Zoo in the head

Imperial lather

The Guardian publishes an extract from Richard Gott's new book, in which he works himself into a lather over the British Empire. It's somewhat overwritten, but that's not the same as overstated; the thrust of the piece is irresistible: that, however much we allow ourselves to be flattered by talk of good intentions or absence of mind or by comparisons with the Belgian Congo, an empire is necessarily violent and oppressive. (The best short version of this argument I know is Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate all the brutes'.)

A striking sentence towards the end, though:

The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great.

Why let Alexander off the hook? In the New York Review of Books, Mary Beard questions the greatness:

In a now fragmentary passage of his treatise On the State, [Cicero] seems to have quoted an anecdote that would turn up again, almost five hundred years later, in the pages of Saint Augustine. The story was that a petty pirate had been captured and brought before Alexander. What drove him, Alexander asked, to terrorize the seas with his pirate ship? “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world,” the man sharply replied. There were plenty of acts of terror he could have cited: the total massacres of the male population after the sieges at Tyre and Gaza; the mass killing of the local population in the Punjab; the razing of the royal palace at Persepolis, after (so it was said) one of Alexander’s inebriated dinner parties.

It seems to have slipped Gott's mind momentarily that empires rely on propaganda, projecting an image of relatively benign power, as much as on brutality.

On the mat: Madagascar

One of those rare, very special days when all the magazines this blog subscribes to - LRB, NYRB, TLS and New Yorker - tumble on to the mat at once.

The TLS letters page leads with this from Gwyn Campbell of McGill University, Montreal:

Sir, – Readers of the TLS unfamiliar with the field of historical scholarship on Madagascar may find themselves perplexed by the emotional tone of a recent letter from Pier M. Larson (April 2) regarding my review of Madagascar: A short history by Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis. Dr Larson is indeed, as he claims, a “leading historian of Madagascar”, but I would like to point out that in the English-speaking world, there are only three of us: Larson, Ellis and myself (for years, I have struggled to gain admittance for the former British ambassador, Mervyn Brown, on the basis of his excellent general history, but to no avail; witness Larson’s veiled attack on Brown by distinguishing himself as a “professional” historian). Both Larson and I are children of missionaries to the island (I was born there); Ellis and I met in Antananarivo in 1978, when we were both doing PhD research. Peer review being the essence of academic progress, we are all three continually called upon to comment on each other’s work. Ellis and Larson back each other up at every turn...

There is more: but what more do you want? The island upbringing, the missionary parents, the scholarly isolation of the field with only three people in it, the rivalry spread over 30 years; and there'd be lemurs. It's a novel, just waiting for you to write it. Come on. Can't you already smell that Booker?

Adam Curtis Day

Yes, I'm declaring the 26th February a national holiday, to celebrate the continued existence of Adam Curtis, the film-maker who gave us Century of the Self and The Trap. He has a rather brilliant blog at the BBC website - the posts on Yemen's dirty colonial back-story and on Joseph Strick's film The Heckler are particular highlights; and some kind soul has posted all of The Mayfair Set (his best programme, because the one with the most substantial, substantiated thesis) on youtube. Your holiday homework starts here:

UPDATE: On the video posted above, at 0:18, an electronically treated photograph of a barn owl floats down the screen. Can anybody explain?

Giant space octopus lands on south-east Asia

 

Or it's a map of Zomia, taken from the Geocurrents blog. "Zomia" is an imagined land, comprising all the highlands of south-east Asia above 200 metres or so, from Vietnam to north-east India; the term was coined by the Dutch historian Willem van Schendel in 2002, and has been enthusiastically developed by the American anthropologist James Scott. Zomia sprawls across borders and encompasses numerous minority peoples - the Hmong, the Karen - who are united by their aversion to central governments: according to Scott, it is the largest area in the world where people have not been incorporated into nation states. Hence the title of his book, The Art of Not Being Governed, reviewed here. 

There is a tendency among lowland peoples to think of the inhabitants of Zomia as ancestors, a hangover from a more primitive culture - civilisation hasn't reached them yet. Scott thinks they've tried civilisation and decided it didn't taste good. They are fugitive peoples, who didn't want to put up with all civilisation's discontents - mostly the obvius things, like taxation, conscription, forced labour, overcrowding; but also literacy: apparently, many hill people have stories about how they lost writing. So they escaped, to organise their own freer, more democratic societies. A good way of getting a handle on Scott's ideas is to listen to the 2008 Elizabeth Colson Lecture.

The idea seems to slot too neatly into liberal ideals of primitive peoples, which are themselves descended from good old-fashioned 19th-century romanticism - cf. Walter Scott's Highlanders, or The Last of the Mohicans. Perhaps Scott (James) makes highland life sound too much like a conscious choice, when what is really happening is that people are being squeezed out of the lowlands, and finding ways of living where they can: cf. the Bakhtiari people of south-west Iran, fording rivers and climbing sheer cliffs to get their goats to better pasture, in Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life - it always seemed obvious to me that they were forced into this way of living; you couldn't choose it. But cf., also, Gavin Maxwell's account of Berber society in his brilliant book Lords of the Atlas: as he describes it, the Berbers of the High Atlas lived happily under an independent quasi-democratic, egalitarian cantonal system, until the French clumped in to uproot it and replace it with something close to medieval feudalism - more centralised, and therefore easier to control. (We tend to think of colonialism as progressive in its effects, in which case the problem is that people don't always want progress; but sometimes it's downright regressive.)

On a related point, I've been reading a lot of obituaries and appreciations of Colin Ward, and realising I need to know a lot more about anarchism. Any suggestions for further reading?