Bill Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write "nature, the nature that preceded human history...is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)". They were arguing that the natural world is transformed by humans, constantly recreated and rebuilt. It is an insight that kept returning to me as I read Bill Gammage's excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth. Gammage's contention is that the Australian landscape as seen by European colonial explorers, settlers and convicts post-1788 (the date of first arrival of the British first fleet) was not natural, pristine or untouched and certainly not terra nullius. Rather as the author says, "there was no wilderness". The Australian landscape was shaped by thousands of years of careful, planned human labour.

But this is not what those arriving from Europe saw. Instead they tended to interpret the landscape as a natural collection of park-like spaces. As Gammage explains "Almost all thought no land in Australia private, and parks natural. To think otherwise required them to see Aborigines as gentry, not shiftless wanderers. That seemed preposterous."

The reference here to gentry relates to the fact that hundreds of European accounts (Gammage quotes dozens and dozens of examples) describe the landscape as often being "park like". Park, at this time, referred to the type of landscapes created by wealthy British landowners. They were rich enough to leave landscapes laid out for pleasure - not to produce food, or generate wealth. It is, as Gammage suggests, peculiarly myopic to see these perceived landscapes and equate them with parkland in Europe, and conclude that they cannot have been artificial. It is also a view imbued with racism and class.

Much of the book looks at exactly how and why the aboriginal people shaped the land. There is a brilliantly illustrated section (in full colour) that uses paintings and old photographs as well as contemporary images to show how the landscape changed after 1788 when the land wasn't burnt back. Burning was the key way that land was cleared and the clearance allowed food to be grown or helped with the hunting of animals like kangaroo. The changes also meant that the destruction of aboriginal communities was also written into the landscape. Take this picture Mills' Plains by John Glover (circa 1832-1834).

Gammage writes:

Glover shows Tasmanians. They were not there in 1832, for in 1828-30 they were shot or rounded up by bounty hunters like Glover's neighbour John Batman. Glover knew this. He captioned his [painting] Batman's Lookout, Ben Lomond (1835) 'on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives'. Yet he depicts not only their presence, but their absence. His Mills' Plains foreground shows young gums, wattles and casuarinas which all regenerate quickly after fire. They are young because Tasmanians burnt the old; they are there because Tasmanian burning was stopped. They are the first generation for decades not to get burnt, so their height measures the end of Tasmanian dominion.

Ironically the lack of burning also meant that some flora and fauna went extinct. The burning encouraged particular growth, or created ecological niches that were needed by certain animals. The end of burning led, for instance, "to the extinction or decline of over a third of small desert animals species."

The recent extreme bushfires in Australia have reawakened debate about how a return to regular backburning could help prevent future catastrophic fires. Gammage certainly provides ample evidence that this is true. But he also makes it clear that it wouldn't be easy. The Aboriginal people had thousands of years of experience and even sympathetic attempts to recreate this have failed: "They knew which fire regime worked" he writes. That said, the effects could be dramatic. As Gammage explains, Aboriginal people rarely had to deal with enormous fires because they rarely happened - because "people had to prevent it, or die". Gammage recounts a story from the 1870s:

When a fire menaced the station while its men were away, an [Aboriginal] elder studied the flames, then organised women and children to light spot fires in five staggered rows across the advancing front. This broke up the fire and it was put out."

But these skills with fire arose from long experience and a particular understanding of the natural ecology. I don't have space to cover Gammage's explanation of Aboriginal understanding of their relationship to history and space. But the "Law" he describes is an obligation on everyone to manage and protect the land as it was and is.

All must care for the and and its creatures, all must be regenerated by care and ceremony, no soul must be extinguished, no totem put at risk, no habitat too much reduced. That mandate, not the theology, made land care purposeful, universal and predictable. This is true of very part, even what might seem untouched wilderness, and even where ecologists today can't see why. The parks and puzzles Europeans saw in 1788 were no accident.

Thus the shaping of landscape was not technological, it was something that arose out of the very understanding that Aboriginal people had of the land and their place in it. There's a tragic story that demonstrates this, told by Gammage, of a small band of Tasmanian people, decimated by the colonial powers, who continued to fire the landscape, doing the work of ten times their number, to try and maintain the land - even though the smoke would betray their existence.

This approach can be contrasted with the settlers who saw the land with very different eyes. It is summed by a quote from 1864 by a surveyor WCB Wilson who wrote:

heavy showers fell which had a wonderful effect upon the hitherto parched up ground innumerable bulbous roots shooting up their long green stems in every direction and clothing the earth with a profusion of flowers.... It is very delightful to contemplate Nature in her holiday garbs, but unfortunately both the flowers and the coarse green grass are intrinsically worthless.

Gammage comments that Wilson "didn't value anything much". But here, summarised, is the new capitalist approach to land as a source of value. The landscapes that the Aboriginal people created where particularly prized by settlers, not simply for the clear areas, but also for the management of water courses, or the holding back of particular plants. But once they had control the Settlers couldn't maintain these landscapes and massive bush-fires are just one ecological consequence. Before 1788 Australia was very different, but so were the societies that lived there. Gammage concludes:

'Man' made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one. In the Great Sandy Desert women replanted yam tops and scattered millet on soft sand, then watched the seasons: millet crops a year after its first rain. This is farming, but not being a farmer. Doing more would have driven them out of the desert. Mobility let them stay. It imposed a strict and rigid society, but it was an immense gain. It gave people abundant food and leisure, and it made Australia a single estate. Instead of dividing Aborigines into gentry and peasantry, it made them a free people.

Marx and Engels pointed out that examining the economic basis to a society enabled you to understand its structures and social relations. Aboriginal society was based on a different relationship to the land and that enabled a much more equitable and sustainable world. Capitalism is the negation of that. Replacing capitalism with a sustainable world will not mean a return to the aboriginal communities from before 1788. But it will mean learning from their relationship with the land to ensure that future generations can enjoy it.

Bill Gammage's excellent and book is a powerful exploration of how we can understand non-capitalist social relations. He shows how modern Australia arose out of the destruction of a way of life, and consequently a landscape. He challenges racist myths about Australia's indigenous people and reminds us that things do not have to be like they are.

Related Reviews

Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

C.J.Sansom - Heartstone

*** Spoilers ***

By the time you've reached the fifth volume of CJ Sansom's books about the Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake you really do know what you are going to get. Near on 1000 pages of well written, convoluted plot about a mystery set around key moments in the reign of Henry VIII. Heartstone is set in the Summer of 1545 as a powerful French fleet is preparing to invade England in the aftermath of Henry's failed invasion of France. Shardlake is asked by Queen Catherine Parr to investigate a mystery brought to her by an old servant who claims that her son died in mysterious circumstances. Her son had been tutoring two young children who were wards of a wealth landowner Sir Nicholas Hobbey.

