How I used the <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> as a student

‘They court the notice of a future age/ Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land’.

Today’s users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are members of the ‘future age’ that William Cowper talks of in his poem ‘On Observing Some Names Of Little Note Recorded In The Biographia Britannica’. For students, this makes the ODNB a treasure trove. On any given topic, movement or episode of history—be it the Crusades, the first women lawyers, or the Romantic poets—we can find in the ODNB elegant and informative entries about the people behind it. These people might be kings and queens, but they are often ‘tiny lustres’: individuals who lived in quieter ways, but who nonetheless shaped the course of British history.

I started using the ODNB when I was a student of English Literature in 2018-2022. Undergraduate and postgraduate student life is, as many will attest, busy, and this made the ODNB an invaluable resource: a long-form biography might take too much time to read during term, but an ODNB entry is both detailed and short. I used the dictionary to locate in-depth research in an accessible, engaging, concise format, but also as a reading list of sorts: it pointed me towards further material about people I was researching (in my case, these were mostly authors). A given entry might contain both primary sources (diaries, manuscripts, books by the subject, podcasts and film) and further secondary material (full-length biographies, books of criticism) that can form a starting point when researching biographical information about a given person.

But what did this look like in practice? Here’s one example. In my second year, one of our set texts was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. I didn’t know much about Defoe’s background when I began this module, so I went to the ODNB for a concise overview of his life. I was also able to do a keyword search within the entry to immediately identify specific information about Moll Flanders, which came in handy when writing my tutorial essay. The entry contained quotations from seminal works of criticism (such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel) as well as responses to the work from other authors, both in Defoe’s lifetime and later (like James Joyce, who called Defoe the ‘father of the English novel’). What’s more, the list of sources at the end of the entry provided an accessible and manageable means of navigating criticism around Defoe when I returned to the topic when revising for Finals.

From then on, the ODNB became an essential tool in my undergraduate and postgraduate research. I used it as a starting point to devise my own reading list in preparation for my BA dissertation on Virginia Woolf: indeed, reading the entry on her convinced me to choose this subject for my thesis. The ODNB helped me to discover Woolf’s circle, too: it contains entries about other members of the Bloomsbury group, from her sister Vanessa Bell to the painter and curator Roger Fry.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allows each user to embark on their own path of discovery. A friend, when writing her history dissertation about Members of Parliament in the eighteenth-century, used the dictionary’s ‘group entries’ to gather sources and discover additional figures related to her project. The ODNB’s coverage stretches all the way back to Roman officers and their wives stationed at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall in first century AD, and to the associates of William the Conqueror, who planned the invasion of England in 1066. History is made by ‘tiny lustres’, and this resource equips us to roam across the vast range of individual contributions to national life. Next time you come across a name you don’t recognize in your research, I encourage you to try looking them up in the ODNB: it might just spark a new idea.

^{Featured image by Zoshua Colah via Unsplash.}

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How did English literature become a university subject?

Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other. As a subject, ‘English’ (an adjective masquerading as a noun) has been central to educational arrangements in Britain for well over a century, seeming for much of that time to occupy a privileged place in the wider culture as well.

Yet literature may seem the most unlikely candidate for becoming a recognized academic discipline. For the most part, science and scholarship have operated with implicit canons of enquiry that have emphasized objectivity, verified knowledge, causal analysis, and impersonal, replicable forms of argument and presentation. But the reader’s encounter with works of imaginative literature does not easily lend itself to such treatment, involving instead subjectivity, degrees of responsiveness, evaluative judgement, and highly individual forms of imaginative re-creation.

As a result, there was initially scepticism about, even considerable resistance to, the idea that the study of vernacular literature might merit a place alongside the new disciplines being established in the expanding universities of the nineteenth century, and even when it had secured a foothold in the curriculum it continued to be derided in some quarters as ‘a soft option’. Surely the reading of enjoyable works of literature in one’s native language, so the objection went, was an activity to be pursued in one’s leisure hours? A university concerned itself with matters of exact scholarship and rigorous reasoning, as in the established disciplines of Classics and Mathematics: appreciation of the beauties of poetry had no claim to rank alongside these strenuous exercises, and, besides, it was clearly impossible to devise an objective way to examine achievement in such a personal, even emotional, activity.

So how did the improbable marriage of beauty and the footnote came to pass; or in other words, how did English, despite these and other objections, establish itself within British universities so successfully that it could sometimes be spoken of by the beginning of the 1960s as the ‘central’ subject in those institutions—even, in some hard-to-define way, as central to the culture at large? The answer to this question cannot take the form of a seamless narrative. We need, for example, to think about some of the larger enabling contextual conditions—the prior reverence for an established canon of English literature, the authority of Classics as a model and a rival, the formative role of history and philology as exemplars of serious scholarship. We also need to examine the relevant institutional developments between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: how far was the Scottish tradition of teaching ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’ a genuine precursor of ‘Eng Lit’; what were the early civic universities actually like; why were Oxford and, especially, Cambridge comparatively late in establishing courses in English; why was English disproportionately prominent in the institutions founded for the higher education of women; and how did these developments relate to what was going on in schools?

Shifting the focus, we need to think about the roles played by some of those who are regarded as among the ‘founding figures’ of the discipline—some who are well-known, such as Matthew Arnold and A.C. Bradley, but also some who are not, such as John Churton Collins, George Saintsbury, Walter Raleigh, and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as thinking about the status of the ‘professorial estate’ more generally, looking at its economic circumstances, its recruitments patterns, and so on. And what about the everyday forms of departments, journals, professional associations and so on? They can’t be left out of the story, can they?

Once we’d done all this, we’d be in a position to challenge the conventional accounts of ‘the rise of English’, showing, for example, that I.A. Richards’s supposedly transformative effect on the discipline was in reality more limited, and that the vogue for ‘criticism’ spread more slowly and more unevenly than has been assumed. In fact, we would eventually discover that most English departments at the beginning of the 1960s still had very traditional-looking syllabuses.

At present, ‘Eng Lit’ is widely seen as a discipline in crisis, with reductions in courses and even closures of whole departments being reported across the country. These problems are systemic and there is no one answer to them, but whatever view we take of the current position and future prospects of the study and teaching of English literature, the essential starting point has to be a more adequate account of the history of the enterprise, one that does not reductively depict it in either sinister or salvationist terms.

_{Feature image by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash.}

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We need to support our health and social care system

Do you remember when we Clapped for Carers?

UK health and social care systems are world leaders in so many ways. Whether it’s leading in medicine and treatments, to providing a social justice-based social care, the system does a great job in supporting the health and additional needs of some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. However, there is no doubt that UK health and social care systems are experiencing significant stress. Virtually every week we are hearing new initiatives from political parties about how they will save the system, or how record amounts of money are being put into the NHS.

The health and social care workforce face difficulties at almost every turn. They are often blamed when serious and distressing events occur, despite doing everything in their power to support those experiencing distress. They have difficulties in workload, satisfaction, looking after extreme events … all of which is against the backdrop of UK Covid lockdowns, where we were implored to stand on our doorstep and ‘Clap for Carers’ all while they were being disproportionately affected by Covid.

The Political Blame Game

In late 2023, the former UK prime minister stated that “we were making progress on bringing the overall numbers [of those on NHS waiting lists] down—what happened? We had industrial action and we got strikes”. Despite NHS waiting lists increasing steadily since 2012, with obvious increases during and following the end of Covid lockdowns, and December 2023 having some of the longest waiting lists ever (although there had been a small decline in that month), the blame is on the workforce for waiting lists that had been increasing year on year since 2012.

Far too often health and social care workers are blamed. The decision of the Conservative government to prevent social care workers from bringing their families to this country from abroad, for example, suggests that the immigration which is needed to keep the care system afloat is a problem. Indeed, nearly one in five of the social care sector are international, and The King’s Fund suggests that without them the sector will struggle to function. As such, governmental actions have inevitably had knock-on effects on the availability of care provision in this country.

We need a political system that supports and guides health and social care workers—not one which demonises and detracts from them.

The Organisational Effects on the Workforce

When health and social care professions go on strike, evidence from studies across the health and social care (and wider public services) sectors suggest that pay is only one of the myriad issues fuelling their discontent—even though we have seen teachers and social workers face amongst the worst fall in wages of all professions in the UK.

Perhaps amongst the most damning evidence comes from national surveys and research which look at the impacts of organisational working conditions on the health and social care workforce. For example, since 2018/19 we have seen that social workers have among the worst working conditions of any occupation and profession in the country. These conditions have been consistently poor, and are undoubtedly contributing to the continually high levels of sickness absence and high turnover rates in the sector. These conditions are typified by high caseloads and long working hours. For example, Ravalier found that social workers worked, on average, over 8 hours per week more than they were contracted to. The picture is similar in other social and health care roles.

I would bravely suggest that, even if our health and social care workers could have regular decent wage increases, what would make more of a difference is decent support, at a level which provides the resources they need to make a difference. After all, study after study has shown that this is why they join the sector—to make a difference in the lives of the ill and vulnerable people who live in their very communities.

So what do we need to do to support our health and social care workforce? Well, firstly, claps don’t work. While they started as a nice gesture, they do not make up for the political, societal, and/or organisational issues highlighted above. We need better investment and support of the workforce which is so vital to the UK and beyond. We need to allow health and social care workers to have the resources they need to make a real difference. This will reduce turnover, improve satisfaction, and reduce sickness absence.

_{Featured image by cottonbro studio via Pexels.}

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Remembering the fallen

This year as usual, on either Remembrance Sunday or Armistice Day, many people in the UK will gather at a local war memorial to remember the country’s war dead, those of the two World Wars and other conflicts since 1945. Lines from Laurence Binyon’s famous 1914 poem “For the Fallen”, beginning ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ will be read and its promise, ‘We will remember them’, will be intoned by the assembled as a civic duty. The whole commemoration has such an air of eternity about it that it is easy to forget that remembrance has a history and it was not ever thus.

Many of Remembrance’s rituals, including poppies and the Two Minutes’ Silence, go back to the Great War. The time and date chosen are a deliberate marker of the end of that war, the guns falling silent at 11am on 11 November 1918. And yet in 1945 there were national debates about whether to inaugurate a separate commemoration for the fallen of the Second World War, with a host of competing proposals, including Victory in Europe Day (8 May) and Battle of Britain Day (15 August). Ultimately, Armistice Day or its nearest Sunday triumphed out of a desire to link together the sacrifice of the dead in both wars as undertaken for the same principles against the same enemy.

The erection of local war memorials, now a seemingly fixed feature of almost every community in the UK, had a more contentious history, for they were substitute grave sites given the government’s policy of refusing to repatriate the war dead—in previous wars the wealthy had been able to return the bodies of their beloved for burial in Britain. A long and sometimes acrimonious campaign was waged by those who wished to bring back the nation’s sons. The Countess of Selbourne branded the ‘conscription of bodies’ as a ‘tyrannical decree’ and the ‘contempt of liberty’, but the government was unmoved. Noting that only the wealthy few could pay to bring home their dead, it clung to a principle of equal treatment to represent a common sacrifice. The official ban on repatriation remained until the Falklands War in 1982.

By contrast, the most striking feature of modern war memorials, the naming of the dead, met with popular support. It was a vast exercise in bureaucracy. Overseas, principally in Flanders, the names of 1,075,293 British and Imperial soldiers were carved in stone in the cemeteries and memorials of the War Graves Commission (another invention of the war, founded in 1917). This exercise in (to adapt the phrase of the historian Thomas Laqueur) hyper-necronominalism, naming the dead, was paralleled at home by local communities erecting their own war memorials. Committees were established, names collected, and decisions made not just about the form of the memorial but who to include (a particular issue was those who died of their wounds after November 1918) and in which order, alphabetical or by rank.

The scale of the memorialization effort is notable—Rudyard Kipling compared it to the erection of the pyramids by the Egyptian pharaohs—but that has often obscured its roots. Naming all the dead, rank-and-file alongside officers, was not new in 1914. Significant efforts had been made in the Boer (or South African War) of 1899–1902 to erect graves and memorials naming all the dead, and that was merely a development of earlier practices, including the Crimean War, 1853–6: by the end of that conflict, British forces had created 120 war cemeteries of varying sizes along the western shores of the Black Sea, most of them identifying the buried by name or initials. Naming the dead was a developing tradition across the nineteenth century, not, as is often believed, a new form of memory for new forms of industrial slaughter in the twentieth century. A contrast is sometimes drawn between the anonymity of the rank-and-file dead of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the preservation of the names of the dead from the Western Front a century later. But perhaps the first British war memorial to name all of the dead, officers and ordinary soldiers, comes from Waterloo: that of the fallen of the 12^th Light Dragoons naming 2 sergeant-majors, 4 sergeants, 3 corporals, and 38 privates, which by 1823 had joined a host of memorials in Waterloo church. The roots of Remembrance Day stretch back through the trenches of the First World War to another conflict in the soil of Flanders a century earlier.

