It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One – Page 32

“Consider Phlebas” Iain M. Banks

I’ve been dragging my heels about writing up this book ever since I finished reading it nearly a month ago, because I’ve got no idea what to say about it. Consider Phlebas is the story of a Changer called Horza. Changers can alter their physiology to make themselves into a mimic of a person, and so make good spies or military agents. Horza is a minor figure in a vast war between the Indirans and the Culture. The war is about expansion and politics and beliefs, of course, but Horza’s part in it is down to a simple principle. The Indirans are all biological, but the Culture have machine AIs who are not just citizens of the Culture but heavily involved in running the Culture. And Horza feels that is wrong, on a deep fundamental level. He (and in fact his entire world/people) are on the Indiran side, despite the fact that the immortal Indirans regard mortals as not really people. At least they’re all biological, right?

Horza is rescued from near death after a mission goes wrong, and sent to capture a Mind (a Culture AI) which has gone to ground on a Planet of the Dead. A Planet of the Dead is sort of a museum exhibit – a particular civilisation preserve worlds where the sentient species self-destructed, and embargo them. Except that a few guardians are permitted, and for this particular Planet of the Dead those guardians are Changers, and Horza was once amongst their number. So he’s a good choice, but obviously things don’t go smoothly (there’d be no story otherwise). Horza ends up “rescued” by a mercenary ship after a space battle destroys the Indiran ship he was on, and must first ingratiate himself and then wait for his chance to fulfill his mission. As a supporting cast we have the various other mercenaries, and for a primary face of his antagonist we have the Special Circumstances agent Balveda who is trying to get to the Mind first (to rescue it).

And I got to the end of the book and just ended up feeling deflated. In retrospect I suppose it should’ve been obvious it was going to be a tragedy, but I wasn’t expecting it to end with it all feeling quite so pointless. Horza’s mission is important to him, but it’s not really important to the war, or to the Indirans. He just ends up a pawn ground to dust between vast forces he has no chance of affecting. He has chances to turn aside, to make a life for himself somewhere else away from the war – but he sticks to his principles, he does the right thing as he sees it. And the universe doesn’t care, the Indirans don’t care, mostly no-one even knows he existed. And his principles are misguided at best – the Indirans don’t care at all about him or anyone who isn’t an Indiran, Horza’s elevation of biologicalness as the most important thing is just convenient for the Indirans to make him more useful.

I prefer more optimism in my fiction, I think. Or maybe just less nihilism.

A note of comparison to the other books by Banks that I’ve read – identity is again a strong theme. Horza can change his entire appearance & mannerisms to mimic others, I don’t think we once see him in his natural form in the book. People are always interacting with who he’s presenting as, rather than who he is – and he definitely has issues with his identity, including recurring nightmares about forgetting his own name. I’m not sure if I missed something there – was Horza not his real name and I missed clues about that?

Another note is that I thought the Culture was “in our future” but this book makes it clear that’s not Banks’s intention – there are framing vignettes for the story that give Earth dates for the war, and it’s happening elsewhere in the universe during the past 600 years, or so.

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And Did Those Feet …

… in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountain green?

Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World

How Videogames Changed the World was a two hour look through the history of computer games, presented by Charlie Brooker. We recorded it from Channel 4 on Saturday and it was very much made to be aired around the release dates of PS4 & Xbox One – and Sony had definitely bought a lot of the advertising spots in the breaks! I’d not actually had high hopes going into watching it – I mean, a mainstream programme about games might miss the mark. But it was clearly not just about games, but also by gamers – all the participants “got it”.

The format was a countdown of 25 significant games – although it was almost treated like it was supposed to be a chart it was really a chronological sequence. Most of the first hour of the show was a nostalgia filled trot through my childhood, and then the second half had a lot of games J or I have bought as adults. Very much the target audience for the programme 🙂 As well as Brooker there were lots of other contributors – some games industry figures (journalists or developers) and some relatively random celebrities (most of whom I didn’t know of). Well, they had a love of games & gaming, so not entirely random, but …

As someone who has spent a lot of her life playing computer games it was nice to find few things I’d quibble at. I think the biggest hole I’d pick in the list is that it’d be nice to’ve had something from the simulation/strategy/god game niche that wasn’t just The Sims. I mean, I can see they wanted to talk about The Sims (and had stuff to say specifically about it), but nothing about Civ or Populous or Sim City and not even name checking those felt like an oversight. In general tho I agreed with their choices – they were good or iconic, or in some cases neither but perfectly illustrated the point being made.

