Consider the Fork
When I listened to the first episode of Gastropod, I immediately decided I needed to read Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork. And now I have, and I was not disappointed.
To start with the writing: Wilson writes beautifully. Her prose is clear, occasionally whimsical, sensible, and altogether a delight to read. It’s not that often that I read 280 pages of history in just over a day, even when I’m on holidays. In fact at one point I tried to put it away because I was worried I would finish it too quickly (I was away from my bookshelf; I was feeling a bit irrational, ok?). Her love of food and history and cooking come through clearly; she mingles the occasional personal anecdote with what’s clearly broad-ranging research. But she also doesn’t get bogged down in the research – she’s not aiming to construct a thorough, blow by blow account of the development of cooking or food technology. She’s writing for an educated but non-professional audience and she does it really well.
The chapters are organised around probably the most important aspects of cooking and its technology: pots and pans; knives; fire; measuring; grinding (I admit this one surprised me a little); eating; ice; and the kitchen itself. In each chapter she gives some of the current thinking about where and if possible how the technology began (in some instances in the Palaeolithic, in others more recently), and then – depending on the objects – skims through the ancient world, the medieval, and the early modern.
My main quibble with the book is its European preponderance, but I do wonder whether I’m being overly sensitive about that. There’s a wonderful section about the Chinese knife, the tou; and a discussion about the difference in fork+knife vs chopsticks; some about the differences in wok cooking opposed to more European methods; and other mentions as well. I wonder if there’s more history done on this from a European perspective – or that’s translated into English anyway. Although if that’s the case I would have liked a mention of the dearth of literature.
Another small quibble is that sometimes her language implies that the changes in cooking technology were things that the population had just been waiting for. While that might be true for can openers (invented FIFTY YEARS after the invention of the tin, I kid you not), sometimes it grated a little: to whit: “At last, these people [the ancient Greeks] had discovered the joy of cooking with pots and pans” (12). I get what she means but it grated a little.
Anyway. A few gems include ideas for future ice cream experiments (burnt almond, orange flower water, cinnamon, apricot, quince; bitter cherry; muscat pear…), the history of the refrigerator and freezer and how they show differences between the English and Americans post-WW2, and developments from coal to gas to electricity in terms of stoves. Also the thing about the tin opener. SO WEIRD.
Overall this is a joyous book that I highly recommend if you’re into food and history, especially both at the same time. Her writing really is marvellous, you might learn something, and it re-inspired me to get into my kitchen and make something. (Which was annoying because I was on holidays, but whatevs.)
Theodora, Empress of Byzantium
I’m really conflicted by this book.
On the one hand, how awesome to have a biography of a woman who was so influential in her time and who has continued to be so, intermittently, in art and so on for the last 1500 years! (I know there are other bios.)
On the other hand, Cesaretti has written what would be better described as a “biographical novel” than a strict biography. Partly this is due to necessity – there is little information about Theodora, and much of what we do have comes from a rather prejudiced source; Procopius appears to have despised her. So while I appreciated a lot of the work he did to put Theodora into context, there is a lot of fleshing out that I felt involved a wee bit too much license.
On the plus side, Cesaretti appears to have done a lot of research into what else was going on around the Byzantine empire, and does provide a lot of context for Theodora and her political and religious positions. Obviously this is a woman who cannot be understood without that context, especially around the question of Monophysite v Dyophysite (Christ having one or two natures, versions of which debate wracked the early Christian world for quite a while).
On the negative side, Cesaretti’s style sometimes really bugged me. I have no idea whether this is an artefact of translation, either of words or of Italian style, but I found his repetition of words and ideas unnecessary – it made me quite impatient.
Happily, the book itself is a quite lovely object. I have a hardback version and when I took the slip cover off I discovered the cover itself was white with the design shown above. It has a lovely map (at both the front and back – not sure why you’d repeat it) showing how far Theodora’s husband, the emperor Justinian, expanded the Byzantine empire, and it has quite a few pictures throughout, many of them specific to Theodor or Justinian.
Sadly, getting back to the Procopius issue, it felt like Cesaretti couldn’t quite figure out whether he mostly believed Procopius or not. While Cesaretti keeps pointing out how Procopius denigrates Theodora, especially around her sexuality and her lowly beginnings as an actress (coughprostitutecough, says Procopius), Cesaretti seems to accept the stories of her having sex with lots of men but tries to put a happier spin on it somehow. There’s not really a discussion about how maybe these stories were a way of undercutting her power (because how else to decry a powerful woman than to talk about her getting it on with dozens of men). Now maybe there is reason to think she was promiscuous… but Cesaretti doesn’t outline that case. He just tries to consider her sexuality in a broader context. Which, fine, maybe she really liked having sex. Whatever. But when the information about that is from someone with an axe to grind? Colour me dubious.
