The opening chapters explore this growth in different sectors. This was a period of class struggle from below and above, and one of consolidation of the economy. Palmer writes:
The layers of colonialism in which Canada was richly enveloped grew increasingly complicated, with capital imports rising to £100 million annually in 1911-1913. British capital supplied three-quarters of this influx... securing the loyalty of the Canadian chartered banks"... On the eve of the First World War, 60 per cent of Canada's government debt was held abroad, and servicing this borrowing consumed one-quarter of the country's export earnings.
At the same time the Canadian government was continuing and expanding its colonial control at home. New laws oppressed Indigenous people still further, and "Ottawa also worked diligently to extend the domination of the Dominion into the last frontier of capitalist exansion, an enclve of the preservation of Indigenous ways of life: the resource-rch North." Finally, "francophone Quebec" was further subordinated within the Confederation. There were also significant examples of workers' resistance and organisation in this period. But the key line of development was the increased centralisation and consolidation of capital.
While there were significant economic differences through the Canadian regions, there was a general growth in large corporations such as steel manufacturing, coal and industrial farming. But the wealth from these accrued to a small minority of the population. Hard work by miners, industrial workers and farmers drove capital accumulation, but they were not its main beneficiaries. Take farming. Palmer explains that on the prairies:
It was wheat... that proved the major engine of capital accumulation... the single most important crop enticing homesteaders. They settled on some ninety-nine million acres of land between 1870 and 1927, successfully patenting 58.2 million acres by 1930. Settlers bought more land than they acquired for free through federally overseen pre-emptions, with fifty million acres purchased from the railways, Hudson's Bayt Company and other agents... These lands, traditionally the territory of various First Nations, sustained the wheat economy of the Canadian west. Harvests of the prairies proved a juggernaut of capital formation for the railways and their beneficiaries, the monopolistic grain elevator owners who controlled the sales and distribution of what. Powerful interests like these bled farmers dry.
Such growth required massive numbers of workers. Between 1901 and 1931 Canada's population nearly doubled. Urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver grew at astonishing rates. The immigrants who came arrived from enormously different areas, and experienced appalling racism.
The prejudice and poverty faced by these recent arrivals disfigured Canada, the intolerance they confronted paralleling the marginalisation and discriminatory treatment accorded the country's original colonised peoples. Confederation's economic margins now included First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Québécois, the labouring poor, the immigrant masses, most Maritimers and wage-earning women, whose pay in the 1920s averaged 54-60 per cent that of males.
These immigrants had arrived hopeful of owning and farming land. The Canadian government "extolled the virues of European peasants as the kind of human material best suited to the settlement of the West" but most lacked the experience and resources and instead usually "ended up as itinerant harvesers... peripatetic railroad navvies...miners; or the lowest-paid labourers in industrial factories."
There was, inevitably, a racist dimension too. These immigrants "became the racialised 'other', scapegoated in the social construction of a Canada htat had to be constantly remade in the image of a British Dominion championed as 'White, forever'."
One of the great strengths of Palmer's histories of Canada is his subtle exploration of the relationship between capital and colonisation. Thus he traces the impacts of capitalism's expansion on the First Nations, Métis and Innuit peoples and its impact on the workers. The growth of new industry, followed by the industrial decline and depopulation of the Maritimes or the expansion of capital and resource extraction into the North and the displacement and genocidal policies against the Innuit. These are handled with care and thought, and never once does Palmer dimminish the horror of what happened to First Nations, the oppressed and exploited. Canada's colonism wasn't just internally. It was central to expansion of the British Empire into the global south: "Sugar refineries in Canada, for instance, were at the centre of capital's expansion in the 1890-1914 years". Imports of sugar from Asia transformed the people and economies of places like Fiji. These were now part of the "sphere of influence" that Canadian capital cultivated. Canadian banks were at the forefront of expansion into South America and the Carribean.
The middle part of the book covers the Great Depression and the horror experienced by working people in the 1930s, it also covers a great period of resistance. Massive strikes, in particular in the "year of rebellion" 1937, saw millions of workers fighting back over pay and conditions. This also saw an expression electorally with the growth of the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Palmer traces the evolution of these groups, and their intersection, well. For those on the Canadian left this is probably a well trod path. For most of us outside of Canada it will be very new material.
