A Magnificent Family – Review of The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance by Paul Strathern

I had become vaguely aware of the Medici family a few years back from reading a very interesting book, The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior, that dealt with the intersection of the lives of three of the most interesting people of the renaissance period: the military commander and son of a pope, Cesare Borgia; the father of realpolitik, Niccolo Machiavelli; and one of history’s most brilliant minds, Leanardo da Vinci. In this book, the Medicis made various cameo appearances: as patrons of da Vinci or as rivals of the democratic / republican government that employed Machiavelli until it fell and Medici rule was restored. I found it quite interesting that one family had such an impact on the renaissance and filed it somewhere in my cluttered mind to read more about this family at some point.

This is why I was happy to come across this really interesting book that provides a very informative but highly accessible history of the Medici family. Starting from the generally accepted founder of the Medici family, Giovanni di Bicci and ending with Gian Gastone (the last male member of the line), we are taken on a whirlwind tour of the renaissance as this famous family faced its ups and downs in the notoriously fickle republican politics of Florence. We become acquainted with the Medicis’ active encouragement of artists of the high renaissance and their participation in, and moderating influence on, the tempestuous political environment that was pre-unification Italy. To read the history of the Medici family is to become acquainted with 350 years of Italian (and wider European) history.

I found a number of the Medicis to be particularly noteworthy. There’s Giovanni di Bicci, the founder of the family who came from humble roots but who through sheer tenacity and a great deal of shrewdness was able to establish a bank that was one of the few multinational enterprises of his day. His son, Cosimi pater patriae (father of the nation) extended the power and wealth of the family but there is no doubt that Giovanni was a very giant shoulder that he was able to stand on. Probably the Medici I found most fascinating is Giovanni di Lorenzo, better known as Pope Leo X. This second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent (and great-grandson of Cosimi pater patriae) became a Cardinal at the age of 13, had been thrown out of Florence with his elder brother by the age of 19 and had been elected pope at the age of 38 - partly on the hope that this famously overweight and unhealthy cardinal will be passive and will soon oblige everyone by passing on to heaven shortly. He shocked everyone by reigning for a very active eight years, during which he was an active patron of the arts, vigorously championed the military aspects of the papacy and managed to restore his family’s hold over Florence – something his incompetent older brother had managed to lose after the death of their father: Lorenzo the Magnificent. The urge by this possibly agnostic pope to raise huge sums of money for his public works projects (especially for reconstructing St. Peter’s Basilica) led to the aggressive and shameless sale of indulgences that drove a young German priest named Martin Luther to launch what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation.

The story of the Medici is not one of an unbroken chain of great men. The male line of the Medici essentially ended with Gian Gastone, the last Medici to be Grand Duke of Tuscany (the Medici ended up becoming along the way). This is a man that is as close to a poster child for the dangers of hereditary leadership as is possible to devise. Although Gian Gastone’s father had managed to preside over a long decline of the city over 50 years of a largely mediocre reign, under Gian Gastone’s reign Florence really came off the rails. During a visit to Florence during his reign, the French philosopher Montesquieu remarked that "there is no town where men live in less luxury than Florence" – this said about a city that brought enlightenment and splendor to Europe under the direction and patronage of his ancestors. He was said to spend the vast majority of his time in bed, entertained with the most debauched acts by the Ruspanti – a group of young men; hardly ever rose before noon and paid zero attention to affairs of state. He was so ineffectual a leader that the inheritance to his grand duchy was twice awarded by leading European powers during his lifetime with absolutely no input from him – they just told him which European prince he had to adopt as his heir and he simply just went along with it.

The biggest point I took away from reading the book was how difficult it is to maintain intergenerational competence and hence to sustain hereditary as a meaningful organizing principle for any kind of leadership (business, political or otherwise). Too many great family histories tend to start off with striving, disciplined men from relatively humble roots like Giovanni di Bicci and end with incompetent men like Gian Gastone, who no one would elect dog catcher if there weren’t born into the role.  

In defense of the scapegoat – A review of “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” by Karen Armstrong

In the course of my (largely disparate) reading over the past couple of years I have read a couple of books that could be described as ranging from being skeptical of organized religion’s influence on society to being basically anti-religion. These books range from “god is not great: how religion poisons everything” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins; and “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. A common thread running through many of these books and those  of others in the field is that religion and religious faith has being a net negative in the world and that some of the darkest and lowest acts of man have not occurred in spite of adherence to some faith tradition but have largely occurred because of it. This viewpoint is definitely not lacking in justification: human history is replete with examples of instances where people were driven to commit the most horrifying violent crimes because they felt some divine impulse to commit such acts. Given this background, I was quite pleased when I come across this book by the noted author and former nun, Karen Armstrong that sought to advance an argument against this potentially simplistic view of religion’s impact on the history of violence.


If I took away a central argument from this book, it will be that i) humans have had violent interactions with members of their society for all of our history; ii) for most of history, religious activities and beliefs formed the principal organizing template for most societies and provided the main (/only) opportunity for people to give meaning to their lives; (iii) as a result all human activities, including violent ones, were layered with spiritual significance; and (iv) as a result of this religious significance, religion came to be somewhat unfairly viewed as the reason for these acts of violence when they would have happened anyway. The author’s argument is quite persuasive. For most of human history, people in most human societies would have been completely puzzled by phrases such as “religious life” or “separation of church and state” – people had one life and it was deeply religious in nature. Religion pervaded everything: agriculture (praying for rain and a good harvest); government (remember the “divine right of kings”); healthcare (remember all the stories about the healing of the sick in the bible?); family (only the church could sanction marriages); warfare and conquest (remember the divinely-ordained conquering of Canaan in biblical times and Pope Alexander’s splitting of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the 15^th century). The list goes on and on, but the general point to be made is the ubiquity of religious symbols and significance in the pre-Enlightenment world. The author gives detailed examples of these historical trends in the areas most impacted by some of the world’s most prominent faith traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism etc.) and the central roles these faith traditions played in the evolution of the societies in which they were dominant.  

In addition to the display of an encyclopedic understanding of the evolutions of the world’s major religions and societies, the author also advanced two important concepts that I found novel and compelling. The first is the necessary and foundational role of “structural violence” in creating the agrarian state: the precursor to modern states. The second concept is the redefinition of the sacred as something (an idea, a belief etc.) that people are willing to die for.

The author argues that in making a transition from hunter-gatherer societies, human beings had to embrace systematic and structural violence. Life was very simple and limited in hunter-gatherer societies: the rhythm of life was determined by the sporadic availability of wild plants and fruits for gathering and animals for hunting. The adults of each family gathered and hunted the food required at a given time. Everyone was involved in getting food and there was no surplus to speak of. In such a society wholly devoted to subsistence there could be no scientific, religious or aesthetic advancements. However, for civilization to advance a new class of thinking elite (priests, philosophers, architects etc.) had to develop and these people who are essentially “idlers”, in a strict agrarian sense, had to be maintained somehow. The only sure way to ensure this was to compel the peasant to do extra work in order to generate the surplus needed to maintain the elite. Since many humans are rational and will gladly stop working once their needs are met, “structural violence” became necessary to keep peasants in-line and busy generating the surplus required to keep the thinking elite fat and happy. Religion came in very handy as the hand maiden of this structural violence and from this unholy marriage came the birth of human progress.

