…neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned…

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who won a US Senate seat in Massachusetts, is an expert on bankruptcy.  Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that ‘Corporations are people’, she replied:

No…corporations are not people.  People have hearts.  They have kids.  They get jobs.  They get sick.  They thrive.  They dance.  They live.  They love.  And they die.  And that matters… because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.

The quote is everywhere; it even made it into a Doonesbury cartoon here.

Doonesbury cartoon, 7 November 2012

Meanwhile the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, worked as a derivatives trader for corporations – Elf Aquitaine and Enterprise Oil – before he changed course and decided to join the ministry in 1989.  His dissertation at theological college was on the topic ‘Can companies sin?’ – to which he answered Yes.  He recently told the Guardian:

When one group corners a source of human flourishing, that is deeply wicked.  It applies to the City, to commodities traders, or to churches who say only this way is right.

These are similar statements from two new players on the political scene questioning the role of the corporation.  Add to that the strong criticism of corporate corruption from the new Chinese leadership (yet to be followed up by any action) and maybe we are seeing something of a trend.

Criticism of corporations is not new, of course.  Elizabeth Warren’s statement parallels that of the British Lord Chancellor, Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806).  During the trial of Warren Hastings of the East India Company, Thurlow said:

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

The idea of a Company goes back a very long way.  The word is associated with Companion, from the Old French compaignier, which literally meant those who come together to break bread – pain.

Those who break bread together, trade together, and the early trading companies – the Levant Company, the East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company and others – depended on the idea of a group of companions sharing the risks and rewards of their venture.  Large-scale investments, such as sending a ship, or a fleet, to the East Indies for spices, needed lots of money, so traders pooled their resources by buying shares in the enterprise.  The Dutch set up the first stock market in the early 17^th century, where traders could buy and sell shares in companies such as the Dutch East India Company and the West India Company.  The English copied the idea.

These early companies were formed around a single investment.  Once the voyage to the Indies was over, the shareholders divided up the profits and began all over again.  But gradually companies developed into permanent institutions, with an address and a board of directors.  Each company needed an Act of Parliament: to be incorporated meant to be given a fictional body (Latin: a corpus) which gave the company the rights of an individual in a court of law: to collect debts, to sue or be sued, and so on.  (Rights that were not available to married women until the 1880s).

Through the 17^th and 18^th century, the most important companies were trading ventures or big colonial projects, such as the Londonderry plantation in Ireland.  With the Industrial Revolution, big infrastructure projects – canals, then later railways – needed to raise capital through selling shares.

It was a clunky system: each railway project needed a separate Act of Parliament, and that usually meant a generous gift of shares to the MP who oversaw the Act through Parliament.  During the 1830s, there was a lot of speculation, insider share trading, and high-risk investments that went belly up when the economy turned sour in the 1840s.  Many investors bought shares for a small percentage of their paper value – a bit like options today – hoping to cash in when share prices rose.  When they didn’t rise as anticipated, the shareholders were caught out.  Sound familiar?

During the 1840s the British government began to sort out the mess.  The Joint Stock Companies Act (1844) let investors form a company with corporate status by registration, rather than going through the hoops of an Act of Parliament.  The total cost of forming a corporation fell to £10 – not quite the $1 companies of shonky dealers today, but still much cheaper than having to bribe MPs.  Then 11 years later, in 1855, a new Act introduced limited liability for shareholders.

Together these two Acts freed commerce from restrictions and made it much easier to raise capital – but also made it harder for Parliament, or anybody else, to oversee what went on in the share market.  From now on, a corporation – a legal fiction designed to let companies behave like individuals – was unrestrained by the fear that restrains individuals: the fear of personal bankruptcy and its consequences.

They still can’t dance.

This time last year:
Violators, Victims and Vigilantes, 9 November 2011

Talking to Asia in the 19th and 21st Centuries

The response to the new white paper, Australia in the Asian Century, just released by the federal government, has been underwhelming to say the least.  Which is a pity.

There’s little doubt that the 21^st century belongs to Asia (however that murky geographic concept is defined), and most of the recommendations of Ken Henry’s panel seem worthy, if uncosted.  During the next century, most of the world’s middle class will be Asian, and Australia naturally wants to tap in – in trade, education, tourism and cultural exchange.

So far, so motherhood.  But one issue the report raised, and the PM emphasised in launching the report, has come in for a lot of criticism.  “All students will have continuous access to a priority Asian language – Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese.”

Over the years there have other attempts to persuade our Anglophone kids to knuckle down and learn an Asian language, but apart from a few ambitious nerds (Kevin Rudd, anyone?) most high school students baulk at the difficulties, especially when their matriculation results depend on how they go in a variety of subjects.  Dean Ashenden nails the problem here - and goes on to point out that

To the extent that we do need Asian-language speakers for business or other purposes, why on earth get schools to produce them?  We’ve already got them.

According to the census, we have 330,000 Mandarin speakers, 111,000 Hindi, 56,000 Indonesian, 44,000 Japanese, 80,000 Korean, 233,000 Vietnamese and 37,000 Thai.

