We held TV night on Tuesday this week, so that J could play Assassin’s Creed III as soon as it arrived yesterday. This also meant we fitted three programmes into the evening & caught up with ourselves with the Andrew Marr one.
The two episodes of the History of the World that we watched covered the birth of capitalism (also including early colonisation of the Americas, the Reformation, British dealings with India & the Dutch and British in Indonesia) and the age of both Enlightenment & Revolution. The problem with having watched two episodes on the same evening (and then neglecting to write about them the day after) is that they’ve got a bit tangled up in my head. And the bit of my current book that I’ve just got to is covering the same era from a different perspective so that’s tangled in as well. The birth of capitalism as the stated theme for the first of the two felt a little stretched – it’s got to be hard to organise a chronological history into episodic themes, but this did feel like one of the weakest so far. I could see what he was trying to do – we started with Columbus “discovering” America and the Spanish moving in to plunder it, and ended in an era where speculative bubbles and stock market trading were an important part of wealth creation and companies as we think of them had begun to exist. So that’s a definite shift from gold and land as wealth to something closer to our modern economics. But still, it also felt like the story of exploration that that era is more often cast as. The age of Reason & Revolution worked better as a theme though, and he didn’t shy from pointing out the hypocrisy involved in both running a slave trade and claiming “all men are born equal”.
And in between those two we watched the second episode of Wartime Farm. Which concentrated on 1940, and on rationing and the black market and on the Land Girls & the WI. The bits that particularly have stuck in my head were how you could take the dye out of red petrol by filtering it through bread – I didn’t expect it to work any more than the historian who was doing the experiment did. But it did! The other thing was the story of the black girl who was originally refused entry into the Land Girls because the people in charge said no farmer would hire her so what was the point. But after the story got picked up by the press a farmer came forward to say of course he’d employ her. So it wasn’t really the prejudice of the farmers that was as much the problem as the prejudice of the people running the Land Girls.