While I found the idea of structural violence to be very interesting, I thought the related idea of defining the sacred as anything people are willing to die for to be the more novel of the two concepts. Redefining the sacred in this way allows a reader to see religion-inspired conflicts as only a subset of conflicts sparked by belief in sacred ideas and to identify secular sacred ideals as another big inspiration and motivator for conflict and bloodshed.

A good example of a time and place where secular ideals attained sacred status was in post-revolutionary France. The armies of Napoleonic France fought with as much fervor and fanaticism as any religiously inspired army led into battle by crucifix-bearing clergy. A flavor of the sacred nature that the Napoleonic armies attached to the ideals of their cause can be gleaned from the lyrics to the army’s main battle anthem, the Chant du Depart. The chorus of the song (below) could easily have come from a religious song and it shows that the believers in the revolution had essentially elevated the ideals of the republic to something akin to a sacred cult and for this cult the soldiers would gladly lay down their lives.
 

La République nous appellee	The Republic is calling us
Sachons vaincre ou sachons périr	Let's know how to vanquish or let's know how to perish
Un Français doit vivre pour elle	A Frenchman must live for her [the Republic]
Pour elle un Français doit mourir	For her [the Republic] a Frenchman must die

 Overall, I thought this was a very engaging and informative book that has led me to see the history of religion’s impact of society in a whole new light.

 

“Horseman of the Enlightenment” – A review of Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

 

Whatever name you may choose to call it, the period between the mid-17^th century and late 18^th century was very significant in Europe. Great minds such Baruch de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, Voltaire, John Locke, and many thinkers too numerous to list, advanced new ideas that revolutionized a person’s relationship with his fellow citizens, to his leaders (/rulers) and to his God. The broadly accepted name for the period which offered this new beginning in Western civilization is “The Enlightenment”. The late writer Christopher Hitchens once described the Enlightenment as the period when humans started to realize that “God is not going to help you and to that extent you are on your own. There may be a God but he doesn’t care about you and you have to take your own responsibility”. This was the period when the Western world started to make great strides to escape the stupefying chokehold of concepts such as divine rights of kings and the abject feudalism that had kept many societies from operating at anything close to their full potential. Essentially, the Enlightenment embodied a really awesome set of ideas that now sit as the foundation of our modern lives.  

 
However, thinking and writing of great ideas is not sufficient to cause change in society.  Ideas need their thinkers to be sure but it is crucial that they have their “enforcers”. Enforcers provide a “sword arm” to the quill of the writer. These enforcers (usually generals, politicians, diplomats, or some other form of statesman) are the ones who take the ideas of the great thinkers, codify them into laws and then ensure that society bends to the will of the laws inspired by these ideas. History is replete with examples of ideas that languished until enforcers showed up. Communism was little more than an interesting governing theory advanced in the writings of Marx and Engels until Vladimir Lenin showed up and led an uprising that threw off the Romanovs from the Russian throne in 1917 and Mao Zedong led his men to victory in the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949. Fabianism’s effect was also barely felt outside of select intellectual circles in London until it became the governing philosophy of the U.K.’s Labor Party for much of the first part of the 20^th century and until Jawaharlal Nehru essentially made it the organizing template for India’s post-independence economy (at least until the 1990s). On the other side of the aisle, the ideas around limited government didn’t travel much beyond the circles of Milton Friedman’s acolytes until the transatlantic duo of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan foisted this governing philosophy on their countries by sheer force of personality and political savvy. In this light it is quite safe to say that The Enlightenment needed its own enforcer before it could affect the lives of everyday people. In many ways, Napoleon Bonaparte was the enforcer of the Enlightenment.  He identified with many of the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment, codified them into laws and enforced them ruthlessly across Europe with the help of his formidable Grand Armee. The historian Andrew Roberts and author of the latest masterpiece on Napoleon captured this essence beautifully when he said “Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback”.

Mr. Roberts’ book does a great job of restoring some sheen to a leader whose reputation has been sullied and distorted by deliberate misinformation of his successful adversaries and the simplistic lens of popular culture. However, to the author’s credit, he stops well short of penning a hagiography of the man. Many people when asked about great villains in history are often quick to list Napoleon alongside such certifiable monsters as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Napoleon was no such person and this book does great justice to the man’s life by advancing a balanced view of his actions and impact on the world stage. And there is much that is attractive, and even admirable, about his life and the impact he had on the world stage.

Napoleon packed a lot into his short and productive life. At the personal level, his rise is a testament to the heights to which ambitious and resourceful people can rise under reasonably positive conditions. A minor nobleman from a provincial outpost of France (Corsica), Napoleon rose to become a talented young general in the post-revolution army, then first consul and finally emperor of an empire fashioned out of Bourbon-era France, parts of present-day Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and Austria. As a statesman, he is probably unrivalled in European history for the sheer scale of the imprint he left on the continent’s character. As his armies swept through Europe, he liberated many Jewish populations from the ghettos that many longstanding European monarchies had confined them. It could also be argued that he delivered death (or at least coma) blows to feudalism in the various regions of Europe that came under his control or influence. He codified and streamlined the tangled affair that was post-revolutionary France’s laws into a set of legal codes immortalized as the Code Napoleon. The Code Napoleon was a huge first step in realizing the concept of equality before the law and still survives as the basis / template of the legal systems in places as diverse as the American state of Louisiana, to Senegal, Belgium, Japan and of course modern France. He created a whole educational system geared towards developing the best minds in France, regardless of their social background and supported meritocracy to a level not deemed possible in the various European monarchies of his day. For example, most of his marshals (i.e., his most important generals) were said to come from the working classes.

Napoleon’s life was not, in any way, a wholly successful affair. For one, while he won the vast majority of the battles he fought, he managed to lose a crucial number of those that mattered the most. Not least is Waterloo: a defeat that led him to live out the rest of his life on an island (St. Helena) that gives true meaning to the phrase “middle of nowhere”. He also lost a lot of treasure and men in a head scratching and ultimately futile military campaign in Spain. The Spanish resistance to French occupation was aided by the clergy, attaining an almost religious fervor.