It wasn’t just a history of how games have changed, I thought the programme did a good job of showing how they fitted into the culture around them at the time and of illustrating how they’d affected the world. There are many positive ways that games have changed things – Minecraft was one major example used here, because it’s not just a game it can be used to teach things too. And just in general games are more interactive and less passive than, for instance, TV watching. I did have issues with the dismissal of books as less immersive than games, tho 😉

They also spent a bit of time on most of the big issues around gaming and gaming culture – not just the positive aspects of gaming. Obviously they covered the moral panic over video game violence, and equally obviously as a programme by gamers it was heavily on the side of how foolish this moral panic is. But even so space was given to examples that did cross lines – because the point is not that all games are OK for everyone, it’s that demonising all games because of a few is like saying every film ever made is pornographic because filmed porn exists. Another issue discussed was the way that gaming culture can be seen as a bit of a cesspit. The two strands of that that they discussed were again the obvious ones. The treatment of women gamers and particularly women gaming journalists can be abysmal, and CoD on Xbox Live in particular is notorious for foul mouthed teenagers. This is just a vocal minority, as they said on the programme, but it can seem relentless at times and probably more so from the outside.

The last “game” on the list was Twitter, which I felt was a bit of a cop-out and didn’t (to me) actually illustrate their point very well. The point Brooker & co were trying to make was that with the rise of social media and so on more of our day to day life has been gamified. I think there is a point there, but I’m not sure for most people Twitter is that thing. All the people speaking on the programme were in some ways celebrities – in the sense that people will follow them on Twitter because of what or who they are not because of a personal connection. So they were all discussing how things like follower counts are like game scores, and projecting a persona is like having a game avatar or playing an RPG, and you craft tweets for maximum impact. And, well, I’m not sure normal people do that? Maybe everyone else does, I do barely use Twitter myself, so I could be way off base here. What did strike me is how the public in that game of Twitter are the coupons that prove you’re winning (or not) – we’re like the gold coins that Mario collects. Which didn’t seem to be the point Brooker was making, but it’s an interesting one to me.

A good programme, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a look at a culture that’s one of my own 🙂

Other TV watched this week:

The Science of Doctor Who – a lecture by Brian Cox about the physics of space time, and the Fermi paradox.

Episode 1 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

The last episode of David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy – which covered the 19th and 20th Century.

Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia (British Museum Exhibition)

One of the British Museum‘s current exhibitions is Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia which runs until March. We went to see it in the afternoon before the recent British Museum Members’ Open Evening (which I wrote about here and here). The jumping off point for the exhibition is the legend of El Dorado which lured Spanish adventurers into Colombia. The way the legend is most remembered now is as telling of a city paved with gold, but the original Spanish adventurers wrote of a man or king coated in gold. From this starting point the exhibition looked at what role gold played in the civilisations of pre-Hispanic Colombia, and more generally at the rituals of these societies.

There was a certain degree of overlap between the subject of the exhibition and a TV programme we watched earlier this year – the third episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America was about Colombia and the El Dorado myth (post). Not really a surprise as the presenter of that series was Jago Cooper, who is a curator at the British Museum, although not the curator for this exhibition (who is Elisenda Vila Llonch).

The exhibition contained objects from six different cultures from the Colombia region, but I’m afraid I didn’t end up remembering which object was which specific culture. Apart from at the very start the exhibition was focussing on a higher level – the equivalent of discussing early modern Europe as a whole rather than a country in particular. Near the beginning of the exhibition they had a timeline showing the periods that the six cultures had existed – as always I’m startled by how recent they are. In part because J’s interest in ancient Egypt has pushed my concept of “ancient” back a long way, and so anything in the last millenium is “practically modern”. I shouldn’t be surprised tho, these were all cultures in existence when the Spanish came to the Americas, so obviously they must have existed in the late 1500s.

