Annabel S. Brett
Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law
Princeton University Press, 2011
242 pages.
£24.95
ISBN 978-0-691-14193-0

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“State” is an extraordinarily polysemous word. One of its myriad meanings is that of a nation or territory considered as a political community. The geographical boundaries of states have generally been determined by wars. The contours of political communities, on the other hand, have always been defined by the system of laws and rights established to preserve individual liberties. Natural law theorists erected this system almost half a millennium ago, in the wake of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and as a result of contemporary cosmopolitan ideals. The task they faced was enormous. On the one hand the exigencies of the time required them to resolve the tension between justifying colonial enterprises and defending notions of legitimate sovereignty or dominion of individual nation states. On the other, they were forced to forge a legal armour that would protect individuals’ universal rights without jeopardising states’ control over their subjects.

Ancient and modern historians, from Polybius to most recently Simon Jenkins with his A Short History of England, have long paid wars their well-deserved attention. Annabel Brett’s Changes of State, faithfully picking up from where her mentor Quentin Skinner had ended in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, looks at the debate that helped define political communities. The book is, therefore, “about the metaphysical boundaries of the city [or state], the ontological ground on which its structure of laws and rights is erected, and it is about the complex negotiation involved in maintaining those limits in the face of a human life that can be neither wholly naturalised nor wholly politicised.” Brett stops to consider chiefly the writings of Vitoria, Soto, Suarez, Grotius, and Hobbes without, however, neglecting those of other lesser known authors such as Case and Conan, turning what might have been a specialist monograph on a single concept into a magisterial survey of early modern natural law theory.

In the 16th century, states had to face the increasing problem of mendicancy and vagabondage whilst safeguarding the interests of their multicultural society. Natural law theorists thus began forming an intellectual membrane that retained some individuals, whilst forcing others out. This enterprise acts as the starting point of Brett’s discussion, which however fails to explore how, practically, this membrane exerted unwanted pressure on already strained international relations. The scope of her research is, in fact, limited to “academic or at least theoretical treatises…rather than on the myriad strategic deployments of natural law arguments and principles in the practical political conflicts of the period.” Thus the readers may not only fail to see how such discussions were borne out of contemporary problems, but how they helped resolve them. There is a sense in which, however, this is no great loss, as they are ushered into a war of words on the political nature of man.

In the 1550s, when the world was strongly dominated by Christian theology, discussions on sovereignty could easily be turned from the external to the internal sphere. Determinism, which is the doctrine that all actions and events are external to the will, and knowledge of God were clearly at odds with notions of free will and human agency. Hobbes’s conception of politics, as Brett rightly shows, provided in the 1650s the antidote to this philosophical impasse. “Political government is government by law, and law is not physical violence, but a verbal or written directive that is comprehensible by reason, and backed up by a system of rewards and punishments that apparently demand a nature that can freely respond to them.” Therefore free will and human agency were inextricable to man, which is by nature, in Aristotelian terms, a political animal.

The debate was manifestly indebted to the contemporary Aristotelian commentary tradition, thus Brett thankfully pays attention to a genre that has unduly suffered incredible neglect. She examines it however only under the lens of her current concerns, leaving us with a broken picture of the true impact of this tradition in early modern political discourse. Her attention is, in fact, chiefly aimed at the juridical language that helped define the legal space of human agency, a topic de rigueur for a proponent of the Cambridge School, a movement that places strong emphasis on the language in which debates were couched.

Some sections of Changes of State are a re-elaboration of Brett’s Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought, such as her discussion of natural liberty and its relationship to the individual as well as “the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings”. In the 16th century, subjects were often thought of as elements of an abstract composite, the people. Questions about the limits of the obligations of individuals transiting between commonwealths brought to the fore the paradox that a non-physical body can have a spatial location. It similarly made notions of jurisdiction central to early modern natural law theorists, ultimately highlighting the fact that “locality or situation is an essential presupposition of the way they [Hobbes and others] think about sovereignty and subjection”.

In 500 years, not much may have changed. Like Soto, Vitoria, Grotious, and Hobbes, we question the bases of our multicultural societies. We enquire about our fundamental human rights. Are we all bound by natural law or is there a positive law between states? The recent and ongoing Arab Spring evokes questions not only about the nature of sovereignty. The massive surge in emigration that still results from it has forced us to examine the rights of individuals in foreign land and the legitimacy of political communities’ jurisdictions. In this context, Brett’s Changes of State is illuminating and could not appear more topical. The notion of state may have been blurred in recent times, partly as a result of globalization. But in the face of the European Union’s potential disintegration, we may have to redefine it again soon.

Nicolas Stone Villani is reading for a DPhil in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

John Nery
Revolutionary Spirit: José Rizal in Southeast Asia
ISEAS Publishing, 2011
280 Pages
ISBN 978-981-4345-05-7

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Since his revolutionary days, Argentinian guerilla-polymath Ernesto “Ché” Guevara has become so iconic that his silhouetted visage is widely recognizable throughout the world, even among those outside the various subcultures of the countercultural left. Screen-printed t-shirts featuring the long-haired, moustachioed revolutionary from the neck up have become mainstays of pop-art fashion, so much so that your first encounter with Ché is as likely to have been at a street vendor as in a Latin American history class. For this reason the choice of cover for John Nery’s new history of 19th-century Filipino patriot José Rizal is curious: Rizal, like Guevara a physician, polymath, author, and national hero widely associated with revolutionary uprising against colonial power, appears in screen-printed silhouette above the title, staring resolutely over your right shoulder.

Yet Rizal, a powerful intellect whose novels Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891) led, first, to his execution, at age 35 by the Spanish authorities, then the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonial occupation, does not appear on t-shirts. As Nery meticulously demonstrates, Rizal is at once a household name in Southeast Asia and a contested figure whose legacy, like those of Thomas Jefferson, Sun Yat-sen, and other comparable revolutionary intellectuals, has become something of an ideological battleground for competing understandings of the stakes of political independence and national sovereignty. For some, Rizal was a Pinoy Don Quixote, a Spanish-influenced idealist and predestined martyr who praised revolution in theory, but loathed the practicality of armed resistance. For others, he was the practical ophthalmologist who believed in top-down reform and failed to imagine the latent power of a people’s movement, a popular uprising. The primary intervention of Revolutionary Spirit is metahistorical: to see the history of Rizal in Southeast Asia precisely as a disputed one, then to follow each strand of disputation from its 19th-century roots to its present day loose end within the fabric of Rizal’s important and globally understated legacy.

Benedict Anderson most prominently introduced Rizal and Noli Me Tangere to worldwide audiences in the foundational Imagined Communities (1983), though Rizal was the subject of a rich body of scholarly work long before Western historians like Anderson took notice. In addition to his novels, poetry, and translations, Rizal left behind hundreds of written correspondences, a corpus that Nery suggests “may almost be said to be Rizal’s first novel”. Between Spanish scholar and colonial administrator Wenceslao Retana’s Vida y Escritos (Life and Writings, 1907), Léon Maria Guerrero’s seminal Rizal biography, The First Filipino (1962), and Syed Hussein Alatas’s groundbreaking post-colonial study The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), Rizal’s importance in the history of Southeast Asian anti-colonial resistance cannot be overstated. Rizal has been widely studied, cited, and translated by numerous Southeast Asian leaders and public intellectuals, from Indonesian nationalists like Tan Malaka and Sukarno to Malaysian scholars like Chandra Muzaffar and Shaharuddin bin Maaruf. Nery’s history effectively situates Rizal as not only a founding hero of Philippine independence from Spain and later America, but an inspirational figure, symbolic of a broader Malay identity, evoked in Indonesian and Malaysian struggles against Dutch, Japanese, and British occupation.