An appreciation of the slowly evolving history of war commemoration and remembrance may better equip societies to face the challenges of future conflicts, notably the extensive use of drones and the vastly increased scale of civilian casualties since 1918. For questions of how best to remember are a key part of how to comprehend and perhaps even how to prevent war. Remembering, as they say, is always about the future.

_{Featured image by Raelle Gann-Owens via Unsplash.}

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Winston Churchill’s 150th birthday [reading list]

Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire on 30^th November 1874. His exploits as Prime Minister during the Second World War left an indelible mark on history. To celebrate 150 years since his birth, we have collated the latest research on Oxford Academic to read more about Churchill’s life.  Whether you’re a history enthusiast or a curious reader, this collection offers a deep dive into the life and times of a figure who shaped the modern world.

1. Blue Jerusalem: British Conservativism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol

This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world. From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back to the land, this book reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as Labour and their left-wing opponents. A study of political thinking as well as political manoeuvre, it goes beyond an examination of the usual suspects—Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, etc.—to reveal a hitherto lost world of British Conservatism and a set of forgotten futures that continue to shape our world.

Read Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War

2. “Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill” in The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made by Michael Mandelbaum

After a long and prominent career in the British parliament and membership in several British cabinets, Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940 as World War II was going badly for Britain. He rallied the country with eloquence, expressing a determination not to give in to Nazi Germany but rather to fight to the end. He also set about cultivating a relationship with the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with an eye to securing American assistance and ultimately American participation in the war against Germany.

Read “Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill”

3. “Civil War and Liberation in the Balkans: 1944–1945” in The Big Three Allies and the European Resistance: Intelligence, Politics, and the Origins of the Cold War, 1939-1945 by Tommaso Piffer

In Yugoslavia, where Churchill had apparently imposed a clear-cut choice in December 1943, British policy was the subject of lengthy discussions. The problem here was what to do with Mihailović. The Soviets had scored an important point when Churchill shifted British support from Mihailović to Tito, but there too the game was far from over. Churchill asserted that Mihailović should be dismissed immediately and all British missions to the Chetniks withdrawn. Eden, on the other hand, thought it would have been sensible to achieve an agreement with Tito before throwing Mihailović overboard. Churchill had, in essence, failed to understand who Tito really was and what he wanted.

Read “Civil War and Liberation in the Balkans: 1944-1945”

4. Rum, Sodomy, Prayers, and the Lash Revisited: Winston Churchill and Social Reform in the Royal Navy, 1900-1915 by Matthew S. Seligmann

“Naval tradition? Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.” When Winston Churchill was in charge of the Royal Navy from October 1911 to May 1915 he sought to make drastic reforms, coming into conflict with the naval officers over the traditions of the Royal Navy. Churchill was not just a major architect of welfare reform as President of the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary, but he also continued to push a radical social agenda while running the Navy.

Read Rum, Sodomy, Prayers, and the Lash Revisited: Winston Churchill and Social Reform in the Royal Navy, 1900-1915

5. The Churchill Myths by Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz, Richard Toye

This is not yet another biography of Winston Churchill. It is instead an innovative study of how and why we think what we do about the figure we call ‘Winston Churchill’—and how generations of politicians, historians, and dramatists have manipulated this figure for their own ends. It is a book for those interested in ‘Churchill’ and how this figure has been put to use—as well as Britain’s past, present, and future.

Read The Churchill Myths

6. Churchill’s American Arsenal by Larrie D. Ferreiro

The idea of a “special relationship” between Britain and the United States was articulated by Churchill after World War Two had ended, but for most of its history, the relations between the two nations were often as distrustful as they were friendly. This book tells the story of how a British and American scientific and technological partnership, one that started not long after Britain had lost its ally France and stood alone against Nazi Germany, developed these innovations, which could not be imagined before the conflict began, on an industrial scale.

Read Churchill’s American Arsenal

7. “The Military and Diplomatic Strands” in The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How Globalized Trade Led Britain to Its Worst Defeat of the First World War by Nicholas A Lambert

As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, Churchill oversaw the Gallipoli campaign. As the Western Front developed into a stalemate, Prime Minister Asquith announced a full review of strategic policy to be held during the first week of January 1915. There were major disagreements over strategy (within both army and navy high commands) and much lobbying ensued, with Churchill front and centre of the debates.

Read “The Military and Diplomatic Strands”

8. “Churchill” in Storms over the Balkans by Alfred J Rieber

Churchill pursued two traditional lines of British foreign policy. He sought to maintain British control over the Mediterranean as the vital connection with its imperial holdings in North Africa, the Middle and Far East. Equally, he opposed Hitler’s expansion as a threat to the balance of power on the continent. He negotiated with Stalin to secure British preponderance in Greece and supported Tito’s Partisans as the most effective resistance in Yugoslavia against the Axis.

Read “Churchill”

9. “Lloyd George, Churchill and Venizelos” in Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman by Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Eleftherios Venizelos pursued the question of naval cooperation with Churchill in further talks, during which the British view of Greece’s naval role became clearer—that they should leave the heavy lifting to the British and view themselves as a light-armed gendarme of the Aegean. While the British fleet, with its great capital ships operating out of Argostoli and Malta, would contain the Austrians and Italians in the Adriatic, the Greeks, with small, rapid craft, would police the eastern Mediterranean and the islands. 

Read “Lloyd George, Churchill and Venizelos”

10. Winston Churchill: A Life in the News by Richard Toye

Before Winston Churchill made history, he made news. To a great extent, the news made him too. If it was his own efforts that made him a hero, it was the media that made him a celebrity—and it has been considerably responsible for perpetuating his memory and shaping his reputation in the years since his death.

Buy Winston Churchill: A Life in the News

_{Featured image by Smith (War Office official photographer), Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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New Jerusalem to Blue Jerusalem: radical visions of Britain’s postwar future

The last verse of William Blake’s epic poem written in 1804 reads:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Based on the theme of the Book of Revelations and its description of the Second Coming, it asks whether Jesus ever visited England and thus, for a brief moment, created Heaven on earth, while also imploring its readers to create an ideal society today.

Set to music by Sir Herbert Parry in 1916 as the hymn “Jerusalem”, today it is associated with a conventional, even establishment, idea of Englishness—hence being belted out at weddings, England cricket matches, and the last night of the proms. Yet, for much of the twentieth century, the hymn was the great anthem of British socialists in general and the Labour Party in particular. Blake’s revolutionary call to build a new City of God (Jerusalem) was an inspiration and rallying cry for generations of activists who dreamed of a more humane, equal, and cooperative commonwealth rising out of the wreckages of capitalism and the industrial revolution (these ‘dark satanic mills’).

Arguably, no one is more closely linked to this vision, than wartime Labour leader and Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951, Clement Attlee—who insisted “Jerusalem” be sung at his funeral. Winston Churchill’s deputy during the Second World War, Attlee and the Labour Party romped to victory at the postwar 1945 General Election promising to turn Blake’s vision into a reality and build a New Jerusalem out of the rubble of war. Some of Labour’s iconography at the Election literally depicted a new ‘city on a hill’ which Labour would build.

This vision of a New Britain—where the chaos of capitalism would be replaced with socialist economic planning, the fear of ill-health and unemployment with a universal welfare state, slums with new towns, Empire with Commonwealth, competition with amity—was what Labour sought to create during its 6 years in power after war. While, of course, the Attlee governments never lived up to their utopian promise, many of the institutions that they put in place—such as the National Health Service—and the changes they made to Britain’s position in the world—such as Indian independence and the formation of NATO—arguably set the scene for much of the rest of Britain’s postwar history. Not for nothing did Attlee introduce his Party’s manifesto at the 1951 General Election by telling his activists that they were ‘a great crusading body armed with a fervent spirit for the reign of righteous­ness on earth’ and that they should continue to ‘go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake’.

Yet, Labour were not the only radical thinkers and planners during the Second World War. Nor was the future that Attlee built for Britain the only one available. Rather, during the war, Conservatives developed their own set of radical, even utopian, ideas for the future of Britain and the postwar world. From dreams of world government to visions of workers going ‘back-to-the-land’ via their preference for developing a ‘warrior welfare state’ designed to properly reward those in uniform, Conservatives had their own dreams of a ‘Blue Jerusalem’—blue here a reference to the colour most usually associated with the Conservative Party. Equally, Labour activists and politicians were not alone in basing their plans on the creation of a more Christ-like polity and society—something sometimes forgotten in today’s largely secularised political parties. Conservatives too sought to use the Second World War to build their own vision of a new Christian Civilization. The most significant element of the Conservative Board of Education President R. A. Butler’s Education Act (1944) was not the raising of the school-age or even the formalisation of Britain’s tri-partite education system, but the fact that for the first time in British history, State compelled Christian religious education.

Conservatives were not at all happy about the kind of Britain that Labour was pledged to build in 1945—something which, contrary to much of the literature, did not emerge out of the way Britain was governed during the war but which was radically different to it. Instead, a wave of depression swept over much of the Conservative Party in 1945—the other type of ‘blue’ in Blue Jerusalem. Revealed in the thousands of letters sent to Winston Churchill after his defeat in in 1945, these writers described in often acute detail how the removal of Churchill and the election of a Labour government left them ‘depressed’, ‘despairing’, and ‘grieving’ for a Britain and a British Empire that they believed the Conservative Party had built up during the war and which Labour was intent on destroying; one vision of a new society giving way to an altogether different one.

_{Featured image by Levan Ramishvili via Flickr. Public domain.}

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George Harrison: ten quintessential songs [playlist]

This playlist with annotations that I have put together is not intended to be a “best-of” George Harrison (although all the songs here would easily be on such a playlist). Nor is it meant to be exclusive—one could easily devise a playlist with ten different “quintessential” George Harrison songs: one that would include “My Sweet Lord,” “It’s All Too Much,” “I Me Mine,” “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” “Blue Jay Way,” and, of course, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

Rather, these are ten songs that represent various aspects of George Harrison’s brilliance as a songwriter and recording artist. They tie together themes, concepts, and musical and lyrical approaches in a manner that represents some essential aspects of George’s genius and creativity.

1. Don’t Bother Me

Written while he was lying ill in a hotel bed in August 1963, “Don’t Bother Me” could well stand as a credo for George Harrison, an early manifesto capturing his personality and entire mindset about fame. Especially in the context of the Beatles’ 1963 album, With the Beatles—replete with typically sunny original numbers by Lennon and McCartney including “All My Loving,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and “Hold Me Tight,”—“Don’t Bother Me” introduced the world to a new invention: the ambivalent pop star. For George, the very first message he chose to impart as a Beatles songwriter was that of a back turned to the crowd, foreshadowing his conflicted feelings about Beatlemania and particularly about the highly excitable crowds that flocked to their concerts.

2. If I Needed Someone

George explored the ambiguities of love and the difficulties of relationships in songs including “You Like Me Too Much,” “If I Needed Someone,” “I Want to Tell You,” “Long, Long, Long,” and even “Something.” Harrison wrote about love with a more sophisticated, mature understanding of its complexities than what was typically found in pop music of the time. Written in the conditional tense (note the first word of the title), “If I Needed Someone” (included on Rubber Soul) finds George singing behind the beat; the disparity between the melody line and the song’s rhythm echoes and implies the ambivalence of the lyrics. Plus, the song was propelled by Harrison’s patented jangle-rock style created by using the then-new Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar.

3. I Want to Tell You

With “I Want to Tell You” (on Revolver), George Harrison continued to write about the impossibility of putting feelings into words. In this way, he was very “meta” or post-modern. As startling as the jagged, dissonant piano chords that color the song’s overall sound is how perfectly they replicate in music the lyrical meaning, echoing the narrator’s stated inability to communicate clearly, while introducing a discordant sound rather alien to pop music. In less than three years, the Beatles went from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “I Want to Tell You.” That alone speaks volumes of the difference between Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting and Harrison’s

4. Within You Without You

“Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was George Harrison’s most sophisticated Hindustani-pop fusion effort—commonly referred to as raga rock. The structure of the song adhered mostly to the Northern Indian classical format, albeit with verses and refrain organized in a recognizable Western pop style. Harrison was the only member of the Beatles to play on the track, which employed musicians from London’s Asian Music Circle and Western classical musicians for the orchestral background. With the opening line, “We were talking about the space between us all,” the song continues to explore the perennial theme of the impossibility of clear communication.

5. All Things Must Pass

George Harrison had tried to get the Beatles to record this song, and they did rehearse it during the January 1969 “Get Back”/”Let It Be” sessions. It was even originally slated to be part of the setlist for the famed “rooftop” concert at Apple headquarters at the end of that month. But nothing ever came of it, Beatle-wise. George revived the tune for his first solo album, aptly choosing it as the title track, which could not help but be seen as a commentary on the breakup of the Beatles. Harrison self-consciously wrote and recorded the song in the style of The Band, with whom he had spent time in Woodstock, N.Y., in autumn 1968.