Canadian capitalism did not recover until World War Two. Palmer accurately describes this as "capital's saviour". But production of food, weapons and ammunition drove the Canadian economy to new heights, bringing new opportunities for women workers'. Economically it was also transformative. US capitalism spent "nearly $12 billion" in Canada during the war, which "helped keep the wartime domestic economy huming and further solidified the Dominion's integratin into a new continentalism, driven by rising American demand". Uranium mining in Canada also meant the country, and its government, became closely linked to the US atomic bomb programme. Coming out of the War the Canadian government needed to implement a Welfare State - much like in Britain, fear of further workers' rebellion fuelled the belief in reforms to buy off the potential threat. But it is striking to learn that so racist was the Canadian state that the original plans for Welfare did not even feature the poorest Canadian people - the First Nations.
By the end of the period, "obvious voices of anti-capitalism" and anti-colonialism were "quieted" and "in retreat". the left was weaker and the post-war consensous seemed to have gained for the trade union movement "much of what it had long sought to attain". But the 1960s were to be a "decade of tumultuous change and oppositional turmoil" and would see Indigenous movements, those of the oppressed and organised workers, and the left, grow and pose radical challenges. But, argues Palmer, these changes were all rooted in a the longer trajectory of colonialism and capitalism boom and slump across Canada.
This book tells a wonderful, if frustrating, story. In the face of a vicious, settler, state power, working and Indigenous people were sacrified to the interests of capital. Resistance was almost continuous. But with the exception of the period after World War One and the later 1930s, rebellion did not fundamentally challenge capital. Palmer tells the story of the few brave radicals who led that fight, and more emerges in the final period in the third volume. But this reader felt that there were too many missed opportunities for radical resistance.
I enjoyed volume two almost as much as Palmer's first volume. I was surprised at the ommission of two things. One was any mention of the experience of Canadian troops during World War One. I had expected that the slaughter in the trenches would have had a political impact back home, but this was not discussed. Secondly I was surprised that there was little discussion of far-right and Nazi politics in Canada in the 1930s. Was there such a movement like much of the rest of the world? Was there anti-fascist resistance? These omissions aside, Palmer's sweeping history is excellent.
Related Reviews
Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025
The time of useless prayers has passed. The protests, the pleas, the peaceful demonstrations were useless. Fedinand II viewed it all with contempt; and as for us, a free people reduced to chains and misery, will it take us yet longer to regain our legitimate rights? To arms, children of Sicily, to arms! The strength of all is omnipotent: the union of peoples is the downfall of kings. On 12 January, at dawn, the glorious epoch of universal regeneration will begin.
Such sentiments arose in almost every part of Europe in the years 1848-1849. They represented a huge desire for fundamental change. On the one hand their were the poverty stricken masses in town and country, for whom life was unbearable. On the other, there were a newly emergent class of wealthly, liberal bourgeois people for whom the existing order was preventing them engaging in, and expressing, their real desires - the pursuit of wealth. Bagnasco, represented the latter, a class for whom the world was changing, but not fast enough. Liberals imagined a different way of organising society. As Christopher Clark says:
Liberals liked markets. In an era when markets are dominated by mighty global entities like Google and Amazon, it is hard to recapture the subversive magic that still attached to the idea of the market in this era. Markets were not manorial or feudal, they did not represent royal power, they were not ecclesiastical. They were a space of exchange in which individuals could operate - in theory at least - on a more or less level playing field, outside the prescriptions of an arbitary authority.
The quest for a bourgeois capitalist order, was also one that threatened to shatter apart the older order, on every level in which it existed. While the ideas of the bourgeois class were radical, so were those of the lower orders and these ideas radicalised as the masses began to move into action against their rulers. One of the patterns that Christopher Clark describes, which was almost universal to the European revolutions of 1848, was the way in which the initial euphoria of revolution, the unity of classes against common enemies, deteriorated as their contradictory interests emerged from the struggle. One example comes from Paris. There the initial revolution had instituted a Provisional Government for France. The make up of the new assembly was a "bitter disappointment" to the left, and it set about writing a new constitution:
Odilon Barrot, who was a member of the Constitutional Committee, later recalled how the 'fear of social war' left its mark on the drafting of the constitution: ' the agitation that had suffused this society, the exasperation of some, the anxiety of others, did not permit the calm, the coolness of mind required for such a task;. He could not forget, he wrote, how in a the room where the commission was deliberating, the sounds of civil strife could be heard through the windows.
Clarke notes that in this constitution the writers' objective was "not to project the revolution forward into the future, but t capiture it in something cool and inert, conserve a liberal understanding of what had been achieved and thereby prevent further radicalisation."
