Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Vol 66 Issue 4
THE FIRST
EUROPEAN
UNION
One Thousand
Years of the Holy
Roman Empire
Shakespeares medieval
Mediterranean
Sights of Horrors,
which we can
never forget:
the Wittenberg
Platz Holocaust
Memorial, Berlin.
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
CONTACTS
History Today is published monthly by
History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn
London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810
enquiries@historytoday.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Tel: 020 3219 7813/4
subscribe@historytoday.com
ADVERTISING
Lisa Martin, Portman Media
Tel: 020 7079 9361
lisamartin@portmanmedia.co.uk
Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321.
Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.
Distributed by MarketForce 020 3787 9001 (UK & RoW)
and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America).
History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246-580)
is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and
distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex
Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New
Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C
Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records
are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10
Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Remembering
Russias Great War
Long overshadowed by the Revolution and
the Second World War, there is renewed
interest in the earlier, imperialist conflict.
Paul Dukes
THE EASTERN FRONT in the First
World War commands far less attention than the Western, even though
it extended further, involved more
soldiers and probably resulted in more
losses. It saw four empires destroyed:
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany
and Turkey. Russia lost at least as
many men as any other combatant,
yet its contribution has often been
neglected, no doubt because Russia
has often been considered apart from
Europe, especially after the Revolution of 1917. The Allies welcomed the
Russia restored:
Monument to
the Heroes of
the First World
War, Victory Park,
Moscow.
HISTORYMATTERS
Hormones,
Elixirs and
Eccentrics
The career of the brilliant
physiologist Brown-Squard
is a reminder of the perils of
scientific innovation.
Jacqueline DePasse
THE STORY of Charles-douard BrownSquard is one of intrigue, eccentricity
and a touch of the insane. It works
as a cautionary tale for those seeking
world-changing breakthroughs in
medicine at any cost. Brown-Squard,
after whom a rare condition caused by
damage to the spinal cord is named,
was a true innovator. Through his work
on damage to the spinal cord, he dramatically enhanced our understanding
of the elegant human nervous system.
Unfortunately, his innovative brilliance
not only shaped the frontier of medicine,
it also derailed it.
Brown-Squard was born to an
American father and a French mother
in the British colony of Mauritius in
1817, a year after the invention of the
stethoscope, and spent his professional
life moving between Paris, Richmond,
Virginia, Harvard and London, where he
became a fello of the Royal Society. He
grew up in an era of medicine before
the widespread adoption of antiseptics,
before anaesthesia and long before
antibiotics. Doctors were unlicensed and
based their work on the four humours.
Though blood-letting was on its way
out, it was still relatively common for a
physician to recommend leeches or the
surgeons knife for a variety of conditions, from the common cold to female
hysteria.
While a young medical student and
physician in Paris, he dedicated himself
to his work, at times to the detriment
of his own health and finances. And,
as he churned through mountains of
frogs, meticulously dissecting their
spinal cords, he was also churning
through his inheritance. He penned
over 100 articles, while digging himself
HISTORYMATTERS
HISTORYMATTERS
Beauty and
the Battleship
In the Great War British
artists developed a new
form of marine camouflage.
Margaret F.M. Walker
DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR,
patterns of disruptive colouration were
applied directly to guns, trucks and
tanks to disguise them from reconnaissance aircraft or spotters in enemy
trenches. Given the historic strength of
the Royal Navy, it followed logically that
Britain would be the most innovative in
developing the field of naval camouflage. For, while the human losses on
the Western Front were staggering, it
was the loss of merchant ships carrying
troops, supplies and munitions that
took the greatest economic toll. They
became easy targets for torpedoes as
soon as Germany announced its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare
in January 1917.
Dazzle is a development curious
to the modern mind, which defines
camouflage as something that blends
an individual in with its surroundings.
These striped ships, highly visible, seem
more appropriate to the realm of art
than combat and occupy a unique place
in military history, as one of the few
instances where the widespread use of
professional artists was of considerable
tactical value.
Norman Wilkinson, who developed
the idea for dazzle camouflage and
oversaw the operation, was an accomplished marine painter before the war.
He submitted his camouflage idea to
the Admiralty in spring of 1917 and was
allowed a trial that August. Previous
proposals, which attempted to paint
or cover ships to blend them with the
water and atmosphere, were unsuccessful due to the vagaries of weather
at sea. However, the results of a trial
convinced the Admiralty in October 1917
to recommend that all merchant ships
receive Wilkinsons camouflage. Dazzle
designs both dismantled the outline of
the ship and created an optical illusion
that deceived enemy eyes in submarines
regarding the speed, size and direction
6 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
HISTORYMATTERS
Emperor, Sage
and Unicorn
Genghis Khans encounter with a mystical
beast marked him as a great leader, but
says at least as much about his adviser.
Geoffrey Humble
Mongol forces were poised to enter the
territory of the Delhi Sultanate in northern India in 1224, after a long campaign
against the forces of the Shah of
Khwarazmshah in Transoxania and
eastern Iran. After destroying the shahs
forces in the Punjab, however, Genghis
Khan returned north, leaving the sultanate intact. The Persian historian Juzjani,
writing from exile in Delhi, reported
that a combination of climate, terrain
and divination caused Genghis return.
The latter may relate to an encounter,
described in Chinese histories, between
Genghis and a single-horned animal
and its interpretation by the Khans
adviser Yel Chucai (1189-1243).
The encounter is recorded in two
medieval biographies of Chucai, a
scholar and official in Mongol service,
which locate it near the Iron Gate Pass
in East India (the Buzgala Pass, in
modern Uzbekistan). Shaped like a deer
[with] the tail of a horse, green in colour
and with a single horn, the animal could
speak like a human and addressed the
imperial bodyguard, recommending:
Your lord should return early. Genghis
turned to Chucai for an explanation and,
on receiving it, followed the creatures
advice by withdrawing immediately.
Genghis had given Chucai the nickname Urtu Saqal (Longbeard) at their
first meeting. He had already spent six
years in the Khans retinue, interpreting
various portents deep summer snow,
a winter thunderstorm, a meteor as
omens of victory. Ordered to perform
divination before every campaign,
Chucai conducted scrying sessions at
which his calculations were compared
to Genghis own from scapulimancy
(charring sheeps shoulder blades and
reading the cracks).
Chucai was descended from the
Kitan Yel family, which had ruled
northern China and Inner Asia from 907
Strange sight:
Mirror stand
in the shape
of a unicorn.
Chinese, 11001350.
The millennia-long
history of the Holy Roman
Empire has been wilfully
misunderstood since the
rise of the nation state.
But can its past shed light
on the Continents future,
asks Peter H. Wilson?
The First
EUROPEAN
UNION
Charlemagne
as Holy Roman
Emperor with the
imperial orb and
sword, French,
15th century.
It was these successes that convinced Pope Leo III that the Frankish
king would be a more effective protector than the distant Byzantine
emperor in Constantinople. Leo used a temporary interregnum in Constantinople, between the reigns of Irene of Athens and Nicephorus,
as an excuse to translate, or transfer, what was still considered the
ancient Roman imperial title westwards and confer it on Charlemagne.
His death in 814 was followed within a few decades by a series of civil
wars among the Frankish elite and a succession of partitions between
843 and 870 that, superficially at least, split the realm into distinct
French, German and Italian kingdoms. The periodic refusal or inability
of various popes to crown one of these kings as emperor contributed to
the impression of imperial collapse.
HIS MEANS tackling the word empire head on. The experience
of European colonialism, together with imperial projects in
Europe itself, like those of Napoleon and Hitler, have all firmly
equated empire with hegemony. Empires, it is assumed,
expand from a core region to dominate more peripheral ones, whose
inhabitants must serve the interests of the imperial people. The Holy
Roman Empire only briefly and superficially corresponded to this model.
Charlemagnes initial expansion was certainly imperial in the conventional sense of conquering and absorbing new territories. Likewise, the
Empires eastward expansion through migration and colonisation during
the 12th century was often violent and partly imperialistic, though it
also involved assimilation and accommodation and it proceeded almost
entirely without involvement or encouragement from the emperor.
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 13
Holy
Roman
Empire
800-1806
under the emperors jurisdiction. Even those kings who were considered
sovereign still formally recognised the emperor as Europes premier
monarch.
Charlemagne,
from the studio
of Albrecht
Drer, 1514.