But if teaching the next generation Asian languages is a flawed endeavour, how did earlier generations of English-speakers deal with the problem of talking to Asia?

It’s ironic, but 200 years ago, when Australian settlers first began trading with China, Chinese law forbade anyone, on pain of death, from teaching Chinese to foreigners. The first English speakers to learn Cantonese, such as the missionary Robert Morrison (1782-1834), had to do so in secret.

The European factories in Canton, c. 1820. The flags represent Denmark, Spain, the U.S., Sweden, Britain, and the Netherlands – and all would have been provided with a specialist interpreter by the Cantonese authorities

China carefully controlled its trade with the outside world.  The only trading port was Canton [Guangzhou] and the trade was strictly regulated under the comprador system.  Foreign traders had to employ Chinese translators.  They could only enter Canton during the trading season and were not allowed to bring their wives or families with them.   Not knowing the language put gweilo at a disadvantage in their dealings with the Chinese – that was the point! – but they got by with translators and a patois – pidgin English is a corruption of ‘business English’.

In other parts of Asia, things were less regulated.  The British in India (or the Dutch in Indonesia) lived in closer proximity with the locals.  In 18^th century India, intermarriage was common, and the children of these unions probably spoke the languages of both parents.  In the 19^th century, interracial marriages were frowned on, but British children born in India might learn Urdu or Hindi from the servants.  In any case the stronger position of the East India Company made English the language of commerce.

In the Middle East, foreign embassies and trading companies used a different strategy, employing dragomans as guides and interpreters within the Ottoman Empire.  Recently I supervised a terrific PhD thesis about an Armenian family in Beirut who acted as dragomans to the British Embassy across several generations through the 19^th century.  These men were skilled linguists who spoke Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Italian and English, as well as their original Armenian.  Such people still play a role today, dealing with tourists, journalists and aid agencies as well.  The pay can be good, but in dangerous times they risk being too closely identified with the foreigners they serve.  Many will have worked hard to learn English through the internet, but if they start as adults they will struggle.

Children really are the key.  The Chinese prohibition on wives and families in Canton was critical in maintaining control of their language, because small kids pick up languages so easily.  It’s much too late by the time they reach high school, but children pick up (and drop) languages with a facility we adults can only envy.

So – do we need to teach more children Asian languages?  By all means.  I don’t regret my years of schoolgirl French, which gave me a vague insight into French culture, a rather better grasp of my own language, and means that I can confidently buy a baguette in a Paris market.  But I wouldn’t want to negotiate a trade deal in French.  I’ll leave that to someone genuinely bilingual, like my friend’s son, raised by a French father and an Australian mother in both languages.

Similarly, there are plenty of bilingual people already in Australia, who have spoken 2 languages from early childhood.  My highly anecdotal evidence is that we could recruit all the Hindi teachers and translators we need from amongst Brisbane taxi drivers – except that most of them are half way through an engineering degree, and would, quite rightly, turn up their noses at the sort of money we pay teachers anyway.

The PhD thesis on dragomans in Beirut is:

Judith Laffan, Negotiating empires: “British” dragomans and changing identity in the 19^th century Levant (2011) – available online, but only to UQ staff and students.

This time last year:
Phar Lap and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 18 October 2011
That Missing Curtsey, 21 October 2011
Mud Wrestling on St Crispin’s Day, 26 October 2011
Trick or Treat? 31 October 2011

Should the European Union have won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Within a day of the award being announced, I was hearing jokes about the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize going to the European Union.  Could they use the prize money to bail out Greece?  How would they stop arguing long enough to choose someone to accept the prize on their behalf?  And the killer, an acceptance speech that begins:

Firstly, I would like to thank Adolf Hitler, without which none of this would have been possible.

The Nobel Peace Prize is often contentious.  For every Aung San Suu Kyi or Desmond Tutu, there is a Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat.  The Committee often uses the prize to try to tweak current events, because its prestige lends clout to the recipient – Jose Ramos-Horta, for instance, became much more widely recognized as a result of winning the prize, and this probably helped the cause of East Timorese independence.  But the risk is that it’s hard to pick winners before they have done anything: Barack Obama got the prize for not being George W. Bush.

The other Nobel Prizes are always awarded for achievement, not aspiration, sometimes many years after the original research was done.  In this case, they have treated the Peace Prize as they do the scientific and literary prizes, and rewarded the EU for past achievement, rather than present or future aspirations.

You can see the point. After the devastation of World War II, it was a visionary decision by a small group of politicians, amongst them the Frenchmen Robert Schuman (1886-1963) and Jean Monnet (1888-1979) and the German Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), to reach across the divisions of the past to take the first steps towards a unified Europe.  The original 6 signatories to the Treaty of Rome (1957) were Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (Benelux).

The Treaty of Verdun (843) divided Charlemagne’s Empire into 3 parts

The original European Common Market of 6 nations covered pretty much the same territory as the empire of Charlemagne (742-814), 1200 years earlier.  Charlemagne’s empire only lasted 2 generations.  It was already being nibbled away at the edges when, in 843, his 3 grandsons divided it amongst themselves at the Treaty of Verdun.  Louis the German got East Francia, the lands east of the Rhine covering much of the territory that eventually (1870) became Germany.  Charles the Bald got West Francia, containing much of what became France.

