My Personal Blog

According to a study commissioned by The Independent London is the “capital of the world.”

London has topped the most exhaustive comparison ever compiled of the worlds great cities in a finding that sees Britain’s capital outstrip global rivals as a centre of economic performance and cultural significance.

Of course there is some implication that the survey methodology could be flawed because it is a newspaper based in London making the claim. Furthermore, the question of how they quantify “cultural significance” is somewhat unanswered.

What I find most interesting about the report is the way that it treats London’s exceptional cultural diversity as a strength. That suggests to me that in the twenty first century “British superiority” is being measured in a completely different way than it was during the twentieth or nineteenth centuries. Cultural heterogeneity is the new vehicle by which Britain claims its status as a top world power.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the most recent public figure to decry American “imperialism” around the world. The London Times reports (“US is‘worst’ imperialist: archbishop”) on his interview on the topic. Interestingly he compares American foreign policy with British imperial policy and makes the claim that the United States is far “worse” than Britain was during its imperial heyday.

Leaving aside the politics or the political implications it seems really problematic to use a historical comparison to make a qualitative judgment. It’s one thing to argue that United States policies are or are not imperialist based upon similarities to historical precedents (like British policies that were at their time uncompromisingly imperialist), but it’s quite another to say that that makes one country “better” or “worse.”

Particularly strange (I think) is his comparison between current United States activities (Iraq, Afghanistan although he never mentions them specifically) and British rule in India.

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed India. “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example.

I’m not a specialist in the history of British India but it strikes me that there are several huge problems with his shorthand assessment of its history. For one thing I find it hard to believe that the net input of “energy and resources” the British put into India for its benefit over several centuries would be more than the wealth and resources that they extracted from it (not to mention “energy,” labor, and lives). I also cringe at the word “normalising” because it suggests that the British / European way of governing or of economic development is the only correct path for a nation. Related to this is the fact that the British imperial administration of India was hardly democratic at the time.

Finally, on the general point of American and British imperialisms, the Archbishop’s comparison fails to take into account the continuity between the British Empire and the American “empire” (if there is such a thing). In some senses the United States shares common culture and history with Britain. It might be that “imperial” activities of the United States are continuations of some British policies and the former global role of Britain rather than something radically new and different.

A slightly hyperbolic but nevertheless serious article in The London Times (“It’s your round: buy a pint and save a piece of Britain”) points out that the British pub is an institution under threat. I’ve read a bit about the pub in the formation of working class culture in Britain in the nineteenth century. Sometimes while studying the past it is easy to lose sight of the way that traditions continue to the present (or sometimes do not continue) which is one of the reasons this article caught my eye.

It opens with two amazing paragraphs that encompass so much that is unique about British culture and the way that Britons conceive of their nation and its past:

The lights are going out all over Britain. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. Or possibly ever. To paraphrase the British foreign secretary on the eve of the first world war might seem over the top, but we are facing a threat to the British way of life that I consider vastly more important than the existence of Belgium.

The British pub is under threat. An institution adored and envied all over the world is disappearing before our very eyes and with it our national drink, beer, as the nation that invented jingoism succumbs to its terminal preference for anything foreign.

Statistics reveal that the pubs are under threat because beer sales have decreased dramatically:

According to figures released by the British Beer and Pubs Association (BBPA) last week, beer sales in pubs are down by 14m pints a day, or 49%, from 1979 levels. Nearly 60 pubs each month shut their doors for good.

At the end of the article Peter Millar reflects on the meaning of the institution in his life and gives one example of how the pub creates and nurtures local culture and community.

British beer and the British pub are joined at the hip, intermingled like no other alcoholic combination. British ale bought in a bottle is a fine but different product from cask ale drunk in a pub. Traditional real ale is a labour-intensive artisanal drink made with natural products and producing a rich range of flavours.

My local, the Pear Tree in Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, is blessed by being owned by the village’s brewery 150 yards away – which still delivers locally by horse-drawn dray – but we are well aware how lucky we are and terrified that we might be living on borrowed time.

Regulars include a jobbing gardener, a carpenter with a degree in earth sciences, the drayman who looks after the brewery horses, a nursery school teacher, a builder, a software writer, an optician, a lorry driver and one of the brainiest blokes I know who refills cigarette machines. Very few of us would know each other if it weren’t for the pub.