800
Charlemagne,
king of the Franks,
crowned emperor
by Pope Leo III
1024
Accession of the
Salian line of German
kings (to 1125)
1077-1122
staged as if they were expressions of spontaneous agreement. Participation signalled consent. Absence could indicate disagreement, but in a
way which allowed opponents to accept a decision later without losing
face. The system was far from perfect and several kings faced rebellions,
including from their own sons. However, there were only 18 rival or antikings between 983 and 1410 and five of these were during Henry IVs
tumultuous reign (1056-1106). Most anti-kings appeared as opponents
of incumbent kings and only four emerged directly from the process
of selecting a successor. Of these four double elections, only those of
1198 and 1314 resulted in serious violence, while in the case of the other
two, one rival never actually arrived to take up his claim (Alfonso X of
Castile, 1257); the other (Jobst of Moravia, 1410) died before he could
pose a serious challenge.
The elective character did not prevent long lines of kings from the
1138
Accession of the
Staufer line of
German kings
(to 1250). Trend
towards a more
complex and finely
graduated feudal
hierarchy of lords
and princes
1250
same family during most of the Empires existence: Carolingians (800911), Ottonians (919-1024), Salians (1024-1125), Staufers (1138-1254),
Luxembourgs (1347-1437) and Habsburgs (1438-1806). Even the age of
the little kings (1254-1347) saw greater continuity in terms of institutions and political culture than is often thought. The Empires record
for royal stability was no worse and often better than that in Europes
more conventional monarchies such as England, Scotland or Spain.
The elective character emerged more clearly during the 13th century,
before being formalised in the Golden Bull of 1356, which reduced the
number of princes involved to seven electors. Traditionally, this process
has been regarded as exemplifying the Empires supposedly centrifugal
political development. In fact, it was encouraged by the Staufers and
later Luxembourg monarchs, who used it as a way to both reduce the
number of lords involved in royal succession and to end papal meddling
in the Empires politics.
1346
Accession of the
Luxembourg line of
German kings, who
shifted the basis of
imperial rule more
clearly to possessing
extensive lands under
their direct control
1356
Golden Bull
confirms the
Empire as
an elective
monarchy
Golden Bull of
1356, issued by the
Imperial Diet at
Nuremberg and
Metz.
1438
Charlemagne and Leo III on the frontispiece of Victor Hugo's Legend of the Ages, 1886.
1480s
Establishment of new
common institutions,
like the Reichstag
and the imperial
supreme court, in a
process labelled
imperial reform,
which continued
into the 1570s
1618-48
Foreign intervention
exacerbated a
constitutional crisis
leading to the Thirty
Years War
Peace of
Westphalia, Josef
Mathias, 1862.
1648
FURTHER READING
Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis 12451414 (Cambridge, 2015).
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, The Emperor's Old Clothes (Oxford
University Press, 2015).
Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Emperor (Oxford
University Press, 2012).
Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806 (Palgrave
Macmillan 2011).
Start of open
Austro-Prussian
rivalry begins to
destabilise
imperial politics
Revolutionary
and Napoleonic
wars widen
tensions,
internally
especially,
as Prussia
withdrew into
a decade of
neutrality after
1795
Francis II,
by Joseph
Kreutzinger, early
19th century.
1806
LOST WORLDS
Amde Forestier's
vision of prehistoric
animals among the
landmarks of modern
London, Illustrated
London News, 1924.
Hippos
of the
Thames
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 21
LOST WORLDS
jungles inhabited by huge insects and the first amphibians
was commonly depicted, as this was the period in which the
coal that was driving the Industrial Revolution, then in full
flow, was laid down. The more recent Pleistocene, the geological era just before the present, was also of interest. The
animals which inhabited Pleistocene Europe including
mammoths, reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, hyenas and lions
seemed to mix Arctic and African forms in a decidedly
strange climate, apparently warm for parts of the era, but in
others locked in the glacial cold.
It was not just prehistoric animals and landscapes that
stoked the imagination of Victorian audiences. Reports of
were in fact some of the first mammal fossils to be discovered; some had been interpreted by medieval observers as
the remains of saints or giants. These fossils began to be
presented as the remains of animals in the rooms of newly
formed learned societies in the 17th and 18th centuries and
were discussed more systematically in the 19th. In 1821, at
the Museum of Natural History in Paris, the comparative
anatomist Georges Cuvier described remains of le grand
hippopotame fossile from northern France. At the same time,
William Buckland noted that hippopotamus bones were
located alongside those of hyena and mammoth in Kirkdale
Cave in Yorkshire. By the 1850s, Richard Owen was recording the discovery of the teeth and bones of Hippopotamus
major from all over England and Wales. Ancient Britain was
shown to have been full of hippopotami.
LOST WORLDS
LOST WORLDS
with the line his ancestors wallowed in the Thames. The
article noted how it is not likely that man was in any great
measure instrumental in exterminating the hippopotamus
in Europe, with Stone Age people being too primitive to
have wiped out such a formidable creature. It continued that
civilised man will be the agent before whose advance this
animal will disappear in Africa, coming with guns that the
hippo could not resist. The development of human society
was directly opposed to these large animals. The real possibility began to dawn that in the future, the African hippos,
like their Pleistocene European equivalents, would disappear. When placed in this context, the lost hippos gained a
new poignancy. They were not just intriguing inhabitants
of the Pleistocene or curiosities in zoological gardens, but
reminders of environmental loss in the modern world.
Hippopotamus
amphibius, an
illustration from
William Jardines
The Naturalists
Library, 1833-43.
concerns, that human society and the modern metropolis was every bit as transient as the megafauna of earlier
geological eras.
Over the 19th century and into the 20th, reflections
on the animals that had once inhabited prehistoric Britain
became an important way of understanding changing
nature and humanitys place within it. On the one hand,
the presence of hippos and mammoths evoked the wonder
of the natural world and the strangeness of the geological
past. But they also offered an insight into the tremendous
change and transformation that had occurred, as climates
shifted (sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly) and whole
fauna came and went. For a modern world, where humans
seemed to play an ever more transformative role, the prehistoric beasts were a reminder of the former wildness of
the territory and the focus of a melancholy sense of loss, of
a world in which both animals and peoples were understood
to be no more than temporary inhabitants.
Chris Manias is Lecturer in the History of Science and Technology at King's
College London. He is researching the history of mammal paleontology in the
19th century.
FURTHER READING
Andrew Flack, The Illustrious Stranger: Hippomania and
the Nature of the Exotic, Anthrozoos 26 (2013), 43-59.
Ralph OConnor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics
of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (University of Chicago, 2007).
Nina Root, Victorian Englands Hippomania, Natural
History 102, 2 (1993), 34-39.
Martin J.S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early
Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (University
of Chicago, 1992).
InFocus
IRELAND 1916
The Irish
Volunteer
dogmatic Irish Republican Brotherhood and the more eclectic nationalist militia, the Irish Volunteers, which Casement had helped form and
fund. He had no mandate for such an initiative, Clarke claimed, telling
her questioner that Casement had started things that the revolutionary
group here didnt want.
Irish republicans have never been entirely clear how Casement fits
into their pantheon. An Anglo-Irish Protestant raised among the Ulster
landed gentry, he was far from the model peat-sodden revolutionary.
Kathleen Clarke raised the issue of class when she described Casement
as the aristocratic kind [who] assumed that when he went into any
movement, ipso facto, he was one of our leaders, if not the leader.
(Nevertheless, as Roy Foster demonstrated in his 2015 study Vivid Faces:
The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, many people from
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 31
IRELAND 1916
Casements class and background, including members of his own family,
played critical roles in the Irish liberation movement.)
That confusion is compounded by the matter of Casements true
home and even his religion. Although born in Sandycove just outside
Dublin in September 1864, he lost his parents at an early age. His father
was Protestant, his mother a Catholic who had him secretly baptised
into her religion. After his parents death, Casement spent his childhood
with Protestant relations in County Antrim, part of Ulster, where he
attended school in Ballymena. He is now buried after a long-drawn
out campaign for the repatriation of his body from England to Ireland
ended successfully in March 1965 in the Irish national cemetery in
Glasnevin, outside Dublin. In the past year, however, there has been a
growing campaign for him to be reinterred in Ulster.
to expose the atrocities associated with the brutal Belgian rule in the
Congo, he began to compile his personal diaries to which he committed
graphic details of his sexual exploits with young men.
When he was arrested in 1916, extracts from these diaries were
seized on by the British government and used unscrupulously to drum
up support for his conviction for treason. The content of those diaries
remains controversial even today, when Ireland has dramatically thrown
off vestiges of its Catholic past and legislated for gay marriage. One
historian, Angus Mitchell of Limerick University, continues to argue
that the diaries were self-serving forgeries by the British government.
Casements fate resulted from an extraordinary turnaround in his
life and career. His consular duties took him to Luanda and Loureno
Marques (now Maputo) in Portuguese East Africa and then back to
the Congo, where in 1903 he was called on to report on allegations of
widespread atrocities in what was then still the personal fiefdom of King
32 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
Casement's photograph of tribesmen from the Putumayo region of the Peruvian/Columbian border.
