ResoluteReader

Saturday, April 04, 2026

George Sturt - The Wheelwright's Shop

From 1884 until 1920 George Sturt ran a Wheelwright's Shop in the small town of Farnham, Surrey in England. Sturt inherited the business from his father, who had in his turn got it from his father. The business was popular, successful and employed a variety of skilled craftsmen who made the wheels and structures that made up the various different types of wagons and carts that were central to the rural economy.

The Wheelwright's Shop is an account of those crafts, the business and the men who worked them. First published in 1923 it is a detailed discussion of the work, and the craft, but it is also an elegy to a vanishing world. Sturt was an educated young man when he took over the shop, and an admirer of Ruskin. His book bemoans the loss of skills and knowledge that was happening as mass production of components was replacing handmade work. Metal tyres from America, chains made by the
women chainmakers in Cradley Heath and axles and other metal goods from Birmingham. Sturt bemoans the loss of work, and the sharpening class divisions in the workplace, but he also understands that some of these improvements were, indeed, better. Mass production made for lighter parts, and stronger, but easier to move waggons.

At the heart of the book though is the labour and craft of the craftsmen in the shop. This is described in great detail. I fancy that readers who are familiar with carpentry or metalwork, or built vehicles and wheels in particular, will understand more of this than I. As a non-expert I was not disintrested, but I was frequently unable to follow the detail. That said I learnt much about how waggons, and in particular, the wheels were built. Particularly fascinating though is how Sturt shows that this knowledge was the product of decades, generations, of experience, knowledge and training. Sturt calls it the "skill of England, the experience of ages". There's a fascinating, and telling, account of a farmer who wanted a cheaper waggon and requested it had none of the fancy decoration on the wood. Of course this was possible, and the saved labour reduced costs, but it also meant the waggon was too heavy to be pulled and put too much strain on the horses. The decoration was less to improve the look of the vehicle, but a clever way of reducing weight while retaining strength.

My own lack of knowledge in these fields is mirrored by Sturt's position. As the owner and employer he had a basic grasp of most processes and assisted in them. But the deeper knowledge eluded him. As he says "how simple is coal-hewing, fiddling, dishing, digging, to the student of books!"

Perhaps for most readers today what will strike them is how clearly Sturt sees the transformation of work taking place in his own time. He writes that "Old England was passing away; villas were coming, the day of farm-waggons was done" and as the waggons were "done", so were the skills in making them. But crucially the transformation of labour was transforming workers and their communities. As he writes about his friend and employee, George Cook, an expert woodworker, he notes the differences:

Yet for all this, we were no longer on the old terms. I was not in touch, through him, with the quiet dignified country life of England and I was more of a capitalist. Each of us had slipped a little nearer to the ignominious class division of these presnt times - I to the employer's side, he to the disregarded workman's... From being one of a community of rustics, [Cook] was becoming more and more a mechanic - a cog in an industrial machine.

This said, Sturt does not over glorify the situation. His opening session discussions the discomfort, long hours, and cold of working in an unheated shop, getting up before dawn and braving the elements. More importantly however he understands that the transformations taking place as industrial capitalism sinks its teeth into the countryside are transforming the very nature of work. In Marxist terms, alienation is increasing. Workers were losing control of their product and the world that it was to be used in. Mass production has removed skills and separated workers' from the wider social and economic countryside. If the peasantry were driven, forcefully, from the land, their compatriots in small, local workshops, were being destroyed by market forces.

In modern conditions work is nothing like so tolerable as it was say thirty years ago; partly because there is more hurry in it, but largely because machinery has separated employers from employed and has robbed the latter of the sustaining delights which materials used to afford them. Work is less and less pleasant to do - unless, perhaps, for the engineer or the electrician.

Later he continues, "there ought to be a little fun in work, for the workman's sake".

This is all true, though readers must remind themselves that Sturt was the owner and empoloyer. The long hours and pay that his craftsmen received may not have been adequate at times. While Sturt was closer to his workers' than the bosses in Cradley Heath, he was still addressed as Mister and treated with respect purely for his position. Several of his workers, by his own admission, appear to have died in poverty.

