Archive for the 'History' Category

Closed chapters of Cuban history

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on February 19, 2008
in Foreign affairs, History, In the news and Latin America and Caribbean
. 0 Comments

With Castro officially yesterday’s man, it’s time to talk of new eras in Cuba—of capitalism and all the joys it could bring. While everyone else is doing that, however, it’s also interesting to look at the longer scale, and to consider just how Castro’s 49 years slot into the 516 that have elapsed since recorded history began for the island (not to mention the 3,500-odd years of habitation that preceded this).

Carbon dating suggests that Cuba has been inhabited since at least 2000BC, and was being visited by South America tribes hundreds of years before that. Once settled, it provided a stable home for branches of the Siboney and Guanahatabey peoples for over 3,000 years; they lived by hunting and gathering until the rather more technologically savvy Taino—who understood such technological marvels as pottery—turned up in 1150AD, pushing the existing inhabitants westwards.

The Taino, then, dominated Cuba until 1492—at which point recorded history commenced, along with its traditional accompaniments of disease, massacre, exploitation and incremental genocide. Cuba got off relatively lightly at first (lacking the gold Columbus was so keen to get his hands on) but by 1514 had been settled in seven locations by the Spanish under Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. By 1550, only around 5,000 survivors of the native population remained; along the way, the Taino chief, Hatuey, mounted a doomed rebellion against the incomers. His reward was to be burned alive and, some half-millennium later, to have a local beer named after him.

Continue reading ‘Closed chapters of Cuban history’

Paul Kennedy

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on February 6, 2008
in Academia, History and United States
. 1 Comment

Over the last couple of decades, a number of British historians have been building up formidable reputations in the US. And by taking up positions on contemporary political debates, their names have become well known outside of academic circles; consider Niall Ferguson on empire and intervention, Tony Judt on Israel and antisemitism or Linda Colley on British identity. Paul Kennedy is another; the Newcastle-born diplomatic historian, who has been at Yale since 1983, turned himself into a hate figure for proponents of American power in 1988 with the publication of his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The final chapter, which looked at the prospects for the world’s two cold war superpowers, became infamous for its uncontroversial thesis that the US, following all great civilisations and empires of the past, was entering a period of relative decline and that the challenge for policymakers was to manage this decline.

Last night I saw Professor Kennedy speak at the LSE, where he has just taken up a new chair in international relations. In his lecture—which is well worth hearing; the LSE assures me it will be available as a podcast from its website within the next few days—he looked at the prospects for American power over the coming years, asking us to consider if a country with declining shares of the world’s population (5 per cent) and its GDP (20 per cent) can continue to account for over half the world’s defence expenditure, particularly considering the military challenges it faces from forms of “asymmetrical warfare” (though he considers these threats to come largely from other states rather than terrorist groups) and economic challenges, both in the form of its own massive deficits and the rise of international economic multipolarity.

Yesterday was “super-duper” Tuesday, of course, and Kennedy was inevitably asked who he thought would emerge victorious from the primary campaigns. He wisely chose not to make any specific predictions, warning us only that if we planned to bet on the outcome to do so with our heads and not our hearts. He told the story of how he held an election night party back in 2004. While his Democratic friends were depleting his wine collection by drowning their sorrows as it became increasingly clear that Bush had won, he was consoled by the thought that the £750 he had put on Bush to win at a British bookies, presumably at rather favourable odds, was about to come good.

(The Guardian ran an interview with Professor Kennedy yesterday, to mark his appointment at the LSE. Ignore the irritatingly cod-provocative headline; it’s worth a read.)

From the archive

Published
by
Susha
on January 30, 2008
in History
. 0 Comments

GandhiAs noted earlier today on First Drafts, it’s 60 years to the day that Mahatma Gandhi was killed. In Prospect’s April 2004 issue, Bhikhu Parekh, the author of several books on the Indian hero, imagined what a debate between Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden might look like. How would the greatest advocate for non-violence challenge Bin Laden’s world view? More recently, Prospect published a web exclusive by the late Horace Alexander, who spent Indian independence day with Gandhi in Calcutta, and saw him broker peace between Muslims and Hindus.