Though Nery’s study undoubtedly makes its metahistorical mark on contemporary scholarly disputes over Rizal’s legacy, no account of Rizal can be as gravely consequential as Retana’s “Un Separatista Filipino” (“A Filipino Separatist”), a misleading but ultimately damning piece on Rizal’s anti-colonial activism, published in the 30 September 1896 issue of the Spanish propaganda paper La Politicia de España en Filipinas. Retana, who would later become an admirer of Rizal before writing Vida y Escritos, attributed to Rizal “many of the evils” of Philippine insurrection, claiming that Rizal “hate[d] Spaniards with a passion”. Nery’s chilling discussion of the similarities between Retana’s accusations and those of Raphael Dominguez, the Spanish investigating officer whose testimony resulted in Rizal’s conviction as “the principal organizer and the very soul of the Philippine insurrection”, then his death sentence, casts Retana plausibly as a Pontius Pilate figure with blood on his hands. Rizal’s final poem, “Adios, Patrio Adorada” (“Goodbye, Land I Adore”; often referred to as “Mi último adiós”, “My last farewell”), penned the evening before his 30 December 1896 execution by musket fire, became an immediate rallying call for the Philippine revolution, and was later translated by Rosihan Anwar to inspire soldiers of the Indonesian independence movement.

From the seemingly romantic (or romanticized) trajectory of Rizal’s life—the talented writer and public intellectual who was educated in Europe, traveled the world, saw his art as a means to revolution, returned to his homeland for love of country despite the dangers that awaited him, and paid with his life for his politically charged art and the independence of his people—stems the problematic image of Rizal as Quixote. In addition to highlighting Rizal’s idealism versus his pragmatism as one of the central disputes over Rizal’s legacy, Nery gives us Miguel de Unamuno’s “poetic interpretation of Rizal”. Unamuno called Rizal “Quijote oriental”, a “Quijote of thought, who looked with repugnance upon the impurities of reality”. This stands in contrast to Nery’s careful discussion of the emergence in the 1920s of Andres Bonifacio, early leader of the Filipino revolutionary group the Katipunan, as a figure of Rizaline esteem in the national consciousness of the Filipino people. As Nery explains, when Bonifacio and the Katipunan sought Rizal’s approval of their plans for armed revolution in 1896, a pragmatic Rizal responded by urging Bonifacio that it was too soon, that the people had not yet secured the necessary weapons and funds for an effective armed resistance.

These competing modalities—quixotic Rizal versus Rizal the measured pragmatist; the predestined martyr versus the “enormous will at work”; the radical insurrectionist versus the conservative intellectual—form the animating structure of Nery’s history, enabling him to exercise his apparent talent for fastidious, circumspect historicizing. Nery works widely and adeptly with sources in, among others, Tagalog, Spanish, and English—the primary languages in which Rizal is read today—and pays refreshingly close attention to intertextual commonalities in his primary sources. Revolutionary Spirit occasionally takes on a plodding tone when Nery’s penchant for obscure detail gets in the way of the narrative; but the benefit is usually worth the cost. Though one sometimes gets the sense that Nery is belaboring an issue of little consequence, he does eventually emerge from a narrative cloud of minutia to make a forceful point. Above all, however, what distinguishes Nery’s history as a particularly important contribution to the histories of Rizal and the Southeast Asian independence movements of his era is Nery’s skill and versatility as a reader of texts. Nery is at his best as an historian when engaged in close reading. The metahistorical quality of Revolutionary Spirit relies significantly on Nery’s ability to close read the speeches of Sukarno against those of Malaka, the articles of Retana against the findings of Dominguez, and The Myth of the Lazy Native against Rizal’s On the Indolence of the Filipinos (1890), among countless other texts that Nery fruitfully brings together. Ultimately, a history of a writer as prolific and consequential as Rizal demands an historian with a distinctly literary sensibility—and Nery fits the bill.

Aaron R. Hanlon is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Linacre College, Oxford.

David French
The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967
Oxford University Press, 2011
304 Pages
£65.00
ISBN 978-0199587964

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The recent row in the London Review of Books between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson seems to indicate that, after decades of painstaking research, there is yet to emerge a consensus on British imperialism. This year saw the publication of both Ferguson’s Civilization and Jeremy Paxman’s Empire, two popular books which are far more equivocal on the topic of empire and its victims—more “perplexingly affirmative” in Edward Said’s formulation—than many might have expected this late in the game. At the same time, Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire, also published this year, is an epic work of popular history examining the resistance to empire on the part of its victims. Far from the formation of a consensus, it appears that writing on empire is as polarised as it has ever been.

Into this divided landscape steps David French, a military historian based at University College London, with his book The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-67. The conventional wisdom that French sets out to question is largely contained in Sir Robert Thompson’s book, Defeating Communist Insurgency, which was published in 1966 and is still seen by many as a counter-insurgency Bible. Thompson had argued that the British method of dealing with insurgency in the post-war period was based on a unique hearts-and-minds approach, thus introducing the rhetoric that now saturates NATO operations abroad.

In this conventional view, a number of key benchmarks are said to have marked British counter-insurgency during the decolonisation period after the Second World War. The British understood the importance of using coordinated government machinery. They knew that one had to defeat the insurgent subversion and not the insurgent per se. They only used minimum force. Their operations were intelligence-led. They knew that success is obtained only by political settlement. They learned from their mistakes, operating within a legal framework that severely restricted the action they could take against insurgents.

French marshals extensive archival research to deliver a series of blows to each of the foundations of this orthodoxy. British counter-insurgency was generally a matter of intimidating the civilian population into subjection: “On the balance, where they won they did so by being nasty, not nice, to the people.” It was often not effective even on its own terms. It was worse in some places than in others, but where it was “mild” in terms of likely casualties, the psychological effects could be horrendous. The legal restrictions placed on it were often very loose, and when it was limited this was due to outside interference more than any sense of legal obligation. “These issues are of more than just historical interest”, he writes. “They are important because much contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine is based upon historical arguments that are at best ill-informed, and at worst almost the opposite of what actually happened.”

A number of scholars have tackled this topic before and French refers to their work. In the 1990s, John Newsigner said that “outright brutality was often a hallmark” of British counter-insurgency. He was followed by largely corroborative work from Ashley Jackson, Hew Strachan, Paul Dixon, and Alex Marshall. On Kenya, we have recently seen the large-scale revisionist work of David Anderson, Caroline Elkins, Huw Bennett, and Daniel Branch. For David French, this work has all been important in bringing out and analysing a considerable body of primary sources, but as the focus has mostly been on single campaigns, we have not yet had a comparative analysis from a historian who can refer to the primary sources from multiple campaigns.

French’s conclusions fit closely with much recent scholarship and should not really be surprising, but he gives them a bracing weight through his incisive handling of the sources. “British colonial government was a confidence trick”, he argues. There were major and regular failings in intelligence gathering. The British could be seriously misguided about the aims of their opponents, and a Manichean view of counter-insurgency was commonplace, in which the West battled multiple eruptions of a Soviet-led plot for world domination. In fact, direct communist involvement was virtually absent from every counter-insurgency except Malaya. A large part of the traditional myth is that the British understood their opponents and were adept at political settlement. French shows that they could almost never accept that their indigenous opponents in the colonies might have legitimate grievances or an understandable desire for independence. They “explained this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon by marginalizing and criminalizing their opponents. They were ‘thugs’, ‘bandits’, ‘gangsters’, or ‘terrorists’.”