6. What Is Life

Also included on All Things Must Pass, “What Is Life” is a perfect pop single— channeling Motown and early rock ’n’ roll even as it creates an entirely new sound, bright and effervescent, soulful and anthemic, and incredibly catchy, its multiple riffs circling in and around one another, building a glorious celebration of the power of music to express a gleeful combination of love, lust, and gospel-like prayer. As in so many of his best songs, Harrison kicks it off with an invocation of frustrated expression: “What I feel, I can’t say.”

7. Be Here Now

Found on George Harrison’s second solo album, Living in the Material World, “Be Here Now” borrowed its title and concept from the 1971 book of that name by Baba Ram Dass (né Richard Alpert), one of the “bibles” of the Sixties counterculture. Its musical setting is vaguely reminiscent of Harrison’s Beatles numbers “Blue Jay Way” and “Here Comes the Sun,” although it was dialed down a few beats from the latter to make the music more meditative in keeping with the song’s message: that the past and future are illusory and that the only state of being that matters is the present. One of Harrison’s most profound and evangelical songs is thus delivered in one of the most quiet, gentlest performances of his career, one that is also, most appropriately, timeless—the most intimate performance on his most intimate album.

8. Dark Horse

The bouncy, rocking title track of his 1974 solo album served as an updated manifesto as well as an answer song to critics and former bandmates. Calling himself a “dark horse” (a name he also gave to his nascent record label), with the connotation of constantly being underrated and underappreciated, gave new meaning and focus to his work; it served to recontextualize his professional and personal lives with a new self-narrative. Whether it was as a Beatle or a solo artist or a lover or a husband, he seemed to be suggesting, he was “a blue moon,” as he sang in the song, something that only occasionally or rarely shows up, not unlike a “dark horse.” The smart money does not bet on a dark horse, as dark horses win only once in a blue moon. Harrison had a way of defying the odds.

9. You

“You” was originally composed for a projected solo comeback album by Ronnie Spector, which was going to be co-produced by Harrison and Spector’s then-husband, Phil Spector. The project was aborted midway through, but Harrison made eventual use of several of the songs he wrote for Spector, including “You,” found on his 1975 solo album, Extra Texture, where it was transformed into a joyously upbeat Motown-style love song. It has an instantly recognizable quality to it, one full of happiness and movement and delirium—a perfect bit of pop that just happened to have been made by one of the most serious songwriters and musicians of the rock era. One can even hear echoes of the music and lyrics in Paul McCartney’s megahit, “Silly Love Songs,” released the following year, whose refrain, “I love you”—which also figures prominently in Harrison’s song—could be a pun on “I love ‘You,’” a reference to the Harrison tune.

10. This Song

The funniest song ever written about being accused of plagiarism.

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Remembering Gresford

Today, 22 September, marks the 90^th anniversary of the Gresford mining disaster. To this day, the bodies of 253 miners remain in the pit underground below Wrexham. In 1934, the industry was rocked by the inquest into the disaster where accusations of forged documents, preventable deaths, and inadequate safety protocols were highlighted, echoing contemporary inquiries into disasters, such as the damning inquest into Grenfell which was published earlier this month. Nowadays, the disaster is remembered as a poignant moment in Welsh history.

In 1934, 266 men and boys perished when coal dust caught alight, causing an enormous explosion in the works of the Gresford mine. After several rescue workers died attempting to reach men trapped by the blast, it was decided that the pits should be sealed: nobody was left alive. The bodies of the vast majority of the men were not recovered.

For the families of the dead, this meant that they had no body to bury.  Henry Walker, Chief Inspector of Mines 1924-1938, explained to the families that recovering the bodies would be too difficult. Speaking to the family of John Clapper, who had worked close to the coal face where the explosion happened, he explained that he would have been blown to pieces, telling the family ‘I’m not going to get any [bodies]. I’d rather let it be their grave.’

The decision not to rescue bodies from the Gresford pit was a highly unpopular decision among the families of the men who were entombed, who lobbied officials to try and force them to retrieve the bodies of the dead. Some of the Gresford widows protested at conferences set up to discuss the remains, in which the bereaved had no official say, demanding news and making their own views known. One woman wrote to request the body of her brother be brought up, saying ‘the shock may be over with some people but it is not over in my home.’ This lack of bodies had a marked impact on the victims’ families. One widow explained ‘it was awful… you can’t describe it… it was so terrible… they didn’t have a chance of getting him home. It was awful, awful… his name’s on the stone in the cemetery… me Mother and my little girl are there, but my husband isn’t, only his name.’

At the disaster’s inquiry, Stafford Cripps, a former barrister turned Labour MP, questioned the colliery managers and delivered a resounding closing statement which blamed managers for preventable deaths, finding that they had forged documents after the explosion. The mining company was only convicted of inadequate record keeping. This ruling was met with contempt by the press and public.

Roger Laidlaw has charted the cultural memory of the Gresford disaster, arguing that it transformed from a bitter argument over how the disaster began, to a memory which glossed over this important part of workplace history. Yet this was not enough to cement the memory of Gresford as one where the colliery managers were proven to be in the wrong—and the disaster as a tragedy, without political edge, is the story which had dominated by the 1990s and remains to this day. When the pit closed in 1973, the only part left standing was the pithead which was to act as a monument to the entombed men. Following a grassroots campaign, led by the sister of one of the dead, this was officially recognised as a public memorial in 1982.

In the last couple of years, the memory of Gresford has once again become increasingly popularised, with a new global audience exposed by the Disney+ show Welcome to Wrexham. A 2023 episode focused solely on the Gresford disaster. It linked the football club, Wrexham AFC, to the disaster, as some men were working an extra shift in order to watch a home match when the disaster occurred. Now, the Wrexham AFC football shirts have the year of the disaster, 1934, on them. The new owners of the club are trying to create a fresh memorial outside a planned football stand, by moving a pit wheel to the new stand, mimicking the pithead memorial created by families of the dead in 1982.

For the 90^th anniversary, a host of commemorative events, from the performance of a new opera through to remembrance services and a candle lighting vigil, have taken place.

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Figleaves: 5 examples of concealed speech

In art, a figleaf is used to barely cover something one isn’t supposed to show in public. I use the term ‘figleaf’ for utterances (and sometimes pictures, or other things) which barely cover for speech of a sort one isn’t supposed to openly engage in.

When someone says “I’m not a racist but…” and then goes on to say something very racist, they are trying to use this first phrase as a figleaf—to convince the audience that even though they might seem racist they really aren’t. For many people, this figleaf won’t succeed. But for others, it will—convincing them that maybe it isn’t so racist after all. And this is why figleaves are so important and dangerous: they have the potential to shift our standards, helping to normalise what was once beyond the pale.

Donald Trump is a big user of figleaves, and it’s through reflecting on Trump’s speech that I began to understand their workings. However, this is not just a Trump phenomenon.

1. “I’m not a racist”

Two classic figleaves are “I’m not a racist” and “I have a Black friend”. These can be used at the same time as the racist utterance, or later to cover up for it. The reason these work is that many white people subscribe to a very restrictive view of what racism is: they think that a racist must be someone who is proudly and intentionally discriminatory toward all members of the group they take to be biologically inferior—the paradigm case here is something like a hood-wearing Klan member. A person like that surely wouldn’t have a Black friend or deny their racism.

2. “This doesn’t apply to everyone”

Trump launched his campaign with a speech in which he called Mexicans rapists, but added on “and some, I assume, are good people”. For many people, this won’t work at all—it seems like a bad faith addition to obvious racism. For others, it’s not needed: they are happy to see an obviously racist remark. But crucially, there is also a persuadable group: these people don’t want to support a racist, but are willing to be convinced that the utterance isn’t racist. If they are like many white people, they will think that racists must believe in the biological inferiority of racial groups. Someone like that wouldn’t add on the assumption that Mexicans are good people so for this persuadable group, the figleaf works: it makes them think Trump might not be racist after all. And it can even make them think that it’s not racist to call Mexicans rapists.

3. “Only temporarily”

When Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, he also used a figleaf: he said the ban was meant to be in force only “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. This is also a figleaf, and it works on those who think that a racist would discriminate against all members of a group forever, rather than calling for a temporary ban. In fact, temporariness is rather an interesting broad-spectrum figleaf. We see Trump using it again, more recently, as he insists that if elected he will only be a dictator for one day. The idea here is that a real dictator would not be satisfied with this.

4. “Others say”

Another broad-spectrum figleaf is to report what “others” have said. This can be a way of introducing racist content without having to be held responsible for it: it’s not necessarily racist to report a racist utterance from somebody else. This can also be used to spread wildly conspiracist claims.  A person who would feel hesitant sharing a post asserting that Bill Gates uses vaccines to monitor people’s locations might feel more comfortable sharing posts that merely assert other people are saying he’s doing this.

This technique is nothing new. British fascist Enoch Powell used this technique in his infamous Rivers of Blood Speech, when he described a constituent (a “quite ordinary working man”) saying “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. In so doing, Powell placed some of the vilest racist rhetoric from his speech in the mouth of someone else.

5. “I’m only asking”

Another favorite figleaf for conspiracy theorists is to insist that they’re just asking questions. After all, one does not need to know that something is true in order to ask a question about it. And the person who pushes back on this can be accused of not really seeking the truth. Joe Rogan, a prolific user of figleaves, combines several in this utterance (figleaves highlighted):

This doctor was saying Ivermectin is 99 percent effective in treating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,” he says on his podcast. “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong. I’m just asking questions.”

An insidious all-purpose fig leaf, the standard of evidence required to ask a question is very low, and one doesn’t have to take on responsibility for asserting something. One can “ask questions” about immigrants stealing jobs, or scrounging from the state, or committing crimes. One can “ask questions” about the dangers of trans people. And one can do all of these without having to show that there’s any reason to believe these questions deserve to be entertained.

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Dogwhistles: 10 examples of disguised messages

Dogwhistles are one of the most discussed methods for politicians to play on voters’ racial attitudes in a stealthy manner, although they come in handy for manipulation on other topics as well. They take their name from whistles that can be heard by dogs but not by humans. The key to a dogwhistle is this hiding of what’s really going on. Broadly speaking, a dogwhistle is a bit of communication with an interpretation that seems perfectly innocent—but which also does something else. It can send a clear coded message to those in the know—what I call an overt code dogwhistle. Or it can work on its targets without their awareness—what I call a covert effect dogwhistle. Let’s turn to some famous and less famous examples:

1. 88

The number code ‘88’ is a very clear case of an overt code dogwhistle. White supremacists and neo-Nazis often use number codes to communicate with each other, especially (but not only) online. ‘88’ stands for ‘Heil Hitler’ because ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet. To those not in the know it just looks like a number. And, crucially, it sometimes is. This is why you’d want to know why the person on a dating app is wearing a sweatshirt with ‘88’ on it. It could be the year they graduated. Or it could be something much, much worse.

2. Egg Dumplings

Images can also serve as overt code dogwhistles. In Austria, Nazis will post images of Hitler’s favourite food (Austrian egg dumplings) on his birthday. To one not in the know, they just look like pictures of egg dumplings. But this method of Nazi communication is so well-established that an Austrian policeman received a prison sentence for engaging in it.

3. The Willie Horton Commercial

One of the most infamous examples of a dogwhistle is the Willie Horton commercial, used by George HW Bush in his campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. Created by Republican political mastermind Lee Atwater, this advertisement did not mention race but merely showed the face of William Horton (called ‘Willie’ in the ad), a Black man convicted of murder who had been given a furlough from prison under Massachusetts law. During this furlough, he committed further violent crimes which were described in the ad. Political psychologist Tali Mendelberg studied the ad and found that exposure to it made racially resentful voters more likely to vote for Bush. This effect, however, began to disappear as soon as racial justice campaigner Jesse Jackson called attention to the role of race in the ad. This is what led Mendelberg to argue that this kind of political messaging functioned outside voters’ awareness—once they became aware of it, it didn’t work any more. And that’s what makes it such a clear example of what I call a covert effect dogwhistle—it only has its intended effect if it remains outside awareness. (Mendelberg argues, by the way, that Jackson’s criticism was so effective that Dukakis might well have defeated Bush if the election had been held two weeks later, a sobering thought for those interested in alternative histories.)

4. The Breaking Point Billboard

The Breaking Point billboard from the Brexit campaign very likely works a lot like the Willie Horton ad. It makes no reference to race, thereby conveniently providing deniability. But the one white face in the crowd depicted has been carefully covered, inexplicitly activating the audience’s racial attitudes.

5. Save The Children

Not all dogwhistles are about race, however. They are also very popular with conspiracy theorists, and in particular with devotees of the Q Anon conspiracy theory. This theory holds that a highly placed Washington insider, Q, has been releasing hints online about a vast conspiracy of paedophiles and child abductors and about the efforts to bring them down—including the role of Donald Trump as chief savior. Followers of Q Anon have adopted the slogan “Save the Children”, employing it on T-shirts, signs, and hashtags—much to the dismay of the venerable anti-poverty charity. The fact that this is the name of a mainstream charity but also a coded way for followers of Q to communicate with each other makes this a highly effective overt code dogwhistle.

