BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Biographical and Autobiographical Writings"

Leon Battista Alberti: Biographical and Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Margin McLaughlin. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 96. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674292680. xxvii + 346 pp.

We have encountered Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before — one of the early volumes is his satirical novel, Momus. I (re-)read it a few years ago (see my post about it), but didn't like it very much, mostly because I didn't find its brand of humour particularly funny. The present volume brings us five shorter works by him, and I didn't like these very much either, so I'm starting to conclude that I'm just not the right person to appreciate Alberti's writing. The fact that the works here are shorter at least had the advantage that I was never at any real risk of getting bored by them.

Often I felt that he was more interested in showing off his rhetorical skills and his ability to deploy an endless amount of allusions to classical literature than in saying something interesting, original, entertaining or persuasive. His Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature presents us such a pointlessly exaggerated view of the disadvantages that it's hard to believe that he meant it seriously; his Life of St. Potitus is suffering from the problem that it can't tell us much of a story because so little is known about this highly obscure saint; his Dog is based on a silly gimmick: he writes about his dog using tropes from classical biographies of great men, and in doing so he mostly misses the opportunity to express sincerely his feelings for his recently deceased and much beloved canine companion; in his Autobiography, Alberti writes about himself in such glowing terms that it's hard to take him quite seriously, and at the same time he tells us almost nothing about the actual course of his life; and lastly, his Fly praises this animal in the most exaggerated and undeserving terms, a contrast which is supposed to provide humour but which in practice soon grew just as tiresome as the insect itself.

I don't deny that there is originality and variety here, but there are also so many missed opportunities for a work to be about more than just a gimmick and an exercise in style. Overall I just couldn't feel very excited about any of the works in this volume. Thank goodness that nobody reads this blog any more, so that at least I won't be getting hostile comments for admitting that I didn't enjoy the book :)

On the other hand, I have to praise the translator for the interesting introduction and notes, and especially for making a good effort to translate the occasional puns and word-play (see e.g. p. 93, ¶30).

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature

This is the longest work in this volume, but unfortunately it wasn't much to my liking. The subject, of course, is an old and well-trodden one, and I didn't have the impression that Alberti had anything particularly original to say about it; the whole thing is better thought of as a youthful exercise in rhetoric (he himself speaks of the importance of practicing writing; 1.15), and the editor of the present volume calls it an invective on more than one occasion (pp. ix, 292), though unlike Petrarch's invectives that I read many years ago in one of the early ITRL volumes, Alberti's treatise is not directed against any particular individual. But what he does have in common with Petrarch is that rather than trying to be sober and fair and balanced, they deliberately fight dirty with all sort of exaggerations, biases and rhetorical tricks in the service of their goals. Alberti's gimmick is basically to spend the first and last 5% of the work on the advantages of literature, and the intermediate 90% on its disadvantages, so as to make it seem more impressive that he is nevertheless committed to the study of literature despite its immense disadvantages.

Incidentally, what he means by literature here is very broad, basically any sort of study that revolves largely on reading (preferably in Latin) — he includes even lawyers, notaries and physicians among the students of literature. He deliberately takes an unhealthily extremist attitude towards study, so as to have a good excuse to play up its disadvantages; in his view, a student of literature should pore over his books day and night (2.16–22), smell badly of lamp oil (5.39), be a pale and scrawny nerd that people will shun and almost literally point and laugh at (3.10–13); even the slightest interruption to his studies will cause him to forget so much that he will have to spend many hours catching up again (3.32, 45); nothing short of total non-stop dedication will do. Apart from the great expenditure of time and effort, it will also cost you a lot of money to pay for your studies, buy books etc. (4.16–18, 23). He is also aware of the idea of opportunity costs; as a student of literature, you are spending money when you could be making it.

He then proceeds to spend most of his treatise arguing at great length how all this effort and expense will yield you neither wealth not honours. He purports to justify this by indulging in some very dubious mathematics and statistics (4.88–112) to argue that out of every 1000 people who begin the study of literature, only three will “be able to make money from literature” (4.110). Only lawyers, notaries and physicians have some chance of making good money (4.137), but even of them most don't, especially if they are honest (4.144, 154). Nor can a literary scholar get rich by marriage, since women with a big dowry won't have him (4.184–91).

Not only do literary scholars get no wealth, they also get no respect. Alberti argues that they *deserve* the highest respect (5.4), but nobody actually respects them. Rich people will not be impressed by the literary scholar's rhetoric enough to give him a seat at the table when it comes to political decision-making (5.26–9); in fact they simply won't care about his learning; it means nothing to them (5.31–40). The common people won't respect him either, for the simple fact that he isn't rich (5.54, 65). Alberti is also doubtful about trying to win honour by serving in the public administration, as such jobs will distract you from literary study and “expose you to vanity and envy” (5.82).

It is only at the very end of the treatise that he finally returns to the advantages of the literature; he reasserts his commitment to this field of study; of course, that's why he expounded at such length on it disadvantages — the greater these are, the greater his merit is in nevertheless persisting in his studies. And perhaps he doesn't spend too much time on his advantages because he considers them obvious enough that it suffices to state them plainly: “Let the minds of scholars burn with a desire, not for gold or wealth, but for morals and wisdom, and let them learn from literature, not power and the causes of things, but the form and cult of virtue and glory” etc. (6.16–17). You will be rewarded by “peace of mind, the stability of virtue and the beauty of the arts” (6.26); “such a man [. . .] will believe that all his goods are placed within himself” (6.36).

This is a very charming view of literary scholarship, and of course one wishes to believe it; and yet, you can't help noticing that this is nothing more than argument by vigorous assertion. There used to be a widespread idea that studying ancient Greek and Roman literature somehow made you a better and wiser person; I think it was probably true, but that was back when people were still able to study literature earnestly. There would be no use in trying to revive the study of classical literature now that our entire intellectual class has, for the better part of a century, betrayed the rest of society by going in for modernism, postmodernism and other such corrosive ideologies; they know only how to criticize and deconstruct and play language games, but would react to the idea of holding a sincere opinion, or of searching in literature for truth and beauty, like a vampire to sunlight.

*

Apparently Alberti conducted something of a poll: “I diligently asked many literature scholars” (2.3) and they all wanted to deter other people from studying literature rather than encourage them. You can read similar advice from humanities professors nowadays :)

Amongst the expenses involved in the study of literature he lists “those foolhardy ceremonies they call doctorates” (4.24) :))

When he talks about professions where it is easier to make money than in literature, he suggests soldiering and farming... He had a bizarrely rosy view of these: “no expectation is more certain from any other thing than what is reaped from a well cultivated field [. . .] the countryside offers [. . .] the maximum amount of leisure to enjoy the good life” (4.72). Clearly his idea of a farmer was a big landowner who doesn't actually do any farming himself, probably doesn't even bother running his own estate but has managers for that.

A hilarious quote from 4.180: “women are by nature stupid, arrogant, contentious, bold, insolent and rash” :)))) I don't disagree, but then men are all these things as well; it's just human nature :(

Alberti is commendably self-critical: “We have now reached the stage where [. . .] nobody except the most abject and lazy turns to literary studies. For it is the lame, or the scrofulous, or the distorted and diminished, the stupid, dense, inert people who are unable to incompetent to do any other work who all end up studying literature.” :)) (5.85–6)

The Life of St. Potitus

Alberti wrote this biography at the suggestion of his patron, a prelate named Biagio Molin (p. 293, n. 1); I wonder how he chose this obscure saint. Unsurprisingly, very little is known about Potitus, and as a result Alberti's biography can't help but be rather thin, even though he did his best to pad it out with long speeches and the like.

According to Alberti's biography, Potitus was originally from Serdica (present-day Sofia) and lived during the reign of the emperor Antoninus. The son of a rich pagan father, Potitus adopts christianity as quite a young man; ignoring his father's entreaties and arguments (e.g. that the authorities were persecuting christians pretty badly just then), the young zealot moves away from home. The devil tries to lure him away from his chosen path by appearing in the form of a phantom and then of an ox, but Potitus successfully ignores these manifestations. He successfully cures a senator's wife of leprosy by converting her to christianity.*

[*Alberti writes as if he didn't think very highly about this conversion (¶57): “Since the minds of the sick are credulous, the woman suffering from leprosy was willing to try anything if she thought it would do her good.”]

Soon, word of Potitus' miracle reaches the ears of the emperor, by a rather bizarre mechanism: the devil obsesses Antoninus' daughter and makes her tell him that Potitus is a christian and where he lives. Potitus is summoned before the emperor and, with god's help, easily drives out the devil out of the emperor's daughter. However, his subsequent interview with the emperor goes very badly indeed. Now, I'm the first to agree that zealots can be tiresome and Potitus is no exception, but the way Antoninus reacts here is just plain ridiculous. He goes on an unhinged rant (¶81–100) which levels the most implausible accusations against the christians: “there is no people on earth more abject than those who have decided to live all their life in leisure, rejecting both diligence and hard work. They shun, think little of and even hate military duty, literary study, and any ornamentation of life. You must realize that these same Christians are the most worthless race of men: they are lazy, idle, supine; they pursue no labor nor arts, undergo no civic discipline, but have learned to languish in idleness, solitude and sleep” (¶83–4). Holy shit, is he supposed to be for or against this thing? If christianity was like that, I'd convert in a heartbeat :))) But in actual fact, of course, I don't doubt that most christians in Antoninus' time were pretty normal people leading pretty normal lives; I suppose there may have been a few who tried to avoid participation in society as much as possible to avoid being dragged into its sins — but the idea that all or even most of them were like that, as Antoninus says, is just plain silly.

Anyway, the emperor sees that the people have been rather impressed by Potitus' miracle, and is worried that more of them might convert unless he makes an example of him. He tries to pressure Potitus into making a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and when the youth refuses, he is promptly taken to the amphitheatre, tortured with fire and then consigned to the beasts; but lo, another miracle, the beasts grow meek in his presence and worship him. The emperor sends his minions to finish the job by hacking Potitus to pieces, but a (probably unintentionally) comical scene ensues: “The executioners were seized by such zeal for carrying out his order that while trying to be the first to cut pieces off Potitus, they actually wounded each other, whereas the young man remained untouched” (¶106) :)) After another few similar failures, the emperor falls to the ground in a fit of rage and gets badly injured. His daughter implores Potitus — who is somehow *still* not dead — to save him, and she promptly converts to christianity to secure divine aid (¶110).

Antoninus recovers at once, but alas, his temper has not improved. He sees Potitus holding a sermon to the crowd, orders his tongue to be cut off, but Potitus continues speaking despite the lack of a tongue. Eventually they finally manage to kill him by cutting off his head (¶114). He was not yet fourteen years old (p. 171).

I can't say that I found this hagiography particularly enjoyable, though I'm sure that's not Alberti's fault, it's simply what this genre is like. The characters are shallow and two-dimensional; god and the devil intervene in events all the time; and there is something unpleasantly self-congratulatory about the whole thing. The writer and the reader both know that the saint or martyr will eventually triumph; there is never any doubt about the outcome, the story as a whole is predictable and only the details remain to be filled in.

