The Reads of Winter

      . . . . The books I've read or tried to read, or listened to, or read aloud in the last 2 1/2 months begins with The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (2015) by Greg Steinmetz.

 Jakob Fugger der Reiche (1459-1525) in der Kunst

This man, born before the fateful 1492 voyage of Christof Colón, active throughout most of the 16th century, was Europe’s first millionaire, who was not a royal. Silver and land were the pillars of his wealth, made by lending to European monarchs, particularly Philip II, funding their wars and their rivalries.  They almost always lost; he almost always won, gaining control of what had been their silver mines and cities, making him all that much richer.  Much if not most of the hot flow of gold and silver coming into Seville via Philip II’s flotas from the New World, ended up in Fugger’s accounts as well.  This is how men who worked with money could become millionaires w/o being a monarch.  Fugger’s story is the birth story of capitalism, allowed by the vast rapine of the unbelievably vast rich riches of the New World, and the equally unbelievable stupid behaviors of monarchs.  It is a fascinating tale, even as it is a tragic one, particularly for African and Native Americans, as both the new worlds and old were transformed by floods of gold and silver. his book filled in a big missing space in the transformation of finance that allowed for the coming European era of industrialization and the finale of the medieval eras.

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgewood and the Transformation of Britain (2021) by Tristram Hunt couldn't have existed without the Age of Fugger. Wedgewood well represents the changes to Europeans’ culture of the material life, the birth of mass production and industrialism, financed by what happened in the 16th Century, providing for the first time ornamental, decorative and often plainly useless, non-functional objects even to the lower middle classes as markers of status.  Not only did this brilliant fellow with quite poor health beginning with childhood tuberculosis of the bone in one of his legs get the whole world desiring English -- his! -- pottery, including the French, but received accolades for the quality and beauty of his works from Chinese porcelain connoisseurs. To more easily and far less expensively to receive the quality of clay his works needed he was instrumental in his region developing the canal system -- which also allowed his products and himself to get to London much more easily, quickly and safely. The Grand Trunk Canal system cost a billion dollars to build, in today’s money.  Not only pack pony breeders, owners and suppliers, objected to the project, but so did many ‘conservative’ lords and others, as being a waste of money. But if potters of luxury porcelain products weren’t important enough to get it built, the surge in coal mining in the region was. Josiah himself, who played an important role getting their route and connection to Liverpool approved and funded by the local lordships, was concerned it would put his potteries too much on the map, easy to visit (which is true), and thus catch the eyes of those who imposed taxes on large businesses.  The canal would make his business grow ever larger.

Currently I'm  reading The Story of Russia (2022) by Orlando Figes. A less large book than many who attempt these matters, less than half the size of Simon Montifiore's really wonderful Romanovs -- and Figes starts at the start -- long before the Mongolian incursions and conquest, and gets Putin and Ukraine in it as well at the end.  It explains so much about Putin, Russia and the Ukraine war.

Before the Figes I did get to read The Lion And The Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy (2022), by Alexander Rose. This is the same author who wrote Turn: Washington's Spies, from which the AMC 4-season scripted drama was adapted. If one wonders how the rebels came up with the idea of building a navy in Liverpool -- recall that Liverpool was Britain's greatest center of the African slave trade and everything that went with it, from shipbuilding to insurance to the forging of manacles and shackles.  It was no coincidence then, that Liverpool was also Britain's primary port for Southern cotton, and where the British Cotton Exchange was located.  These Brits provided so much money and assistance, not to mention encouragement, to confederate James Bulloch, the honcho from Georgia.

While reading Lion and Fox, I was listening to Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) -- I've read the second and third volumes of Morris's award-winning biography, but hadn't read this one as I'd read other biographies of TR's earlier years prior to becoming POTUS). In this first volume of his biography of the (then future) POTUS, is included TR's uncle, who is one of the two central figure in The Lion and the Fox. SSo all through, as in the past, when I evaluate anything regarding Teddy, I take into account first that TR's beloved mother, Mittie Bulloch was a confederate, who would, if she could, do anything for the Rebels. As it was she did send lots of supplies and money, not only to her family on the plantation in Georgia, some of which went without doubt to her brother's efforts in Liverpool. She kept it up until public opinion forced her husband -- an ardent Northern unionist, instrumental in many ways to the Union war effort -- to stop her. Upon which, Mittie took to her room as a permanent invalid. Such an affecting scene when she was finally reunited with her brothers in Liverpool 2-3 years after Appomattox.  Her indulgent, adoring husband was taking her -- and thus the family- on a European tour for the sake of his wife's 'nerves.'  There, Mittie regained her nerves,and Teddy met his 'bully uncle James' for the first time.  Teddy hero worshipped his uncles -- the other one was working in Paris with Slidell.