In an article (“Duke opens Field of Remembrance”) related to Remembrance Day activities in Britain the BBC quotes a veteran who makes the point of British war dead buried overseas in a very personal way. What also strikes me is that the burial of war dead overseas has clearly influenced the way that the British honor their war dead at home.

Mr Bowen, who joined the Army when he was just 15 and took part in D-Day with the 5th Battalion East Yorkshire, spoke of the importance of honouring his fallen comrades at the Abbey each year.

“I served for 25 years. My friends… some are buried in France, Belgium, Holland. I have friends buried in Egypt and friends buried in Palestine.

“How can I go and visit all their graves? It’s impossible. So what I do is come here and this is my way of paying my respect to my fallen comrades.”

Historian Francois Furstenberg compares the Bush presidency to the French Revolutionary period in The New York Times (“Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons”). Regardless of the political implications I think it is noteworthy the way that the French Revolution continues to be a lens through which contemporary politics and political clashes are understood.

Much as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.

Among the many carry-overs of the French Revolution that Furstenberg mentions is the original usage of the word “terrorist.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

The Daily Telegraph gives a brief overview of the history of royal scandals as a background to the current instance of alleged blackmail against a royal.

The most prominent instance mentioned in the article is a prior case of blackmail against a member of the Royal Family:

In 1891, the Duke of Clarence, son of the future Edward VII, discussed the possibility of paying off two prostitutes he had met, in exchange for the return of two letters he had sent to them.

The rest of the article consists of descriptions of instances when royals were part of legal proceedings:

In 1870, his father the Prince of Wales - later King Edward VII - voluntarily appeared as a witness in a divorce case when Lady Mordaunt falsely accused the heir to the throne of being one of her lovers.

Again, in June 1891, he appeared as a witness in the Tranby Croft case to testify on a slander accusation arising from a card game.

King George V, Edward VII’s son, was accused of bigamy by a republican newspaper early in his reign and sued for libel.

Although he did not appear in court to give evidence, the King sent a statement making clear that he was innocent of bigamy and was legally married to Queen Mary.

Five years ago, the Princess Royal became the first member of the royal family to be convicted of a criminal offence when she admitted a charge under the Dangerous Dogs Act after one of her pets bit two children in Windsor Great Park.

The previous year, the Princess was fined £400 and given five penalty points after admitting driving her Bentley at 93mph on a dual carriageway in Gloucestershire.

The Daily Telegraph article, “History of royal scandals”

This weekend The Guardian publishes two reviews of Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.

The first review, by Maya Jasanoff, argues that the book:

is a compelling and spectacularly detailed retelling of imperial “rise” as well as fall, from Yorktown to Hong Kong. Not since Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy has anyone recounted these events with such sustained panache. Brendon’s empire is a ramshackle affair, managed for decades out of a Colonial Office that boasted “an assortment of rickety chairs and old, baize-covered tables,” a basement “so damp that it had to be pumped out twice a day” and an attic that doubled as a fives court. Virtually every page offers up some memorable observation.

In addition Brendon emphasizes the peculiar characters of the British Empire. Jasanoff writes:

All told, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire presents a glittering panoply of decadence, folly, farce and devastation. Brendon’s characters alone could fill a pantomime stage many times over.

Jasanoff claims that this strength of the book simultaneously suggests its weakness.

This touches on the chief casualty of Brendon’s descriptive approach: the relative absence of explanation and analysis. After so much rich narrative, one is left craving synthesis - particularly comparison across regions, for such interconnections help make an empire what it is. How, for example, did the use of partition in Ireland in 1921 influence its subsequent application in Palestine and south Asia? How might British counter-insurgency tactics developed in one domain - South Africa or Ireland, Palestine or Malaya - have been replayed in others? (To say nothing of their influence on the Americans in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria.) To what extent did imperial personnel carry policies from region to region? What kinds of networks of influence existed among anti-colonial leaders, such as the black nationalists inspired by Gandhi, or advocates of non-alignment? Brendon nods in these directions, but readers looking for deep answers will want to turn elsewhere.

The second review, by Robert McCrum, emphasizes different aspects of the book. McCrum dwells more on the larger themes than in the individual personas (although the latter are sometimes indistinguishable from some of the more notable episodes of the Empire).

