If you’re looking for a chronological history of the Roman Empire, or an account of the military campaigns and battles which led to its territorial expansion, or an account of the organisation and administration of the Roman army, during either the republican or imperial eras, forget it. None of that is in this book.
Beard’s interest is in exploring themes or aspects of Roman social, cultural and political history. Hence, although the final chapter in SPQR is devoted to ‘Rome Outside Rome’ i.e. the wider Roman empire, it is nothing like a chronological history of the empire, or of the wars of conquest and putting down of rebellions which consolidated it, or a really thorough examination of Rome’s administrative bureaucracy. Instead it is an entertainingly meandering essay which considers some selected aspects of Roman rule beyond Italy. Beard starts the chapter, as usual, with a flurry of academic questions:
how were the cultural differences across the empire debated?
how ‘Roman’ did the empire’s inhabitants outside Rome and Italy become?
how did people in the provinces relate their traditions, religions, languages and literatures to those of imperial Rome, and vice versa?
Beard uses biographies of Roman administrators such as Pliny the Younger (61 to 113 AD), touches on the Roman attitude to religion – especially the troublesome new religion of Christianity – uses Hadrian’s Wall as an example of the limits of empire, and generally delves into other topics which take her fancy.
So, as a reader, as soon as you abandon any hope of getting a thorough or even basic chronological overview of the main events of the wider Roman empire, and settle down for a chatty meander through some selected aspects of a fascinating subject, then Beard is an enjoyable and informative guide.
The limits of imperial expansion
Augustus called a halt to the expansion of imperial Rome following the disastrous Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD in which Publius Quinctilius Varus lost three legions massacred by barbarian Germans led by Arminius (p.480). Fascinatingly, Beard tells us that Augustus had fully intended to extend Roman power into Germany, and had begun construction of a town at Waldgirmes, 60 miles east of the Rhine, complete with forum, statue of the emperor and all the trimmings. After Teutoburg he ordered all building work abandoned and withdrawal of all Roman forces to the Rhine and in his will instructed his successors not to extend the empire.
But they did. Claudius sent legions to conquer Britannia, which they’d seized enough of by 44 AD to justify Claudius awarding himself a triumph, although the Romans took a long time to extend their power right up to the border with Hibernia. In the east, in 101 to 102 Trajan conquered Dacia, part of what is now Romania and in 114 to 117 invaded Mesopotamia to the borders of modern Iran.
Emperors less competitive than consuls
But overall the pace of territorial acquisition slowed right down. Beard makes the interesting point that this was at least in part because under the Republic you had two consuls who competed with each other for military glory, rising to the epic rivalry between Julius Caesar, busy making a name for himself conquering Gaul in the West, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey, redrawing the map of the Roman East.
By contrast, the emperors had no rivals and no-one to beat. Their only rivals were the previous emperors so they could take their time, make a few strategic ‘conquests’, award themselves a nice triumph and relax. Most of the wars of the first 200 years of empire were against internal rebellions or border skirmishes.
Governor Pliny in Bithynia
Slowly the focus of administrators and emperors switched from conquest to good administration. It’s to examine this that Beard gives the example of Pliny the Younger who in 109 was sent to become governor of the province of Bithynia along the southern coast of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey. Next to Cicero Pliny is one of the most knowable ancient Romans because of the 100 or so letters he sent directly to the emperor Trajan, reporting back on all aspects of Roman administration, from taxes to statues, to the nitty gritty of local legal cases.
What the Romans wanted was peaceful administration, avoidance of flagrant examples of corruption, good regular supplies of taxes. They made little or no attempt to impose their own cultural norms or eradicate local traditions. Instead the East, in particular, remained a mostly Greek-speaking fantasia of different religions, gods, festivals, dress, traditions and so on.
Small number of imperial administrators
In a striking similarity to the British Empire, Beard tells us the number of imperial administrators was vanishingly small: across the empire at any one time there were probably fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators running an empire of more than 50 million subjects (p.490). So how was the empire managed?
1. The most obvious answer is the substantial Roman legions posted around the borders of the empire and Beard mentions the insight we have into one such garrison from the amazing discoveries which have been made at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall.
2. Building new settlements was another strategy. In the north and west in particular the building of Roman settlements on the classic, standardised Roman town layout was one of the most enduring legacies of empire. Roman policy resulted in ‘urbanisation on an unprecedented scale’ (p.492).
3. Also, just like the British, French and other European empires 1,800 years later, the Romans co-opted the local elites. Local rulers who came over to Rome were awarded formal titles, new Roman names, rights and privileges. They took to wearing the toga, they sent their children to Roman schools to learn Latin, rhetoric and civics. Over generations these became embedded and Romanised elites did the work of ensuring peace and lack of rebellions among their subjects.
The 1st century efflorescence of Greek literature
In the East, the Greeks didn’t need to take any lessons in ‘civilisation’ from the Romans and no Roman would have dared suggest it. Nonetheless, Beard points out that the early imperial period saw an extraordinary florescence of Greek literature, much of it addressing, skirting, questioning the impact of Roman hegemony on the Greek world. In a striking example, she tells us that the output of just one Greek writer of this period, biographer and philosopher Plutarch (46 to 119 AD) fills as many modern pages as all the surviving literature from the 5th century BC put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the histories of Thucydides (p.500).
Three typical rebellions
Surprisingly, maybe, there were only a handful of major rebellions against Roman rule in the first century (although it may be that these were under-reported, as both regional governors and emperors weren’t keen to record dissent).
Anyway, Beard makes the interesting point that the three major rebellions we know about weren’t standalone nationalist uprisings of the kind we’re familiar with from the end of the modern European empires. In the three biggest instances they were not popular uprisings but rebellions by members of the collaborating class felt they had, for one reason or another, been badly treated by their Roman allies.
1. Thus the leader of the German forces in the Teutoburg Forest, Arminius, was a solid ally of Rome and personal friend of the general whose forces he massacred. Modern thinking has it that Arminius was a rival for leadership of his tribe, the Cherusci, with his brother, Segeste. When a revolt began among the auxiliary troops for an unknown reason, it may be that Arminius thought he stood more chance of becoming paramount leader of his people by betraying his Roman allies (and brother) and it seems to have worked.
2. In Britannia, Queen Boadicea or Boudicca rebelled after terrible treatment by the Romans. When her husband Prasutagus died he left half his tribal kingdom to the empire and half to his daughters. But when Roman forces moved in to take their territory they ran amok among the Britons, plundering the king’s property, raping his daughters and flogging Boudicca. Hence her armed revolt, and you can see why her tribe would rally to her standard, whose first steps were to burn to the ground the nearest three Roman towns, murdering all their inhabitants, before the governor of the province, 250 miles away on the border of Wales, heard the news, marched across country to East Anglia, and exterminated the British forces (p.514).
3. The First Jewish War or Great Jewish Revolt (66 to 73 AD) is also attributable to bad behaviour by the occupying Romans. The middle classes protested against heavy Roman taxation and there were some random attacks on Roman citizens. In response the Roman governor, Gessius Florus, raided the Second Temple (where no non-Jew was allowed to enter) for back payment of the taxes, then arrested senior Jewish figures some of whom he had crucified for disobedience. Bad idea. The rebellion spread like wildfire and pinned down Roman legions in Palestine for the next seven years.
Free movement of goods and people
Another massive effect of the Roman Empire was the free movement of goods and people on an unprecedented scale. Among the ruins of Pompeii has been found an ivory figurine from India, the soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall were buying pepper brought all the way from the Far East. Vast amounts of olive oil (20 million litres per year) were imported to Rome from southern Spain and the province of Africa became the breadbasket for the capital (250,000 tonnes of grain).
Not only goods but people moved vast distances, making lives and careers for themselves thousands of miles from their birthplaces in a way that was unprecedented for most of world history before. Beard exemplifies this astonishing freedom of movement in the story of Barates who was working near Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD, and built a memorial to his wife who predeceased him and came from just north of London. The point is that Barates himself, as his memorial records, originally hailed from Syria, 4,000 miles away.
Trade and administration, imports and exports, sending soldiers and administrators to the ends of the known world, involved a huge amount of bureaucracy and organisation, many fragments of which have survived to build up a picture of the empire’s multi-levelled commercial and administrative complexity.
The people, group or ideology this free movement around the entire Mediterranean basin was ultimately to benefit most were the Christians. Familiarity with the life of St Paul shows just how free they were to travel freely and to spread their word to the ‘godfearers’, the groups who attached themselves to Jewish synagogues but couldn’t become full Jews because of their lack of circumcision and/or the food and ritual restrictions, so who were an enthusiastic audience for the non-ethnic, universalising tendency of the new religion.
It is this principle of openness and assimilation, which characterised Rome from the earliest times when Romulus incorporated members of neighbouring tribes into his nascent settlement, that I briefly describe in the next blog post.
Credit
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.
Belarus police and militia men arrest a woman protesting peacefully in Minsk, Belarus
Myanmar
Armed and helmeted policemen arrest a woman protester in Myanmar
Iran
Armed policemen arrest Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran
Russia
It takes four armed and helmeted Russian policemen to arrest one woman protester in Moscow
Hong Kong
Two armed policemen force a woman protester to the ground and handcuff her in Hong Kong
England
Metropolitan policemen manhandle, force to the ground and arrest a woman attending a peaceful vigil in South London for Sarah Everard, murdered last week by a serving Metropolitan policeman.
