Storm in the Outer Hebrides

Sabbatarians on Lewis and Harris (the name of one island) resist Sunday sailings from Ullapool on the mainland to Stornoway across the Minch.

I have an odd sympathy with them. This is old-style resistance, not part of the modern chessboard of defensive religious postures.

The new scramble for Africa

Egypt is said to have been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Had Greece also depended on Egyptian grain? Did the Romans merely buy Egyptian wheat or did they also buy out or expropriate local landowners and manage Egyptian agriculture as a colonial ruling class? Today Egypt supplies no-one and is a large-scale net importer of wheat.

Nineteenth-century imperialists had exploited Africa for copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, tin. In southern and east Africa there were European settlers who had their own farms. A few of their descendants are still there.

There must have been some direct foreign investment in agriculture in Africa over the past fifty years. But there was an intensification of interest in 2008 as a result of unprecedentedly high world food prices.

Countries that depended on food imports became conscious of their lack of “food security”. Countries that could only farm unsustainably (by reducing their reserves of water to a dangerously low level: the story in Saudi Arabia, which had engaged in an ecologically-disastrous programme of wheat-farming in the ’80s and ’90s) had a similar problem.

Could those countries improve their “food security” by outsourcing their farming to Africa? Africa was not productive or efficient enough to supply the world’s needs on the open market, and was further hindered by the protectionism of the first world, so why not invest directly there? If having one’s farms in another country was not, on the face of it, the most obvious strategy for improving “food security”, at least it was a hedge.

It would benefit Africa, too. Africa, which should be a major food exporter, buys about a quarter of its food on the world market, where it buys its clothes, and is a net food importer. For world market, read, in many cases, China, which is about to overtake the US as Africa’s main trading partner. I’m surprised it hasn’t yet.

African agriculture is inefficient. Education, logistics, distribution systems are poor. Pockets of lingering African socialism and outbursts of official anti-colonialism don’t help. Value chains are short. There is little investment in food processing or packaging. Africa hasn’t been turned into a continent of consumers.

China was already being accused of rapacity with the world’s mineral resources. Now it is being blamed for agricultural neo-colonialism. (What, one might ask in passing and without prejudging its effect on Africa, is so wrong with Chinese agriculture that it can’t make the investment at home?)

I did a short post a while back on China in Africa, quoting from Prospect. Very few countries have relations with Taiwan now – the Vatican, a few Pacific islands, Paraguay, a few states in Central America and the Caribbean, and four countries in and off Africa: Burkina Faso, Gambia, São Tome and Príncipe, and Swaziland.

The latest African country to have made the switch is Malawi, at the beginning of 2008. A friend of mine who works there has watched the mainland Chinese enter the country and some of the Taiwanese leave. The Taiwanese, he feels, had been a mainly beneficent influence. The mainland Chinese coming in, with their nasty suits, are low-grade people, “floor-gobbing racists”, there to get what they can from it in mining and agriculture, on behalf of themselves or China, and bringing their own people along to do the work, because “African people lazy, no li’ wor’.”.

Which sounds fairly racist itself. We know that China, for the sake of oil, supports the régime in Sudan that supports the murderers in Darfur, but how do we compare the economic and political effects of its interventions across an entire continent?

Government and private-sector investors need to be aware of the danger of a social backlash within Africa against a perceived neo-colonialism. The Chinese may find themselves reacting to Africans as they did to the Uighurs a few days ago. “We love your culture. How can you object to us when we are bringing so many improvements to your way of life?”

African governments are as sensitive about their farmers as governments anywhere else, and depriving smallholders of their land in the name of agricultural reform is, in most or all African countries, a political non-starter. But isn’t that what many of the projects now being discussed are threatening to do?

The mantra of “working with African smallholders to reform agriculture” is, according to my friend in Malawi, largely sentimental NGO talk. So how will foreign partners be engaged?

—

GRAIN is a “small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems” based in Barcelona.

“Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. On the one hand, ‘food insecure’ governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land is becoming increasingly privatised and concentrated. If left unchecked, this global land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming, and rural livelihoods, in numerous places around the world.”

Some grain.org links: Introduction to the landgrabbing question here. More here and here.

The second of those pages allows you to download a summary called The 2008 land grabbers for food and financial security. This is a list of projects announced or referred to in the media in 2008 up to October. It isn’t limited to Africa. The link to a page which is supposed to show us its sources doesn’t work.

GRAIN have also created a dedicated site about global landgrabbing. The word landgrabbing is obviously loaded. GRAIN has a point of view.

—

In the course of a work project, I extracted from The 2008 land grabbers for food and financial security everything about Africa. I’m reproducing those extracts below. I made some stylistic changes, added a small amount of new material, and tempered the language in the direction of caution where it seemed advisable to do so by inserting phrases such as “was reported”.

Much of it is hearsay. It is easy to turn these reports into alarmist headlines. Some people have suggested that large tracts of African land are being virtually given away. The list here is presumably not even complete. China is not the only grabber. Many of the projects promise to be on a huge scale, but how many are turning into realities? How new is all this? Is the pressure still as strong in 2009? (Cereal prices have continued to rise in 2009: Economist.)

Some of the investments were being made as a means of supplying the local African market or the world market, but the majority in the list are envisaged as a method of supplying the investors’ home countries with staple products.

Some of the projects were being considered at a government-to-government level. The majority depended on the technological expertise and financial commitment of the private sector. Many involve public-private partnerships and dialogue between governments and investors, with government-to-government discussions to prepare the ground.

-

“The government of Bahrain, working with private-sector investors, was reported to be seeking to lease farmland in Egypt and Sudan and contract out food production.”

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“In the first half of 2008, it was reported that China’s Ministry of Agriculture was drafting a central government policy to encourage domestic firms to acquire (lease or purchase) land abroad, including in Africa, for farming purposes, especially to assure China’s long-term soybean supplies. Five state-owned firms were chosen to implement the plan.”

-

“In May 2008, the French television station TF1 produced a major report on how the Chinese businessman Jianjun Wang has acquired rights to 10,000 hectares of land in Cameroon to produce rice. The local farm-workers contracted to work the fields believe that the project is meant for rice to export to China.”

-

“According to a study by Loro Horta, the son of Timor L’Este’s President Ramos Horta, the Chinese government has been investing in infrastructure development, policy reform, research, extension and training to develop rice production in Mozambique for export to China since 2006. EximBank has already provided a loan of US$2bn and pledged an additional US$800m for these works, though more is expected. Some 10,000 Chinese settlers will be involved. G2G contracts and land leases are still under negotiation. Land cannot be owned by foreigners in Mozambique, so joint partnerships with ‘sleeping’ Mozambican entities may need to be formed.”

-

“According to China’s Economic Observer, the US Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, in which Chinese investors have a stake, has already invested heavily in sub-Saharan agricultural projects.”

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“President Museveni of Uganda was reported to have provided Chinese investors with 4,046 hectares of land, to be farmed by 400 Chinese farmers using imported Chinese seeds. The project is being overseen by Liu Jianjun, a former Chinese government official and now head of the China-Africa Business Council, who also has contracts to build a cornflour-processing factory in Kenya and a farm in Côte d’Ivoire.”

-

“In May 2008 it was reported that China has received rights to farm 101,171 hectares of maize in southern Zimbabwe.”

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“Egypt, one of the world’s largest importers of wheat, signed a contract with President Omar Al Bashir’s government to produce 2m tonnes of wheat a year in the north of Sudan for export to Egypt. Egypt is also eager to raise livestock there.”

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“The Ugandan government was reported to have leased 840,127 hectares of land – a staggering 2.2% of Uganda’s total area – in various parts of the country to Egypt, so that Egypt’s private sector may come in and produce wheat and maize for export to Cairo. The deal was apparently struck in late August 2008 and would involve seven Egyptian agribusiness firms, according to Reuters’ discussions with Egyptian officials.

The details were denied by Ugandan ministers, as well as Egypt’s ambassador to Uganda, though he did confirm that a deal of this nature is under preparation; it will focus on wheat and organic beef for export to Egypt; they hope small farmers, not large, will be contracted for production; the Egyptians may build abattoirs in Uganda for the scheme; and it will be financed by the private sector.”

-

“In August 2008, three Gulf firms – Abu Dhabi Investment House, Ithmaar Bank and Gulf Finance House – announced the creation of AgriCapital, a new Islamic investment fund. The US$1bn investment vehicle will engage in land purchases in Africa and elsewhere to produce food for the region, through a separate investment bank specially created for this purpose, and to fund biotechnology research.”

-

“There are reports that some Gulf states have talked with the government of Somalia about allocating land for Gulf food production.”

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“According to the Economic Times (India’s largest financial daily), Africa has been among the places targeted by India’s Ministry of External Affairs as a place where Indian agribusiness firms can go and farm for export to India.”

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“In 2006, the governorate of Qena, in Egypt, granted 1,600 hectares of farmland to Kobe Bussan, a Japanese agribusiness firm, to produce food for export at a total investment cost of LE1.2bn (US$290m).”

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“In March 2008, Jordan’s prime minister announced that his country would cultivate land allocated to it by the Sudanese government to produce food for Jordanians, and urged the private sector to get involved. Four months later, the agriculture ministry in Amman said that it was appointing a private company to handle the government’s overseas agricultural investments in the fight against domestic food insecurity and inflation.”

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“In 2008, it was reported that the Kuwait Investment Authority, the country’s US$265bn sovereign wealth fund, may invest in food production, particularly poultry, in Morocco, Yemen and Egypt for export to Kuwait. The trade ministry was also seeking to change the statutes of the Union of Cooperative Societies, the government-run group which dominates food retail in Kuwait, in order to enable the union to invest in overseas farmland, possibly in cooperation with other Arab Cooperative Unions. That move is apparently on hold for now.”

-

“On 7 September 2008, Kuwait’s Minister of Finance was reported to have signed what his Sudanese counterpart called a ‘giant’ strategic partnership deal with the government in Khartoum. Under the agreement, the two will invest jointly in food production in Sudan, including cattle.”

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“In April 2008, during the World Islamic Economic Forum, the government of Kuwait was reported to have launched a new US$100m fund called ‘Dignity Living’. The funds will be invested in food production and agribusiness development in Uganda, among other (unreported) countries, to supply the Middle East market.”

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“In December 2007, Libyan African Investment Portfolio, a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, put US$30m into a rice project in Liberia through a tie up with a local NGO, the Foundation for African Development Aid. The Liberian government has granted the joint company, ADA/LAP Inc, land concessions of over 17,000 hectares to produce rice for the local and international markets.”

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“The Qatar Company for Meat and Livestock Trading (Mawashi) has established a sheep farm in western Sudan and has signed a memorandum of understanding with the country for further expansion in livestock farming.”

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“In July 2008, Qatar and Sudan announced the formation of a joint holding company which will invest in food production for export to the Arab markets. Zad Holding Company (previously Qatar Flour Mills), a state-owned firm, and QIA, the emirate’s sovereign wealth fund, are both involved.”

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“There are reports that Saudi Arabian investors are exploring possibilities for land acquisition to produce food for Saudi Arabia in Egypt, Senegal and Uganda. There are also reports that Saudi Arabian firms are looking for Thai partners to jointly go into rice production in Uganda and Sudan.”

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“In August 2008, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister told the Financial Times that he is eager to give Saudi Arabian investors access to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of hectares of farmland for investment and development.”

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“In August 2008, the Saudi Fund for Development announced that it will set up a US$566m special investment vehicle for buying land abroad for domestic food production. Both the government and the private sector will invest in the fund. The priority crops are rice and wheat, and the first investment will be made in Sudan.”

-

“In June 2008, the Saudi Arabian ministers of trade and agriculture both visited Sudan to survey possible food project investment sites and push for further agriculture investment liberalisation, including for livestock.”

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“Hail Agricultural Development Company (HADCO), a Saudi Arabian agribusiness firm, which has since been acquired by Almarai, leased 10,117 hectares for US$95m north of Khartoum to produce food and feed (presumably alfalfa) for export to Saudi Arabia.”

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“In May 2008, President Lee Myung-Bak publicly declared his government’s plan to purchase land in Sudan to grow food for South Koreans, and invited President al-Bashir to cooperate with him.”

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“In May 2008, the Sudanese government committed 690,000 hectares of land for Koreans to grow wheat to export home. Production will start later this year – through a joint venture between Korean, Sudanese and Arab firms – on an 84,000-hectare farm.”

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“Al-Qudra Holding, an Abu Dhabi investment firm, plans to acquire land by early 2009 to produce wheat, maize, rice, vegetables and livestock in Egypt, Eritrea, Morocco and Sudan (to name only the African destinations). The land will be acquired through a mixture leases, concessions and outright purchases. Al Qudra have reportedly already acquired 1,500 hectares in Algeria (cattle and dairy) and Morocco. According to the CEO, Mehmood Ebrahim Al Mehmood, 40% of the total investment will go to maize, although no decision has been taken yet about whether to convert it to ethanol, with the first harvests expected in 2011 or 2012. The investment plan may expand to port operations, breeding and the manufacture of irrigation equipment.”

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“The UAE’s Minister of the Economy is on record as saying, in mid-July 2008, that UAE intends to purchase farmland in Africa to ensure the emirate’s food supply.”

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“The Abu Dhabi Fund for Development is seeking land in Senegal (to refer only to Africa) to produce food and feed for the UAE market.”

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“The UAE government is investing in food production in Sudan to meet its own market needs. As of August 2008, it was reported that the UAE had invested in a total of 378,000 hectares of farmland in various Sudanese states, including a 16,000-hectare plantation for maize and wheat production. According to some sources, Khartoum is providing the land free of charge. It was also reported that the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development is hoping to set up a joint company with another Arab partner to develop at least 28,329 hectares in Nile State, northern Sudan, to the tune of ‘hundreds of millions of dirhams’, for the production of wheat, maize, alfalfa and possibly potatoes. Initial studies on this will be finalised in November 2008.”

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“Cru Investment, a UK-based ethical fund, facilitates private investment in African agriculture for guaranteed returns of 30-40%. They already control more than 2,500 hectares of farmland in Malawi and operate another 4,000 hectares there through outgrower schemes. The produce is exported to the UK. In September 2008, Cru announced that in 2009 it will expand its Africa fund to the Middle East. This means teaming up with Gulf investors to address food security concerns in the GCC.”