Napoleon was also not lacking in many substantial defects and the book lays many of these defects bare. He was a misogynist, not just by modern standards but also by the standards of his day. He was deeply disrespectful and dismissive of women in power. A situation that could have contributed to the peculiar loathing that powerful women (such as the Queens of Prussia, Naples and Russia) had for him. Essentially, one will be hard pressed to find any acts taken by Napoleon to improve the rights of women and this is particularly glaring because of the progressive views that he held on the rights of the working classes and those of confessional minorities. As much as he promoted excellence and meritocracy in the army and the civil service, he was also excessively zealous in promoting the careers of his largely mediocre (and often disloyal) siblings. He promoted his ne’er do well brothers into really important roles in his empire and they almost all failed abysmally in their roles and / or betrayed him when the going got tough. It may be interesting to speculate that in both of these failings (i.e., the misogyny and zeal in promoting his family) he may have betrayed his true roots as essentially a middle class product of the petite noblesse from an agrarian outpost of France. In fact on his dying bed this great man, who made the greatest monarchs of Europe quake in their boots at the thought of his approaching army,  spent a good deal of time in his will ensuring that his sons (legitimate and otherwise) were in a good position to inherit some relatively minor farmland and estates in his native Corsica.

Overall, the book is an engaging read and an excellent full portrait of a substantial man who is too often crudely caricatured.

 

“Take Honor from me, and my life is done” – A review of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah
 

Different people have different definitions and interpretations of what a revolution is. Looking up the word on Wikipedia, I see it defined as a drastic political or social change that usually occurs relatively quickly. I think that’s as good a definition as any. The concept of revolution, especially in politics and revolution, is embedded in most educated people’s knowledge of human history. Countless books have been devoted to examining political and economic revolutions over time. Every year in the United States many books are written and many reenactments staged to commemorate the political revolution of the late 18^th century that saw British monarchical rule terminated and a new sort of representative democracy established in what will become the United States. The American Revolution has been almost studied to death but every year some other scholar, or politician with a historical bent, manages to release one more book that promises a new twist on some obscure aspect of the whole saga. Same goes for the French revolution of 1789, which had a collateral effect of sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine. Revolutions in the economic / business sphere have also being studied and published about extensively. We all learn and talk about the historical significance and causes of the Industrial Revolution that started in Great Britain in the late 18^th century and spread across Europe and North America in the decades of the first half of the 19^th century. In more recent times we have all gotten used to speaking of the information / internet revolution that has swept the world since the early 1990’s with the commercialization of the internet and invention of the World Wide Web. Given the fascination with revolution in many parts of our lives, it is somewhat baffling that the concept of “moral revolutions” is not more central to our every-day vocabulary and historical consciousness. I think it is the absence of robust everyday discussion of the significance of, and requirements for, moral revolutions that this excellent book by the noted philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is ideally placed to fill.

 

Why is the examination of honor important to understanding not just moral revolutions but human existence? I would say it is because honor is so central to human life. Most people desire, consciously or otherwise, to be regarded as honorable and not to have their honor diminished or maligned. This is something the great bard William Shakespeare realized and acknowledged when in the play Richard II he placed in the mouth of Thomas de Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, the following words “Mine honor is my life; both grow in one: Take honor from me, and my life is done: Then, dear my liege, mine honor let me try; In that I live and for that will I die”. There is nothing inherently wrong or right about the human sense of honor, it is just there in us. There are many times when the honor codes of individuals or particular societies are very congruent with what we can all agree to be morally upright or beneficial to society (e.g., ensuring protection for vulnerable children, selflessly working to free people stuck in burning buildings etc.). However, there are many situations when the honor codes conflict with what will be broadly accepted as being morally just and beneficial to society. A good contemporary example of this situation is the practice of “honor killing” of women by members of their own family in response to some behavior that they perceive to have brought disrepute to the family. Mr. Appiah’s book helps readers understand the factors that sustain such evidently harmful honor practices and the factors that were responsible for their decline (in cases where such practices are thankfully no more).

 

The author does a great job of explaining this phenomenon of harmful honor practices and the process of fomenting the moral revolutions that can end them by giving an excellent historical summary of three situations when morally repugnant honor practices were successfully ended. These include: the decline of the duel in 19^th century England; the move to stop the binding of the feet of young girls in turn-of-the-20^th century China and the movement in England in the first half of the 19^th century to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. The author also spends a good deal of time examining the unfortunate durability and the valiant efforts being made to eradicate the existing practice of honor killing.

 

Of the thankfully defunct practices that the author profiled, I found the history and practice of dueling to be the most interesting for a variety of reasons. Dueling was a colossal waste of human talent as the practice claimed the lives of many aristocratic men of means at the prime of their lives. A good example was the death of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the US, at a duel at the age of 47. Also, for most of the time that dueling was practiced across Europe it remained an unambiguously illegal activity that was frowned upon by governments and civil leaders. And these leaders had a good reason to be against dueling. European monarchs and civil servants had worked diligently over many centuries to establish the concept of a state as one in which the sovereign / government held a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force and by so doing managed to drag Europe out of the fractious lawlessness that pervaded the continent in the dark ages. The quasi-execution aspect of duels flew against the monopoly power of the state to render judgment and deliver capital punishment. It was bad enough that this practice was illegal, it was also widely viewed as immoral by many. The practice was fundamentally immoral. It is reasonable to view a moral outcome as one in which the quest for truth is successful and the perpetrator of a lie or some other form of bad behavior is brought to justice. Given the varying quality of dueling pistols and differences in the quality of duelers’ marksmanship, this outcome was far from assured. A better marksman is much more likely to prevail in a duel than a bad marksman is, even if the great shot was the perpetrator of an offence. So let’s think about this: you impugn the honor of another man who then feels duty-bound to challenge you to a duel unless you do the honorable thing by apologizing for your statement or act. You refuse to apologize and you then show up on the day of the duel and because you are a better marksman you shoot him dead in broad daylight and you end up paying no price because there is a gentleman’s agreement that dueling gentlemen are not prosecuted for murder. By the way, all the religious authorities are also vehemently against this activity. In a nutshell, the practice made absolutely no sense. So why did all these educated upper class men keep participating in such a senseless activity? It’s simple, they thought dueling was necessary for them to defend and maintain their honor. If you went back and really quizzed some upper class type in early 19^th century England about his support for dueling you would probably not get a better answer than “this is what we do”.


So how did the duel fall out of favor in Victorian England? It was not because people pointed out to potential duelers that the practice was illegal, there were already well aware of the fact. The practice didn’t all of a sudden become immoral, it had always being immoral! What happened was that opponents of the duel worked within the confines of the honor code to redefine what honorable conduct meant for a gentleman such that it actually became dishonorable for an aristocrat to participate in a duel. A similar strategy was adopted by the brave members of the Chinese intelligentsia that formed the core of the resistance against foot binding. These people had a deep appreciation for the honor traditions of their society and took great pains not to impugn the honor code of the society. Rather, they succeeded in redefining the honor code such that it became a dishonorable thing to bind your daughters’ feet. These Chinese reformers couched their opposition to foot binding in terms of the honor of China (e.g., “this practice is making our country look bad in the world”, “all modern societies no longer do this” etc.).