I’m not sad I read this book; I did read the whole thing. I think Theodora is an important woman to understand and my understanding of the Byzantine empire more generally is woeful (did you know they invaded Italy to try and take Rome back from the Goths? Me neither). But I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who didn’t have a fairly hefty dose of skepticism in their bones.
The Romanovs
This book was provided to me by the publisher at no cost.
This book is a physical example of how hard it is to do complete histories of stuff from much before the 18th, even really 19th, century. Of the 650-odd pages, the last half covers less than the last century of the Romanov dynasty (which started in 1613 and went to 1918). Not because Michael or Peter the Great or Catherine the Great did less stuff, but because there’s less stuff firmly attested. Or attested at all. Whereas there are heaps of diaries and letters and non-Russian people talking about the goings-on certainly around Napoleon, and then even more so afterwards with the various power struggles, the Crimea, and then into the 20th century.
Anyway: this book is, as the name suggests, a biography of a dynasty. As with any biography there’s a certain frisson in knowing how everything ends – in this case, in a damp cellar with gunshots. I’ve done a fair bit of reading around the end of the dynasty (this bio of Alexander Kerensky was great, and I also read a bio of Nicholas and Alexandra recently), and I know names like Catherine the Great (it’s always weird to make connections like she’s active during the French Revolution), but I didn’t really know how it all connected. The answer is with blood, and sweat, and more blood, and a lot of trial and tribulation. Then more blood.
I was intrigued by, and quite liked, the format of the book. It’s divided into Acts: The Rise, The Apogee, The Decline. Each Act is divided into scenes, like The All-Drunken Synod and The Golden Age and Colossus, where the names are intended to reflect the individual Tsar (or, occasionally, Tsarina) who is the focus. It’s not quite a chapter per Tsar, in the earlier half, but it comes close. Additionally there’s a map early on showing the extent of the Romanov empire at different times, and each Act opens with a family tree, while each scene opens with a cast list – family, courtiers, other hangers-on. Which is a good thing because if I learnt nothing else I learnt:
- By golly there’s a lot of people with the same name in Russia over this period. I’m not just talking about the number of men called Alexander or Nicholas – Montefiore’s use of nicknames was a lifesaver – but the surnames! There’s like three important families! For three hundred years! … which also tells you something about the dynasty and who was important of course.
- If I thought the English royal family had a complicated family tree, I was kidding myself. The Romanovs are incredibly hard to follow – partly from marrying across generations, occasionally, but also with cousins coming and going and multiples wives and WHOA. I just gave up eventually.
There’s also quite a few pictures, in four different sets across the book, showing portraits and architecture and such things. I love that part of a good history book.
Other things I learnt:
- There were a surprising number of important women. Catherine I had acted as empress even before Catherine II reigned so superbly, and Anna was between both of them and Elizaveta, while Sophia was ‘Sovereign Lady’ for a while in the late 1600s and another Anna was briefly regent.
- Did I mention the blood? There was a lot of blood spilt by and for this dynasty. Like, a lot. Even if you don’t count the Napoleonic Wars (which were EPIC) and then World War I, of course, there was a LOT of fighting. Some of the blood was even Romanov blood… looking at you, Peter III, and all you would-be usurpers.
- There was a lot of infidelity. Two of my favourite picture captions are one depicting “A rare happy marriage” between Nicholas I and his Prussian wife Mouffy (this is another thing: the nicknames), while immediately below is a picture of Varenka Nelidova, “the beauty of Nicholas I’s court,” whom “he visited twice daily” because she was his favourite mistress. Not just mistress; favourite mistress. These Romanovs, they could not keep their pants on.
- How German the Romanovs were. So many princesses came from the German principalities – Hesse-Darmstadt, Wurttemberg, Holstein-Gottorp and so on – I’m frankly amazed that some more-Russian types didn’t do some maths and throw them over on account of not being very Russian. I guess that’s partly what Catherine II did, to her husband Peter III – where SHE is the formerly German princess and HE is acting all “I wish I were Prussian.”
- Napoleon was a cad. So were many of the Tsars.