6. Emojis

Emojis are also used as dogwhistles, and some of them have become especially popular amongst anti-vaccination groups as a means of avoiding content moderation. These include carrots, cake, and pizza emojis to represent vaccinations.

7. Groomers/Grooming

Dogwhistles can vary greatly from country to country. Consider, for example, the idea of grooming. In its mainstream usage, grooming refers to a technique used by pedophiles to gain the trust of their victims. The terms ‘grooming’ and ‘groom’ have become popular dogwhistles in both the US and the UK, though they largely target different groups. In the US (and sometimes the UK), the term ‘groomer’ is used primarily to refer in a derogatory way to LGBTQ people, based on the false and defamatory stereotype that they’re attempting to make children trans or gay. In the UK, the term ‘grooming gang’ is used primarily to perpetuate stereotypes of Pakistani men, referencing some particular cases of child abuse—and ignoring the evidence that such gangs are in fact more likely to be white. In both cases, users of these terms are able to fall back on the claim that they’re concerned about child abuse, rather than about trans people or Pakistani men.

8. Immigration/Immigrant

Another term that can be used as a dogwhistle is ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’. We can expect to hear this one a lot. It’s particularly potent because it can dogwhistle so many different things—racism, Islamophobia, anti-Eastern European views, or simply xenophobia. And these shifting possibilities make it especially hard to discuss or object to.

9. George Soros

It can be easy to suppose that the right approach to dogwhistle terms is to simply avoid them. But not all such words are avoidable. Take for example George Soros. He’s a real person who has done a lot of important things that one might wish to discuss. But his name has also become a very widely used anti-Jewish dogwhistle. Much as we might like to avoid using dogwhistles, we can’t simply avoid all discussion of George Soros. (And for Soros himself this would be even more difficult!).

10. Anti-Jewish Art Mural

Importantly, it can sometimes be difficult to discern the intent behind a dogwhistle. Back in 2012, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted his support for an artist whose mural was being removed. When Corbyn was Labour leader in 2018, this became a subject of considerable controversy. The reason was that the mural was filled with classic anti-Jewish dogwhistles: in particular, hook-nosed bankers. As a half-Jewish person who is very interested in dogwhistles, I initially agreed with those who felt there was no way Corbyn could have been unaware of this. I found to my surprise that very large numbers of my friends in the UK did not recognize the anti-Jewish dogwhistles in the mural and were sceptical when I pointed them out. This left me uncertain about whether Corbyn in fact recognized them.

And this is where we sometimes end up with dogwhistles. What is well-known and obvious to some is not at all obvious to others—so it can be difficult to know what the intention was behind the usage of a dogwhistle term or image.

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Charles Darwin the geologist

Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.

It did not start well. Aged 17, he assessed the Edinburgh University geology lectures he dropped in on, while studying Medicine, so ‘incredibly dull’, that he would ‘never attend to the subject of geology’.

His lecturer was Robert Jameson, who was on the wrong side in the dispute about the origin of dolerite. As dolerite could be found as a layer among strata of sandstone and limestone, he believed it had somehow precipitated out of water. It turned out a sill could be intruded between the layers as red-hot basaltic magma.

In the spirit of student rebellion Charles also assessed all but one of his lecturers in medicine as ‘intolerably dull’. Squeamish about anatomy, he ostensibly switched to the University of Cambridge to study theology. By the summer of 1831 he needed to prove some rapid geological acumen in applying to become the geologist/naturalist on a round-the-world voyage on the survey ship HMS Beagle.

Charles convinced Cambridge Professor Adam Sedgwick to allow him to spend a few weeks as a field assistant while the professor mapped the geology of North Wales. The learning was intensive, but it worked.

While on the Beagle, Darwin’s notes on geology were four times longer than those reporting natural history. He wrote to his sister that ’the pleasure of the first day’s partridge shooting …. cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones’—there were some great bones to be found in Patagonia.

On returning after almost five years away on the Beagle, Darwin became the society secretary to the Geological Society of London where he remained for three years. He published four scientific papers on geology, including how coral reefs formed above sinking volcanoes.

Less known was Darwin’s solo expedition to investigate the ‘parallel roads’ contouring Glen Roy in the Scottish Highlands. This was a real adventure. From London one could only get as far as Liverpool by train. Like the raised beach deposits he had mapped on the coast of Chile, he visited Glen Roy to record former sea levels.

Another facet of Darwin’s geology emerged on the long walks he took around his wife’s family’s house at Maer near Stoke on Trent. (His own family life was hectic, with ten children.) On one of these walks he discovered an igneous dyke, now named Butterton Dyke, which intruded around the time of the Hebridean volcanoes (one date gives 54 million years ago) but which chemically and by orientation is of mystery origin. To commemorate Darwin, again as a geologist, a fragment of the dyke was sent into orbit on the Mir space station and then flown to a last resting place on the Moon.

Although no longer collecting bones, or dolerite samples, after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, he summoned geological evidence to manifest the time needed to allow for evolution. He proposed sluggish rates of erosion of 500-foot-tall Sussex cliffs, such as an inch per century, to explain how much geological time had passed to enable evolution. His estimates for erosion have proved to be perhaps a hundred times too slow and he came under much criticism from physicists who calculated the age of the habitable earth from simple thermal decay. However, by the beginning of a new century, twenty years after his death, the discovery of heating accompanying radioactive decay vindicated his projection of the duration of geological time.

If you were scoring Charles Darwin as a geologist the results would be mixed. Always concocting hypotheses, he was ready to change his theories as new evidence arrived. He admitted there was only one such area of theorizing (the explanation for coral reefs) where he hadn’t had to change his mind. And it was Darwin the geologist who could give Darwin the evolutionist the eons of time required to realise his theory of natural selection.

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Israel, Palestine, and reflections on the post-9/11 War on Terror

How can the United States best help Israel defend itself against terrorist atrocity? Obviously, sustaining the alliance and friendship with the United States is vital for Israel and its security. Equally clearly, the scale and nature of Israeli violence in Gaza since October 2023 has placed new and great strain on the US relationship. This has famously been reflected in university campus protests across the States, including those at major universities. But this strained relationship has also been repeatedly evident in the tensions between US political preferences and the current Israeli government’s stubborn adherence to its Gaza policy.

One of the repeated problems with state counter-terrorism is a tendency towards short-termism. The understandable pressure to do something after a terrorist atrocity, and to do it now, can get in the way of wise policies based on past experience. Short-termism also ignores the long-term future dangers that are generated by impulsive contemporary actions.

The United States’s long and sometimes painful experience of its post-9/11 War on Terror offers potential insights to help shape its ally’s response to Hamas terrorism. Hamas’s horrific 7 October attack, like al-Qaida’s appalling assault on the United States in September 2001, prompted the demand for something unprecedented and decisive to be done. So much can now be known about what went well and what went badly in the post-9/11 War on Terror as it evolved. Given this retrospect, we can start to analyse the limitations and errors in Israel’s approach towards Palestine, in light of previous US actions.

Allow me to briefly suggest four undermining factors of the US’s counter-terrorist approach:

1. The exaggeration of what can be done through military means

Much that went badly in the US-led War on Terror involved an exaggeration of what could be done through military means. This has been a common error in the long history of counter-terrorism elsewhere too: from the French in Algeria, to the UK in Ireland in the 1920s and in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and beyond. While the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was justifiable in relation to al-Qaida and their Taliban hosts, the Iraq War was—in relation to counter-terrorism—a disastrous military venture. Terrorism increased as a result of the invasion and its aftermath, rather than diminishing.

In Israel/Palestine too, both Hamas and the current Israeli government exaggerate what their own violence will achieve. For Israel’s part, military methods simply will not eradicate Palestinian resistance and Hamas terrorism in the ways that are being proclaimed by some politicians.

2. The pursuit of unrealistic goals

A second insight from the War on Terror is the need to set realistic goals and then to pursue them consistently. Much of what proved problematic in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider War on Terror had its roots in a mixture of unrealistic ambitions and an unhelpful vacillation between priorities. The envisioned transformations of Afghan and Iraqi society were implausible, not least since their only chance of success would have required a US commitment to massive engagement over a period far longer than was ever likely to be possible. More limited goals (damaging al-Qaida, displacing the Taliban, but not embarking on nation-building transformation) would probably have been more sensible.

Regrettably, part of the adoption of a realistic approach to counter-terrorism involves learning to live with and contain terrorist violence rather than pledging to eradicate it (certainly within any short timeframe). Israeli government mistakes here are clear, and are likely to prove counter-productive. There seems no likelihood of completely removing Hamas terrorism against Israel. But there does exist the possibility of limiting it so that life can proceed in far safer and more normal ways than has become the case for Israeli citizens in recent years. A combination of efficient counter-terrorist tactics with the avoidance of strategic over-reaction is likely the best approach.

3. The mistaking of the terrorist symptom for the wider issues

Counter-terrorism is made more difficult if one mistakes the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues at stake. In the War on Terror, it was less accurate to suggest that al-Qaida hated the United States for its freedoms, than to suggest that it hated the US for its foreign policy. Misdiagnosis of cause does little to help those trying to remedy the problem so produced. In Israel, understandable rage at entirely unjustified Hamas atrocities such as 7 October should not blind anyone to the reality that terrorism in Israel/Palestine emerges from a clash of religiously fuelled rival nationalisms; and from an agonizing conflict over state legitimacy and the autonomy of national peoples.

This does not mean there are any easy answers or simple political solutions. But the ignoring or misdiagnosis of the root causes behind terrorism have tended in the past to prove counter-productive.

4. The public opinion that too many civilians have been avoidably killed

Counter-terrorism has tended to undermine itself where public and international opinion judges too many civilians to have been avoidably killed and injured in the process. In the War on Terror, civilian deaths at the hands of the United States and its allies (whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere) helped terrorist enemies gain sympathy and damaged the War on Terror in terms of credibility and support. The implications here for Israel and Gaza could hardly be clearer. Extensive violence against civilians—however unintended—is likely to undermine the counter-terrorist effort.

Israel’s most important global ally needs to ensure that the mistakes of the War on Terror encourage the adoption of a more proportionate and politically strategic counter-terrorism. Without this, Israel and the wider Middle East will likely experience exacerbated conflict and bloodshed.

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Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies

In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous. Throughout history, ‘experts’ have put out careless suggestions about the types of people likely to write these letters, with poor people, busybodies, menopausal, repressed women being identified as likely ‘types’. I do not think that particular personality types are more or less likely to write anonymously, but that some people, for various reasons, respond to moments in their lives, or react to social or personal situations by writing such letters.

We must be careful, when discussing anonymous letters, to not assume we have a full or typical sample. The anonymous letters that were considered sensational by the press, or actionable at law, were probably atypical. Very many were disregarded, burned, ignored, or thrown away. In the twentieth century, for example, the media and the police became particularly focused on letter campaigns where there was a female suspect and where letters were sent within a tight neighbourhood, especially if these letters were deemed to be obscene or threatening. Similar letters with an obvious male suspect, or sent to workplaces and not homes, were, in contrast, not the focus of significant legal attention.

In only 39 of the 105 cases I examine in Penning Poison do we have a known writer. Despite the fact that men would have written the vast majority of anonymous letters throughout history (often because of disparities regarding available time, resources, abilities, and money), 17 of these ‘unmasked’ writers were women and 22 were men, implying a much greater focus on identifying female writers. One suspect, Annie Tugwell, was watched around the clock by three policemen for over three weeks in the summer of 1913. This seems to be a disproportionate response. It also appears that material evidence was planted by the police in that case to secure a conviction.

In the Victorian period, there were many assumptions that only the poor would write anonymous letters. In 1870 attention was drawn ‘to the nuisance that the new half-penny post was likely to become by mischievous persons sending obscene, slanderous, or grossly offensive remarks on the open cards’. This came with the assumption that a cheaper delivery system would encourage poor people to write anonymously. However, until the early twentieth century, most of the convicted writers of anonymous letters were affluent men who appeared to be respectable members of their communities. The people in control of the medium—the male, the respected and the rich—were those who appeared to abuse it. In the book, I include the case study of Rev Robert Bingham, the curate of Maresfield in East Sussex, who in 1810 wrote fake threatening letters, penned as though from the ‘Foresters’, local people connected to enclosures in nearby Ashdown forest. These letters threatened arson, and in January 1811 Bingham’s parsonage burned down. Eventually suspicion settled upon the curate himself; Bingham was seen moving stacks of wood the day before the fire, and had planted a flower over his books, buried in the garden. Despite very weighty evidence against him, Bingham was acquitted.