Two Metropolitan policemen wrestle Patsy Stevenson to the ground as they arrest and handcuff her for attending the peaceful vigil (CREDIT: James Veysey/Shutterstock)
Watch respectful women holding a quiet and moving vigil for the murdered woman being attacked and sworn at by furiously violent male police.
Empires exist to accumulate power on an extensive scale…
(After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 page 483)
Questions
Why did the nations of Western Europe rise through the 18th and 19th centuries to create empires which stretched around the world, how did they manage to subjugate ancient nations like China and Japan, to turn vast India into a colonial possession, to carve up Africa between them?
How did white European cultures come to dominate not only the territories and peoples who they colonised, but to create the modern mindset – a vast mental framework which encompasses capitalist economics, science and technology and engineering, which dominates the world right down to the present day?
Why did the maritime states of Europe (Britain, France, the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) end up either settling from scratch the relatively empty places of the world (America, Australia), or bringing all the other cultures of the world (the Ottoman Empire, Hindu India, Confucian China and Shinto Japan) under their domination?
Answers
For at least two hundred years politicians, historians, economists and all kinds of academics and theoreticians have been writing books trying to explain ‘the rise of the West’.
Some attribute it to the superiority of the Protestant religion (some explicitly said it was God’s plan). Some that it was something to do with the highly fragmented nature of Europe, full of squabbling nations vying to outdo each other, and that this rivalry spilled out into unceasing competition for trade, at first across the Atlantic, then along new routes to India and the Far East, eventually encompassing the entire globe.
Some credit the Scientific Revolution, with its proliferation of new technologies from compasses to cannons, an unprecedented explosion of discoveries and inventions. Some credit the slave trade and the enormous profits made from working to death millions and millions of African slaves which fuelled the industrial revolution and paid for the armies which subjugated India.
Lenin thought it was the unique way European capitalism had first perfected techniques to exploit the proletariat in the home countries and then applied the same techniques to subjugate less advanced nations, and that the process would inevitably lead to a global capitalist war once the whole world was colonised.
John Darwin
So John Darwin’s book, which sets out to answer all these questions and many more, is hardly a pioneering work; it is following an extremely well-trodden path. BUT it does so in a way which feels wonderfully new, refreshing and exciting. This is a brilliant book. If you were only going to read one book about imperialism, this is probably The One.
For at least three reasons:
1. Darwin appears to have mastered the enormous revisionist literature generated over the past thirty years or more, which rubbishes any idea of innate European superiority, which looks for far more subtle and persuasive reasons – so that reading this book means you can feel yourself reaping the benefits of hundreds of other more detailed & specific studies. He is not himself oppressively politically correct, but he is on the right side of all the modern trends in historical thought (i.e. is aware of feminist, BAME and post-colonial studies).
2. Darwin pays a lot more attention than is usual to all the other cultures which co-existed alongside Europe for so long (Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Safavid Empire, the Chinese Empire, Japan, all are treated in fascinating detail and given almost as much space as Europe, more, in the earlier chapters) so that reading this book you learn an immense amount about the history of these other cultures over the same period.
3. Above all, Darwin paints a far more believable and plausible picture than the traditional legend of one smooth, consistent and inevitable ‘Rise of the West’. On the contrary, in Darwin’s version:
the passage from Tamerlane’s times to our own has been far more contested, confused and chance-ridden than the legend suggests – an obvious enough point. But [this book places] Europe (and the West) in a much larger context: amid the empire-, state- and culture-building projects of other parts of Eurasia. Only thus, it is argued, can the course, nature, scale and limits of Europe’s expansion be properly grasped, and the jumbled origins of our contemporary world become a little clearer.
‘Jumbled origins’, my God yes. And what a jumble!
Why start with Tamerlane?
Tamerlane the Eurasian conqueror died in 1405. Darwin takes his death as marking the end of an epoch, an era inaugurated by the vast wave of conquest led across central Asia by Genghis Khan starting around 1200, an era in which one ruler could, potentially, aspire to rule the entire Eurasian landmass.
When Tamerlane was born the ‘known world’ still stretched from China in the East, across central Asia, through the Middle East, along the north African shore and including Europe. Domination of all of China, central Asia, northern India, the Middle East and Europe was, at least in theory, possible, had been achieved by Genghis Khan and his successors, and was the dream which had inspired Tamerlane.
Map of the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan
But by the death of Tamerlane the political situation across Eurasia had changed. The growth in organisation, power and sophistication of the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria, the Muslim sultanate in north India and above all the resilience of the new Ming dynasty in China, meant this kind of ‘global’ domination was no longer possible. For centuries nomadic tribes had ravaged through Eurasia (before the Mongols it had been the Turks who emerged out of Asia to seize the Middle East and found the Ottoman Dynasty). Now that era was ending.
It was no longer possible to rule the sown from the steppe (p.5)
Moreover, within a few decades of Tamerlane’s demise, Portuguese mariners had begun to explore westwards, first on a small scale colonising the Azores and Canary Islands, but with the long-term result that the Eurasian landmass would never again constitute the ‘entire world’.
What was different about European empires?
Empires are the oldest and most widespread form of government. They are by far the commonest way that human societies have organised themselves: the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, the Greek and Roman Empires, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Chinese empire, the Nguyễn empire in Vietnam, the Japanese Empire, the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, the Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, to name just a few.
Given this elementary fact about history, why do the west European empires come in for such fierce criticism these days?
Because, Darwin explains, they were qualitatively different.
Because they affected far more parts of the world across far more widespread areas than ever before, and so ‘the constituency of the aggrieved’ is simply larger – much larger – than ever before.
Because they were much more systematic in their rapaciousness. The worst example was surely the Belgian Empire in the Congo, European imperialism stripped of all pretence and exposed as naked greed backed up by appalling brutality. But arguably all the European empires mulcted their colonies of raw materials, treasures and of people more efficiently (brutally) than any others in history.
The result is that it is going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, for the trauma of the impact of the European empires to die down and become what Darwin calls ‘the past’ i.e. the realm of shadowy past events which we don’t think of as affecting us any more.
The imperial legacy is going to affect lots of people, in lots of post-colonial nations, for a long time to come, and they are not going to let us in the old European colonial countries forget it.
Structure
After Tamerlane is divided into nine chapters:
Orientations
Eurasia and the Age of Discovery
The Early Modern Equilibrium (1750s – 1800)
The Eurasian Revolution (1800 – 1830)
The Race Against Time (1830 – 1880)
The Limits of Empire (1880 – 1914)
Towards The Crisis of The World (1914 – 42)
Empire Denied (1945 – 2000)
Tamerlane’s Shadow
A flood of insights
It sounds like reviewer hyperbole but there really is a burst of insights on every page of this book.
It’s awe-inspiring, dazzling, how Darwin can take the elements of tremendously well-known stories (Columbus and the discovery of America, or the Portuguese finding a sea route to India, the first trading stations on the coasts of India or the unequal treaties imposed on China, or the real consequences of the American Revolution) and present them from an entirely new perspective. Again and again on every page he unveils insight after insight. For example:
American
Take the fact – which I knew but had never seen stated so baldly – that the American War of Independence wasn’t about ‘liberty’, it was about land. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756 – 63) the British government had banned the colonists from migrating across the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley (so as to protect the Native Americans and because policing this huge area would be ruinously expensive). The colonists simply wanted to overthrow these restrictions and, as soon as the War of Independence was over (i.e. after the British gave up struggling to retain the rebel colonies in 1783), the rebels set about opening the floodgates to colonising westward.
India
Victorian apologists claimed the British were able to colonise huge India relatively easily because of the superiority of British organisation and energy compared with Oriental sloth and backwardness. In actual fact, Darwin explains it was in part the opposite: it was because the Indians had a relatively advanced agrarian economy, with good routes of communication, business hubs and merchants – an open and well-organised economy, which the British just barged their way into (p.264).
(This reminds me of the case made in The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson that Cortés was able to conquer the Aztec and Pissarro the Incas, not because the Indians were backward but precisely because they were the most advanced, centralised and well organised states in Central and South America. The Spanish just installed themselves at the top of a well-ordered and effective administrative system. Against genuinely backward people, like the tribes who lived in the arid Arizona desert or the swamps of Florida or hid in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, the Spanish were helpless, because there was no one emperor to take hostage, or huge administrative bureaucracy to take over – which explains why those areas remained uncolonised for centuries.)
Cultural conservatism
Until about 1830 there was still a theoretical possibility that a resurgent Ottoman or Persian empire, China or Japan, might have reorganised and repelled European colonisers. But a decisive factor which in the end prevented them was the intrinsic conservatism of these cultures. For example, both Chinese and Muslim culture venerated wisdom set down by a wise man (Mohammed, Confucius) at least a millennium earlier, and teachers, professors, civil servants were promoted insofar as they endorsed and parroted these conservative values. At key moments, when they could have adopted more forward-looking ideologies of change, all the other Eurasian cultures plumped for conservatism and sticking to the Old.
