Category Archives: History

South: The Story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Expedition – Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had ‘suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.’ We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.”

Shackleton has reached almost cult status as a heroic figure who kept his team together in enormously difficult situations. He conducted three Antarctic expeditions, dying on the third one and being buried there at the request of his wife.

His second expedition, however, was what sealed his reputation, despite failing in the original aim to cross the Antarctic continent. His ship, the Endurance, got caught by ice over the winter, trapped by icebergs for 281 days and drifting 570 miles before eventually being crushed by the millions of tons of pressure placed on it by the ice. The 28 men were forced to camp on icebergs, waking up the middle of the night to find them splitting underneath them, and make their way over hundreds of miles of frozen ocean to the nearest island. There, 22 men were left to wait while the final six took a small boat over 800 more miles to get help. 24 hour darkness, massive blizzards, and rather chilly weather were just some of the obstacles they faced.

Despite all that, all of them survived, and Shackleton’s book is a testament to human endurance in the face of adversity. It practically oozes British stiff upper lip. Sailors ask for their tea to be a little weaker or stronger next time while losing limbs to frostbite; they trade imaginary bottles of champagne to each other while lying in icy sleeping bags. The book can at times feel dry as it proceeds through hundreds of pages of adversity and log entries, but the endurance of the men it talks about is truly astounding.

“Man can sustain life with very scanty means. The trappings of civilization are soon cast aside in the face of stern realities, and given the barest opportunity of winning food and shelter, man can live and even find his laughter ringing true.”

George-Etienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois – Brian Young

“Tied to a specific mid-nineteenth-century milieu, Cartier, in his family, life-style, social ambitions, politics, and professional and business interests, serves as one barometer of the Montreal bourgeois experience.”

Canadian independence was rather less traumatic than the American experience, lacking a revolutionary war or even (so far) a civil war. Nevertheless, involved significant institutional change, as a country that initially consisted of only four provinces in Eastern North America attempted to develop its own institutions, culture, and society. One of the leaders in this process was George-Etienne Cartier, a French-Canadian statesman and partner of John A MacDonald.

I don’t really expect anyone who isn’t a Canadian history buff to have heard of Cartier, and since Brian Young’s book quotes liberally from French sources without translating, I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone who wasn’t one either, or at least to anyone who doesn’t speak French. The book is interesting though: rather than attempting to retread old ground, it focuses on Cartier’s origins and bourgeois background, before skipping to his political life.

It is his political activities, in the context of a young country trying to grow, that are particularly interesting. He was instrumental in codifying the laws of Quebec, which still operates under a different legal code than the rest of Canada; helped establish the school system of Quebec, imposing a tax-supported system on a reluctant population; and most of all bringing Quebec into Confederation, his alliance with MacDonald instrumental in convincing Quebec to join. Cartier was a French nationalist, but one who believed that Quebec was better off in a union within a greater Canada, rather than outside it or paired only with Ontario.

Canada still struggles to reconcile the French and English elements within it, a cause that has endured from Cartier’s day. Without him, though, and people like him, Canada might never have existed as it does today.

Fire and Ashes – Michael Ignatieff

“I want to explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.”

Michael Ignatieff is an extremely distinguished academic internationally, having held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. He’s won a variety of prizes for his books, including short listing for the Booker prize as well as a variety of non-fiction and academic texts, and also worked as a television and radio broadcaster in the UK. He is also a rather dismal politician.

Fire and Ashes is the story of how Ignatieff took over the leadership of the Canadian Liberal party, traditionally the most powerful party in Canadian politics, and led it to its worst result in history, even losing his own seat. Of course, the vagaries of party politics are hardly attributable to the leader alone, but it suffers in comparison to his professional success elsewhere. Ignatieff attempts to use that experience to draw lessons for those who might come after him, with mixed results.

The book does capture why he struggled as a politician, though perhaps not how he meant it to. Comparing it to Bill Clinton’s autobiography, for example, you can see the difference between someone who thinks deeply about politics, and someone who actually lives as a politician. Ignatieff comes across as wise about politics as an observer, not as a participant.