For much of January my workout book (this is when I listen to audio versions of books) which I've nearly come to the end of, is In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire (2021) by Laurence Bergreen.  So much I never dreamed of I've been learning about the run-up to the Spanish invasion and what 'the Battle of the Armada" actually was.

Sir Francis Drake, (born c. 1540–43 circumnavigated the globe. Unlike Magellan, his global circumnavigator predecessor, Drake survived to continue fighting and plundering, pushing Spain to declare war on England, sending the ill-fated, infamous Armada.

By no means was it a single battle of a single day or even of a day and night and another day.  It went on for weeks. Elizabeth and her Lord Burley treated the navvies who save England from the Armada's invasion like shyte, just starting with refusing to pay them, then leaving them often literally naked and penniless, to try to get home.  Cynically, Burley figured the fewer of the men who survived the fewer the Queen needed to pay somewhere down the line when she might get around to it.

Prior to the Drake biography I listened to the audio version of Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe that Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign  (2007) by Stephan Talty. 

Sir Henry Morgan (c. 1635-1688), Welsh privateer

Morgan was almost two centuries post Drake, but the Spanish were still the Catholic bane of England and fair game, most fair game, nay the game to which the Brits were entitled, if only for the sake of religion.  Drake's trajectory continued almost up to the age of Bourbon Spain -- which had so many of the same problems and errors as did Phillip II's Spain when it came to a navy.

Which brings me to our current read-aloud to each other before lights out, an old one history, Bourbon Spain 1700 - 1808 (1989) by John Lynch, part of a many-volume academic series of the history of Spain, for which series Lynch is the general editor.

Among the works waiting for me are The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (2022) by Nicolas Morton that tells me all sorts of things I've wanted to know about the region and the period, told from the perspective of the then established medieval kingdoms in the near East, from Europe and from that of the Mongols.  It's wonderful, but I haven't had time to read it yet.  Also there's Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran (2011) by Dilip Hiro, which will help in my doomed desire before I die to get some geographic, cultural and historical sense of this vast region about which, alas I know nothing. ]

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I read two novels in January!  Two! This after having read no fiction at all for a long time -- nothing appeals or keeps my attention. 

I do admit alternate, historical sf/fnal Babel: An Arcane History (2022) by R.F. Kuang, though it enthralled me for at least 300 pp. as no sf/f novel has been able to do for in decades, didn't quite carry me all the way to the end. I skimmed the final fifth (it's a long novel). Everything about Babel, from the issues of translations, which is part and parcel of our own household, to having one of the primary four characters as young Haitian woman speaking of the issues of her native Kreyol -- which in our own history has only in the last decade been recognized as a language, and which el V has learned -- language is a primary tool, like religion, for imperialists, is My Stuff. In other words, Babel is about something that authentically matters, historically and presently. However, the novel as a novel would have been better reading if about 100 pp. had been cut out. The plotting and characterization was good, but, and I know this sounds odd -- there was too much of both.  Or more accurately, the book repeated the points already made about the characters and their relationships, how hard they have to study, how overwhelming the amount of work, several times in every chapter, which wasn't necessary, and that felt rather amateurish.  But Babel certainly lived up to its title, and I gave the novel enormous credit for that. In the end all the figures we meet in this alternate history sf/fnal novel, wherever they are from or go, or what they do, are as incomprehensible to each other as the Old Testament humanity are to each other with the failure of their tower planned to allow them to conquer heaven.  No matter how much and deeply language was studied, whether to fuel exploitation of others as well as the planet, it dd not provide a solution to this, which brings violence always.  One understands this so well, living with pre-lingual children, their outrage and frustration that no matter how they try we don't understand what their issues are (so much of the time). In the end too, no matter how well planned the resistance to the colonial metropole's power is, in the end, centuries later, we are still waiting for the day of reckoning, Likely the ends of such empires and colonialisms only arrive with full out global calamities such as what happened in the 6th century, and then the consequent Dark Age births the nascent new colonialisms and slaveries. I am the one who said that, not Kuang. She's very young, and thus barely able to raise the fortitude to face squarely in her own novel her characters' specific failure to reverse the plundering of their language, culture and worlds to which they'd been born, before being plucked for Oxford's imperial translation college of Babel. The exception to being ripped out of one's own world and thrown into another is, of course, the white English gentry-small aristocrat girl, who, extremely gifted with language deploys her gifts to have a life different from that decreed for young women of her social status and wealth. 

