the greycat blog

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Two new essays are published at greycat.org today (well, the model railway essay is a revised version of a draft that has been around for some time, but the revisions are so extensive that it counts as new).

‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950′ - a study of the sociocultural history of railway modelling in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, examining issues from philosophical and historical questions of the nature of leisure to the presence of modernism and nostalgia in model railways.

‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ - in June 2004 Marvin Heemeyer used an armoured bulldozer to stage a destructive assault on the town of Granby, Colorado. Taking this incident as a starting point, ‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ explores the significance of the bulldozer as a weapon, ‘simultaneously tank and tractor, tool and weapon, creator and destroyer’.

Theodore Sturgeon’s short story about a killer bulldozer, published in 1944, is the origin of the term ‘killdozer’. The story was turned into a film in 1974. This flash game is much more exciting than the film. Make sure you have your sound on.

The most-read article on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Baroque cities have been described as representing ‘the cosmic-dynastic grand illusion’ with the great palace acting as the focus, ‘sending its surveillance and benevolence into the far corners of the geometrically disciplined urban universe’. This vision is perhaps most dramatically expressed in completely new cities such as Karlsruhe and St Petersburg; but it is fully present, on a smaller scale, but nonetheless in the grand manner, in the development of Dresden during the baroque period.

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine on the design of First World War aircraft. The gist of it is that while huge advances in aircraft design took place between 1914 and 1918 lots of good ideas took a long time to be adopted and lots of bad ideas persisted much longer than they should have done.

Most of the improvements emerged from trial and error. But what if designers during the first World War had had the tools for simulation and analysis that are available today? Many of the errors would have been avoided had the firms of Fokker, Sopwith, Nieuport, and the rest had a few desktop computers. 

The question is asked tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the article does take a rather teleological approach. The history of technology offers very few cases of straightforward development towards the best solution for whatever problem is being addressed; the process of technological change tends to be a lot more complex, indirect and contingent than that, and technical issues are never the only ones at stake: social, political, financial and cultural factors all play a part, and can end up being more important than the simple question (if it is simple) of what is ‘the best technology’. Heavier-than-air craft of military value only dated from about 1910; the whole area of military aviation was new and largely unknown; the pressure of war forced improvisation as much as it did innovation; engineering at the time was as much an intuitive pursuit as it was a technical discipline, particularly in aviation where gifted amateurism was the order of the day; and the luxury of hindsight was - of course - not available at the time. What is surprising is not that Great War aircraft were not better than they were, but that they were as good as they turned out to be.

The issue of interrupter gear is raised at one point - i.e. a system that meant you could fire a machine gun forward along the axis of the aircraft without shooting your propellor off. Its invention is ascribed to Anthony Fokker, and the author wonders about ‘the inability of the British and French, who could build both engines and machine guns, to quickly contrive a satisfactory way to synchronize them’. My understanding was (and I haven’t time to check this with a reliable source right now) that it was the French pilot Roland Garros who invented the first effective interrupter system, which he fitted to his own aircraft, and that it was when he was shot down that the Germans found the secret, improved upon it, and fitted it to the Fokker Eindecker, with devastating results.

Peter Garrison, ‘What the Red Baron never knew’, Air & Space Magazine, February 2008.

The first ‘most-read’ of the new year, and the new favourite essay at greycat.org is ‘Burke and revolution: reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke’. Many of the visitors who have been interested in this essay have been from the United States - appropriately enough, for Burke was a friend of American independence.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works.

Read ’Burke and revolution’ by clicking here. Other essays on eighteenth-century topics can be found here.

Picture: Edmund Burke, engraving after Joshua Reynolds. [Source]

The history of human society suggests that useful technologies tend gradually to develop rather than suddenly appear, and often do so independently in different parts of the world, but that doesn’t stop people from always trying to find ‘the origin’ of whatever it is they are interested in, and ideally ‘the inventor’ as well.

Thus: ‘Bone Ice Skates Invented by Ancient Finns, Study Says’, is a headline in National Geographic this week. The study in question, ‘The first humans travelling on ice: an energy-saving strategy’ by Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti, is published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society for January 2008. Looking at the terrain of southern Finland (lots of lakes) and calculating the energy saving available to people who skated rather than walking (10% or so) leads Formenti and Minetti to conclude that ‘ice-skating happened in [this] area because of the several long and thin lakes that people had to cross in order to get around, hunting for food or for any daily activity’ - a reasonable notion, but a long way from establishing that ice skates were Invented by Ancient Finns. Southern California is an ideal climate and terrain for motor transport, but the automobile wasn’t invented there.