I suppose the christians looked back at their early martyrs as the plucky underdogs who took on the mighty Roman empire and won, triumphed over all the persecutions and the like. And I suppose that a christian who lived in the 2nd century could justifiably consider himself the underdog; but not so in Alberti's time; someone who writes a hagiography in the 15th century is not a supporter of the plucky underdog, but of the establishment; he is the sore winner who has been absolutely triumphant for more than a thousand years yet still can't stop grinding the face of his long-defeated opponent into the dust.

From my perspective, of course, it is not christianity, but the Greco-Roman paganism that was the underdog; even in the 2nd century its days were numbered, and it was very much the underdog by the 4th. So when I read something like the life of Potitus here, I can't sympathize with the saints and martyrs, because I know that very soon they would win and become the oppressors in turn. Moreover, my sympathies are instinctively with the pagans, and I can never quite understand why people converted from paganism to christianity; my attitude can be summarized by Swinburne's lines: “What ailed us, o gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain?” Perhaps the problem is that ancient paganism, being long gone, is not so well known to us; we all see how many pleasures christianity denies its followers, and how many unpleasant duties and restrictions it lays upon them; for all I know, ancient paganism, as actually practiced, may well have had many of the same faults; but I know so much less about it that it is easy to see it in a more sympathetic light. You sometimes hear that the closest thing to a modern survival of the ancient pagan religions is hinduism, and that religion certainly looks like a total mess that doesn't seem to have much more to recommend itself than christianity does. Perhaps ancient Roman paganism would also seem less appealing if it survived into the present day.

*

A funny passage from ¶42: at one point, the devil changed “into the color and shape of an ox; and that with a great mooing sound he struck the young man [i.e. Potitus] down” We're used to Satan appearing as a goat, but apparently even the poor ox is now to be distrusted. What's next, a kitten? :))

A fine passage from Antoninus' anti-christian rant: “My goodness, it is ridiculous the way they exaggerate when they speak. The heavens, all the gods, the world itself seem not to be enough for them to talk about; they actually descend to the underworld with their tales.” (¶92) You can practically see him getting enraged at the tiresome religious zealouts and missionaries who keep knocking at his door, trying to convert him :)

My Dog

This rather bizarre composition is again in some sense an exercise in rhetoric; Alberti says he was inspired by funeral oratory with which the ancients used to praise eminent men after their deaths (¶1–3); he apparently also wanted to prove that he could do such a thing better than a certain lesser orator (p. 211).

Anyway, the chief conceit of this piece, of course, is that it is written not for an eminent man, but for Alberti's dog. This is a neat idea and I liked it, but the execution leaves something to be desired; in principle seeing someone praise a dog in terms usually used of a person could make for very funny reading, but most of the time I didn't find Alberti's piece to be particularly funny. There are a few puns here and there, which mostly didn't make it into the translation (but the notes point them out); and at times you can have fun figuring out what certain features and character traits, described as if about a person, actually mean when applied to a dog; but most of the time you can't find any meaningful connection between his oration and a dog's life, and the effect is mostly just odd. As the translator's notes point out, Alberti often uses nearly the same phrases here which he would later reuse in his own autobiography (e.g. see notes 36, 38–9 on p. 306).

By way of illustration, here are a few of the stranger passages from this canine biography. The dog's “mother was distinguished for her piety” (¶9); his ancestors included practically every dog mentioned by any ancient author, and Alberti is tireless in rifling through the works of Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero and countless others for anecdotes in praise of dogs; “some were endowed with such courage and bravery” that they would fight “even an elephant [. . .] no matter how fierce and violent” (¶11). Alberti's dog combined the virtues of “the most renowned commanders” — Fabius Cunctator, the Scipios, Caesar, Alexander, etc. (¶30–1). He “mastered in just a few days all the liberal arts that are worthy of a wellborn dog” (¶44); “before he was three he could understand Greek and Latin as much as Tuscan” (¶46; I guess the joke is that he of course didn't understand any human language; there is some wit there, but you are hardly going to laugh out loud). Such was his dedication to the arts that he “would sometimes sing to the moon in various musical modes which he drew from the harmony of the spheres” (¶58). And he lacked the faults of many great men, e.g. he was not “ambitious like Cicero, who when he was almost exhausted from praising himself, in one of his letters then asked other people to write a book in his praise” ¶69). :))

My favourite part of this oration comes at the very end, when Alberti finally, for a brief while, drops the conceit and writes plainly and honestly about how much he loved his dog and how much he misses him (¶73–6). That brief moment of genuine feeling is worth more than the rest of the treatise combined.

My Life

This short autobiography of Alberti wasn't much to my liking either. First of all, the translator's notes at the end of the book point out so many parallels to various classical authors that I can't help wondering how much this is meant to be taken seriously as an autobiography at all, as opposed to being merely yet another exercise in rhetoric. Alberti writes about himself in the third person and doesn't hold back in attributing to himself all sorts of excellent qualities, abilities, talents and personality traits (even the power of divination :)) ¶77). If you can believe him, he really was the very archetype of the Renaissance man, constantly busy studying and working in a wide range of fields.

Meanwhile this autobiography is actually very bad if you expected any clear account of his actual life, rather than merely 20 pages of saying what a great guy he was. He tells us about his various literary works and briefly discusses each of them, which is nice, but other than that there's almost none of the things I would expect in an autobiography: nothing about his ancestors and family; where and how he grew up; his studies, his travels (I saw from passing mentions in the translator's notes that Alberti studied in Bologna, but he never mentions this in his autobiography here); his employments, if he had any (the impression one gets from the lack of this information in his autobiography is that he was simply an independently wealthy man who spent his time tinkering and writing, and who by dint of sheer grit and talent managed to become an important and influential humanist intellectual; but I wonder whether he really was wealthy, since we read at in the translator's notes that Alberti was an illegitimate child, who therefore couldn't take public office (p. 292, n. 24), and moreover that when his father died and left some money in his will to Alberti, the other family members refused to hand this money over).

An interesting feature of this autobiography is a longish list of his supposed witty sayings, which he was apparently able to come up with on the spur of the moment and in considerable abundance (¶40–107). I didn't actually find most of them to be all that witty, but then I already knew that humour is one of those things that doesn't travel well across centuries and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless here's one anecdote that I liked: when a foreigner in his city asked him the way to the palace of justice, Alberti said he didn't know; upbraided by some passers-by who pointed out that the courthouse was right there, he replied: “I had no recollection of justice ever having been in those premises” :)) (¶43).

He was in the “habit of dictating the first draft of his works”, which “accounts for the oral dimension of early drafts and the complex philology behind his texts” (translator's note 20, p. 313).

At the age of 20, he wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, which “circulated for ten years as though it had been written by a little-known ancient writer Lepidus”, until Alberti finally admitted his authorship (translator's note 8, p. 311). I like this idea; it proves that his Latin must have been really good, and moreover people might be less likely to criticize small defects if they believed the work was by a genuine ancient author.

I greatly liked his opinion about art: “He used to ask young boys whether they recognized whose likeness he was painting, and he used to deny that anything could be said to have been painted artistically that could not instantly be recognized by children.” (¶34.) How far we have fallen from this ideal after more than a century of degenerate art!

The Fly

Most of us would agree that the fly is an annoying and worthless creature, but in this short piece Alberti turns this on its head and spends the whole time praising the fly in the highest terms. Much as in the case of My Dog, I agree that this in principle a neat and humorous idea, but in practice I didn't find The Fly particularly funny.

The author pretends to uphold the flies as altogether nobler animals than “the bees, those unworthy favorites of the poets” (¶20; see also ¶4). They are descended from the Centaurs (¶4), a proud warrior race (which we can tell because swarms of flies always accompany human armies, ¶8, and because they always wear “a breastplate with varied colors of gold and bronze”, ¶12) which yet never commits atrocities like human armies do (¶15–16); honourable and sociable creatures, they do everything together and in the open (¶17, 19); they are scientists and philosophers (¶42), “endowed by nature with such enormous eyes that they can easily discover what lies hidden beyond the heavens” (¶25);* a true stoic, the fly “always shows itself to be of the same demeanor” (¶31); the fly “is never idle” and “energetically encourages the lazy to action” (¶39); etc. “We wrote the above laughing, and you too should laugh”, Alberti says at the end; but alas, I almost never did laugh. I don't disagree that there is wit in Alberti's praise of the fly; but it takes more than that to make one laugh.

[*The fly “even knows what blemishes Helen of Troy has on her bottom, has fondled all of Ganymede's hidden parts, and knows by constantly landing on them how bitter is the taste of Andromache's ancient, sagging breasts.” (¶26.) One of the few passages that actually made me laugh :)) ]

Miscellaneous

Apparently another of Alberti's works, the Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, “is forthcoming in this I Tatti Renaissance Library series” (p. xxvi, n. 23). Let's hope I will enjoy it better than the two Alberti volumes I've read so far :)

I was interested to learn (translator's note 36, p. 327) that the names of the musical notes come from “the first syllables in the lines of a famous medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist by Paulus Diaconus: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, mira gestorum famuli tuorum, solve polluti labii reatum”. From this we also see why so is sometimes called sol. The wikipedia says that ut was replaced by the now usual do in the 17th century, to make it an open syllable.

In his autobiography, Alberti mentions some of his works which he wrote in Italian rather than Latin; the thing I found interesting is that, where the translation says “in the vernacular” and “Tuscan” (p. 219, ¶13), the corresponding word in the original was “etruscos” both times. Of course, in one way it makes sense — the words ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Etruscan’ are related — but on the other hand it sounds a little as if he had written those works in the ancient Etruscan language, and that is a very intriguing alternative-historical idea :)

BOOK: Paolo Giovio, "Portraits of Learned Men"

Paolo Giovio: Portraits of Learned Men. Edited and translated by Kenneth Gouwens. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 95. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674290150. xviii + 667 pp.

We have already encountered Giovio in the I Tatti Renaissance Library a few years ago — vol. 56 is his dialogue Notable Men and Women of Our Time, consisting mostly of short biographies of notable military commanders, poets, and noblewomen (see my post about it). The present volume, Portraits of Learned Men, has a few things in common with that previous one: it, too, consists of short biographies, though only of men of letters; and both volumes have the same editor and translator, Kenneth Gouwens. (Incidentally, an earlier English translation of this work, by Florence Alden Gragg (1935), is available online. Gouwens mentions a few downsides of this translation in the notes here on pp. 454–5.)

Giovio's Portraits of Learned Men is based on an interesting concept: he was trying to set up a kind of museum,* a villa (open to the public) on the shores of Lago di Como that would house portraits of notable men of letters of the last few generations, roughly from 1300 to his own time (he lived in the early 16th century); and next to each portrait there would be a sheet of parchment with a short biography of the individual in question (p. xi). Unfortunately he didn't manage to gather all the portraits he had hoped to obtain, and it seems that nobody bothered to continue the project after his death; the villa was demolished in the early 17th century.

[*In his time the word still meant simply a place dedicated to the Muses, but I guess efforts like his helped shift it towards our modern sense of a building containing educational exhibits.]

