Tom Lawson - The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania

The story of the British arrival in Tasmania (known then as Van Diemen's Land) and the subsequent genocide of the aboriginal people who lived there is rarely discussed. It has parallels with events in other colonial nations, particularly in mainland Australia. But, as Tom Lawson's convincing but  tragic book shows, this was a genocide that was made in London and needs to be understood in the wider context of British colonial policy.

Lawson is a Holocaust scholar and he explains that he came to write about this subject after looking at the depiction and understanding of the Holocaust and genocide in society. As such this book is not a detailed history of what took place in Tasmania, though there is enough to make those who do not know the general history understand that this was a period of horrific events against the aboriginal population. An early massacre of aboriginal people at the first settlement at Risdon Cove was horrific enough, but the British turned this into an explanation for the aboriginal resistance that they experienced, which required a response in turn. In other words, the British argued that the victims were the cause of their genocide - which combined with racist prejudices formed the backdrop to subsequent events. As Lawson explains:

The idea that the island's [Tasmania] people had been prompted to an indiscriminate vengeance by the massacre, a passion which sustained them and their descendants over the next 30 years, tells us much about the assumption that the British brought with them to Van Diemen's Land. Tasmanians were not, they supposed, capable of rational thought or action. Indeed the belief that indigenous peoples across the Empire were essentially childlike, incapable of meaningful communal or political action, underpinned the very basis of the British occupation of the land. It was widely believed that an imagined failure of such peoples to exploit the resources of the land provided the moral and legal basis of colonisation.

The British considered that a "state of war" existed, which basically legitimised their actions. But their prejudices about the indigenous peoples also affected what they wanted done. "No longer would the communities be able to pursue their nomadic, migratory culture. Instead they would be reliant for sustenance on a colonial authority that wished to enclose them permanently."

The contradictory interests of the British and the aboriginal people "could only be resolved by force", and the power was in the hands of the colonists. Lawson explains about the colonial authority in Tasmania that it was

trapped within a mindset that they could not recognise made little sense even on its own terms. They were committed to a path that continually sanctioned a greater and greater degree of force, while arguing that force should be avoided. With every approval they opened up new possibilities for violence even while they continued to condemn violence itself. The British government preached protection [of the aboriginal people], while contrarily approving of measure after measure that would escalate violence. It was, at the very least, a form of self-deception.

This last point is important. Some historians have argued that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of the British on the ground. Lawson, in contrast, argues that it was British policy that encouraged genocide. Since violence was considered a legitimate response to resistance from the aboriginal people, then massacres became acceptable. In passing its worth noting that much of this violence was committed by convicts sent to Tasmania. As Lawson points out "their violence was directed at the only people in their world less powerful than themselves." The role of convicts, undesirables, in the eyes of the British government would become an excuse for many for what took place in Tasmania.

Lawson points out that the British government select committee that was setup to examine the aboriginal people's condition reflected a "class-based discourse" that saw the violence as arising out of sending "Britain's own savages" abroad. But we should not lose sight of the fact that genocide came from colonial policies that saw indigenous peoples as occupying land that they could not and would not use, and that colonialism could both use those resources and transform the aborigines into model British citizen Christian farmers. In the eyes of the British, when they refused to conform, the aboriginal people were doomed to an inevitable decline.

Liberal and progressives in Britain also saw this inevitable decline arising out of a similar process. If Britain was the height of technical and intellectual achievement than "lesser" peoples were doomed in the face of British arrival. Perhaps most fascinatingly and distressingly, Lawson shows how this approach pervades attitudes to indigenous remains and relics that were in British museums until recently. Efforts to get human remains and important cultural objects back to Tasmania were, on several occasions, met with responses from authorities which assumed that either the Tasmanian people must be extinct or that they could not look after the objects themselves.

This is a remarkable book that deserves a wider readership than it appears to have had. Lawson argues clearly that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of  of the British Colonial Office's "commitment to the relentless pursuit of colonial development". But he goes further and argues that the horrific, forgotten events of this time, mean that "when we think about the British Empire we should remember the violence on which it was based, and when we think about genocide we should remember that it is part of our world too".

Tom Lawson's book is an important contribution to post-colonial studies of British Empire and a must read for anyone trying to understand Australian politics as well as contemporary debates around genocide.

Related Reviews

Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact

Bill Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write "nature, the nature that preceded human history...is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)". They were arguing that the natural world is transformed by humans, constantly recreated and rebuilt. It is an insight that kept returning to me as I read Bill Gammage's excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth. Gammage's contention is that the Australian landscape as seen by European colonial explorers, settlers and convicts post-1788 (the date of first arrival of the British first fleet) was not natural, pristine or untouched and certainly not terra nullius. Rather as the author says, "there was no wilderness". The Australian landscape was shaped by thousands of years of careful, planned human labour.

But this is not what those arriving from Europe saw. Instead they tended to interpret the landscape as a natural collection of park-like spaces. As Gammage explains "Almost all thought no land in Australia private, and parks natural. To think otherwise required them to see Aborigines as gentry, not shiftless wanderers. That seemed preposterous."

The reference here to gentry relates to the fact that hundreds of European accounts (Gammage quotes dozens and dozens of examples) describe the landscape as often being "park like". Park, at this time, referred to the type of landscapes created by wealthy British landowners. They were rich enough to leave landscapes laid out for pleasure - not to produce food, or generate wealth. It is, as Gammage suggests, peculiarly myopic to see these perceived landscapes and equate them with parkland in Europe, and conclude that they cannot have been artificial. It is also a view imbued with racism and class.

Much of the book looks at exactly how and why the aboriginal people shaped the land. There is a brilliantly illustrated section (in full colour) that uses paintings and old photographs as well as contemporary images to show how the landscape changed after 1788 when the land wasn't burnt back. Burning was the key way that land was cleared and the clearance allowed food to be grown or helped with the hunting of animals like kangaroo. The changes also meant that the destruction of aboriginal communities was also written into the landscape. Take this picture Mills' Plains by John Glover (circa 1832-1834).

Gammage writes:

Glover shows Tasmanians. They were not there in 1832, for in 1828-30 they were shot or rounded up by bounty hunters like Glover's neighbour John Batman. Glover knew this. He captioned his [painting] Batman's Lookout, Ben Lomond (1835) 'on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives'. Yet he depicts not only their presence, but their absence. His Mills' Plains foreground shows young gums, wattles and casuarinas which all regenerate quickly after fire. They are young because Tasmanians burnt the old; they are there because Tasmanian burning was stopped. They are the first generation for decades not to get burnt, so their height measures the end of Tasmanian dominion.

Ironically the lack of burning also meant that some flora and fauna went extinct. The burning encouraged particular growth, or created ecological niches that were needed by certain animals. The end of burning led, for instance, "to the extinction or decline of over a third of small desert animals species."

The recent extreme bushfires in Australia have reawakened debate about how a return to regular backburning could help prevent future catastrophic fires. Gammage certainly provides ample evidence that this is true. But he also makes it clear that it wouldn't be easy. The Aboriginal people had thousands of years of experience and even sympathetic attempts to recreate this have failed: "They knew which fire regime worked" he writes. That said, the effects could be dramatic. As Gammage explains, Aboriginal people rarely had to deal with enormous fires because they rarely happened - because "people had to prevent it, or die". Gammage recounts a story from the 1870s:

When a fire menaced the station while its men were away, an [Aboriginal] elder studied the flames, then organised women and children to light spot fires in five staggered rows across the advancing front. This broke up the fire and it was put out."

But these skills with fire arose from long experience and a particular understanding of the natural ecology. I don't have space to cover Gammage's explanation of Aboriginal understanding of their relationship to history and space. But the "Law" he describes is an obligation on everyone to manage and protect the land as it was and is.

