Eric Richards - The Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances were one of many blots of the development of the modern world. The story of the way that the Highlander crofters were forced from their land is well know. Over a period of around a century, though clearances did occur earlier, tens of thousands of some of the poorest people in Scotland were made to leave the lands that they, and their families had farmed for generations. Often their homes were destroyed in front of their eyes. In at least one case, the buildings were torched while a family member was still inside.

The people were being cleared to make way for animals, cattle initially, then the extraordinarily profitable sheep and finally, in many cases deer. Scotland itself was transformed by the process, not just through the depopulation, but also her landscape became much more one of open "sheep walks", and less of farmed land. The people had many destinations. Some were shoved aside, onto progressively less and less arable land, till they lived off the worst that their landowner had. Others were driven towards new industries, particularly the kelp and fishing industries. Still more found themselves heading towards the major cities of Scotland, reliant on charity if the economic moment was not right and they weren't needed in the factories. Finally, many thousands ended up making a journey into the unknown, ending up in Britain's colonies, forming a wave of settlers who themselves, in turn, often took part in clearing the foreign landscape anew. Despite what the propaganda said at the time, the journeys to the new world's were seldom pleasant and life was harsh.

Eric Richards' has written a comprehensive account of the clearances. He very much sites them in the changing economic circumstances of the 18th and 19th century. A time when the old landowners were no longer able pay their debts from the rents they could charge their tenants. A time when increasingly cash crops were offering huge profits in the run up to, and during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of these landlords, whose origins lay in the old clan system clearly believed that improvements to their lands were in a collective interest. The introduction of sheep would produce wealth that would benefit all. Those conservative crofters only had to accept in the inevitability of change and take up new opportunities or positions and they too would feel the benefit.

This is an older version of the "trickle down" argument, that everyone would benefit. It was certainly not true in the Highlands, though as with today, "economic improvement" often brings wealth to a tiny minority. Richards makes much of the economic contradictions that plagued the landowners, indeed he spends some time demonstrating that a number of them did much to help the poor on their land. Some landowners invested large amounts in trying to create industrial opportunities for the poor farmers, though how many were to make the transition from subsistence farming to fishing was not something thought through by these wealthy individuals. Presumably work was just work to them. Other landowners offered enormous amounts in payments to encourage emigration. Sometimes these were not honoured and people arrived in Canada lacking clothes and food, never mind hope. The reality is, that such wealth was designed to get rid of the problem, by pushing the poorest away, so the land owners could continue to invest in sheep and earn their profits.

The process was by no means inevitable. Resistance was frequent and fierce, though it barely graces the history books. Mobs would often try and prevent evictions, officers of the law and less legal hard men were fought and stoned. On occasion their papers were burnt and they were themselves evicted naked from the villages. A general uprising in 1792, led to hundreds of crofters gathering up to 10,000 sheep and herding them miles away from their lands. Later on resistance did force the evictions to be cancelled and clearances to stop. The crofters had limited economic power themselves, but increasingly they did have the support of public opinion. The sight of the poor and the old being thrown of their lands did not sit well with the new socially aware Victorian society, and the Highland question eventually led to limited parliamentary reforms to protect some tenancies. Interestingly, out of the struggle against clearances, the first radical MPs were elected to help bring the Crofters Law to pass.

Richards has produced a readable and detailed history of the clearances. But it left me unsatisfied. I felt he concentrated too much on the economic argument. Like many he seems to see the Clearances themselves as a tragic, but inevitable part of the progress to a more modern world. Like the enclosures, or the displacement of those in the way of new canals and railway lines, the suffering was immense, but in the long term almost necessary for the greater economic development. That's not to say Richards has no sympathy with those whose lives were destroyed. He writes with passion and empathy for them, and by rescuing their struggles for justice from forgotten history, he shows he believes in the justice of their cause.

So was their an alternative. In some senses this is idle speculation, after all the crofters were isolated and politically inexperienced. Though had their struggles linked up with the wider, growing movements for justice elsewhere in Britain, they may have stood a chance. Its notable that the later victories of the Crofters linked in with a growing sense of the need to protect people from the excesses of industrial capitalism. Like all too many historians, Richards makes one mistake. He cannot break from the logic of private ownership of the land - if there was an alternative, it was the destruction of the landowning class, or at least their acceptance that the Highland people had the right to do what they saw fit.

Richards' book is however worth reading. The Highland Clearances are but one part of a tragic story of the development of capitalism. Richards points out that at the beginning of this millennium, 14% of Scotland was owned by just 21 nobles. The fact that we haven't yet broken from the logic of small number of people owning vast acres of land is reason enough to remember the crofters and the way at the forces of one of the world's most powerful states were directed against them.

Related Reading

Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Hutchinson - The Soap Man: Lewis, Harris & Lord Leverhulme

James M. McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom

In the introduction to this volume the series editor feels obliged to justify the length of the work itself. He points out that almost every other treatment of the American Civil War requires multiple volumes. James M. McPherson's book is compressed into a single volume, albeit of almost 900 pages and is lauded on the cover as "the best one-volume treatment of its subject". This obsession with size is a little strange, but nonetheless the work is an astounding piece of history. McPherson has skilfully combined what seems the key features of the events leading up to and during the Civil War and woven them together with a detailed, but clear analysis.

I approached the book as a new-comer to this period of American history. With only a haziest grasp of some of the names and issues - Lincoln, Slavery, Confederacy and places like Gettysburg. I'd certainly recommend the book to someone trying to get to grips with the period. McPherson assumes nothing and if on occasion his treatment lacks enough detail, this is only for reasons of space. His detailed footnotes surely point the scholar to further reading.

McPherson begins with an analysis of the situation on the eve of war. The United States appears very much as a collection of diverse states, to a certain extent in competition with each other and lacking it appears in a sense of collective identity and ideology. At the heart of this was the growing divergence over the question of Slavery. For the Southern States the question was one of survival - without this aspect to their economy, they would fail and to the North, increasingly for large numbers of people Slavery was an abhorrence that should be ended.

McPherson deftly describes, sometimes in painstaking detail the growing confrontation between the two sides, and the great rainbow of opinions between the extremes. From a layman's point of view it becomes clear that a confrontation over the question becomes inevitable at a certain point. For the United States to survive as a whole the question of slavery has to be resolved, there cannot be a compromise. Northern Capitalism is increasingly based on free labour, Slavery anywhere in the US undermines this. In the South, the opposite is true. The capitalists there want to continue in the old ways, and the northern methods of making profits undermine their ability to benefit economically from slavery.

War, once it comes, is appalling brutal. The earliest of battles were fought in the old ways, men charging fixed positions, defended by soldiers with muskets. The heavy, slow ammunition causing horrific wounds. Its in this sort of discussion that McPherson's scholarly work really shines through. Detailed analysis of the war is one thing, but the social consequences, such as the drafting of women on both sides to nurse the wounded is not left out. Just as women entering the workforce in Europe during World War I had important social consequences so did their involvement at this point in US history.

My crude understanding of the war had lead me to believe that the North won on the back of its economic and industrial superiority. I was surprised to find that the North came very close on a number of occasions to losing. In part this was due to military ineptitude (there was plenty of this on both sides, particular from senior commanders). Though another important factor was the inability from both sides, but particularly the north, to press home military advantage. On at least two occasions the north could have finished the main bulk of the south's forces off on the battlefield but held back, letting them fight another time.