This was backed up by a racist and self-serving paternalism—not only did the colonial administrators talk to the natives about their mission civilisatrice, it appears they actually believed it. (It gives for some amusing lines. British soldiers serving in Kenya were told: “You will find that most Africans have an innate respect for the White Man.”) This means they could never really accept the genuine support that an independence movement could gain in the local population; often they “saw their colonial subjects as an inert and amorphous mass, waiting to be controlled by either the insurgents or the administration.”

With regard to the legality of British counter-insurgency, French argues that the British rejection of martial law in the colonies post-war was not “because of some high-minded preference for preserving legal norms”, but because the 1939 Emergency Powers Order-in-Council, and the local legislation it generated, allowed them to use virtually all the coercive powers of martial law without having actually to declare it. Administrations were given the power to intimidate the civilian population, disrupt insurgents organisations and arrest suspects, limit the freedom of movement of people and goods, impose curfews, introduce compulsory identity cards, restrict the possession of foodstuffs and other articles, censor the media in various ways, ban suspect organisations, search homes without a warrant, mount cordon and search operations, and impose a variety of collective punishments.

If that wasn’t enough—and it seems that it often wasn’t—there were also “counter-terrorist” regulations which allowed the government to detain suspects without trial, deport non-citizens, enforce wholesale population resettlements, and create free-fire zones where the security forces could engage “suspected insurgents” with lethal force. Kenya, in part because the anti-colonial resistance was isolated from foreign aid and there was a vehement European settler population, became the laboratory for some of the worst instances of British violence. By the end of May 1954, around half of the entire Kikuyu population in Nairobi was detained without trial. From 1954-55, over one million Kenyans (69% of the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu groups) were forcibly moved to new villages.

Counter-insurgency “resettlement”, as Elkins and Anderson have previously shown, was not like moving social housing tenants to another part of the city. It involved the removal of whole communities to camps, surrounded by barbed wire and policed by watch towers, in which the full set of emergency regulations could be stringently and often brutally enforced. In the “punitive” villages in Kenya, designed for those considered Mau Mau sympathisers, trade and movement between villages was prohibited, and all food destroyed except the minimum necessary for local consumption.

French compares this with Malaya, where almost exactly half the entire Chinese population was forcibly resettled, numbering around one million people. There was also an extensive air-bombing campaign in Radfan, part of modern Yemen, where according to intelligence reports, well and water courses were destroyed and an indeterminate number of people were killed. People were told to leave designated villages, and if they stayed they could be legally shot. By February 1959, villagers were facing imminent famine. The only difference between this and the Kenya and Malaya cases, states French, was that in Radfan the refugees—having been bombed out of their villages—were not resettled.

This is a careful, often riveting book that has been constructed on the basis of rigorous archival research. French takes on a major task, insisting on a sweep of place and time that must have demanded he tackle an intimidating quantity of archival material, and the results are frequently a testament to modern historical scholarship. He has a good eye for readability, with the welcome result that a potentially enormous book comes in at just over 300 pages, including notes. Yet at times, a disconcerting desire for relevance amongst military practitioners seeps in. There is some uncritical discussion of notions like “efficiency” and “effectiveness”. And in the concluding section French says that there “may be kind and gentle ways of doing [counter-insurgency]…and there is every reason for today’s practitioners to seek them out.” At points like these one is reminded of Ranajit Guha’s discussion of writing on this topic, in which “even the more liberal type of secondary discourse is unable thus to extricate itself from the code of counter-insurgency.”

Musab Younis is reading for an MPhil in International Relations at Wadham College, Oxford, and is the deputy editor of Ceasefire magazine.

Andrew Roberts
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
Harper, 2011
768 Pages
ISBN 978-1907773044

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For an historian to attempt to document the blood-soaked entirety of the Second World War in a single volume is an ambitious, perhaps foolhardy task. Andrew Roberts has both the talent and the ego to match it. The biographer of Lords Halifax and Salisbury counts George W. Bush among his fans, and won praise and ridicule in equal measure for his grandiose History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900. One of the most skilled historians of his generation, Roberts flavours his work with his firm neoconservative views, which in this book surface in the form of admiration for Winston Churchill and a conviction that the war was a struggle of good versus evil.

This volume is a masterwork, combining detail with concision and condensing the terror of those six years into a gripping 600-page narrative. Roberts sets out to discover why exactly the Axis lost the war. His answer is simple enough: the Nazis lost because they were Nazis. A command structure that brooked no dissent and was therefore immune to constructive feedback sowed the seeds of failure. A murderous obsession with Jews diverted resources from defeating the enemy to conducting genocide.

With the historian’s gift for measure, Roberts tackles the grim task of probing the motives that propel men to commit acts of barbarity. The mindset of ogres such as Himmler, who spoke coolly about reducing the population of Eastern Europe by expulsion or mass murder, is dissected with care, seeking explanations while leaving no doubt as to its wickedness. The Holocaust is treated with the combination of outrage and sensitivity it deserves.

With admirable vigour and not a trace of gloss, Roberts goes on to defend actions of the Allies that, when exposed to full daylight, are not pleasant to behold. The obliteration of Dresden is defended valiantly, as is the use of atomic weapons in Japan. There is an excoriation of armchair generals, and it is not unfairly pointed out that the circumstances were extraordinary and the enemy singularly frightening.

And yet, for all his undoubted skill and bold defence of civilised Western liberal democratic values, Roberts fails to convince that this was a just war. Some of the most harrowing writing is found in the chapters dealing with Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s insane invasion of Russia and Stalin’s brutal retaliation. This is no struggle of good versus bad but a clash of monstrous behemoths, machine versus machine. The picture of mass killing, famine, and total destruction is unbearably bleak.

Total control was the only way to rally Russia to fight its Great Patriotic War. Stalin’s barbarity saved his country from defeat, and in keeping Hitler busy in the East, was instrumental for the Allies. Roberts criticises the means, such as the brutality with which commanders such as Marshal Zhukov treated their own troops, but stops short of criticising the ends. There is little consideration of the misery endured by Poland in exchanging one set of inhuman oppressors for another or of the eventual imprisonment of millions of Eastern Europeans behind an Iron Curtain. Ultimately, he avoids the uncomfortable truth—that the Nazi tyranny was only defeated because it was stopped by a tyranny as bloodstained as itself. Unable to justify this, Roberts describes it pithily as the “giant and abiding paradox” that lies at the heart of the war.

A fascinating and counterintuitive comparison arises between Nazi and Soviet systems of command. Those who challenged Hitler were given no more severe punishment than demotion. It is puzzling that so few spoke out against the disastrous leadership of their Führer. Some, like Field Marshal Model, instrumental in the Battle of the Bulge, were ideological Nazis who believed in the cause. Many were simply cowards. On the other hand, commanders who disagreed with Stalin were often killed (one unfortunate soul was executed in 1950, having been sentenced in absentia). Comparing Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia does little to reinforce the author’s view of the Allies as an unmitigated force for good.