IRELAND 1916
Roger Casement
I SAY that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do.
He died upon the gallows,
But that is nothing new.
Afraid they might be beaten
Before the bench of Time,
They turned a trick by forgery
And blackened his good name.
A perjurer stood ready
To prove their forgery true;
They gave it out to all the world,
And that is something new;
For Spring Rice had to whisper it,
Being their Ambassador,
And then the speakers got it
And writers by the score.
Come Tom and Dick, come all the troop
That cried it far and wide,
Come from the forger and his desk,
Desert the perjurers side;
Come speak your bit in public
That some amends be made
To this most gallant gentleman
That is in quicklime laid.
W.B. Yeats
One of these, known as the Amazon Diary, recorded Casements legitimate business as a British representative in Brazil in 1910, while five
more (later dubbed the Black Diaries and comprising three private
diaries, a notebook and a ledger) contained details of his homosexual
affairs in Africa and South America, often strangely mixed with regular
consular information.
Knowing how important it was to tarnish Casements name,
Thomson and Blinker Hall took the lead in circulating these Black
Diaries to prominent opinion-formers in Britain and the United States,
including, crucially, the US Ambassador in London, Dr William Hines
Page, who declared himself sickened and unable to read more than half
a page of them.
As a result there was only a muted response in the US when Casement was found guilty. After a hasty appeal, the original verdict was
upheld and Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on
August 3rd. (In the view of his supporters, he was hanged on a comma.)
At no stage was it clear that justice was seen to be done. Apart from the
suspect use of the diaries, the prosecution and defence teams appeared
to collude. The judge who heard the appeal, Sir Charles Darling, a former
Conservative MP, later commissioned a painting of this phase of the trial
from the celebrated Irish artist Sir John Lavery. On his death in 1936,
Darling bequeathed this work to the National Portrait Gallery, which
refused to take it. It was passed on to the Royal Courts of Justice, where
it was hung out of sight of the public, before being transferred to the
headquarters of the Irish bar, the Kings Inns, in Dublin.
At the end of the Great War, Basil Thomson became Britains first
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 35
IRELAND 1916
and only Director of Intelligence, heading a service designed, according
to MI5s official history, to combine military, naval, air and civil intelligence organisations at a crucial time when the German threat had given
way to fears of Bolshevism. This pulling together of British Intelligence
never worked. Thomsons directorate was regarded as unwieldy and
inefficient, particularly in Ireland, where its failures led to the assassination of a number of MI6 agents. Thomson himself was considered
too hardline at a time when the civil war in Ireland was drawing to a
close, culminating in the Anglo-Irish treaty, which created the Irish
Free State in December 1921. Consequently, at the end of that year
Casement's remains
receive a guard of
honour on their
return to Dublin
in 1965.
Thomson found himself out of a job. Though the exact cause has never
been established, he himself suggested that his dismissal resulted from
four Irishmen evading security and daubing the walls of Chequers, the
prime ministers residence, with pro-Sinn Fein slogans.
After Thomson was sacked, he took copies of Casements diaries
with him, hoping that they might help supplement his meagre pension.
(The actual diaries remained with the Metropolitan Police, which gave
them to the Home Office in 1925.) Thomson passed his copies to Peter
Singleton-Gates, a Fleet Street reporter best known for his writings on
the wartime Russian relief expedition. When Singleton-Gates tried to
publish extracts from these diaries in 1925, he was warned by the Home
Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, that he would face prosecution
under the Official Secrets Act. Singleton-Gates had to wait over 30 years
before publishing them abroad in a limited edition under the Olympia
Press imprint in Paris in 1959. His fellow editor was Michel Girodias,
boss of Olympia, which specialised in pornography. Singleton-Gates
coined the phrase the Black Diaries (the title of his book), a name
which has stuck ever since.
LONG THE WAY, the story of the diaries has taken many unexpected twists and turns. After the Home Office informed
Casements first biographer, Denis Gwynn, that it could not
even confirm that the diaries existed, a US doctor, William
J. Maloney, became the first author to claim that the diaries had been
forged in his 1936 book, The Forged Casement Diaries. W.B. Yeats was
convinced enough by this argument to write a powerful ballad Roger
Casement, in which he pointed an accusatory finger at the English poet
Alfred Noyes. A former employee of the British governments Propaganda Bureau in the First World War, Noyes had described the diaries
as a foul record of the lowest depths that human degradation has ever
touched. On this point he had been harangued by Casements sister
36 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
while giving a public lecture in New York. He felt chastened and wrote
an apologetic letter to the Irish Press in which he admitted he might have
been misled. Yeats changed the poem, removing the reference to Noyes.
Two decades later, Noyes took this further, specifically criticising the
conduct of the case in his book The Accusing Ghost or Justice for Casement.
Following the repatriation of Casements body to Glasnevin in 1965,
his diaries were finally released into the British National Archives at
Kew in 1994. One hundred years after his death, few people, apart from
Angus Mitchell, now dispute their authenticity.
Instead the debate has moved on. The anthropologist Samas
Sochin, senior lecturer at the National University of Ireland at
Maynooth, who has written a biography of Casement, admits that
his subject played a peripheral role in the 1916 Rising: having been
isolated in Germany, he returned to a remote corner of Ireland,
where he was immediately arrested.
Like Mitchell, he sees Casement as a model humanitarian,
who, as a result of his experiences in Africa and South America,
raised issues that are as relevant now as in the early 20th century:
issues of corporate responsibility, environmental justice and
human rights.
ORE SPECIFICALLY, Casements pioneering approach to global justice is playing a belated role in
the debate on Irelands foreign policy. His pro-Germanism is now quoted in favour of a greater role for
Ireland in Europe, an argument that may gain strength in the
light of Britains impending referendum on its membership of
the European Union. As Casement wrote in his 1915 book, The
Crime Against Europe:
FURTHER READING
Roger Sawyer, Roger Casement's Diaries 1910: The Black and White
(Pimlico, 1997).
Samas Sochin, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary
(Lilliput Press, 2008).
Roy Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation, 1890-1923
(Penguin, 2015).
Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation, Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 19131923 (Profile, 2015).
Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (Penguin, 2015).
XXXXXXXXXX
| AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
How the
Brits lost
America
Taxing issue:
The Repeal, or
the Funeral of Miss
Ame-Stamp, 1766.
38 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
XXXXXXXXXXX
for the American colonies; but it was accompanied by an informal assurance to the colonial representatives in London
that it was a right that would never be exercised. Franklin
was satisfied, declaring to the Commons that you claim the
same right with regard to Ireland, but you never exercise it.
He was to be proved wrong a little more than a year later.
The Declaratory Act was not enough to sustain Rockingham in office and, in the summer of 1766, the king persuaded Pitt to return. Pitt, it was believed, offered stability.
He was generally sympathetic to the Americans and had the
authority of a successful and respected war leader, leading
Franklins friend William Strahan to write at the time that:
Mr Pitt, it is agreed on all sides, is the only man that can at
present extricate us from our present and more immediate
difficulties. But Pitt, elevated to the Lords as the Earl of
Chatham, showed himself unable to act as prime minister
and, debilitated as he was by physical and mental illness,
incapable of functioning in any meaningful way at all.
Divide or rule:
Benjamin
Franklin's cartoon,
published in
the Pennsylvania
Gazette, 1754.
Townshend's duties
This lack of leadership offered an opportunity to Charles
Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a long-time
advocate of enforcing parliamentary supremacy over the
colonies. Ignoring the views of his Cabinet colleagues,
Townshend persuaded Parliament to pass the duties on the
American importation of glass, paint, paper and tea which
bear his name. Once again there was resistance in America,
all the more bitter because the powers of
the Declaratory Act had been exercised. The
opposition was particularly acute in Massachusetts and, the following year, the secretary
of state, Lord Hillsborough, ordered British
troops supposedly stationed in America for
frontier duty to garrison Boston. It was a
move supported by Parliament. Edmund Burke
summed up the position: The Americans have
made a discovery, or think they have made
one, that we mean to oppress them: we have
made a discovery, or think we have made one,
that they intend to rise in rebellion against us
we know not how to advance; they know not
how to retreat Some party must give way.
Townshend died suddenly in 1767, but his successor,
the Duke of Grafton, could only retain a parliamentary
majority by bringing a core of anti-American ministers into
his Cabinet. When Lord North replaced Grafton in 1770 he
retained the same balance of ministers and his position was
cemented by the support of the king. Political stability had
been achieved, but with a coercive policy towards America
locked in place. War between Britain and its American
colonies did not break out until 1775, but the breakdown
of trust between the two sides had begun a decade before.