Shardlake makes the trip to Hobbey's manor house, which conveniently for the story teller is near Portsmouth where Henry is gathering his forces to attempt to repel invasion. Conveniently for Sansom's main character, this is relatively near to the possible home of Ellen, a woman that Shardlake has been looking after who lives in Bedlam. Desperate to solve the puzzle and keen to learn more about Ellen, Shardlake manages to immerse himself in a variety of dangerous escapades which ultimately lead him to be trapped aboard the Mary Rose as she sales on her ill-fated voyage.

A former lawyer himself, Sansom's own legal knowledge often imbibes the books with a sense of realism. In this novel he is able to explore the Court of Wards, a Tudor institution ostensiasly set up to look after those who are too young to manage their estates. For Henry VIII it's also a way to drum up much needed wealth. Sansom gives a real sense of a population tired out by Henry's reign. There's a drunken clergyman Reverend Seckford who complains that his vicar is a radical reform, while he finds "the new ways difficult". There's a palpable sense of weariness to the soldiers, villagers and workers that Shardlake meets and as with the other novels much of the enjoyment comes from exploring the Tudor world that Sansom evokes.

Shardlake's own weaknesses betray him. He jumps to conclusions, gets things wrong and misses the thing in front of him, as one character warns him. The ending is not particularly positive, as Shardlake realises that he has gone too far in delving into Ellen's background. He makes the classic assumption that the outcome he seeks is also desired by the other person.

Volume five is up there with the other books in the series, though I felt it a little too contrived in places - especially the shenanigans getting Shardlake on the Mary Rose in time for its sailing. That said it's one for the fans of the earlier books.

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Matthew Cobb - Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

There are some iconic "races" in scientific history. US President Kennedy's 1962 challenge to put a "man" on the moon by the end of the decade is perhaps the most famous. More infamous is the US drive to get the atom bomb before the Germans and Russians. Others are less famous, and of these, the story of the rather more elongated race to "crack the genetic code" is probably the most important.

The same year that Kennedy made is speech, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins won the noble prize for their work in understanding the shape of the DNA molecule. The event is well known, particularly in Britain where it's celebrated as a British success story. Ignored at the time, though increasingly better known today, was the work of Rosalind Franklin whose leg work laid the foundations for the discovery which was announced in April 1953.

But this was just one moment in a long, convoluted exploration of the biological structures and processes that allow leaving things to pass on information to their offspring. Matthew Cobb's book is a detailed and entertaining account of that story, which begins long before the discovery of DNA and has a cast of fascinating and sometimes eccentric scientists.

Cobb begins not with the practical science, but the theoretical studies by physicists and mathematicians who hoped to develop understanding of heredity science through understanding flows of information. Surprisingly then we're treated to such diverse, but important, subjects such as the development of automated anti-aircraft guns. Such early attempts to model behaviour formed the theoretical backdrop to latter attempts to understand biological information in genes.
But these approaches ultimately failed. Cobb explains:

None of the hypothetical codes dreamt up by the theoreticians were correct, because they made assumptions that were logical, rigorous and hopelessly wrong. The physicists' appetite for elegance and the biochemists' naive assumptions about natural selection led them to assume that the code had to be extremely economical, that it would look as though it had been designed along logical principles. But that is not how biology works. The genetic code is a product of biology and is messy, illogical and inelegant. It is highly redundant, but to bewilderingly varied degrees...Explaining this patter on the basis of chemical, physical or mathematical principles has so far proved difficult. Whatever logical there may have been has been overlain by billions of years of evolution and chance events. As Jacob put it in 1977, natural selection does not design, it tinkers with what is available.

Cobb points out though, that "at first glance the genetic code does indeed look like an artificial code", which lead many up the wrong path. In the 1950s many scientists tried and failed to crack the genetic code through theoretical approaches because they didn't (or couldn't) understand a key point:

Interpreting the genetic code in terms of precise analogies, strict definitions and exact parallels to artificial systems will almost certainly fail, because the genetic code, like every other aspect of biology, has not been designed. It is part of life and has evolved. It can be properly understood only in its historical, biological context. That was the lesson of the doomed attempts to break the code in the 1950s and it should guide us today in trying to understand what is in our genes.

Watson and Crick's key moment is recounted quite early on in Life's Greatest Secret. Large chunks of the book are devoted to what happened afterwards as working out the shape of DNA was only one break-through. There are a succession of other noble prize winners in these pages, many of whom were doing science that I found quite difficult to follow. Indeed, one of the problems with this book is that despite Cobb's accessible writing style, if you lack knowledge of biology, much of the science is inaccessible. Personally I'd have found a extra chapter on the basics of genetics and cellular biology invaluable, but to be fair to author and publisher, I doubt that I was the target audience.

That said, this is still a book that contains a great deal of well presented, excellent information (as well as not a few entertaining anecdotes) and insightful comment. The final discussions on contemporary debates around genetics is also very useful. Readers with a better grasp of basic biology than me will find it very stimulating, but even those like me who took other GCSE and A-levels will enjoy the work.

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Carys Davies - West

What happens when a passing fancy becomes an obsession? It's something that many novels have dealt with but few perhaps do it with such style as Carys Davies' West. Rightly it has won multiple awards and much praise, and its taken an age old subject and cast it anew.

Cy Bellman is a mule breeder some where in the American east. He has a few dreams, mostly about breeding more mules and moving west to find somewhere to do that better. But one day he reads a report of enormous ancient bones found in a swamp, and comes to believe that giant animals are still living in the unexplored far west of America. Unable to stop thinking about them, he abandons everything, including his beloved daughter Bess whom he leaves with his straitlaced God fearing sister, and buying a new hat, heads west.

If the book simply followed Cy's travels it would be a classic. Davies' prose is brief but descriptive - she evokes the lands brilliantly as weeks become months and years on Cy's fruitless search. The country he travels through are wilderness to him, but are of course inhabited by Native Americans from whom Cy buys supplies and assistance from with shiny trinkets.

In Cy's absence, Bess becomes a young woman, and she too is obsessed with her absent father. Long dismissed by the rest of their village as insane, Bess holds out hope that Cy will return - at the same time with dealing with all her own changes.

Of course, to us Cy's quest is insane. We know there are no dinosaurs or mammoths out there. But to his generation it wouldn't have been impossible and some well read people certainly thought it possible. But really Cy's quest isn't about the giant animals he draws in the dirt for Native Americans when he asks them if they've seen a mammoth. It's also a quest to understand (or even find) is dead wife. Bess comes to realise this and at the finale she is, rather suddenly confronted, by the metaphorical return of both her parents. The strange, and somewhat unpleasant, climax to the book required several re-readings. My initial dismay being replaced with satisfaction as I realised that Cy and his daughter had reached a redemption with themselves that no one else could really understand.