Roberts’s main claim, that the Nazis were destined to lose, stands up well. A compelling aspect of the book is its collection of character sketches and the study of Hitler’s character explains a great deal. Hitler’s great fault militarily, as shown in disaster after another, was his total inability to comprehend the value of a tactical retreat. His perennial order was to move forward, despite entreaties from seasoned generals such as Rommel that a temporary withdrawal and regrouping might be a better idea than mindless attack. During the first part of the conflict, momentum was the Nazis’ friend. The blitzkrieg tactic of highly coordinated and fast-moving armoured assault was brutally effective in knocking France and Poland, amongst others, out of the war. But as the tide turned, Hitler’s insistence on movement was his undoing. The book describes the stream of “stand and die” orders issued by the Führer; commands to perish rather than retreat and preserve strength. During the battle of Stalingrad, such an order resulted in the slaughter or capture and eventual murder of hundreds of thousands of Germans. The myth of Hitler’s tactical genius is comprehensively debunked.

In the gallery of rogues and heroes, the author’s own idol, Churchill, features heavily. His decency evinced by the genuine concern he showed for his troops is complemented by his cheerful enjoyment in belittling his foe as “Corporal Hitler”. Montgomery is shown to be a vain self-publicist whose heroic mastery of desert warfare never goes unnoticed, thanks to his own efforts. There is also a portrait of Patton, a borderline psychopath for whom the theatre of war was a natural home.

The test of a good history of the Second World War must be whether it adds anything new to the existing works about that conflict, which compiled would fill several libraries. The Storm of War does this partly by presenting a wealth of newly unearthed material, but primarily by focusing on the inevitability of Nazi defeat. If Roberts’s Manichean world-view does not quite stand up to scrutiny, his examination of Nazi incompetence does. Moreover, the achievement of documenting the whole war from Atlantic to Pacific in a single, readable book is a magisterial one. It will be a brave historian that attempts to better this feat.

Abhishek Majumdar graduated in 2006 with a BA in Physics from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

David McCullough
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
Simon & Schuster, 2011
576 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-1416571766

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I have lived among a great and glorious people. I have thrown my thoughts into a new language. I have received the shock of new minds and new habit. I have drawn closer the ties of social relations with the best formed minds…I hope you do not think your money wasted.

Written in 1834, these lines of the future poet-physician-professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. capture the youthful, energetic spirit of David McCullough’s The Greater Journey, a narrative litany of amuse-bouches crafted to satisfy a popular, never-satiated American craving: Paris! It was “La Ville-Lumière” long before the Yablochkov candle bestowed such esteem—as McCullough reminds us in his charming paean to these transatlantic American pioneers, who are affluent and erudite, but no more or less ambitious than those who trekked West. On the hardcover jacket’s spine, Caillebotte’s determined young man represents these American men and women learning, perfecting, and striving on the banks of the Seine. Yet, McCullough’s fleeting attention to their stories reveals his ambition to be far more modest than theirs.

McCullough writes about whom and what he likes. Otherwise, he will quit, as he did on a biography of Pablo Picasso. “He was an awful man. I don’t think you have to love your subject—initially you shouldn’t—but it’s like picking a roommate.” McCullough’s prize-winning presidential biographies, Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001), derided by some as “Valentines” to their subjects, focus on forgotten great men, their burdens, and their decisions: whether to bomb Hiroshima and end the war; or how to consolidate a fragile federal polity. Mornings on Horseback (1981) shows how Theodore Roosevelt forged his renowned sturdiness despite being a feeble, anxious child. The Great Bridge (1972) is a laborious but profoundly insightful tome on the courage of anonymous laborers in the caissons below the East River that came to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. These are works with beginnings, middles, and ends, with nothing preordained and emphasis stressed on the contingencies in a person’s life.

What makes McCullough so satisfying to read is his talent for writing narrative, a structure naturally befitting a life—but does it befit a century? Or a city? Or rather, the experience of an expatriate community over the course of 70 years, with few crossed paths between the protagonists? The Greater Journey is really a string of short stories tenuously related by the relentlessly beautiful setting in which they take place. Historical events keep time—the 1848 revolution, the rise of Napoleon III, the Prussian siege—and intrude on the lives of Parisians, who are uncritically portrayed as “pleased with the weather and the crowds, delighted to be seen in their new spring finery and to be part of the glittering show.” The Americans are there to enjoy Paris, too, but more importantly, to grow amidst the inspiration of teachers and colleagues. The Greater Journey is more akin to the short stories of Brave Companions (1992) than any of McCullough’s other books, as the latter recounts stories from Alexander von Humboldt’s ascent to Louis Agassiz’s charge to his Harvard students (“Look at your fish!”) to the impact of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who makes a repeat appearance here.

In weaving together short narratives, McCullough puts to practice his own adage that “writing should be done for the ear.” There are a few choice topics that he feels deserve sustained attention in conversation with the reader, and they shine in The Greater Journey. The rest, it seems, are cocktail party filler. Yet, even the most engrossing stories suspiciously confirm familiar-sounding tales of the inspiring impact of Paris on American students, the courageous American contributions to Parisian survival, and American genius that happened to settle in Paris on its way elsewhere.

For example, McCullough has us imagine clusters of American and French medical students peering at patients, accompanying Parisian physicians during their rounds in renowned hospitals. Most prominent is Pierre Louis, who taught a generation of the talented “Medicals”, such as Holmes, Henry Bowditch, and Mason Warren:

He was known—and at times ridiculed—for his extended questioning of patients, careful examinations and endless note-taking. Seeing Holmes taking notes one morning during the rounds at La Pitié, Louis exclaimed, ‘Vous travaillez, monsieur. C’est bien ça! ’

Louis’s empirical lesson for his American students is unmistakable, and akin to Agassiz’s: only careful, holistic observation leads to anything useful.

The stories are not only of Americans learning from the French. In “Under Siege”, U.S. ambassador Elihu Washburne comes to the fore in the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and the heady days of the Commune. Whereas all other major diplomats chose to leave the city, Washburne decided to stay, serve, and grapple with the very human dimensions of war, whether rushing out Americans and Germans or negotiating to release the captured archbishop amidst bombardment and rampage: “However anxious I might be myself to get away, I would deem it a species of cowardice to avail myself of my diplomatic privilege and leave my nationaux behind me to care for themselves.” McCullough’s original analysis of Washburne’s diary is his only historiographical contribution in The Greater Journey, unsurprisingly, given that it highlights the traits of loyalty and sacrifice most admired in his biographies.

Whereas the stories of the medical students, Washburne, and others are unimaginable without their situation in Paris, we glimpse transcendent genius in John Singer Sargent. At 18, Sargent walked into the atelier of Carolus-Duran:

Sargent’s father explained that he had brought his son to the studio that he might become a pupil. The portfolio was laid on the floor, and the drawings were spread out. We all crowded about to look, and…[we] were astonished.

At 26, he painted the “arresting” El Jaleo, a Spanish dancer in the midst of performance, which hangs unavoidably in the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston, meant to be seen by all who visit, and unmistakable in its vibrant, darkly sensual warmth. Along with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and Madame X, this work closely reflects Carolus-Duran’s direction, as perceived by Sargent himself: “If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it towards the darks—so that you deal last with your highest lights and darks—you avoid false accents. That’s what Carolus taught me.” Notwithstanding this bit of tutelage, his genius was a genuine contribution to the Paris art world, appreciated year after year at the Salon.

Criticizing The Greater Journey heavy-handedly is like caring too much about the hors d’oeuvres. This is popular history—or, in the words of one critic, popular “heritage”. Complaints about McCullough’s footnoting practice will arise from some critics, as will nitpicks from academic historians about the lack of any French sources. This is nothing new, as one reviewer in 1973 wrote of The Great Bridge: “The author’s method of footnoting is unusual and a little troublesome to the scholar.” In his works, McCullough is unconcerned with making an intellectual contribution, most obviously demonstrated by his airy account of the American Revolution in 1776, which outranks David Hackett Fischer’s vibrant and thoughtful Washington’s Crossing by 14,000 spots on the Amazon best sellers rank. This will be understandably annoying to some, irrelevant to others. In the end, McCullough (and Simon & Schuster) surely know that there are few things Americans love more than a good story and Paris.