One of the strengths of McPherson's analysis is that he understands that everyone involved in the war was going through change throughout the conflict. The war began as a war to maintain or restore the Union. It ended as an all-out war to end slavery. Many of the military leaders in the North were prepared to take the first, but not the second. Their unwillingness to destroy the enemy was based on their unwillingness, in the final analysis, to end slavery. Lincoln himself optimises this change. While slavery is the dominant question in the run up to the war, he himself only belatedly comes to the question of emancipation. Indeed, before making this his public position he goes through a whole host of other positions first - partial emancipation, a black homeland in South America and so on.

As it becomes clear that the war must be fought to a military end it also becomes clear that this means the destruction of the institution of slavery in the south. The war becomes a revolutionary conflict - the North has to destroy the basis for the south's old strength. This is why the question of the involvement of black people in the North's military forces is so important. It is both a recognition of the fact that the North needed to mobilise everyone, and as a symbol of what the war has become.

This review cannot hope to do justice to McPherson's brilliant book. There is so much inside - from the naval war, which saw the use of iron-clads for the first time, to the role of the United Kingdom and Napoleon, as well as the support from the ordinary people of Britain to the anti-slavery fight. The military history is fascinating too. Wars and battles cannot be separated from the social situation in which they are fought, and the descriptions and details of the conflicts are fascinating for the insights into the minds of the commanders and the ordinary troops. It is notable that the war bridged a period of military history; it began in the style of the Napoleonic conflicts and ended with the brutal attrition of trench warfare.

The United States like most nations is contradictory. Its leaders spoke of freedom but its very existence was based on the destruction of the country's aboriginal people. Indeed many of those who fought slavery in the South, in turn took part in the final destructions of the Native American tribes.

The American Civil War was the turning point for US history, the victory of the North was the moment when modern capitalism became free to develop as it needed, no longer restrained by the last vestiges of the old order. The stage was set for the twentieth century. McPherson's book tells this story brilliantly and deserves to be read and re-read.

Karl Marx – The Civil War In France

Marx's Civil War in France is both an impressive history of the Paris Commune – the short lived, but important moment in working class history, when working people rose up and took control of Paris, and a powerful polemic against the barbarity of the capitalist system and those who stand in its name.

There is no doubt, from the various drafts that exist and have been since published that Marx worked hard to produce a sucinct, but detailed historical account of the Parisian events. The Civil War works though, precisely because Marx applies his own approach to history to the events, rather than merely reporting things. The Commune then becomes a living breathing attempt by working people to seize control of their lives, reorganise society on a more democratic and inclusive basis, precisely because it is located in the a viciously corrupt and disorganised old order. Marx's brief account of French history leading up to the Commune paints a picture of a newly emerged capitalist order, intent on enriching a tiny minority, at the expense of both the wider population and France's own position in the world order. “The proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs.”

For most readers though, the parts of the Civil War that are most interesting and inspiring are the brief accounts of the ways that the Communards attempted to reorganise their society. The direct democracy, delegates paid no more than 6000 Francs, or the average working wage, were instantly recalable by the electors. As Marx puts it, “instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.”

Marx uses the term Universal Suffrage as it would have been understood in his time. This was suffrage for Male adults only. Woman played, as Marx reports, a central role in the Commune and suffered equally the fate of their male Communards, but despite their role, they weren't given full democratic rights. The working class movement had to develop further before these were to be fully understood and accepted, even by its most advanced sections.

The Commune wasn't just about radical democracy. Attempts were made to kick religion out of education and provide free education for all that needed it. The seperation of church from state meant that Priests feel back on the donations of their worshippers, as Marx quips, like the apostles they claimed to follow. Indeed, shot through the Civil War, is Marx's sense of humour and vicious barbs aimed at those who opposed the Commune.

And those that opposed it, destroyed it. Marx's points out that working people cannot simply seize control of the state and wield it in their interests. The state machinary must be destroyed and rebuilt in order to help the newly victorious class stabalises its power and defeat the old order. The most barbaric means were used to destory and isolate the Commune, and many thousands perished in its defense. If the enemies of the Commune highlight atrocities of the Communards, they do so to cover the fact that these were in retailiation for far greater crimes committed against innocent working men, women and children. Marx quotes independent witnesses to highlight these, and points out that the capitalists, despite their talk of freedom and democracy only care for the freedom to profit from other peoples labour. When this order is challenged, as the Paris Commune did, they will react with the utmost brutality to maintain the status quo.

The Civil War is far from the complicated writings that many expect Marx's writings to be. Indeed it is one of the most accessible of his works, though some French history will help readers. My edition has a very useful introduction by Frederick Engels, written on the 20^th anniversary of the Commune, as well as some supporting introductions from Marx to put a wider context. Earlier drafts of the pamphlet are online and will reward those willing to delve deeper into this important revolutionary moment.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - The Paris Commune; A Revolution in Democracy

Steven Mithen - To the Islands

Before reviewing this book, I want to mention how I came about it. On holiday just south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland, I visited Kilmartin. This small village is the centre of an enormous concentration of neolithic sites, including several impressive cairns, a few stone circles and not a few standing stones and inscribed rocks. Kilmartin has a very impressive museum including an extraordinary bookshop specialising in particular ancient history. I encourage readers who are fascinated by the Mesolithic and neolithic periods of history to visit and support both the museum and its bookshop.

I was lucky to find Steven Mithen's book there, because holidaying on an island very near many of the places mentioned inside, helped me picture and understand his work more. Mithen is the author of After the Ice a book that I consider one of the best introduction to the lives of ancient humans living in the post ice-age world. His latest book, To the Islands is much less an academic work and more of a archaeological autobiography. Mithen describes how his career has been tied to the people of the Mesolithic era since the earliest days of his PhD studies. The Mesolithic people were the hunter-gathers who spread across the world at the end of the last ice-age. They lived, in a myriad of different ways depending on the landscape they inhabited, before with the arrival of agricultural practices, the “neolithic revolution” led to a new mode of production.

Mithen believes that to understand the people of the Mesolithic requires a detailed understanding of their lives in the context of the environment and landscape they inhabit. The fish they could catch, the deer they could hunt, the trees and plants that surrounded them, the way they would have been inspired by the land itself. His early research using computer models to predict how hunter-gatherers might exploit the natural resources, led to repeated visits to the Hebrides to try and understand the lives of these people.

Mithen is enchanted by the Hebrides, their culture, the environment and the modern people, as well as the historical inhabitants. The remoteness of many of the islands, despite the popularity of places like Jura as modern holiday destinations, has helped protect many important prehistoric sites. This remoteness leads to further problems. Mesolithic archaeology cannot rely on hunting for visible remains like stone circles. Rather, the archaeologists must look for more subtle clues. Shell middens – the piles of waste left by prehistoric peoples as they extracted food from limpets and mussels are gradually covered by grass. Rabbits can dig out the prehistoric shells, littering them outside the entrances to their warrens and provide a clue for archaeologists. Other clues can be found in subtle surface bumps, or as Mithen tries to show, simply looking at the landscape and trying to get the mindset of an ancient hunter-gatherer. What would you look for as a hunter-gatherer on a Scottish island? Easy access to fish, woodlands and shelter? Where might you sit?