At slightly less than 150 pages the book packs a lot in and reminded me as a devoured it, that many authors today could learn a lot from the sparsity of words which paint a very detailed picture. Highly recommended.

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David Miles - The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain

I've been looking forward to reading The Tale of the Axe for some time as there is a lack of popular studies of the stone age tools that our ancestors used for much of human history. As the subtitle of David Miles' book suggests, these tools were fundamental to the transformation of human society from nomadic hunter-gathering to sedentary farming communities.

Disappointingly, however, stone age technology is not really the subject of the book. In fact the title is a bit of a misnomer, as there is no real tale of the axe here. Instead this is a decent over-view of how our understanding of ancient human history has developed and a summary of contemporary understanding, which particularly focuses on the British Isles.

Unfortunately the book suffers from trying to do too much, and becomes a bit of a mish-mash of ideas and subjects. There is quite a bit of skipping back and forth, and at times I was frustrated because I didn't really get what the author was arguing. It is refreshing to see someone engaging critically with the work of Gordon Childe and the ideas of Engels in the context of archaeology, but I didn't really find out whether he found them useful or not. Instead Miles appears to take bits and pieces of what he finds useful and apply them to particular situations without really giving me a sense of his actual framework.

While there is actually much of interest here (and some absolutely stunning photos and illustrations) I was quite frustrated by the book and the author's style. His tendency to throw in random facts and contemporary quotations was deeply distracting and left me annoyed rather than illuminated.

These criticisms aside, David Miles' book does have some interesting details and he draws on his long career as an archaeologist to illuminate specific sites and periods. But ultimately I was disappointed.

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John Wyndham - Jizzle

As a big fan of John Wyndham I was very pleased to discover this collection of short-stories that I was previously unaware of. First published in 1954 the stories appear mostly to date from the early 1950s. Reading these today I'm struck by how familiar they seem. Perhaps this is because their subjects and structures have been much emulated over the years. As such the tales lack the punch from their twist endings that readers probably enjoyed when the book was first published. That said, I enjoyed the stories as much for their contempory social comment as their plots.

Today Wyndham is mostly remembered as a science-fiction author, but his writing was actually often closer to fantasy or horror. Several of the stories in Jizzle are actually horrific, the title story for instance, deals with the consequences of a circus monkey that can draw, and how its extremely accurate pictures of people in compromising positions with others, lead to tragedy.

Several of the stories deal with a favourite subject for Wyndham - time travel, including a rather clever one involving a love-lorn woman who has just been dumped and visits a fortune teller. Rudely dismissing the predictions, she fails to hear the warning "that was your second marriage" and the reader is left to fill in the delightful gaps.

Women play a central role in many of these stories, though often as individuals looking for love. I'd like to suggest that Wyndham was breaking the mould in how women were portrayed but his characters tend to fall into various stereotypes. Because the books very much reflect the period they were written in they share some other stereotypes. One of the stories has a child playing with her dolls in a tea party. The gollywog in her game is the "naughty" character. I doubt that Wyndham was making a deliberate racist comment, but it certainly jarred when I read it 66 years after publication.

Chinese Puzzle is a comic story dealing with the arrival of a Chinese dragon in Wales. Ignoring the crude attempts to portray a Welsh accent in print, the story follows a rather predictable path, with the exception that a central role is played by the local Welsh Communist activist who sees the creatures' arrival in terms of the successful Chinese Revolution. Unfortunately the arrival of a red Welsh "peoples' dragon" turns the conflict into nationalism versus communism. The slightly predictable ending disappoints, but the premise is clever and there are some amusing digs at over-inflated egos in the Communist movement and the Nationalists. I loved Confidence Trick a story in which the London Underground plays a key role, proving that over-crowding on the tube is not a recent development at all!

Some of the stories felt very dated. Does anyone know what a flea circus is these days? But others have stood the test of time. Contemporary concerns about the impact of technology are dealt with neatly in The Wheel, which looks at a future where the wheel has been banned and the Church deals with heretics who try and make one.

Despite these being more fantasy, questions of science and technology run through many of the stories, including the consequences of misusing science (or indeed magical situations) to achieve personal profit. There's a definite sense of karma to most of the tales, protagonists get what is due to them.

All in all this is an entertaining collection that will probably be of most interest to those who are existing fans of John Wyndham. The stories didn't quite have the sense of relevance as The Kraken Wakes did when I re-read it a few years ago. But they are neat and tightly written, reminding me it is possible to tell a story in a few pages, just as well as several hundred.

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Angela Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science

The election, and re-election, of right-wing governments around the world has encouraged the growth and confidence of racists and fascists. Racism is not a rational world-view, but racists, and those who want to encourage them often need to justify and explain their ideologies. Pseudo-scientific racist ideas have been around for some time - arising in particular out of attempts to justify the African slave trade. But, as Angela Saini's important new book explains, there has been a revitalisation of scientific racism and this is helping give confidence to right-wing ideologists today.

That these ideas should return is itself a shock. For most people the scientific justification of racism was closely linked to the Holocaust, and in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis, these ideas were banished. In fact, as Saini says, it seems impossible that rational minds could conceive of such ideas. Writing about the Max Planck institute, a prestigious scientific organisation in Germany which, in 2001, had to "accept responsibility for historic crimes committed by its scientists" under the Nazis:

The truth - that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge - doesn't sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it's above politics, that it's a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice.

She continues, "the answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out." But there is a problem says Saini. The unique horrors of World War Two have made race science abhorrent. But, "were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?" In fact, as my reference to the slave trade above indicates, "the well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others... drew their plans for 'racial hygiene', leading ultimately to genocide, didn't originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth".

So the book is in two parts. The first deals with the history of race science. The second part looks at how those ideas are used today. But really there isn't a separation between these two halves. As one researcher from the 1970s who studied the far-right commented many years later, "I didn't really understand that there were these structures and networks and associations of people that were attempting to keep alive a body of ideas that I had associated with at the very least the pre-civil rights movement... going back to the eugenics movement... These ideas were still being developed and promulgated and promoted." Saini unpicks these networks, the shadowy sources of funds and the journals that allow those with similar beliefs to publish. Publication in particular gives a sheen of academic veneer to right-wing ideologists who want to push race science.