Gold wasn’t valuable in Colombia in the same way that is valuable in our culture – it wasn’t currency instead it had spiritual and symbolic importance, which varied in its details between the cultures. After setting the scene by talking about how the various objects were made the exhibition moved on to talking about how they were used and what their significance was. One culture, the Muisca, had the most obviously different attitude to their gold objects – they weren’t even what we would consider “finished”, i.e. not polished. And then generally the objects were put in significant locations like in caves or lakes. Even as recently as the 20th Century there were Westerners scheming to do things like drain the most significant of the lakes so that all the gold could be retrieved, which is somewhat saddening (it didn’t happen tho).

The other cultures did use their gold objects in ways we’d recognise – as jewellery, as decorative containers etc. One room of the exhibition looked at the jewellery and showed how it was often a status indicator. This room also talked about other status indicators in these societies – like body paint, which can convey messages about who you are in your society and what society you’re from. Another status indicator is representation of people sitting on stools – this always indicates high status.

The jewellery is very elaborate & large, and it often has little moving parts which will move around when the person wearing it moves – and reflect the sun or firelight. This ties in when use of these ornaments in religious rituals, particularly involving lime & coca leaves. The next room of the exhibition talked about these rituals, and displayed some objects associated with them. Taken together lime & coca leaves are hallucinogenic, and the exhibition had several lime containers & dipping sticks – from more basic ones to elaborate and decorative ones. The rituals also involved music, and movement – the way the jewellery the participants were wearing shimmered & jingled would’ve added to the general ambience.

The motifs chosen to decorate the jewellery and other objects also had religious significance. The next room of the exhibition had several pieces that had representations of things from the natural world. Some of these were as straightforward as a necklace made of gold beads shaped to look like jaguar claws – effectively a more high status version of a necklace of jaguar claws. Others were more symbolic – like pectorals shaped like a half-bat half-man figure. Often the belief was that the shaman wearing an item representing a particular creature would take on the essential characteristics of that creature during his hallucinogenic trance – for instance fly across the landscape with the wings of the bird figure he was wearing.

It was an interesting exhibition – but I’m aware I was missing a lot of the nuances because I know so little about the region and the peoples who lived there. If we go to the museum again before the exhibition finishes I think I’ll go through again for a second look 🙂

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 4)

Wales

In this chapter Prestwich takes a digression from his chronological trot through the Plantagenet era to look at the situation in Wales during this period. It’s very much Wales from the perspective of its interactions with England, and fits in here because Edward I conquered Wales.

He begins by setting the scene in terms of the political situation in Wales during Henry III & Edward I’s reigns in England. A key difference between the two cultures is that in England inheritance is by primogeniture, but in Wales it is not that clear cut. Which means that when there were multiple heirs (as there were in Gwynedd in 1246, for instance) the territory might be shared out between the heirs, or they might fight amongst themselves for who got the inheritance. Obviously England isn’t immune to civil war or inheritance disputes – but in Wales the tendency is for lands to fragment and be reunited only to fragment again. The early 13th Century had seen Llywelyn ap Iowerth reunite Gwynedd into a strong principality, only for it to fragment again after his heir’s death. His great-grandsons fought amongst themselves, and eventually Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was effectively in charge – with one of his brothers imprisoned, one paid off and one still free and at times plotting against him.

Another important facet of Welsh politics at the time is the Marcher Lords. These are the descendents of Norman nobility who hold lands along the border between England and Wales. I’ve always thought of them as a part of England, but this chapter made it clear that’s far too simple a picture. From the perspective of the English crown the Marcher Lords were their vassals, albeit with greater traditional liberties than other English nobles. From the perspective of the Welsh the Marcher Lords were also seen as part of the English invaders, but nonetheless there was a degree of integration between the Marcher Lords and the Welsh. More in the south than in Gwynedd to the north, but even there Llywelyn ap Iowerth married his daughters into Marcher families. However from the perspective of the Marcher Lords themselves they weren’t as firmly English as all that. Prestwich says that they saw themselves as potentially independent – that at the moment their interests aligned with the English crown (useful backup against the Welsh…) but this wouldn’t necessarily always be the case.