Piers Brendon’s prodigious volume is a brilliant account of acts two, three and four in this swelling drama of imperial themes from Yorktown to Goose Green. Despite his title, he knows he is not Edward Gibbon and is the first to concede that Decline and Fall casts a long shadow. While he has resisted ’setting up as a rival’ to the choleric county colonel and his rolling Augustan narrative of Roman decline, the awesome scale of a subject that includes Africa, the Far East and the Antipodes compels the faithful narrator into an enthralling mini-series of colonial adventure from Plessey to Omdurman, via the Zulu wars (Rorke’s Drift) and Baden-Powell’s defence of Mafeking.

Brendon’s empire, about which he has mixed feelings, is a liberal enterprise dedicated, however hypocritically, to the principle of liberty. Although its antecedents trace back to the 16th century and beyond, this empire was inspired by the loss of the American colonies and the ancient rivalry with France. It was made possible by the supremacy of the Royal Navy, by Britain’s industrial revolution, and by the relative weakness of rival European powers in the 19th century.

McCrum argues that the weakness of Pearson’s work is his lack of attention to the role of the United States during the twentieth century period of the Empire’s decline.

If Piers Brendon has a weakness, it lies in his insufficient attention to the role of America in Britain’s decline. Dean Acheson’s famous claim that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’ is both a statement of fact and also a boastful assertion of late 20th-century American supremacy, however brief. Ironically, 1963, the year of Acheson’s comment, was the year of the Beatles’ first American tour and the beginnings of a new kind of Englishness, a global phenomenon but one unintelligible without an understanding of the empire. By 2007, Britain’s role in the world seems to have become more loosely cultural than political. But that’s another story.

Maya Jasanoff’s review in Saturday’s edition of The Guardian: “Last post for the oddball empire”

Robert McCrum’s review in Sunday’s edition of The Guardian: “From Empire to Oblivion”

The London Times reports on a new British memorial to those who have been killed following the Second World War. The article notes that there is no monument like it on British soil, because the Commonwealth War Graves Commission stopped burying soldiers after the end of the Second World War.

The new memorial reminds me of the fact that the process of commemoration in Britain is still an ongoing one. Although my dissertation research focuses on the war memorials of the First World War period, the tradition of memorialization that they inaugurated remains.

Another interesting part of the report is the fact that this new memorial includes space for another 16,000 or so names in anticipation of future needs. Compared with the 1920s when architects and engineers struggled to find room on the Menin Gate for all of the names it had to contain, building a memorial in part to anticipate future needs is something relatively new.

Since the end of the Second World War 16,000 British servicemen and their auxiliary forces have lost their lives in a variety of circumstances. Yesterday the Queen opened a national memorial to them, where relatives and friends of the lost can reflect before a carved list of their names.

There is nothing quite like it, and there has long been a call for a memorial to take over from where the Commonwealth War Graves Commission closes its books at 1948. There are memorials around the world to particular regiments, campaigns and even individuals, but no national shrine on home soil.

Public subscription, National Lottery funding, and a modest £1.5 million government contribution from the sale of a Trafalgar commemorative coin, have enabled completion of the £7 million National Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, near the geographical centre of England. Trustees still need to raise a further £1 million to ensure that the memorial is properly maintained.

The names carved in the Portland stone walls span age, class and ethnicity. They include Earl Mountbatten of Burma, killed by an IRA bomb in the Irish Republic in 1979, and Jabron Hashmi of the Intelligence Corps, killed in Afghanistan last year, the first Muslim in the British Armed Forces of recent times to lose his life.

The complete article from The London Times: “A monument at last for the fallen of modern times”

The New York Times travel section includes a narrative about journeying to the American First World War cemeteries in France, particularly the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.

It’s strange that a military graveyard should be so lovely, but lovely is the only way to describe the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, 26 miles northwest of Verdun. As exquisite as any French park or chateau grounds, the cemetery is a formal garden of perfectly clipped trees, immaculate lawns, fountains and roses and long white rows of grave markers. Given its beauty, it’s also strange how empty the place is — and stranger still since this is the largest American military cemetery in Europe, the burial site of 14,246 United States service members who died in the war to end all wars.

The complete article in the New York Times: “On Hallowed Ground, a Place of Painful Beauty”

Today’s Cal football game versus Oregon was nervewracking to watch. It was very back-and-forth (the Bears would score and then the Ducks, etc) but Cal pulled it out in the end.

This is an image of one of the last plays of the game when it appeared as though Oregon might score and tie the game. Oregon fumbled the ball into the endzone resulting in a touchback and the Bears getting the ball with about 20 seconds remaining.