The success of the Seven Years War, its exceptional cost
and a British political leadership in flux had unbalanced the
relationship between Britain and America. The formerly disunited colonies had come together in response to perceived
British aggression. Though it was the colonies that rebelled,
the first moves had been made in London.
George Goodwin is the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life
of Americas Founding Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 39
SHAKESPEARE
THE
BARD
Beyond
Borders
Shakespeares approach to history and
geography is often regarded as something
of a joke. Wrong, argues Dominic Green.
He skillfully reconstructed the people
and places of the medieval Mediterranean
for audiences whose horizons were being
expanded by the Renaissance.
SHAKESPEARE
SHAKESPEARE
was given to his fellow Lombard, Guido Pallavincini, who built a
castle to defend the pass at Thermopylae. The other, the County of
Salona near ancient Delphi, went to Bonifaces ally from Picardy,
Thomas dAutremencourt. Beyond these statelets, Bonifaces
vassal Otto de la Roche, a minor Burgundian nobleman, became
Duke of Athens, ruling the Attic peninsula and southern Thessaly
from his seat at Thebes.
To Bonifaces south-west lay the Morea, as the Peloponnese
was then called. There, across the Isthmus of Corinth, another
large vassal territory arose. In 1205 a hundred knights invaded
the Morea on Bonifaces behalf, led by a pair of French opportunists, William of Champlitte and his friend Geoffrey of Villehardouin, the namesake and nephew of the chronicler of the
Fourth Crusade. Defeating a larger Byzantine force in an olive
grove north of Coroni, William and Geoffrey declared the Principiate of Achaea. In 1210 Geoffrey, now Prince of Achaea, allied
with Otto, Duke of Athens and their campaigns expanded the
Latin presence in the Morea.
The Greeks of Nicea, determined to regain Constantinople, invaded northern Greece in 1259. They
defeated and captured William at Pelagonia and conquered Achaea. Two years later, Michael VIII Palaeologos took Constantinople. The Latin Empire of the
East was over. Achaea became a Byzantine province
and William a servant of the new Greek emperor. For
his ransom, the Greeks took the trio of castles that
dominated the southern Morea: Monemvasia, Great
Mani and, third and more beautiful, Myzithras. Williams dynasty dissolved. His title became the subject
of minor wars between rival French houses and the
territory they described became the Despotate of the
Morea. His ally and enemy, the Duke of Athens, suffered a worse fate. After 1311, the ducal line descended
through a family of Catalan mercenaries.
The Frankish citadel of Myzithras became the
Greek city of Mystras, capital of the Despotate of the
Morea. A city grew on the slopes beneath the castles
wing, with a palace, several churches and monasteries and a kind of medieval class system: nobility in
the upper town, merchants in the middle, artisans
at the bottom. As the despots expanded, the Morea
became Byzantiums richest province and Mystras a
city second only to Constantinople. The era of Latin
Greece was over. The last stand of Byzantine Greece
was beginning.
SHAKESPEARE
and Asian land masses on either side of Constantinople. The Byzantine
Empire had shrunk to the capitals western hinterland: the tiny Aegean
islands of Skiathos, Skopelos and Skyros; and the Morea, minus the
Venetian ports of Modon, Coroni and Nafplion. Only a fragmented band
of buffer states, including the Duchy of Athens, lay between the Greek
Morea and the Turkish armies in Greece and the Balkans. In 1453, as
Constantinople fell to Mehmet II, the Morea became an Ottoman possession. Mystras succumbed in 1461.
Under Turkish rule the Morea entered an oppressive slumber,
enlivened by the occasional, sometimes violent, crisis. In 1464
Sigismondo Malatesta, the freebooting Wolf of Rimini, led a Venetian army to Mystras. He failed to take the castle, but returned to
Italy with the bones of Gemistus Plethon, so that the great teacher
may be among free men. Malatesta reinterred Plethon in the
Tempio Maletestina, his private church, among his wives and mistresses and a splendid assemblage of ancient statuary. Pope Pius II
denounced the Tempio as full of pagan gods and profane things.
Plethon, who had sought to revive the old gods along with the old
learning, would have approved.
HAKESPEARE WAS BORN in 1564, a century after Malatestas retrieval of Plethons bones. In the intervening years, the
Ottomans had continued to sweep westwards and by 1561 the
Moreas only Latin holdouts were the Venetian fortresses at
Modon and Koroni and the scattered clans of the Mani peninsula.
From a European perspective the medieval Morea went into rapid
eclipse. Politically, Latin civilisation no longer existed. It had become
suddenly foreign, obscured by Byzantine, Muslim and Turkish accretions. The Reformation had shattered
the unity of Christendom, a premise of
A detail from Gozzoli's
the Crusades, with a disunited Europe
Journey of the Magi cycle
has Plethon portrayed
of religious schisms and nation states.
with beard and gold cap,
Meanwhile, the westward growth of the
Palazzo Medici-Riccardi,
Ottoman Empire redrew the map of the
Florence, c.1460.
Mediterranean and the bounds of strategic
possibility. Foxes Acts and Monuments had also included a History of
the Turks, stocked with atrocities, fearing for the future of Europe
and Christianity. In 1571, when Londoners learnt that a Spanish and
Venetian fleet had defeated the Turks at Lepanto, celebratory bonfires
were lit. Yet just a decade later, Elizabeth I and Murad III discussed
collaboration against the Spanish in the Mediterranean.
Culturally, however, the indirect influence of Plethon and the scholars of late Byzantium endured. After the fall of Byzantium, refugees
from Constantinople and Mystras congregated in the cities of northern
Italy, especially in Venice, whose print shops disseminated the New
Learning over the Alps and across northern Europe. The New Learning
was consciously modern in its fascination with ancient sources. The
Renaissance imagination embraced its own time, however, and that of
the ancient Peloponnesus, but not the medieval Morea. Shakespeares
Duke of Athens has a medieval title, but the Greece of A Midsummer
Nights Dream is not medieval. It is both older and newer. The helots of
ancient Attica are the mechanicals of Elizabethan Stratford. The woods
of Arcadia are the early modern Forest of Arden. The ancient myth of
Hippolyta the Amazon elides with Englands own Amazon, Elizabeth I.
The eclipse of the Latin Morea by the Renaissance and the Ottoman
Empire also blurred the identity of the most famous Morean albeit
fictional of them all: Othello, the Moor of Venice. At Venice, a moro
was a Morean, not a Spanish or North African Moor. Venice had always
been the most Byzantine of Italian cities. Its Greek population grew
every time the Byzantine Empire faltered and the Turks advanced. In
the late 1400s and early 1500s, thousands of fugitives arrived from Constantinople and the Morea. Shakespeare backdated Othello to precisely
this period: sometime between the 1480s and the fall of Rhodes in 1523.
46 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
Sigismondo
Malatesta, by
Piero della
Francesca, mid15th century.
FURTHER READING
Jean Longnon, The Frankish States in Greece, 1204-1311, in A History
of the Crusades, Vol.2: The Later Crusades, 1189-1311, eds. K.M. Setton,
R.L. Wolff and H.W. Hazard (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
William Miller, The Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece,
1204-1566 (Dutton, 1908; out of print).
Steven Runciman, Mistra (1980); reprinted as The Lost Capital of
Byzantium: The History of Mistra and the Peloponnese (Harvard, 2009).
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 47
MakingHistory
Was Henry VIII a good-natured buffoon or an egotistical tyrant? Your answer is likely to depend
on which cinematic portrayal you have seen most recently, suggests Suzannah Lipscomb.
Tudor chicken:
Charles Laughton
in The Private Life
of Henry VIII, 1933.
PENAL COLONIES
All the
worlds a
PRISON
Francis Lagrange, A Row of Solitary
Confinement Cells, c.1940s.
PENAL COLONIES
The number of convicts sent to key penal locations by European powers, 1415-1953.
French convicts
depart for French
Guiana, early 20th
century.
HE PENAL HISTORY of
French Guiana is part of
a global story. Around the
world, transportation was
underpinned by sometimes incompatible ambitions: to
create a deterrent; to employ convict labour in opening up
frontiers, colonies and borderlands; and to populate newly
colonised locations with what in Guyane were called transports-colons (transportation-colonists). Political repression
and forced labour combined to change the face of nations,
empires and colonies and to produce long-term impacts
on economy, society and identity. Convicts took various,
interconnected routes to penal sites across the world, which
were closely associated with other forms of punishment
Cellular Jail
National
Memorial, Port
Blair, Andaman
Islands.
Arracan, 14th
February 1849,
Kyook Phoo. Ghat &
Prisoners carrying
water in Buckets,
Isle of Ramree,
by Clementina
Benthall.
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 51
PENAL COLONIES
and Western Australia. The 167,000 or so convicts shipped
to the Australian colonies included a significant minority of
courts martialled soldiers and imperial subjects convicted
in the West Indian and other colonies, including the Cape
Colony, Hong Kong and Mauritius.