In the decades of research and excavation that Mithen does, with dozens of students and helpers, he gradually comes to understand more about the prehistoric life. On several occasions, Mithen quotes an earlier archaeologist, Lewis Binford about how archaeologists must “recalibrate their perspective of hunters and gatherers from the five foot excavation unit at a single site to an area of more than 300,000 square kilometres”. 

With this view, Mithen shows how hunter-gatherer life in the Hebrides was spread over island after island. One a source for flint for tools, others a good place to fish or find shellfish, another a ideal hunting ground. Life then wasn't stagnant, nor was it necessarily based in one place, instead it was spread across time and space. The landscape was a living part of human life, not a separate thing.

Mithen's book is wonderful. By choosing the autobiographical format, he has shown how archaeological understanding must develop over time, how intellectual ideas must be challenged and developed regularly to allow for new data and information.

For those amateur archaeologists, two things will be particularly pleasing about Mithen's book and his work. One is the detailed descriptions of the archaeological processes, how and where they sink trenches, why it takes so long and costs so much. The other is the importance he gives to amateurs. Countless times he visits local people and is shown their collections of Mesolithic tools. He frequently relies on local knowledge from farmers and others to find the best sites and is clearly inspired by the way that people are interested in the history of their place, even thousands of years ago.

One thought popped into my head repeatedly while reading this book. The world of academia that Mithen inhabits, a world of grant applications and quests for funding, is one that must be getting tighter and tighter. In fact his search for funding and support for his work makes up an important theme of the book. I don't doubt it is easier to get money to dig up a site of national importance or a famous image. But archaoeological work must rest on all history, even the small charcoal remains and broken tools that dominate the historical record from our hunter-gatherer past.

As funding gets further squeezed by Tory cuts and as education gets still further restricted to those who can afford it, how will academic subjects like archaeology cope? Mithen describes the passion and enthusiasm of his students and helpers. But if there is no cash to fund digs, how will the next generation of archaeologists develop and learn? Mithen is clearly someone prepared to fight for his subject in the wider world. We'll need him and others like him in the struggle to understand our past, but also to ensure that in the future we can continue to learn.

Related Reviews

Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals
Mithen - After the Ice

Henry Pollack - A World Without Ice

If you can ignore the somewhat sycophantic paeans to Al Gore that make up some of this book, and the all too demoralising hopes vested in the election of a Democratic government in the United States, then there is much to get out of this book.

The author is a distinguished scientist who has been part of those investigating climate change and its environmental impacts for many years. His speciality interest is ice, in all its forms. The thousands of glaciers, the millions of cubic metres that form the polar caps and those on Greenland and mountains around the globe.

The first section of this book is a history of the exploration of the poles. Pollack is astute enough to locate the era of polar exploration within the imperial expansion by the major powers. The poles were the last, unexplored and unknown territories and it was not until the 1950s that governments agreed that Antarctica was to be used for science rather than a mineral grab.

Much of the rest of the book is an exploration of the causes and impacts of climate change. As many others have done before Pollack explores the way that from the industrial revolution onwards capitalism has poured countless tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Pollack is a excellent populariser of scientific ideas and his explanation are easy to follow as well as illuminating. He doesn’t duck some of the more complex ideas and takes on the climate sceptics who seem prepared to let us all cook in a warming world, simply to bolster their own distorted social agendas.

Pollack tries to pitch the questions that arise from climate change through the impact on the world’s ice. Ice he argues, is a major ecological resource for billions of people. The agriculture, drinking water and sewage systems of millions of people in cities all around the globe depend on the melt water from mountain snow caps and glaciers. As the world warms, this is increasingly under threat, and the question remains unclear… what will happen to these people.

As the ice melts, millions more face floods and extreme weather. Pollack looks at the 108 million people who live on land less than three feet above sea level and worries about how the world will cope with them fleeing their farmlands.

Using analogies with environmental systems in the past, Pollack shows what might happen if we pass some of the tipping points that mark the transition from one stable situation to another. Again the prognosis is bleak for millions of people. Which brings Pollack to solutions. Sadly, this is the book’s weakest point. Pollack points out, rightly, the technology ease with which these problems could be solved. Governments need to urgently switch to low and zero carbon technologies, invest in public transport and so on. Pollack can only understand their hesitancy to do this due to lack of willing. He doesn’t see any structural problems within the political and economic system we have to this moving forward. Its why his mate Al Gore was unable to deliver real change during his vice-presidency and why emissions rose during the Clinton era. That he has hopes for Obama shows that he doesn’t understand the blame lies within a system geared to profit, rather than human needs.

That said, there is much here of interest. Pollack’s book is yet another stern warning in the face of growing environmental crisis. I disagree with some of his points - I think he puts over emphasis on the problems of population, and downplays the questions of big business. But his honest and straight manner deserves a wide readership, particularly in his home country. Strategies for taking the question forward and winning the change needed will have to be found elsewhere.

Related Reviews


Hooper - The Ferocious Summer; Palmer's penguins and the warming of Antarctica
Pearce - The Last Generation; How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
Bellamy Foster - The Ecological Revolution
Monbiot - Heat; How to Stop the Planet Burning

Brian Fagan - Floods, Famines and Emperors - El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations

Environmental archaeologist and historian Brian Fagan has written a number of excellent books on the historical links between environmental and climatic change and human history. This early book of his, concentrates on the links between a particular aspect of the Earth's environmental systems and their wider influence on the global climate and thence, human civilisation.

El Niño is a semi-regular change in the temperature at the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Every five years or so, these temperature changes in the East of the Pacific cause a corresponding drop in air pressure in the West. This regular oscillation, which likely has no single cause, can have major impacts depending on the severity of the changes and other factors that can exacerbate the fluctuations in the climate / weather.

The sudden shifts in climate can wreak havoc on human society. Fagan wrote this book in the late 1990s when El Niño was already a household word as a result of a number of extreme periods of weather in the 1980s and 1990s. Scientific studies were launched by a number of governments to try and understand the process better, as extreme weather changes caused by El Niño spread famine, floods and drought around the globe. Some of the consequences were appalling. The 1992 drought threatened up to 80 million people in Southern Africa. An early famine in the Sahel in 1972, another El Niño year, killed up to 200,000 and destroyed 1.2 million cattle - the principle source of food and wealth the people there.

Much of the book is concerned with this historical impacts of El Niño, as well as the way that wider climatic shifts have altered civilisation. Fagan is particular keen to link particular periods of climatic changes with similar impacts around the globe. But mostly he is examining the way that different societies can reach the point when changes in the climate can have devastating consequences. Some societies survive or adapt. One of the most fascinating chapters is the Moche people of western Peru who, in around 1000 AD were destroyed as their world warmed and the waters they relied on in their dry homelands vanished. Their leaders became increasing authoritarian to try and survive and moved their whole kingdoms closer to the sources of water in an effort to survive and maintain power. Their much reduced society was a shadow of its more glorious past, their former lands swallowed by sand dunes.

Fagan marks the passing of a number of civilisations. One of the themes he comes to, is that some of these societies had reached or exceeded the carrying capacity of the lands they relied on. He then uses this to argue that we, in the modern world, are in danger off allowing our growing population to threaten our own survival. This is not to paint Fagan as some sort of neo-Malthusian. He is more subtle than that, understanding that other factors have a major impact upon environmental questions and so on. However he stops short I think of a clear understanding of the barriers to modern society dealing with climatic catastrophe. That's not to say he doesn't come close. In discussing the 1992 Famine in Southern Africa, he shows how the IMF imposed structural adjustment schemes had lead to that country selling all its grain reserve to raise cash. Meaning that when El Niño caused droughts, they had to rely on foreign aid.

