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Charlemagne — Rosamond McKitterick

Published on March 13, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Charlemagne

Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008

I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.

Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.

Charlemagne is divided into five chapters. In the first McKitterick tackles the problem of how Charlemagne has been represented in late eight century and early ninth century sources, like the Annales regni francorum produced during his lifetime and revised shortly after, as well as purely posthumous sources like the Vita Karoli. The largest problem with these sources is of course the dating of them, which is far from easy; obviously it makes a difference if a source is truly contemporary or written several decades after his reign, with memories having become unreliable in the meantime and political useful interpretations of it having been developed…

The second chapter: Poppinids, Arnulfings and Agilolfings: the creation of a dynasty, is the closest this book comes to a narrative history as McKitterick gives a short overview of the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and Charlemagne’s own rise to the throne, first as ruler together with his brother Carloman, then on his own. The assumption underlying much of Carolingian history is that Charlemagne had fallen out with his brother at some point, but as McKitterick shows, this is actually not easy to prove using contemporary sources. From there on, she moves on to Charlemagne’s own succession as well as the growth of the empire during his lifetime.

The third chapter introduces another important aspect of Carolingian history where the orthodox interpretation might not quite be in synch with what can actually be deducted from the historical documents available: the royal court. She first looks at the representations of the court in various types of texts, then at what we might be able to conclude from these, in the context of whether the image of Charlemagne’s court as an itinerant one, travelling with the king between palaces, is actually correct. She also looks at Charlemagne’s own travels, the political and diplomatic space in which he operated and on a more meta level, at the survival and redaction of royal charters and what information these can give us.

The fourth chapter builds on this, examing the king’s own communications both within and outside the empire and what they reveal about the Carolingan political identity and programme, if there was such a thing. This and chapter five, looking at the religious aspects and ideology of Charlemagne, were the hardest chapters to finish, as McKitterick’s analys of the primary documents on these subjects is somewhat less than gripping, to be honest.

On the whole Charlemagne wasn’t quite the history book I was looking for, but it is obviously a valuable contribution to Carolingan studies.

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company — Wil O. Dijk

Published on February 25, 2012Leave a comment

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Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

It’s not for lack of sources that this subject has been neglected for so long: the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) archives are largely complete and extensive, recognised as long ago as 1939 by D. G. E. Hall of being a rich source of informaetion of the VOC’s trade with Burma. It’s this data that forms the basis for this book, painstakingly gathered by Wil O. Dijk for her dissertation. This is the sort of tedious, labour intensive research that’s sometimes dismissed as beancounting by more trendy historians, but which is essential as a foundation for further research. It does perhaps make Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 somewhat dry at times therefore, but that can’t be helped.

The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602 as a monopoly for the Dutch trade with Asia. Its mission was to exploit the trade potential there to establish itself in the lucerative spices trade with Europe and to muscle out the enemy, Spain and Portugal. In this early stage it was not yet the colonising power it would become in later centuries, depending more on intra-Asian trade to finance the spice trade, which is where Burma came in. Burma was both a place where the VOC could sell (e.g. clothes and textiles from India) and buy (gold, long peppers, tin, rice, various kinds of wood) and make a profit at both ends. What’s more, getting into the Burmese trade would also win one over the Portuguese, who had been in the Gulf of Bengal for decades. In fact, one Portuguese adventurer had carved out its own kingdom in Burma, but came to a sharp end and was impaled, once this kingdom was reconquered by the Burmese.

The Burmese trade promised rich rewards to the VOC, but trade was never straightforward. The kingdom of Pegu, as the VOC knew it, was ruled by strong kings who kept trade restricted and who at all times were concerned about the stability of their own power, determined not to undermine e.g. the royal monopoly on rubies. They kept prices for import goods artificially low, prices for export products high, quantities of many goods restricted and on the whole the VOC was very much dependent on the sometimes arbitary decisions of the Burmese king.

Which is why it was hesitant at first to get into Burma, despite its rich potential, as it could not be certain of steady, year on profits. After the first few hesitant years though this worry was no longer a concern and while the trade did decline somewhat in later years, it wasn’t this that got the VOC to withdraw in 1680, but more the increased competition of other European (and other) trading companies and more importantly, its own internal restructuring. In the later part of the seventeenth century the VOC more and more focused on the direct trade with Europe, rather than the intra-Asian trade, starting to become a true colonial power with imperial holdings in Indonesia and the Spice Islands. While the Burma trade was very profitable, it no longer fitted its strategy, so it was abandoned. Some halfhearted attempts would be made a few decades later to reopen it, but this came to nothing.