The one thing that really bugged me was the use of footnotes. I want a history book to have copious endnotes where sources are detailed – this reassures me that the author really has done their research. When these are presented as footnotes, it clutters up the page too much. When the author uses endnotes for sources and footnotes for extra stuff that didn’t quite fit into their narrative, well, I’m largely ok with that – if it’s done well. Here it felt like there were footnotes on almost every other pages, and the thing that MOST annoyed me was that the symbol was almost never at the end of the sentence. Which for someone like me meant I was breaking in the middle of a sentence to go read a footnote that WASN’T ALWAYS ACTUALLY RELEVANT. I mean, what even is that about? By the second half I was basically training myself away from this compulsion and at least waiting to the end of the sentence, so that I wasn’t wasting time going back and re-reading the whole sentence. I’m still very bemused by a bunch of those footnotes because I don’t know why they were included, except to imagine Montefiore was just so excited by the fact that he wanted to include it.
While there were a few other stylistic tics that occasionally annoyed me, there was nothing bad enough to prevent me from reading this pretty steadily and basically enjoying the whole book. It’s a big book, but it doesn’t require much in the way of prior knowledge, so if you want an overview of Russian political history from 1613 to 1918 this is a pretty good place to get it. It’s also got violence and sex. Quite a lot of both. And some comparisons with modern Russian politics that gave me pause, too.
The Amazing Mrs Livesey
The publisher sent me this book at no cost.
So Ethel Swindells – whose name is hilarious in context – had something like forty aliases, eight official marriages, five divorces (… think about that for a moment…), four children, and a few stints in prison. She gained goods on credit, borrowed money, passed fraudulent cheques, stole from numerous people, and tried very hard to live the high life whenever possible. She apparently got to be about 20 stone (c. 125kg), which is relevant because it meant she could be identified on the street more easily than not when there were outstanding warrants; she could be incredibly friendly and lovely and persuasive; she left all of her children when they were young; she made up amazing stories about her life, borrowing liberally from movie stars she admired. Reading the story of her life is horrifying, because she hurt and near-ruined a lot of people, but also fascinating, to see how one person could leave quite such a trail of destruction.
It’s not quite tragedy + time = comedy, but it does come close.
However, I’m conflicted on this book.
On the one hand: holy smokes, a book about a woman! One who wasn’t noble and wasn’t a saint and isn’t generally famous today! That’s pretty awesome.
On the other hand I was disappointed to have a suspicion confirmed by the Author’s Note – at the end of the book: that this is written “as narrative or factional history, real people and actual events… woven together with fictitious character names, and imagined conversations and actions to bridge occasional gaps in the storyline or account for unnamed people.” It was pretty obvious that that must have been what Nicholls was doing, since there was no way that the levels of detail she represented could exist about such a person, but it was annoying to find this at the end of the book; felt a bit like misrepresentation, actually, which is hilarious in a book about a conwoman. I have little problem with reconstructed conversation – I’m not so naive – but I would have liked a note about what the book was trying to do, up front. Additionally there’s one moment where the narrative acknowledges an unnamed character, but that’s all; I’m left wondering if there were others.
Also there were some annoying typos, which aren’t the fault of the story but always grate on me.
If you’re interested in semi-ordinary life in Britain and Australia during and between the world wars, this gives something of a glimpse. It’s not the best written book in the world, but it’s a fast read and it’s generally engaging and Mrs Livesey (… etc…) was clearly quite something.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution
Overall this is a very readable book about the French Revolution. I’m not sure it would work for the complete novice – because I’m not, so I can’t judge that anymore. But it gives a generally thorough overview of the French Revolution and, interestingly, its impact on the wider world; Ireland and Poland both get mentions as being inspired by the Revolution itself during the Revolution, and the rest of Europe by virtue of conquest, with Latin America being mentioned in passing. Haiti also gets a few mentions in terms of the uprising there inspired by the Revolution.
I have two complaints; one stylistic, the other content. The first is that some of the writing is a bit obscure, in that sentences could definitely have been better formulated to avoid confusion. The second is Doyle’s attitude towards women. On the first page he mentions ‘an empty-headed queen’, and doesn’t really walkabout Marie Antoinette much except in terms of being anti-revolution. On one of the last pages he mentions that equality between men and women was never going to be a thing, despite women’s contributions to the revolution – which he’s mentioned about once, with the Women’s March to Versailles, which would be hard to avoid – but there he talks about women pushing matters to extremes, and Mme de Stael as ‘Necker’s busybody daughter’ (!!), and Theroigne de Mericourt and Olympe de Gouges and Claire Lacombe only once each. I found this very disappointing. Of course you can’t mention everyone in one book, but surely these women deserve more than just the one line dismissal of their contributions.