Thus, even as it dawned on both China and Japan that they needed to react to the encroachments of the Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, both countries did so by undertaking not innovations but what they called restorations – the T’ung-chih (‘Union for Order’) restoration in China and the Meiji (‘Enlightened rule’) restoration in Japan (p.270). (Darwin’s description of the background and enactment of both these restorations is riveting.)
The Western concept of Time
Darwin has a fascinating passage about how the Europeans developed a completely new theory of Time (p.208). It was the exploration of America which did this (p.209) because here Europeans encountered, traded and warred with Stone Age people who used bows and arrows and (to start with) had no horses or wheeled vehicles and had never developed anything like a technology. This led European intellectuals to reflect that maybe these people came from an earlier phase of historical development, to develop the new notion that maybe societies evolve and develop and change.
European thinkers quickly invented numerous ‘systems’ suggesting the various ‘stages of development’ which societies progressed through, from the X Age to the Y Age and then on to the Z Age – but they all agreed that the native Americans (and even more so, the Australian aborigines when they were discovered in the 1760s) represented the very earliest stages of society, and that, by contrast, Western society had evolved through all the intervening stages to reach its present state of highly evolved ‘perfection’.
Once you have created mental models like this, it is easy to categorise all the other cultures you encounter (Ottomans, Hindus, China, Japan, Siam, Annamite etc) as somewhere lower or backward on these paths or stages of development.
And being at the top of the tree, why, naturally that gave white Europeans the right to intervene, invade, conquer and administer all the other people of the world in order to ‘raise’ them to the same wonderful level of civilisation as themselves.
18th and 19th
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the way that, if you read accounts of the European empires, there is this huge difference between the rather amateurish 18th century and the fiercely efficient 19th century. Darwin explains why: in the eighteenth century there were still multiple European players in the imperial game: France was the strongest power on the continent, but she was balanced out by Prussia, Austria and also Spain and Portugal and the Dutch. France’s position as top dog in Europe was admittedly damaged by the Seven Years War but it wasn’t this, it was the Napoleonic Wars which in the end abolished the 18th century balance of power in Europe. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the new top dog, with a navy which could beat all-comers, which had hammered the French at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar, and which now ruled the waves.
The nineteenth century feels different because Britain’s world-encompassing dominance was different in kind from any empire which ever preceded it.
The absence of Africa
If I have one quibble it’s that I’d like to have learned more about Africa. I take the point that his book is focused on Eurasia and the Eurasian empires (and I did learn a huge amount about Persia, the Moghul empire, China and Japan) and that all sub-Saharan Africa was cut off from Eurasia by the Sahara, but still… it feels like an omission.
And a woke reader might well object to the relative rareness of Darwin’s references to the African slave trade. He refers to it a few times, but his interest is not there; it’s in identifying exactly where Europe was like or unlike the rival empires of Eurasia, in culture and science and social organisation and economics. That’s his focus.
The expansion of the Russian empire
If Africa is disappointingly absent, an unexpected emphasis is placed in each chapter on the imperial growth of Russia. I knew next to nothing about this. A quick surf on Amazon suggests that almost all the books you can get about the Russian ’empire’ are about the fall of the Romanovs and the Bolshevik Revolution and then Lenin or Stalin’s creation of a Bolshevik empire which expanded into Eastern Europe after the war. That’s to say it’s almost all about twentieth century Russia (with the exception of a crop of ad hoc biographies of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great).
So it was thrilling to read Darwin give what amounts to a sustained account and explanation of the growth of the Kingdom of Muscovy from the 1400s onwards, describing how it expanded west (against Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden), south towards the Black Sea, south-west into the Balkans – but most of all how Russian power was steadily expanded East across the vast inhospitable tundra of Siberia until Russian power reached the Pacific.
It is odd, isn’t it, bizarre, uncanny, that a nation that likes to think of itself as ‘European’ has a huge coastline on the Pacific Ocean and to this day squabbles about the ownership of small islands with Japan!
The process of Russian expansion involved just as much conquering of the ‘primitive’ tribal peoples who hunted and trapped in the huge landmass of Siberia as the conquest of, say, Canada or America, but you never read about it, do you? Can you name any of the many native tribes the Russians fought and conquered? No. Are there any books about the Settling of the East as there are thousands and thousands about the conquest of the American West? Nope. It is a historical black hole.
But Darwin’s account of the growth of the Russian Empire is not only interesting as filling in what – for me at any rate – is a big hole in my knowledge. It is also fascinating because of the role Russian expansion played again and again in the game of Eurasian Risk which his book describes. At key moments Russian pressure from the North distracted the attention of the Ottoman Empire from making more offensive thrusts into Europe (the Ottomans famously encroached right up to the walls of Vienna in 1526 and then again in 1683).
When the Russians finally achieved one of their territorial goals and seized the Crimea in 1783, as a result of the Russo-Turkish War, it had the effect, Darwin explains, of cracking the Ottoman Empire open ‘like an oyster’. For centuries the Black Sea had been an Ottoman lake and a cheaply defensible frontier. Now, at a stroke, it became a massive vulnerability which needed costly defence (p.175).
And suddenly, seeing it all from the Russian perspective, this sheds new light on the timeworn story of the decline of the Ottoman Empire which I only know about from the later 19th century and from the British perspective. For Darwin the role of Russian expansionism was vital not only in itself, but for the hemming in and attritional impact it had on the other Eurasian empires – undermining the Ottomans, making the Chinese paranoid because Russian expansion around its northern borders added to China’s sense of being encircled and endangered, a sense that contributed even more to its risk-averse policy of doubling down on its traditional cultural and political and economic traditions, and refusing to see anything of merit in the Westerners’ technology or crude diplomacy. A policy which eventually led to the Chinese empire’s complete collapse in 1911.
And of course the Russians actually went to war with imperial Japan in 1905.
Numbered lists
Darwin likes making numbered lists. There’s one on almost every page. They rarely go higher than three. Here are some examples to give a flavour of his careful, forensic and yet thrillingly insightful way of explaining things.
The 18th century geopolitical equilibrium
The geopolitical revolution which ended the long equilibrium of the 18th century had three major effects:
The North American interior and the new lands in the Pacific would soon become huge extensions of European territory, the ‘new Europes’.
As a result of the Napoleonic war, the mercantile ‘zoning’ system which had reflected the delicate balance of power among European powers was swept away and replaced with almost complete control of the world’s oceans by the British Navy.
Darwin gives a detailed description of why Mughal control of North India was disrupted by invasions by conquerors from the north, first Iran then Afghanistan, who weakened central Indian power at just the moment the British started expanding from their base in Bengal. Complex geopolitical interactions.
The so-called stagnation of the other Eurasian powers can be characterised by:
In both China and the Islamic world classical, literary cultures dominated the intellectual and administrative elites – the test of intellectual acumen was fitting all new observations into the existing mindset, prizes went to those who could do so with the least disruption possible.
Cultural and intellectual authority was vested in scribal elites backed up by political power, both valuing stasis.
Both China and the Islamic world were profoundly indifferent and incurious about the outside world.
The knowledge revolution
Compare and contrast the East’s incuriosity with the ‘West’, which underwent a cognitive and scientific revolution in which merit went to the most disruptive inventors of new theories and technologies, and where Darwin describes an almost obsessive fascination with maps. This was supercharged by Captain Cook’s three huge expeditions around the Pacific, resulting in books and maps which were widely bought and discussed, and which formed the basis of the trade routes which followed in his wake, and then the transportation of large numbers of convicts to populate Australia’s big empty spaces (about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868).
Traumatic impact of the Napoleonic Wars
I hadn’t quite realised that the Napoleonic Wars had such a traumatising effect on the governments of the main European powers who emerged in its aftermath: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. Very broadly speaking there was peace between the European powers between the 1830s and 1880s. Of course there was the Crimean War (Britain, France and Turkey containing Russia’s imperial expansion), war between Austria and Prussia (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War. But all these were contained by the system, were mostly of short duration and never threatened to unravel into the kind of general conflict which ravaged Europe under Napoleon.
Thus, from the imperial point of view, the long peace had four results:
The Royal Navy’s policing of all trade routes across the Atlantic and between Europe and Asia kept trade routes open throughout the era and kept costs down for everyone.
The balance of power which the European powers maintained among themselves discouraged intervention in either North or South America and allowed America to develop economically as if it had no enemies – a rare occurrence for any nation in history.
The post-Napoleonic balance of power in Europe encouraged everyone to tread carefully in their imperial rivalries.
Geo-political stability in Europe allowed the growth across the continent of something like a European ideology. This was ‘liberalism’ – a nexus of beliefs involving the need for old-style autocratic power to be tempered by the advice of representatives of the new middle class, and the importance of that middle class in the new technologies and economics unleashed by the industrial revolution and in founding and administering the growing colonies abroad.
Emigration
Emigration from Europe to the New World was a trickle in the 1830s but had become a flood by the 1850s. Between 1850 and 1880 over eight million people left Europe, mostly for America.