The biographies he wrote for his museum, however, are still extant and are gathered in the present work. There are 106 longer ones (about two pages long on average, which is rather longer than than the amount of time Giovio spends on each person in Notable Men and Women), of people whose portraits he managed to obtain; and then there are about 50 short ones, just one paragraph long or so, of people whose portraits he lacked. He concludes the work with a ‘peroration’, really an appeal to potential supporters of his project in other countries, asking them to donate portraits of eminent men of letters to his museum.

I liked this book a good deal; because the individual biographies are short, it's easy to read them in small doses and thus avoid getting bored. One downside, however, is that he doesn't really have the space to tell you much about each individual and he certainly can't go into any details of either the subject's life or his work. A peculiar obsession of his seem to have been epitaphs: he concludes each biography with one or several epitaphs, short poems commemorating the subject of the biography, sometimes by that subject himself but more often by various minor poets. Perhaps someone who understands Latin (unlike me) can enjoy these epitaphs for their poetical qualities, but from my point of view they didn't really contribute anything of biographical value to the work. Another good feature of this book are the translator's endnotes, which are very extensive; for every person mentioned by Giovio, we get a list of references to further literature; for every work mentioned by Giovio, we get the bibliographical details of its original publication; for every epitaph, we are told what metre it's in; the notes also point out parallels to Giovio's Notable Men and Women (which mention some of the same people are the present work) and contain a wealth of other background information.

Giovio's biographies are arranged in more or less chronological order (he points out that this conveniently avoids any disputes about the order of precedence; p. 25); the first few are actually medieval scholastics: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus; but then we reach Dante and continue with the usual panoply of Renaissance authors. A good few of them were already slightly familiar to me because we've had some of their works in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, but many others were of course also completely new to me. As one might expect, Giovio's subjects are mostly Italians, but they don't predominate by as much as I thought they would. In the early parts of the book, there are about ten or so Greeks, people who had fled from the declining Byzantine Empire and helped restart the study of ancient Greek language and literature in Italy; to my surprise, there were also several Englishmen (Thomas Linacre, Thomas More, John Fisher), some of whom even spent part of their career in Italy. Later in the book there are more and more northern authors — Dutch, French, Germans, etc., about twenty in total; and Giovio admits on more than one occasion that in his time the study of ancient Greek and Latin was flourishing more in those countries than in Italy. Unsurprisingly, however, he had a harder time getting the portraits of these northerners, so their biographies are mostly among the shorter ones at the end of the book. But he was aware of this deficiency and, as I already mentioned, his peroration at the end of the book contains appeals for potraits from all sorts of countries.* Often enough, western Europeans' idea of Europe used to end at the eastern borders of Germany, and I was pleasantly surprised to see here that this was not the case for Giovio: his world stretches as far as learning is done in Latin, and he extends his appeal for portraits and support as far as Poland (which he calls “Sarmatia” :)), Hungary (“Pannonia”), Transylvania and Dalmatia (pp. 437–9).

[*And clearly his appeals had at least some success; he mentions that the bishop of Arras “is having portraids made for me” (p. 439) and that another Frenchman, Danès,** “even now is sending a portrait ofhis teacher Budé” (p. 443).]

[**This is how it's spelt in the book; but the French wikipedia spells it “Danes” and adds in a note: “And not Danès, although the e is open.” :))]

Miscellaneous

“Pomponio [Leto]'s early morning lectures were so popular that students would arrive at midnight to be sure of getting a seat.” (From the translator's introduction, p. xiii.) Clearly those were very different times :))

Giovio on Duns Scotus: “he seems to have made sport of Christian doctrines: for, hesitating here and there on a question that had been raised, he obscured faith in religious matters with a dense fog of jargon. In this manner he sowed the seeds of interminable quarrels” (III.2). That may well be true, but surely you can say the same of any other theologians. They have been causing disputes and heresies from the first centuries of christianity onwards.

Apparently Scotus was mistakenly buried alive after having an apoplexy; when he “regained consciousness, it was too late: as the poor fellow was shouting, vainly seeking help, and after he had long been beating his head against the sarcophagus, at last he bashed it in and died.” (III.3) Eeek :S But on the other hand, how did Giovio know this? Did someone dig him up later, just in case, and open the sarcophagus?

Giovio points out how mistaken Petrarch was when he thought that he would become famous for his Latin rather than his Italian works: “Fortune, mocking the judgment of so great a man, deceived him grievously when he spurned these works, which would enjoy a life of everlasting favor, in order to pursue surer and nobler glory from his Latin poem Africa” (V.2). The same happened to Boccaccio: “with a fate not unlike Petrarch's, Boccaccio himself was deceived by his opinion of his literary efforts”, but his Latin books “are forgotten and indeed barely retain a breath of life” (VI.2).

There is a biography of Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita) which, to my surprise, contains no mention at all of his infamously, gloriously obscene poems which we saw in the ITRL a few years ago (see my post from back then). Even the translator's notes say that “It is remarkable that Giovio does not mention” them (p. 481, n. 60). I wonder how many other interesting things are missing from other biographies in this book, without me being in a position to notice them...

A bizarre anecdote about how Cardinal Bessarion almost became a pope: “when three of the most powerful cardinals had approached him in his cell at the conclave in order that they might hail him as pope, they were not let in by the doorkeeper” who “said that Bessarion had to be left alone to his studies”; annoyed, they cast their votes for a rival candidate, who thus won the election (XXIV.4). However, judging by the wikipedia page about that conclave, it doesn't seem that Bessarion was quite that close to being elected pope after all.

From the biography of John Argyropoulos: “in the last act of his life, when he made his will, as a joke he made his richer friends heirs to his debt. [. . .] by eating too much watermelon he brought on an autumnal fever, and thus died in his seventieth year.” (XXVII.3.) What a way to go :))

Demetrius Chalcondyles “surpassed the morals of the Greeks, inasmuch as no deceit or artifice was observed in him” (XXIX.1) Wahahaha :))) Judging by my experiences with the Greek tourist industry, Giovio may have been on to something.

The bizarre end of Callimachus, an Italian (his real name was Filippo Buonaccorsi) who spent much of his career in the service of the King of Poland: “he became an exile of sorts, hidden away in the Polish villa of an old friend. His death there was kept secret and he lacked funeral obsequies; once his body had been dried in an oven, it was stored in a chest”; the king later had it buried in a church in Cracow (XLI.2). But according to the translator's note 298 on p. 298, these things “appear to be more fabrications of Paolo Giovio than fact”.

Galeotto Marzio “had such a great belly that he used to ride in a carriage, since even massive pack animals would break down under the tremendous weight of his obese body; and when he was an old man he finally died at Montagnana, near Este, smothered under his own lard” (XLIV.4). You can't accuse Giovio of idealizing his subjects :))

Interesting: “clade Sonciaca” is translated as “the defeat at the Soča River” (XLVIII.2) — I was pleasantly surprised by this, as the ITRL translators tend to use Italian names of such geographical features when available. On the other hand, in chap. CXI “Iustinopoli in Histria” is translated as “Capodistria”.

Syphilis was “called la maladie italienne by the French, and la maladia francese by the Italians” (translator's note 363 on p. 521). Ah, nothing like a bit of neighbourly love <3

Bartolomeo Cocles was a fortune-teller who came to a sad end: he was murdered by a certain Coponi, who “gave no excuse for committing this crime, other than Cocles's having made known to him that he was soon to become a foul murderer.” (LIII.5.) Amazing — this is almost like Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, but in real life :))

A certain physician named Zerbi “lured by a large sum, had traveled to Bosnia to cure from dropsy the pasha Skander Bey [. . .] Zerbi did not make good on what he had extravagantly promised the dying man, and was butchered by Skander's barbarian servants in order that they might yield him up to the spirit of their lord as a sacrificial victim.&rdquo, (LIX.2) Translator's note 436 (p. 531) adds that “in the summer of 1499 Skander Bey led troops from Sarajevo into Friuli and Carinthia and subsequently ‘ravaged the country around the Isonzo River in September [. . .]’ ”.

The poet Pietro Gravina “died in his seventy-fourth year [. . .] when a chestnut burr very lightly punctured his calf as he was taking a siesta in the shade: for by casually scratching it, he opened a sore, bringing upon himself a deadly infection.” (LXXIV.7) I'm starting to sense something of a pattern here — many of Giovio's subjects ended their lives in gruesome ways :]

I was interested to learn that Baldassare Castiglione, who is of course famous as the author of The Courtier, a sort of early etiquette-book, also wrote “a long epic, Cleopatra” (LXXVII.1). This sounds intriguing, but apparently the poem is actually about “an ancient statue of Ariadne purchased by Julius II that was thought to have been of the Egyptian queen” (n. 563 on p. 553).

Giovio's biography of Ludovico Ariosto mentions that “he distinctly surpassed Boiardo and Pulci himself” (LXXXIV.4), which made me realize that these two other epic poets don't have biographies in Giovio's book — a very rare case of two Italian renaissance authors who are famous enough that even I know about them but didn't get biographies here.

Interesting: Machiavelli had “no Latin, or at least a mediocre knowledge of it” (LXXXVII.1); Giovio is amazed that someone with this deficiency was able to become such a good writer. Later he adds: “It's a fact (as he himself used to tell me) that the Greek and Latin he slipped into his writings had come from Marcello Virgilio, whom he served as secretary an assistant when he was working for the government” (LXXXVII.4). So it seems that Machiavelli got his own boss to help him write his books — you've got to admit that that's pretty damn Machiavellian :)

Albert Pigge, “from the Dutch town of Kampen” had a “grotesquely harsh and throaty voice, and his resonant snorts pretty much disfigured the whole appeal of his wisdom.” (CV.1) Sounds like your average Dutch speaker :))) I also liked the mention of snorts, which go well with his porcine surname, but this must be just a coincidence in the translation, since the original is in Latin and I don't think there's any Latin word for a pig that would sound similar to Pighius.

There's also a biography of Giovio's older brother, Benedetto Giovio (CVI). This seems a bit nepotistic but Giovio describes his brother in such affectionate terms that I can't blame him for including this biography in his book.

Pietro Alcionio “was such a shameless slave to gluttony that often, within the space of a day, he cadged meals at two or three different people's tables. [. . .] when at last he was home,he relievedhimself of the burden of excessive drink by throwing up at the very edge of his bed.” (CXXIII.1) A Spaniard named Sepúlveda published a book so critical of Alcionio that the latter “was compelled to go to great expense to buy up his Spanish enemy's books in all the shops to burn them.” (CXXIII.2) Poor Alcionio — I think I'd prefer not to have my portrait in a museum than to have it appear next to such a biography :))

From the short biography of Hector Boece, a Scottish historian: “we marvel greatly that there can be found a written tradition of over a thousand years concerning the islands of the Hebrides and Orkney, so remote from our region; whereas in Italy, that nursemaid of genius, writers were entirely lacking for so many centuries after the expulsion of the Goths.” (CXXXIV)

Near the end of the book Giovio writes that he has “completed the first volume, which contains portraits of the deceased” and that he intends to write a second, which “will treat of the living” (p. 431). I don't know if he ever completed this second volume, however. Perhaps he was distracted by a different project: the translator's introduction says that six years after the present work, Giovio published a similar volume “surveying prominent military and political figures” (p. ix).