What Sturt's book reminds us of, apart from the great transformation of agricultural production in the late 19th century and early 20th, is that work can be skillful, enjoyable and rewarding. Industrial capitalism has robbed us of the final dignities of that. But early capitalism was only slightly better. Until class society is finished with we will continue to suffer the indignities and frustrations of capitalist labour. A future socialist society will not return to the structures of labour recorded in Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop. But it will restore workers to a place where they can labour with pride, and be properly compensated. Reading Sturt today is to remind ourselves of the past, but also to understand exactly what capitalism has taken from us.

Monday, March 30, 2026

Mahmood Mamdani - Neither Settler Nor Native: The making and unmaking of permanent minorities

I came across Mahmood Mamdani's work while researching for an article on settler colonialism. Mamdani is a key thinker of decolonialism and this book is a study of both the processes of colonialism and decolonialism - or the aftermath of colonial rule. It is a dense and intense work, wide ranging in its scope and sharp politically. In setting out his view, Mamdani contrasts the Ancient Roman method of colonialisation with the British Empire:

The Romans were content to rule peoples as they found them, but the British were not. In this sense nineteenth-century indirect rule turned out to be a far more ambitious project than direct rule had been: whereas direct rule aimed at civilising elites, indirect rule looked to impose a native subjectivity on the entire local population.

Mamdani explores this through a study of several different colonial experiences - the dispossesion and destruction of the Native Americans, the experience of Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism and independence in Sudan. Regarding the later he writes:

Colonial authorities did not have to tell Sudan's various peoples that they were different from each other - the people already knew that. They pracrtices different religions, spoke different languages, tended different crops and animls, and had different ideas about how to structure communities. They dressed, ate, amrried and died differently. Rather, what the British did was to invest these differences with political meaning. The British turned differences of culture into boundaries of authority and decided what power that authority would possess.

This classic form of divide and rule was enormously successful. The problem was that the divisions were cemented to such an extent that the post-colonial experience was shaped by them. In Sudan this was devastating. As Mamdani says, "colonialism made ethnic violence thinable because colonialism made ethnicity an important contour of public life". In Sudan, post-colonial violence, civil war and the eventual separation of South Sudan saw tens of thousands of lives lost, ruined or displaced.

In contrast, notes Mamdani, South Africa was able to transition away from Apartheid in a peaceful process. Why the difference? In Sudan, "everyone in control was committed to perpetating the colonial nightmare", but in South Africa "various groups learned to reject the political identities they had been given under colonialism." Through political mobilisation, "Afrikaners... came to relaise that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority".

The problem is that this doesn't really hold. Apartheid was dismantled by the Black majority. The white minorty did not abandon racism. They just understood that they could not longer hold on to their systems of power and in this they were helped by concessions from the ANC to maintain the South African capitalist state. Civil war was a real possbility.

Mamdani continues:

In South Africa today there is little angst about the results of the Truth Reconcilation Commission. The focus is on the deficits... specifically [the] failure to achieve a more socially just country.... If the demand is that the end of apartheid should have delivered socila justice, then it ignores the political contxt of the transition. The political prerequisite for attaining social justice would have been a revolution, but this was not attainable given the balance of forces. There was instead a stalemate between forces supporting and opposing apartheid, which was broken through a compromise agreement.

But this outcome was not inevitable. What was underminded the possibility of revolution of the Black majorty working class was not the balance of forces, but political leadership. Revolution, like Civil War was a possibility. But by abandoning the struggle for the former, to avoid the latter, social inequality was baked in. There's a similar absence in Mamdani's treatment of Sudan. While its an exemplary discussion of the crises caused by colonial divisions, the story stops short of discussing the Sudanese Revolution. This is, in part, because of when the book was published. But that Revolution demonstrated a real possibility for uniting disparate groups. A different future was possible there too - as I wrote in my own book Socialism or Extinction.

These weaknesses undermine Mamdani's chapter on Israel/Palestine which ends up looking to a politically rejuvenated Israeli middle ground who can decolonise the Israeli state. Indeed Mamdani is critical of BDS as seeing this movement as undermining potential allies within the Israeli population. The problem is that these groups have demonstrated no desire to overthrow Israeli Apartheid. Indeed, mass protests and criticism of Netanyahu during the most recent genocide have failed to raise Palestinian solidarity in anyway. Israel, as Mamdani says, is a racist settler colonial power - liberation for the people of Palestine will come from the wider working class of region dismantling Israel and building a new state where Jews, Arabs and others can live together. This requires revolution. Mamdani says that "in place of the nation... we might imagine a new political community". But its not enough to imagine, one has to strategise how to get there. The process of "stripping away the nation" as Mamdani wants requires struggle and the way that the Israeli working class have become tied to the interests of the Israeli state (and by extenstion Western Imperialism) makes this process impossible. That state will need to be defeated, and wishing or imaging isn't enough.