Deepti Kapoor, author of Age of Vice

The second novel is Age of Vice (2023) by Deepti Kapoor, a great big gangster-thriller set in Northern India, and particularly, New Delhi. It's the first novel in years I have read to the very final word in order to find out who did what and why -- I'm not quite sure even so I have it figured out.  This too is a long novel, but I managed to gallop through it during four nights of reading (there's a lot of white space in a lot of sections, which helps).  This novel has received enthusiastic reviews for the most part, though some have said it is 1) too long; 2) melodramatic for the sake of melodrama, and implausible -- but the pace is so fast and the text goes downs so easily one hardly notices. Lee Child is among the pros who have enthusiastically endorsed it, and so has Marlon James. I do not know if Age of Vice is published in India.  The author lives in Portugal.

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Now, of for mid-season Mardi Gras Postmambo-"For the Funk of It" style, and much, much, MUCH else. Hope the weather cooperates despite much rain expected,  Back next month, to get ready for Spain.

Panipat (2019) -- Maratha Empire

     . . . . Last evening the school in which the course is situated had its usual faculty Wine Wednesday, but via Zoom. That was cheerful. 

Then it was dinner time. After clean-up I watched for a while an historical action film set in the 18th C Maratha Empire Hindustan, Panipat -- Great Betrayal (2019). Recall at the same time (1751) the East India Company is warring to take out the Mughal Empire on the other side of the subcontinent. That the Marathas took out the Nizam helped the Brits do that.  Around 1805, the EIC begins its war upon the Maratha and other Hindu kingdoms. We see some spectacular recreations of the famous Red Fort, among other striking visuals.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/movie-reviews/panipat/movie-review/72375755.cms

Ashutosh Gowariker’s magnum opus ‘Panipat’ is based on historical facts, taking some creative liberties along the way. Shadashivrao Bhau (Arjun Kapoor), is an able commander in his cousin Nanasaheb Peshwa’s (Mohnish Bahl) army. After a victorious battle against the Nizam of Udgir, Shadashivrao Bhau is chosen by the Maratha Peshwa to lead their army to Delhi. Ahmad Shah Abdali (Sanjay Dutt), the king of Afghanistan, has set his inroads into India after forming an alliance with Najib-Ud-Daula (Mantra) with the intention to defeat the Marathas and curb their expanding power....

.... ‘Panipat’ packs in a layered narrative that delves into the complex politics of the period, the intricate workings of war strategies versus might, negotiation dynamics and the importance of forming alliances. And it also weaves in the love story between Shadashivrao Bhau and Parvati Bai. In fact, the chemistry between Kriti Sanon and Arjun Kapoor as their love story develops, is one of the high points of the film. But with a run-time of close to three hours and the many characters and plot points the film touches upon it becomes a lengthy and at times, tedious watch...[but worth it, particularly for the spectacular final battle sequence]

There are spectacular dance numbers, and singing interludes, which these I don't care for generally and don't here either, though they too are spectacular. What I love are the dancing, the brilliant colors, that eye-popping palette, all that gold and truck loads of pearls, rubies and emeralds. So I watched that for a bit, before retiring, reading aloud, and not sleeping most of the night, filled with the stress of getting up at 6 AM for a supermarket shopping trip, without real gloves and mask.  But I do have my own Italian granny era wheeled shopping cart that has been leaning against a wall here unused for umpity years!

Edward the King (US) / Edward VII (UK). (1975). ATV. 13 episodes; 208 minutes approx.