Gandhi 60 years on

Published
by
John Lloyd
on January 30, 2008
in Asia and History
. 7 Comments

The new issue of Prospect comes out on the 60th anniversary of the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and so it’s worth remembering the reasons why he has become a moral touchstone. His genius was to develop, during his 21-year stay in South Africa from 1893-1914, the strategy of non-violent, or passive, resistance: the confrontation of authority with masses of people who refused to work, or to move, or to obey orders—but peacefully, offering no physical resistance to the police or army. It made him the model for many of the figures of resistance in the 20th century—including Martin Luther King Jr in the US and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma; it ensured that the mass movement against the British was largely without violence; and it offered a benign alternative to the revolutions and coups with which the last century was marked. But above all, it did what it was designed to do: it shamed the British out of India, and out of empire.

As an inspiration and a symbol, Gandhi has no peer in the 20th century; as a practical politician, he was a despair to his colleagues in the Indian national movement. His insistence on non-violence grew more extreme as he aged: during the war, he recommended to the British that they should “invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.” And in an interview given after the war, he went so far as to say that “the Jews [in Europe] should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” To attempt to overthrow tyranny, or even to oppose genocide, became for Gandhi an act almost as bad as tyranny or genocide itself—a view which finds an echo today in those who oppose any action of intervention to stop massacres.

Yet more than any other figure, Gandhi destroyed not just the British empire, but the very idea of empire. He did it by holding up to the British and to the world a mirror in which they could see themselves—preaching law, democracy and rights at home, while oppressing abroad. It is that vision which won out, in the latter half of the 20th century.

A tale of two Hillarys

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 11, 2008
in History and In the news
. 2 Comments

The late Sir Edmund Hillary led a full and varied life. In an old interview replayed on the BBC World Service this morning, he said that he considered his conquest of Everest not to be the high point of his life, but merely the beginning of a lifelong connection to the Sherpas of Nepal, which continued through his philanthropic work, particularly his Himalayan Trust.

One point that has been ignored by all coverage of Sir Edmund’s death I’ve seen today is that his achievements may have inspired a pregnant Dorothy Rodham in 1947 to name her daughter after the mountaineer. On a trip to Nepal in 1995, the two Hillarys bumped into each other at Kathmandu airport, apparently coincidentally, and speaking to the press afterwards, the first lady said that her mother had once told her that she had been named after Sir Edmund.

Given recent events in the US, you might think it surprising that the obituaries don’t seem to have picked up on this pleasing story. This may, however, be something to do with the fact that it’s probably codswallop. Hillary Rodham was born six years before Sir Edmund’s Everest ascent, and although in 1947 he was a serious climber, and may possibly have been profiled in some periodical or other, it’s unlikely that what were then his fairly modest achievements would have inspired Dorothy Rodham to take his name for her daughter. More at the essential urban legends reference guide Snopes.

A beautiful find: Stefan Zweig’s memoir

Published
by
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
on January 8, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and History
. 1 Comment

Whilst researching for a play set in 1900 Vienna, I came across Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I was pointed there by Clive James’ enlightening recent collection of essays Cultural Amnesia, although I had long held an interest in that period of Viennese history since studying the positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle. I had also come across Zweig’s elegant prose in the shape of his novella on chess and madness, The Royal Game.

Zweig paints a fascinating portrait of the last days of Habsburg Austria-Hungary, one in which history, tradition and social conservatism provide a gilded, if insufficiently strong, cage for art and thought to flourish. The theme of his book is exactly that - security, and how its preconditions were shattered by the universal folly of the Great War, and then, just when they seemed to be returning, were finally ground to dust by the nihilistic megalomania of one man - Adolf Hitler.

Spanning Zweig’s life from 1881 to 1941 (he and his second wife committed suicide in exile in Brazil ‘42), we are given an undoubtedly biased, but also intriguing and informative perspective on one of the most fascinating periods of change and fracture in history, when each person was “shaken in the depths of his being by the almost unceasing volcanic eruptions of our European earth.”

Perhaps the most unsettling passage, beside the excellent ‘anecdotes of encounter’ with luminaries of the age such as Freud, Rilke, Rodin and the like, is his description of how a powerful and truly pan-European mind such as his could have no inkling of the possibility of a conflict on the scale of the First War. For him the years immediately preceding 1914 were ones in which, “one discovery, one invention, followed another, and instantly was directed to the universal good; for the first time the nations sensed in common that which concerned the commonweal… a European community spirit, a European national consciousness was coming into being… I pity those who were not young during those last years of confidence in Europe.”