Ironically, though that may have made him a worse politician, it makes it a better book: one can appreciate his observations without attempting to disentangle political motivations. Perhaps that’s why much good political commentary is written by unsuccessful politicians. A book length reflection on a personal failure is no easy task, however: Ignatieff’s is a mix of astute observations about politics, somewhat bitter discussions of why he didn’t do well that are not as incisive as they needed to be, and some revealing confessions, as when he argues power matters above conscience because without power you can’t do anything (a section I found rather depressing, since if you sacrifice conscience to win power, I’d rather you didn’t). Ignatieff is a smart, analytical man who isn’t meant to be a politician, and his book captures that, both in what he recognizes and what he doesn’t about his performance.

The Lays of Ancient Rome – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible…A man who can invent or embellish an interesting story, and put it into a form which others may easily retain in their recollection, will always be highly esteemed by a people eager for amusement and information, but destitute of libraries.”

The Lays of Ancient Rome are a collection of narrative poems, written as if they date from early Roman history. Macaulay’s intention was to recreate the feel of ballads the Romans might themselves have listened to, but are now lost. More recently, Winston Churchill memorized them in their entirety while at school to show that, despite his weak academic performance, he at least had an excellent memory.

The poems are a mix of martial, tragic, and spiritual themes, and are each prefaced with a discussion of the legend that inspired them. As with more modern folk tales, however, he also tries to capture themes of inequality and justice that would colour the telling of history in Roman times. For that reason, they still feel clever, as a poem written for the inventors of satire deserves.

On War

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods.’”

On increasing inequality

“Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the High,
and the Fathers grind the low.”

On Poverty

“Lest, when our latest hope is fled, ye taste of our despair,
And learn by proof, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.”

The Black Jacobins – CLR James

“They enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.”

The most successful slave revolt in history is also one of the least well known. San Domingue (modern Haiti) was the wealthiest colony of France, supplying two thirds of France’s total overseas trade and serving as the largest single market for the European slave trade. In 1791 the slaves rose up, defeating in succession their French masters, British and Spanish armies, and then a 60,000 soldier French force. They would declare full independence in 1804, and remain the only slave revolt to found a state.

The story is best known from CLR James’ 1938 The Black Jacobins, one of the first books to portray slaves not as things to whom atrocities were done, but rather men and women who had agency over their own lives: masters of their fates and captains of their souls, as it were. Their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, would eventually be arrested on Napoleon’s orders and die in prison, but not before beginning a revolution, inspired by the French ideals of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, that would end with the declaration by his lieutenant of full independence.

The book can at times be hard to follow, covering as it does eight independent sides with constantly shifting alliances; the slaves, wealthy whites, poor whites, French royalists, French counter-revolutionaries, Spanish, English, and Mulattoes. Each would make and break treaties with the others while attempting to dominate the island. I also tend to object to Marxist historians: all historians have biases, of course, but I prefer mine to at least try to minimize their biases, instead of reveling in them. If all you want is to know the history, you should read the Wikipedia article. If you want to understand the history, however, and even more understand how slaves and slavery have been seen and portrayed through history, CLR James is the place to start. From how scorched earth tactics and crippling reparations impoverished Haiti, to the end of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade three years later, to framing 12 Years a Slave’s portrayal of slaves with agency, there is much of modern interest.

“The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”

The National Dream – Pierre Burton

“Nothing would ever be the same again. The tight little Canada of Confederation was already obsolete; the new Canada of the railway was about to be born. There was not a single man, woman or child in the nation who would not be in some way affected, often drastically, by the tortured decision made in Ottawa that night.”

It’s easy to forget how important railways were in North American development. Without them, however, history could have been very different in both the US and Canada, not only economically but politically. Railways weren’t just a way to ship goods; they were a lifeline to remote areas, often deciding whether a particular territory would join the larger federation, stay independent, or even join another country, as the US once envisaged for the area between Alaska and Washington (now part of Canada).

Indeed, the 1885 railway across Canada is perhaps the most notable example of the influence of railways, as well as an example of just how much effort it took to get the railways built. The railway crossed thousands of miles of almost unexplored territory, with no other transport links to send construction materials or supplies; bottomless mud (one lake with a mud bottom had 220,000 yards of gravel poured into it before the contractors went bankrupt, while another had piles driven 96 feet below the surface before they hit bedrock); huge mountains; strikes by workers over the terrible conditions; constant drinking as a result of the cold; and continuous accidents and explosions from poorly handled nitroglycerine, which needs to be kept warm to be stable, not an easy task in Canadian winters.

