History

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.

The Later Roman Empire — Averil Cameron

Published on July 13, 2008

Cover of The Later Roman Empire

The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
238 pages including index
published in 1993

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of my booklog, is that I’ve developed a mild obsession with Late Antiquity and the Roman Empire, fueled by the two excellent books I got out of the library last year, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome. Before that I’d only read about Rome in a few history lessons at school, a couple of popular history books for kids and a shedload of Asterix comics, all of which emphasised the early days of Rome, up until Caesar and Augustus, with perhaps a bit of Nero thrown in. Everything after the first century CE was largely ignored or at best only mentioned briefly; the later centuries of the Roman Empire are seen as an afterthought, a long slide into barbarism ala Edward Gibbon.

Yet if you start reading more academic treatments of Roman history, you soon discover that this view has long been abandonded, ever since the publication of Peter Brown’s The World of Late antiquity in 1971. That was the first popular book to do away with the idea of the dark ages, re-emphasising the continuity between the Christianised empire of the third century CE and the Early Middle Ages, as well as the continuing survival of the Eastern Empire centered around Byzantium, as opposed to the Western Empire’s breakup. Averil Cameron’s The Later Roman Empire is one product of this re-emphasis. Published in 1993 as a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World, it shows that the view put forth by Peter Brown has won mainstream acceptance. It is meant as a standard textbook on the late Roman Empire, because none such was yet written in English, as the preface explains.

As a textbook The Later Roman Empire gives a largely chronological overview of the late Roman Empire, starting with the rule of Diocletian in 284 CE and ending with Theodosius, the last emperor to rule both the Western and the Easterns halves of the Roman Empire. This is largely a political and military history, with the emphasis on how the Roman state survived the turmoils of the third century and consolidated itself in the early fourth century and subsequent rise of Byzantium as alternative power centre to Rome. One important aspect of this evolution is the relationship between the Roman state and Christianity, which from the time of Constantine became the official state religion. This had of course an incredible impact on the further development of the empire, both strenghten it, giving it more cohesion, but also leading to dangerous rifts due to the differences in doctrine between the various streams of Christianity in existence then. The last few chapters abandon the chronological approach for a look at the late empire in general, examining its economy, society, culture and the way the army was changing in coming to terms with the threat of barbarian invasion. Again, the role of Christianity is given special attention in these chapters.

What Averil Cameron attempts to show in this book is the continuity of the Roman Empire, both in the problems engulfing it in the third century, as in the ways it survived into the fourth and fifth century CE, and even after it had officially fallen. In sketching her view of the fourth century, Cameron shows both, as she puts it, “the resilience of the Roman imperial systems and the inertia of pre-modern society. If she shows that many of the supposedly unique problems of the late Roman Empire had been present much earlier, she also shows the failure of the Empire to deal with them: it manages to survive and consilidate, but it’s a precarious survival and it only takes a bad run of luck for the western empire to largely be destroyed at the end of the fourth century. At the same time, she continues to emphasise the ways in which major portions of the empire did survive and indeed thrive in the east.

The Later Roman Empire gives a good overview of a period of history I until recently knew little about, but I have to admit it was a little bit too dry for me. This is partially due to the attention paid to Christianity and its response to the changes in the world surrounding it, it’s adaptation to becoming a state religion and the various crisises it underwent during this adaptation. It’s not a subject that interests me greatly to be honest, but it is central to this book. It made for some difficult reading at times, but on the whole this was another interesting look at the late Roman Empire.

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea — Ernle Bradford

Published on June 2, 2008

Cover of Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea

Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea
Ernle Bradford
574 pages including index
published in 1971

I read Ernle Bradford’s book on the 1565 Ottoman siege of Malta, The Great Siege, some four years ago and enjoyed Bradford’s obvious enthusiasm and interest in the subject, though at times he made the siege sound a bit too much like a boy’s adventure. Other people seem to like it too, as not a week goes by without recieving hits on the review of it I did back. Apart from The Great Siege however I’ve never seen any other Ernle Bradford book, until Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea caught my eye on the Amsterdam library’s shelves two weeks ago. Bradford did a great job with his book on the siege of Malta, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he would do with a slightly bigger subject.

And subjects don’t come much bigger than this: the complete story of the Mediterranean, one of the most important areas in human history, from the earliest beginning to the present day. As the subtitle indicates, Bradford isn’t interested as much in the history of the various countries and empires that have bordered the Mediterranean, as he is in the sea itself. He focuses therefore on the ebb and flow of human exploration of the Mediterranean, on how the traderoutes through it were established and fought over, on the maritine empires that were established on it, on how their domination of the sea led succesive empires to rule the countries surrounding it.

Wehrmacht – Wolfram Wette

Published on March 3, 2008

Cover of Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
Wolfram Wette
372 pages including index
published in 2002

One of the enduring myths of World War 2 is the idea that the crimes committed by nazi Germany were the work of a relatively small number of villains with the vast majority of the German population either being their victims or just trying to make the best of a bad situation or to do their duty to their country. More specially this myth lives on in the idea that while the Waffen SS was a criminal organisation responsible for uncounted numbers of warcrimes, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s most important military organisation, had relatively clean hands. With tens of millions of German men having served in the Wehrmacht during World War 2 it is no surprise that this myth came into being. Far easier to believe you were the innocent dupe of Hitler than to acknowledge that you may just be a fellow criminal. What’s strange is that this idea is believed not just in Germany, but throughout Western Europe and America. If like me you’re interested in military history, you sooner or later come across military enthusiasts extolling the martial virtues of the Wehrmacht, without much consideration of the context in which they fought.

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality was written to explode this myth and explain how and why it came into being. Its author, Wolfram Wette, is a German historian who’s made his speciality in researching Germany’s history of militarism. Until 1995 he worked for the official German institute for military history research, where he worked on Germany’s official history of World War 2, which should lend considerable weight to this book. This is no firebrand outsider courting controversy with a perhaps overstated sensationalist thesis (as with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners), but a distinguished senior historian attempting to put an generally accepted truth before the general public.

The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marschall Lang

Published on February 16, 2008

Cover of The Peoples of the Hills

The Peoples of the Hills
Charles Burney,
David Marshall Lang
324 pages including index
published in 1971

I picked up The Peoples of the Hills because I wanted to know more about the history of the caucasus in general and Armenia in particular, mainly because Doug of Halfway Down the Danube had been blogging about his being stationed there. He had been posting about some of Armenia’s history and it seemed interesting. Since I knew next to nothing about any of the history, espcially the early history of Armenia, Georgia and the Caucasus, The Peoples of the Hills seemed a good start.

Unfortunately however it disappointed. For a start, I didn’t realise how dated it was, having originally been written in 1971 and reprinted for the History of Civilization series published by Phoenix Press. Not that there was much choice in the library I picked this up: it was this or nothing. In thirty years a lot can change and I’ve found that on the whole more modern history books are preferable to older ones (this is not an absolute rule of course). But what also disappointed me was the writing itself. This is, unfortunately, a very dull book, full of facts but lacking sparkle.