Category Archives: History

Environmental politics History Politics

Definitely worth reading: The Village (Marinaleda) Against the World

December 27, 2013 – 9:46 pm

The Village Against the World is an affectionate, but not hagiographic account of the development of Marinaleda, with a strong focus on its leader Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, a farming community in Andalusia, southern Spain that over three decades transformed itself from being a landless, poverty=stricken peasant community with 60% unemployment, population 2,700 to being a land-owning, communally run community with its own farm, processing plant, bar and much more. One of its achievements is a community that is to be eventually of 350 homes; the Andalusian regional government provides the building materials, the villagers build the homes themselves and pay 15
euros/month mortgage

Hancox is realistic about its special nature “for centuries, Andalusian day labourers have settled in … tidily-sized pueblos, rather than in big cities or isolated cottages … and this has forged a unique spirit, an ultra-local micro=patriotism,… a thriving collective personality develops of its own volition, independent of
trends outside”.

But this is no ordinary pueblo – it’s as politically sophisticated as they come. Hancox tells the story of how the village went on hunger strike to demand land, since earlier occupations had come to nothing, sometimes violently, since police can’t beat up someone for not eating. Topping it was a letter from the villages’ children, some of whom had joined the hunger strike, apparently entirely on their own initiative, to the young crown prince of Spain. Political genius.

But … “Before the land seizures, before the collective farm, before economic democracy, before virtually free housing, before the assassination attempts, before the supermarket raids, before utopia, came organisation… in 1976 the field workers’ union, the Sindicato de Oberos del Campo was founded and soon after the Mirinaleda chapter formed … a union for day labourers, focusing on direct action, with a broadly anarchist philosophy. … at that time Spanish law prohibited voting in union elections until you had worked for the same employer for more than six months, ruling out 98% of the 500,000 Andalusian field workers, severing an entire class from labour organisation.” (p. 73)

What they acquired was part of an aristocrat holding of 23,000 hectares of land … were planted with labour-light dry crops like cornand sunflowers. “The Marinaleda proposal was to sow crops that created substantially more work, like tobacco, cotton or sugar beet, and to create secondary industries for processing them. This, they argues, would instantly lead to a 30 per cent reduction in unemployment in central Andalusia.” (p. 79)

“It was land reform from below, not above, delivered by direct action, and always pacifist ; their rule was to leave when evicted (although this did not prevent countless lawsuits for trespassing, roadblocks and other related incidents.) They fell into a routine whereby the Guardia Civil would evict them every day at the same time, around 5 or 6 pm, when they would go peacefully and walk back to the village. They following morning they would walk the 10 miles back again, flags held high. In the summer of 1985, in the blistering heat,
they made the same journey every day for a month – taking only Sunday off.” (p. 97)

“In 1991 they were finally granted El Humoso’s 1,200 hectares, the Duke of Infantado was quietly paid off by the regional government… In Sanchez Gordillo’s reading … it was the first time in 5,000 years
that the Andalusian farm labourers had been given the land that was rightfully theirs.”

Well worth a read … an extract.

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Books Feminism History Women's history

Early modern women healers – a further blow to traditional views

October 26, 2013 – 9:17 pm

First published on Blogcritics

The traditional view of women healers of the medieval and early modern period has been that they were marginal, distrusted figures, at risk always of being cast as witches, enjoying little or no respect, if some fear. It’s a view that modern scholarship is gradually overturning. I was fascinated when I was reading about early modern England to learn of the respect with which midwives were held, and how, particularly in London, they were subjected to rigorous training and a strict licensing system that involved testimony from women they had attended in childbirth.

Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany by Alisha Rankin is a further piece of the story, showing how a wide cast of noblewomen enjoyed considerable respect for their medical knowledge, not just from their peers but also professional physicians, with whom they operated in general in concert, rather than competition.

Indeed the final chapter in this book, focused on Elizabeth of Rochlitz, who had a modest reputation as a healer, but here is studied most as a patient, provides a fascinating Insight into the actual experience of being treated for illness in early modern times.

Physicians – classically trained in book learning dating back to classical times, and with a traditional contempt for empirical evidence (although Rankin suggests that was fading) – tended to prescribe regimens, particularly diets, to match what they saw as the underlying problems of the patient, rather than treat particular symptoms. Barber- surgeons dealt with wounds and at least some of the time dressings. pharmacists, including the gentlewomen described here, were the true scientists of the time, testing and trying herbal and chemical treatments, sharing and comparing them.

Elisabeth – it is a sad story, suffered more than a decade of illness, which she resolutely refused to allow to be diagnosed as “the French disease” (syphilis). Rankin maintains her professional uncertainty in saying we can’t be sure, but given her father and brother died of it, this seems highly likely. There was of course stigma attached, which Rankin says may have been one reason for refusing to accept the diagnosis, but another may also have been her dislike of regimens- one suggested to her involved giving up garlic, onions, mustard, horseradish, spices, smoked protein, all food fried in butter, beans, lentils and sauerkraut, and wine. Quite a lot to ask of an aristocrat, even a minor one.