This mass emigration relieved the Old World of its rural overcrowding and transferred people to an environment where they could be much more productive.
Many of the emigrants were in fact skilled artisans. Moving to an exceptionally benign environment, a vast empty continent rich in resources, turbo-charged the American economy with the result that by the 1880s it was the largest in the world.
Fast
His chapter The Race Against Time brings out a whole area, an entire concept, I’ve never come across before, which is that part of the reason European colonisation was successful was it was so fast. Not just that Western advances in military technology – the lightning advances in ships and artillery and guns – ran far ahead of anything the other empires could come up with – but that the entire package of international finance, trade routes, complex webs sending raw materials back home and re-exporting manufactured goods, the sudden flinging of railways all across the world’s landmasses, the erection of telegraphs to flash knowledge of markets, prices of goods, or political turmoil back from colonies to the European centre – all of this happened too quickly for the rival empires (Ottoman, Japan, China etc) to stand any chance of catching up.
Gold rushes
This sense of leaping, hurtling speed was turbo-charged by literal gold rushes, whether in the American West in the 1840s or in South Africa where it was first gold then diamonds. Suddenly tens of thousands of white men turned up, quickly followed by townships full of traders and artisans, then the railway, the telegraph, the sheriffs with their guns – all far faster than any native American or South African cultures could hope to match or even understand.
Shallow
And this leads onto another massive idea which reverberates through the rest of the book and which really changed my understanding. This is that, as the spread of empire became faster and faster, reaching a kind of hysterical speed in the so-called Scramble For Africa in the 1880s (the phrase was, apparently, coined by the London Times in 1884) it meant that there was something increasingly shallow about its rule, especially in Africa.
The Scramble for Africa
Darwin says that most radical woke historians take the quick division of Africa in the 1880s and 1890s as a kind of epitome of European imperialism, but that it was in fact the opposite, and extremely unrepresentative of the development of the European imperialisms.
The Scramble happened very quickly, markedly unlike the piecemeal conquest of Central, Southern of North America, or India, which took centuries.
The Scramble took place with almost no conflict between the European powers – in fact they agreed to partitions and drew up lines in a very equable way at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Other colonies (from the Incas to India) were colonised because there were organised civilisations which could be co-opted, whereas a distinctive feature about Africa (‘historians broadly agree about one vital fact’ p.314) was that people were in short supply. Africa was undermanned or underpeopled. There were few organised states or kingdoms because there simply wasn’t the density of population which lends itself to trading routes, settled farmers and merchants – all the groups who can be taxed to create a king and aristocracy.
Africans hadn’t progressed to centralised states as humans had in Eurasia or central America because there weren’t enough of them. Hence the poverty and the lack of resistance which most of the conquerors encountered in most of Africa.
In fact the result of all this was that most of the European governments weren’t that keen on colonising Africa. It was going to cost a lot of money and there weren’t the obvious revenue streams that they had found in a well-established economy like India.
What drove the Scramble for Africa more than anything else was adventurers on the ground – dreamers and fantasists and ambitious army officers and business men and empire builders who kept on taking unilateral action which then pitched the home government into a quandary – deny their adventurers and pass up the opportunity to win territory to a rival, or reluctantly support them and get enmeshed in all kinds of messy responsibilities.
For example, in the mid-1880s a huge swathe of West Africa between the desert and the forest was seized by a buccaneering group of French marine officers under Commandant Louis Archinard, and their black rank and file. In a few years these adventurers brought some two million square miles into France’s empire. The government back in Paris felt compelled to back them up which meant sending out more troops, police and so on, which would cost money.
Meanwhile, modern communications had been invented, the era of mass media had arrived, and the adventuring soldiers and privateers had friends and boosters in the popular press who could be counted on to write leading articles about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the torch of civilisation and ask: ‘Isn’t the government going to defend our brave boys?’, until reluctant democratic governments were forced to cough up support. Modern-day liberals often forget that imperialism was wildly popular. It often wasn’t imperialist or rapacious governments or the ruling class which prompted conquest, but popular sentiment, jingoism, which couldn’t be ignored in modern democracies.
Darwin on every page, describes and explains the deep economic, trade and financial structures which the West put in place during the nineteenth century and which eventually underpinned an unstoppable steamroller of annexation, protectorates, short colonial wars and long-term occupation.
The Congress of Berlin
The Congress of Berlin helped to formalise the carving up of Africa, and so it has come to be thought of as evil and iniquitous, particularly by BAME and woke historians. But once again Darwin makes you stop and think when he compares the success of the congress at reaching peaceful agreements between the squabbling European powers – and what happened in 1914 over a flare-up in the Balkans.
If only Bismarck had been around in 1914 to suggest that, instead of rapidly mobilising to confront each other, the powers of Europe had once again been invited for tea and cake at the Reichstag to discuss their differences like gentlemen and come to an equable agreement.
Seen from this perspective, the Berlin Congress is not so much an evil colonialist conspiracy, but an extremely successful event which avoided any wars between the European powers for nearly thirty years. Africa was going to be colonised anyway because human events have a logic of their own: the success was in doing so without sparking a European conflagration.
The Scramble for China
The Scramble for China is not as well known as its African counterpart, the competition to gain ‘treaty ports’ on the Chinese coast, impose unfair trading terms on the Chinese and so on.
As usual, though, Darwin comes at it from a much wider angle and makes one massive point I hadn’t registered before, which is that Russia very much wanted to seize the northern part of China to add to its far eastern domains; Russia really wanted to carve China up, but Britain didn’t. And if Britain, the greatest trading, economic and naval power in the world, wasn’t onside, then it wouldn’t happen. There wasn’t a genuine Scramble for China because Britain didn’t want one.
Why not? Darwin quotes a Foreign Office official simply saying, ‘We don’t want another India.’ One enormous third world country to try and administer with its hundreds of ethnic groups and parties growing more restive by the year, was quite enough.
Also, by the turn of the century, the Brits had become paranoid about Russia’s intentions to conquer Afghanistan and march into North India. If they partitioned China with Russia, that would mean policing an even longer frontier even further way against an aggressive imperialist power ready to pounce the moment our guard was down.
Summary
This is an absolutely brilliant book. I don’t think I’ve ever come across so many dazzling insights and revelations and entirely new ways of thinking about a time-worn subject in one volume.
This is the book to give anyone who’s interested not just in ‘the rise of the West’ but how the whole concept of ‘the West’ emerged, for a fascinating description not just of the European empires but of all the empires across Eurasia – Ottoman, Persian, Moghul, Chinese and Japanese – and how history – at this level – consists of the endless juggling for power of these enduring power blocs, the endless and endlessly
complex history of empire-, state- and culture-building. (p.490)
And of course it all leads up to where we are today: a resurgent Russia flexing its muscles in Ukraine and Crimea; China wielding its vast economic power and brutally oppressing its colonial subjects in Tibet and Xinkiang, while buying land, resources and influence across Africa. And both Russia and China using social media and the internet in ways we don’t yet fully understand in order to undermine the West.
And Turkey, keen as its rulers of all colours have been since the Ottoman days, to keep the Kurds down. And Iran, as its rulers have done for a thousand years, continually seeking new ways to extend its influence around the Gulf, across Syria and to the Mediterranean, in eternal rivalry with the Arab world which, in our time, means Saudi Arabia, against whom Iran is fighting a proxy war in the Yemen.
Darwin’s books really drives home the way the faces and the ideologies may change, but the fundamental geopolitical realities endure, and with them the crudeness and brutality of the tools each empire employs.
If you let ‘morality’, especially modern woke morality, interfere with your analysis of this level of geopolitics, you will understand nothing. At this level it always has and always will be about power and influence, dominating trade and ensuring raw resources, and behind it all the never-ending quest for ‘security’.
At this level, it isn’t about following narrow, English notions of morality. Getting hung up on that only gets in the way of grasping the utterly amoral forces at play everywhere in the world today, just as they’ve always been.
Darwin stands up for intelligence and insight, for careful analysis and, above all, for a realistic grasp of human nature and human society – deeply, profoundly flawed and sometimes pitiful and wretched though both routinely are. He takes an adult view. It is absolutely thrilling and a privilege to be at his side as he explains and analysis this enormous history with such confidence and with so many brilliant ideas and insights.
Ashurbanipal was ruler of the Assyrian Empire from 669 to about 630 BC. From his capital at Nineveh on the edge of present-day city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Ashurbanipal ruled a vast and diverse empire, reaching from upper Egypt, via the eastern shore of the Mediterranean (modern Cyprus, Israel Lebanon and Syria) and along a corridor either side of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down to the Persian Gulf. During his reign he was probably the most powerful person on earth.
Map showing the fullest extent of the Assyrian empire (in pink) by Paul Goodhead
This blockbuster exhibition examines the life and times and cultural achievements and social context of Ashurbanipal’s rule alongside detailed profiles of the different kingdoms and cultures which he ruled over and exhaustive accounts of his numerous military campaigns.
