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The Fox by D.H. Lawrence (1922)

‘There wants a man about the place,’ said the youth softly. Banford burst out laughing. ‘Take care what you say…’
(Don’t mess with the lesbians, page 99)

Like ‘the Ladybird’, ‘The Fox’ is a wartime story. Early on Lawrence mentions the passage of the new Daylight Saving Act (which was passed 1916), the third of the three characters is a soldier just back from the front, we hear about rationing, about the billetting of soldiers in the local village, and so on. Wartime.

The narrative concerns two single women in their late twenties, Jill Banford and Ellen ‘Nellie’ March, who decide to go shares and make a living on a farm. They have a very close relationship and I assume they are lesbians, maybe wrongly. Banford is the thin one with spectacles but she brings the capital, gifted to her by her father, a tradesman in Islington.

March was more robust. She had learned carpentry and joinery at the evening classes in Islington. She would be the man about the place… she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident.

So they buy Bailey Farm (no indication where it is, which county). Banford’s old grandfather lived with them at the start and he had been a farmer but he died after a year. Initially they had a load of chickens and two heifers but the one heifer refuses to stay in the fields, was continually breaking out and roaming free so they sold it. The other heifer they sold after the grandfather died, and so they became two single women running a chicken farm. I’m not sure how ‘exotic’ this notion of two women living alone and running a farm would have been in the 1920s…

But try as they might, they simply couldn’t get the chickens to lay eggs, despite March building them a lovely hencoop and taking pains over their feed.

And then there was the fox, which continually carries off their best fowl. Two years pass without them turning a profit. That summer they rent out the farm house and retreat to live in an abandoned railway carriage in a field, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the non-viability of the place.

All this is the setup. The narrative proper gets going one evening at the end of August (p.88) when March has gone out with a gun to hunt the fox. She sees him and he sees her in a standoff, then the fox slips away into the woods. Somehow, the fox has cast his spell over her. Several more times she sees it but it slips away but its spell infiltrates her quiet, musing times. November comes and the long dark nights.

Then one night they hear footsteps approaching, March sweeps up her gun, the kitchen door opens and there stands a young man in army uniform. He had expected to find William Grenfel, his grandfather, who he lived with there for five years. The girls tell him they’ve been living there for three years. They’d heard tell of an old man who lived here before them but he died before they bought the place.

Something about the boy’s fair-haired appearance and bright eyes and thrust-forward face holds March ‘spellbound’ (the same word used of the fox) and, in that voodoo way of Lawrence’s, she sees the boy as the fox. Now he is here, she can cease to be two-minded, a daytime mind and the dark fox mind. Now the boy-fox is here she can relax.

Back in the real world, they invite the young man (aged about 20) into the house, and give him a basic dinner of bread, margarine and jam. He explains how he ran away from his grandfather to Canada, volunteered for the Army when the war broke out, has just returned from his final posting in Salonika (Greece). His name is Henry (never Harry) Grenfel. When the women describe their failures at farming he can’t help bursting out laughing. When he says they need a man about the place, March warns him to watch his tongue.

But when Henry asks if he can stay, none of them can think of a reason not and so he does. That night March dreams of the fox and, from now on, seeing Henry, being near him, hearing his voice, brings back the vivid intimacy of the powerful fox dream. So he stays for a few days, which turn into weeks etc. It is late November 1918 i.e. the war is just over. (Historical note: When Henry says he’ll go and stay at the village pub, The Swan, the girls tell him the owners are all laid up with the flu i.e. the famous Spanish Flu which swept the world in 1918.)

Slowly, Lawrence achieves the effect of making Henry a fox-man by overlapping their physical descriptions. Like the fox, Henry has bright eyes, brown hair except light round his face, walks with his head thrust forward, like loping around the fields after dark. He discomfits both the women.

He likes living there so much that one rainy night in November he conceives the notion of proposing to March. But not proposing so much as hunting her. It’s worth quoting the passage in full.

How to hunt a wife

He would have to go gently. He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. It’s no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: ‘Please fall to my gun.’ No, it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home. When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don’t then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet’s flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.

He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck in a regiment. And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. So he gathered himself subtly together, seemed to withdraw into a kind of invisibility. He was not quite sure how he would go on. And March was suspicious as a hare. So he remained in appearance just the nice, odd stranger-youth, staying for a fortnight on the place.

Henry proposes to March in the woodshed and she says no. Neither of them tell Banford but she senses something has taken place and there is tension in the evenings as they all sit quietly trying to crochet or read but unable to settle. March is miles away, thinking she can hear the singing of the fox around the house. After Banford goes to bed, Henry hunts-seduces March again, deploying his soft, velvety voice, insistently telling March that she will marry him, insinuating himself, sliding closer, touching her arm, then kissing her neck until, in an agony to break away, she says Yes yes, now I have to go upstairs to bed.

Next day he announces the marriage to Banford who is full of disbelief. That night he hears the two girls arguing in their room. He goes out with his gun and spots the fox and shoots it dead. This wakes the girls. He holds up the fox by its brush in a flashlight for them to see. That night March has another dream about the fox, this time she dreams that Banford dies and she has to find something to line the coffin and so uses a lovely soft fox skin.

Henry is meant to be leaving in a few days’ time, catching the train. Banford taunts him, asking if he really is going to marry March and how he is going to support her. She forces Henry to extemporise that he’s going back to Canada and he’ll take March with him. Banford continues to badger him, asking whether they’ll marry before or after he’s found a place in Canada.

Next day she goes into town on the train, returning at 4.30. Henry watches her cross the fields, his heart full of hatred of her for continually thwarting him. When she returns, March joins her to help her carry the bags and he overhears their conversation, Banford berating March for letting herself be treated so cheaply.

It’s he last night before he’s due to catch the train. The last supper of bread and butter and a bit of meat. Henry wants Banford to go to bed so he can seduce March again but she won’t. Instead, Henry insists on taking March out to the woodshed, despite Banford’s entreaties for her to stay in the farm, and there he batters her down till she agrees to marry him as a soon as possible and he kisses her (although he gets nowhere near touching her breasts, as he had spent half a page, earlier, fantasising about doing).

Next morning Henry and March go to the town and see a registrar and pledge to marry, before he catches the train back to his garrison in the West. Nine days later she writes a long letter saying it’s madness to marry him and go off to Canada since she hardly knows him, whereas she knows Banford inside out and loves her and they look after each other and she can imagine them growing old together. It is a very reasonable letter and she asks him to forgive and forget her.

The letter infuriates young Henry who feels he is being balked again. He is described biting his teeth with his snout raised, like an angry fox. He gets permission from his captain (a fellow Cornish man) for one day’s leave and cycles off to the station.

It is just before Christmas. Banford’s old mother and father are staying at the farm. March is in the final stages of chopping down a big fir tree. They’re standing round calculating where it fall, when Henry arrives, hot and sweaty on his bike.

Embarrassment all round except that when March sees Henry she feels lost all over again, completely under his influence. Several times she’s been described as drawing her lips back so her teeth make her look like a rabbit. She is the plump aimless rabbit to his focused fox.

There is a lot of fol-de-rol and fussing about giving the final chops to the tree with an axe, but Henry volunteers to do it and sees that there’s a way of doing it which will ensure it falls onto Banford, who’s standing away from the main group. He makes a big show of telling her to move in case it falls awkwardly but she mockingly refuses so then he strikes the last few blows and it does, indeed, fall on top of her, breaking her neck and killing her. General hysteria and that sad sinking feeling I always have in short stories which can’t think of any other way of ending than having someone die.

To Cornwall

The last four or five pages leave reality altogether to enter the Lawrence realm of hyperbolic emotions. With Banford out of the way, Henry has definitely ‘won’ March. They are married within weeks and he takes her as honeymoon to his village in Cornwall.

Here they sit on the rocks staring West over the sea but they are not at rest. With mad unrealism she doesn’t blame him for killing her best friend, her one true love. This thought doesn’t even appear in the delirious last four or five pages. Instead we get peak Lawrence describing her feeling that life always ends in failure, that she (March) set out to protect Banford but failed because every attempt at happiness ends in the pit.

The more you reached after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you became aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any farther. You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

Henry has ‘won’ and yet he doesn’t ‘possess’ her. Her sadness resists him. Sometimes he wishes he’d left them both at the farm where they’d have ended up killing each other (unlikely). He just wants to hustle her across the sea to Canada where they can, somehow, start a new life, but – it is strongly implied – this is not going to happen. But not for the obvious reason you or I might have imputed, namely he murdered her girlfriend. Instead, for deeply Lawrentian reasons which are hard to follow or credit.

He wanted her to give herself without defences, to sink and become submerged in him. And she – she wanted to sit still, like a woman on the last milestone, and watch. She wanted to see, to know, to understand. She wanted to be alone: with him at her side…

He wants her asleep, unconscious in the sea of his love or possession, while she insists on staying awake.

He wanted her asleep, at peace in him. He wanted her at peace asleep in him… [but] She seemed to stretch her eyes wider in the obstinate effort and tension of keeping awake. She would keep awake. She would know. She would consider and judge and decide. She would have the reins of her own life between her own hands. She would be an independent woman to the last… (p.158)

Let’s make a wild guess and predict that it is not likely to be a happy marriage.

Thoughts

Lawrence really only has one subject which is the extraordinarily intense vision of the love between a man and a woman. The basic idea is padded out with the intrusion of a third party to create a love triangle, as in both ‘The Ladybird’ and this story.

The last four or five pages, the extended description of March’s feelings, are so wildly improbable and almost incomprehensible that it’s hard to tell whether it’s twaddle or some kind of visionary genius.

Lawrence’s characters seem to live more intensely than you or I. Whether he’s summarising passages of time or character or specific events or conversations, they seem more alert, alive, full of more depth and resonance of life and experience, than I am in a week!

Then again, they seem to only live in their emotions. They have next to no work to do. A good deal of my life, my time and my mental energy goes in planning, organising, scheduling and doing work. At the end of all that I’m often too tired to read or think. Lawrence’s characters, by contrast, spend all their time feeling passionately and intensely. In this sense, his fictions are wonderful dreams or delusions, escapes from our real experiences of exhausting life.

Turns of phrase

His face seemed extraordinarily like a piece of the out-of-doors come indoors: as holly-berries do.

A line of four brown-speckled ducks led by a brown-and-green drake were stemming away downhill from the upper meadow, coming like boats running on a ruffled sea, cockling their way top speed downwards towards the fence and towards the little group of people, and cackling as excitedly as if they brought news of the Spanish Armada.

Credit

‘The Fox’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in 1922 in The Dial magazine. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with The Ladybird and The Captain’s Doll.

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Posted by Simon on February 12, 2025

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An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen (1882)

Hurt and dismayed by the hostile reception of his 1881 play Ghosts, Ibsen responded a year later with the dramatic story of Dr Thomas Stockmann, a man of principle holding out against social pressure and much the kinds of high-minded moralising criticism which he had endured.

Executive summary

A doctor discovers the newly-opened spa and public baths, which have been attracting visitors to the town and boosting the local economy, are seriously polluted, threatening disease and illness. When he tries to publicise this the town’s leading figures gang up to silence him and the townspeople as a whole declare him ‘an enemy of the people’.

Unlike most of Ibsen’s plays, whose successive acts are set in the same room and whose drama comes from the interplay of characters, ‘A Man of The People’ features a couple of locations (a newspaper office, a rowdy public meeting) which are much more colourful than usual and give the play a lot more surface vim and energy.

Cast

  • Dr Thomas Stockmann, Medical Officer of the Municipal Baths
  • Mrs Katherine Stockmann, his wife
  • Petra their grown-up daughter) a teacher
  • Ejlif and Morten Stockmann (their sons, aged 13 and 10 respectively)
  • Peter Stockmann, the doctor’s elder brother, Mayor of the town and Chief Constable, Chairman of the Baths’ Committee and so on
  • Morten Kiil, a tanner Mrs. Stockmann’s adoptive father)
  • Hovstad, editor of the ‘People’s Messenger’ newspaper
  • Billing, sub-editor on the Messenger
  • Aslaksen, printer of the Messenger
  • honest Captain Horster

Act 1. The news

Dr Stockmann is the physician attached to the newly opened spa baths in an (unnamed) Norwegian town (‘a dump like this where nothing really happens.’)

As the play opens he’s delighted to be back from a long period spent working as a doctor in the far north of the country, lonely and isolated, and for a pittance. He revels in his new income as physician to the baths, revels in luxuries like eating roast beef, buying a new table cloth and surrounding himself with representatives of the new younger generation such as Hovstad, the muck-raking editor of the town’s populist newspaper the Herald, and his deputy, Billing. Stockmann is excited, maybe over-excited, to be back in a decent-sized town.

And we also learn that he has a reputation for outspokenness. His brother pops by and wryly remarks that Thomas is prone to sending great screeds to the newspaper about any subject under the sun, sounding off intemperately without any consideration for the impact he has.

PETER STOCKMANN: You have a chronic disposition to take things into your own hands…In a well-ordered community…the individual must be ready to subordinate himself to the community as a whole; or, more precisely, to the authorities charged with the welfare of that community.

This is a succinct expression of the view the doctor will, of course, come to completely oppose.

After grumpy Peter leaves, Dr Stockmann encourages his guests – Hovstad the editor, Billing his deputy and the sea captain Horster – to eat their fill of the roast beef, then pull up chairs in the living room for a chat. Most notable fact is that Horster is due to sail to America in a week. Hovstad is surprised that Horster doesn’t even know there’s a municipal election pending, he doesn’t care about politics.

Dr Stockmann’s daughter Petra arrives. She’s a young schoolteacher. She loathes having to teach her pupils lies:

PETRA: There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

So Petra represents the young generation irked at having to trot out the same old beliefs (presumably, in Christianity).

Anyway Petra brings with her the letter Sr Stockmann has been waiting for. When he reads it he announces the news to the characters onstage (his wife, Petra, Hovstad, Billing and Horster) that hte famous baths they’re so proud of are in fact a sink of pollution. ‘Filth’, presumably sewage, from ‘up at Mölledal’ has been leaking into the pipes which take water to the pump room. This explains why tourists to the spa the previous summer fell ill with typhoid and gastric fever. The spa which has so recently contributed to the town’s new-found prosperity is, in fact, a stew of pollution and disease. Stockmann sent some water samples to the university laboratories and the letter he’s just read contains the conclusive, and damning, results.

Stockmann mistakenly thinks that what he’s discovered is a great contribution to his community. Admittedly they will have to build the water pipes so they go higher into the mountains and extract purer water, but he has found the source of the disease and ensured the spa’s future.

In this he is backed up by family – his wife Katherine and schoolteacher daughter Petra and by his guests – Hovstad, Billing and Horster. In fact they all congratulate Stockmann and Billing wonders if the town oughtn’t to make him some special award, ‘You’ll be the leading light of the town, doctor’ and Stockmann himself wonders if they might increase his salary.

His family and guests shout three cheers, toast him as a hero, and the act ends with him taking his wife round the waist and dancing a joyful, laughing dance of celebration.

All this is very obviously setting him up for the fall which the rest of the play describes. For what Stockmann doesn’t grasp, in his naivete, is how this revelation is going to set the entire town against him. Above all, Stockmann doesn’t understand that his news will put him in bitter opposition to his brother, the town’s mayor, Peter Stockmann, as we will see in Act 2.

Act 2. A visit from the mayor

In Act 1 Thomas sent his brother, by hand messenger, a copy of the article he plans to write about the pollution for the Herald. At the start of Act 2 it is returned with a note telling him Peter will visit at midday.

Katherine’s step-father, Morten Kiil visits. He is a wily old man who doesn’t understand the first thing about biology, doesn’t know the germ theory of disease and so thinks Dr Stockmann’s story about lots of tiny animals in the water is a kind of elaborate joke. Mind you, he’d like it if the town was taught a lesson as he is still smarting from being kicked off the town council for being too old. (You can begin to see how all the characters adopt positions vis-a-vis the town council / authorities. You could draw a mind map with ‘town council’ at the centre and lines going off in all directions with a description of each character’s relation with ‘the centre’.)

As Kiil goes out, enters Hovstad. He’s been thinking about the doctor’s discovery and wants to broaden the issue out from attacking the swamp (or cistern or sewage farm) up at Mölledal, to make it into an an attack on the entire administration, on the authorities, on the town council, run by the wealthy and their cronies, a ‘ring of obstinate old buffers who’ve got hold of all the power’. Hovstad says things will only change when the working class have a say in the running of town affairs.

Enter Aslaksen who, as well as being the printer of the People’s Herald is also chair of the Ratepayers’ Association. He’s heard the story about the Baths and has come as a representative of ‘the compact’ majority to give his support. He’s considering writing a formal ‘address’ to be made to the doctor. Not, obviously, to offend the authorities, that would never do. In this he is, timidly, miles away from Hovstad who wants to offend as many people as possible and proceeds to lambast him when the old man has exited.

Since Stockmann has the article he’d drafted and sent to h is brother in  his hand, he now gives it to Hovstad and tells the delighted editor to publish it, at which he leaves.

Obviously plays and dramas move forwards in the sense that things happen, events lead to crises and climaxes etc. But Ibsen’s plays also work backwards, if that makes sense. What I mean is that, as the action moves forward, Ibsen deploys a schedule of revelations which open up the past and shed light on all the characters’s backstories and motivation.