Prestwich says that conquest wouldn’t’ve felt inevitable to the people of the 13th Century. It would’ve seemed more plausible that the Welsh and the Marcher Lords would continue to integrate, and the sense of Wales & the Welsh as a separate entity would attenuate over time. But what actually happened was a growing sense of Welsh nationhood, which lead to a desire for recognition as independent. There were often skirmishes between the Welsh and the Marcher Lords, and whenever the English crown was having difficulties (see the bulk of Henry III’s reign) the Welsh would take advantage of it. So from the English perspective it became ever more important to get the matter of English power over Wales settled.

During Henry III’s reign raids by the Welsh on the Marches were met with shows of power by the English. A substantial English army would move some way into Wales, and a castle would be built (or planned) where they had pushed forward to. These gains stopped well short of full conquest, but they did give the English the upper hand. In 1247 the Welsh princes (including Llywelyn ap Gruffudd) acknowledged Henry III’s dominance, and submitted to the jurisdiction of the English crown. This wasn’t a long lasting situation, though – as Henry’s political difficulties increased the Welsh situation also deteriorated. He had left Edward in charge, but this appears to’ve been a mistake. And Llywelyn ap Gruffudd took full advantage of the civil war that developed after 1258, starting to call himself Prince of Wales in this year. But the English civil war also caused Llywelyn difficulties – the uncertainties of the English political situation meant he couldn’t come to a final settlement with them. A settlement was arrived at in 1267, with Llywelyn acknowledge as Prince of Wales by the English, but owing fealty to Henry III – so pseudo-independent.

After Edward succeeded to the English throne Llywelyn should’ve come to pay homage to him – but he failed to do so. This provided a formal reason for the outbreak of war, but Prestwich says that Llywelyn’s marriage to Simon de Montfort’s daughter was also a factor. The prospect of a Welsh prince who was also a de Montfort was unthinkable to Edward. The first Welsh war of his reign followed the pattern of his father’s campaigns – march an army in as a show of force, build a castle. But Edward miscalculated – the show of force wasn’t impressive enough. And the subsequent political situation was mismanaged, to a degree that united the Welsh, even Llywelyn and his brothers. The rhetoric of the dispute was focussed on the law – the Welsh wanted their own traditional Welsh laws, not the ones harshly imposed by Edward I.

The last conflict started in 1282, kicked off by one of Llywelyn’s brothers. Prestwich suggests that Llywelyn would’ve preferred not to start anything at this point, but the choice he now had was to fight with the English against his brother (unthinkable) or fight alongside his brother. Neither side was interested in compromise. Edward wanted the Welsh to submit to his authority unconditionally, and Llywelyn wanted to be recognised as an independent Prince of Wales. The turning point of the war came in late 1282 when Llywelyn was lured out of Snowdonia, perhaps by false suggestions of an alliance with the Mortimers (or by betrayal by some of his own men). His force met the English in battle at the river Irfon, and Llywelyn was killed. His brother Dafydd, now Prince of Wales as Llyweln had no male children, continued the war but Edward pushed on and it was all over but the mopping up. In June 1283 Dafydd was captured and the conquest was over.

There were still rebellions after this, and in particular the rebellion of 1294-5 required significant effort by the English to put down. But what was notable after this was that not all the Welsh were against the English crown. The country didn’t fully integrate into England, and the Welsh retained their own culture. The law codes of the two countries remained different in some respects, but criminal law was brought into line with England and the shire system of England was extended into Wales.

Prestwich also looks at what happened to the English army during these campaigns. One of the reasons for Edward’s success was that he brought a lot of resources to bear on the problem. He recruited sufficient men – not just via the feudal system, but also paid soldiers. And he provisioned and armed them properly, allowing him to keep the army in the field for longer. But Prestwich is keen not to overstate the innovations that Edward brought to the army – he says that the changes were quantitative rather than qualitative, and there’s no particular indication of novel tactics or organisation. Rather it’s that Edward’s logistics were what made the difference – his army was well fed, and supported, even when deep in Welsh territory.

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November 2013 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Fiction

“Crewel” Gennifer Albin. A rather disappointing YA dystopia. Library book.

“Enchanted Glass” Diana Wynne Jones. Childrens’ fantasy book about magicians & fairies. Library book.

“Poltergeist” Kat Richardson. Sequel to Greywalker, urban fantasy about a ghost-seeing PI in Seattle. Library book.

Total: 3

Concerts

Marillion playing at the Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury, 9/11/2013.

