Dave Goulson - A Sting in the Tale

This is a charming and entertaining book that at its heart has an important ecological message of interest to anyone concerned about a sustainable future, particularly, an environmentally friendly agriculture. Dave Goulson is a world expert on bumblebees, but he is also an enthusiast for the tiny creatures. He has the rare ability that experts often lack, of making his specialist subject both interesting and accessible. A Sting in the Tale begins with Goulson's childhood fascination with animals, plants and insects, his experiments with taxidermy and butterfly collecting, and his growing awareness of the natural world. It is a story that Goulson tells with wit, and a fair amount of self-deprecating humour, and intertwines it with the history of the study of the bumblebee.

There is an oft repeated quote about bees, attributed to Albert Einstein, (though Goulson argues Einstein was unlikely to have said it) which suggests that if bees die out, human society will rapidly follow. Goulson argues that this isn't realistic, but does explain how central bumblebees are to the pollination of key plants - including fruits, nuts and many other crops that we rely on. He explains in detail the evolution of bumblebees, their central position in plant ecology, and how they have been moved around the world to better serve the interests of agriculture.

I don't have space here to summarise everything about bumblebees that he writes about. The "cuckoo" bees that steal other bee nests, the way that bees use chemicals to detect whether a flower has recently been visited by another bee, how they use colour to avoid predators and so on. Though I feel I should mention that I was fascinated by Goulson's detailed explanation of bee reproduction and how this has, in evolutionary terms,  led to their collective behaviour. In short this is because female bees have more DNA in common with their sisters than their children, which helps create a collective interest.

But for me the key part of the book was the question of bees and agriculture. When writing my own recent article on capitalism and agriculture, I noted the way that a bee industry has developed around the almond industry in California. There, monoculture fields, high usage of pesticides and destruction of the sites (like hedgerows) that bees nest in has created fields devoid of insect life, and bees are brought in their millions across the USA to pollinate crops. Goulson shows how this industry has become global, with factories producing packaged nests for farmers to pollinate crops. Interestingly this is not particularly new, though it is on  massively expanded scale. When European farming moved to New Zealand in the 18th century, bees had to be sent over to pollinate the crops. In turn this had an impact on local ecology (though it created a reservoir of bees to potentially replace extinct species in the UK).

But this isn't simply historical - the introduction of bees for the tomato industry has meant farmers can increase profits massively and cut labour, but it can have a tragic impact on local ecology as bees displace "native" species. The problem isn't simply about the disruption of ecologies. But also that factory farming of bees can produce the perfect environment for the spread of disease. So industrial farming has both damaged the natural communities of bees and produced an industry that also threatens bees! As Goulson writes:

Whether or not a European disease is the cause of these terrible declines, the principle remains. Shipping bees around is inherently risky unless they can be guaranteed to be free of disease. Oddly, despite the commercial trade in bumblebees now being well over twenty years old, there is very little regulations. Honey bees cannot be transported between most countries unless they have been certified free of their major diseases, but no such regulations have been applied to bumblebees.

The book concludes with Goulson's role in trying to preserve and save bumblebees by expanding their natural habitats and educating people about the threats to them. One heartening fact is that farmers seem very keen on being part of the solution, demonstrating once again that rural communities aren't somehow anti-environment and only concerned with profit.

I have no difficultly in recommending Dave Goulson's book. It's an easy read, but full of fascinating information and real insights into ecology. I was annoyed at his tendency for unflattering and jokey descriptions of his students - "she had a very loud voice and an astonishing capacity for food" went one, and "a pretty and terribly well-spoken girl" for another. It felt patronising and unnecessary and detracted from the excellent writing. That aside A Sting in the Tale is a recommended read, and I look forward to reading Goulson's other writings.

Related Reviews

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Rackham - The History of the Countryside
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Cixin Liu - The Wandering Earth

Cixin Liu has produced some of the most innovative and entertaining, as well as thought provoking science fiction that I've read in the last couple of years. So I was excited to pick up this volume of his short stories. Like his longer novels these are stimulating and in places unusual, as they subvert many of the established science fiction norms. The majority play around with various threats to Earth and humanity - some of these are natural and others are alien. The titular story considers how humanity might react to an sun that is about to destroy itself and its solar system. The solution, the moving of the Earth, is one that provokes intense debate and discussion. It might be read as a metaphor for the threat from climate change, as many people are swayed by denialism.

I was most struck by the rather poignant story Sun of China which follows Shui Wah on his journey from a tiny unremarkable, and extremely poor village into space. It is very much a story of modern China as Wah travels away from home trying to find work and make his fortune. His eventual employment as a window cleaner on one of Shanghai's numerous steel and glass tower blocks leads him into space. While the story is one purely of Wah's success and personal achievement its wider context is the conquering of space for ordinary working class people - the people who end up doing the maintenance and support for China's space enterprises. Cixin Liu cleverly links the ambitions and successes of Wah, together with the needs of space based economy. How do the capitalists make space travel cheap enough that they can get their labour into orbit?

Taking Care of God explores the return of the "Gods" from space. Gods in this context though are super-beings who firstly seeded Earth and now return seemingly to retire. As with all of Cixin Liu's stories it is multilayered, but raises real questions about how ageing societies, even ones that have conquered interstellar travel, can continue in the face of limited resources.

Several of the stories explore themes that will be known to readers of Cixin Liu's novels, particularly the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The idea of "bubble universes" and time travel through hibernation are explored in different ways to the trilogy, but make for entertaining plot premises in themselves. The last two stories in the book are slightly linked, but very different tales. The penultimate one is unashamedly sentimental, and discusses the age old theme of an explorer isolated as an individual but still in contact with the rest of humanity.

The only story I didn't particularly like was Devourer which deals with a external threat to Earth as an alien spacecraft approaches intent on destroying Earth for its resources. There are very strong similarities to Cixin Liu's classic Three Body Problem especially in the high level human discussions about how to fight the aliens. If Three Body Problem followed Devourer, then I'm glad that the author used the short story to work through his ideas, as it doesn't quite come together here. Its treatment in that excellent novel is far superior.

All in all this is a strong collection that fans of Cixin Liu's other work will undoubtedly get a lot out of. I would recommend his novels as a starting point though.

Related Reviews

Cixin Liu - The Three Body Problem
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Cixin Liu - Death's End

Rivers Solomon - An Unkindness of Ghosts

***Contains Spoilers***

It is rare to find a genuinely original science fiction novel, but Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts deserves that label. It is set on a generation starship, the Matilda, though the reader is never clear entirely why the ship left its home planet and where it is going. It is entirely possible that none of those on-board know either. The ship's destination is a "promised land" and this is the first clue to the nature of the society on the Matilda.

Whether it began like this or it somehow evolved/degenerated, the people on Matilda live in a society rigidly split by race and class. Those on the lower decks, like the central character in the book Aster, do the majority of the work and are all dark-skinned. The majority of those at the top of the ship's pecking order are white and live lives of extreme luxury. Aster has medical skills and she uses these to help those one her deck and on others. This doesn't mean that she can escape the mind-numbing work producing food for the thousands of people on-board Matilda though, and it is through Aster's eyes that we see how society maintains itself.

Despite the enclosed spaceship, this is not a vessel of shortages. The ruling elite live lives of luxury, with plenty of food, drink and, notably, space. The slaves at the bottom are crowded into communal living, working hard in fields and short of medicines, food and comforts. Despite the overwhelming numbers of slave workers the system is maintained through brutal violence and terror. Physical beatings are common, for the smallest of transgressions, rape and other abuse is common and, because this is a space ship, those at the top of the order even reduce the temperature of the lower decks to ensure cooperation. This results in tragedy. One of the poignant early scenes is when Aster has to remove a young person's foot as a result of frostbite.

Solomon uses the spaceship scenario brilliantly to make sure this isn't simply the antebellum South transposed into space. As Aster moves around the ship we find out that different levels have different languages, histories and beliefs. The author plays around with the use of gendered language and we see how the oppressed develop ways of communicating to get around their "masters".

Gradually Aster learns that her mother left her a secret before her death, one that might open up Matilda's mysteries, but one that puts Aster's in immense danger. That story is well told, but I'll admit that what I mostly enjoyed was the world that the author builds up. Slaves working in a generation spaceship growing food for their masters shouldn't work, but Solomon makes it real.

Like slavery the novel isn't pleasant. Solomon rightly doesn't duck the reality of violence - Aster makes her own medical paste to put on herself to numb the pain of being raped. An event that is common enough that they need to prepare for it. Some of the scenes of violence are painful, but they also serve to contextualise the latter rebellion against the system - one of the more satisfying scenes that I've read in science fiction for a long time.

Reading An Unkindness of Ghosts I was reminded of the story of the Haitian Revolution that was brilliantly retold in a book I reviewed recently. That's not to say that Rivers Solomon has written a work of history (though their own history weighs heavily on the characters in the novel). If anything this is a book about Earth today - with #BlackLivesMatter movements and other anti-racist campaigns fighting bigotry and racism today. With its discussions of class, race and gender it is a book that uses real history and a fictional future to illuminate the world today. I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

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Julius Caesar - The Conquest of Gaul

Julius Caesar's personal account of his time as military commander (58-50 BCE) in central and north-west Europe is a fascinating read. Caesar has responsibility for an area that mostly covers modern France, Switzerland and parts of Germany and the low countries. Today, his account is often remembered as it contains the first written accounts of Britain and the Britons. But it should also be read for its insights into the reality of the Roman Army.

Rome's imperialism allowed it to gather booty and slaves, essential for the functioning of its economy. But the subduing of huge areas of the continent also allowed it to create areas with which trade was possible. Caesar was mostly concerned with making sure that the local tribes could not damage Rome's economic interests. So some of the book is accounts of Caesar's attempts to create alliances between Rome and various French and Germany tribes. It's fascinating to see how divide and rule is used to undermine the power of the united tribes.

But most of the book is a military account. In places it's breathless as thousands of Roman soldiers and their mercenary allies (often German cavalry) smashes the numerically superior tribes. Sections of the book contain detailed accounts of contemporary warfare. The description of the Siege of Alesia, where the Roman area besieged a town held by the Arveni tribe under the leadership of Vercingetorix. The Roman's completely surrounded the town and held off a huge relief force before winning a military victory that is probably still looked at in academies today.

But what really struck me about reading this book is how it exposes Roman occupation and military action as essentially terror. Hostages are demanded, villages and towns are razed. People are killed in huge numbers when they aren't captured into slavery. Crops are despoiled or stolen to keep the legions marching and the enemies aren't simply defeated, they are smashed.

Setting out once more to harass the Eburones, Caesar sent out in all directions a large force of cavalry that he had collected from the neighbouring tribes. Every village and every building they saw was set on fire; all over the country the cattle were either slaughtered or driven off as booty; and the crops, a part of which had already been laid flat by the autumnal rains, were consumed by the great numbers of horses and men. It seemed certain, therefore, that even if some of the inhabitants had escaped for the moment by hiding, they must die of starvation after the retirement of the troops.

Caesar here is writing about himself in the third person, so this is his own account of events. This sort of mass terror is repeated time and again by the Romans and their allies. What is also remarkable about these descriptions is that they were intended to be read as a celebration and justification of Caesar's actions. In other words, they were read and accepted by the Roman population, who presumably didn't object - or if they did we have no record of it. Certainly Caesar saw no problem in putting his mass oppression in print.

For those interested in military history this is a great read. For those who want to understand the reality of Imperial rule there's also much in it. Sadly the parallel with more recent imperial behaviour is all too clear.

Related Reviews

Harper - The Fate of Rome
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Suetonius - The Twelve Caesars
Tacitus - The Annals of Imperial Rome
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Kyle Harper - The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire

I have to admit that I began by disliking Kyle Harper's Fate of Rome. The initial prejudice was because of Harper's use of Malthusian ideas as the intellectual framework for his discussion of Ancient Rome. Reading a book published in 2017 I was surprised to find big chunky quotes from "Parson Malthus" not least because his ideas have repeatedly been challenged and shown wanting.

Persevering with the book however I began to find much of interest. Harper does not abandon his Malthusian positions, but his study of the impact of environmental change and disease on the Roman Empire has much of interest. Harper argues that the fall of the Roman Empire was the "single greatest regression, in all of human history". This was, he says, the result of the contradictions of the Empire coming together with a period of climate change and disease which repeatedly undermined the Empire's rulers' ability to maintain the system.

There are several interlinked contributing factors. The first of these is the environmental context. Harper argues that the Roman Empire arose in a particularly benevolent environmental era - the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO). The RCO is:

poorly defined in time and nature. The chronological boundaries proposed here, ca. 200 BC - AD 150, are a coarse abstraction imposed on a range of evidence, but not arbitrarily. They allow us to describe a phase of late Holocene climate defined by global forcing patterns and a range of proxies displaying some coherence. Buoyed by high levels of insolation and weak volcanic activity, the RCO was a period of warm, wet and stable climate across much of the vast Roman Empire. 

In other words, the RCO allowed big surpluses of food to be grown, agriculture to expand and there were reduced natural disasters to threaten the early Empire.

However the urban nature of the Roman Empire created disease ecologies. The concentration of large numbers of people, in towns and cities that often overwhelmed the sewage systems provided opportunities for disease to flourish. Without any understanding of how disease spread or germ theory, there was little the Romans could do once disease took hold. The results could be devastating. During the Antonine Plague, a disease that was probably small pox, around seven million people died.

The relationship between climate and disease "is not neat and linear". Harper gives us a few examples of how climate change fed the growth and virulence of disease. But his main thesis is that the Roman Empire had little or no protection against disease when it came, and because it was constantly pushing against a Malthusian limit, the results were always catastrophic. While the Empire saw a series of deadly plagues and outbreaks of disease, it seems that the final nail in the coffin was a series of outbreaks in the 500s. In 544 the plague lead to an "unprecedented fiscal-military crisis". The Roman Empire, hitherto reliant on its massive army was unable to mobilise the troops it needed. The repeated outbreaks of plague undermined the viability of the state itself:

The violence of the initial wave reversed two centuries of demographic expansion int he blink of an eye. Then the persistence of plague for two centuries strangled hopes of recovery. If we imagine... a normal growth rate of 0.1 percent per annum leading into the first wave, 50 percent total mortality in an eastern Roman population of 30,000,000, and thereafter a combination of quick recover rates (0.2 percent per annum) and smaller mortality events (10 percent mortality events every 15 years...), the power of the subsequent amplifications to maintain the population at low levels is apparent.

It is difficult to argue against this scenario. But I want to suggest that things were a little more complicated. One thing that is missing from Harper's book is any real discussion about the limitations of Roman society itself. This was a slave economy - the wealth of the Empire was built, in large part, from the labour of slaves. This was a very real limitation on the ability of the Empire to keep expanding, and caused major internal contradictions. The particular nature of Roman society - its highly urban character - arose from the nature of its productive base. The huge populations mentioned are there because there are lots of slaves in the economy. There is nothing here about the interaction between the different classes - the tensions in the cities that meant Emperors had to constantly think about appeasing the mob, the slave revolts, or the condition of the peasantry. One of the strengths of Mary Beard's recent history of Rome is that she points out that the vast majority of the Roman population worked all their lives until they died. Tensions between those at the bottom of society and the one percent were a constant concern for the ruling classes - yet the nature of Roman society is minimised in the face of the external threat from climate and disease. While it would be wrong to ignore these factors, to reduce the rise and fall of a civilisation simply to them is inadequate. Writing about the barbarian attacks on Rome Harper writes:

We need not go in for monocausal explanations. The coming of the Huns did not, by itself, spell the doom of the western empire. In the end the Huns conquered very little, and the effect of their entrance onto the scene must be measured within the particular circumstance that they encountered.

What is true of the Huns is also true of climate and disease. Their impact must be measured against the nature of Roman society that made it vulnerable. In this Harper's book proves inadequate. The reason for this inadequacy is that Harper's starting point is Malthusian - that every human society faces a brick wall against which it constantly presses, and mass hunger (or ecological crisis) is just around the corner. Karl Marx pointed out that the problem with Malthus was that he ignored the economic and social context. As Marx wrote:

overpopulation is... a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production. As well as restricted numerically. How small do the numbers which meant overpopulation for the Athenians appear to us!

Despite my disagreement with his thesis, I found much of interest in Harper's book. After finishing it, I read Caesars account of the Conquest of Gaul and I was pleased to note a bit when Caesar complains that the barbarians constantly mock the Romans for their short stature. Harper explains that Roman society was inherently unhealthy. Statistical studies of bones show that the coming of the Empire led to smaller stature. People were taller before and after the Empire, but while it ruled their region they were less healthy and were thus shorter. Such details and Harper's detailed studies of the impact of disease on the Roman Empire are fascinating. But the book is undermined by a weak theoretical framework.

Related Reviews

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Jeannette Ng - Under the Pendulum Sun

What would happen if Victorian England, in all its colonial glory, discovered fairy land? This is the intriguing basis for Jeannette Ng's new novel Under the Pendulum Sun. Catherine Helston is a classic example of her class. A young woman born into a middle class family, the daughter of a minister. Her beloved elder brother, Laon, follows their father into the church and becomes a missionary in the country of Arcadia - the land of the Fae.

Left behind in England, Catherine has little to do. Her upbringing has prepared her for a life of sewing, embroidery and tea parties. However when Laon's letters end she begins to fear for him, and eventually receives a letter from the missionary organisation asking her to try and find him. Once in Arcadia Catherine finds herself in a world that is both mysterious and constantly changing. Arcadia isn't simply another part of Earth, it's a place that can only be visited by getting lost (which is why Captain Cook found his way there on one of his voyages). It's a world that is utterly alien - the novel's title refers to the Pendulum Sun of Arcadia, that swings back and forth across the land.

Ng describes the world well. Inhabited by very strange characters and creatures, Catherine has to battle to escape being trapped in a pastiche of her life in England - stuck in a bizarre castle with a few strange characters, one of whom wants to discuss the finer points of Christian doctrine and the other who would mostly not tell Catherine any details of life, but instead take tea and sew.

Eventually Laon does return and Catherine and him find themselves in the midst of rather a complicated situation whereby the Queen of the Fae appears to be setting either a test, or a trap. There's a couple of twists to keep the reader hooked, though I thought the main plot turn was fairly expected. Ng portrays well the stifling nature of Victorian society for the female sex, and the simmering repressed sexuality for the middle classes.

More interestingly I was struck by a number of themes here. One of which is the neat way that Ng upends the dominant colonial mindset of Victorian England. During that period, the sun never set on the British Empire, and the British establishment want to extend that rule to Arcadia. Others are also interested - I loved the idea that Germany was building a railway to Arcadia consisting of a clockwork system to randomly move trains along points so they became lost.

The central ideology of the British Empire was that the English were the most superior race and everyone else was subsurvient. Yet in Arcadia their rules and methods don't work. Here Christianity makes no sense (despite the desperate attempts by Catherine and Laon to find the Fae in the Bible). Here military might is foiled by magic, and while there is much material to trade, it seems that Arcadia gets as much out of the exchange as the human world.

In the end Catherine and Laon find that they have no power in Arcadia. They have become living proof that British rule cannot extend into the lands of magic. But the nature of their Fall also means that they cannot ever return to their old lives. Under the Pendulum Sun is thus more than a simple novel of the Fae (to quote it's subtitle) but instead is quite a rather clever morality tale that shows what can happen to those who believe their culture is far superior to everyone else's. It's a great novel and despite a few errors that should have been caught in editing I enjoyed it alot.

Stephen Mosley - The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian & Edwardian Manchester

Stephen Mosley's The Chimney of the World is a fascinating book about one of the earliest environmental problems for a major industrial city, but for today's activists concerned about climate change and air pollution in the 21st century it will stimulate many thoughts about how we meet the environmental challenges we face. I read this book for two reasons. Firstly I live in Manchester today and before that lived in Salford for many years. Secondly I am an environmental and socialist activist and one of the key campaigns I'm involved in is against the extension of fossil fuel use through fracking. Thus Mosley's book resonates on several levels for me.

In 1898 there were 1,200 factory chimneys in Manchester and about 760 in next door Salford. To people living here today the figures sound incredible. In addition to these, every home had at least one chimney which was also producing smoke, and there were hundreds more in the towns that today make up Greater Manchester, many of these like Oldham, Rochdale and Stockport, themselves centres of industry. All these factories were belching smoke because they burnt coal to provide energy, and the homes used it for heating and cooking. The pollution was staggering.

In 1888 someone living in Ancoats, Manchester's main industrial area wrote:

The atmosphere in this neighbourhood is so dense with smoke that it is impossible to see any object at a distance of a few hundred years; and, as for sunshine, I have lived here ten years and never seen what could be called 'brilliant sunshine'.

In 1901 another observer wrote:

Deadly suburban fields form the most extensive element of the background; but what rivet the eye are the scores, and scores again, of mill chimneys, tall, straight, and lank, belching forth volumes of black, dense smoke straight at the rocks on which we stand! [Blackstone Edge] Rochdale, Littleborough, Bacup, Burnley, Nelson, Colne - each contributes its quota... and the great smoke drift from South an East Lancashire [can] be seen crossing over the Pennine Range of moorlands and then mingling with the West Riding smoke.

Smoke and fogs on this scale had an enormous impact on the health of the people living in Greater Manchester and beyond. The economic impacts were also huge. What we now call acid rain destroyed buildings in the area and much further afield - in fact the pH of acid was much lower than that experienced in Europe in more modern times. Nothing was clean for more than a few hours, and Mosley documents a couple of cases of women driven mentally ill by constant cleaning - a never ending battle. The Victorians put great emphasis on the need for nature and clean air to prevent ill health, but the parks that they built in Manchester were constantly destroyed by the acid rain, the lack of sunlight and the chemical pollution. Even the council's attempts to put planted trees around municipal buildings relied on the constant ability to cycle the plants into the countryside were they could recover after a few months.

But it was the human impact that is most shocking. By the 1870s Mosley reports, bronchitis had become the most common form of death in "England's factory towns, consistently killing between 50,000 and 70,000 people per annum". In Salford an 1881 report said that 598 out of 100,000 people die annually from lung complaints, compared to 334 in Mid-Cheshire only a few miles away. The contrast between health in industrial towns and rural areas was well know. In addition, sunlight killed TB and "rickets... [was] brought about by the combination of a dietary deficiency of vitamin D and sunlight deprivation".

But despite this, Mosley explains, there was no popular mass movement against smoke and pollution. The reasons, he argues, having nothing to do with lack of awareness of smoke or anger against it. People, including working people, clearly disliked the pollution. The reasons that anti-smoke and clean air campaigns never attracted mass support were mostly linked to economic reasons.

Firstly, Mosley provides ample evidence, that working people in particular associated smoke with prosperity. Chimney's without smoke meant economic down time, unemployment and poverty. As one visitor to Lancashire wrote in 1842:

Thank God, smoke is rising from the lofty chimneys of most of the! for I have not travelled thus far without learning, by many a painful illustration, that the absence of smoke from the factory-chimney indicates the quenching of the fire on many a domestic hearth, want of employment to many a willing labourer, and want of bread to many an honest family.

Smoke meant industry and well-being. This was something played upon by the manufacturers who tried to block attempts to encourage them to use smoke reducing technology by emphasising the economic impact. Indeed the manufacturers did manage to get their workers to protest and picket anti-smoke meetings and activists were attacked on occasion.

In terms of domestic pollution from home fires, another factor played a role. This was the close association in the Victorian mind of the benefits of a warm, open fire in the house as a centre for family life, and as a way of drawing clean air into the house. Tackling the home fires would mean a drastic alteration to behaviour.

To get around these issues, the anti-smoke campaigns tried to play the factory owners on their own territory. One of their main arguments was that smoke represented waste energy - inefficiently burnt coal - and that reducing smoke could save costs. But they found it extremely difficult to prove that the savings were worth the cost of installing specialist equipment and, they had to challenge the industrialists wealth and political power. Without a mass campaign the campaigners lacked political and social weight, and if anything the workers were on the side of the bosses. Despite firm evidence of the toll of the pollution on lives, as late as 1897 some doctors could confidently say that the smoke was not unhealthy.

But there was growing pressure on politicians for action. The Boer War found the working class so unhealthy that it was difficult to find able-bodied men to fight. Of eleven thousand Mancunions who volunteered to fight, 8,000 were rejected because of ill health and of the 3,000 who did join up, only 1,200 were found "moderately fit". But the anti-pollution measures that were introduced were ineffective and the fines so small, and the crimes so difficult to prove, that manufacturers didn't change their behaviour. In fact it wasn't until the 20th century that governments finally acted seriously to stop smoke, in particular as a result of the "Great Smog" of December 1952 that killed 3,000 people in London.

What can we learn for today? Firstly note some parallels. The Victorians had an optimistic belief in technological development to solve their pollution problems and while there were inventions that would reduce smoke considerably, as well as changes to working practises, the manufacturers resisted their introduction in order to maximise their profits. There are many similarities with modern pollution and companies refusing to innovate or introduce technologies because of costs.

Secondly, environmental activists often come up against the question of the economy. President Trump, for instance, frequently plays up the cost to the US economy of action on global warming when compared against China. He plays the jobs versus the environment card. In Victorian and Edwardian Manchester big-business was able to bring workers onto their side, because there wasn't an alternative narrative that attracted workers. Today when we argue against fossil fuels we have to provide an alternative that doesn't alienate workers but makes them feel they have an interest in opposition to the industries that might be providing work. In the UK, one example of this is the Million Climate Jobs Campaign. Finally, there are parallels with the cultural practises of in the 19th century around home fires and today's use of cars. Stephen Mosley makes this point when he argues that car-owners don't want to give up their vehicles in the same way as their predecessors clung on to coal fires  - "the extraordinary affection that the nation once held for the smoky domestic hearth... is rivalled by the contemporary attachment to the... automobile".

Stephen Mosley poses all these questions for us through the prism of historical campaigns to end pollution. If it only did this it would still be a valuable book, but his work is also fascinating, readable and entertaining. It ought to be read by a new generation of political activists and social historians.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

This is an unusual and sometimes strange novel. It follows two attempts by humanity to colonise and terraform far distant worlds. The first of this is abruptly terminated when human civilisation collapses, but not before colonists have seeded a planet with earth creatures and a virus intended to allow the apes they've left to evolve rapidly into humans.

The second expedition follows the second colonisation attempt by a new human civilisation that has grown up on the ruins of the old. These are fleeing an Earth that can no longer support human society and have the old world's star charts to follow. When they arrive at the seeded planet they find things have not gone as the original mission intended.

The novel's chapters alternate between what takes place in space, mostly on humanities ship, and what's taking place on the planetary surface. I won't describe the latter as its too much of a spoiler, and frankly, part of the fun is in watching this develop through the book. But I should say there are some interesting discussions about gender and society as a result of Adrian Tchaikovsky's very alien civilisation.

On board the ship we follow the lives of a number of "key crew" who, because they are in suspended animation through the centuries long journey, get to experience all the major events in the story. It's a useful plot device and the main character, who is a academic expert on the old human civilisation, gives a nicely cynical view of events.

This is the first Adrian Tchaikovsky novel I've read and it is certainly different. It's not particularly subtle, but it has a genuinely original set of ideas at its heart and fans of science fiction should enjoy it.

Eric Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

There is a growing movement of people thinking about how their food is grown, what it contains and its impact on their health and the environment. Often this is tied up with an individualistic view of improving the world - the idea that you can save the world by simply choosing the best food with the least impact on the planet. Eric Holt-Giménez explains he wrote A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism precisely to argue that this approach is inadequate:

This book is intended as a political-economic tool kit for the food movement - from foodies, farmers, farm justice activists, and concerned consumers to climate justice and environmental activists. It is a basic introduction to the economic system of capitalism as seen through the lens of the food system.

In this, Holt-Giménez succeeds admirably. His book is an accessible account of how capitalism works from a Marxist perspective that is focused on the food system, from those who work in the industry, to those who grow the food and how multinational corporations and the profit motive shape the type of food that is produced and how it is grown.

One explain the author gives is the story of the fashionable superfood quinoa. This is an ancient South America staple "poor people's food" which was discovered by wealthy foodies and rapidly became transformed into an expensive export. The locals who had relied on this food for years suddenly couldn't afford it having to switch to "cheap imported bread and pastas for nourishment" and the crop's agriculture was transformed. No longer part of a "complex cropping and animal husbandry rotation system" quinoa instead was grown in huge mono-cultural fields. In turn this displaced the llamas from the grazing areas they've lived on for millennia. Thus the "quinoa boom" gives wealthy western consumers access to a healthy food stuff, but only by breaking up traditional and sustainable food systems in South America - and forcing those peasants to eat less healthily.

The central story here could be applied to thousands of examples from around the globe. In its drive to maximise profits the food corporations transform agriculture into an unsustainable, unhealthy system at the expense of those who produce the food and the planets eco-systems. Much of Holt-Giménez's book explains how this happens and why this is, and one of its strengths is that he never forgets that food is produced by human beings labouring, usually in extremely low paid, exploitative roles. I was struck that the author focused on the peasantry not just as victims of the capitalist food system - people who are impoverished, driven off their land, living in poverty or, forced to migrate in their millions in the hope of better lives - but also as the people who can remake the food system along equitable and sustainable lines.

This focus on the workers and peasants of the system means Holt-Giménez can discuss aspects of food that are seldom acknowledged by liberal foodies - including the racism and sexism at the heart of the exploitative relations between "big food" and "big agriculture" and those who work in them. There is also some useful material here on the importance of immigrant labour to the production of food and while the examples are predominately from North America the same could be said of the UK and Europe (and no doubt many other parts of the world).

Because Holt-Giménez uses a Marxist framework to explain the capitalist food system he has some real insights that might be missed by non-socialist authors. One of these is the centrality of the question of what Marxists call "socially necessary labour time". This, in short, explains how the price of manufactured commodities under capitalism is shaped by a rough average of the amount of human labour that goes into producing something. Looking at the example of organic food, Holt-Giménez points out that it should be much more expensive as it involves more human labour - despite the farmer using less expensive "external inputs" like chemical fertliser. So organic food is more expensive, not lots more expensive, because the price is determined "by the socially necessary labour time to produce a similar conventional product". Capitalist agriculture wants to drive this down, to maximise profits, but only at the expense of those working in the system.

Ever since peasants were pushed off the land and made dependent on wages, agricultural labour has been paid far less than its social value (what it costs to reproduce a farmworker's capacity to work), much less what it adds to the price... of food products.... The low cost of immigrant labour works like a tremendous subsidy, imparting value to crops and agricultural land... The effect of criminalizing immigrant labour is to drive down its cost while passing the vale of immigrant labour power up the food chain.

Calls to "fix a broken food system" are misplaced says  Holt-Giménez. What is needed is a radical reconstruction of the food system in terms for farmers, consumers and the planet. He concludes:

Capitalism is the silent ingredient in our food. It means that the 50 million people living in poverty in the richest country on earth - many of whom grow, harvest, process and serve our food - can't afford to be foodies because they're too busy worrying where their next meal is coming from... It is also the food manufacturers' quest for profits that pushes people to consume unhealthy junk foods high in sugar, salt, fat, artificial flavours, and other additives. If we care about people as much as we do about food, and if we really want to change the food system, we'd better become fluent in capitalism.

Holt-Giménez's book explains this system very well - from land-grabs to the centrality of fossil fuel and the persistence of the peasantry. If I have one criticism it is that I felt Holt-Giménez did not go far enough in explaining how a socialist food system, one that arose from a revolutionary movement might work. I wonder if this is because of the failures of the forced collectivisation that took place under the Soviet Union. However a truly collective, democratically organised food industry would work very differently to the Soviet disaster, and would certainly offer the change of a sustainable, equitable and healthy food system. Our vision, as Holt-Giménez points out, must be far more than a fixing of the broken system. But then I think we should try and spell it out more. I have tried in some of my own writings to explore this, and perhaps in the future we'll need a "Foodie's Guide to Socialism". That criticism aside, Eric Holt-Giménez's book is a very important guide to capitalism for those who want to eat healthier, better, more sustainable and with more regard for those who work at every level in capitalism's broken food and agricultural system.

Related Reviews

Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
McMahon - Feeding Frenzy
Lymbery - Farmageddon
GRAIN - The Great Climate Robbery
Graham-Leigh - A Diet of Austerity

Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Despite enjoying the first volume of this short series by Peter Watts, I found Echopraxia to be utterly incomprehensible. The story follows the adventures of a biologist Daniel Bruks who is caught up in a space mission to investigate events described in the first book, Blindsight. That novel was marked by some interesting discussions on the nature of consciousness and humanity, as well as a relatively clever first contact plot.

Echopraxia on the other hand is a constant stream of events that are impossible to understand as a story line. Things happen to characters for no apparent reason and are never explained. Characters are two dimensional cut outs that don't engage the readers sympathies. The reason for the space mission is unclear and what the characters are actually doing in space is never explained satisfactorily and in places the author inserts random bits of techno-babble seemingly to keep the reader convinced that this is actually a very clever piece of hard science fiction

The first volume is a decent piece of writing. The second is over-complicated, confusing and in places unreadable. Read the first if you like very hard science fiction and skip the second.

Related Reviews

Watts - Blindsight

Kohei Saito - Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature & the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Kohei Saito's book Karl Marx's Ecosocialism is a detailed examination of the way that Marx's ideas of what we would today call ecology developed and evolved. Kohei Saito engages closely with all of Marx's work - from his published writings, his unpublished (until recently) notebooks, as well as the margin notes and comments that were made in other peoples' writings. Importantly, Kohei Saito also examines the works that Marx himself read to show how Marx was aware of, and increasingly put the question of the "metabolic interaction" between human society and nature into his critique of political economy.

Key to this is Marx's own understanding of the law of value and his theory of alienation, developed earlier in his life. In places this can be a challenging read, but it is important and very rewarding. I recently selected it as one of my reads of 2017 and hope others will engage with Kohei Saito's work.

My longer review of this important book was published in Monthly Review April 2018. You can read it here.

Joanne Paul - Thomas More

Thomas More was one of England's most important philosophers. A prolific writer and thinker, his writings and ideas are often neglected today with most people knowing him for his role in Henry VIII's court and his most famous work Utopia. So Joanne Paul's new book that explores and rescues More's work is to be very much welcomed.

More's ideas were very much rooted in established ideas, as Paul explains:

More was heavily influenced by the memento mori medieval tradition, which sought to remind people of their death as a way of dissuading them from sinful living. Fore More, the fleeting nature of this life and of what it contains puts one in mind of what is eternal: notably, our equality and commonality. As we are all essentially the same before birth and after death, we should remember these lessons in our daily lives, avoiding the temptation to feel pride in worldly things; after all, our ownership of them doesn't last very long.

But More was also shaped by the changing world that he was living in. Paul points out that the "unsettled world" of the War of the Roses, the "rebellions of the 1490s" would have played their role in shaping his ideas about society. But More was also challenged in his world view by the reformation, and Paul's book makes it clear that More's response to that showed just how well-rounded and thought through More's ideas were.

Central to this was the sense of the "commonality" the collective society to which everyone belonged. More built upon other ancient thinkers to argue that the collective interest was challenged, or undermined, when individuals started to put their own interests first (pride). This meant that an individuals obsession with earthly riches, or private property, was a problem for the whole of the community as it undermined its unity.

As Paul explains, More was in favour of equality, but did not necessarily think that people were equal.

Part of his [More's] critique of the absurdity of social hierarchy was that it was based on the wrong qualities: birthright rather than merit. For More and his fellow humanists, virtue was what should distinguish people in the commonwealth. This was vera nobilitas - 'true nobility'. Inequality of social position, especially in political rule, could be justified, bit not on the grounds of any material difference between people, such as the random circumstances of birth or the artificial value placed on gold.

For such as short book, Paul does an excellent job in locating More's developing thought in the context of those thinkers around him, and those available to him - particularly the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. I would have liked to have some discussion about More's class position - it is fascinating, for instance, to note that his ideas and debates about private property come in the context of the beginnings of a new rising class of landowner - the beginnings of the bourgeoisie.

The start of a new order (already making itself felt through enclosure in agricultural areas) that put private gain before collective interest was surely a key factor shaping More's ideas. Famously More commented that "sheep... devour men". But More was explicitly not a revolutionary - in fact he despises anything that upsets the smooth workings of the system. As Paul points out, in Utopia More has one of his characters say "the active citizen ought to play his part in the stage play of politics without upsetting the performance, even though he might see through it."

It's this obsession with unity that undoes More when he comes to the Reformation. Unable to side with Henry VIII's changes precisely because he doesn't want to shatter the unity of the church, he ends up becoming an obstacle  that has to be removed. Paul summarises More's thinking:

A citizen 'cannot give his consent' to Henry's supremacy... because 'many foreign places do not affirm;' this supremacy. In other words, as he had indicated to [Thomas] Cromwell, the problem was that England was only a small part of Christendom: the power of deciding over the headship of the church lay with the general council as a representative of the whole body of Christendom.

I was left with the feeling that More was actually a man whose ideas were in advance of the political and economic development of the society he was part of.  More couldn't yet break with a feudal approach to the king and church, one that allowed the mass of the people full participation in society even though he knew it was a worthwhile aspiration.

Developing these ideas would be the task of later thinkers and activists. Having written myself on the Digger Gerrard Winstanley's vision of Utopia, I was struck, as Paul has been, on the similarities of Winstanley and More's ideas of Utopia. But I think Winstanley goes much further than More does - precisely because the society that Winstanley is living in has developed economically much further. Which is why Winstanley places so much emphasis on economic production, unlike More who focuses on ideas.

A small weakness with Paul's book is that she decouples More to a certain extent from the changing economic system he was living in and focuses on his ideas abstracted from society. The Reformation had very real economic roots and neglecting them can lead us to understand the process through individuals and not their interactions with world around them.

The final section of Paul's book looks at the legacy of More's ideas in the Early Modern and modern periods. She notes that More has been adopted by many people, with leading Marxists often claiming his as the first socialist. This I think is unfair, as More wasn't really a communist in the sense that Winstanley was a century later. But More was responding to the changing world around him, and he wanted a better commonwealth for all. So in that sense he remains important to us today. Joanne Paul's excellent and readable introduction will hopefully give a new generation reason to read and debate Thomas More.

Related Reviews

Duffy - Stripping of the Altars
MacCulloch - Reformation
Tawney - Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Hoyle - The Pilgrimage of Grace
Winstanley - The Law of Freedom

Miranda Kaufmann - Black Tudors: The Untold Story

In the months before I read Miranda Kaufmann there was a twitter outcry from right-wingers who objected to the portrayal of some Ancient Romans in a documentary about Roman Britain, as being dark skinned. Despite the assurances of a number of well qualified historians they seemed unable to believe this well established fact.

I suspect these same individuals would be hugely outraged to read Miranda Kaufmann's new book Black Tudors which makes it clear that during the Tudor period English people would not have been surprised by, or unused to seeing black people, particularly Africans, on their shores. Indeed, as the stories she focuses on here make clear, black and non-white people, played a large variety of different roles within Tudor society - from servants and prostitutes, to highly qualified sailors and weavers. Kaufmann begins by making a very important and clear statement about the perception of non-white people in Tudor England:

When the Black Tudors encountered Tudor Englishmen, they found a people who, though certainly xenophobic on occasion were deeply curious about the world beyond the seas. Most English men and women knew little or nothing of the world beyond their parish boundary. A 'stranger' was simply someone from outside the parish. Tudors were far more likely to judge a new acquaintance by his or her religion and social class than by where they were born or the colour of their skin, though these categories did on occasion intersect.

Furthermore, and this will surprise more than a few bigoted twitter users. The idea that black people only came to England as slaves and as a result of slavery is completely incorrect. Instead the opposite is true and one of the fascinating things is that many black people in the Tudor period appear to have come to the British Isles precisely because they understood that there were no slaves there. Racism, in the sense that we understand it today, did not exist, and people were treated (whatever their skin colour) in terms of what position they occupied, or should occupy in society.

As Kaufmann continues:

Social class governed society. Everyone, from the King... through the aristocracy, to the gentry, yeomen and husbandmen, down to the lowliest vagrant, occupied a particular place in the 'Great Chain of Being'. When Africans arrived in England as ambassadors, they were treated as such, but when they arrived aboard a captured ship, they found themselves at the bottom of the pile.

Kaufmann explores this through the stories of a few select individuals. The shortage of records from the period means that Kaufmann must at times speculate about the people she records, but the facts she has unearthed tell as fascinating story. There's Diego an escaped slave who joined the ship of Captain Drake, helped him raid the Spanish and then returned to Plymouth with him. Later he travelled on Drake's circumnavigation of the world. Diego was wounded on the trip (and eventually died) but he was not a slave. In fact Kaufmann provides evidence from witnesses that Diego had "made a contract with Francis Drake". In other words he was being paid a sailor's wage. There are plenty of stories like this about other black sailors and other black men and women who played a role in Tudor society.

But it is important to say that Kaufmann is not sentimental, nor does she pretend that colour did not matter. It's clear in the case of Anne Cobbie, a prostitute described as a "Tawny Moor with Soft Skin" that Tudor men sought her out because of her complexion and her body. Kaufmann uses the discussion of race, sex and Tudor prostitution to re-emphasise her central point though - that race was not a barrier to involvement into Tudor society. She writes:

Both African men and women were punished by the church courts for having sex outside marriage. In February 1593, Joanna Bennett of Grays Thurrock, Essex, was brought before the Church court at West Ham and charged with 'having carnal knowledge and abusing her body with a certain blackmore now dwelling in the town'. The following January one Agnes Musby did penance for 'fornication with Paul, a blackemore'... These relationships show a very physical acceptance of Africans into Tudor and early Stuart society.

Surprisingly I found that the accounts of specific individuals were more interesting for the way that the author used them to show just how many black people there were in England in the period. She shows this through discussions of Shakespeare s work, analysis of wills, baptism and marriage records and so on. The importance of this is summed up by Kaufmann:

Historians have often argued that the racialised chattel slavery that developed in Colonial America was based on a mind-set imported from England. But the experiences here show that slavery was not an inevitable result of the Anglo-African encounter. Coupled with evidence of free Africans in early Virginia, this book adds weight to the conclusion that American slavery was something that emerged in the very specific economic and social circumstances of the early colonies.

I agree with this conclusion, and the value of Kaufmann's book is precisely that it does support this argument. However what I felt the book didn't do was explain what, precisely, did lead to the racism that developed in the UK and the United States. If it did come from such "specific economic and social circumstances" how did it develop? Who pushed it and why? I think the answer lies in the way slavery and capitalism were linked - the need to justify slavery and stop the unity of black and white that would oppose the barbaric trade.

Miranda Kaufmann's book is an excellent and accessible book that demonstrates that racism and prejudice were not automatic in the encounter between Europeans and Africans. If it didn't go far enough to explain where that racism did come from, that certainly isn't enough to stop me recommending it to others.

Related Reviews

Snowden - Before Colour Prejudice
Richardson - Say it Loud
Fryer - Staying Power

Kim Stanley Robinson - New York 2140

What will life be like for people when global warming has melted the ice caps and climate change has transformed the world's environment? The vast majority of scientists conclude that the temperature rises we can expect by the end of the current century will mean a colossal human catastrophe, unless there we radically reduce the amount of carbon emissions. These changes will mean disaster for millions of people with water shortages, heat waves, flooding, extreme weather and famine following. Millions of people will suffer and there will be a corresponding catastrophe for the Earth's flora and fauna.

Runway climate change - the result of global warming causing processes that feedback and lead to more global warming - could, in some scenarios lead to levels of warming that make Earth uninhabitable for humans. But before that takes place, there will be millions of people living, and struggling, on a hotter world.

This then is the premise for Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel. He focuses on the city of New York after two major "pulse" events have led to significant sea level rises that have destroyed much of the world's coast lines and turned cities like New York into collections of island skyscrapers. People have learnt to adapt - to sea the basement floors and build farms on the top of the towers. Many of the towers in Robinson's New York of 2140 are run by a sort of collective democratic leadership.

Capitalism still exists, and Robinson brilliantly shows how the system adapts to these changes. New financial markets are opened up with wealthy speculators betting on the way that water levels change the value of the markets. Robinson uses much of this to discuss the way that capitalism leads to economic and environmental crisis, and how governments are prepared to let ordinary people suffer in order to bail out the banks and the system.

The story follows a group of people living the Met tower - a couple of computer experts who have tried to hack the financial system to bring capitalism down, a policewoman who is trying to find out who kidnapped them, a financial speculator who is obsessed with new ways of making himself rich in the era of high water levels and various other characters including a couple of kids who find treasure worth billions. One rather lovable chatterer is Amelia who pilots a blimp and has an enormous "cloud following" of viewers who watch her nature films. These characters all gradually come to the conclusion that the system is broken and is heading for a major economic crash, and the time is right to change things.

Reading this as an environmental activist and a Marxist I had three problems with the book. At this point I should emphasis that Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favourite authors, but there are major problems with this novel. Firstly the world he depicts, post climate disaster, is simply to good. This is basically early 21st century capitalism with higher sea levels and no ice-caps. You don't get any sense of how the warming that has lead to the pulse events has impacted the rest of the world. Even the stories of the Netherlands being destroyed and replaced by a floating city state seem to imply that everything is OK really. The refugees who make it to the Met come across as slightly lost migrants, rather than people who have seen their entire world collapse. In fact we hear next to nothing about what is taking place in the rest of the world. Surely there are wars, famines and disasters?

In other words, Robinson's future is too nice. There's no real sense that global warming has led to phase shift of the planet's ecological system. Things are just a little bit worse than they were. It's not a scientifically accurate picture of what could happen and it downplays the crisis we are in the midst of. In addition, Robinson's belief that technology is the solution seems naive too. New York 2140 is extremely high-tech, the environmental disaster having apparently spurred innovation to solve the problems of the world.

Secondly the economics just don't work. While reading this I was suddenly struck by the idea that this was actually not a revolutionary work (despite the mass involvement of ordinary people in a capital "strike" that puts the economy into crisis). It's a book about how Keynesian economics must replace neo-liberalism if we're to have social and ecological justice. The big, radical idea at the heart of the book is to nationalise the banks. It's inadequate in the context of Robinson's world and its not enough if we want to really challenge real-world capitalism.

The final problem I had is that the story doesn't go anywhere. There are some brilliant bits - a very well described riot in the aftermath of a huge storm, and a comic chapter about polar bears and blimps - but the story is weak and ends by getting the reader to believe that Washington really is an OK place if only you get the right people elected.

To be a little blunter, I think this is the book that Robinson wrote after reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything and seeing Trump elected instead of Clinton. Klein's book is a great read in terms of understanding the scale of the environmental crisis and its roots in capitalism. But she fails to put across a revolutionary challenge and falls back on a Keynesian solution - where neo-liberalism ends and the state is more directly involved. These are laudable aims, but as a solution to exploitation, oppression and environmental crisis it is inadequate. In Robinson's homage to New York, even a highly flooded one, it underpins a very weak novel indeed. Sadly you can imagine someone reading this and concluding that climate change isn't actually that bad.

Related Reviews

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Eamon Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars

This is a fascinating and comprehensive account of the impact of the English Reformation on the people of England in particular how they practised their religion and how they understood their world. Eamon Duffy is a master at mining church records for the minutiae of everyday life, as his wonderful book The Voices of Morebath showed. In The Stripping of the Altars he takes this to a new level, giving an over-view of a couple of centuries of change.

A key point that Duffy makes is that there is no "substantial gulf" between the religion of the clergy and the elite and the mass of the population. While the more well off may have had better religious books, nicer churches and so on, the actuality of how they worshipped and what they believed was near identical. Nor was this a period where the mass of the population was kept in ignorance while the ruling class had all the knowledge - one of the main arguments here is that there was wide knowledge of church doctrine. For instance, on the "eve of the Reformation" there were some 50,000 Books of Hours in circulation, many of them produced in cheap editions in continental "factories" aimed at a mass audience.

Duffy uses the phrase "traditional religion" to describe religious beliefs and practises before the Reformation. His detailed reconstruction of what this entails is fascinating. For instance, he shows how the life of rural villages was dominated by a "liturgical calendar". This had major implications for economic (agricultural) life, as there were "almost seventy days in the year when adults were obliged to fast" and numerous feast days when work was not permitted and the laity were expected to attend services. For the whole population the religious dynamic, its calendar, its sequence of religious services, the way that the church prepared its followers for life, and death, was central to how people lived. As Duffy notes, "for townsmen and countrymen alike, the rhythms of the liturgy on the eve of the Reformation remained the rhythms of life itself."

Duffy distances his analysis from those who saw within the traditional church a tendency to hold onto older, "pagan" practises. He shows how many beliefs, such as superstitions or astrology, where incorporated into religious practice. He also shows how the Protestant suppression of many aspects of traditional worship (Duffy uses a fascinating example of religious plays) helped to undermine wider knowledge of religious doctrine. Take the example of The Kalender of Shepherdes,  a book translated from French in the early 1500s. It was a "beautiful and an unmistakably lay book... an extraordinary mixture of calendrical, astrological and medical lore, together with orthodox religious instruction imaginatively presented". As Duffy points out, many clergy would have found the mix uncomfortable, but the popularity of the Kalender was in its ability to create an

assimilation into popular culture, by commercial publishers for a mass audience, of the official educational programme of the Church.... the Kalender certainly found a readership which would have considered unpalatable many more over didactic treatises, for it was common place of the time... that the people were often resistant to catechesis.

The pre-Reformation traditional religion that Duffy describes was an all encompassing explanation for the world as it was and how it would be. It's focus on death was not a morbid obsession with human mortality, but a response to a religious view that placed the afterlife as a key question for the living, and indeed often saw the dead as remaining connected to the living community. This is the importance of the question of indulgences that were exchanged for prayers etc. Some of the most fascinating aspects of Duffy's book are the chapters were he examines what death meant for people of the late Middle Ages and how it affected their everyday lives.

The second half of the book is a look at how the English Reformation played out. Here I felt the work wasn't as strong as the first half. This is not because Duffy's use of the historic material is weaker, in fact his detailed examination of what the Reformation meant in practice, in terms of changes to religious practices, the removal of feast and Saints days, changes to books and bibles and the physical alterations to religious spaces is fascinating and detailed. The weakness arises more out of Duffy's failure to see the Reformation as being linked to the changes taking place in the English economy. He does note in places the class content to the Reformation, and the way that how the Reformation proceeds is closely linked to the class interests of individuals. In places he does come close to this, so I would be wrong to completely dismiss Duffy's analysis here. For instance he writes

There can have been few if any communities in which Protestants formed anything like an actual numerical majority. The influence of the reform usually stemmed from the not always very secure social and economic prestige of its more prosperous or articulate adherents.

But this is to ignore the fact that the real influence of Protestants was making itself felt at a different level in society - some of the key figures in the English state. This is why the Reformation could proceed even though Henry VIII was a traditionalist at heart and why it could be reversed briefly under Mary's reign. When revolt did break out against the changes, such as the Prayerbook Rebellion or the Pilgrimage of Grace, what mattered for the ruling class was the mobilisation of armed bodies of men. Thus we have to see the Reformation in terms of the different class interests it represented and sadly I felt that Duffy is a little weak on this.

The Reformation took a long time. The changes that were driven through did not simply abolish the beliefs in peoples heads. The resurgence of Catholicism under Mary saw many worshippers gladly return to traditional practises. In many examples digging up the statues they'd hidden, rescuing the church cloths and candlesticks and re-writing their wills in ways that reflected their traditional beliefs. But the Reformation did eventually transform England's Church because it was closely linked to the development of a new economic system. Duffy sees the Protestant Church's success as being mostly due to the way that ordinary people responded, "By the end of the 1570s, whaever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believe d the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world."

This is true to a large extent. But England kept the Protestant faith as its official religion because its proponents where the new ruling class. For that to be cemented for good eventually required a revolution and the shattering of monarchical power for good.

Despite the weaknesses I think that Eamon Duffy's book has, I have no hesitation in recommending it anyone who wants to understand more about the Reformation and what it meant for ordinary people. It brings alive the lives and struggles of those who lived in villages across England whose world was shattered by the changes.

Related Reviews

Duffy - Voices of Morebath
MacCulloch - Reformation
Wilson - The People and the Book
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Tawney - Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Leon Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

I chose to re-read Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution over November 2017, exactly one hundred years since the all to brief triumph of the Revolution it discusses. Doing so allowed me to reflect on what that Revolution meant, but also how it has been portrayed, interpreted and understood since.

You don't have to read much of Trotsky's book to see how inadequate the coverage of 1917 has been for the centenary. Trotsky's work is a masterpiece of literature, powerful writing combined with a Marxist clarity that gives an unrivalled historical perspective on the events of the Revolutionary year. As a result The History of the Russian Revolution reads like a novel, in fact its very structure feels at times like a fictional account as the author builds tension towards the climatic seizure of power. The book teams with passages that are quotable, but take this section describing the situation as power decisively shifts away from the "compromisers" and towards the Bolsheviks:

Kerensky... was confidently calculating that in case of danger the Central Executive Committee, in spite of all family misunderstandings, would come to his aid in time. It was so in July and in August. Why should it not continue so? But now it is no longer July and no longer August. It is October. Cold and raw Baltic winds from the direction of Kronstadt are blowing through the squares and along the quays of Petrograd.

Junkers in long coats to their heels are patrolling the streets, drowning their anxiety in songs of triumph. The mounted police are riding up and down, prancing, their revolvers in brand-new holsters. No. The power still looks imposing enough! Or is this perhaps an optical illusion? At a corner of the Nevsky, John Reed, an American with naïve and intelligent eyes in his head, buys a brochure of Lenin’s entitled 'Will the Bolsheviks Be Able To Hold the State Power?' paying for it with one of those postage stamps which are now circulating in place of money.

These two paragraphs demonstrate a couple of things about Trotsky's book. First is the way he manages to get across a real sense of the balance of class forces and how they shift and change throughout 1917. Secondly is the way that Trotsky builds tension and drama - the raw winds blowing from the base of the revolutionary sailors at Kronstadt towards Petrograd aren't just about the weather, and secondly Trotsky's ability to build narrative tension as the crisis deepens in Russia.

But it is Trotsky's historical account that is most important. Despite portraying himself in the third person (a writer's master stroke in my opinion) Trotsky eschews any attempt at an independent historical narrative - this is polemic. But it is polemic for two reasons - the first, and most obvious is that it is designed to arm and give confidence to socialists who are trying to build revolutionary organisation and look to the Russian Revolution for inspiration.

Closely linked to this is Trotsky's battle with Stalin. The History of the Russian Revolution was written towards the end of the 1920s and finished in 1930 and comes immediately after Trotsky's defeat by Stalin and his exile. Thus the book has to be understood as reassertion of Trotsky's principle political arguments against Stalin, in particular Trotsky's argument that "socialism in one country" was impossible. Thus some of the most important sections of the book do not actually deal with 1917 but with the historical context of Russia's economic development to the revolutionary years.

Trotsky explicitly sets this out in several appendices which he hopes that a tenth or hundredth of his readers will read in addition to the main account. Trotsky was setting out on his new task of finding handfuls of supporters who could rebuild the international socialist movement. His focus on the role of the Bolsheviks' here and how they related to the mass movements on the streets is a key part of the story and his polemic.

But the majority of readers will, as Trotsky acknowledged, read this book for its unrivalled historical account of 1917. It is a long and detailed book, which seems to have penetrating insights on every page. But it's length shouldn't intimidate - Trotsky's writing is clear, passionate and at times very funny. Take his hilarious thumb nail portraits of the Russian generals who would go on to form the basis of the counter-revolutionary White Terror:

An army is always a copy of the society it serves – with this difference, that it gives social relations a concentrated character, carrying both their positive and negative features to an extreme. It is no accident that the war did not create one single distinguished military name in Russia. The high command was sufficiently characterised by one of its own members: “Much adventurism, much ignorance, much egotism, intrigue, careerism, greed, mediocrity and lack of foresight” – writes General Zalessky – “and very little knowledge, talent or desire to risk life, or even comfort and health.” Nikolai Nikolaievich, the first commander-in-chief, was distinguished only by his high stature and august rudeness. General Alexeiev, a grey mediocrity, the oldest military clerk of the army, won out through mere perseverance. Kornilov was a bold young commander whom even his admirers regarded as a bit simple; Kerensky’s War Minister, Verkhovsky, later described him as the lion heart with the brain of a sheep. Brussilov and Admiral Kolchak a little excelled the others in culture, if you will, but in nothing else. Denikin was not without character, but for the rest, a perfectly ordinary army general who had read five or six books. And after these came the Yudeniches, the Dragomirovs the Lukomskies, speaking French or not speaking it, drinking moderately or drinking hard, but amounting to absolutely nothing. First time readers might be surprised that some of the most fascinating chapters are those that deal not with the revolution but with the ruling class that was overthrown - Trotsky showing why their regime was ripe for collapse.

But ultimately this is a description of a year of revolutionary upheaval that involved millions of people in action. Trotsky never loses sight of that key fact - that the revolution was made by ordinary men and women, and he celebrates this fact at every stage. In fact by focusing on the ideas, slogans and demands of the factories and streets Trotsky is able to get to the heart of why the Bolsheviks were able to lead the working class to victory. This is a celebration of mass democracy, participation and revolutionary dynamism.

No other author does it as well as Trotsky's history and no one trying to understand 1917 can avoid reading this book. I first read this as a young socialist some 25 years ago. Re-reading it again a quarter of a century later I was struck by how fresh it felt, but also, how much of it I had retained and learnt from. Perhaps that's Trotsky's true legacy.

In the course of 2017 I've read or re-read a number of books related to the Revolutionary Year of 1917. Those reviews can be found here.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October

Rachel Carson - Under the Sea Wind

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is probably the most famous ecological work every published. Its clarity and its clarion call for action, as well as the way it located environmental crisis in a system that prioritised "the right to make a dollar" helped kick-start the modern environmental movement. Yet Carson was also a author of a whole number of works that looked at the ecological systems she was most familiar with, in particular a trilogy of books about the sea. Carson had worked as a scientist for the US fisheries bureau before becoming a full time writer and her knowledge of the sea and its ecology shines through in this book from the trilogy.

Under the Sea-Wind is a lovely piece of writing. Carson takes a number of key animals who live on, in or above the sea and describes their lives. Looking at individuals she uses a novel style narrative often naming the animal after its scientific name, but this is no work of fiction. Her descriptions of the lives of birds, fish and other animals like crabs are beautiful and often tragic, but this is no Watership Down. Her animals don't speak or have human characteristics; they shape and are shaped by the ecology they inhabit.

That said, some of the stories here are truly epic. We encounter the mackerel first as a tiny living thing, no more than a few living cells clumped together. As it grows it's life radically changes, initially eating other small sea creatures before it can feed on larger prey. Carson describes the luck that keeps our individual fish out of the belly of other predators, and we see how the huge shoals protect the individuals from death. But we also see the cyclical nature of life. The death of animals is usually the life of others.

This is no less true of humans and one of the good things about Under the Sea Wing is that Carson does not pretend the sea's creatures live isolated from human contact. In fact, humans, particularly fishermen are as much part of the world that these animals inhabit. Whether its the harbours that provide hiding places for young mackerel and some of their predators, or the fishermen whose nets threaten large numbers of the fish.

The fisherman who lived on the island had gone out about nightfall to set the gill nets that he owned with another fisherman from the town. They had anchored a large net almost at right angles to the west shore of the river... All the local fishermen knew from their fathers, who had it from their fathers, that shad coming from the channel of the sound usually struck in towards the west bank for the river when they entered the shallow estuary, where no channel was kept open. For this reason the west bank was crowded with fixed sighing gear, like pound nets, and the fishermen who operated movable gear competed bitterly for the few remaining places to set their nets.

Here we see the impact of human interaction with the sea, the potential for over-fishing and the consequent destruction of the ecology. But here is also the importance of the sea to human communities.

Over and again I was struck by how Carson emphasises the continuity of life in the sea. There's a beautiful chapter early in the book where a bird is hunting crabs and other seashore life. In turn the crabs are eating fleas, but one is scared by a fisherman walking on the beach. Fleeing into the surf the crab is eaten by a sea bass, which is then eaten by a shark. Some of the bass' body floats back to the beach where the meat is eaten by beach fleas.

When environmental NGOs campaign to save the tiger or the panda we can forget that these creatures are part of a wider network of interactions. These interactions are never one way, but rather cause numerous onward effects. The crab feeds off the fleas, and sometimes is eaten by a fish. But the fish in turn can be food for other animals or the fisherman casting their nets. Carson gives us the Sea as it really is - a network of interacting animals and plants, whose ecology can be distorted and broken by outside forces. It's a beautiful piece of writing that has much to teach us about how we think about the environment today.

Related Reviews

Carson - Silent Spring
Levins & Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist
Lewontin & Levins - Biology Under the Influence