The eldest grandson, Lothair, took the title of Emperor, and Middle Francia, a territory that ran from what re now the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (Benelux), across Alsace-Lorraine (the name Lorraine is a corruption of Lotharingia), down into Provence, through the Jura into Switzerland and across the Alps into North Italy.

This long strip of territory, not surprisingly, wasn’t viable as a single state, and soon fragmented into independent statelets, which flourished without any central control.  The wealthiest, most independent minded cities in Western Europe were those of North Italy and the Benelux region, variously known, depending on period, as Flanders or Burgundy or the Low Counties.  Lothair’s territory included Charlemagne’s old capital, Aachen, but it’s telling that the city has a second, French name – Aix-la-Chapelle – for Middle Francia marked a cultural boundary whose memory lingers on.  It is the frontier between the French and German languages, where amalgams exist – Dutch, Alsatian, Luxembourgish, Swiss-Deutsch….

The states and cities flourished – when there was peace.  In the best of times, they acted as a buffer zone between France and the Imperial lands; in the worst of times, they became the  territory across which French and Imperial (later German) armies slogged it out, wealthy, strategic, divided and militarily weak.

The institutional centres of the European Union are strung out along Lothair’s strip of territory today: the European Commission is in Brussels, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.  Other global institutions are also clustered here too, such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the International Labor Organization in Geneva.

Another perspective on Verdun: River Crossing on the way to the battle, probably 1917

The EU has been a great peace maker.  There has been no conflict between France and Germany since 1945, whereas conflicts erupted every generation or so beforehand: 1793-1815, 1870-1, 1914-19, 1939-45.  The EU has also facilitated democratic change: Spain and Portugal both entered the EU only after the deaths of the dictators Franco and Salazar.  Their citizens wanted to the benefits of EU membership and chose democracy at least in part because it was a condition of entry.  Similarly Greece only joined after the Colonels departed, in 1981.  And the EU, as a supranational organization, has created a mechanism for national minorities to emerge from the resentful shadows: from Northern Ireland to Corsica to the Basque country, historical grievances remain, but are expressed far less violently than before.  When all else fails, become a member of the European Parliament, like Ian Paisley.

The problem is: just how big is Europe?  and just how unified?  In retrospect, the idea of a single currency, without a single political will to decide on economic policy, was a mistake.

Charlemagne’s empire was based on the imperative of constant warfare and constant expansion.  To pay his army, he needed a constant supply of lands and treasure, which came from the army’s conquests.  This sort of expansion couldn’t last forever, and the whole edifice broke into pieces within 2 generations of his death.

The EU’s expansion has been much more benign – but it’s hard not to think that it, too, has reached – maybe overreached – its limits, and could easily implode.

Nobel Prizes only go to the living.  Some great discoveries, such as plate tectonics, are not recognized for what they are before their discoverers die, and there are no posthumous awards.  The visionary men of the 1950s, who first dared to reach across that bitter, bloody land of Middle Francia in search of peaceable union, undoubtedly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.  But nobody thought of it at the time – and it’s rather too late now.

This time last year:

Occupying Wall Street and Boundary Street, 14 October 2011

Dutch Courage and the FV Abel Tasman

They say it’s bad luck to change the name of a ship.  The owners of the super trawler formerly known as Margiris may be pondering this old saltie’s superstition as the Australian government ramps up its efforts to prevent the ship fishing out in Australian waters.

The issues are complex and controversial.  Environmentalists are worried that this ship – larger than any fishing vessel that has operated in Australian waters before – will gobble up too many fish, and destroy too much ‘by-catch’ while doing so.

Scientists are divided, and there’s a healthy dose of nationalism in play as well, worried that ‘our’ fish will be harvested for sale overseas.  But there’s a division of power in a federal system, and as Tasmanian government has already okayed the deal it’s not clear what the federal Minister for the Environment can do, especially in a hung Parliament.  We may find out later today. [Update: Or not]

As a historian, I’m intrigued by the actions of the spin-doctors behind the Dutch company, Parlevliet & Van Der Plas, who have decided to rename the ship, which is now registered in Australian waters as the FV Abel Tasman.  It’s a clever attempt to highlight 400 years of Dutch-Australian contact, but I think they may have been too clever by half.

Abel Tasman, detail of portrait (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every school kid in Australia has heard of Abel Tasman (or I hope they have.  You can never be sure these days).  In the early 17^th century, the new Dutch Republic created a global trading empire.  In the Western hemisphere, the Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island to tap into the fur trade; in the Eastern hemisphere the Dutch East India Company (always abbreviated as VOC, for Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) with its capital at Batavia (now Jakarta) on Java, set out to corner the spice trade.

Unlike earlier European imperialists, the Dutch empire was based on middle class investors who bought shares in a company.  There weren’t interested in conquest or conversion, like the Spanish, but in profit, and the profits came from buying cheap and selling dear, scooping up whatever natural resources came their way.  The trick lay in concealing from the local vendors what the real value of their products was.