Its this difference between modern civilisation and the past that needs developing. While there are of course similarities between us today and in the past, our ability to shape the world has grown a hundred fold, but the impact upon the natural world has also grown. The motivating forces of capitalism today are the biggest barrier to us having a rational relationship with nature, as well as dealing with the consequences of environmental crises. We saw that in Africa in 1992, and more recently in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Capitalism continues to cause environmental crisis, and remains a barrier to the struggle to prevent more.

Related Reviews

Fagan - The Long Summer; How Climate Changed Civilisation
Fagan - The First North Americans

Thomas C. Patterson - Karl Marx, Anthropologist

Thomas Patterson sets out to argue that central to Marx's understanding of the world, history and society was what we might now call anthropology. In one sense this should be no surprise - the study of society and how it changes does after all centre upon an understanding on what makes humans tick.

Marx was fascinated by human society in all its forms. Both Engels and he devoured contemporary books and research on archaeology, anthropology and related subjects. Patterson points out, that between 1879 and 1882, Marx filled 450 pages of notes "on topics as diverse as prehistoric Europe, the history of India, Dutch colonialism, family and gender in Roman society and American Indian societies". In part this is no doubt a result of the fascination that Marx had with history and people. But this was also a time when Marx was feverishly working on other topics, and Patterson argues that this reading reflected not just an interest, but as part of an attempt to understand non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies. This was not a separate interest, but as part of a wider attempt to grapple with human history. In particular, Patterson argues, that Marx was trying to understand the potential for "alternative pathways of development for capitalist societies by the 1870s and for non-industrial and non-Western societies more than a decade earlier".

Marx and Engels also had a great fascination with other important subjects that were shaking up the intellectuals of Victorian England. One of these was evolution, and Marx devoured Darwin. "Absolutely splendid" was how Marx described The Origin of the Species in a letter to Engels, less than a month after its publication. Marx was critical, but he also saw how "Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and the plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, "inventions" and Malthusian "struggle for existence."

This was not to argue that the social structures visible around them were mirrored in nature, but rather that Darwin and other scientists tended to reflect social ideas in their work. Their ability to locate the new scientific explanations and ideas in a wider understanding of society meant that Marx and Engels could be incredibly perceptive. Patterson demonstrates this by comparing Engels' little known pamphlet The Part Played By Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man to modern understandings of human evolution and the development of language and so on. Patterson concludes that Engels "got it right!" in his argument that the ability of proto-humans to use their hands as tools, helped to develop and encourage both this and their wider cogitative abilities. Of course, these ideas on the part of Engels were broad brushstrokes, and as with other areas of his scientific writing, Engels was often wrong. But what matters here is the approach to a subject and the attempts to link science with wider social questions.

Patterson's book is fascinating if a little hard going in places. Occasionally it feels to academic and the reader new to Marx's work (or indeed wider philosophical writings) might find some of it quite difficult. I was disappointed with the price-tag. Twenty pounds for a book of only 200 pages is a little steep, but clearly this is aimed at the academic market. This brings a second minor point - Patterson has an extensive and very useful bibliography. The one obvious missing Marxist from this is Chris Harman who had a great fascination with anthropology and wider human history. His writings I think would have fascinated Patterson and backed up some of his wider arguments. I cannot help but feel though that his absence reflects the fact that Harman was never an academic. In this context though, Harman's grounding in revolutionary practice would also have been useful to the author.

Related Links

Chris Harman reviewed an earlier book by Patterson, Marx's Ghost - Conversations with Archaeologists. You can read that here.
This review of Karl Marx, Anthropologist by an actual anthropologist is worth reading.

George MacDonald Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here

George MacDonald Fraser is most famous for his highly entertaining Flashman novels. At the centre of those stories, which follow the adventures of Flashman through various battles and conflicts of the Victorian era, is a deep sympathy and understanding of the life of a soldier.

Fraser's knowledge of soldiering is based on his own active surface in the forgotten war in Burma during World War II. Here, Fraser as a young man took a minor part in some of the major battles with the Japanese as they retreated from India towards Japan. Most of this book deals with Fraser's time leading a small group of British soldiers from Cumbria. The Cumberland dialect is so unlike modern written English that the author provides a note on translation and a glossary to help the reader.

Much of the book, as with other accounts of war, is of boredom and waiting. Fraser actually takes very little part in some of the most important battles, his small troop being on the periphery. What action he does see, takes place in a seeming flash, such as the time he is nearly killed by a wounded Japanese soldier who almost fails to see in a ruined bunker. There is a brilliantly funny section towards the end of the book, when Fraser, about to leave for officer training school is sent to train a strange and slightly crazed officer to use a particularly unusual anti-tank weapon. The officer wants to use it against the boats that the Japanese are trying to use to escape and Fraser gets involved in a firefight led by the half mad British soldier. There are shades of Apocalypse Now here, but more laughs.

Fraser is very good at putting across the life of the solider. The petty complaints, the worries and the personal feuds. However what annoyed me mostly about the book is that it wasn't really about the war, but about Fraser's reflections on life, soldiering in general and modern society. Fraser perhaps tries a little too much to be like the lofty arrogant character that is at the centre of his best read novels. But writing at the time of the First Gulf War, he has nothing but disdain for modern soldiering methods and equipment. He seems bemused at those who needed Post-Traumatic counselling following the Falklands and Gulf War and certainly seems to see it as part of the namby-pamby state.

Sadly Fraser's political interventions ruin what is an interesting book. His accounts of the discussion on how his troops would vote in the 1945 election is fascinating (most of them for Labour) as is his discussion on the use of nuclear weapons. Despite his view that Japan wasn't on the brink of surrender, and the pleasure he gets from his description of challenging a lecturer in the 1980s who thought it was a mistake to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he points out that most of his comrades would have opposed the use of the weapon had they known what the consequences were.

The war in Burma was one that most people seemed happy to ignore. Long after VE Day, men were dying in jungles and rivers far from home. Fraser's book is a useful introduction to the war, and Burma itself probably deserves being a larger part of British history. But Fraser's heavy handed politics and contemporary polemic, as well as his seeming desire to be come across as a grumpy old colonel ruin what should be a fascinating read.

Related Reviews

Fraser - Flashman on the March
Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger

Kieran Allen - Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism

According to the blurb on the back cover of Kieran Allen's latest book, it "provides a crucial alternative introduction to Marx for undergraduates in sociology and politics". I have no idea what passes for discussion about Marx and Marxism in university departments but I have no doubt that this book will prove useful for anyone trying to get to grips with Marxist ideas for the first time. However to reduce the target audience down to university undergraduates, would in my opinion be a great shame.

Allen's book is a clear and detailed explanation of the ideas of Karl Marx. An early chapter puts Marx into the context of his times, and describes his revolutionary life, but rapidly Allen gets to the meat of the story. Allen demonstrates how Marx explained the driving force of capitalism was the need to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulation. This wealth comes from the exploitation of workers, and Allen's explanation of the Labour Theory of Value is particularly clear. For those approaching Marx's ideas at first, the LToV can often be a stumbling block. Marx explains that it is from the work of men and women that all wealth originates. In this, he was following Adam Smith and other classical economists. Smith wrote that it is from "labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new production is precisely equal to the quantity of labour it can enable them to purchase or command."