Steven Wilson at the Royal Albert Hall, 20/10/2013.

Total: 2

Photos

Total: 5

Radio

The Book of Common Prayer. In Our Time episode about the history & contents of the Book of Common Prayer.

The Corn Laws. In Our Time episode about the Corn Laws of the early 19th Century.

Galen. In Our Time episode about Galen, the 2nd Century AD Greek physician.

Total: 2

Talks

“The Arts of War: Assyrian Narrative Art” Nigel Tallis. Talk at the British Museum Members’ Open Evening in November 2013.

“Ritual and Religion in Egyptian Mines and Quarries” Hannah Pethen. Talk given at the EEG meeting in November, about the rituals and mythology that the Ancient Egyptians had surrounding mining.

Total: 2

Television

Fiction

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor.

Total: 1

Non-Fiction

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. David Attenborough talks about Darwin, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Attenborough’s own past.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Film about the Chuavet cave paintings.

Dan Snow’s A History of Congo. Depressing look at the last 150 or so years of the history of Congo & how this has left the country in a state.

David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy. David Starkey tells us all about the influence the English monarchy has had on English music starting from Henry V through to the present day.

Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide. Programme about the 50 year backstory & history of Doctor Who.

Games Britannia. History of games in Britain, we only watched the first episode.

A Hundred Years of Us. Aired to coincide with the 2011 census this is a look at how British culture has changed over the last hundred years.

The King’s War on Witches: Revealed. Rather good Channel 5 documentary about James VI & I’s witchhunts.

Metal: How it Works. Series about the history & use of various materials (only the first episode is about metals).

Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered. Sam Willis follows an archaeological excavation in Antigua, uncovering 18th Century Navy burials.

The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors. Series about the history of the Ottoman Empire presented by Rageh Omaar.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon Armitage talks about the poem Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, and his translation of it.

Stories of the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisted. Julian Richards returns to digs that were originally filmed for Meet the Ancestors more than a decade ago & sees what new things have been learnt.

Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy. Cut down version of Ultimate Tut.

The Viking Sagas. Rather weak programme on the Viking sagas presented by Janina Ramirez.

When Coal Was King. Timeshift episode about the culture of coal miners in the 1940s & 50s. Not a full post.

Total: 16

Camera Shy

Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide

I recorded Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide before the 50th anniversary special episode aired (post) but we didn’t watch it till afterwards. J’s very spoilerphobic and so we didn’t want to risk it being full of coy “teasers” about the upcoming episode – in retrospect I think they handled it pretty well, there were references to what the story was going to be about but nothing that wasn’t completely obvious from the end of the episode before.

This programme was a look at the whole of the Doctor Who series so far – running through the Doctors, and discussing the iconic companions and monsters. It did this partly with clips from old episodes, and partly by interviewing people who’d been in those episodes … and partly by interviews with “celebrities”. The scare quotes are there because I didn’t actually recognise many if any of the non-Doctor Who people (and in fact I didn’t recognise all the Doctor Who ones, Sophie Aldred no longer looks much like Ace for instance). I’m sure they’re all famous if you’re up on your modern pop culture … There were also a couple of framing vignettes with the 11th Doctor & Clara about the Doctor losing his memory, and there was a voiceover from Russell Tovey pulling the whole thing together. And someone had clearly had a lot of fun assembling clips from a wide range of episodes to have the Doctor respond to or join in with the commentary.

Obviously all the Doctors (including 8, but not the War Doctor) were covered. They had clips from everybody and tried to give some sense of the personality of that particular Doctor and what each actor had brought to the part. That was a bit more fleshed out when you got to the Fifth Doctor and onwards (except for Nine) as the actors were part of the show so could actually say what was in their minds. I’ve watched almost every episode since sometime early in the Fifth Doctor’s run, so a lot of the later stuff was very nostalgia fueled for me. It’s always a little odd for me to see the gushing over the Fourth Doctor, because I didn’t really see many of his episodes (perhaps only one at the time? I’ve watched Genesis of the Daleks since). So I’ve never been as fond of his interpretation as everyone else seems to be – the Seven/Ace era is the best of Old Who as far as I’m concerned. This programme did make me want to seek out the earlier Doctor’s stories though, but I think I’ll look for (library) books. J and I did try & watch through some Old Who serials a few years ago, and I think it’s my fault we gave up – my tolerance for televised fiction is variable and low, and the less modern pacing/story-telling drove me batty.