The poet Baptista of Mantua was rewarded after death with “a marble likeness of him crowned with laurel [. . .] alongside that of Vergil” (LXI.3), which Giovio thinks ridiculous since Baptista was such a mediocre poet. But what's even funnier is the following from the translator's note (n. 455 on p. 536): “Within months after its completion in 1514, a notice bearing the marquis of Gonzaga's official seal was posted on it forbiding its defacement — and soon thereafter, someone hurled feces at the notice itself” :)))

A poet named Guido Postumo, whom I haven't heard of before, “composed the elegies, for which he is best known today, which describe the pope's court and include a detailed account of a hunting expedition in Palo” (n. 512 on p. 546). Sounds interesting — too bad we don't have that work in the ITRL :)

Cardinal Egidio of Viterbo wrote a Book on Hebrew Letters; this work, “written in hopes of persuading Leo X to reform the Roman alphabet, drew extensively upon the Kabbalah and analyzed what he believed to be the sexual anatomy of Hebrew letters.” (Note 634 on p. 563.) ROFL :)) I think if you're starting to write about the sexual anatomy of the alphabet, it's high time you've put the pen away and had a wank...

BOOK: John Keay, "Last Post"

John Keay: Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East. London: John Murray, 2005. (First ed.: 1997.) 0719555892. xii + 388 pp.

Another book that I bought nearly twenty years ago and only got around to reading now. This is a very pleasant and very readable narrative history of the end of Western colonialism in the Far East, from about 1930 onwards, but there are also several chapters (covering the first 1/3 or so of the book) about how those areas had come under Western control in the first place, which I thought was a great idea as it makes the story quite self-contained.

Placing the beginning of the end of empire in 1930 means that there are basically four imperialist powers that are of interest for the purposes of this book: Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. Portugal still had a few small scraps of territory such as East Timor and Macao, but those are pretty much irrelevant; Spain had lost her territories (such as the Philippines) to the USA at the end of the 19th century. As for Japan, I guess the idea is that Japanese imperial presence in the Far East came to an end with their defeat in the WW2 and there isn't really a separate process of ‘the end of empire’ distinct from their simply losing the war, so there isn't much to say about them in a book like this (although we do of course see a lot about how Japan's conquests of former Western colonies during WW2 contributed to the end of Western imperialism in the East).

*

Although the book is mostly about the end of empire, I found the early chapters, about the growth of Western imperialism in the Far East, very interesting as well. It turns out there were a lot of differences between the four imperial countries. The Dutch had had a fairly long presence in Indonesia (though they didn't finish conquering it until the late 19th century; p. 28), and it was very important to them since they had almost no other colonies elsewhere; they cared about it only from a business point of view, invested heavily and made it very profitable to themselves (p. 15–17), mostly by requiring the natives to dedicate a certain proportion of their land (and time) to growing cash crops for the government (pp. 21–22).

By contrast, the British had so many different colonies in the east that “few outside the Colonial Office” (p. 35) could have listed them all; unsurprisingly, many of these were quite new to me. And in a such wild variety of political arrangements, too; there were the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, the Straits Settlements; there was Sarawak, technically an independent monarchy ruled by ‘White Rajahs’ of the Brooke family; and of course there were treaty ports and concessions in China. Of the treaty ports, Shanghai was by far the most important, initially for trade but later also for industry; all the imperialist powers had a presence there, and their concession, the International Settlement, was an example of the “increasingly collaborative approach” (p. 146) to imperialism.

I knew about the 99-year lease on Hong Kong's New Territories which the British obtained from China in 1898; but it turns out that at the same time they got another lease — Weihaiwei, a town much farther north, on the Shantung Peninsula. They were supposed to keep it for as long as the Russians kept Port Arthur; the Russians had to give up the latter after their defeat against Japan in 1905, but the British stayed in Weihaiwei until 1930, when they finally handed it back to China after some prodding (and with remarkably little fuss). The two British officials who had administered this territory were keen Sinophiles: “Run by a Confucianist with a Buddhist as his assistant, Weihaiwei, it was said, was more Chinese than China” (p. 39).

In the case of France, I was particularly suprised by how short-lived their empire in the Far East was: Keay points out that Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of independent Vietnam, was the son of a minor official in the service of the last emperor prior to French colonial rule (pp. 89–90). One gets the impression that for the French, their empire in Indo-China was not primarily a matter of business and profit, but a means of boosting their national pride and spreading christianity and (French) civilization (pp. 92–3); but despite the fine colonial buildings constructed in Saigon, the French impact on the area was actually very shallow (pp. 99–101).

Lastly, there's the USA, whose colonial presence in the Philippines was even more short-lived, starting only in 1898. I knew that they had been a Spanish colony prior to that, but was now interested to learn that Spain had conquered the Philippines from America and subsequently administered them from Mexico (p. 108). The Philippine revolt against Spanish rule in the late 19th century also had more in common with similar revolts in early-19th-century South America than with the later anti-colonial revolts in Southeast Asia in the 20th century (p. 110). The U.S. was at war with Spain around that time, took over several Spanish territories such as Cuba and Porto Rico, and sort of pretended to have taken over the Philippines from Spain as well, although the Spanish had by then almost completely lost control to the Philippine revolutionaries (whose declaration of independence was simply ignored by the U.S.; pp. 112–13). Apparently the Americans believed that if they didn't occupy the Philippines, some other imperial power would (p. 115), which I guess is entirely possible. Although U.S. presence on the Philippines started with a nasty military campaign to suppress the independence movement, relations got better later on, and the Filipinos, especially their elites, became heavily Americanized (p. 119). The U.S. was in principle committed to Philippine independence at some vague indefinite point in the future, and meanwhile gave them favourable access to U.S. markets (pp. 119–20). In 1933 they promised independence in ten years, and the Philippines indeed became independent after the war, in 1946 (p. 187).

William Taft, who would later become famous as the fattest president in U.S. history, spent some time on the Philippines to help organize a civilian government there: “Taft was chiefly remarkable for a stature which rivalled that of most Filipino homes and a 325 lb bulk which exceeded that of entire Filipino families.” :))) (P. 118.)

*

The Great Depression apparently hit southeast Asia pretty badly; the economic slump brought in its wake higher taxation and labour unrest (pp. 128–33); “[t]he myth of colonial prosperity was wrecked by the depression” (p. 4). Nationalist movements emerged and began calling for an end of colonial rule; but probably they would have emerged sooner or later anyway, regardless of the economy.

China, which had of course never really been colonized by the imperialists, was already governed by a nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, who was pushing for a return of the concessions (such as those in Shanghai) under Chinese control, and might have achieved this had the process not been interrupted by the Japanese aggression on China in 1931 (p. 151). The Shanghai concession “rested on bluff” (p. 142) — the imperialist powers had no realistic way of protecting it against the forces which now loomed around it. For a time the bluff worked; in 1931, fighting reached Shanghai but stopped on the borders of the International Settlement, whose inhabitants would gawk at the fighting “[f]rom their roof-tops and verandas” (p. 152). But when the Sino-Japanese conflict escalated into a full-blown war in 1937, “the spell of imperial inviolability” (p. 155) was broken; the settlement got bombed, it had to accept an increasing amount of Japanese control, and its economy declined so much that there was hardly any point in its continued existence (p. 156). Imperial presence in China (except in Hong Kong) was simply swept away in the first couple of years of the war.

Japan's war against China didn't go as well as the Japanese had expected, which led them to increase their war aims so as to justify this unexpectedly large and hard war; they now wanted a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” covering the whole Far East (p. 161). This put them on a course for conflict with the Western powers, who were in any case busy with the war in Europe and weren't really in a position to defend their Far Eastern colonies well. Previously Japan had depended on resources imported from the U.S., but the latter now imposed an embargo and Japan pushed into southeast Asia to secure such things as rubber from Malaya and oil from Indonesia (p. 168). Colonial administrations there were embarrassingly easily swept away; the myth “of imperial invincibility was exploded” (p. 4). In French Indo-China it was even easier; Vichy France maintained neutrality towards Japan and yielded to Japanese demands without a fight, e.g. allowing Japan to station troops in Vietnam (p. 166). On the Philippines, the Americans had ambitious plans to defend the islands, but this went badly and they had to abandon most of the territory quickly (pp. 189–90).

General MacArthur, who led the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines in 1941–2, went to considerable lengths to liberate them speedily in 1944–5. As a result, he was enormously popular there (pp. 194–5), and so was the U.S. as a whole: the Philippines became independent in 1946, but kept very close ties to the U.S., and “nowhere in the East [. . .] did the ex-colonial power enjoy greater popularity” (p. 197).

But in countries where the imperial powers intended to re-establish colonial rule, things would not be so easy. Many of these territories were still occupied by Japanese forces when Japan surrendered, which deprived the Dutch, British and French of restoring their colonial prestige by liberating their ex-colonies in a triumphant campaign (p. 213). Moreover, late in the war, Japan had begun promoting the notion of future independence in such occupied countries as Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines etc., with the idea that they would be Japanese puppet-states, or “at least not anti-Japanese” in case Japan lost the war (p. 208). Nationalist movements in Indonesia and north Vietnam declared independence at the end of the war (pp. 210, 219). The former colonial powers would have to wage wars on them to re-establish control; but they were weakened after the WW2 and could hardly expect the U.S. to help them regain their colonial empires.

In Malaya, the British fared a bit better since the country was too ethnically divided for a nationalist movement to have emerged (p. 229); the native Malays were in danger of becoming a minority amidst all the Indian and Chinese immigrants (known as “Malayans”). Moreover, the British empire in the Far East had been attractive and profitable because of “India's eastern trade” (p. 242), and there was little point in trying to hold on to it once India became independent. “Like one stricken with senile impotence, the British found that losing the means to perform coincided with losing the inclination.” :)))) (P. 243.)

By contrast, the French regarded Indo-China as “part of France; their inhabitants could become French citizens, their deputies sat in the French government” (p. 244), and they also saw their colonies as the key to restoring their great power status (p. 275); and the Netherlands needed its colonies for its post-WW2 recovery “and to avoid, as one Dutch statesman put it, ‘becoming another Denmark’ ” :)) (p. 245). These two countries therefore resisted demands for colonial self-government or independence, or at best tried to deflect them by offering to establish vague unions of the metropole and the colonies, in which the former would always have the upper hand (pp. 261, 275).

The situation in Indonesia struck me as particularly bizarre. The nationalist movement obtained Japanese weapons and was in control of the country; in some places former Dutch prisoners now had to stay in their camps under Japanese guard “for their own safety”, due to all the nationalist militias rampaging outside — how embarrassing :)); and occasionally the Japanese, having surrendered, then fought alongside the British against the nationalists (pp. 250–2). The British troops, which were mostly from India, withdrew in late 1947; the Dutch kept fighting but came under heavy international pressure as aggressors against the “Indonesian Republic” (p. 263). The U.S. had reluctantly tolerated the re-establishment of colonial rule on the theory that it helped prevent the spread of communism, but once it became clear that the Indonesian Republic is heavily anti-communist itself, the U.S. withdrew its support of the Dutch and threatened to cut them out of the Marshall Plan; hence they finally caved in and recognized Indonesian independence (pp. 268–9).