     . . . . The" corpulent voluptuary," as Bertie - Edward VII (1841 - 1910) was called by Kipling,  reigned for only a short time. He was 59 when ascending to the throne. His mother didn't die until 1901, thus the odious toad, Queen Victoria, also dominates his biographical television series, based on the biography (1964) by Philip Magnus, just as she dominated his life.  She won't die until in the middle of the 10th episode.

Annette Crosbie, the actress ages the Queen subtly and yet visibly, in body, face, ex, egotistic monstrous royal that she was.  Prince Albert is equally so. Their terrible parenting created tragic consequences for at least a century of European history. This Vicky's not the adorable fairy princess of ITV's contemporary series, Victoria (2016 - ). For that matter, none of the figures of the endless 19th century are the gorgeous creatures they are in that series either. 

Lily Langtry in her iconic black dress; in ATV's Edward the Seventh she's blonde. Later the actress and  LL got their own tv series, Lillie, (1979).

The exception is Lily Langtry, reputedly one of the most beautiful women of her time, played by Francesca Annis, with an icy poise that doesn't really jibe with contemporary descriptions of this very successful stage performer who couldn't really act.  Though the portrait of Bertie here given is, at best, incomplete, the character is played with such flair by Timothy West that he effortlessly convinces the viewer that the prince is a very fine fellow indeed, whom history has unfairly estimated.  (It hasn't.)  He is played as as utterly charming, possessing a sweetness to his character that isn’t found in any other members of his family. 

The deep connections among the protestant 19th century’s ruling houses – Britain, the nordic and german states and reaching even into the imperial Russian family, despite their  Orthodoxy. Never allow conversion reluctance blockade entrée for familial European empire! We see war becoming inevitable, and the Russian Revolution too – the czar’s family for more than one generation have been living in a security prison made from terror of their own subjects and assassination. 

Edward VII provides a window into changing social attitudes within lifetimes. The view of Germans and Germany are deeply unattractive: rigid, cold, militaristic, poisoned by resentment and jealousy of the British royals.  In the early 1970’s hatred of Germany was still quite fresh in Britain, one thinks. Kaiser Wilhelm I is unhinged and terrifying – this is blamed on Bismark. The contemporary opulent preposterous that is the Victoria series also is much softer on the Germans (at least so far), particularly Albert the utterly loving and kind father -- utterly different from this one.

The problem with Edward VII is that Bertie is presented as a the most jovial, genial, socially skilled, nice all-around royal fellow who ever lived. There’s not a hint of his massive fecklessness with gambling debts, that he wouldn’t pay his other bills either,  frequently disappearing before the reckoning at a restaurant arrived, leaving others to pay his for his massive consumption of food and drink. There's no mention that he was as addicted to women as he was to gambling and food. No woman was safe from his sexual demands, whether an aristocrat or a kitchen maid, no matter her preference to not be humped and dumped a moment later by the royal whale.

The series also puffs up the very few things he ever did, which amount to greeting foreign heads of state, ribbon-cutting, and sitting on a couple of committees formed for matters such as a vague commitment to "improve the poor," making of this a vast enterprise that he administers with great skill, gravity and compassion. He’s also presented as a brilliant diplomat and far-seer in international affairs. This is undiluted bs, to put it honestly. Bertie couldn’t be bothered to interrupt changing his clothes seven times a day, drinking, eating, shooting, gambling and fornicating for anything like a semblance of real work. 

This Bertie, who had great talent and skill for ruling, who wasted by his nasty toad of a Queen Mother, is a false Bertie, despite the very real facts that his childhood was made a living hell by both his parents, and that Victoria was never going to share the spotlight with anyone.

However, the acting by all the cast provides a much closer sense to the periods the characters inhabit -- stiffly buttoned to a degree that one of course understands why Bertie so enjoys his select company of cronies.  It is via these aspects that this 1975 production presents a more accurate picture of the times than the two seasons so far of Victoria.  These actors, many of them very early in their careers in British television drama, do bring everyone to life.

The Imperious Drive

This last week Antipope's Charlie's Diary examined "Fantasy Shibbolths" here.

Earlier this month Charlie's Diary took on "Science Fiction Shibboliths" here.

In the course of both of these articles and the discussions of the subject matters that follow, empire, imperialism and colonialism were unavoidable topics.