All must care for the and and its creatures, all must be regenerated by care and ceremony, no soul must be extinguished, no totem put at risk, no habitat too much reduced. That mandate, not the theology, made land care purposeful, universal and predictable. This is true of very part, even what might seem untouched wilderness, and even where ecologists today can't see why. The parks and puzzles Europeans saw in 1788 were no accident.

Thus the shaping of landscape was not technological, it was something that arose out of the very understanding that Aboriginal people had of the land and their place in it. There's a tragic story that demonstrates this, told by Gammage, of a small band of Tasmanian people, decimated by the colonial powers, who continued to fire the landscape, doing the work of ten times their number, to try and maintain the land - even though the smoke would betray their existence.

This approach can be contrasted with the settlers who saw the land with very different eyes. It is summed by a quote from 1864 by a surveyor WCB Wilson who wrote:

heavy showers fell which had a wonderful effect upon the hitherto parched up ground innumerable bulbous roots shooting up their long green stems in every direction and clothing the earth with a profusion of flowers.... It is very delightful to contemplate Nature in her holiday garbs, but unfortunately both the flowers and the coarse green grass are intrinsically worthless.

Gammage comments that Wilson "didn't value anything much". But here, summarised, is the new capitalist approach to land as a source of value. The landscapes that the Aboriginal people created where particularly prized by settlers, not simply for the clear areas, but also for the management of water courses, or the holding back of particular plants. But once they had control the Settlers couldn't maintain these landscapes and massive bush-fires are just one ecological consequence. Before 1788 Australia was very different, but so were the societies that lived there. Gammage concludes:

'Man' made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one. In the Great Sandy Desert women replanted yam tops and scattered millet on soft sand, then watched the seasons: millet crops a year after its first rain. This is farming, but not being a farmer. Doing more would have driven them out of the desert. Mobility let them stay. It imposed a strict and rigid society, but it was an immense gain. It gave people abundant food and leisure, and it made Australia a single estate. Instead of dividing Aborigines into gentry and peasantry, it made them a free people.

Marx and Engels pointed out that examining the economic basis to a society enabled you to understand its structures and social relations. Aboriginal society was based on a different relationship to the land and that enabled a much more equitable and sustainable world. Capitalism is the negation of that. Replacing capitalism with a sustainable world will not mean a return to the aboriginal communities from before 1788. But it will mean learning from their relationship with the land to ensure that future generations can enjoy it.

Bill Gammage's excellent and book is a powerful exploration of how we can understand non-capitalist social relations. He shows how modern Australia arose out of the destruction of a way of life, and consequently a landscape. He challenges racist myths about Australia's indigenous people and reminds us that things do not have to be like they are.

Related Reviews

Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Max Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

Max Hastings is not a natural ally of the left. He is, after all, a former editor of the pro-Tory newspapers the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Yet, despite his politics, his book on the Vietnam War turns out to be both insightful and readable. Unlike some accounts of Vietnam, which overly focus on the American experience in Vietnam, Hasting understands the need for the long sweep of history to understand both the US involvement in the country and their ultimate defeat.

Hastings begins with the French. Their colonial rule of the country generated enormous discontent. Their ousting, but a popular military uprising was an incredible feat of arms for an under-armed national liberation movement. Hastings' vivid account of that most symbolic of defeats for the French, the shambles at Dien Bien Phu, leaves the reader with no other conclusion than colonial racist arrogance led the French to believe that they invincible.

Unfortunately the United States failed to learn the lesson. As American involvement in Vietnam gradually developed from simply advising and funding the enormously corrupt South Vietnamese regime to active military engagement, its representatives behaved exactly like the former colonial rulers. Hastings' writes:

In 1961, and indeed thereafter, there was an insensitivity among policy-makers about the impact that a Western military presence makes. Many harsh things may be justly be said about what communist fighters did to Vietnam, but their footprint on the ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the US military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed, uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA's Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.

Readers will detect that Hastings' is not a fan of the Communist movement that led the struggle to oust the Americans. It's probably fair to say that, on balance, he thinks that Communist victory was a "bad thing", a failure for Western foreign policy. But that does not mean he is gung-ho for the US. In fact his sympathies lie very much with the ordinary Vietnamese who suffered appalling during French and US involvement. In this regard while celebrating (to a certain extent) the expulsion of the French, Hastings sees a fundamental break with the movement that defeated the United States. He concludes that:

The fatal error of the US was to make an almost unlimited commitment to South Vietnam, where its real strategic interest was minuscule, when the North - the enemy - was content to stake all, and faced no requirement to secure or renew popular consent. Moreover, the 1964-65 American takeover of the South, which is what took place, legitimised Vietnamese communism.

Hastings is at his best in the book when he zooms from the strategic overview of politicians like President Johnson, or Kissinger or Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn down to the level of the ordinary solider (on both sides). The anecdotes he tells of the battle fields are often horrific, and he is balanced in making sure he covers the experiences from both sides. Aspects of the conflict that are often ignored - the experience of long-range high-altitude bomber pilots, or Russian and Chinese "advisors" in North Vietnam are covered. He is also scrupulous in trying to give the reader a sense of strategic interests of both sides.

He also is not afraid to expose inconvenient truths. Discussing the enormous corruption of the South Vietnamese government, including the vast sums of money given to them by the US and their involvement in illegal buying and selling of military materiel and the laundering of money. But he notes this could not have happened without "active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of the relatively exalted".

It is no surprise then that Hastings can write:

It is among the themes of this book that the foremost challenge for the allies was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order. Dr Norman Wyndham a... Australian surgeon who led a volunteer medical team in a Vung Tau hospital, was a devout Christian who made himself a fluent Vietnamese-speaker. He wrote in 1967 of the local people: 'Most want a united Vietnam, but not one controlled by the communists... the feeling is growing... that anything would be better than life as it is today.'

One of my major criticisms of Hastings is that his anti-Communism colours his ability to understand the dynamic of those opposing US involvement in Vietnam at home and in the country itself. For instance, he tends to imply that the left at the time (and by extension, the anti-war movement) tended to look positively on Hồ Chí Minh and celebrate a North Vietnamese victory. Hastings does acknowledge that hindsight makes this seem more credible. But I'm also not sure that it was true at the time. Many anti-imperialists understood very clearly that the Communist government of the North was an oppressive one, even in the 1960s. But Hastings doesn't have a framework to understand Imperialism - despite knowing it is real - and so he cannot understand the celebration of anti-Imperialist movements, even if they don't make a perfect social movement. As Lenin said of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, "whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it."

But for Hastings the biggest reason for US defeat was its methods in fighting the war.

The Vietcong exploited their own excellent local intelligence networks to eliminate enemies, often with conspicuous sadism. Yet none of the villagers assembled to witness beheadings and live burials doubted why appointed victims were killed: for opposing the revolution. By contrast, when Americans or ARVN killed civilians, while some where communist activists or sympathisers... others were not. The indiscriminate nature of American-led terror, caused by ignorance about the identities, never mind loyalties, of many of those whom its warriors killed, inflicted as much damage upon US strategic objectives as upon the moral legitimacy of its war effort.

To this we might add the high levels of racism towards the Vietnamese (even their allies) and the indiscriminate nature of warfare that involved blanket bombing and chemical weapons. As an aside Hastings downplays the scale of the impact of Agent Orange. He seems incorrect here as my understanding is that it was much worse than Hastings suggests. I hope to find further reading to clarify this.

Despite the length of the book, I thought some aspects weren't dealt with in enough detail. One key aspect to this was the anti-war movement in the west. Hastings mentions it, but doesn't go into detail and he certainly doesn't really get deep into the links between this and the growing discontent in the US military. There is nothing here about the anti-war newspapers produced by military personal, and while he covers events like the fragging of unpopular officers, he tends to imply it was more individual discontent rather than systemic, organised rebellion. Despite this he displays a subtle and sympathetic understanding of the reality of class and racial differences within the US army itself.

