Robert Harris - Imperium

Novels set in Ancient Rome are always hampered by the perceptions that people have of life there 2000 years ago. For many years Roman history has suffered from being the history of great men. Of senators, generals and of course Emperors. That's not to say that novels based around such individuals cannot be entertaining and informative.

Nonetheless because the history (and the documents) we have of the period tend to be those of “great” individuals, novels tend to follow similar paths, if only because the material available to form the backdrop for such lives is more readily accessible.

Robert Harris has now written a number of novels set in the ancient past. I wasn't overly impressed with the first of these Pompeii. But Imperium is a much stronger novel. Even though it centres on some of the most important figures of the late Republic, Harris avoids the trap of forgetting about the majority of the population because his narrator is Tiro, the extremely talented slave of the famous lawyer and counsel, Marcus Cicero.

Harris has done his research well. Many of the events in this book (which is in effect two linked shorter stories) are based in reality. The novel itself is supposed to be a biography of Cicero, and such a book (at least according to Plutarch) did exist, though tragically it has been lost to us since. Cicero is portrayed not simply as a brilliant orator. He also holds a mind of tactical genius and a singular determination to reach the peaks of power that were offered during Republican Rome.

Thus while centring on a particularly dramatic legal case (of extreme corruption and abuse of power by a Roman governor) and a political intrigue several years later, the main thread of the story is Cicero's struggle to achieve recognised greatness, seen through the eyes of his most important slave.

The backdrop to this is the decline of Republican Rome and the beginnings of the rise of the era of the Emperors. But behind all of this are the interests and struggles of Rome's different classes. The ruling class are aloof from the majority of the population, though a middling layer (of whom Cicero is a New Man) form a link between the top of the system and the masses below. Cicero's clients include those from the lower levels of society who often have been failed by the system as well as those who are more wealthy but seek redress. The masses by and large are a stage army, who give their loyalty to those politicians who have managed to either offer them the most in the way of bread and circuses or improved their lot. In Harris' telling Cicero is a man of the people, struggling against the excesses of the aristocracy and hence beloved by many ordinary people.

While Harris captures the limitations of Rome's democracy and brilliantly portrays the excesses and corruption of the majority of the ruling class, his portrayal of the dynamics of the mass of the population seems rather more one dimensional. This is very much exposed in the references to Grachuss, the reforming politician who was murdered by the ruling class for attempting to redistribute land in the interest of the masses. It is in these short paragraphs where you get a feel for how mass, class interests could shape Roman politics in a way that is absent elsewhere in the story.

Ultimately though this is the tale of a few individuals, despite Rome being the backdrop. Harris gives the reader a plausible tale of what life was like, the sights, smells, over-crowding and problems in the ancient capital. The dreams of freedom of Tiro are poignant and seem real, and if on occasion there are plot devices that seem a little contrived to ensure that our narrator can be present at some of the most important events in Roman history, this can be excused in the interest of a great storyline.

Unfortunately the afterword tells us nothing of what is based on known history and what is speculation and Robert Harris despite acknowledging his reliance on more recent scholarship he fails to direct the reader to more works that might allow those whose interest has been pricked in the history, to learn more. This is a shame because Imperium is an excellent read and could well put many on the path to a deeper study of Roman history.

Related Reading

Harris - Lustrum

Graves - I, Claudius

Graves - Claudius the God

Lisa Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution

Having really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver recently, a novel set during the late 1600s which frequently focuses on some of the lives of members of the Royal Society, I decided to learn more about these early scientists - men like Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Lisa Jardine's book on the Scientific Revolution seemed to be a good place to start.

Jardine begins with the scientific advances being made in the early 1600s in the fields of astronomy. Much of these were triggered by new technology in the fields of optics and time keeping. People gazing at the heavens, such as the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed could now precisely measure the position of stars as well as observe the skies in improved detail. The work that Renaissance thinkers like Galileo had done was built on and expanded. Much of the needs of this were driven by wider interests. The measurement of the heavens was important not simply for pure science, but because it added navigation, and as the world was being opened up to Europeans by traders, explorers and the military, accurate navigation was very important.

Jardine's book is well written and readable. She deals well with the debates and disputes that took place between scientists at the time. The arguments that took place in late 1680 and 1681 for instance as leading figures like Isaac Newton and Flamsteed tried to understand the comets that had been seen in November and January are covered well. Whether they were the same comet or different had enormous ramifications for the understanding of the solar system and Jardine explains this well. She also captures the frustrations of these new experimenters well, as they competed for funds or tried to get new ideas published before the others to secure their patents and scientific notability. Though Jardine's main thesis is that these new scientific minds were less concerned with day to day politics and more with seeking scientific truth. On a number of occasions scientists continued to communicate despite their respective countries being at war. One reason why the Royal Societies secretary, Henry Oldenburg was briefly imprisoned by the King.

The book is neatly parcelled up into different sections which often centre on a particular scientific theme - astronomy, map making, anatomy and clockwork for instance. While this makes the book readable and self-contained it highlights wider problems with Jardine's work. Not the least of this is an annoying level of repetition - several of the anecdotes she tells are repeated and we are introduced to key figures on more than one occasion. Were the book longer this might be necessary, but in this case it really is not needed.

Much of the book is made up of illustrations, though many of the black and white images are replicated in colour in the centre of the book. Oddly some of these are on facing pages, which is a strange layout. Omitting the duplication would have shortened the book considerably.

However this is a minor irritation. More problematic is Jardine's approach to the period. The late 1600s were a period of immense scientific development in western Europe. Jardine seems to make no real attempt to locate these changes in the context of a enormously changing world. Following the Dutch revolt and the English Revolution, new commerical interests were opening up the world. Slavery was beginning on a mass scale and global trade was rocketing. Inside England, new industrial processes were taking root as the economic and political situation was freeing up the ability of the rich to make more money from capitalistic methods.

Throughout human history, there have been geniuses like Leonardo de Vinci, Galileo or Newton. But Jardine doesn't get to the heart of why in the period being discussed they seemed to blossom in great numbers. It wasn't simply that people were suddenly more interested in the world, it was that the world had changed and was demanding to be understood. The financial incentives to understand for commerical, or military gain were also encouraged by a new layer of the wealthy who had the time to collect, study and experiment.

Sadly this lack of clarity over wider questions is hampered by other problems. On occasion Jardine is warrant to make somewhat glib generalisations. On one she writes that "Even during the period of Newton's presidency [of the Royal Society]... the physics, astronomy and mathematics we associate with the birth of modern science today was a minor, specialist interest". Given that Jardine has spent several large sections of the book discussing the importance that various figures in the Royal Society gave to these subjects as well as pointing out their importance to navigation and the longitude problem this seems an odd claim.

An isochrone curve. Image from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautochrone_curve

In addition to these generalisations I was disappointed by a number of other observations. For instance, Jardine writes that Jacob Bernoulli was the discoverer of the "isochrone, the curve along which a body with uniform vertical velocity will fall."

Bernoulli did not "discover" the isochrone. He was the first to solve the problem using calculus. Huygens did it geometrically 40 years beforehand. In addition her description of the isochrone is inaccurate. The isochrone is actually the curve for which an object moving without friction will reach the lowest point in the same time, independent of its starting position.

Sadly Jardine's focus on the individuals rather than the wider picture, obscures the real processes taking place in science during the 17th and 18th centuries. Later, while discussing the discovery of the structure of DNA in her epilogue, she writes that:

"What must strike us... is how similar the tales are that Hooke and Watson tell: tales of casual encounters in coffee houses, overheard remarks and data encountered fortuitously... brash remarks, rash promises of success, mistakes hastily withdrawn..."