 

These moral revolutions hold great promise for some of the moral challenges that confront us in the 21^st century, including the scourge of violence against women. If humanity will successfully beat back honor killings and other acts of violence against women, the movements will need to be led by local groups of committed people who live in the affected societies and have a deep appreciation for the culture of their people. Reformers are unlikely to meet with great success if they simply dismiss the honor codes of these societies as atavistic behavior. Rather they will need to work within the confines of their cultures to redefine what honor means and have the protection of the dignity and physically wellbeing of their wives, daughters and sisters be the highest consideration for the honor of the members of her family.

 

Overall, I found it to be a great and accessible book that should be read by politicians, social activists and anyone with an interest in seeing positive change in their society and the world at large. It also gives the lie to the view, held by some, that philosophers hardly write books with tangible real world practical value.

 

The Forgotten Empire – A review of “Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization” by Lars Brownworth

If someone in a history class, or just an overly nerdy friend, asked the question: “when did the Roman Empire end?” the answer to the question is likely to be varied. Some may say that the empire ended in AD 476 when the commander Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus (the last Roman Emperor) and proclaimed himself King of Italy. Others may trace it even earlier to AD 410 when the Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome and put paid to the myth of Roman invincibility. Others may even have more “out there” choices for a date of the empire’s demise. What is not very likely is that many people will say the Roman Empire ended in 1453 (a millennium after) when Constantine XI Palaiologos died defending Constantinople (present day Istanbul) during Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s conquest of the city. However, that choice is probably the closest to being the most factually correct answer, as it was technically the Western Roman Empire that fell in the 5^th Century AD. The eastern half of the empire lived on for another millennium until it was overthrown by the Ottoman Empire, which itself ended at the end of the First World War. That many history buffs will miss the date of the de

mise of the empire by a full 1,000 years goes to support the title of this excellent book (i.e., “Lost to the West”). In fact most people’s association with anything Byzantine is through the adjective used to describe a process that is overly complex and intricate but ultimately devious or duplicitous in nature - not sure who we should thank for the reduction of an illustrious empire into an uncharitable adjective! This book by Lars Brownworth, a speaker and author who happens to be a high school history teacher in his day job, is a laudable step in correcting this sorry state of affairs as it provides a great introduction into the fascinating world of this great but somewhat strange empire.

The author’s decision to adopt a personality-driven historical narrative was a brilliant decision. Telling the history of an empire through the lives, actions and circumstances of its emperors certainly made the book a more engaging read than a straightforward chronological work would have been. The author’s thrilling narrative transports the reader back to an age largely lost to common memory, when men with large armies and even larger egos played geopolitics in such a way as to make even the most scheming 21^st century statesman seem like some dowdy old matron. The author describes colorful men such as Justinian the Great, the 6^th century emperor who reclaimed huge swathes of the lost western empire and ruled over a kingdom stretching from Constantinople to Rome and parts of present-day Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. Not only did Justinian conquer vast lands and enact a uniform code of Roman law that still serves as the basis of civil law in many European states, he also embarked on massive building projects including the world famous Hagia Sophia: a building which served as a Greek Orthodox church for almost a thousand years, a Roman Catholic church for half a century, a mosque for about 500 years and a museum since 1935. We also meet Justinian’s most illustrious general, Belisarius: a man who is probably the most successful military commander in all of antiquity. A widely successful and popular man whose exploits on the warfront was perhaps only matched by his unwavering loyalty and commitment to a scheming emperor and bureaucracy that often tried to sabotage his best efforts.      

 

One of my favorite stories is that of Leo III the Syrian, the man we have to thank for the word “iconoclast” (literally translated as “icon breaking”). This was a man so wedded to a puritanical and fundamentalist reading of the Christian scriptures that he sought to rip out all graven images and icons in his empire and have them destroyed. Leo III and his band of original iconoclasts were so successful in their quest that they effectively tore apart their church and retarded the arts and culture of their society so badly that it took a very long time after the death of Leo III and his son for some semblance of the fine arts to germinate again in the empire.

 

Surprises also abound in this engaging read. Probably the most intriguing is that of Emperor Basil I “Basil the Macedonian”, if only because his rags to riches story is not something one would associate with monarchy. Born into a peasant family, he ended up ingratiating himself (due to his wrestling prowess) with the ne’er do well and perpetually drunk Emperor Michael III. Once in the emperor’s good graces, he merrily proceeded to murder the emperor’s uncle (obviously with the dim-witted emperor’s support). Since someone of Basil’s ambition could not possibly be expected to contend himself with getting rid of just an uncle of an emperor, he proceeded to dispatch the emperor in a particularly gruesome murder and usurped a throne for which he did not even have the most tenuous of legitimacy. Despite this particularly inauspicious start to his reign, Basil turned out to be a particularly effective emperor. Ruling for 19 years, a long time by Byzantine standards, he established a dynasty that was so enduring that over two centuries later one of his direct descendants still occupied the throne of Byzantium. Another interesting character was Basil II “the Bulgar Slayer”, who probably gets honors for having the most interesting nom de guerre of all the emperors. Orphaned at age five, Basil II spent most of his youth being pushed around by courtiers with the general consensus being that he was another timid and ineffective emperor in the making. However, upon managing to secure control he became a very effective emperor who ruled for almost 50 years. If Basil II had a fault, it was his penchant for excessive display of force and a ready willingness to be crushingly brutal towards its opponents. During a campaign against the Bulgarians (the source of the grotesque “Bulgar Slayer” nickname) he captured 15,000 prisoners and proceeded to blind 99 out of every 100, sparing the sight of only 1 man out of 100 so the “lucky” man could have the necessary task of leading his blinded colleagues back home to further inflict terror in the civilian population.

 

Reading this book is to become engrossed in the dozens of these stranger-than-fiction stories that showed how rich and tragic the history of this most fascinating empire is. All things considered, I found this book to be a very engaging and accessible introduction to the history of a place and era that I knew nothing about.  

Tinkering with Leviathan – Review of “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
 

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help’” – Ronald Reagan
 

Anyone following American politics will be familiar with quotes similar to the one from America’s 40th president. There is no shortage of people eager to echo sound bites like the above or the even simpler charge to “shrink government to a size that we can drown it in a bathtub”. While these statements make for effective campaign rhetoric, they do not make for elegant policy prescriptions and are also guaranteed to elicit reflexive opposition from their adversaries on the opposite political spectrum. A lot of air time is spent by the right in denouncing the “evils of big government” with their counterparts on the left responding in kind by describing any attempt to trim the government as an attempt to starve poor kids. What has been sorely lacking is a debate or examination of what the proper role of government should be in modern society, what the structural challenges are that prevent governments from being responsive to the needs of its citizens and, most importantly, what steps could be taken to right the ship. This excellent book by two journalists at The Economist goes beyond doing much needed justice to these essential topics, it also provides an intellectually coherent and beautifully written sweep of the evolution of what could be termed “western democracy”.

The authors’ essential point is that the values and governing structures of western democratic societies (broadly defined to include much of Europe and Anglophone North America) have undergone distinct dramatic changes or revolutions over the past half millennia. These changes have happened in response to the needs of society or to correct the excesses that result when successful revolutions are transformed into a staid status quo by the passage of time and the calcification of the governing elite.