Topics
The quickest way to give you a sense of the scope might be to list some of the headings which introduce different areas of the exhibition and displays:
Nineveh, a city without rival
The royal family
Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh
Aqueducts and canals (agriculture and pleasure gardens)
Training to be a king (featuring numerous lions hunts in which the king displays his mastery of the natural world)
The scholar king (in inscriptions he boasts of being able to read numerous languages)
Knowledge is power (his surprisingly large library)
Coronation
Assyria’s world domination (introducing the various kingdoms and people the empire ruled over)
The southern Levant
Babylonia
Elam
The kingdoms of Cyprus
The kingdom of Urartu
Western Iran
Aramaean kingdoms
Ashurbanipal at war
Ashurbanipal conquers Egypt
Trouble in the East (Urtak, king of Elam, invades Babylonia)
Sibling rivalry (with his older brother Shamash-shumu-ukin)
Retaliation (against Elam for its rebellion)
Order restored
The empire falls apart (after Ashurbanipal’s death)
Ashurbanipal’s fate (a mystery to this day)
Legend, discovery and revival (Victorian archaeologists uncover the key sites and ship statues and carvings back to the British Museum in London)
This is the first ever major exhibition to explore the life of Ashurbanipal in such depth and a dream come true for anyone interested in this period. Anyone familiar with the Assyrians knows that they were a strongly militaristic culture characterised, above all, by the immense statues of lions with the heads of bearded men. These tend to covered in cuneiform inscriptions which, when deciphered, amount to world class bragging about the emperor’s might and strength, king of kings, and then go on to give a long list of the emperor’s achievements.
Maybe even more famous are the numerous enormous friezes we have depicting the emperor on one of his countless lion hunts. Elsewhere in the British Museum (rooms 6, 7 and 8) you can walk along a corridor entirely lined by stone friezes depicting the lion hunt which was a central icon and symbol of Assyrian kingship. Why? Because the emperor’s role was to impose order on the world. The lion was the fiercest beast in the world. By beating it, by killing lions single handed (although surrounded by scores of courtiers and warriors) the emperor showed his fitness to rule and, symbolically, enacted the ordering of the world.
Both these types of imagery are familiar to anyone who knows a bit about the ancient Middle East.
Social history What is new and striking about the exhibition was a lot of the non-military social history. For example, the section on the immense library which Ashurbanipal assembled, and which led him to boast about his learning. His library at Nineveh may have contained as many as 10,000 texts and the exhibition powerfully conveys this by displaying them in a massive glass wall divided into grids, each containing a cuneiform text, carved into a clay tablet, covering a wide range of subjects – astrology, medicine, legends and so on. Ashurbanipal claimed to be unlike his predecessors in that he could read, write and debate with expert scholars.
The canals of Nineveh Nearby is a section devoted to the orderly agriculture and watering of the capital city, conveyed via a big carving showing canals, tilled fields and a path leading to a gazebo with a happy looking emperor standing in it. Apparently it was Asurbanipal’s grandfather, Sennacherib (mentioned in the Bible) who built the canals which watered Nineveh.
Clever lighting What brings this all alive is the clever use of lighting which animates bands of blue slowly colouring the canals, and of green, slowly colouring in the fields, and white indicating the path. The information panel tells us that all of these carvings and sculptures would have been brightly coloured. But the use of son et lumiere to animate the colouring was inspired.
Battle scenes The same goes for several of the battle panels. One of them is maybe 30 feet wide and depicts the Battle of Til-Tuba in 653 BC, as Ashurbanipal led an invasion of the kingdom of Elam. As with many of these battle panels, the figures are carved in horizontal bands, each of which tells a story, in this case the Elamites retreating in panic down a hill before triumphant Assyrians who drive them into a river.
There are information panels along the bottom of the long frieze picking out scenes, but there was also another display of lighting effects for a sequence of spotlights picked out a particular scene – not only picked it out but highlighted the silhouettes of the relevant figures – and then text was projected onto a blank part of the frieze explaining what was going on.
The exhibition contains a number of maps and, in the main area you realise that the entire floor you are walking on is a schematic map of the Assyrian Empire.
There are several timelines, twenty of more large information panels and, of course, hundreds of smaller information panels relating to each of the 200 or so artefacts on display.
Partitions The exhibition is divided into different ‘rooms’ or areas by immense partitions on which are printed patterns and designs found on the tiled rooms of the emperor’s palace, abstract geometric patterns.
In fact these vast decorated partitions dominate the exhibition visually, much bigger than any one object on display, and encourage you to pay attention to the section of the show which focuses on Assyrian tiles and glazed bricks, explaining the evolution of their decorative patterns and styles.
If the central section focuses on Ashurbanipal’s military campaigns, with cases explaining the history and culture of each of the dozen or so areas which made up the empire, and then a series of displays about each of his major campaigns (against Egypt and Elam in particular), there are also plenty of more modest cases highlighting what we know about Assyrian religion, culture, design, even cookery – displaying ‘delicately carved ivories, extravagant metalwork, cosmetic vessels and gold ornaments’ – one case showing an enormous bronze cauldron decorated around the lip with what seem to be dragon heads.
Overall the exhibition layout is imaginative and over-awing, and the use of the light animations to bring old stone friezes to life is really inspiring.
However the curators make the same mistake they made with the Viking exhibition. A good number of the information labels are at waist height. When I went the exhibition was absolutely crammed. Imagine the crowd at a football stadium. It was impossible to process through it in sequential order because some display cases were simply unapproachable. Early on, there is a display of a characteristic battle relief, maybe 20 feet long by 7 or eight feet high. As usual it shows a series of incidents during a battle and it was accompanied by about ten informative and interesting panels picking out and explaining specific incidents.
But because they were at waist height, they were completely hidden by the crowd of twenty of more people in front of them. Whereas, there was plenty of space above the relief. Why not put the information panels above the objects where anybody can read them, instead of at waist height, where they are inevitably hidden?
The end
The final sections of the show peter out a bit, after the dense concentration of information and huge reliefs depicting his famous victories which dominate the centre.
I was fascinated to learn that we don’t know when Ashurbanipal died. Nobody knows whether he died of natural causes, was murdered or abdicated. The last public inscription about him dates from 638. His kingship may have ended as early as 631 or as late as 627 – there is no written record in the sources of Assyria or its neighbours.
We do know that Ashurbanipal was briefly succeeded by a son, then another one. The significant event was that in 626 a former general, Nabopolassar, claimed the throne of Babylon and started a war of independence which led to the entire empire unravelling. The Iranian Medes led by Cyaxares, joined Nabopolassar and their forces sacked the city of Ashur, home to Assyria’s chief deity. This alliance then marched on Nineveh, the beautiful city of canals and decorated palaces built up by Ashurbanipal’s forebears and himself – and sacked it, burning it to the ground.
The Victorian rediscovery
It was only in the 1840s that Victorian archaeologists began systematically to uncover the site of Nineveh, discovering the massive lions statues, thousands of clay tables covered in writing, and other treasures. Some of these treasures were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and sparked a short-lived enthusiasm for Assyrian motifs on such things as tankards and dishes, and their use in jewellery and necklaces, a handful of which are on display here.
Until these discoveries, the reputation of the Assyrians and of Nineveh was taken from the Bible, where its rulers are depicted as gross, corrupt, Sybarites, who fully deserved their destruction by the Israelites’ jealous God.
The archaeological discoveries began to overthrow that old view and restore the more rounded view of Assyrian civilisation which, we like to think, we enjoy today.
War and destruction
The final section of the exhibition is staged in a long narrow corridor. It contains a timeline of modern archaeology (i.e. since the 1840s) and two short films.
One uses computer technology to match together aerial photos of the site of Nineveh as it appeared from the 1930s up to the present day, a rough square in a bend of the River Tigris. The camera, or point of view, slowly circles down from the high vantage point of early 20th century photos, spiralling down to show us how the site has changed and developed over the past eighty years or so, until we are at ground level looking up at the rather pitiful remains.
The second film features the head of the British Museum’s Iraq section explaining the scheme whereby archaeologists from Iraq are being brought to London and trained in various techniques, and then supported as they return to Iraq in the task of ongoing digging and preservation of that country’s heritage – the ‘Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme’.
(This isn’t exactly the same one, but covers the same scheme)
I couldn’t help noticing the world class irony here.
For the previous half hour I had been reading numerous inscriptions in which Ashurbanipal had his sculptors inscribe words describing how he not only defeated his enemies in Egypt or Elam, but annihilated them and their cities, leaving not a blade of grass standing, how he ransacked the tombs of their royal families, destroyed their monuments, killed their sheep and goats and left not an animal stirring in the barren wastelands he created.
This is the man who is being held up, not exactly for our admiration but for our awe, a man who destroyed and killed wantonly in pursuit of his worldview, namely that the known world should be ruled by a man like him, with his beliefs.
The irony being that two and a half thousand years later, another cohort of warriors seized control of this region, also convinced that they had a God-given right to rule, to impose their beliefs on all the inhabitants, and to destroy anything, any relics or remains of civilisations which they saw as infidel and blasphemous.
Difficult not to see a certain continuity of culture reaching across two and a half millennia.
There’s a second final thought. Many bien-pensant liberals, as well as hard core identity politicians and virtue warriors, think the British Museum is a guilt-filled testimony to the wholesale looting carried out by the British Empire, and that all of its artefacts, starting with the Elgin Marbles, should be returned to their countries of origin.
