Friday, August 18, 2017

A mountain of history – Review of Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand

Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill – Nicky Oppenheimer, South African diamond magnate

Koh-i-Noor (“Mountain of Light” in Persian) is a diamond with a history as rich as its luster. Since this diamond was dug up, probably in the present-day Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the 13th century, it has been passed between Mughal Emperors, Persian Shahs, Afghan Emirs and Sikh Maharajas and crisscrossed the area that is now modern day India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan before finding its way into the hands of the British state in the mid-19th century under Queen Victoria’s reign. It is the history of this exceptional stone, and its equally exceptional owners, which forms the topic of this short and accessible book by historian and travel writer William Dalrymple and journalist Anita Anand.
It is fair to say that few diamonds have filled psychological needs at a deeper level and for a more varied set of people across as many centuries as the 105 carat diamond that is the centerpiece of the Queen Mother’s Crown, which is on display in the Tower of London. The

I am fascinated by the history of objects because they often carry with them a deep history. Something as mundane as a salt cellar from the Benin kingdom (in present-day Nigeria) displayed in the British Museum isn’t just some piece of brilliantly carved ivory. Carved on its face is a testament to the kingdom’s earlier peaceful contact with an European power (i.e., the Portuguese) and its journey to the museum also embodies the history of the kingdom’s later hostile contact with another European power (i.e., the British). Few objects bear as much witness to history as the Koh-i-Noor does and the authors of this book bring this diamond's tryst with history to life in a vivid way. The history of the Koh-i-Noor is the history of the Mughal Empire at its height with powerful kings like Aurangzeb, who cherished the diamond. It is also the history of the decline of Mughal Empire and the sacking and plundering of its cities by the Persian Shah Jahan, the subsequent decline of Shah Jahan’s own dynasty and its replacement with the Afghan Durrani dynasty which came to its definite end with the debacle of the First Anglo-Afghan war in the 1800s. This same gem found its way from the collapsing Durrani dynasty to the emerging Sikh empire in the early 1800s before the current owners (i.e., the British) claimed it after the British East India Company’s conquest of the Punjab from the Sikh Empire in the 1840s. Through all these changing fortunes and brutal battles, the Koh-i-Noor remained an object of great desire and was passed from one conquering empire to the next.

While I got a feel for the eras that span the Koh-i-Noor’s history, I didn’t get the same feel for the depth of characters in the book as I did for other books by Mr. Dalrymple. This is certainly an unfair comparison as this book deals with a history spanning hundreds of years while some of the author's earlier works which I have thoroughly enjoyed have focused on a relatively short span of history: the Return of a King dealt with the events surrounding the First Anglo-Afghan war in the late 1830s / early 1840s while the Last Mughal was largely focused on the events leading to the Indian Rebellion of 1857/58 and its immediate aftermath. This book necessarily glosses over the lives and characters of many of the key actors in the Koh-i-Noor’s history as to do more than that would have led to a multi-volume door-stopper of a book rather than the accessible short read the authors produced. If this book has something close to a flaw, I think it is the evidence one gets that this is a book written by two authors with different styles as the hand-off from one section to the other could be slightly jolting.


Overall, I think this an apt book for the times. In this climate of increased agitation for “de-globalization” and the erection of walls, it is important to remember the bonds of a shared past embedded in a gem that is smack in the center of something as central to British identity as the crown of its monarchs. The centerpiece of the crown isn’t something from the British Isles or even Continental Europe, it is a diadem that for many years adorned the Peacock Throne of Mughal Emperors and was later worn as amulets by Sikh Maharajas. 

Friday, August 04, 2017

Philosopher-queen – Review of Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert Massie


“You forget the difference between our two positions: you work only on paper, which is smooth, supple, and offers no resistance to either your imagination or your pen; whereas I, a poor Empress, work on human skin, which is much more irritable and ticklish" – Catherine the Great in correspondence with French Philosopher, Denis Diderot


In the long list of the brilliant, average or downright incompetent people who served as Emperors and Empresses in the c.300 years of the Romanov dynasty, two people stood out in their leadership and impact on the Russian state that they earned the appellation of “Great”. These are Peter I and Catherine II – both widely regarded as the two most competent Russian leaders ever. Peter was the son of a Tsar and raised from birth to lead his nation, so while his achievements are breathtaking they are not necessarily wholly unexpected given his background. However, what strength of character propels a young girl born into a minor German noble family into a position of being rated as one of the two most impressive autocrats in Russian history. This excellent book by author Robert Massie gives us an insight into the character of this extraordinary woman.