In this case, Peter the mayor arrives and the brothers have an extended set-piece argument. In this we find out that 1) it was Dr Thomas’s original idea to funnel water to the town baths and establish them as a health cure but that 2) it was Peter, in charge of the town council, who made the foolish decision to lay the pipes for the water shorter and lower than pure mountain streams, so that muck from the Mölledal swamp leaks into them.

In fact early in Act 1 it is explained that the brothers compete about who had the idea in the first place: Peter tells Hovstad that even if the basic ideas was his brother’s, you need a practical man to get things done so it was he, Peter, who actually had the Baths built. But that explains why now, in the argument in Act 2, Thomas tells Peter that the positioning of the pipes was an epic blunder and all Peter’s fault.

In other words, the whole situation was created by these two brothers, it’s a family affair

All this comes out when Peter the mayor delivers some bitter home truths. The doctor naively thinks the town will now have to relay the pipes but the mayor says this will cost a fortune and may take years. During that time the baths will have to be closed, the tourist trade for health spa visitors will collapse and all the newfound wealth and confidence the town was enjoying will come to an end. Meanwhile other neighbouring towns have seen the wealth it brings so they’ll all copy the town’s idea and they’ll permanently lose their place as the innovators.

No, the mayor insists that Dr Thomas makes a public announcement denying the truth of the report i.e. publicly lie to save the town’s economy. Further, he wants Thomas to make a public statement saying he has every confidence in the Board to manage things. When Stockmann is outraged the mayor says he can have him sacked from his job as medical supervisor of the baths; after all, he’s the one who got him the job in the first place.

Peter asks Thomas to consider what impact his role in ruining the town will have on his wife, on his family, daughter and two school-age sons.

At which point Petra bursts in. She’s been eavesdropping from outside the room, followed by Mrs Stockmann. They’re just in time to stop the brothers coming to blows.

This could all be a one-way street with the doctor carrying Ibsen’s message about individualism, but Ibsen makes some effort to balance the argument. The mayor is definitely wrong to want to hush up a serious public health emergency. But on the other hand his criticism of Thomas for being headstrong, over-reacting, writing to the press to express every whim and opinion without pausing to consider the consequences for others – all of this is not only plausible but we see it onstage in Thomas’s (over)excitable character.

This is demonstrated in the act’s last few moments, after Peter has stormed out, when Stockmann’s wife and daughter present different arguments. Wife Katherine begs Thomas to stop and consider the wellbeing of his family, his sons and her. Idealistic Petra says the opposite, criticises her mother for being a coward and tells her father to plough on, concluding that he is fine! He will never give in!

Act 3. In the newspaper office

In the office of the Herald, Billing finishes reading Stockmann’s article and comes to discuss it with Hovstad. They both agree it’s not just a statement of the facts but a damning indictment which rains hammerblows down on the administration. They both talk about it causing a ‘revolution’ although, in practice, this appears simply chucking out the present council and getting them replaced by the Liberal party.

Dr Stockmann

Stockmann arrives still fuming from his row with his brother. He tells them ‘this is war’, to print the article and promises it’s only the first of many. He’ll write many more devastating the administration, bombarding them, crushing them, bettering them, smashing their defences! (On the face of it this is exhilarating, but it’s also done in such a way that you see the justice of brother Peter’s criticism that Thomas is always headstrong and never thinks of the consequences, the bigger picture.)

They call the older printer, Asleksen into the office, who disapproves of all this wild talk and urges moderation but is swept away by the wild-eyed enthusiasm of the other three:

DR STOCKMANN: All those dodderers have got to be chucked out! Wherever they are!…my friends, what we must look for is young and vigorous men to be our standard bearers. We must have new men in command in all our forward positions.

Billing declares Stockmann should be acclaimed the people’s friend and they all toast and cheer him, till he says he has to go and see a patient now, but can’t wait to see his article in print…

When he leaves, though, this united front crumbles a bit. Hovstad makes it clear he wants to use the doctor for his own political agenda, i.e. changing the council for a Liberal one. Aslaksen doesn’t like all this talk of revolution and embarrasses Billing by revealing the latter has applied to become secretary to the council – to Hovstad’s amazement.

Petra

When Asleksen goes back into the print room the other two wonder how long they have to put up with the timid old so-and-so i.e. revealing the extent to which they’re using each other. When Billing goes back to his office enter Petra. She had been commissioned to translate a short story in to English for the paper but has come to say she refuses to do it. When Hovstad asks why she explains that it’s one of those old stories which talk about a big daddy in the sky who will make everything well and punish ill-doers (presumably Ibsen didn’t dare simply write ‘Christian’) and she doesn’t believe in such stuff any more and she hopes he, Hovstad, the apostle of Truth and Enlightenment won’t either.

Hovstad reveals his practical/cynical side by explaining that if you want to persuade people of the Truth and New Thinking on the front pages, you have to offer them something reassuring and familiar on the back pages…

Then he goes a bit further, in fact too far, and reveals that he’s only championing her father because…well, because of her. He doesn’t have to say much more but he’s implying he fancies her, has an eye for her etc.

When she realises what he means, Petra is staggered, appalled, the scales fall from her eyes, she is bitterly disillusioned, she will never forgive him etc. Hovstad then makes it a lot worse by saying she shouldn’t be like that because her father is going to need his help…which sounds creepily like blackmail. Petra hands him the book and stalks out without another word…

The mayor

At which point enter the mayor. Hovstad is fairly obsequious to him, he is the local boss. Peter confirms the Hovstad is planning to publish his brother’s article, although Hovstad weasels out of full responsibility. When Aslaksen enters again, the mayor goes to work on him, He silkily explains to them both what the doctor’s article means. The baths will close for several years putting people out of work. The new piping will costs 200,000 kroner which will have to be raised from the ratepayers i.e. the petit bourgeoisie Aslaksen represents.

This news is a thunderbolt to Aslaksen and shakes Hovstad. Peter cannily gives them a way out of their predicament by suggesting that the entire thing is a story, a fiction or exaggeration cooked up by Dr Stockmann who is well known for being impetuous and rash. Aslaksen and Hovstad are only too willing to fall in behind this interpretation.

At which the mayor announces that he just happens to have a short factual article which puts a completely different spin on things, addresses the ‘rumours’ but claims it’s nothing the current Board can’t easily deal with. Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Hovstad (rather easily) agrees not to print the Stockmann article but to print the mayor’s short report instead.

At this delicate moment Dr Stockmann returns. They quickly bustle Peter into a side room, Billing’s office, then Hovstad is all formality when the doctor enters. Amusingly, the doctor in his pomposity begins to explain to Hovstad that it’s occurred to him that the grateful people of the town might wish to honour him, with a banquet, say, or a procession and he really thinks…as he burbles on Hovstad tries to get a word in edgeways to tell him the lie of the land, but they’re both interrupted when Mrs Stockmann (Katherine) enters.

Katherine

Katherine has been looking for her husband and now confronts him with a more vehement appeal to consider the plight of his family. She incidentally upbraids Hovstad for encouraging her husband in his ruinous decision to publish the article, heavily ironic seeing as Hovstad is struggling to announce that that is just what he isn’t going to do.

Stockmann’s pomposity goes into overdrive as he marches up and down the stage declaring he won’t be put off, even by his wife, declaring that Truth and the People will prevail, imagining the massed ranks of a citizen army marching to victory!!

It’s at this moment he notices the mayor’s hat and stick which he left on Hovstad’s desk in his hurry to nip into the side room. Instantly grasping the situation, Dr Stockmann puts on the hat and marches up and down swaggering the stick till he opens the door to Billing’s office and calls his brother out. All this amply demonstrates Stockmann’s character as a bit unhinged, a bit crazy.

In a nutshell the mayor reveals that Hovstad and Aslaksen have come over to his side. Astonished Dr Stockmann asks them if it’s true, and Aslaksen in particular says yes, the reading public, the ratepayers, the whole population will be against him.

Suddenly, at a stroke, in his mind’s eye, Stockmann goes from being the leader of a people’s army to being a rebel against the people. Suddenly it’s precisely the people who are the problem.

As a last thought he asks Aslaksen to publish his article as a pamphlet but Aslaksen refuses and says no-one else in town will either. ‘I daren’t offend public opinion.’

Stockmann says if he can’t get the article printed, he’ll call a public meeting. Aslaksen assures him no-one will hire him a hall, so Stockmann wildly claims he will hire a man with a drum to accompany him round town as he declaims it.

Outraged at the turncoats Mrs Stockmann changes her tune and declares she’ll stick by her husband.

DR STOCKMANN (puts his arms round her and kisses her): Thank you, my dear! And now, gentlemen, the gloves are off! We’ll see whether you and your shabby tricks can stop an honest citizen who wants to clean up the town.

When the mayor comments that he’s driven his wife mad as well, it’s not just an insult, you do see the force of his comment, that there is something unhinged in Dr Stockmann.

Act 4. The town meeting in Captain Horster’s house

The whole town assembles in Captain Horster’s house including all the main characters. The meeting is being held here because all the other venues refused Stockmann permission i.e. he has alienated the entire town whereas Captain Horster is an old friend who doesn’t understand politics of any kind.

The meeting scene is a combination of strident seriousness with some pretty low comedy. As they assemble various townsmen say they’ve brought their cow’s horn and whistles, hoping for a riotous evening out rather than a serious debate. There’s a drunk man at the back who keeps shouting comic misunderstandings of the main speeches and being thrown out by the men around him only to reappear and shout some more comic stuff. Critics have deprecated this but I thought it added to the general messiness and scrappiness of public discourse, of the ‘public’ as often little more than a disorderly mob, which is Ibsen’s serious point i.e. most people are stupid and misunderstand whatever you try to say. Brexit. Trump.

Earlier the same day the Herald printed the mayor’s factual notes about the Baths which calmly pointed out that all Dr Stockmann’s accusations are false, and most of the people attending the meeting have read that article and accept it as the truth.

Things are about to get started when the mayor floats the idea that the meeting needs a chairman which is quickly taken up and so, against Thomas’s wishes, Aslaksen the newspaper’s printer, is elected Chairman of the meeting.

This was a canny move because it allows Peter to then put it to a vote whether Dr Stockmann should even be allowed to speak, a move backed by Aslaksen in a speech which repeats his mantra of ‘moderation’ but also his petty bourgeois concern that the expense of the doctor’s proposed rebuild would fall entirely on the members of his ratepayers’ association.

Then Hovstad stands up to deliver a subtle character assassination of Stockmann, saying he (Hovstad) is an old friend and initially supported him until he learned that his account was based on errors. Now he laments that his friend’s heart is in the right place but he is often too headstrong.

Despite his wife’s attempts to calm him down, Thomas becomes so infuriated by all this prevarication and censorship that he announces he is going to speak on a different subject.

And it is now that he delivers what we imagine to be The Author’s Message. This is an impassioned denouncement of the stupidity and obtuseness of the majority in any community or society, a decryal of the ‘colossal stupidity of the authorities’ and the small-mindedness of ‘the compact liberal majority’. Stockmann laments how mediocre public opinion is always against anything new, how it opposes anything new and truthful, how the genuinely individual is always crushed and stifled by respectable society.

Hovstad shouts that the majority is always right to which Stockmann replies that the majority is stupid. No matter where you go in the world it’s the fools who make up the overwhelming majority.

He goes into a bit more theory, claiming that ‘truth’s have a fixed lifespan. After a while they become senile and need to be put out of their misery. But that’s precisely the moment when ‘the majority’ take them up and swear by them. Hovstad defends the tried and tested old truths but Stockmann says it is exactly that attitude which is holding society back. It is the masses who are polluting society’s spiritual life and infecting the ground they stand on. The greatest lie is that the common people, the most ignorant, uneducated and stupid sections of society, should have the final say. The handful of intelligent individuals in a society must always fight to be free, to escape from ‘the mass mind’. It is the triumph of the mass, of the liberal compact mind which Aslaksen and Hovstad promised him back at the start, which has ensured their entire town is built on a quagmire of lies and deceit.

Understandably, the townspeople feel roundly insulted by these accusations and become angry but Stockmann then goes way over the top. He says he loves the town so much he would rather see it razed to the ground then thrive on lies. And then that all the people who live this lie deserve to be ‘wiped out like vermin’, deserve to be ‘exterminated’.

Unsurprisingly this turns the entire audience against him, one man says it’s the talk of an ‘enemy of the people’ and the chant is taken up across the room. This is taken up by Aslaksen who proposes a motion that Stockmann formally be declared ‘an enemy of the people’.

During the chaotic voting Morten Kiil comes up to Stockmann to check he heard right something Stockmann said in his speech which is that his, Kiil’s tanneries, are the worst offenders in leaking impurity into the pipes. He warns that if this fact is printed anywhere it will be very costly for the doctor.

Separately, a Mr Vik goes up to Captain Horster and asks why he is loaning his house to an enemy of the people. When Horster says it’s his to do what he likes with, Vik says two can play at that game.

Back on the stage Aslaksen announces the result of the vote which has unanimously declared Stockmann an enemy of the people.

As the meeting breaks up Stockmann asks the captain if there’s room for his family on his ship going to America (as we learned in Act 1). Voices in the mob declare they should go and smash his windows or dunk him in the fjord and the scene ends with the mob chanting ‘enemy of the people’ over and over again.

Act 5. Repercussions

It’s the next morning and back in Dr Stockmann’s house after a night of rioting, which has seen crowds outside his house chanting slogans and throwing stones through his windows. He and his wife are clearing up. The maid brings a message that the glazier won’t be able to attend to fix the windows as he is scared what people will think, prompting a characteristic outburst from Stockmann: ‘they’re all cowards, the whole lot of them. Nobody dares to do anything for fear of all the others.’

The maid now presents another letter which has been handed in at the door. It’s from their landlord. He is serving them notice to quit. He’s evicting them.

Katherine asks if he’s thought through this sudden plan to leave for America. Stockmann is under no illusions that there won’t be public opinion and stupidity in America, too, but it’s bigger and a man can hide.

Petra comes home unexpectedly to announce that she’s been sacked from her school for her association with an enemy of the people. The head didn’t want to do it but had received letters accusing Petra of holding ‘advanced’ views. The letters were, of course, anonymous, making Stockmann curse the authors as cowards and announced ‘We are not going to live in this stinking hole a moment longer.’

Captain Horster enters to considerately ask how they are and if they got home safely last night before announcing that although his ship is still sailing to America he won’t be captaining it. He, too, has been sacked. His boss, like Petra’s is a decent sort but, like Petra’s, he daren’t do otherwise, afraid of public opinion.

His brother Peter the mayor arrives with an envelope containing his notice. Of course, he doesn’t himself want to sack him, but he daren’t do otherwise, afraid of public opinion. As to trying to find another job, he won’t. The Ratepayers Association is distributing a petition to all its members and nobody will dare not to sign it.

There’s a further twist. Peter now insinuates that Thomas was only brave to mount this whole campaign and attack the members of the council because he knew he was provided for in old Morten Kiil’s will. This is in fact complete news to Stockmann but when he rejoices that his wife and children will be looked after, Peter chooses to interpret this as meaning that the doctor and Kiil had been in a joint conspiracy, then extrapolates that maybe Thomas only launched the campaign in order to truckle to Kiil’s wish for vengeance against the council, for sacking him from his post on it and levying such high taxes.

Out of nowhere Peter has conjured this imaginary conspiracy and pretends to be shocked at Thomas’s deceitfulness while Thomas is astonished at Peter’s Machiavellian cynicism. These brother will never understand each other. Peter stalks out.

Enter the very same father-in-law Morten Kiil with an even more amazing revelation. He tells Dr Stockmann that he has just spent the entire large sum he had set aside to bequeath to Katherine and his boys buying up all the shares in the Baths. Last night Stockmann told him that his tanneries were the worst offenders so now he wants to make things right; he wants Stockmann to clean up the Baths and clear his name.

But to put it another way, if he doesn’t succeed then the shares are worthless and Katherine and the boys will inherit nothing. Persisting with his story about the pollution and disease will impoverish his wife and children. Stockmann walks up and down the room in a daze and berates his father-in-law for putting him in this ridiculous situation. Kiil then makes it even worse by saying he has until 2pm today to decide whether he can come up with a cover story, invent a way of cleaning the water, or just changing his story, or he’ll give the shares to charity and Katherine will inherit nothing. Until 2pm and he walks out.

Just as Hovstad and Aslaksen arrive at the front door. Blimey, it’s like Piccadilly Circus at the Stockmann house this morning!

Hovstad and Aslaksen note old Kiil leaving which confirms their suspicions. They’re heard the rumour that old Kiil has been buying up shares in the Baths and they now believe that the entire thing was a collaboration and a sting. They offer to put their services and the newspaper at his command when he’s taken over control of the Baths and to back whatever plans he has to expand or renovate them.

Stockmann the naive at first doesn’t understand what they’re driving at but when the penny drops he decides to play along a bit in order to ask what they’re expecting to get out of it. Oh nothing much, replies Hovstad, it’s just that the Herald is undergoing a bit of a financial crisis at the moment, so a bit of funding or support would be very welcome.

When he says what if he doesn’t give them a penny, both men strongly imply that they’ll blackmail him, threatening to expose his conspiracy. In other words (as in Hovstad’s tacky propositioning of Petra) both men, so quick to sound off about Truth and Independence, turn out to be as corrupt as the establishment they seek to overthrow.

Once he’s heard them out, Stockmann goes bananas, grabs his umbrella, chases them round the stage brandishing it (for some reason I suddenly saw him as Captain Haddock and imagined him chasing the two creeps round and round the table shouting, ‘Ten thousand blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon’).