But if all of these objects had been in the Baghdad Museum in 2003 or the Mosul Museum in 2015, they would all have been looted or simply destroyed.
That doesn’t settle the debate about the Marbles or thousands of other objects, but these are the thoughts which the final section, all about the Iraq War and ISIS, leave you pondering.
Video
Here’s an excellent visual overview of the show from Visiting London Guide.
The ‘refugee crisis’ started to make headlines in 2015 as thousands of people fled wars in Syria, Iraq, and conflict and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
News footage of overcrowded boats coming ashore in Greece and Italy made the evening news, along with images of those who didn’t survive the trip, who drowned at sea, and then images of life in the squalid, overcrowded refugee camps which sprang up on the Mediterranean shore, as well as the so-called Jungle refugee camp in Calais.
Journeys Drawn is the first ever UK exhibition to explore the refugee crisis through illustration. It includes 40 multi-media works by 12 contemporary artists, several of whom are themselves refugees.
Illustrators have the advantage over ‘fine artists’, in that they are already used to working with stories and narratives, and most refugees’ stories are, by definition, stories about moving, about travelling, journeying – fleeing x and arriving in y.
Also, the genre of ‘illustration’ is flexible enough for illustrators to feel to treat subjects in all kinds of ways, from childlike picture-books, through stark political cartoons, to images packed with all kinds of information and detail – a kaleidoscope of approaches which ‘purer’, fine art tends to disavow.
A good example is the information-rich pictures of Olivier Kugler, who didn’t just depict the refugees he met on the Greek island of Kos (on a project funded by Médecins Sans Frontières) but created a format which can accommodate their stories through the extensive inclusion of text, especially the refugees’ own words, as well as inset images of their key objects and belongings.
As he says: ‘If you take time to view the drawing, it is like spending time with a person and their family in their tent.’
Rezan and Roca by Olivier Kugler (2015)
At the other extreme are the stark black-and-white images of David Foldvari. Foldvari usually does editorial work for The New York Times, Guardian and FT. He was commissioned by Save the Children to illustrate the stories of unaccompanied children at Civico Zero in Rome, a centre for refugee children. In his own words:
My main concern was to treat the subject matter in a way that was not patronising or clichéd, and to create some kind of emotional connection with the viewer without resorting to shock.
Typical of his style is this stark but deeply shaded, black-and-white image of one boy, Awet (not, in fact, his real name),which becomes even more powerful when you learn his story.
After fleeing his home in Eritrea at just 15 years old, Awet trekked to Sudan. He was smuggled with 30 others on a packed pick-up truck to Libya, but here they were kidnapped and imprisoned in a disused factory, where they were starved and tortured until their families could pay a ransom. Awet later managed to get onto a boat bound for Italy, only for it to fill with water. Rescued by the Sicilian coastguard, he found shelter at Civico Zero, two years after leaving Ethiopia. Which is where Foldvari met him.
I like realistic drawings, I am endlessly stimulated and excited by an artist’s magical ability to draw the world, to set down what we the rest of us only see around us, in solid lines and colours on paper – so I was immediately attracted to the documentary illustrations in pen, ink and watercolour which George Butler has made from what he’s seen in Greece, Belgrade and Syria.
As he puts it: ‘Reportage should tell a story, communicate an idea, or help someone relate to a situation.’
Of this picture, made in war-torn Syria, he says: ‘This was the first scene we saw as we came into Azaz – children playing on a burnt-out government tank. The fighting had finished here ten days earlier and would soon start again, but in the meantime the few residents left were trying to fathom what had ripped through their homes.’
Climbing frame tank by George Butler
There are a number of animations in the exhibition. This is Iranian artist Majid Adin’s award-winning animation set to Elton John’s song, Rocket Man.
Adin was imprisoned for his political works in Iran, before being expelled. He made his way by boat to Greece then trekked across Serbia before reaching the Jungle camp at Calais. He was smuggled to London inside a refrigerator in a lorry. In 2017 he won a global competition to create the first ever music video for Elton John’s hit Rocket Man and since then has been working as an animator in London.
Another video, by Karrie Fransman, uses a format called ‘zoom comic’ in which the picture is continually zooming in on the central image to open up the next scene. It was inspired by the testimonies of four Eritrean refugees who fled their homes to make the dangerous journey across Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya to Europe. The animation is narrated by Lula Mebrahtu, an Eritrean refugee who has found fame as a singer, songwriter and sound designer.
Kate Evans created a graphic novel, Threads from the Refugee Crisis, describing her experience of volunteering in the Calais Jungle. She published drawings from the camp within days of returning, and then went on to expand them into the book, ‘a poignant and emotive depiction of conditions in the camp, punctuated with political narrative, insightful commentary and angry responses from the public to her original blog post.’
Earlier this year Threads became the first ever graphic novel to be nominated for the Orwell Prize for Books.
Camp Sunset from Threads by Kate Evans
By now you should have got the idea of what the show looks and feels like.
In a way the subject matter is a bit repetitive – war, escape, camp. But visually, the artists and their works are extremely varied. I was surprised to see one set of pictures entirely in the style of Japanese manga, created by Asia Alfasi.
Alfasi grew up in Libya and moved to Glasgow at the age of seven. She now lives in Birmingham and has been working in the manga style since 2003. She aims to represent the voice of the Muslim Arab and her illustrated short stories have won several national and international manga awards.
In this wordless comic a young refugee returns to her destroyed childhood home. She is haunted by memories, but finds hope when she sees children playing among the rubble.
Childhood is hope by Asia Alfasi (2016)
All of the illustrations in this exhibition are good, some very good. All the stories are moving, some very moving. It is, all in all, quite a shocking and upsetting exhibition.
According to Wikipedia, ongoing conflicts and refugee crises in several Asian and African countries have increased the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2014 to almost 60 million, the highest level since World War II.
Haven’t been to the Design Museum since it moved from its old location at Shad Thames and opened in its fancy new building at Holland Park at the end of 2016.
The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.
On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.
Both the exterior and interior of the new building are spectacular.
The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.
Hope to Nope
The rise of graphic design
The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.
This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.
Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?
Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.
Big and varied
This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.
Politically neutral
The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:
a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement
a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere
a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement
opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies
opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain
opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa
opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un
opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.
Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.
Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport
In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.
Structure of the show
The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.
1. Personality
This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions – Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.
In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)
Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.
There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.
What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?
Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.
Wall of magazine covers lampooning Donald Trump. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
2. Protest
The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.
Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:
Catalonia – street protests for independence
South Africa – street protests, speeches etc against President Jacob Zuma
Grenfell Tower in London – an angry crowd shouting ‘justice justice’
Turkey – street protests against Erdogan
The Women’s March in Washington
Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.
One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.
But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.
I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.
But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.
And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.
And so on, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
Anti-capitalism
Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.
And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.
The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?
Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs – videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.
It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…
Protest web statistics
I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.
As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.
This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.
Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.
Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Thus we are told that:
in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet
in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day
in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter
in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.
in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election
in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration
For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?
Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.
32.
Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?
At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.
Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.
Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.
Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.
But what that means – how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.
The Hope icon for Barack Obama’s election campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Results
Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted – ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.
Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?
10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.
Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest
I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.
My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.
It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.
All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…
Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.
But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure – because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.
After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side – Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…
Fancy t-shirts, stylish badges, clever hashtags aren’t enough, nowhere nearly enough, to begin to effect real social and political change.
Forlorn poster, t-shirt and other items promoting the Remain campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.
All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.
All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.
It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:
SLOGANS IN NICE TYPEFACES WON’T SAVE THE HUMAN RACES
Slogans in nice typefaces won’t save the human races. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.
Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).
The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.
The role of graphics in political protest
Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.
The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.
Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.
Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.
This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.
On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.
I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.
Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC
On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.
So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.
But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?
This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.
We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.
Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester
The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?
A morality tale
Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.
On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.
Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.
Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author
Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.
Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author
Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.
And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.
Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.
The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.
Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.
The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.
Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.
Curators
Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.
It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.
A video
Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.
‘I needed to be at home. I needed the peace of my own country, England. Yet when I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless. I am not shaped for a house. I grew up in harsh surroundings. I have slept under tables in battles for days on end. There is something about this that unfits you for sleeping in beds for the rest of your life. My wars, the way I’ve lived, is like an uncurable disease. It is like the promise of a tremendous high and the certainty of a bad dream. It is something I both fear and love, but it’s something I can’t do without.’ (p.226)
Don McCullin is one of the most famous war photographers of the 20th century. He first published his autobiography (co-written with Lewis Chester) in 1990. This is the new, updated edition, published in 2015, as McCullin turned 80.
Having just read Dispatches, the stoned, stream-of-consciousness prose poetry of Michael Herr’s classic account of his time covering Vietnam War, the detached, lucid prose of this book initially seemed a bit flat. But it perfectly suits the laconic, understated attitude McCullin brings to the varied and intense subject matter – whether it’s massacres in Africa or meeting the Beatles or the unlikely friendship he once struck up with Earl Montgomery.