Today race science isn't solely pushed by those who want to see genocide. It can, as Saini points out, be used for all sorts of ideological arguments, for instance that equal opportunity programmes are "doomed to fail". In fact, one of the problems with contemporary race science, is that it often builds on the work of anti-racist scientists who thought their research (into eg genetics) was undermining the very basis for racism. Writing about the Human Genome Diversity Project, a 1990s programme that tried to understand human evolution and migration through genetics, Saini comments that the well intentioned scientists "failed to connect what they were doing with people's rel-life experience of race, with the history and politics of this deadly idea. They thought they were above it all, when in fact they were always central to it." Discussing one of the scientists who was central to the project, the esteemed scientist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who at the end of his long life maintained "there are simply no races in humankind", Saini points out that "it is also difficult to read his work and come away convinced that his generation of scientists had fully abandoned race science after the Second World War. Although they had ditched race in name, it wasn't clear that they had necessarily shed it in practice". So some scientists argue that there is so much variation in human genetics that the idea that there are only a few races is incorrect, instead there could be thousands of "social groups" having some biological uniqueness. But, as Saini says:

Canadian philosopher Lisa Gannett has similarly warned about the ethical limits of thinking about race in this new way. To some, it may not seem racist to think about average 'populations' rather than distinct 'types' of people. Certainly, early population geneticists such as Dobzhansky believed that racism was rooted in the assumption that within ethnic groups, people are all the same, whereas those like him believed that, within these groups, people are actually very different. But in the racist mind... it doesn't necessarily matter how differences are distributed, so long as they are there in some form or another. This conceptual loophole in population genetics - the fact that we're all different as individuals but that there is also some apparent order to his diversity - is what has since been seized upon by people with racist agendas. Gannett calls it 'statistical racism.

Modern science doesn't back up race science. But, as Saini points out, that doesn't matter, "racists will find validation wherever they can". The problem is exacerbated she argues, because we are increasingly locked into generalisations and categories that have little basis in reality.

We can't help it. We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity. For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from.

Even well meaning scientists fall into this trap, as do some anti-racists. In her chapter on "Black Pills" Saini shows how pharmaceutical companies are targeting "black" people for specific medical conditions, even though the causes of those diseases and illnesses are entirely social. Such an approach "lets society off the hook. It places the blame for inequality at the foot of biology. If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and nothing to do with racism, it's no one's fault."

In other words, it's not society at fault, for treating people differently, but genetics - and that cannot be helped. But as this book demonstrates, the truth is the opposite. Society both causes poverty and inequality, and the racism that is used to justify it. At best race science provides a cover for this, at worst it opens up the door to those who would like to encourage genocide.

Angela Saini's book is an urgent and important read for every anti-racist. But it should also be read by scientists, and not just those in biology departments. It makes it clear that tackling racism and bigotry needs more than just facts, but also requires an approach that understands the origins of these divisive ideas and can challenge them.

Perhaps we need a revival of left wing science - both in practice and organisation. There's a long tradition, particularly in the 1930s, of scientists collectively challenging dominant right-wing narratives. In an era when we see the revival of far-right politics and fascism and growing concern about climate change such networks of radical scientists could come together with anti-racist and environmental movements to push back the right-wing agenda. That would be a powerful weapon in fighting bigotry and the system that causes it. Angela Saini's book is crucial ammunition for that struggle

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Stephen King - Elevation

Having thoroughly enjoyed Stephen King's most recent full length novel The Institute I was excited to see this novella in the shops. As I noted in my review of The Institute, one of King's skills is the description of life in small-town America, full of memorable detail and dark foreboding. So the fact this short novel, set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, is based around this concept made the book even more attractive.

Unfortunately King fails to pull it off this time. There are two aspects to the story, both centred on the likeable, if dull, Scott Carey. Scott finds himself experiencing two simultaneous problems. The first is that he is losing weight rapidly. But unlike people on a diet he is experiencing no simultaneous decrease in size. Moreover, things he touches also lose their weight. At the same time Scott's lesbian neighbours, Deirdre and Missy, are experiencing the dark side of small town America. Here, the conservative minded locals, are boycotting their restaurant and silently mocking their marriage.

Scott, uses his new found weightlessness to rather unconvincingly pull the town together around the gay couple and rejuvenate their lives and business. This happens when he helps Deirdre, a former Olympic athlete, win the annual Thanksgiving run. The picture of Deirdre, her wife Missy and Scott on the finishing line is enough to convince the conservative inhabitants that gay couples aren't a bad thing.

There's nothing particularly bad about the tale. But it just doesn't work. Prejudice doesn't just vanish like this based on a pleasant photo in the newspaper. The one occasion that Scott does challenge the homophobia he is unsuccessful and warned off. For the story to work it needed a more powerful challenge to the bigots. The disease itself might be intended as a comment on contemporary politics, but it is unbelievable - and given that King can make killer cars, haunted hotels and giant alien spiders living in the sewers believable that's strange.

The weight loss, and its inevitable outcome, might work as a convoluted metaphor for Scott dying of cancer, but as a plot device it is completely unbelievable as King fails to setup Castle Rock as the sort of place were this sort of thing takes place. Clearly this is all a metaphor by King for Trump's America. But if King thinks that it is going to be this easy to knock back the bigots that he'll have a surprise. It's only a short book (in fact I was very annoyed to find some 30 pages of the already slim volume devoted to an extract from The Institute) so King fans can read it quickly without feeling they're committing to a major tome. But I guarantee most will be disappointed.

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Max Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

Max Hastings is not a natural ally of the left. He is, after all, a former editor of the pro-Tory newspapers the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Yet, despite his politics, his book on the Vietnam War turns out to be both insightful and readable. Unlike some accounts of Vietnam, which overly focus on the American experience in Vietnam, Hasting understands the need for the long sweep of history to understand both the US involvement in the country and their ultimate defeat.

Hastings begins with the French. Their colonial rule of the country generated enormous discontent. Their ousting, but a popular military uprising was an incredible feat of arms for an under-armed national liberation movement. Hastings' vivid account of that most symbolic of defeats for the French, the shambles at Dien Bien Phu, leaves the reader with no other conclusion than colonial racist arrogance led the French to believe that they invincible.

Unfortunately the United States failed to learn the lesson. As American involvement in Vietnam gradually developed from simply advising and funding the enormously corrupt South Vietnamese regime to active military engagement, its representatives behaved exactly like the former colonial rulers. Hastings' writes:

In 1961, and indeed thereafter, there was an insensitivity among policy-makers about the impact that a Western military presence makes. Many harsh things may be justly be said about what communist fighters did to Vietnam, but their footprint on the ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the US military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed, uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA's Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.

Readers will detect that Hastings' is not a fan of the Communist movement that led the struggle to oust the Americans. It's probably fair to say that, on balance, he thinks that Communist victory was a "bad thing", a failure for Western foreign policy. But that does not mean he is gung-ho for the US. In fact his sympathies lie very much with the ordinary Vietnamese who suffered appalling during French and US involvement. In this regard while celebrating (to a certain extent) the expulsion of the French, Hastings sees a fundamental break with the movement that defeated the United States. He concludes that:

The fatal error of the US was to make an almost unlimited commitment to South Vietnam, where its real strategic interest was minuscule, when the North - the enemy - was content to stake all, and faced no requirement to secure or renew popular consent. Moreover, the 1964-65 American takeover of the South, which is what took place, legitimised Vietnamese communism.