The authors (who are physiologists rather than historians or archaeologists, and I think it shows) summarize their conclusions in their abstract like this: ‘An analysis of the geometrical shape of lakes associated with fractal analysis of their distribution suggests that, in order to better adapt to the severe conditions imposed by the long lasting winters, Finnish populations could benefit more than others from developing this ingenious locomotion tool’. This is rather more cautious than the NG headline, but is still somewhat generalized and teleological; it’s like arguing that because of the particular characteristics of Polynesian geography, boats must have been invented by Polynesians.

An interesting piece of research, anyway, into a neglected aspect of transport history. The story is also covered by The Times (‘Dashing Finns were first to get their skates on 5,000 years ago’) and the BBC (‘Skating traced back 4,000 years’), although unlike National Geographic they don’t provide a helpful link to a map of Europe for people who don’t know where Finland is.

Here’s a web-based scholarly resource that had somehow evaded my notice until now: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Index, neatly abbreviated (with obligatory capital letter in the middle) as the SciPer index. Here’s what it is and what it does, in its own words:

The Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) Index provides a scholarly synopsis of the material relating to science, technology, and medicine appearing in sixteen general periodicals published in Britain between 1800 and 1900. With entries describing over 14,000 articles and references to more than 6000 individuals and 2500 publications, it provides an invaluable research tool for those interested in the representation of science and in the interpenetration of science and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as for students of the period more generally. […]

Constructed by systematically reading runs of sixteen non-scientific titles, [the index] provides details of the scientific references occurring throughout the periodicals, whether in fiction, poetry, illustrations, or dedicated scientific articles. The index has been compiled by experienced nineteenth-century researchers, whose judgement in identifying non-trivial references, and in identifying the people, publications, and institutions to whom reference is made, makes the finished product both more inclusive than conventional indexes, and more incisive than full-text searching. Although the index inevitably represents only a small proportion of the material available, a wide range of periodical formats and genres is represented. The indexing is very detailed, including not only the authors, titles, and bibliographical details of articles with relevant references, but also references to people, institutions, and publications mentioned, and in many cases a more extended description.

The SciPer index is very easy to use, with a sound basic search facility and an advanced search feature that provides almost every option you could wish for (although it would be nice to be able to exclude specific periodicals from the results; one can have too much of Punch). The periodicals indexed are listed here and include Blackwood’s, Cornhill, Edinburgh Review and the European Harper’s.

The recent expansion in the availability of full-text electronic resources has, if anything, increased the need for this kind of detailed and focused scholarly indexing, as the creators of SciPer observe: ‘full-text searching threatens to overwhelm the student with unwanted hits. Furthermore, both conventional indexing and digital full-texts have tended to leave illustrative material difficult to locate’. SciPer fills that gap and for anyone working on Victorian STM constitutes an invaluable resource.

There’s an interesting article by Guy Kewney at The Register today: ‘Who’s archiving IT’s history?’. Kewney points out the difficulty of finding accurate archiving on the web. Many sites hardly archive at all, or only started recently; even where content is archived, context and presentation has often changed completely. Add to this the difficulties of documents disappearing, links going bad and images vanishing and you have a very unreliable, partial and perhaps even misleading record.

This isn’t some failing of the web, but a result of its inherent nature. It is a slippery, unstable, unreliable thing. Yet the received wisdom is that once something is out there on the web, it’s out there for ever. And the converse is also widely held to be true, i.e. that if you can’t find it on the web, it doesn’t exist. A remarkable instance of this is discussed in an article by academic Mark LeVine in the Orange County Weekly for 19 March 2003 (and safely archived on the OC Weekly site). LeVine was being interviewed by talk-show host Dennis Prager; LeVine said, in answer to a question, that a particular thing had happened in 1996. Prager, however, accused LeVine of lying. The reason? He’d looked on Google and found no trace of the event LeVine had cited. ‘I was stunned by Prager’s remark’, says LeVine, ’more specifically by the idea that a minute-long Internet search would provide sufficient evidence to pass judgment on a historical claim’. Yet is it surprising that such a delusional view of the web persists when the gods of Google themselves have proclaimed their mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’? Short of sending their robots to crawl the contents of all human souls it is very difficult to see how Google can make the world’s information ‘universally accessible’ (even if that were desirable), and as for compelling it to be ‘useful’, I simply don’t understand what they mean. But such megalomaniacal nonsense helps sustain the misconception that the web is itself ‘the information’, rather than (like all other media) a means of accessing a limited amount of information, in certain limited ways.