The French fought in Vietnam for a few years, relying to a considerable extent on American equipment (pp. 270–4); for some time they negotiated with Ho Chi Minh about the establishment of a French-Vietnamese union, but refused to offer any real autonomy to Vietnam, so that Ho Chi Minh's policy of moderation and negotiation with France was discredited (pp. 283–5). Hitherto the war hadn't mattered much to anyone outside France and Vietnam, but this began to change after the latter gained the support of China and the USSR (p. 291); now the war became part of “America's global crusade against Communism” (p. 292). After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the French agreed to partition the country and withdraw from (communist-controlled) North Vietnam; and the U.S. was now propping up South Vietnam, so there was no further role for France there (pp. 295–6). Soon South Vietnam received “more than half of its total revenue” in the form of U.S. aid (p. 347); more and more U.S. equipment and soldiers were being shipped in, and in 1965 the U.S. entered the war in earnest (p. 352). Their public opinion soon grew tired of it, the U.S. withdrew in 1972, and South Vietnam collapsed by 1975 (p. 353).

There was also a communist insurgency in Malaya around 1950, but the British managed to suppress it, partly by wisely minimizing civilian casualties (p. 308) and partly by committing to Malay independence and presenting communism as a common enemy to Malay nationalists (p. 302). Malaya became independent in 1957 and merged with a few other states into Malaysia a few years later — a much smoother transition to independence than in Vietnam (pp. 303, 320). There were even some areas that didn't want independence, such as Penang (p. 316), a region in Malaya; nor were the people of Sarawak happy when the last White Rajah ceded the territory to Britain (p. 239).

The last bit of empire to be surrendered was Hong Kong; the lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997, and the rest of the colony (which had in principle been ceded to Britain permanently) would be unviable without them; moreover China demanded the whole of Hong Kong, and Britain wasn't really in a position to prevent them from doing so. As is well known, the only concession that the British were able to obtain from China was a promise to maintain democracy in Hong Kong for fifty years (p. 364). Keay, writing soon after these events, seems to have regarded this arrangement with a certain amount of optimism, but as we now know, the Chinese broke their promise before even half of the fifty-year period was over.

*

An interesting observation from p. 274: after the WW2, “empire as a mechanism of control was ending because ease of communication was making it obsolete”, e.g. due to the spread of air travel. You could still do imperialism, but didn't have to maintain “elaborate administrative structures and far-flung military establishments”. — U.S. interventions in the Philippines in the '50s (to suppress a communist insurgency; pp. 336–41) or Vietnam in the '60s were a typical case of imperialism, even though they didn't involve “the colouring-in of world maps, the monarch's head on colonial currencies and postage stamps” etc. (p. 335). Old-school empire was simply “outdated” (ibid.). Another sense in which empire is now obsolete is that the sort of wars required to maintain it are unacceptable to Western public opinion (p. 355), which makes these wars politically insupportable (as long as the countries are democratic, at least).

*

Looking back, I can't help but be surprised at how quick and easy the end of Western imperialism in the Far East was. Who would have thought, in 1930, that in little more than twenty years it would all be over? When you look at maps of the world in the Age of Imperialism, with huge swathes of the planet painted pink, blue, etc. to signify the British, French etc. empires, it's hard to resist the temptation to think that such huge empires must have been enormously powerful; and yet they all turned out to have been mere houses of cards, completely unable to preserve themselves, collapsing ignominiously at the slightest push as soon as they were dealing with anything other than literal spear-chucking natives. I think this fact, just how weak these empires really were, is not emphasized enough in education today, and this gives us an unrealistic idea as to just what is possible for a country to accomplish if it sets its mind to it.

Another proof of just how weak the imperialists really were is the fact that they never managed to colonize any substantial parts of China, and never even seriously tried to. Even in the 19th century when they actually won a few wars against China, none of those were proper wars of conquest; and when they won, all they got was just leases here and concessions there, nothing that China couldn't easily claim back once she ceased to be weak. It is telling that the only imperialist country that managed to conquer any substantial amount of Chinese territory was Japan with her conquest of Manchuria, probably due to the advantage of geographical proximity. That famous old cartoon of imperialist powers carving up China turned out to be a mere illusion. I wonder how different the world would be today if China *had* been properly colonized. In that hypothetical scenario, would the China of today be less dangerous and harmful than she is here in the real timeline, with its size, power and malignant authoritarianism? If the imperalist powers had really carved China up, there might be several independent countries there now, smaller and hence less dangerous and less harmful.

Another interesting hypothetical scenario: obviously the WW2 had a big effect towards speeding up the end of imperialism in the Far East, but it's tempting to speculate how things would have developed if the WW2 hadn't taken place, or if the imperialist powers had been able to reassert control after the war — perhaps with American help, if the U.S. hadn't been so heavily opposed to traditional colonial empires at the time. But I suspect that even then, the end of empire could only have been delayed by a few decades, rather than really prevented. Once the whole population of a colony becomes politically conscious and is completely opposed to your colonial rule, what are you going to do? You'd have to have a spy in every street, a squad of soldiers on every corner, send millions of people to prison camps, pile up mountains of skulls, raze villages and cities to the ground. It is certainly possible to control a hostile subject population that way. Many conquerors have done it over the course of history; China's treatment of the Uyghurs is a recent case in point, as is Russia's treatment of the parts of the Ukraine that they are presently occupying. But by the mid-20th century the western powers, and especially their public opinion, didn't have the stomach for that sort of thing any more; and without that you can't do old-style imperialism with any success, and there's no point in even trying. It may even be objectively true that you'd be bringing a better administration to the primitive inhabitants of your colony, but they won't appreciate it, and your efforts will be wasted.

ToRead:

Keay mentions a great many very interesting-sounding books, especially memoirs of people who were involved in the events discussed in this book.

• Hickmann Powell: The Last Paradise (1930). A book about Bali: “A world rent by repressions and revolutions badly needed a new paradise myth, and in this island in the back of beyond it found it” (p. 14).
• Ladislao (László) Székely: Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (1937). The memoirs of a Hungarian who participated in the ‘gold rush’ focused on tobacco cultivation in late-19th-century Dutch East Indies: “He found unimaginable brutality, described it in appalling detail, yet stayed on long enough to acquire the expected reward” (p. 26).
• R. O. Winstedt: Start from Alif: Countfrom One (1969). An official in British Malaya, he is mentioned here on p. 30 for his remarks on the Dutch exploitation of Java.
• Gregor Krause: Bali (2 vols., 1920; archive.org has the 1922 one-volume reprint); “written in German but lavishly illustrated with photographs of Balinese physiques” (p. 31), this book drew the attention of Western travellers and helped make Bali a tourist destination.
• Reginald Johnston: Lion and Dragon in Northern China (1910). A memoir by a British official in China; later he also became the tutor of the last Chinese emperor and eventually served as the last British governor of Weihaiwei (p. 77). I now see on Johnston's Wikipedia page that he wrote two other interesting-sounding memoirs: From Peking to Mandalay (1908) and Buddhist China (1913).
• Stella Benson: this “sylph-like novelist” (p. 82) of the 1920s and '30s lived in China for a number of years, where her husband was a British customs official; Keay mentions her a few times and occasionally quotes from her letters (Some Letters of Stella Benson, ed. by C. Clarabut, 1978), but doesn't mention any of her novels or travel books specifically. I was greatly intrigued to read, in her wikipedia page, that she received the Benson Medal :)
• Osbert Sitwell: Escape With Me! (1939). A travel book, mentioned here on p. 100 for Sitwell's impression of the shallowness of French presence in Indo-China.
• Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown: Crowded Hour (1975). Memoirs of an “old Malay hand” (p. 233; also quoted on pp. 126, 177).
• Maggie Keswick: The Thistle and the Jade (1980). She was the daughter of John Keswick, a prominent Scottish businessman in China (hence the title). Mentioned here on p.  127; when the Sino-Japanese war started in 1937 and the Chinese authorities “banned the use of the radio telegraph, desperate dealers in Jardine Matheson's office suddenly became avid pigeon fanciers” :)
• R. H. Bruce Lockhart: Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). About his time as a spy in Russia in 1918–19; mentioned here on p. 133.
• Mona Gardner: Menacing Sun (1940). An American writer who visited Singapore shortly before the Japanese invasion; quoted here on p. 172.
• Ronald C. H. Mackie [but everyone else on the internet spells it ‘McKie’]: This Was Singapore (1941). “A laconic Australian journalist with a Philip Marlowe prose style” (p. 173), he spent three years in Singapore just before the war.
• Somerset Maugham: The Circle (1921), The Painted Veil (1925), The Casuarina Tree (1926), The Summing Up (1938). According to the wikipedia, these are a play, a novel, a book of short stories, and a memoir, respectively. Keay refers to them here and there in the book, so presumably they are at least partly set in the Far East (pp. 62, 85, 172).
• Agnes Keith: Land Below the Wind (1939), Three Came Home (1948). A “restrained but heart-rending account, later filmed, of survival in Japanese detention” (p. 180), by the American wife of an English official on Borneo.
• K'tut Tantri: Revolt in Paradise (1960). K'tut Tantri was “the Balinese title used by a Scots-born American called Vaneen Walker” (p. 182; but her wikipedia page currently says Muriel Stuart Walker); she ran a hotel on Bali in the 1930s. Her “account of her wartime exploits as a gun-runner for the Indonesian resistance and then as a prisoner of the Japanese has strained the credulity of critical readers” (p. 257). At the end of the war she gained some notoriety for her radio broadcasts in support of the nationalists trying to prevent the re-establishment of colonial rule in Indonesia (ibid.).
• Albert Klestadt: The Sea Was Kind (1959). “A pipe-smoking back-packer with a taste for intelligence”, Klestadt lived in Manila when the Japanese invaded. He was initially interned but “[s]ome fluency in Japanese [. . .], plus his German birth, secured his release” (p. 190), and after many adventures he eventually made his way to Australia.
• F. Spencer Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (1953). About his involvement in resistance to Japanese occupation in Malaya (p. 213).
• Compton Mackenzie: All Over the Place (1947). A book about “the wartime exploits of the Indian army” (p. 242): “Nowhere east of Gibraltar had Indian troops not been involved” (p. 243).
• James A. Mitchener: The Voice of Asia (1952). Quoted here on p. 236 for his observations on Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak.
• Dirk Bogarde: Backcloth (1986). A memoir of his time as an intelligence officer in Indonesia just after the war (pp. 249, 252); later he became a famous actor.
• Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent (1951). He travelled in Indo-China while the French were trying to re-establish control (p. 274). For a moment I thought he was the same travel writer who had written Old Calabria some time before WW1, but then it turned out that I mixed him up with Norman Douglas.
• S. J. Perelman: Westward Ha! or, Around the World in 80 Clichés (1948). The author was an American humourist; mentioned here on p. 289 for his encounter with the Vietnamese ex-emperor who, by 1947, was living it up in the night clubs of Hong Kong.
• Lucien Bodard: The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (1967). The author was a journalist and “friend and mentor to the novelist Graham Greene” (p. 292).
• Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955). A novel set early in the Vietnam War; some of the characters are based on real people (pp. 343–4).