Hastings is at his best in the book when he zooms from the strategic overview of politicians like President Johnson, or Kissinger or Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn down to the level of the ordinary solider (on both sides). The anecdotes he tells of the battle fields are often horrific, and he is balanced in making sure he covers the experiences from both sides. Aspects of the conflict that are often ignored - the experience of long-range high-altitude bomber pilots, or Russian and Chinese "advisors" in North Vietnam are covered. He is also scrupulous in trying to give the reader a sense of strategic interests of both sides.

He also is not afraid to expose inconvenient truths. Discussing the enormous corruption of the South Vietnamese government, including the vast sums of money given to them by the US and their involvement in illegal buying and selling of military materiel and the laundering of money. But he notes this could not have happened without "active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of the relatively exalted".

It is no surprise then that Hastings can write:

It is among the themes of this book that the foremost challenge for the allies was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order. Dr Norman Wyndham a... Australian surgeon who led a volunteer medical team in a Vung Tau hospital, was a devout Christian who made himself a fluent Vietnamese-speaker. He wrote in 1967 of the local people: 'Most want a united Vietnam, but not one controlled by the communists... the feeling is growing... that anything would be better than life as it is today.'

One of my major criticisms of Hastings is that his anti-Communism colours his ability to understand the dynamic of those opposing US involvement in Vietnam at home and in the country itself. For instance, he tends to imply that the left at the time (and by extension, the anti-war movement) tended to look positively on Hồ Chí Minh and celebrate a North Vietnamese victory. Hastings does acknowledge that hindsight makes this seem more credible. But I'm also not sure that it was true at the time. Many anti-imperialists understood very clearly that the Communist government of the North was an oppressive one, even in the 1960s. But Hastings doesn't have a framework to understand Imperialism - despite knowing it is real - and so he cannot understand the celebration of anti-Imperialist movements, even if they don't make a perfect social movement. As Lenin said of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, "whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it."

But for Hastings the biggest reason for US defeat was its methods in fighting the war.

The Vietcong exploited their own excellent local intelligence networks to eliminate enemies, often with conspicuous sadism. Yet none of the villagers assembled to witness beheadings and live burials doubted why appointed victims were killed: for opposing the revolution. By contrast, when Americans or ARVN killed civilians, while some where communist activists or sympathisers... others were not. The indiscriminate nature of American-led terror, caused by ignorance about the identities, never mind loyalties, of many of those whom its warriors killed, inflicted as much damage upon US strategic objectives as upon the moral legitimacy of its war effort.

To this we might add the high levels of racism towards the Vietnamese (even their allies) and the indiscriminate nature of warfare that involved blanket bombing and chemical weapons. As an aside Hastings downplays the scale of the impact of Agent Orange. He seems incorrect here as my understanding is that it was much worse than Hastings suggests. I hope to find further reading to clarify this.

Despite the length of the book, I thought some aspects weren't dealt with in enough detail. One key aspect to this was the anti-war movement in the west. Hastings mentions it, but doesn't go into detail and he certainly doesn't really get deep into the links between this and the growing discontent in the US military. There is nothing here about the anti-war newspapers produced by military personal, and while he covers events like the fragging of unpopular officers, he tends to imply it was more individual discontent rather than systemic, organised rebellion. Despite this he displays a subtle and sympathetic understanding of the reality of class and racial differences within the US army itself.

These points, which probably reflect Hasting's own prejudices and politics, I was very surprised by the book. It demonstrates that honest bourgeois historians can produce remarkably insightful accounts. Hastings shows how little the political leaders in the US cared for the Vietnamese, and the cynicism with which they condemned thousands to their deaths. For a book of nearly 700 pages of main text I was unusually gripped to the very end. Hastings has an ability, helped in no small part by being actually present in the briefing room and on the battle field as a junior reporter, to link the big political decisions, with the reality for the US marine, or the North Vietnamese soldier. It makes for a very useful account of what was an appalling war.

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Camilla Royle - A Rebel's Guide to Engels

2020 is the bicentenary of the birth of the great revolutionary Friedrich Engels. The anniversary is likely to see numerous articles, pamphlets and books about Marx's friend and collaborator. But few of them will get across Engels' ideas and life as succinctly as Camilla Royle's latest contribution to the Rebel's Guide series.

Engels came from a wealthy bourgeois background. While the money he earned allowed him to lead the life of a relatively well off member of British society, it also enabled the Marx family to survive, Karl Marx to write and Engels' the space and time to develop his own work. As a result Royle points out that Engels was "a disappointment to his parents and a traitor to his class". It is a description Engels himself would have been proud of.

Royle's book begins with Engels' early years locating him in the milieu of those progressive German thinkers who were breaking with Hegelian philosophy as they attempted to understand the changing world around them. Engels himself fought on several barricades during various Continental revolutions and, like Marx, had to flee the authorities on several occasions. These movements shaped Engels profoundly, as did his experiences of the working classes. Royle writes:

Marx and Engels had more less independently reached the same conclusions about the importance of the working class; Engels by observing workers in England and Marx through his reporting of the revolts of the Silesian weavers, where thousands of workers took strike action and smashed machinery in protest at declining wages and living standards.

With their re-acquaintance in 1843 Marx and Engels embarked on a lifetime of collaboration. But Engels also produced some significant works independently. Most famously his The Condition of the Working Class in England. Royle also emphasises the importance of some of their joint works, showing how both thinkers contributed significantly to what would become known as Marxism. In her discussion of The German Ideology, a book which she explains Engels wrote most of the text for based on long detailed discussions with Marx. In the book the authors show how Marxism roots its understanding of human history in the relationship between humans and the natural world. It is a key point that shows how an ecological understanding of human society is central to Marxism, with important implications for Marxism as a tool to understand capitalism's environmental degradation.

I'm pleased that Royle devotes two chapters to two of Engels' lesser known works - Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. The first is a polemical critic of the near forgotten German Utopian socialist Eugen Dühring. Royle shows how Engels attacks Dühring's ideas explaining the centrality of dialectics to Marx and Engels' work. In her comments on Engels' Dialectics of Nature Royle shows that he was trying to apply these ideas to the natural world. Sadly, given the importance of "nature" to the current class struggle, Engels' book was left unfinished. Royle criticises the way that some of Engels' book has been interpreted, particularly the infamous question of the three laws of dialectics. She argues that these laws "can be useful in demonstrating the type of philosophy dialectics is. But if they are taken too literally, they can end in an attempt to look for rules in nature, which is more complex than trivial examples about boiling water". That said, she does celebrate parts of Dialectics especially the wonderful The Part Played by Labour in the Transition of Ape to Man. This is a section that stands the test of time and I'm glad Royle highlights its importance to a new generation of readers, given the parts of it where Engels writes on the human-nature relationship.