Yet we get this silly article about SF/F in the LA Book Review here, that complains the person from part of the former UK empire is not employing the correct terms to talk about SF/F.  Both writers, the subject of the criticism and the critic, miss the really important points that writers of sf/f  such as Charlies don't.

Empire, above.

Empire, below.

Fantasizing that sf/f -- or any pop culture -- saves the world is alike to living in an imperialist theme park because the default of the field is always empire one way and another. It's impossible to argue that steampunk isn't about class and empire, though the field is to be applauded in fact on how many diversities of empire it can envision.

Which is why even an article about the #1 UK television baking show speaks of it in terms of the yearning for empire even in desserts and faux competition here (NY Times article so use one's paywall work-around of choice).

Quote:

It’s astonishing to think that not even a century ago, Britain was the largest, most effective and arguably the most brutal empire the world had ever seen — one of the fundamental political institutions that structured the entire world. This might explain why British national identity, such as it is, continues to manifest itself in signifiers left over from the days of Empire: gin, tea, cricket, flags, those wretched “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, all of them now zombified and divorced from their material basis. Their appeal is the dream of an endless summer of Pimm’s, bowls and thwarted romantic expectations on the lawn of a great country estate, as if this lifestyle could ever be made possible without the violent exploitation of around one-third of the population of the earth. Ten years ago, adorning oneself with these signifiers might have been considered a somewhat alternative statement. Since then, though, they’ve gained a great deal of popularity, to the point where they’re firmly established in the mainstream of middle-class culture in the British Isles.

For sf/f, telling doncha think, the author's use above of "zombified?

Which brings one to another new restaurant that has opened in the neighborhood, that largely and loudly beckons the truly non-historic consciousness of the young tourists in their deluded fantasy of finding NYC's historical golden past of of a hip and happening underground -- a cultural rebellion of the above ground fortunate --proclaims itself as serving up an authentic colonial Indian food experience (owned by recent immigrants from either Pakistan* or -- India). Is this a sign of the desperate times in which the underground, the vast majority of the world live, that the formerly colonialized too feel it necessary to mine the hip hip hooray above ground colonial golden past of empire, in order to survive in a new world.  Will we be seeing the Native populations of North America open theme park restaurants celebrating the fun and delicious era of the Trail of Tears?

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*  Here it has been noticed that often restaurants owned by people of Pakistani origin bill themselves as "Indian" because this designation is understood more easily by the young and the tourists who are honestly ignorant of both history and geography.

What the British Did During The Blitz

A new book declares the real beginning of the sexual revolution took place in England, with London the epicenter target of the Blitz.

Long article in The Daily Mail:

"Adapted from The Secret History Of The Blitz by Joshua Levine, to be published by Simon & Schuster in partnership with the Imperial War Museum on July 30 at £16.99."

The Blitz intensified sexual desire. A full two decades before the so-called permissive society of the Sixties, a dramatic, if understated, sexual revolution was already taking place — one which would, significantly, prove to be a forerunner of the mores by which Britons live today.

I Am A Bad Person + Poldark

For reasons unfathomable to mere mortals, the bare ankle has been a thing these last couple of years, summer and winter, for both male and female.

Having spend most of today, like yesterday, at a history conference on various matters of slavery in the Atlantic world I could not help but notice the Fashionable and Trendy hording upon on the streets and sidewalks, on a weekend, that if still quite cold, is at least sunny (or it was -- there are mutterings on AccuWeather of mixed snow and rain fall later). They are wearing, without sox, stiletto heeled boots, dazzling white $500 sneakers, rhinestone flatties, all kinds of very fine footwear. They also are all looking at their devices, talking, texting, whatever. Four times -- 4! -- I watched these fashionistas walk into the water gathered at most corners, filthy water from melted snow and ice and all kinds of stuff in it. The expressions of shock when that water went over their bare ankles was so amusing I laffed (though politely and hopefully inaudibly behind my gloved hand, of course). Splutters and swears, shrieks and screams, all of which I confess here to enjoying, very much.  I am a bad person, totally lacking in sympathy for my fellow women and men.  Nor do I give a gd. >g<

Now -- Poldark!

Tomorrow night begins the first episode on BBC1 of the remake of the 1970's Poldark series, which I had loved when amiga T and I would watch it in PBS re-runs on Wednesday nights. This one looks scrumptious -- see the trailer above.