He threatens to make Hovstad climb out the window but is interrupted by the entry of Katherine which allows Hovstad and Aslaksen to escape through the door.

The play winds up quickly. Goaded beyond endurance, Stockmann sends a message to Kiil saying No no no. Screw the inheritance. Screw his job. Screw America. He tells Katherine they’re not going to leave, they’re going to stay here, scrimp and save as best they can, and Stockmann is going to devote himself to being an enemy of the people and excoriating the people in power with all his might.

At that moment his sons, Ejlif and Morten come in. When Stockmann asks them if they have a holiday they say, no, they got into a fight about him at school so their teacher told them to stay away for a few days.

At which moment Stockmann has another brainwave. Oh God, not another one, moans his long-suffering wife. Yes, he will home school his sons and to do so he will set up a small school. He’ll educate the children of the very poor. Katherine asks why on earth he wants to stay and Stockmann replies because he is the strongest man in town. And when Katherine asks what he means, he replies that he has made yet another discovery (oh no):

STOCKMANN: The thing is, you see, the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

Ibsen and Allegory

Liberal criticism insists that all art and literature be about something, an attitude I loathe. One of the things I loved about Samuel Beckett’s plays is they’re not really about anything. There are people and they might say things but the real thing going on is the patterns and the repetitions, the counting and the calibrated movements.

Well, Ibsen is a great genius but the thing I like least about his plays is how they offer themselves up to the deadening clichés of liberal criticism and interpretation. Thus it is bleeding obvious that Dr Stockmann represents a certain type of integrity and honesty and is then set against a little set of opponents who each represent other types. You could make a mind-map with Stockmann at the centre representing INTEGRITY and then lines leading off to each of the secondary characters, each with their own allegorical title. In fact despite his vaunted realism and father of modern theatre reputation, in the highly schematic conception of his dramas Ibsen reminds me of medieval allegory, The Faerie Queene or the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Thus his brother the mayor is Mr Worldly Wise, clever at deploying arguments personal and political, and managing meetings, bureaucracy, and the crowd, in favour of his position.

The printer Asleksen is the Voice of Moderation, only ever opening his mouth to council caution and moderation which, Ibsen shows, is really a form of moral cowardice.

Hovstad is Mr Slimy Corruption, who makes a huge song and dance about his independence and free speech and integrity but turns out a) happy to publish bollock old stories about Christianity purely to butter up his conservative readers, b) in a gruesome scene, tries to hit on Petra, and c) once he realises the doctor’s revelations will be ruinous for the town and his paper, completely abandons the doctor only at the end to 4) reveal he thinks the whole thing is a scam, worthy of his own corrupt view of the world.

Billing is Hovstad’s Mini-Me, a loudmouth about ‘the revolution’ who turns out to have applied for a job as secretary to the very council he claims to want to overthrow.

And then The Mob, the townspeople, the populace, possessors of Public Opinion which turns out to be the only force in this wretched society. Not Christian belief, not even traditional morality, rule this society but fear, the fear which leads their landlord to evict them, Petra’s headmistress to sack her, the boys’ teacher to send them home, and old Captain Horsley to be relieved of his command. Fear of supposed Public Opinion is all that drives this society.

And his daughter is Miss Pure-in-Heart, supportive of what is clearly a not completely accurate image of her embattled, sometimes hesitant father, holding him to the Path of Righteousness.

James McFarlane’s introduction

I like James McFarlane’s translations. They’re surprisingly clear and modern considering they were done in the late 1950s. I also like his introduction which makes the following useful points:

‘An Enemy of the People’ is generally considered the thinnest of Ibsen’s mature plays. It was written in half the time he usually spent on a play. It was a quick angry response to the criticism of ‘Ghosts’.

Some critics see ‘An Enemy’ as the end of a series which began with ‘Pillars of Society’ (1877) with ‘Rosmersholm’ inaugurating a new mode of composition that characterised his final seven plays, with ‘The Wild Duck’ playing the role of swing position, the switch between middle style to final style.

Part of the pace of ‘An Enemy’ is due to the way it dramatises extremely well-worn opinions of Ibsen’s. His correspondence amply proves Ibsen’s profound hatred of any party or association or grouping of any sort which based itself on the ‘majority’, majority decisions or majority rule. As long ago as 1872 he talked enthusiastically about undermining the whole concept of the state for the state is the curse of the individual.

Rather amazingly, his politics veered towards anarchism and the extreme left because they, at least, cared about the important things in life while he thought the large organised political parties traded in nothing but lies and sham. He considered freedom’s worst enemy to be organised Liberalism.

Well the harsh reaction to ‘Ghosts’ drove these opinions into overdrive and added a new vitriolic loathing of the press, especially the Liberal press, which spouts bombast about freedom but turns out to be the craven slave to ‘public opinion’ and organised pressure groups and its own circulation figures. He thought the press (in McFarlane’s words) ‘a parasite on the grotesque and deformed body politic’ (Introduction page xi).

When he comes to look at the details of the play McFarlane makes the point that both Dr Stockmann and Gregers (from ‘The Wild Duck’) have only recently returned from a long period up north or in isolation from society. This (not very subtly) explains why they fail to understand even the basic realities of the societies they try to reform. Their ideas are abstract, untempered. They lack knowledge of what is socially possible.

Individualism

To quote McFarlane, Ibsen was at pains in the play to stress:

the need for individual decision, the necessity for individual responsibility and the value of individual courage… (Introduction p.xii)

which is interesting because I’ve just been reading the essays of Oscar Wilde from a few years later, from the late 1880s, in which he bases an entire creed on the cult of individualism, for example The Soul of Man under Socialism which is a hymn to the paramount importance of the Individual. On the face of it you could hardly have two authors more unlike in subject matter and style than Ibsen and Wilde and yet here they are, sharing the same underlying ideology – why? Why do two such dissimilar writers both evince the same horror and revulsion at the way late-Victorian bourgeois society sets out to crush individuality and spirit?

Credit

I read ‘An Enemy of the People’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

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Ibsen reviews

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by Simon on October 2, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 2, 2024

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Soulscapes @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Landscape painting is associated with the classical tradition, with nostalgic views of often idealised landscapes (in England, by painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds in the 18th century, via Constable in the 19th, and onto 20th century artists as varied as Ravilious or David Hockney). Above all it is associated with white, male, historical artists, and Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to numerous works by masters of landscape painting, in Britain and Europe.

And so the thought naturally arises: why not gather together works by non-white artists, by contemporary living artists who, in a host of different ways, can offer new and interesting perspectives on a well-worn subject? Hence this exhibition, ‘a contemporary retelling of landscape by artists from the African Diaspora.’

It sounds like a simple enough proposition but raises a surprising number of questions and issues, problems and perplexities, which I try to address through the course of this review.

Scope

‘Soulscape’ features about 33 works (20 paintings, 2 textiles, 10 photos and 2 videos and a video installation) by 21 contemporary Black artists. The works include large-scale pieces, a site-specific installation, and a big new painting commission from Michaela Yearwood-Dan. They cover a wide variety of media including photography, film, tapestry and collage. And they are all very 21st century. The oldest work is from 2012 but that’s an outlier, most are much more recent. I counted five a piece from 2020, 2022 and 2023. It’s up-to-the-minute stuff.

Some of the artists I’d heard of before, namely the film-maker Isaac Julien, photographers Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda because I’ve been to exhibitions of their work at the Black gallery, Autograph ABP (and de Miranda also features in Tate Britain’s current Women in Revolt! exhibition). But most of the rest were, to my shame, completely new to me.

As you might expect the show goes way beyond traditional limited interpretations of ‘landscape’ to bring in a host of weighty themes and ideas. Dulwich Picture Gallery is a relatively small space, made up of four consecutive galleries (with a small broom cupboard of a mausoleum at the break between rooms 2 and 3) and the rooms have each been assigned themes or topics, being: belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

1. Belonging

Room one is arguably the best room in the show. It contains just four big works, but I liked them all. They have been selected to illustrate the theme of belonging. I’m going to quote the curators’ introduction in full:

Belonging is fundamental to the human experience. It is intrinsically linked with our relationship to landscape and our place in the world. We can feel an emotional affinity to a place through shared histories, as well as being rooted somewhere through a collective identity.

Each artist here offers a unique perspective in the way their work draws links between self and nature. They reflect on the intersections of felt experience and the traditional understanding of belonging, often against the backdrop of colonial history, migration, and the complexities of disputed territories.

‘Limestone Wall’ (2020) is a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, which depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. The curators write:

Anderson is the youngest of eight children born to Jamaican parents, the only one born in England. His work reflects an attempt to reconcile his inherited and imagined knowledge of Jamaica with his own limited experience of the landscape. ‘Limestone Wall’ invites us to consider the liminality of belonging through a landscape that was inspired by photographs taken on a visit to Jamaica.

Limestone Wall by Hurvin Anderson (2020) © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo by Richard Ivey

‘The liminality of belonging’. For those not familiar with curatorspeak, liminality means ‘the quality of being in between two places or stages, on the verge of transitioning to something new’. It’s a term taken from anthropology where it indicates ‘the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete’ (Wikipedia).

This is, as you can see, a big and complex idea to attach to a painting of what looks like some kind of terrace (of a café, maybe?) set against a lush green tropical jungle.

The idea that immigrants, emigrants, the children of people who have emigrated from one society to settle in another and who remain, in some sense, between two worlds, and two identities, is a Central Issue of Our Times, and runs like a thread through all the rooms in the exhibition.

The question which this first room raised for me was not the one the curators intended, about belonging or identity etc, but more like: Does the knowledge about the artist’s family background and immigration status (I apologise if this is insensitive phrasing, all I mean is knowledge of whether the artist comes from a family which has emigrated from an African country to somewhere in the West, Europe or America), does and should this knowledge affect our appreciation of their art?

On one level it doesn’t matter at all to me, I don’t care where any artist comes from or what their ethnic background is. I’ve come to an art gallery, I’m looking at 30 or so paintings (and a couple of videos) and deciding which ones I like purely on the basis of how they look and how they make me feel. But it matters a lot to the curators. It’s the curators who’ve made it an issue, because it’s the curators who include this ‘immigration information’ in almost every wall label, as well as in the articles which accompany the show in the Dulwich Gallery magazine.

This is the room which hosts the pieces by Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda. Of the Miranda triptych of photos, the curators write:

De Miranda, a Portuguese artist with Angolan ancestry, explores the poetry of belonging throughout her work. This piece, from the series ‘The sun does not rise in the north’, investigates the physical and mental concept of borders and migration. Depicting landscapes that witness hope, de Miranda examines the complexity of migrant histories in Europe in relation to the politics of land. The three figures, standing amid breaking waves, lead us to consider the limitations of belonging.

Sun rise (detail) by Mónica de Miranda (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid

She’s also represented by ‘When words escape, flowers speak’, massive digital photos of twin Angolan sisters standing in the seemingly natural but carefully constructed landscape of the botanical gardens of Floresta da Ilha (Island Forest) in Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The curators describe this city, Luanda, as bearing ‘a history of colonial presence’. Well, yes, Luanda ‘bears’ quite a bit more than that, since Angola gained independence in November 1975 and was immediately plunged into a devastating civil war which lasted, with interludes, until 2002, leaving up to 800,000 dead and the country’s economy and infrastructure in ruins. See my reviews of:

As so often, as in Tate Modern’s excellent exhibition of African photography, the (white liberal) curators bang on at great length about the evils of the colonial period, and simply ignore the 60 years of civil wars, military coups, famines and kleptocratic dictatorships which have ravaged Africa since the end of the colonial era.

On the big wall facing the entrance is Marcia Michael‘s 2022 work, ‘Ancestral Home 45’, from the series ‘The Object of My Gaze’. It’s a photograph of a jungle scene which has been mirrored vertically and horizontally to create a dazzling image of a tropical landscape.

Kaleidoscopic and mesmerising, this photographic work is a meditation on the sense of belonging that can be evoked through immersion in nature. It was created from a series of images captured by Michael on a visit to her late mother’s homeland in Jamaica.

2. Memory

Room two is devoted to memory. The curators, again, make a number of sweeping claims:

Landscapes have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate. Sometimes these memories are nourishing and affirming and at other times they are challenging, making us feel unwelcome or excluded. The artists in this section explore the space in between these extremes. 

Do landscapes ‘have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate’? Maybe. It’s a big claim, a big thought.

This room contains the most works, with 8 or so paintings and fabrics, 6 photos, plus a video and a still from a video.

The video is by Harold Offeh, is titled ‘Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air’ (2019) and is 20 minutes long. It consists of very calm, quiet shots of one, two or three Black people sitting on log benches in what looks like a typical (and typically boring) English park. There’s no dialogue or interaction. The calm scenes are accompanied by music from the early twentieth-century Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. There’s a web page which gives more explanation, stills and a clip from the video.

The curators give an explanation which is presumably the artist’s, namely that:

These figures are liberated from any racialised notions of victimisation, or suffrage, to reimagine the inclusive possibilities of this romanticised environment.

The complete lack of action or dialogue is the point, and I (think I) understand the political or polemical aim, to show Black people in a nice park, with none of the melodrama or negative stereotypes which usually accompany Black people in TV dramas or movies. Bit boring, though.

In a similar vein, of normalising Black figures in non-urban settings, are two big digital photos by Jermaine Francis.

‘A Pleasant Land J, Samuel Johnson, & the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures’ by Jermaine Francis (2023) Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis

According to the curators Francis:

considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.

‘Conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.’ These are hefty topics, walloping great ideas, to simply mention and then leave hanging. For me they are like lead weights which have been hung on the photos, which drag down your response, which channel whatever initial response you have to them as works of art, into an urgent-sounding, political-sounding straitjacket.

And the ideas are just too big to engage with. Am I meant, somehow, to review the entire history of the English landscape based on just these two photographs?

I mentioned Isaac Julien. He’s represented by a big colour photograph, a still from a 2015 film installation Julien made titled ‘Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds)’. The film aimed to celebrate the beauty of natural elements. The sequence the still is from was filmed in the rarely accessible ice caves in the Vatnajökull region of Iceland. It shows a Black figure standing in a beautiful ice-white and azure cave. It is accentuated by the presence of the onyx figure, dwarfed by the magnificence of the backdrop.

Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds) by Isaac Julien (2015) © Isaac Julien / private collection, London

But this beautiful, awesome image isn’t enough. Again the curators corral it into one of their polemical concerns about Black inclusion/exclusion from the tradition of landscape art.

Historically, these depictions of cold-climates excluded the Black figure, so its presence here challenges notions of belonging and memory.

Obviously this is an idea implicit in the image, if you choose to read it this way. But if Julien really did intend his piece to be first and foremost a celebration of the beauty of nature, I wonder how he feels about this broad aim being straitjacketed into yet another discussion about Black figures in art. It made me wonder what any of these 21 artists thought about being chosen for this exhibition primarily for the colour of their skin rather than the quality of their work.

Interlude: the Mausoleum

It’s a quirk of Dulwich Picture Gallery that half way through, between rooms 2 and 3, off to one side, there’s a smallish circular room which is actually the mausoleum of three of the founders of the gallery. It is shaped to recall a funeral monument, with urns atop the building on the outside, sarcophagi above the doors and sacrificial altars in the corners.

The back wall is flat and it’s onto this wall that Phoebe Boswell has created a ‘site-specific installation’, namely a big door-shaped projection of a video titled ‘I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know’ (2019). This is a kind of visual collage depicting everyday activities of (Black) people in a beach in Zanzibar. It’s happy and innocent and lovely, with a low soundtrack of laughter and conversation and chat as holiday makers and day trippers runs, skip, play, go swimming, handle fishing boats etc. There are four attractive stools carved from a gnarly old tree because they contain gaps and holes, for visitors to sit on and be nicely lulled. It’s more or less the only piece in the show which really does convey a sense of the happiness and relaxing quality of being out of doors. However, the curators rope it back into their concern with migration, disaporas and the artist’s multi-country identity:

The work is a reflection on belonging, community, freedom, and migration. Boswell is informed by her own history, which spans various geographies and landscapes, and her work navigates the spaces between.

3. Joy

Room 3 is devoted to the theme of Joy. It contains nine works.

The joy that that comes from connecting with nature is a deeply personal and emotional experience. Whether experienced in solitude or socially with others, this feeling is often underlined by the nourishment and release that arises from being at one with the natural world.

The artists here invite us to join with them in sharing this moment of euphoria. For some, this is conveyed through evoking the sensory delight that comes from an immersion in the beauty of nature; the smell of fresh flowers, the feel of petals between one’s fingers. For others, depicting scenes of familial joy that place Black figures into classical pastoral scenes is a way of expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom.

‘…expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom’ rather begs the question: Do Black bodies currently not experience true ease and freedom? Anywhere? What would it take for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom? The wall labels begged loads of questions which I found worried and distracted me from the art.

Anyway, I’m afraid I found most of the pieces in this room pretty meh. After strolling through the four rooms four or five times, I came to the settled conviction that I only really liked about ten, about a third of the 33 or so works. Some I found so horrible that I could barely look at them. It would be invidious to single out the really bad ones, but here are some I thought were very average.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020). The medium is interesting – it’s a hand- and machine-embroidered fabric so that when you get up close, you can see the individual threads and appreciate the extraordinary amount of time and patience it must have taken to make. I just didn’t like the final image very much. Maybe you do. Tastes vary.

‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020) Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

However the curators load the work with some rather scary issues.