What Allen is particularly good at getting across is an explanation of why it is that say a car is worth a certain number of bicycles. As he puts it the "reason why a suit of clothes now exchanges with a chair in a certain proportion is that both contain a distinct quantity of abstract labour." Abstract labour being a "quantitative measurement of human labour for the purposes of exchange... general, human labour that is not marked by specific feathres and can be reduced to a common denominator so that units of labour can be compared to one another".

In other words, what is important is the way that amounts of human labour average out across industries and economies. This helps explain why for instance, my inabilities at carpentry mean that a chair I manufacture (taking 10 times the length of time as a worker in an Ikea factory) isn't worth ten times more.

Now Allen's explanation of Marxist ideas goes much further than the LToV. Short snappy chapters on Alienation, Class, "How We Are Kept in Line" detail much of Marxist thought. Their length perhaps betrays that this is primarily a university text book, but don't let that put you off. These are useful introductions that will help direct the reader to a more detailed reading of these ideas, particularly if they follow up with the useful section of further reading at the end.

Finally Allen's last two chapters take Marxist thought and look at the future. This is unusual. Most introductions to Marx avoid placing too much emphasis on what a future, socialist society might look like. In the penultimate chapter, Allen looks at "The Economics of Socialism". Here he distances himself from the bureaucratic command economies of the former Eastern Bloc, which labelled itself socialist, and instead looks at how a democratic, planned economy might work, and why we need it. He looks at the potential for worker's self management, drawing on historical examples, such as the Paris Commune, that inspired Marx and Engels. He draws a useful picture of a world were representatives are elected and accountable to the electorate. Were decisions are taking in a collective interest, rather than that of a tiny number at the top of society. Allen also looks at the question of environmental destruction and climate change in the context of a society that is able to solve the question through a rational system of production, rather than simply hoping the market might deliver.

The final chapter, aptly titled "Into The Beyond" then looks at what happens as the old order vanishes, as a new generation grow up without the distortions that capitalism has imposed on us. It is an optimistic chapter and one that will inspire readers.

The criticisms I have are mainly typographical though the price is ridiculous, £16.99 for a 233 page book (including notes & biography) seems to me very steep. There are a number of errors including the miss-spelling of the Marxist John Molyneux's name several times (including in the acknowledgements) and the NASA climate scientist (Hansen not Hanson).
But these are pedantic moans from me and should not impinge on the enjoyment of the vast majority of readers. If you are new to revolutionary ideas and want to explore things further, in particular if you want to explore thoughts on what comes after the revolution, then this is an ideal book for you and I recommend it.

Note that as I post this review, I find a video of Kieran Allen speaking on the current economic situation in Ireland which is worth watching.

Related Reviews

Choonara - Unravelling Cpitalism; A Guide to Marxist Political Economy
Perry - Marxism and History
Choonara & Kimber - Arguments for Revolution

Angus Calder – The People’s War: Britain 1939 – 1945

There are many histories of the Second World War. Most of them deal with the battles and military campaigns, or the leaders of armies and nations. Angus Calder’s book though is in some ways a very narrow history, because it looks at the War through the eyes of the people of Britain.

The British were told they were fighting a war for democracy and freedom, against tyranny. However for the majority of the people of Britain the world of democracy was not one of peace and justice, it was one of poverty and unemployment, of fear of the future and old age. The belief that the world should be a better place helps explain the introduction and the enthusiasm for the welfare state at the end of this conflict. The establishment knew this, Tory MP Quentiin Hogg commentated about the Beveridge Report that  "[i]t was not that it was a bible or a panacea, but it was a flag to nail to the mast, a symbol, a rallying point for men of goodwill - above all, an opportunity to re-establish a social conscience in the Tory party"?

One of the central threads to this history is class. Rationing was supposed to be for everyone, yet those with money could always find better food.  Take one quote from a young woman travelling with some salesmen, “Tyres? As many as you want – at the right place” he tells her smiling, when she overhears their deals. At a time of rubber shortages for the war effort, those with the cash could get what they need. This was particularly true in terms of housing. The “clearest area in which the rich stayed rich and the poor got poorer as a result of wartime conditions” argues Calder. In part this was because the immense bombing raids tended to hit the poorest parts of East London, in part is was because war workers had to be accommodated in villages and towns around the country and compensation wasn’t adequate. What made things worse was the way that those with larger homes, the ”upper middle classes” often took the least burden. In one case a town was declared full, when all the working class accommodation was full, but twenty-three town councillors have between them 66 rooms to spare.

Of course many of the wealthy didn’t think that they needed to contribute anything at all. During World War Two, various councils asked citizens what public services they could do in the event of a Nazi invasion. In November 1942, from the West End of London came this response "My maid and I would be glad to help in any way from five to seven any evening except at week-ends, when we are always in the country".

The book is full of anecdotes, humour and insights that result from Calder’s reliance on the testimony of ordinary people. The unique Mass Observation system which encouraged people, through diaries, interviews and records to put down their thoughts on everything from the cost of food, to their attitudes to the Germans gives us a fascinating insight into life during wartime. Calder uses this sparingly, but often enough for us to almost understand what life was like. The pain and the suffering is always there, but so is the resistance and defiance – and not just of the enemy, but also of governments and politicians seen as being remote. This was a time of boom for authors and writers, books sold in vast quantities, despite the shortage of paper. Libraries were oversubscribed – the ones that survived the bombing.

One of the great aspects to this book is the way that Calder draws conclusions about the people’s ideas from less obvious sources. He quotes one social scientist who “undertook the ordeal of reading sedulously every book about the war published between the outbreak and the end of 1941”. The scientist is surprised and taken aback by the right-wing sympathies of the low-grade fiction, and “the prevalent anti-Semitic tone” half the books had a Jewish character and only in one case was the reference positive.

What Calder gets at here, is that whatever the war was being fought for, the image of a united, collective British people is mistaken. People had all sorts of ideas. Some wanted an end to Fascism, some wanted just to survive. Some would have worked with and helped the Nazis had they invaded. During the war, the absence of contested elections between the main parties allowed a number of more obscure parties to gain a hearing. The Communist Party vacillated all over the place, depending on the line from Moscow, even supporting Tory candidates at times, against socialists and anti-imperialists. The “Common Wealth” party gained a hearing, mixing popularist policies with demands for the immediate introduction of the Welfare State. This was early evidence for the swing away from Churchill towards Labour after 1944. Interestingly though, Labour couldn’t find it in themselves to build on this popularity. Reminding me of their activities post 1997, when expectations of actual policies were much more optimistic than Tony Blair delivered, the incoming Labour government in 1945 didn’t take the Welfare State or nationalisation program as far, or as quick as most voters expected (and hoped for).

There is so much that I found fascinating in Angus Calder’s book, that I feel that I cheat you by not including more. So I want to finish with one more quote that I think summarises why Calder was such a brilliant historian – this is the empathy with which he treats his subjects. Describing the thousands of children evacuated to the country early in the war, the trip chaotic badly planned and the ending disorganised. He tells how many of these children away from home and parents for the first time, in a countryside many had never visited with strangers looking after then, slept in strange beds, and

Because they had bottled themselves up in the train or because they were upset at being parted from their parents, or because they thought the country darkness must harbour ghosts and were afraid to move, at the beginning of September, from Aberdeenshire to Devon, countless numbers of children wet their beds.