I think to understand the life of Catherine the Great, it is important to understand two things: the first is the unique form of government that was Romanov Russia and the second is the intellectual and humanist revolution sweeping Europe in her lifetime (i.e., the enlightenment). I think much of Catherine’s character is defined by the fundamental contradictions of combining a renaissance European mind with wielding absolute power over a vast realm that was barely out of the medieval age.  Since I picked up this book after reading the sweeping narrative history of the Romanovs by the writer Simon Sebag Montefiore, I already had a decent sense of Romanov Russia. This was a form of royal rule that went beyond mere monarchy into full-fledged autocracy: Russian monarchies didn’t have to be bothered with constraints of constitutions – up to the ascension of Catherine’s son, there were no rules governing royal succession and Russian monarchs had absolute discretion to appoint their successors and Peter the Great used this discretion to appoint his 2nd wife, a former Lithuanian camp laundress, as his successor. However, Russian monarchs had to contend with running a vast, diverse land and with a regicide rate that was significantly higher than the European average. That a German lady with tenuous legitimacy (she was simply proclaimed Empress after the overthrow of her husband Peter) was able to hold to power for many decades until her death in old age and expand the wealth and boundaries of her empire all the while maintaining friendships with the leading intellectuals of her day (Voltaire, Diderot etc.) is simply remarkable. The author does a great job of demonstrating how she achieved this feat through a combination of clear vision, prodigious hard work and a level of political sagacity that would have made Machiavelli proud.

Catherine the Great was a case study in assimilation. Born Sophie Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg in 1729 in Anhalt (in present day Germany), she only moved to Russia around the age of 14/15 when the reigning Empress of Russia (Elizabeth) summoned her to become a bride-in-waiting for her nephew and heir (the future emperor Peter). She converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity (to the chagrin of her Lutheran father) and threw herself into mastering Russian customs and language – something her husband Peter never managed. She mastered Russian within a year, learned to manage a “mother-in-law from hell” who also happened to be empress and developed a set of relationships within the army and the court that proved very helpful to her ascending to the throne and keeping it. Throughout her life she managed this tricky task of assimilation so well that while her husband was widely reviled for being foreign (and German), she largely avoided that charge even though she was much less Russian than him – her husband, Peter, had at least been Peter the Great’s grandson.

Following the coup against her husband and subsequent regicide, she went on to rule Russia for 34 years and to notch major achievements. She expanded the boundaries of the Russian state through various conquests (including the annexation of Poland and the Crimea as well as the establishment of Alaska), reformed education and health services (she had herself and her grandchild vaccinated before promoting vaccination amongst her skeptical subjects) and instituted various administrative reforms (including chipping at the edges of serfdom). She also sought to spread the fruits of the Enlightenment in Russia and a lasting homage to this effort stands in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which was initially built to house her large collection of the leading European art of her day.
  
The book isn’t all about affairs of state though as the author devoted significant space to discussing Catherine’s many love affairs. No it wasn’t hundreds as often claimed by mischief makers – it was more like 12 according to the author and only 4 of these were significant, with the one with Grigory Potemkin as the most significant of her life (she may have secretly married him actually). I could not however help but get struck by how someone with as fine a mind as Catherine the Great came to be as emotionally needy and in need of such constant affection. However, this deep longing to be constantly in love may be explained as a psychological response to a loveless and joyless childhood that was followed by a loveless and joyless marriage. Her marriage to Paul may never have been consummated and the children she bore during their marriage were not fathered by him. Her mother-in-law (Empress Elizabeth) also effectively “kidnapped” Catherine’s first child as soon as he was born and raised him personally as a property of the state.


The book however stops well short of a hagiography. In many ways a legitimate charge of hypocrisy could be leveled at her as she was more “enlightened” in thought than in action. As a princess of the Russian empire, she wrote moving criticism of Serfdom. However, on becoming Empress and getting to fully realize the importance of Serfdom to the wealth of the nobles and the crown she was happy to go on with that evil system. She wrote glowingly of what could be termed “17th century human rights” with her pen pals Diderot and Voltaire but thought nothing of installing a former lover as king of Poland and conspiring with Prussia and Austria to carve up his kingdom when it suited her plans. This was a very balanced book and on the whole, I found it to be a very informative and lively portrayal of a strong, lively woman who lived life on her own terms and raised the standards of her age. 

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Where did this populist wave come from? – A review of The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

I recently read this new book from the FT’s Washington-based Chief U.S. commentator but I must admit I approached it with a fair degree of skepticism as I was half-expecting it to be yet another book from yet another journalist about the inevitability of Brexit and the election of President Trump from the very same people who were happy to declare to whoever would listen that neither event could happen. However, I have a lot of respect for Mr. Luce’s commentaries in the FT and thought “why not give it a shot?”. Well, I am glad I did not judge this book by its cover! The author did a great job of discussing the historical roots of the recent wave of populism and its most recent macroeconomic drivers, while also making an attempt to proffer some policy / political prescriptions for treating the ailments for which populism is merely a symptom.