Mafafo explores the joyous embrace of nature as an act of resistance. The woman emerging from a cocooned veil of white muslin peers out with an air of excitement and wonder. The veil, once a sanctuary of peace and introspection, billows around her playfully as she rediscovers her world, uplifted by the natural beauty that defies the weight of patriarchy and racism.

Looking at the image cold, was your first response be that it is an act of resistance to patriarchy and racism? Maybe it was. But these struck me as being huge, troubling issues to load onto what (I think) is intending to be an image of innocence and natural beauty.

Another work which didn’t light my fire was a set of four paintings by Kimathi Donkor from her ‘Idyl’ series (2016 to 2020).

‘On Episode Seven’ by Kimathi Donkor (2020) Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo by Kimathi Donkor

These depict:

The concept of Black joy is a central theme of Donkor’s Idyll series. The figures in his painting display gestures of ease, relaxation and shared play between friends and family members. The pleasures of public green space and balmy weather are celebrated as precious gifts of nature, available to uplift us all.

‘Black joy’? Is this a lot different from white joy? Chinese joy? Latinx joy? Asian joy? Then comes then the polemical kicker:

For Black communities, this joy is also a form of resistance against being excluded, silenced or classed as victims.

OK, if this picture is something as serious and politically committed as ‘a form of resistance…for Black communities’, am I even allowed to have a view of whether I like it or not? The other three in the series were all in the same style and, well, I just didn’t like them very much.

On the plus side, the room contained two very good works. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, ‘Cassava Garden’ (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity.

‘Cassava Garden’ by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015) © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Photo by Robert Glowacki

I always like collage, whether in its 1910s Cubism, 1920s Weimar or 1960s Pop guides, so I straightaway liked this. But I just responded to the size and feel of this work, it’s big and striking. I liked the way the repeated face of the women embedded in the fabric on the right is at right angles to the picture plane. You can’t really see them in this reproduction but in the two big green leaves at the top are embedded (from left to right) the faces of an African woman and man and they are both stunningly vivid and realistic. Maybe they’re photos somehow worked into the piece. If they were painted they’re extraordinary. And the off-centre positioning of the stalk of what is, presumably, the cassava plant. It all combines to make this one of my favourite pieces from the show. According to the curators:

The Nigerian-born American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby uses an abstracted collage to engage with the idea of memory. The main feature is the cassava plant, whose broad leaves extend across the canvas and are layered with photographic images of the artist’s family life.

The collage is a reflection on Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s childhood trips to her ancestral land which were marked in her memory by the presence of cassava plants. She also references traditional West African material and patterns, signifying the duality of her cultural identity since making a new life in the USA.

Nearby are two more really good pieces, ‘The Climber’ (2022) and ‘Moonlight Searchers’ (2022) by Che Lovelace which depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Again this catered to my slightly Asperger’s taste for squares and geometric shapes. I immediately responded to the way it consists of four rectangles bolted together, each signalling a different perspective or colour palette on the main composition. And then I liked the rather Cézanne-like way the two naked women are turning into geometric shapes or geometric shapes are emerging from their bodies, beginning to schematise or diagrammatise them. And I liked the colours, especially the green fronds of the palm tree leaves on the left.

‘Moonlight Searchers’ by Che Lovelace (2022) private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, Various Small Fires and Nicola Vassell Gallery

According to the curators:

Lovelace reflects on the loving embrace of the landscapes found in his homeland, Trinidad. His depictions of the rhythms of life on the Caribbean island are informed by his rootedness there. The result is a complex and nuanced expression of his sense of identity, as well as an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy. The division of the canvases into quadrants reflects the interactions between different cultures on Trinidad. Both works show bodies at ease with nature, exploring and connecting with their surroundings.

Once again the wall label raised questions in my mind: Is this painting ‘an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy’? Or are those just fashionable words thrown at these paintings, combined and recombined in an impressive number of ways but, at bottom, representing just a handful of ideas, none of which actually is actually ‘explored’. Are these terms like confetti thrown at a wedding, bouncing off the central figures and then lying around on the floor till swept up and thrown away?

4. Transformation

The Gallery often reserves the fourth and final room for Big works, acting as a climax to what came before and this exhibition is no exception, the fourth room containing four big, big paintings. The curators explain the theme of transformation thus:

Nature can be a powerful force that changes the way we see the world and its history, as well as equipping us with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds.

This begs so many questions, it left me dizzy. Is nature ‘a powerful force’? What does that mean, exactly? Surely we are part of ‘nature’, every organic thing, plus the geographical and geological environment, surely these are all part of nature? So what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see the world’? How are these terms, ‘nature’ and ‘world’ different? Is it because the curators are assuming that ‘world’ gestures more towards the world of humans the world of culture and technology we surround ourselves with?

And what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see…history’? How, exactly? Does walking through a park change my view of the French Revolution or the Rwanda genocide? I don’t really see the connection?

And these are all implications of just the first half of that sentence. the second half goes on to make the huge claim that ‘nature’ equips us ‘with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds’. Does it? What tools? How?

So I found myself hugely distracted by this simple couple of sentences, my mind buzzing with an explosion of implications and issues, so it took quite a while to settle down and actually look at the works in the room.

These include the one specially commissioned for the show, by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, ‘Another rest in peace – from a holy land in which we came’. It’s a huge landscape-shaped canvas filled with swirling paints, with ceramic petals and other matter stuck to the surface, and I actively disliked it. It looked like an abortion on a canvas and had absolutely no healing impact on me.

Next to it is an equally huge painting of a tropical rainforest which appears to be hanging over a river, although the paint is handled in such a way that it looks like it is melting into the river, an uncomfortable image of distortion, reminding me of the cover art for a science fiction book where some horrible radioactive disaster has struck the world. the grey blobs on the right, from a certain angle, looked like distorted skulls.

‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023)

This is ‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023) and, according to the curators:

In this moody and evocative painting, Pillay explores the legacies of colonialism and transformation of painful colonial histories alongside the conflicting nature of historical memory. The lush shoreline sits against the backdrop of a jungle made up of palm trees that appear weighted and changed by the histories they have witnessed. The water seems to hold spectral energy. The artist allows us to consider the way history can affect a landscape and reveal wounds that call for healing and change.

None of that was obvious to me. I just found it huge, overpowering and depressing. Maybe you think differently.

And, finally, a pair of enormous paintings, dominated by orange and browns, by Christina Kimeze, namely ‘Wader (Lido Beach)’ and ‘Interior I’, both painted in 2022. Here’s a link to the Wader, and to the Interior on Kimeze’s website. Actually, in small reproduction they scrub up quite well, the orange palette coming across very powerfully. Also, on the internet you can see installation shots of exhibitions with lots of her works together, which I imagine give a strong cumulative effect.

But here, the context of two other huge and not very appealing works dragged my reaction down into negativity. In the ‘Interior’ I found the space (is it inside a hut?) offputtingly square and rigid, and the depiction of the woman’s shape or outline disconcertingly clumsy and unappealing.

The figure of the pregnant woman in ‘The Wader’ is a lot more appealing, as is the liberal use of purple marking or strokes but, in the flesh, huge and oppressive in a small room, I found both these works the exact opposite of healing or transformative. I couldn’t wait to get away from their looming presence.

Summary

After carefully reading the 40 or so wall labels which repeatedly invoke troubling social and political issues around racism, ethnicity, migration, identity, Black oppression, Black suffering, Black exclusion and Black exploitation, I felt anything but soothed and healed by nature. I felt very troubled and anxious about some of the hottest hot-button issues in modern society. The labels of almost every work have the harassing, hectoring tone of a Guardian article lecturing you about your white privilege and asking what you are going to do for the Black Lives Matter movement. Quite stressful.

As to the healing, joyous and transformative power of nature which the main room captions repeatedly invoke, one minute in the lovely gardens surrounding Dulwich Picture Gallery, amid the deckchairs and playing children and picnicking families, was more instantly and deeply healing and calming than anything I saw in the challenging hour I spent in this difficult and very uneven exhibition.

Exhibiting artists

  • Njideka Akunyili Crosby
  • Hurvin Anderson
  • Michael Armitage
  • Phoebe Boswell
  • Kimathi Donkor
  • Jermaine Francis
  • Ebony G. Patterson
  • Alain Joséphine
  • Isaac Julien
  • Christina Kimeze
  • Che Lovelace
  • Kimathi Mafafo
  • Marcia Michael
  • Mónica de Miranda
  • Harold Offeh
  • Nengi Omuku
  • Sikelela Owen
  • Ravelle Pillay
  • Alberta Whittle
  • EVEWRIGHT
  • Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Promotional video

Related link

  • Soulscapes continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until June 2024

Related reviews

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by Simon on February 17, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/soulscapes-dulwich-picture-gallery/

A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt (2017)

This is a very good book – scholarly, serious, authoritative. Newitt summarises the latest thinking in a whole range of issues which affect Africa’s prehistory, early modern history, colonial periods and contemporary history. It doesn’t aim to please. There are no fascinating anecdotes, colourful vignettes or pen portraits of key figures. Just the most up-to-date facts, dryly presented.

Born in 1943 (and so now 80 years old) Malyn Newitt had a long academic career during which he wrote over 20 books on Portugal and Portuguese colonialism. He was a professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London, and then deputy vice chancellor at Exeter University, before retiring in 2005. So this book is by way of being the summary of a long and distinguished academic interest in the subject.

Mozambique factsheet

The first European to land in Mozambique was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498.

The coast, territory inland and coastal islands were very slowly settled and colonised by Portugal over the next 200 years. Initially the refuelling ports scattered along the west and east coasts of Africa and onto India, later reinforced with defensive forts, were all part of the same entity, the Estado da India, way stations on the sea journey to India which was where the spices and wealth were.

In the early years the main Portuguese settlement was on the Island of Mozambique, lying off the coast at the northern end of the modern country. The sea between the island and the mainland is still known as the Mozambique Channel. The Portuguese established a port and naval base on the island in 1507 and it remained an important part of their maritime estate for centuries. It became the capital of what came to be known as Portuguese East Africa until 1898, when the administrative centre was moved to Lourenço Marques in the far south of the country, ‘reflecting the shift in economic and political importance’ (p.115).

The name of the island, and so the country, is derived from the name of Ali Musa Mbiki, Muslim sultan of the island when da Gama arrived. So never a western name, then.

For centuries a handful of coastal ports and some territory further inland were part of a huge tract of coast known as Portuguese East Africa. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, as rival European nations like Britain, France and Germany staked out their claims to Africa, was this huge territory pared away and reduced to the borders of the current Mozambique, which were only finally defined in 1891.

Mozambique is bisected by the Zambezi River, the fourth longest river in Africa (after the Nile, Niger and Congo) which rises in Zambia then flows through eastern Angola, along the north-eastern border of Namibia, the northern border of Botswana, then along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, until it enters Mozambique.

North of the Zambezi a narrow coastal strip gives way to inland hills and low plateaus, then onto rugged highlands further west. South of the Zambezi the lowlands are broader with the Mashonaland plateau and Lebombo Mountains located in the deep south.

Until the 1960s there was no paved road link between the north and south halves of the country. A railway bridge across the Zambezi linking north and south was only completed in 1932.

In 1964 guerrilla fighting broke out and developed into what became known as the Mozambican War of Independence. It lasted for ten years. The main independence fighters were the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) led by Samora Machal.

After ten years of conflict Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975, following the overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian regime in the so-called Carnation Revolution of April 1974.

Soon after independence a civil war broke out which was to last from 1977 to 1992 between FRELIMO and the anti-communist insurgent forces of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). Like so many African wars it was exacerbated by the Cold War: the Soviet Union and Cuba backed the Marxist government (cf Angola and Ethiopia) while the USA, South Africa and Rhodesia provisioned, helped and trained RENAMO.

Mozambique’s capital was for centuries known as Lourenço Marques after the 16th century Portuguese explorer who explored the area. (It was only made Mozambique’s administrative centre in 1898). Soon after independence, in 1976, the city was renamed Maputo and remains the country’s capital. The distinctive thing about it is that, instead of being in the centre of the country, maybe on the mouth of the mighty Zambezi, Maputo is way down at the southernmost tip of Mozambique, less than 75 miles from the borders with Eswatini and South Africa.

Mozambique has a land area of 801,590 square kilometres, compared to Portugal’s 92,225 km².

Newitt’s book

A Short History of Mozambique is a brisk, no nonsense, 225-page overview of the subject, written in a very dry, very academic style, a very theoretical style. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone as a history of Mozambique since it’s the kind of history which deals with issues and theories rather than dates and people. For example:

Newitt gives a sophisticated explanation of the concepts of language, ethnicity, empire, kingdom and tribe which Europeans have used ever since the Portuguese first landed on the coast of Mozambique to try and categorise and order and understand its inhabitants. He carefully explains why all of them are flawed and inaccurate. ‘Ethnicity’ is a notoriously slippery category. People’s identities change and even the idea of what an ‘identity’ is has changed over the period we have records for, roughly 1500 to the present.

It was interesting to learn that even right up-to-date contemporary linguists struggle with African languages. It is interesting to learn that modern linguists can’t agree a common definition of what a language is; some linguists consider some African languages as discreet languages, others consider them dialects of parent languages. This explains why even ‘experts’ consider there might be anything from 17 to 42 languages spoken in Mozambique. Just as confusing is the notion that ‘most Africans speak more than one local language or dialect’ (p.19) with the result that language isn’t a reliable indicator of ‘identity’.

You know how progressive critics complain that the Western imperialists imposed nations and categories and tribal names onto much more fluid African identities? Well, Malyn is their dream come true, deconstructing pretty much every type of western category and concept to indicate a fluidity of identity which is, by definition, hard to capture, and equally challenging to read about.

This carries on being the central theme for chapter after chapter. When he’s covering the historical records left by the earliest Portuguese traders and administrators in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even more so in the full-blown imperialist 19th century, Newitt goes to great lengths to explain that the names which westerners assigned to tribes were almost always wrong. Sometimes, to take a blunt mistake, they called tribes after native words which simply meant ‘king’ or ‘leader’. (The country of Angola takes its name from the title ngola, a formal title which was held by the kings of Ndongo and Matamba.)

Westerners assigned social structures familiar to their own history – of empires and emperors, kings and kingdoms – to societies which had completely different, alien structures and identities.

The Africans were organised in groups and social structures but modern scholars have to reach back beyond the distorted and error-ridden Portuguese records to try and piece them together. Some societies were matrilinear, but there appear to have been several types of matrilinearity. Archaeology is not much help, since Africans built so few towns and their villages, made entirely of organic materials, disintegrated back into the earth.

Incidentally, Hewitt’s history obviously focuses on the territory and towns (mostly the notable ports) of what is called Mozambique, but he is not the first to point out the arbitrariness of the borders the Europeans drew up – in Mozambique’s case, finalised in 1891 – and how the deep history of the peoples who lived in this randomly drawn territory obviously had a huge overlap with peoples in the surrounding areas.

His account gives a bewildering sense of a kaleidoscope of peoples, continually migrating, fighting, conquering and holding territory, establishing dynasties that ruled for a few generations before a handful of recurrent issues – drought and famine, flooding, invasion of outsiders – reshuffled the picture.

The result is an immensely detailed and complicated picture, consisting of a blizzard of unfamiliar names – using names the tribes in questions may not even have called themselves – which is very hard to follow. This is why I’m not recommending it as a practical history. Two names which recur are the Ngoni and the Karanga, but there are many more.

Another theme which emerges very strongly indeed is the role of slavery. Slavery was present well before white Europeans arrived. They discovered it to be an intrinsic part of many African societies’ strategies, not only of war and conquest but even of basic survival. Newitt tells us that drought and famine have been recurrent features of the huge territory now known as Mozambique and the region around it, often threatening tribes’ very existence (pages 31, 50). Thus slaves, especially women, could be seized from other groups simply to provide more breeding vessels in order for the group to survive.

What comes over is that all the African groups practised slavery before the Europeans arrived but (as in everything else in this complex account) in a multitude of ways. Some slaves were relatively high caste, and might even serve as warriors or leaders. Some were forced into menial agricultural work. There was a recurring category of sex slaves i.e. women taken from tribes defeated in war.

The capture of slaves, especially women, in warfare had always been a way in which communities that depended on agriculture rather than cattle herding increased their productive (and reproductive) capacity. (p.71)

For hundreds of years the Portuguese were just one more invader-warrior-trading group among many, in a region used to wars and incomers. Alongside the Portuguese were Arabs from the Persian Gulf. These set up trading stations manned by an Arab elite which traded heavily in slaves. For centuries before the Europeans came there had been a trade capturing African slaves and carrying them off to the Arab gulf kingdoms.

For many hundreds of years slaves had been exported from the ports of eastern Africa to markets in Arabia, the Gulf and India where they were in demand as soldiers, domestic servants and sailors. (p.52)

But the numbers were relatively small, maybe 3,000 a year. A sea change occurred when the French established plantation agriculture on the Mascarene and Seychelles islands after about 1710. The numbers jumped again in 1770. Between 1770 and 1810 around 100,000 slaves were exported. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, France only in 1848.

Another major shift occurred in 1840 when the Sultan of Oman relocated the centre of his kingdom from the Gulf to the island of Zanzibar. Arabs not only transhipped slaves to the Gulf but set up their own plantations which required African labour, setting in train the ethnic mix of peoples on Zanzibar which was to cause conflict at independence, hundreds of years later. As the years passed Arab slavers penetrated further inland, setting up bases of operation and converting natives to Islam (p.71). This combined with the many slaves working on Zanzibar or other Arab-owned plantations to spread Islam. Today about a third of Mozambique’s population is estimated to be Muslim.