These points, which probably reflect Hasting's own prejudices and politics, I was very surprised by the book. It demonstrates that honest bourgeois historians can produce remarkably insightful accounts. Hastings shows how little the political leaders in the US cared for the Vietnamese, and the cynicism with which they condemned thousands to their deaths. For a book of nearly 700 pages of main text I was unusually gripped to the very end. Hastings has an ability, helped in no small part by being actually present in the briefing room and on the battle field as a junior reporter, to link the big political decisions, with the reality for the US marine, or the North Vietnamese soldier. It makes for a very useful account of what was an appalling war.

Related Reviews

Marlantes - Matterhorn
O'Brien - If I Die In A Combat Zone

Carl J. Griffin & Briony McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality & the Landscape

2019 was a very interesting year to be a socialist in Manchester. The bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 was marked by a plethora of events: a controversial new memorial was (finally) unveiled, walking tours, exhibitions, meetings and a major day of marches to a central rally all took place. I suspect that there were many more, smaller scale, events in schools, colleges and trade union meetings. At those events I attended I was struck by the contemporary parallels with Peterloo. Many speakers also noted this - not because they expected an imminent cavalry attack - but because there was a sense of deep discontent, poverty and inequality about Britain in 2019.

Manchester has, to a certain extent, always marked Peterloo. In a recent book Katrina Navickas has shown how the protest was a touchstone for numerous protest marches in the years and decades after 1819. Radicals and social movements sought legitimacy for their contemporary causes by associating themselves with Peterloo - by marching to St. Peters Fields or invoking the name of the massacre.

But as Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 shows this is nothing new. Those of us who have been involved in radical and trade union politics for a while will know our movement is often more fond of celebrating past victories and defeats than it is of fighting to win new struggles. But this was very much true of the past. As Nicola Whyte says in the introduction to her chapter in the the book:

Memory has not atrophied, but rather the relationship between society and its past always takes on new forms, being wrought in the dialogical space between official and unofficial perspectives. Meanings do not merely shift with the passage of time, they are renewed through the evocation of various, multiple and unpredictable pasts.... people interpret and employ the past for diverse ends, both as a social resource and means to articulate their own life-histories.

Whyte explores these concepts by looking at Mousehold Heath, the site outside Norwich where in 1549 Robert Kett and thousands of rebels camped as part of what became known as the "Camping Time". While 1549 rebellion was part of a much larger period of rebellion Andy Wood has shown elsewhere how it was highlighted to posterity by the local establishment who wanted to use it's lessons to undermine potential future rebellions.

But Mousehold Heath was a site of protest going back to 1381 and for long after 1549. A 1589 map reproduced in the book is as much as record of past events as it is of contemporary locations and pathways. It is a "way of seeing" as Whyte explains, a "lord's view of the world...that chronicles past events and actions attaching them to physical places, and embedding a hierarchical understanding of social relations in the landscape". Even in the 21st century there were protest events on the Heath that had links back to the distant past. It is not enough to think about the impact of an event like 1549 through "oral tradition" or the records people have:

Memories do not simply reside in the mind to be evidenced in the speech patterns of local people; rather, memories are made through routine practices and experiences of being in and making landscapes. Memories of Mousehold Heath operated at the level of the everyday, remembering past generations and... the material work of day-to-day resistance. A landscape approach provides a useful methodological and conceptual framework for our understanding of the dynamic and contingent relationship between people and the material worlds in which they lived.

Such an approach is further developed in Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda's discussion on the Midlands Rising of 1607. This "all but forgotten" event saw a major, though relatively localised protest against enclosure in Northamptonshire. However 1607 was not an isolated event in the grander historical narrative. The authors put the rebellion in a "longer-term historical context and wider landscape setting". For them, the key question is the way that "national and local politics of land" shaped events prior to, during and after 1607. Primarily this relates to the way that the enclosure of previously open lands impacted upon those who lived and worked in the localities - thus 1607 was not a unique event, rather a peak of struggle. As the authors write:

We can read the Midlands Rising not simply as a response to an unprecedented upsurge in the scale and frequency of enclosure in the English Midlands in the decade prior to 1607, but rather the most striking movement in an ongoing surge of discontent with enclosure which had been building at least through much of the previous reign.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that class struggle "was [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight". History is full of peaks of rebellions and revolutions, but these are really the more visible parts of a continuum. McDonagh and Rodda bring this out extremely well as part of their discussion on 1607, an event that continued to inspire and worry both the authorities and the lower orders for years afterwards. The authors highlight several examples of those who raised the spectre of 1607 as part of their struggles (and legal cases) in the aftermath.

A similar continuum of protest is discussed in Simon Sandall's account of the protests in the Forest of Dean when protesters and rebels retained memories of previous social organisation (the Mine Law Court) to justify and bolster contemporary struggles against injustices caused by the development of capitalist relations in the region. This was more than simple tradition, but an active use of tradition as a weapon in their struggle - to inspire participants and give vindication to a cause.

Ruth Mather's chapter takes a different approach looking at the hitherto mostly ignored subject of the way that protest was remembered within the homes of working class people. Visitors to the Peoples' History Museum in Manchester and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford will know that the events like Peterloo were often commemorated by the issuing and sale of "memorabilia". But this was more than simply the purchase of pictures or plates that serve as a talking point, it was part of creating a radical tradition of memory and connection to the past.

This was not just about physical objects. Mather notes Peterloo was memorialised through "radical child-rearing". This included the naming of babies after radicals (136 children received the unfortunate first name 'Henry Hunt' after Peterloo), but also the production of materials to instruct children in the history of struggle. A map produced as a teaching aid, is Mather says, "physically materialising reminders of the events of the day" to "carry forward the aims of the radicals...to sustain the movement into the next generation."

Mather's chapter, draws on the memoir of Peterloo leader Samuel Bamford. She notes that the description of his home notes with pride the items that decorate a typical working class home. I raised a smile at this because in a recent visit to Rochdale museum's exhibition on Peterloo I noted that among the exhibits were Bamford reading glasses. The use of object to venerate, remember and memorialise history continues.

Samuel Bamford glasses, among other historical objects
associated with Peterloo in Rochdale Museum (my photo).

Space precludes a detailed discussion of all the chapters in this excellent book. They all, in different ways, contribute to a wider understanding of how radical movements create spaces for memorialising that draw on the past. Rose Wallis says in her discussion of the Captain Swing movement that "the memory of popular protest was... central in shaping both the resort to protest in the present and the responses of the authorities".

The past cannot be separated from the present. Historical struggles shape the terrain that contemporary women and men fight on, and within which they try to shape the future. Radicals planning incendiary attacks in 1830, riots in the Forest of Dean or organising marches to St Peters Fields in 1819 drew on their experiences, knowledge and understanding of what had gone before to try and be victorious. Similarly the forces of the establishment and authority learn their own lessons, for their own class. But what this book also shows, is that those memories are not simply remembered from generation to generation, but are often written into the very landscape that people act upon. As Carl Griffin comments,

we might usefully understand plebeian communities, individual bodies and the landscapes in which they lived as bearing the characteristics inherited of past tragedies, something akin to a cultural form of Lamarckism,... It is all there, but it is just that in the shift from the personal to the community narrative, the archive is used selectively, past events become written in the matter of place and in the body of the community...Through remembering to remember and remembering to forget, the past was constantly folded, remade, reanimated, becoming something always new.

Understanding how the past has been interpreted and memorialised thus helps us understand the actions and motivations of later generations. Learning from protest history is more than simply empowering our contemporary struggles - it helps explain the world we are in and the movements we have. Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh's book is a wonderful insight into these processes. The individual chapters contribute to the central theme and are also very illuminating on their specific subjects. I highly recommend this collection to those interested in the history of protest and the writing of that protest.