Clarke's analysis here is not new. The gap between the liberal bourgeoisie's interests and those of the masses was plain at the time, and has much been commentated on. Marx and Engels noted this often in their writing, and indeed - to relate this work to my own recent interests, the whole purpose of Engels' work on the German Peasants' War was to explore why the bourgeosie in Germany in 1848 was so cowardly through contrast with 1525.
There were other factors too. The lack of radical leadership from below often undermined the revolutionary movements. Clark notes how mass demonstrations in Berlin were curtailed by the use of the popular radical orator Friedrich Wilhelm Held, who was chosen at a crucial moment to speak to a revolutionary protest:
Held announced that the demonstration would retrace its steps... The tension in the crowd dissipated. To countermand Held's announcement was impossible - his grip on the crowd too strong. The demonstration was over; people began to drift away. Looking back, Paul Boerner felt that this was the moment when the radical movement in Berlain missed its appointment with history.
Crucailly Clark argues, Held's own motivations matter little: "Whether Held was an agent of some kind or simply changed his mind at the last moment is not important. He was a crucial link in the sequence of that day's events, a link made of capricious and changeable stuff. That a man like him should have found himself in such a position on 14 May 1848 tells us something about the absence of a cohesive radical leadership cadre".
Despite the failure of more strident and throughgoing revolutionary change, 1848 did make massive changes. A space was opened up for capitalist development that pushed aside the older order. Clarke notes that these changes "were a direct consequence of the revolutions. They were only possible because conservative political groups that had previously opposed or resisted them had been pushed away from the centre of power."
Marxists often point to the way that the capitalist class pretend that revolution played no part in their conquest of power. Clark's book demonstrates the opposite. The centrality of mass revolution to their victory. He also celebrates the role of the masses - without whom the bourgeoise could not make a revolution, but who were universally feared and reviled by the same class. In his own discussion of revolution and counter-revolution in France in 1848, Karl Marx concluded:
Thus the solution is postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of the party of Order compromised, weakened, made unworkable by the other; the repression of the common enemy, the mass of the nation, extended and exhausted — until the economic relations themselves have again reached the point of development where a new explosion blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their constitutional republic.
These revolutions then, in many senses, remain unfinished, at least for the "mass of the nation". Clarke is right to conclude his book by drawing parallels with more recent, contemporary struggles, and revolutions. In reading of 1848, for instance, it is impossible not to visualise the very similar looking scenes that saw the masses take over squares in cities throughout the Middle East in 2011 - not least Cairo's Tahrir Square or Sudan in 2019.
But, as Charlie Kimber notes in his own review of this superb book, "one key difference from 1848 is that our rulers no longer face a working class that is being born. Instead, they face a global one whose members and dependants make up the majority of society."
The 1848 revolutions remade the world for capitalism. But they also began the process by which the working class became a class for itself.
Clarke's book is extraordinary. Its breadth and attention to detail are phenomenal. More importantly it is extremely readable, and avoids trying to tell the story nation by nation. Instead Clark constructs the story by reference to multiple places, drawing out similarities and differences. He thus avoids repetition and boring the reader. There are plenty of exciting, inspiring moments and Clark has an eye for the unusual and the comic. It is a sweeping history. Clark avoids just focusing on the familiar and talks about the whole geographical breadth of the continent, in all the varied forms revolution manifested. He never fails to neglect wider implications of the struggle - the question of women and gender roles, the emancipationary conclusions that the revolutions had for enslaved people and the differences between town and country. All these aspects deserve a review of their own. Above all Revolutionary Spring is a reminder of what we can achieve when millions of us join together.
Related Reviews
Saville - The Consolidation of the Capitalist State
Mehring - Absolutism & Revolution in Germany 1525-1848
Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Davidson - How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions
Leipold - Citizen Marx: Republicanism & the formation of Karl Marx's social and political thought
Greene - Communist Insurgent: Blanqui's Politics of Revolution
In organising to stop the right activists should learn from the past. Two strands of fascism dominated European politics. One of these was Hitler's Nazis in Germany. The other was Mussolini's fascists in Italy. The latter is not discussed as often as the former, so John Foot's Blood and Power is an important read. Foot begins:
Italy invented fascism. Out of the chaos of the First World War, in which nearly 600,00 Italian soldiers lost their lives, a new movement emerged which preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland. Fascists embraced violence, both in their language and on their streets.
The violence was needed. In the early 1920s the myriad of local fascist leaders out of whome Mussolini was to emerge was the sole leader faced a powerful foe - the working class movement and mass socialist organisations. As Foot says, the fascists were "overshadowed" by a "socialism uprising" at the end of World War One. One cannot downplay the scale or significance of the Italian workers' movement in this phase. The opening chapters of Foot's book are a sweeping, but powerful and inspiring account of a working class in open and confident confrontation with the state.