Instead, she put her faith in herbal remedies, aqua vitae (distilled strong liquor – which certainly must have made the patients feel better) and a barber surgeon’s plasters of egg white, honey, saffron and flour. (Which might actually have done her some good.)
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Books History Politics

European food, from hard tack to Oyster Ketchup, Roquefort to fish fingers

October 24, 2013 – 9:49 pm

First published on Blogcritics

The Food Industries of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (edited by Derek J. Oddy and Alain Drouard) is a dry collection of academic articles that is written in what is often the dullest possible prose. So why am I telling you about it? Well because the subjects are so fascinating that they overwhelm the format and, while encouraging skipping to the narrative bits, are well worth hanging in for. It also has a broad pan-European view that’s quite unusual and illuminating.

We begin with the start of industrial food production – somehow it’s unsurprising it’s a war that provides the impetus, or rather the Napoleonic Wars. Britain needed salt beef and hard tack to feed its navy, and suppliers started to gear up for the bulk production.

But for products more recognisable today, it’s the last four decades of the 18th century that advertisements for branded pickles and sauces started to appear in the London newspapers. “John Burgess, for instances, offered West India Pickles, Cayenne Pepper, Bengal Currie Powder, Japan Soy, Lemon Pickle, Oyster Ketchup, Shallot Ketchup and Devonshire Sauce.” These were, if not exactly reserved for the wealthy, certainly not reaching far down the social scale, in part because they were designed to go with fish or meat, households in which animal protein consumption was increasing.

Popularity of a new flavour led to mass production. There’s a lovely example of Elizabeth Lazenby who in 1793 was given a fish sauce recipe by her innkeeper brother, Peter Harvey, so she could support her family. She manufactured and sold it from Portman Square (you wouldn’t want to try that now), and when she retired Harvey’s Sauce (why are women’s names never preserved?) delivered her a substantial annuity of £300 a year. The brand continued, becoming Lazenby Pickles, operating from 1808 from a Southwark factory, where they remained until 1926.
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Books Feminism History Women's history

Sex, love, marriage, a complicated story…

October 21, 2013 – 10:18 pm

First published on Blogcritics

Reading The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution, which covers relationships, courtship and marriage from 1920 to 1970, with a particular focus on the period around the Second World War, is a powerful reminder that marriage has never been a fixed and stable structure, but has changed regularly, certainly with each 20th-century generation.

Author Claire Langhammer relies chiefly on individual accounts, often painfully frank and honest, looks into the guidance of “agony aunts” and other media reports, and occasionally official reports and studies, to conclude that over the total period of her study there was a significant shift from marriage as primarily an economic relationship – breadwinner support traded for the creation of a comfortable home –  towards a more “emotional”, demanding relationship even during the Fifties, which she suggests relationships were much less stable than we commonly suppose, meaning that the freewheeling Sixties were not marked by more demand for continuing love, but rather the transition of marriage into the late teens and early twenties, a reflection both of increasing wealth and less need to save for marriage, but that also that this was seen as an essential, normal step into adulthood.

Langhammer quotes a 1959 survey showing that a quarter of working class brides were teenagers on their wedding day; more than three-quarters were under 25. A telling item in the initial Boyfriend magazine in the same year tells the story of a young woman determined to do something with her life – transform and modernise her aunt’s cafe, which interferes with her love life. But eventually she finds a man who also wants to run a cafe, so they settled down together.

And particularly as the ideology of love and marriage going together, indeed being essential, spread, many of the same tensions and concerns we recognise in relationships today emerge.

One painfully honest ‘case history’ from the Mass Observation Survey from 1949 tells of a 19-year-old woman who has sex with a 24-year-old merchant seaman – although only after he reassures her he’s using a condom. “I agreed then. I didn’t want to but I liked him and he wanted to. He said: ‘You can’t be in love with me unless you will do it.”
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Books History

Fifties Britain – today’s debates ….

September 17, 2013 – 10:42 pm

Recently out, and as readable as his earlier Austerity Britain is David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain: 1957-59.