The first revolution identified by the authors is the emergence of the modern European state in the 1600s. This is a revolution personified by its intellectual godfather, Thomas Hobbes who in his seminal work: Leviathan (or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil) advanced for the first time the concept of a social contract between the governed and their (absolute) sovereign. While modern readers may wince at the powers that Hobbes sought as ideal to bestow on the sovereign - essentially a call for dictatorship - it is important to put the work in its proper context. Europe in Hobbes’ day was a place where life was truly nasty, brutish and short. The entire continent was a relative backwater (compared to China) that was been torn apart by senseless wars started by every petty lord or minor aristocrat who could muster men under arms and proceed to find something to be offended about. The most important thing that 1600 Europeans needed was order and security, so the first revolution in government occurred to grant them the much needed order. In the 1600s and subsequent centuries, Europe’s monarchs grew much more powerful. Gaining greater control or successfully co-opting previously troublesome noblemen and establishing dominance over religious activities within their realms through the concept of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”). They effectively succeeded, in many cases, in establishing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within their kingdoms. France’s monarchs went to such great length to keep tabs on their country’s nobility that they come up with the concept of “The whole of France around the king”, keeping anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 noblemen as hangers on at court and occupied with frivolities to keep them from dangerous thoughts of war. The net effect of these moves was the emergence of a stronger and more prosperous Europe that was able to shift its attention and resources away from the wasting competition of civil wars to the productive competition of commerce.

Like every innovation, the move to more powerful governments embodied by the sovereigns - while serving a real need at that time to tame the fractious tendencies of petty nobles - soon became long in the tooth and self-serving. Government, especially in the UK, became largely a vehicle through which elites extracted rents from the economy and society. This was the era of “rotten boroughs”: parliamentary constituencies so small (one had 3 houses and 7 votes) that wealthy landowners basically treated them as heirlooms that were passed from father to son and in that way secured an absurdly disproportionate influence on the legislative process. This concentration and abuse of privilege was not only restricted to the legislature. What counted as a civil service was little more than a system of sinecures, with stories of privileged appointees to government offices not showing up for a single day of work for decades. To correct this unfortunate turn of events, the 2^nd revolution identified by the writers was launched by thinkers such as John Stewart Mill and politicians like William Gladstone, a Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister and Chancellor of Exchequer on four separate occasions each. William Gladstone was a man so committed to reforming the corrupt and inefficient public service of his time that he earned the nickname “The People’s William” and had a most famous parsimonious quote: “No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of his country”. If Gladstone is the political embodiment of this movement, its intellectual godfather will be John Stuart Mill: a thinker who championed the rights of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. These liberal reformers made important tweaks to the apparatus of the state: instituting competitive exams for civil service roles; reforming the parliamentary process and laying the foundation for a laissez faire economic system.

This trend towards utilitarianism however met with its inevitable reversal as 19^th century England became an increasingly harsh place. This was the era of workhouses, debtors’ prisons and other cringe-worthy mainstays of life now immortalized in the great works of Charles Dickens. By the dawn of the 20^th century, many people had come to find the situation untenable and the authors did a masterful job of explaining how the yearnings of the citizenry for a more humane society led to some deemphasizing of utilitarianism as a governing philosophy and the advent of Fabianism (in the UK) and Social Democracy (in much of Scandinavia and Northern Europe). This movement, embodied by intellectual and organizer extraordinaire Beatrice Webb, had the establishment of a universal welfare state coupled with strong workers’ rights at the core of its governing structure and philosophy. Proponents of this philosophy often viewed government control of “the commanding heights of the economy” as a necessary condition for an ideal society. This thinking led to the establishment of social security in the US in 1935 and universal health care in the UK through the founding of the NHS in 1948. Governments all over the western world become more assertive in the economy and more willing to intervene in the markets when they felt the markets were not helping to achieve desired public policy. Franklin Roosevelt established the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”) to electrify America’s deep south when it appeared profit-maximizing utilities were more than happy to ignore the, often poor inhabitants, of these sparsely populated farms in favor of the North’s more industrialized centers. In the UK, the post-World War II government of Clement Attlee proceeded to establish the foundations of the British welfare state and embarked on a vast nationalization agenda that covered coal mining, railways, telecoms, road haulage, electricity and the steel industry. The Swedes went much further in putting a safety net under their citizens and a paternalistic glow on their nation by coming up with the concept of Folkhemmet (“the people’s home”). A concept that says society should effectively function like a small family with everyone’s needs taken care of and the richer members subjected to the crushing taxes required to maintain such a generous “cradle to the grave” style welfare system. The social democrats’ long unbroken tenure running Sweden’s government (from 1932 to 1976) gave them enough time to put this concept into action that people started to refer to a Swedish “middle way” between socialism and capitalism.
 

Like everything conceived by man, the appeal of Social Democracy / Fabianism / The Welfare State - or whatever term can be used to describe the intellectual justification of the brand of activist government popular in much of the western world in the post-war years – soon began to fade and its warts became all too apparent in the 1970s. And if the backlash against the welfare or corporatist state has a guardian angel, it will be Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter made good, who decided she was going to force a sought of striver’s thriftiness on her countrymen. To put into perspective how much of a trailblazer she was, it is important to think about how involved the government was in the lives of ordinary Brits when she came on the scene. A Briton getting up to catch a flight to America in the late 1970s, would have put on his bed lamp with electricity from the state; left a message for his superiors on a phone line provided by the state; fixed himself breakfast on a stove using gas supplied by the state; rode to the airport on a train owned by the state; arrived at an airport owned by the state and travelled on a wide bodied aircraft owned by an airline controlled by the state. And this is all before 10am in the morning! Margaret Thatcher was not going to put up with this for much longer and proceeded to launch a major privatization program, which ensured that by the end of her tenure almost all of the services earlier referred to would have been provided by private firms. Her kindred spirit across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan also embarked on a task to shrink the state. Although he had much less to cut because the state in  America was never as big (in relative terms) as it was in the UK. These reforms were not limited to the western world. India, a nation in love with Fabianism as any, also embarked on a series of lauded liberalization programs in the early 1990s that effectively put the “License Raj” to a well-deserved death. The Brazilians also launched a series of ambitious privatizations in the early 1990s and the Russian privatizations, though seriously flawed, achieved a real objective of shrinking the state.  

So why, one may ask, was the Thatcherite / Reaganite only described as a “half revolution” by the authors? The answer lies in the lack of durability of their revolution. After a lull in the 1990s, the governments of the western world have continued to grow at a fast clip. Both conservatives and liberals continue to find things to spend money on (e.g., defense and homeland security for conservatives, education and other welfare spending for liberals). Essentially, the authors argue, in much of the western world there is no real party of small government. Each party is perfectly willing to be big spenders when it comes to favored constituencies or projects and often times unwilling to raise the tax revenue necessary to fund this expenditure, leading to deepening fiscal problems.  