The companions weren’t as exhaustively covered – and the selection was a little odd, I thought. Like Susan was name-checked (and we had a clip of her departure) but Ian and Barbara weren’t mentioned by name (tho they were in some clips iirc). Obviously Sarah Jane Smith got some attention – and it was suggested that she was the first to have an actual consistent character, rather than being a scream-on-demand-question-asker – partly because she’s the one who returned in New Who, and partly because the actress (Elisabeth Sladen) recently died. Oh, and she was the iconic Fourth Doctor companion, in many ways. And that was also odd – we had SJS and Leela name checked, but not Romana. Tegan completely missed out (except a mention in a clip) and Peri really only talked about for her outfits. And because the Fifth Doctor’s death scene was memorable mostly for the camera angle straight down Peri’s cleavage … Ace did get a few mentions (yay!) and we got to see her beating up a Dalek with a baseball bat, but the Nitro 9 was kinda noted in passing and not dwelt on. Once into the modern era I think everyone got name checked, and a little bit of chat. Not everyone was interviewed, but a fair few were (including the guy who played Adam who I’d almost forgotten about).

Monsters were the obvious ones, really – a lot mentioned in passing, but we dwelt on the Daleks and the Cybermen. And the Master plus sidenotes on the rest of the Time Lords. I was entertained by the clip of the 2nd Doctor holding forth about how the Time Lords’ non-interference policy was immoral, because of course the modern era has had the Time Lords being far too keen to interact with the rest of the universe. And there was some talk about how in the modern era the alien races aren’t as often presented as monolithic – like there’s Strax the Sontaran who isn’t an enemy. There’s more of a sense of every race (short of the Daleks & Cybermen) as having good people and bad people and those that’re in between.

I’ve missed loads of stuff, I think – it was a fairly information dense show, not surprising given it was covering 50 years of back story both from a outside and inside perspective. It was a lot of fun to watch as a Doctor Who fan, and I’d recommend watching it if you are. Although if you’re the sort of person who knows every detail inside out I suspect you’ll find it shallow, and it’s very much focussed on celebration so there’s nothing about why it was cancelled back at the end of the 7th Doctor’s run or anything like that. The closest they get to negative is Colin Baker mentioning that a lot of people didn’t much like his Doctor at the time, and saying the outfit wasn’t what he’d’ve preferred.

Other tv watched this week:

The last episode of A Hundred Years of Us: a superficial look at how British society has changed over the last 100 years.

Timeshift: When Coal Was King: a programme using footage from the Mining Review features in cinemas in the 50s & 60s to look at what the mining community was like during that era.

Editorial note: I’m still trying to find the right way to write up TV from the week without it turning into a chore and taking over the blog. For now I’ll be writing about one or two programmes in depth, and just name checking the rest.

In Our Time: The Corn Laws

In 1815 the British government passed a law fixing the price of grain at a higher than market price. This was the first of the Corn Laws, and it sparked rioting by those most affected – the urban poor. The laws were to last until the late 1840s, when they were finally repealed under pressure from manufacturers concerned about the effect on trade. The three experts who talked about these laws on In Our Time were Lawrence Goldman (Oxford University), Boyd Hilton (University of Cambridge) and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey (London School of Economics).

They started the programme by giving us a bit of context. Britain in 1815 was at the start of the process of industrialisation and just coming to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So there was concern about how the economy was going to adjust to the new demands of peace and industry. There was also concern over political instability in Europe, and worries about the spread of revolution to Britain (it’s not that long after the French Revolution after all). And the industrialisation of Britain was also shifting population and the balance of power more towards the growing manufacturing cities of the north, which was generating pressure for reform of Parliament and extension of the franchise.

So against this backdrop the landowners, who were the major interest represented in the Parliament of the time (both in terms of who has the vote and in terms of how many MPs come from which areas of the country) vote through a law that protects their profits from grain growing. During the war it was harder to import grain, so to feed the country more & more marginal land was forced into cultivation. Now that peace has broken out the landowners are worried that grain imports will force down the price of grain and the profits they make & the rents they can get from their tenant farmers will be reduced. The law was openly protectionist in nature and the landowners who passed it felt it was their due for supporting the country during the war.