I would still recommend this a very good overview, keeping in mind that no single book is going to be perfect.
Sheila
Sheila Chisholm led a remarkable life, which I think is done justice by this biography from Robert Wainwright.
Born into a well-t0-do family outside of Sydney, she went to England in 1914 to make her debut. When war broke out she and her mother ended up in Cairo, helping to care for injured soldiers there… and while there she married a young Scottish lord. He ended up being a drunk gambler, so after two children and quite a long time in a fairly unpleasant marriage (not a violent one, though, it seems), they divorced. By this time she was firmly established as one of the Beautiful People, with friends in the highest echelons of society and she herself becoming a trend setter. Being friends with the English princes may well have helped with that. Eventually she remarried, this time an English lord (lower in the ranks that the Scottish one). One of her sons died at the very outset of World War 2. Her second husband died soon after. After some time, she married for a third time, this time to a prince: Dimitri Romanoff. Yes. Romanoff.
Life wasn’t all love and dresses and travel (frequently to America!), although there was a great deal of that, and it does Sheila a great disservice to only think about her in terms of who she married and who she might (or might not) have had an affair with. Sheila started an interior design business with her second husband; she was deeply involved in a variety of charities, including organising a ball to raise money for one of the biggest hospitals in London. She also, in 1948, started Milbanke Travel (John Milbanke was the English lord). Two decades later, when she sold it to a British hotel and restaurant company, it had eight branches in Britain and 200 staff, as well as operations in the US and Australia – and “it had 
generated a turnover of £5 million.”
Additionally, Sheila had an amazing set of female friends, many of whom were influential in their own way. In fashion – Sheila was one of the first women to have really short hair in London – and in the parties they threw, and attended, and therefore had the chance to influence important people. Sheila knew Winston Churchill and Joseph Kennedy, Rudolph Valentino and Evelyn Waugh. And of course two kings of England were, for a time, close friends. I think that, in a way, the parties Sheila and her ton went to may have had some similarities to the salons of eighteenth-century France. Perhaps they were mostly about gossip, but real discussions can and do happen around gossip.
Robert Wainwright has written a really interesting biography. As with so many biographies of women I think it has to be accepted that there’s no way to be certain about some parts of Sheila’s life. Wainwright is relying heavily on memoirs, diaries, and letters for some parts of his reconstruction. That said, she was such a powerful and famous woman that she did get mentioned a lot in newspapers, and interviewed for the Women’s Weekly a few times, so there’s more about her than for many of her peers.
Reading this biography is a bit like reading a regency romance (… except there are three different kings mentioned…): there’s a lot of dressing and partying, and there are names like “Buffles” for Lord John Milbanke; Anthony Hugh Francis Harry St Clair-Erskine; Count Court Haugwitz-Reventlow; and Viscount Marmaduke Furness. I will never again accuse those romance writers of making up ludicrous names.
The other awesome thing is that Wainwright has managed to write an intensely readable biography. This is a truly page-turn-y experience. I’m not sure I will read many more biographies of this era – I’m not that interested in your average dude from this period – but I have zero regrets about reading this.
The Great Cat Massacre
I heard about this book a long time ago, probably in the context of a university history subject that was attempting to give students an overview of different ways of approaching the writing of history; it was preparatory to undertaking Honours. It was probably mentioned by Peter McPhee, discussing the idea of cultural history. At any rate, I thought of it on and off but never got around to it, and then a friend gave me a copy when culling their library of extraneous books. So I read it today. And overall, it was very good.
Darnton’s approach is an anthropological one, in an attempt to understand the mentalite of sections of Old Regime French society. He doesn’t claim to be getting to the heart of 18th century French culture, nor completely understanding any one individual. Rather this is meant to be a beginning, showing a possible methodology (or road, using one of the metaphors in the book) that might allow Anglo-Saxon historians to do something the French have been doing for a while and, in his estimation, sometimes doing poorly.