If the authors of this book did an admirable job of explaining the evolution of government in western democracies, they did a much more outstanding job in examining and distilling the current ills that plague western democracies. Of the “Seven Deadly Sins” of modern government that the authors raised, using California as an example, the two that resonated the most with me are: Olson’s Law and the problem of the “Overactive State”. Olson’s law, first proposed by American economist Mancur Olson, essentially states that because lobbying and collective action in a democracy is inherently time-consuming and expensive only the people with the most interest in a topic or issue will be sufficiently motivated to organize to effect change on that issue. This “law” provides a good explanation for why so many issues that affect society at large are effectively controlled by a few people. Examples of this abound and they range from the influence the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) has on US gun policy; the impact of the teachers’ union on shaping public K-12 education and the very significant role that the prison guards’ unions have played (especially in California) in advocating harsh criminal law policies of questionable value such as the “three strikes” law. For these constituencies the issues they care about are “voting issues” and they can effectively dictate the agenda since most of citizens don’t pay enough attention.

One doesn’t have to be a “small government conservative” to be sufficiently miffed by the overactive state and the move to ever more licensing and regulation. When Hippocrates was hanging out in ancient Greece around 400 BC and codifying some of the early precepts of medicine or Benjamin Rush was helping to lay the foundation of modern American medicine in 18^th century Pennsylvania, they may have contemplated a situation where the practice of medicine will require a state license obtained after rigorous examinations and many years of postgraduate medical education. What both men will probably find deeply ridiculous is that it takes about 300 hours of coursework to work in the wig trade in Texas or that many American states require multiple hours of coursework, exams and licenses for people wishing to be barbers, florists and even fortune tellers. While it is important for government to protect the unsuspecting from an unqualified brain surgeon, I think it should not be a high priority for the state to protect citizens from receiving a terrible haircut, or from buying an incompetently arranged bouquet of flowers; or from wearing wigs that are just not cut exactly right or receiving an inaccurate forecast of their future. People are perfectly capable of dealing with these things. While consumer protection may be the headline reason for the proliferation of licenses, the net effect of this excessive licensing is increased costs to consumers as prices are kept artificially low due to the barriers to entry that licensing provides. You could wake up a medieval guildsman in the 21^st century and he will quickly recognize much of occupational licensing as basically the same stuff they did back in the day. Liberals, with an interest in protecting the poor and striving, should have an interest in taming the overactive state as it increases costs to the people least likely to afford the extra cost. This is one area of reform in which liberals and conservatives can make common cause.

In concluding the book, the authors laid out a series of common sense reforms that could go a long way in improving governance and providing an avenue for western democracies to regain the edge in the competition with alternative Eastern governance models (notably those of Singapore and China). The idea I find most appealing is setting a sunset clause for every new law that is passed. Every law that is passed should have an expiry date, at which time it would be reexamined for relevance and if there is sufficient public support it will be reaffirmed and if not, the law will be struck off. That seems like a good antidote for anachronistic laws.

Overall, I believe this is a great book that should be read by every politician or person interested in how people organize themselves for effective governance in a democracy. And if you are just a history buff, the sweeping history of western political philosophy and organization should tick some boxes as well!

From Sea to Shining Sea – A review of “The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible” by Simon Winchester

Of the 193 sovereign nations that are member states of the United Nations (as good a definition of a “country” as any), only 21 border on two or more oceans. Of these 21 countries only a small group of 11 countries share the distinction of bordering on the earth’s two greatest bodies of water: the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The United States is not just one of these 11 countries; it manages to get on the list in grand style. The country has a massive land mass and long coast lines on both oceans unlike some other members of the “club of 11” such as Chile, which can be uncharitably described as being effectively a strip of land on the Pacific that just happens to touch the Atlantic.

Translating the phrase of “sea to shining sea” in the (unashamedly patriotic) song, “America the Beautiful” into a real physical and cultural reality took centuries of diligent and often mind-bending and back-breaking work by courageous pioneers and adventurers. These people decided they were going to bend untamed wilderness to their will and embark on engineering marvels that still manage to boggle the mind. In the process, these pioneers wove regions and lands as disparate as the cotton fields of Louisiana; the rugged hills of Appalachia and the windswept coastal fishing towns of New England into a multicolored, imperfect but ultimately enduring quilt that is the modern United States. These people had to put together rail networks; draw up cartographic and geological maps; build steamships and carve out broadcast networks and flight routes literally out of thin air to create the physical and cultural bonds that hold the country together. Some of these pioneers remain famous; some have seen their fame lapse with the passage of time while a great number never achieved any renown that could be subsequently lost. Simon Winchester’s new book (“The Men Who United the States”) provides a great service to all these people, the well-known and the barely-known, by telling their stories in as compelling and completes a manner that surely deserves an award by some august body that hands out such laurels.

I found the book to be an absolutely great read, with a lot of things to commend it to readers. Chief among the many commendable qualities of the book was the author’s decision to organize the book in a thematic fashion. Given the large cast of characters that were involved in “Uniting the States” and the considerable span of time this uniting took, there was a temptation that a less able writer could easily have fallen for to organize the book chronologically or, worse still, as a series of mini-biographies. That would have resulted in a book that reads more like an encyclopedia. Thankfully for readers everywhere the author avoided that trap. Instead Mr. Winchester, who lived many years in Asia, chose to organize the book using the five elements (or the Wu Xing) of Chinese philosophy: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal. The author was helped by the various elements aligning pretty reasonably with the broad chronology of American progress. The theme / element of wood corresponds closely to the early years of post-independence America when logging activity was a key driver of economic growth and the famed Lewis & Clark expedition took place to the period from 1835 to the current day which is dominated by metal (i.e., electricity grids, cable TV, radio transmission, telecoms / telegraph etc.).  

The cast of characters and events so richly described by Simon Winchester range from popular people and popular stories such as Samuel Morse and the invention / commercialization of the telegraph; to the Lewis & Clark expedition to cross the west after the Louisiana purchase to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Lesser known people and stories also come alive in this book. My favorite story is that of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed soldier who climbed mountains, led expeditions and finally served as the 2^nd director of the US Geological Survey. For the stories most likely to be well known by his readers, the author sheds new light and provides a fresh perspective that makes reading a story you already know still pass for a very engaging read.

This book is one of the best I have read in a long time but it is not without its flaws. One is that it adopts a sometimes overly adulatory tone towards these men and the America they created, a minor flaw that is probably linked to the enthusiastic patriotism often exhibited by naturalized citizens (“Americans by choice”) such as the author. The second and slightly irritating flaw was the author’s constant reference to Native Americans as “Indians”, a deliberately non-political correct term that most of the literati in America has jettisoned by now. I found the constant use of the term to be particularly silly, especially since “Indian” is a term that Christopher Columbus applied to Native Americans when he got lost, landed on American shores and thought he had arrived in India!

All told, this is a truly good book that deserves to be highly placed on best seller lists.  