BOOK: "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robert van Gulik. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.* (First ed.: privately printed in Tokyo, 1949.) 0486233375. xxiii + 237 pp.

[*Obviously my copy is from a later printing, but it doesn't indicate the year anywhere. I bought it in 2008 and it was new then. The RRP on the back cover is $8.95; as of this writing, in 2024, the price on Dover's website is $17.95. Ouch!]

I cannot claim to be a huge reader in the genre of detective stories, but I have read, and enjoyed, Poe's stories about Dupin and Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes, several times in fact, and I also listened to a lot of audiobooks of Agatha Christie's stories about Poirot; and I was vaguely aware that Poe's Dupin stories, from the first half of the 19th century, were pretty much the beginning of the detective story as a genre. So naturally, I was greatly intrigued when, years ago on a book fair, I came across a book subtitled “An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel”. It turns out that, while Poe's stories may have been the first detective fiction in the West, something very much resembling detective stories and novels had existed in China several centuries earlier than that (p. iii). I bought the book right away, but only got around to reading it now.

As it turns out, the book has very many excellent features — and one or two horrible downsides, but we'll get to these in due course. The translator, Robert van Gulik, was evidently both an excellent Sinologist and a keen connoisseur of crime fiction, both Western and Chinese, and he provided the book with a very interesting introduction and an appendix with some notes; he introduces us to Chinese detective stories, points out a few ways in which they differ from Western ones, and explains the minor adjustments he made in the process of translating the present work to make it more accessible to Western readers. Many of these novels are very long, have a confusingly large cast of characters, reveal the criminals up front, and feature prominent supernatural elements — characteristics which the Chinese audiences expect and like, but which Western ones wouldn't; van Gulik chose to translate the present novel precisely because it is one of the few without these downsides (p. v).

The protagonist of the Chinese detective novel isn't exactly a detective as we would understand the term now, but the “district magistrate”, an imperial official in charge of an area typically consisting of “one fairly large walled city, and all the countryisde around it, say for sixty or seventy miles” (p. ix). When people reported crimes or brought lawsuits before him, it was his job to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge, all in one person; so he has a wider range of things to do than the Western detective, and we get to see him do all these things in the present novel as well. The Chinese readers expected to see the criminals not only discovered, but also tried and executed, the more gruesomely the better.

Judge Dee was a real person, a prominent official at the Imperial Court in the 8th century (p. xiii); but the present novel, written in the 18th century, shows Dee in his early days as a district magistrate. Apparently, although the author didn't go out of his way to avoid anachronisms, there were very few of them anyway since the Chinese law and administration had changed so little in the intervening thousand years (p. xx); moreover, the translator removed one or two more blatant anachronisms, such as the occasional use of firearms (p. 229).

Dee solves three cases in this novel, but they aren't presented as three separate stories; the second case opens up while he's still working on the first, and the third case intervenes later (but is solved quickly). I rather liked this idea, though it made it slightly harder to keep track of what is going on and which character belongs where. There is a pleasing variety in the cast of characters: one case involves travelling silk-merchants, one involves gentry and one mostly involves relatively poor town-dwellers. And moreover, there is also a pleasing variety in the contents of the cases. One isn't a criminal case at all, but turns out to be a combination of a unfortunate accident and of suspicions which prove to be unfounded; one is a fairly straightforward murder case, but the problem is how to find the murderer and prove his guilt; and one is a case that Dee discovers purely by coincidence, and only gradually does it turn out that a crime has been committed at all.

Dee has several assistants whom he occasionally sends out to gather information, watch suspects and so on, but they are mostly just the muscle* while he is the brains of the operation. Sometimes he travels around in the pursuit of his investigations, either in his official capacity as the magistrate or in various disguises; sometimes he conducts hearings and interrogations in his own tribunal. Supernatural elements, which are apparently common in Chinese detective stories, fortunately have a fairly minimal presence here; on one or two occasions, Dee receives hints from ghosts and dreams, but they are mostly very vague hints, some of which he only comes to understand after he has solved the case by conventional means. Apparently it is also common in this genre for the criminal's spirit to find itself in the underworld, judged by a tribunal of infernal demons, but the present novel features a nice inversion of this trope: there is a scene like that, but it turns out to be just Dee and his assistants wearing masks and costumes, trying to trick a suspect into making a confession (and it works).

[*Occasionally we even get ‘action scenes’ in which these characters practice some sort of boxing or martial art. Evidently this art had a rich vocabulary of technical terms for every possible move, and the author loves to deploy them to construct a sort of detailed step-by-step account of the fight: “a tiger clawing at a sheep”, “enticing the tiger out of his forest”, etc. (pp. 104–5). I suppose the original readership of these novels must have relished this sort of thing; I for one was simply glad that in the present novel such scenes are short and few in number.]

So, as far as detective work is concerned, this was all pretty neat and interesting and made for an enjoyable read. But now we come to the downsides. In the Western detective fiction I've read so far — which, as I have already admitted, is fairy limited — the detective isn't really a very powerful figure; he relies on his wits, not on having a position of power over other people. You don't generally see Holmes or Poirot yelling at people, and you certainly don't see them having people flogged and tortured. But for an ancient Chinese district magistrate like Dee, that is a routine part of his work. Unless some higher-ranking imperial official comes for a visit, Dee is the most important person in his district. People who appear in his court are on their knees all the time, knocking their heads against the floor and referring to themselves as ‘this insignificant person’ when talking to him. He can, and does, have them tortured to extract information or confessions from them.

Now, to be sure, you could advance many extenuating circumstances on Dee's behalf. He lived in the 8th century. If you were to set such a story at the same time anywhere west of China — say in the Frankish Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Caliphate — I daresay the tortures would have been just as bad and just as easily forthcoming, possibly more. We even see a scene where Dee is urged to torture a suspect but refuses to do so because there is no evidence against him, only mere suspicions (p. 159). Moreover, Dee is labouring under a supremely idiotic constraint which is not his fault: “it is one of the fundamental principles of the Chinese Penal Code that no one can be sentenced unless he has confesed to the crime” (p. xviii) — of course torture is rife in such a system, otherwise why would anybody ever bother confessing? How could anybody ever have thought that having such a principle in your legal system is a good idea? I suspect that people who came up with it didn't really care about justice in the sense of finding out who was actually guilty, punishing him and avoiding harming the innocent; probably to people who designed this system, it was enough if for each crime, someone — anyone — was found who could be made to confess to it, and who would then get punished for it; a surface appearance of justice was thereby maintained, so that people wouldn't complain too much about crimes not getting investigated and punished, and for this purpose it didn't matter if they got the right person or not.

The translator, in his introduction, tries to point out various factors that, at least in theory, worked to discourage magistrates like Dee from abusing their powers too much (pp. xx–xxiii); and he quotes this opinion of a British official: “As regards then the criminal law of the Chinese, although the allowance of torture in the examination of prisoners is a blot which cannot be overlooked, although the punishment for treason and parricide is monstrous, and the punishment of the wooden collar or portable pillory is not to be defended, yet the Code—when its procedure is understood—is infinitely more exact and satisfactory than our own system, and very far from being the barbarous cruel abomination it is generally supposed to be”.

Well, I don't know. To my mind all this sounds a little bit too much like ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ Sure, if you disregard the torture and the inhumane punishments and the vast potential for abuse in the hands of corrupt officials — if you disregard all that, it was probably a fine system. But all that was actually a routine part of the system, so... it *was* a barbarous cruel abomination. The most that can be said for it is that Western systems were also barbarous cruel abominations until a comparatively recent time.

As far as I'm concerned, this aspect of the novel prevented me from enjoying it. I can be intrigued by a detective as he uses his wit and logical skill to solve a puzzling case; I might even admire him if, at the end, he gathers everyone into a room and explains how he did it. But for the judge, who acts as if he were better than other people, who demands deference from them, who presumes to pass judgment on them — for him I can have nothing but the liveliest contempt. They have a very easy job with all these powers vested in them. If they wanted me to respect them, they'd have to lay down all their powers *and then try to accomplish anything* — that would impress me, to do something when you have no power over people; but the way it is now, they should only be despised.

The fact that the criminals in this novel suffer tortures and execution also caused me to transfer all my sympathy to them and away from the victims. Sure, the fact that Shao killed one of his fellow silk-merchants and also a random passer-by who might otherwise have become a witness isn't exactly commendable; but the very essence of a merchant's work is to screw people out of their money; from that to murdering them for their bales of silk is but a small step; we allow them to do the former, so why not also the latter?

And sure, the fact that Mrs. Djou killed her husband in the hopes of subsequently marrying her lover isn't exactly commendable either — and yet I can't really find it in me to object to it all that much. He's long dead and buried, so what good can punishing her now possibly accomplish? Besides, it's not her fault that divorce isn't easily available in ancient China. The same applies a fortiori to Hsu, her lover, who doesn't seem to have been guilty of anything more than adultery.

It would be easier to sympathize with the victims if we had got to know them first; but in this novel we never get to know them as individuals, we only hear about them once they are already dead, and so it is easy to write them off without feeling sorry for them. I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the author; there are eight billion people in the world, and I cannot care very much if a random stranger gets murdered; Mrs. Djou is a human being whose sufferings and death I have many reasons to care about, but her late husband and victim, Bee Hsun, is just a name to us, and we have no reason to care if he lives or dies.

So to me, this novel felt like a tasty dish sprinkled with broken glass. Theoretically, there's still a tasty dish in there somewhere, but practically it's ruined beyond repair. Perhaps other readers, if they are able to ignore Dee's judicial violence better than me, will enjoy the book better than I did. In any case, this doesn't change my admiration for the translator, who did an excellent job of making the book as accessible as possible even to a reader like me, who knows next to nothing about China, its administration, its legal system and the like.

ToRead:

• Robert van Gulik, the translator of the present volume, went on to write a series of some sixteen volumes of ‘Chinese detective stories’ of his own, with Judge Dee as the protagonist. I don't know if they manage to avoid torture and execution scenes or not; but if they do, they sound like they should make for quite enjoyable reading.

BOOK: Patrick French, "Liberty or Death"

Patrick French: Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division. London: Flamingo, 1998. (First ed.: HarperCollins, 1997.) 0006550452. xxv + 467 pp.

Yet another book about India that I bought a long time ago (some 15 years ago, in this particular case) and only got around to reading it now. I probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't found it at a deep discount in a bookshop at the time, as I'm not *that* interested in the subject of Indian independence; but now that I've read it, I have to say that it was actually quite interesting, and certainly well written.

I was also intrigued by the title, though one associates its more with the Greeks than with the Indians; and I remembered it vaguely as the title of a novel that I read long ago in the early years of this blog. I see now in the wikipedia that many other revolutionary groups also used this slogan, but I can't see any specific connection to India, nor do I remember noticing any references to this slogan in French's book, despite its use as the title, except briefly in the introduction (p. xxv) and one instance of Bose's supporters using it in 1943 (p. 205).