The problem isn’t that the web’s record of things, like every other archive, is incomplete and misleading. The problem is that it is believed not to be.

History News Network have published a new article from me, dealing with the history of the bulldozer, a theme I have been researching and writing about for some time. Why the bulldozer, of all things? This is why (from the conclusion of the article):

[The bulldozer] is a machine that deals with fundamentals: the earth, transformation, creation, destruction. It buries the past while it builds the future, demolishing in order to construct, leveling the ground and starting anew from a cleared and emptied landscape – it is the year-zero machine. Celebrated as an icon of social progress or despised as a symbol of destructive exploitation, hymned as a machine of liberation or feared as a tool of repression, the bulldozer has reshaped cultural perceptions as it has transformed urban and rural landscapes. To follow in its tracks is to understand the history of the modern age.

You can read the entire article, ‘The bulldozer: one of the overlooked wonders of technology’, here. I hope you’ll soon be able to explore the history of the bulldozer at even greater length, in one of the must-read books of 2008.

In the current (3 December 2007) edition of In These Times, Slavoj Zizek of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, has an interesting article about the People’s Republic of China: ‘China’s valley of tears’. He argues that western expectations that democracy will follow in the wake of capitalism in China are profoundly mistaken, pointing out that economic development in China has occurred because of authoritarian rule, not in spite of it.

Zizek is surely right in seeing no essential contradiction between capitalism and authoritarianism in the Chinese case. Where he goes badly astray is in the parallel he draws between the development of capitalism in the People’s Republic of China today and its historical development in Europe. In short, he argues that the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe was accompanied by precisely the kind of state authoritarianism that we see in contemporary China:

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill might well have approved of this facile Marxism, but it really won’t do as history. ‘Democracy’ in early modern Europe meant something quite different to what it means today, in so far as it had (or has) a settled meaning in any case; as for ‘brutal state dictatorship’, no early modern state had the means to impose such a thing, even had it wished to do so. Capitalism in Europe was not imposed from above, it arose from below, from investment, invention and entrepreneurship. It arose first and most successfully in those countries which had political stability, surplus capital, availability of labour and natural resources, and in which governments enabled its development. An enabling government is a very different thing from an enforcing government. No Dutch merchant was forced by the state to trade with the East Indies; no English landowner was compelled at bayonet-point to dig for coal on his estate; no Scottish businessman was threatened with beheading if he did not open a bank. Even for the workers who provided the muscle which powered the development of capital, the economic imperatives of the market were far more significant in determining whether and where they worked than the coercive power of the state, which was minimal by modern standards.

Zizek’s characterization of the development of European capitalism is profoundly mistaken, and the parallel with contemporary China simply isn’t there. European capitalism arose organically from below, and the state developed to accommodate it. In China, capitalism is imposed from above by state decree (and what one decree gives, another can take away). European capitalism was driven by invention; no-one in China has invented anything for centuries, being content to copy. The development of western capitalism was bound up with philosophical and political notions of individual liberty and free will; in China these notions are absent, and have indeed long been officially despised and rejected.

Not only is the supposed parallel absent for the past, it is equally false for the future. The growth of the capitalist economies of Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was built on deep economic, financial and philosophical roots; it was real, it endured, and it changed the world. China’s recent growth is built on sand: it is illusory, it is short-term, and it will only change the world if the world is foolish enough to go on accepting China at its own valuation.

Where Zizek argues that there is a parallel between the contemporary Chinese situation and the conditions under which capitalism developed in early modern Europe, he is mistaken. He is correct, however, to argue that, far from authoritarian rule undermining contemporary Chinese economic development, it is the foundation of it, and to assert that (contrary to the claims of China’s cheerleaders in the west) there is no natural progression from capitalist economic liberalization to democratic political liberalization. That argument needs to be taken a stage further: given the artificial, state-imposed nature of contemporary Chinese capitalism, its continuing expansion - indeed, its continuing presence - cannot be relied upon.

Zizek sees modern China as a natural and consistent expression of Marxist economic and political philosophy. He is right, and the lesson is clear. The Marxist house of cards collapsed long ago; how long before the fragile edifice that is the People’s Republic falls down flat as well?

UPDATE 10 Dec 07: This article has been republished by History News Network in their ‘Roundup’ section - see ‘Ralph Harrington: China’s Future’ (number two in their ‘top ten’ today).