The Royal Navy cracked down on the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. In response business boomed on the East coast. After the Napoleonic War Brazil boomed as an exporter of coffee and sugar, and importer of slaves. Between 1800 and 1850 Brazil imported around 2,460,000 slaves, mostly from Portuguese East Africa. Under increasing pressure from Britain, Portugal finally outlawed the slave trade in 1842 (pages 62, 67) and Brazil formally ceased to import slaves in 1851.

The peak of slavery from Portuguese East Africa around 1830 coincided with a bad drought. This disrupted local societies and led to invasion from outsider tribes: Ngoni warbands from modern-day Natal and groups of Yao moving from northern to central Mozambique. These a) conquered and enslaved their adversaries b) became involved in trading to the coast.

Although the external slave trade was severely dampened in the 1850s, explorers like David Livingstone arrived to discover it was still flourishing inside Africa, as native and Islamic warlords led militias which conquered and enslaved weak tribes, then sold them on to burgeoning plantations. Maybe 23,000 mainland slaves were exported to Madagascar every year till the end of the nineteenth century.

The hectic nineteenth century

1858 to 1864 – David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition.

1866 – Livingstone’s ‘Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries’ becomes a bestseller and inspires a generation of British explorers.

1867 – First gold and then diamonds are discovered in South Africa.

1871 – Discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines.

1874 to 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley undertakes his epic journey, crossing Central Africa from east to west, mapping the route of the river Congo.

1875 – The French president confirms Portugal’s right to Delagoa Bay, the best deep sea port in south eastern Africa. This encouraged the Boers in the Transvaal to think of it as an outlet to the sea rather than the Cape, which was owned by Britain.

1877 – Britain annexes the Transvaal.

1879 – Portugal helps Britain in the Zulu War.

1881 – The Transvaal Afrikaners rebel against Britain, which grants them independence.

1884 – Congress of Berlin called to clarify the rights of the colonial nations in the Congo and Niger regions, turns into a general carving up of Africa.

In the late 1880s there was a race between Portuguese authorities – who dispatched explorers and agents to sign deals with natives in a bid to create a band of Portuguese territory right across central Africa – and agents working for the British buccaneer, Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes won, his people planting flags and seizing territory in what came to be called north and south Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia) thus ruining Portugal’s plans to own one uninterrupted band of territory across Africa.

Prolonged negotiations about the frontiers of British and Portuguese south Africa began in April 1890 and continued until August 1891 when the borders of modern Mozambique and Angola were almost completely finalised (p.93). Failure to achieve their much-trumpeted goal of creating a ‘rose corridor’ across Africa was perceived in Portugal as a public humiliation and rocked the Portuguese monarchy.

The early colony 1891 to 1919

You tend to think of the imperial nations as large and mighty powers engaged in fierce rivalry to gobble up even more third world countries. It comes as a bracing surprise to learn that after its diplomats had fought hard to win these two huge new territories, Angola and Mozambique, they didn’t know what to do with them. They had developed coastal ports and trade networks up the rivers and licensed companies to develop some areas (fertile highlands). But most of the territory was undeveloped, there were few roads, even fewer railways, much land remained in the hands of native rulers, and some parts had never even been explored or mapped by white men.

Moreover, Portugal was very poorly placed to take on such onerous responsibilities. It had experienced not one but two civil wars earlier in the century and was currently the poorest and arguably the most backward country in Europe. People were leaving in droves. Newitt gives the striking statistic that between 1890 and 1920 some 750,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil, while 170,000 went to America.

It’s fascinating to learn that Britain and Germany signed not one but two secret treaties agreeing how they would carve up Portugal’s colonies if, as most expected, the country went bankrupt.

But Portugal’s solution to its challenge was to revert to a variation of the 17th century idea of leasing out land to individual landlords or businesses to develop. On a much bigger scale the government now divided Mozambique into half a dozen territories and leased them out to commercial companies to develop. The result was very mixed.

The big story in this period was the importance of South Africa. The details are complicated but it became ever clearer to the Portuguese authorities that its neighbour to the south was rich and getting richer due to the discovery of diamonds and gold. So three things:

1) South African mines needed miners and so a large number of blacks from southern Mozambique became migrant workers in South Africa, and the government established a steady stream of income by taxing them.

2) The Portuguese built a railway from the Transvaal into Mozambique and to the deep-water port at Delagoa Bay. This became very commercially successful, as the government raked off various taxes and fees.

3) It was these very close economic connections with South Africa which led the Portuguese to move their administrative capital from Mozambique Island in the north right down to the settlement at Delagoa Bay, named Lourenço Marques. The capital’s dependence on South Africa (it even got its power from SA) was to have big implications for the future (p.115).

Mozambique developed into a reserve of migrant labour for British South Africa and South Rhodesia, while also serving as an outlet (via the railway) to the sea.

The mature colony 1919 to 1974

In 1910 Portugal’s tottering monarchy was overthrown in a revolution and replaced by a liberal republic (pages 114 and 116). This promised all Portugal’s colonies greater autonomy though nothing like democracy. Even the whites had no say in how their colonies were run and the native population had no rights at all.

These plans had hardly got going before the First World War. Portugal joined on the Allies’ side in 1916 and emerged heavily in Britain’s debt. South Africa’s General Smuts wanted to annex the entire Delagoa Bay railway and Lourenço Marques into his country.

In 1926 the Liberal republic was overthrown in a coup. After two years of uncertainty the authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) regime of António de Oliveira Salazar emerged. In 1930 this published a Colonial Act declaring Portugal and all its colonies one political entity. The colonies were expected to balance their books without subsidies from the centre.

The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression confirmed Salazar’s regime in its theory of Autarky i.e. a protectionist policy of trading among themselves, which boiled down to: the colonies supplied raw materials, the metropole converted them to manufactured goods and sold them back. So the colony was divided up into sugar, cotton and rice growing areas, the investment in farms, the wages paid to natives, the prices sold to middle men and onto importers, all controlled and dictated from Lisbon.

The Second World War saw a spike in prices of raw commodities which greatly benefited Portugal, which carefully stayed neutral during the conflict. Using some of its profits, Portugal began to sketch out a network of health and education facilities across Mozambique.

It was only in 1942 that the last of the business concessions dividing the country into separate entities came to an end and the country came under one unified government, tax and business regime (p.147).

After much bureaucracy, a comprehensive 5-year plan was published in 1953, with two more to follow in the 1960s. Schools, hospitals, more railways, a huge dam across the river Limpopo.

All populations grow. At the First World War there were around 10,000 Europeans in Mozambique. In 1945, 31,000. By 1970, 164,000 (out of a population of 8.5 million). Half of these lived in the capital, many as administrators.

Independence movements

Ghana kicked off the rush to African independence in 1957. Between 1958 and 1962 the Salazar regime back in Portugal experienced a crisis of support and vision. A general stood in the presidential election against Salazar’s candidate and attracted a wide range of opposition movements. In January 1961 a revolt broke out in Angola. In March India unilaterally seized Goa, a move which staggered the Portuguese regime.

In June 1962 the various opposition groups in exile reluctantly agreed to come together to form Frelimo, which commenced a low-level guerrilla insurgency. Tensions between secular, left-wing modernisers and conservative, traditional ‘Africanists’. It was only at the second party congress in 1968 that the modernisers under Samora Machal triumphed. Dissidents fled abroad where some were assassinated. By 1970 Frelimo was a disciplined and effective fighting force that was successfully keeping the Portuguese army tied down.

In 1973 Frelimo moved into Tete Province and for the first time launched attacks south of the Zambezi. In the same year a Portuguese general published a book questioning the entire future of Portugal’s colonies. The army was tired of fighting in Angola and Mozambique. In April 1974 a military coup overthrew the regime.

Frelimo never succeeded in mobilising the general population let alone fomenting a mass uprising. They just fought the Portuguese army in the northern two provinces of the country for ten years with very little impact on the rest of the country, none on the capital far away in the deep south. Frelimo came into power because the Portuguese simply gave up and withdrew. But this left Frelimo lacking either military or political legitimacy (p.146).

The civil war 1977 to 1992

First of all, the transition to independence was bungled. Frelimo came into power with a programme of hard-core Marxism-Leninism with the result that 90% of the white educated population and an unknown number of the Asian business community simply left. Frelimo immediately made enemies of the white nationalist governments in South Rhodesia and South Africa. These set about training a combination of Frelimo dissidents and anti-communists into what became Renamo, short for Resistência Nacional Moçambicana i.e. Mozambican National Resistance.

Renamo’s insurgency against the Frelimo government lasted for 15 long years with atrocities committed, of course, by both sides. Peace was eventually made possible when Frelimo softened its doctrinaire communist ways in the later 1980s as the writing on the wall for the Soviet Union became clearer. Newitt doesn’t go into the relationship between Frelimo and the USSR, and how this changed with the advent of Gorbachev, which feels like a glaring omission.

Negotiations began in the late 1980s but the war dragged on because neither side was capable of ending it. Eventually Frelimo caved in to the demands of Renamo and the international community for a multiparty system and free elections.

These have actually been held, in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014. They were accompanied by violence, international monitors say they were rigged, but in each of them Renamo won 40% or so of the vote i.e. they weren’t a complete stitch-up. As communism faded away, Frelimo converted itself into your standard African corrupt, nepotistic patrimonial government, committed to staying in power forever.

However, Mozambican politics are notable for two exceptions to African traditions. One is that tribalism hasn’t reared its ugly head. Leaders on both sides refrained from playing the tribal card which so often, in the rest of Africa, led to massacres. Instead the country’s politics continue to be dominated by what have become entrenched regional divisions, with Frelimo being seen as the part of the south and far north, Renamo holding the centre and mid-north.

Second exception is that, whereas in most African countries presidents turned themselves into dictators-for-life (Mobutu, Mugabe, Kagame, Afwerki) in Mozambique, although Frelimo is committed to eternal rule, it has actually changed presidents after each has completed his two terms.

Interesting to learn that some 50% of the government budget is funded by international donors, over $2bn in 2014 (p.210). Frelimo has become dependent on staying in office on foreign aid (pages 187, 192). In fact Newitt drily comments that, seen from one angle, Frelimo’s chief skill has been dancing to the changing whims and fashions of western aid to ensure the money keeps flowing (p.212). The Frelimo elite then channels the aid to itself and its followers, who live a luxury, First World existence in one of the poorest countries in the world.

After twenty-five years the most striking consequence of the government’s policies is the huge disparity in living standards between rich and poor. A relatively small Mozambican elite, which includes many senior members of Frelimo and the foreign business, diplomatic and NGO communities, enjoy an exaggeratedly high standard of living. The modern buildings of Maputo are grand and even ostentatious, the city hotels are clad in marble with fountain courts and air conditioning. Expensive cars are parked outside to whisk businessmen to the ministries or the banks. (p.222)

I was interested to read that Frelimo set out in 1977, under Marxist puritan Machel, to create New Socialist Man, to force peasants off their traditional land into collective farms, to ban pagan religions and old spiritual beliefs, to educate the population into zeal for the revolution. Obviously all that failed, and Newitt quotes peasants (who make up 75% of the population), interviewed by researchers, who expressed relief at being able to return to their ancestral land, worship their ancestral spirits, practice polygamy, and so on. The African way.

Why, Newitt asks, are the bottom 25 countries on the Human Development Index all in sub-Saharan Africa (with the one exception of Afghanistan)? Because of the special style of patrimonial politics which has established itself as distinctively African, meaning rule by a corrupt elite which run national budgets to benefit themselves, their cronies, and keep themselves in power. Screw their actual populations (p.204).

The 1992 Peace Accord, and the aid bonanza that followed, rapidly transformed the Frelimo elite into a patrimonial political class which, in spite of the lip-service being paid to liberal democratic ideals, was determined to hang on to power at all costs. And the costs increasingly involved not only corruption, soon to achieve gargantuan proportions, but crime, fraud and political assassinations. (199)

Newitt is entertainingly satirical about the bureaucratic, organisation-speak of the countless plans and strategies and policies unleashed on poor Mozambique by a never-ending stream of western institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN with its utopian Millennium Development Goals. He quotes some of these documents purely to mock their high-minded rhetoric, which usually bears no relation to what’s happening on the ground.

Apart from killing each other, which they still do in periodic outbursts of renewed fighting between the last Renamo holdouts and government forces, the main thing happening on the ground in Mozambique is that its inhabitants, like humans all round the planet, are destroying the environment and degrading the ecosystems they rely on for their existence.

Forests are being cut down and the native iron wood and ebony has been plundered uncontrollably; illegal hunting is emptying the game parks and illegal fishing is plundering the seas; the Zambesi dams are radically altering the ecology of the river valley and illegal washing for gold is destroying whole landscapes. (p.211)

In 1964 when the war for independence started, the population of Mozambique was 7.3 million. Now it is 32 million. Human beings are like locusts, locusts with machine guns.

Credit

A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt was published in 2017 Hurst and Company. All references are to the 2017 paperback edition.

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by Simon on November 29, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 29, 2023

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A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 1. Key features of 17th century Britain

Mark Kishlansky (1948 to 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

  1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I and Charles I) 1603 to 1642
  2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 to 1660
  3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II and James II) 1660 to 1688
  4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William and Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 to 1714

Although obviously you can also divide it by monarch:

  1. James I (1603 to 1625)
  2. Charles I (1625 to 1642)
  3. Wars of the three kingdoms (1637 to 1653)
  4. Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653 to 1660)
  5. Charles II (1660 to 1685)
  6. James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685 to 1688)
  7. William and Mary (1688 to 1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge that his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

  • business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
  • empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
  • feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
  • media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
  • new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
  • the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
  • sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
  • architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
  • philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
  • non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Patriarchy

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

Hierarchy

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography

80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West

The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east

The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population

The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation

Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy

The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans

Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

  • abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
  • reforms of theology and practice: getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
  • reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
  • adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning

Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping

The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus

Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

The point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion

What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties

It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

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Posted by Simon on August 24, 2020

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After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 by John Darwin (2007)

Empires exist to accumulate power on an extensive scale…
(After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 page 483)

Questions

Why did the nations of Western Europe rise through the 18th and 19th centuries to create empires which stretched around the world, how did they manage to subjugate ancient nations like China and Japan, to turn vast India into a colonial possession, to carve up Africa between them?

How did white European cultures come to dominate not only the territories and peoples who they colonised, but to create the modern mindset – a vast mental framework which encompasses capitalist economics, science and technology and engineering, which dominates the world right down to the present day?

Why did the maritime states of Europe (Britain, France, the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) end up either settling from scratch the relatively empty places of the world (America, Australia), or bringing all the other cultures of the world (the Ottoman Empire, Hindu India, Confucian China and Shinto Japan) under their domination?

Answers

For at least two hundred years politicians, historians, economists and all kinds of academics and theoreticians have been writing books trying to explain ‘the rise of the West’.

Some attribute it to the superiority of the Protestant religion (some explicitly said it was God’s plan). Some that it was something to do with the highly fragmented nature of Europe, full of squabbling nations vying to outdo each other, and that this rivalry spilled out into unceasing competition for trade, at first across the Atlantic, then along new routes to India and the Far East, eventually encompassing the entire globe.

Some credit the Scientific Revolution, with its proliferation of new technologies from compasses to cannons, an unprecedented explosion of discoveries and inventions. Some credit the slave trade and the enormous profits made from working to death millions and millions of African slaves which fuelled the industrial revolution and paid for the armies which subjugated India.

Lenin thought it was the unique way European capitalism had first perfected techniques to exploit the proletariat in the home countries and then applied the same techniques to subjugate less advanced nations, and that the process would inevitably lead to a global capitalist war once the whole world was colonised.

John Darwin

So John Darwin’s book, which sets out to answer all these questions and many more, is hardly a pioneering work; it is following an extremely well-trodden path. BUT it does so in a way which feels wonderfully new, refreshing and exciting. This is a brilliant book. If you were only going to read one book about imperialism, this is probably The One.

For at least three reasons:

1. Darwin appears to have mastered the enormous revisionist literature generated over the past thirty years or more, which rubbishes any idea of innate European superiority, which looks for far more subtle and persuasive reasons – so that reading this book means you can feel yourself reaping the benefits of hundreds of other more detailed & specific studies. He is not himself oppressively politically correct, but he is on the right side of all the modern trends in historical thought (i.e. is aware of feminist, BAME and post-colonial studies).

2. Darwin pays a lot more attention than is usual to all the other cultures which co-existed alongside Europe for so long (Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Safavid Empire, the Chinese Empire, Japan, all are treated in fascinating detail and given almost as much space as Europe, more, in the earlier chapters) so that reading this book you learn an immense amount about the history of these other cultures over the same period.

3. Above all, Darwin paints a far more believable and plausible picture than the traditional legend of one smooth, consistent and inevitable ‘Rise of the West’. On the contrary, in Darwin’s version:

the passage from Tamerlane’s times to our own has been far more contested, confused and chance-ridden than the legend suggests – an obvious enough point. But [this book places] Europe (and the West) in a much larger context: amid the empire-, state- and culture-building projects of other parts of Eurasia. Only thus, it is argued, can the course, nature, scale and limits of Europe’s expansion be properly grasped, and the jumbled origins of our contemporary world become a little clearer.

‘Jumbled origins’, my God yes. And what a jumble!

Why start with Tamerlane?