Note: I do feel bound to comment on the disappointingly high price of Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Aimed at an academic audience it was only because the publisher had a massive online sale that reduced the price by about £60 that I was able to afford to get hold of it. Sadly this will price the book out of reach of the hands of almost any ordinary activists and readers who do not have access to an academic library. It is a real shame because its contents would appeal greatly to a current generation of radicals who might want to learn from the past.

Related Reviews

Navickas - Protest & the Politics of Space & Place 1789-1848
Griffin - The Rural War
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the making of Early Modern England
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Poole - Peterloo: The English Uprising
Riding - Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre

Chris Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83

I was motivated to re-read Class Struggles in Eastern Europe by two anniversaries. The first was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall - the emblematic event of the great transformations that shook Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. The second date was the tenth anniversary of the death of Chris Harman himself, a socialist and revolutionary who dedicated his life to the struggle for socialism from below.

It is this second aspect of Harman's life - the belief that socialism was the "emancipation of the working class, by the working class" which shapes this book. Harman, like others in the International Socialist tradition, argued that the states of Eastern Europe were not "socialist" or "communist" but "state capitalist", something he argues here was not simply a arbitrary name but a "definition, in the full meaning of the word". He continues:

The term 'state capitalism' captures the essence of the East European societies because it locates within them a dynamic which determines their historical development - the dynamic of competitive accumulation.

It is the competitive accumulation, caused by East European economies' competition with the "capitalist" western economies and lead by a bureaucratic class which drove the attacks on living standards, wages, freedoms and democratic rights, which encouraged the struggles described in the book. As Harman explains:

Without the drive to accumulate, there is no explanation as to why a motley collection of planners, managers, party leaders, generals and police chiefs come to form a solid phalanx, united under a single discipline in opposition to the demands of the rest of society.

Harman writes that there are two general myths that covered how people viewed the Eastern bloc (before 1989). The first, from some on the left, was the idea that these were socialist societies of one form or the other. The second, more generally from the right and their media mouthpieces, was the idea that these societies were frozen in time, lacking freedom where dissent was ruthlessly held down by near unstoppable security forces.

Yet, as the book shows, Eastern Europe from the imposition of bureaucratic rule was shaped by class struggle. Strikes, protests, occupations and insurrection were relatively common as ordinary workers and peasants fought for more rights and better living conditions. Class Struggles in Eastern Europe begins with a short history of the development of the Eastern Europe regimes. These arose, not from the mass struggles of workers and peasants, but from military imposition by Russia, and it was the Soviet Union that initially shaped (or reshaped) industrial economies in it's own interest - "[Russia] matched the Marshall Plan's consolidation of western capitalism in one half of Europe with their own form of consolidation in the other half".

The reality of "competitive accumulation" for Eastern Europe was regular, cyclical crisis. Over the decades covered, repeated attempts by governments to focus investment or cut wages failed to solve underlying economic problems - exactly like capitalist governments and companies cannot fix their own economies. The crises led to splits in the ruling class as different sections of the East European ruling classes, while united in their desire to maintain the system and continue to exploit workers, argued about different strategies. It was these splits that time and again gave workers' movements the opportunity to break through. As Harman writes about the East German workers uprising in 1953:

The SED leadership later complained that functionaries had 'fallen in to panic, had slipped into positions of capitulationism and opportunism in relation to the enemies of the party'. But the confusion of the functionaries was not an accident. It was the inevitable consequence of the splits at the top of East German and Russian society. And these splits were no accident: they flowed from the inner economic dynamic of state capitalist society, as the examples of Poland and Hungary three years alter were to show even more dramatically.

Or, writing about Czechsolavika in 1968:

The first strikes broke out at a time when the whole apparatus of bureaucratic control was in turmoil. This was reflected in the attitude of local bureaucrats to the strikes. One automatic reaction was to condemn the strikes out of hand ... But some sections of the bureaucracy saw possible benefit to themselves in the strikes. Junior managers often regarded them as a lever to remove more senior Novotnyite officials or to gain a degree of autonomy for the plant they controlled.

Of the "class struggles" described in the book many will be known already to readers. Two events stand out above the others. The first is the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the second the experience of Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s. The Hungarian Revolution deserves to listed alongside other great working class revolutions. Today it is usually remembered for the brutal intervention of Russian tanks, but 1956 was marked by all the elements of previous revolutions - mass strikes, demonstrations and workplace occupations and, crucially, the creation of workers councils which in the words of the British Communist Party's Peter Fryer, "bore a striking resemblance to the workers peasants and soldiers councils which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 revolution and in February 1917". But tragically, as Harman shows, there was a lack of any revolutionary minority that could argue for the seizure of power during the period of "dual power". In fact the leadership of the Hungarian workers' councils consciously avoided 'political decisions' leaving the existing state together with the armed might of the Russian military to retake the whole political space.

In Poland, there was no intervention from Russia,

precisely because of the depth and radical nature of the Polish movement compared to that in Czechoslovakia. They viewed a Russian military takeover of Poland as a very hazardous undertaking indeed. Poland was a much larger country with a much larger working class than Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Its population had historic traditions of armed resistance to invasions.

Yet the movement in Poland also failed to break through and was defeated, with its activists arrested, imprisoned and sometimes killed. In this case, while individuals were drawing revolutionary conclusions during the height of Solidarity's workers' revolt. There was also no political party capable of linking together the struggles and challenging the vacillations of reformist leaders like Lech Walesa who were terrified of radical action from below.

Writing about Hungary in 1956, but with words that are applicable to all the struggles he writes about here, Harman argues that:

The real significance of the Hungarian revolution does not rest in any attempt at a crude balance sheet, with workers' deaths on one side and economic gains on the other. It is to be found elsewhere. The myth that 'totalitarian', state capitalist societies are immutable, with their populations brainwashed into acquiescence, was smashed once and for all. Hungary proved that the Stalinist monolith itself bred forces that could tear it asunder.

The last part of the book is a discussion of why, in both east and west, accumulation leads to crisis and, often workers resistance. Harman lays out an argument that any relief for the rulers of the Eastern bloc would only be short. In 1989 the Iron Curtain collapsed in a few months as ruling classes were no longer able to solve the contradictions of their society and prevent reform or revolution. But if Harman's arguments about State Capitalism seem less important today, his wider theme - the need for activists to come together in revolutionary parties in order that the next struggle is victorious - remains utterly crucial. Class Struggles in Eastern Europe is a brilliant explanation of the importance of revolutionary organisation, through these forgotten accounts of workers' struggle.

Related Reviews

Harman - Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis & The Relevance of Marx
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Revolution in the 21st Century
Binns, Cliff & Harman - Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism
Harman - Marxism and History
Dent - Hungary 1930 and the forgotten history of a mass protest
Fryer - Hungarian Tragedy

Peter Ackerman & Jack Duvall - A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict

In this wide-ranging history authors Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall attempt to demonstrate that nonviolent strategies are the most successful and viable way of bringing about social change. Unfortunately their argument is limited by their understanding of social change and because they fail to get to the heart of what capitalism is.

The book covers a lot of 20th century territory. It begins with the 1905 Russian Revolution which, rather surprisingly for those in the Marxist and revolutionary socialist traditions, turns out to have be considered one of the earliest examples of a successful nonviolent movement. Figures like Gandhi and Tolstoy considered it a success because it did not degenerate into violence and introduced the first democratic victories under the Tsar.