But sadly this is not the key lesson of how discoveries are made, nor is it a accurate explanation of the scientific method, which examines theories based on experimental evidence and then reworks them. This was the real legacy of the scientific revolution. Unfortunately these weaknesses mean that this book is not particularly useful in understanding either the context for the scientific revolution or some of the key discoveries of the period.

Related Reading

Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

Donn Pearce - Cool Hand Luke

Warning spoilers

Many readers will be familiar with the classic film Cool Hand Luke produced in 1967 and starring Paul Newman. Few will know that it is based on a novel by Donn Pearce, first published in 1965.

The book and film follow the brutalised lives of a group of convicts working on a chain gang. The film centres mostly on Paul Newman's character, but the novel is more about the day to day life of the convicts, the back breaking work in the hot sun, clearing verges, building roads and the few pleasures that they have to look forward to - boring food, a few pornographic magazines, a weekly film and a relentlessly mundane, regimented life. Pearce himself had more than a few experiences of criminal life and imprisonment and the book's descriptions carry the ring of authenticity. Pearce is writing is powerful and lyrical. Here's his narrator describing some of his fellow prisoners:

"Ugly Red, the moonshiner; Four Eyed Joe who is doing Time for screwing his daughter; Little Greek, the sponge diver and check artist from Tarpon Springs; Big Steve the heist man; Rabbit, Coon, Possum, Gator and Eagle, all characters from the tales of Uncle Remus; Sleepy, the last of the Seven Dwarfs, whose six partners all got away when the cops arrived; Onion Head, Burr Head; Stupid Blondie, Stupider Blondie and Stupidest Blondie; Chief, the Blackfoot Indian, the con man and chronic liar whose true exploits are just fantastic enough to keep everyone guessing about the others...."

The prison system brutalises and dehumanises all these characters. The prisoners invent nicknames and make ridiculous bets to keep their spirits alive. The descriptions focus on the mundane, but also the reality of life with so many men crammed into such a small space - the smells, the defecation, the masturbation that inevitably takes place. The book fleshes out the background to Cool Hand Luke's life much more. In the film it was never really obvious why he committed the crime he did. In the book his temporary madness is a product of alcohol and mental breakdown. Pearce locates Luke's mental state very much in his experiences as a soldier in the US army, where he and his comrades murdered and raped their way across Germany. One can only speculate how much Pearce puts his own WWII experiences into this part of the tale, but certainly this picture of the US army is very much a product of the 1960s.

Ultimately this, as with the film, is a story of resistance. Luke's refusal to bow down and his repeated escapes offer hope to the other prisoners. This is not because they can copy him, but hope that the system can be beaten. Their disappointment when Luke is recaptured and his apparent resignation in the face of apathy is one of the most poignant moments in the novel.

"A gloom hung over the whole Camp, a despair, a lack of the lustiness and the gaiety of former times. We know what had happened. The Free Men's revenge for the night of July the Fourth was now complete. They had captured and chained and punished the culprits. They had broken them down in order to prove to the rest of us what would be the inevitable results of defiance. Then they had taken the greatest rebel of them all and rewarded him to show us the fruits of obedience."

But Luke surprises everyone. His temporary defeat giving way to more determined resistance, albeit a resistance that cannot be allowed to continue by the authorities. Failing to break him, they destroy him.

Ultimately Luke's story passes into convict history and prisoners talk of him in hushed tones. Luke's martyrdom has changed them all. The powers that be are not all powerful, they can be beaten. The convicts continue their awful work but they do so with "heads... ringing with the melody and the hymn called Cool Hand Luke".

The 1960s produced many novels that raged with indignation and anger. There are many that are more powerful, and more politically nuanced that Cool Hand Luke. But in my opinion few can match it in giving us the sense that resistance is never futile, that we can never bow down before the system or its paid servants.

Adrienne Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

"The giant ogre Skiron used to throw victims off a rocky cliff near Megara until the hero Theseus threw Skiron over the precipice. After a very long period of time 'his bones were tossed between sea and earth and finally hardened into rock'." - Ovid, Metamorphoses.

"It is a matter of observation that the stature of the entire human race is becoming smaller... When a mountain in Crete was cleft by an Earthquake, a skeleton 46 cubits long was found, which some people thought must be that of Orion and others of [giant] Otus... Augustus preserved the bodies of two giants (Secundilla and Pusio) over 10 feet tall at Sallust's Gardens in Rome." - Pliny the Elder, Natural History.

I have to admit that when I first received Adrienne Mayor's book I assumed it was a work of pseudo-science, exploring perhaps some invented history of Greeks and Romans living simultaneously with extinct ancient creatures. However, despite the somewhat unusual presentation (I thought the book looked like a cheap self-published work, and several of the drawings are very amateurish and add little to the text) this turns out to be an exceedingly interesting book that rapidly convinced me of the authors' central thesis.

Mayor begins with a simple argument. In many of the areas of the ancient world around the Mediterranean fossils are easily found. In the wider areas that were influenced by the Greeks and Romans or known to them through travelers and traders, even more extensive remains are common. How did the ancient people understand these?

The two quotes above demonstrate that to a certain extent, many of the ancients had a surprisingly good grasp of how such remains might be formed. Lacking an understanding of the age of the world, they could not comprehend the timescales necessary to create fossils, but they could understand them as the remains of long dead creatures or races. Frequently the remains themselves were interpreted as human, though they were usually from mammoths or similar animals. In a lovely demonstration, Mayor rearranges the bones of a model mammoth to show how they could be altered to look like a large tall humanoid. An ogre, or an ancient hero.

In the Gobi desert remains of dinosaurs like Protoceratops are frequently found, often with eggs in their nests. Mayor shows how the shape of these dinosaurs with their curved beaks, long tales and crested skull could easily be morphed or interpreted as the classic ancient image of a griffin, with a bird like head and wings and lion's body. She then offers us evidence from ancient texts and archaeological remains to show how the ancients clearly thought that griffins did live in parts of the desert. With only a small amount of speculation Mayor adds that the legends that griffins guarded piles of gold could be understood by the flecks of the metal often found with the remains.

Some of the evidence that Mayor has produced is fairly convincing. A pottery vessel with depicting a hero fighting a monster easily resolves itself into an image of a dinosaur skull protruding from the earth. Another image of a human fighting a griffin seems unremarkable until you notice that the griffin, unlike the man, appears to be growing from the ground. A suggestion that the artist understood about bones found under the earth?

Mayor seems to know her classical sources well, and frequently lists sites were bones would have been found eroding from the ground, particularly on the Mediterranean coasts. It has to be said she builds an impressive argument.

But what did the ancients actually understand about these bones? Mayor demonstrates that many of them, including some of the most well known philosophers thought they were the remains of ancient beasts and the ogres who populated the earth before they died out at the hands of heroes like Hercules. While explaining this though, we learn that many of the ancients had a rudimentary understanding that species could evolve, change and go extinct. However while there were those in ancient times who understood these bones as remains of ancient humans or mythical creatures there were also those who saw them as being other animals. Mayor quotes a statement by Plutarch where he identifies some bones as those of a species of elephant (1,700 years before a modern scientist would make the same links). Notably though, prior to the discovery of contemporary elephants by the Greeks, these same remains were interpreted as a vanished monster known as Neades.

It is interesting to speculate whether the myths of giant humans or creatures like centaurs or griffins came first, or were they the result of people seeing fossil remains and creating myths. What it undoubtedly true though, is that in ancient times these remains were often venerated and debated as much as we would today. In fact, Mayor describes a period which is almost a "bone craze" as ancient cities and temples located remains and identified them as famous local heroes putting them on display.