-

“In September 2008, the IFC, the commercial investment arm of the World Bank, announced that it would greatly increase investments in agribusiness development because of new private sector interest in seeking returns through the food crisis. Part of its spending will be to bring ‘under-utilised’ lands into production. In 2008, IFC spent US$1.4bn in the agribusiness supply chain, of which US$900m went directly to agribusiness firms.”

-

“In October 2008, the Financial Times reported that Lonrho, a UK-based pan-African corporation, is putting together funds to acquire 20,000 hectares of productive farmland in Angola. This is part of a wider ‘aggressive’ strategy to acquire ten times that amount – 200,000 hectares – for the same purpose across Africa. The Angolan government is reportedly trying to attract US$6bn worth of new agricultural investments and is engaged in talks with corporations from Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Canada and the US.”

-

“Trans4mation Agri-Tech, a UK investment house, is involved in a joint venture with a Vietnamese company that will bring Vietnamese workers, scientists and technology to villages in the Niger Delta in Nigeria to produce food for the local and world markets. T4M, as it is sometimes called, has reportedly received loan financing from the UK government of US$36m, and the Delta villages are providing infrastructure, including land. A minimum of 10,000 hectares of fertile land has been assigned to the project for 25 years by Delta state officials. Stephen Liney, the project director, is in similar discussions with the Rivers, Abia and Ebonyi state governments.”

-

“Japanese businesses have announced investments in Africa, but at the G8 summit in Italy (July 2009), Japan advocated a set of principles to ensure smooth investment in agriculture in developing countries and to limit ‘land-grabbing’. Tamaki Tsukada, director of the economic security division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has said: ‘We feel there should be a code of conduct, a set of principles, for investment in farmland [...] for both producing and consuming countries. There’s a need to provide a scheme to ensure private sector investments are promoted while the interests of the producing countries are preserved.’”

—

Picture credit

Reith Lectures 4

For some reason, I wrote about all the BBC Reith Lectures since 1948 last year (here and here; postscript here). The last two years have been

2008 Jonathan Spence, Chinese Vistas
2009 Michael Sandel, A New Citizenship

You can hear them, and others in the series, here.

2008 marked, I thought, a low point of incoherence, because Spence, an excellent historian, had obviously been told, like Barenboim before him, that a lecture was not what people nowadays wanted. His virtually extempore delivery might have worked at a university; it failed in the medium of radio.

Sandel this year was good. Sue Lawley continues to make sure that she is heard more than any questioner in the audience.

Here is a playlist for one of Pevsner’s lectures in 1955 on The Englishness of English Art.

A preposterous thrust of opportunity

A shoal of sharks

There was only one Lord Northcliffe; the first Lord Rothermere was his brother. They founded the Daily Mail together in 1896, as Alfred and Harold Harmsworth. Alfred went on to found the Daily Mirror in 1903. His brother later bought it from him. The fourth Lord Rothermere is still chairman of Daily Mail and General Trust.

George Newnes founded, inter alia, Tit-Bits (1881-1984), The Strand Magazine (1891-1950) and Country Life (1897-).

There is a brilliant thumb-nail sketch of Lord Northcliffe’s career in the first volume of Mr. H. G. Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934, Gollancz), pp. 325-33. “The Harmsworth brothers … sailed into this business of producing saleable letterpress for the coppers of the new public, with an entire disregard for good taste, good value, educational influence, social consequences or political responsibility. They were as blind as young kittens to all those aspects of life. That is the most remarkable fact about them from my present point of view, and I think Posterity will find it even more astonishing. In pristine innocence, naked of any sense of responsibility, with immense native energy, they set about pouring millions of printed sheets, of any sort of trash that sold, into the awakening mind of the British masses.” Mr. Wells also brings out the still stranger fact that the business instinct which prompted these irresponsible activities was equally blind, notwithstanding the unerringness with which it aimed at, and hit, its mark. “Neither Newnes nor Harmsworth, when they launched these ventures, had the slightest idea of the scale of the new forces they were tapping. They thought they were going to sell to a public of at most a few score thousands, and they found they were publishing for the million. They did not so much climb to success; they were rather caught by success and blown sky-high,” without having “had the faintest suspicion of” this “preposterous thrust of opportunity”.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

A shoal of sharks

The bread of Universal Education is no sooner cast upon the waters of social life than a shoal of sharks rises from the depths and devours the children’s bread [footnote: Matt xv 26] under the philanthropists’ eyes. In the educational history of England, for example, the dates speak for themselves. Universal compulsory gratuitous public instruction was inaugurated in this country in A.D. 1870; [footnote: The system of universal direct compulsion was not made complete until 1880, and the practical establishment of free education not until 1891.] the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later – as soon as the first generation of children from the national schools had come into the labour market and acquired some purchasing power – by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational philanthropist’s labour of love could be made to yield the newspaper-king a royal profit.

The Daily Mail 1896 (Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, and his brother Harold, later Lord Rothermere); the Daily Express 1900 (Cyril Arthur Pearson, in 1916 to Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook); the Daily Mirror 1903 (Alfred Harmsworth): early British Yellow Press examples that survive.

Did the critics of the Yellow Press forget how much sensational journalism and other material there had been in mid-Victorian England?

Toynbee’s statements, in the same passage, about the consequences of the diffusion of learning and dilution of culture in the Roman Empire, quoting Hume and Rostovtzeff, are not fully argued and the analogy can hardly be exact: I will return to them.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Melancholy late Romans and pathetic Gauls

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, episode 13, BBC2, 1969. The music is obviously Britten. I’m not sure what piece(s).

Potter on Murdoch

I quoted a remark in the FT by Martin Wolf on Rupert Murdoch a while ago. It sounds like an unconscious echo of something Dennis Potter said in his final interview in 1994, a few weeks before dying from cancer.

Up to 1:22 what Potter says apropos Murdoch is still true. Things, of course, have become much worse.

His next remarks are partly a swipe at John Birt’s internal-market reforms at the BBC. Potter seems to be implying a link between them and the dependence of the Murdoch-controlled media and their like on external markets, but really the Birt reforms were nothing to do with monopolies or advertising. In the longer view, they probably saved the BBC. (The funniest person on the subject of the philistine Birt isn’t Potter but John Drummond, controller of Radio 3 from 1987 to ’92, in his autobiography, Tainted by Experience.)

The interview was recorded in April 1994 – the month Netscape and the modern Internet were launched.

The power of media owners, which Potter blames for the decay of broadcasting, journalism and political discourse, is supposed to have declined since then, as the control of media has become decentralised. But large providers still control the dissemination of news even if they are wondering how long they will be able to afford to do so. New Labour sensed this in 1997 in Britain and made a historically last-ditch attempt to manipulate the mass media. Tony Blair’s crew were anyway spiritual allies of Murdoch.

There are now so many channels that striving for monopolistic control ought to be impossible and cultural criticisms that assume that monopolies are operating ought to seem out of touch.

The residual problem won’t be monopolies, of course, but the absence of dominant channels that can reach large numbers of people and set standards. The proliferation of channels will mean that budgets are so small that the costs of excellent programming, in the way Potter had understood and contributed to it, can no longer be met. The energy that programmers used to derive from the knowledge that they would reach large audiences has already gone. Each fragmented provider is in danger of being the prisoner of a small interest. Governments retreat hopelessly to Twitter. The watery culture of the cable channels feeds into channels that ought to be able to resist it, such as the BBC.

Blogs are in some ways as bad as the old monopolies at leading you, in Potter’s words, to “discover something you didn’t know”: they are usually the voice of one person whom you have pre-selected.

These are the transitional problems 15 years on from Dennis Potter.

There is more from this interview on YouTube.

The stuffy closet

One of the virtues of of the old-fashioned “classical” education was that it taught one to put one’s treasure in something outside the immediate here and now. The objective of a post-classical non-scientific education in the West is to soak the student’s mind in the language, literature, history, and manners of his own country, on the assumption that this is a valuable training for citizenship in a democratic national state. At Oxford one day in the year 1910, when the end of my formal classical education was in sight, I picked up the current syllabus of the Oxford School of Modern History to consider whether, after taking my final classical examination at the University in literis humanioribus, I should spend the next year at Oxford reading modern history or spend it in Greece walking about the countryside. A brief glance at that syllabus was decisive. The quantity of English history that was prescribed in it as obligatory was enough to knock me over backwards – the more so when I found that what was not specifically English in the prescribed history course was still almost exclusively West European. Accustomed, as I had become by then, to roaming freely in the great open spaces of Hellenic history, with its vistas opening on to the still broader realms of the history of mankind and the history of the Universe, I felt as if I was being invited to put my head into a stuffy little closet that had not had an airing for years. I had been thrilled by English history at the age of four, when my mother had told the story to me in instalments, night by night, while she was putting me to bed. But my mother had made it thrilling by making it do for me what Hellenic history had been doing at a later stage. The prospect of studying English history in accordance with the specifications of the Oxford syllabus was unattractive to me; so I went to Greece, and have been thankful, ever since, that this was the alternative for which I had opted. Sir Ernest Barker is right in reporting [see Toynbee and History, Critical Essays and Reviews, Boston, Porter Sargent, 1956] that I do not know English history and do not love it.

The “back to British history” argument in modern discussions about education is utterly dispiriting.

It is meant partly for cultural “minorities” (make them understand where they are!), and partly for culturally “British” children (make them remember what they are!). Of course it should be taught, at all ages. Even for those reasons. It is the “back to”, the duality, that are dismal. It isn’t as if other histories are taught adequately to culturally “British” children.

The Oxford Modern History syllabus in 1972, when I began studying, was as parochial as it had been in 1910.

A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961

Before the global system 2

Before the global system 1

As for the wars which the eastern border-states of the Western World were waging with a Muscovite Orthodox Christian Power in the continental hinterland of the Baltic, and with an Ottoman Iranic Muslim Power [I will look later at what Toynbee means by the strange word Iranic] in the Danube Basin and the Mediterranean, these sequels to the Crusades were at first carried on in virtual independence of the Western Powers’ fratricidal warfare with one another. The move made by France in A.D. 1534-6 [footnote: In May 1534 France made a treaty with the Ottoman Corsair Khayr-ad-Dīn Barbarossa; in February 1536 she made a commercial treaty with the Porte that served as a cloak for a political entente.] to redress the balance between herself and the Hapsburg Power by allying herself with the Hapsburgs’ Ottoman adversary was an obviously expedient application of a Machiavellianly rational statecraft which struck a contemporary Western Christian public, including the French themselves, as being so shocking that France forebore to follow this policy up, notwithstanding the importance of the military and political advantages that she stood to gain by it and the extremity of the straits in which she found herself at the time; [footnote: See Fueter, E.: Geschichte des Europaïschen Staatensystems von 1492-1559 (Munich and Berlin 1919, Oldenbourg), pp. 47-49. There was no sequel to the Franco-Ottoman combined naval operations of A.D. 1543/4, in which an Ottoman fleet was harboured in the French naval base at Toulon.] and, as late as A.D. 1664, Louis XIV gave precedence to the oecumenical interests of Western Christendom over the parochial interests of France when he permitted French volunteers to help a rival Western Power in the shape of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy to stem an Ottoman invasion whose success would have been advantageous to France on a Machiavellian reckoning. [Footnote: A regular French expeditionary force, as well as a flow of French volunteers, came to the aid of the Venetians in A.D. 1668-9 during the last agonies of the siege of Candia, but this French support of Venice against the ‘Osmanlis was less meritorious than the French support of the Danubian Monarchy against the same assailant, considering that Venice, unlike the Danubian Monarchy, could not be regarded by France at this date as a rival Power, while on the other hand the French might have hoped, if their intervention against the ‘Osmanlis at Candia had been successful, to enter into Venice’s heritage in at least a remnant of her dominion in Crete.] France did not exploit, as she could have done, the predicament of a Hapsburg Power that was implicated in Western Christendom’s border warfare with the ‘Osmanlis as well as in the Hapsburgs’ family quarrel with France; and, thanks to this French forbearance, whether it was deliberate or inadvertent, [footnote: According to Fueter, op. cit., p. 48, no special consideration was shown to the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy or to Venice by other states of the Western comity in return for the public service which these two anti-Ottoman march-states were performing for Western Christendom as a whole.] the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, usually found itself able to avoid simultaneous engagements on its French and on its Ottoman front.

The same policy of limiting her military liabilities to a single front at a time was followed by Russia after she had become implicated in the Western Balance of Power at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and, until after the close of the General War of A.D. 1792-1815, the insulation of the vortex round the frontier between Western Christendom and the Ottoman Empire from the vortex in the interior of the Western World usually proved to be practical politics. “The Eastern Question” began to enter into the Western Balance of Power only when Napoleon’s failure to expand a French ascendancy over the debris of a Medieval city-state cosmos into a French ascendancy over the whole of a Modern Western and Westernizing World left a victorious Russia and a victorious Great Britain free to pursue a rivalry with one another in the Near and Middle East.

Even the vortex round the frontier between Western Christendom and Russian Orthodox Christendom did not coalesce completely with the vortex in the interior of the Western World till more than a hundred years after the date of Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava in A.D. 1709 over Charles XII of Sweden. It was not so surprising that, before Russia had been received into the Western Society as a result of Peter’s life-work, the Great Northern War of A.D. 1700-21 should have been waged without becoming implicated in the Western World’s General War of A.D. 1672-1713, just as the Great Northern War of A.D. 1558-83 had been waged without being implicated either in the last cadences of the overture (currebat A.D. 1494-1568) to a latter-day Western series of cycles of War and Peace or in the first cadences of the first regular cycle in this series (currebat A.D. 1568-1672). It was more remarkable that the partitions of Poland-Lithuania in A.D. 1772-95 between Russia and the two eastern march-Powers of the Western World [Austria and Prussia], and also even Russia’s acquisition of Finland from the Scandinavian march-State of the Western World in the Russo-Swedish war of A.D. 1808-9, should still have taken place in the margin, and not in the centre, of the Western system of international relations. It is true that Russia was a belligerent in the Seven Years War from A.D. 1756 to A.D. 1762, and that her withdrawal from this war in A.D. 1762 may have marked a turning-point in the fortunes of Frederick the Great. Yet the first Western general war in which Russia played a principal part was the war of A.D. 1792-1815, and even in this war it was not till A.D. 1812 that Russia’s role came to be a decisive one. On the other hand, from A.D. 1812 onwards down to the War of A.D. 1939-45 inclusive, there was no general war in the Western World in which the part played by Russia was not one of first-class importance. There were, however, down to the eve of the outbreak of the General War of A.D. 1914-18, still certain local wars – fought in outlying regions only recently incorporated into a Westernizing World – which followed independent courses of their own without being drawn into the central vortex of the Western Society’s international relations. The Russo-Japanese War of A.D. 1904-5 was one case in point; the Spanish-American War of A.D. 1898 and the British-Afrikander War of A.D. 1899-1902 were two other instances.