In later cases, the local police, juries, and judges refused to accept that respectable people accused of letter-writing episodes were actually the most likely culprits (unless the accused person was a menopausal woman). In many cases, the legal system first prosecuted a person who seemed to be rough or uneducated, before finally convicting the actual perpetrator, often a person with education and cultural capital who was pretending to be less respectable in their letters. This happened in Redhill, Surrey, in the 1910s, when greengrocer Mary Johnson was repeatedly accused (and twice convicted) of writing letters that were actually penned by her more respectable neighbour, Eliza Woodman. Johnson was hounded out of the town, and settled in Croydon, despite being proven to be innocent. In Littlehampton in the 1920s a similar situation occurred, with Rose Gooding imprisoned for letters written by her more outwardly respectable neighbour, Edith Swan.

Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations could be much better. The majority of speculation as to the mental dispositions of writers (their ‘personality types’), hinged on perceptions of respectability and preconceived ideas about the particularity of feminine malice. An unbalanced fascination with female letter-writers in the twentieth century was influenced by a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women. It was not an epidemic of female mental illness, but British society was not interested in complex societal explanations and instead sought psychological factors—being uptight, sexually repressed, menopausal, having a ‘dual personality’, enviousness. No doubt some of the writers discussed in Penning Poison could have been diagnosed with psychological disorders if they were assessed today, but the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, their mental states were not assessed properly at all and cannot now be reconstructed.

Anonymity creates disinhibition—people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many anonymous letters show the author to be play-acting a role—as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In particular, it is noticeable that in quite a few of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised and often powerless lives within their respective communities. Not signing their name permitted these writers to create an entirely new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (at least in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a street, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience.

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Five ways the British magnetic enterprise changed the concept of global science

The concept of global science was not new in the nineteenth century. Nor was that of government-sponsored science. But during the 1830s and 1840s, both of these concepts underwent a profound transformation: one that still has ramifications over today’s relationship between specialist knowledge and the modern nation state.

We are used to governments invoking scientific advice and technical expertise when making policy, be it in the handling of a global pandemic, or the formation of strategies for mitigating anthropogenic climate change. In the nineteenth century, however, the mobilization of the natural sciences for governance was embryonic. True, past governments had looked to scientific practitioners for solutions to technical challenges, most famously in the development of reliable methods for calculating longitude at sea throughout the eighteenth century. Yet the nineteenth-century problem of terrestrial magnetism would see the extent of such activity escalate both in financial and geographic scale.

Amid growing anxieties over the threat magnetic-induced compass error presented to oceanic navigation, and philosophical concerns over how the Earth’s magnetic phenomena operated, the British state provided the military, naval, and financial resources to transform the study of terrestrial magnetism into a world-wide study. The impact of this was to change the concept of “global” science in five ways.

1. To truly know how a global phenomenon operated, you had to be able to coordinate and synchronise experimental measurements over vast geographical space, even without modern communications technology.

The great challenge of charting the world’s magnetic phenomena is that you have to know how it changes over time and physical space. Edward Sabine, the magnetic fanatic leading Britain’s magnetic enterprise, was well aware of this problem: a successful survey would depend on the coordination and synchronization of magnetic experiments around the world, in an age before modern communications technologies.

Sabine was especially concerned with recording magnetic epochs, that is to say, single moments in which the Earth’s magnetism was measured at the exact same time, producing a snapshot of its magnetic properties. However, ensuring naval ships and observatories around the world performed such experiments in synchronization demanded a strict regime or, rather, a system of magnetic data collection.

Sabine was not the first to appreciate the global nature of examining magnetic phenomena: Alexander von Humboldt had promoted such an approach to the study of a series of natural phenomena, including terrestrial magnetism, during the 1800s. An Empire of Magnetism really is the story of the development of a system for realising such global ambitions. It demonstrates the crucial role of the state in delivering such a system.

2. The state could play a transformative role in the collection of data from around the world.

In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy was the most powerful military organization in the world. Britain’s empire was the most expansive of all of Europe’s colonial powers. And the British Treasury was unrivalled in its capacity for expenditure. Put together, these resources were beyond what any individual, private or corporate, or voluntary organisation, could mobilize in the investigation of terrestrial magnetism or, indeed, any natural phenomenon. 

The allocation of money to sustain scientific activity was nothing new, but the extent and broadening range of material assets involved in the British magnetic enterprise was unprecedented, including ships, trained officers, overseas territories for observatories, building materials, the funding of instruments, and human calculators. Of particular value was the formation of a Magnetic Department at Woolwich Arsenal, which provided Sabine with a disciplined team to process incoming magnetic data and reduce it to the order of charts. This effectively made possible the rapid publication of the survey’s results, though this task would not be complete until 1877.

3. The military’s potential to deliver discipline for realizing a global scientific enterprise.

Naval and army officers were far from perfect experimentalists: they frequently made errors or damaged their magnetic instruments. However, they did provide a disciplined labour force with which to realise a global survey.

For a start, they were under orders, particularly those emanating from the immensely powerful Admiralty. When instructed to undertake experimental training, they obliged, and when told to be diligent in making measurements at fixed times, they performed these as directed. Sometimes, other duties or circumstances prevented officers from performing their magnetic work, but generally they followed their orders, be it from Sabine or the Admiralty. 

They also had obedient crews or non-commissioned officers from the Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers to assist in the practicalities of magnetic experiments: dipping needles, the primary instruments for measuring magnetic phenomena, tended to be heavy, while constructing temporary magnetic observatories was physically demanding and required teamwork. Naval officers like Sir John Franklin and James Clark Ross needed little persuading to be industrious in their collection of magnetic data and it was not uncommon for magnetic practitioners to become committed to their study of magnetic phenomena, but military order and discipline was crucial to a systematic surveying of the globe.

4. The rising significance of standardization for producing consistent results, despite a diversity of contributors of varying experimental skill.

The key to transforming the Royal Nay into an organ of scientific investigation was standardisation. Sabine, along with Cornish natural philosopher Robert Were Fox, were constantly engaged in developing and refining a network of instruments training, instrument manuals, and experimental procedures that could allow naval and military officers to collect and return reliable magnetic data, be they performing experiments in Cape Town or Hobart, or on a ship in the middle of an ocean. The effort that this involved is well exhibited by the immense volume of surviving correspondence on the subject of dipping-needle design, especially between Fox and Sabine, but also with naval officers like John Franklin and James Clark Ross.

But it is also evident from the number of revised instrumental manuals produced during the 1830s that the promoters of the enterprise were eager to produce written instructions of greater clarity that could shape the actions of experimentalists, regardless of their location or distance from Sabine’s immediate direction. Likewise, Fox regularly invited naval officers to his home in Falmouth, where he could guide them on the use of his instruments. Achieving standardization was both crucial to the operation of Sabine’s system of magnetic data collection, as well as a source of constant labour for those at the centre of global survey work.

5. Public accountability would take on a growing urgency in global scientific enterprises that relied on state support.

Traditionally, if a nation state sponsored scientific activity, the question of public accountability was of low concern. Given that most pre-nineteenth-century forms of governance were essentially autocratic, usually being the business of unelected monarchs, this is hardly surprising. The eighteenth-century British state had invested into the resolution of the longitude problem, but Parliament was representative of a very narrow socio-political elite. With the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the vote to the middle classes for the first time and increased the franchise from around 400,000 to about 650,000, Parliament was faced with questions of accountability to a broader electorate. 

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of the Reform Act, given that voters still had to be small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, or in a household with an annual rent of £10, and also be male. Mid-nineteenth-century Britain was very far from a representative democracy as we would know it now. Yet, undoubtedly, the problem of public accountability escalated after 1832. Along with the repealing of a host of taxes, most famously the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, Parliament found itself under increasing scrutiny, especially over perceived financial extravagances.

The 1830s and 1840s saw a series of economizing measures, with both Whig and Tory administrations cutting government expenditure, particularly on the armed forces. During this period, we see the rolling back of what historian John Brewer has described as the “fiscal-military state”; that is to say, the disintegration of the system of high-taxation and high-military expenditure which had been crucial to Britain’s victory over the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French states during the 1790s and 1800s, but was largely redundant after Britain’s victory over Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815. In this context, promoters of the British magnetic enterprise were under constant pressure to justify themselves with increasingly broad public audiences.

Changing the face of scientific study

It is important to note that “global science,” in the sense that we use it today, was not an actor category in the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the magnetic enterprise’s promoters were keen to stress the project’s global ambitions and world-wide extent. Britain’s magnetic enterprise was central to a broader trend in nineteenth-century science. Increasingly, scientific practitioners were looking at the world as a complex network of interconnected natural phenomena. The global study of terrestrial magnetism concurred with the world-wide collection of data and observations, including astronomical, geological, botanical, anthropological, and tidal. Yet it was the performance of magnetic measurements that required the greatest organization in terms of coordination and synchronization. The examination of terrestrial magnetism’s protean nature, both in terms of time and physical space, required a system that could operate on a global scale.

_{Feature image: Owen Stanley – Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake : Vol. I. f.6 The Pursuit of Science under adverse circumstances, Madeira. Image out of copyright, original held at Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.}

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Falling dice and falling ministers: explaining an artwork in the Royal Collection 

This curious drawing in the Royal Collection, attributed to William Hogarth but possibly by Phillipe Mercier, depicts a game of hazard, the ancestor of modern casino “craps.” An attribution to Mercier is supported by the figure of a young man wearing an order of chivalry (possibly the Garter, although the ribbon is worn over the wrong shoulder) who bears a strong resemblance to Mercier’s portraits of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Mercier was appointed painter to the Prince and Princess of Wales soon after the accession of George II allowed Frederick to set up his own household.

The staffage of the drawing is unusual, given the subject matter. Women as well as men sit at the hazard table, despite the strictures of Richard Steele that throwing dice was not ladylike. Even more remarkable is the clergyman who holds the dice box. Given the august company, he might be a bishop, and in fact, closely resembles Hogarth’s portrait of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Salisbury and later of Winchester. There are not many circumstances that would explain how, in the words of Frances Burney, these individuals became so strangely situated.

One such is Twelfth Night, 5 January, as it was observed at court, when the sovereign, Royal Family, and courtiers played hazard for the benefit of the Groom Porter, the court official charged with procuring and dispensing small furnishings. Since these could include cards and dice, the Groom Porter was inextricably associated with games of chance at court, as the final authority, for example, on the rules of games. The drawing may be an unfinished sketch for a painting, never undertaken, to commemorate the revels of a particular Twelfth Night, that of January 1731, whence our story.

The years after the Hanoverian Succession saw a concerted effort to suppress gambling operations, such as tables for hazard and faro, conducted in taverns, coffeehouses, and other public accommodations in London and Westminster. Apart from any moral hazard they posed (and there were admonitions aplenty in print culture), the “silver tables” at Vanderman’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden or at the Phoenix tavern in the Haymarket were competition for the Government’s own gaming operations, the lotteries it used to fund public works, freeing up other revenue to bankroll an expanding military and naval establishment.

Spurred by Charles, second Viscount Townshend, holder of the office that evolved into the Home Secretary, the magistrates of Westminster (where most of these gambling parlors were housed) authorized raids on premises determined to be “common” (i.e. public) “gaming houses” open to all comers in violation of statute. The magistrates were thwarted, however, at every turn by resourceful, well-connected, and above all well-lawyered gambling entrepreneurs, as adept at gaming the system as they were at reaping the benefits that mathematical probability afforded them.

It did not help that gambling went forward with impunity at court, as the royal household was explicitly exempted from all legislation aimed at proscribing or regulating games of chance. Townshend deployed all of the powers of his office to support the prosecution of gaming operations, authorizing the Crown’s attorneys to defend constables at public expense when gaming entrepreneurs sued them, and funding rewards for those who informed on gaming operators. A widely circulated pamphlet recounting the efforts of the Westminster magistrates and the obstacles they faced apparently originated in Townshend’s office.

George I and (briefly) George II were evidently pressed to set an example, and for the decade of the 1720s, hazard was banished from the Twelfth Night revels in favor of ombre, a polite card game played for relatively low stakes. By the end of that decade, however, Townshend had fallen out with the Prime Minster, Sir Robert Walpole, who happened to be his brother-in-law, and by the spring of 1730, Townshend had resigned, returning to Raynham in Norfolk to promote the cultivation of turnips. Raids on gaming venues slowed dramatically, ceasing entirely by 1735. And no sooner was Townshend out of office than hazard immediately resumed on Twelfth Night at court, with the King, Queen, Prince of Wales, and the three princesses winning nearly a thousand guineas among themselves. Hazard continued as the game of preference as Twelfth Night was observed at court for at least the next decade, even after subsequent legislation outlawed it, along with basset and faro, as an illegal lottery.