Most of all, though, the book is about political difficulties. The politicians, the contractors, and pretty much everyone else involved in the railroads at that time, both Canadian and American, were, to paraphrase the book, up to their sideburns in corruption. False companies, bribes, patronage, sudden disappearances and falsified bankruptices: no effort was spared, and above it all the worry of some politicians that without the railway, the West Coast would never join Canada at all.

To be honest, the book goes into more detail than I think most would want: unless you have a particular interest in this period, it is perhaps not suitable for a general reader. If you are interested, however, the railways played a key role in the development of the West, and the corruption that went with it makes for entertaining, if mildly depressing, reading.

Out of the Ashes – David Lammy

“The riots spell out a fundamental challenge in British politics: to replace a culture in which people simply take what they want with an ethic of give and take, reciprocity, something for something.”

The Economist reviewed this book not so long ago, so I decided I’d pick it up. David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, an area of London central to the riots in 2011, and in Out of the Ashes he “explores why they happened, what [he] think[s] they tell us about Britain, and where we should go from here.”

In brief, he suggests the reason is an over-focus on individualism in modern culture. People don’t have a stake in society, and so they feel no sense of responsibility towards others. Unemployment is corrosive to our sense of who we are and what we stand for; businesses fail and we stop feeling like we’re part of a community or that we owe the community anything, least of all respect. Even in prison, the UK isolates their prisoners and prevents them from forming or keeping communities, unlike the Scandinavian model that focuses on giving prisoners social ties, to the extent of creating couples wings in prisons.

Books written by standing politicians are generally terrible, for the simple reason they want to be elected, not inform. This one is better: he still indulges in the periodic unrealistic suggestion or political haymaking to establish his credentials (I’m unconvinced of the value of giving football clubs to the people, but I’m sure it wins votes), but parts of the book are insightful. He writes well about his concerns about our modern focus on human rights, for example: they bring considerable benefits, of course, but they’ve also lead to a modern discourse where we focus on what we can do by right, instead of trying to decide the right thing to do.

Ironically, this is in some ways a small-c conservative argument, with a focus on community and group rights, though I suspect he’d disagree with that. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it’s a nice expression of feelings I think a lot of people in the UK share about the riots. Most of the policies aren’t new, but he argues well for them, whether requiring young people to help care for the elderly, reforming prisons, or a guaranteed minimum income (also known as a negative income tax). If you’re willing to wade through some standard fluff and electioneering, it’s one of the better books available about the London riots.

The Roman Experience – L.P. Wilkinson

“Baths, sex, and wine our bodies undermine; /

Yet what is life but baths and sex and wine?”

-Roman jingle

I can remember visiting Palmyra and hearing the story of some poor Roman engineer having a fit over the Arabic and therefore angled central street, making elaborate architectural efforts to conceal the bend. For Romans, main roads had to be straight. It has always captured our shared humanity for me: I can well picture a modern engineer going to similar lengths to ensure elegance. Such minor details help humanize ancient cultures, and remind us that human nature has changed little in the intervening thousand years.

In some ways, we know a surprisingly large amount about the Romans. We can say what they ate for breakfast (bread, oil, and sometimes cheese); that moralists condemned shellfish, central heating, hothouse flowers, and out of season roses; that they worried that eating meat was immoral (probably not due to carbon emissions); that they invited guests to parties in sets of 9, because that’s how many people would fit around couches on three sides of a table; and that they laughed at a man’s taste when a joke made the rounds that he threatened his shipping agents that any works of art from Corinth damaged in transit would have to be replaced by replicas just as good. In other ways, we know almost nothing: all of the above, for example, refers only to a narrow subset of elites, not to the plebian Roman citizen.

Wilkinson has written a book to attempt to tell us how the Romans lived; not what they did or who they conquered, but what their everyday lives were like. It’s a noble effort; historians often seem to focus on political and military history exclusively, and though I enjoy both those forms of history, I’d be the first to admit they’re hardly the whole story. Unfortunately, it faces the standard problem; there simply isn’t information about what everyday Romans did or thought. What we have, and we have a lot, is almost exclusively from the Senatorial or upper class, or later the Emperors themselves.

The book is appealing: the personal detail of everyday life in Rome is interesting, and it humanizes the Romans. The book does, however, require knowledge of history of the Empire in order to piece it all together, a fact for which the author is unapologetic. Still, it would have been nice to see a book capture both the broad themes of Roman history as well as provide some of the quotidian detail. Failing that, I can’t deny that it’s fun to relish some of the everyday tasks and troubles of Romans, even given the incomplete picture we have.