A few highlights…

“In theory, there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the roughly 1,200 grammar schools and 3,800 secondary moderns. In practice, not only did most people view the secondary moderns as vastly inferior, but there was a shocking relative shortfall in their resourcing. ‘It is likely’ noted John Vaizey in his 1958 treatise The Costs of Education, ‘that the average Grammar school child receives 170 per cent more per year, in terms of resources, than the average Modern school child. …The gulf in expectations was even greater. Surveying in 1961 that year’s school-leavers from a semi-skilled and unskilled background at five Leicestershire schools (two grammars and three secondary moderns), William Liversidge found that 93 per cent of the grammar boys anticipated moving into a higher class of employment than their parents – whereas only 18 per cent of the secondary modern boys did. ‘The general conclusion … is one of a startlingly accurate appraisal of life chances by the children … a shrewd appreciation of the social and economic implication of their placing within the educational system.’ … Social class … did much to determine outcomes within grammars. In 1954 an official report on Early Leaving found that whereas children from the semi-skilled and unskilled working class represented over 20 per cent of grammar school intakes, but the sixth form that proportion was down to barely 7 per cent.” (pp. 218-219)

“On the morning of 5 December, two days after the pit-closures announcement, Macmillan inaugurated the 8.5-mile Preston Bypass, Britain’s first stretch of motorway, and, subsequently, part of the M6. ‘In the years to come,’ the PM declared, ‘the county and the country alike may look at the Preston Bypass – a fine thing in itself but a finer thing as a symbol – as a token of what is to follow’: pressing a button, he cut the traditional tape by remote control … he was driven along in a Rolls-Royce Landau.” (p. 259)

“Shortly after Christmas the government announced the full convertability of sterling held by non-residents … Although the announcement itself provoked no great controversy, Anthony Crosland would state the potential downside forcibly in a Third Programme talk in early February. Claiming (probably correctly) that the ‘strongest pressure’ behind the decision had come from the Bank of England and the City, wanting convertability ‘in order to enhance the position of London as a world banker and financial centre,’ he called it a ‘disastrous approach’ – given not only that ‘the financial earnings of the City from overseas business are trivial in relation to our balance of payments’ but that ‘every step in the direction [i.e. of financial liberalisation, ultimately leading to the end of exchange controls] increases our vulnerability to speculation’. And: ‘The really serious thing about all this is that our domestic policies are increasingly dictated by the holders of sterling – by bankers in Zurich and London, by speculators all over the world, and by traders using sterling as an international trading currency. These people are not, unfortunately, as the City likes to think they are, highly rational and sophisticated judges of the true state of the British economy. On the contrary, they are often naive, volatile and ill-informed…Yet the fear of what they may do to sterling increasingly influences our Bank rate policy, our rate of economic expansion, our wages policy, and … even what taxation policy we are allowed to pursue.” (pp. 262-3)
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Books History Politics

1978 – a year of change

September 1, 2013 – 9:50 pm

First published on Blogcritics

I was 13 years old in 1979, and from a family that only bought the newspaper on Saturday, so my father could read the car classifieds. So I wasn’t exactly immersed in or aware of political events, but I do have some vague memories that have stuck. Those are the television footage of the Ayatollah Khomeini arriving back in Tehran to unimaginably large and excited crowds, and the election of Margaret Thatcher, which as a budding feminist struck me chiefly from the gender angle.

It was thus fascinating to read Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, a text that looks at the events of that year, what led up to them and what came immediately after, through the view of key states. And this is an unusually globally focused book for its kind: the key states are not just the UK, but China (this is the year Deng Xiaoping came to power), Iran, Afghanistan, and the Vatican (with the election of the Polish John Paul II).

The author, Christian Caryl, comes very clearly from a political perspective not mine – he’s worked for Foreign Policy – and it’s telling that in the final chapter, when he brings concluding comments up to in some cases 2012, there’s no focus on the global financial crash and what it might mean. His theses – that there has been a coalescence of revolutionary leftist theory with traditional Muslim teaching, producing something entirely new, and that the late Seventies saw the end of a general acceptance of a social democratic welfare state as the Western standard, are not original.

What he’s really good at is researching and telling the story of great events, from a truly localised perspective in these very different states, which is no mean feat, and doing so in a way that is both gripping and memorable. He really has a fine line in anecdote, whether it is the fact that it was an Air France steward who assisted Ayatollah Khomeini down the steps in Tehran because the competing individuals on the plane with him couldn’t decide who’d get the honour and the potentially resulting influence, or the fact that the plane had been stuffed with Western journalists in a bid to ensure the Shah’s regime didn’t shoot it down, as it had threatened to do.

The machinations of the Afghan communist party, and the coup that saw it take power, which Moscow learned about from Reuters, and the account of the dangerously see-sawing career of Deng (who I learnt loved croissants from an early stint in France!) bear the hallmarks of an experienced foreign correspondent and a power of research.

Other reviews have questioned how these events all fit together – Iran and Afghanistan are easy, as are London and Beijing, but the complete package is less obvious.

Nonetheless, it is clear that this was a year of rapid change, in which old, seemingly solid, certainties dissolved with the swoosh of a limescale being swept away by lemon juice. That makes it a timely read, when so many of the certainties established in the era of Thatcher, Reagan and even Deng, the ruling neoliberal “consensus” that replaced unchallenged theories of social democracy, are clearly on the way out. I’m not sure there’s many lessons here about what comes next for us — the gap of more than three decades is too great — but that change tends to happen in big leaps, rather than gradual evolution, is one lesson to be taken here.

Other views: Observer, New York Times, The Economist.

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