The Greater Journey will be well-recommended in any reputable future guidebook to the most-toured city in the world: 78.95 million visitors in 2010. (Buy the Kindle version, though, for your trip. It is a hefty 558 pages.) McCullough’s descriptions of Samuel Morse’s serendipitous inspiration for the telegraph and future abolitionist Charles Sumner’s shock at the equitable French treatment of blacks are truly enjoyable morsels of history for the general reader. But despite the beautiful artwork that adorns the volume outside and in, it aims for little more than to provide the lessons about inspiration, observation, and duty that McCullough has already taught us so well.

Rahul Prabhakar is reading for a DPhil in International Relations at St John’s College, Oxford. Rahul is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Rachel Hewitt
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
Granta Books, 2011
432 Pages
£9.99
ISBN 978-1847082541

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A map is a curious thing. Part visual artifact and part text, it occupies the space between art and instrument; it is neither beautiful for its own sake nor exclusively practical. Any history of cartography will show that mapmaking was not merely for the purpose of navigation, but also contributed to the creation of national identity. Whether stemming from a history of military defence or geographical ownership, maps delineate that land which is “ours”.

Maps of the Ordnance Survey (OS) in particular hold a special place in the history of cartography and in the hearts of the British public. In the United Kingdom, the simultaneous dependence on and freedom offered by the Ordnance Survey maps place them on nearly every household’s bookshelf, if not the kitchen table. In a nation that has fought from Acts of Enclosure of the late 1800s to the Rights to Roam established in 2000, public footpaths and cairn-marked trails democratise the land. Now that we have our first “biography” of the Ordnance Survey, it seems a good time to reflect on its origins, its impact, and its legacy.

As Rachel Hewitt shows in Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, the familiar bright pink (Landranger) and orange (Explorer) OS maps, far from beginning as the tools of hikers, fell walkers, and dog owners, evolved out of a military context. Hewitt has undertaken the commendable and surprisingly overlooked task of providing a history of the OS map’s provenance. In her title and introduction, she promises a biography of one of the most beloved British institutions. More than a biography, she offers a lively history of the key figures involved and events that followed the inception of this institution.

“But it strikes me now”, Hewitt writes, “that one of the reasons I find Ordnance Survey maps so seductive is the promise they seem to offer of the unfettered freedom to wander across the British landscape.” It is this promise that brings the OS maps, and thus the interest in history, so close to so many. For all the book’s charm, however, Hewitt neither engages fully with the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of this distinctly British institution and its relationship to the general public, nor does she provide a complete history of the survey itself. Yet even so, she should be credited with identifying a missing link in British popular interest, one that will yield answers to the greater questions the OS maps propose. If nothing else, her book calls us away from the talking GPS and back to the crinkled, folded map.

Hewitt’s story begins with the Jacobite uprisings of 1745 and the call for a map of the Highlands among Scottish rebels. She traces the project as it later passes hands, again and again (though rarely as a result of mismanagement). The continuation of the Ordnance Survey maps relied on the royal engineers and directors of the Board of Ordnance, a precursor to part of the Ministry of Defence. Mapmaking in the 18th century was a much more painstaking process than it is now. Each map first required a baseline measurement—ideally a long and flat piece of land—which served as control points for triangulation. This method consists of measuring the angles of known points along the baseline in order to determine a specific location. The overlapping triangles created triangulation networks, which were used to survey the land until the advent of global navigation systems in the 1980s. The process of triangulation required long and often arduous distances to be covered by foot and precise measurements to be taken throughout, requiring complicated and heavy instruments such as theodolites.

The Ordnance Survey was spearheaded almost exclusively by devoted and upright men, beginning with William Roy, who first served under Ltn-Col David Watson in 1747. Though of humble origins, Roy quickly manifested a talent for cartography, and he made his career as an engineer and surveyor. He insisted on charting the Highlands, and later became the key figure in the Anglo-French triangulations. He was later succeeded by William Mudge who, among other achievements, charted the meridian arc into Scotland. Finally, the survey was led by Thomas Colby, who saw the OS through to the maps’ issuance in 1846. Rather than relating the biography of the Ordnance Survey, it is to these unrelenting individuals, brilliant geographers, mathematicians, and draughtsmen that Hewitt’s book pays honour.

In focusing on the key players, however, she merely glosses over the literary, philosophical, and historical implications of the survey, which would have made for a more interesting text. Where the book (originally a draft of a PhD thesis) might have fruitfully engaged with the intellectual history informing the Ordnance Survey’s creation, it opts instead for a factual, if somewhat dull, narrative. Hewitt nods toward the different questions occasioned by mapmaking, from Andersonian nationhood to the relation between arts and sciences (especially mathematics), but does not take them up any further. Although Hewitt’s historical analysis of the process is acute, she leaves the reader longing for something more—either a fictionalised (and up-to-date—her book ends in 1870) account of the survey process, or instead, a much more academically rigorous investigation of the theoretical and practical problems that a “map of a nation” entails: first and foremost, what is a nation, and what role does mapping a landscape play in establishing nationhood? Spanning several centuries, her book does not address, in the words of Sir Robert Rees Davies, “the Matter of Britain and the Matter of England.”

The question of “what is a nation” was famously addressed by Ernest Renan in an 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne. He explored those characteristics which have been associated with nationhood, but which do not of themselves delineate a nation. He shows how neither dynasty, nor race, nor language, nor religion, nor communities of interest, nor even geography are enough to unify a people into a nation. Of national frontiers, he says they “undoubtedly play a considerable part in the division of nation”:

Can one say […] that a nation’s frontiers are written on the map and that this nation has the right to judge what is necessary to round off certain contours, in order to reach such and such a mountain and such and such a river, which are thereby accorded a kind of a priori limiting faculty? I know of no doctrine which is more arbitrary or more fatal, for it allows one to justify any or every violence. […] No, it is no more soil than it is race which makes a nation.

In Map of a Nation, however, both soil and race contribute an integral part to the history of the Ordnance Survey. It began from a defensive fear of the Scottish, but natural frontiers, of course, also had great importance to an island that depended on the channel for protection against French invasions. The Ordnance Survey maps, then, by becoming available to the general public, grant them a sense of ownership over the land. But boundaries can exclude even more than they include. Hewitt mentions the difficulties involved in the Irish triangulations and the perplexities of Welsh place names when it was evident that mapping the British Isles caused friction amongst the different groups. The desire to belong chafed against the desire to be independent and free. Renan argues that the joint features defining nationhood are “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” and mutual suffering, thereby making it even more difficult for readers to envision the OS maps as a depiction of a harmonious, stable nation.

Since 1870, the OS maps have undergone significant technological advancements, especially global positioning systems, and are now subdivided by use and function, including scientific research, military, tourism, leisure, road, and even collector’s editions. The maps have evolved from being markers of national identity to household instruments. And whereas they are no longer as loaded with contentions about “British” plurality, they do raise questions about future accessibility and recorded history in a different sort of “quantitative spirit” than that of the men so smitten by original mapmaking in the 1800s.

Judyta Frodyma graduated in 2010 with an MSt in English Literature from Worcester College, Oxford.

