the greycat blog

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).

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Cold War sub-texts: the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain’. This particular essay, along with several others, has recently been indexed by Intute, a service which finds, evaluates and categorizes freely-available scholarly material from across the web, and this seems to have brought it to a wider audience. Which is nice. The essay was originally written for an academic conference at the University of London’s Institute for Contemporary British History in September 2003. The Institute has since been utterly transformed and revolutionized by its renaming as the Centre for Contemporary British History.

On both sides of the Cold War the details of submarine missions were naturally concealed behind varying degrees of secrecy, but the legacy of wartime experience, combined with what was publicly known about contemporary submarine activities, ensured that these vessels retained a highly significant place in Cold War culture, not least in maritime-minded, culturally navalist Great Britain. The submarine combined advanced technology with the timeless human virtues of courage and daring; it operated in the front line of the Cold War, on the enemy’s doorstep; it had the allure of secrecy and stealth; it possessed global reach; and, in the form of the SSBN – ‘this killer whale in our midst’, as The Times put it in 1967 – it symbolized the balance of terror that ultimately embodied the Cold War confrontation.

The essay goes on to examine two popular novels by British writers from different periods of the Cold War that can be seen as embodying important aspects of the place of the submarine in contemporary culture: Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (1963) and Craig Thomas’s Sea Leopard (1981). To read the whole of ‘Cold War sub-texts’, click here.

Picture: Soviet Sierra II class nuclear-powered attack submarine. [Source]

Thanks to Candace de Russy and Campus Watch I’ve found a moving cri de coeur from Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. Cole is disturbed at the recent establishment of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) by academics dissatisfied with the existing Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and by the increasing signs that outside interests are trying to exert influence on the academic world for ideological reasons of their own. He sees these developments as symptomatic of the politicization of Middle East studies.

Outside groups, non-specialists, intervene because they don’t like the conclusions. The politicization of scholarship is very dangerous. Scholars are like canaries in a mine. They are on the cutting edge of research, and most sensitive to dangers in a society. If you silence them, you’re poking out the eyes of society.

This view of the importance of scholars to society surely owes more to vanity than it does to reality. Leaving that aside, how credible is Juan Cole as an opponent of the ‘politicization of scholarship’? Well, I haven’t read his latest book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but I have a very clear idea of what it’s all about because the author has spelled it out:*

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East … There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

Nothing politicized about that, then. Of course not: the politicization that suits us is never perceived as politicization (as post-modernists are always keen to tell us). On 11 September 2001, Cole reports, he had written about half the book. ‘I had no way of knowing then’, he writes, ’that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush’s Iraq War’. As if it had the slightest chance of ending up as anything else.

As for the poor canaries, they were taken down mines because of their high sensitivity to carbon monoxide, which they ‘detected’ by breathing it in. Their eyes had nothing to do with it.

* For a thorough dismantling of Cole’s tendentious and politicized version of history, see Martin Kramer’s ‘Juan Cole loses head’.

The strange fixation of our age with saying sorry all the time is brilliantly anatomized by Gorman Beauchamp in the current American Scholar:

History, that is, offers so much to apologize for that the question is not where to start but where to stop. We could save time, energy, and the risk of invidious specificity by just apologizing for history itself … its annals are overrife with horrors, crimes, and cruelty. Except for reasons of political expediency and publicity, how would we cherry-pick from this long and dismal record which enormities merit apology?

A round-up of the leading current apology stories:

• Rudd will apologize to Aborigines - ‘Newly elected Australian leader Kevin Rudd renewed a commitment Monday to apologize to indigenous Aborigines for past indignities.’
• Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness - ‘we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbours.’
• Queen should apologise for slave trade - ‘The Queen of Britain should apologise for the evils the British inflicted on Ugandans during the colonial era, the chairman of Africa Leadership Institute, a think tank in Kampala, has said … “If she does not apologise to the Africans then she would suffer severe punishment from the creator”.’
• Bishop offers apology over Church’s role in bloody civil war - ‘On many occasions we have reasons to thank God for what was done and for the people who acted, [but] probably in other moments … we should ask for forgiveness and change direction.’

The above cases, wretched as they may be, are pretty tame stuff, really; it isn’t that long ago that a Danish government minister was apologizing for the behaviour of the Vikings.