It is a powerful image that Calder creates. Yet it was the first of many terrors for these children and their friends, family and all those who spent the war in the British Isles. Calder’s history is a monument to their courage and sacrifices, but it is a far truer account that you’ll get from those whose simplistic histories are ones were the war was won by the British stiff upper lip and a united country facing a common enemy.


Related Reviews

Angus Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Heartfield - An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Challinor - The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War

Pamela Horn - The Rural World 1780 - 1850 Social Change in the English Countryside

The period covered by this work of history is a period which saw an inexorable change to country life. From the late 18th century onwards, Britain moved from being an economy dominated by agriculture, to one where industry and the urban life was the major feature.

As late as 1811, agriculture made up a third of British GDP. As population rose dramatically during this period, the agricultural population peaked in 1851 at around 2 million active farm labourers. This was the first year were the urban population was larger than that of rural areas. It marked a moment of change for the country.

Pamela Horn's book charts this transformation. She does so with a sympathetic eye on the people who worked the land, usually for other people, often for a pittance of money or food. She shows how then, as now, economic changes impacted the people at the bottom of society and during the booms, they benefited the least.

But Horn has a knack for demonstrating how change occurs. There is no great inevitable transformation of agriculture for her. Nor does the increased mechanisation lead simply to smaller rural populations. Though these factors are important. She sees the transformation of the countryside as taking place as a result of numerous factors, which interact with each other in ways that start to bring great change. However alongside this, is a determined effort by the ruling class of the time to reshape the countryside.

The enclosure of land helped dramatically improve crop yields. Yet it could only take place with Acts of Parliament and their forceable imposition by armed bodies of men.Where resistance did take place, it slowed the transformation of the land and delayed the impoverishment of those who previously worked the land. The deliberate reshaping of the countryside in the interest of a tiny minority is a theme that runs in the background of much of the book. Horn demonstrates some of this through the way that gaming laws were viciously imposed from the 1770s onward, by a parliament dominated by wealthy landowners. The introduction of stringent laws against poaching, helped to protect game solely for the use of the landowner, but it was yet another nail in the coffin of a rural life that relied on "nature" being available for use by everyone.

The radical William Cobbet described the legal changes taking place as a move towards a rural society were there were "but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents". One aspect of this changes was the way in which the rich created an ideology were unenclosed land made the poorest lazy. Thus the enclosure process was one of making the poor work harder and be more useful to society.

Horn shows how the introduction of technology did change agricultural practices, but much of this was a more organic process, with new inventions and changes gradually seeping throughout the country. Later, as industrialisation bought more centralised factories to the fore of the capitalist system, this changed, but it often took agricultural societies, or learned farmers to change practises that had taken place for centuries. Rural change is a slow process, the scythe didn't replace the sickle in much of Britain until the mid-part of the 1800s.

Horn's book is packed with facts and statistics. It is of great use to the researcher, as a summary of the changes taking place that form the backdrop to the industrial revolution. To the casual reader it is a fascinating account of a changing world, that fundamentally shaped our own and leaves its imprint on the hedges and fences of the countryside today.

Nicholas Monsarrat - Three Corvettes

Detailing his time in the Royal Navy during World War II, Three Corvettes is actually Monsarrat's embellished diaries. The Corvettes were a small escort ship, used to bolster the limited number of destroyers as fast, offensive ships to help counter the threat from submarines. First published during the war, this is more than a war story. In fact for much of it, we feel the tedium of days at sea, long watches were nothing happens, yet crew members are constantly alert - for a change in the weather, for enemy aircraft, or the sound of something on the sonar.

There are of course moments of horror. Monsarrat details the crews they rescue from the sea after their ships are destroyed and those they cannot find. His stories are personal, emotional and powerful. They are also tragically painful. I'm fascinated that they were published during the war itself. Many of those depicted in these pages bought copies of the first volumes and read them during voyages that Monsarrat helped command. But my mind is fascinated by the reaction from those on shore who would have read them and perhaps understood for the first time what their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers were going through.

There is humour, Monsarrat has the eye for a good yarn, and in particular I enjoyed the messages flashed between ships, turning the vessels themselves into characters in a story. Describing the minesweepers looking for mines he writes that:

"you hear a 'WHOOMF!' You look round, and there is a small surprised ship scuttling away from a patch of boiling foam.... We once saw one of them almost overwhelmed by a gigantic explosion close astern of it: a huge column of water shot into the air, hiding the ship from us. When she emerged we called her up (feeling rather shaken ourselves) and said, a trifle patronizingly: 'That was a big one.' Her reply: 'What was?' put us in out place exactly."

The book tells the story of Monsarrat rise to captain his own ship. I suspect for many readers, myself included the sequence of stories and anecdotes will chiefly be of interest because it makes you realise how much of Monsarrat's most famous book, The Cruel Sea, is actually based on real experiences. In fact, some of the more horrific, or perhaps less believable parts of that work turn out to be based on the authors own time at sea. Reading this short biography makes The Cruel Sea an even more impressive novel.

Related Reviews

Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea

Gavin Stamp - The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

The battle of the Somme defies numerical analysis. Mere military statistics have little meaning when used to describe suffering and death on such a scale. Early on in this book Gavin Stamp sums up the battle with a quote from a military historian "a battle fought from July to November 1916 saw the British and German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties between them in an area just seven miles square".
Stamp avoid spending too much of this book on the actual battle. Though his brief summaries underline what was surely one of the greatest military wastes of human life in human history. Stamp's contempt for the a British military leadership "quite prepared to lose half a million men in the Somme campaign" who then "colluded with Douglas Haig after the war to falsify the record to try and protect his reputation" shines through powerfully. Further anger is reserved for the church and its leadership who preaching forgiveness, were prepared to "prostitute themselves to nationalist myths".

But the bulk of this book is about the memorials and the cemeteries in which the bodies of those who died are laid. In particular, the great, powerful Thiepal Memorial to the Missing is at the heart of this history. Prior to World War I, little effort had been made by the authorities to mark the place were men fought and died in their country's interest. After Waterloo, most ordinary soldiers were buried in mass graves. Yet the scale of the Great War meant a different response was required. A government that asked for sacrifice on this scale, could not be seen to ignore those who gave everything.

Stamp looks at the growth of the War Graves Commission, who from the early years of the War took on the task of recording graves of those who died and designing memorials. The great architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was the man chosen for most of the monuments. His task was enormous. His designs were simple and powerful. Lutyens argued that the memorials and graves should not differentiate rank or religion. Despite protests, it became illegal to remove a body from France or Belgium back home. As Stamp remarks, once you joined up, your body, dead or alive, belonged to the King. Men were buried were they fell, the cemeteries marking the lines of the battle fields.

The scale of the task is summed up by the enormous arch at Thiepval. It is covered in the names of 73,357 names of those missing from the Somme battles. There are similar arches across the front lines. Lutyens designed graveyards for British soldiers across Europe, and in their simple elegance are a powerful reminder of the costs of war. Lutyens himself comes across as an interesting man. His designs do not glorify war, nor celebrate victory. They mark sacrifice and this seems appropriate.