The book does have one or two features that I found a bit odd. As French explains in his introduction, the British government used to have its spies keep an eye out on various Indian independence activists, both in India and in Britain, and the files of these intelligence agencies remained classified until French, in the process of working on this book, got the government to release them (p. xxi). I imagine it is every historian's dream to be able to tap into a fresh and previously unaccessible store of primary source material, so we can't blame him for making use of it in this book; but I couldn't help feeling that the way he made use of it was somewhat incongruous. Most of the time his book tells a perfectly ordinary story with characters whose activities were a well-documented matter of public record — your viceroys, your Congress politicians and the like — but then every now and then, our attention is suddenly and briefly diverted to some obscure official from the Indian Political Intelligence or some other such spying organization, without it ever being particularly obvious why we should suddenly be interested in them or whether their activities really had any material impact on the larger story. You can't help feeling that he included them simply because that's what his fresh new source material was about, so he was damn well going to include these things in his book.

The other odd thing is his concern that “by approaching the past through documents and dignitaries, I risked writing bureaucrat's history rather than living, human history” (p. xxiii), and to ameliorate that he occasionally interrupts his historical narrative with a page or two about his conversations with random people in India whom he encountered while doing research for the book. It's not that these passages aren't also interesting to read (I particularly liked the section where he follows the route of Gandhi's salt march; p. 74), but they don't really improve your understanding of the historical period that the book is supposed to be about; they would fit better into a travel book instead of a history book; and besides, I think a bureaucrat's history focused on documents and dignitaries is precisely how history should be written — those are the things that matter, and not the everyday lives of random unimportant people. If what you really want to be is a collector of anecdotes and teller of tales, that's fair enough, but you shouldn't mix that up with the practice of writing history. It's sad to think that the field of history has sunk so low that a historian now feels compelled to apologize for not focusing enough on random nobodies.

One thing I liked about the book is that it's fairly broad in its coverage. It starts around 1900 (early enough that when we first meet Nehru, it isn't Jawaharlal but his less well known father Motilal) and doesn't end with independence, but also contains a few chapters about its aftermath: the partition of India and Pakistan, with the enormous amount of violence that accompanied it; subsequent political developments in both countries (it was depressing to see how quickly Pakistan descended into its now seemingly permanent condition of military dictatorship, p. 365); the civil war in Pakistan that led to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh; and in an excellent couple of chapters at the end of the book, French spoke to a wide selection of people who still remembered the partition and whose lives had been impacted by it. At the time of the writing of his book — and I suspect it is not much different now, some 25 years later — there still existed whole communities of people who were basically stuck on the wrong side of a border. (An interesting observation from p. 381: noting the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, French says that “most political commentators” think that “Hindu extremism has reached its peak, and will now decline into oblivion”. Alas, that was more than 20 years ago, and we can now see that just the opposite happened, and the BJP has been ruling India for a decade now.)

I also liked French's many concise and interesting judgments on the various politicians involved in the story. For example, as someone who mostly knew about Gandhi from watching the famous biographical film in which he had been played by Ben Kingsley, I was interested to see here that the real Gandhi “was an emotionally troubled social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator” and “a crafty Gujarati lawyer” (p. 17). Jinnah was a “cadaverous chain-smoker” (p. 230) and, somewhat surprisingly for the leader of the Muslim League and hence practically the founder of Pakistan, a ham sandwich enjoyer :)) (p. 63).

*

Despite starting earlier and ending later, the bulk of the book deals with the period from approx. 1920 to independence. The Indians had expected that their loyalty during WW1 would be rewarded with greater autonomy after it, but the reforms introduced by the British after the war were minimal and kept the vast majority of power in British hands. This disappointment “marked the start of serious agitation” (p. 37) and transformed the Indian National Congress into a truly mass movement. British rule was based on “legal authoritarianism rather than arbitrary totalitarianism” (p. 37), and so they couldn't really do much to seriously suppress the movement once it grew large enough (p. 52).

Indeed I couldn't help feeling, as the story progressed, a sense of inevitability about it — British rule in India had always relied on the fact that, at some level, Indians basically accepted it, and once this ceased to be the case there was no way the British could have kept India short of going full Nazi on it; and they weren't willing to go as far as that. You can't help feeling that this must surely have been obvious to them in 1920 if not earlier, so that instead of dragging their feet for another few decades and then leaving in a positively unseemly haste once things really got out of control, they could have preserved some dignity by exiting earlier, before it became obvious how powerless they were to direct the course of events.

Instead, they just made matters worse by trying to delay the inevitable. As time went on, Indian demands grew and British concessions were invariably too little and too late. “The reforms of 1919 might well have appeased political India in 1909; the reforms of 1935 would have evoked enthusiasm in 1919” (p. 96). Of course, at the same time I don't doubt that even if the British had given them greater concessions earlier, the Indians would still have kept on raising their demands all the way to full independence; so in that sense it doesn't really matter what the British did or didn't give and when.

An example of such a concession was the introduction of provincial autonomy in the 1935 Government of India Act (p. 150). As a result, from about 1937 onwards the regional governments of India were in the hands of the Congress (p. 108), and the British were less and less able to exert any control over what was going on.

The British set up a secret agency called Indian Political Intelligence to spy on Indian activists (p. 98). This occasionally provided them with useful information, but of course couldn't really change the flow of events in any major way.

I was interested to see that it was only in the late 1930s that the Muslim League became a true mass movement (p. 113). Initially it was small and was dismissed by Congress as irrelevant, which was probably harmful in the long run (p. 111). Its first demands for something resembling an autonomous Pakistan only appeared with the Lahore Resolution of 1940 (p. 124), though they were a bit vague on the details.

An interesting detail: at the start of WW2, the then Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on behalf of India, without consulting the Indian politicians (p. 120); this naturally caused much resentment, even though otherwise they'd likely have been in favour of such a declaration. But I was surprised to see that a separate declaration of war by India was even necessary; I didn't think it had enough autonomy for that (unlike, say, Canada or Australia) — after all, it wasn't even a dominion yet. Linlithgow accompanied his declaration with the bizarre statement that India could not “accept the dictation of a foreign power in relation to her own subjects”; French remarks that the irony “was probably lost on him” (ibid.). The Congress responded by withdrawing from participation in provincial governments (p. 121). The British lost the “moral argument” by claiming they were fighting WW2 to liberate occupied countries and yet continuing to occupy India themselves (p. 141).

Churchill, who was the prime minister during most of the WW2, was heavily against any sort of autonomy for India, and probably did more harm than good with his stubbornness on the subject (p. 130); but even he could not prevent the inevitable. The British lost a lot of prestige after their defeats in Southeast Asia in 1942; there was a “popular feeling in India that their British rulers were no longer invincible” (p. 135). Moreover, some pressure to make concessions to India also came from the Americans, who were not fond of the British Empire and whom Churchill couldn't afford to ignore since Britain increasingly depended on U.S. support in the war (p. 137).

[Incidentally, there is a pleasantly wacky paragraph about plans that Roosevelt discussed with a “Professor Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution” on how to “cross-breed and develop ‘an Indo-Asian or Eurasian or (better) Euroindasian rase’ as a counterbalance to the ‘nefarious’ Japanese. [. . .] The idea was that certain ‘racial crossings’ were good, while others were dangerous.” Roosevelt insisted “that Japanese-European and Chinese-Malayan crossings were ‘bad’, while Chinese-European were ‘not all that bad’ and Dutch-Javanese were positively ‘good’. Roosevelt was especially concerned with an indigenous ethnic group in Japan who went by the intriguing name of the ‘Hairy Ainus’, and wondered in what way they differed from the other Japanese, apart from their hirsute appearance.” (Pp. 138–9.) Not that I really have anything against this sort of good old-fashioned racism — at least it has the virtue of being honest, unlike the present-day quasi-religious insistence that all groups of people are somehow equal — but the part that amazes me is how they came up with this insane shit in the first place. How did Roosevelt even come to form an opinion as to whether Chinese-Malayan hybrids are better than Dutch-Javanese ones or vice versa? When did he even meet any Malayans or Javanese? If you asked me which of those two groups is better than the other, I could only say that I haven't got the foggiest idea, but here's Roosevelt having very definite and firm preferences regarding them...]

The British were not keen to make big concessions, and the Congress was not willing to accept small ones, figuring they could get better terms later since British power was obviously on the wane. The gap between the two sides is illustrated by the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942: Cripps tried to come up with a compromise, but it was rejected by both sides, being far more than Churchill was willing to give and far less than the Congress was willing to accept (p. 147).

The Indian nationalists decided to embark on a wide-ranging campaign of civil disobedience, the Quit India Movement (p. 151). The British, for their part, were willing to suppress this sort of thing pretty heavy-handedly since India was of great strategic importance during the war, both as a source of soldiers and on account of its production (p. 133). As soon as the Quit India campaign began, the British arrested the Congress leadership and kept them in (admittedly fairly comfortable) imprisonment for most of the rest of the war (p. 156). Initially the British even planned to deport them out of India, to Aden, though this last part of the plan foundered on bizarre legal complications: they couldn't legally be detained while in transit at sea, and moreover the Governor of Aden indicated that there was no room for any additional nonwhite people in his colony :))) (p. 153).

Protests, strikes, riots, sabotage etc. spread over large parts of India, and the “authorities responded with public floggings, the burning of villages and collective fines” (p. 159); they shot at protestors and raped the women (ibid.). “India was spiralling out of control” (p. 161). “By the end of 1942, sixty thousand people had been arrested” (p. 161) and the Quit India movement was mostly suppressed (p. 169). British rule over India lost all legitimacy and could thenceforth only be sustained by the means of repression (p. 160). Anglo-American relations also deteriorated as the Americans now saw that the British were more interested in preserving their control of India than in fighting against Japan (p. 162).

I liked this wild idea by Field Marshal Wavell, who was appointed as the new Viceroy of India in mid-1943: he proposed that the leading Indian politicians should be told that Britain was committed to giving India self-government as soon as possible, and they “would then be put into a room, with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutions, international law and so forth, and be left there until they reached a solution” (p. 177). Of course, nothing came of this; Churchill and his ministers “were not amused; the last thing they wanted was a Viceroy who showed initiative” (ibid.). The idea reminds me of how the Bosnian war of 1992–95 was ended when Bill Clinton shut the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia into a U.S. Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, and told them they aren't getting out until they sign a peace treaty :))

Unlike Churchill, who had something of a visceral hatred of Indians and couldn't stomach the idea that the British Empire might be coming to an end (pp. 188–9), Wavell was a realist and surprisingly open-minded for a former military officer. He understood that what Britain would sooner or later have to do in India was something rather akin to a military retreat (pp. 260–1), and that such things are best done in an orderly manner and in accordance with a plan prepared in advance. He constantly urged the Cabinet to give him some sort of definite instructions as to what kind of policy to pursue towards India, but they just ignored him and dragged their feet (p. 194). Meanwhile, law and order were deteriorating in India; by 1944 Wavell observed that “HMG has no longer the power to take effective action” (p. 191). It became clear that after the war British rule could only be maintained if a large number of troops were deployed in India to suppress popular unrest — something that was both politically and financially impossible (pp. 189, 289).