There are six chapters. The first three essentially go through three different classes (DANGER WILL ROBINSON!) and look at a particular piece of culture as a way in to understanding, in some way, that person, group, and indeed the cultural milieu of France. I think I loved the first chapter the most – looking at peasants through the lens of folklore. It is the one that he describes as most ‘impressionistic’ and I get the feeling he feels almost guilty over it, and certainly worries that it appears least to rely on evidence. But it is wonderfully written, sets the context for peasant life beautifully (acknowledging the problematic nature of ‘generic peasant’), and does some really intriguing stuff in looking at variations in folkloric traditions within France and then between France and England, Italy, and Germany. He warns the reader off the idea of thinking you can completely ‘understand’ people, but suggests this as a way of better grasping how people approached their world.
The second chapter is the titular one, and is also deeply fascinating as it explores relationships between apprentices, journeymen, and masters; it also looks at the role of tormenting cats, which – whoa. The third looks at what must be a really bizarre text created by a man living in Montpellier, which seems to want to present the entire town as text and which Darnton uses to try and get at what it might have meant to be or think of oneself as bourgeois.
The second half is focussed on even more ambiguous groupings. The fourth chapter was kind of hilarious as it looks at the police reports written about ‘men of letters’ in the mid-18th century – written by a man whose job was basically to keep an eye on these producers of culture, and who makes all sorts of comments on their appearance, their literary worth, and who they’re connected to. I can’t help but imagine what a similar set of ASIO files would look like for Melbourne’s literary scene. The fifth chapter was, sadly, almost impenetrable for me: it looks at Diderot and d’Alembert and their constructing the Encyclopedie. There’s a lot of discussion of various philosophical ideas and modes of constructing knowledge and so on that I just didn’t get; Darnton presupposes a lot of understanding in his readership here that he doesn’t presuppose in knowledge of French society. Which surprised me, and disappointed me somewhat. Anyway, the last chapter is about reading Rousseau and changes in ways of reading. Darnton explicitly says not to but I can’t help but read the letters that readers of La Nouvelle Heloise as the most awesome fan letters ever; there’s a lot of weeping and sighing and offers of sex, basically. (I thought I would get to the end of the chapter feeling guilty about not wanting to read Heloise but Darnton reassures me that it’s almost unreadable to a modern audience. HOORAY.)
I had two issues with reading the book. The first, site-specific, was the opaque nature of the fifth chapter. It really bugged me. The second was the lack of women. Yes, there probably were fewer literate women at the time. Yes, digging up evidence of women’s contributions to culture can often be problematic. But the man is using folklore as real and useful evidence; I don’t think that difficulty ought to be used as an excuse here. Even in that chapter on peasants it felt like there was an emphasis on men – he uses the Perrault versions of the stories as his ‘literary’ comparisons, and of course the Grim brothers, and acknowledges that Jeanette Hassenpflug was the latter’s source, but Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy gets one mention only. And there’s no discussion, really, that women may have been involved in the transmission of stories, except in telling them to the men who wrote them down. And he does mention women as running salons when discussing the men of letters, and of being patrons, but again only in passing. I don’t know what else is out there; I would really like to have seen some discussion at least of the difficulty of finding women, perhaps as a challenge to later historians.
Overall this is a generally approachable book – not for the completely un-historical, but fun if you’re interested in the development of culture and different styles of Doing History.
Suffragette
This post brought to you courtesy of Parissah and Aoife.
I’ve long had a fascination with the Pankhursts and the suffrage movement; I was reminded recently that I did a research assignment on the Pankhursts in year… 10? 11?; I’ve taught the British suffrage movement for a few years; I loved the biographies of Emmeline and of her daughter Sylvia, such different women; I’ve enjoyed other books on the movement too. I’ve wished that the 1970s tv show Shoulder to Shoulder existed on DVD, and I long to see Up the Women. So it should be no surprise that I was pretty excited to see Suffragette.
The only spoilers below are for which bits of the suffrage movement the film focuses on. If you don’t know the events, then I guess there are spoilers… and you need to go read some history. Here, this will help. If I tell you that the film starts in 1912… well, that’s a bit of a giveaway.
Just go see the film, right?