Gavin Stamp's book is an architectural history. But it avoids the trap of seeing Lutyens' work as being outside of the world around. There is no doubt that his designs were the work of genius, yet they were also of their time. A break from the classical past, a precursor to a more modern architecture. Yet the hundreds of memorials designed by Lutyens, that mark villages across Britain and battlefields across Europe remain a powerful symbol of the pointlessness of the First World War. As Stamp concludes, "The Great War continues to haunt us because it was the ultimate war, innocence really was destroyed, and we can only hope that we are never asked to undergo what the men of 1916 endured".

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series

Miller - St Peter's
Watkin - The Roman Forum
Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Walden Bello - The Food Wars

Much of Walden Bello's Food Wars covers ground discussed in Magdoff and Tokar's book which I reviewed previously here. Indeed Bello contributed a chapter to that volume, with the same title as this book. Nevertheless, there is much of use in Bello's short book, certainly it is very readable.

What Bello tries to do is to put the modern agricultural system in the context of capitalism. His argument is that capitalism has destroyed the old peasant based agrarian economies in the interest of creating a agricultural system based on the desire to make profits. This he says, isn't new. It began with the enclosure movements in England and continues today. In fact, he points out that the enclosures in England were almost unique for the extent to which they destroyed the peasantry, the "almost completely displacement of peasant agriculture" was "rarely repeated". For this reason, we have seen over the last centuries, policies that have gradually, and then with greater intensity destroyed the small-farmer and peasantry, replacing them with systems beloved of the major food corporations.

In three powerful case-studies, Bello looks at how Mexico, the Philippines and China have, in their different ways, become tools of international finance capital. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s have, in the first two cases turned countries that were net exporters of food into countries reliant on imports. In the process, contrary to the claims of the IMF and World Bank, millions have been impoverished and hungry. China has, until recently, been an agricultural success story. Almost entirely self-sufficient, despite previous disastrous policies towards the peasantry, it's new turn toward the market threatens to undermine its own ability to feed its population. Once again we are seeing protests in great numbers in rural areas as people resist the drive towards agricultural for export and profit. 

The myths of agro-fuels as a solution to climate change are exposed here again. These are not carbon neutral, but rather are cash crops that make the multinationals rich. That names like Bill Gates and Richard Branson can crop up as part of the agro-fuel industry might give an inkling as to why recent US and EU governments have found this new crop so popular. At the very least Bello points out, these fuels do nothing to challenge the systemic problems with the system that is producing environmental disaster. It is also useful to note in passing that Bello shows that agro-fuels were not the primary driving force behind the recent food price rises, though they played an important contributory role.

Finally, Bello looks at the alternatives, basing many of his arguments on the peasant and small-farmer organisations, such as Via Campesina. He puts an excellent case for the importance of small-farms over massive mono-cultural industrial agriculture. Bello points out that mixed, family farms are more efficient, better for the environment and better for food than the enormous farms that produce a single crop. Localised production for national population is the way forward he argues.

I think this is interesting, but, as with my criticisms of Tokar and Magdoff's book, I think that this solution in part accepts the logic of capitalism, or perhaps the inevitability of capitalism. I've no doubt over the technical arguments, but I wonder if the actual farm size is the key point if we were to consider agriculture in a economy not driven by profit. I also think that the role of peasants and farmers is considered in isolation. Their struggles are important, but how can they be linked up with the urban poor, the working classes and the trade unionists. All these groups have an interest in fighting for better food, better agriculture, better environments and capitalism itself.

In conclusion then this is a useful book, easy to read, inspiring and devastating in its critique of modern capitalist agriculture, but it raised a large number of further questions in my own head.

Related Reviews

Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Pearce - PeopleQuake
Mazoyer & Roudart - A History of World Agriculture

Fred Magdoff & Brian Tokar (eds) - Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal

The question of agriculture and food is one of the most pressing issues for society in the early 21st century. It is inextricably linked to the questions of climate change and the environment, to the distinction between town and country and to issues of health, democracy and governance. This Monthly Review book is thus very important. It brings together some of the most important writers and activists on food issues who collectively put forward in a series of short, readable and incisive essays their thoughts on the current situation and possible solutions.

We live in a world were food is a marker of divisions. Its marks the differences between rich and poor and between the rich nations and the poorest. Within countries there are tremendous differentials between who gets to eat and who goes hungry. In the US, 17% of children under five are at high risk of developmental damage because of hunger. Not because they eat the wrong foods, or bad foods but because they don't have enough to eat. 36 million Americans are in "food insecurity" (these are 2007 figures). These figures have the power to shock, because they are from a country we consider affluent. We are used to the idea that Africa or Asia has millions of starving people. But for people to go hungry on such a scale in America or Europe is a surprise.

But many of the essays here point out that the causes of hunger in Africa and Asia, and that of those in richer countries have the same cause. This isn't that there is not enough food produced - at the height of the great crisis in food prices in 2008, there was still 1.5 times enough food to feed everyone at current demands. People starve in Africa, Asia and everywhere else because they are poor and cannot afford to eat. Over the last 20 years, food production as grown at around 2% a year. Population has grown at 1.14% on average. Food shortages aren't the problem, the distribution of wealth is.

But there are other contributing and related factors. Several powerful essays document the way in which global food production has become the sharp point of the battle to impose neoliberal mechanisms on the whole world. International bodies encourage the switch from localised production of food for consumption to mono-cultural agriculture for sale on the world market. This is nothing new - its been part of how the world economy has been shaped post World War II, but in the last two decades there has been a rapid acceleration of this change. Food was very much a weapon of the Cold War. Food aid was granted to win allegiance to one side or the other. But the US also helped to create markets for its own products. Out with local grains, in with US wheat. This continues today - wheat exports to Africa increased by 35% between 1996 and 2000. Cheap imports wipe out local production and help create the conditions were only food for international markets can survive.

I cannot hope to cover the impressive facts, figures and arguments within this book in this short review. Nor can I do justice to the alternatives that the various authors put forward. They argue that there are real changes that can be made, on national levels to avoid the various food, climate and social crises that are faced. Some of these are demonstrated by the very real improvements made by a number of left wing governments in Southern and Latin America. Chapters here on Venezula (without falling into the trap of lauding President Chavez from the rood top) demonstrate how by encouraging and supporting local, sustainable practices, yields of crops can dramatically rise, based on sustainable and ecologically rational choices.

If there are two problems with the book, I would say they are this. Firstly all the authors demonstrate that the problems of food production are ones based on capitalism. In particular, the concentration of food production and distribution into the hands of a few enormous corporations. This makes food and agricultural a tool of the desire to increase profits, rather than feed people. However simply advocating the encouragement of smaller, localised farming based on state support can fall into the trap of encouraging a belief that all these problems can be solved if only we elect governments that can blunt the worst aspects of capitalism. There is some truth in this of course. Venezuela and other places show this is possible to a limited extent, though they are still at the mercy of the world markets and the powers of western imperialism, which has, as the essays themselves demonstrate, smashed up similar, rational agricultural systems in the past.

Secondly, if we have identified the barrier that is capitalism, then we should at least acknowledge the debates about what an alternative could look like. In particular, the role of the peasants, smaller farmers and agricultural labourers in overturning the system. This is something that has preoccupied radicals from Prince Kropotkin, to Karl Kautsky, Marx and Lenin over the centuries. Several of the essays do refer to the importance of ordinary people taking back land from the rich, resisting their displacement and fighting to create the sort of agriculture they need. There is no real acknowledgement of the role of those people fighting against the system, once they become farmers, it is almost like that is enough for these writers.

