History Archives - Page 10 of 12

Blessed Among Nations – Eric Rauchway

Published on April 26, 2009

Cover of Blessed Among Nations

Blessed Among Nations
Eric Rauchway
240 pages including index
published in 2006

The main reason I picked up this book from the Amsterdam library was because I recognised Eric Rauchway’s name; a quick google confirmed that this was the same Eric Rauchway who writes on The Edge of the American West, an excellent history orientated groupblog. It’s always nice to see somebody who can write clever blogposts is able to sustain that cleverness over the length of a book, as Rauchway did here. It’s even better if it’s done in a book I actually would want to read anyway, of course.

Blessed Among Nations is an examination of “American exceptionalism”, the idea that America as a country is different from other countries in more than the trivial way in which every country differs from every other country. In several ways the United States differ from its peers in Western Europe. It is the largest economy in the world, but depends on investment of foreign labor and capital to keep its economy running. It spent much less on social welfare than other rich countries, its government is somewhat less centralised as well and finally there has never been the kind of broad mass socialist or social democrat movement in the US as there has been in Europe. What Rauchway wants to do in his book is to explain these differences without either explaining them away or falling in the trap that America is special, unbound by rules that govern lesser nations.

The explenation Rauchway reaches is contained in the subtitle of the book: How the World Made America. He argues that the foundation for modern post-world war America was laid in the period between the Civil War and World War I, during the first era of globalisation. During this era America was a favourite destination of both labour and capital, the first in the shape of mass immigration from Europe, the second through investments made by British investers. America was far away enough from Europe not to be sucked into the great power conflicts there but near enough through new technology like the telegraph and the steamship to be integrated in the worldwide capitalist system. What’s more, America could make do with a relatively small army and navy as it could shelter behind the might of the Royal Navy as Britain kept the oceans free for their own purposes, while its expension westwards brought the country into conflict with mainly military inferior opponents.

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

Published on April 13, 2009

Cover of The Iron Wall

The Iron Wall
Avi Shlaim
670 pages including index
published in 2000

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli/British historian, one of a generation of revisionist historians who from the 1980s started tearing down the foundation myths of the state of Israel. History always has political undertones and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel, which after all justifies its existence with the historical claim of the Jewish people on the lands of Palestine, as developed through zionist ideology. With the succesful establishment of Israel as a Jewish state came a set of founding myths and in the first decades after independence Israeli historians by and large confirmed rather than challenged those myths. In the eighties this changed, as new historians started re-examining those core assumptions. Unlike the earlier generation, people like Avi Shlaim had not had the same personal experience and direct involvement in the foundation of Israel and its wars and could look more objectively on the facts rather than let ideology steer their interpretations.

In The Iron Wall – Israel and the Arab World Avi Shlaim takes aim at Israel’s foreign policy concerning its immediate neighbours. It’s a big book, tracing the evolution of Israel’s approach to the Arab countries from its struggle for independence up to 1998 and the failure of the Oslo peace process. The title of the book comes from two 1923 essays by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader and according to Shlaim, “spiritual father of the Israeli right”. In these essays Jabotinsky set out the possibilities for dealing with the socalled “Arab problem” and coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to continue the settlement efforts “under protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”.

Byzantium — Judith Herrin

Published on March 15, 2009

Cover of Byzantium

Byzantium
Judith Herrin
392 pages including index
published in 2008

In her introduction Judith Herrin explains she was inspired to write this book by a conversation she had with two workmen knocking on her office door. They had been doing repairs on the building in King’s College where she worked and noticed the sign on her office: “Professor of Byzantine History” and were interested enough to ask what this meant. As she puts it, she found herself “trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots”. From their suggestion that she should write a book explaining Byzantium to people like (or me, for that matter) who knew little if anything about the subject, this book arose. Byzantium — The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is an attempt to explain more than a thousand years of Byzantine history, as well as the many facets of this history.

It sounded like the perfect book to read, now that I had temporarily exhausted my library’s stock of interesting looking books on Roman history. Byzantium was after all a clear succesor to Rome, I knew little about it and Herrin’s book easily passed the page 37 test. She isn’t a historian I was aware of before, but with Byzantium she’s become one of the names I’ll pay attention to when looking for new books, no matter the subject. She manages to write a good introduction to a complex subject without talking down to the reader.

A Savage War of Peace — Alistair Horne

Published on January 25, 2009

Cover of A Savage War of Peace

A Savage War of Peace
Alistair Horne
604 pages including index
published in 1977

Remember how the White House a few years ago, in one of their periodic attempts at convincing the rest of the world George Bush is not a complete moron, released a list of books supposedly read by him in the past year? One of the books on the list was this, A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne’s history of the Algerian struggle for independence from France. What’s more, the same book was also reported to be widely read in the US army occupying Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an attempt to understand the enterprise they were engaging in. This isn’t necessarily a recommendation of course; another much read book in the US army is that piece of pseudoscientific racism, The Arab Mind. A sort of mixed bag of recommendations then: this is clearly an important book in that it seems to have shaped the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but does this make this a good book?

Fortunately, it does. Had Bush read this book in 2002 before the War on Iraq, and had he been able to actually understand what he read, he may have actually decided against the invasion. Everything that happened in Iraq is described here, every mistake and failed strategy the Americans would use, written down twentyfive years before the war even started. No wonder various army generals studied it so vidly. Colonial wars follow certain patterns it seems and what happened in Algeria in 1954-62 can be used as a guide to Iraq forty years later.

Britain’s Gulag — Caroline Elkins

Published on August 3, 2008

Cover of Britain's Gulag

Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
475 pages including index
published in 2005

Before Tom Wolfe used “Mau Mauing” to describe the ways in which well meaning, white government officials where cheated out of welfare money through racial intimidation, Mau Mau was synonymous with a much greater terror. Mau Mau was the stuff of white colonialist nightmares: a freakish native cult of criminals and gangsters that savagely attacked innocent white settlers in their very homes, killing them and their families, mutilating their bodies. Sure, these people said they were freedom fighters, but you couldn’t take this claim seriously. Everybody who mattered knew Kenya wasn’t ripe at all for independence, that only the poison the Mau Mau spread through their pagan rites would cause the natives to question the benevolence of the British civilising mission in the country. Britain was therefore justified to use harsh measures to suppress this savagery and fortunately managed to do so, protecting the white settlers and loyal natives and crush the rebels, though it took them eight years, from 1952 to 1960 to do so.

That’s the myth of Mau Mau. The reality as Caroline Ekins describes in Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya is far different. There were incidents of Mau Mau savagery, but the British and settler response to it was much greater and was systematic, not incidental. It was under the Kikuyu of central Kenya, the most populous of the ethnic groups in Kenya and the group with the greatest grievances against British rule, as much of their land had been appropriated for white settlers that the Mau Mau rebellion was the most widespread, therefore the British did to the Kikuyu roughly what the Germans did to the Polish during World War II. The nazi plan for Poland had been to destroy its population as a people by murdering its intellectual elite, remove it from all the best parts of the country and herd the rest into the wastelands to serve as uneducated slave labour, with any resistance brutally put down. What the British did to the Kikuyu in Kenya was not quite as bad, but it came awfully close. It was motivated by security concerns rather than deliberate planning, but the endresult was still that less than fifteen years after World War II the British in Kenya had recreated much of the nazi system in dealing with the Kikuyu’s struggle for freedom.