While Italian fascism was nationalist and racist, and later embraced antisemitism, it's core ideology was one of counter-revolution and patriotism. It was the perceived threat (even after the struggle had receded) from the workers' movement that gave Mussolini's fascists a chance to organise and a ideology to coalesce around. Italian fascism cannot be understood without seeing the centrality of counter-revolutionary politics. In 1914, for instance, the northern Italian city of Ravenna had been the centre of a major workers' revolt against World War One. The story itself is inspiring. But in July 1922 it was the scene of a brutal counter-revolutionary strike by the fascists:
Thousands of armed blackshirts descended on the city... The 'march on Ravenna' was carried out like a military invasion. It took place out in the open, during the day, and was accompanised by a selective purge - the victims being socialists, republicans and trade unionists... At least nine people were killed in Ravenna alone... but the attacks ranged across a vast area.
By the summer in Ravenna and Cremona, Ferrara, Bologna and countless other places, the fascists squads were in control, and "the state, police prefects, army and carrabinieri were all reduced to the role of onlookers, and often took sides, providing logistical assistance to the violent gangs".
The speed at which fascist gangs did defeat democracy and the left is breathtaking. In city after city, town after town, village after village fascist gangs smashed, murdered and broke local and regional organisations of trade unions and socialists, democratic organisations and elected bodies. It was systematic. One thing that should be recognised by all activists today, is that democratic organisation in any form - whether it was local councils or national government, was in no way a barrier to the fascists. Their deployment of extreme violence at the slightest provocation (and usually with no provocation at all) saw democratic institutions fall almost instantly. It seems incredible, but democracy as a set of ideas and institutions could not (and often did not try) to stop fascism. Foot writes:
Local democratic institutions fell, one by one, to fascist pressure. Forty [fascist] councillors had been elected to the provincial administration of Cremona... in May 1922. But this formal, democratic procedure was completely ignored by the local fascists. They did not recognise elections. In that same month, local fascist leader... Roberto Farinacci, insisted that he be allowed to speak as the 'forty-first councillor'. Farinacci had not even been a candidate in the elections... When asked who had elected him, he replied, 'I elected mysefl'. It was the last meeting of that provincial council.
He concludes "Election results and democracy had come up against fascist violence and the latter had won".
This begs the question, could the fascists have been stopped. There's no doubt that the left could and done so. Tom Behan's remarkable book The Resistable Rise of Mussolini shows how this happed in one location. The key was left unity and militant mass mobilisation. Certainly there was resistance and the fascists were held back temporarily in places. But there was not enough. One problem was clearly that the left (in a broad sense) did not understand that everyone was threatened. Too many liberals and moderates thought the fascists were only targetting the revolutionary left, but "moderates were often targeted in the same way, and with even more violence, than those on the far left". Tragically, in a number of key cases, such as when the fascists took out the left stronghold Bologna in November 1920, the leader of the radical left, the Mayor Ercole Bucco, backed down from armed defence, despite having a massive majority in the city. Foot concludes:
Bucco's actions that night also seemed to confirm the overall historical judgement on maximalism. They talked the talk, but were incapable of organising a real revolution. Local fascists on the other hand, were emboldened.
Time and again the left was to fail. In January 1921 the Socialist Party left split, and the Italian Communist Party walked out. Foot regards this as a mistake. He says that "at a time of mass fascist violence directed against socialists, the main political organisations... divided into two, weakened any sense of opposition or even defence". This was, of course, a dangerous time. The trick would have been if the Communist Party had been able to respond in a way that would have built left unity in an anti-fascist alliance while maintaining independence. This failed to happen, and probably it was too late after January 1921. Had the CP prepared the ground by organising like this, the split could have been much more productive in terms of anti-fascist mobilisations. I was reminded of Clara Zetkin's analysis of fascism in Italy:
Fascism... is not at all the revenge of the bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia.
At the start of this review I mentioned the ideology of Italian fascism. It is notable that while the fascists were appalling racists, many Jewish people were members. Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and his adoption of a vicious antisemitism shocked them. Italian fascism was not more benign than in Germany. Jewish people were hounded, murdered, arrested and lost everything. Many were sent to Concentration Camps, particularly later in the war. Foot's analysis of fascism in power is an important counter to those today who argue that Mussolini was not as vicious. The Italian fascist state was a violent, repressive and murderous entity - and its violence extended into Africa with the occupation of Ethiopia.