Right at the start of the book then we already see the limitations of Ackerman and Duvall's philosophy. Firstly the 1905 Revolution was hardly a success for democracy. The limited enfranchisement that the Tsar granted was very much a toothless parliament, utterly unable to make any major changes that could benefit the mass of the population. Further though, the Revolution itself was limited by its failure to engage in a more forceful confrontation with the ruling class - a point that Trotsky makes in his own account 1905. Most importantly though, their account fails to acknowledge that one of the significant developments of the Russian Revolution of 1905 was the creation of workers' councils, in particular the Petrograd Soviet. These organs of bottom up democracy formed the basis for new ways of organising society, yet the authors fail to elaborate on what this might have meant for radical change.

Their account of 1905 demonstrates how the authors are, much like Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's more recent theoretical book Why Civil Resistance Workers, limited by their belief that Bourgeois democracy is the highest achievable ambition for social movements fighting oppression and dictatorship.

Other chapters - whether discussing the 1923 German protests against the French Occupation of the Ruhr, the First Palestinian Intifada and the Anti-Apartheid movements (as well as many more) have many interesting accounts of the struggle, but fail to get to grips with key issues - in particular the nature of the capitalist state.

There is also, and this is replicated in contemporary debates about violence in social movements, a tendency to create a false polarisation between violence and nonviolence. In fact, many of the movements illustrated show their is an interplay, and on occasion there is a grudging acknowledgement that at times violence played a part in the successful outcomes - one example is the South African struggle against Apartheid, where the authors show that the violent attacks on police and collaborators meant that state authorities were cautious about entering many black areas.

The authors appear to be motivated by a desire to discredit revolutionary politics in the Marxist tradition, through their understanding of this is extremely crude - limited to suggesting that Lenin and Trotsky favoured violence simply because they thought revolutions had to be violent. In fact both Lenin and Trotsky understood that the nature of the capitalist state meant that it would have to be violently overthrown and a new state, capable of physically resisting counter-revolution created.

Finally the authors also create a false argument when they look at what makes movements successful. Highlighting strikes, stayaways, sit-ins and mass protest movements they seem to think these are somehow dismissed by other revolutionaries. In fact, it is precisely because workers have collective power to change society that socialists constantly emphasise the need for more strikes and mass protests. Sometimes I got the feeling that the authors believed that only they understood this.

While it's been influential, I suspect that many people who have read A Force More Powerful found it interesting, but not particularly useful in arguing a course forward. Readers might want to look at some of the literature that comes out of the revolutionary Marxist tradition if they want a better understanding of what can make social movements successful.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - 1905
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Chenoweth & Stephan - Why Civil Resistance Works

Duff Hart-Davis - Our Land At War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939-1945

The Second World War was a transformative period for British rural society. The restrictions of wartime production, the expansion of agriculture, the massive increase in the use of mechanised vehicles for ploughing and transport began the transition to an industrialised landscape in the 1950s. There were tremendous social changes too - as women worked the land and forests in huge numbers - and agriculture communities lost population to the armed forces and war industries.

So it was with interest that I picked up Duff Hart-Davis' book on rural Britain during the World War Two. But it is with great disappointment that I finished it. The book is constructed with a series of chapters looking at different aspects of the author's topic. Unfortunately these chapters are marred by two problems for those interested in agricultural history. Firstly most of the content is in the form of interesting (and entertaining) anecdote, and secondly many of the chapters and contents are only loosely connected to the topic.

For instance there are about 15 pages devoted to the Women's Land Army and about ten to the (often neglected) Women's Forestry Service and the Forestry Commission. But more devoted to the impact of the war on sports (is what happened to Lords' cricket ground anything to do with the rural experience at all?) and hunting. The experience of women working in fields and forests was fundamental to the social changes that took place during the war, yet is reduced here to a mere handful of pages. Similar comments could be made about many other chapters. Do we really need to know about the debates about whether Churchill should join the Navy's flagship during D-Day? Or the experience of animals at London Zoo? Or the details of V1 bombs landing on London? Almost a chapter of information on code-breaking at Bletchly Park is included apparently solely because the stately home was in the countryside.

All of these are interesting, but are extremely peripheral to the subject matter, and are often only included because of a tenuous link (V1s and V2s did land on fields sometimes...) Even when more anecdotes would have been illuminating we learn precious little - for instance there must be much more to say about the role of prisoners of war in the countryside than the handful of pages here.

It must be said that many of the anecdotes and short stories are highly entertaining, but give us barely a snapshot into wider experiences. While Hard-Davis does acknowledge that there is a major transformation going on, he tends to see this in a romanticised way - a golden era of old ways disappearing never to be returned. In fact romanticism pervades the whole book - lots of young boys exploring crashed bombers while out blackberrying.

Yet we learn nothing really about how the War changed agriculture. Did those years improve lives? Did they ultimately make Britain more or less dependent on imported food? What happened to wages, housing and living conditions?

If you want another highly romanticised view of life in wartime based on a few amusing anecdotes then this will while away a few hours. Otherwise avoid - you'd be better reading the chapters in Angus Calder's The People's War devoted to the countryside and Alun Howkin's excellent book The Death of Rural England.

Related Reviews

Calder - The People's War
Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Kynaston - Austerity Britain 1945 - 1951
Howkins - The Death of Rural England

Robert Poole - Peterloo: The English Uprising

During the massacre of peaceful protesters by cavalry and yeomanry at St. Peter's fields in Manchester on August 16 1819, several cavalrymen answered cries for mercy with the chilling response:

"If we let you go, you will come again some other time."

It's a telling comment that neatly sums up the reasons behind what became known as the Peterloo massacre. Peterloo was, in the words of EP Thompson, "class war", and it was the culmination of an extended period of class conflict that raged across England, but was particularly focused in the north-west. Some people have been sceptical about the title of Robert Poole's new book because "Uprising" implies for them a insurrectionist revolutionary moment. But what Poole shows very clearly is that this was a period of mass working class discontent and the ruling class responded in the most brutal fashion.

Poole puts Peterloo (and the preceding discontent) into a historical context. One of the most important factors is the war with France, and following Linda Colley's book Britons he argues that "arming the people for national defence" against Revolutionary France was a "revolutionary departure, with profound consequences". The government had won the war through mass mobilisation and heavy taxation. The end of the war brought hopes for respite, but it also left a huge number with experience of military mobilisation. But instead of relief came years of austerity. The government "had not fought off revolution abroad in order to concede democracy at home".

Ironically, the hatred of revolutionary abroad exacerbated the response of the government to demands for Reform. Few in London appear to have an sense of a nuanced response to mass petitioning for relief and reform. Today politicians are adept at dangling the hope of future change, but in the post-Napoleonic war period the response was almost always to use force and the law to stop or undermine social movements. Poole argues that this was particularly an issue in Manchester where the Collegiate church ("autocratic, secretive, enterprising and mired in corruption") ran the "greatest village". It was here that "the conflict between property and democracy was played out". There was, suffice to say, little democracy. Manchester's deputy constable, Joseph Nadin "the real ruler of Manchester" according to a contemporary newspaperman, corruptly ran the city with an iron fist. The Manchester oligarchy had "tight control" over local institutions and used them to try and undermine potential discontent where-ever it reared its head. It was this group who made sure the massacre took place, but they did it in the context of national government policy.

Followers of Tom Paine had left a radical tradition across Lancashire, but growing discontent across the region, particularly in the weaving districts, lead to the eruption of new radical groups, publications and, in particular, meetings. Activists like John Cartwright brought the practice of mass petitioning to the manufacturing areas and he and his comrades became adept at finding ways around the limitations imposed by the law. Demands at the time for reform of parliament are often understood as the start of the movement for democracy - this is of course true, and Poole details at length exactly how rotten and corrupt Parliament in the early 19th century was. But he also points out that Reform was also about economic justice. As he points out, the failure of petitioning by Stockport weavers in August 1816 meant that for them reform came to be seen "as the only option for survival". It would also have driven a strong cynicism towards those at the top of society who ignored their impoverishment.