What becomes clear from Mayor's fascinating book, is not simply the way that ancient people tried to understand the world around them, but also how their ideas developed and changed. Sadly we have lost much of the evidence that would enable us to understand how the bones were displayed, though tantalising comments in ancient books clearly indicate that they were gawped at by tourists much as museum visitors might today. Mayor's book seems to have spurred other writers and scientists to look at old materials and books with different eyes, for the non-expert reader however it is a stimulating and informative look, not simply at how our ancestors understood fossils but how their ideas shaped the view of their own history and myth.

Related Reviews

Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility

There are a myriad of books and articles being written about the rise of the Chinese economy and the conditions inside the country for ordinary people. However too few of these are being written by Marxists, particularly those who understand that China is not a socialist society (despite the continued insistence from key figures in the country). More importantly, even those who do comment from a revolutionary point of view are rarely from China itself.

This makes Au Loong Yu's book very important. Based in Hong Kong he has a long record of being involved in the working class movement as well as being a key figure in left wing journals that discuss China's history. He is also from a Trotskyist background and so explicitly rejects the notion that China is a socialist society, or was in recent history. While I might quibble with some aspects of his, and his fellow collaborators, exact analysis of Chinese history, these are very much disagreements amongst friends who want to see change in China that benefits the majority of its population rather than a tiny elite. It should be noted that several of the chapters in this book are from other authors, who very much share Yu's general analysis.

In the preface to China's Rise, Yu quotes, with only a little irony, a Chinese academic who reports that "a total of 18 different names have been used to describe China's [contemporary] system, from authoritarian capitalism, commercial Leninism to Confucian capitalism". Yu himself describes it as "bureaucratic capitalism" and I think this label works well, describing as it does a country were the ruling elite have formed from the upper ranks of the only political party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However it also encapsulates the way that the lower levels of bureaucracy form part of local governing classes that overlap to a great extent with firms and companies that are the real face of China's capitalism.

Yu also points out that these officials to also gain personally from their role through their involvement in implementing the Chinese government's policies, as well as the "coercive power of the state machine". China's internal security budget is actually higher than its defence budget and involve enormous numbers, "in one county alone there are 12,093 informants which is equivalent to 3 per cent of the population" reports Yu.

All too often external commentators on China will focus on such internal repression, and while this should not be ignored, it would be dangerous to argue that this is the sole problem for Chinese workers and peasants. The real story is not just the internal repression, but the enormous growth of capitalism interests within the country. The opening up of the economy to private interests has been something of enormous interest to the world's wider governing classes. Reports in both 1997 and 2012 by the World Bank argued that China must let its state sector shrink in the interest of the private sector.

Such neo-liberal interests are not new, and have been imposed or encouraged in former "communist bloc" nations since the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. But they hide enormous suffering and destruction.Yu points out that the CCP has strived hard to create a "favourable business environment" and this requires the "repression of working people". In a interesting chapter on the role of China's official trade union movement, Yu - the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Bai Ruizue shows how rather than fighting for its members, the ACFTU has become a tool of the CCP in implementing Privatisation and the interests of the bureaucracy. Indeed in a number of cases the authors point out that strikes and workers occupations have been broken up physically by representatives of the ACFTU's unions.

Favourable business conditions in China mean imposing major attacks on workers. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989, the "CCP reacted by brutally suppressing the movement" and also the "complete restructuring" of the working class. Over the following 20 years, forty million state workers were laid off in a "wave of privatization and those who kept their jobs experienced downward mobility." At the same time, a new working class was formed from 250 million rural workers. These workers had even less knowledge of their rights, or traditions of organising and now form a major part of the new urban working class in China.

Alongside the destruction of state industry, the Chinese ruling class have taken away much from a large section of the population. In particular rights at work and the hope of a job for life, meaning a simmering level of anger. There is resistance. Yu argues however that often this resistance comes too late, as workers often don't hear about the privatisation of their workplaces until long into the process. More importantly, state repression and the lack of genuine, legal workers organisations makes action difficult. Thus while Yu agrees with other writers about the growing number of "mass events" such as strikes and protests, he is less confident that this demonstrates a growing movement as opposed to mostly isolated examples of fight back. The chapter on "resistance in China today" then is a small selection of stories of resistance, but they all show the potential for Chinese workers to seriously challenge the power of the state.

"The Tonghua anti-privatisation struggle... begun when workers found out about plans for Jianlong steel to [privatise] the company... on 24 July 2009 a worker who had previously been laid off hung a banner outside the main office saying "Jianlong, Get Out of Tonghua" and workers started to blockade the company to suspend production. Approximately 30,000 present and former workers and their families were involved... the action ended after 10pm that night following factory boss Chen Guojun being beaten to death during the protest. Jianlong withdrew their offer to buy out the mill... the workers anger had been specifically directed at Chen... he was seen as the representative of Jianlong and known for his tough disciplinarian style... Chen was paid 3 million Yuan in 2008, some of the company retirees were receiving as little as 200 a month".

Yu and Ruixue are particularly interested in a strike of 2011 by Pepsi workers, because for the first time there were co-ordinated protests at bottling plants in five different cities. Workers used social media to network and create a powerful movement. They also write briefly on the Wukan events, when a whole village of 13,000 people defied the government and elected their own representatives which were then officially recognised. This struggle against the privatisation of land is a particularly important one, because it also demonstrates the way that the CCP is often not seen to be the enemy. Workers often believe the problem is corruption by bureaucrats locally. Indeed one of the key figures in the Wukan struggle was a local member of the CCP who was then elected by his fellow villagers to head their committee.

Sadly there aren't enough of such stories, but Yu and his colleagues argue that if there is to be significant change in China it will have to come out of these sort of struggles from below. A useful chapter on historical resistance in China shows the extent to which the 1989 events were a massive blow to the whole working class. In the west we often think of Tianiman Square as being a student protest. But there was significant working class involvement, particularly in Beijing. Yu believes that a new generation of workers is now beginning to get confidence to fight and they are not weighed down by historical defeats.

As China's capitalism grows and develops it is mirroring what happened with the development of capitalism elsewhere. Millions of peasants are being forced from the land into the cities, enormous destruction to the environment is taking place and poverty is endemic. The Chinese ruling class is not all powerful and Yu makes a good argument that there is potential for it to be challenged. However he leaves us in no doubt that this will require an enormous struggle.

There is much of interest in this book for those trying to understand China today. The chapters on the role of Chinese liberals and Tibet are particularly useful as they illuminate from a revolutionary Marxist perspective subjects that are dominated by neo-liberal thought normally. I was less taken by the chapter on wider Chinese history as I felt that it painted to bright a picture of China under Mao and the 1949 revolution. Rather than creating a socialist society as the author seems to argue, this seemed to be more of a argument of the way that a state could provide for improvements for millions of people. The lack of any descriptions of mass workers movements, or organisations such as workers councils would support this view. Nonetheless this does not invalidate the way that the turn by the CCP towards capitalism is destroying the lives of millions of people. As I argued at the beginning, these differences however are ones that do not undermine the usefulness of this book. Ultimately it will be up to the workers and peasants of China itself to settle some of the unresolved differences.

Related Reviews

Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Gittings - The Changing Face of China

Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver

The question that bugged me through the whole time I read Neal Stephenson's enormous Quicksilver, was how to review it. In part the problem is one of scope. How can a reviewer condense a 900 page novel? More importantly, when the author enjoys playing with the written form (some of the chapters here are written in the form of letters, others in the style of scripts and poetry is sprinkled throughout) it seems like the task is impossible. How to make this book sound worth reading, rather than making it look like a sprawling mammoth of a novel that is the result of a writer who didn't know when to stop?