Nonetheless fascism in Italy was weak. It seemed extremely powerful, but the contradictions of economic and imperilaist policies undermined its position. By the time it had entered the war, the longer anti-fascist and anti-war traditions of the working class were beginning to make themselves felt. When Mussolini's regime eventually fell, it was a surprisingly quick series of events. This period, and the subsequent German take over of Italy, is well told by Foot.
Foot's book concludes with an analysis of Italian fascism in the context of contemporary Italian politics. It is clear that the failure of the Italian state to properly come to terms with, or confront, the legacy of Italian fascism - including its failure to prosecute or challenge many of its key figures - has left a belief that Mussolini's time was "wonderful". Foot's expose reminds us that it was for a few people - those who were frightened by the rise of a powerful workers' movement. But the reality for millions was the opposite.
It is an excellent (and extremely readable) account of a period of history we ought to study more. I would have liked more accounts of anti-fascist resistance and further analysis of how the left could have stopped fascism. Nonetheless this is a very useful read.
Related Reviews
Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre
This was very unusual in the period. The British Army had only just got rid of the Purchasing of Commissions as a means to becoming an officer, and ordinary troops being promoted upward was not yet common. It meant that "Fighting Mac" as he was known, was famous and popular, and was the source of patriotic pride for thousands of Scotsmen. His poor background made it extremely difficult to survive in this atmosphere. Being a British Officer then still required the soldier to purchase his own uniforms and so on, as well as dine out and be seen. There was enormous pressure on Macdonald and it is fair to say, at least in Trevor Royle's telling, that Fighting Mac struggled with the fame and the spectacle.
But at the height of his fame Macdonald was laid low by scandal and committed suicide. The scandal itself concerned "very grave charges". Royle argues that these were "homosexual" in origin. It seems likely that Macdonald was gay. While he married young and had a son, his relationship with his wife was distant - during his military career they hardly ever met and almost no one knew they were married. In fact this was possibly deliberate. At the time Macdonald's regiment did not allow officers to be married. Homosexuality was illegal at the time, and while there may have been suspicions within the army about Macdonald, nothing was proved. Royle details the repression and secrecy of gay men, and some of the scandals at the time that meant there was "a good deal of public interest" in homosexuality during Victoria's reign. It was considered "an illness bordering on insanity" and would have destroyed Macdonald's career and damaged anyone associated with him - since he had been close to members of the Royal Family this would have been a problem for the establishment.
In 1902 Macdonald was posted to command the troops in Ceylon. He arrived in March, and was "a man who may have been under suspicion" for his sexuality. Whether or not he was actually "under suspicion" or not, he did not improve his situation by "spurning polite society". Lack of funds meant he did not entertain, he was rude to the gentlemen who served in the local milita, and he befriended "a number of Burgher families - old Ceylonese familes of mixed European, usually Portugese and native Celonese origins". Macdonalds friendsship with the Burgher community and particularly a "family called de Saram" outraged the English colonial class. As Royle put's it, he was to "pay for his lack of allegiance to the white planter class".
The scandal erupted when Macdonald was suspected of "spending too much time" with the de Saram family children, especially their two sons. Rumours were that there was a "sexual relationship" between the boys and the General. While homosexuality "was an accepted and natural fact of life amongst the native Ceylonese... the de Sarams were a strict Burgher family whose code of morals proably owed more to their Portugese ancestry than to local customs".
Two versions of what caused the scandal exist. Both of them involve Macdonald being caught in some sexual relationship with boys on a train. Macdonald was sent back to England when the news borke, by his commanding officer, and then returned to Ceylon to try to clear his name. On the way back he stopped in Paris, and shot himself in a hotel room.
It was a huge scandal and Macdonald was buried with indecent haste, quickly and without ceremony. Thousands of Scots were shocked and heart broken, disbelieving the rumours and wanting to celebrate his life and patriotism.
There is no doubt that MacDonald was treated badly by the Army command. It is possible that this was in part because of his class background. It is also because Macdonald's senior officers were foolish. Royle asks whether MacDonald could have got away with the accusations and survived the scandal. He answers yes, pointing out that similar scandals had been dealt with without soldiers committing suicide or the public hearing of them:
If Macdonald had been possessed of influence in high places or indeed of more wordliness, or a guinea or two, then he could have taken legal or political advice and perhaps have put a damper on the charges.
Royle further suggested that Macdonald misplaced faith in the army and his belief in "honour" made him think that suicide was the only way out. It was the only way to "regain the army's trust in him".