The precise nature of the demands for reform were well thought out. As Poole says, twenty years before the Chartists five of their six demands were being raised at meetings up and down the country. Through the period from 1816 to 1819 there was a groundswell of radical activity, centered on the working class areas of the north-west, demanding change. These meetings were interpreted as revolutionary threats by the government. Poole details the way that the organisers consciously built these up into a mass movement. The August meeting at St Peter's Field in 1819 would be a climatic event that Henry Hunt in particular saw as the point when the government would have to give way.

The problem was that the government had no intention of giving way. Poole shows how the Peterloo massacre became an almost inevitable reaction to a growing mass working class movement.

This was not a challenge for political power. There were revolutionaries who wanted fundamental change and the symbols of the movement, in particularly the red caps of liberty, were understood as representing radical change. As a result pitched battles were fought between government forces and workers at mass meetings over who got the "colours" and Poole quotes many sources from Peterloo about how the yeomanry took revenge for previous failures to get these symbols. But this was not a conscious revolutionary movement.

Hunt's strategy, the "mass platform movement of 1819" had a problem. As Poole explains:

The post-war radical movement made its appeals in the name of 'the people of England' rather than the working class, to the past rather than the future, and to existing constitutional rights rather than new-found revolutionary principles. There was no master plan in 1819. The natural strategy was improvised... Hunt tried to steer a middle way, using sheer force of numbers to persuade the government to back down without getting himself or his followers arrested and with no real idea of how it would all end... Hunt hoped that the threat of insurrection would make military intervention less likely, but from the governments's point of view it made it all the more necessary.

And in August 1819 they did just that. Events at St Peter's Fields were nothing short of premeditated mass murder. The state was teaching the movement a lesson. Hunt's faith "in legal methods" undermined the movement, but that's not to put too much of a blame on him. Hindsight is wonderful, and the government was guilty very much of seeing revolutionary conspiracy where "reformers displayed community".

Two hundred years later, what is the judgement? At the time Peterloo was a massive shock to the movement. But I don't think it was the defeat it is often seen as. The peaceful march to St Peters Fields that was followed by massacre saw an explosion of rioting in the city and there were accounts afterwards of those going home preparing to "return" again but this time with arms. It reminds me of the reaction of the black-working class areas of the United States to the assassination of the pacifist Martin Luther King Jnr. His killing led to an explosion of violence and riot. At the time, the government and its cronies thought they had won. Certainly the media believed it was a famous defeat for reform. But Reform did come and today, with all its limitations, we do have at least limited democracy - thought not yet economic and social justice. In that sense the protesters at Peterloo lost a battle, but the war was won. It is an open question about what might have happened had the movement not had Peterloo. Certainly it would have grown, and might have approached the revolutionary levels that France had experienced. I tend to think that the most likely event would have been a massacre on a different day, in a different place. After all, as Poole shows, Peterloo was in no sense unique.

The 200th anniversary of Peterloo has been much discussed and there have been some wonderful events and exhibitions across Greater Manchester to mark it. Robert Poole's book is, perhaps the best book ever written on the subject. It's well written, exhaustive and covers every aspect of the movement - from the central (though neglected) role of women in the movements, to the forgotten individuals who shouted the slogan "liberty or death" and meant it. It is a masterpiece of historical writing and should be read, not just by those that want to understand Peterloo but by those who want to see how mass struggle was at the heart of the movements that won the rights we have today.

Related Reviews

Riding - Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre
Navickas - Protest & the Politics of Space & Place 1789-1848
Hobson - Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Hammond & Hammond - The Skilled Labourer

Saul David - Victoria's Wars

The period of Queen Victoria's reign 1837 to 1901 saw the consolidation of the British Empire over it's most important possessions, specifically the Indian sub-continent. Full expansion into Asia, the Middle East and Africa was only just beginning, but it was certainly during Victoria's era that the system began to take shape. The period saw the end of the old rule by companies like the East India and the beginning of devolved state power. It also saw the British Army become a modern military - ending antiquated systems like the buying of commissions for officers, uniforms that were more fit for use in the varied climates of the Empire and the use of more modern weaponry.

So Saud David's book covers a fascinating period of social and military transformation. It is accessible, well-written and entertaining. At times the author is prone to turns of phrase that are somewhat uncouth. Were the mutinying soldiers in 1857 joined by "the rabble from the bazaar" or did ordinary people join them? Is it fair, relevant or even appropriate for David to describe Queen Victoria as "far from unattractive (if you liked your women plump and homely, more milkmaid than courtesan)"?

This is very much a military history. The various campaigns are described in detail, particularly some of the key battles. David dwells on the heroism of British (and occasionally allied) troops, particularly given the relevance of the Victoria Cross to the Queen's personal interest in the military. This isn't a particularly left wing or socialist history of the period, though David highlights how the British government's involvement around the world was driven by their desire to protect commercial interests. This is most clear perhaps, in David's chapter on the Opium Wars, he comments, for instance, that Prince Albert feared that the fall of the Chinese Emperor would "usher in the anti-capitalist Taipings, with all the dire consequences that would have for British commerce".  In the event, following the end of four years of war, vast quantities of opium were brought from the British Empire - a vastly profitable industry which proves, once again, that capitalists are quite happy to make money from appalling trades if they are able.

One of the good things about David's book is that he demonstrates just how useless the British command could be. Not a few of the chapters (Afghanistan and the Crimea are cases in point) deal with the debacles that followed British imperial arrogance. It was these that drove military reform, and Albert had a peripheral role in that.

I was less convinced by David's thesis that Victoria played the central role he attributes to her. He argues that she was "shaping, supporting and sometimes condemning her government's foreign policy - but never ignoring it. And through all this she was helped and guided by her talented and hugely underrated husband, Prince Albert". The evidence that David presents does show the Queen closely following events and putting an argument, but I didn't quite feel that he proved his point. In fact, his epilogue where he describes Victoria's Wars as "the flexing of Britain's imperial muscle" and continues to quote Robert Lowe on Imperialism: "the assertion of absolute force over others... to impose our own conditions at the bayonet's point." In other words Victoria's influence may have shaped particularly responses (her indignation during the Crimean War certainly helped transform Britain's activity in the latter half) but the wars arose out of the needs of British capitalism, and were driven by those interests first and foremost.

Readers who are looking for an accessible account of Britain's military actions in the mid to late 19th century will find this a good start, particularly the accounts of the Crimea and the Opium Wars (I was less taken by his analysis of the 'Indian Mutiny' which David appears to see solely as the consequence of conspiracy, rather than the outcome of British rule). But having read this, I'd highly recommend Mike Davies' Late Victorian Holocausts and John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried - two books that properly put the wars into the context of the emergence of British capital as an international force.

Related Reviews

Macrory - Signal Catastrophe: The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842

Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts

Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

Thomas Firbank - I Bought a Mountain

Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain was a runaway bestseller when it was first published in the midst of World War Two. It must have been the ideal book for those seeking escape from the shortages and danger of wartime life. The book begins with the author purchasing a 2,400 acre Snowdonian sheep farm and follows him, very roughly, through a calendar year (though the story jumps back and forth) as he writes about what takes place on the farm. The accounts of sheep gathering, dipping and selling at market are interpersed with other stories from the farm as Firbanks and his wife Esme Cummins learn how to manage the farm and develop other side projects for more income. Diversification has been a buzz word for years for farmers in the UK, but if I Bought a Mountain tells us anything it's that farmers have been looking for ways to add to their income for as long as there have been farms.