A Land Facing Both Ways – Review of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

For a geopolitical junkie, no region holds more fascination than the Middle East: with its alluring mix of rich cultural heritage, strategic importance and a particularly combustible style of politics. Of the nations that occupy this subcontinent that that the French and British carved out of a vanquished Ottoman empire in the wake of the 1^st world war, the State of Israel stands out in a very unique way. Like most of its neighbors (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria etc.), it is a young country that did not exist a century ago. However, the differences far outweigh the similarities: in a region populated largely by ethnic Arabs, Israel has a Jewish majority. While most of its neighbors are monarchies, theocracies or secular Baathist dictatorships, Israel has been a parliamentary democracy since its founding in 1948.

I have read a fair amount of essays and books on this important nation and they, for the most part, tend to be well-researched and fun to read. However, these books tend to be hampered either by: i) being written by insiders with an agenda to push or an ax to grind – the worst of the lot tend to be little more than partisan screeds; or ii) an objective and dispassionate observation penned by an outsider who struggles to muster the same level of passion or intimacy that insiders can. This new book by Ari Shavit (a celebrated writer at the Israeli left-of-center paper: Haaretz) seems to be the Holy Grail: a book by an insider that manages to be both passionate and objective and which examines the country in a deeply personal way: warts and all.

This book has many virtues to commend it. Mr. Shavit displays a deep love for his country, a love so deep that while he celebrates its triumphs and strengths he is also willing to explore his country’s shortcomings. Mr. Shavit narrates in very honest terms the expulsion of over 50,000 Palestinian Arabs from Lydda and Ramle in 1948, after both towns fell to the army of the new State of Israel. These towns were resettled by the victors, the empty houses of the vanquished occupied by new immigrants and the towns given new names of Lod and Ramla respectively. This was an event so indelibly etched in Arab minds that they refer to it as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”). While not papering over this tragic event, it is important to put the event in historical context. Earlier in that decade, paragons of human rights such as the United States and the United Kingdom committed acts that top the incident at Lydda. While the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki is well known, the arguably needless joint British and American aerial bombing of Dresden in the waning months of the 2^nd world war left over 25,000 people dead (most of them civilians).  

Mr. Shavit also charts (in a deeply personal way using his family’s history) the story and evolution of the state of Israel. We are swept from the days of Theodore Herzl’s publication in 1895 of Der Judenstaat (“the Jewish State”), a pamphlet arguing for the creation of the Jewish State, then to the early days of the immigrant farmers in the Kibbutzim, and their famed Jaffa Oranges. He lays out the evolution of the country from a few immigrants toiling in the Kibbutzim of the early 20^th century to the wave of immigration from the survivors of the holocaust in Europe and the pogroms of the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s , to the emergence of the settlements movement in the 1970s and finally to the sophistication of the modern day.

A particularly touching part of the book which I believe has universal appeal is the description of Bizaron, a classic housing estate similar to many built in the 1950s to accommodate the thousands of immigrants streaming into the young country. These immigrants from Europe and the Middle East all had a few things in common: they had all suffered traumatic or near-death experiences, lost a great deal of their material possessions on their flight to Israel and, almost to a man, had to settle into jobs beneath their status in their prior lives. Recognizing that they would probably not reach their full potential, these people turned their efforts to educating their children to attain their fullest potential. These children of “down-on-their luck” immigrants achieved great strides: president of the Supreme Court of Israel, millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs and many distinguished academics at various leading universities globally. This is a universal and classic immigrant story. Immigrant lore is replete with tales of the Nigerian doctor working as a healthcare assistant in Baltimore, the lawyer from Nepal driving a cab in Manhattan or the Ukrainian nuclear physicist working as a bookkeeper for a small firm in Queens. The high-energy and zealously-educated children of these people end up being disproportionately represented in high-powered positions in Corporate America.

Some of Mr. Shavit’s more potentially controversial statements revolve around the issue of Israeli settlement building, an enterprise which he vigorously opposes. The writer describes these settlements as “pregnancies outside the womb” and predicts that runaway settlement activity and ultra-nationalism exemplified by zealots such as Yehuda Etzion, a right wing activist previously imprisoned for a foiled plan to blow up the Dome of the Rock, will present challenges for the continued success of the country. Finally, summing up the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he talks about a continued conflict that leaves both sides worse off and unleashes a wave of everyday evildoing by non-evil people (in his own words “evil can take place without a need for evil people”). This section of the book is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil.

All said, a great read and highly informative book that makes a gallant effort of being even-handed and balanced. Reading Mr. Shavit’s book I am reminded of the phrase: “militant centrist”, which I think is an apt description of the man. 

Finding significance in the mundane – Review of A History of the World in 100 Objects

It wasn’t very long ago (1963 to be exact) that the widely overrated historian: High Trevor-Roper, then a professor of history at Oxford University said “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa. The rest is largely darkness”. While many mainstream historians now correctly view this statement as being particularly narrow-minded, the key approach to historical analysis that informed the worldview of this condescending man has proven particularly hard to shake. Many people have a reflexive instinct to largely view history as written history, with most of history scholarship and teaching still being focused on the evaluation of written texts handed down by ancient societies and contemporary observers or visitors to such societies.

This emphasis is a really unfortunate one, not only because it largely confines the history of societies without a tradition of writing to the dustbins of history and leaves their achievements unsung. Further complicating this already sad picture is that what little information we have of these societies tend to come from the writings of other people they came in contact with. These interactions were often in circumstances that were less than amiable (i.e., enemies, competitors etc.) and the guys who did the writing often made sure to leave behind descriptions that were decidedly designed not to flatter their subjects. For example, much of the world’s knowledge of the Aztec civilization came from the writings of the Conquistadors that ended their subject’s civilization by - shall we say - taking a few items they were not entitled to while dispensing with the lives of those who posed any obstacle to their theft. Similarly, our knowledge of the life and activities of the Germanic tribes (out of present day Scandinavia) come largely from the writings of the Romans which they ended up defeating, a rare case of the vanquished getting to write the story. The list of biased reporting goes on: European settlers wrote about Native Americans, English visitors wrote fantastical tales about indigenous communities in West Africa etc.

This is why I really liked the approach of Neil MacGregor (Director of the British Museum) in writing this really great book. His great idea was to select 100 objects from all across the world through which he charts the progress of mankind from the Stone Age to the current day. He examines each object and explains the significance it held in the societies (and ages) in which it was created and used. These objects range from the two million year old Olduvai stone chopping tool to the modern-day credit card. The origins of these objects range from the Ife Bronze Heads (created in the 17^th century in what is now Nigeria) to an Egyptian sandal label from 4000 BC to the Seated Buddha of Gandhara (created in the 2^nd century AD in modern-day Pakistan) as well as a chronometer from the HMS Beagle (an early Victorian-Era naval vessel).