Right from the start didn’t go as well as they had hoped. Britain wasn’t actually able to be self-sufficient, but the hope was that for the 4 or 5 years out of 6 when the harvest was good enough then British grain would be enough. And for the other 1 or 2 years in this cycle when the harvest failed then grain could be bought in from the Eastern European farmers and prevent famine. But as one might predict (with the benefits of a cursory, but 21st Century, knowledge of economics) without the market always being there the farmers of East Europe turned to other crops or other ways of making their living, rather than growing surplus corn just in case they could sell it to Britain. So further laws were passed trying to sort this situation out whilst still protecting the interests of the British aristocracy.

Into this situation comes the Great Reform Act of 1832. This extended the franchise to men with less property (one now needed land or a house to the value of £10). And the boroughs were redrawn – the system had been kept the same for about 400 years previously, despite changes in population. Previously there were areas (“rotten boroughs”) where there was little population but they had an MP, and places such as Manchester (a new and growing town in this period) had no representation. This reform changed the balance of power, and the industrialists started to campaign against the Corn Laws. From what the experts on the programme were saying this didn’t have much to do with the plight of those poor who couldn’t afford to buy bread. Instead it was about trading the goods that the manufacturers were making. If Britain wasn’t importing grain then it was hard to get other countries to buy Britain’s exports, which hurt the profits of the industrialists and the country’s economy as a whole. And it was about how if food is expensive, then people buy less clothing or other goods, and again less profit for the boss and less economic activity in general.

The Anti-Corn Law League was formed in 1838, and attracted many supporters. They were working towards a plan for repealing the Corn Laws after the planned 1848 election – involving propagandising to the country in general and the electorate in particular, and getting their sympathisers elected. The Anti-Anti Corn Law League (real name the Central Agricultural Protection Society – CAPS) was formed in 1844 to campaign in support of the Corn Laws. Schonhardt-Bailey gave us some figures to demonstrate something of their reach – the Anti-Corn Laws League started off with about £5,000 worth of subscriptions, and grew by 1845 to ~£250,000 worth of subscriptions. The CAPS had about ~£2,000 worth of subscriptions at that point. The CAPS were handicapped in a couple of ways – firstly their senior figures (like the Duke of Richmond) were the sort of people that fit contemporary stereotypes about useless & wasteful aristocrats, whereas the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League were charismatic and good persuaders. And the CAPS membership and support base was drawn from people who felt it wasn’t appropriate to take politics “out of doors” – i.e. politics was something that happened primarily in Parliament and between the Members of Parliament. So they had an ideological opposition to drumming up support amongst the electorate & the population at large.

Robert Peel, eventually responsible for repeal, properly enters this clash of ideologies in 1841 when he becomes Prime Minister as the leader of the Conservative Party. The programme digressed a bit to talk about Peel’s background here, as he’s the man responsible in the end for driving through repeal. Peel’s father had been a self-made man, who then became a baronet. Peel himself had been educated at Eton & Oxford, so brought up with the members of the elite, and went into politics. He was ideologically a good fit for the Conservative party of the time, but didn’t feel at ease with them – because he wasn’t part of the old aristocracy he was an outsider in some ways. The Conservative Party was generally in favour of the Corn Laws – they represented the old landed interests. Peel himself voted against repeal several times in the early 1840s, although the experts suggested that he’d always been in favour of repealing them. This probably wasn’t for the same sorts of reasons as the industrialists wanted to repeal them. The suggestion is that Peel saw the Corn Laws as protecting the short term interests of the landed aristocracy at the expense of their long term protection. Effectively he was spooked by the rioting and opposition of the general public to these laws, and believed that as long as these laws existed they kept inflamed the possibility of revolt like in France only half a century earlier. You might have hefty bank balances from your grain profits, but will that help you if the mob burn your house down?