When I normally think about the VOC and Dutch exploration in Asia, the picture I get is one of imperialism and colonalisation, with the native civilisations as the inferior, exploited party. But what Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 shows is a situation in which the Burmese, far from inferior, are actually the superior power, with the VOC as just one of many trading parties, neither particularly welcome, nor particularly feared, quickly replaced by others once it upped sticks. The Burma trade for a few decades was very important to the VOC, but the VOC was never all that important to Burmese trading…

So all in all, Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 does well both in sketching what these five-six decades of Dutch-Burmese trade looked like, its impact on VOC and Burma both and in presenting the data that support these conclusions.

African Trilogy — Alan Moorehead

Published on February 5, 2012Leave a comment

cover of African Trilogy

Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa
Alan Moorehead
642 pages including index
published in 1941, 1943,1943, compilation 1945

If journalism is history as first draft, then these three books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa; published in one volume as African Trilogy are history as second draft. Written while the Second World War was still ongoing, each of these books tell the story of one year of war in the desert, as seen by one of the preeminent war correspondents of the era. Written largely without the benefit of hindsight, from the notes that Moorehead took at the time, these three books together not only provide an interesting look at an important period in World War II, which England largely had to fight on its own, but also at how people at the time thought about the war, when the outcome was by no means certain yet.

If you’ve heard of Alan Moorehead, it’s probably for his post-war books on the exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Daily Express, following the war in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the war in Italy. As becomes clear from reading these three volumes, Moorehead wasn’t one of those journalists content to stay at headquarters, but went chasing down the front whenever he could. Some of the incidents here certainly read like Boy’s Own Adventures stuff, several times barely escaping running into the enemy at several moments. Moorehead is a born raconteur, aimable, slightly understated, though with some of the attitudes and language use of the time that might seem strange to modern readers.

Mediterranean Front is the story of the first year of war in the desert, from 1940 to 1941, at time when the UK stood alone against Germany, and in the Middle East, Italy. Italy had only declared war on England in June of 1940, had overwhelming numerical superiority over the British and Commonwealth forces and was poised to overrun not just Egypt from Libya, but also much of the British Empire in East Africa from Italian Somalia and Ethiopia. For obvious reasons, there wasn’t much chance of reinforcement from home, nor was the equipment available first rate. Despite this, never in Moorehead’s account do you get a feeling of despair or that the troops were particularly worried. Concerned yes and the commanders certainly were aware of their limitations, but they come over as determined to overcome these without being reckless.

In that first year of battle the see-saw nature of war in the Western Desert already is clear. The Italians are the first to go on the offensive, get into Egypt but can’t go further, a smart counteroffensive by Wavell manages not only to get them out of Egypt, but overruns most of Italian Libya, but in turn can’t quite get to Tripoli. This gave the Germans the chance to come to the aid of their allies and in turn they drove back the British and Commenwealth forces. This pattern would last throughout the war in the desert, up until the Allied landings in French North Africa broke the deadlock.

In that first year of battle the British had more to deal with than just the Western Desert. There’s the struggle in East Africa, the British occupation of French ruled Syria that concludes the first volume, a pro-Axis coup in Iraq and most importantly, the British expedition to support Greece in its defence against the Italians, which goes disastrously wrong. Moorehead is there for most of these secondary campaigns, following them for longer or shorter times, making an effort to show how they influenced the main effort in Libya and Egypt.

But he always returns to the Western Desert, as in the second volume, a Year of Battle, which starts with the joint British-Russian takeover of Persia/Iran, which Moorehead witnesses from nearby. The struggle in the second year of desert warfare is simpler, as with the British failure in Greece and success in East Africa, Syria and Persia only the Western Desert remains as an active theatre. This time it’s the British who have the succesful offensive only to run out of steam and the Africa Korps who manages to successfully counter and overrun almost all British defences, including Tobruk. Again, despite the seriousness of the situation Moorehead shows no despair on the side of the British, though there is panic as the Germans seem poised to take Alexandria and Cairo. Since this book too was published during the war, you do wonder briefly how much here has been (self) censored, but Moorehead seems remarkably honest about the mistakes and faults of the British and their commanders.

Moorehead is no longer in the desert at the start of the third book, having left the Middle East behind for some assignments in America, missing the start of the invasion but making use of this to sail to Africa with an escort to a convoy. Once in Africa, he has to split his time between the First Army moving up from North Africa into Tunesia and the Eight Army doing the same from Egypt. He does this well, slighting neither even if the Eight is still his favourite.