There is much else to recommend the book, and my only complaint is the dry, journalistic style, which renders the prose inferior to that of his near-contemporary Axel Munthe’s memoir The Story of San Michele. However, perhaps the transparent style better suits the awful events which he described in so much greater depth than the lyricism of the Swedish physician and his beautiful house on Capri.

Measuring the world

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on October 22, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and History
. 1 Comment

The Prospect Reading Group met this month to discuss Measuring the World, by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting due to illness but a report was compiled by group member Caroline Ballinger, including observations from those present and a few of my own.

Measuring the World is an imagined account of the lives of two German scientific giants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, structured around a (real? potential?) meeting between the two men later in life. The book was a literary sensation in Germany itself, and had good reviews in the UK, including in this magazine. The book was chosen following a discussion by the reading group about whether there were novels coming out of Europe as ambitious as some noteworthy examples from the US, in asking the big questions and linking the private and public spheres.

Our reading group had an interesting but rather unenthusiastic discussion about the book: interesting because of the subject matter, but unenthusiastic because of doubts about the work as a piece of writing. The most important complaint was that Kehlmann fails to make the science come alive, so that it is difficult for non-scientists to grasp the significance of the breakthroughs made by these two men. There were also questions as to whether the narrative structure – in which alternating chapters follow the careers of each man – was entirely successful, and a sense that the Humboldt sections worked better than those on Gauss.

What holds it together is the author’s ironic humour and the vivid descriptions of Humboldt’s travels to South America, which had a ‘Heart of Darkness’ feeling at times. There is also an interest in the emotional detachment of the main characters, who take to extremes the championing of the scientific and rational over the emotional, and Humboldt’s obsessive attempts to impose order on a chaotic world. There is ambivalence here: Gauss’s son Eugen loves poetry, but is also susceptible to political romanticism which can lead to extremism. Kehlmann shows sly self-awareness when he has Gauss muttering darkly about the modern fancy for fictional stories about real people.

A darker side of Prussian emotional repression emerges in a scene towards the end of the book in which the leader of the Gymnastics movement, an early expression of militant German nationalism, delivers a rant on the nation’s humiliations. One imagines that for German readers, Kehlmann’s book offers a subtle, witty examination of what it is to be German. But he also offers a view on the vagaries of power from a wider slant. In the period in which the novel is set, the United States is a newly independent nation looking with concern at the antics of powerful Spain to its south. Thomas Jefferson queries Humboldt about Spanish rule: “If one had a great power for a neighbour, one could never have enough information.”

A man’s real possession

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 18, 2007
in History
. 7 Comments

“Memory,” the poet Alexander Smith wrote in 1863, is “a man’s real possession… In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.” The title of the particular essay this comes from is “Death and Dying,” and memory certainly can be a sobering topic. Even in 2007, for all the wonders of technology, it remains an absolute limit: the history that living eyes have seen creeps behind us, reaching back only a century or fractionally more. The title of world’s oldest human has, since 13th August 2007, been held by 114-year-old Edna Parker of Indiana, born on 20th April 1893: no human being now alive saw the year 1892.

Consider Henry Allingham, who at 111 is the oldest of the 23 veterans of the first world war still alive today, and one of only 3 British veterans living. Within a few years, this epochal event will have passed from living memory; the government announced in June last year that the death of the last known British first world war veteran would be marked by a national memorial service at Westminster Abbey. It’s a slightly macabre thought, and also begs the question—what else should we be commemorating? It can be surprising how long, and how, the past lingers. In 1869, the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War which founded the United States died. In 1956, the last surviving member of the Union Army which fought in the American Civil War died. It was as recently as 1993 that the last surviving veteran of the Boer War died.

In one sense, this is all incredibly banal. Only a tiny slice of history can ever “live” in memory, while every experience comes only once. In another sense, however, anything that puts history and mortality into fresh perspective has its value—and it is worth being reminded that talking to a living person about events they have witnessed is a privilege that time constantly revokes.

