of India;. England was teh tick on the udder of the world’s cash cow, sucking up all it could get, inflating itself in direct proportion to what it took. .. The railways that Briatin ‘gave’ India were not the standard history book definition of gifted infrastructure,. but in fact intravenous tubes lodged deep inside the body,k transfusing the blood as efficiently as possible fromn the heart of India to England.”

p. 151 When the British left India they had drained its GDP from 27% to 3%. It is estimated that up to 29 million Indians died of famine, murder and organised genocide under the colonial regime.”

p. 187 At Grow Heathrow and reflecting on Greenham “Foucault had a word for spaces such as these. He called them heterotopias – spaces of outsiders forged deep inside society, spaces that reflect the orthodoxy of that society by arranging themselves differently. These spaces are distinct from utopias in that they are real, they actually exist, and they manifest their ideologies in real space. Someone has done the plumbing, set up the solar panels, dug the long-drop toilet. They work; there are alternatives. This is a message that the Fathers find profoundly threatening.”

p. 193 In 1985, the then secretary of state Michael Heseltine introduced new by-laws for Greenham Commmon that upgraded the trespass into the camp to a criminal charge… Hansard recorded a total of 812 trespasses in the first 15 months from January 1987, each breack calculated to expose the flaws not just in the fence , but the legal systemns that supported it. And it worked. After a four-year legal battle, the courts ruled that Heseltine had pushed aside a legal constraint in his quest to end the protest – he had acted ultra vires, beyond his powers, or more literally, beyond his manhood. In 1992 the courts ruled that the fence itself had not been erected under ministerial consent and Judge Lait ruled “the perimeter fence at RAF Greenham Common was unlawful at all relevant times.” The fence was the crime, not the crossing of it.”

p. 204 “when William invaded England, the 4,000 or so thegns were wiped from power and replaced by 180 of William’s closest mercenary allies, the barons. A new hierarchy of French nouncs was imposed: the barons, then the cisounts, the marquises and the dukes. The only remaining Germanic title was earl, which was kept to divert the crass minds of the English … “It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title ‘count’ was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic earl … precisley because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt.”

p. 211 “at the start of the 18th century, fuelled by the civil unrest of commoners across Hampshire and Berkshire, the silence of poaching transformed into a brash, violent protest for equal rights. In broad daylight, hordes of men and women would corss the fences, on horseback or on foot, and devastate the deer stock of local manor parks, taking some home, but leaving, like foxes in the henhouse, most of the carcasses strewn in blood on the plains … because many smudged their faces with charcoal, they were known as ‘the Blacks’. .. The Black Act of 1723 introduced 50 new capital offences across the land… the Black were labelled a national emergency… They were described as Jacobites, terrorists cells seeking to topple the king. The Act was suppposed to be a temporary measure, but lasted for another century.”

p. 213 “I am reminded of philosopher Edmund Burke’s definition of the aristocracy. “To be bred in a place of estimation; to see bothing low and sordid from one’s infancy … to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be ebaled to draw on the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found … these are the circumstances of men that form what I call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation”.

p. 218 “Today, a third of Britain is still owned by the aristocracy. The 24 remaining non-royal dukes own almost 4 million acres between them. There are 191 earls, 115 viscounts and 435 barons, and most are still significant landowners. In 2016 the 14 marquises recived just over £3.5 million worth of farm subsidies for the 100,000 acres while 17 of the dukes who receibved farm subsidies got £8.4 million etween them.”

p. 265 “The Hobhouse report of 1947 proposed a fundamental change to the access laws of the countryside – it envisaged a full right to roam over all uncultivated land in England, so that people could actually experience the land for which they had fought. It was proposed as a corollary to the NHS, providing health and recreation, the prevention of illness before the need for a cure. But landowners… lobbied hard against this proposal, and so when the Bill was trnasitioned into law, a full right to roam was demmed a step too far. The compromise that followed was called the National Parks Act, and though it was still hailed as a people’s charter it was in fact a major success for the landowning establishment.”

p. 278 “In 1989 the philosopher Edward Soja publiched the first in a series of books and essays that advanced the concept of Henri Lefebvre’s Third Space.. a conversation between ideology and architecture open to all who inhabit it. It is both imagined and real, both abstract and concrete, and builds a space where the borders of society can be constantly challenged… groups who are marginalised by the ideologies imposed by place can interact on an equal footing with the centres of power that created them… an area of “radical openness, a context from which to build communities of resistance and renewal that cross the boundaries and double-cross the binaries of race, genmder, class and all oppressively Othering categories”. … not imposed from above, but created from within. Its central concept is its lipperiness, its opennes to change, the permeability of its borders of definition. It is in constant flux, an ‘open-ended set of defining moments’.It is a theme picked up by bell hooks in her book Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural politics, where she talks of ‘heterotopic marginality’ as a place, and mindset, of resistance against unequal power distribution.”

p. 298 “Free festivals, organic gatherings of people on common land, have always been a threat to the status quo. But organised, sanctioned festivals, the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, were seen as a way of allowing people to vent their frustrations in a manner contained by local authorities. An article from the London Magazine in 1738 sums up this paternalism neatly: “Dancing on the Green at Wakes and merry Tides should not only be indulg’d but incourag’d: and little Prizes being alloted for the Maids who excel in a Jig or a Hornpip would make them return to their daily Labour with a light Heart and a grateful Obedience to their Superiors’.”

p. 299 “the final nail in the coffin for freedom in the ocuntryside was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Like the Tudor and Georgian Vagrancty Acts, it targeted specific types of people, grouped them together and defined them as a threat to the state. It outlawed alternative lifestyles and ideologies, by removing people’s rights to express them in real space… Its trigger was trhe largest rave in English history, on Castlemorton Common, but it sroots stretched back into the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to obliterate what she called the ‘permissive society’ to a long-established battleground in the fight for space: Stonehenge.”

p. 307 “river and their banks are subject to a category of legislation called Riparian Rights. While the Crown is said to own the water that flows through a river, the landowner holds the rights to the riverbank which extends across its bed towards an imaginary line drawn halfway through the river. To kayak or swijm along a stretch of river, you much have permission from each and every one of the porperty owners on the banks, meaning the long stretch of open water is actually (or rather legally) divided up into an invisible grid of lines, each under the control of the lord of trhat section of land.”

p. 320 In France, you can walk into any town hall and request to see the maps of ownership for that part of the country. In the US, Montana’s land registry is online for all to access. New Zealand opened up its land registry in 2015, and now has a minister for Land Information… the resistance to opening up the Land Registry continues to this day, because when you put up a fence around land it becomes your business and yours alone.”

p. 372 “When Cotland introduced its first Land Reform Act in 2003, it also introduced the right of a commujnity to buy land as a cooperative. Now, almost 20 years later, nearly 500 community bodies own more than 500,000 acres in common.”

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