The truth is that Neal Stephenson's novel is a work of brilliance. Despite being 900 pages in length, the writing is tight and entertaining. Suffused with humour and the occasional bit of erotica, there are moments that made me laugh loudly on the train and others that made me cringe at the pain and suffering. Stephenson has painted a brilliant picture of a world going through an enormous transformation. It is one of the best accounts I have read of the changes that took place following the English Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism and in my opinion can only be understood as an attempt to draw out the different ideas and forces in society that were being shaped and reshaped during that later half of the 17th century.

Quicksilver is written in three parts. The first deals with the beginnings of the scientific revolution. It centres on Daniel Waterhouse, a university roommate of Isaac Newton, contemporary of Robert Hooke and eventual friend of many of the most important scientists and Royal Society members of the 17th and early 18th century. The tale skips back and forth in time, but we begin to see the biography of Daniel as he helps Newton with his early experiments, encourages the savant to remember to eat and helps encourage and shape his work. Much like another of Daniels contemporaries, Samuel Pepys, we see the wider changes to society taking place, alongside the Plague and the Great Fire of London. We also encounter the wider debates and constraints in society, in particular the religious debates and disagreements, now somewhat in decline following the end of the Civil War and Cromwell's death. Much of these arguments are still important and the positions that different families took in the Civil War continue to shape the lives of those individuals.

The first third of the book then is a retelling of the story of the birth of the Scientific Method. This is summed up by Newton himself a man that Daniel helps insert knitting needles into his eye socket to observe the effects on his vision, but then seems to turn his back on "science" and retreat into alchemy. Stephenson brilliantly captures the debates and arguments taking place at this time, in the dark rooms of bars and gentleman's smoke filled rooms as ideas of religion, nature and science are all in flux, fulled by the enormously shifting world outside.

The second volume at first seems to take off in a completely tangential direction. During the siege of Vienna, Jack, a mercenary rescues Eliza a Turkish slave. Escaping the battle field, they travel across Europe in a westerly direction having adventures and learning much about the world and themselves. Gradually though, we realise that what they are also witnessing is the flip side of the scientific revolution we've followed in part one. This is the economic revolution, a world being turned upside down as new ways of commerce, trade and manufacture are taking place. We see the new stock exchanges as Eliza teaches Jack how money can be made by betting pieces of paper on potential economic outcomes. The pair spend some time with Leibniz, Newton's anti-particle, and learn about new methods for extracted silver in larger quantities that apply the lessons of both the scientific and economic revolutions. Throughout all of this Stephenson's wonderful language and humour make this the most readable of history lessons.

Here's Jack exploring the area around the Parisian docks. The early days of capitalism and the beginnings of the labour theory of value have rarely been more eloquently summed up:

"Some boats carried blocks of stone that had been cut to shape by freemasons working out in the open, somewhere upstream; these boats pulled up along special quays equipped with cranes powered by pairs of large steeped wheels in which men climbed forever without ascending, turning a gear-train that reeled in a cable that passed over a pulley at the end of a tree-sized arm....Elsewhere the same amount of labor might've made a keg of butter or a week's worth of firewood; here it was spent on raising a block several inches so that it could be carted into the city and raised by other workers, higher and height, so that Parisians could have rooms higher than they were wide..."

Stephenson's style is fairly unique. I pointed out that he enjoys playing with different forms of the written word. He also enjoys his jokes, and occasionally he likes to insert a more contemporary reference. Here's Leibniz writing from Venice:

"As I write these words.... two gondoliers who nearly collided a minute ago are screaming murderous threats at each other. This sort of thing happens all the time here. The Venetians have even given it a name: 'Canal Rage.' Some say that it is a new phenomenon... a symptom of the excessively rapid pace of change in the modern world."

The universe of Quicksilver is not quite our own. Stephenson has inserted some fictional characters into his history, but also some fictional places. This is not really fantasy though, it is more a trick to allow him to play with people and tales in a way that a strict work of historical fiction wouldn't. That said, he doesn't shy from the realities of history.

Capitalism, Karl Marx once wrote was born, "dripping in blood" and there's plenty of that in Quicksilver. Much of the third volume deals with the machinations of various courts as they try to gain their own power in the wake of the English Restoration and the run up to the Glorious Revolution. Enormous armies march back and force, torture, violence as well as poverty and hunger stalk the land.

The myriad of characters and story lines come together in the final section of this book as England appears, at least superficially, to be gaining a level of calm following the chaos of the years of rule by Charles II and James Stuart. We know from the earliest chapters however, that Daniel returns from his exile in the New World where he has gone to escape the Old. The story is only beginning and I look forward to continuing to read it in the second and third volumes of the trilogy.

Related Reviews

Stephenson - The Confusion
Stephenson - The System of the World

Antony Beevor - The Second World War

Given that British bookshops groan under the weight of tomes about World War Two, readers would not be mad to wonder whether or not there is any need for a new book chronicling the war. However this new history by the author of Stalingrad and Berlin is well worth the effort of its 800 pages. Part of this is to do with Beevor himself. He has an unparallelled grasp of the historical material and he writes very well indeed. He isn't prone to the disease that afflicts many western writers when discussing the Second World War, in that he recognises that the war was not won by Britain on her own, nor even by the military and industrial might of the United States. He understands that these were important, but not so important as the role of Russia's enormous reserves of manpower and industry.

Thus, for those brought up on what might be loosely called the Daily Mail view of the world, there are some strange omissions. The Luftwaffe's Blitz on British towns and cities receives very little coverage compared to Beevor's discussion of the destruction of German towns and cities. Britain is not, after all, the centre of the world. But Beevor doesn't limit himself to a history based on relative importance of different events. He is also extremely critical of the way that the war was prosecuted. In particular, two favourites of the British view of the war, Bomber Harris and General Montgomery receive short shrift from Beevor's analysis of the war. In particular Beevor notes the limitation of Harris' strategy of defeating Germany by mass bombing of cities, as well as pointing out on a couple of occasions the way that Bomber Commands attacks often had a negative role for Allied soldiers on the ground. Take the capture of the German town of Cleve. Beevor writes that "Harris's bombers had smashed the city for once with high explosive instead of incendiaries, which made it far harder to capture because the Germans fought from the ruins."

Beevor never diminishes the heroism of the fighting men, whichever side they fought on, though he never paints either side as fighting with some angelic pureness. Beevor documents the atrocities, the massacre of prisoners of war and civilians, but points out that these were never just the Axis powers. Sadly British and American troops were also guilty of such crimes, though rarely were they disciplined for it. Indeed sometimes it was encouraged by commanders who would not, or could not deal with the prisoners.

Elsewhere, in Berlin Beevor has documented the forgotten history of the mass rapes that took place as the Russians captured German cities. But this was not limited to Germany. Russian soldiers were particularly brutal towards Japanese women in towns they captured in China. But other Allied troops from Britain and the US were certainly guilty of similar crimes in South East Asia, in part because of the brutal nature of that war.

It is the brutality of the conflict that shines through Beevors book. Almost every page tells the stories of casualties on a scale that defies comprehension. 1000 killed in a bombing raid, 2000 lost in a pointless attack or defence, 10,000 dead in a firestorm or forced march. This is the logical conclusion of total war in a time of mass industrial production. But Beevor also locates the Holocaust, with its mass murder of Jews and others in the context of the brutal genocidal war being fought on the Eastern Front. Hitler certainly wanted to eradicate the Jews, but the mass murder was the consequence of this anti-Semitic propaganda combining with a brutal war that dehumanised everyone involved in it. That said, Beevor makes it clear that many people, including leading members of the British and American governments knew about the death camps, and decided not to act on their intelligence.