The final part of the book looks at Engels life in the aftermath of Marx's death. Engels helped make sure that Marx's unfinished work was published - a surprisingly difficult job; and he carried on the work that had been a near constant theme of his, and Marx's life, the building of socialist organisation. Here Royle defends Engels from crude attacks that argue he abandoned revolution at the end of his life, and show him remaining committed to the revolutionary workers movement till the end. Royle concludes by pointing out that the Marxism that both Engels and Marx developed was not an "unchanging dogma, but a method, a set of tools that we can use to help make sense of the world". Understanding the world helps us change it and Camilla Royle's book is an important contribution to making sure that 200 years after his birth the ideas and activity of Friedrich Engels helps our revolutionary struggle today.

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Carl J. Griffin & Briony McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality & the Landscape

2019 was a very interesting year to be a socialist in Manchester. The bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 was marked by a plethora of events: a controversial new memorial was (finally) unveiled, walking tours, exhibitions, meetings and a major day of marches to a central rally all took place. I suspect that there were many more, smaller scale, events in schools, colleges and trade union meetings. At those events I attended I was struck by the contemporary parallels with Peterloo. Many speakers also noted this - not because they expected an imminent cavalry attack - but because there was a sense of deep discontent, poverty and inequality about Britain in 2019.

Manchester has, to a certain extent, always marked Peterloo. In a recent book Katrina Navickas has shown how the protest was a touchstone for numerous protest marches in the years and decades after 1819. Radicals and social movements sought legitimacy for their contemporary causes by associating themselves with Peterloo - by marching to St. Peters Fields or invoking the name of the massacre.

But as Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 shows this is nothing new. Those of us who have been involved in radical and trade union politics for a while will know our movement is often more fond of celebrating past victories and defeats than it is of fighting to win new struggles. But this was very much true of the past. As Nicola Whyte says in the introduction to her chapter in the the book:

Memory has not atrophied, but rather the relationship between society and its past always takes on new forms, being wrought in the dialogical space between official and unofficial perspectives. Meanings do not merely shift with the passage of time, they are renewed through the evocation of various, multiple and unpredictable pasts.... people interpret and employ the past for diverse ends, both as a social resource and means to articulate their own life-histories.

Whyte explores these concepts by looking at Mousehold Heath, the site outside Norwich where in 1549 Robert Kett and thousands of rebels camped as part of what became known as the "Camping Time". While 1549 rebellion was part of a much larger period of rebellion Andy Wood has shown elsewhere how it was highlighted to posterity by the local establishment who wanted to use it's lessons to undermine potential future rebellions.

But Mousehold Heath was a site of protest going back to 1381 and for long after 1549. A 1589 map reproduced in the book is as much as record of past events as it is of contemporary locations and pathways. It is a "way of seeing" as Whyte explains, a "lord's view of the world...that chronicles past events and actions attaching them to physical places, and embedding a hierarchical understanding of social relations in the landscape". Even in the 21st century there were protest events on the Heath that had links back to the distant past. It is not enough to think about the impact of an event like 1549 through "oral tradition" or the records people have:

Memories do not simply reside in the mind to be evidenced in the speech patterns of local people; rather, memories are made through routine practices and experiences of being in and making landscapes. Memories of Mousehold Heath operated at the level of the everyday, remembering past generations and... the material work of day-to-day resistance. A landscape approach provides a useful methodological and conceptual framework for our understanding of the dynamic and contingent relationship between people and the material worlds in which they lived.

Such an approach is further developed in Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda's discussion on the Midlands Rising of 1607. This "all but forgotten" event saw a major, though relatively localised protest against enclosure in Northamptonshire. However 1607 was not an isolated event in the grander historical narrative. The authors put the rebellion in a "longer-term historical context and wider landscape setting". For them, the key question is the way that "national and local politics of land" shaped events prior to, during and after 1607. Primarily this relates to the way that the enclosure of previously open lands impacted upon those who lived and worked in the localities - thus 1607 was not a unique event, rather a peak of struggle. As the authors write:

We can read the Midlands Rising not simply as a response to an unprecedented upsurge in the scale and frequency of enclosure in the English Midlands in the decade prior to 1607, but rather the most striking movement in an ongoing surge of discontent with enclosure which had been building at least through much of the previous reign.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that class struggle "was [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight". History is full of peaks of rebellions and revolutions, but these are really the more visible parts of a continuum. McDonagh and Rodda bring this out extremely well as part of their discussion on 1607, an event that continued to inspire and worry both the authorities and the lower orders for years afterwards. The authors highlight several examples of those who raised the spectre of 1607 as part of their struggles (and legal cases) in the aftermath.

A similar continuum of protest is discussed in Simon Sandall's account of the protests in the Forest of Dean when protesters and rebels retained memories of previous social organisation (the Mine Law Court) to justify and bolster contemporary struggles against injustices caused by the development of capitalist relations in the region. This was more than simple tradition, but an active use of tradition as a weapon in their struggle - to inspire participants and give vindication to a cause.

Ruth Mather's chapter takes a different approach looking at the hitherto mostly ignored subject of the way that protest was remembered within the homes of working class people. Visitors to the Peoples' History Museum in Manchester and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford will know that the events like Peterloo were often commemorated by the issuing and sale of "memorabilia". But this was more than simply the purchase of pictures or plates that serve as a talking point, it was part of creating a radical tradition of memory and connection to the past.

This was not just about physical objects. Mather notes Peterloo was memorialised through "radical child-rearing". This included the naming of babies after radicals (136 children received the unfortunate first name 'Henry Hunt' after Peterloo), but also the production of materials to instruct children in the history of struggle. A map produced as a teaching aid, is Mather says, "physically materialising reminders of the events of the day" to "carry forward the aims of the radicals...to sustain the movement into the next generation."

Mather's chapter, draws on the memoir of Peterloo leader Samuel Bamford. She notes that the description of his home notes with pride the items that decorate a typical working class home. I raised a smile at this because in a recent visit to Rochdale museum's exhibition on Peterloo I noted that among the exhibits were Bamford reading glasses. The use of object to venerate, remember and memorialise history continues.

Samuel Bamford glasses, among other historical objects
associated with Peterloo in Rochdale Museum (my photo).

Space precludes a detailed discussion of all the chapters in this excellent book. They all, in different ways, contribute to a wider understanding of how radical movements create spaces for memorialising that draw on the past. Rose Wallis says in her discussion of the Captain Swing movement that "the memory of popular protest was... central in shaping both the resort to protest in the present and the responses of the authorities".