At the time Toynbee was writing – the early years of the Cold War – even “local wars” had been “drawn into the central vortex of the Western Society’s international relations”.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

Before the global system 1

[The] twentieth-century integration of international relations all round the globe into a single system, centring on a Balance of Power that had originated in Western Europe and had then progressively brought the rest of the Earth’s surface within the field of its magnetic attraction, presented a striking contrast to the configuration of the field of force in earlier chapters of the same story. The overture (currebat A.D. 1494-1559) had ranged no wider than the areas involved in a competition for hegemony over Italy between nascent adjoining Great Powers in the Transalpine and Transmarine provinces of Western Europe [the Holy Roman Empire and France]; and even Flanders had then been only a secondary theatre of military operations, though the two Great Powers of the day actually marched with one another there, without being insulated on this front by any intervening political vacuum or buffer. The civil war between Catholics and Protestants in France (gerebatur A.D. 1562-98) went on its way more or less independently of the contemporary civil war between Dutch and Spaniards in the Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy (gerebatur A.D. 1568-1609). The civil war in England (gerebatur A.D. 1642-8) likewise followed its own course without becoming implicated in the contemporary civil war in the Holy Roman Empire (gerebatur A.D. 1618-48). The Americas and the Indies were drawn into the main vortex of Western warfare only in the course of the first regular cycle (currebat A.D. 1568-1672); and, though during the second regular cycle (currebat A.D. 1672-1792) the decisive military operations on Flemish and Lombard battlefields were usually accompanied by “side-shows” in North America and in Continental India in which the same belligerents were engaged, the synchronization of the local conflicts in the West European and the overseas theatres of war was still inexact. As often as not, the eighteenth-century campaigns on American and Indian soil would open later or earlier and close later or earlier than the corresponding campaigns in Western Europe, so that there were years in which France and Great Britain were at war with one another in Europe while at peace with one another overseas, or conversely at war overseas while at peace in Europe. [Footnote: For example, in the General War of A.D. 1672-1713 the respective war years were 1672-8, 1688-97, 1702-13 in Western Europe; 1690-7, 1702-10 in North America. In the epilogue to the General War of A.D. 1672-1713 the respective war years were 1733-5, 1740-8, 1756-63 in Western Europe; 1744-63, 1775-83 in North America; 1746-9, 1750-4, 1758-61, 1778-83 in India.

The synchronization of the local conflicts continued to be inexact in the third regular cycle (currebat A.D. 1792-1914). In the General War of A.D. 1792-1815 the respective war years were 1792-1802, 1803-14, 1815 in Europe; 1812-14 in North America; 1799-1805, 1816-18 in India. In the epilogue to the General War of A.D. 1792-1815 the respective war years were 1848-9, 1859, 1864, 1866, 1870-1 in Europe; 1861-7 in North America (taking account of the French expedition to Mexico, 1862-7); 1838-42, 1843, 1845-6, 1848-9, 1857-9, 1878-81 in India; 1839-41, 1853-6, 1875-8, 1882, in the Near and Middle East.]

To be continued.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The silliness of George Bernard Shaw

Toynbee does not seem to have known Shaw, but he mentions him in a chapter about the Webbs, whom he did know.

Sidney (1859-1947) and Beatrice (1858-1943) Webb were English socialists, social reformers and busybodies. She was the daughter of an industrialist, he the son of a shopkeeper.

The catalogue of the Webbs’ public achievements is amazing. They were founding fathers of the Labour Party as well as of the Fabian Society, and they were not rank-and-file founding fathers either; they were George Washingtons. They were the founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Shaw, too, was all of these.

They were the authors of a long series of learned works in the field of social and economic history, all of which required laborious research. They worked like ants or bees. They told me once that, after their first half-dozen years of happy marriage and intellectual hard labour, they had decided that they needed a holiday, so they had gone for three weeks to Warrington [industrial town on the Mersey] and had spent the time working on the records there. They told this story against themselves because they knew that it was funny. They had the saving human gift of never taking themselves too seriously, while always being one hundred per cent. serious about their work.

Wells lampooned the Webbs (as the Baileys, “two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service”), and Fabians generally (he had been one himself in 1903-08), in The New Machiavelli (1911). Toynbee is kinder, but not uncritical. One could have called Toynbee’s politics humanely left-of-centre, but he did not fall for Stalin. The Webbs, like so many others, did. They were supporters of the Soviet Union until their deaths. And so did Shaw.

The Webbs, Shaw and Wells were early supporters of eugenics, which was an aberration of both left and right. In 1917 Shaw’s friend Chesterton published a book criticising the idea, Eugenics and Other Evils.

“We must persecute,” Shaw had written in the Preface to Saint Joan, “even to the death.”

How silly was Shaw (the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature and an Oscar, but, since Al Gore, not the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize and an Oscar)?

His sympathy for dictatorship, which he might have called government by benign strong men, grew in the ’20s and ’30s, as it did in so many of his contempoaries.

He visited Russia in 1932, met Stalin, and became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The Preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the State Political Directorate (OGPU). In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he dismissed stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and called reports of Russia’s exploited workers falsehoods. He wrote a defence of Stalin’s espousal of Lysenkoism in a letter to Labour Monthly.

We really need a comparative timeline showing who, Toynbee included, said what, and when, in England about communism, fascism, eugenics, race, war, the League of Nations, Jews and world government. I might try to create one. But people shifted their ground. Good people spoke in terms that shock us. A couple of antisemitic remarks do not make Wells a monster.

The background for all this is in John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, Faber, 1992, one of the indispensable short books about the twentieth century.

Shaw’s views on spelling, vaccination and life-forces seem silly now. So do some of his views on education, marriage, religion, government and medicine generally. Leaving money to fund the creation of a new phonemic alphabet (the foundation was never set up: the funds were insufficient) is silly. His teetotalism had something of the sandal-wearers about it. Bertrand Russell thought there was nothing at all to Shaw but vanity.

The marriage of an inherited Victorian seriousness with the (half-feared) modernists’ desire to shock and disconcert was fatal in lesser twentieth-century intellectuals and led to a foolish vehemence.

Toynbee:

One day Shaw announced to [the Webbs] that he was going to stand for election to the London County Council. The Webbs threw cold water on this idea; the technicalities of public administration were not, they told him, in his line; but Shaw would not be dissuaded. “I shall stand all the same,” he said, “and of course I shall be sending you a copy of my address to the electors.” (It was customary for candidates for election to the London County Council to distribute, in advance, an election address in print, as a substitute for house-to-house canvassing.) Shaw did stand, the polling-day arrived [in March 1904; this is pre-modernism], and Shaw was nowhere in the running. The Webbs found Shaw fuming. “I cannot understand”, he said, “why I failed to get elected. I had supposed that my election address had made my election certain. It ought to have. I took great trouble with it, and it is one of the best things I have written – don’t you agree?” – “But we haven’t seen it.” – “You must have. I sent you a copy as I promised. We must look through your files: yes, of course, here it is.” – “This pamphlet of yours? Yes, that came, and we enjoyed reading it, but we still haven’t seen your election address.” – “Not seen it? Why, that is it.” – “But, in this pamphlet you haven’t mentioned the election; you haven’t even mentioned the County Council itself. It certainly makes very good reading; but how could you expect the electors to gather from it that you were a candidate and that, in this pamphlet, you were canvassing them for their votes. No wonder you weren’t elected.” – “Well, I am disgusted. If the electors are so stupid that they couldn’t see that this was my election address without being told that in so many words, I am sorry that I stood and am glad that I didn’t get in.”

“An irresistible force in the theatre,” the back cover of old Penguin editions called him. He was that, quite obviously. There is a wonderful lyrical scene in Saint Joan, where the French wait for the wind to change on the Loire.

He could be humble. Responding to his friend Edward Elgar when opening a Shaw exhibition at the Malvern Public Library in 1929, he said: “I am seriously and genuinely humble in his presence. I recognise a greater art than mine and a greater man than I can ever hope to be.” It was Shaw who, shortly afterwards, badgered the BBC to commission Elgar’s third symphony. The sketches Elgar left when he died were thought indecipherable. Anthony Payne’s “elaboration” of them was first performed in 1998. We have Shaw, as well, to thank for it.

How well do most people know his work nowadays? How many of us have seen Mrs Warren’s Profession, Major Barbara or Heartbreak House? Memo to self: download one of these for a long flight.

Shaw being extremely silly in a Fox Movietone clip filmed on August 26 1928, on the occasion of his first visit to America. Or is this a rather lovable Irish charm? There is a reference to Mussolini.

More Fox Movietone, from a 1931 (presumably second) visit. (There is a further Movietone clip on YouTube which shows him at Malvern, perhaps on the occasion I referred to.)

Getting on board a Stinson Model T at San Francisco, c 1932, and a lecture on dictatorship

The kindly Irishman on the desirability of mass killing – but on class or economic, not racial, grounds. The date of the clip, shown in a documentary, is not clear. This is the way DH Lawrence spoke, but Lawrence, partly under the influence of his German wife, spoke from the right and more malevolently.

In his last full-length play, Buoyant Billions (1947), post-war, a character asks:

“Why appeal to the mob when ninety-five per cent of them do not understand politics, and can do nothing but mischief without leaders? And what sort of leaders do they vote for? For Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon with their Popish plots, for Hitlers who call on them to exterminate Jews, for Mussolinis who rally them to nationalist dreams of glory and empire in which all foreigners are enemies to be subjugated.”

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

The nineteenth century

On the first day of the nineteenth century, the legislative union of the kingdoms of Great Britain and of Ireland was completed, and the first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered in the Mediterranean night by Giuseppe Piazzi at the observatory at Palermo.

___

“The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather, did not stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house – damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the disease is at work.

“Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it. Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by the brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared; beards were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The chill which he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was left bare. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home – which had become extremely important – was completely altered.

“Outside the house – it was another effect of the damp – ivy grew in unparalleled profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. No garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus – for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork – sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando, A Biography, 1928.

___

Illustration by John Tenniel in Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871

Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative

“He was a man of less than middle height, with stiff brown hair en brosse, a little toothbrush moustache, and glasses through which his blue eyes, looking at you aggressively, were somewhat distorted. There was a defiant perkiness in his appearance which reminded you of the cock-sparrow, and as he asked you to sit down and inquired your business, meanwhile sorting the papers littered on his desk as though you had disturbed him in the midst of important affairs, you had the feeling that he was on the look out for an opportunity to put you in your place. He had cultivated the official manner to perfection. You were the public, an unavoidable nuisance, and the only justification for your existence was that you did what you were told without argument or delay. But even officials have their weakness and somehow it chanced that he found it very difficult to bring any business to an end without confiding his grievance to you. It appeared that people, missionaries especially, thought him supercilious and domineering. He assured you that he thought there was great deal of good in missionaries; it is true that many of them were ignorant and unreasonable, and he didn’t like their attitude; in his district most of them were Canadians, and personally he didn’t like Canadians; but as for saying that he put on airs of superiority (he fixed his pince-nez more firmly on his nose) it was monstrously untrue. On the contrary he went out of his way to help them, but it was only natural that he should help them in his way rather than in theirs. It was hard to listen to him without a smile, for in every word he said you felt how exasperating he must be to the unfortunate persons over whom he had control. His manner was deplorable. He had developed the gift of putting up your back to a degree which is very seldom met with. He was in short a vain, irritable, bumptious, and tiresome little man.

“During the revolution [the Boxer Rebellion], while a lot of firing was going on in the city between the rival factions, he had occasion to go to the Southern general on official business connected with the safety of his nationals, and on his way through the yamen [local official’s residence and office] he came across three prisoners being led out to execution. He stopped the officer in charge of the firing party and finding out what was about to happen vehemently protested. These were prisoners of war and it was barbarity to kill them. The officer – very rudely, in the consul’s words – told him that he must carry out his orders. The consul fired up. He wasn’t going to let a confounded Chinese officer talk to him in that way. An altercation ensued. The general informed of what was occurring sent out to ask the consul to come in to him, but the consul refused to move till the prisoners, three wretched coolies green with fear, were handed over to his safe-keeping. The officer waved him aside and ordered his firing squad to take aim. Then the consul – I can see him fixing his glasses on his nose and his hair bristling fiercely – then the consul stepped forwards between the levelled rifles and the three miserable men, and told the soldiers to shoot and be damned. There was hesitation and confusion. It was plain that the rebels did not want to shoot a British consul. I suppose there was a hurried consultation. The three prisoners were given over to him and in triumph the little man marched back to the consulate.

“‘Damn it, Sir,’ he said furiously, ‘I almost thought the blighters would have the confounded cheek to shoot me.’

“They are strange people the British. If their manners were as good as their courage is great they would merit the opinion they have of themselves.”

W Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, 1922.

Official session in a Chinese yamen, Guangzhou, before 1889 (Wikimedia Commons)

Spoilt children and whipping-boys

Toynbee remembered

the atmosphere of animosity against Islam and against the Turks in which I had grown up.

Gladstone on the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876:

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.”

Toynbee’s 1917 pamphlet The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks (too short to be shown in the bibliography here) was the descendant of Gladstone’s 1876 pamphlet Bulgarian Horror and the Question of the East.