Aidan Turner, the actor playing Ross Poldark, was the romantic male lead on the Brit Being Human, and he was why I watched the first two seasons.  Aidan Turner's character managed to be brooding in that dark moody romantic troubled soul way, and yet very charming and very funny too.  He might make a terrific Ross Poldark, though surely one very

different from the original BBC Ross, played by Robin Ellis -- who was also a very satisfactory period drama romantic male lead.

Among the elements that made this series, the original and this re-make, and the books on which they're based, so appealing to me, is that they take place during the Era of Revolution. This is the 1970's when neither British nor American movies and television had yet turned their backs from including any content in the scripted drama that commented on class and political - economic inequity.

The series begins with Ross coming back to Cornwall from America, where he fought for the King against the rebelling North American colonists.  He returns with sympathy for the rebels and revolutionary ideas about class and rank himself.  Recall, he's a Cornish man, not necessarily in sympathy with the King and the House of Lords.  The more I read in this era's history the more aware I am too of how tough the rank-and-file and poor had it in these times of war with France and Napoleon.  Everything was taxed, just for starters.

Being on the coast, as they are in Poldark, there has always been smuggling, doubtless even before the Romans invaded and conquered. But during these decades of war and taxes smuggling everywhere became the biggest business of all, other than army and navy matériel business.  As well, there were years of bad weather, in which crops failed, and business for everything dropped way down, as Europe was increasingly in chaos (though Napoleon as First Counsel, did manage to bring France back to order, including eradicating the bandits).  All of this is in Poldark.  Yum.

PBS, please bring this Poldark to the U.S. audience too!

Corporate Pillage and Power Supported By the State: The East India Company

In the Guardian's Long Read series, "The East India Company: The original corporate raiders," is excerpted from William Dalrymple's forthcoming book, The Anarchy: How a Corporation Replaced the Mughal Empire, 1756-1803, to be published next year.

One cannot but help recalling the English government, its enthusiasm to help fill the East India Company's empty coffers from the glut of India tea on the market, gave some big pushes to the North American colonies' rebellion and secession. (For a good description of this series of unfortunate events, particularly for New England, and especially Boston - Massachusetts, see Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge (2014).*

The pull from Dalrymple's The Anarchy concludes:

The 300-year-old question of how to cope with the power and perils of large multinational corporations remains today without a clear answer: it is not clear how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess. As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-2009 have so recently demonstrated, just as corporations can shape the destiny of nations, they can also drag down their economies. In all, US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets from January 2007 to September 2009. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 actually happened to Iceland in 2008-11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy. A powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in 1765. 

Corporate influence, with its fatal mix of power, money and unaccountability, is particularly potent and dangerous in frail states where corporations are insufficiently or ineffectually regulated, and where the purchasing power of a large company can outbid or overwhelm an underfunded government. This would seem to have been the case under the Congress government that ruled India until last year. Yet as we have seen in London, media organisations can still bend under the influence of corporations such as HSBC – while Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s boast about opening British embassies for the benefit of Chinese firms shows that the nexus between business and politics is as tight as it has ever been. 

The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current. 

I'm guessing (i.e.I do not know!) this first serial from Dalrymple's book was run so far ahead of publication due to the Guardian centering for weeks the HSBC scandal. It's also not a chunk just pulled from the book; it was edited and revised,

as the pulls in various publications from Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band: A Memoir aren't chunks of self-enclosed text, but revised as well.  First Serial excerpts often need a revision specifically for the specific publication in play, as most books aren't composed as stand-alone sections, and the length and focus for each publication is different.

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*  William Dalrymple  and Nick Bunker are two of my most admired and favorite independent scholar-writers -- meaning they both do splendid research, but they are also good writers as writers, which makes all the difference. 

UK Gun-running Lengthened the U.S. Civil War By Two Years

An article in the Independent captioned "Historians reveal secrets of UK gun-running which lengthened the American civil war by two years," by David Keys describes:

200 vessels were purpose-built or upgraded on Clydeside, in Liverpool or in London for the Confederate states – and hundreds of thousands of guns (including heavy artillery) were manufactured in Birmingham, Newcastle and near London for the Confederate Army.