From a 21st century perspective though it is difficult to see this in the same way as Royle does, writing in 1982. But there is a repeated conflation of homosexuality with pedestry. While Macdonald may have been gay, the scandal was actually around "the fact that he liked little boys perhaps too much" to quote Royle. While Royle doesn't claim Macdonald as a tragic victim of homophobia and certainly not as a hero for the LGBT+ movement today, the conflation of homosexuality with abusive and inappropriate relationships sits badly today.
Macdonald was, no doubt, a victim of prejudice, and Royle is right to say that he had been forced to "live a lie". We do not know the full evidence for the scandal that destroyed him, and General Macdonald was probably a victim of forces in the British military who hated him for his background. But he was also a man who used his position in society to abuse boys.
Trevor Royle's book details the case well, and Macdonald's career is interesting, as is the material on the scandal and the awful position of gay men in Victorian society. But the book feels very dated with phrases such as "latent homosexual" being particularly noticeable.
Related Reviews
Royle - The Wars of the Roses
Ziegler - Omdurman
Holmes - Redcoat
This first volume of the trilogy traces this process. But it begins with what was lost. Palmer explores the First Nations life before colonialism. This was not a Utopia, but it was one with a completely different conception of property to that of Europeans. One of the first European settlers, Jazues Cartier was, according to Palmer, "unsettled" by his encounter with the "original inhabitants of the St. Lawrence Valley". He sais, "These people live as it were in a community of goods". A frightening thing for Europeans obsessed with money and natural resources as a source of wealth accumulation.
This "community of goods" meant that Europeans would struggle with their relations with First Nations. The seemingly free landscape was not unused or unvalued. First Nations expected compensation for the loss of resources, and were prepared to fight if they didn't get it.
But Palmer is also careful not to idolise pre-colonial Canada. He quotes an incredulous First Nations account of visiting Paris in 1649 shocked at the extreme poverty adjacent to the wealth of the Court. But he rejects a romantic view of Indigenous Peoples. They suffered "want and war" and sometimes "abhorred one another". But Palmer notes how this view often dominated early accounts of Canadian history (and some more recent ones):
Romanticized notions of the innate goodness of Indigenous people - the 'noble savage' or the ecological preservationist - are thus misplaced, the mirror image of stereotypical, ethnocentric denigrations... Both judgements should give rise to discerning skepticism.
But, he also points out that colonialism destroyed all the realities of Indigenous life, upsetting and transforming social and cultural relations and dividing, or increasing, divisions between groups. As he says:
A struggle for dominance in the fur trade pitted First Nations against one another in new, intensified ways. Commerical, commodified exchange relations with white traders played a significant role in an evolving state of conflic, undeniably exacerbated by the introduction of trade goods, European-based pathogens and technologies.
The Canadian state, which emerges out of the colonial conflict between Britain and France, and then that between Britain and the US, was shaped by white supremacy, racism and the acceptability of forced dispossession and genocide. Canada itself was "born a conservative, counter-revolutionary colony" shaped by wider forces of industrial development and colonial conflict. But it was also born in the era of Revolution and this meant that Canada's capitalist development had to be "mirrored... in a rhetoric of constitionalist, liberal-democratic rights".
The contradiction of Canada's supposed liberalism and its treatment of Indigenous Peoples and workers is a key part of Palmer's analysis in the second part of the book. The development of industrial Canada, based on its plentiful natural resources - land, wood, fish, coal and so on - combined with racist genocide and the brutal exploitation of workers shapes the country on the eve of the 20th century.
The early Canadian capitalist class also had to be wary of a different dynamic. As land became the "decisive" commodity European settlers could hope to break free of their proletarian chains. Indeed just as in the United States, capitalism's development depended on a section of people doing just that and in doing so "opened up and developed land, enhancing the value of the larger holds of the elite". Simultaneously this helped to discipline and further displace Indigenous Peoples. But the capitalist class were worried. Lord Goderich, the British colonial secretary, worried in 1831 that "without some division of labour, without a class of persons willing to work for wages, how can society be prevented from falling to a state of almost primitive rudeness, and how are the comforts and refinements of civilised life to be procured?"
It is tempting to think that the "primitive rudeness" that Lord Goderich feared was one of "community of goods", but what this illuminating paragraph actually shows is that the capitalist class knew that they had to fight to construct a society in their interests. It was, as Palmer notes, the story of English enclosures "all over again" but "in a colonial setting in which Indigenous displacement seemingly created land's availability". At the same time though the British state was terrified of losing control of its wealthy colony, and deliberately tried to hold back industrial development in order to keep Canada's reliance on Britain.