The basic premise of the film is that life is generally crap for women and maybe getting the vote will help. Which was basically the premise of the Pankhursts’ campaign, and that of Millicent Fawcett and all the campaigners for fifty or so years before the WSPU seriously made headlines. The film manages to show just about every way in which everyday life sucked for British women in 1912: unequal pay, sexual abuse in the workplace, men in control of the house – money, children – and the general notion that women are unfit for politics or anything other than menial work. (The focus is on white women, since the suffrage movement In Britain was generally; of course there was a whole other layer of problems for women of colour.) The response of most of the men to the women’s claims for equality is to be abusive or to laugh, at the very idea of it. Let’s not forget that rapper who thought Hilary Clinton shouldn’t be president because she might nuke someone because women get emotional. In 2015. Cue this:
The focus is on Maud, a 24-year-old woman who’s been a laundress since she was seven. She’s married, she has a son, and she has no time for politics – literally no time, because she works all day at the laundry and then keeps working at home. She gets caught up almost accidentally in a suffrage protest, and things progress from there in an almost textbook case of how to radicalise someone, which is an interesting thought given Australia’s current overblown fears about just that issue.
Most of the cast is fictional, as Maud is. There are a couple of notable exceptions. There’s a scene when Maud is first in prison and she’s introduced to an Emily, who’s on hunger strike. I thought nothing of it, really, until there was a list of names in the police station and suddenly the name Emily Wilding Davison flashed up and if I had been alone watching the film I would have yelped. It had not occurred to me that the film would go there.
Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst only has one significant scene, which surprised me somewhat, although as this review points out the focus on working class women is a fairly radical one and one that I really appreciated. She was appropriately grand, and again, when I saw her, I nearly yelped. They had the costuming down brilliantly, which is to be expected given how many wonderful pictures there are of Pankhurst; no idea whether they got her speech mannerisms or not, because I don’t know of any recordings of her voice.
Of the others – I liked the variety portrayed, within the limited purview of the film (that’s not a criticism; the film deliberately sets itself the task of looking at one group of women). Violet is a long-time campaigner struggling to keep the faith; Edith Ellyn, played by Helena Bonham Carter (who is wonderful AND! I discovered is the great-graddaughter of that bugger Asquith, who rejected women’s suffrage!) is a pharmacist with a loving and supportive husband. There’s a brief appearance from an upper middle-class woman who supports the campaign but whose husband is strongly against, and numerous women around the laundry and Maud’s neighbourhood who do not support it at all because of the difficulties it brings at home.
I have one significant quibble, and it’s one that I’m conflicted over. I liked that the police perspective was given; it highlighted just how anti-suffrage the establishment was, and the lengths that they were willing to go to stop the women. (The scene with the new portable camera – so light it doesn’t need a tripod! – that can be used covertly is hilarious; it’s still a shoebox.) However. However. Why is it that a film about the suffrage movement needed a male perspective? Because that’s exactly what Brendan Gleeson is providing, by being the copper who talks to Maud and is always present when something big is happening on the streets; he’s a male point of view on the proceedings. Could it be that a significant portion of the audience still couldn’t care less about the experiences of a person like Maud – poor, uneducated, female? I’m troubled by this, and it’s the one aspect that made me sad (about the film experience, I mean. There was a lot that made me sad). The film could have shown the police in general, as they prepare to battle the women on the streets; that would have got across the same point without it feeling like Gleeson’s character was an alternate viewpoint on the events.
I’ve also read comments about it being disappointing that there are no people of colour in the film at all, which I think is absolutely a fair call. From the perspective of suffrage history, yes there were women of colour involved but the records about individual members, regardless of race, are pretty sparse so as far as I know it’s not clear what the proportions are. I don’t know what the solution to this could have been (not an excuse, just a comment).
I’ve read a review that suggests Maud is basically a cipher, a stand-in, and not a really person – and to an extent I agree. I mean, basically everything bad that could happen to her, does, and she’s involved in just about everything interesting (well, public anyway) that happens in the suffrage movement in 1912 and 1913. But I don’t think this is a bad thing necessarily. The film is called Suffragette. The only way to really convey the experience of ordinary women in the struggle is exactly like this – to show one woman, experiencing it. I think Maud is intended to stand in for white working class women in 1912 who started thinking about politics, and she does it well.
At the end of the film, there’s a potted history of when different countries gave women the vote; the cinema erupted when Switzerland came up as 1971.
It’s also only I think the second time I’ve been in a cinema when there was applause when the film concluded.
Overall I think this a welcome addition to films about women’s history… since the list of films about women’s history, and feminist history, is a pretty short one. Next I would like to order films about Olympe de Gouges, and one about Mary Wollstonecraft kthxbai.
Conquerors: or Portugal goes to India
I read Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire courtesy of the publisher, via Net Galley.