Robert Fossier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages
University Presses of California, 2010
400 Pages
£24.95
ISBN 978-0195399622

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Robert Fossier sets out on a quest to find the common man (and woman) in The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages. As in most medieval quests, the hero is beset by trials along the way; resolution is achieved in the end, usually at some cost. In this book, Fossier’s trials are of his own making, and resolution is the province of the inquiring reader. It is a quest worth investigating, but what are the costs of accompanying Fossier on his journey?

The extreme bitterness which the author has for mankind taints the book. In a pattern common throughout, he rails against the modern man who is sensorily starved: blinded by electricity, deafened by machines, tasting only frozen food. This leads into a discussion about the medieval man, who was able to laugh about blindness, who found deep symbolic value in touch and gesture, who may have listened in churches but could not necessarily hear the liturgy. The sensory framework provides an accessible and intriguing guide for asking questions about what it felt like, literally, to be alive in the Middle Ages. Yet Fossier damages his quest to “find” the common man independent of time by his unmitigated attacks on today’s common man. “I am persuaded that medieval man is us”, he later claims, but this is a jarring claim given his earlier implication that modern man has moved into a sensorily deprived box. His claims are not tempered by acknowledgements of how man has extended his senses: constructing telescopes to see distant stars up close, developing audio and radio technology that permit us to hear the voices of loved ones though they be thousands of miles away. There is a degree of inconsistency in his selective skepticism. Fossier asks questions of the sources about “medieval man”, but does not do the same for “us”: he takes modern advertising at face value as a representation of modern culture and values. If he has so little regard for people, why write a book for them—or about them?

Fossier sets himself up as a champion of medieval people: the “others” whom he claims are not knights, bishops, or kings but are nine-tenths of humanity typically disregarded by historians. There are a few problems with these claims. His frequent and acerbic charges at historians’ indifference to the common man miss the mark: there are well-established trends of social history and history of the common man, and these trends are not limited to the academy. Most school curricula mandate study of the common man and woman; gift-shops at historical tourist sites are filled with books about him and her. Furthermore, when looking at his defensive strategies on behalf of these “others”, one begins to wonder how concerted a fight he is really making on their behalf. He claims it is pointless to “accuse” him of “mixing up centuries, of being content with simplistic generalizations…of using deceptive words and impure sources”, arguing that by putting these aside, he can better access the human being across time.

It is an injustice to those nine-tenths of society to decide that, because specifics about them are less readily available, we are permitted to generalize freely about these people. The desire to search for the common man is commendable, but there is a kind of tyranny in his apathetic attitude toward deceit: it sends the message that common people are not worth the time, effort, and precision of serious study. The common man of the Middle Ages deserves a better champion.

The costs of Fossier’s quest do not mean that the quest should not be undertaken. The immense value of a book like this lies in its latent ability to stimulate readers—be they historians professional or amateur—to ask stimulating questions. If a reader drinks in Fossier’s readable, intriguing discussion of medieval lay-learning, and learns enough from his wide-ranging discussion to ask a question either of Fossier or of the medieval sources, he has made great progress. Indeed, if this book inspires its readers to go off on their own quests for the medieval common man—even if it means leaving Fossier’s quest behind—it will have achieved a resolution to rival all medieval quest stories. A solid resolution worth more to today’s reader, perhaps, than the ever-elusive Holy Grail.

Emily A. Winkler is reading for a DPhil in History at Jesus College, Oxford.

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“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice”. Robert Frost was a bit more equivocal in his apocalyptic musings than Harold Camping, head of the Family Radio International ministry, who recently predicted that the Rapture would most definitely, certainly, and without a doubt, occur on May 21st, 2011. Camping’s colorful, Hieronymus Bosch-esque conjectures about the event have spurred journalistic satire, Facebook-generated post-apocalypse looting parties, and tongue-in-cheek answers to “Frequently Asked Questions Regarding a Rapture Day Zombie Attack”. But some took Camping’s prediction very seriously, giving away all their belongings, leaving their families, euthanizing their pets, and dedicating their last days on Earth to spreading the message of the Messiah’s return.

The word apocalypse, from the Greek apokálypsis, means an “uncovering”, a “lifting of the veil”; in the Judeo-Christian tradition it refers to the revelation of God’s intentions for the sinners and the saved. The cryptic Apocalypse of John, the last book of the New Testament, has inspired poets, preachers, and R.E.M. to imagine an end of the world as we know it in which God will harness the destructive force of every natural and supernatural disaster to cleanse the Earth of moral rot. “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake,” but then, in Chapter 8, Verse 7 of John’s imaginings: “the first angel sounded the trumpet: and there followed hail and fire, mingled with blood: and it was cast on the earth. And the third part of the earth was burnt up: and the third part of the trees was burnt up: and all green grass was burnt up.” Suddenly one feels less than fine.

The end of the world has been a long time coming…and going. Although Matthew 24:36 states that, “But of that day and hour knoweth no [man], no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only”, Camping is only the latest—and certainly not the last—in a long line of doomsday forecasters. One doesn’t even need to have known the wrath of Yahweh to fear an infernal end: a 29th century BC Assyrian clay tablet links the moral decline of the kingdom to a kind of apocalypse. Even the Romans couldn’t stop predicting their fall (until, of course, they fell). Fancy numerological footwork often goes into such prognostications: Camping arrived at his prediction by multiplying a series of Biblically symbolic numbers and counting that number of days from the (debatable) date of Christ’s crucifixion. The 16th century seems to have been wild about the predictive powers of astrology, and the Kabbalah has always been popular. The tardiness of the end of the world has led to some similarly fancy prevarications; Camping, wrong twice now, can count himself among the great Cotton Mather and the 17th century Turkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi as a master of apologia and revision (although, unlike Zevi, Camping does not actually believe that he is the Messiah). There’s something wonderfully misguided about employing secular systems—mathematics, science, general rationality—in a search for religious certainty, not to mention something rather blasphemous about striving to know the mind of God. This hasn’t stopped Camping from trying, though. The countdown to October 21st, 2011 has begun.

Humanity can’t seem to help envisioning its own violent, theatrical, spectacular destruction. Long before Christianity articulated the threat of an eternally horrific existence after death, many ancient cultures, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, worshipped Death itself as a god. Freud, privy to the mind’s secret depths, explored in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the paradoxical existence of the Todestrieb, the “death drive” that lurks in our unconscious, that compels us to masochistically revisit—and sometimes reenact—the primal urge to return to an “inorganic” state. Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Stekel later brought together ancient myth and modern science, conflating the Greek god Thanatos with the death drive and positioning its deadly urge in opposition to Eros, the instinct toward life. For Freud, these drives were universal, irrespective of religion, culture, or supposed modernity. For all of our 20th and 21st century sophistication, we’ve been churning out quite a few disaster films, from the Communist/alien invasions of The Body Snatcher variety in the 1950s to such cinematic artistry as 2009’s 2012, inspired by the (arbitrary) end of the Mayan calendar. A sublimation of fear to make Freud proud.

It may even be argued that the post-industrial world has taken worshipping one’s Thanatonic drive to new heights. God is dead, but Satan loves nuclear bombs, strip mining, and greenhouse gasses. Frost’s “Fire and Ice” may not be far off the mark–by most accounts we are entering an age in which the earth may, sooner rather than later, go up in some sort of unstoppable conflagration followed by an age of barrenness. This is not so distant from Camping’s vision of Divine annihilation; it’s just that we don’t need God to rain down bloody hail, as we are doing a perfectly good job of burning the trees and green grass ourselves. Perhaps, then, we might temper our incredulity in reaction to Camping’s Judgment Day judgment. The Apocalypse, it turns out, is within. And if October 21st comes and goes with nary a strong breeze or earthly shudder, we always have the Mayans.