The Dutch reached the Indies in 1602.  The standard route was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope into the Roaring ‘Forties, then turn north to Java.  Every so often on their voyage north, they bumped into bits of land.

In 1642, the Governor in Batavia, Antonie van Diemen, commissioned Abel Tasman to search for new land to the south.  He was given explicit instructions: to look for land, but not just any land, for profitable land.  Van Diemen instructed him to treat any locals with respect, as possible trade partners, but if he found anything of value, such as gold or silver, he must be very careful to conceal its value from them.

1659 map prepared by Joan Blaeu based on voyages by Abel Tasman and Willem Jansz. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tasman ‘discovered’ land far to the south, which he named Van Diemen’s Land after the boss.  By 1856, when Van Diemen’s Land became a self-governing colony, its politicians and spin-doctors decided on a rebranding, because ex-convict ‘Vandiemonians’ had become notorious in mainland Australia.  Tasmania, named after the Dutch explorer, sounded much better.

But the super trawler may not be so lucky.

The Dutch West India Company’s Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, is best remembered today as the name of a cigarette.  The advertisers probably thought this a good idea at the time, but times change, and tobacco is no longer viewed so favourably.

Neither are super trawlers, whatever their names.

This time last year:
Noble Hector, 8 September 2011

Potatoes and the foods of the poor

I bought 2 kg of potatoes last weekend.  Four days later, I took out the bag to peel some for dinner, and found that every single potato in the bag had shoots on it.

I spent a minute or so muttering about supermarkets and their appalling buying policies, but then I realised that, in a funny way, I felt quite happy for those potatoes.  It’s cold at the moment (by Brisbane standards), but we passed the shortest day three weeks ago.  In their plastic bag, deep in the darkness of my pantry, those potatoes knew that spring is only a week or so away.

We ask a lot of potatoes.  There are some basic foodstuffs we expect to be on hand all year – potatoes and onions, apples and bananas, eggs and milk – yet even the humble spud is really a seasonal vegetable.

Purple potato chips, made from purple potatoes, and served at the Chateau of Villandry in the Loire Valley,  which is noted for its vegetable gardens.

In 1949 the pioneer in World History, William H McNeill published an article on ‘The Introduction of the Potato into Ireland’ in the Journal of Modern History, based on his postgraduate work.  Now that every commodity, from cod to coffee to the colour mauve, seems to have its own historian, it’s easy to miss just how innovative McNeill’s thematic approach then was.  Exactly 50 years later, he returned to the topic with ‘How the Potato Changed the World’s History’, in Social Research: An International Quarterly (1999).  His preoccupation is understandable, for potatoes really did transform the world.

Farmers in the Andes first domesticated potatoes many thousands of years ago. From the wild potato, Peruvian farmers gradually line bred a tuber that was nutritious and so productive that it fed the Inca Empire.

Potatoes belong to the Solanaceae family, which also includes deadly nightshade and other poisonous plants.  Wild potatoes needed to be processed to make them safe, and even on modern potatoes, any green patches and sprouts can be poisonous.

When the Spanish arrived, they took potatoes back to Europe, along with many other products of New World agriculture – tomatoes, chillies, tobacco, corn – as part of the great Columbian exchange that transformed both sides of the Atlantic.

Until then in Europe, the main source of carbohydrates in the diet was wheat. This was a broad acre crop, sown by men guiding ploughs that were drawn by horses or oxen.  But in South America, there was no comparable broad acre crop, because there were no draft animals (the llama is a pack animal), and therefore no ploughs.  Peruvian cultivation was garden based, and the gardeners were usually women.  They planted the tubers in trenches, gradually heaping on extra soil as they grew, to produce a high yield from small plots of land.

When potatoes arrived in Europe, they quickly became the food of the poor. Peasants who couldn’t afford acreage or a team of oxen or a plough only needed a spade and a garden plot to grow potatoes.  (The word ‘spud’ probably comes from the spade used to dig it up.)

Unlike grain crops, potatoes can’t easily be stored. In the thin cold atmosphere of the Andes, Peruvian farmers process fresh potatoes by leaving them outside to freeze-dry for several nights. This makes chuño, a dried potato that can be further processed into flour for long term storage. This wasn’t possible in the clammy lands of northern Europe, so potatoes were useless for long term storage.

And that was an advantage.  No tax collector or landlord wanted to fill their granary with potatoes, so peasants grew wheat to pay the bills, and potatoes for their own use, outside the money economy.

Frank Holl, Peeling Potatoes, Yale Center for British Art

Potatoes store best when they are left in the ground after the plant dies down.  In Ireland, the rule was: put the pot on the fire first, and only then dig up enough tatties for dinner.  That was another advantage, in strife-torn areas such as Cromwell’s Ireland or Germany during the Thirty Years War. Rampaging armies might steal the grain harvest, or next year’s precious seed corn – but unless they had the time, and knew where to dig, they left the potatoes in the ground.

When potato blight hit in the 1840s, this inability to store potatoes from one year to the next was a disaster instead.  There was no fallback, no warehouses holding last year’s crop of potatoes that could be released.  And people starved across much of northern Europe.