We often forget that the Second World War encompassed far more that Europe and the Pacific. So Beevor includes in his grand narrative the war between China and Japan that began in 1937 and places that are often forgotten in shorter histories - Burma, Singapore or Yugoslavia for instance. In places Beevor is necessarily brief, though for those parts of the history I knew well, he often sums up a complex story accurately in a couple of paragraphs. But Beevor's tale is not always a distant over-view. By illustrating his history with more personal accounts the reality of conflict is brought home all to well. Here is one harrowing, but short description that sums up the dirty nature of hand to hand fighting in Warsaw when the Poles rose up against the German occupiers but were left high and dry by the Red Army in 1944.

"A nine-year-old was seen to climb onto a German panzer and throw grenades inside. Both Germans and Poles froze in disbelief at the sight. 'When he jumped down,' and eyewitness recorded, 'he raced off to the gate [of a tenement building] and there burst out crying.'"

One theme that runs through Beevor's book is that World War Two was important because it setup the world (and the conflicts) that would come after the defeat of Germany and Japan. The famous account of Stalin and Churchill drawing up the ratio of influence of the two powers in post-war Europe is here, as are wider discussions about the impact of the post-war agreements on the people of the Middle East and Asia.

Antony Beevor's latest book is one of the best single volume histories of World War Two that I have read. While it is limited in part by its concentration on the military side of the war (there is only a little of the social history that concerns, say, Angus Calder or the revolutionary potential of mass movements that Donny Gluckstein has recently written about) it does not ignore wider questions. The book gives a detailed overview of the conflict and provides an excellent introduction into this important, world changing war.

Related Reviews

Grossman - A Writer At War: With the Red Army 1941 - 1945 (edited by Antony Beevor)
Beevor - D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
Kershaw - The End: Germany 1944 - 1945
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Calder - The People's War: Britain 1939 - 1945 

Henry Bernstein - Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change

Henry Bernstein's short book is a useful introduction to studies of contemporary agrarian questions. Using an explicitly Marxist approach Bernstein attempts to unravel the complexities of capitalist agriculture, from its origins in pre-capitalist modes of production to the numerous different forms it takes today.

Bernstein begins by pointing out the realities of modern farming. We are used to seeing farming as being dominated by enormous capitalist conglomerates. But this is only half the story. While in the US only 2.1% of the labour force were employed in agriculture in 2000, the industry employees around 1.3 billion people world wide. 97 percent of these are in the developing world. The vast majority of these people (some three quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas) live lives of poverty.

The author argues that this poverty is closely linked to the resistance of working people in the countryside. His book, he argues, is in part about helping such movements understand the nature of the class dynamics that shape their struggles. The issue is complex, because Bernstein argues that there is no single "class" of peasants. In this he echoes Marx's famous quote describing the mass of the French peasantry as a "a sack of potatoes". Bernstein gives one telling example of the differing interests and needs of different sections of farmers or peasants when he quotes Toby Shelley pointing out that "France prides itself on its self-sufficient peasant agriculture, yet without Moroccan field workers many farmers would struggle."

These differences within the peasantry are often, but not always, related to whether or not the peasant owns land. Indeed Bernstein's book is a useful explanation of the way, in different parts of the globe, the development of capitalism has been associated with the privatisation of land. This is further explored by looking at the destruction of existing peasant relations in the eras of colonialism and imperialism.

As a result of these developments, Bernstein writes:

"In agrarian societies before the advent of capitalism... farming was what most people did. What we call "agriculture" was then simply an aggregation, the sum total, of farmers and their activities. Farmers connected with non-farmers to some degree through the exactions of rents and taxes and through typically localized exchange but were not affected by the wider divisions of labour, process of technological change and market dynamics that came to characterize the "agricultural sector" in industrial capitalism."

Today's capitalist economy is geared to the maximisation of profits and almost no part of the agricultural world can be separated out from that. Indeed in many parts of the world capitalism has (and continues to) explicitly turn the family farmer into a wage labourer "working with other people's means of production".

Bernstein's book is short (of the order of 120 pages) but it covers a multitude of ideas and useful analysis. It is an excellent primer for discussions of wider agrarian questions but its Marxist approach makes it particularly useful for activists. The authors examination of some contemporary peasant movements (such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement) should be of particular interest.

Related Reviews

Bello - The Food Wars
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Mazoyer & Roudart - A History of World Agriculture

Christopher Hill - The World Turned Upside Down

I've seen it occasionally suggested that Christopher Hill's classic book, The World Turned Upside Down is one of the best introductions to a study of the English Revolution and Civil War. I don't agree with that, but I understand why radicals often suggest it. Hill's book is not a history of the Revolution, nor an introduction to the period. In fact, without a basic understanding of the history of the era, the reader of this work might be left a little high and dry. As the subtitle suggests, this is a more specific history, that of "radical ideas during the English Revolution" and by radical ideas Hill also means the people and organisations that spread them.

One of the reasons that it is often suggested as a introductory read is, I suspect, because it has had a profound effect on so many people. Hill's coverage is extensive and his knowledge of the source material very impressive, as the extensive footnotes indicate. But more importantly the book is important because it treats the subject matter dialectically. Ideas were not static, organisations did not remain unchanged, but they grew and developed as the English Revolution itself grew and then, with the suppression of radical ideas and organisations after 1650, they changed once again.

This helps to explain a modern conundrum. Today the Quakers are a network of pacifistic Friends, yet during parts of the 1600s they were a radical religious grouping that in turn spawned even more radical ideas. Their survival into modern times is in part because of their ability to shake off their radical origins and make themselves more acceptable into the post revolutionary landscape, indeed Hill describes one of the radical founders of Quakerism, George Fox as playing "a part only slightly greater than that of Trotsky in official Soviet histories of the Russian Revolution". An early airbrushing of history.

But the Quakers, like other groups were part and parcel of a wider radical landscape, their success was as Hill points out, a result of the defeat of more political organisations, such as the Diggers and the Levellers:


"The spread of Quakerism, emptying the churches of Anabaptists and separatists, witnessed both to the defeat of the political Levellers and to the continued existence and indeed extension of radical ideas".

This book must surly be credited with the wider recognition of the existence of such organisations. Much of the radical core of the English Revolution had been forgotten until the rediscovery of many of the writings and records in later centuries. Hill's book is excellent and explaining the stunningly radical ideas of groups such as the Diggers. He avoids the temptation to suggest they were ahead of their time, pointing out in the conclusion that many of their ideas were in advance of ours. But the Levellers and Diggers were merely the tip of a radical iceberg. There were many groups and individuals who questioned society, ideology and religion in extremely detailed ways.

The Levellers didn't want to abolish private property, though they were happy to see a blunting of the rule of the rich. Other sects did want to see private property destroyed and they also questioned everything, from the existence of heaven and hell, to the idea that marriage and divorce should not be infinitely easier, or that the Bible was not the word of god. As in any period of radicalism, more open attitudes towards sex came to the fore, but in a period of history when religion invaded every aspect of love this was shocking to the establishment (and perhaps the wider population). But the theme that returns over and again in Hill's book, is that ordinary men and women are beginning to question the world around them, the structures of society and their own roles within it.