Trips to war zones are covered in a few pages, insights dealt with in one or two pithy sentences. The battle of Khe Sanh in Vietnam takes up 60 pages of Herr’s book but gets just two paragraphs here – but it feels enough. There’s little fat, very little to come between you and the many highlights of McCullin’s extraordinarily long and colourful life. Which makes this a hugely enjoyable and absorbing book.
(By his own account McCullin suffers from severe dyslexia – as a result he didn’t passed any exams, has never liked reading and so, presumably, a great deal of credit for shaping this consistently spare, flat but very focused prose must go to the book’s co-author, Lewis Chester.)
Here’s an example, almost at random, of the book’s clipped, spare prose which is, nonetheless, gripping because it focuses so precisely on the relevant information and detail of the extreme events it describes. It’s January 1968 and McCullin is in Vietnam covering the Tet Offensive.
Under a heavy overcast sky, I joined the convoy of the Fifth Marine Commando as it started rolling up to Hue. It ploughed through heavy mud and rain, past houses collapsed and pitted by artillery, and columns of fleeing refugees. It was very cold. (p.116)
The narrative moves fast from one carefully selected high point to the next, focusing in on moments of insight and awareness. Cameos of war. Snapshots in time. Photos in prose.
Beginnings
Born into a working class household in Finsbury Park, North London, McCullin left school at 15 without any qualifications before doing his National Service, which included postings to: Suez, Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and Cyprus during the Enosis conflict. It was, as he puts it, ‘an extended Cook’s tour of the end of Empire.’ (p.45) His dad was ill, his mother struggled to manage three small kids, they lived in real squalor and poverty, and he grew up with a rough bunch of post-war lads, lots of fights outside north London dancehalls in the Teddy Boy 1950s.
But, as he explains, it was photographs of the local gang – the Guv’nors – at the time a local murder had hit the deadlines, that first got him noticed, that got him introduced to Fleet Street picture editors and – voom! – his career took off. Within a few pages he has begun to be given photo assignments, and then starts winning photography prizes, which bring better assignments, more pay, more freedom.
Wars
He makes it clear that he did plenty of other jobs – photo reportage at a nudists camp, countryside gigs, snapping the Beatles and so on – but it was the conflict zones which really attracted him.
Cyprus 1964 – photographs of a Turkish village where Greek terrorists had murdered inhabitants. He makes the interesting point that Mediterranean people want a public display of grief and so encouraged him to take photos.
Congo 1964 – a Boy’s Own account of how he smuggled himself into a team of mercenaries who flew into the chaos after the assassination of Patrick Lumumba, encountering CIA agents and then accompanying the mercenaries on a ‘mission’ to rescue 50 or so nuns and missionaries who had been kidnapped by brutal black militias, known as the Simbas, who raped and dismembered some of the nuns. He sees a lot of young black men being lined up alongside the river to be beaten, tortured and executed by the local warlord.
Vietnam 1965 – There was something specially glamorous about Vietnam and it attracted a huge number of correspondents and photographers: he namechecks Larry Burrows and Sean Flynn, the latter a big presence in Michael Herr’s classic account Dispatches, both of whom were eventually reported missing presumed dead. Vietnam was ‘black humour and farce’ and ‘waste on a mega scale’ (p.95)
Bihar, India during the famine of 1965 – he contrasts the monstrous amount of food and all other resources being wasted by the Yanks in Vietnam, with the absolute poverty and starvation in India.
Israel in the Six Day War – where he accompanied the first platoon into Arab Jerusalem, soldiers being potted by snipers to the right and left, before the city was captured and he snapped singing soldiers kissing the Wailing Wall.
Vietnam – the Battle for Hue, 1968. He was there for eleven days and it comes over as one of the most intense experiences from a life full of intense experiences. He is appalled at the waste. Hue, produced two of his most famous images –
Biafra – McCullin went back three years in a row and was initially supportive of the Biafrans, who had seceded from Nigeria because they were scared of their increasing bad treatment by the Nigerian state. But the Nigerian government (secretly supported by the British government) fought to defeat the Biafran army and reincorporate the province into the country. (It’s interesting to compare McCullin’s account with the long chapter about the same war in Frederick Forsyth’s autobiography, The Outsider.)
Cambodia 1970, where McCullin was wounded by mortar shrapnel from the Khmer Rouge.
Jordan 1970 where fighting broke out in the capital Amman between Jordanian troops and Palestinians.
With legendary travel writer Norman Lewis in Brazil, McCullin absorbed Lewis’s dislike of American Christian missionaries who appeared to use highly coercive tactics to round up native tribes and force them into their re-education compounds.
East Pakistan 1971 for the immense suffering caused by the breakaway of East Pakistan, eventually to be reborn as Bangladesh.
Belfast 1971 where he is blinded by CS gas and finds it uncomfortable being caught between the three sides, Catholic, Protestant and Army, and how he missed Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972).
Uganda – where he is imprisoned along with other journos in Idi Amin’s notorious Makindye prison and really thinks, for a bad few hours, that he’s going to be tortured and executed.
Vietnam summer 1972 – By this time, with its government negotiating for American withdrawal, the wider public had lost a lot of interest in the war. The number of Americans in country had hugely decreased since 1968, and the peace negotiations were well under way and yet – McCullin discovered that he fighting was more intense and destructive than ever.
Israel 1973 the Yom Kippur War in which Sunday Times reporter and friend Nick Tomalin is killed.
The new editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Hunter Davies, is more interested in domestic stories. Among 18 months of domestic features, Don does one on Hadrian’s Wall. And a piece about racist hoodlums in Marseilles with Bruce Chatwin.
He hooks up again with the older travel writer Norman Lewis, who is a kind of father figure to him, to report on the plight of native tribes in South America being rounded and up and forcibly converted by American missionaries.
Spring 1975 – back to Cambodia for the final weeks before the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh. It is in transit in Saigon that McCullin learns his name is on a government blacklist and he is prevented from entering Vietnam and locked up by police in the airport until he can blag a seat on the flight organised by Daily Mail editor David English taking Vietnamese war orphans to England.
Beirut 1975 – McCullin had visited Beirut in the 1960s when it was a safe playground for the international rich, but in 1975 long-simmering resentments burst into a complex, violent and bitter civil war. At great risk McCullin photographs a massacre carried out by the right-wing Christian Falange militia.
1975 – among the Palestinian Liberation organisation, McCullin meets Yasser Arafat and other leaders, and gives his take on the Arab-Israeli struggle, bringing out the terrorist tactics of the Jewish side – the well-known Irgun and Stern gang – and Jewish massacres of Palestinians back in the founding year of 1948.
1977 – West Germany, to report on old Nazis, Hitler’s bodyguard, unrepentant SS killers.
Spring 1982 – El Salvador. Covering a firefight in a remote town between soldiers and left-wing guerrillas he falls off a roof, breaking his arm in five places. He makes it to a hospital, is looked after by colleagues and flown back to England, but the long-term injury interferes with his ability to hold a camera. Worse, it crystallises the strains in his marriage. In a few dispassionate pages he describes leaving his wife of twenty years and children, and moving in with the new love of his life, Laraine Ashton, founder of the model agency IMG.
1982 the Lebanon – to cover the Israeli invasion.
1983 Equatorial Guinea ‘the nastiest place on earth’.
1980s A lengthy trip to see Indonesia’s most primitive tribes, in places like Irian Jiwa and the Mentawai Islands, with photographer Mark Shand (who wrote it up in a book titled Skulduggery).
Personal life
At this point in the early 1980s a lot of things went wrong for McCullin. His marriage broke down. His injuries took nearly two years to properly heal. The British authorities prevented him going with the Task Force to the Falklands War, which could have been the climax of his war career and obviously still rankles 35 years later.
And then Andrew Neil, the new editor of the Sunday Times, itself recently bought by the brash media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, turned its back on the gritty reportage of the 1960s and 70s to concentrate more on style and celebrity. As a friend summed it up to McCullin – ‘No more starving Third World babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues.’ (p.275) The book describes the meeting with Neil in which he was manoeuvred into resigning.
He was still not recovered from his injuries and now he had no job and no future.
And then came the bombshell that his first wife, the woman he left for Laraine, was dying of a brain tumour. Like everything else, this is described pithily and swiftly, but there’s no mistaking the pain it caused. The year or more it took his first wife to die of a brain tumour was traumatic and the emotional reaction and the tortured guilt he felt at having abandoned her, put a tremendous strain on his new relationship with Laraine. In the end he broke up with Laraine: she returned to her London base.
Thus, distraught at the death of Christine, McCullin found himself alone in the big house in Somerset which he’d been doing up with Laraine, with no regular job and isolated from his journo buddies. It’s out of this intense period of unhappiness and introspection that come his numerous bleak and beautiful photographs of the Somerset countryside. These were eventually gathered into a book and John Fowles, in the introduction, notes how ominously they reflect the scars of war. Maybe, McCullin muses but – now he has shared this autobiographical background – we readers are now able to see all kinds of emotions in them. Certainly he preferred winter when the trees are skeletons and the ruts and lanes are full of icy water – all under threatening black clouds.