We still ask a lot of potatoes, and when they fail us, they get the blame!  Yet Ireland continued to export wheat throughout the famine years. Wheat was the market crop, the crop that paid the bills. Potatoes were a part of the non-market economy.  Nobody knew how many potatoes were grown or eaten, and when the crop failed, it took time for awareness to filter through to the political class – who of course ate bread.

Today there are other foodstuffs that rarely reach the marketplace, yet feed millions of people. Bananas, taro, cassava all share some of the characteristics of potatoes. They are starchy and filling, but not very nutritious, and are often grown as a monocultural crop. They reproduce asexually, so they have very little genetic diversity.  And they don’t store well.  Next year, American food crops will be way down because of a hot, dry summer.  Prices of grains will rise in the market place.  But what will be the knock-on effect for foods like these, that don’t reach the market?  Watch this space.

This time last year:
Hamlet’s University, 30 July 2011
Why the Census Counts, 3 August 2011
Jane Eyre and the Sisterhood, 11 August 2011

Batman and A Clockwork Orange: films and violence

I was never going to see The Dark Knight Rising in any case.  At my age and stage, I’m not really into superheroes, and the sort of films that appeal to teenagers and young adults usually leave me cold.  And yet –

Amongst all the tragedies associated with the massacre last weekend in Aurora, Colorado, the future of the Batman franchise seems a trivial matter, but inevitably some discussion has focussed on the relationship between cinematic violence and the real, horrifying thing.

Nobody knows yet what, if anything, motivated this latest in a long line of mass killings.  It probably wouldn’t make sense to the rest of us anyway.  But amongst the collateral damage, a sure-fire box office hit is now a tarnished brand.  In Paris, the distributors cancelled the premiere of The Dark Knight Rising – though only for a day or so.

Meanwhile, here in Australia, where knives and fists are the weapons of choice, not guns, we have been preoccupied with our own outbreaks of violence: a teenager randomly killed when king hit in King’s Cross, incidents of road rage that led to death or injury.  Rage in general.

There have been many thoughtful analyses of the relationship between the massacre and The Dark Knight Rising, such as this post here.

Do violent films normalise violence?  Does they encourage the idea that violence resolves disputes effectively?  Does a Good Superhero conquer an Evil Joker only because he has the biggest and best weaponry?  And is this an argument for censorship?

We’ve been here before, blaming films or books for causing violence, or creating an environment in which violence flourishes.

In 1962, the English novelist Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange, a controversial novel dealing with gang violence.  The gang and its leader, Alex, beat, slash and rape their way across of an imagined, dystopian world, fueled by drugs – and Beethoven.

In 1971 Stanley Kubrick converted the novel into a film.  A Clockwork Orange was full of stylised violence – a carefully choreographed rape scene, for instance, is filmed against a soundtrack of Singing in the Rain.  Unlike the Batman movies, there were no guns, for Burgess’s vision was based on England, where gun laws are much stricter than in America.

A Clockwork Orange was controversial from the start.  Nothing occurred to rival the Aurora massacre, but during the following months and years, several murders or beatings occurred which were blamed on the film.  In most cases, it was the lawyers, not the criminals, who drew a connection with A Clockwork Orange, but there were some unnerving incidents, such as a gang rape in which the rapists sang Singing in the Rain.

In 1974, Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from distribution in Britain.  It continued to be shown in other parts of the world, but it was suppressed in the UK until Kubrick’s death in 1999.  Meanwhile Burgess’s book gained notoriety as a result of the film.  According to Wikipedia (so it must be true) the first place to withdraw it from school libraries, in 1976, was Aurora, Colorado.

James Holmes wouldn’t be born for another 11 years.

Stanley Kubrick defended A Clockwork Orange, and by implication, violence in art generally, when he said:

To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.

Kubrick withdrew the film all the same.  Nobody blamed Singing in the Rain.

The New Cythera and the Transit of Venus

I wonder, if Captain Cook had gone to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the Transit of Mars* instead of the Transit of Venus, he would have seen an island full of brave warriors rather than nubile maidens?

William Hodges, Tahitian War Galleys in Matavai Bay, Tahiti

Probably not. Cook’s Tahitian visit was not the first instance of this association between the island and the goddess of love, though it is a strange coincidence that linked the planet Venus with Tahiti.

In her book, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2009), the anthropologist and historian Anne Salmond looks closely at what happened when an earlier explorer, the Frenchman Louis Antoine de Bougainville, visited in April 1768.

The men approached the ships first, followed by the women, and finally a beautiful young girl came on board.  In front of the gob-smacked sailors, she dropped her tapa cloth garments and exposed herself.  According to Anne Salmond, it was a local custom that

people stripped to the waist in the presence of gods and high chiefs, and a high-ranking stranger was often greeted by a young girl swathed in layers of bark cloth who slowly turned around, unwinding the bark cloth from her body until she stood naked – a ritual presentation with no necessary implication of sexual availability.

The Frenchmen had not seen a woman for six months.  It’s not surprising that they misunderstood the gesture, and the girl was groped enthusiastically before she finally left the ship ‘looking distressed and offended’.  That first encounter was to fuel Europeans’ sex-charged view of the islands of Polynesia.