Tamerlane the Eurasian conqueror died in 1405. Darwin takes his death as marking the end of an epoch, an era inaugurated by the vast wave of conquest led across central Asia by Genghis Khan starting around 1200, an era in which one ruler could, potentially, aspire to rule the entire Eurasian landmass.

When Tamerlane was born the ‘known world’ still stretched from China in the East, across central Asia, through the Middle East, along the north African shore and including Europe. Domination of all of China, central Asia, northern India, the Middle East and Europe was, at least in theory, possible, had been achieved by Genghis Khan and his successors, and was the dream which had inspired Tamerlane.

Map of the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan

But by the death of Tamerlane the political situation across Eurasia had changed. The growth in organisation, power and sophistication of the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria, the Muslim sultanate in north India and above all the resilience of the new Ming dynasty in China, meant this kind of ‘global’ domination was no longer possible. For centuries nomadic tribes had ravaged through Eurasia (before the Mongols it had been the Turks who emerged out of Asia to seize the Middle East and found the Ottoman Dynasty). Now that era was ending.

It was no longer possible to rule the sown from the steppe (p.5)

Moreover, within a few decades of Tamerlane’s demise, Portuguese mariners had begun to explore westwards, first on a small scale colonising the Azores and Canary Islands, but with the long-term result that the Eurasian landmass would never again constitute the ‘entire world’.

What was different about European empires?

Empires are the oldest and most widespread form of government. They are by far the commonest way that human societies have organised themselves: the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, the Greek and Roman Empires, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Chinese empire, the Nguyễn empire in Vietnam, the Japanese Empire, the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, the Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, to name just a few.

Given this elementary fact about history, why do the west European empires come in for such fierce criticism these days?

Because, Darwin explains, they were qualitatively different.

  1. Because they affected far more parts of the world across far more widespread areas than ever before, and so ‘the constituency of the aggrieved’ is simply larger – much larger – than ever before.
  2. Because they were much more systematic in their rapaciousness. The worst example was surely the Belgian Empire in the Congo, European imperialism stripped of all pretence and exposed as naked greed backed up by appalling brutality. But arguably all the European empires mulcted their colonies of raw materials, treasures and of people more efficiently (brutally) than any others in history.

The result is that it is going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, for the trauma of the impact of the European empires to die down and become what Darwin calls ‘the past’ i.e. the realm of shadowy past events which we don’t think of as affecting us any more.

The imperial legacy is going to affect lots of people, in lots of post-colonial nations, for a long time to come, and they are not going to let us in the old European colonial countries forget it.

Structure

After Tamerlane is divided into nine chapters:

  1. Orientations
  2. Eurasia and the Age of Discovery
  3. The Early Modern Equilibrium (1750s – 1800)
  4. The Eurasian Revolution (1800 – 1830)
  5. The Race Against Time (1830 – 1880)
  6. The Limits of Empire (1880 – 1914)
  7. Towards The Crisis of The World (1914 – 42)
  8. Empire Denied (1945 – 2000)
  9. Tamerlane’s Shadow

A flood of insights

It sounds like reviewer hyperbole but there really is a burst of insights on every page of this book.

It’s awe-inspiring, dazzling, how Darwin can take the elements of tremendously well-known stories (Columbus and the discovery of America, or the Portuguese finding a sea route to India, the first trading stations on the coasts of India or the unequal treaties imposed on China, or the real consequences of the American Revolution) and present them from an entirely new perspective. Again and again on every page he unveils insight after insight. For example:

American

Take the fact – which I knew but had never seen stated so baldly – that the American War of Independence wasn’t about ‘liberty’, it was about land. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756 – 63) the British government had banned the colonists from migrating across the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley (so as to protect the Native Americans and because policing this huge area would be ruinously expensive). The colonists simply wanted to overthrow these restrictions and, as soon as the War of Independence was over (i.e. after the British gave up struggling to retain the rebel colonies in 1783), the rebels set about opening the floodgates to colonising westward.

India

Victorian apologists claimed the British were able to colonise huge India relatively easily because of the superiority of British organisation and energy compared with Oriental sloth and backwardness. In actual fact, Darwin explains it was in part the opposite: it was because the Indians had a relatively advanced agrarian economy, with good routes of communication, business hubs and merchants – an open and well-organised economy, which the British just barged their way into (p.264).

(This reminds me of the case made in The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson that Cortés was able to conquer the Aztec and Pissarro the Incas, not because the Indians were backward but precisely because they were the most advanced, centralised and well organised states in Central and South America. The Spanish just installed themselves at the top of a well-ordered and effective administrative system. Against genuinely backward people, like the tribes who lived in the arid Arizona desert or the swamps of Florida or hid in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, the Spanish were helpless, because there was no one emperor to take hostage, or huge administrative bureaucracy to take over – which explains why those areas remained uncolonised for centuries.)

Cultural conservatism

Until about 1830 there was still a theoretical possibility that a resurgent Ottoman or Persian empire, China or Japan, might have reorganised and repelled European colonisers. But a decisive factor which in the end prevented them was the intrinsic conservatism of these cultures. For example, both Chinese and Muslim culture venerated wisdom set down by a wise man (Mohammed, Confucius) at least a millennium earlier, and teachers, professors, civil servants were promoted insofar as they endorsed and parroted these conservative values. At key moments, when they could have adopted more forward-looking ideologies of change, all the other Eurasian cultures plumped for conservatism and sticking to the Old.

Thus, even as it dawned on both China and Japan that they needed to react to the encroachments of the Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, both countries did so by undertaking not innovations but what they called restorations – the T’ung-chih (‘Union for Order’) restoration in China and the Meiji (‘Enlightened rule’) restoration in Japan (p.270). (Darwin’s description of the background and enactment of both these restorations is riveting.)

The Western concept of Time

Darwin has a fascinating passage about how the Europeans developed a completely new theory of Time (p.208). It was the exploration of America which did this (p.209) because here Europeans encountered, traded and warred with Stone Age people who used bows and arrows and (to start with) had no horses or wheeled vehicles and had never developed anything like a technology. This led European intellectuals to reflect that maybe these people came from an earlier phase of historical development, to develop the new notion that maybe societies evolve and develop and change.

European thinkers quickly invented numerous ‘systems’ suggesting the various ‘stages of development’ which societies progressed through, from the X Age to the Y Age and then on to the Z Age – but they all agreed that the native Americans (and even more so, the Australian aborigines when they were discovered in the 1760s) represented the very earliest stages of society, and that, by contrast, Western society had evolved through all the intervening stages to reach its present state of highly evolved ‘perfection’.

Once you have created mental models like this, it is easy to categorise all the other cultures you encounter (Ottomans, Hindus, China, Japan, Siam, Annamite etc) as somewhere lower or backward on these paths or stages of development.

And being at the top of the tree, why, naturally that gave white Europeans the right to intervene, invade, conquer and administer all the other people of the world in order to ‘raise’ them to the same wonderful level of civilisation as themselves.

18th and 19th

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the way that, if you read accounts of the European empires, there is this huge difference between the rather amateurish 18th century and the fiercely efficient 19th century. Darwin explains why: in the eighteenth century there were still multiple European players in the imperial game: France was the strongest power on the continent, but she was balanced out by Prussia, Austria and also Spain and Portugal and the Dutch. France’s position as top dog in Europe was admittedly damaged by the Seven Years War but it wasn’t this, it was the Napoleonic Wars which in the end abolished the 18th century balance of power in Europe. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the new top dog, with a navy which could beat all-comers, which had hammered the French at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar, and which now ruled the waves.

The nineteenth century feels different because Britain’s world-encompassing dominance was different in kind from any empire which ever preceded it.

The absence of Africa

If I have one quibble it’s that I’d like to have learned more about Africa. I take the point that his book is focused on Eurasia and the Eurasian empires (and I did learn a huge amount about Persia, the Moghul empire, China and Japan) and that all sub-Saharan Africa was cut off from Eurasia by the Sahara, but still… it feels like an omission.

And a woke reader might well object to the relative rareness of Darwin’s references to the African slave trade. He refers to it a few times, but his interest is not there; it’s in identifying exactly where Europe was like or unlike the rival empires of Eurasia, in culture and science and social organisation and economics. That’s his focus.

The expansion of the Russian empire

If Africa is disappointingly absent, an unexpected emphasis is placed in each chapter on the imperial growth of Russia. I knew next to nothing about this. A quick surf on Amazon suggests that almost all the books you can get about the Russian ’empire’ are about the fall of the Romanovs and the Bolshevik Revolution and then Lenin or Stalin’s creation of a Bolshevik empire which expanded into Eastern Europe after the war. That’s to say it’s almost all about twentieth century Russia (with the exception of a crop of ad hoc biographies of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great).

So it was thrilling to read Darwin give what amounts to a sustained account and explanation of the growth of the Kingdom of Muscovy from the 1400s onwards, describing how it expanded west (against Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden), south towards the Black Sea, south-west into the Balkans – but most of all how Russian power was steadily expanded East across the vast inhospitable tundra of Siberia until Russian power reached the Pacific.

It is odd, isn’t it, bizarre, uncanny, that a nation that likes to think of itself as ‘European’ has a huge coastline on the Pacific Ocean and to this day squabbles about the ownership of small islands with Japan!

The process of Russian expansion involved just as much conquering of the ‘primitive’ tribal peoples who hunted and trapped in the huge landmass of Siberia as the conquest of, say, Canada or America, but you never read about it, do you? Can you name any of the many native tribes the Russians fought and conquered? No. Are there any books about the Settling of the East as there are thousands and thousands about the conquest of the American West? Nope. It is a historical black hole.

But Darwin’s account of the growth of the Russian Empire is not only interesting as filling in what – for me at any rate – is a big hole in my knowledge. It is also fascinating because of the role Russian expansion played again and again in the game of Eurasian Risk which his book describes. At key moments Russian pressure from the North distracted the attention of the Ottoman Empire from making more offensive thrusts into Europe (the Ottomans famously encroached right up to the walls of Vienna in 1526 and then again in 1683).

When the Russians finally achieved one of their territorial goals and seized the Crimea in 1783, as a result of the Russo-Turkish War, it had the effect, Darwin explains, of cracking the Ottoman Empire open ‘like an oyster’. For centuries the Black Sea had been an Ottoman lake and a cheaply defensible frontier. Now, at a stroke, it became a massive vulnerability which needed costly defence (p.175).

And suddenly, seeing it all from the Russian perspective, this sheds new light on the timeworn story of the decline of the Ottoman Empire which I only know about from the later 19th century and from the British perspective. For Darwin the role of Russian expansionism was vital not only in itself, but for the hemming in and attritional impact it had on the other Eurasian empires – undermining the Ottomans, making the Chinese paranoid because Russian expansion around its northern borders added to China’s sense of being encircled and endangered, a sense that contributed even more to its risk-averse policy of doubling down on its traditional cultural and political and economic traditions, and refusing to see anything of merit in the Westerners’ technology or crude diplomacy. A policy which eventually led to the Chinese empire’s complete collapse in 1911.

And of course the Russians actually went to war with imperial Japan in 1905.

Numbered lists

Darwin likes making numbered lists. There’s one on almost every page. They rarely go higher than three. Here are some examples to give a flavour of his careful, forensic and yet thrillingly insightful way of explaining things.

The 18th century geopolitical equilibrium

The geopolitical revolution which ended the long equilibrium of the 18th century had three major effects:

  1. The North American interior and the new lands in the Pacific would soon become huge extensions of European territory, the ‘new Europes’.
  2. As a result of the Napoleonic war, the mercantile ‘zoning’ system which had reflected the delicate balance of power among European powers was swept away and replaced with almost complete control of the world’s oceans by the British Navy.
  3. Darwin gives a detailed description of why Mughal control of North India was disrupted by invasions by conquerors from the north, first Iran then Afghanistan, who weakened central Indian power at just the moment the British started expanding from their base in Bengal. Complex geopolitical interactions.

The so-called stagnation of the other Eurasian powers can be characterised by:

  1. In both China and the Islamic world classical, literary cultures dominated the intellectual and administrative elites – the test of intellectual acumen was fitting all new observations into the existing mindset, prizes went to those who could do so with the least disruption possible.
  2. Cultural and intellectual authority was vested in scribal elites backed up by political power, both valuing stasis.
  3. Both China and the Islamic world were profoundly indifferent and incurious about the outside world.

The knowledge revolution

Compare and contrast the East’s incuriosity with the ‘West’, which underwent a cognitive and scientific revolution in which merit went to the most disruptive inventors of new theories and technologies, and where Darwin describes an almost obsessive fascination with maps. This was supercharged by Captain Cook’s three huge expeditions around the Pacific, resulting in books and maps which were widely bought and discussed, and which formed the basis of the trade routes which followed in his wake, and then the transportation of large numbers of convicts to populate Australia’s big empty spaces (about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868).

Traumatic impact of the Napoleonic Wars

I hadn’t quite realised that the Napoleonic Wars had such a traumatising effect on the governments of the main European powers who emerged in its aftermath: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. Very broadly speaking there was peace between the European powers between the 1830s and 1880s. Of course there was the Crimean War (Britain, France and Turkey containing Russia’s imperial expansion), war between Austria and Prussia (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War. But all these were contained by the system, were mostly of short duration and never threatened to unravel into the kind of general conflict which ravaged Europe under Napoleon.

Thus, from the imperial point of view, the long peace had four results:

  1. The Royal Navy’s policing of all trade routes across the Atlantic and between Europe and Asia kept trade routes open throughout the era and kept costs down for everyone.
  2. The balance of power which the European powers maintained among themselves discouraged intervention in either North or South America and allowed America to develop economically as if it had no enemies – a rare occurrence for any nation in history.
  3. The post-Napoleonic balance of power in Europe encouraged everyone to tread carefully in their imperial rivalries.
  4. Geo-political stability in Europe allowed the growth across the continent of something like a European ideology. This was ‘liberalism’ – a nexus of beliefs involving the need for old-style autocratic power to be tempered by the advice of representatives of the new middle class, and the importance of that middle class in the new technologies and economics unleashed by the industrial revolution and in founding and administering the growing colonies abroad.

Emigration

Emigration from Europe to the New World was a trickle in the 1830s but had become a flood by the 1850s. Between 1850 and 1880 over eight million people left Europe, mostly for America.

  1. This mass emigration relieved the Old World of its rural overcrowding and transferred people to an environment where they could be much more productive.
  2. Many of the emigrants were in fact skilled artisans. Moving to an exceptionally benign environment, a vast empty continent rich in resources, turbo-charged the American economy with the result that by the 1880s it was the largest in the world.

Fast

His chapter The Race Against Time brings out a whole area, an entire concept, I’ve never come across before, which is that part of the reason European colonisation was successful was it was so fast. Not just that Western advances in military technology – the lightning advances in ships and artillery and guns – ran far ahead of anything the other empires could come up with – but that the entire package of international finance, trade routes, complex webs sending raw materials back home and re-exporting manufactured goods, the sudden flinging of railways all across the world’s landmasses, the erection of telegraphs to flash knowledge of markets, prices of goods, or political turmoil back from colonies to the European centre – all of this happened too quickly for the rival empires (Ottoman, Japan, China etc) to stand any chance of catching up.

Gold rushes

This sense of leaping, hurtling speed was turbo-charged by literal gold rushes, whether in the American West in the 1840s or in South Africa where it was first gold then diamonds. Suddenly tens of thousands of white men turned up, quickly followed by townships full of traders and artisans, then the railway, the telegraph, the sheriffs with their guns – all far faster than any native American or South African cultures could hope to match or even understand.

Shallow

And this leads onto another massive idea which reverberates through the rest of the book and which really changed my understanding. This is that, as the spread of empire became faster and faster, reaching a kind of hysterical speed in the so-called Scramble For Africa in the 1880s (the phrase was, apparently, coined by the London Times in 1884) it meant that there was something increasingly shallow about its rule, especially in Africa.

The Scramble for Africa

Darwin says that most radical woke historians take the quick division of Africa in the 1880s and 1890s as a kind of epitome of European imperialism, but that it was in fact the opposite, and extremely unrepresentative of the development of the European imperialisms.

The Scramble happened very quickly, markedly unlike the piecemeal conquest of Central, Southern of North America, or India, which took centuries.

The Scramble took place with almost no conflict between the European powers – in fact they agreed to partitions and drew up lines in a very equable way at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Other colonies (from the Incas to India) were colonised because there were organised civilisations which could be co-opted, whereas a distinctive feature about Africa (‘historians broadly agree about one vital fact’ p.314) was that people were in short supply. Africa was undermanned or underpeopled. There were few organised states or kingdoms because there simply wasn’t the density of population which lends itself to trading routes, settled farmers and merchants – all the groups who can be taxed to create a king and aristocracy.

Africans hadn’t progressed to centralised states as humans had in Eurasia or central America because there weren’t enough of them. Hence the poverty and the lack of resistance which most of the conquerors encountered in most of Africa.

In fact the result of all this was that most of the European governments weren’t that keen on colonising Africa. It was going to cost a lot of money and there weren’t the obvious revenue streams that they had found in a well-established economy like India.

What drove the Scramble for Africa more than anything else was adventurers on the ground – dreamers and fantasists and ambitious army officers and business men and empire builders who kept on taking unilateral action which then pitched the home government into a quandary – deny their adventurers and pass up the opportunity to win territory to a rival, or reluctantly support them and get enmeshed in all kinds of messy responsibilities.

For example, in the mid-1880s a huge swathe of West Africa between the desert and the forest was seized by a buccaneering group of French marine officers under Commandant Louis Archinard, and their black rank and file. In a few years these adventurers brought some two million square miles into France’s empire. The government back in Paris felt compelled to back them up which meant sending out more troops, police and so on, which would cost money.