This isn't news, really, at least not to American historians of the Civil War. However, what might be news to our friends in the UK,  is these vastly lucrative enterprises were entirely illegal.  Which is why our U.S. Navy was allowed to patrol the Channel, the upper Thames, and the surrounding coasts, particularly that of Scotland. They sunk many a CSA owned and operated vessel, particularly the privateers.  The British government did not protest, nor did the British navy attempt to engage the U.S. vessels.

Nor does blame-shifting to the UK change the facts that the responsibility for the continuation of the U.S. Civil War 1863-1864 through 1864 - 1865 was directly the responsibility of Jefferson Davis and his fire eaters. New Orleans had been lost, Vicksburg had been lost -- the control of the Mississippi was the Union's. Gettysburg had been lost -- no more opportunity to invade the North, and in most wars, a defensive war only is a losing war.  The CSA had no money, they had run run out of supplies to replace what they'd lost.  The UK had nothing to do with Sherman's March of 1864 after the loss of Atlanta and the last effective railroad.

This was click-bait to get readers to look at what is news --  marine archeology, which found CSA wrecks in the Thames, Channel and particularly around Scotland's coast.

This part of the article provoked very large smiles:

Three other Confederate wrecks around Britain’s coastline are the Iona
1, which collided with another ship and sank in the Clyde in 1862, the
Lellia, which went down in a storm off Liverpool with the loss of 47
lives in 1865, and the Matilda, which sank in dense fog in the Bristol
Channel in 1864.

The newly discovered main secret UK headquarters of the blockade-busting operation was a still extant mansion in the quiet and secluded
Stirlingshire village of Bridge of Allan. At any one time, it housed
around 10 Confederate agents who held their planning meetings there –
and used it as a base from which they could visit top shipbuilding
magnates and others on Clydeside and "test drive" vessels to assess
their speed.

Eliza Wigham, left, and Elizabeth Pease Nichol were leading lights in the Edinburgh Ladies' Emancipation Society. Link to more information about them here.

They seem to have located their headquarters in the countryside so as to avoid the attentions of the various detective agencies which had been appointed by the US Federal government to track them down.

However, their wish for rural anonymity did not prevent some of the southern agents from wearing “big hats and smoking large cigars” – key clueswhich, in early 1864, led the amateur sleuths of the anti-slavery Dundee Ladies’ Emancipation Society to realize who they were – and to inform the US consul in Dundee accordingly. After much pressure had been exerted by the US on the British Government, the exposure of the secret headquarters led a year later to the British preventing the export of a giant, potentially game-changing 130m armoured warship - and four other warships - to the Confederate Navy.

Warning: do not waste time, as I did, reading the comments to this article.  They are  filled with serious false information.  This includes insistance that the Mission to Saint James, who was Lincoln's choice, Charles F. Adams (father of Henry Adams, who has written extensively out of his experience as his father's private secretary in these matters), was run by somebody else -- as well as the inevitable revisionist correcting the author with the news that the U.S. Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, and all the other inevitable bs's of those ilks.

I also disagree with the author of this book quoted in the article, because he says things like this:

“It demonstrates that Britain’s neutrality was, in reality, a complete
sham,” said Dr Graham, the author of a major book on the Civil War
gun-runners, Clyde Built: The Blockade Runners of the American Civil War. 

If this was true, why were those Dundee Ladies' Emancipation Society so vigilant? Both Keys and Graham seem to  misses the point of their existence and their activities entirely.

That the UK's capitalists were more than willing to make a profit in every way they could manage out of the U.S. Civil War, well, that's not news or surprising.  Gunrunning is part of every war, and by golly, though I hate to say it, that includes a buncha northerners too. Slavery?  A war about it?  It'$ ju$t busine$$ to run guns, evade blockades and cheat on the very lucrative government contracts by providing shoddy goods, over-charging and all the rest.  I'm so sorry that both the CSA and the USA did it too.  So that France and the UK wanted to get them some of that, not a surprise at all.

Alas.

There is a terrific historical novel to be written in this.