Firbank's writing is entertaining and easy to read. There's plenty of self-deprecating humour thought a little more humour aimed at some of his employees. In fact this highlights one aspect of the book that I found a little troublesome - Firbanks is very much the farmer and owner. Though he certainly works hard and learns the trade, he is also free enough from day to day chores to spend long weekends away with Esme climbing mountains and hill-walking, or driving the length and breadth of the country to buy something for their latest whim. The real workers are those that do all the work, and often get little recompense - likely because they were those who where hired to do whatever the owner needed. I noted, for instance, that when Firbanks and Cummins setup a tea shop and are overwhelmed with the response one of the farm-workers Thomas, dresses up in his best suit to help on a Sunday and was, according to Firbank "quite over-come by emotion when we presented him with a supply of cigarettes to repay his help". No extra pay for someone working on their only day off, despite the big extra earnings. Firbanks cynically comments "one cannot buy loyalty; one can only reward it".

Firbanks purchased the farm for £5000 just at the point the world economy collapsed in 1930. The labour of him, Esme and the other workers make it pay - to the extent their able to install a hydro-electric plant, as well as experiment with poultry and pigs. I understand the book helped encourage a big "back to the land" movement in the post-war period, though few of those wanting to do it would have had that amount of cash.

Those interested in farming will, of course, find much of interest. There is also a lot of fascinating period detail and Firbanks describes how him and others, including Cummins, break the record for climbing all the Welsh 300 feet mountains. Historians of mountaining will also find the discussion of 1927 Great Gully disaster interesting. But readers shouldn't think they're picking up a book about rural Wales through the eyes of ordinary people - in fact, Firbank's somewhat arrogant style becomes a little grating in places. I would also encourage readers to compare it to James Rebanks' contempory book The Shepherd's Life not least because of how much of sheep-farming remains unchanged despite nearly 90 years of time passing.

Not mentioned in the book is the post-war account of what took place. Firbanks and Cummins' sepearated and Firbanks gave the farm Dyffryn Mymbyr to his former wife. Firbanks went on to have a successful business and writing career (building on an illustrious military career described in his follow up book I Bought a Star). Esme Cummins' remarried and rank the farm until her death, but also became a campaigning advocate for Snowdonia fighting for the right of people to enjoy the landscape and places. On her death Dyffryn Mymbyr was gifted to the National Trust who now run it as a luxury self-catering cottage - something that I suspect all the previous owners would find distasteful, but is sadly all-too representative of what has happened to British agriculture.

Related Reviews

Rebanks - The Shepherd's Life
Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Hasback - A History of the English Agricultural Labourer
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Bell - Men and the Fields

Mick Reed & Roger Wells – Class, Conflict & Protest in the English Countryside 1700-1880

The early 1980s saw intense debates among scholars studying rural social history in England. This volume brings together some of the key articles from these debates, which while frequently intense and polemical were always insightful. For non-specialists, the key debates might seem somewhat esoteric – they focus on the nature of social protest and the different contexts in which protest took place. But these debates are of more than specialist interest as they are really about how people protest. I was often reminded, while reading these essays, of Marx and Engels’ dictum that class struggle is sometimes visible and at other times hidden. Protest is not always the highly visible struggle of strikes, riots and insurrection.

The book is framed by two essays that put forward a study of contemporary rural studies. In the opening essay by Mick Reed, he argues that rural history has been limited by mistaken framing of key concepts. He also shows how, in the period covered, the traditional social relations in the rural village were breaking down. A transition from a more collaborative economy (and there are some fascinating examples of cashless economies) to ones were capital (and capitalism) dominated. This is not to say there wasn’t class struggle – far from it, but Reed argues that class itself is complicated, so class struggle is more complex:

Class is not about opposition and antagonism – and of course, power. But there are no simple lines of cleavage that can separate classes into opposing and antagonistic camps.

Here Reed is getting to the heart of the debate that is developed in the essays. I don't agree 100 percent here, because there are simple lines of cleavage between classes – that’s their relationship to the means of production - which is what leads to class struggle. But Reed is correct in that in the period discussed some of these relationships are being crystallised out and so class struggle itself can be much more complex than relations in rural situations than in urban areas or industrial environments in the period considered. As the essays in this volume that deal with the Captain Swing insurrections of 1831 show some farmers (who were a capitalist employing class) sided with the mass of the rural labourers, because they shared some interests (eg the abolition of tithes).

The opening essay by Roger AE Wells (1979) generated much of the debate that followed. Wells argues that “covert” protest, by which ne and other historians meant protest done under cover of anonymity – threatening letters, arson - not hidden protests that might not be recorded (mumbling in pubs, or brief work stoppages) – was the principle form of protest between 1700 and 1850. This was not, he emphasises, “political radicalism” in the sense of Chartism, but rather ongoing struggle against the reality of agriculture work and the changes to farming – such as the changes to traditional employment terms.

Andrew Charlesworth responds (1980) by arguing that Wells “neglected the social component of that process: the changes in the daily lives of the agriculture labourers that emphasised for them their new condition as a proletariat, as a group separate from the employers.” He emphasises the importance of the “open” village, free of landlord control and containing much more diverse groupings of labourers and small artisans separate from the “patriarchal web of control of the farmhouse and the ‘close’ village.” Thus, for Charlesworth, the explosion in collective struggle by labourers as a class was far more important than incidents such as “threatening letters and arson” and represented “overt, direct collective action”.

It is tempting here to follow Charlesworth over Wells, if only because collective action such as strikes clearly left much more of a mark on the rural proletariat even if they didn’t leave quite so much fear in the minds of the landowners and farmers. But Charlesworth ignores the point that Marx and Engels makes – not all class struggle is overt. I tend to agree more with J.E. Archer’s point when he argues that Charlesworth and Wells don’t actually agree with each other on what makes up “covert protest”. He is right to highlight that “Well’s conception of social protest is somewhat broader than Charlesworth’s”. Indeed, he continues by pointing out that much covert and overt struggle (defined loosely as arson and strikes) did tend to co-exist even if one dominated. Archer writes:

Labourers and rural working-class communities appear to have been quite selective in their choice of tactics when furthering a dispute. For example, disputes over charity rights and enclosures usually produced mass meetings and demonstrations in the full light of day and in full view of the police…. Examples… show how overt protest existed alongside covert unrest... In 1844 a year renowned for incendiarism, the village of Snettisham (Norfolk) experienced a serious enclosure dispute. Arson was not employed by the protesters, but instead, they took to felling a large number of trees on the disputed land despite the presence of a large body of heavily armed police.

A further essay by Dennis Mills and Brian Short, undermines Wells’ reliance on the “open-closed” model of the countryside to model locations and types of struggle. These two authors point out that Wells’ own research is highly restrictive to a single parish (Burwash, Sussex). In discussing the nature of protest they uncover some fascinating examples of collective action in agricultural communities – eg the mass leaving of workers at the same time at ends of contracts to punish a bad employer. These lead Mills and Short to argue:

Conflict extends beyond the category of protest success and failure are not to be measured I a schematic way; existence within the social formation of groups other capital and labour allows the possibility of alliances between different groups on specific issues and the mediation of class and power relations by these groups.

In other words, class struggle is much more dynamic and complex than many of the authors suggest – even in, for instance, one closed village “below the surface of the ‘necessarily subservient village there was resistance by an ‘underground’, and almost all men were poachers, whose motivation, amongst other things, was ‘to get even with squires and games laws as well as with ‘Church and State’.  They continue “equally important, conflict occurred within employer’ worker relationships in both open’ and ‘closed’ villages.”

What to conclude from these debates? Firstly, it is clear that simplistic models that assume particular social relationships based on ownership of land (closed versus open villages) do not hold up to scrutiny. Secondly, class struggle and protest is far more diverse than a simple dichotomy of arson or strikes. Thirdly, the particular nature of relations in the English countryside could lead to dynamic alliances between different classes. Finally, the development of class consciousness amongst the rural working class meant that struggle took many forms, but just as with the urban workers, it was near constant. Outbreaks of overt (or covert) struggle might make the headlines, but represented a peak in struggle rather than its appearance out of nowhere.