During the First World War Toynbee had written anti-Turkish propaganda for the Foreign Office. In 1921, while Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine Language, Literature and History at King’s College, London, he had travelled to the Near East for the Manchester Guardian to report on the Greco-Turkish War. His new-found sympathy for the Turks cost him his professorship. See Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy, Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair, Routledge, 2004. We have seen that happen in our own time with wrongly-applied sympathy in Arab-Israeli matters.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922) rehearses certain ideas which are developed on a large scale in A Study of History. This book is, among other things, about Western foreign policy as a cultural distorting lens and about the effects of that inconsistent policy on people who are affected by it. This ambiguous passage, in a very complex book, seems to me to anticipate modern ideas about, inter alia, Orientalism and “objectification”. Toynbee’s “Western Question” is a deliberately ironic reversal of the “Eastern Question” of British foreign policy. The “Question” is dated to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74 and the beginning of Turkey’s status as the “sick man of Europe”. The phrase dates from the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, when much Western sentiment attached itself to the Greeks. The phrase “sick man of Europe” is, rightly or wrongly, attributed to Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55).

A working-man often makes allowances for an acquaintance who is a gentleman, and a gentleman for a working-man, which they would not either of them make readily for individuals of their respective species, or even for a shopkeeper. This well-known psychological fact has not been without benefit to the Turk. When a Westerner meets a Turk (whether it be an unsophisticated peasant or a Western-educated doctor, official or officer), he finds himself in contact with an individual who has traditions, standards, manners, and a soul of his own. Social relations with him are straightforward and full of interest. They possess all the charm and vividness of intercourse with a live human being, with a minimum of those moral commitments which ordinarily follow. The western traveller takes the same aesthetic enjoyment in his live Turk as in the fictitious personalities of a novel or a play, or as in the ghosts of a dead civilisation. The author, and every reader after him, of Paradise Lost can idealise and sympathise with Satan in the imaginary world of that poem, without having to feel the disapproval obligatory when much less serious offences are committed in this world by sons of Adam. Scholars, too, can take delight in the poetry of Aeschylus, the heroism of Leonidas, and all the glories of Ancient Hellenic civilisation, without being unduly distressed by the paederasty and infanticide which co-existed with them. In the same way, a Westerner who has once made friends with a Turk will shake hands with him again, next time he visits Turkey, without embarrassment, however red the hands of other Turks may have been stained, since his last visit, by massacre. Without his being aware of it, the conventional picture of the “blood-stained Turk,” with which he has been familiarised since infancy, has made him proof against being shocked by the reality. This feature in the personal relationship between Westerners and Turks, on its present footing, is as undesirable as that noted above in the case of Westerners and Greeks; but it has the same psychological origins, and neither feature will disappear until the “complex” of prejudice in Western minds has been removed.

It is imperative to remove it, for unwarrantable prejudice and unwarrantable indulgence do not in this case counterbalance one another. When you have made a spoilt-child of the Greek, it is no good rounding on him as an impostor; and when you have used the Turk as a whipping-boy, you do not heal the stripes that you have inflicted by congratulating him on his fortitude. Unnatural treatment is made doubly harmful by inconsistency in its application [...].

The shadow of the West

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

Sublimation

I’ve suddenly realised that my rather harsh comments last year on a series of BBC films by Michael Wood about India were a sublimation or transference of contempt for New Labour.

London c 1949

Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus.

By Chalmers Butterfield. Wikimedia Commons. Click to enlarge.

A thronging, amazing Paris

“In 1919, Paris was the capital of the world.” Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers, The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, John Murray, 2001.

In a moment, HG Wells’s Outline of History on Paris in 1919.

Wells, as an older contemporary of Toynbee, wanders into this blog occasionally. But why was the Outline, large parts of which were, as he admitted, cobbled together from the Encyclopædia Britannica, taken so seriously in its time?

It was published as a serial in soft covers in 1919, with colour plates and black-and-white photographs, and drawings and maps by JF Horrabin. The first hard cover book edition appeared in two volumes in 1920, reproducing or imitating the large-page format. The book one sees more often, which endured, was a monochrome single-volume blockbuster with no photographs, but with Horrabin’s drawings and maps.

Wells revised and updated the book more than once. After his death, Raymond Postgate and HG’s son GP Wells took the story up to 1963. The last print edition was in 1971.

What value does the Outline have now? None really, except as ’flu reading, though some passages, including those on Versailles, are vintage Wells (I have quoted another on Versailles here). It’s an otherwise intellectually unsatisfying work, a thousand times superseded. Some saw its limitations at the time, but nearly all agreed that it was a wonderful achievement.

Wells had prestige. There was a hunger for a “synoptic view of world affairs” after the war. But, as I have suggested, it impressed partly because the idea of a world history, strange as this now sounds, was new. There had been ancient and medieval precedents, and a few recent multi-volume syndicated encyclopædic efforts in a format which the original, serialised Outline itself partly followed, but nothing by a serious modern figure.

Soon, there were imitators. Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind was particularly popular. Spengler’s Decline of the West, very different, had appeared in Germany in 1918.

Edward Shanks’s review in The London Mercury is reprinted in Patrick Parrinder, editor, HG Wells, The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

Forster wrote at least three critical articles about it (they are reprinted in The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, André Deutsch, 1998).

Catholics objected. Chesterton wrote a book, The Everlasting Man, to refute its world view. “I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or civilization merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short, I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines.”

Belloc wrote A Companion to Mr Wells’s “Outline of History”. Wells replied with Mr Belloc Objects. Belloc replied with Mr Belloc Still Objects.

Toynbee referred to it in the Study.

Nehru’s Glimpses of World History (I mentioned it here) was a kind of Asian riposte to it. This is an enchanting book, even though, or because, written for a child, his daughter Indira (Gandhi). Somebody offered it in a Sunday newspaper list recently as among the unjustly forgotten books. I’ll second that. I’d rather have it on a desert island than the Wells. Its maps were done by Wells’s illustrator, JF Horrabin.

Virginia Woolf referred to it in Between the Acts.

There was more.

___

Wells on Versailles and Paris in 1919, mainly relying on a quotation:

“As the heads of the principal Governments implicitly claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race, and endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the people’s organs in the Press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson being excepted. … [Footnote: Dillon. And see his The Peace Conference, chapter iii, for instances of the amazing ignorance of various delegates.]

“The restriction upon our space in this Outline will not allow us to tell here how the Peace Conference shrank from a Council of Ten to a Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando), and how it became a conference less and less like a frank and open discussion of the future of mankind, and more and more like some old-fashioned diplomatic conspiracy. Great and wonderful had been the hopes that had gathered to Paris. ‘The Paris of the Conference,’ says Dr. Dillon, ‘ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow.

‘An Arabian Nights’ touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan (sic), Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz – men with patriarchal beards and scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand and Bokhara. Turbans and fezes, sugar-loaf hats and head-gear resembling episcopal mitres, old military uniforms devised for the embryonic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowywhite burnouses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in the city where the grimmest of realities were being faced and coped with.

‘Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise, and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia, India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal mines, pilgrims, fanatics and charlatans from all climes, priests of all religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes, field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up and pullers-down. All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast. Every day, in my walks, in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun, Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed  me that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek Republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were represented by my old friend Turkhan Pasha, on the one hand, and by my friend Essad Pasha on the other – the former desirous of Italy’s protection, the latter demanding complete independence. Chinamen, Japanese, Koreans, Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians, Mingrelians, Buryats, Malays, and Negroes and Negroids from Africa and America were among the tribes and tongues foregathered in Paris to watch the rebuilding of the political world system and to see where they “came in.” …’

“To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, came President Wilson, and found its gathering forces dominated by a personality narrower, in every way more limited and beyond comparison more forcible than himself: the French Premier, M. Clemenceau. At, the instance of President Wilson, M. Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference. ‘It was,’ said President Wilson, ‘a special tribute to the sufferings and sacrifices of France.’ And that, unhappily, sounded the keynote of the Conference, whose sole business should have been with the future of mankind.”

___

See Versailles 1919.

The “Council of Ten” contained the heads of government and foreign ministers of Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan.

The months of the conference were those of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, of the foundation of the Fascist party in Italy, of the Bavarian and Hungarian Socialist Republics, of the Amritsar massacre in India, of convulsions in Ireland, Egypt, eastern Europe and Russia, Turkey, Korea and China.

Arrival of jazz in France. In painting and a vein of classical music, the eve of a return to form and order.

Paris would remain the centre of the Western art world for another twenty years. Then its decline would be as steep as that of Vienna had been in music.

Parisian throngs not embroiled in war or revolution: La comédie humaine … Les enfants du paradis … La bohème, Act II, Louise, Act II …

William Orpen, The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, London, Imperial War Museum

The professional man

The National manufactory
Tolstoy and Tagore
The giraffe

“The West has been systematically petrifying her moral nature in order to lay a solid foundation for her gigantic abstractions of efficiency. She has all along been starving the life of the personal man into that of the professional” (Tagore, Sir R.: Nationalism (London 1917, Macmillan), p. 33).

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

The giraffe

The National manufactory
Tolstoy and Tagore

[...] Sir Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (London 1917, Macmillan), pp 35-6: “Man, with his mental and material power far outgrowing his moral strength, is like an exaggerated giraffe whose head has suddenly shot up miles away from the rest of him, making normal communication difficult to establish. This greedy head, with its huge dental organisation, has been munching all the topmost foliage of the World, but the nourishment is too late in reaching his digestive organs, and his heart is suffering from want of blood.”

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Tolstoy and Tagore

The National manufactory

Tolstoy has a story of a little boy who, on being taken for the first time in his life to see a military review, was drawn by curiosity to venture close up to the troops and then came running back to his mother crying, “Mummy! Mummy! What do you think I have found out? These soldiers were once men.” Such robots wear the same appearance in Hindu as in Russian eyes. “In the West the national machinery of commerce and politics turns out neatly compressed bales of humanity which have their use and high market value; but they are bound in iron hoops, labelled and separated off with scientific care and precision. Obviously God made Men to be human, but this modern product has such marvellous square-cut finish, savouring of gigantic manufacture, that the Creator will find it difficult to recognise it as a thing of spirit and a creature made in His own divine image.” – Tagore, Sir R.: Nationalism (London 1917, Macmillan), p. 6.

Can anyone identify the Tolstoy quotation?

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

The National manufactory

“The Nation has thriven long upon mutilated humanity. Men, the fairest creations of God, came out of the National manufactory in huge numbers as war-making and money-making puppets” (Tagore, Sir R.: Nationalism (London 1917, Macmillan), p. 44).

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Oliver’s Advice

“Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry” (Blacker, Valentine: Oliver’s Advice).

Valentine Blacker was born in Armagh in 1778 and died (and was buried) in Calcutta in 1826. He was a lieutenant colonel in the East India Company and later Surveyor General of India. He published a history of the Maharashtra War – the war with the Hindu Maratha Confederacy which resisted both Mughals and British – including discussion of the Battle of Khadki in 1817, where the Company destroyed the Confederacy; and a popular poem on military service, Oliver’s Advice, An Orange Balled, originally published under a pseudonym, “Fitz Stewart”.

As published in Irish Minstrelsy, Being a Selection of Irish Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads Original and Translated, Edited with Notes and Introduction by H Halliday Sparling, London, Walter Scott, 1877, Oliver’s Advice is prefaced by “[There is a well-authenticated anecdote of Cromwell. On a certain occasion, when his troops were about crossing a river to attack the enemy, he concluded an address, couched in the usual fanatic terms in use among them, with these words – ‘Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry.’]” In the adjusted form they become a refrain.

Did he write the poem before he sailed for India? His brother William was one of the original members of the Orange Order.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Outsourcing enjoyment

Thomas Derrick (1885-1954), a forgotten artist, drew for Punch between 1932 and 1948, though most of his hundred-plus Punch drawings are from the ’30s.

This pair of drawings, published on November 6 1933 in the Punch Almanack for 1934, is a very early satirical comment on television. There are captions on both drawings. The coruscating punchline is in the second.

He had nothing to do with broadcasting professionally, but the year after the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation (by Royal Charter), he published black and white illustrations for Eleanor Farjeon’s book of 26 poems, The ABC of the BBC, William Collins, 1928. Television timeline in a Comment below the drawings, and see copyright notice below this.

Alla marcia quasi andante

Marching as if walking. I’ve just invented this tempo marking. It has never been used, but should be applied to the quiet trio sections of Elgar or Walton marches.

“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Sir John Seeley, The Expansion of England, Macmillan, 1883.

And then there were three

British WWI veteran dies aged 108

Nearly every one of the volunteers in the picture will have been killed. Stone isn’t there.

Notice the three kinds of working-class hat in 1914: the flat cap, the boater and the bowler.

English translations of the Qur’an

The Koran has probably had as much effect as any other book that has yet been written. In this it rivals the Bible, the Confucian Classics, Homer and The Book of the Dead, not to speak of the Vedas. Moreover, one cannot yet foresee any term to the period of the Koran’s influence over the minds of a large contingent of the human race. Accordingly, it is important for all of us whose mother tongue is not Arabic to have translations of the Koran that reproduce for us, as faithfully as possible, the atmosphere, spirit, and meaning of the original.

Here is a list of English translations. Here is an article about translations of the Qur’an generally.

Dr. Arberry’s purpose in making his present translation into English has been – as be tells us in his preface – “to imitate, however imperfectly, those rhetorical and rhythmical patterns which are the glory and the sublimity of the Koran.” He has not imitated them mechanically. For instance, he has sought to reproduce the effect of the Arabic rhymes that punctuate the sub-divisions of many chapters of the Koran, not in English rhymes, but in short lines of free verse punctuating sequences of longer lines. He has also called attention to changes of mood and tempo in the original by making corresponding variations in his own rhythmical patterns.

Dr. Arberry modestly concurs in the orthodox Muslim view that the Koran is untranslatable. The present reviewer’s smattering of Arabic is just enough to allow him to obtain the impression that Dr. Arberry’s interpretation has been successful and has been very well worth while.

In his preface he leads up to the considerations that moved him to translate the Koran himself by way of a review of the earlier translations into Latin and English. He gives the reader the means of comparing these translations with each other and with his own by quoting the renderings, in each, of the passage describing the incident of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and the passage recounting Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary. He also quotes from the prefaces of some of the earlier translations, to show the spirit in which they were made. The Western translators who did their work before the “Enlightenment” at the end of the seventeenth century were ostentatiously hostile. The eighteenth-century translator Sale was fair but perhaps rather supercilious. Some of the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century translators have been preoccupied with the higher criticism and have arbitrarily changed the traditional order of the chapters, and, indeed, of fragments of the chapters, in accordance with what they believed to have been the chronological order of their original emission.