History To Warm the Bones In the Cold and Gloom

The Weather They Sayers tell us though we're cold and dark now, very soon it shall be colder and darker, and maybe snowflakes. And I'm sick, which is not helping. That I spent 3 hours walking around with a friend in the wind and the cold yesterday probably did this to me. But I was enjoying being with her so much and walking around, I didn't even notice.  Last night I couldn't sleep for chills and sneezing and coughing, and my skin feeling too small. Thus it is great that el V's away because he wouldn't be able to sleep either, with all my tossing, turning, coughing, sneezing etc. Hopefully by tomorrow night when he gets back the worst of the symptoms will have abated.

In the meantime I've been reading in William Henry Seward's life and papers. There's an additional benefit to digging into Seward, which is learning more about the intricacies of New York state politics.  Seward was a politician from his very early 20's so this covers a lot of decades, including those decades of one odd political party after another sprouting to then disappear: Anti-Masons, Know Nothings -- o there were so many, and for every one of them,  New York state threw up voters who liked them.  Then, as now, New York state was a crazy quilt of competing regions with their own interests and objectives.  So yes, Seward, with the never-to-be-underestimated tutelage and sponsorship of Thurlow Weed, who, unlike Seward, was born impoverished and really did rise by his own efforts to dominate the New York political system.

Seward's other fascination is how he grows politically and socially throughout his career.  This is what strikes me about so many of the figures from what we can loosely call the North, who began taking our national center stage in the later 1840's and in 1850. They evolve.

Francis Adeline Miller Seward

Her father, Judge Elijah Miller, gave Seward permission to marry his daughter on the condition they live with him and his wife in their Auburn, New York mansion, amply staffed with servants

They are generally very close to their wives. They constantly talk to their wives and, when separated, write to their wives. The content of their conversations and letters go far beyond domestic matters.  They discuss deeply with their wives politics, issues, ways and means.  Often it is their wives' influence that convince these men who are very effective at creating political careers for themselves* that slavery is even more a moral issue than a political one of representation in the House and Senate and control of the White House. Many of them, like Seward, are not only anti-slavery, but they are early supporters of women's rights and particularly the right of women to vote.

You do not see any of this among southern politicians, even those whose wives are politically ambitious on behalf of their husbands, and very loyal, like Varina Davis.  Jefferson Davis, though he wrote to her, their matters of discussion were almost entirely domestic.  In other matters, there was no discussion at all. Jefferson Davis would would announce he was going to be away for a year in service of his career, and she was to take care of the plantation -- under the supervision of his brother.  Then they would fight about it all year because Varina hated him being away and she and her brother-in-law were rivals for Jefferson's attention.** Sometimes Jefferson would just stop writing to her, or she to him, or both to each other. The early years of their marriage were rocky, followed by more brief rocky periods -- and became so again for a while, late in life when Sarah Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy, and beautiful widow became his patron, willing him outright her Biloxi plantation, Beauvoir -- much to the disquiet of her relatives.

I've also been reading William Dalrymple's latest book, Return Of A King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839 - 42 (2013).  It's a cognitive exercise to wrench one's mind from the 1840's of the United States to the 1840's of the British Empire in India, Afghanistan and surrounding region. -- when the Great Game gets going, at least according to Peter Hopkirk.  Others have come around to thinking in terms of "the Great Game" is more useful to fiction than it is to historians.  Dalrymple isn't much interested in the concept as a concept.  He's interested in the failure of the East India Company and how it pulled British military and political failures in the region along with its own financial and administrative failures. This one does not have the snap and sizzle, the page-turning impetus, as his previous books,

particularly his splendid The White Mughals (2002).

When I finish with Seward I'm going to move on to a biography of Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (1997) who is a less likable figure than Seward.  However, the biography's author is the great Robert Remini, who owns the Jacksonian era.  As the scope of what he knows is so vast by the time he got around to writing separate works on John Q Adams, Webster and Clay, he is relaxed and sometime is very funny  -- on purpose, so I'm looking forward to that.

These are what help me forget how very very very very rotten I feel.

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*   Seward served variously as Senator in the New York legislature, Governor of New York, United States Senator from New York, and United States Secretary of State.

** The Polks (Tennessee and Mississippi) are an exception. They were a very close couple, who equally loved slavery and despised slaves, and were united in their ambition to get rich via slavery.  But they had no children, and maybe never even had sex due to an operation for urinary stones Polk suffered when very young, that seems to have left him both sterile and impotent -- or so his biographers seem to mostly agree.