These however are criticisms in the spirit of wanting to encourage more people to read this book and think about the questions it raises. As one essayist asks, can capitalist agriculture really deliver for 9 billion people in an epoch when oil may well reach $300 a barrel. It's a good point, and the ideas within this book are important parts of those debates and offer some vision for the way forward.

Related Reviews

Mazoyer and Roudart - A History of World Agriculture
Bello - The Food Wars
Vergara-Camus - Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism
Patnaik & Moyo - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era

Diane Purkiss - The English Civil War, A People's History

Given the historical importance of the English Civil War, it is surprisingly little understood. At school we had a rudimentary introduction, which left me with little understanding of anything but a few battles between roundheads and cavaliers and a few place names – Marston Moor and Naseby for instance.

My schooling in this crucial juncture of world history was only taken further by Monty Python, whose surprisingly useful song about Oliver Cromwell sums up some of the key points in the events.

I suspect that my knowledge of the Civil War was as limited as many others. Which is why Diane Purkiss’ book is so important - her history is a brilliant introduction to a series of political events that are often dressed up in complicated imagery and difficult ideas. She also understands that the outcome of the Civil War was fantastically important for English, British and world history, calling it the “single most important event in our history”. It is also brilliantly readable.

Purkiss’ book is called a People’s History. Don’t fall into the trap though of thinking that this is “history from below”. For Purkiss, this title means letting the voices of the people (whoever they are) tell the story as much as possible. Using diary extracts, letters, speeches and pamphlets, the author lets us hear the voices of those central to the Civil War.  Equal weight is given to poets, MPs, monarchs, revolutionists, soldiers and townspeople. She herself admits that this approach brings with it “drawbacks” but concludes that her approach is important, because “constitutional reforms are important but only because they are eventually experienced by people”.

Here lies I think the books major problem. In part this is also her choice of title, calling the events that lead to the beheading of Charles I a “Civil War”, rather than a revolution. Purkiss consciously doesn’t take a position on this question, “Whether or not there had been a revolution, the regicides were men who had done the unthinkable and survived. But after Charles’s death, no one quite knew what came next.”

But the importance of the Civil War wasn’t the beheading of the king, though this was breath-taking in its bravery and ideological symbolism. Nor was it the constitution change that resulted from the victory of Parliaments forces over the monarch, though these were important for a myriad of reasons. The importance of the Civil War, and why it is right to call it a revolution, is that it was the first of such European events that “made the world safe for capitalism” to quote the historian Nora Carlin. At the start of her book, Purkiss points out that none of those involved in events had any inkling of what they were about to take part in, “There were political struggles, there was murmuring and discontent, but these disputes were well within the realm of normality”. This is of course true. But there was also a growing and increasing discontent with the method of Charles’ governance and the way it imposed limits and difficulties on those who increasingly wanted to make their money from the profits of trade and wage labour. I am aware that this is a simplistic explanation, shortened down for the sake of a brief review. But these tensions and new economic interests were expressing themselves in all sorts of waves – religious, ideological and political.

This can best be seen with the ideas that mushroomed at the bottom of society. The radical and political concepts for instance, that came to the fore during the Civil War, epitomised by the Levellers, the Diggers and a thousand other preachers and pamphleteers. These radical ideas could only have developed at a time when people’s lives were being shaped by wider forces, larger economic tensions and whole new concepts. That ordinary people didn’t like what was happening to their lives is demonstrated by the way that they took the opportunity to reclaim common lands that had been taken from them, or destroy property belonging to hated landlords.

So I think that Purkiss misses the point of what is happening in the mid-1600s and ends up seeing the process as almost being a social convulsion that gets out of hand. While I have nothing but praise for some of her treatment of radical ideas and individuals in the book, I don’t think she gets to the heart of why these helped to drive those, like Cromwell, to regicide, even though they would not have countenanced it a few years beforehand.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Diane Purkiss’ book is an excellent read, and she doesn’t shy from trying to tackle the difficult questions thrown up by the Civil War – particularly the nuances of religion. Her approach does bring the realities of the war to life. Particularly the descriptions of the battles and their consequences.  I was also impressed by her coverage of the lives of women and children, who often only receive walk on parts in books like these.

Purkiss is scrupulously fair. She gives as much time to the voices of the rich as the poor, to the royalists and the parliamentarians. To my surprise I enjoyed this. I thought the letters of Charles particularly interesting, as they showed just how isolated he was at the top of his mountain of privilege. His complete lack of comprehension of what was happening at his trial speaks volumes.

I would recommend this book to those who want to understand more about those times. Neither side comes out of it clean and heroic. War brutalises all. Purkiss is right to expose this in the face of the sanitised histories we often see. But she also brings out the radical and inspiring kernel to the story, that shows that there were people prepared to fight for a new world, with a myriad of exciting and powerful ideas. That in itself is a story to inspire us today.

James Hilton - Goodbye, Mr. Chips

This is rather an unashamedly sentimental novel. Set in the last decades of the 19th century and progressing into the early quarter of the 20th, Goodbye, Mr. Chips appears to be about the changing world. The end of the Victorian era that represented stability for many, to the uncertainties of the modern world.

Chips is a schoolmaster at a public school called Brookfield. Brookfield isn't one of the top flight places like Eton or Harrow. It is a bit of a quiet backwater and the school itself doesn't, at least in the beginning have a particularly brilliant reputation. Chips teaches generations of children classics. Some of his more modernising colleagues plainly disapprove of his style and methods, but Chips hangs onto the past like a limpet. For him modernity is something that exists only to disturb the school. Change is bad, unless it is the gradual changing of the school years, the next generation of children entering the gates for the first time.

His kindness and fairness win the hearts and minds of generations of children. Chips serves at the school until he is no longer capable, and then is allowed to hang around in his retirement, inviting boys over for tea and watching them play sports. Such behaviour was clearly viewed with less suspicion in the 1920s.

But there are contradictions. Chips falls for a modern young lady. She's so modern, she reads Bernard Shaw and William Morris, rides a bicycle and speaks up against the punishment of the kids. It brings contradiction to the school, but Chips is won over by her. Unfortunately her presence would ruin the sentiment of the story line, so Hilton has her killed off early on. This allows more sentimentality to develop.

The book has proved amazingly popular. Almost certainly because of the way it deals with war - as a brutal disruption to normal life. Though the lives of the majority of the non-privileged only occasionally make it into the pages. Once during the General Strike and once earlier, with the brief visit of some token poor people from Poplar in East London. To give Hilton his due, Chips' extreme fairness is used in both cases to give the upper-classes something to think about. Though in the case of the General Strike, Chips muses that it has been sorted out in a most English way, to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. In the world outside the rarefied air of a public school, the General Strike was of course merely sorted out to the satisfaction of the establishment, but what does Chips really care about that?

Readable and amusing though the story is, it is fantasy. At one point Chips reflects that there is no bullying at Brookfield any more. Seems odd, given he's allowed to cane the children. If you like uncritical sentimentalist fantasy you'll probably like this. I'm told that R.F. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days, is a similar story, but has much more politics, social observation and reality in it. I'd suggest you go there for your public  school stories first.