Meanwhile, modern communications had been invented, the era of mass media had arrived, and the adventuring soldiers and privateers had friends and boosters in the popular press who could be counted on to write leading articles about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the torch of civilisation and ask: ‘Isn’t the government going to defend our brave boys?’, until reluctant democratic governments were forced to cough up support. Modern-day liberals often forget that imperialism was wildly popular. It often wasn’t imperialist or rapacious governments or the ruling class which prompted conquest, but popular sentiment, jingoism, which couldn’t be ignored in modern democracies.

Darwin on every page, describes and explains the deep economic, trade and financial structures which the West put in place during the nineteenth century and which eventually underpinned an unstoppable steamroller of annexation, protectorates, short colonial wars and long-term occupation.

The Congress of Berlin

The Congress of Berlin helped to formalise the carving up of Africa, and so it has come to be thought of as evil and iniquitous, particularly by BAME and woke historians. But once again Darwin makes you stop and think when he compares the success of the congress at reaching peaceful agreements between the squabbling European powers – and what happened in 1914 over a flare-up in the Balkans.

If only Bismarck had been around in 1914 to suggest that, instead of rapidly mobilising to confront each other, the powers of Europe had once again been invited for tea and cake at the Reichstag to discuss their differences like gentlemen and come to an equable agreement.

Seen from this perspective, the Berlin Congress is not so much an evil colonialist conspiracy, but an extremely successful event which avoided any wars between the European powers for nearly thirty years. Africa was going to be colonised anyway because human events have a logic of their own: the success was in doing so without sparking a European conflagration.

The Scramble for China

The Scramble for China is not as well known as its African counterpart,  the competition to gain ‘treaty ports’ on the Chinese coast, impose unfair trading terms on the Chinese and so on.

As usual, though, Darwin comes at it from a much wider angle and makes one massive point I hadn’t registered before, which is that Russia very much wanted to seize the northern part of China to add to its far eastern domains; Russia really wanted to carve China up, but Britain didn’t. And if Britain, the greatest trading, economic and naval power in the world, wasn’t onside, then it wouldn’t happen. There wasn’t a genuine Scramble for China because Britain didn’t want one.

Why not? Darwin quotes a Foreign Office official simply saying, ‘We don’t want another India.’ One enormous third world country to try and administer with its hundreds of ethnic groups and parties growing more restive by the year, was quite enough.

Also, by the turn of the century, the Brits had become paranoid about Russia’s intentions to conquer Afghanistan and march into North India. If they partitioned China with Russia, that would mean policing an even longer frontier even further way against an aggressive imperialist power ready to pounce the moment our guard was down.

Summary

This is an absolutely brilliant book. I don’t think I’ve ever come across so many dazzling insights and revelations and entirely new ways of thinking about a time-worn subject in one volume.

This is the book to give anyone who’s interested not just in ‘the rise of the West’ but how the whole concept of ‘the West’ emerged, for a fascinating description not just of the European empires but of all the empires across Eurasia – Ottoman, Persian, Moghul, Chinese and Japanese – and how history – at this level – consists of the endless juggling for power of these enduring power blocs, the endless and endlessly

complex history of empire-, state- and culture-building. (p.490)

And of course it all leads up to where we are today: a resurgent Russia flexing its muscles in Ukraine and Crimea; China wielding its vast economic power and brutally oppressing its colonial subjects in Tibet and Xinkiang, while buying land, resources and influence across Africa. And both Russia and China using social media and the internet in ways we don’t yet fully understand in order to undermine the West.

And Turkey, keen as its rulers of all colours have been since the Ottoman days, to keep the Kurds down. And Iran, as its rulers have done for a thousand years, continually seeking new ways to extend its influence around the Gulf, across Syria and to the Mediterranean, in eternal rivalry with the Arab world which, in our time, means Saudi Arabia, against whom Iran is fighting a proxy war in the Yemen.

Darwin’s books really drives home the way the faces and the ideologies may change, but the fundamental geopolitical realities endure, and with them the crudeness and brutality of the tools each empire employs.

If you let ‘morality’, especially modern woke morality, interfere with your analysis of this level of geopolitics, you will understand nothing. At this level it always has and always will be about power and influence, dominating trade and ensuring raw resources, and behind it all the never-ending quest for ‘security’.

At this level, it isn’t about following narrow, English notions of morality. Getting hung up on that only gets in the way of grasping the utterly amoral forces at play everywhere in the world today, just as they’ve always been.

Darwin stands up for intelligence and insight, for careful analysis and, above all, for a realistic grasp of human nature and human society – deeply, profoundly flawed and sometimes pitiful and wretched though both routinely are. He takes an adult view. It is absolutely thrilling and a privilege to be at his side as he explains and analysis this enormous history with such confidence and with so many brilliant ideas and insights.

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Posted by Simon on November 15, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/after-tamerlane-john-darwin/

Ignorance by Milan Kundera (2002)

This is a really enjoyable book and feels like a return to form for Kundera. I hate to say it because it sounds like such a cliché, but it feels like the reason for this is simply that, after three novels set predominantly in France and in a Western consumer capitalist culture which Kundera can’t help but loathe and despise – this one returns to Czechoslovakia, to his homeland – and feels significantly more confident, relaxed, integrated, deep and thoughtful as a result.

It’s a novel about returning from exile. It’s set soon after the collapse of communism in 1989 and the liberation of Czechoslovakia from Russian rule, and describes the journeys back to newly-liberated Czechoslovakia of two émigrés, one man, one woman.

But it is a Kundera novel, so the narrative, such as it is, is routinely interspersed with digressions and thoughts and analyses, primarily about the characters’ perceptions and feelings, then of their personal situations, then of their positions as symbols of ‘the émigré’, then explanations of the broader historical background to their situation, and then, stepping right back from the present, Kundera aligns their ‘returns’ with a) the classical legend of Odysseus, maybe the greatest symbol in European literature of the Returner, and b) with passages about the different words in European languages which attempt to convey the many feelings of the returner, nostalgia, longing for home, and so on.

Ignorance

Thus we discover he is using the word ‘ignorance’ in the title of the book not at all in the common or garden sense of ‘lack of knowledge or information’, but in a subtler sense moderated by placing all around it words from other languages (such as the German Sehnsucht and the Czech stesk) which express ‘nostalgia’, longing, the act of missing something or someone – then by examining its Latin root, to produce a wider deeper definition:

To be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss. In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know what is happening there. (p.6)

Arguably, the rest of the text is an extended mediation on the meaning of this concept, the suffering of the exile, and the bewilderment of return.

Odysseus is doubly relevant: not just as a returner, but a returner after an absence of twenty years, he is surprisingly close to Kundera’s fictional character. It was in 1968 that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia and suppressed of the Prague Spring, but only in 1969 that they imposed their new government which proceeded to implement its harsh crackdown on all liberals and dissidents. So it was 20 years later that Russian communism collapsed and the Russia-backed Czech communist government fell.

And Odysseus was away from his homeland (Ithaca) for a long 20 years: 10 years fighting at Troy, three wandering across the Mediterranean and having the extraordinary adventures all children learn about; then seven trapped by the magician Calypso, who was also his lover.

Now these disparate elements – geopolitics, personal stories, etymological precision and ancient myth – could easily have hung apart and pulled in different directions. In my opinion his use of these kinds of disparate elements, or different levels, failed to gel in the previous couple of novels.

But here they meld perfectly. All four of these levels or themes naturally complement each other. The feelings and experiences of the present-day émigrés really does illuminate your understanding of how Odysseus must have felt, pitching up in his homeland twenty years after leaving it. And Kundera’s subtle insights into Odysseus’s plight really does help to amplify the bitter experiences of his émigrés in the present day.

To both of them Kundera applies his insights about memory and forgetting, namely the idea developed in Identity that part of the point of friendship it to tell each other stories about the old days and keep memories alive. Exiled to a foreign land, with no friends, those memories atrophy and die. The more intense Odysseus’s longing for his native land – the less he can remember anything about it.

Émigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. (p.33, emphasis added)

Plus (as a big history fan) I am fascinated by the light Kundera sheds on the political and social and cultural changes which took place in a communist-dominated society, how it changed so quickly after the fall of communism, and the myriad little insights thrown up as his two protagonists move among this familiar but alien world.

For me, all of these elements come together to make a really fascinating and engaging book.

The characters

Irena

The woman protagonist, Irena, fled Czechoslovakia with her husband Martin, with one little girl and pregnant with another, back in the 1970s. Émigrés from communist countries weren’t all that welcome in the Paris of the 1970s, dominated by its communist party and the fashion for left-wing students. Her husband fell ill and died, and she had a hard time bringing up the girls (cleaning houses, caring for a paraplegic, p.28).

Emigration-dreams

All the émigrés have them, both she and her husband are plagued by them, dreams in which you are wandering the streets of a strange city and the see the uniforms of the Czech police and awake sweating in panic. Dreams like that. Sometimes they came during the day, in the middle of a meeting, a sudden shaft of memory, walking through a green part of Prague, for a moment, becomes more real than the real world. The continual eruption of the unconscious.

Gustaf

Then she met Gustaf, a Swede who’s fled his homeland to get away from his homeland. They become friends then lovers, then partners. He disconcerts her by saying his company are going to open up a small office in Prague. She wants to get away from the old life, not have it hanging over her all the time. Especially her self-centred, garrulous mother. After the fall of communism his company expands this to buying a house in central Prague, with a flat in the eaves where Gustaf stays on his business trips.

Now Irena flies back to Prague and is able to stay there, while she looks up her old friends and has a sort of hen night for women friends only. This scene registers their different reactions, some jealous, some bitter, everyone keen to tell how much they suffered, the ‘suffering contests’ (p.41).

All of this is interesting and moving and subtly described – very unlike the sex comedy shenanigans of the previous novels, Slowness and Identity, which I didn’t like. When references to Odysseus’s experiences as an exile returning after twenty years are interleaved with Irena’s it doesn’t feel contrived or arch; the two complement each other really well.

Josef

In the airport Irena spots a man she knew twenty years earlier. He had been someone else’s boyfriend who she had flirted with at some party downstairs in a bar in Prague. But then she got married and left the country. But she’d always wondered what would have happened. When she introduces herself to him, he is flustered and shy.

Then we cut to his point of view and learn why he is flustered. He is called Josef and he has absolutely no memory of her whatever, can’t even remember her name. He also fled Czechoslovakia, settling in Denmark and marrying. Now his wife is dead and he is making the pilgrimage home.

The great broom

He wriggles free of her and goes on his own quest in Prague, his own odyssey. He goes to the cemetery where his parents are buried and is appalled by how cramped it is, overshadowed by high rise blocks and freeways. He reflects than an invisible broom has swept across the landscape of his childhood, wiping away everything familiar.

And it seems to be getting faster. Things changed slowly ‘back in the day’, now they change before your eyes. This is brought home in the dining room of the hotel where he’s staying and he realises spoken Czech has changed in intonation and tone in the twenty years he’s been away. Now it feels like ‘an unknown language’ (p.55)

Josef’s brother

Then Josef goes on to meet his brother and the sister-in-law who never liked him. I really liked this scene, the way his sense of the feelings of the other two fluctuate, how Kundera captures the changing mood, the sudden embarrassing silences. He realises he must have been seen as The Betrayer, the lucky younger son who ran away. His flight bedevilled his brother’s career as a surgeon, casting a blight over it. Josef had turned his back on a career as a doctor (turning his back on the family tradition pursued by his grandfather and father) in order to become a vet. The motives for his flight are examined.

Josef left in a hurry and mailed his brother the key to his apartment, saying take what he wanted. Now his brother gives him a bundle of notes and journals and diaries and letters. Back at his hotel he goes through them. He realises he has forgotten most of his childhood.

The law of masochistic memory: as segments of their lives melt into oblivion, men slough off whatever they dislike, and feel lighter, freer. (p.76)

He is disconcerted at the combination of ‘sentimentality and sadism’ (p.83) displayed by the diaries of himself as a frustrated virginal teenager.

The teenage girl

Kundera now creates ‘out of the mists of the time when Josef was in high school’ a virginal girl his own age who has just split up with her first boyfriend. She enjoys the fist pangs of ‘nostalgia’, the first teenage tryouts of that feeling of wanting to ‘go back’ (in her case to the happy days when she was going out with X; but you see how this mention of nostalgia ties in with the book’s theme).

She goes out with young Josef. He is petulant and frustrated. When she announces she is going off on a school skiing trip he has a tantrum and dumps her.

Josef tears up his diary and throws the pieces away. But,

The life we’ve left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court. (p.90)

Gustaf and Irena’s relationship decays

I thought the book was about Irena’s first and major visit back to Prague, but this passage makes it clear that, her partner Gustaf having opened an office in the city, she found herself spending more and more time there, watching as Prague rapidly becomes westernised, repaints itself and fills up with tourists.

Meanwhile her relationship with Gustaf peters out. They stop having sex. They stop even talking because he enjoys talking in American English, talking loud and long, whereas she clings to the French she had learned in Paris, and behind that to the Czech she grew up with, neither of which Gustaf understands. Now, meeting the strange man (Josef) in the airport has revived something in her. He had given her the number of his hotel and when she gets through after trying half a dozen times, she is thrilled and aroused at his voice.

All this contrasts with the gabby loudmouth Gustaf who she can hear downstairs keeping her horrible chatterbox mum in stitches. Josef represents escape from two people she’s come to loathe.

The teenage girl attempts suicide

The narrative cuts back to that teenage girl after her second boyfriend cruelly dumps her. We are intended by now, I think, to realise that the sentimental and sadistic boyfriend was none other than Josef, and I think the distraught girl was a young Irena.

We are told how the teenage girl goes on the school ski trip, one evening walks away from the chalet, as far as she can, swallows a bunch of sleeping pills she’s stolen off her mother, and lies down in the snow to die.

Burying the dead

This narrative breaks off to revive a thought that had been mentioned earlier (and which recurs in Kundera’s later fiction) which is the correct disposal of the dead. When Josef’s wife dies, he fights an almighty battle to stop her family claiming the body and burying it in the family plot. Josef feels she would be abandoned among strangers. (This parallels Chantal’s anxiety in Identity about what happens to the bodies of the dead the instant they’ve gone i.e. they lose all privacy and pored over by pathologists and police and strangers, cut open and humiliated. Which is why she insists on being cremated.)

The suicide survives

She had lain down under a beautiful blue Alpine sky, her head woozily full of images of a beautiful death. She wakes up under a black night sky feeling awful and in fact unable to feel half her body. Evidently she is not dead, and she staggers back to the ski chalet where the doctor diagnoses her with frostbite and says part of her ear will have to be chopped off. Word goes round the other kids and teachers about the girl who tried to kill herself. She is mortified. Now her life divides into two halves – the innocent years under the blue sky of childhood, and the years of knowledge under a black sky.

The implications of human lifespan

There now follow some fascinating passages about the human condition. Nothing impenetrable or difficult, it’s all very accessible. It’s as if Kundera’s made philosophy entertaining. It’s like Heidegger turned into a newspaper editorial.

First idea is a consideration of how much our lifespan – say 80 years – affects meaning. If human beings lived for, say 160 years, then the notion of a Great Return which his book is about, would dissolve into just one of the many peregrinations 180 year-olds would be prone to.

Human memory

Next, Memory. The fact is that human memory retains no more than a millionth, maybe a hundred millionth of our actual lived experiences. If human beings remembered everything they would cease being human and be a different species. One of the things that defines us is the way we forget almost everything.

And why do we remember some things and not others? Because they are part of the complex narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. And these narratives, obviously, vary hugely from person to person.

It’s not just that people remember the same event differently (as Kundera has given us ample examples of throughout his work), but that quite often two people don’t even remember the event at all. Thus Irena powerfully remembers her first meeting with Josef, and remembers him as a symbol or talisman of the single life she left behind when she married her husband soon after. Whereas Josef doesn’t remember her at all.

Kundera describes both Irena’s experience after her husband died and Josef’s after his wife died: for both of them the shared memories which made up their relationships required constant discussing and sharing. Once the sharing ended, the memories started to decay, worryingly quickly.

Kundera’s discussed some of these issues before but, as I’ve said, they seem to arise more naturally from the subject matter and setting in this book than they do in its immediate predecessors. The result is that it feels more graceful. There are fewer abrupt handbrake turns.

Back to the narrative

Irena goes strolling round Prague, revising the middle class area where she grew up. She walks through woodland to the back of the famous castle. She thinks about her upbringing, the poets and storytellers and the little theatres with their humour – the ‘intangible essence’ of her country.

Josef reflects

He drives out into the country. He reflects on the destiny of the Czechs, a small nation, whose history has been one of fear and domination, yet have refused to bow to their larger neighbours, like the Danes he has settled among.

He and his sister-in-law had bickered about a painting, a painting by a painter friend of his depicting a working class neighbourhood in the flamey colours of the Fauves. Now he realises he doesn’t want it anyway. It would be a splinter of old Prague in his clean, windswept Danish existence. Out of place.

Man cannot know the future because he doesn’t understand the present

This point is made very amusingly though the example of Schoenberg the revolutionary Austrian composer. In the 1920s he announced that his new twelve-tone system would ensure the dominance of German music for a century. Barely ten years later he, a Jew, was forced to flee Nazi Germany, to America. Here he continued to write and developed the fans and acolytes who were to dominate post-war classical music and impose the atonal ‘system’ onto serious music until well into the 1970s.