The past cannot be separated from the present. Historical struggles shape the terrain that contemporary women and men fight on, and within which they try to shape the future. Radicals planning incendiary attacks in 1830, riots in the Forest of Dean or organising marches to St Peters Fields in 1819 drew on their experiences, knowledge and understanding of what had gone before to try and be victorious. Similarly the forces of the establishment and authority learn their own lessons, for their own class. But what this book also shows, is that those memories are not simply remembered from generation to generation, but are often written into the very landscape that people act upon. As Carl Griffin comments,

we might usefully understand plebeian communities, individual bodies and the landscapes in which they lived as bearing the characteristics inherited of past tragedies, something akin to a cultural form of Lamarckism,... It is all there, but it is just that in the shift from the personal to the community narrative, the archive is used selectively, past events become written in the matter of place and in the body of the community...Through remembering to remember and remembering to forget, the past was constantly folded, remade, reanimated, becoming something always new.

Understanding how the past has been interpreted and memorialised thus helps us understand the actions and motivations of later generations. Learning from protest history is more than simply empowering our contemporary struggles - it helps explain the world we are in and the movements we have. Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh's book is a wonderful insight into these processes. The individual chapters contribute to the central theme and are also very illuminating on their specific subjects. I highly recommend this collection to those interested in the history of protest and the writing of that protest.

Note: I do feel bound to comment on the disappointingly high price of Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Aimed at an academic audience it was only because the publisher had a massive online sale that reduced the price by about £60 that I was able to afford to get hold of it. Sadly this will price the book out of reach of the hands of almost any ordinary activists and readers who do not have access to an academic library. It is a real shame because its contents would appeal greatly to a current generation of radicals who might want to learn from the past.

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Poole - Peterloo: The English Uprising
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Jeff Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre

This new book by Australian socialist Jeff Sparrow is an important contribution to understanding fascist movements in the 21st century. It is a short book that focuses on the Christchurch killer, a fascist activist who murdered 51 people and injured 49 more at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Person X, as he is anonymously labelled in Sparrow's book, left a detailed manifesto which was much more than the ramblings of a madman. Instead it was a carefully crafted piece of writing, that was designed to appeal to a particular set of far-right online activists and encourage further killing.

I initially picked up the book because I wanted to know more about "eco-fascism". This is the tendency for far-right activists to use concern over environmental crisis to push their own agenda. As Sparrow shows, close links between fascist ideas and nature are not new. While concern about the environment is usually seen as a left-wing cause, there has historically been a far-right strand of environmentalism. This, as Person X demonstrated, is usually tied up with ideas of over-population.

The concern of Person X and other "eco-fascists" is contradictory, and so , says Sparrow, needs to understood in what Person X "describes as his 'tactics for victory' - in particular, something he calls 'accelerationism'." Sparrow spells out what this means:

Person X's embrace of accelerationism means, above all, an advocacy of social and political breakdown as both necessary and desirable. Stability and comfort constitute, he says, major obstacles to the fascist revolution, which can only arise from the 'the great crucible of crisis'. As a result, fascists 'must destabilise and discomfort society where ever possible'. Even someone pushing for minimal changes with which fascists might agree should be considered 'useless or even damaging' far better, Person X says, to have 'radical, violent change regardless of its origins'.

So fascists can even celebrate climate change as a solution - one that will kill off many of those who they hate, and where, as one commentator points out "only the strong should survive". 

But Sparrow's book is far more than an explanation of eco-fascism or even a detailed study of Person X's motivations. He also shows how, perhaps paradoxically to the outside observer, Person X's appalling crime was actually a response to the success of the anti-fascist movements. Sparrow shows how, in the wake of Trump's victory, the fascist movement in the US was able to grow. Far-right politicians like Trump in the US, as in a host of countries post 9-11 created an atmosphere of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feeling, within which fascists were able to grow. The movement tried to move from "online influence" to "real-world popularity". To do this, the fascists "needed to bring their supporters out from their computers and into the streets".

At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, USA in 2017, where fascists openly marched and chanted antisemitic and anti-Muslim slogans, a young anti-fascist activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The violence that is never far below the surface among fascists surfaced. But in the context of 2017 caused massive revulsion. After this, fascist protests were massively outnumbered and proved unattractive for the Nazis.

A similar process took place in Australia where Person X originated. Finding it impossible to march and create the atmosphere of togetherness that the Nazis wanted, some, like Person X, looked for other strategies. Sparrow explains:

American fascism hadn't disappeared. But its key figures learned... that they couldn't convert their online support into a conventional political movement as easily as they had hoped. Such was the context in which Person X developed his own strategy for bridging the gulf between fascism's online strength and its real-world weakness. That strategy was terrorist murder.

Compared to other mass killings, Person X "injected political content into an apolitical form":

In his reshaping of rage murder - injecting a conscious political element into the already-existing massacre script - Person X hoped to set in motion a cascading sequence of atrocities, in which young men (on the fringes of the fascist movement or at least already vaguely sympathetic to far-right ideas), would individually decide to, as he put it 'stop shit-posting and make a real-life effort' with each murder inspiring murders to come.

Tragically Person X has already inspired copy-cats. Massacres like this will not provoke a fascist revolution - but that was never really Person X's plan. He hoped that such events would help spread the fascist message in a way that couldn't easily be stopped by counter-protests.

Historically we know that fascism grows during periods of political and economic crisis; it is then that the violent fantasies of the fascists can be taken up by mass movements. The task, as Sparrow explains, is to build social movements that can fracture the nascent fascist movements which people like Person X want to build. To do this means of course confronting the far-right and fascists wherever they appear - out-numbering them, exposing them and preventing them marching. But it also means providing an alternative to economic and environmental crisis. It means creating a positive message that can offer an alternative. As Sparrow concludes, "the more we offer an alternative to environmental destruction - and to the society that unleashes such destruction - the more squalid and miserable fascism seems."

Jeff Sparrow's book is an excellent, and much needed, introduction to contemporary fascism; online and in "real life". It contextualises this with a detailed explanation of historical fascist and Nazi movements, showing how fascism has evolved, while retaining links to its past. But Sparrow emphasises that fascism's ambition is to rebuild mass movements - to break out of the on-line ghetto - and that what the left does on the streets and online matters in terms of stopping it. I encourage everyone to read this, and then get involved in fighting the far-right, wherever you live.

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Ian Cameron - Red Duster, White Ensign

The battle for Malta during the Second World War was a key strategic question for the Allies and Axis powers. Malta had, for centuries, been a gateway to the rest of the Mediteranean. With Britain keen to protect its colonies and strategic assets in the Middle East and North Africa, the small island would be crucial. Initially however few, according to Ian Cameron's short history, understood this, with Winston Churchill nearly a lone figure in wanting to protect the island. Churchill would not have been motivated for his interest in the people of Malta - more the British Empire's needs.