Site-specific theatre and “Mauerpark”

Published
by
Sabine Wolf
on August 29, 2007
in Arts and culture, Europe and History
. 3 Comments

At midday on 17 August, 1962, Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, two teenage citizens of the GDR, jumped into ‘the death strip’ - an area of no-man’s land leading up to the Berlin wall. As they reached the wall, they were fired upon 21 times. Helmut made it over to safety, but Peter was hit a number of times. Seriously wounded, he lay a few yards short of the wall shouting for help. Having seen what had happened, hundreds of citizens of West Berlin gathered, shouting demands at the guards to help Peter, though they did nothing. First aid kits were thrown over the wall but were of no use to Peter. After 50 minutes of calling for help, he fell silent. More than an hour after the attempted escape, GDR guards finally removed his dead body from the death strip.

This is the story to which artist S Mark Gubb turned his hand in the ICA’s re-enactment of “The Death of Peter Fechter,” the latest example of “site-specific theatre,” a phenomenon discussed by Chris Wilkinson in the new issue of Prospect. The audience were taken to an industrial site near Belmarsh prison, a location kept secret until the end. As we stepped off our coaches, we saw guards/actors in 1960s uniforms patrolling a makeshift wall.

The ICA’s re-enactment is very much in line with a fashion that has been growing in Germany since the post-wall years, one I call Mauerpark, after a Berlin park that occupies part of the old wall’s route. Mauerpark is a “theme-park” approach to the wall and the fission created by its 30-year history, one where terror turns curiosity. The souvenirs of Mauerpark are GDR insignia such as gold-framed portraits of party leader Erich Honecker, always with a particularly stern pair of shell-rimmed glasses. Mauerpark’s celebrities are those who tried to escape over the inner-German border, with defectors using hot air balloons or secretly dug tunnels with a whiff of Indiana Jones about them.

image.jpegYet the most famous escapees remain two young men who ran for it, perpetuated in grainy black-and-white pictures: one is Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier who in 1961 seized his chance while on duty at the Bernauer Strasse border. A camera caught him as he jumped over what was then still a barbed-wire fence, and the resulting photo (see left) turned him into a symbol of defiance. The other is young Peter Fechter, a limp body being lifted out of the death strip by border guards.

The ICA play, while well intentioned, turned the story of Fechter’s escape into a didactic play on civil courage (with a continuous undertone of ‘What would you have done?’). The over-the-top acting of the West Berlin civilians, who were planted in the crowd, and the focus on one tragic story without real historical context, meant that “The Death of Peter Fechter” felt exploitative, somehow anti-historical—and completely Mauerpark.

Partition and hope

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on August 15, 2007
in Asia, Foreign affairs, History and Religion
. 1 Comment

It’s 60 years today since India was born as an independent nation, and 60 years and one day since Pakistan was. The history of the divided subcontinent has been a troubled one—to say the least—which is perhaps why our latest web exclusive has, for me, a double poignancy. It is taken from the writings of Horace Alexander (1889-1989), one of a group of English Quakers closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi. Alexander spent the day of independence itself with the Mahatma in a group that contained Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and that brought an all-too-brief peace to one of India’s most religiously divided regions. In his words, we see both the fierce hopefulness that attended the birth of the largest democracy in history, and the awareness that its triumphs and failures would be the fruits of struggling self-mastery rather than sudden miracles.

Alexander’s writing also reminds me of another great Quaker who made his life in India (and there have been several)—Laurie Baker, who died in April this year. Also a friend of Gandhi, Baker embodied much that is finest about India as a home of authentically popular idealism—an architect by training as well as a missionary, he designed hundreds of buildings that attempted to combine simplicity and affordability with a sensitivity to local environments. A resident of Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) in Kerala for much of his life, his creations include one of my favourite of all Indian buildings—a humble coffee house near the bus station that serves delicious, inexpensive food and drink, within which I have passed more time than almost any other public space in southern India.

coffeehouse.JPG

And for those who believe that faith in humanity is a vanishing part of the world, take a look at our review of Jonathan Power’s new book—as clear a testament as you’ll ever find to those parts of our nature that may be, perhaps, a little less difficult to see or believe in at this time of anniversaries.

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