A funny anecdote about Major Peter Coats, whom Wavell brought on as a sort of “major domo at Viceroy's House”: “When an eminent Indian visitor complained that there was a rat in his room, Coats replied: ‘Ah, a rat, sir. Those are for our most distinguished guests, the others only get mice.’ ” (P. 180.) :)) I wish the visitor had then asked how distinguished one would have to be to get a cat :)

Another thing that caused great damage to British reputation in India was their unwillingness to do anything about the great famine in Bengal in 1943/44 (p. 183); Wavell, who was viceroy at the time, urged the British government to do something, but they ignored him. (He noted later that they were much more interested in preventing famines in Europe than in India; p. 194.) This lack of British response to the famine even induced some Indian soldiers to defect to Bose's “Indian National Army”, which fought alongside the Japanese (p. 206).

An interesting observation from p. 197: the British Empire, at that time, “was no longer turning a profit [. . .] with the exception of Malaya, all the imperial colonies were losing money from the 1920s onwards”. It would have made financial sense for the British to cut their loses and let their colonies go, but “[t]he belief in Empire remained long after its practical uses had evaporated”. This sounds very interesting and I should like to read more about it at some point. How could the Empire be losing money like that? Was Britain spending too much money on paying its bureaucrats and soldiers there, and on building infrastructure and the like? I suppose they should have reduced these expenditures to a level which the local economy of a colony could support, even if that meant that some colonies made progress more slowly. As it was, the British seem to have been getting the worst of both worlds: they were getting hated by the natives and also losing money in the process.

I was surprised to read how popular Bose is in modern India (or was, at any rate, when French was writing this book in the late 1990s): “Some more extreme Indian politicians are currently calling for the erection of a statue of Adolf Hitler, using the inverse logic that since Hitler was a supporter of Bose, he must have been a great man.” :)) (P. 202.) French interviewed a manufacturer of statues, who told him that statues of Bose were now much more popular than those of Gandhi or Nehru (p. 203). In actual fact, Bose's INA had been strategically irrelevant, and its main contribution to Indian independence may have been the fact that, when the British put some of its senior officers to trial after the war, this added to the anti-British feelings in India, since most Indians saw the INA people as “simply patriots who had been caught on the losing side” (p. 210).

The British, contrary to what was later sometimes believed in India, were not actually keen to divide their old colony into two countries, i.e. India and Pakistan (p. 222); but after the WW2 they reluctantly had to admit that such a division might be necessary, since on the one hand the Congress and the Muslim League were unable or unwilling to work together, and Congress was getting so strong that if they started a large-scale uprising Britain would have been unable to suppress it (p. 217). Accordingly, Wavell drew up a secret plan of how the country might be divided; the biggest problem were the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, where the population was about 50% Muslim and 50% non-Muslim (pp. 219–20). New elections were held in 1945/46, with Congress getting the vast majority of non-Muslim votes and the Muslim League the vast majority of Muslim ones (the Muslim voters weren't necessarily quite sure what sort of country Pakistan might be or what its boundaries might be, but saw it as their best hope for protection from being oppressed by the Hindus); pp. 223–4. This success of the Muslim League meant that the Congress could no longer afford to ignore it as they had hitherto done (p. 226).

In the spring of 1946, the British government sent a delegation to negotiate with Indian nationalist politicians, both Hindu and Muslim, but without much success because both groups were too stubborn. The British proposed an independent India as “a loose federation of Hindu-majority, Muslim-majority and Princely States”, with provinces being able to form “groupings [. . .] with a large degree of autonomy” (p. 237). This could help avoid the issues of splitting Bengal and the Punjab, and Jinnah even accepted the idea in principle (p. 240), but then the whole thing failed because he and the Congress could not agree on the details of how the groupings should work (p. 243).

Wavell decided to form an “interim government” of Indian nationalist politicians, hoping this would help keep the peace; however, the Muslim League refused to participate (p. 249) and a series of riots erupted anyway, with thousands of people killed in Calcutta (p. 252). The riots continued and increased, so that by late 1946 “much of northern India was [. . .] heading towards anarchy” (p. 268).

An interesting side effect of the establishment of the new interim government was that the Indian Political Intelligence, an organization which the British had built up to spy on the Indian nationalist politicians, now came under the control of one of the most powerful of these politicians, Vallabhbhai Patel. He decided to keep the IPI's surveillance activities going, but direct them against extremist groups only, rather than against mainstream Congress politicians like himself; and he made sure that the intelligence thus collected was available only to him and his colleagues from the Congress, but not to the Viceroy (pp. 258–9, 267).

In early 1947, the British government decided to definitely withdraw from India by June 1948, and announced that “power would be handed over come what may, even if necessary ‘to the existing provincial governments’ ” (p. 277), i.e. if the Indian politicians at the national level couldn't by then agree on questions of federation or partition etc. This spurred them to action, and in March 1947 the Congress accepted the partition into India and Pakistan, provided that Bengal and the Punjab get split between the two countries; Jinnah had to agree with this, knowing that the British would be leaving soon and he couldn't get a better deal from the Congress later (pp. 277–8).

An interesting observation from p. 291: what took place at Indian independence was not a case of “grassroots liberation” or “revolutionary transformation”, but simply “a transfer of power”.

Mountbatten, the new Viceroy since February 1947, began negotiating with the Indian politicians on the details of the transition, but his options were limited by the fact that “[t]he British were no longer in a strong enough position to impose a settlement on India” (p. 296). He proposed a “Balkan plan” according to which each province and princely state could decide for itself whether to split up, become independent or join some larger grouping (p. 297); but this was unacceptable to the Indian politicians, and would probably have led to chaos. What was eventually adopted was the alternative plan written hurriedly by V. P. Menon, a high-ranking Indian civil servant; this provided for two separate independent countries, India and Pakistan, with provinces such as Bengal and the Punjab deciding for themselves whether to be divided (p. 301). Menon accomplished in some three hours what others had been unable to do in years.

With the British gone, the princely states could theoretically be independent again but in practice all were pressured into joining one or the other country (mostly India; pp. 312–13). The princes were supposed to keep a share of the taxes from their former territories, but I was saddened to read, on the wikipedia, that both India and Pakistan unilaterally deprived them of these revenues in the early 1970s (pp. 367–8).

State assets had to be divided in great haste, which was no simple thing, but it also had its ludicrous aspects: in Delhi, “senior civil servants who had opted for Pakistan were turfed out of their buildings, and ‘in some cases they have had to move tables and chairs out and are working under the shade of trees’ ” (p. 315). The army was likewise split into two, with soldiers “given a matter of days to decide” which country to join (p. 343). A British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was brought in at the last moment to define the details of the border between the two countries, in a little more than one month (p. 324; he seems to have made an honest effort, but it was “an impossible job”, pp. 330–1).*

[*Later, a Bangladeshi general, complaining about Radcliffe's complicated boundary line which “curved backwards and forwards over either side of riverbanks”, joked that “the British could never draw a straight line!” (P. 410.) I guess the joke is that in other parts of the world, the British had drawn plenty of straight lines, and those usually weren't liked any better by the locals either...]

Interestingly, many at the time of independence thought the partition into India and Pakistan was something unnatural, and expected the two countries to merge again soon (p. 306). Others thought, until the massacres began in the lead-up to independence, that the two countries would remain on friendly terms and people could easily move from one to the other and back (pp. 323, 401), that “the relationship between India and Pakistan would be similar to that between Canada and the United States” (p. 351). “There was a stunning incapacity among politicians of all kinds” as to how much violence would accompany the partition (p. 344); about a million people ended up getting killed (p. 349). Houses of people who fled across the new border for safety were seized by corrupt officials instead of being used to house refugees who had moved across the border in the opposite direction (pp. 394, 401).

A funny joke from p. 332, told to the author by an old Sikh: “If a Sikh has one bullet left in his gun, and he sees a Muslim, a Hindu and a Britisher coming towards him, which should he shoot? The Muslim — you only shoot Hindus and Britishers for pleasure.” :)))

Another Sikh joke from p. 398: around the time of the partition, some Muslims caught a Sikh and threatened to kill him unless he converted to Islam. He converted, but then told them to kill him anyway. They asked why, and he replied: “Because when you kill me one more Muslim will be gone from this earth.” (P. 398; told to the author by a Muslim in Lahore.) I remember hearing a similar joke except it was a Jew who, on his deathbed, asked for a priest, saying he intended to convert to Christianity ‘because it's better if one of them dies than one of us’ :))

*

So, I enjoyed reading this book, and the only thing I disliked is something that the author can in no way be blamed for, namely that the subject-matter is a bit sad and depressing. Imagine if this were a fictional story, a movie set in a galaxy far away or something of that sort, in which a great people, after a patient struggle of many decades, led by a group of surprisingly clever and upright politicians, finally won its freedom from the evil empire that had been oppressing them — there would have been a happy end to the movie at that point, and that would have been it. Here in the real world, we get a million people massacred, tens of millions displaced, and the nation gets split into three squabbling corrupt authoritarian shitholes, each worse than the other. You can't help wondering if it hadn't been possible to manage things differently somehow, to get a better outcome.

The best thing of all, in my opinion, would have been for the British to never have colonized India in the first place; then it would have developed in an organic fashion; perhaps it would have unified like Germany or Italy did in the 19th century, or perhaps it would have remained split into a plethora of states, but either way there would be something ‘natural’ about this state of affairs, which is not the case about the present-day division into three countries.

Or alternatively, given that the British *had* colonized India, they should have given it independence earlier, before the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims got too bad, and before independence they should have reorganized it into a loose confederation where each province or princely state was nearly autonomous; that, again, would have reduced the need for massacres and mass expulsions.

Or the British should have kept ruling India for much longer than they had, using as much oppression as necessary to maintain control, waiting for as long as it took the local population to grow less religiously zealous, less excitable and less prone to political corruption; at that point it might have been possible to give them independence without the whole thing turning sour immediately afterwards. In practice, of course, this solution never happens in cases of decolonization; the point at which a colonized nation becomes too strong for its colonizers to keep controlling it invariably comes much sooner than the point where it would be capable of governing itself well; the result, inevitably, is that it gets independence too early and then governs itself badly.

So perhaps, in the end, horrible though the aftermath of Indian independence was, it was simply the least bad of the realistically available possibilities, perhaps the only possibility. The British did not wish to leave earlier than they did, and weren't able to stay longer than they did, so the current outcome was the only one possible. And that's what makes the whole thing rather depressing. Another proof, if any further proof were necessary, that it would have been better not to colonize India in the first place.

ToRead:

• Katherine Mayo: Mother India. A “hugely popular 1920s compendium of bigotry and prejudice about the failings of Indians” (p. 93). :))
• David Cannadine: The Pleasures of the Past (1989). A collection of essays, quoted here on p. 289 for his remarks on Mountbatten as “the pioneering and pre-eminent de-imperialist” for his role in the British withdrawal from India and its transition to independence.