As he turned fifty McCullin’s life concentrated more and more on mooching about in the countryside. He takes up with a model, Loretta Scott and describes their mild adventures for precisely one page (p.298). Then has a fling with Marilyn Bridges, a Bunny Girl turned impressive nature photographer. McCullin is awarded the CBE in 1993. He married Marilyn and they travel to Botswana, Bali, India and Cambodia but could never agree whether to base themselves in Somerset or in her home town of New York. There were fierce arguments and a lot of plate smashing. By 2000 he was divorced and single again.
India is his favourite country to photograph. He assembled his shots of it into a book titled India.
He had been supporting himself since he was kicked off the Sunday Times with jobs from other newspapers but mainly by doing adverts, commercial work. Lucrative but soulless. On the one hand he prided himself on being a completely reformed war junkie, on the other his soul secretly, deep down, hankered for conflict and disaster.
2001 So it was a boon when he was invited to travel to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa to chronicle the devastating blight of AIDS on already impoverished people.
2003 back to the same countries to check progress.
2004 Ethiopia with his new wife, Catherine Fairweather (married 7 December 2002).
The Africa trips resulted in another book, Don McCullin in Africa. He tells us that in total he has authored 26 books of photography – quite an output.
In 2003 his old friend Charles Glass invited McCullin to accompany him back to Iraq, via their familiar contacts among the Kurds. In fact they accompany the party of Ahmad Chalabi, the smooth-talking exile who had persuaded the Americans that Saddam was running programmes to make Weapons of Mass Destruction. But both journalist and photographer are kept completely isolated among the Chalabi entourage, flown to an isolated airport miles away from any action. McCullin reflects sadly that the American military had learned the lessons of Vietnam and now kept the Press completely under control and authorised. No room for cowboys winging it and roaming the battlefields at will as per Tim Page or Michael Herr in their heyday.
Another book, In England, brought together work from assignments around the country between 1958 and 2007, generally reflecting McCullin’s sympathy with the underdog, the poor, the derelict, and he is happy that it – along with the books on Africa, India and the Somerset landscape, have come to outsell the war books. He wants to be remembered as a photographer not a ‘war photographer’. In fact the final pages describe the assignment which gave him more pleasure than anything in his life, a three-year-labour of love to visit ancient Roman sites around the Mediterranean, titled Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across The Roman Empire.
He has a stroke, from which he recovers with the help of a quadruple heart bypass – but then – aged 77 – he is persuaded to go off for one last war adventure, travelling with his friend Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor for The Times, and under the guidance of Anthony Lloyd, the paper’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, to Aleppo, in Syria, to cover the collapse of the so-called Arab Spring into a very unpleasant civil war, to experience for one last time ‘that amazing sustained burst of adrenalin at the beginning, followed later by the tremendous whoosh of relief that comes with the completion of any dangerous undertaking’ (p.334).
Photography
Equipment is fun to play with but it’s the eye that counts. (p.340)
There’s some mention of his early cameras at the start, and a vivid description of the difficulties of getting a light reading, let alone changing film, under fire in Vietnam – but on the whole very little about the art of framing and composing a photo. The book is much more about people, stories and anecdotes. And considering the photos are the rationale for his fame and achievement, there are comparatively few examples in the book – I counted 47. And they’re printed on the same matt paper as the text i.e. not gloss reproductions on special paper.
All suggesting it’s probably best to buy the photos separately in large format, coffee-table editions.
Learnings
War is exciting and glamorous. Compelling. McCullin candidly states that many people found the Vietnam war ‘addictive’ (p.92), echoing the fairly obvious analyses of Michael Herr and Tim Page.
And he briefly remarks the need to find out whether he ‘measures up’ – like so many men, he obviously sees it as a test of his manhood: how will he react when the shooting starts? Although he reports himself as feeling panic and fear quite regularly, the evidence suggests that he was phenomenally brave to go the places he went, and to stay there through tremendous danger.
The point or purpose
The psychological cost of being a war photographer But the clear-eyed and clipped accounts of each conflict refer fairly often to the psychological cost of seeing so much trauma so close up. He reflects on the damage it must do but, that said, the text doesn’t really reflect any lasting damage. From his appallingly deprived childhood onwards, there’s always been the understated implication of his strength and bullishness. Quite regularly he refers to troubles with police, scuffles with passport officers, answering back to armed militias, standing up to bullies and generally not backing away from a fight. He’s tough and doesn’t really open up about his feelings. He is most overt about being upset to the point of despair, not about anything he witnessed but about the cruel death of his first wife to cancer, which leaves him utterly bereft for a long period.
The morality of war photography Apart from the personal cost, though, there’s also the nagging doubt that he is profiting, quite literally, from other people’s unspeakable suffering and pain. Is he a parasite, exploiting their misery? He and other war photographers justified their activities as bringing the ‘reality’ of war to the attention of a) a complacent public ignorantly preparing to tuck into their Sunday lunch b) those in authority who had the power to change it, to end it, to stop the killing.
In this vein he writes of the famine victims in Bihar:
No heroics are possible when you are photographing people who are starving. All I could do was to try and give the people caught up in this terrible disaster as much dignity as possible. There is a problem inside yourself, a sense of your own powerlessness, but it doesn’t do to let it take hold, when your job is to stir the conscience of others who can help. (p.95)
And he also gets very fired up about the plight of AIDS victims in Africa.
But well before the end of the book, he also expresses doubts whether any photo he took made any difference to any of the conflicts he covered. Re. the AIDS in Africa work, he comments:
I had a notion that this was an area in which my photographs might have a positively beneficial effect, by raising consciousness and awareness. This was not something that could be said about my war pictures, which demonstrably had not impaired the popularity of warfare. (p.304)
The latter clause reminding me of the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote a lot of socially conscious poetry throughout the 1930s, but ended up in the 1950s candidly admitting that, as he put it, no poem or play or essay he wrote ever saved a single Jew. There are limits to what even the most powerful art can achieve.
When he went to Africa in the early 2000s to chronicle the impact of AIDS McCullin really wanted these horrific pictures to have an impact, ‘to be an assault on people’s consciences’ (p.308). But I’ve been seeing photos and reports of starving Africans all my adult life. I’m afraid that, in a roundabout way, McCullin, by contributing to the tidal wave of imagery we are all now permanently surrounded with, may have contributed to creating precisely the indifference and apathy he claims to be trying to puncture.
Is war photography art? McCullin was given a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1980s (he has subsequently had numerous exhibitions, at Tate, the Imperial War Museum, all the top galleries). He describes his pride at the time in being chosen by the V&A, and it is an accolade indeed – but does rather confirm the sense that, precisely insofar as the photos are changed and transmuted into ‘works of art’, hung on walls and discussed by slick connoisseurs, so they lose their power to upset and disturb, the purpose he ostensibly created them for, and enter the strangely frozen world of art discourse.
I had drafted this thought before I came upon McCullin’s own reflection on photography-as-art on the penultimate page of this long and fascinating book.
One of the things that does disturb me is that some documentary photography is now being presented as art. Although I am hugely honoured to have been one of the first photographers to have their work bought and exhibited by the Tate Gallery, I feel ambiguous about my photographs being treated as art. I really can’t talk of the people in my war photographs as art. They are real. They are not arranging themselves for the purposes of display. They are people whose suffering I have inhaled and that I’ve felt bound to record. But it’s the record of the witness that’s important, not the artistic impression. I have been greatly influenced by art, it’s true, but I don’t see this kind of photograph itself as being art. (p.341)
From the horse’s mouth, a definitive statement of the problem and his (very authoritative) opinion about it.
Photography in the age of digital cameras and the internet Then again, maybe the photographer doesn’t have any say over how his or her art is, ultimately, consumed and defined.
Superficially, yes, the first few McCullin photos you see are shocking, vivid and raw depictions of terror, grief and shock – but the cumulative effect of looking at hundreds of them is rather to dull the senses – exactly as thousands of newspaper, radio, TV and internet reports, photos and videos have worked to dull and numb all of us from the atrocity which is always taking place somewhere in the world (war in Syria, famine in Somalia). It’s hard not to end up putting aside the ’emotional’ content and evaluating them purely in formal terms of composition and lighting, colour and shade, the ‘drama’ or emotional content of the pose.
History If the photos didn’t really change the course of any of the wars he reported on, and nowadays are covered in the reassuring patina of ‘art’, to be savoured via expensive coffee table books and in classy art galleries – there is one claim which remains solid. His work will remain tremendously important as history.
Taken together, McCullin’s photographs amount to a documentary history of most of the significant conflicts of the last 40 years of the twentieth century. And this autobiography plays an important role in creating a continuous narrative and context to underpin them, providing short but very useful, focused background explanations to most of the conflicts which the photographs depict.
Early on in his story, McCullin remarks that his National Service was a kind of Cook’s Tour of the end of the British Empire. In a way the rest of his career has been a continuation of that initial itinerary, as he ended up visiting some 120 countries to record for posterity how peoples all around the world lived, fought and died during his and our troubled times.
‘I was, what I always hoped to be, an independent witness.’ (p.116)
Credit
Unreasonable Behaviour (revised edition) by Don McCullin was published by Jonathan Cape in 2015. All references and quotes are to the 2015 hardback edition.
Books & Boots 