One of the twentieth-century English translators, Marmaduke Pickthall, was himself a convert to Islam, and approached the task of translation in the spirit of humility and reverence with which an adherent of any religion regards his own religion’s holy scripture. Dr. Arberry shows himself sympathetic to this approach. Like Pickthall, he preserves the traditional order of the chapters. His aim is to give, in English, as far as may be, the equivalent of the effect that the original Arabic has produced, through the ages, on the minds and hearts of believing Muslims. This makes sense, because it is the Koran in its traditional presentation that has moved the Islamic World and has thereby made history.

Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s may be the most widely-used version, alongside Pickthall’s.

The old Penguin translation by NJ Dawood is still in print, but has been criticised.

Robin Yassin-Kassab has a special liking for the translation by Muhammad Asad (1900-92), originally Leopold Weiss, a converted Polish Jew who studied in Vienna, lived in colonial Palestine and Pakistan, and became Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations.

There have been a dozen translations in the last ten years, including MAS Abdel Haleem, in the Oxford World’s Classics.

Review of Arthur J Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, two volumes, Allen & Unwin, 1955, in The Observer, Sunday April 8 1956

The siege of Gaza

Before I come back on January 6, Robin Yassin-Kassab on Gaza.

Two cruising Conors

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917-2008):

Times

Telegraph

Independent

Conor Cruise O’Brien was described as Ireland’s leading public intellectual. There is no equivalent in the UK. Among many things, he was a historian (Burke, Jefferson, Parnell). He was sometimes called the Cruiser, but one of his godfathers, named Conor O Brien (1880-1952, no Cruise and, according to his preference, no apostrophe), was a real yachtsman and, in 1914, a gunrunner. I can claim a family connection with the older Conor: he married my grandmother’s sister.

Here is what Conor Cruise O’Brien’s biographer Donald Harman Akenson has to say about Conor O Brien (he keeps the apostrophe):

“It was intended that Conor [Cruise O’Brien] should be christened Donal Conor Cruise O’Brien. Donal is a traditional O’Brien name. The ‘Conor’ was in honor [Canadian edition] of one of his two godfathers, Conor O’Brien, who was himself a grandson of William Smith O’Brien, one of the leaders of the 1848 uprising. As mentioned earlier, Conor O’Brien was a good friend of Francis [Conor Cruise O’Brien’s father] and they had worked out that they were some kind of blood relations (the exact details of which have been lost). Conor O’Brien was one of the Foynes O’Briens, who were also the Inchiquin O’Briens and the Monteagle O’Briens, very wealthy Protestant families. Conor O’Brien, like so many of Francis’s friends, was a man of character and also a Dublin character. He was a wonderful sailor and later wrote a brilliant book about his long-distance cruise from Dublin to Melbourne and back. [Endnote: Conor O’Brien, Across Three Oceans: A Colonial Voyage in the Yacht Saoirse (London, Edward Arnold, 1926).] In Dublin folklore, he was known for his patriotism (he had landed arms at Kilcoole in 1914) [I think Conor actually landed at Howth rather than Kilcoole] and for his vile and violent temper. He looked rather like a large member of the monkey family, which makes his most famous outburst appropriate: incensed by a visiting English journalist who referred to the simian appearance of the Irish people, he ambushed the man and horsewhipped him on the steps of one of Dublin’s most exclusive addresses, the Kildare Street Club.”

The landing of arms was part of Erskine Childers’s (and, indirectly, Roger Casement’s) operation to arm the Irish Volunteers. Conor’s boat then was the Kelpie.

What Akenson describes as a “long-distance cruise from Dublin to Melbourne and back” was, in fact, a voyage round the globe. In 1923-5 Conor became the first man to circumnavigate the world south of Cape Horn skippering his own yacht. The Saoirse (pronounced Sirshay) flew the new flag of the Irish Free State, though Conor, like Casement and Childers, not to mention Parnell, had belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy. He returned an Irish hero.

A couple of people are trying to write the life of Conor O Brien. I have done some research, but have now missed the chance to consult Conor Cruise O’Brien. I suppose the biographers spoke to him. A Shannon estuary sailor whom I was hoping to interview a couple of years ago, who remembered the older Conor, has probably now died.

Conor’s next yacht was the Ilen, which he built and delivered to the Falkland Islands in 1926-7, where it became the service vessel for the Falkland Islands Company. The Ilen was brought home to Ireland on a Russian cargo ship in 1997.

In 1928, he married my grandmother’s sister, Kitty Clausen, the English daughter of the painter Sir George Clausen. She softened him. They spent some years in the Mediterranean on the Saoirse, based in Ibiza, Iviza as they called it. He was a talented writer (sometimes overly technical) and wrote a book about this period, Voyage and Discovery (William Blackwood, 1933), one of his many books. Kitty did the illustrations. In 1936 she was taken ill and they had to sail home. She died (perhaps of leukaemia) soon after they landed in Cornwall. The Saoirse eventually passed into other hands and was destroyed in a hurricane in Jamaica in 1979.

Kitty was over forty when she married Conor. She had been engaged before, to Second Lieutenant Charles Geraint Christopher Payne of the Highland Light Infantry, previously of the Artists’ Rifles, killed in action at Neuve Chapelle on March 12 1915. Geraint was the maternal uncle of the writer Jan Morris, who recently sent me a fine photograph of a drawing Kitty had made of him in 1914.

See www.ilen.ie.

Two drawings by Kitty for Voyage and Discovery; the captions are You can see the Sierra Nevada (showing Conor) and Nightmares of houses (Algiers). Click to enlarge.

Bertrand Russell 2

Bertrand Russell

I’ve edited the last Russell post and added a comment. What did Toynbee think of Russell? He admired him. Between, say, 1946, when Somervell’s abridgement of the first six volumes of the Study came out, and 1954, when the last four volumes of the main part of the work were published, Toynbee was bracketed with Russell in the mass media with the super-eminent. Time magazine on November 3 1975, after Toynbee’s death: “He had become an international sage, like Einstein, Schweitzer or Bertrand Russell [...].”

After 1954, attacks on aspects of Toynbee’s work started to undermine his reputation. Schweitzer’s reputation also declined.

Toynbee was a very different man from Russell. The Greco-Roman world was the centre of his world. Russell tells us in the interview shown in the last post that the classics didn’t interest him when he was growing up. Mathematics were his world. Nor were classics his main interest later in life. Toynbee admitted with regret, for example in passages in the twelfth volume of the Study (1961) and in Experiences (1969), that he knew little of mathematics or science.

Russell came from a Whig family which had “participated in every great political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-40 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688-89 to the Great Reform Act in 1832” (Wikipedia).

Toynbee’s paternal great grandfather George had been a Lincolnshire farmer. His grandfather Joseph (1815-66) had been a doctor in London, the first ear, nose and throat specialist. Joseph’s son Arnold (1852-83) was an economic historian and social reformer, after whom Toynbee Hall was named in east London. Another son, Paget (1855-1932), was a Dante scholar and editor of the letters of Horace Walpole. The historian’s father, Harry Valpy Toynbee (1861-1941), was a minor philanthropist; his mother, Edith, the main early influence on him, came from a Birmingham industrial family which had fallen on hard times. Arnold Toynbee inherited something of his uncle’s and father’s seriousness and philanthropic temperament. He passed it on to his son Philip Toynbee (1916-81), writer, ’30 communist, later religiously-leaning, and tormented son of a too-busy father. Philip passed it on to his daughter Polly, who now writes in The Guardian. Perhaps one can see the faintest trace of social deference in Toynbee’s article on Russell below.

But Toynbee and Russell had a central experience in common: the First World War, though neither fought in it. Russell was too old; Toynbee did office-bound war work. The war turned Russell into an activist and campaigner in ways shown in the last post and changed Toynbee’s view of humanity and history in ways I have described. For example, here.

Their alarm at the fact of the atomic bomb was an echo of their response to the first war, but Russell was an activist, Toynbee was not.

Toynbee had a strong sense of the numinous, Russell little. Russell’s views on social and sexual matters were more liberal than Toynbee’s.

A friend of mine who has occasionally commented here has a rather low opinion of Russell. I’ve referred to his view in a comment underneath a post called Hellenistic philosophy and saddened Whigs. He considers him a narrow philosopher, though a considerable logician (On Denoting) and mathematician. His empiricism had a certain smugness in it. He thinks there are better histories of western philosophy than his History. You need wider historical sympathies, which Toynbee at least had, if you are going to attempt something as big as that. It’s full of a Whiggish “we’re done with all that”. He has reservations about Toynbee, too, and would not class him as a philosopher at all (and has a particular intellectual disdain for the phrase “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest” in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto!).

Russell did little important philosophy after the First World War. Many of his later books are popularisations (The ABC of Relativity, Why I Am Not a Christian, The Conquest of Happiness). His Nobel Prize in 1950 was for Literature – for his History of Western Philosophy (1945). The sub-title of that work is And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day.

Toynbee did not know Russell well, though they were related by Toynbee’s first marriage. There is no mention of Russell in Acquaintances (1967). When he came to write the follow-up volume, Experiences (1969), I am sure that he had been stirred by the first volume of Russell’s Autobiography, which had appeared in 1967, whose prologue I quoted in the last post. Russell was perhaps even a stimulus for that book. It mentions him admiringly. I have quoted a letter by Toynbee from 1961 expressing admiration of Russell. There is one other reference to Russell in the same collection.

The article by Toynbee I’m about to show is online in a couple of places. The source is not stated, but it was clearly his piece in The Sunday Telegraph of February 8 1970 A Man Who Stood His Ground. I show it as it is online, including dots: I haven’t seen the original.

Russell’s autobiography does not refer to Toynbee, except in printing a letter which Toynbee had written to him from Stanford in California on May 9 1967 on the occasion of Russell’s 95th birthday (May 18). There is some material relating to Toynbee in Russell’s published letters, which I have not yet consulted.

Morton’s bibliography of Toynbee mentions an article by Russell in The Sunday Times, February 15 1953, Where I disagree with Mr Toynbee. That, I presume, was a response to Toynbee’s Gifford Lectures, which were printed as An Historian’s Approach to Religion in 1954.

I met Bertrand Russell first a few weeks after he had come out of prison towards the end of the First World War. What he said then made an impression on me that has been life-long. In 1914 anyone in this country who was already grown-up had felt that the bottom had suddenly fallen out of his world. But it was not till I met and talked with Russell … that I began to realise the full measure of the catastrophe.

When I met Russell in 1918 he was manifestly suffering from severe shock, and this was awe-inspiring in itself. I had known of him as a man who was “on top of the world” in every way. He was an aristocrat, a master mind, and a masterful personality. Aristocrats expect to have licence to say and do what they choose; first-rate intellects expect to carry conviction when they are telling plain truths; strong characters expect to win adherents. For Russell during the first war all these reasonable expectations had been harshly disappointed, so, for him, the shock of 1914 had been multiple. His shock had been both public and personal. His reaction to 1914 had been to jump … into the arena with intent to part the combatants. One man against warring herds of tribesmen with their blood up. I doubt whether even Russell would have dared if he had not been armed with an aristocrat’s self-confidence to reinforce his own intrepid nature. And now, in 1918, he was being execrated as “the enemy of the people” … The shock from which Russell was suffering in 1918 was natural enough. What was amazing and magnificent was his resilience and his persistence. A lesser man who had brought on himself Russell’s experience in 1914-1918 might then have quit – especially, if he had, as Russell did have, a golden bridge to retreat over.

Russell, discharged from gaol, could have withdrawn into an ivory tower … By 1914 he was already world-famous … If he had died in February 1914, instead of February 1970, he would still have been famous today. His intellectual work during the first 13 years of this century … is, I imagine, unsurpassed … But if he had died before August 1914, he would have been famous for this one thing only, and the number of people who could have appreciated what he had done would have been far smaller; for his pre-1914 work was esoteric. However, after finishing the first of his two terms of imprisonment for trying to save mankind from itself Russell, being Russell, had not had enough. Nature gave him from 1918 to 1970, and he used those last 52 years as he had used the previous four. He never, of course, ceased to work on at philosophy, but he also never ceased from mental strife in William Blake’s meaning of those words.

Russell’s spirit was never daunted by hostility, and it was also never damped by ridicule, which is harder than hostility to bear up against. The zest for life with which Nature endowed him, and the self-confidence … led him back into the ring again and again … But the motive that kept him going more than any other was … his concern for his fellow men – not just his contemporaries, but all future generations. Powerful minds take long views, and Russell’s mind saw the vista of the broad way that leads to destruction. This trenchant intellect was mated with a compassionate heart … He cared intensely about what was going to happen after his long life was over – as intensely as if he had been a believer in personal immortality and had expected to see, as a disembodied spirit, the denouement of the drama of human life on this planet. Russell’s mind was not only trenchant; it was also satirical and provocative. The impulse to annoy, combined with a generous passion to make all things new, is a well-known mark of youth, and in this sense Russell remained youthful to the end. His insatiable relish for getting into trouble kept him always young in spirit. After a 43 years’ interval he found himself in prison … again; but this time the authorities had their hearts in their mouths. By now he was getting on for 90, and he was already a formidable world-power.

If he had died in prison, his posthumous potency as a martyr would have been stupendous. So, this time the authorities nursed him solicitously and discharged him with despatch … Since 1914 mankind has been in one of those recurrent moods in which it is bent on going to hell, and since 1945 we have possessed the means of instant conveyance. In this mood human beings are infuriated by a fellow creature who does strive officiously to keep the human race alive in spite of being told that he need not. What business has one man to stay sane when the fashion is to be mad? The intervention is the more exasperating if the self-appointed saviour tries to goad us into facing up to our folly by sticking pins deftly into our tenderest spots. Did Russell defeat his own purposes by pursuing them so provocatively? On a short view, in some cases, perhaps yes; but on Russell’s own long view, no. This has been proved already by the unanimity of the tribute that has been paid to Russell at his death. He is remembered as the man who dared to take his stand across the path of the Gadarene swine with the audacious intention to stem their headlong rush – the man who held his ground when the bedevilled herd threatened to trample him underfoot.