The sketch in the Royal Collection certainly looks like a study for the sort of conversation piece for which Hogarth was particularly known, and which Mercier was known to have undertaken as well. Assuming that Twelfth Night of 1731 was the intended subject, there may have been any number of reasons that the project was abandoned. Newspaper reports of the revival of hazard at court festivities that week in January appeared in the same issues as accounts of raids on gaming venues; not long afterward, Captain William Bradbury, the recently ousted deputy to the Groom Porter Thomas Archer, wrote letters to newspapers threatening to expose his former employer. It was not the time to draw attention to this sort of courtly practice. What might seem to courtiers to be a harmless seasonal amusement might look to the public like insupportable hypocrisy.

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United kingdoms and European Unions: using global history to better understand the UK

Was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was inaugurated in January 1801, unique? It has certainly been uniquely recognised as the “United Kingdom,” or (more simply) the “UK.” But how far does this recognition reflect the UK’s exceptional multinational structures?

In fact, there was a proliferation of the idea and practice of “united kingdoms” during, and at the conclusion of, the conflict with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1815). These were polities which had generally begun life as composite monarchies—“unions of the crown”—and which later developed into an array of different forms of multinational (and sometimes specifically named) “united kingdom.” They were also polities which, aside from these resemblances, were otherwise linked both by chronology, being created at roughly the same time, and often through the pressures of British foreign and imperial policy.

Pragmatic and contingent creations, these unions generally lacked a visionary ideal: they were forged (like many subsequent federal unions) in the context of economic and military need. The UK (1801), the Austrian empire (1804), the United Kingdoms of Sweden-Norway (1814), and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815) were all formulated in the context of a world war, and against the backdrop of the struggle against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. An additional form of “union” polity, the Grand Duchy of Finland, came into being at this time (1809), and indeed a further “united kingdom,” that of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, was created and also decisively shaped in the light of the contingencies of the global conflict (1815).

The UK, through its foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh (in office between 1812 and 1822) and his lieutenants, was central to both the origins and the preservation of much of this network; indeed, Britain may be said to have exported the supranational union just as the French republic exported revolution and the nation state. This of course is not to suggest that the British invented “union,” or even parliamentary union, or (still less) that these unions were all exactly the same. But it is to say that some of the key British and Irish architects of the United Kingdom emerged as staunch promoters and defenders of other union polities in the early nineteenth century—generally, as with the Irish union, with security and the French threat both firmly in mind. It is also to say that these constitutional architects were effectively using union to reinvent the institutions of the ancien régime for an age of revolution and reform.

But there was also, ultimately, a reciprocity of influences and connections. Contemporary Britons—politicians, scholars, travellers—naturally saw rich and dense interlinkages connecting the different unions of nineteenth-century Europe and beyond; and from these they eventually came to identify exemplars or paradigms for the constitutional reform of the United Kingdom. The best known case of such a set of influences rests with W. E. Gladstone; but Gladstone was merely the most prominent, and the most influential, of a much wider cohort who thought carefully about the reform of their own country (or indeed, more generally, about its merits and demerits) in comparative terms. The intercommunication of influences with these union polities across the long nineteenth century is truly striking. Scotland, for example, was at different times both influencing and being influenced by the Irish union, its supporters and opponents, while, looking to the British empire, Canada both received and bestowed influence from and on the unions of the United Kingdom.

In particular, Irish nationalists and Irish unionists, long engaged with the history of the multinational union states of continental Europe and beyond, sought both angels and demons and both models as well as warnings. Irish Catholics on the whole warmly embraced Habsburg Europe, and sometimes sought refuge within its boundaries; Irish Protestants (some of whose ancestors had originally fled from Moravia and other crownlands) were more suspicious. Indeed, there is an unremarked historical aptness in the notorious fisticuffs exchanged in 1988 in the European parliament by Ian Paisley and Otto von Habsburg, when evangelical Protestantism and Habsburg Catholicism once again came into violent conflict.

In short, the story of the unions of the United Kingdom has been closely associated with external exemplars; and, more generally, the story of these unions has always been associated with European analogy and comparison. And it remains the case that the unions of the United Kingdom are intimately bound within European (and wider) politics. What has been identified recently (by, for example, The Economist) as the growing Europeanisation of the flagging unions of the United Kingdom has thus an historical aptness—since it was the UK who helped to provide union to parts of Europe in the first instance.

Unions and united kingdoms have been British and Irish—and also European; but they have been transnational and indeed transcontinental as well.  In order to fully understand the unions of the UK, we need to look beyond these islands to the stories of the other contemporary European and global united kingdoms: how and why they survived—and how and why they sometimes failed.  

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A free market? The French East India Company and modern capitalism

“Paris is the place to make money, & England is the country to enjoy it.”

With what we think we know about capitalism in England and France circa 1790—a year into the tumult of the French Revolution and as the territorial expanse of the gargantuan British East India Company continued to wax in Asia—it is hard to fathom how exactly, a banker based in London (albeit one of French ancestry) could have come to this conclusion as he wrote to a friend, one of the directors of the much smaller French East India Company, or Compagnie des Indes. 

Our twenty-first-century business history textbooks and op-eds tell a different story: that we should think of the British East India Company as the first modern multinational corporation, an ancestor of Amazon or Google. Like the corporate giants of the present, scholars often identify the British and Dutch East India Companies as architects of Western political and economic dominance, having built the modern world through their imperial exploits, conquests, market power, and exploitation of labor. Uncomfortably straddling the boundaries between the political and the financial, these “company-states” were both self-governing, profit-driven enterprises, but also political bodies that built and governed territorial empires of their own.

But neither journalists nor scholars pay much attention to one crucial element of the story: that the British and Dutch companies inspired a long suite of both imitators and competitors across a European continent thirsty for the exploitation of colonial trade. In the Atlantic world, settlement and slave trading companies populated the Americas with migrants both free and enslaved. In the Indian Ocean, European states competed against one another for access to lucrative markets for spices, Indian cotton goods, and Chinese silks and porcelain. Among the corporate entrants to this competition in the long eighteenth-century numbered Prussian, Austrian, Swedish, and Danish East India companies, among many more—companies that were often financially precarious, short-lived, and whose politics and operations remain largely unknown and unstudied.

This characterization curiously applies to the early modern trading companies of what was ultimately one of the most significant European global empires: France. In its three successive incarnations, the French East India Company earned a not entirely undeserved reputation for scandal, financial crisis, and institutional turmoil. Modern historians must reckon with the fruits of that turmoil: unlike its British and Dutch counterparts, whose archives are largely consolidated in major collections in London and the Hague, the papers of the three French companies are fragmented and scattered across different repositories throughout the country. The fact that royal ministers meddled so deliberately and repeatedly in the politics of the Compagnies des Indes hardly makes them desirable forebears for modern corporations beholden to the whims of their shareholders.

Yet the French East India Companies were major imperial and capitalist actors in their time. It was, after all, direct rivalry and competition between the British and French East India Companies that drove the establishment of British dominion in India in the decades after the global Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). This military consolidation came at a tremendous cost to the British company, whose repeated bouts of financial insolvency became a critical subject of parliamentary scrutiny in the decades to follow. At the same time, the defeated French had to invent new ways to secure access to coveted Indian goods and markets now controlled by the British, while still maintaining fragile diplomatic ties with independent South Asian powers who remained key geopolitical allies against a common enemy.

The final iteration of the French East India Company—lasting only from 1785 to 1793—emerged from this moment of mutual crisis between these rival imperial powers that drove a rethinking of the relationship between empire and business. By the late eighteenth-century, the “company-state” system was breaking down: exploitative and extractive as empire was, the costs of policing and governing territories were enormous, and private companies were proving ill-adapted to govern and trade simultaneously. In 1773, Voltaire called the defeated and bankrupt French company “a two-headed cadaver that conducted war & commerce equally badly”—a sentiment matched by the opprobrium towards its British counterpart articulated by Adam Smith in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations. Companies made poor sovereigns, and states had to take responsibility, one way or another, for what their company-states had wrought.

One solution was to put the company under an elaborate regulatory framework, and in the decades after the Seven Years’ War, this is exactly what happened with the British East India Company, which progressively became a centralized state bureaucracy of its own, to the chagrin of its capitalist investors.By contrast, the French government—both under the Bourbon monarchy and during the early years of the Revolution—pursued a deregulation of their new company.  As the cost of empire in South Asia led French officials to scale back their military presence, they envisioned an informal empire for France instead, where a “purely commercial” company would maintain trading relationships with both Britain and key Indian states, like the kingdom of Mysore.

This vision of informal, commercial power progressively led French company shareholders to fight for their own rights as investors and to demand even greater independence from the state. Their corporate activism unfolded amid some of the greatest economic and political turmoil in French history, with the coming of the French Revolution—and yet, offered a decidedly alluring alternative to the rigid, parliamentary framework being imposed on the reluctant shareholders of their British counterpart. The reimagined French East India Company, though short-lived, offered a model of what a private company free from the regulations of royal or parliamentary charters might look like. Despite what we think we know about the British East India Company and the making of modern capitalism, there was money to be made in Paris, too. 

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_{Featured image: “Hindoustan” by Pierre-Antoine Mongin (1807), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0}

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The British Army: how is the Army meeting changing societal priorities?

It was commonplace among the pioneers of the study of civil-military relations in the 1950s to stress that armies reflected in very sharp focus the social structure, degree of technological progress, and creative vigour of the societies they sought to defend. In short, armies were a mirror of their parent society. But these early proponents of civil-military relations theory struggled to explain why Britain did not fit their proffered models. 

To a degree Britain fitted into the wider Western relationship of war to the development of the modern state but also stood outside European practices by virtue of an army primarily raised by voluntary enlistment other than in the twentieth century. An island, maritime, and imperial mind-set was fundamentally different from that of Continental powers with open land frontiers. Ambiguities in public responses to the army in Britain were shaped by continuities in environment and culture that marked its exceptionalism. Voluntary enlistment ensured that the army was unrepresentative of society and even wartime conscription and national service was selective rather than universal. In the past what might be termed the “amateur military tradition” represented by militia, yeomanry, volunteers, and territorials provided a better link between army and society. In the twenty-first century, however, the “footprint” of the amateur soldier in the wider community has contracted even further than that of the regular. The “Army Reserve Centres”—the modern version of the old drill halls – have been banished to the peripheries of communities.

Despite wider popular sympathy for the army than previously as a result of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is more disconnect between army and society than before. Public sympathy does not fill the ranks nor does it equate to understanding, not least when public perception of the circumstances in which the use of military force is justifiable changed dramatically as a result of the deceit visited upon the public by Blair’s government prior to the Iraq War. In any case, an ever-smaller army has faced increasing challenges from changing strategic priorities, changing military environments, continuing and unrelenting financial pressures, and often dysfunctional political and military decision-making.

A survey undertaken for the British Forces Broadcasting Service’s Remembrance Campaign in 2017 revealed that 85% of those asked were unaware of more than half the conflicts or military deployments in which the British armed forces had participated since 1945. Notwithstanding financial reductions, the army has confronted a change in the age profile of the UK population, those aged 18-22 declining by a quarter between 1987 and 2000. Familiarity with the army also decreased. In 1997, 20% of those aged 35-41 had a direct link to individuals with a military background broadly defined. That was true of only 7% of those aged 16-24.

Society is less deferential and more individualistic in ways testing traditional military culture. The army felt obliged to advertise its “right to be different” in a doctrinal publication, Soldiering: The Military Covenant, in 2000. It has had to come to terms with recruits from more unstructured backgrounds as well as coming to terms with issues of gender and sexuality. From 1991, pregnancy no longer resulted in dismissal whilst the prohibition on homosexual acts was lifted in 2016 and HIV-positive recruits permitted to enlist from 2022. An earlier zero tolerance on drug use was lifted in 2019. Bizarrely, recruitment was outsourced in 2012 and the army’s cause has not been helped by cases of “beasting” of recruits; excessive shouting and swearing of recruits was prohibited in 2016. Cases of racial discrimination have also arisen, non-white soldiers including overseas recruits representing 13% of army strength in 2020.   

Military wives are increasingly better educated and more likely to pursue their own careers than in the past and the army has struggled to improve family life. In 2021, the National Audit Office reported critically on the state of army housing, its privatised maintenance remaining a disgrace. Treatment of veterans remains an underlying and unresolved problem that has not been adequately addressed. The 2011 Armed Forces Covenant has certainly assisted in drawing in central and local government, business, communities, and charities to support serving personnel, service leavers, veterans, and families. It contrasts with the extended indemnities handed out to terrorists in Northern Ireland by Blair’s government amid the continued vexatious persecution of veterans.       