Rachel Abramowitz is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. She is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Adam Sisman
Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010
598 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-0297852148

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Adam Sisman’s new biography has a fascinating story to tell, and tells it very well. Its subject is the man variously described as “the leading historian of his generation”, “a relentless scourge of zealots, cheats, and bores”, and “a robot, without human experience, with no girls, no real friends, no capacity for intimacy and no desire to like or be liked”. Born into the fading gentry of Northumberland in 1914, Hugh Trevor-Roper underwent a rigorous education at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, spent a dramatic period monitoring German intelligence transmissions, and enjoyed an illustrious academic career as a fellow of Christ Church, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (appointed in 1957 at the age of 43), and finally master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was also a long-standing correspondent for The Sunday Times, and wrote book reviews for a number of publications (many of these were reprinted in his volume Historical Essays, published in 1957). His standing, both academically and socially, was high indeed (he became the second husband of Earl Haig’s daughter Alexandra in 1954, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1979); his fall, brought about by his unfortunate authentication of the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983, was all the greater for it. Yet he weathered this particularly turbulent storm and continued to produce work of outstanding quality, before succumbing to cancer in 2003 at the age of 89.

In many ways his career was unusual. Most professional historians do not attain popular recognition, and those that do often have to wait many years, even decades, for it. Not so Trevor-Roper. The Last Days of Hitler, a journalistic investigation into the fate of the Führer, remains his most famous work. He had been asked to solve this most pressing of mysteries by his former wartime colleague Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin and later head of MI5 and MI6 in succession. The book appeared in 1947, and was only his second (he never thought very highly of his first, a study of Archbishop Laud published in 1940). It made his name and his fortune. It also established him as an authority on Nazi Germany, a subject he would frequently revisit in print and even on television in a notable debate with his Oxford colleague and sparring partner AJP Taylor. But it has tended to overshadow his more scholarly output. Although first and foremost a historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, Trevor-Roper never confined himself to this period. He wrote on Hitler; he wrote on Homer; he wrote on most subjects in between.

He also wrote brilliantly. A dazzling essayist and letter-writer, he fully appreciated the value of a lucid prose style in putting across his point. His assessments of figures past and present were always memorable and often devastating. Queen Christina of Sweden was “that dreadful woman, the Cartesian princess, the crowned termagant and predatory bluestocking of the north”, CS Lewis “a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding.” Anthony Eden got off rather lightly in comparison, being merely a “vain, ineffectual Man of Blood”. The index of a Trevor-Roper volume was always essential reading; this specimen, from the index to his Renaissance Essays, was not untypical:

Jesuits: impose orthodoxy on all sciences, 193-4; and arts, 234; adapt humanist history, 138; drain humanism of its content, 229; creep in everywhere, 216; including China, 252; the Pope’s janissaries, 268; have mastered the mechanics of power, 229; constant allies of Spain, 279, 284; the courtliest of religious orders, 289; hated by de Thou, 136; and by the university of Paris, 207; but unstoppable, 229; ‘Hell-born’, 250

Like de Thou, Trevor-Roper had little time for the Jesuits. He had little time for clerics in general. Yet good sense and shrewd historical understanding always trumped his prejudices. Assessing the crusades in one of a series of lectures later published as The Rise of Christian Europe, he might have been expected to line up behind his 18th-century heroes Gibbon and Voltaire in outright condemnation of the movement. This is not what happened. Whatever his personal feelings on the subject, he sought to place the movement in a wider context, as one facet of the high medieval expansion of Europe in which spiritual and economic motivations were intermingled. The account he produced was characteristically perceptive.

Trevor-Roper’s merits and successes were numerous, yet there were failures also, and these Sisman does not neglect. He started many books, but finished few; his magnum opus on the Puritan Revolution never appeared. After his death much material was, and continues to be, salvaged from his manuscripts; much remains. Failure of this kind has dogged many historians, and for many different reasons. Sisman suggests, convincingly, that the problem for Trevor-Roper was not the sheer amount of archival research necessary before such a work could be written, although this was certainly substantial, but his perfectionism. Each essay he wrote went through numerous drafts before publication; to prepare to the same standard a multi-volume work of the kind he envisaged was necessarily a laborious and lengthy endeavour. In so doing he found himself continually overtaken by new research, as well as distracted by the demands of teaching and other college duties (not to mention other historical projects that also came to nothing), and the endeavour ultimately proved abortive. In any case, the essay form suited him better; it is on these that his scholarly reputation rests.

This is the Hugh Trevor-Roper that emerges from the pages of Sisman’s vivid and impressive biography: reticent in person, effervescent in prose, possessed of a brilliant mind but burdened with expectations he never quite fulfilled, he fully deserves the lengthy treatment Sisman gives him. Sisman is careful to evoke in detail the various environments in which his subject lived and worked, and he provides a wonderful gallery of supporting players. There is Trevor-Roper’s early mentor, the effete literary scholar Logan Pearsall Smith, forever pressing him about the most intimate details of his private life; Smith’s brother-in-law Bernard Berenson, the renowned art historian, at whose Florentine villa Trevor-Roper often stayed, and with whom he enjoyed a lengthy correspondence (his letters to Berenson were published in 2006); the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Freddie Ayer, the former a wartime colleague of Trevor-Roper; the Russian spy Kim Philby, another wartime colleague and later subject of his short book The Philby Affair; Rupert Murdoch, “a megalomaniac twister, surrounded by yes-men and hatchet-men,” as Trevor-Roper once put it; and many others. The book is, furthermore, a remarkable chronicle of Oxbridge academic life over the course of the 20th century. Of particular interest are the machinations of the Peterhouse common room during Trevor-Roper’s tenure as master, when a coterie of reactionary fellows headed by Maurice Cowling sought to undermine the man who, contrary to expectation, was not prepared to stem the forces of modernisation. It is a shame that this phase of his life receives comparatively less coverage than others; indeed, his last 20 years are dealt with in little more than 30 pages. But it would be churlish to criticise this imbalance, for the author’s hand has (understandably) been stayed by defamation law, as he explains in his introduction.

Now if Sisman is less detailed here than one would like, there are also moments when he is more detailed than he perhaps ought to be. While he has explicitly made every effort to avoid such pitfalls, some of the anecdotes, clearly told to him by Trevor-Roper himself, come across as rather fanciful. Several such tales are to be found in relation to his undergraduate days and pre-war jaunts in Europe; most notable of all, and seemingly uncorroborated by diary evidence, is the account of a 1935 trip to Germany, in which Trevor-Roper dodged belligerent Nazi missionaries, won vast sums at a casino in Baden-Baden, and was forced to post his money out of the country to ensure its safety (not to mention his own). For one who could breathe life into seemingly the dullest historical topics, such embellishments were no doubt routine, and Sisman is to be congratulated on the fact that only very occasionally does his narrative fail to ring true. Indeed, he is to be congratulated on a biography that is, for the most part, hard to fault. Other, more detailed treatments of Trevor-Roper’s historical works and philosophy are available, for instance John Robertson’s recent piece in the English Historical Review. But it is no mean feat to wrest a compelling and illuminating narrative out of the mass of correspondence and diary entries that confronts the chronicler of such an eventful life, and this is precisely what Sisman has achieved.