Down to the end of his long and indefatigable career, Russell did not know whether the reasonableness that he strove for was going to prevail. We who have survived him are still an enigma to ourselves. But at least we have recognised that, if we do decide to commit mass-suicide, our blood will not be on Russell’s head … Russell did his utmost to save us from ourselves, and this is why we are honouring him … We still have that much sanity, and therefore that much hope.

Bertrand Russell

Voices

Russell interviewed by John Freeman, Face to Face, BBC Television, March 4 1959.

Introduction (later) by Joan Bakewell. (More text below.)

Russell’s parents died when he was an infant. His father, the 2nd Earl, was an atheist and consented to his wife’s affair with their children’s tutor. Both his parents were early advocates of birth control. At the age of three he was put in the charge of his grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His paternal grandfather, John Russell, the 1st Earl Russell, was the Whig prime minister from 1846, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, to ’52 and in 1855-’56.

His maternal grandfather was Edward Stanley, 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley. Stanley’s daughter Rosalind married George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. Their daughter Mary married the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, and their daughter was the first wife of Arnold Toynbee.

One Sunday morning (I’m told), when I was a young boy, and at about the time of this interview, my parents pointed out to me, as he walked on the edge of Richmond Green, a “very famous person”.

A few feet away was a godson of John Stuart Mill and a man whose grandfather, the prime minister, had visited Napoleon on Elba and whose maternal grandmother had been a friend of the widow of the Young Pretender.

___

Russell was an English founder of analytic philosophy, a method (we’re told) characterised by emphasis on clarity and argument achieved via modern formal logic, analysis of language, and a respect for the natural sciences. It shared the positivist view that there are no philosophical truths which stand outside science and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. You get a sense of his mind from this interview.

The Wikipedia article divides his thought under the headings of Analytic philosophy, Logic and philosophy of mathematics, Philosophy of language, Logical atomism, Epistemology, Philosophy of science, Ethics, and Religion and theology. His best-known work is Principia Mathematica (1910-13), which had been preceded by The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He was sceptical of most religious beliefs.

During the First World War Russell was a pacifist, though he was too old to be called to fight. In 1916 he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act. For this, he became, in his words here, “as isolated as Milton after the Restoration”. A later conviction resulted in six months’ imprisonment in Brixton prison, from which he was released in September 1918. In September 1961 he was imprisoned for a week for inciting civil disobedience, when he took part in a Ban-the-Bomb demonstration at the Ministry of Defence.

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This interview is from Face to Face, a series of BBC television interviews, shown between 1959 and 1962, with the great or eminent in the last moments of high culture’s “eminence”. But not only the eminent, defined in the old way: Adam Faith, a pop star, was interviewed. So was Hastings Banda. The list is here. It includes Jung and (Otto) Klemperer. And, famously, Evelyn Waugh.

The ’60s may have changed things, but there had been a previous assault on “eminences”: when the ramparts of academic art were broken by modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The camera fixed its subject obsessively, only very occasionally changing its angle. This came close at times to Freudian analysis. The interviewer was in shadow. He was John Freeman, a right-of-left Labour politician and ambassador to Washington from 1969 to ’71, who is still alive. Freeman spoke in an old style, as the educated to the educated. See my posts on the BBC Reith Lectures, the first of which was given by Russell. But, as I have said, the series straddled the pre-pop world and the world of the ’60s.

Its opening sequence – the music from Berlioz’s overture Les francs-juges, the drawings by an establishment figure of the time, Feliks Topolski – has itself become a modern cultural icon. Face to Face was revived on the BBC, less memorably and no longer with Freeman, between 1989 and ’98. The Bakewell introduction here may have come from then. Russell’s sense of fun, to which she refers, may have been more developed than his sense of humour.

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Several passages in this interview strike me in particular. Of course, his remarks about the First World War in the second sequence. Then two passages in the third and final sequence:

“Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm.”

And one which leads us into very deep waters, seldom navigated:

“The world [in the nineteenth century] was much more beautiful to look at than it is now. Every time that I go back to a place that I knew long ago, I think: ‘Oh, how sad it is, this place used to be beautiful and now it’s hideous, and one thing after another, one piece of beauty after another, is destroyed.’”

Russell tells us here that his autobiography would be published after his death. In fact, it was published before, in three volumes, in 1967, ’68 and ’69. He died in 1970, aged 97.

It contains a prologue, which I have taken here from a web source. I do not have the books in front of me.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

“With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

British law and Sharia

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/world/europe/19shariah.html

Stony ground: Roman law and Sharia

Intellectual property

I’ve initiated a discussion with OUP about the use of Toynbee material here. A friend who understands the issues concludes his advice with: “It seems to me OUP should love TC if you provide links to their books.” That may turn out to be the answer.

The first real copyright act in Britain was the Statute of Anne in 1709. It vested rights with authors. Previously they had been vested with printers.

A book to commission

“There are books about Britain written by foreigners who speak English as a first language and who share most of Britain’s cultural assumptions. But what the travel writing market needs – and what I would most definitely commission if I were a publisher – is accounts of Britain written by people entirely wrapped up in the perspectives of their African or Asian villages, people who would find ordering a meal in English a challenge.”

Robin Yassin-Kassab should get on the board of Saqi Books and commission it or write it himself. Ben Okri, the English Paulo Coelho, dishes up Africa for Islington, but will never tell these stories.

A vein of ruthlessness

This is related to a post called Scotland – Ulster – Appalachia. There, Toynbee argued that the migration of Scots to Ulster from the Scottish side of the border between Scotland and England and along the Lowland fringe of “the Highland Line” – a process of colonial “plantation” encouraged by James I/VI and his successors – had a stimulating effect on the migrants, whereas the subsequent migrations of Ulster Scots (of whom John McCain is a descendant) to Appalachia had a regressive effect on them and turned them into the barbaric “Indian fighters” of the North American backwoods.

The “Highland Line” separated the partially-anglicised Lowlands from the Highlands to the north, where Gaelic speech and customs were preserved for longer, until the “clearances” of the eighteenth century. The cultural distinction was first noted towards the end of the fourteenth century, more than two centuries before the union of the two kingdoms. The “Line” was within Scotland or was the northern border of a no-man’s-land. Scotland and England had the same king from 1603, with the accession of James VI of Scotland and I of England; the formal Act of Union in 1707 created Great Britain.

In the passage that follows, The Historical Antecedents of the Vein of Ruthlessness in the Modern English Method of Overseas Settlement, Toynbee argues that the cultural wars between Anglo-Saxons and Celts/Romano-Britons which started in southern England early in the fifth century went on for centuries and became an Anglo-Saxon habit, which the English and anglicised migrants to America continued in their wars against native Americans.

The Celts were exterminated in England and a war of attrition continued along the Celtic fringe. But is “extermination” the right word or are we in England dealing more with a successful cultural assimilation? Toynbee almost addresses this point in a footnote, but many questions are begged. Where does the consensus stand on this?

Ireland was “conquered” in 1171 under Henry II; the part of Ireland that was controlled de facto by the English thereafter was called the Pale; the Kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain were formally merged in 1801; except for Ulster, Ireland gained independence in 1922. Wales was “conquered” in 1282-3 under Edward I; thereafter, the Prince of Wales was the English heir-apparent. Cornwall had been absorbed into England by the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), but resistance continued for centuries afterwards.

The wholesale extermination of the previously established population, which has distinguished our English method of overseas settlement from the method of overseas settlement practised by most other West-European peoples in modern times, is a trait which likewise distinguished the settlement of the English on the territories of the Roman Empire from the settlement of the other Barbarians during the interregnum which followed the break-up of the Empire and the dissolution of the Hellenic Society. In that Völkerwanderung, most of the Barbarian war-bands from beyond the former frontiers simply stepped into the shoes of the former Roman soldiers and officials – taking their places in ruling and exploiting the provincials, in the same fashion as in the New World, a dozen centuries later, the Spanish conquistadores took the place of the Aztecs and the Incas. The English war-bands alone more or less exterminated the local provincials in the provinces which they overran, and re-populated the country themselves, [footnote: The results of recent research tend, on the whole, to diminish the blackness of the original picture; yet the replacement, in Britain, of the conquered people’s language by that of the conquerors, in contrast to the survival of the Latin vernaculars on the Continent, is a hard fact which tells a tale.] instead of being content to rule and exploit the population which they found there, just as, a dozen centuries later, it was the English settlers alone who exterminated the population which they found in the New World. Thus, on two occasions, many centuries apart, the English have distinguished themselves from their fellows and contemporaries by a peculiar ruthlessness in their treatment of an alien population which they have conquered.

Is this repeated appearance in the same distinctive role no more than a coincidence, or were these two bouts of English ruthlessness historically connected, notwithstanding the long interval of time by which they are separated chronologically? Was there some tradition of ruthlessness towards “Natives” which may have been driven under the surface or into a corner without ever quite dying out of English life? Conceivably there was; for we may observe that, at the time when the English began to settle in North America, their settlement of the British Isles was still incomplete. The movement which had turned the greater part of the ci-devant Roman island of Britain into English soil during the Völkerwanderung in the post-Hellenic interregnum had slowed down before the previous population had been exterminated in every corner of the island; and the struggle for existence between invaders and invaded had become transformed into a border warfare which was conducted with all the old ferocity but without the old decisiveness in its results. Thus the tradition of the first English settlers in Roman Britain was kept alive in the English Marches on the fringe of Wales and along the line which divided the Lowlands from the Highlands of Scotland; and this ferocious frontier spirit afterwards asserted itself along the border between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland (though here the frontiersmen on both sides came of the same English stock) and also along the line of the Irish Pale.

In the seventeenth century of our era, the Governments of England and Scotland under all régimes – in the reign of James I and under the protectorate of Cromwell – were as active in “planting” Ireland and the Hebrides with settlers from England and the Lowlands of Scotland as they were in “planting” the Atlantic sea-board of North America; and on both frontiers the attitude towards the “Natives” – whether “Wild Highlanders” or “Wild Irish” or “Red Indians” – was the same. The “Natives” were to be uprooted, in order that the settlers of English stock, from England and the Scottish Lowlands, might be planted in their stead. Thus, for a century or more, the border warfare which had never ceased in the British Isles since the time of the Völkerwanderung was going on in the British Isles and in North America contemporaneously. In the British Isles, this border warfare was brought to an end, during the half century between the Battle of the Boyne [1690, Ireland] and the Battle of Culloden [1746, Scotland; “clearances” having been an eighteenth-century term for ethnic cleansing], by the complete union [1707] of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland and the complete subjugation of the Scottish Highlanders [1740s] and the “Wild Irish” to the authority of the United Kingdom. Therewith, the frontiersmen found their occupation gone, and their craft at a discount, on all the extinct frontiers – in Ulster and on the Border and along “the Highland Line” – and many of them emigrated to the Indian frontier of the North American plantations, where, in following their habitual pursuits, they would still be looked upon as performing a public service rather than as leading a life of lawlessness and crime.

These were the ancestors of the “Indian-fighters” who, in less than a century, carried the frontier of the United States from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific coast, exterminating the Indians as they advanced. It has been remarked that these English-speaking Protestant frontiersmen became assimilated to their Indian foes and victims – in dress, in habits, and above all in ferocity – and that, as soon as they had completed the extermination of the Indians, they died out themselves (except in the fastnesses of the Appalachians, where their descendants are living the old life to this day). An assimilation between the Indian-fighters and the Indians certainly did take place, as usually happens on barbarian frontiers of this kind. At the same time, it may not be fanciful to suggest that, in this instance, the assimilation was facilitated by the fact that the English-speaking Protestant frontiersmen in the New WorId had brought with them a ruthless tradition of their own which had been handed down unmitigated from an age when their forefathers had been no better than Red Indians themselves.

The River Severn was a border between England and Wales.

When Severn down to Buildwas ran
Coloured with the death of man,
Couched upon her brother’s grave
The Saxon got me on the slave.

The sound of fight is silent long
That began the ancient wrong;
Long the voice of tears is still
That wept of old the endless ill.

In my heart it has not died,
The war that sleeps on Severn side;
They cease not fighting, east and west,
On the marches of my breast.

[Footnote: Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad. For the assimilation of Indian-fighters to Indians, see Turner, F. J.: The Frontier in American History (New York 1921, Holt), especialIy the eloquent passage on p. 4; for the historical connexion between the old English frontiers in the British Isles and the new English frontier in North America during the seventeenth century, see Macleod, W. C.: The American Indian Frontier (London 1928, Kegan Paul), ch. xiii: “Celt and Indian: Britain’s Old World Frontier in Relation to the New”, especialIy the evidence, cited on pp. 153-4 and 168-9, which shows that some of the seventeenth-century “Indian-fighters” on the American frontier had been first apprenticed in the British Isles by fighting the Scottish Highlanders and “the Wild Irish”, and the evidence, cited on p. 161, for James VI/I’s policy of extermination in the Scottish Highlands. [...] ]

That passage is one of the Study’s “Annexes” (you might think an Annex to Vol II, D VII; actually it’s to Vol I, C II (a) 1 ).

Elsewhere, Toynbee makes a further leap. The “frontier spirit” mentality, which America had inherited from England, was later taken by the Americans to places such as Vietnam.

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934

The Severn

Slingsby Moor

The more southerly of the two round barrows [burial-mounds] on Slingsby Moor [North Yorkshire], on which I often used to lie on summer afternoons in the nineteen-thirties while I was writing Parts I-V of this Study, served as a physical receiving-station for catching still unspent reverberations of waves of psychic events that had been breaking on this fringe of the Oikoumenê since the unrecorded time at which this barrow had been heaped over the ashes of the unknown man [do we know that he was cremated?: Beowulf was] whose presence was still brooding here in my day. When my dog Tilda and I were lying side by side on the barrow’s pelt of heather, she used to prick up her woolly ears as she heard the rabbits stirring beneath us in their burrows, while my own sixth sense used to tingle with the inaudible music of “the horns of elfland faintly blowing” [Tennyson, already quoted here].

A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954 (Acknowledgements and thanks)

Cities in a recesssion

I hope “socialised” European cities learn this from New York.