Christopher Hill is not so mechanical a Marxist to suggest that this radicalism was only driven by economic changes, he writes:

"I have tried to stress in this book the most unusual stimuli which during the revolutionary decades produced a fantastic outburst of energy, both physical and intellectual. The civil war itself, the intellectual forcing house of the New Model Army and its Army Council, regicide, the conquest of Ireland and Scotland, the Dutch and Spanish wars, physical and social mobility, the continuous flow of pamphlets..."

This an much more contributed to an immense groundswell of ideas that men like Cromwell were first to use for their own class interests and then to bloodily suppress. Hill concludes that the "tragedy of the radicals was that they were never able to arrive at political unity during the Revolution". This means that the outcome was less in their interests than it might have been. Nonetheless the radical ideas that were defeated post 1650 did not vanish for good, but became a small and influential part of wider ideas for many decades.

Hill's book is an inspiration in the sense that it shows how men and women at different points in history have stood tall and tried to understand their world and shape it. Socialists are used to arguing this about the great revolutions of the 20th century, but it was true for centuries before 1917 and 1968. It will undoubtedly be true again.

Related Reviews

Hill - God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution
Purkiss - The English Civil War: A People's History

Emir Sader - The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left

Over the last decade and a half or so Latin America has, along with the Arab Revolutions, been one area of hope for those of us who hope to see radical change. A succession of mass movements and left wing governments have offered, and continue (in some cases) to offer hope. Certainly leaders like Evo Morales in Boliva and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela have inspired millions. The mass movements of rural workers, landless peasants as well as the urban working class have brought down governments and shaken the complacency of important people in Washington.

Emir Sader's recent book is an attempt to grapple with the changing movements in South America and offer some direction forwards. Unfortunately the book is somewhat mechanical in its approach to historical change and while it acknowledges the problems of some of those governments (such as that of the Workers' Party in Brazil) which have failed to deliver much of the people's hopes, Sader tends to argue that better a slightly progressive bulwark against neoliberalism than none at all. Even if this means capitulating to the wider problems of the capitalist system.

Sader begins by locating the story of South America in a wider Marxist history. In particular, as the title of his book implies, he concentrates on Marx's "Old Mole" of history, the revolution that emerges, then disappears only to reappear somewhere else. But Sader's vision of what the revolutionary mole is varies through history. Beginning with the post-World War One revolutions in Russia and Europe he then locates a follow up appearance in Cuba.While the Cuban revolution certainly had popular support and defeated a vile regime it was not the same mass movement that had been seen elsewhere.

This becomes even more apparent when Sader describes where the "mole" appears next. With the defeat of guerrilla movements in South America and the death of Che Guevara, Sader tells us that "the mole responded by promoting institutional governments - that of Velasco Alvarado in Peru in 1969, that of Allende in 1970". While these were progressive challenges to the system they were also very much within the system. Certainly not what Karl Marx imaged when he hoped that Old Mole would burrow up into the daylight again.

This is not to say Sader is on the wrong side. He absolutely understands the way that Imperialism and capitalist forces have attempted to smash those governments and movements (from Chile to Nicaragua) that have threatened their interests. But because he also sees the later Soviet Union as progressive (at one point he describes Stalin as one of the "new leaders of the revolution") and the collapse of the Eastern European regimes from 1989 onward as a defeat for the socialist cause, he cannot help but see the problems of the left as being a crisis of legitimacy, rather than a failing of strategy.

As a result of the defeat of the Soviet Union, Sader tells us that the Washington neo-liberal agenda has run rampant. But "neoliberalism's biggest achievements were not in the economic field, where most of its promise had lain, but in the social and ideological fields." By this Sader means the destruction of public services, weakened unions, increased unemployment and an more atomised workforce. "The majority of Latin Americans can no longer organise, have no recourse to justice and no public identity" he claims. Yet this flies in the face of the reality that large sections of the Latin American population have always faced these problems and have resisted and continue to do so.

For Sader, neoliberalism rather than capitalism is the problem. "Latin America was the laboratory of neoliberalism" he tells rightly us;

"Here it was born, here it spread and here it took on its most radical forms. As a result, the continent suffered a neoliberal hangover and became the weakest link in this chain, with a proliferation of governments elected on the back of opposition to neoliberalism, contrary to the tendency elsewhere in the world."

The problem with this analysis is that it increasingly sees the key task for the left as being to encourage those governments that challenge neoliberalism rather than building a wider movement against capitalism. This is not to say that Sader ignores mass movements, on the contrary he champions them, but he does not see them as key.

Why is this? Sader is clearly of the revolutionary left, but in his critiques of what he calls the "ultra left" he seems to have given up on the task of revolutionary change. Part of this comes I think from his weak politics. His obsession with a world-wide defeat for the working class as a result of the end of the "bipolar" world in the early 1990s. More worryingly he seems to misunderstand the role of the state. Classical Marxism as well as the work of subsequent revolutionaries like Lenin, saw the State not as a mediating force between the classes, but as an instrument of class rule. Sader however sees the State as something that can be appropriated by governments as weapon against neoliberalism.

"it could also be a state that has been refounded by governments that seek to break out of neoliberalism, developing new structures of power. The state is, therefore, a space in dispute."

He continues:

"All the more reason, therefore, for the presence of the state in the fight against neoliberalism."

The problem with this analysis is that it leaves the movement and the anti-neoliberal governments Sader looks to weak in the face of the forces of capitalist power. Sader is well aware of what took place in 1973 in Chile when the CIA and Pinochet smashed a left wing government to protect their wider class interests. But he doesn't seem to have learnt his lesson. While rightly critiquing those like John Holloway for not acknowledging the need to "challenge for power" Sader has failed to give any real line of march for the wider left movements in South America that could begin to seriously challenge the system. As a result The New Mole makes some interesting points and is a useful, short summary of the radical history of South America, but it needs to be read critically and challenged.

Related Reviews

Sader & Silverstein - Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers Party and Brazil

Rachel Hewitt - Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

For those readers outside of the UK, the phrase "Ordnance Survey" will probably mean very little. But for millions of Britons over the years, the Survey has represented the maps and charts that we have used to find our way around the country. In particular, hikers, ramblers and climbers will know the garish pink covered maps that, in amazing detail, show the locations of windmills, ancient remains, monuments and public telephones, as well as mountains, roads and waterways.

It is easy to take this for granted, after all it is no surprise that nations have maps of themselves. From this point of view a history of the Ordnance Survey (and wider attempts to map the British Isles) might seem only of interest to a specialist readership. Yet Rachel Hewitt's book contains much of interest to those interested in the development of modern Britain, science and social history.

Hewitt begins with the failed Jacobite rebellion of the mid 1700s. The defeat of Charles Stuart at the Battle of Culloden led to "loyalist" troops hunting down the last of the rebels. They were hampered by a complete lack of maps. In fact, large areas of Scotland were not only very difficult terrain, they were also completely unknown to anyone but the locals.

For a developing nation this was an enormous problem. In addition to the military consequences the nation state also needed to know what it had in terms of resources, people and places. From these early beginnings the modern Ordnance Survey was born.

Hewitt ably traces the story of those early mapping exhibitions. The small groups of men who travelled though inhospitable terrain, measuring, drawing and noting the names of landmarks. Their equipment was rudimentary and their skills were new. Many of the earlier maps are closer to pictorial representations than the symbolic maps we know today. The accounts of the progress of the surveyors are fascinating.

A few individuals struggled to get national recognition, and eventually government realised the importance of the task. Yet it took almost a century before the first, full Ordnance Survey map of the country was finished.