Smaller than at any time since the eighteenth century, the army is simply unable to match politicians’ continuing aspirations for a “global Britain” in a world of increasing tensions. Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, admitted that the army was “hollowed out and under-funded” in January 2023. The promises by Liz Truss during the Conservative leadership contest to increase defence expenditure to 3% of GDP by 2030 have fallen away under the Sunak government to a mere 2.25% at some point in the future. Understandably, considerable assistance has been given to the Ukraine in terms of training, equipment, and munitions but, as Andrew Roberts pointed out recently, Britain’s own stock of munitions has been woefully depleted based on consumption rates in the present war. Too many ministers of defence have been less than distinguished and some truly pitiful. With two exceptions all had some military experience until 1992, the trend being reversed with Ben Wallace’s appointment in 2019. The last prime minister with any service experience was James Callaghan.

It must be said that Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated the army’s inability to embrace institutional learning to the extent required, and of its leadership to accept accountability for military failure. The tri-service Permanent Joint Headquarters established in 1966 failed to recognise the reality of the insurgency being faced both in Iraq and Afghanistan. History suggests the unexpected is always likely to occur and the army will always do its best but, as the Chilcot enquiry concluded in 2016, an ingrained “can do attitude” prevented “ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Britain has been fortunate in its army—indeed, more fortunate than it has often deserved—but institutional limitations remain.

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Revisiting toxic masculinity and #MeToo [podcast]

Globally, an estimated one third of all women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence; however, out of fear and socio-economic disenfranchisement, less than 40% of women who experience such violence seek help. In the United States alone, one in four women have suffered rape or attempted rape in their lifetime; for men, this figure is closer to one in 26.

The disparity is staggering; statistics on gendered violence reveal men are more likely to commit violence crimes, whereas women are far more likely to be the victims of violence.

Despite greater visibility and awareness of crimes against women, notions derived from what is understood to be “toxic masculinity,” and its proponents, are a growing influence over men, and especially young males.

In 2022, the US Secret Service released a report detailing the rising threat of domestic terrorism from males identifying as “involuntary celibates,” better known as “incels,” a network of mostly young males who uphold the misguided belief that sex with women is an entitlement to which they’ve been denied. This report considered misogyny not only a threat to women, but to national security itself.

So how do we stop the tide of violence and hate-speech stemming from the circulation of such misogynistic rhetoric, and how can we move forward while best supporting its victims?

On today’s episode, we explore two recognizable components in contemporary conversations on gender and gendered violence: that of “toxic masculinity” and of the #MeToo movement, the awareness campaign that came to global prominence in October 2017 after the public downfall of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

First, we welcomed Robert Lawson, the author of Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints, to share how language intersects with masculinities in media spaces and how it may be our best weapon in combatting rising misogyny, especially online. We then interviewed Iqra Shagufta Cheema, the editor of The Other #MeToos, who spoke with us about the origins of the #MeToo movement, how it has been received around the world, and how it has changed—and will continue to change—to meet the needs of the victims for which it advocates.

Check out Episode 85 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

In his interview with us, Robert Lawson discussed positive masculinity as represented by the various characters on the American sitcom, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Read this chapter from Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints an in-depth look at how the characters subvert and destabilize hegemonic forms of masculinity through their use of language in building relationship with each other. Language and Mediated Masculinities is part of the Studies in Language and Gender series.

Read this chapter by Asmita Ghimire and Elizabethada A. Wright from The Other #MeToos on protest signs and placards written in Global English that allow women from very different contexts to identify with each other and builds on how people in non-dominant spaces can engage in semiotic reconstruction to adapt dominant languages for their individual needs. The Other #MeToos, edited by Iqra Shagufta Cheema, is part of the Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations series. 

This chapter from Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy by Sarah Sobieraj explores how women who attempt to participate in public discussions about political and social issues online confront a hostile speaking environment analogous to the hostile work environments identified in policies addressing sexual harassment in the workplace.

Why is it the case that men perpetrate the vast majority of all violence against women and girls? This chapter from Jacqui True’s Violence against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know® explores the argument that masculinity is in fact dynamic, rather than fixed by biology or any other factor, and that it is the social constructions of masculinity within and across almost all societies that have encouraged and rewarded male aggression and violence toward themselves and others.

Read the following Open Access articles from our journals:

• “Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed” by Elizabeth Pearson in International (November 2019)
• “Online Abuse of Feminists as An Emerging form of Violence Against Women and Girls” by Ruth Lewis, Michael Rowe, and Clare Wiper in The British Journal of Criminology (November 2017)
• “Retweet for justice? Social media message amplification and Black Lives Matter allyship” by Jessica Roden, Valerie Kemp, and Muniba Saleem in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (January 2023)
• “’This Patriarchal, Machista and Unequal Culture of Ours’: Obstacles to Confronting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence” by Anne-Kathrin Kreft in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society (Summer 2023)
• “Promoting positive masculinities among young people in Stockholm, Sweden. A mixed-methods study” by M Salazar and A Cerdán-Torregrosa in European Journal of Public Health (October 2022)

_{Featured image: Mihai Surdu, CC0 via Unsplash.}

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The great gun conundrum [podcast]

With estimates of nearly 400 million privately-owned firearms in the United States and more than 40,000 deaths due to gun violence each year, guns and gun ownership have become polarizing issues. Forty-eight percent of Americans view gun violence as a major problem, with more than half of US citizens favouring stricter gun laws. The prevailing arguments, both for and against greater gun ownership restrictions, incorporate a range of issues, from party lines and political agendas to the influence of media coverage and the role of police in combatting violence—but what does recent scholarship reveal, and how might this scholarship inform policy for the better?

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we explore the history of gun ownership in the United States and practical solutions for resolving contemporary gun violence. First, we welcomed Robert J Spitzer, the author of The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights, to share new historical research on America’s gun law history as it informs modern gun policy disputes. We then interviewed Philip J Cook, the author of Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem, who spoke with us about utilising the police as a strategic resource for reducing gun violence.

Check out Episode 84 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Read the first chapter from Robert Spitzer’s book, The Gun Dilemma: How History is Against Expanded Gun Rights, which explores the policy dilemma of a public strongly supportive of stronger gun laws, and overwhelmingly supporting of existing laws, while gun rights advocates press to repeal existing gun laws by expanding the definition of gun rights.

Read the second chapter of Philip J. Cook and Anthony Braga’s book Policing Gun Violence, which explores the social burden of gun violence. The authors explore the widespread fear and trauma that stem from the threat of gun violence and the required vigilance to avoid victimization, addressing the statistics of the communities that are most affected. 

The fourth chapter of The Silent Epidemic of Gun Injuries by Melvin Delgado approaches gun violence interventions as establishing a foundation using the latest thinking and data. A social perspective on gun injuries allows for casting a wide net in capturing this phenomenon, helping readers develop a wide lens for gun injury. Grasping the social meaning of guns is essential in coordinating public health campaigns on the outcomes they cause.

Read the introduction to Mark R. Joslyn’s The Gun Gap: The Influence of Gun Ownership on Political Behavior and Attitudes, wherein the gun gap is defined to refer to differences in political behavior and attitudes between gun owners and nonowners. In addition, the introduction establishes why the gun gap is important for understanding modern mass politics.

This chapter from Pained: Uncomfortable Conversations about the Public’s Health by Michael D. Stein and Sandro Galea explores how states with stricter firearm legislation have fewer fatal police shootings—defined as the rate of people killed by law enforcement agencies. Also assessed is the relationship between different types of legislation and rates of fatal police shootings, showing laws that strengthen background checks, promote child and consumer safety, and reduce gun trafficking are linked to lower rates of fatal police shootings.

Read the following Open Access articles from our journals:

• Social media response to mass shootings in the United States provides an important window into the nature of public mourning and policy debates in the wake of these tragedies: “Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012–2014” by Yini Zhang et al, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (July 2019)
• Social movements pushed to reconceptualize intimate partner violence (IPV) as a social problem deserving of intervention rather than a private family matter, but political ideology and affiliation shape support for disarming the abuser or arming the victim: “Polarized Support for Intimate Partner Violence Gun-Related Interventions” by Anne Groggel, Social Problems (January 2023)
• Within the business of organized crime, guns are mostly used as a threat or to maim or kill but they also serve the more basic masculine requirement of protection, giving them a symbolic meaning as well as serving as a resource for achieving power: “Masculinities on the Continuum of Structural Violence: The Case of Mexico’s Homicide Epidemic” by Jennie B Gamblin and Sarah J Hawkes, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society (Spring 2018)
• Taking a long view of police shootings from 1970 to 2020 lessens the stochastic effect of shootings over shorter time periods and reveals that the frequency of police shootings has increased in both jurisdictions over this period, despite police not being routinely armed with firearms: “Police Shootings in New Zealand and England and Wales: A Cross-National Comparison” by Ross Hendy and Darren Walton, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (April 2022)

Featured Image: bermixstudio, CC0 via Unsplash

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Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future [podcast]

Scholars continue to explore the role of sexuality in private lives—from the retrospective discovery of transgendered people in historical archives to present questions of identity and representation in social media—with the understanding that those who identify as LGBTQ+ have always existed and have fought tirelessly to advance their rights.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss LGBTQ+ privacy through both historical and contemporary lenses. First, Simon Joyce, the author of LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, shared his argument for revisiting Victorian-era thinking about gender and sexual identity. We then interviewed Stefanie Duguay, the author of Personal but Not Private: Queer Women, Sexuality, and Identity Modulation on Digital Platforms, who spoke with about digitally mediated identities and how platforms, such as social media and dating apps, act as complicated sites of transformation.

Check out Episode 83 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

You can read the introduction from Simon Joyce’s book, LGBT Victorians, which reimagines and complicates our understanding of the Victorian period by thinking about how British thinkers and writers assessed and responded to larger international movements, including European sexology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and late-century French erotica. Joyce also wrote about “LGBTQ+ Victorians in the archives” on the OUPblog last fall. 

Read the prologue from Stefanie Duguay’s book, Personal but Not Private, which explores how queer women share and maintain their identities across social media platforms despite overlapping technological, social, economic, and political concerns. You can explore more of Duguay’s research at the Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab, where she serves as director.

Learn more about the origins of Pride in the introductory chapter of Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation by Perry N. Halkitis.

Explore LGBTQ+ online identity mediation in our Open Access articles:

• “Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives” by Lin Song and Shangwei Wu in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)
• “Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism” by Lucas Amaral Lauriano in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)
• “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World” by Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and Danah Boyd in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (May 2018)
• “Predictors of self-harm and suicide in LGBT youth: The role of gender, socio-economic status, bullying and school experience” by V. Jadva, A. Guasp, J. H. Bradlow, S. Bower-Brown, and S Foley in Journal of Public Health (March 2023)

_{Featured image: Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Open secrets? Where to look for the history of colonial violence

It has now been more than a decade since the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was forced to reveal the existence of a secret archive at the Hanslope Park intelligence facility in Buckinghamshire. As decolonization accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of thousands of files were wrenched free from archival procedures that would have made them accessible to officials of the new states that emerged from the empire or to members of the public in Britain. A 1961 Colonial Office directive made clear that this special handling was specifically intended for materials that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government.” Roughly 20,000 such files ended up at Hanslope Park while many more were destroyed on the spot.

Since 2011, this collection has gradually been transferred to the National Archives of the United Kingdom and opened to the public. The consensus among historians is that revelations from the files so far have been incremental rather than revolutionary. But unsettling questions about the politics of historical writing continue to linger. If it had not been for a lawsuit brought by survivors of the brutal British counterinsurgency in 1950s Kenya, the Hanslope Park archive would likely never have come to light at all. How can the history of British imperialism—and above all the “embarrassment” of its violence against British subjects—be salvaged from archives painstakingly crafted and sanitized by imperial rulers? Of course, all historians must construct their narratives from fragments of the past; they must likewise read against the grain of potentially misleading documents. But with seventy-five linear feet of colonial files apparently “lost” by the Foreign Office and another 600,000 “non-standard” files yet to be released, one has to ask whether a source base already overwhelmingly biased toward literate, Anglophone men can tell us much beyond the aspirational self-image of the ruling elite. The conspicuous black holes of official suppression threaten to make at least some aspects of imperial history one of those subjects, like the royal family or the Kennedy assassination, where constraints on scholarship have left a flourishing field to speculation and lore.

How to write a worthwhile history of empire after Hanslope Park was something I wrestled with when starting work on the book that would become Age of Emergency. I soon realized that the seductive drama of secrecy and revelation was not just a distraction but an active impediment to understanding Britain’s relationship with colonial violence. Too many observers had drawn the wrong conclusion from the archive scandal: that the brutality of imperial rule had long been “suppressed and buried,” as critic Paul Gilroy put it, and that the horrifying truth was only now emerging into the light of day. Besides overstating the importance of the Hanslope files themselves—and perhaps falling prey to what has been called the “fetishism” of secret files—these kinds of responses painted a highly questionable picture of the British past. My thoughts turned first to the 1950s: a period marked not only by intensely violent counterinsurgencies in colonies such as Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus, but by record-high newspaper circulation, the advent of television, the conscription of ordinary men as soldiers, and fresh memories of the Second World War as a “good war.” Against this backdrop, was it really possible that British forces could torture suspects, carry out summary executions, and commit other atrocities in the colonies without people at home taking notice?  