When Bougainville returned to France, he published an account of the voyage, Le Voyage autour du monde (1771).  The book became a red-hot bestseller, with passages such as the following, describing that first encounter:

…the girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having indeed the celestial form of that goddess.  Both sailors and soldiers endeavoured to come to the hatch-way… At last our cares succeeded in keeping these bewitched fellows in order, though it was no less difficult to keep the command of ourselves.

Bougainville naturally drew on classical imagery, the source of most soft porn in 18^th century Europe.  He gave Tahiti the name of New Cythera, after the island of Cythera (now Kythera), the birthplace of Aphrodite.  (Or one of her birthplaces.  Cyprus also claims her, but then, if you are born from sea foam, you probably spread yourself around a bit.)

Voyage autour du monde (A Voyage around the World) was a sensation because of its eroticism, but also because it seemed to confirm the idea of the Noble Savage, the Romantic notion that people in a state of nature were nobler and less corrupted than those in the civilized world.  These ideas were already current when Bougainville left France; like everyone, he probably saw what he expected to see, but his Voyage fed back into the discussions of French philosophers.

Cook set out for Tahiti before Bougainville published his account, so he arrived at his experiences of Venus in the South Seas independently.  More prosaic than Bougainville, his main worry was that, by the time the Endeavour reached Tahiti, a regular sex trade had developed.  The Tahitians had no metal, and enterprising sailors found they could buy sex in exchange for iron – including ships’ nails, potentially endangering the integrity of the ship.

Meanwhile, preparations went ahead to observe the Transit of Venus on 3 June 1769, at a specially built high point named, appropriately, Fort Venus.  Transits occur in pairs.  The Transit of Venus next Wednesday, 6 June, follows one in 2004, and Cook’s 1769 Transit followed one in 1761.  In both cases, those of us who observe the second transit will be dead before the next one comes around.

The original purpose of observing the transit, from as many locations as possible, was to provide data to allow mathematicians to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun.  The astronomer Edward Halley first recognised the potential for using transit observations in this way, and went out to St Helena in 1679 to observe a Transit of Mercury, but was defeated by foggy conditions.  In the same way, the data collected at Fort Venus turned out to be a disappointment – though Cook’s secret instructions to search for the Great South Land were more successful.

The New Cythera, meanwhile, spun its magic back in Europe.  Tahiti became inextricably linked with eroticism.  Both the British and French crowns laid claims to the islands, though it was only in the 1840s that France seriously ran up the flag.

But both France and England have also endlessly competed for the right not to be responsible for another consequence of first contact, just as closely linked to the goddess of love – venereal disease, which ravaged the islands over the next century or more.

*A Transit of Mars is an impossibility.  We can only see transits of those planets between ourselves and the Sun, so Martians could view a Transit of Earth – but not the other way around.

Lachlan Macquarie takes the Overland Route

I’m on holidays in Russia at present.  Going to new places always sends me back to things I half knew, but wasn’t interested in before.  I vaguely knew that Governor Lachlan Macquarie had travelled through Russia, but now that I’m here myself, I thought I’d have another look at his journey.  His travel diary has been transcribed, and is available here.

Before he became Governor of New South Wales in 1810, Macquarie was a soldier in the Indian army – the sharp end of the East India Company.  In 1807, he was a lieutenant colonel.  His first wife had died, and at 44, he now planned to marry a cousin, Elizabeth Campbell, to whom he had proposed while on furlough in Scotland.

Elizabeth was waiting for him, slightly impatiently, and he needed to get home.  In early 1807, for reasons that don’t seem entirely clear, Macquarie decided to travel home through the Middle East and Russia, instead of taking the normal route around the Cape of Good Hope, in one of the EIC ships.

There was a war on, and the EIC convoy would be a major prize to the French, but overland travel had plenty of hazards too.  The Persian, Ottoman and especially the Russian Empires all had conflicting interests in this war – in many ways the first real World War.  Macquarie needed to get passports, authorizations, introductions, and he talks at length about travel documents in his diary.

On 19 March 1807 he sailed in the Benares for the Persian Gulf, arriving in Basra in late April, where the British Resident told him that Turkey had joined the war.  Diplomatic relations with Constantinople [Istanbul] were on hold, and there was no way that Macquarie could proceed, as planned, through Turkey.  He could either return to India, or continue overland, so on 29 April, carrying various dispatches from the British Resident, he headed for Baghdad.

The British Resident in Baghdad agreed with his colleague: there was no way home through Constantinople.  Instead, Macquarie headed for Persia, crossing the Zagros Mountains where snow still lay on the ground.   There was safety in numbers, and by now several other British travelers had joined him, including an Armenian interpreter.  On 4 June they toasted the King’s birthday.  The next day they were invited to the Shah’s court.  On 19 June they were entertained by the Shah’s Vizier:

We found an elegant large Tent belonging to the Vizier ready pitched for our reception close to the Kaunaute enclosing the King’s Tents; and which we were requested to occupy, and where we were immediately served with an excellent Supper from the King’s own Kitchen!