Transportation was not exclusive to European empires.
Into the early 20th century, imperial Russia shipped
convicts to its far eastern territories, including Siberia
and Sakhalin Island. Meiji-era Japan sent convicts to the
northern island of Hokkaido between 1881 and 1907. Qing
China, which lasted from 1644 to 1912, used convict transportation overland to open up its westernmost frontiers,
including, after its conquest in the late 1750s, Xinjiang.
After gaining independence from the Iberian powers in the
early 19th century, the new nation states of Latin America
set up offshore penal colonies, too, including Ushuaia in
Argentinian Patagonia, Brazils Fernando de Noronha and
Mexicos Islas Maras.
The number of convicts transported by the European
powers was at least 680,000, an estimate likely to rise as
the complex research necessary to piece together often fragmented archival material progresses. It does not include the
600,000 or so prisoners and military offenders conscripted
into the convict forces of the French Empire between 1832
and 1972. Nor does it incorporate the 900,000 or so convicts
shipped by imperial Russia, the (at least) 10,000 convicts
O
View from the
Commissioner's
House across
the Royal Naval
Dockyard to
Casemates
Barracks, National
Museum of
Bermuda.
the British Empire, convicts were used to colonise the Antipodes after 1787, to build Bermudas naval dockyard in the
Atlantic Ocean (1824-63) and to undertake military works
on the rock of Gibraltar (1842-75). Fearing Russian invasion
and wanting enhanced overland communication, at the
turn of the 20th-century, the Japanese government transferred convicts from Kushiro to Abashiri, where they built a
new road connecting the town to central Hokkaido.
The global dimensions of transportation are evident
across penal systems, too, including through the ongoing
mobility of convicts following their initial transportation
via onward shipment or relocation. Across empires, convicts
were not just sent outwards to the colonies, but between
and around imperial possessions. In early modern times,
this included extensive convict movement between the
Spanish presidios in the Americas and the Philippines.
Entirely separate regional circuits could develop in some
contexts. The English East India Company, for example,
shipped convicts from its Indian possessions to penal settlements in Mauritius and Aden, as well as Penang, Malacca,
Singapore and Burma. After Britains possessions in India
were transferred to Crown control following the Great Uprising of 1857, the government of India established a new
Left: Russian
convicts on a boat
to Sakhalin Island,
1890. Photo by
Anton Chekhov.
Below: Illustrated
handscroll
depicting convict
labour at Horonai
Coalmine, painted
by anonymous
convict at Sorachi
Central Prison,
Japan, c.1881-89.
PENAL COLONIES
Prisoners at work
at the Noumea
Penal Colony,
New Caledonia,
engraved by Gillot,
c.1900.
FURTHER READING
Frank Diktter and Ian Brown (eds), Cultures of
Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and
Latin America (Hurst & Co, 2007).
Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in
the Indian Ocean World, 17901920 (Cambridge, 2012).
Clare Anderson, Madhumita Mazumdar and Vishvajit
Pandya, New Histories of the Andaman Islands: Landscape,
Place and Identity in the Bay of Bengal, 1790-2012
(Cambridge, 2016).
REVIEWS
Tessa Storey on the food and health regimens of early modern Europe
Emma Griffin praises E.P. Thompson Rohan McWilliam observes the masses
SIGNPOSTS
Ugliness
A Cultural History
Gretchen E. Henderson
Reaktion Books 236pp 16.99
GRETCHEN E. Henderson
approaches her topic through
an impressive number of examples, spanning disciplines,
mediums, usages, geographies
and chronologies and including works of fine and popular
art, architecture, mythology,
cultural moments, historical
facts and human individuals
and groups. The book offers an
anecdotal survey of what people
have termed ugly in various
contexts. This method proves a
productive approach towards
a concept that is constantly
shifting: ugliness, we are told, is
a cultural construct.
REVIEWS
IF NEWSPAPER columns, TV
listings and the self-help shelves of
bookshops are anything to go by,
the importance of diet to health
is an expanding area of contemporary concern. However, it may
be a surprise to learn that a great
volume of medical advice on diet
REVIEWS
feudal rituals, marital diplomacy
and the dispensing of benefices.
But in 1489 her family forced her
to abdicate and Cyprus became
a Venetian colony. Retaining the
empty title Queen of Cyprus,
Corner was cast into internal
exile at Asolando, the terrafirma
hill town where Robert Browning would later live.
At Asolo, the symbolic activities that had failed to save
Corners throne became sources
of new influence. Not all of her
new life was under her control.
Daughter of Venice
Giorgione and Titian painted
Caterina Corner, Queen of
Corners portrait and Pietro
Cyprus and Woman of the
Bembo set his Neoplatonic
Renaissance
treatise on love, Gli Asolani (1505),
at Corners court. But Bembo,
Holly S. Hurlburt
Hurlburt concludes, does not
Yale University Press 360pp 40
seem personally to have attendHENRY JAMES found great
ed events there. Nor can the
pleasure in writing the word
presence of the great Venetian
Venice, but was not sure there
artists be confirmed, though it
is not a certain impudence in
may be significant that, while
pretending to add anything to
Titians Corner is an even greater
it. Holly S. Hurlburt adds much
triumph of tact over truth than
about one of Venices mythic
Holbeins portrait of Anne of
figures, Caterina Corner. Instead Cleves, Giorgiones is mercilessly
of the familiar territory of doges, plain.
canals and all-male patrician
Corner died in 1510. Her
politicking, Hurlburt explores a
menfolk cultivated the legend
womans biography, set mostly
of Caterina Veneta, the dutiful
in Venices territories on the
daughter who surrendered
Italian mainland and the stato da her throne for the good of the
mar, the Venetian empire.
republic. The operas of Donizetti
Corner was born in 1455 or
and Halvy and Brownings verse
1456 to a patrician family, whose exploited the legend, too.
genealogy sported four doges
Was Corner a willing martyr
and a rash of royal in-laws.
or a vulnerable pawn in the
Her mother was the daughter
game of Venetian diplomacy?
of John IV of Trebizond, the
James excused his impudence
Byzantine outpost on the Black
with a double negative; Hurlburt
Sea, and her father was creditor navigates the lagoon of early
and counsellor to the Lusignan
modern historiography, between
kings of Cyprus. In 1468 her
the legends of Corner as passive
father married her by proxy to
victim or tragic heroine. HurlJacques II of Cyprus, known to
burts Corner is often weak but
the genealogists as the Bastard. frequently brave, a better patron
Within months of her arrival in
than politician and more a
Famagusta in 1472, her husband
woman of the Renaissance than
was dead, probably poisoned
a Renaissance woman. Subtly
by her family, and she was
written and lushly illustrated,
pregnant. Her son died in equally Daughter of Venice is a fascinatsuspicious circumstances. The
ing journey into contest and
Venetian merchants, notably
conviviencia, an imperial game
her father and brother, now
of thrones. It is also a skilled and
controlled Cyprus.
judicious recovery, extricating
For 15 years Corner fended off Corner from myths that, preher scheming family, the King of serving her image, had obscured
Naples and the Mamluk sultan
her personality.
by processions, gift exchange,
Dominic Green
Diplomacy in
Renaissance Rome
The Rise of the
Resident Ambassador
Catherine Fletcher
AN AMBASSADOR is an honest
man sent to lie abroad. The
delicious ambiguity at the heart of
the dictum of Sir Henry Wotton,
himself an ambassador for James I
of England, exemplifies the obfuscations that were essential to
diplomacy. As Catherine Fletcher
reminds us here, an ambassador
had to simulate and dissimulate,
to charm and to dissemble, to be
himself (always himself) and more
than himself: he must embody his
master. The world these diplomats
inhabited may sound familiar but it
was also distant because distance
mattered; communication was
not in real-time (Fletcher notes
that from London to Rome could
take a courier two weeks, but it
was usually more). That proved a
barrier and an opportunity for our
man to be his own man: but not
too much, for fear of overstepping
the elusive mark between honest
service and self-aggrandisement.
Sixty years lie between Garrett
Mattinglys classic Renaissance
Diplomacy and Fletchers volume.
Her pages bear witness to the
lively scholarship of the intervening generations. Her brief is not
to replace Mattingly but to focus,
in the decades either side of 1500,
on the city which was the premier
diplomatic locale of Christendom:
Rome. She comes to this having
already published her study of one
ambassador, Henry VIIIs agent,
Gregorio Casali. Her new volume
provides the broader context,
An ambassador
is an honest man
sent to lie abroad
exemplifies the
obfuscations that
were essential to
diplomacy
It is to the development of
these ceremonial practices that
Fletcher especially attends, giving
a vivid taste of the theatricality of
ritual, in which the cityscape acted
as the stage. Successive papal servants recorded precedents in order
to claim there was an established
order, while tweaking that order
time and again to allow for particular circumstances. An apparently
static hierarchy was offset by a
practical need for flexibility. The
corridors of power, as it were, deceived with their straight sightlines;
they hid an architecture of nooks
and crannies. This is the paradox
at the heart of the emerging diplomatic culture Fletcher describes:
increasingly complex certainties
bred creative ambiguity.