It is interesting to see all these essays together. Roger Wells’ final, lengthy, essay brings together many different aspects of rural protest, but what I got most from was the interaction between the different authors which might not have been quite so illuminating if only reading them as individual papers in different journals. This book is likely however, to remain a specialist one for students of rural protest, which is a shame as there is much of interest for those trying to understand how, why and when workers fought and the forgotten history of resistance.

Related Reviews

Griffin - The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest
Archer - 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming & Poaching in East Anglia: 1815-1870
Fisher - Custom, Work and Market Capitalism
Rudé - Ideology and Popular Protest

Danny Dorling - Population 10 Billion

Far too many books on population are filled with fearful predictions about what will happen if the world's population continues to grow. So it is refreshing to read Danny Dorling's much more sober study that argues for a more nuanced discussion of the subject. It is also entertaining, something that can rarely be said about demographic studies. Dorling sets his case out early on. In the opening introductory chapter titled "Stop Worrying" he argues that he problem is not over-population, or population growth, but a world that prevents people having what they need. Talking of 2011/2012 when population was predicted to reach 9.1 billion by 2100 he writes:

The main reason for the scare stories of 2011 and 2012 was that some demographers had been influenced by those with other agendas, people who were becoming interested in demography because they believed there were too many people already. Projections that indicate a 'soft landing' of human population growth do not help the agenda of those who want to cry wolf. As the world economy faltered in 2008, there were groups that wanted to put the blame for the fact there would be too little to go round in future on there being too many people, rather than not enough sharing.

As I've noted in other recent reviews on books about demography, there is a close association between the growth of global capitalism and population expansion. Dorling shows 1851 as the start of the "population explosion" but he argues that 1971 (ironically the year when Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was first published in the UK) as being the point when population when "global population acceleration... ended". In keeping with the "Stop Worrying" theme, Dorling argues:

The latest UN projections suggest that in the 14 years following 2011, we will increase in number from seven to eight billion humans. What king of world can we expect to live in by 2025?... Look at the graphs in this book of where population growth is forecast to occur - almost all the extra people are to be born where pollution by humans is least. And notice the deceleration. It is going to take longer, another 14 years, to add this extra billion as compared to the billion that came before. This is the first time we have ever seen an increase in the number of years it has taken to hit the next billion.

Dorling puts an firm case against those who argue that population growth is the problem and that we need to take drastic action to lower population. Instead, Dorling argues, the problem is inequality in wealth distribution: "There is suddenly a very obvious solution to a rich world plagued with greed and obesity and a poor world suffering oppression and starvation, a solution that is only possible because we are not going to have additional billions to be fed decade after decade.

He also argues that population growth will decline quicker if we "tackle gross economic inequalities". He also skewers those on the right who rail against immigration and migration. Rather than this being a problem, it is enormously  important for ageing populations in the developed world, and, he notes, encourages global population to decline because immigrants to rich countries have smaller families.

This facts are important because they contradict those on the right who argue population is inevitably growing to the detriment of the plant. It also gives anti-racists further arguments to defend migrants, immigrants and asylum seekers. But I'm not sure it's the best way to approach the debate because it gives some ground to the idea that population is an issue. Here, in my criticism I should reiterate how much I agree with 99 percent of Dorling's book. He says, for instance, "Children are not a cost to the planet". This is a fundamental point, those who argue that population is a problem forget that each life matters to our world, their friends and family etc. They are part of a solution, not a problem.

But I think what Dorling fails to do is really show how the problem is the capitalist economy which is driving environmental destruction and producing hunger, poverty and unemployment. For instance, Dorling concludes:

The "problem" with global population - if there is one - is too many rich people consuming too much, not too many poor people. There are not that many rich people on the world, but there are a few rich people who consume a huge amount of our collective resources.

I disagree. I think the problem is we have a system which gives a tiny minority vast wealth because it is based on the blind accumulation of wealth for profit. It's that economic organisation that destroys the planet. Its those multinationals that burn the oil and fossil fuels and encourage more consumption and production. It's not the consumption of the rich, (nor the consumption of the masses) but the system that puts profit before anything else. And, as a by-product, it is capitalism that also produces the inequality that Dorling rightly rages against.

But this criticism aside, Danny Dorling's book is a well written powerful destruction of the "over-population" argument. It stands out for its focus on inequality and his discussion of class in this context. Written in an accessible, entertaining style but not one that omits the crucial facts and figures. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to understand population debates particularly those from the environmental movement.

Related Reviews

Bacci - Our Shrinking Planet
Morland - The Human Tide
Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash
Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb

Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population

Philip Ziegler - Omdurman

In September 1898, a British Army including units of Egyptian and Sudanese troops and numbering around 25,000 (the majority of whom were colonial soldiers) destroyed an enormous Mahadist force of over 50,000. The carnage was enormous, the heavily armed British force killed 12,000 enemies, wounding 10,000 more and capturing thousands. In the process they lost less than 100 themselves. The Sudanese Mahadist army under Abdullah al-Taashi, known by his title as the Khalifa, was only superior in terms of numbers. His forces were armed with few rifles, some small arms, but mostly spears. The British had maxim guns, repeating rifles and were supported by heavily armed gunboats. Victory was bloody, with accounts of British troops slaughtering the wounded, causing outrage back home. Even Winston Churchill, a man rarely bothered by unnecessary killing, called it "inhumane slaughter".

Philip Ziegler's book is a well written account of the military events, but little else. Ziegler gives a brief account of the death of General Gordon less than a decade before Omdurman, and shows how the latter battle was popularly seen as Colonial revenge for that defeat. But in reality the attack on Sudan in 1989 had little real purpose to it. As Ziegler explains:

What is certain is that the British had no economic incentive for invading the Sudan; the conventional caricature of the greedy imperialist grabbing the raw materials of the less developed countries has no application here... What in fact eventually induced the British government in 1896 to undertake the expedition was neither benevolent imperialism nor a belated lust for revenge but the needs of European politics. It was Lord Salisbury's wish to shore up the Triple Alliance and do something to please Italy and Germany which made intervention in the Sudan seem desirable.

Leaving aside the idea that Imperialism is only ever for resources or economic benefit, it is notable that Britain had little reason for entry into Sudan. When they did so it was very much driven by the self-interest of the British ruler in Egypt, the Sirdar, General Kitchener. Less than two decades before the outbreak of World War One, it is notable that a few senior figures in that war appear in the Sudan - Kitchener and Douglas Haig are just two.

The bloody victory at Omdurman was greeted with popular rejoicing back at home, not least because it was covered by a significant number of embeded journalists, some of whom, like Winston Churchill, were also officers and were certainly not neutral in proceedings. Churchill himself figures highly in these pages, not least because of his detailed account of the campaign and his self-serving arrogant letters home about events. The last cavalry charge in British Army history took place at Omdurman, with Churchill in pole position. For the public back home the charge became a much celebrated event, though Ziegler makes it clear that it was relatively unnecessary, confused and could easily have ended in tragedy. Ziegler details the aftermath - the British razing much of Omdurman and the Khalifa's palace - and the disappointment of the troops when they found little to loot. Churchill considered the victory to prove the superiority of his race and nation; though the inept and chaotic leadership described by Ziegler certainly doesn't back this up.

This is an easily read well written military account. Those looking for background to Sudan's later history or a greater understanding of Britain's imperial role in Northern Africa will need to go elsewhere. If you're simply after an account of Omdurman there's probably no better single volume history.

Related Reviews

Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire
Mason - The Four Feathers
Macrory - Signal Catastrophe; The Story of the Disastorous Retreat from Kabul 1842