The three books of the African Trilogy obviously do not tell the whole story of this part of World War II, but it’s as close a look at it as you can get from any historian. Moorehead was often close to the battles he writes about and it shows.

Ivan’s War — Catherine Merridale

Published on January 25, 20121 Comment

Cover of Ivan's War

Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005

Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.

So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.

But, as she makes clear, there are some unique difficulties in writing such a book about Soviet soldiers. Our own western view of World War II may have its distortions, but there never quite was a systemic effort to bring it in line with government ideology, to proof the legitimacy of an entire way of life, which is what happened in Russia. From the start of the war certain embarassing truths have been airbrushed away and have only been open for discussion in the last few decades and even then it’s controversial. Many of the veterans themselves have completely embraced the idea of WWII as the Great Patriotic War, with everybody standing firm behind Stalin. The realities of their wartime experiences has often been replaced by this much more comforting myth.

The reality was of course that the Soviet Union was completely unprepared for the German attack, struggled for a long time to come up with the right strategies and tactics to stop and defeat the nazis, that Stalin like Hitler would later send hundreds of thousands of hard to replace soldiers to death or captivity by ordering them to defend the indefensible. The lifes of ordinary soldiers never was a real consideration in the general staff’s plans, while equipment and weaponry was often lacking, especially in the early years with the USSR still on the defence.

The average soldier and officer both therefore had a much harsher time of it then their western or even German counterparts. He or she — because many more women fought in the Russian armed forced than they did in any other army — didn’t often even have the comfort of the company of friends and comrades, because the casuality rate was so high that the sort of close knit platoons familiar from Hollywood war movies rarely could happen. It’s no wonder therefore that many veterans after the war rather believed the governmentally ordained myths than their own realities, especially after the war receded further and further into memory.

Ivan’s War is a good corrective to the standard, German inspired view of the war on the East Front of technologically superior nazi superwarriors against overwhelming Asiatic hordes of barbaric soldiers who knew no pain or fear winning the war just through sheer numerical weight. It gives the Soviet soldier a face, an identity other than that of the enemy that first the nazis and then our own Cold War ideology wanted to reduce him to.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 — Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools

Published on January 21, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
395 pages including index
published in 2007

Everything the authors tried to achieve with this book is in the title, but whether they succeeded is another question. Based on a massive research project that was carried out between 1999 and 2002, what the book was intended to be was a comparative study of two roughly similar countries in a period critical to Early Modern European history, to determine the impact of war both on society and the (semi-modern) state. As the authors argue, both England and the Netherlands (meaning what we would now call the Low Countries) were sort of outliers in Europe, neither quite fitting in “conventional narratives of the growth of state power”, not as centralised as other countries and with a greater level of democracy. For English historians, an added advantage of this comparison is that it puts England back into an European context by showing the simularities and differences between the two countries’ experiences.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is impressive and interesting but what it lacks is that comparative aspect that the title and introduction promises. It’s more a parallel than a comparative history, with developments in the two countries looked at side by side. So you’d have a section on the defence of towns looking first at how English towns dealt with fortifications, then at how Dutch towns did the same, but nothing much on how they differed or why they did. This lack of analysis wasn’t that big a problem for me personally because I found the subject interesting enough already.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded had this been concerned only about the Netherlands, as this particular period is just so much more interesting in Dutch/Belgian history than it is in English history, what with those boring Tudors and all. At the start of the period the Netherlands are still very much a collection of countries under the shadow of Burgundy; at the end of the period it’s unified under the Hapsburgs, mostly during the reign of Charles V. Yet the Netherlands remained a patchwork of principalities and overlapping loyalties with counts, provinces and even cities making their own policies, like Holland sending naval forces to the Baltic to protect its trade there on several occasions, with no regard for wider Hapsburg concerns…

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is divided in five parts, with a short introduction and shorter conclusion making two parts and the heft of the book being the three middle parts: towns at war, nobles at war and subjects at war. Each is build up in roughly the same way, with an introduction, at look at the resources towns, nobles or subjects have to bring to war, moving on to how each groups experiences war, how war influences each group’s identity and finally a short conclusion/summing up. It’s all written very well and concisely, with plenty of interesting examples and anecdotes. Despite three authors, there are no real differences in the writing styles between the chapters. As said, each part and each section and subsection in each part deals with both the English and the Dutch experiences; for the most part the Netherlands sections are richer in detail and more interesting.

This book is worth reading just for those details, for the portrait it sketches of an interesting period in Netherlands history, and to a lesser extent, in English history. It doesn’t quite live up to its title, but it’s worthwhile nonetheless.