Many commentators have noted the drift all across the western world of the working class populations away from traditional parties of the left into nationalist movements. This ranges from the move of the blue collar American male from the Democratic party into becoming Trump voters to the hemorrhaging by Labour of its traditional working class Northern England voting bloc to UKIP and the loss by the French socialists of core working class voters to Marine Le Pen’s Front National. When did the traditional parties of the “working man” start losing their close links and solidarity with the working class and why did this happen? In a sense the working man’s party became cerebral and the author made a convincing case for tracing the genesis to the student movements of the late 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic and in one year in particular: 1968. This year marked the iconic street battles between students protesting the Vietnam war (i.e., “the hipsters”) and the Chicago police (“the hard hats”) at the sidelines of that year’s Democratic National Convention. In the author’s view, while the hard hats section of the Democratic Party won the battle that year - they got Herbert Humphrey elected, the hipsters won the war as they succeeded in picking their candidate in 1972 with the emergence of the “peace candidate” George McGovern. In the exact same year that American college students were making their mark on their country’s party of the left, their counterparts in Paris (the “Soixante-huitards”) were making their mark in their own country and nudging France’s traditional parties of the left towards more embrace of liberal social values as opposed to their historical focus on the class struggle. The author did a great job of describing the process of disengagement of traditional leftist parties from the working class sensibilities and labour movements that birthed them.

This drifting apart of blue collar workers from the traditional parties of the left may not have been sufficient to spark the populist movements across the western world if it was not coinciding with a profound change that has been happening in western societies (at least the Anglo-Saxon ones) over the past couple of decades. In the author’s words, “since the late 1970s, Western governments of right and left have been privatizing risk”. I personally consider this sentence to be the most important in the entire book as I think it probably explains a large part of the anxieties that is driving the embrace of populism. This privatization of risk is so pervasive that we often don’t think of the various profound manifestations of this trend. I can easily think of one seldom discussed example of this and it is pensions. A couple of decades ago most workers in a western company were part of a defined benefit scheme: i.e., they had pensions that guaranteed them a certain monthly payout in their retirement years. These payouts were often linked to their final working year income and was going to be paid out for as long as they lived. There were of course risks involved in this arrangement: the investment returns on the pot of money set aside may be insufficient to meet the liabilities (financial markets do have a habit of fluctuating!) or pensioners may live for longer than the actuaries predicted when they advised on how much money should be set aside (there’s a fancy term for this: “longevity risk”). What happened is that these risks were borne by employers and not employees and this situation created financial difficulties for many companies. This situation, among other reasons, led to the vast majority of companies moving from a guaranteed payout in retirement (i.e., a “defined benefit”) to one in which employers make contractual payments to an employee while s/he is in its service without being on the hook for the employer’s pension years (i.e., a “defined contribution”). Companies provide support and investment platforms for their employees to invest for retirement but ultimately, the risk of sufficient funds for retirement is the employee’s to bear. There are pros and cons for this arrangement but it’s instructive to note that for most of the workers in formal employment in the western world, the risk of ensuring adequate retirement funds has shifted from a corporate risk to one that is now private to the individual. If companies with teams of actuaries, treasury staff and all sort of expertise largely did a questionable job of managing retirement funds, what are the odds that the Average Joe will do a great job of setting aside adequate funds and investing these funds prudently to address a myriad of risks including cost of living inflation and longevity risk. Pensions represent just one example of many instances in which risk has become increasingly privatized over the past couple of decades – the “gig economy” is another as is the increasing prevalence of out-of-pocket payment for healthcare. The author contends that this privatization of risk has made the median contemporary westerner more exposed to the impact of arbitrary misfortune than his / her parents and that in some respects western society seems to be reverting to resemble the days before the social safety net revolutions of the early 20th century. I’m not sure that things have gone that far but the man has a point.

So what is the way forward? The author makes a case for stronger social safety nets across western societies, saying “I believe that protecting society’s weakest from arbitrary misfortune is the ultimate test of our civilizational worth”. However, there are no silver bullets and the author was honest in admitting that some of the well-intentioned ideas suggested may have unintended consequences. For example, the Universal Basic Income (“UBI”), a system that pays everyone in a society a minimum amount of money, has its advantages but also has serious drawbacks. How would a UBI be designed to ensure that the incentive to work remains? What about the potential for UBI to make western societies even more attractive to migrants and serve as a powerful magnet that is likely to exacerbate the migrant wave that is proving very challenging for European politics and societies to manage at the moment.


On the whole, this is a very accessible book (of c.200 pages) that is a great addition to the topical debate of populism in western societies.