Finally at the end of June, they reached ‘Anseley’ [Enzeli] on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea.  Water transport was always the fastest form of transport before railways arrived, and he took ship for Baku, on the western shore.  There he learned of an epidemic of plague at Astrakhan, to the north.  Quarantine would cause further delay.  They set sail again, and reached the Volga.  After 4 days in a barge, rowing upstream, Macquarie decided to transfer to a ‘kibitka’, a covered wagon pulled by relays of horses, travelling through the land of the Don Cossacks.  Everywhere he encountered problems: plague in the south, bureaucratic delays, and difficulties with communication.  French was the usual lingua franca, but in many places they had no language in common at all.

He finally reached the walls of Moscow at 9pm. On 30 August, where it took him 2 hours of argument before he was let in.  He mutters about the Russian police, and Russian bureaucracy, throughout his diary – but no doubt the Russians were jittery about spies.  Only 5 years later Napoleon’s troops destroyed the city.

Two days later, he left on horseback for St Petersburg, where he met the British Ambassador, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, who asked him to carry back dispatches to Britain, and arranged his berth on a British man-o’-war.  Britain was now at war with Denmark, so sailing with the navy made sense.  Leveson-Gower also told him that the EIC convoy had arrived safely in England in July, two months before.

Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower. This is a stunning portrait. Lawrence has managed to put texture into a variety of blacks – cloth, leather, fur, etc. Apparently he kept it in his studio for years, refusing to hand it over to Leveson-Gower, and my hunch is that he loved it too much to part with it.

It all seems rather hair-raising, even for a senior officer with introductions along the way – far different from my luxury river cruise from Moscow to St Petersburg.  I hoped when I read his journal, that Macquarie would say something about the Moscow-St Petersburg stage of his journey, but he rarely describes anything in much detail, and he dismisses this last stage as merely ‘a Journey of 5 days and 6 hours’.  I think he was just fed up.

He loved St Petersburg though.  It was the capital, and the Tsar and family were in residence in the Summer Palace.  He writes enthusiastically about

this most magnificent elegant City which is certainly by far the finest and most beautiful I have ever yet seen, and I believe is the finest and most regular built City in the whole World; – at least it far exceeds every idea I had formed of its grandeur and magnificence; which are greatly heightened by the three beautiful Branches of the Neva running through the City, with elegant Bridges of Boats across each Branch, none of which is less than half a mile broad. —

In the evening I took a walk in the Public Summer Gardens, and also in Count Strogonoff’s Gardens; which are always open on Sundays for the Public, with a Band of Music Playing in them in the Evening. Both these Gardens are very extensive and beautiful, and that of Count Strogonoff is most elegantly laid out.

I get there on 30 May.  I can hardly wait!

John Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie: a Biography (1986)

This time last year:
Pictures from Two Exhibitions, 14 May 2011
Her Dedication, 18 May 2011
Candle in the Wind, 22 May 2011
Old Fritz and his dogs, 25 May 2011

A Black Swan Event in Moreton Bay

The language of business can be surprisingly vigorous.  I love the bestiality of its bulls and bears and dead cat bounces.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve only just discovered a new phrase, this one with a tangential Australian connection.  A Black Swan Event, according to a newish book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is an event that comes as a surprise, has a major impact, and can’t be predicted but which in retrospect, could have been expected.

What we call here a Black Swan … is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.
Taleb, in New York Times, 22 April 2007, quoted in Wikipedia

Now who am I to question someone whose book was on the NYT bestseller list for 36 weeks, but this sounds to me basically what we historians call contingent events, and which Dick Cheney more succinctly described as ‘shit happens’.  I suspect that one reason The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) did so well was that it came out just before the global financial crisis, and therefore appeared as a timely warning that people underestimate how random the world really is – and overestimate our ability to predict events by the use of statistics.

I suspect that historians are more skeptical than statisticians.  Nobody could predict 9/11 or the Boxing Day tsunami – but the Fukushima meltdown?  Maybe.

But looking for black swans sent me back to the origin of the idea of the black swan as something extraordinary, an outlier, something that defies logic – because for 20+ million Australians, this is not the case.

Juvenal wrote about a ‘rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno’ – ‘a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan’. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the oldest quote in English, from 1398,

The swan … he is al white in fetheres, for no man findiþ a blak swan

The ‘black swan’ was the classic example of impossibility.  Pigs might fly, the leopard would change his spots and pink elephants roam the veldt before anyone would see a swan with black feathers.

Black Swan, from John Gould’s Birds of Australia (1837-8)

Then, in 1697, somebody did.  The Dutch captain, Willem de Vlamingh, spent some time exploring the coast of Western Australia en route to Java.  He named the Swan River after the swans he saw there.

On the 11^th [January 1697], at break of day, we again ascended the river, and saw many swans (our boat knocked over nine or ten) some rotganzen [geese], some divers, etc., also a quantity of fish, which were frisking on the water. We also heard the song of the nightingale.

He captured several of the swans and took them on to Batavia [Jakarta], although they eventually died.

Black swans were an exotic export from early Australia.  John Macarthur arranged gifts of swans and other rara avis to the wives of the politicians he hoped to influence.  They were also shot, both for food and as trophies, prompting one of the first environmental laws in Australia, when Charles Meredith, a Tasmanian politician, introduced legislation to protect black swans from hunting.