Despite the great diversity in the geographic origins and purposes of these various objects, they largely have one thing in common: they are largely mundane and pretty unremarkable in nature. There are very few grand and popular objects on the list: the Mona Lisa and other great works commissioned by the Medici are not held up to represent the renaissance era, rather we have mundane everyday items such as a note written in calligraphy and a miniature mechanical galleon that demonstrates the technical skill of 16^th century Germany and their seafaring ways. Representing the 2^nd part of the 20^th century is not a grand or sophisticated item like the Space Shuttle or the Mars Rover. Rather Mr. MacGregor’s choice is the humble credit card, a distinctly unremarkable rectangular piece of plastic lodged in billions of wallets the world over. The choice struck me as odd, but on further reflection I realized that a thousand years from now when our current civilization has been confined to the footnotes of history and an enterprising academic decides to write a thesis on how humans lived in the second half of the 20^th century, the credit card will be as good a window into understanding our lives as any other item I can think of. Encapsulated in that small, flat piece of plastic are themes such as: the emergence of the credit society and the attendant effects that personal debt brings; the rise of the “consumer society” that has led to there being 46 square feet of retail space per person in the US as well as the ubiquitous electronic networks that make all these incessant “swipings” workable.

I’ve always regarded Archaeology as a really cool discipline (hey, what other grown up occupation allows one to go around playing scavenger hunt games!). However, the end results of archaeology have too often been regarded as novelties that end up being gawked at in Museums and rich collectors’ living rooms. The close connection between history and archaeology is often not as closely linked as it should be, with very few books explicitly attempting to tell the history of everyday people in past eras through the simple objects they created and used in the normal course of their lives. This book did a great job giving voice to the voiceless as well as ink and parchment to the lives of often forgotten people who left little or no written text for succeeding generations to follow. 

Founding Pragmatist – A review of “Thomas Jefferson- The Art of Power” by Jon Meacham

I just finished reading the latest book by Pulitzer prize winning journalist and historian: Jon Meacham, the author of highly acclaimed historical works such as “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” (for which he won the Pulitzer in 2009). A former editor of Newsweek, he seems to have finally succumbed to the itch that plagues every American historian, which is a restless feeling that can only be sated by writing yet another book on Thomas Jefferson. While the 3^rd president of the United States can be said to have been studied to death, Jon Meacham manages to write a book that holds its own among the great works on this over studied great man. My sense of the author’s intent in writing this book is to paint a picture of Thomas Jefferson as a practicing politician and statesman of his time. A man skilled in the exercise of power and not simply the high minded philosopher and ideas man behind the lofty words of the American declaration of independence. I found this book to be refreshing and illuminating and I took away a couple of lessons that are often lost due to the all too human tendency to inflate the currency of the past

Revolutions – at least the successful ones – are typically run or enabled by the rich and/or the established. As Meacham wrote about the march to the American Revolution, “for the elite, revolution was the shrewdest economic choice”. While the history books are replete with stories of yeoman American farmers and striving craftsmen picking up arms in ragtag armies to secure their freedoms by defeating the “Redcoats” (as the British Army was not so affectionately called in those days). The truth is a little more encompassing than this, as the revolution was championed by the gentry, ruling classes and business elite of the colonies who had come to realize that continued rule from London was, well, not great for business and for their continued prosperity. One of the initial skirmishes on the road to the revolutionary war was the “Pine Tree Riot” in New Hampshire, during which royal officials were flogged and marched out of town. The leader of this revolt was Ebenezer Mudgett, a rich lumber mill owner who basically did not like the effect the royal ordnance to save the best trees for his majesty’s use was having on his profits. Counted among the signers of the declaration of independence were some of the richest men in the 13 colonies, they saw that throwing off the colonial overlords was not only good for the liberty of man, it was also good for business. This was probably not lost on Thomas Jefferson himself as Jon Meacham noted, “it was a rich man’s revolution and Thomas Jefferson was a rich man”. This is not just a relic of historical revolutions, the protesters at Tahrir Square started the revolution to overthrow Hosni Mubarak but the decision of the Egyptian Army generals to not attack the protesters but to abandon Mubarak basically sealed his fate.

The second important lesson is that partisanship and partisan bickering, like the poor, have always been with us. Listening to American media, one hears “talking heads” and politicians bemoan the partisan rancor in the country. They collectively long for the more amiable atmosphere of the past while not forgetting to add something along the lines of the “founding fathers rolling in their graves” at the sight of the bickering politicians. I am not so sure that these fathers will be as taken aback as pundits (who pine for a bygone era when political sages strode across the nation and engaged in calm, high-minded discussions) will like us to believe. Former US President Harry Truman was said to have remarked that “the only thing new in the world is the history you do not know” and that statement was quite borne out by this book. The election of George Washington was in many ways the last non-partisan election of a US president as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were locked in highly partisan contests in 1796 and 1800. And each man was at the head of a political movement, Adams led the Federalists and Jefferson the Democratic-Republicans. Vicious publications in broadsides and pamphlets were the attack ads of the day and men such as James Callendar, a noted pamphleteer of his age, may even have one or two things to teach modern campaign hands like Karl Rove and David Axelrod about “defining the opponent”. Jon Meacham notes that the election between Adams and Jefferson was so hard fought that it drove a wedge between two men that had hitherto been very close (although they did make amends in their old age). Much has been made of the Jeffersonian practice of opening the White House for dinners with legislators every night, as it was a good faith effort to build bipartisanship. However, it must have been a sign of the times that the President avoided having congressmen of both parties together on the same day out of concern that such dinners may end in fist fights.

Also shining brightly throughout the book is the vivid image of Thomas Jefferson, the pragmatist. The portrait of Jefferson as philosopher king, devoted to such idealistic pursuits as crafting the declaration of independence and the statutes of religious freedom, has become quite ingrained in the popular imagination. In this book we see a new side to the man, we see Thomas Jefferson the politician skilled in realpolitik. The man who had a deep belief in a participatory democracy anchored on an active citizenry of his much beloved “yeoman farmers” also did as much as any president to expand executive power. He negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, which currently encompasses all or part of 15 American states and at 3 cents per acre it is considered by many to be the greatest real estate deal in history. The judicial “strict constructionists” of his time viewed this move as unconstitutional as the constitution did not explicitly make provisions for acquiring territory. However, he viewed it as imperative that the French influence in North America be curtailed and that the opportunity for the young country’s westward opportunity needed to be ensured. In foreign affairs, the man who had expressed reservations about standing armies (considering them a marginally less bad idea than banks) expanded the navy and launched the United States’ first foreign war. He sent ships to defend American ships that were being harassed by the Barbary states, getting the sanction from congress after the ships were on their way and establishing a precedent of vesting the power to conduct war and defend the country in the president even though the formal declaration of war was controlled by congress.

Overall, I found the book to be very densely researched but beautifully written in an engaging way that kept me going through the approximately 800 pages of this great book. It contained enough “red meat” for history and political nerds like me, while also having enough interesting anecdotes and engaging human interest content to engage the general reader.