I am not the first historian to argue that the violence of decolonization was more open than secret. But this is usually asserted rather than demonstrated, leaving open the question of how contemporaries came to know about violence and what those ways of knowing meant for action—or the absence of action—to stop it. Rather than seeing the Hanslope Park scandal as confirmation that the state exercised a tight grip on information from the colonies, I took it as an invitation to look beyond the self-serving records of the imperial bureaucracy altogether. As it turns out, one of the clearest signs of widespread knowledge about colonial violence is the sheer range of institutions and individuals whose archives still contain traces of it.

Letters from soldiers in the field to relatives and friends in Britain acknowledged brutality in a few different registers: sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes ashamed and disgusted, sometimes vengeful and excited. Missionaries and aid workers came face-to-face with violence in the detention camps where they did their jobs, then drew correspondents at home into discussions about the atrocities they witnessed and the dangers of complicity. Debates unfolded, too, between journalists and editors who questioned whether common knowledge in the colonies met professional standards for publication or broadcast. From the British Army and the Church of England to the British Red Cross and the BBC, the confrontation with extreme violence moved in parallel through bureaucratic chains of command.         

Private confidences and public statements reinforced each other rather than defining radically different domains of knowledge. Fantasies of racial violence were pronounced in the memoirs and novels about colonial war that rolled off presses in the 1950s, many of them written by veterans, giving rise to a surprisingly explicit genre I call “counterinsurgency pulp.” Though muted and hedged in significant ways, reporting on colonial war in newspapers, newsreels, radio, and television delivered a steady drumbeat of disclosures and occasionally shocking revelations. Even stage plays and television dramas meditated on the grim fatalism of crossing moral boundaries for the sake of an empire that seemed to be slipping away.

To show that colonial violence was experienced as British violence, moving beyond state archives proved vital, not only because governments selectively disclose information but because an unsettling sense of involvement in brutality reached across classes and cultures. It became part of everyday life. And it was no secret.

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Macbeth, King James, and biting the hand that feeds you?

Possibly the most dangerous play William Shakespeare wrote was The Tragedie of Macbeth.  The drama is packed with illegality: assassination of kings; prophecies about kings; supernatural women; and necromancy. To add to the danger, Shakespeare’s employer, King James, was a prickly patron of the performing arts and notorious for his sensitivity to slights, real and perceived.

Patrons of the theatre can have a confrontational attitude to the world of the stage and one such patron was King James VI of Scotland and I of England. James enjoyed plays and, prior to his elevation to the English throne, he kept abreast of English works as well as those in Scotland. Foreign observers considered the theatre to provide a valuable insight into the thoughts of King James, so much so that George Nicolson, the English agent at the Scottish court, gave his employer, the Secretary of State Robert Cecil, a list of plays. James was aware of the political implications of plays and also was sensitive to what he considered abuse or insults. A message from Nicolson to Robert Cecil’s father William, Lord Burghley on 15 April 1598 pleaded with his lordship: 

It is regretted that the comedians of London should scorn [King James] and the people of [Scotland] in their play; and it is wished that the matter be speedily amended lest the King and the country be stirred to anger.

James also used the theatre in his contest for power with the church and the towns. The next year Nicolson wrote on 12 November 1599 to Robert Cecil that the ministers of the churches were forbidding their parishioners to attend theatrical performances. Furthermore, the bellows-blowers were claiming that two English actors named Fletcher and Martin were English agents who had been sent to sow discord between the king and the Church. King James responded by directly ordering the Edinburgh city council and the churches to reverse their bans and allow people to attend performances. 

When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England on 24 March 1603, he extended his patronage to the English theatre. In a royal patent of 19 May 1603 the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s men became the King’s Men. The first name on the patent for the actors was Lawrence Fletcher (died 1608), apparently the same Fletcher who is mentioned in George Nicolson’s letter of November 1599. The very next name is William Shakespeare. 

The King’s Men discovered that plays referring to Scottish events did not always meet with their royal master’s approval. There was, for example, the Tragedie of Gowry that the company performed twice in August 1604. This was otherwise known as the “Gowrie Conspiracy,” which was a supposed attempt on the king’s life in August 1600. When hunting near Falkirk, the king was approached by Alexander of Ruthven, the brother of the Earl of Gowrie, who said that a man with a pot of gold coins was at his residence called Gowrie House. James rode to the house and came to a room in a turret where there was an armed man. The king dashed to a window where he shouted “Treason” and his entourage broke into the house. Neither the assassin nor the man with the pot of gold coins was found and that led many people to question the king’s account. A generous interpretation is that there was an attempted assassination by Alexander Ruthven who wanted revenge for the execution of his father ordered by James’ regency council. The controversy might explain the cold reception the King’s Men received. A letter of 18 December from John Chamberlaine to his friend Sir Ralph Winwood noted: 

The Tragedy of Gowry, with all the Action and Actors hath been twice represented by the King’s Players, with exceeding Concourse of all sorts of People. But whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the Stage in their Life-time, I hear that some great Councellors (sic) are much displeased with it, and so ‘tis thought shall be forbidden.

Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that the Tragedie of Macbeth was performed so soon afterwards. Many critics believe that the play was written during the winter of 1606 and performed for the first time in the summer when James entertained his brother-in-law King Christian of Denmark. The play had many topics of possible offense to King James; so why did Shakespeare write Macbeth?

One possible answer is that the Tragedie of Macbeth told history the way that King James wanted it to be told. The drama was based on the historical record. All the main characters and the progression of events—murder of Duncan, flight of Malcolm Canmore, and his eventual triumphant return—are historically attested, with one exception: Banquo. The murder of Duncan by Macbeth could have been seen by James as parallel with the murder of his father Henry Darnley, while the victory of Malcolm was similar to his triumph over the Scots and English nobility. James’ fear of witches can be judged by his Demonology of 1599, where he sees them as enemies of humanity. Even prophecy was dubious and, since the fifteenth century, any prophecy that juxtaposed royalty with chronology was illegal. In the play, however, all these unsavoury elements are destroyed. The prophecies are shown to be deceitful and the witches deliberately mislead Macbeth. Finally, the world is put right when Malcolm avenges his father.  

Like Robert Cecil, William Shakespeare understood how the theatre offered an insight into the mind of a prince. The Tragedie of Macbeth was drama of the sort that King James wanted and for which he paid.

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Excommunication in thirteenth-century England: a volatile tool

The Becket Leaves, a set of thirteenth-century drawings depicting the life of Thomas Becket, include an image of the archbishop pronouncing an excommunication. Becket himself is depicted in the act of throwing a candle to the ground. On the right of the picture, a group of men and women react to this fearsome spectacle. Some of these onlookers, notably the man in the green hat, appear to be cowering in fear. Yet others, at least to a modern eye, look as though they have only contempt for the archbishop and his sentence of excommunication. The image, albeit anachronistically interpreted, encapsulates the varying responses to excommunication in thirteenth-century England. Excommunication was the medieval church’s most severe sanction, but reactions varied from fearful to indifferent to defiant.

The censure implied an afterlife spent in hell: “as this candle is extinguished, thus let excommunicates’ souls be extinguished in hell.” It was not to be taken lightly. Indeed, evidence suggests that the spiritual power of excommunication was not rejected in principle in thirteenth-century England. Dying excommunicate was a terrifying prospect. Adam le Warner, for instance, sought absolution explicitly because he had fallen ill and was afraid to die without having obtained absolution. The problem, however, was that for most excommunicates, the risk of dying was not an immediate one: absolution could be put off. Before falling so suddenly and deathly ill, Adam had been defying the bishop of Lincoln; his attitude changed only when death loomed. Other excommunicates refused to seek absolution from those they believed to be acting unjustly. Llywelyn the Great of Wales eloquently explained his contempt for his own excommunication in 1234: “we prefer to be excommunicated by man, than to do anything against God, with our conscience condemning us.” 

Individuals’ own responses to their sentences is only part of the story, however. The entire “communion of the faithful” was supposed to ostracise them. Yet an excommunicate’s associates could deem sentences unfair too. Llywelyn incurred his sentence because he continued to support his ally, Falkes de Bréauté (a rebel against the English king), whom he did not consider excommunicated “as far as God is concerned” (usque ad deum). How excommunications were received by the wider community has been understudied. In many more cases, communities who were supposed to enforce excommunications by avoiding those under the ban failed to do so. The many excommunicates who were able to live while under the church’s ban were only able to do so because their friends and neighbours were not ostracising them as canon law required. Ecclesiastical authority and judgements were often questioned.

The expectation of communal enforcement also meant that excommunication was necessarily a very public matter. Sentences had to be extensively publicised, generally in parish churches on Sundays and feast days. Widely disseminated sentences were an important means through which the laity was informed about local and political disputes. The sentences solemnly publicised also needed to convince people to shun excommunicates, so could be extremely vitriolic. For this reason, excommunicates worried about the defamatory aspects of being under the ban. On the other hand, the publicity attached to sentences also launched the sometimes-questionable behaviour of clerics into the public eye, to be discussed and condemned. This exposed not only individual clergymen to ridicule and derision, but potentially the church’s authority as a whole. The risk of scandal was particularly acute when clergy fought amongst themselves: as the bishop of Hereford observed in 1275, clergy who were mutually excommunicating each other throughout the city risked causing the laity to treat these excommunications no more seriously than they would a jester’s anathema. 

Its public nature was thus simultaneously a considerable incentive to use excommunication, and its greatest liability. An especially venomous dispute between the archbishop of Canterbury and the monks of Christ Church in the 1230s, recorded in the monks’ own chronicle, demonstrates this. The monks themselves repeatedly appealed not against their excommunications, but to prevent denunciations, which they treated as a separate issue to excommunication itself. The archbishop’s fellow bishops, meanwhile, tried to dissuade him from publicising his sentence so extensively, seemingly worrying that it would bring the church into disrepute by airing its dirty laundry in public. The citizens of Canterbury, clerical and lay, continued to support the monks, flouting the archbishop’s commands. They were accordingly chastised, but the disputes effects were more widespread. Such a great scandal had been generated by the archbishop’s unreasonable public measures that merchants and pilgrims were avoiding the city entirely. 

Excommunication remained a powerful, albeit it volatile, tool. It was certainly best to avoid being sentenced. Yet churchmen using excommunication had limited control over how their sentences played out. The populace could play ball, more or less willingly (those who communicated with excommunicates themselves faced censure, usually interdicts and minor excommunications) or they could render the sanction toothless by refusing to enforce it. Excommunication’s use risked turning the people against the church, potentially causing reactions like those seemingly depicted in the Becket Leaves. The study of excommunication provides a window into medieval attitudes, loyalties, and mass communication.

_{Featured image by Jaakko Kemppainen via Unsplash, public domain}

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Egyptology at the turn of the century [podcast]

On 1 November 1922, Egyptologist Howard Carter and his team of excavators began digging in a previously undisturbed plot of land in the Valley of the Kings. For decades, archaeologists had searched for the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun with no success, and that November was to be Carter’s final attempt to locate the lost treasures. What Carter ultimately discovered—the iconic sarcophagus, the mummy that inspired whispers of a curse, and the thousands of precious artifacts—would shape Egyptian politics, the field of archaeology, and how museums honor the past for years to come.

On today’s episode, we discuss the legacy of early twentieth-century Egyptology to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

First, we welcomed Bob Brier—one of the world’s foremost Egyptologist, and an expert in mummies who is one of a few scholars who have had the opportunity to investigate Tutankhamun’s mummy—as he discusses his new book Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World and the 100 years of research that have taken place since the tomb’s discovery. We then spoke with Peter Der Manuelian, the author of Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology, to discuss Reisner’s life, the rise of American Archaeology in Egypt, and the archeological field’s involvement in nationalism and colonialism.

Check out Episode 77 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

To learn more about the themes raised in this podcast, we’re pleased to share a selection of free-to-read chapters and articles:

Earlier on the OUPblog, we shared an interactive map showing some of Reisner’s and Carter’s key discoveries. Included in the map are photos of some of the amazing artefacts as well as excerpts from Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World and Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology.

From The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology, read about the nature of history and Egyptology.

You can read about the exploration of the Valley of the King’s prior to the late Twentieth Century in The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings.

To learn more about the phenomenon of Egyptomania that has spread through the 20^th and 21^st centuries, you can read a chapter from Ian Shaw’s book Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction.

Learn more about the discovery of Howard Carter’s letters confirming the theft of artefacts in this recent piece from The Guardian.

The greywacke statue of King Menkaura and the painted coffin of Djehutynakht, two of George Reisner’s discoveries mentioned by Peter Der Manuelian, can be viewed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Lastly, Bob Brier mentioned one of the most famous Saturday Night Live skits, Steve Martin’s “King Tut” song from 1978:

_{Featured image: “Howard Carter in the King Tutankhamen’s tomb, circa 1925” by Harry Burton, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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