Malta was a forgotten place for the London establishment. When the King visited the island in 1943 it was the first visit by a monarch since 1911. As Ian Cameron shows, the Maltese faced a horrific onslaught. The blitz that rained down upon the island was on a terrifying scale - far worse than that unleashed on London, though not on a par with the attacks on Berlin, Cologne or Dresden. The Maltese at least had nearly bomb proof shelters in the catacombs in the rocks. Nonetheless suffering was terrible, particularly when combined with hard rations.

The lifeline - the convoys, and the often forgotten supply trips by submarine - are the meat of the book. These were costly enterprises and the heroism of sailors from the Merchant Marine and the Navy is deservably celebrated here. Cameron tends to highlight the bravery, and like many others since the War, particularly celebrates the contribution of the civilians on the islands. Though there is precious little in the way of personal accounts, or detailed analysis of the feelings of those under fire. Cameron tends to give us the impression that everyone was supportive of the war, and hated the Germans and Italians. Is this true I wondered?

This is very much a short, readable account that focuses on the action and the famous highlights. It's worth noting that the air battles and bombing where on a scale far greater than the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz, but few films or novels are set in these battles. There are enough accounts by participants even in this short book to provide source material.

Malta was, eventually relieved as the war moved further away from its location and as German arms and bases were reduced. This short, readable account gives the general story, but I felt it lacked detail on the bigger context and the experience of the civilians. Perhaps there are more recent accounts that fill this gap.

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Nick Ashton-Jones - Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Part 2: Feudalism

Part two of Nick Ashton-Jones projected six volume study of the British Landscape and the way it has been shaped and used by various human societies. This book looks at Feudalism and the emergence of capitalism.

I've reviewed this, and the previous volume, for the Agricultural History Review, see here.

Georges Duby - The Age of the Cathedrals: Art & Society 980-1420

Georges Duby's The Age of the Cathedrals is a classic work that shows how the development of feudalism transformed the sacred art of the time, in particularly how it manifested through the art and architecture of cathedrals, but also monasteries, churches as well as the actuality of worship. Duby shows, in great detail, how social changes were reflected (and encouraged) by artistic changes. But he also roots his explanation in an understanding that society was one of class inequality and struggle. Thus, in a passage I first read when Nortre Dame Cathedral was destroyed by fire in 2019, we can see both Duby's beautiful prose and his clarity of understanding:

By definition, a cathedral was the bishop’s church, hence the city’s church; and what the art of cathedrals meant first of all, in Europe, was the rebirth of the cities… They were lodestones drawing wealth. After a long period of obscurity, they became the principal centres, north of the Alps, of the most advanced culture. But for the time being virtually all of their vitality still came from the surrounding fields…Thus, although cathedral art was urban art, it relied on the nearby countryside for the major factor in its growth, and it was the efforts of countless pioneers, clearers of land, planters of vinestocks, diggers of ditches, and builders of dikes, all flushed with the success of a flourishing agriculture, that brought cathedral art to its fulfilment. The tower of Laon rose against a backdrop of new harvest and young vineyards; the image of the oxen used in ploughing, carved in stone, crowned those towers… The facades of the cathedrals in Amiens and Paris showed the turning of the seasons by depicting different types of peasant labour. It was only right to honour them in this way, fort it was the work of the harvester sharpening his scythe, of the vine-grower pruning or layering his vines or spading about them, that had made the edifice rise little by little. The cathedral was the fruit of the system of manor lords – in other words, of the peasants’ labour.

As society changed, art reflected these changes:

Within the ruling class, a split widened between the warriors... and the churchmen, who took over all the charismatic missions that had belonged to royalty. This is what matters, particularly for anyone interested in the conditions with which social structures surround the birth of works of art. In the course of the eleventh century the local lords seized most of the royal prerogatives... They thus deprived the kings of the benefits hitherto conferred by the position of supremacy...in doing so they limited the extent to which the sovereigns could play a role in artistic creativity, fostered instead by the muted yet decisive emergence of the new class of lords.

Thus art would be representative of the interests and needs of these new classes. But religion couldn't lose one of its primary roles - to offer hope in the heartless world - and so "eleventh-century art helped to reveal God's face. It shed light. It claimed to offer man the sure means of coming back to life bathed in light". This came through architecturally as Cathedrals became massive spaces of light, instead of massive towers and heavy columns, big windows, open spaces and thin beams allowed light to fill the void.

A few hundred years of artistic evolution and social change later, things and developed further. Art was now more show, don't tell. It had become, in the view of artists and patrons, "a means of dispelling the mysteries of the world and revealing its inner order... Art... became an illustration, a narrative, a tale....intended to provide an immediately intelligible relation of a story... of God, but also of the knights of the Round Table, and the conquest of Jerusalem". Duby continues:

In the fourteenth century, creativity turned into the pursuit of fancy. As a result, its major objective was not to provide a space conducive to prayer and suitable for processions or psalmody as before, but one designed for display. Thus painting, the most appropriate medium for suggesting visions, raised itself at that very moment in Europe to the highest rank of the arts.

But if art reflected the system, it also was part of shaping it. Emphasising the interests of one or other class against the masses - shaping their ideas, helping to control and manipulate them. In the 13 the century when feudal society had reached "fulfilment" the "two dominating orders, churchmen and men of war, gathered around the king in whom priesthood and knighthood were joined" and so "royal liturgies accordingly installed that equestrian figure in the cathedral". Art in the places of religion now sent a message about who God's representatives were on Earth. Poignantly, Duby points out that "nothing is known of peasant death". The fears, hopes and dreams of the nobility were written large in their art and architecture. The peasantry had to look at these, and donate money for the privilege of pilgrimage. Cathedral art (and feudal art in general) was a message from one side to the other.

Duby's book is fascinating. But I found it a slog. The Age of the Cathedrals is one of those books that I read, but felt I was only scratching the surface of its insights. Lacking an in-depth knowledge of the history of the period, or the detail of the Bible I was only really able to accept what Duby was saying, not follow through his ideas. I suspect that other readers will get much more from what is a deeply sympathetic, materialist account of the linkage between art and society.

Related Reviews

Lacey & Danziger - The Year 1000
Faith - The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England
Bloch - Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence
Lindsay - The Normans and their World

Nick Ashton-Jones - Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Part 1: Humanity

The first part of Nick Ashton-Jones projected six volume study of the British landscape and the way it has been shaped and used by various human society. It begins with an examination of the underlying geology of the British Isles and an overview of hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies until the Roman era.

I've been asked to review this, and the succeeding volume, for the Agricultural History Review journal and you can see that review here.