Hugh Reid is reading for a DPhil in History at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson detects a rot in the instruction of history. Sixty years ago, courses in Western civilisation offered sweeping narratives that required students to engage with classical texts and study the reasons for Western ascendancy. Today, Ferguson bemoans, students “have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions and Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.” Ferguson’s recently released Civilization: The West and Rest (reviewed by Oliver Cussen in issue 15.6) seeks to return a focus to grand historical narrative, answering what Ferguson considers to be the most interesting question of Western historiography: how 11 empires came to control 58% of the world’s land surface and 79% of economic output. Ferguson enumerates six advantages—or “killer apps”—of the West: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Together, they allowed the West to pull ahead of the “Rest”; however, Ferguson warns, these advantages are no longer the West’s preserve. Just as Westerners are beginning to lose faith in their cultural institutions, Easterners are “downloading” the apps that once created the conditions for Western supremacy. The 21st century, Ferguson concludes, may be defined by the precipitous decline of the West and the ascendancy of the East.

On Saturday, 9 April, Ferguson spoke to the Oxonian Review about Eastern ascendancy, the relationship between Western cultural institutions, and how to improve the instruction of history.

If the West is a set of cultural institutions and practices, why would the downloading of Western apps by the East not constitute an expansion of the West, rather than its decline?

That is an issue I address in the conclusion of the book by asking—particularly with reference to chapter 5—how far the consumer society represents a Westernisation of every society that it touches. At one level, we can celebrate the success of China and India emerging from poverty by using our killer applications. It’s just that the most successful of these consumer societies—China—has not downloaded all six. In particular, it isn’t interested—at least it doesn’t appear to be interested right now—in the idea of the rule of law, private property rights, and representative government: the John Locke app. So if China is going to become the largest economy in the world in the next ten years and increasingly a competitor for strategic dominance with the United States, I don’t think we can call this a triumph of Westernisation. This is a country that is still a one-party state and where, for example, an artist like Ai Weiwei can be simply arrested at Beijing airport after expressing criticism of the regime. I think there is some Westernisation going on in China—that is obvious in the way people dress—but to call this a complete triumph of Western civilisation is highly naïve.

What do you think the consequences are for Eastern ascendancy that all the Western apps haven’t been downloaded, particularly representative government?

The good news is that India has all these institutions. It’s just that they work rather slowly. One way of thinking of it is that India has the software but there are some bugs in the machinery that make it run super slowly. I’m an optimist about India, because I think those problems can be fixed and are being fixed. India is a free society in which you can criticise politicians for being corrupt, and we’ve just seen an enormous surge of public opinion in India about corruption, which is going to have a very [sizable] effect on Indian political life. It’s much harder for the Chinese to cope with the aspirations of their middle class…[because] there is no political channel to express dissent. If you look ahead to the 21st century in which there is an equal in economic terms to the United States and European Union in the form of China, but that this China is very emphatically not a free society, the potential for conflict is very obvious. And we already see it in a whole range of economic areas, and we are seeing it beginning in the scramble for commodities, which is rampant in Africa and South America—not to mention Australia—right now. And ultimately there is more reason to expect a breakdown in relations between the West and China than to expect them to carry on harmoniously.

Do you think there is any link between the apps insofar as having five apps would begin you on the path to acquiring the sixth?

They are presented in the book in a chronological sequence, and I’m implying that there is a causal relationship. The transition to representative institutions and the rule of law was a very important precursor of the successful industrialization of the English-speaking world. The fact that China has gotten as far as becoming an industrial superpower without the creation of free institutions is a cause for concern. It is a likely source of instability. I draw a parallel with Wilhelmine Germany in late 19th and early 20th centuries—a very dynamic economy but with a fundamentally deformed political system, which ultimately resorted to aggressive foreign policy rather than make meaningful concessions to the left. There is an interesting parallel to be drawn there, but one wouldn’t want to take it too far. The big unknown is the timing and nature of institutional change that will come to China. No one denies that some kind of change will come, but the timing of it is very hard to gauge. And my fear is that a regime like the Chinese regime, faced with economic and social challenges, will be quite tempted to resort to nationalism to legitimise itself. We’ve already seen that happen in some degree.

Is it the case that in the West we’ve lost faith in our apps?

I think to some extent we have, although it’s very hard to generalise now because there are so many very profound differences between—say—the United States and Europe. What I see is a mindset in which the last 500 years is primarily understood through the prism of imperialism and the crimes of the West against the Rest. By emphasising empire in the narrative of modern history, we make a major mistake, because the least interesting thing about Western civilisation is that it engaged in imperialism. Everybody did that. All civilisations of any real note have engaged in some kind of imperialist expansion. The original, interesting things about the West are not slavery and not conquest. The interesting things are the innovations in the realm of science or political institutions or economic life. Those are the novel things. My sense is that the way we think about our past now, the way that we teach kids in school, underplays the importance of—to take one other example—the work ethic. So I do think we are in danger of undervaluing our own civilisation and doing the thing that’s fatal: we are failing to transmit its values to the next generation.

You’ve written that this transformation in the instruction of history is rooted in the 1960s. Is there a reason for the de-emphasis of Western values?

I think there is a close link between the political left and a shift in the way in which the content and the form of teaching were conceived. The New History, insofar as it was a movement in this country, was partly a design to transform historical methods and to move away from the idea that history is “one fucking thing after another”—in the famous Allen Bennett phrase. There was a political angle to that because it was supposed to be displacing Our Island Story—a caricatured version of British history that sprung from Macaulay and turned into an early 20th-century textbook. I’m not arguing for going back to Our Island Story. But I think it would help to have some kind of story beyond the wickedness of empire in the way we understand the period from 1500 to the relatively recent past.

I don’t want to make this too simplistic. A lot of what has happened in history education has been the law of unintended consequences. I certainly don’t think Kenneth Baker, when he was education secretary, had any clue what the national curriculum would mutate into after it was created. But I think there’s a problem, and I think the problem is there in a generation that is leaving school with a very, very jumbled and fragmentary knowledge of the past. Very few people would dissent from that despite the attempts of school inspectors like Ofsted to claim that everything is fine.

How do you reconcile reorienting the curriculum to teach an overarching narrative with educating students to examine primary sources?

There is a need for realism about how much in the way of historical methodology you can teach a 12-year-old kid, and I think there is a somewhat disingenuous belief that you can teach the methods of professional historians to preteens who don’t even know whether the Enlightenment came before or after the Renaissance. I think you’ve got to walk and then run. And teaching sources and methods first—in my experience talking to kids—is not a particularly effective way in engaging them. Indeed, if you talk to both teachers and school children doing Key Stage 3 and GCSE, they mostly ridicule the source analysis. And I don’t blame them. If you look at what they are asked to analyse, it is usually one paragraph. It is a parody; a sort of caricature of what we do. And that’s really why, in some way, I am in revolt against that approach. I don’t think they’re in fact really learning historical methods; I think it’s a charade. And it would be far better [teaching] some historical knowledge, facts, and then worrying about the methodology when they’re a little bit older. It’s all about getting people to study history in the long term. Right now you can stop at 13, which is crazy.

How would you change the way history is taught at the university level?

In one fundamental way. In my experience, both at Oxford and at Harvard, far too little of the philosophy of history is taught. And faint runs through historiography are no substitute for a proper grounding in philosophy as a subject. You probably haven’t been asked to read RG Collingwood or Michael Oakeshott or Benedetto Croce or any of the philosophers who grasped and grappled with the issues of historical thought…The thing I would change if I had some control over our graduate programme at Harvard [is to] make every single PhD student do a foundational course in historical philosophy in year one.

William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review. Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.