Roger Crowley has done a wonderful job of acknowledging the truly stupendous effort that was required for Portugal – tiny, generally-ignored-by-Europe Portugal – to get a trading foothold in India… while also detailing, in occasionally remorseless detail, just how barbarous the Portuguese practises were in getting and maintaining that foothold.
I believe it’s important to acknowledge things like the astonishing insight that, in order to take advantage of winds and currents, ships needed to swing way, way out west from the African coast in order to then be driven east, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean. I think we should acknowledge the hundreds of unnamed sailors who died on the voyages of exploration – from scurvy, dehydration, disease, fights with inhabitants encountered along the way – who families didn’t know their fates sometimes for years, and whose names are not commemorated in geographic features. And understanding historical context is important too: wanting to get to the Indian Ocean in order to screw the Egyptian Muslims is definitely unpleasant, but (and this is not to downgrade the unpleasantness) I want to know why they did it.
Crowley does these things. Using what can only be limited information – since who cares about sailors drawn from jails and the lowest classes – he gives an indication of what life must have been like on these tiny, tiny carracks travelling across a big big ocean. And while I might have liked just a little more context about why the Portuguese king – furthest west of Christians! – had quite such fervent crusading dreams, he does do a good job of setting these remarkable few decades of exploration into a global political context.
But with all the yes-they-were-remarkable (the leaders, that is; your grunt sailor really has no choice) because of their tenacity, and vision… it was impossible for me to not to be appalled by the actions of the Portuguese, both as they travelled the coast of Africa and when they got to India. (Please note that I am of course not singling the Portuguese out as particularly barbaric!) The actions taken against Muslim traders and their families for example were shocking and, in the established context of trading in the Indian Ocean, unnecessary. And their arrogance in dealing with Hindu rulers, likewise.
I think the aspect that surprised me most – which it really shouldn’t have, because I did actually know some of it but hadn’t put it together – is just how well-established trading was in the Indian Ocean. It makes sense, too: after all, it’s basically like a great big lake (rough and all, I know) with land on three sides – land with really different stuff that just screams out to be traded. And with monsoon winds that are regular to make criss-crossing if not straightforward then timetable-able – well of course the various different civilisations, from Malacca and what is now Malaysia over to what is now Oman, with India in between, they’re going to do what humans do: explore, and look for ways to make money. To some extent Crowley presents this pre-existing as idyllic; few disagreements between merchants or rulers, and so on. I have no doubt this was not the case, humans being humans, but it was long-established and everyone seemed to be getting something out of it, so why rock the boat.
And then along come Europeans, en masse (there were a few random Euros about previously, but never in big groups). They already dislike Islam and are looking to completely stop them from trading in this area (which, nicely for the Portuguese, will also screw Venice). They completely misunderstand Hinduism, because a) they’ve never encountered it before and b) they’re expecting to meet Christians (who do exist in the east, just not quite in the numbers the Europeans thought), so logically the Hindus must be Christians. And the Portuguese Christians demand exclusivity in trading rights (wha-??) and that the Muslims be kicked out (WHA-??) and if you don’t like our terms we will shoot our fancy guns at you until there is death and destruction.
Another aspect I enjoyed of Crowley’s book is his analysis of the Portuguese themselves. This is largely focussed on the leaders, since that’s who get books written about them in the day (early 16th century), and because they do shape policy after all. Finally I discover that Albuquerque is a Portuguese name! (…this one didn’t go to America, so I assume it was a relative.) The difficulties of leading men in what were, admittedly, difficult conditions – human enemies all around (largely of your own making but in the end that doesn’t matter when they’re fighting you), plus scurvy and weird new diseases… and a king whose letters only reach you once a year, who is getting advice from your enemies back home, and who wants you to pay the sailors with money you make from your trading thank you very much. Crowley does a generally good job of presenting these men as actually human, rather than icons, although at the same time they were clearly exceptional men to do what they did.
Another aspect that surprised me, which had a big impact on the Portuguese: this period is really a turning point in understanding how wars are fought (well, for the Portuguese anyway; Agincourt was a while back…). The fidalgos are all about one-on-one combat, personal honour, reckless charges and self-sacrifice. Albuquerque in particular isn’t stupid; he sees how impossibly pointless these tactics are, and starts making changes. He starts making men train in squads, to work together, and with weapons that can be used in such conditions. The fidalgos however are so insulted by this that at one stage they apparently tried to break the weapons! Of men who might be able to help them not die in battle!! I just can’t even.