Why did this take so long? It is illuminating that there was a full map of Ireland produced long before the whole of the England, Scotland and Wales. The South Coast was mapped repeatedly long before the mountains of Scotland. The reason for this disparity has everything to do with the needs of the growing British State. The South Coast was important because it was the most likely site of French invasion and understanding the location of strategic sites was crucial for the military. Ireland was Britain's first colony and the government needed to know its resources, people and places in detail. It is noteworthy that the "Great Trigonometrical Survey of India" was begun in 1817 and was well advanced by the mid-1840s, yet the final map in the first series of the British Isles (south west Northumberland) wasn't released until  1870.

One of the weaknesses of Hewitt's book is that she doesn't draw more of this out. In fact it is merely one element in an interesting story for the author, rather than a central theme of the story of British mapping. This is a shame because the story of the Ordnance Survey is one that illuminates the development of British capitalism. Capitalism brought together a particular method of organising production, one that needed incredible amounts of natural resources and people, as well as being incredibly dynamic in terms of scientific and technological development. All these elements are brought out in the story of the technological and social developments of the Ordnance Survey, yet they feel tacked on to Hewitt's history.

This is not to say that Rachel Hewitt's book is not a worthwhile read. She has collected an immense amount of forgotten history and tells a great story. It is one that interweaves William Wordsworth's poetry with the story of the determination of the distance between observatories in London and Paris. It mixes technological genius with stories of men camping for weeks on mountain tops in the hope of a clear day. Sadly this detail sometimes obscures the far greater story beneath.

Carolyn Ives Gilman - Ison of the Isles

Ison of the Isles is the sequel to the marvellously original novel Isles of the Forsaken which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It is such a direct sequel that it really reads as part two of a single volume and the publisher might want to consider re-issuing the two books in this format in the future.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Forsaken told the story of the colonial ambitions of the Innings in the Forsaken Islands. Their military interventions and the threat to the lives and culture of the people of these Islands leads to an initial uprising, led by a former naval commander, Harg. This uprising rapidly becomes a revolution against colonial rule, one that in this sequel is being bloodily suppressed by the Inning naval forces. Massacres and violent attacks on towns are leading to enormous numbers of refugees and growing calls for action.

The problem is that the only real option that is apparent to the islanders is military and despite Harg's strategic genius there is no way he can defeat the overwhelming military force being deployed against him. This means that the islanders' only option is to turn to their cultural and religious beliefs to save them. They look for a traditional leader, the Ison, who can lead them. The Ison however has to go through a ritual that will transform him, and the only person who can do that is a Lashnura woman Spaeth, who has the magical abilities but not the experience.

At the heart of this novel, as in its prequel, is the clash between the new rationality represented by the "developed" or "modern" nation of the Innings as contrasted to the "old" beliefs of the Forsaken islanders. As I argued in reviewing the first novel, when in our own history colonial powers have encountered people they want to control, these clashes are not simply cultural - they are rooted in the economic and political nature of the respective societies.

In Ison as in the earlier book the difference is that these forces are very real indeed (at least for the Islanders). Spaeth is able to encourage her gods to use their powers over storm and sea to try and sink the Inning naval ships. Unfortunately, in a brilliant illustration of the central theme of the novels, the captain of the Inning flagship is able to make a lightening conductor to protect his vessel from the vengeful gods. The captain's rationality appears to tame the extremes of nature, but in reality he unknowingly defeats a god.

Carolyn Ives Gilman has clearly built on her understanding of the beliefs of the native peoples of the Americas to create this wonderful fantasy. However she takes this further. There is a darkly humorous part of the book were one of the Islanders is convinced to marry an Inning. The ritual means nothing to her. She cannot comprehend the idea of being a virgin at marriage, or how important monogamy is to the Inning, nor the idea of having a single partner for life.

I also enjoyed the way that different revolutionary strategies are played out. There are those that want to try and defeat the colonials at their own game, but the Islanders' technology and economic system isn't yet strong enough, nor can they win in the courtroom which is rigged against them. The problem for the author is that there is no real solution.

This is a military conflict that the Innings are going to win despite the heroism and the tactics of the Islanders' soldiers. The Forsaken Islands will not be entirely subdued and ultimately, as in the real world, the colonies will rebel and kick out the oppressor. This contradiction means that the end of the novel is somewhat unsatisfying. That said this is an enjoyable read about a fantasy world of magic and warfare that mirrors the clash between oppressed and oppressor in our own history. I look forward to Ms Gilman's future writing.

Related Reviews

Gilman - Isles of the Forsaken

Leon Trotsky - 1905

Lenin described the revolution in Russia in 1905 as the "great dress rehearsal  for the revolution of 1917 which seized power. As a result, the 1905 revolution is often hidden by the shadow of the events twelve years later. Yet for those trying to understand the dynamics of the revolutionary process, there is much to learn from 1905 (as the Bolsheviks themselves understood).

Leon Trotsky was a central figure in this revolution. His book on 1905 is not an attempt at a historical over-view. It doesn't tell the whole story what was a year of revolution - in fact he begins with the massacre of January 9th, when Tsarist troops fired on a crowd who can marched to the palace to raise a number of wide ranging demands for reform. Then he skips to the events of October, barely touching at the surface of what were many months of strikes, protests and intervention from the Tsarist state.

October 1905 was important because it was then that the great body that represented the working people of St. Petersburg - the Soviet of Workers Deputies was formed. Much of 1905 is spent analysising this body, which Trotsky was to chair during a brief period at the end of the year, before the state arrested the leadership. From Trotsky, we get a real sense of the activity of the Soviet, as well as the way that it represented an alternate centre of power to the existing bourgeois state.

"The Soviet's premises were always crowded with petitioners and plaintiffs of all kinds - mostly workers, domestic servants, shop assistants, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. Some had an absolutely phantasmoagorical idea of the Soviet's power and its methods.... Applications and petitions arrived from remote parts of the country. After the Novembers strike the inhabitants of one district of a Polish province sent a telegram of thanks to the Soviet. An old Cossack from Poltava province complained of unjust treatment by the Prices Repnin who had exploited him as a clerk for 28 years and then dismissed him without cause; the old man was asking the Soviet to negotiate with the Princes' on his behalf. The envelope containing this curious petition was addressed simply to The Workers' Government, Petersburg, yet it was promptly delivered by the revolutionary postal service."

The Soviet was also a body of action, it tried to co-ordinate and develop the workers struggles across the city and the country, launching a strike wave to demand an eight hour day, but encouraging workers to implement this in their workplaces in the face of management opposition. This was incredibly successful and in the fifty odd days of its existence, workers made many gains that had been denied to them by the repressive regime. As Trotsky writes:

"By the pressure of strikes the Soviet won the freedom of the press. It organised regular street patrols to ensure the safety of citizens. To a greater or lesser extent, it took the postal and telegraph services and the railways into its hands. it intervened authoritatively in economic disputes between workers and capitalists. It made an attempt to introduce the eight-hour working day by direct revolutionary pressure. Paralysing the activity of the autocratic state by means of the insurrectionary strike, it introduced its own free democratic order into the life of the labouring urban population."

Trotsky's book contains much else of interest - the role of the mass strike wave in revolutionary periods and the way that the masses can attempt to win over the army for instance. However the revolution was defeated, in part because sections of the army remained loyal and in part because of the weaknesses of the under-developed Russian working class. Much of the processes that would shape the 1917 revolution existed in embryo in 1905 - the alliance between workers and peasants for instance.

The defeat of the revolution led to prosecutions. The task for the Russian ruling class though was difficult, because "they had to represent the Soviet as a conspiratorial organisation which, under pressure from a group of energetic revolutionaries, controlled the terrorized masses."