The experts were saying that Peel started by introducing legislation to weaken the effects of the Corn Laws – they believed this was an attempt to avoid looking like he was betraying his party. The plan seemed to be to reduce the laws, and then win the 1848 election on the back of these partial repeals which would then give him the mandate to repeal the Corn Laws fully. But this isn’t how it played out, instead in 1846 Peel brought repeal to the table at Parliament, and managed to persuade sufficient of his party to support him to bring it about. The experts were suggesting perhaps he came to believe his party wouldn’t win the planned 1848 election, so wanted to get this done when the Conservatives would reap the political benefits. Apparently the language used around the issue at the time was fairly religious and overblown (with talk of martyrdom and so on), so perhaps Peel was also swept along by a feeling that it would be the right thing to do to politically die for his faith in repeal.

After the Corn Laws were repealed and a Free Trade approach to the economy was now employed. The experts said that the next couple of decades were very prosperous for Britain – with ample harvests, and plenty of growth in the economy. They also said that this didn’t have much to do with the Corn Laws or Free Trade – it was mostly a result of climatic conditions favourable to agriculture. But because of the presumed cause & effect – repeal of the Corn Laws –> prosperous Britain – this shaped the future of Britain. Free Trade was now seen in many circles as proven to lead to a booming economy.

The programme ended quite abruptly, as Bragg realised they were running out of time – one of the problems with this being a live show I guess. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I’m not surprised it happened to this one, it was one of those subjects I thought might be a bit dull in advance but turned out to be fascinating once it got going.

“Wise Men from the East: Zoroastrian Traditions in Persia and Beyond” Vesta Curtis (Talk at the British Museum Members’ Open Evening, 11/11/2013)

The second of the two talks we went to at the British Museum Members’ Open Evening the other week was about the small exhibition of Zoroastrian and related pieces that has recently opened at the BM. This is in some ways a related exhibition to the larger Zoroastrian exhibition at SOAS which finishes soon (we went to see it the other day so I shall be writing that up soon). In this post I’m going to talk about both the exhibition and the curator’s talk.rather than split them into separate posts. My photos are up on flickr here.

The curator, Vesta Curtis, started by telling us that she herself is Iranian, and her professional interest is in royal iconography on pre-Islamic Iranian coins. She’s taken advantage of interest generated by the other Zoroastrian exhibition to draw people in to look at her coins. The other strand of the exhibition is to look at how the Zoroastrian iconography has influenced both modern Iran and the Western world (hence the “Wise Men from the East” bit of the exhibition title).

The Zoroastrian religion is named (by outsiders) after its prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra. He lived somewhere between 1800BC and 600BC (amusingly one of the audience at the talk thought Curtis meant he lived that long, but no she meant the much more plausible fact that his dates are unknown). The primary god is Ahura Mazda, sometimes shown as a winged figure. This same iconography can be used as representation of the concept of Kingly Glory, and it’s not always clear which it is in a given context. The Zoroastrians see the world as a battleground between good and evil forces, and see the role of humanity as working to aid the good force. Curtis said in some ways it’s an eco-friendly religion, as one of it’s precepts is that a good person should not pollute the natural elements (like water, fire, earth).

The religion started in Iran and spread to India. Curtis had displayed a selection of coins and seals which depicted Zoroastrian iconography from across the region and across time from c.400BC through to the 1600s AD. In modern Iran the winged figure of Ahura Mazda or the Kingly Glory has become a secular national symbol. Curtis was telling us that a lot of people, in particular the younger generation, in Iran have some piece of jewellery or accessory with this figure on it – even non-Zoroastrians. It’s a symbol that emphasises the long history of Iran, and to go with this theme in the exhibition there were some stamps released in 1970 to celebrate 2500 years of the Persian Empire.

The impact on the Western world is via Christianity. The three Wise Men who bring gifts to the infant Jesus are generally depicted in Persian dress. Even the name we use for them – the Magi – derives from the Persian word for a Zoroastrian priest. From the word Magi we also get “magician” and “magic”. One of the Magi is possibly an Indo-Parthian King called Gondaphares, his name is corrupted to Caspar or Jasper in the Christian texts. I admit I’m not clear if there was more evidence than just the name to link the two or not.

This was an interesting talk and exhibition, but I think it was a little unfocused for such a small collection. Coins were clearly Curtis’s thing, and I think in trying to give it a broader appeal it ended up with a few too many only tangentially related things. Still, I likely wouldn’t’ve gone to look if it had all been coins (because they’re not really my thing), so it did the job right in that sense 🙂