But where is he now? In Kundera’s view forgotten and ignored (I’m not sure that’s quite true, but his system certainly doesn’t dominate classical music the way it used to).

Anyway, Kundera introduces another level to explain what he means. Imagine two armies meet to determine the fate of the world but unknown to either one carries the plague bacillus which will wipe out the civilisation they’re fighting over.

Same with Schoenberg and his arch-enemy Stravinsky who he spent fifty years slagging off. In the event both were blown away by radio. The advent of radio in the 1920s was the start of the great plague of noise and din and racket which, in Kundera’s view, has ruined music forever. Kundera lets rip with some classic cultural pessimism:

If in the past people would listen to music out of love of music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, ‘regardless of whether we want to hear it’, it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form); sewage-water music in which music is dying. (p.146)

So who cares any more whether Schoenberg or Stravinsky was right. Both have gone down under a tsunami of sewage-water music.

Irena and music

As so often in Kundera, having shared a thought or idea with us for a couple of pages, he then applies it to one of his walking experiments, also known as ‘characters. Thus we eavesdrop on how much Irena hates the way music blares from every outlet, how much she wants to get away from it to a realm of quiet. On one side of her the bedside radio which, even in its speech programmes, contains snippets of sewage music; on the other side Gustaf snoring like a pig. (This trip to Prague has crystallised how much she hates him.)

She is tense because it is the day when she’s made an appointment to meet Josef.

Josef and N

Before he left the country, Josef had been helped by N., a devout communist who stood up for people like him. Josef goes to meet him, his head full of questions about how he felt about collaborating in the oppression of his people, how things changed towards the end, what he feels now. But N.’s house is packed full of his grown-up kids milling around and he and Josef can’t manage to get a conversation started. He laments the capitalist commercialisation he sees all over the country. N. nods his head. ‘National independence has been an illusion for some time, now.’

Josef abandons his plans to engage in Weighty Conversation and, as soon as he does so, experiences a sudden release and sense of liberation. Suddenly he and N. are like two old friends chatting and gossiping about the past. (There is a certain polemical purpose in the notion that Josef the émigré has more in common with a former communist than with his own brother. His brother represents bitterness, and his wife, Josef’s sister-in-law, would string up the old communists if she could. Josef’s relaxed and warm conversation with his old friend shows how irrelevant that witch-hunting mentality is to the situation. Celebrate what we have in the here and now. Not least because ‘they’ – N. nods towards his adult children – have no idea what they’re talking about.)

The memory theme reappears because N. thanks Josef for acting as his alibi to his wife, on an occasion when N. was off with his mistress. Josef has absolutely no memory of this happening and doubts it was him, but acquiesces in the story. Earlier, his brother had reminded him of some boyhood lines he had supposedly uttered, and his sister-in-law reminded him that he used to scandalise the family with his anti-clerical sentiments. Josef remembers none of this, none of it.

Irena and Josef

They meet at his hotel. They chat and get on. She describes how alien she feels in Prague and yet how she has been cold-shouldered in Paris. The French accepted her and Martin as Heroic Exiles. When the wall came down and she could go back, she realised her few friends slowly lost contact with her because she was no longer interesting.

The suicide girl grown into a woman

I was wrong about the suicide teenager being Irena. It’s her best friend from the old days, Milada, who alone of the cackling women at the hen night reception for Irena, makes the effort to talk to her and understand her. At the time Kundera had told us that she had a very particular hairstyle, the hair cut to perfectly frame her face. Now we realise it is to hide the ear she had cut off because of the frostbite. For her, while Josef and Irena get to know each other in the Prague hotel bar, it is another boring day driving out to a suburb, having a beer and a sandwich alone in a bar.

Except that she has learned that he has come back, the teenage boy who rejected her and prompted her suicide attempt and the loss of her ear. Him. Josef.

Irena and Josef

It’s so noisy with sewage-water music in the bar that Josef invites Irena up to his bedroom. He’s reading the Odyssey. They explicitly compare Odysseus’s 20 year exile with Irena’s own. Talk swiftly moves to Odysseus and Penelope’s first night back in bed. Irena describes it then, half drunk, describes it again using coarse sex words. Both are immediately aroused and tumble into bed. Yes. It is a Milan Kundera novel where, no matter how artful, erudite and thought-provoking the ideas and discussion, straightforward heterosexual penetrative sex is never far away.

It was the sound of those rude words in their native Czech. Both have been married to or living with people who don’t speak Czech. The sound of those words in their native tongue, certainly stimulates Irena to ecstasies of sexual abandonment, she wants to do everything, try every position, and then describe out loud her crudest fantasies, voyeurism, exhibitionism (to be honest, in the era of Fifty Shades of Grey, these do not sound like the wildest fantasies).

Gustaf and Irena’s mother

She is a loud bossy vulgar woman who Irena has been trying to escape all her life. She lives in one of the rooms of the big house Gustaf’s company bought after the liberation. He gets back after a heavy lunch with clients. She has put on some dance music and playfully dances round the room. She takes his hand and makes her dance with her. She pulls him over towards the wall-length mirror. She places her hand on his crotch. They continue dancing. She lets her robe fall open so he can see her breasts and pubic triangle. They continue dancing. She slips her hand down his trousers to touch his hardening member.

Irena and Josef

Irena is exhausted and drunk. She bursts into tears. One thing leads to another and suddenly she realises the awful truth – he doesn’t know who she is. He didn’t on the plane, or in their follow-up phone calls, or downstairs in the bar, or now. She stands and demands he tell her her name. He is silent. Oh dear.

Gustaf and Irena’s mother

Gustaf withdraws from Irena’s mother’s quavery wobbly body. In the darkness she intones that he is quite free to make love to her whenever he likes, but under no obligation. Now, throughout the book we’ve been gently reminded that Gustaf is a bit of a mother’s boy, who fled the responsibility of his wife and child. Now, we realise, he has finally arrived home. Irena’s mother offer him precisely the reassurance and mother love he’s always sought. He reaches out to stroke her cellulite-wobbly buttocks.

Irena and Josef

Abruptly drunk tearful Irena collapses on the bed and passes out. She starts snoring. Josef knees beside her naked body and wonders: could he spend his life with her? she is so obviously in love with him? is she the sister-lover he’s been seeking (on and off) throughout the book?

The suicide girl

Alone and sad, she is in her flat, she is a vegetarian because she is terrified by the thought of eating bodies, that we are all bodies, that she is a body. She has a sad snack dinner and looks at herself in the mirror. She lifts up her hair and looks at her damaged ear. She became a scientist and dreams about flying off into space to find a world where people don’t have bodies.

I thought she and Josef would have had some dramatic reunion in which she blamed him for ruining her life (after he, the selfish teenager, dumped her, she made her suicide attempt, then had part of her ear cut off due to frostbite and gangrene, then she was too scared to show herself to men and never married). But it doesn’t happen, and it feels like an opportunity (deliberately) missed. Remember when he wrote:

The life we’ve left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court. (p.90)

I thought this was a strong hint that the jilted girlfriend was going to step out of the shadows to confront Josef. Shame. It feels a little like coitus interruptus, a little like the flirting with the reader Kundera does in all his books, promising big things which, somehow, don’t quite come off.

Josef leaves

He writes sleeping snoring Irena a brief sincere note, telling her she has the hotel room till noon the next day. Then packs his bags, goes downstairs, tells reception there’s a guest sleeping in the room who’s not to be disturbed, takes a taxi to the airport and catches his flight. The plane flies up through the clouds and into the big empty black empyrean of night dotted with stars.

Credit

Ignorance by Milan Kundera was first published in the English translation by Linda Asher by Harper Collins in 2002. All references are to the 2003 paperback edition.

Related links

Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)

1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)

1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity

2002 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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Posted by Simon on September 6, 2019

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The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson (1895)

Humanly speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works upon recondite subjects.

Introduction

This is the third of Stevenson’s short autobiographical travel books, following An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).

Stevenson had met in France and fallen in love with the short, feisty American, Fanny Osbourne, ten years his senior and married to a feckless American prospector and philanderer, who she’d separated from in order to come and learn to paint in France. Stevenson was totally smitten by Fanny, this tough-talking shrewd independent lady, completely free from the airs and graces of polite British society, and so when she decided to return to California to try and patch things up with her husband, she left Stevenson feeling dejected and rejected in France.

He travelled south and spent August 1878 deeply miserable in a village near Le Puy in southern France – then conceived the idea of going on a walk with a donkey as material for another book, looked around for a likely donkey and finally set off on a 12-day walk, which lasted from late September to early October 1878.

Although it has plenty of Stevensonian fancy, the donkey book feels more oppressed than the Inland Voyage – and a number of references to unrequited love and how things are better experienced as part of a loving couple, alert the reader to Stevenson’s lovelorn condition.

After concluding the donkey book, Stevenson spent a long year mooning about in France, then back in London, visiting friends round the Home Counties, travelling back to Edinburgh to see his parents, trying and failing to write anything, before he finally came to a momentous decision: in August 1879 he decided that he must see Fanny again and bring the relationship to a head. He would travel to California and force a decision: did she want reconciliation with her no-good husband or would she choose him – a shabby, unhealthy, unknown Scottish author?

In this determined spirit Stevenson bought a ticket on a transatlantic steamer, the Devonia, to New York and went aboard on 7 August 1879.

(An Amateur Emigrant should, logically, have been the third of his published travelogues and followed fairly quickly on the heels of the other two, but his friends, and especially his family, were so shocked by his descriptions of conditions among the rough working class steerage passengers, and Stevenson’s shameless hobnobbing with them, that they suppressed the book during his lifetime; it was only published after his death, in 1895.)

An Amateur Emigrant

Stevenson is a great one for chucking you right into the action at the start of his texts. All three of the travel books get stuck right in, with no long-winded Victorian preparations. The first sentences are:

We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. (An Inland Voyage)

In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. (Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes)

and so with Emigrant:

I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.

No preliminary remarks, just straight in, the Broomielaw being the ferry boat which takes Stevenson and his fellow passengers from the Glasgow docks down the River Clyde to where the transatlantic steamer, the Devonia, is anchored.

Steerage

Some critics (Andrew Noble is mentioned as one in the Wikipedia article about The Amateur Emigrant) think this is Stevenson’s best book because it confronts the squalor and economic tribulations of Victorian working class life – epitomised by the thin walls through which Stevenson can hear the chavs of his day being seasick, eating their meals, smacking their children and having drunken fights – ‘the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of children’, and so on.

Maybe.

At the other end of the scale, his biographer, Claire Harman, thinks it is one of Stevenson’s worst books (pages 171 to 173) because his attempts to rough it, to blend in with the genuine working classes, so obviously fail. She thinks the ‘pose’ of detached bohemian which worked so well in the first two travel books, is unsuitable in this context.

That aspect comes as no surprise to this reader. The young man who had spent years perfecting a bohemian nonchalance, playing the part of the knowing littérateur, of the Parisian flâneur, the alert and witty observer, was never going to blend in with illiterate Irish peasants and scouse navvies he found himself among. He is interested in the whimsies of character, in flights of fancy, not in economic plights, social theory or political analysis – as he goes to some lengths to explain.

We may struggle as we please, we are not born economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass.

So: no facts and figures; instead japing paras about the ship-borne beverages:

At breakfast we had a choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the second. As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been supplied them.

Stevenson presents himself, at least initially, as a witty, self-sufficient man of letters talking directly to other witty, well-off men of letters about the oddities of the crazy world – with the occasional moment of sublimity and nature worship thrown in just so everyone can confirm the superiority of their finer feelings.

Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.

He is a student with a student’s shallow flashiness, his lack of human experience revealed in his lack of empathy and understanding. Soon enough he has paired off with a preposterous Welshman named Jones, the equivalent of his sidekick Simpson in the Inland Voyage, and they take to strolling the decks pointing out the oddities and absurdities of their fellow passengers:

If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s experience.

In this mood, other people aren’t hell, or fellow pilgrims – they are a source of unending entertainment. They are a God-given source of material on which Stevenson can practice his prose pirouettes. Hence an entire chapter titled, simply, Steerage Types:

We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow’s-feet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man’s demeanour. You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.

Emigration: myth and reality

However, as the days go past Stevenson is prompted to be a bit more reflective. Quite early on there is an honest attempt to contrast his own, youthful (naive and shallow) images of emigration with the reality he found around him.

As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the bo’s’un’s whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man.

This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, ‘in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.’

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as we please, we are not born economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.

‘A shipful of failures’. It is a sustained critique of his own romantic delusions and, in that third paragraph, a vivid depiction of the economic hard times which had fallen on Britain, which so few other writers of the time seem even to have been aware of.

Aspects of Victorian society

In fact Stevenson’s entire writing career took place against a prolonged depression across the industrialised world, which began with the Panic of 1873 and lasted twenty years in Britain. (The Long Depression Wikipedia article) This book is a rare concession – or description – of the economic calamity which affected millions.

Stevenson must also have been aware of the steady trickle of ‘small wars’ which characterised the later Victorian period, British colonial wars on the periphery of India and the stirrings of what would become the Scramble for Africa i.e. the ruthless competition among European powers to gain control of as much of Africa as possible. This is generally dated to the 1880s but Stevenson read the papers and was aware of its tremors. Here, they only impinge insofar as the emigrants he meets might have been involved or suffered in them.

Nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.

Politics

If there’s a spectrum between Harman (this is a bad book) and Noble (this is his best book) I find myself at the Noble end. Stevenson’s writing is so attractive, so sharp and quick, that it always wins you over. And slowly, through a patchwork of observations and through a gallery of characters which he paints with depth and insight, a picture of the wrong end of 1870s British society emerges.

Take the chapter titled ‘The Sick Man’. It starts off with RLS and chums coming across a man half conscious in the scuppers and chronicles their earnest attempts to get him seen by the pretty indifferent ship’s doctor. But next day, when RLS seeks out The Sick Man, and finds him quite recovered, the tone completely switches, as Stevenson gives a long account of the man’s emblematic career – born in Ireland, worked as a trawlerman out of Newcastle for 25 years, married a Scots lass, he has saved enough to have a house of his own and is on a pleasure trip to visit his brother in the States.

This slow accumulation of biographical detail makes it all the more powerful when Stevenson goes on to describe The Sick Man’s political opinions: he thought the masters selfish and greedy, but also the unions who carried out so many strikes nowadays. In fact, he despaired of England under its current masters and dispositions and Stevenson ends the chapter with a kind of bombshell summary of the man’s astonishingly apocalyptic belief that only a full-scale violent revolution could save Britain.

He had so little faith in either man or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands from worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such principles, he said, were growing ‘like a seed.’

From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea, — to rend the old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the hand of violence.

When I read this kind of thing in the mouths of people from so long ago, I am struck all over again that one of the most remarkable things in history is that there wasn’t a violent revolution in Britain in the subsequent 140 years – as there was almost everywhere else in the world with, generally catastrophic, results. The history of Britain for the last 200 years is a history of the flexibility, the arts of accommodation, which managed all the social stresses and inequalities generated by the industrial revolution, and yet contained and defused them.

Working class talk versus literary writing

The penultimate chapter is a long meditation on what it is to be a ‘gentleman’. It starts with the ways Stevenson managed to get himself accepted into the society of working men on board, so much so that he was disconcerted to find himself looked down on by the posh passengers in 1st class when they came tour the ship’s ‘slums’.

Stevenson gives a dispassionate analysis of the people he met and so – maybe it’s counter-intuitive, but maybe it fits with his Tory mind-set – that one of his most striking findings is how lazy and work-shy the average working man is, epitomised in the story of the ‘tapper’.

More interesting from a literary point of view is his meditation on why working people are often such good talkers and storytellers.

There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men. Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information will be given and received by word of mouth; and this tends to produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for conversation, good listeners. They could all tell a story with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think that the less literary class show always better in narration; they have so much more patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the points, and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts. At the same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected quarters, and when the talk is over they often leave the matter where it was. They mark time instead of marching. They think only to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their reason rather as a weapon of offense than as a tool for self-improvement. Hence the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result, because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little as possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to conquer or to die.

I was struck by the implication that what literary writing has that non-literary talking doesn’t have, is ‘an agile fancy… [which throws] sudden lights from unexpected quarters.’

There’s a lot of different literature and definitions and traditions of what literature is. But the ‘agile fancy’ which throws ‘sudden lights from unexpected quarters’ is a good definition of the core, appealing element of Stevenson’s own writing.

Conclusions

This is another very good book. I think it taught me a basic lesson that the novelist proceeds through people, characters, human types, rather than generalisations. The generalisations (and there are lots) are generally the icing on top of the real bulk, which is the real observation of people.

And so you close the book a bit better informed about the economic depression which prompted so many to emigrate from the British Isles in the 1870s and 80s, about the squalid conditions in ‘steerage’, and with a much better idea of what ’emigration’ actually meant, and who it affected.

But overwhelmingly what we have experienced is a gallery of late Victorian characters – Jones the purveyor of a miracle snake oil, the Sick Man who has done well out of life but still reckons there should be a revolution, the stowaway Alick who can charm the birds out of the trees, the amateur fiddler who can make anyone get up and dance a jig, the stern but fair bosun, and so on and on.

It is completely different in feel from the two previous travel books, but just as good in the speed and penetration of his perceptions. He was a travel writer of genius.

the Last of England by Ford Maddox Brown (1855)

The Last of England by Ford Maddox Brown (1855)

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by Simon on September 30, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 30, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/the-amateur-emigrant-robert-louis-stevenson/