These are harsh criticisms. Mamdani's book contains, however, much of interest to socialists. There's a lot of detail about the processes of colonialisation in the US, Sudan, Palestine and South Africa that shows how settler colonialism created and expanded differences to maintain colonial power. There's also some fascinating accounts of struggles against that. A chapter on the failure of de-Nazification in Germany post-WW2 is also particularly good at exposing the methods and hypocrisy of the United States. That said, I was left wanting, because Mamdani wasn't able to articulate a strategy for liberation or clearly identify the agency for that change.

Friday, March 27, 2026

Daniel Oberhaus - Extraterrestrial Languages

In some ways this book's title is a misnomer. There are no extraterrestrial languages. Or at least none that we yet know of. But Daniel Oberhaus has not written a scientific text teaching us to speak another language, rather this is a fascinating study of how we could communicate and, indeed, what communication might mean to aliens. Oberhaus begins with a useful historical introduction to the science of communicating with aliens. There are some early proposals that set the scene - plans to use mirrors in the Sahara or burn messages into forests to communicate with Mars - but these are background to show the evolution of the idea.

More important are the beginnings of serious attempts to communicate combined with the development of the science of understanding language and communication. Here Oberhaus takes the reader on a series of discussions about how we might communicate with intelligences that do not share our culture, biology or indeed references points. Many readers will be familiar with SF films or novels that show communication where the two alien species attempt to communicate around common knowledge. Maths is the normal starting point, and indeed this forms the basis for much of how such communications might happen. Oberhaus shows how messages can be used to use simple maths to build up communications teaching, for instance, counting, then logic and so on. But there is always a problem. What knowledge is common across the universe? Will aliens understand our maths? Is maths even a thing likely to be held in common? Oberhaus writes, while discussing the possible use of set theory and logic to establish common ground:

Axiomatic set theory and symbolic logic have come to dominate mathematics over the past century to the point htat it feels entirely natural to conceive of the order of the world in terms of sets and cognition in terms of symbolic logic. Yet this misses the cirtical transition from grounding metaphors, which can reasonably be assumed to be shared with extraterrestrial intelligences since they arise from direct experiences... to linking metaphors, which are the creative productions of human minds meant to deal with human experience. In other words, a very useful mathematical invention that meets the idiosyncratic needs of embodied human intellifence has been naturalised to the point that it is taken to be a trait of the universe itself.

There's a good example in the book. We might think physical understanding is a common ground. But what if we had communicated with aliens when our only understanding of the atom was Bohr's model and not the quantum models now favoured. Might a more advanced alien race have ignored us?

Oberhaus grapples mostly with the sciences of communication and languages. But there are some interesting moral points. He notes, for instance, criticism of the Pioneer plaques that only depicted humans who looked caucasian. The Voyager records were better, mixing languages and music from many cultures, but still displaying cultural limitations. Indeed none of these languages offered enough information to allow real communication or understanding to develop. Perhaps their greatest success would have been in terms of inspiring future scientists here on Earth.

Oberhaus also makes a further interesting point. When we communicate, "do we want to tell extraterrestrials the truth?" Indeed do we share the limitations of our civilisation or, as we have done so far, share "messages into space [that] hve been filtrered through rose-tinted glasses".

Realistically there is little chance that any historic messages to space, or indeed any ones in the near future will be received or answered. While I was not convinced by Oberhaus' arguments that other aliens may well share biological traits with us, and indeed DNA might not be unique, the bigger problem is that aliens are likely to be extremely rare. I suspect that most life in the universe will be some form of slime or bacteria. That said the scale of the universe is such that statistically there ought to be intelligences out there, that we might converse with. That is unlikely to happen. But the science of how we communicate, and this fascinating little book, are part of developing our own knowledge of ourselves and our universe. As Oberhaus says, "each message... is like a mirror that reflects the spirit of the age that crafted it".