Black swans have been successful emigrants from Australia.  They have been breeding in St James’s Park, London, since at least 1914, when Winston Churchill wrote that ‘The two black swans on St James’s Park lake have a darling cygnet – grey, fluffy, precious & unique.’  Yet they never quite lost their sense of strangeness, evoked by Barron Field who wrote in 1816:

…this is New Holland, where it is summer with us when it is winter in Europe … Australia is the land of contrarieties, where the laws of nature seem reversed … where the swans are black and the eagles white…

Black swans are particularly associated with Western Australia (originally the Swan River settlement) but they are much more widely distributed.  Until a few years ago, they used to breed in a lagoon within walking distance of my home, but during the long drought, the lagoon dried up, and although 2 years of heavy rainfall have brought back the water, the swans have yet to return – perhaps they need time for the weeds to grow again.

Swans are vegetarian.  They eat waterweeds, but also sea grasses.  In the past I’ve seen great flocks of them on Moreton Bay, and they are said to gather in places where the sea grasses are healthy.  Tons of silt were dumped in Moreton Bay during the floods last year.  The sea grasses are suffering, and the swans haven’t come back.  The Port of Brisbane is expanding, and this may put at risk the swans that live nearby, and there is talk – just talk, so far – of a naval base in Moreton Bay as well.

Despite what Nassim Nicholas Taleb may think, few Australians would ever think of a black swan as a bird of ill omen.  But a lack of black swans – that would indeed be a Black Swan Event, except that it is sadly predictable.

Vidal Sassoon – and the long and short of it

Vidal Sassoon died last week.  He was a hairdresser, in the same way that Mary Quant was a dressmaker or The Avengers was just another TV series.  He introduced short, sleek, edgy hairstyles to the celebrities of the Swinging Sixties – and my brush with his hairbrush is about as close as I ever got to Carnaby Street fashion.

According to his obituaries, Sassoon made most of his money from selling hair care products and by teaching his hair-cutting skills.  When I spent 6 months in London in the late 1970s, you could get a haircut at the Vidal Sassoon School of Hairdressing for £2 as a ‘model’ – on condition that you let the student do whatever s/he wanted.  A friend of mine ended up with purple hair.  I was luckier, a silent spectator as tutor and student riffled through my hair, drew a map of my scalp showing crown and parting, and then layer cut it to a point, so that it sat neatly or swung obediently.  They were the best haircuts I’ve ever had.

In the 1970s, Vidal Sassoon attracted students from all over the world.  When a young man from Hong Kong cut my hair, he told me that my ‘widow’s peak’ is a sign of beauty in China, and gave me a cut to accentuate it.

Hairstyles can be a fashion statement or a revolutionary statement or a way of displaying tribal allegiance.  When I was a student in the late 1960s, student radicals were always described as ‘long haired radicals’.  I remember before an anti-Vietnam protest march, men queuing outside the campus barber shop.  They got their hair cut so they would be harder to identify – but also so that the then-notorious Queensland police would have less hair to hang on to.

Long hair can be a problem – and has been since biblical times, when King David’s rebellious son met a sorry end:

Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.  2 Samuel 18:9

On the other hand, short hair did for Sampson.  Clearly hairstyles matter, even when the statements they make have become obscure.  For the long and the short of it is that humans are the only mammals who do not shed their hair, except for a few domesticated animals – most sheep, and a few dogs such as poodles – who could not survive for long without human intervention to clip them regularly.

Unlike dogs and sheep, we have a choice – to clip or to braid – for walking on 2 legs has given us fingers.  One of the earliest representations of a human being shows a woman without a face – but with a complicated hairstyle.

Venus of Willendorf, 24,000-22,000 BCE

When the Manchus conquered China in the mid-17^th century, they forced the Han Chinese to wear their hair in a long pigtail or queue, and to shave their foreheads.  The Chinese who migrated to Australia during the gold rushes still wore their hair this traditional way – and it became a dangerous problem during race riots on the gold fields, when thugs dragged them by their hair, and forcibly cut off their queues.  Some Chinese were scalped as a result, and probably died from their wounds, though it is hard to pin down numbers.

S.T.Gill, ‘Might versus Right’, Lambing Flat Riot 1861

The long pigtail went out of fashion when the Qing Dynasty was overthrown in 1911.  Short hair became a revolutionary statement, and western hairstyles became fashionable, a statement of modernity.  At much the same time, western women were also cutting their hair short as a mark of liberation.

In a global world, both men’s and women’s hairstyles have largely converged, thanks in part to Vidal Sassoon and his franchise of hairdressing schools.  We go from short to long to short again, in thrall to international norms, so it’s nice to see the occasional culturally-specific hairstyle, like the braided crown of Yulia Tymoshenko from Ukraine.

And it’s nice to know that my widow’s peak is a sign of beauty – even if only in China.

Michael Godley, ‘The End of the Queue: Hair as Symbol in Chinese History’, in Chinese Heritage Quarterly, 2011.

This time last year:
Secular Saints and Sinners, 11 May 2011