David Rundle
APRIL 2016 HISTORY TODAY 59
REVIEWS
Communities
were uprooted and
removed ... one of
the great tragedies
of Scottish history
But what makes this volume
stand out in the history of the
Clearances is the way in which
Hunter follows the stories of
those affected by the unfolding
events in Sutherland beyond the
north of Scotland and across the
world, particularly to Canada,
where many of those evicted
moved. The stories of the
mind-boggling hardships faced
by those people from shipboard illnesses to winter treks
are researched and presented
here for the first time.
Hunter makes very clear
which side he is on in the
ongoing clearances debate. He
argues passionately that life for
people in pre-clearance Sutherland was viable, that the last 200
years of poverty and depopulation has been a historical blip
and one that could be corrected
with modern land reform.
This reflects Hunters other
London Lives
projects (www.oldbaileyonline.
org and www.londonlives.org).
This book supplements these
efforts and adds dimension to
their aim, to posit a new model of
paupers and criminal agency and
to emphasise its distinctive effect
in shaping the evolution of policy.
Their approach of highlighting the
complex relationship between
plebeian tactics and elite strategies
is highly successful.
From the masses of data
we find that servants were the
most likely occupational group to
commit crime (a massive 33 per
cent of the total) with labourers,
porters, soldiers, gentlemen and
squires accounting for between
three and four per cent each. Unsurprisingly, most criminals were in
low-status occupations.
Aggressive begging and vagrancy increased as more people
battled for fewer resources, thanks
to the influx of migrants, not just
from the countryside but from
all over western Europe. A grand
jury complained in July 1693 of the
neglect of the poor, & their being
suffered to beg in great numbers
up & down the streets of this City,
to be a dishonour to the City, & an
injury to the Inhabitants. By the
end of 1701 many of the systems
of dealing with crime, poverty and
belonging for the next century
were in place, as the poor increasingly identified as social problems.
Most noticeable was the
increasing number of young
unmarried people in London:
women who had come to work
in domestic service and men in
apprenticeships. There was a
dramatic increase in the number
of women involved in crime; they
made up over half of defendants at
the beginning of the 18th century.
Clipping or counterfeiting coins
was also on the increase.
In response to the growing
numbers of people in desperate
need, the London Workhouse
reopened in 1698 and the Vagrancy
Cost Act was introduced in
1699. Since the need to establish
belonging was regarded as an
imperative, paupers badges and
resettlement certificates were
given out in an attempt to ensure
rights to poor relief.
Vice was a particular focus
REVIEWS
of societies for the reformation
of manners, which sprang up to
target the problem. The overseers
of the poor of St Martin-in-theFields in the parish of Westminster
complained of a dayly increase of
poor in the said parish and that the
encouragers thereof are people
of evill fame who keep reputed
bawdy houses in severall by alleys
and placed in the said parish
whereby several great disorders
and misdeamenors [sic] are dayly
committed against the peace
Streetwalkers were also often
suspected of being house-breakers
or pickpockets and were convicted
on flimsy evidence. On September
22nd, 1693, for example, Eleanor
Rawlinson and Elizabeth Thorne
stood before Bridewell governors
accused of being idle Lewd persons
and Suspected to be common
pickpocket(s), with little further
evidence deemed necessary. By
1728 the main aim of the Middlesex
justices was to discover and
Supress all Such Persons who keep
night-Houses, Gaming Houses, or
other disorderly Houses, wherein
Robbers or other Felons are
harbourd or incouraged. By 1763
the magistrate John Fielding was
urging the closing of the low, and
common bawdy-houses, where
vice is rendered cheap, and consequently within the reach of the
common people.
Thief-takers or informers, such
as the notorious Jonathan Wild,
were among those policing crime,
either as volunteers or paid agents;
these figures increasingly attracted
public hostility. The public often
took matters into its own hands
when it considered the law too
harsh: when 500 alehouse keepers
and tradesmen were convicted
for breaking the Sabbath, the
numerous complaints led to the
expulsion of a Justice of the Peace,
Ralph Hartley.
Calling upon a new body of
evidence, Hitchcock and Shoemaker illuminate the lives of prison
escapees, manipulators of the poor
relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants
to reveal how they each played the
system to the best of their ability
in order to survive in their various
circumstances of misfortune.
Julie Peakman
CLASSIC BOOK
had regarded as scraps from the archive and inE.P. THOMPSONs The Making of the English
terrogated them for what they told us about the
Working Class was one of the most successful
beliefs and aims of those who were not on the
history books of the 20th century. At the time
winning side. The Making rambled over aspects
of its writing, Thompson had one book to his
of human experience that had never before had
name a largely unnoticed biography of William
their historian. The timing of its appearance
Morris and held a less than glamorous position
could scarcely have been more fortunate, as
in the extra-mural department at Leeds Univerthe 1960s saw unprecedented expansion in the
sity. No one could have predicted that within
university sector, with the creation of new unimonths The Making would become a runaway
versities filled with lecturers and students whose
commercial and critical success. In 1968 Pelican
families had not traditionally had access to the
Books bought the rights and published a revised
privileged world of higher education. Little
version as its 1,000th title. Fifty years on, it is
wonder, then, that so many felt a natural affinity
still in print, widely revered as a canonical work
with Thompsons outsiders and underdogs.
of social history.
Yet, radical and innovative as it was, The
With its preface so memorably declaring the
Making, like all history books, was still very
books intention to rescue the poor stockinger,
much a book of its time. In the Marxist tradition,
the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom
Thompson rejected the notion
weaver, the Utopian artisan,
that capitalism was inherentand even the deluded follower
ly superior to the alternative
of Joanna Southcott, from
model of economic organisathe enormous condescension
tion it replaced. He refused
of posterity, The Making
to accept that the decline of
was part of the new wave of
the artisans was inevitable,
social history. Social history
or that their distress was a
sought to put those who had
necessary adjustment to the
traditionally lain outside the
market economy. It was an arprofessions mainstream congument that resonated widely
cerns of politics, diplomacy
at the time, when Marxist
and statecraft into the historintellectuals could still believe
ical frame. Workers, women
that a realistic alternative to
and people of colour were
capitalism existed and could
finding their historians. A
still argue that true Marxism
very different kind of history
had not been tried properly.
was starting to emerge.
The Making of the
The Making also shared the
In fact, pioneering social
English Working Class
sexual politics of the 1960s.
and economic historians had
E.P. Thompson
The new power-driven factobeen studying working people
Victor
Gollancz
1963, rev. ed. Penguin 1968 676pp
ries at the heart of Thompfor decades, but the focus
sons industrial revolution
had always been squarely
were operated largely by women and yet women
on the tangible, the measurable, the signifiwere curiously absent from his book. Of course,
cant: wages, living conditions, unions, strikes,
given Thompsons central concern with the new
Chartists. Thompson attempted something
working-class culture of the period their absence
different in The Making. He touched, of course,
is not entirely surprising: women were, after
upon the trade unions and the real wage, but
all, largely excluded from the political culture
spawned during industrialisation. But accepting
and reproducing the sexual inequalities and exclusions of industrialising Britain lies in tension
with the books radical ambitions.
Our historical understanding of the Industrial Revolution has inevitably changed many
times since The Making was first published.
Thompson did not provide the answers. Rather,
most of his book was devoted to what he referred to as experience. Through a patient and
his enduring gift was to create a space in which
extensive examination of local as well as
generations of teachers and students could seek
national archives, Thompson had uncovered
to understand the marginalised, the powerless
details about workshop customs and rituals,
and those who left little mark on the historical
failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular
record.
songs and union club cards. He took what others
Emma Griffin
REVIEWS
Masculinity, Class
and Same-Sex Desire
in Industrial England,
1895-1957
Helen Smith
Sexual violence
against men in war
is deeply difficult
... and is too often
ignored
Ultimately, this book does
achieve its stated goal of raising
awareness of a complex subject.
Unfortunately, it does so in ways
that are often incoherent and intellectually problematic, while for the
more general reader the academic
language and thematic structure
create barriers to full engagement
with the text. Misra is right to call
for further and broader discussion;
sadly his work here adds little to
the conversation.