The Restoration of Rome (Charlemagne) – Peter Heather

The last history post for a while, honest! We’ll be back to doing books next week. But can’t you just feel all the character you’ve built learning all this history?

Charles the Great. Karolus Magnus. Charlemagne. Around 800 AD, he would be the last of our three wannabe reunifiers to attempt to recreate the Western Roman Empire. He had the right pedigree for it; his grandfather, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, is often credited with stopping the Islamic invasion of Christendom through Spain in a major battle.

Charlemagne was the leader of the Franks in Northern Europe, and was called to Italy to help defend the Papal state from the Lombards in the North of Italy. He did so, incidentally conquering the Lombards and most of Western Europe.

Having conquered the territory, however, he still needed a way to show he was emperor. The Catholic Church was respected, but it was reluctant to pronounce anyone emperor, since emperors were seen as the chosen of God and in some sense even outranked Popes. For some reason Popes weren’t wild about that. In 799 AD, however, an opportunity arose. The pope at the time, Leo III, was accused of various crimes, imprisoned, and barely escaped. After a meeting with Charlemagne, however, he was sent back with troops enough to protect him and ensure his authority. A year later, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Leo III. Interpretation is left to the reader.

Even Charlemagne’s empire, however, would last only a century. Why? Heather argues that without Roman bureaucracy, a new Empire was impossible. The Roman Empire worked because local nobility wanted to become part of the imperial bureaucracy; that’s where power and influence was, but revenues still flowed to the Emperor. The Carolingian Empire, on the other hand, used gifts to buy the loyalty of nobles, often of land and the associated tax revenues. With the loss of the tax base, combined with the decreased agriculture productivity across Western Europe, emperors weren’t much wealthier than their nobles, and so nobles would rebel or support rival claimants to the throne, carving the empire up. This problem was only exacerbated as the Vikings attacked from the North, since the presence of a highly mobile attacking force meant even more resources had to be devolved to local areas, which would in turn feel less loyalty to the central power. The result was many smaller kingdoms, not one large empire.

It’s a difficulty all Empires face; devolving enough power to make regions able to solve their own problems, without giving them enough to be independent. In a time when it could take a month for a message to cross Europe, the problem was even worse, but its remnants remain in debates of decentralization and state power in the UK and the US.

And so ends our week and a half of history: back to book reviews!

The Restoration of Rome (Justinian) – Peter Heather

“By Roman or indeed any standards, Justinian was an autocratic bastard of the worst kind…He was certainly, however, the last ruler of Constantinople to use the resources of his Eastern heartlands to attempt to recreate a Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean and beyond.”

We’re still on a history kick, I’m afraid; we’ll be back to book reviews soon, honest!

Almost immediately after Theoderic died in the West, Justinian would take over as emperor of Eastern Rome. Historians are divided as to his abilities and motivations: some see him as a visionary who would attempt to rebuild the empire and Roman law, but it’s hard to know how true that is. Regardless, immediately after succession he faced the challenge any new leader faces: how to build legitimacy and popular support.

To do so, he embarked on two projects, picking a fight with the neighbouring Persians and attempting to codify the last 1400 years of Roman law. We’ll discuss the law later, but in brief the Persians defeated him, leading to huge riots in Constantinople, which he would put down by killing approximately 5% of the total population.

This, perhaps understandably, did not endear him to his subjects, so he looked for another way to build popular support: he would turn to Western Europe, conquering first North Africa, then Sicily and Italy. As he did so, however, the Persians invaded and utterly destroyed the second largest city in the Eastern Roman empire, Antioch. It would take him 27 years to stop the Persians and pacify Italy.

Within two generations, however, most of what he conquered would be lost, and most of the Eastern Roman Empire as well; historians are divided as to whether he is to blame for overextending, or if the new Islamic state that would take so much of its territory was inevitable.

It is for his reform of law, however, that Justinian is perhaps best known. Assembling all legal documents from the last 1400 years of Roman rulings, he would build a single legal system, suppressing entire law schools when they disagreed with him. That system would shape most of Western Europe’s legal system, and courses in it were mandatory at Oxford, for example, until the 1990s.

In any case, reuniting the West having failed from both West and East, attempts at reunification would falter for several centuries, until we get to perhaps the best known of our three wannabe unifiers: Charlemagne.