Parallels have been drawn between this age of European exploration and the modern space age. I think these are warranted to some extent. The money, the dreams, the bravery and tenacity required – these the two periods have in common. I’m glad the moon did not have inhabitants for the Apollo astronauts to patronise and threaten, though.
Crowley has written an accessible book about a remarkable and depressing period in world history.
Alexander Kerensky
When I teach about the French and Russian revolutions, I like to pick a personage to announce as my very favourite; it seems to amuse the kids. For the Russian, Kerensky is my best and favourite; Lenin and Trotsky are a bit too dubious, and none of the other Bolsheviks get that much of a look-in in the textbooks. Kerensky, though… he seems to try his best in difficult circumstances between the revolutions in 1917, he had a career in politics and was a radical before the February Revolution, and I knew there was some vague connection to Australia. So he seemed a good choice. Which meant that I really needed to read a biography. Thus my excitement at finally hearing about this biography, old though it is, and the fact that I found a hardback version via Better World Books.
Certainly there are aspects of this book that date it, and while it’s pretty good about being objective it of course doesn’t entirely manage it. And books that refuse to translate French for we non-speakers just make me throw my hands in the air, sometimes non-metaphorically. Nonetheless, I am so happy to have read it; it has cemented Kerensky as the revolution’s ‘first love’ even while I acknowledge that I’m absolutely getting something of a biased account of Kerensky’s role and motivation. It’s a biography; that’s what they do
Kerensky comes across as desperately in love with Russia, probably a bit near-sighted about the issues affecting the non-Russians, but vehement in his defence of, for example, the Jewish population; he was unendingly opposed to anti-Semitism. He was a passionate radical (although not a Marxist) – and, as happens to so many radicals, changed by actually being in power; he seems to have been one of those people whose reaction to setbacks is to take on yet more work and responsibility, since noone else would be able to do it as well. I felt deeply sympathetic for him, from this 100-year-on perspective, as he faced the problems of 1917: how could someone successfully negotiate placating the Allies during World War 1 about Russia not negotiating a separate peace, and deal with the Russian soldiers’ impatience with fighting this war that has gone dreadfully for them over the past two years, and deal with the expectations of the population for change following the fall of the Tsar, and deal with the political bickering from both left and right? Possibly these obstacles could have been negotiated for someone else, and maybe it should have been possible to reconcile the differences of opinion and bring everything to rights within Russia… but it didn’t happen. Abraham’s account shows where Kerensky made very poor decisions but also points out the immense pressure of the times. Like I said, I’m sympathetic (which is easier at a distance).
Two things frustrated me a bit about this biography. The first is that it didn’t really clarify for me one of the more bizarre episodes of Kerensky’s turn as head of the Provisional Government, between the revolutions: the Kornilov affair, where – depending on who you talk to – General Kornilov might have been trying to replace the Prov Gov with a military dictatorship, or working with Kerensky to save Kerensky’s position, or… who knows. Abraham does put the events into greater context by talking about Kornilov’s earlier actions as part of the overall Russian command, and gives details about Kerensky’s moves in August and negotiations with Kornilov; Abraham certainly makes it less Kerensky’s fault than other historians (looking at you, Richard Pipes) suggest, and gives reasons for some of the more incriminating evidence that turned up afterwords. But my problem is that Abraham doesn’t go into much detail about what happened to Kornilov afterwards – just a mention of a cushy prison in the context of the Civil War – and there is zero mention of Bolsheviks being let out of jail and armed in order to defend Petrograd, which the textbooks all mention. It’s too long since I read other histories of the period so I’ll have to refresh my memory from Fitzpatrick… because there’s either a weird lacuna from Abraham or a serious overstatement elsewhere.
That frustration is quite academic. The other is one I should have expected: that the women in his life aren’t that well treated. Kerensky married young; Olga gets served well enough early on but not later. He has an affair while a leading politician; what happens to her after he leaves Russia is dealt with brusquely in half a paragraph, and then not clearly. He has at least two more serious affairs and then marries an Australian woman; the affairs are glossed over with little explanation. Nell appears a bit in the last couple of chapters, with discussion of their moves within America and then to Australia and then back to America, but really it’s superficial. And I feel this is a shame, given how much time they spent together.
Overall this is a well-written biography, although not one I would recommend to a reader with zero knowledge of the Russian revolution. It’s certainly added to my knowledge of pre-Bolshevik Russia, and has deepened my understanding of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky.
Randomly Yours, Alex 