Jessica Meyer
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
Worktown
THE STORY begins with a pair of still life paintWalking through these galleries, we sense
ings from the 1860s: Monets Spring Flowers and
the artists pleasure in manipulating paint to
Renoirs Flowers in a Greenhouse (inset). A decade such vibrant effect. We share and delight in
before the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874,
their sensations of sunlight, colour and warmth.
the two artists were finding in this most traditAnd, indeed, with very few exceptions the sun is
ional of art genres scope for their experiments
shining. For the French Impressionists, gardens
with composition, tone and colour. The Royal
en plein air meant gardens in spring or summer,
Academy of Arts current exhibition follows
never on a rainy day. Not until the Symbolists
Monet, Renoir and fellow Impressionists as they
in a gallery labelled Gardens of Silence do we
moved outdoors to paint flowers en plein air.
encounter gardens under mist and snow.
The garden became a prime site for innovation,
A thematic show of this type sharpens our
as the Impressionists developed an approach to
awareness of the dramatic changes taking place
painting grounded in their own individual perin European art at the turn of the 19th and
ceptions of nature: what Zola
20th centuries. At one point
called a corner of creation
the sheer diversity of early
seen through a temperament.
modern art causes an otherWhere Caillebotte translated
wise tightly organised display
his interest in urban geometto lose coherence. The gallery
ries into the lines of a wall, a
labelled Avant-Gardens tries
path or a flower bed, Renoir
to encompass the different
preferred gardens that were
faces of European art at the
overgrown and unkempt, for
start of the 20th century,
artists can only work where
but the limited sampling of
nature is left some freedom.
Matisse, Klee and Munch is
Monet sought to create an
unsatisfactory and confusing.
idyll in a succession of suburbBetter to home in on just
an gardens in Ville dAvray,
one aspect of avant-garde art
Argenteuil and Vthueil
during this period and to give
while Pissarro found inspiraMatisse a stronger presence.
tion in the mundane: peasants
In fact, with only two works
at work in the market gardens
by Matisse on display, it is
Painting the Modern
of Pontoise and Eragny. One
hard to justify the exhibition
Garden
otherwise sympathetic critic
title: Monet to Monet would
Monet to Matisse
found the painters inclinathave been nearer the mark.
Royal Academy, until April 20th
ion for cabbages and peasants
Both Caillebotte and
deplorable.
Monet were keen gardeners,
Missing from this show are examples of
a point made here with displays of journals,
contemporary Salon art. A few examples from
flower catalogues and books on horticulture. A
painters like Toulmouche and Stevens might
painting by Edouard Manet of 1874, The Monet
have highlighted just how radical the ImpresFamily in their Garden at Argenteuil, shows the
sionists were. However, we do see contemporary artist tending plants, while his wife and son look
associates of the group, including James Tissot
out towards the viewer. In the 1870s Monet
and John Singer Sargent. Indeed one of the great
was already hard at work shaping one of his key
strengths of this exhibition is its international
sources of inspiration and over time his art and
his garden would grow to be interdependent.
In the last decades of his life Monet was drawn
within the paradise he had created at Giverny,
the garden he described as his most beautiful
work of art. The final gallery provides a suitable
climax, with all three paintings of the monumental Agapanthus Triptych presented together
for the first time in the UK. Following Monets
shifting gaze from depth to surface, shadow to
scope; it moves beyond the well-trodden field
light, water to sky, we share with him a glimpse
of French Impressionism to include artists from
of the infinite in a lily pond.
Spain, America, Belgium, Denmark and elseKathleen McLauchlan
where. The names Sorollo, Kryer, Le Sidaner
and Childe Hassam may be unfamiliar to a
Catalogue: Painting the Garden: Monet to Matisse,
British audience, but their work at the RA makes Monty Don, Ann Dumas, Helen Lemonedes, et al.
a powerful impact.
Royal Academy of Arts 328pp 48
REVIEWS
Spender (whose photographs
created a visual record) and the
film-maker Humphrey Jennings.
Working-class locals were also
part of the team, grounding it in
everyday life. David Halls evocative book lovingly recreates this
early phase of the movement.
Mass-Observation had an
eye for the smallness of English
life. No detail was too insignificant. It recorded the drudgery
of work and the life-threatening
illnesses associated with factory
work. But it was fascinated by
the home and the way people
spent their leisure time. When
a comedy was playing at the
cinema, observers turned up
with stopwatches to time the
length of audience laughter and
note what they found funny.
Another volunteer took in a
meeting of the Bolton Budgerigar Society. At a dance hall, we
learn there were no men with
bald heads downstairs (presumably where dancing took place)
but a considerable number upstairs. Grafitti on lavatory walls
subsequent prosecution of a
covert military campaign against
the Ukrainian government in the
Donbass region and its formal
annexation of the Crimean peninsula has caused consternation in
western capitals. In this opaque,
largely undeclared conflict, all
interested parties have sought to
instrumentalise history for political
ends. Memory politics and historical grievance fuel the conflict and,
in extremis, history its appropriation and misappropriation has
become a weapon of war.
It is in this context that Plokhy
locates his formidable account
of Ukrainian history. His remit is
vast: careering, often at breakneck speed, from an account of
the region given by Herodotus
to the present day. It is a story of
historical contingency and evershifting borders, as the lands at
the western edge of the Eurasian
steppe that now constitute
Ukraine are redrawn by regional
empires: Roman to Ottoman,
Habsburg to Romanov, Nazi to
Soviet. It is often a tragic history,
REVIEWS
which reaches its ghastly apogee
early in the 20th century. The
devastation visited upon Ukraine
by the state-orchestrated famine
of 1932-33 and later by the Nazis
is unspeakable every sixth
Jew killed in the Holocaust was
Ukrainian.
Plokhy sheds considerable light
on the current conflict by paying
special attention to the integrated
history of Russia and Ukraine. Both
states claim to be the legitimate
heirs of Kyivan Rus, the medieval
state centred on Kiev. The image
of Yaroslav the Wise appears on
the banknotes of both countries.
The founding myth of modern
Russia is of a state conceived and
born in Kiev. More pertinently, as
Plokhy highlights, despite Putins
claim that Russias annexation of
Crimea was an act of historical
justice to redress the transfer
of the peninsula to the Soviet
Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, it
was Russian imperial expansion
of the late 18th century that led
to dominance by Russia of lands
once inhabited by the Crimean
and Noghay Tatars. Similarly, the
recently revived notion of Novorossiya (the territory connecting
Crimea with mainland Russia)
was also born of Russian imperialism under Catherine the Great,
centred on the former lands of the
Zaporozhian Cossacks. As Russian
claims persist that the Ukrainian
state is an artificial formation, it
propagates a narrative that, the
only genuine and thus historically
legitimate polity is the empire: first
the Russian Empire and then the
Soviet Union, Plokhy states.
This erudite account errs only
under the weight of its own ambition. Its relentlessly chronological
and sometimes clinical attempt to
provide a comprehensive as well
as granular account can seem a
little list-like and leaves a sense
that Plokhys narrative might have
been better curated. However, this
is an important, timely survey of
Ukraines history, providing a corrective to recent historical abuses.
Though it may sound like a grand
sentiment, if the misappropriation
of history is a weapon of war,
historical truth can sometimes be a
potent instrument of peace.
John Owen
CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Berger teaches
History of Art at University
College London.
Dominic Green is author of
The Double Life of Doctor Lopez
(Century, 2003). He teaches at
Boston College, Mass.
Emma Griffin is Professor of
History at the University of
East Anglia. Her books include
A Short History of the British
Industrial Revolution (Palgrave,
2010).
Jerome de Groots books
include Remaking History
(Routledge, 2015).
John-Pierre Joyce is a writer,
journalist and teacher. He is
currently writing a gay history
of Britain, 1957-70.
Kathleen McLauchlan is a
lecturer in History of Art and a
course director at the Victoria &
Albert Museum.
Rohan McWilliam is Professor
of Modern British History
at Anglia Ruskin University,
Cambridge.
Jessica Meyer is University
Academic Fellow in Legacies of
War in the School of History at
the University of Leeds.
John Owen is a journalist and
producer, whose documentaries
include The Warroom and
Churchill: When Britain Said No,
both broadcast on BBC2.
Julie Peakmans books include
Peg Plunkett, Memoirs of a Whore
(Quercus, 2015).
Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus
Professor of History at the
University of Lancaster.
David Rundle is a lecturer in
the Department of History at
the University of Essex.
Tessa Storeys most recent
book (co-authored with Sandra
Cavallo) is Healthy Living in Late
Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2013).
Annie Tindley is a senior
lecturer in History at the
University of Dundee. Her books
include The Sutherland Estate,
1850-1920 (Edinburgh University
Press, 2010).
Letters
The Argument Falls Down
My friend Alex von Tunzelmann
(Rhodes Must Fall? A Question
of When Not If, March 2016) is a
good historian. But she overstates her case.