Michael Bloomberg, NBC, Meet the Press, September 21:

“MR. BROKAW: I moved to New York in the 1970s. The city was on its backside at that time. Real estate prices were depressed [...]. Central Park was a mess, the infrastructure was in desperate need of a lot of work. Are you going to go crashing back into the 1970s in New York as a result of what’s happening on Wall Street?

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: No, we’re not going to make the mistake – the mistake that was made in the ’70s is we stopped policing the streets, we stopped cleaning the streets, we stopped cleaning the graffiti off buildings, we stopped supporting our cultural institutions and building parks and schools and all those kinds of things. We are going to go ahead and continue those things. We may have to stretch out some construction projects, we may have to ask people to do more with less. We may not be able to have the frills at the edge, but we are not going to walk away from our city. That’s the prescription for disaster. When you do that, your tax base leaves, and the rest of this country, as well as New York, are going to have exactly the same decisions to make. The taxpayers are going to have to decide do they want to have a future or not? If they don’t want to have a future, then they’re not going to have to pay as much now, but if they want to leave a better world for their kids, they’re going to have to pay the bills up front.”

Scotland – Ulster – Appalachia

Anatol Lieven, Prospect, August 2008: “Both sides of McCain’s family come from the old Confederate southwest: his father’s side from Missouri, his mother’s from Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma. McCain’s great-great-grandfather, William Alexander ‘Fighting Bill’ McCain, was a Confederate soldier. His paternal family took the classic Scots-Irish route in the 18th century, from Scotland, down from Virginia through the Carolinas to the old frontier in the Appalachians and beyond. [...]

“The American Scots-Irish are the descendants of the Scottish Protestants settled in 17th-century Ulster by the Stuart kings, a process that involved the ethnic cleansing of much of the native Irish Catholic population. In the 18th century, those of the Scots-Irish who moved on to the western frontier of Britain’s colonies in North America took with them a prior experience of frontier fighting and a fundamentalist identification of their cause with God. [...]

“The first defining character of the frontier was of course conflict with Native Americans, in which both sides committed appalling atrocities. This has bred in sections of the American tradition a capacity for ruthlessness and a taste for unqualified victory. The second was constant expansionism, often pushed for by the white frontier populations against the wishes of Washington administrations.

“The frontier also helped keep alive a cult of personal weaponry associated with a certain kind of egalitarianism and belief in every man’s right to defend his honour – a classic theme of Hollywood westerns, but one with real roots in the southern and frontier traditions.

“One of my favourite stories of upper-class southern violence in the 19th century comes from the family history of William Faulkner (an old Ulster Protestant name; Faulkner added the ‘u’) – a history which renders the lurid subject matter of some of his novels more comprehensible. In 1848, Faulkner’s great-grandfather William C Falkner stabbed and killed a friend of his, another Mississippi gentleman, in an election dispute – one of several killings in the course of his life. The unusual aspect of this otherwise commonplace occurrence was that the election in question was to the local chapter of the Sons of Temperance.

“As someone remarked of Appalachian society in the 1890s, ‘It has been found impossible to convict men of murder … provided the jury is convinced that the assailant’s honor was aggrieved and that he gave his adversary notice of his intention to assail him.’ John Shelton Reed has described this as a tradition of ‘lawful violence’: a socially sanctioned response to certain actions that observes codes and limits. This is related to the idea of the community right to administer ‘justice’ when the state is unwilling or unable to follow the popular will. Lynching is most associated with the terrorization of blacks in the south in the century after the civil war, but the practice on the frontier was much older, and was usually deployed against deviant whites (as well as Native Americans).”

The passage I’m about to quote shows Toynbee, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, unabashed in making a distinction between civilised and barbarous societies. And there is residual racial thinking here and some old-fashioned racial nonsense (the Ainu as “white”). But this was published in 1934, and written earlier.

At the present day, there is a notorious contrast between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. While Southern Ireland is a rather old-fashioned agricultural country, Ulster is one of the busiest workshops in the modern Western World. The city of Belfast ranks in the same company as Glasgow or Newcastle or Hamburg or Detroit; and the modern Ulsterman has as great a reputation for being efficient as he has for being unaccommodating.

In response to what challenge has the Ulsterman made himself what he now is? He has responded to the dual challenge of migrating to Ulster across the sea from Scotland and contending, after his arrival in Ulster, with the native Irish inhabitants whom he found in possession and proceeded to dispossess. This twofold ordeal has had a stimulating effect which may be measured by comparing the power and wealth of Ulster at the present day with the relatively modest circumstances of those districts on the Scottish side of the border between Scotland and England and along the Lowland fringe of “the Highland Line” from which the original Scottish settlers in Ulster were recruited some three centuries ago by King James I/VI. [The Plantation of Ulster was one of several efforts to create permanent Protestant colonial settlements in Ireland. Cromwell gave it new momentum a few decades later. It wasn’t so different from the West Bank and Gaza.] The comparison reveals that, in the course of the intervening centuries, the dual challenge presented by Ulster has administered a noteworthy stimulus to those descendants of the original Scottish settlers who have remained on the Irish soil on which King James once planted their ancestors.

The modern Ulstermen, however, are not the only living representatives of this stock; for the migratory habit, once acquired, is apt to persist; and the Scottish pioneers who migrated to Ulster in the seventeenth century begot “Scotch-Irish” children and grandchildren who re-emigrated in the eighteenth century from Ulster to North America. At the present day, the twice-transplanted offspring of these “Scotch-Irish” emigrants to the New World survive, far away from their kinsmen in Ireland and their kinsmen in Scotland, in the fastnesses of the Appalachian Mountains: a highland zone which runs through half a dozen states of the North American Union from Pennsylvania to Georgia.

What has been the effect of this second transplantation upon the Scotch-Irish stock? In the seventeenth century King James’s colonists crossed the sea from Scotland to Ulster and took to fighting “the Wild Irish” instead of “the Wild Highlanders”. In the eighteenth century, their grandchildren crossed the sea again to become “Indian fighters” in the North American backwoods. Obviously this American challenge has been more formidable than the Irish challenge, and this in both its aspects. In the human sphere, the “Red Indian” heathen was of course a more savage adversary than the “Wild Irish” Catholic (however wilfully the difference may have been ignored by the Scotch-Irish frontiersman in his Protestant fanaticism). In the physical sphere, the Appalachian Mountains are wilder in scenery and vaster in scale than any landscape in Scotland or in Ulster, with the consequence that the Scotch-Irish immigrants who have forced their way into these natural fastnesses have come to be isolated and segregated here from the rest of the World to a much greater extent than their ancestors ever were, or than their cousins ever have been, in their Irish and Scottish habitats. In terms of the total environment, the severity of the challenge has been enhanced in the transition from Ulster to Appalachia to such a degree that “the law of diminishing returns” has come into operation with unmistakable force.

If the modern citizen of industrial Belfast has in some respects outstripped his Scottish cousin who has never migrated from the rural neighbourhoods of “the Highland Line” and the English Border, he has certainly not been outstripped in his turn by his American cousin who has migrated for the second time from Ulster to the Appalachian fastnesses. On the contrary, the stimulus which was once administered by the migration from Scotland to Ireland, so far from being reinforced by the subsequent migration from Ireland to America, has been more than counteracted – as we shall find if we now compare the Ulsterman and the Appalachian as they each are to-day, some two centuries since the date when they parted company.

Let us compare them, for example, on the point of their respective proneness to bloodshed: a point on which Ulster has by no means a good record. The old war to the knife between intrusive Protestants and indigenous Catholics is still carried on by gunmen from the windows of Belfast; and at this day the toll of political murders is heavier in the capital of Ulster than in any other great city of Western Europe. [Footnote: These lines were written before the National-Socialist Revolution in Germany at the beginnnig of the year 1933.] Yet even in Ulster, where this political bloodshed still persists, there is no longer any survival of the family blood-feud which has remained one of the regular social institutions of “the Mountain People” of Appalachia. The Ulsterman, again, is unlikely to forget the sea, considering that one of his principal industries is shipbuilding, whereas the Appalachian, whose ancestors actually crossed the Atlantic five or six generations ago, has lost touch with the sea so completely that he no longer attaches any clear meaning to the word itself – which is preserved in his vocabulary solely through its occurrence in his folk-songs. In the third place, the Ulsterman has retained the traditional Protestant standard of education, whereas the Appalachian has relapsed into illiteracy and into all the superstitions for which illiteracy opens the door. His agricultural calendar is governed by the phases of the Moon; his personal life is darkened by the fear, and by the practice, of witchcraft. He lives in poverty and squalor and ill-health. In particular, he is a victim of Hook-Worm: a scourge which lowers the general level of vitality in Appalachia just as it does in India and for just the same reason. (The children persist in going about barefoot, and their parents either cannot afford to give them shoes, or will not take the trouble to insist upon their wearing them, or are too ignorant to be aware that Hook-Worm gains entry into human bodies through sores in naked soles.)

In fact, the Appalachian “Mountain People” at this day are no better than barbarians. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarians of the Old World: the Rīfīs and Kabyles and Tuareg [all Berbers; we met the Rīfīs in rebellion again Spain], the Albanians and Caucasians, the Kurds and the Pathans and the Hairy Ainu. These White barbarians of America, however, differ in one respect from those of Europe and Asia. The latter are simply the rare and belated survivals of an ancient barbarism which has now passed away all around them; and it is evident that their days, too, are numbered. Through one or other of several alternative processes – extermination or subjection or assimilation – these last lingering survivals will assuredly disappear within the next few generations, as other survivals of White barbarism have disappeared in other parts of the Old World at earlier dates: in the Scottish Highlands in the eighteenth century and in Lithuania in the fourteenth. It is possible, of course, that barbarism will disappear in Appalachia likewise. Indeed, the process of assimilation is already at work among a considerable number of Appalachians who have descended from their mountains and changed their way of life in order to earn wages in the North Carolinian cotton-mills. In this case, however, there is no corresponding assurance; for the White barbarism of the New World differs from that of the Old World in being not a survival but a reversion.

The “Mountain People” of Appalachia are ci-devant heirs of the Western Civilization who have relapsed into barbarism under the depressing effect of a challenge which has been inordinately severe; and their neo-barbarism is derived from two sources. In part, they have taken the impress of the local Red Indians whom they have exterminated. [Footnote: “The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the mocassin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and the Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war-cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.” (Turner, F.J.: The Frontier in American History (New York 1921, Holt), p. 4.)  Indeed, this impress of Red Indian savagery upon the White victors in this grim frontier-warfare is the only social trace that has been left behind by these vanquished and vanished Redskins. For the rest, the neo-barbarism of Appalachia may be traced back to a ruthless tradition of frontier-warfare along the border between Western Christendom and “the Celtic Fringe” which had never died out among their ancestors in the British Isles and which has been revived, among these Scotch-Irish settlers in North America, by the barbarizing severity of their Appalachian environment. On the whole, the nearest social analogues of the Appalachian “Mountain People” of the present day are certain “fossils” of extinct civilizations which have survived in fastnesses and have likewise relapsed into barbarism there: such “fossils” as the Jewish “wild highlanders” of Abyssinia and the Caucasus or the Nestorian “wild highlanders” of Hakkiari.

It will be seen that industrial Ulster is a social “optimum” between rural Scotland on the one hand and barbarian Appalachia on the other; and that this “optimum” is the product of a response to a challenge which, in point of severity, presents itself as a “mean” between two extremes. The challenge to which King James’s colonists were exposed in Ulster was distinctly more severe than the challenge that had been faced by their ancestors along the English Border or “the Highland Line”. On the other hand, it was very much less severe than the challenge which afterwards presented itself to their Scotch-Irish descendants when these migrated from Ulster to North America in order to become “Indian-fighters” in the Appalachian hills. The contrast between rural Scotland and industrial Ulster bears out, as far as it goes, the law of “the greater the challenge the greater the response”; but in the sharper contrast between industrial Ulster and barbarian Appalachia we see this particular law overridden by the general “law of diminishing returns”: a law which, in any situation, infallibly comes into operation at some point or other when things are pushed to extremes.

The reference to gunfire from the windows of Belfast reminds us that all was far from well between partition in 1921 and the troubles that officially began in 1969.

This passage can be compared with one quoted in the post I called Norway – Iceland – Greenland – Vinland: another story of successive migrations.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934

The propagandist

I have had certain opportunities for first-hand study of (and Turkish affairs. Just before the Balkan Wars, I spent nine months (November 1911 to August 1912) travelling on foot through the old territories of Greece, as well as in Krete and the Athos Peninsula, and though my main interest was the historical geography of the country, I learnt a good deal about the social and economic life of the modern population. During the European War, I edited, under the direction of Lord Bryce, [footnote: Whose death has removed one of the most experienced and distinguished Western students of Near and Middle Eastern questions, though this was only one among his manifold interests and activities.] the Blue Book published by the British Government on the “Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: 1915” (Miscellaneous No. 31, 1916), and incidentally learnt, I believe, nearly all that there is to be learnt to the discredit of the Turkish nation and of their rule over other peoples. Afterwards I worked, always on Turkish affairs, in the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of Information (May 1917 to May 1918); in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (May to December 1918); and in the Foreign Office section of the British Delegation to the Peace Conference at Paris (December 1918 to April 1919). Since the beginning of the 1919-20 Session, I have had the honour to hold the Koraís Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History, in the University of London; and on the 20th October 1920 the Senate of the University kindly granted me leave of absence abroad for two terms, in order to enable me to pursue the studies connected with my Chair by travel in Greek lands. I arrived at Athens from England on the 15th January 1921, and left Constantinople for England on the 15th September. During the intervening time, I saw all that I could of the situation from both the Greek and the Turkish point of view, in various parts of the two countries.

Toynbee gives us this short account of his early career in the Preface to The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922). And see the page here called Cv.

He resigned from his fellowship at Balliol, teaching Greats, early in 1915 to do propaganda work at the Foreign Office. He was twenty-five years old.

He doesn’t name that first (pre-1917) war job. Nor does McNeill, his biographer. It was a unit, presumably under the Foreign Office, charged, according to McNeill, with publishing propaganda directed at America. Toynbee privately referred to it as the “Mendacity Bureau”. That period saw the production of most or all the wartime propaganda works, from The Armenian Atrocities to Turkey, A Past and a Future, listed below.