Of course this was very much the wrong way, but the Tsar and his ministers could hardly acknowledge the fact that enormous numbers of workers and peasants had supported a body that had become an alternate to their government.

The edition of 1905 that I read (Wellred publications 2005) contains a lot of useful material. Trotsky uses it to expound his theories of Combined and Uneven Development and Permanent Revolution, arguing long before Lenin that a working class revolution was possible in Tsarist Russia. In later articles and footnotes he points out that his criticisms of the Bolsheviks were no longer valid as they had, in the process of 1917, moved to share his position. Additional material includes Trotsky's account of the trial of the Deputies of the Soviet and his speech in the court room, in which he displays his eloquence, political analysis and rhetoric. It also includes an account of the deputies journey into Siberian exile and an exciting description of his escape on a sleigh pulled by reindeer and a drunken Siberian driver. Sadly this edition is marred by a very bad layout, plenty of typographical errors and spelling mistakes and a couple of duplicated paragraphs. It makes the reading process much harder and would encourage potential readers to search out an alternative edition.

Related Reviews

Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October 1879 - 1917
Cliff - Trotsky: The Sword of the Revolution, 1917 - 1923

Choonara - A Rebels' Guide to Trotsky

Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe

John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

The very idea of Ancient Egypt conjures up some obvious images; the pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, frescoes and carvings showing boats plying the Nile or impressive statues and grave goods. This is not surprising, as these monuments are both impressive and photogenic. Yet they make up only a small part of Egypt's ancient history, a culmination of thousands of years of life near the Nile and the history of the area continued long after the pyramids were built into the era of classical Greece and Rome.

John Romer's earlier books have looked at particularly aspects of ancient Egypt. In particularly I was impressed by his exploration of the daily life of a section of Egypt's more ordinary population, the tomb builders who worked in the Valley of the Kings. That book Ancient Lives included a detailed description of some extended strike action by the workers. But Romer's latest book takes on a far larger task, an account of the whole history of Ancient Egypt. He is well qualified to do this having spent many years excavating and studying the period and this, the first volume of two, is a wonderful book that will set the standards for writing about Egypt for a long time.

Romer begins his tale with the earliest of people who live in the area that we now think of as Egypt. We know a little about the hunter-gatherer nomads who lived in the area, but the real story begins with the farming communities that hunted, grew food and fished on the northern shores of the Faiyum Oasis, a few hundred miles west of modern Cairo. The climate then was different and one of the factors that shaped the eventual growth of the ancient population was a changing environment that helped force the earliest farmers to the banks of the Nile. The arid conditions of the Egyptian desert preserve the legacy of these farmers from perhaps 7000 years ago. When excavated their grain bins were found to not only to contain grain, so well preserved that curators tried to germinate them later, but also the tools and reed baskets had also survived. Thus begins the story of a people who transformed the Nile region using the most rudimentary of tools, yet produced stunning buildings, tombs and artworks. The pyramids after all, were made with bronze age technology.

At the heart of John Romers' story though, is the tale of the growth of the Egyptian State. It took many centuries before what we know as ancient Egypt came to exist. Romer takes pains to explain the neolithic revolution that led to farming becoming the dominant mode of production along the Nile. But he also argues that the particular nature of the Nile, the extreme fertility of the soil meant that those farmers could support a large non-agricultural work force at a very early point in history. Here-in lies the secret of the rapid growth of the Egyptian state, but also its ability to mobilise and sustain large numbers of workers in its monument building phase. During the building of the Great Pyramid, Romer estimates that a tenth of the working population were not working on the fields, but were engaged in building or providing the networks of exchange to support the pyramid builders.

Romer sees the development of this state as central to the development of the wider Egyptian world. While discussing King Narmer, the earliest Pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt, Romer writes that:

"the formation of Narmer's state had provided the foundations of a truly orignal order for [a] society that would last for millennia and which, as Pharaoh's Egypt, became a wonder of the ancient world.... a commonly used term like 'kingdom' appears to be appropriate. Yet the Pharaonic state stands at the beginning of all that. It was created from the ground up, without the benefit of an exemplar and, indeed, without the aid of writing or the presence of a national faith."

In this development of the state, the King or Pharaoh comes to represent the very state itself. Indeed,

"when ancient Egyptian scribes referred to Pharaoh's kingdom in non-literary texts, they used terms like 'residence' - that is the royal residence - to denote the controlling centre of the networks of trade and traffic, tithing and taxing, that operated in the regions of the lower Nile."

Kings like Narmer were often portrayed as warlike and violent. Early Egyptian history certainly was violent, many of the kings of this period, including Narmer, where buried with hundreds of murdered people around them. They are often depicted in the act of vanquishing an enemy, yet much of the migration and spread of the people northwards from the sites where the early Egyptian state developed was marked by peaceful co-existence with those who had come from the Levant. Extensive trade networks developed and cultural ideas, such as design of buildings and farming were taken up and shared by communities from different areas. I liked for instance that in the midst of one enormous Naqqadrian cemetery lies a grave of an individual buried in a traditional way from the Middle East.

All this could only be supported by the agricultural produce from the Nile, and the earliest technological innovations were the irrigation channels and pools built along the banks to trap the annual flood. Such methods are still used in other parts of Africa and one reason we know something about ancient farming patterns is that they lasted until very recent times. The ancient state was never far from the farming and the water that allowed the desert kingdom to flourish. This is why on a giant mace head, archaeologists have found an image of "a man... wearing what would become the White Crown of Upper Egypt, in the act of opening a water channel with the stroke of a farmer's adze... it is improbable that this unique object.... does not reflect something of the age in which it had been made."

In the language of Historical Materialism, the immense surplus that could be obtained from agricultural on the banks of the Nile (sometimes two or three crops a year) meant that the forces of production developed rapidly. Within a few centuries of the early Naqqadrian state and the rule of Narmer, the enormous pyramids were being built. This required a complex and developed state to organise the networks of trade and distribution of food, as well as the movement of stone and metal from quarries and mines. Egypt then as an agricultural state and Romer argues convincingly that the ancient cities were not places as we might imagine them today, but places of residence of the state's workers. Those who oversaw the production process.

Towards the end of the book, Romer laments  that we know very little about these ancient people.

"Our real knowledge of these ancient people hardly extends beyond their pyramids, their tomb chapels and names and titularies. We know nothing, for example, of those who carried [Queen] Hetep-heres in her palanquin, and though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all."

It is for this reason that much of the this book is dominated by discussions of architecture, pottery or stonework. Yet this is never boring, Romer has tried to draw out a history of people based on what they did to shape the world around them in order to survive. As he aptly points out, the images they have left are less a depiction of what is taking place and more a depiction of the state itself. As the ancient Egyptian state matured, its monuments and buildings also evolved. The very act of building the enormous pyramids also shaped the state and created the conditions of further building works. Our vision of ancient Egypt is thus in turn a reflection of what the ancient state itself did. As Romer concludes, "the greater part of what survives from early Egypt is exactly what those ancient people took pains to store and thus preserve within the dryness of the desert."

John Romers' book is a unique and magnificent read. It is accessible and well written, though if I have one minor criticism it is that the pictures seem old and of low-quality, a few higher resolution images of the objects being described would have been welcome. But this is a minor complaint about what is an essentially materialist account of the rise of the ancient Egyptian state. I recommend it, and look forward to the companion volume with great anticipation.

Related Reviews

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers
Shaw - Ancient Egypt - A Very Short Introduction
Verner - The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History
Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest