Jonathan Sumption - Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V

The final volume of Jonathan Sumpton's epic history of The Hundred Years War brings the story to a violent close. This is a period marked by the revival of France's fortunes and the defeat of England as a continental power in any meaningful sense. English Kings continued to use the title "King of France" but for some of them at least it was more of an embarrasement than an aspiration.

Three decades previously it had all been so different. Henry V had died, but only after masterful victories at Agincourt had meant he could win the Treaty of Troyes. Even with Henry V's death, the near complete victory over France left much of northern France in either England's hands or in the hands of those who were completely loyal to the new monarch. But despite this, England's collapse when it came at the end of the 1440s was rapid and inglorious.

But despite the claims of the English monarchy at the time, and popular belief now, England in the 1400s was not a particularly powerful nation. Henry V's victory had been, essentially, a technological one. His longbowmen were able to decimate the French Army at Agincourt and simultaneously the French ruling class. The latter was more devastating, weakening the French government and undermining their ability to challenge England. But England's position was a castle built on sand. As Sumption says:

Fifteenth-century England was a middling power with a population of about two and a half million... less industrialised tahn the Low Countries and less populaous than France of even than that part of France which regocnised the authority of the Dauphin. The country had suffered, like the rest of Europe, from sevrere depopulation during the pidmics of the previous century. Its population was still declinigng... In 1422 England was in the grip of a prolonged agricultural recession that had lasted with brief intermissions since the 1370s. The previous years had been diffcult and the following ones would be worse: abandoned fields, declinging agricultural prices, shrinking rent-rolls, falling land values, scarce and expensive labour. These changes were gradual but disruptive. They brought about a significant transfer of wealth from landowners to wage-earners.

For a mode of production were land, or those who worked the land, was the principle source of wealth, this was devastating. The ability of England to fight wars was badly hit. Sumption points out that it was the "nobility and the richer gentry" who were hardest hit. The problem was that despite the Treaty of Troyes seemingly offering peace, the war had to continue. England's rulers could pretend this wasn't the case because they felt they were in a position of strength. Normandy formed a buffer (together with the lands of allies like the Duke of Burgundy and neutral powers) that meant there was no enemy directly on the other side of the Channel. The French were arguing amongst themselves about who was to rule, and "the frontier of Valois France was more than 200 miles away". 

The problem was that France, whoever eventually came to dominate politically, could not let this stand. If land was the source of wealth and power, then the loss of land to the English could not be tolerated. When French fortunes revived England was crucially hampered by its inability to pay for the war, or to raise money in time. The final decades of the Hundred Years War feel like the gradual and inevitable loss of land (despite occasional reverses) by England to a resurgent France. 

France, as ever, benefiting from its larger size, the proximity of its lands (no need to hire ships) and an ability to fight a war to reclaim what it had loss. That's not to say that France was always ascendent, or free of economic concern. Both sides suffered reverses and both sides lacked cash. On one occasion in early 1423 the French commander Tanneguy du Châtel simply disbanded his army ahead of a crucial battle because he had run out of money.

But other factors were coming to the fore. While English castles and walled towns crumbled for lack of cash, the tensions created by the occupying power were causing discontent at the bottom of society. At the end of 1434 and the beginning of 1435 a peasant rising led to a peasant army uniting with French forces and challenging the English in several locations. In particular the English gave up their eighteen year long attempt to capture Mont-Saint-Michel. This "loss of nerve marked a profound change in the political mentality of the English in Normandy" writes Sumption, "Soldiers and administrators became more suspicious of their Norman subjects". Crucially:

Summonses of the indigenous nobility for field service became rarer and the response weaker. In the new forms of indenture issued to garrison commanders six weeks after the outbreak, the rules about recruiting local men to royal garrisons were tightened up... A government dedicated to the defence of the population against external enemies, gradually became an army of occupation whose priorities were internal control and counterinsurgency.

Nonetheless in this period, "neither part was strong enough to overcome the other". Indeed at times reading Sumption one is inclined to believe that the war could never end. Neither country could break out, however good their leadership or their weaponry. So why was France triumphant? Partly that has to do with the ineptitude of leadership in England, and the growing tensions within feudal England that would lead to the Wars of the Roses. Henry V was dead, and with him died the idea of a single strong military and political leader. Henry VI was inept at best and at worst a pawn in the hands of which ever court faction was stronger. Another key factor was economic - England could not draw on its rural hinterlands for manpower and money over and over again. The last few years of the War saw this financial crisis play out over and again.

Other factors are important too. While Sumption's analysis of Joan of Arc emphasises her lack of military prowess and instead her role as a useful figurehead, he uses it to demonstrate the way that a revitalised French monarchy was growing in confidence and power. While her military role was limited, her role as a harbinger of the ideal of nationhood was enough to begin a process that saw English allies and neutral lords swing behind the French monarchy. These would end up being crucial to undermining the position of England in Normandy in particular. Other things mattered too. French military prowess and technology was improving - though these are perhaps less important than purely military historians would like readers to believe.

But there remains a final factor - the ordinary folk at the bottom of society in both France and England. Sumption makes an important point about the Congress of Arras in 1435. These peace talks were unlikely to ever bring lasting peace. But their failured was understood to mean "the continuance of the war" and for the peasants of Normandy in particular, it "fundamentally affected their attitude to the English occupation". Sumption explains that the local ruling class were loyal to the English throne, but this was

not widely shared in the Norman countryside or the smaller townsm where the new taxes served only to remind men of the burdens of the war. Conditions were particularly difficult in the north of the duchy where there was frequent contact between the inhabitants of the towsn and the French garrisons of Picardy and the Beauvaisis. In the following year, Poton de Saintrailles briefly occupied Gisors after the townsmen went over to the French in a body. The English sensed the change. "There was so much treason walking that men wist not what to do," a London chronicler wrote.

Similar tensions existed in England. Military failures (and it should be added local economic issues which Sumption downplays) and discontent at the lords around the King led to Jack Cade's rebellion in 1450. Wider discontent in England's rural regions and the tensions that led to the Wars of the Roses, were making themselves felt. While in the 1430s it seemed that the war could never be won, as the 1440s progressed things were much less certain for the English.

The end of the war was as brutal and violent as any other period. The details matter little here. What should, however, concern us in passing is the dislocation and horror of the process. One contemporary French account estimated that two million lives had been lost in the course of the war. The figures don't seem impossible. Whole swathes of the French countryside were abandoned for decades as a result. The War may have brought temporary glory for some commanders, and battles like Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt are supposed to remind us all of "English glory" today. But they were won through the systematic destruction of thousands of lives. The flowers of English and French chivalry were rarely chivalrous to those whose villages they burnt. The Black Prince and his ilk were war criminals fighting for land for their power and glory. 

Sumption finishes with some musings on the meaning of the war, and its historical legacy. France came out of the War a nation in the modern sense. While it was still a patchwork of territories, the centrality of the French government in Paris was obvious. England too, though impoverished and entering a prolonged period of Civil War, was also differently positioned, though this was far from obvious at the time. England became a nation off the continent, rather than one partially embedded in it. As Sumption concludes:

As Henry VIII eventually discovered, the growing disparity of wealth and power between the English and continental monarchies after 1453 made a revival of the dynsasty's old European ambitions unrealistic. The historic rivalry of England and France which had dominated European politics in the late middle ages gave way to a world in which Italy, central Europe and the Low Countries, and the European empires in Asia and the Americas were the focus of international tensions.

But this was a world that was changing fundamentally. The rise of the Low Countries, central Europe and Italy reflected a world were emerging social relations were displacing older ones. The feudal societies that had dominated, and had fought over every inch of Norman land, would soon be pulled apart by revolutionary change. If the Hundred Years War was not quite the final conflict of Medieval Europe, it was one that demonstrated the irrational nature of the feudal society better than any. 

On the Five Volumes

Having finished all five volumes of Jonathan Sumption's epic history (a grand total of 4231) pages. I am moved to make a few concluding remarks about the work as a whole. It is, of course, a detailed and readable history, worthy of much of the superlative quotes from other reviewers.

Surprisingly my tweet announcing that I had finished the five volumes went viral. This was an interesting experience in and of itself. In one of the replies to that tweet I was asked "what was the war about?". Slightly facetiously I replied simply "Land". In doing so though I did hint at something frustrating about Sumption's work. While the detail is impeccable and at times overwhelming, I was often left frustrated that there was no theoretical depth to the analysis. 

All of the volumes discuss broader aspects to the war beyond military history. Questions like economics, rebellion, the peasantry, technological development and even military architecture are discussed, sometimes at length. But what is lacking is any attempt to root the war in society itself. Sumption is no Marxist. But understanding the question of land, and its importance as a potential source of wealth for feudal lords, offers crucial insights into why the war happened and why it continued for so long. The political factions on both sides of the Channel that Sumption expertly describes, owe their existence to much more than personal allegiances and political ideas. They also represented the tensions within a ruling class whose figures were constantly at war with each other because they needed more land to pay the bills. As the war continued and money became short, this only exarcerbated the pressures for the feudal lords in England and France. In England the war ended in Civil conflict. In France a similar crisis led to England's greatest successes. But in coming out of that crisis and solving, temporarily, some of those tensions by making Charles VII King, the newly united French were able to drive England back in the midst of their own economic and political crisis. Sumption's work is monumental, and will probably be definitive for a long while in the English speaking world. But it doesn't quite get to the bottom of why the war happened. 

That said these books are an astounding read and very accessible to the non-specialist. In telling the history Jonathan Sumption never neglects the horror and barbarity; the murder, pillage, rape and dislocation exprienced by thousands of people. While this is no peoples' history, these books are far more than a military history of the Hundred Years War.

Related Reviews

Sumption - Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War I
Sumption - Trial by Fire: The Hundred Years War II
Sumption - Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III
Sumption - Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

When I reviewed  Peter Cozzens' The Earth is Weeping which tells the story of the "Indian Wars for the American West" in 2024 I complained that it was wekaned because the author "did not have the framework to tell it properly. His desire at "historical balance" means that he sees no difference between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor." This is not a complaint that can be leveleed at Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz's superb history of the United States through the eyes of indigenous people.

Since its first publication in 2014 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States has become somewhat of a touchstone for histories of the Americas that seek to look at the history through the lens of settler colonialism. That said, this is not a dry academic text. It is a polemical work that seeks to link the ongoing settler colonial destruction of indigenous people with their resistance historically and today. The link to today is important. Dunbar-Ortiz makes it clear that the settler colonial origins of the United States, which are themselves rooted in the original and early settler project dating from European arrival in the Americas, continue to shape the US imperialist project today. As she says:

Why then does the popular US historical narrative of a "natural" westward movement persist? The answer is that those who still hold to the narrative remain captives of the ideology of 'manifest destonu,' according to which the United States expanded across the continent to assume its preordained size and shape. This ideology normalises the successive invasions and occupations of Indigenous nations and Mexico as not being colonialist or imperialist, rather simply ordained progress. In this view, Mexico was just another Indian nation to be crushed.

She continues that while the US invasion of Mexico is called the first foreign war by the US, it was not. "By 1846, the US had invaded, occupied and ethnically cleansed dozens of foreign nations east of the Mississippi".

One of the great strengths of the book is that Dunbar-Ortiz links the destruction of indigenous societies with wider, global questions, such as slavery and the development of global capitalism. Take the question of land. This is, she argues, central to the project of settler colonialism. But the structures of settler colonialism incorporate those at the bottom of society into the logic of land. Thus, writing about slavery, she says:

Every settler in the Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own more land and more lsaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the extent of property owned. Even small and landless farmers relied on slavery-based rule: the local slave planatation was the market for what small farmers produced, and planters hired landless settlers as overseers and sharecroppers.

Lincoln, as an opponent of slavery (though not genocide) had to offer "free land" to those that supported him and those that fought the South. But this free land was in the hands of indigenous nations.  As such, "the dispersal of landless settler populations from east of the Mississippi served as an 'escape valve' lessening the liklihood of class conflict as the industrial revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labour."

Resistance to the settler colonial project has shaped US policy. "Between the alternatives of extermination and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace policy) were interim periods chraacterised by benign neglect and assimilation." The delay in states like Montana getting recognition was because of native resistance. Opposition by indigenous people and their allies has helped protect and defend communities. 

Why does this matter? Dunbar-Ortiz says that the structures built by settler colonialism remain today, both ideologically and in terms of politics and economics. The tactics learnt by the US military in exterminating Native Americans are still studied and used today. In some depressing quotes she shows how this even influenced how the US military and politicians thought about the enemy in the Middle East during the various Gulf Wars - reflecting policies and racism at the same time. 

Even those whose ancestors were not part of the destruction of indigenous people come to be part of the structures because of the nature of the system itself. She writes:

In a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behaviour of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

Restitution cannot come from compensation, though given the poverty of some many indigenous communities today, that would be helpful. It requires more thorough going change. Treaties need to be acknowledged. Sacred lands need to be returned, as do "stolen sacred items and body parts". But more importantly there needs to be a "radical reconfiguration" of the continent, "physically and psychologically". As Dunbar-Ortiz hints in her final lines, a quote from the poet Simon Ortiz, this will have to be revolutionary change.

The question of agency for that change matters though. Settler colonialism in some of its interpretations can lead to the idea that all descendents of Settlers are complicit in the ongoing destruction of indigenous communities. In this book Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't take up that issue explicitly. The question of land ownership or the aspiration to own property remains one way that the US system does try to buy off its population, and this land is always originally that stolen from the indigenous people. But it is also true that sections of the working class can be won to a strategy that sees indigenous people as allies, and is prepared to fight for their interests. These struggles (and perhaps the most obvious is the Standing Rock anti-pipeline protests) have demonstrated that it is possible to create unity against the Settler state. Those struggles together with wider anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements are what point towards a strategy for shattering the Settler Colonial structure that is the United States.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is perhaps one of the most impressive of the many books I've read on Native American history. Together with Nick Estes' book Our History is the Future I recommend it as required reading for those trying to understand the United States today. It is a remarkable book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Related Reviews

Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

In 1875 Karl Marx wrote a devastating critique of the programme of the United Workers’ Party of Germany. In its opening paragraph he dismissed their summary that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture” commentating instead:

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.

This was such a basic tenet of revolutionary ideas that Marx claimed that it was written in “in all children's primers”. We can forgive Marx’s hyperbole here, but his central point is a crucial starting point for understanding how capitalism functions today, and how capitalists themselves behave. 

Nature, as a source of value, has long been understood as a “free gift” to the capitalist production process. Alyssa Battistoni’s book is a detailed study of the phenomena of “free gifts” and how they are used. She begins from the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say who saw nature’s free gift in almost every part of the economy, developing the concept in part from the view that nature was a “gift from God”. She says however that “free gift” is an “odd” term. Gifts are, by definition, given freely with no expectation of reward. Indeed it is telling that the word processor I am writing these sentences is telling me to drop the word “free” as superfluous.  The addition of the word “free” by the classical economists is, Battistoni says, telling, because “it provides a clue that the free gift is not timeless or universal, but rather a category defined in relation to the market”. 

Marx had a different starting point. Nature’s “free” gift is a gift only to capital. Once the means of production are held in private hands then the only beneficiaries of nature’s gifts are the capitalists. Consider a river whose flow can drive a water wheel, the private ownership of the banks of the river, or the right to access the waterway, mean that the endless power of the river is accessible only to the capitalist who has bought access to it. Battistoni concludes:

The problem with capitalism… is not just that it destroys nature or unjustly distributes the material harms and benefits of production. Rather, these problems stem from another, second—order problem: that capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free git. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions. Put simply: capitalism limits our freedom.

While this might not seem to great an insight, and Battistoni doesn’t claim any originality, it’s importance lies in the fact that it locates the concept of the “free gift” central to the structure of capitalist production itself, rather than as a superficial outgrowing of particular functions of the system. There are plenty of writings that critique one aspect of neoliberal environmental policy of the other – the absurdity of assigning prices to particular aspects of non-human nature, or the creation of markets and trading in carbon and other forms of pollution. What is less common is the understanding that the possibility for these neoliberal expressions of capitalism arise out of the structure of capitalism itself. 

One further point on this theme by Battistoni is insightful. Discussing the famous comment by Marx that what distinguishes an architect from a bee is that an architect “raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”. A more rewarding insight she says, comes from Harry Braverman, who notes that the significance of human consciousness is not just that humans can make the reality from their imagination, it is that they can communicate this to others making possible “capitalism’s particular organisation of production”.  In turn, she notes, this “makes possible the separation of control over the means of production from the producers”. 

Thus while human labour is very much, as Marx noted, a “manifestation of a force of nature”, it is different to the other gifts of nature. When purchasing labour power, the capitalists are able to deploy it in a myriad of different ways. A river, on the other hand, flows with gravity. Class rule is the ability of the capitalists to direct human labour in order to utilise nature in order to accumulate wealth. The capitalists are not however entirely free to make their own decisions. As Marx memorably pointed out, the capitalists are “compelled” to behave in a particular way by the competition at the heart of capitalism. “The market”, Battistoni points out, “is capitalism’s government body, the institution that structure action on a daily basis”. It is this that makes capitalism so destructive to humanity and nature. Because it means that the capitalists cannot escape the logic of production – a logic that places profit before everything else.

Nature, however, can form a barrier to capitalist accumulation. There are obvious physical limitations – for instance it might not be profitable to mine a particular resource. But there is a secondary form for this. Some aspects of production are not profitable enough. For instance, Battistoni notes that the persistence of peasant and small scale production, despite expectations to the contrary, is a result of capitalism’s inability to make enough profits from day to day agriculture. It is more profitable to invest upstream and downstream from farming through producing fertilisers, or distributing foodstuffs than to take over all aspects of production. 

This is, she notes, a point of critique of those such as the radical Republican movement in the 19th century, or anarchists today, who argue that production like this represents a bastion against capitalism. In reality, it not “the absence of capitalism” but “the result of a particular set of strategies adopted by capital in the face of intransigent natural obstacles to the total subordination of production”. She makes a similar point about fishing, which she says is one of the last remaining areas of “formally subsumed production” as opposed to areas of the economy which have experienced “real production”. While there is no doubt that small fishing fleets and individually owned boats do persist. I’m unsure its quite as stark as Battistoni suggests – the domination of massive trawlers and big corporations in the marine economy cannot be ignored.

Two other aspects of Battistoni’s discussion of “free gifts” are worth noting. One of these arises out of her discussion of pollution. The production of waste products and the dumping of them in the wider environment is a central part of capitalist production. Pollution in this sense, is “matter out of place” that has no use or exchange value. The inability of capitalism to monetarise this is what makes it pollution. Again Battistoni argues, it’s not enough to critique the individual factory or capitalist for this pollution. We have to see pollution as arising from the structure of the system itself. But one further “free gift” exists in this context. The ability of the human body to tolerate pollution or absorb it. Our ability to survive in polluted factories, or live in areas polluted by industry or cope with certain levels of poison in our water, is a gift to the capitalist. Pollution in this sense is another aspect of our lack from freedom within capitalism.

The labour that is central to the reproduction of labour – the bringing up of children and the feeding, clothing, providing for the family is another “free gift” to the system. Here Battistoni rejects the idea that “reproductive labour is devalued “because it has been ideologically ‘naturalised’.” Similarly, it is not enough to say, like Jason W Moore, that capitalism “defines nature as ‘cheap’ in order to better appropriate it”. Instead

Attending to the interaction of bodily and labour processes, and to their organisation within capitalist societies, is vital for understanding how and why certain kinds of human labour are perpetually devalued. 

She continues:

The relationship between human reproductive labour and the ‘free gifts of nature’, then is not merely analogical or isomorphic, but continuous: both reflect a similar collision of recalcitrant biophysical processes with capitalist social forms and relations. Instead of treating reproductive labour as an inherently distinctive type of activity of sphere of life, one always-already informed by gender, I understand it as a formal category naming a diverse array of concreate activities unified by their structural position as a remnant of capitalist abstraction.

For Battistoni nature’s gifts to humanity can only be understood in the context of the dominant economic system. The free gift concept is the “default form” in which nature appears to the capitalist system of production. It is this central insight, and the wider politics that Battistoni engages with, that make the book valuable at a time when concepts like “Natural Capital” are the dominant ones by which environmental movements approach nature. It is an analysis that points us towards the revolutionary strategy that the workers’ and environmental movement needs.

Related Reviews

Burkett - Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Smith - Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
Foster - The Dialectics of Ecology
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a leading historian of settler colonialism in the Americas and the history of indigenous people and their struggles. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a response to one of the most enduring myths of the history of the United States - the idea that the US is made up of immigrants, and immigrants alone, whose struggles and labour has transformed the barren, inhospitable and virgin landscape into a country emblematic of freedom and hope. That myth has taken some battering in recent years from the second Trump Presidency. Nonetheless, the liberal idea (beloved of the Democrats) of a liberal nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures and societies is one held on to by many - perhaps increasingly so as ICE agents arrest and kill on the streets of US cities.

But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it is a myth that needs to be demolished for there to be true equality, freedom and liberation. Rather than a nation of immigrants, we should understand the US as a Settler Colonial power, whose origins were shaped by colonialism and imperialism from the start, and whose legacy of injustice, dispossession and genocide cannot be ignored. As she writes, the US constitution "created a people empwered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired."

She continues:

The history of the US is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide.

She quotes the indigenous historian Michale Witgen who concludes:

The US was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

The scale of the extermination almost defies comprehension. In hte mid 19th century, around 100,000 Native people in California were "exterminated". Not just murered, but the entire ecological system that they had created was destroyed in a few years by people hunting for gold. Though, as Dunbar-Ortiz points out, if it had not been for their resistance "there would be no indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California", because the settler's "objective" was "to eradicate them".

The argument for a "nation of immigrants" is predicated on the idea that Native Americans no longer exist, no longer have any claim to land and that their history is essentially finished. In her book Dunbar-Ortiz shows however that that this is not true. The treaties and laws that dispossed indigenous people of their lands and livelihoods were ones that continue to be used, and must be challenged. A process of decolonisation is required, but this is one that would require the destruction of the settler colonial state itself. The process of immigration to the US has been a process whereby settlers and immigrants have been incorporated into the structures of settler colonialism itself. She says:

The migrant forced into migration to the US or other states structured on settler colonialism - Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel - is susceptible... to the ideology of settler colonialism, which in the US is imprinted in the content of patriotism, Americanism. Without consciousness of and resistance to this pull, the migrant can passively contribute to the settler-colonial order.

She continues:

This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It's a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers... It's a call for those who work tirelessly for workers' rights and working class solidarity to recognise that it's not nly racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers' identification as even being working class and work solidarity in the US and with other workers of the world.

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to reject the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US... state". She says instead "a revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism".

At the core of this argument is one that says the structures of US imperialism and settler colonialism needed the dispossession of indigneous lands. Settlers were able to acquire this land and could reconsitute themselves as the original Americans. The structures, ideology and racism of this setup then shapes the attitudes of millions of people - and unless this is shattered, historic injustices and contemporary ones will continue.

Racism and settler colonialism are at the heart of US ideology - Dunbar-Ortiz shows the horrors of racism towards Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese people, among others. She also demonstrates how ideas of White Supremacy became central for many trade unionists and white workers, against Black and Asian people in particular. 

But it is also true that the realities of life in the US constantly create a tension with these ideological realities. Growing numbers of people understand that the US is a society built upon systemic racism and white supremacy. Indeed the very success of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's earlier work, including her brilliant Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, demonstrates this (and shapes it, dialectically). Indeed, the recent retreat of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Minneapolis following major protests by local people, demonstrates this. On ICE, Dunbar-Ortiz has written (quoting Mexican immigration historian Alexandra Délano Alonso):

The project of dismantling ICE can't be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society's vision of justice and "a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built inot the 'nation of immigrants' from its very origins."

It is clear that tens of thousands of people have come to this conclusion as a result of Trump's recent actions in Minneapolis. The task for the US left is to ensure this mood is not diverted by the Democrats into another tiresome electoral strategy that embraces the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric and destroys the potential for generalisation of radical ideas.

But agency too matters. When Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses what she calls the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution" I felt obliged to ask what other alternative there was. What agency exists for the root and branch transformation of US society and the destruction, from the bottom up, of settler colonialism? Here, I think we have to note, that few workers actually gain a stake in the system from settler colonialism. Racism does, of course, divide. But it also disempowers White workers as well as Black workers. 

The taking of indigenous land, which is central to the settler colonial project, produces "free land". But not everyone gets that, and when it "presented possibilities for white workers to own property", it also in doing so transformed them from their working class position into that of small producers and smallholders. In turn many of those workers were dispossed by big business and large landowners. Thus few workers have a material stake in the settler colonial society of today. This opens up a contradiction to be exploited. Settler colonialism offers something, but that is out of reach of most workers.

But, I want to emphasis, in concluding this review while these are important debates they do not undermine systematically the importance of Dunbar-Ortiz's central thesis. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project and it must be destroyed. The structures of settler colonialism in the US were emulated everywhere - from Nazi Germany to the racist South African apartheid state and Zionist Israel. Learning the lessons of its history and the resistance to it, are crucial to the liberation project for humanity. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book is a crucially imformative tool in developing our own revolutionary struggles.

Related Reviews

Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Brian W. Dippie - Custer's Last Stand: The anatomy of an American myth

In 1876 George Armstrong Custer's forces attacked a Native American village. In the battle that followed around half of his troops, including every single man that was with him, was killed. It was a major victory for the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho who had temporarily united and a significant blow to the US Army, and the American state which was in the middle of celebrating its centennial year.

There are a plethora of books about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which is known to White people as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I've reviewed some of them on this blog. There is a modern tendency to understand Custer as a spoilt, over-confident, inadequate military leader whose lust for glory led him and hundreds of troops to an early grave. This was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the Battle. Indeed as Brian W. Dippie's brilliant book points out it was not until the death of Custer's widow Elizabeth Custer in 1933 that more critical accounts began to circulate.

What did circulate in the aftermath of June 1876 was the myth of Custer's "Last Stand" and his heroic battle against "savage" hordes. Dippie's book is a study of the process by which this myth was constructed and the role it has played in how the US sees itself. The book was first published in 1976, and the edition I have was republished with a new introduction in 1994. In that introduction Dippie points out that some critics were frustrated by the repeated descriptions of the "last stand". These, Dippie shows, took places in multiple formats - reenactments, paintings, poetry (such terrible poetry), novels, comics and most recently films. 

The problem of the Last Stand is it is a myth. As Dippie points out it was constructed immediately after the Battle with a press dispatch "from the field" reporting "Custer, surrounded bya chose band... all lying in a circle of a few yeard, their horses beside them". It made, according to Dippie, "a deep impression on the minds of contemporary Americans... they became the basis of a heroic national myth". 

There is no need in this review to repeat the various accounts that Dippie has collected. Some of them are dire, and bear little resemblance to what happened at the Battle. Custer has, by turn, been ambushed by devious enemies, killed by a rush, killed escaping, died by his own hand, died by betrayal and died as literarily the last man, fighting with a cavalry sword (which neither he, nor any other cavalryman, were carrying on the day). There was a strong tradition of poetry being written, usually heroic, and almost always laughably bad. But poetry was widely read at the time and perhaps more than anything else it helped recast the defeat as a victory - even as Custer was lying in his grave. 

But other formats have also played their role - some also influential on me. A very large number of paintings depicted the battle and continue to shape perceptions of how the fighting took place. Dippie notes that one of the most important was that distributed by brewer Anheuser-Busch in 1896. They began promoting Budweiser a million prints of "Custer's Last Fight" sent out to bars and pubs across America. Generations of drinkers looked at that painting as they sipped their beer. Similar paintings graced the covers of childrens books that impressionable kids like me read, marvelling at heroism in the face of American Indian savagery. Looking at the Anheuser-Busch print today one is struck by how laughable it all is. Custer standing tall in the middle of dead and dying soldiers brandishing a sword (he didn't have) as troopers are violently scalped and clubbed around him. Its an awful image that only surfices to portray Custer and his men as the brave, civilised people, in the midst of savagery.

Custer’s Last Fight (1888) by Cassilly Adams

There is a certain irony in this. Dippie points out that for Indians, "Custer is the core of a complex of white racist beliefes. For guilt-ridden whites in turn, he is a convenient cultural scapehoat: 'Custer died for our sins.' " But, he says, ironically, "Custer was no hardline racial bigot". However it's hard to agree completely with where Dippie takes this. "To cast him in the form of a zealous racial exerminator is simply to substitute rhetoric for fact". But in June 1876 Custer had every intention of exterminating a village of Native Americans, just as he had in 1868 when at the Battle of the Washita River Custer's troopers killed men, women and children in a Cheyenne camp.

Nonetheless Custer's death and the myth of the "last stand" became both a justification for further assaults and extermination of Native Americans and a myth of white supremacy. As Dippie concludes, of the Battle, "precisely because it was a deviation from the relentless pace of Western conquest, because it was a temporary imperiment in the path of that 'resistless restless race' of pioneers, Custer's Last Stand was elevated into a realm apart". 

Dippie's systematic cataloguing and recounting of pictures, films, poetry and literature, demonstrates both the centrality of the myth to the US's self image and the construction of a particular vision of America. It is a fascinating account.

Related Reviews

Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat
Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn

Claire North - Slow Gods

Claire North has a gift for unusual stories that usually meld fantastical elements (humans who relive their lives over and again; people who can take over other people's minds and bodies) with the gloriously normal worlds the rest of us inhabit. In Slow Gods however North has done something a little out of the ordinary for her. This time her novel has a principle character Mawukana na-Vdnaze who cannot die. Or rather they cannot stay dead ("I am a very poor copy of myself"). But they don't live on our Earth, they live in a very complicated galaxy dominated by a powerful corporation known as the Shine and a rather ineffectual UN type body called the Accord.

The interplanetary travel in this universe is conducted by means of arcspace. Gifted humans have to link into spacecraft and guide the ships through "the dark". In doing so they risk their minds and those of their passengers. Most humans can only do it a few times. But for some reason Mawukana na-Vdnaze can do it repeatedly, and with a precision that allows remarkable missions and occasional warfare. The Shine like to use piloting as a punishment. It's a sign of their cruelty.

Into this well thought out universe comes news from the Slow, and unknown alien force of enormous power. They inform worlds that a supernova will consume a densely inhabited part of the galaxy in a few decades, and leave humanity to try and cope. The Shine does little - rescuing handpicked individuals and people they need, leaving the masses to perish. Other planets do more, and pilots like Mawukana na-Vdnaze are in great demand to pilot refugee ships. Every great science-fiction novel is a reflection on our times, and those of us who've felt horror at dozens of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean can only imagine the horrors when billions are fleeing. Some people get a lottery ticket to escape. Others are left. The evacuation of one planet, Adjumir, sees its population desperately scrabbling to save their culture, traditions and history. But what can be saved? At the end those who've survived have begun to lose their songs and language - merging into their new locales.

In response to the failures to rescue people a resistance movement is born, and on some planets the Shine are fought to a standstill. Eventually the Accord is forced to act - not to save people, but to stop the Shine. Mawukana na-Vdnaze plays their own role, as spy, warrior and pilot. Part of the resistance to the Shine that first destroyed his own city.

Slow Gods is a complicated novel in places. I found North's development of Mawukana na-Vdnaze's story hard to follow as it was scattered through the book. But what worked well were interpersonal relations between Mawukana na-Vdnaze and their friends, comrades and lover. Here North plays around with gender (and lots and lots of pronouns) to flesh it all out vividly. 

Ultimately I was left a little disappointed. The book is very much a metaphor for how society reacts to threats. The analogy with the supernova in a few decades time threatening to destroy everything, and the inaction over climate change is obvious and works well. But I found the story itself a little thin and underwhelming. So read it for the people, places and cultures that North portrays. Also a living spaceship made from trees and flowers.

Related Reviews

North - The Pursuit of William Abbey
North - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
North - Touch
North - The End of the Day
North - The Gameshouse

Charlie Kimber & Judy Cox - Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When workers were ready to dare

On day in May 1926 when my grandfather was on his way home from school in Plymouth, he was astounded to see a tram tipped over by a crowd of people. It was such a vivid moment in his youth that in his nineties he could still recall it. It was his only recollection of the British General Strike, but it stuck with him even though it was the closest he ever got to the trade union movement. 

This new book, written for the hundredth anniversary of the General Strike, has many such events in it. But I mention it as an opening to this review because it demonstrates one of the themes of Charlie Kimber and Judy Cox's important new book. May 1926 was a period of brutal class war, and the strikers were prepared to escalate and fight for victory. Responsibility for their defeat lay in the hands of the trade union leadership, not in their lack of courage.

This important corrective is needed because the General Strike has traditionally been remembered, outside of the radical left, as a time less of class struggle and more of classes rubbing shoulders. I remember being taught at school about strikers playing football with policemen. How surprised I would have been to hear that strikers derailed The Flying Scotsman the emblematic train of the time. My grandfather would have been less surprised. The authors give us a more examples:

On Wednesday 5 May, there were violent clashes between strikers and scabs in Poplar and Canning Town and around the Blackwall Tunnel [all in London] and cars were shashed and set alight. Newspapers reported that strikers 'tried to impede the progress of cars and motor buses', scabs driving buses had to run to escape violence and 'organised gangs' of strikers were baton-charged by the police. In Hammersmith seven buses were wrecked and fascists attacked strikers... A magistrate in Hammersmith declared, 'Women will be treated the same as men. They often inflame men's passions'.

Such reports demonstrate that this was no mere strike marked by peaceful picketing and protest. Rather, as the authors say:

In 1926, working class people made a huge leap of politics and of imagination by hurling themselves into the struggle. They did not know if they would win or not - but they were determined to try and assert the power of their class.

The General Strike was not an isolated event. It grew out of a long period of radicalism, which saw the British working class, like its comrades elsewhere, flexing its muscles and trying out its power. The run up to World War One and the immediate aftermath had seen strikes and revolutions across Europe. Britain had not been immune from that. 1919 had been a year of near revolution. 1926 saw the big battalions of the British working class taking action to defend their collective interests. The problem was that most workers had illusions in their trade union leaders. As the authors explain:

Trade union leaders and the full-time employees of the unions constitute a separate social stratum with their own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other. They become negotiators between workers and bosses instead of class fighters looking to end exploitation altogether... This makes them pull back from leading strikes in the militant direction which could lead to victory.

In 1926 the trade union leaders in Britain did everything they could to limit radicalism and undermine the strike. They were terrified of it getting out of hand. The worst of the leaders (including those in the Labour Party) made sure that the British ruling class knew that they were not under threat. Despite these flawed leaders, British workers demonstrated their desire to fight for real change. The authors write

Overall, strikers and other trade unionists set up some 300 Councils of Action during the strike. Some began to take over the local administration of society, the basis of elementary and temporary "dual power". It is in this sense that they gave a glimpse (no more than that) of workers' councils and soviets.

Workers "contested the way the TUC leaders had tried to constrain and narrow them politically". 

Even the best books on the General Strike can downplay the role of women in the struggle. Revisiting the General Strike on the other hand explores the centrality of women to the struggle usually as active supporters (as the Hammersmith magistrate mentioned earlier demonstrated). The authors quote one local strike newspaper, "We would like to pay special tribute to the brave, enthusiastic and effective co-operation that has been given by the wives and other women relatives of the strikers."

But this support wasn't just passive, it was active in the sense that women took part in protests, meetings and pickets. By the time the strike ended and the miners' were locked out, women had to play a new crucial role in sustaining their communities. Soup kitchens and communal kitchens were set up, and women played a central role in making these work, which "added greatly to the solidarity of the whole community". The strike, and the lock out, also transformed things in the mining areas one commentator noted "there were concerts in every street, and the sense of fellowship in the community was more marked than at any other time."

Women were also central to "mass community mobilisations against scabbing in the South Wales coalfields", and many were arrested and fined. 

The authors rightly describe the end of the strike as its "murder". The sell-out came as an enormous shock to strikers, most of whom were experiencing near total solidarity and an escalating number of workers' taking action. The trade union leaders turned off the dispute with vague promises from the government of no victimisation. The anger from below however was contained because there wasn't any political force capable of urging the workers on and taking control out of the hands of the leadership. The potential for that however is described by one of the most fascinating aspects to this book. These are the collection of dozens of telegrams from across the country and the trade union movement protesting the end of the strike. The authors have done an amazing job to get these into print for popular readers as they definitely demonstrate a different story to the one that will be made in May 2026 when various trade union leaders celebrate the anniversary. Let's quote a few:

Custom House: 14 May, Demand resumption of General Strike to safeguard positions of men who responded to the strike call.

Stafford: 13 May, Report extreme dissatisfaction with strike ending here

Hampstead: 14 May, There is a growing feeling locally that your leadership together with our standard of life is at stake

The telegrams once again demonstrate the key argument of Kimber and Cox - the strike showed of workers' growing confidence, their desire to fight for real change and a growing frustration with the established leadership. These were "Days of Hope". But they also were days when the British working class could have moved to a new level of struggle. Tragically the only significant socialist organisation at the time, the British Communist Party, had an incorrect understanding of the trade union leadership and despite its militants being the most frequently victimsed it had disarmed the movement by putting faith in the left trade union bureaucracy.

The book ends with two important final parts. The first is a study of the cultural impact of the Strike, particularly its influence on literature. Having never read Lady Chatterley's Lover I was intrigued to find that DH Lawrence had been inspired by the strike to include it in all three drafts, with growing levels of radicalism. But I was disappointed that the authors didn't mention my favourite example of the Strike in literature - its part in Goodbye Mr Chips (and it's imitator To Serve Them All My Days). The private schoolboys scab on the strike, but Chips surprises them with his sympathy for the workers. As the authors say the strike "shaped the work of the writers who lived through it. For some, it was a terrible reminder of the power of the working class struggle to uproot society. For others, it was a movement of inspiration and possibility).

Finally the book is aimed at a new, and emerging socialist movement. The book is not just a retelling of the history but an attempt to educate workers in the meaning of struggle and the lessons of the period. The inclusion of a glossary of keywords that are much forgotten today - pickets, rank and file organisation, solidarity - shows that the book is a tool to sharpen the struggle today. Read and use this excellent book and the anniversary of the General Strike to renew our fight against capitalism.

Related Reviews

Hinton & Richard Hyman - Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the early British Communist Party
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

*** Spoilers *** 

Len Deighton's follow up to The Ipcress File begins in the same seedy post-war Europe that the first novel did. The anonymous hero of Horse Under Water may, or may not, be the same "hero" of the first book. Deighton's 2009 afterword makes it clear he doesn't know himself. It does not really matter, because the point Deighton seems to be making is that spycraft in the 1950s and 1960s was in the context of a cold Cold War and the economic decline of Western Europe. 

Horse Under Water though has a difference, it's set in Portugal and Spain, by then they were holiday destinations - for a minority of people. Our spy hero meets his milkman on the flight Lisbon - but we aren't yet in an era of mass tourism. There's still an elements of exotic to the destinations, plane travel and general being abroad drinking coffee and eating local food. Deighton plays this well - not the fancy food of Ian Fleming, but the ordinary tasty working class fare that would appeal to his readers and to him as a cook.

The plot, as always, is convoluted. There's an old Nazi U-boat off the coast and the British want to get into it to grab forged cash that the Nazis had made to finance the resistance against Franco and for democracy. Other people also want the U-boat, but then it turns out that there might not be any cash, only drugs, and then it seems like the drugs are the tip of a rather nasty Nazi iceberg. In fact, it turns out that the Nazis who fled Germany on said U-boat, had in their possession a list of Nazi sympathisers from the Second World War who are now, leading figures in the British Tory Party. Who could have imagined it?

Either way our brave spy, naively hunts this list down in order to fight for democracy and against fascism, only to find out that his masters know already and don't really care. It's a bit grim. But realistic. British spies haven't exactly been known to be on the side of the angels.

Its a thrilling ride that leaves world-weary London with its fan heaters and damp behind, and gives the reader a glimpse of the sun and the exotic world of Southern Europe. There's a touch of the naive about it too. There's so exposition (bizarrely requiring a trip to the Welsh valleys) where the reader gets various types of drugs explained to them. Our hero still has to put in his expense claims at the end though, and there's little to show for it. A great little thriller and, it has to be said, it's a nifty pun title that you might only work out half way through.

Related Reviews

Deighton - The Ipcress File
Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
Ambler - Journey into Fear