The book's final chapters trace how, in the aftermath of independence, the late 1800s in Canada were characterised by two parallel processes. The first was the further dispossesion of First Nations, including such brutal experiences as Residential Schools, as well as their resistance including the Métis rebellion in 1885. The second process was a massive wave of workers' resistance and trade union struggle which emerges from the development of a new industrial working class. The "Great Upheavel" of 1886 saw mass strikes and the ruling class feared revolution. But the failure of these struggles to break through partly lay in the inability of the struggles to connect. This reflects, Palmer argues, the "Canada's history of uneven capitalist development combined with its historically evolving colonialism" which structure the struggles differently. The tragedy was the failure of these two struggles to connect in significant ways. And while Palmer highlights the "faint indications" that "both challenges to capitalism and colonialism were nonetheless gravitating in directions that might feed into common struggles", he also notes:
Labour's uprising rarely espoused an unequivocal anti-capitalism to the same extent that the Métis-led war of resistance in the North-West categorically rejected colonialism.
Having said this, Palmer finishes his fantastic book on a positive note:
Canadians need not be confined in the shapes that colonialism and capitalism have hammered out for them, over centuries, on an anvil of developmental determination. Paths once taken can be reversed; choices advocated and refused might now well be embraced, adapted to new circumstances. And struggles long separated from one another can be brought into new and exhilarating alignment.
It's a fitting conclusion for a remarkable history that traces the tragedies and horror that mark the birth of Canada at the same time as celebrating the struggles and resistance that shaped the state. I look forward to the next two volumes which will no doubt show these processes continuing in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Related Reviews
Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Krasowski - No Surrender: The land remains Indigenous
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Fagan - The First North Americans
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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| 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
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.
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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
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Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914
Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.
Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".
On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.
These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.
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Amarpal Singh's account of the First Anglo-Sikh War is an excellent introduction to these events. It is, however, primarily aimed at those who would (either in person or on their armchairs) explore the battlefields. Today these are hardly recognisable, and the British war memorials erected after various battles are in a delapitated state. Nonetheless for enthusasts these are useful guides.
But the strength of the book is that it draws out the day to day experiences of the combatants. Wherever possible the author has used contemporary accounts, diaries and newspaper reports to describe events. He laments that there are few surviving Sikh accounts, though those that do survive are useful.
Much rested on this war. A British victory would open up the Punjab to exploitation. A defeat would have dire consequences for the whole of colonial India. As one of the British commanders Sir Harry Smith said, "all India was at gaze and ready for anything." He continued by criticisng the tactics of his opponent Ranjodh Singh:
He shold have attacked me with the vigour his French tutors would have displayed and destroyed me, for his force compared to me was overwhelming; then turned about upon the troops at Ludhiana and beathen them and sacked and burned th ecity - when the gaze I speak of in India would have been one general blaze of revolt.
And defeat in the Punjab almost happened. Had it done so, India would have risen (as it did only slightly more than a decade later, but this time having already seen the defeat of the British army). It was close. At the battles of Mudki and Ferozeshah the British came close to significant defeat, and had huge casualties. After five hours of hand to hand combat the British at Ferozeshah fell back. Singh describes:
Few soldiers knew where their officers were and who was giving orders. As the British weakened, the Sikh army staged a significant rally and launched a counterattack all along the line. Although Lal Singh had played little part in the proceedings, the Sikh soldiers had lost none of their morale. Less weary than the British, the Sikh line moved forward and began to progressivel recapture the southern area of the Sikh camp.British arrogance, overconfidence and no doubt racist attitudes to their opponents was once again nearly their undoing. So bad were conditions that officers offered Indian troops months wages for water and licked dew from the cannons. But they were saved by betrayal at the top of the other side. Ferozeshah should have been a supreme victory for the Sikh army, instead it was a defeat that meant that the British would likely win the rest of the war. Other things worth noting. The battles were a precussor to the industrial slaughter of World War One. Take the battle of Sabraon. For two hours both sides shelled each other with artillery, in a "grand contest between the heavy guns". A contemporary account asked the reader to "pause and imagine the thunder of 120 guns on both sides... Never shall I forget the majesty of the whole scene."
Few people in Britain today know about the first (or indeed the second) Anglo-Sikh War. More know about it in the Indian Sub-Continent, though the events are seldom marked. Amarpal Singh points out that it is the betrayal of the Sikh commanders that is the most commentated event of the war for people in the area now. Indeed without this betrayal the Sikh army would certainly have triumphed in the early battles and it is entirely possible that the history of colonial rule would have been very different.