She cites the demolition of
the statue of Saddam Hussein in
Baghdad in 2003, saying it was
hauled down by protesters. It
was not. It was pulled down by
American troops. Those of us
watching the event on live television feeds saw the efficiency
of US military communications
when the serviceman climbing
a ladder to attach the Stars and
Stripes to the plinth was ordered
to the ground and returned
to the top with an Iraqi flag:
commanders were well aware of
the symbolism of the event and
wanted to present the war as an
indigenous uprising. It was only
after US forces had dragged the
statue down that Baghdadis set
about bashing the effigy with
sledgehammers.
The destruction of Saddams
statue mattered because it was
a symbol of power. The same is
true of the toppling of effigies
of Stalin in Hungary in 1956 and
Lenin in Ukraine in 2013-14: the
individuals may have been dead,
yet they represented a living
system of repression.
Cecil Rhodes was a brute. But
his effigy is over a century old.
It does not tell us anything at all
about current attitudes and so
pulling it down achieves nothing.
You might as well pull down the
statue of Henry VIII over the
Great Court of Trinity College,
Cambridge on the grounds that
he was unsound on feminism.
Our universities take their
money where they can scrounge
it. The oligarch Leonid Blavatnik
has funded Oxfords School of
Government and Wafik Said the
business school. Rupert Murdoch
has endowed a professorship of
language and communication
there. They are all, of course,
66 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2016
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
honourable men.
Instead of focusing on a
clapped-out imperialist, there is
a far stronger case to be made for
tearing down the numerous effigies of Napoleon scattered about
France. The moment the country
stops revering the little Corsican
tyrant will be the point at which
he deserves to be left alone.
Jeremy Paxman
London
Liberating Languages
Stewart McCains article
(Should One Nation Mean One
Language, March) reminded
me of the linguistic skill of my
maternal grandfather. He was
born in Alexsandrw, in what was
then Russian-controlled Poland,
in 1867. Polish and Yiddish were
the languages at home, but they
were both forbidden in public
and education was allowed to be
conducted only in Russian.
The reason for this draconian
imposition was security; integration was not an issue. I venture
to believe that Prime Minister
David Cameron has integration
in mind and that using and understanding English will enable
immigrants to better integrate
with their English-speaking
neighbours. They will also be
able to weigh up the wider social
benefits available to them.
This does not in any way
preclude them from continuing
to use the language of their birth
within their homes and those of
their particular communities,
but they will be enabled to mix
and shop within the wider world,
towards which they will owe a
certain responsibility.
When my grandfather came
to Britain towards the end of the
19th century, he taught himself
English within six months. To
the best of my knowledge all
his family contemporaries did
likewise, though it was probably
not always the language they
used to communicate between
Conspiracy or Not?
The credentials of Nicholas
Morton as a historian (The
Rise of the Teutonic Knights,
February) may extend so far as
that military order and the skill
of Herman von Salza in securing
donations for the spread of Christendom beyond the boundaries
of the Holy Roman Empire to
the North and the East. Yet to go
on from there to maintain the
broad similarity between the
Teutonic Knights and the other
international orders such as the
Templars and the Hospitallers is
surely going too far.
As for the Templars, their constitution had been composed by
no less a religious figure than St
Bernard and their military presence was required for the protection of Christian pilgrims to the
Holy Land against the incursion
of Muslims forces. They were
known as redoubtable warriors,
never giving an inch of ground in
battle. For this reason, without
the need of seeking donations for
their financial clout, they naturally became bankers in order
to raise and distribute money
crusaders. As for the Hospitallers,
their strength similarly arose not
from the donations they may
have sought, which Herman von
Salza got from wealthy benefactors, but from the circumstances
of the successive crusades to the
Holy Land and of the resulting
need of medical assistance.
As for their so-called possession of mighty religious relics
such as the Holy Grail or their
shadowy status as some form
of secret society, with their
possible appeal to conspiracy
theorists, the only such claim
that has come to my attention has been that of the Holy
Hedy Achievements
I usually love Richard Cavendishs Months Past, but I was
disappointed by his contribution
about Hedy Lamarr and her sad
fate in the January 2016 issue,
especially about the fact that
the only information the reader
gets on the actress is that she
was known more for her looks
and sexy roles than for acting.
True or not, Lamarr deserved
better than such a disparaging
comment.
She was not just a pretty face.
During the Second World War,
Lamarr, working with her friend,
the composer George Antheil,
developed a radio guidance
system for Allied torpedoes,
which used spread spectrum and
frequency hopping technology to
defeat jamming by the Germans.
The US navy did not adopt the
technology during the war but
they did so in the 1960s. From
there the principles of the invention found their way into WiFi,
CDMA and Bluetooth technology. Thanks to this, Lamarr and
Antheil have been inducted into
the US National Inventors Hall of
Fame in 2014.
Such an achievement deserves some kind of mention.
Andr Pelchaty
LAvenir, Quebec, Canada
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Books & Publishing
Courses
Health
Travel
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Travel
Places to Visit
Research
Family History
Gifts
Societies
As the conflict progressed, so, too, did public anxiety at the speed of its
scientific advances, which included chlorine gas in 1915, the tank in 1916
and submarine warfare in 1917. It was against this background that, in
1917, the first cybernetic organism, Soldier 241, appeared in the pages
of Strand Magazine. Its fictional creation posed questions: were cyborgs
servants or autonomous beings? And whose side would they be on?
Kate Macdonald explores metaphorical uses of human-machine hybrids.
Domitians Eunuch
www.historytoday.com/app
It is not only history that favours the victors: poetry does, too. Those
marginalised in Roman society are also marginalised in verse, and no
group in the Greco-Roman world was more maligned than the eunuchs.
In a society that associated sexual potency with respectability, the
eunuch was beneath contempt. One of their number was the slave
Earinus, owned by the Emperor Domitian, whose shadowy existence in
contemporary writing is explored by Llewelyn Morgan.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, InFocus, From the
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PASTIMES
GR A ND TOUR
WHERE:
Bangkok, Thailand
WHEN:
Constructed in 1784
Prize Crossword
DOWN
1 Ancient city in Saudi Arabia,
considered sacred in Islam (6)
2 The ___, 1866 ghost story by
Charles Dickens (6-3)
3 Moulin ___, dance-hall established
in Paris in 1889 (5)
4 Name for a late fourth century Latin
translation of the Bible (7)
6 French city conquered by Trebonius
in 49bc (9)
7 Franz ___ (1870-1948), Hungarian
composer of The Merry Widow (5)
8 ___ Oil, US trust controlled by John
D. Rockefeller (8)
11 Elisha ___ (1811-61), inventor of
the safety lift (4)
15 Irish island, home to the
prehistoric fort Dun Aengus (9)
17 Troopers in Oliver Cromwells
parliamentary cavalry (9)
18 Whaling ship aboard which
Herman Melville served (8)
20/16 The ___: A Tale Of Passion,
1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford (4,7)
21 Henrietta ___ (d.1813), poet and
satirist (7)
22 Paul ___, heroic lumberjack of US
legend (6)
24 Lenore ___ (1892-1970), star
of Hollywood films including Frozen
Justice (1929) (5)
25 ___ Rouge, Louisiana city
incorporated in 1817 (5)
The Quiz
ANSWERS
ACROSS
1 Sir James ___ (1826-1904),
Antrim-born industrialist (8)
5 Samuel ___ (1812-1904), author
of Self-Help (1859) (6)
9 Charles ___ (1890-1970), French
general and statesman (2,6)
10 In Hinduism, the four-faced
creator god (6)
12 Airey ___ (1916-79), army officer
and Conservative politician (5)
13 Seventh-century Mercian king,
son of Penda (9)
14 A great ___ and little minds go ill
together Edmund Burke, 1775 (6)
16 See 20 Down
19 George ___ (1770-1827), prime
minister for four months in 1827 (7)
21 Celtic language introduced to
north-western France in the fifth and
sixth centuries (6)
23 Joanna ___ (1750-1814), Devonborn prophet and cult leader (9)
25 Municipality in Schleswig-Holstein,
associated with the 12th-century
historian Helmold (5)
26 Charles Eliot ___ (1827-1908),
US scholar and editor of the North
American Review (6)
27 There could I marvel my ___
away Dylan Thomas, Poem In
October (1946) (8)
28 Sophie ___ (1884-1966),
Russian-born US singer (6)
29 Otto de ___ (d.1328), nobleman
and close ally of Edward I (8)
UTOPIA
FromtheArchive
The 500th anniversary of the publication of Utopia is a chance to appreciate Thomas More in all his
complexity, argues Joanne Paul, as she reassesses a critical article from 1980 by John Guy.