Related Reviews

Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Bell - The Interstellar Age

Monday, March 23, 2026

Anthony Trollope - Doctor Wortle's School

Dr Wortle’s School is a later one of the prolific novelist Anthony Trollope's books. It is also one of the shorter. This era, and type, of novel is not one that I often read and I picked it up because I came across a discussion of its plotline which piqued my interest. The novel is a surprisingly interesting discussion of Victorian morals. Or rather the pious and pompous attitudes of a particular class to those morals.

Doctor Wortle is a clergyman and headmaster of a small, private, rural boarding school. His staff includes Mr Peacocke, a teacher and an occasional preacher in the church. His wife, Mrs Peacock, is American and while they are nice people, there is a reticience to engage in the social life of the village, or that of the wider (and wealthier) parents of the students they look after. Early on in the book Trollope tells the reader that he will explain the reason and the reader can continue if they like.

It turns out that the Peacockes were married, but that Mrs Peacocke was already married in the United States, to an uncouth, abusive and alcoholic Colonel Lefroy. Mr Peacock feel in love with her while Lefroy and his brother, also a Colonel, are in the Confederate army. Nothing improper occurs, though it is clear the two fall for each other. On hearing that a Colonel Lefroy has been killed during the Civil War, Mr Peacocke travels to the South to learn which brother has died. On hearing from her brother that it is Mrs Lefory's husband he returns and marries her, making her Mrs Peacocke.

On discovering that her former husband was not actually killed, and finding themselves not actually married, the pair flee to England and Dr Wortle's school where they live as husband and wife. Guilt eats at the two of them. Living in sin like this is considered a major social, moral and personal failing, particularly for those who would teach children and preach in Church. But it is clear they love each other very much, and Mr Peacocke decides to tell Dr Wortle. Before this can happen, Lefroy arrives and breaks the news, scandalising the local population, shocking the gossips and leading to many students to be withdrawn from school.

The plot then follows Mr Peacocke as he returns to the US to find the truth.

The novel is of greatest interest because of the moral questions. Dr Wortle is the lynch pin of the story, and the reader now (and then) explores the ambiguity of the Peacocke's position through him. Wortle understands that the Peacockes love each other greatly, and feels that they are effectively married. He looks after them, offering Mrs Peacocke somewhere to live while her husband goes to the US. This scandalises people still further but Wortle, a brave, principled, if inflexible, soul stands firm.

Readers today will find it singularly unshocking. Had Mrs Peacocke had the right to divorce, nothing would have mattered. I suspect that the scandal that is depicted is true to life. Trollope offers his readership a slice of gossip, a slice of amusement and a slice of morals. What is love? What is marriage? What should these things matter?

But matter they did. Trollope has to offer his married, but not married, characters a way out - and of course the first husband is found to be dead so the Peacockes can marry again. There's not defying of Victorian morals, but there is a challenge to those who would dismiss people so easily. Trollope knows his readers and he knows he has to give the steam an escape valve.

As such this is a novel very much of its time. Nonetheless, Wortle does speak to a more modern audience. Do you stand by your friends and colleagues when the world is flinging mud? Do you make snap judgements? Do you care for society's morals?

The book is shorter than the more well known Trollope novels. On the other hand, it does feel padded out in places. There is a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving the Wortle's daughter and her betrothed. Perhaps Trollope was being paid by the page.

Nonetheless there is a lot here, dated though the moral questions are, its an insight to how a certain class of people in the 1880s thought about each other.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Linda Pentz Gunter - No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress & provokes war

Proponents of nuclear power, whether politicians or representatives of the nuclear industry, have a long history of claiming that their technology will fix the latest of humanity's problems. Today they like to claim nuclear energy as the ultimate safe technology that can reduce carbon emissions and solve the climate crisis. It is a devious lie that must be challenged by those who want a just and equitable future for the planet and its people.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a long standing anti-nuclear campaigner. Her book, No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress and provokes war, is an excellent primer for those who want arguments against nuclear power. I suspect it will be widely read among those who oppose nuclear energy and that is a good thing, for reasons I will come on to. But it also should be read by the growing number of activists who are unsure how we are going to stop climate change or are seduced by the lies of the nuclear industry.

I was priviledged to interview Linda about her book during a recent book launch in Manchester for CND. Linda explained that the book came out of a growing need to tell the stories of those people, and animals, affected by nuclear power already. One of the great strengths of the book is how it explores the impact of nuclear power already. In particular, and probably of great interest to activists in Europe, Linda talks about the impact of nuclear power on indigenous people. She recounts how some of the poorest communities in countries like Australia and North America have been used as testing grounds for nuclear power, or sites for resource extraction. As she says, they get all of the danger and problems and none of the benefits.

But indigenous people are not just victims. They are also activists who have successfully mobilised against the nuclear industry. In telling the stories of how they have suffered and how they have resisted Linda gives us a new approach to nuclear power. One that sees communities as being sites that can demand a different approach to the environment and energy, free of corporate control. But these accounts also show a significant fact. Just like disasters and environmental crises impact worst along the fissures of capitalist society, nuclear power impacts the oppressed and exploited first and worst. Take the question of waste. It is black, indigenous and poor commuities that become the places where they want to dump it. As Linda writes:

Where does it go in the meantime? We must return to the lands of Indigenous peoples and communities of color. Yucca Mountain ripples acorss Western Shoshone land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtim with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain "Serpent Swimming Westward." It is a sacred place. It was also never ceded to the US government. But, for a time, it was the chosen destination for America's high-level radioactive waste repository.

Two other arguments run through Linda's book. The first might seem counter-factual. Linda argues that nuclear power itself has been a distraction from action on climate change. Despite being portrayed as the solution to disaster, it's made it worse. Linda says:

Studies also clearly show that the political choice being made today to continue with or build nuclear power plants, rather than ceoncentrate on renewable energy, only further impedes progrss on carbon reductions, takes longer and of course costs far more. But because nuclear power got in the way of what could have been a global renewable energy revolution decades ago, there is a case to be made that it is far more a contributor to climat echange than it could ever be a solution to it.

I think this is an important argument against nuclear power. There has been a tendency to oppose nuclear power by highlighting its costs, or the amount of dangerous waste, or the technical problems associated with building reactors. What we must do is to look at the whole of nuclear energy within wider contexts. This flows then, into Linda's key argument, the one that opens the book and frames wider politics - the question of nuclear power, war and weapons proliferation.

Because nuclear energy plants always have the potential to be used to manufacture materials for nuclear bombs, building them in ever increasing numbers threatens the potential for more bombs. Indeed that has been the stated reason behind many a country's nuclear plans, the "pathway to the bomb" as Linda calls it. She writes:

Any country with a "civil" nuclear power program is in possession of the necessary technology, skills and materials to develop nuclear weapons. This was already demonstrated by India's transition to nuclear weapons and is responsible for the concerns today surrounding Iran's nuclear intensions, which led in part to the decision by Israel and the US to bomb Iran's nuclear faciltiies in the summer of 2025.

It was also the excuse that the US and Israel used to attack Iran the month that I write this, opening up an appalling moment of imperialist war. But the existence of nuclear weapon potential also encourages others. As Linda points out Saudi Arabia, a country with masses of fossil fuels and enormous potential for solar power, is looking at starting a nuclear energy programme. That's clearly to put it on the path, or potential path, for nuclear weapons. The existence of nuclear energy esclating the possibilities of nuclear weapons elsewhere.

This is a short, readable and polemical book. It places nuclear power in the context of a wider economic system geared to profit and the need to protect markets and resources. It is, in that sense, a frightening book that makes it clear that the threat of nuclear war is getting worse. At the same time it reminds us that in places were there have been accidents, or where uranium is mined, or bombs tested, ordinary people, particularly those from minorities, are already suffering horribly. But Linda also makes it clear that we can resist. Who knew that in Orkney mass movements in the 1970s stopped uranium mining? Linda gives us good numbers of other examples.

Nuclear power can be stopped and in doing so we can strengthen the struggle for more just society and a more rational energy policy. Linda Pentz Gunter's No to Nuclear is an important weapon in that battle.

Commoner - The Poverty of Power: Energy & the economic crisis

Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Alfred W. Crosby - Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900

In his infamous book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond tried to answer the question of why it was that European settlers arrived in the Americas, and not the other way around. His geographical determinism left many wanting in their quest for answers to these important historical questions. Before Diamond however Alfred W. Crosby asked similar questions, and while his book Ecological Imperialism is much better than Guns, Germs and Steel, it still is flawed in providing answers.

Crosby is, however, good at exploring what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas. He begins with the brief arrival of the Norse and that will not detain us here. He then looks at various aspects of the arrival of Europeans after 1492. The impacts he discusses are primarily biological - disease, weeds, crops and animals. What was driven extinct? What survived well? What caused the decimation of the indigenous people?

The first thing that Crosby notes is the "striking paradox" that

The parts of the world that today in terms of population and culture are most like Europe are far away from Europe - indeed, they are across major oceans - and although they are similar in climate to Europe, they have indigenous floras and faunas different from those of Europe. The regions that today export more foodstuffs of European provenance - grains and meats - than any other lands on earth had no wheat, barly, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsover five hundred years ago.

While Crosby is very detailed in what happened and always sympathetic to the human cost of colonialism, his answers to the questions such as "why did so few of the natives of the Neo-Europes survive?" are often rooted in quite crude biological determinism. Take this point:

A very specific advantage of the Norse over the Skraelings, Eskimo or Amerindian, was the ability of their adults to gain nourishment from fresh milk.

On the question of disease, and it's impact, he writes:

The Amerindians, Aborigines, and Australiasians were true isolates. They had been different from Europeans, Asians and Africans for thousands of years, and so, perhaps, were the capabilities of their immune systems.

Essentially what Crosby argues is that for a number of reasons European biology was able to supplement and destroy indigenous people, flora and fauna. But while this is true in a general sense, it fails to explain why it happened. Here, for instance is Crosby's key argument around the queston of pathogens:

We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because they success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogepgraphical realities that underlay the sucess of European imperialists overseas. It wa stheir germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.

But here Crosby plays a neat trick. He starts by saying we must examine colonial histories of pathogens. But then he doesn't and simply says that it is the biological realities that did the horrifc deads that saw enormous numbers of indigneous people in the Americas and Australisia die. What Crosby misses is that the diseases cannot be separated from colonialism. There are, for instance, multiple examples of settlers using disease to infect and kill (the infamous smallpox blankets for instance). But Crosby also misses something else - if the Europeans had not had smallpox and other diseases, they would have used the musket and gatling gun to murder their way to supremacy. In fact they did exactly this in many places were disease hadn't killed vast numbers. The Europeans did nothing to try and stop the spread of disease, and they did nothing to help its victims. They simply took the vacant land.

But there's a deeper problem. Crosby doesn't articulate any real understanding of what it was about (say) European culture that was different to that in the colonies. Part of this is that he doesn't really get how the economic dynamics of societies in Europe meant that they were much more productive - particular;ly after the 17th century. They could produce more to overwhelm indigenous people. Secondly the reshaping of the environment of the colonies was part of developing capitalism. The slave trade, the introduction of industrial agriculture and so on all strengthened Europe's ability to subsume the colonies.

Crosby does make some interesting points about the biological processes themselves. He argues, for instance, that European biology thrived in conditions of disturbance, and it was disturbance that was introduced by the Europeans. By this he means, "condition[s] of continual disruption: of plowed fields, rzed forests, overgrazed pastures, and burned prairies, of deserted villages and expanding cities, of humans, animals, plants and microlife that hav eevolved separately suddenly coming into intimate contact."

But really these conditions are not about "Europe". They are more about the particular mode of production of capitalism, and how capitalism treats the natural world and the humans it encounters. Those people were subsumed into the process of accumulation and either died, or were distorted by it. Crosby is not entirely ignorant of this. He notes, when discussing the horrific impact of sexual diseases on Native Americans, hat their economic world was turned upsidedown:

A physician serving the Sioux at Fort Peck toward the end of the last century assessed the tragedy of veneral infections among their women not simply as a result of immorality but as the result of a more general change: "They were chaste till the disappearance of the buffalo".

What Crosby doesn't say here is that this is partly because Native American women, to survive, had to turn to sex work. Another example of biology following economic change, not the other way around.

In conclusion there is a tendency here for Crosby to end up blaming the victim's circumstance/biology for their misfortune, rather than the nature of the settler states that arrived in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand. Crosby has a tendency to associate more advanced societies with those in Europe which means there is an inevitability to his analysis of what happens. Crosby doesn't in any way celebrate the destruction of indigenous societies or people. But his conclusions are inadequate to explain what happened and why, and while there is much of interest here, the book is flawed.

Maja Lunde - The History of Bees

Climate fiction is in the vogue these days. It usually depicts a horrific, post-apocalytic world where extinction and global warming have decimated humanity and destroyed society. The few survivors grub about in the ruins and try to live their lives. When Maja Lunde's The History of Bees was first published in 2015 the genre was less advanced, and to be fair, Lunde's take on it errs on the side of hope, rather than inevitable disaster.

Bees are a key, though not the only, part of the ecological system due to their role in pollination. Without bees, we are told, the world come close to starvation very quickly. In the last few decades the decline of bees, and the collapse of bee colonies, through the little understood "Colony Collapse" has become an issue of mainstream concern. Lunde puts it at the heart of her story which uses three different, and obliquely connected stories to tell a wider tale about how bees have been transformed by humans.

The earliest story is set in the 1850s with a scientist whose efforts to advance understanding of bees and improve their domestication are constantly undermined by his failure to remain at the forefront of scientific knowledge. Wracked by depression and self-doubt, William designs a new beehive, but is distraught to learn it isn't unique or the first. His design however becomes a family heirloom and his descendents become bee keepers in the United States. Interestingly William's depression overcomes his ability to innovate, but Lunde's development of his daughter, Charlotte, as the person who takes things forward and breaks free of England's stiffling atmosphere is one of the high points of the book. William, characteristically dismisses Charlotte's insights. Rather like one of his descendents George.

George is a bee farmer (I use the words deliberately) in the 2000s. He's farming colonies that can make honey, but more importantly because they are part of a wider and utterly irrational part of capitalist agriculture. I've written on this elsewhere, but the monoculture of industrial farming makes it impossible for bees to survive. So capitalism has made it profitable for bee farmers to move thousands of hives across country to artifically pollinate crops. You couldn't make up a better metaphor for the limitations of farming for profit. Unfortunately George is too pigheaded to see this. He also is too pigheaded to understand that his son is the only person who can truly innovate things, but doesn't want anything to do with the bees (or his father).

Finally we have Tao and her family. In China in a future where bees have disappeared she works in near slave conditions to artifically pollinate trees by hand. Its the most dystopian part of the story, and Tao dreams that her son will escape through education. His sudden illness and disappearance sets her on a journey that leads to the "hope" of the novel.

While bees, farming, and colony collapse are the central themes of The History of Bees, the substance of the book comes from the family relationships. Lunde is adept at portrayal of parents who don't understand their children, and whose obsessions blind them to wider issues of family and society. That said, Lunde is also shownig how our attempts to domesticate the undomesticable (is that a word?) drive ecosystems into crisis. The desire to manipulate for profit is what is dooming us - and along the way fathers will fail to understand their children just as they have always done. But the politics and the conclusions aren't developed enough, and the ending is too much of a liberal cop out (with a leader who "also has kids"). Relying on family won't save us. What will save us is the rejection - exemplified by George's son Tom - of capitalist farming and its profit motive.

Nonetheless I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite the appalling insensitivity and blinkered nature of George and William.

Sunday, March 08, 2026

Ivan Doig - Mountain Time

In my head I associate Ivan Doig closely with the old West, settlers and immigration. His autobiography This House of Sky is mostly set in his time as a boy and young man on a ranch near the Rockies in Montana. The period traverses the 20th century in many ways, finishing with Doig heading to a new life as a writer in Seattle, but is rooted in the characters and family of the late 19th and early 20th century and their experiences living, farming and loving in Montana's rural areas.

So it is strange to read a Doig novel that has laptops and email, and seems to focus more on the Seattle side of this life. While Mountain Time is part of the lose Two Medicine Country series, it shares only a few names with the early books in that series and a few characters with the later books. Indeed one of the realistic things about these books is how the past, while present for all the characters, matters less and less to them the further generations it is away. There is clearly a lot of Doig's life here. His main characters are centred on Seattle having made the break from Montana and rural life. Mitch, the main character is a talented environmental journalist, whose regular columns document the depletion of the natural world on the West and NW coast of the United States. Mitch's connection to Montana is his father, a grumpy old grifter back home, whose get rich projects never, well, get him rich.

Mitch's wife Lexa is the sister of Mariah McCaskill the central figure in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. This allows Doig to tie up a few story lose ends from previous books in passing. But the main story centres on Mitch's return home to see a dying Dad and the weeks that follow his death.

Life most of Doig's novels there is little plot. Montana itself, the countryside, the mountains and the people are the real story. Here however the real story is an individuals relationship with their parents, and how that is challenged and transformed by death. It is inevitably, poignant and sad. But also a celebration of life and labour.