While this book is very much designed as an introduction to the War and to the sites, it is well written and accessible. I'd recommend it.
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I could not have picked a finer introduction to the subject that Stuart Easterling's "Short History", which despite its length is exemplary in its description of events and personalities and its location of the revolution within wider social forces.
The revolution arose out of the contradictions caused by the dictorial politics of Porfirio Diaz, which on the one had was leading to some economic development, but on the other was constraining almost every class of society through corruption and violence. Easterling quotes one future revolutionary who said that "I began to feel the need for change... when I was 19... back in my town.. I saw the police commissioner get druunk, almost every day in the town pool hall, in the company of his secretary, with the local judge who was also the ...tax collector, with the head of the post office; and with some merchant or army officer, persons all of whom constituted the influential class of that small world."
The Diaz regieme was unable to change in the face of such "deep and widespread dissatisfaction", but the discontent was first expressed through the abortive attempt by Francisco Madero to introduce democratic and economic reforms through a Presidential bid. While unleashed social movements from below in a revolutionary wave that brought down the old regime and began to introduce very radical reforms. This story has no doubt been told before, but it is Easterling's analysis that I found so helpful in understanding the revolutionary dynamics. He writes:
A key point to understand concerning the Mexican Revolution is that it did not consist of a single movement. It was not led by a single political party, nor did it mobilise only one social class. Indeed, of the major camps within the Reovlution, only that of Zapara and his allies, based in the campesinos of the 'free' villages, was highly homogeneous in class terms. The Revolution is thus best understood by looking at the various social forces it unleashed - from campesinos to middle-class reformers to industrial workers to disgruntled landlords - and the goals and aspirations they developed. The different revolutionary camps and leaders did not simply float unattached above these various sort of people... it was from this source... that the Revolution's camps formed political programs and leaders formed worldviews.
Thus the Revolution was not a working class revolution rather it was a revolutionary movement whose base reflected the uneven development of Mexican capitalism, and its poor rural base. This is where the revolutionary bandits beloved by this reader found their base. Easterlin recounts how one of the most famous Pancho Villa made the transition from bandit to revolutionary precisely because of his connections to the rural poor. His revolutionary actions thus became those of a Robin Hood type figure:
[Villa's] first act was to attack one of Luis Terrazas' largest estates and summarily execute the administrator. The latter was a man despised by the local peones for numerous abuses, including reserving the privilege of sleeping with bridges on their wedding night.
Other acts of revolutionary violence including forcing a priest to acknowldge a child he had fathered. But Villa's military forces were his real contribution to the struggle, and army that "effectively nationalised wide swaths of territory previously owned by the state's hacendados as well as a number of factories owned by Huerta supporters... In cities and towns under Villista control the Northern Division distributed generous food rations to the urban poor, the unemployed, wiows and orphas. The price of beef was radically reduced".
But it was the tensions between the different revolutionary camps that would prove the revolutions undoing. By Summer 1915 the government had fallen and the radical Carranza was in charge. He was to turn on his previous allies having used his base in urban areas to defeat the government. But Carranza was too tied to the officer class in the army, who were unwilling to tolerate real social reforms. To appease them he turned on his former supporters in the trade union movements. "The destruction of the tyranny of capitalism... [should not be followed] by the tyranny of the workers". The most bizarre anti-capitalist justification for imposing the death penalty for striking and the smashing of the workers' movement. But Carranza himself would not survive these competing interests. He was ousted and then assassinated by the very forces he sought to appease.
The Mexican society that emerged from 1920 was one dominated by military officers, a state which "had acquired an exceptional degree of power relative to the rest of society." The "military caste" was interested in developing capitalism, and this did require a degree of social reform. This meant the state had to make "concessions to the campesino and worker when necessary" to "ensure peace and stability" for the development ocapitalism. Class struggle was to end, and instead a new "perspective was often proclaimed with radical language, and the new leaders often identified this state-supervised capitalism as a form of socialism. This was not seen as the civtory of labour over cpaital, or campesino over landlord, but rather a careful balance between the different sides". That this required the destruction of the most radical and revolutionary forces tells who was really in control.
Easterling's book is by no means a full account of the Mexican Revolution. But it is a brilliant introduction, particularly because its starting point is not just that of description of events, but rather an attempt to understand the often complex and interacting social forces that were emerging in the early 20th century. It really is a brilliant read and it is probably one of the best starting points I could find for a subject that continues to be an inspiration to radicals in South America today. Highly recommended.
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