They were written, as far as possible, with a scholar’s scruples, but must have reinforced a desire to escape from a national viewpoint in the way he would eventually write history. To his friend Rob Darbishire, September 16 1917:

There is a “Terror in France” out to complete that damned “Terror in Belgium”, but that is the last.

I’ve created three new Categories in this blog:

Armenian massacres
German terror
Greco-Turkish War

They embrace an earlier Category, which I have left, called A Turkish sequence, which linked to posts up to June 15 2007 on the Turkish nationalists who were in power during the War and on the massacres of Armenians on Turkish territory.

But in the post here called Atatürk’s frown Toynbee describes some of his Turkish friendships. In Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 1, he remembers

the atmosphere of animosity against Islam and against the Turks in which I had grown up.

McNeill makes no distinction between the Intelligence Bureau and the Political Intelligence Department and has him starting at the latter in May 1917 (or rather “1971”). He writes: “Not surprisingly, he became responsible for political intelligence pertaining to the Ottoman Empire; but, with the collapse of Russia, his expertise was soon applied to the Moslems of Central Asia as well, and from there he went on to explore the risks of confrontation between a newly self-conscious Islamic world and a weakening British Empire – a clash which would affect India, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Africa as well as the lands directly subject to Ottoman administration.”

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Here are the books that he published before (in one case in) 1934, when the Study was launched. (As in my main bibliography, I don’t promise to show the correct order of publication within a year – nor does Morton’s bibliography – and confine the list to published items or contributions of 70 pages or more.)

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915
The first magnum opus was completed before he left Balliol, and published on April 1, one month before the start of his war work. I’ve done a post on it based on an online review and will address it at length later. It was the first evidence of the ability rapidly to synthesise diverse materials that would serve him in the Survey of International Affairs.

The Armenian Atrocities, The Murder of a Nation, with a speech delivered by Lord Bryce in the House of Lords, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915
A little over a hundred pages. It contains a Statement by Lord Bryce, a Map, and chapters called Armenia before the Massacres; The Plan of the Massacres; The Road to Death; The Journey’s End; False Excuses; Murder Outright; The Toll of Death; and The Attitude of Germany.

The New Europe, Some Essays in Reconstruction, with an Introduction by the Earl of Cromer, Dent, 1915
Essays. All but one had been printed in The Nation. A spinoff, for wider circulation, of the much longer Nationality and the War, though it does not reproduce its material directly. Strangely, the online version of what appears to be its first edition, page images at Internet Archive, contains no Introduction by Cromer; and Morton (whom I follow on this) refers to only one edition.

Contributor, Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915
A view of the whole of Greek history, ancient and modern.

Editor, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce, Hodder & Stoughton and His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916
The “Blue Book” on the massacres of Armenians in Turkey presented to the Foreign Secretary, and subsequently to both Houses of Parliament, in 1916, and still one of the main bodies of evidence for the alleged genocide. Toynbee worked under the direction of Bryce, whom he met first in 1915. I have mentioned Bryce several times. The report as published contains a Map; Correspondence between Viscount Grey of Fallodon and Viscount Bryce; a Preface by Viscount Bryce; a Letter by Mr. H.A.L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Prof. Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Mr. Moorfield Storey, ex-President of the American Bar Association, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Four German Missionaries to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Berlin; a Memorandum by the Editor of the Documents (Toynbee); and 149 General Descriptions, eye-witness and other documents presented in twenty sections. After that we have A Summary of Armenian History up to and including the year 1915 in six parts by Toynbee; six Annexes prepared by Toynbee; an Index of Places referred to in the Documents; and a Message, dated 22nd July, 1916, from Mr. N., of Constantinople; communicated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief.
A formidable effort. I have a post called Propaganda and intelligence here, looking at how hearsay was used as intelligence during this period.

The Belgian Deportations, with a statement by Viscount Bryce, T Fisher Unwin, 1917

The German Terror in Belgium, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917

The German Terror in France, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917
Those three titles belong together. I have quoted from the first of them. Toynbee writes in a Preface:

The German Terror in France is a direct continuation of The German Terror in Belgium, which was published several months ago. The chapters are numbered consecutively throughout the two volumes [...].

Turkey, A Past and a Future, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917
A study of the consequences of the Turkish revolution of 1908 and the events leading up to the Armenian massacres and deportations. I have quoted from it.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922
An important work, the second magnum opus, based on Toynbee’s second visit to Turkey, reporting on the Greco-Turkish war for The Manchester Guardian in 1921.

Introduction and translations, Greek Civilization and Character, The Self-Revelation of Ancient Greek Society, Dent, 1924

Introduction and translations, Greek Historical Thought from Homer to the Age of Heraclius, with two pieces newly translated by Gilbert Murray, Dent, 1924
Two volumes of translations which Toynbee had made before the war. (Another work, based at least on pre-war notes, which was not published until much later, was Hellenism, The History of a Civilization, OUP, Home University Library, 1959. It had been commissioned by his father-in-law Gilbert Murray in 1914. The war intervened. Hannibal’s Legacy, the magnum opus of 1964, had been been on his agenda since the same year. The Preface of Some Problems of Greek History, 1969, begins: “The problems discussed in this book have been in my mind since the years 1909-11, when I was reading for the Oxford School of Literae Humaniores.”)

Contributor, The Non-Arab Territories of the Ottoman Empire since the Armistice of the 30th October, 1918, in HWV Temperley, editor, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol 6, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1924

The World after the Peace Conference, Being an Epilogue to the “History of the Peace Conference of Paris” and a Prologue to the “Survey of International Affairs, 1920-1923”, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1925
This was published on its own, but GM Gathorne-Hardy, the Institute’s Honorary Secretary, writes in a Preface that it was

originally written as an introduction to the Survey of International Affairs in 1920-3, and was intended for publication as part of the same volume.

In Experiences, Toynbee calls this cross-section of the world c 1920 a “base-line” for the Survey.

With Kenneth P Kirkwood, Turkey, Benn, in Modern Nations series edited by HAL Fisher, 1926
I have not consulted this.

The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1928

A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen, Constable, 1931
The book of a journey to Japan and back (via China, pace the title) in 1929-30.

Editor, British Commonwealth Relations, Proceedings of the First Unofficial Conference at Toronto, 11-21 September 1933, with a Foreword by Robert L Borden, OUP, Issued under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1934

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One could add to this pre-Study list two short works, among many articles and other material:

The Destruction of Poland, A Study in German Efficiency, T Fisher Unwin, almost certainly 1916

and

The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce, Hodder & Soughton, 1917
A rather blatant piece of work. A pamphlet distillation of the two other Armenian works.

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Let’s look at his evolution. According to Morton, Toynbee published his first learned article while he was at Oxford in 1910: On Herodotus III. 90, and VII. 75, 76, Classical Review, vol 24, no 8. You can find it online. Another, The Growth of Sparta, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol 33, part 2 followed in 1913. 1914 sees two more: Greek Policy since 1882, Oxford pamphlets, vol 9, no 39, OUP and The Slav Peoples, Political Quarterly, no 4, December 1914. In those first four pieces we see classical interests vaulting towards urgent contemporary ones.

Toynbee’s first visit to Greece and territory that was then Turkey had been made during a post-University “gap year” in 1911-12. It was a formative experience, and often alluded to, but did not produce its own book. His longest piece of published historical writing on Greece before 1934 was a contribution, Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915.

The second visit to Greece and Turkey took up most of 1921, when CP Scott’s Manchester Guardian sent him to report on the Greco-Turkish War. He had been appointed, in 1919, to the Koraes Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History at King’s College, University of London, but was given leave to travel. The result was The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922).

This is a rugged work of reportage of a war (and to some extent a travel narrative) which shows an utterly out-of-the-ordinary grasp of history for such a piece, but does not lose touch with the subject. The language is simple, different from the sinuosities and contortions of the Study (particularly the later parts of the Study). One almost regrets that Toynbee was about to leave its sturdy realism behind and set off on his grand project. At the same time, the subtitle, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, hints at what was to follow; and it was on a train, while en route back to England from this assisgnment, somewhere after Adrianople on September 17 1921, as he tells us in a Preface to Volume VII of the Study, that he formed thoughts which led to the drafting that evening of part of the plan for his work. Of course, the Study’s origins are more complex than that, and I will trace them in another post.

During his 1921 travels, Toynbee began to take a position more favourable to Turkey. I have already linked from here to two posts which look at this change: Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 1 and Atatürk’s frown. Was it partly because of a sense of shame at the tone of the propaganda writings? He writes in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey:

It may, I fear, be painful to Greeks and “Philhellenes” that information and reflections unfavourable to Greece should have been published by the first occupant of the Koraís Chair. I naturally regret this, but from the academic point of view it is less unfortunate than if my conclusions on the Anatolian Question had been favourable to Greece and unfavourable to Turkey. The actual circumstances, whatever personal unpleasantness they may entail for me and my Greek friends and acquaintances, at least preclude the suspicion that an endowment of learning in a British University has been used for propaganda on behalf of the country with which it is concerned. Such a contention, if it could be urged, would be serious; for academic study should have no political purpose, although, when its subject is history, its judgments upon the nature and causal connection of past events do occasionally and incidentally have some effect upon the present and the future.

But these views, published in 1922, and following an absence from duty of nearly a year, forced him out of the Greek-funded Koraes Chair in 1924, and towards Chatham House. He never held another conventional full-time academic post. Chatham House offered something mid-way between academia and public affairs.

He writes in Experiences (1969):

I originally broke my way into current affairs by following up the main line – that is, the Levantine line – of the sequel to the Graeco-Roman civilization till this mental journey brought me to the living civilizations of the Near and Middle East. Between 1911 [his first visit to the region] and 1923 [his third], I was, I think, in danger of letting myself become imprisoned in a couple of specialisms. I was then heading for becoming a combination of “Balkanist” with “ancient historian”. Fortunately I was saved from being caught in this blind alley by a personal mishap. I became personally involved in a conflict between two Near Eastern nationalisms. I had, in consequence, to resign the Koraes Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in the University of London; and, in taking another job [at Chatham House], I found that I had committed myself to expanding my study of current affairs from the Near and Middle East to the contemporary world as a whole. I had undertaken to produce a Survey of International Affairs for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the commitment required me not to leave any region of the present-day world out of account. I must try to follow current events not only in the Near and Middle East and not only in Europe and the United States but in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and China as well.

History and current affairs were parallel seams in his career from then on. He often says that he could not have written A Study of History, which was published between 1934 and 1961, if he had not also been working, from 1924 to ’56, on the The Survey of International Affairs. The Survey, which was not propaganda, was published under Chatham House’s auspices between 1925 and 1977 and covered the years 1920 to 1962.

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This post desribes the pre-Study œuvre. Before 1934, “Arnold Toynbee” meant not the historian, but his uncle, the economic historian and social reformer (1852-83). The older Arnold Toynbee’s brother Paget, the Dante scholar, took Toynbee to task for using his uncle’s name on the title page of his first book. He could have added or substituted an initial.

I described the post-1933 œuvre here. I listed the main post-Study works there in order to emphasise that the Study was not the end of Toynbee any more than the beginning. It’s a sign of sanity to finish a project and move on; which, apart from the Caplan collaboration, is what he did.

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The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

William H McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989 (letter quotation)

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

The German Terror in France, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917

The World after the Peace Conference, Being an Epilogue to the “History of the Peace Conference of Paris” and a Prologue to the “Survey of International Affairs, 1920-1923”, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1925

Experiences, OUP, 1969

Armistice Day and VE Day

The inhabitants of London needed the harsher ordeal of a Second World War to transfigure their mood from the hysterical abandon [italics in original; he is using it as a French word] of Armistice Day, 1918, to the sober restraint of VE Day, 1945. An observer who, on both days, was out and about in the streets of London, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace and Whitehall, could hardly fail to be struck by the contrast between the temper of a crowd who had jumped to the childish conclusion that they had seen the last of War in their time, and perhaps for all time, and the temper of the same crowd when another twenty-seven years of disillusioning experience had taught them to suspect that, in their time, world wars were not just meaninglessly hideous accidents in a normally rational and benign order of Nature, but were the very stuff of which the thread of contemporary world history was being spun.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

On sale at Nice airport today

In the UK there are two mainstream popular history magazines (which are not exclusively about genealogy or military history): History Today and BBC History Magazine. You’d be unlikely to find the first in an airport (or in most non-airport retailers). It sells mainly by subscription. You probably wouldn’t even see the second in an airport. It wasn’t on sale in Heathrow Terminal 5 a fortnight ago.

I bought all of the titles shown below at Nice-Côte d’Azur airport today, from an ordinary branch of Relay. I did not buy any specialist titles on genealogy or military history, which were almost as numerous.

Nor are these likely to be everything. French magazine publishing has always been big on parallel series, like the Historia Thématique here, and numéros hors-série and spéciaux.

All this has something to do with the conventions and economics of French retailing, no doubt. Something we should remember before getting starry-eyed, as we’d like to, about how educated the French public is. Wait for my post on the Que sais-je? series and French encyclopaedism. The next paragraph isn’t scientific.

If Relay is the equivalent in size of an airport or station branch of WH Smith (many, I think, are smaller), then it is more focussed on magazines, and less on books and certainly less on non-print items. I may be wrong, but I suspect the UK is also more likely than France to offer a dedicated bookshop, with no magazines at all, in an airport. For history, and magazines generally, the Relay will sensationally outclass the WH Smith, but there may not be a Waterstone’s. On the other hand, the history magazines will take up far less shelf space than the history books at Waterstone’s and will probably sell faster. (Most or all of Relay’s 1,000 branches are in stations and airports.)

I’ll say something about Higginbotham’s in Chennai airport, and the joys of Indian bookshops generally, in another post. Meanwhile, one pleasant thing strikes one about the covers shown below. Or is it a French avoidance of a topic? Not one of them shows Hitler or so much as mentions the Second World War. The closest we get here is a picture of the older de Gaulle. There was a time when History Today and BBC History Magazine were afraid to have covers that didn’t show a swastika, just as it is a requirement for the word sex to appear at least once on every cover of Cosmopolitan. They have got away from this obsession recently, realising that the current history boom goes wider and deeper than this. There isn’t a mention of slavery or the status of women either.

The Relay offering: