Book Review: Fire and Fury

By Michael Wolff

There is no better way to raise your public profile and celebrity than to run for president and narrowly loose. This will inevitably lead to enviable name recognition, increased value for your own personal brand and serve as a springboard for a future career in the media. This, according to Michael Wolff’s exposé Fire and Fury, was the goal of Donald Trump when he launched his presidential campaign in June 2015. Trump and his campaign team were prepared to lose with fire and fury, as most of the polls in the run up to November 8^th indicated they would. What they were completely unprepared for, however, was the eventuality that they might win the election.

Michael Wolff has written several acclaimed novels, and is also a contributor to numerous publications, such as British GQ and Vanity Fair. He has previously written a great deal about the media in Britain and the USA. Personally, I remember him best for several well written articles in GQ about the media moguls Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. His ambition when approaching this latest project was simple: to be a fly on the wall during the Trump campaign and during the first 100 days of the administration. Knowing full well that the 45^th president of the United States is somewhat susceptible to flattery, Wolff wrote several admiring pieces about Trump, and so managed to gain access to the Trump campaign. Once that campaign moved into the West Wing, Wolff has in several television interviews recounted his amazement at the disorganized and ad-hoc state of affairs that enabled him to be a constant presence, even speaking to senior members of the administration, without anyone asking who he was and when he was leaving.

According to Wolff, much of the tumult and drama that the Trump White House has been plagued by is a direct result of the president’s own management style and character. An excellent example of this can be had by looking at the back of the book’s cover, where there is a picture of the president sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by members of his administration. The people standing next to the president’s desk are chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steven Bannon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer, national security advisor Michael Flynn and vice president Michael Pence. As of this date, the only member of this group who hasn’t been fired or resigned voluntarily is vice president Pence. Turbulence of this magnitude is unheard of in any previous administration, but the current one seems to move from one scandal to another on an almost daily basis. Indeed, the new scandals that keep popping up divert attention from older ones in a most bizarre fashion.

Since day one, the Trump administration has had not one, but three simultaneous and conflicting agendas championed by different groups of people in the president’s orbit. Wolff recounts how former chief of staff Priebus carried water for the Republican establishment, represented by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, together with the director of the national economic council Gary Cohn, represented a centrist, business friendly agenda of the kind you might have found in a Clinton White House. Arrayed against these establishment forces was Steven Bannon, a self-proclaimed right-wing populist who championed aggressively nationalistic policies on trade and immigration. To say that these different agendas might have a hard time coexisting peacefully is somewhat of an understatement, and much of Fire and Fury concern the bitter infighting and strategic leaks of information to the press carried out by these factions as they vied for supremacy and the ear of the president.       

In regard to the man himself, Donald J. Trump, Wolff recounts how several of his longtime friends doubted his ability to carry out the duties of his new office “He can’t even read a balance sheet” is one memorable quote from the book that springs to mind. Even more alarmingly, Trump doesn’t seem to read much of anything, which has had the unfortunate effect that aides have a hard time briefing him on policy and he is unable to adequately inform himself of complex issues and developments.

Even though he has long been skeptical of trade deals such as NAFTA and many attributes the injection of Bannon’s populism as a reason Trump was able to win “rust-belt” voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, Wolff paints a picture of a man more concerned with being accepted by the respectable establishment than being a populist in the mould of William Jennings Bryan. In Trump’s world there are only two kinds of people, winners and losers. The four-star generals and former Wall Street executives he has recruited to his administration are clearly seen as the former. Perhaps the institution that Trump is most concerned with is the media, whose favor and attention he has doggedly courted for the best part of his life. Getting good press and dominating the news cycle seems to be the overriding focus of Trump’s administration, no matter how he achieves that goal. Consequently, Trump has acted like an absolute monarch, aloof and surrounded by courtiers who constantly vie for his attention, distributing favor and influence as he sees fit. For said courtiers, this is a perilous existence, as Trump can at any time withdraw his favor and leave them out in the cold. For Trump, who subscribes to a zero-sum mentality, no one can be seen to profit at his expense, least of all those in his administration, and every slight, real or imagined, is brooded over until the perpetrator has been fired or ridiculed on Twitter, or both.       

Firing too many close aides will be dangerous in the long term, argues Wolff, because that will leave the president with fewer and fewer loyalists who can defend him against his numerous political enemies. Filling vacant positions is also becoming a serious problem for the administration. The respectable policy establishment is starting to sour on Trump despite the tax cuts and “light-touch” regulation policies of the administration. This was made painfully apparent in August last year, when Trump failed to strongly condemn Neo-nazis after a series of violent rallies had been held in Charlottesville, Virginia. One business leader after another abandoned Trump’s business advisory council in disgust at his behavior, until the president was forced to wind it down himself to save face. Meanwhile, the Neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer was delighted that Trump didn’t attack them, indeed he seemed to be quietly condoning their bigotry.

In terms of the investigation regarding possible collusion with Russia during the campaign, one gets the impression that if this is true it was probably more due to raw opportunism than any sinister agenda. The firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017 was Trump’s own decision, but he had been encourage to do so by Jared and Ivanka, a decision Wolff notes everyone, including Trump, now view as a serious mistake. At this date, the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election is carried out by special counsel Robert Mueller, whom Trump interviewed as a replacement for Comey but decided to turn down.  

In terms of his goals for writing Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff has made it clear where he stands “If it’s a book that brings down this presidency…I bow to the god of irony”, he told Bill Maher during an interview on his HBO show. Reading his book certainly doesn’t improve one’s opinion of the president, and I know that it isn’t intended to do so either. I would say that I very much enjoyed getting a glimpse into what truly goes on in the West Wing, as well as seeing how Trump’s cabinet and his administration view their role amidst all the turmoil and political intrigue.  

In regards to Trump’s  political fate it remains to be seen whether he is rendered a lame duck after democrats make big gains in the midterm election this November, or if he is reelected in 2020 on the back of a soaring economy, but the second year of this administration is unlikely to be any calmer or less controversial than the first one.

Book review: Syria, A Recent History

By John McHugo

For the last seven years, Syria has been engulfed in a devastating civil war that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, while millions of refugees have lost their homes and livelihoods. The civil war has become the scene of vicious sectarian violence, as battles are fought between adherents to different ideologies and religions. At the same time global powers have intervened, the most significant of these being the United States, Russia and Iran. To many Westerners this conflict is hard to fully comprehend, as many different actors with their own agendas and allegiances wage war while the civilian population suffers.

In Syria, A Recent History, international lawyer and Middle East historian John McHugo examines the history of Syria from the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and on to the present day, in order to give readers a deeper understanding of the festering discontent that led to the eruption of civil war, as well as the brutality of the regime’s response.

The land we now know as Syria was originally known in Arabic as Bilaad al-Shaam, which roughly means “the land to the left”. This is because a man standing in the middle of Arabia, facing north, has Shaam to his left. Today’s borders are no natural creation, and the concept of Greater Syria encompasses territories that currently belongs to several neighboring countries. Under Ottoman rule an area of land greater than Syria’s current landmass fell under the administration of a province named Syria, but after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, the victorious English and French sought to carve up former Ottoman territory to expand the size of their own colonial empires. During this process, lines were drawn on a map to divide the territory, often without consideration for the ethnic and religious borders and entirely new countries, such as Lebanon, came into being. I would have wished that McHugo had taken the time to explain how the borders in the region were drawn up at this time, in particular how this division reflected earlier agreements, such as the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. As it is, the reader must consult other sources to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this process. 

In 1923, France was given a mandate by the League of Nations to govern the newly created countries of Syria (whose borders differed from those of the Ottoman province) and Lebanon. Since Britain was already deeply invested in Egypt, they acquired the neighboring territories of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. The mandate system differed from a traditional colony, in the sense that the indigenous population were supposed to be handed control of their respective territories in due time. In its founding covenant, the League of Nations describes a mandate as a “sacred trust of civilization” where the people in question are to be given tutelage so they can one day prosper and be granted independence.

This wasn’t something that a powerful and vocal colonial lobby in France was willing to accept, and French rule over their mandate was marred by instability and a clash of priorities between developing the new territories domestically and giving French trade and exports preferential treatment. Local elites also saw French administrators as interfering with their own interests. In 1925, Sultan al-Atrash, a leader of the Druze religious minority called his followers to revolt against French rule, and soon the entire French mandate was in jeopardy as the small garrison force was unable to fend off a tidal wave of revolts erupting all over Syria. France only managed to cling on to their mandate, notes McHugo, by shipping in large numbers of colonial troops, mainly from Morocco and Senegal, to finally end the rebellion in 1927. Thousands of Syrians had been killed or displaced and parts of the country were in ruin, adversely impacting commerce and agriculture.

McHugo uses the 1925 revolt as an example to illustrate the many divergent agendas and interests that have jostled for control of the hearts and minds of the Syrian people, and still do today. Devout Muslims were angered that Syria was ruled by Catholic France, but religion and dissatisfaction with French rule was only part of the explanation. The concept of an Arab identity and Arab nationalism were steadily gaining more and more adherents. The ideology known as Baathism was born in Syria, its founders being the gentle Damascene intellectual Michel Aflaq and a fellow Syrian he met while studying at the Sorbonne, Salah ad-Din al-Bitar, the Christian Orthodox son of a grain merchant. Baathism combined Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism with a form of socialism that was milder than the Marxist-Leninism espoused by the Syrian Communist Party, which both men had had an earlier falling out with.

After the Second World War, Syria was granted independence in 1946. Syrians now had their own sovereign state and a fragile democracy, but many obstacles remained if the country were to achieve stability and prosperity. Government expenditure during the Mandate had mostly gone to security and the military, with the unfortunate side effect that education, infrastructure and all that a burgeoning country desperately needs had been neglected, notes McHugo sourly, and he makes a solid case for the Mandate period to have been one of lost opportunities for Syria’s economic development. With a growing population that was restless, poor and ill-educated, Syria was in a precarious position. Nevertheless, successive governments made some progress in developing the country.

After Egypt’s president Nasser had successfully stood his ground against France, the UK and Israel during the Suez crisis of 1956, his prestige and popularity in the Arab world was enormous, and support for Pan-Arabism was on the rise. Two years after Suez, these dreams became a reality when Syria and Egypt merged to form the United Arab Republic. This republic turned out to be short lived, as many Syrians became dissatisfied at playing second fiddle to the much more populous Egypt and in 1961 the union was dissolved when Syrian army officers launched a successful coup d’état.

Nine years later defense minister Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawi Shia minority who had risen from humble beginnings, launched another coup with the support of the military. The previous dictator, Salah Jadid, who had himself toppled a government led by the Syrian Baath party in 1966, was now replaced with Hafez al-Assad. Hafez’s rule began as he meant to go on, and his efforts to modernize Syria were marred by brutality, repression and the accumulation of great riches by a small clique of government officials.

The foreign policy of Hafez’s reign was not without its contradictions. Both Syria and neighboring Iraq were ruled by dictators who claimed to govern in the name of their country’s local branch of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, and both countries’ populations were majority Arab and Sunni, yet Hafez’s Syria was hostile to Iraq and instead allied with Iran after the revolution of 1979, an ethnic Persian state that mostly worshipped Shia Islam. During the Iran-Iraq war Syria supported Iran, while the US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Syria’s relation with the US was seldom very good, one factor that contributed to this froideur was no doubt Syria’s long-standing enmity with the state of Israel. Syria fought against Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom-Kippur war of 1973. Following the Six-Day War, Israel occupied a large part of the Golan Heights, which Syria failed to retake when they went on the offensive in 1973. Israel maintains control of the occupied territory to this day, while the United Nations Security Council Resolution 497 states that this occupation is “null and void and without legal effect”. Another area of contention between Assad’s Syria and the West is Lebanon, where Hafez had no qualms about intervening if he felt it necessary. During the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, Syria intervened militarily to protect its interests in the region, as did Israel at a later date. According to McHugo, Syria’s involvement achieved some of Hafez’s goals, notably to keep Lebanon from falling into Israel’s orbit, but his indirect support of militant groups such as Hezbollah, which engaged in terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, made peace with Israel an ever more distant prospect, and neither Hafez nor his son has succeeded in regaining the Golan heights through diplomacy. This continues to be a formal Syrian requirement for a peace deal with Israel. Hafez’s opportunity to mend relations with the West came after his nemesis Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. As George H W Bush busied himself assembling an international coalition, Hafez offered Syria’s full support.

On the domestic front, McHugo explains the Janus-faced nature of Hafez’s rule. Living standards for ordinary Syrians has improved. Life expectancy has increased, and infant mortality decreased as education, electricity and proper sewage systems were introduced to virtually the entire population. At the same time, the country remained a repressive police state where dissidents were liable to get rounded up by the Mukhabarat, the notoriously brutal secret police. When his eldest son and heir apparent, Bassel, died in a car accident in 1994, Hafez first thought his stone-faced aides were carrying news that he had been deposed in a coup d’état, an indication of his paranoia and suspicion.

After Bassel’s death, his younger brother Bashar was recalled from his medical studies at King’s College in London, where he studied to become an ophthalmologist. He was hastily enrolled in the army as a stepping stone on the way to the presidency and succeeded his father when he died of cancer in 2000. In his inaugural speech, Assad seemed to strike a reformist note, conceding that some government officials might be corrupt. He proceeded to say that even though the time wasn’t yet ripe for Western-style democracy, Syria might achieve democracy sometime in the future by engaging in the somewhat vague concept of “democratic thinking” and by strengthening the country’s institutions. Bashar’s wife, Asma, whom he had met while studying in London, was a British citizen of Syrian nationality and Sunni faith. Hopes that the glamorous new presidential couple would fundamentally transform Syria were not realized. The country continued to be mired in corruption and stagnation, and large parts of the impoverished rural populace continued to flock to the cities in search of work.          

When the protests of the 2011 Arab Spring spread to Syria, the regime responded with a brutal crackdown by the military and secret police. What followed these initial protests we know all too well, Syria descended into vicious sectarian conflict, and the Assad regime survives because of Russian support.

In the concluding chapter, McHugo reflects on what could have been if Syria had been left alone from outside interference and had the opportunity to develop at their own pace, something he understandably laments was not to be. Perhaps most interestingly he criticizes the Western habit of wanting to redraw the map and divide the region into new countries to achieve stability. Carving up Syria into a number of smaller states, even if this takes into account local ethnic groups is doomed to failure due to the complex circumstances on the ground, claims McHugo.

All in all, I found Syria, A Recent History to be very interesting and thought provoking. McHugo succeeds in introducing the Western reader to the history behind the bloody civil war in Syria, as well as the fiendish complexity of Middle East politics.  

  

Book Review - Napoleon the Great

Book Review - Napoleon the Great

By Andrew Roberts

”He is the Napoleon of crime”, was how Sherlock Holmes described his nemesis Moriarty, head of the London underworld, in the popular crime novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This short description sufficed to inform the reader that Moriarty must be a truly formidable character indeed, someone who has risen to the absolute pinnacle of his chosen profession, and who is not to be trifled with. That the mere mention of Napoleon’s name roughly half a century after his death was still so pregnant with meaning and subtle menace to a Victorian audience suggests that during his short but intense life, Napoleon Bonaparte managed to leave his mark on the world. Even though he was ultimately defeated and brought low by his enemies, his name remains synonymous with military genius. In Napoleon the Great, British historian Andrew Roberts has written a superb biography of history’s consummate adventurer, a man who rose from relatively humble beginnings and exploited the tumultuous events of the French revolution to become Emperor of France and the undisputed master of Europe.

Napoleon Bonaparte (at this stage Buonaparte) was born in Ajaccio, Corsica in 1769. Since he was of the island’s nobility his future prospects were relatively bright, as long as his family could stay in the good graces of the French, who were reviled by many Corsican nationalists. Indeed, as a young man Napoleon sympathized with the nationalists, and viewed their leader, Pasquale Paoli, as something of a role model. His sympathies notwithstanding, the young Napoleon travelled to France to learn a soldier’s trade, and was soon commissioned as an artillery officer thanks to his gift for mathematics. Along the way his Corsican nationalist sympathies wavered, as he was forced to navigate the tumultuous political climate in the wake of the French revolution. Napoleon agreed with demands for equality before the law and the concept of promoting soldiers and civil servants based on merit, but he was never a hardcore Jacobin.

During the siege of Toulon in 1794, Napoleon commanded the victorious French forces, leading from the front, he was injured by the thrust of a British bayonet, but survived, and earned the respect of his men as a corporal in gold braid. Victory at the Siege of Toulon helped launch Napoleon’s career and catapulted him ahead of other ambitious peers. It also showed his capacity for hard work, ingenuity and disregard for his own physical safety on the battlefield, all of which would later help him seize power in France and humble the armies of his enemies.  

Even after this victory, Napoleon’s rise was by no means ensured, his career was nearly undone by his association with the bloodthirsty Robespierre brothers, when they were toppled later that same year, but after he returned to Paris and protected the Directory from a royalist uprising, his star was once more in the ascendant. Shortly after marrying the widow Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon became a general at the age of twenty-seven. Fearful of the ideals of the French revolution, the old monarchies of Europe had forged a coalition against France, intending to restore the old order. The main theatre of war was in Germany, and the Italian theater was regarded as a sideshow. Napoleon thought otherwise. Arriving in Nice he took command of the Army of Italy, and proceeded to lead it to victory against superior Austrian forces. During this campaign, Roberts notes, Napoleon was able to use his great energy and speed of maneuver to best his opponents, who were often older than he was, and led armies that were more poorly organized.

After the Italian campaign Napoleon went to Egypt, to lead a military expedition with a contingent of scientists, with the aim of challenging Britain’s overseas empire. The Egyptian campaign was a failure from a military standpoint, but thanks to Napoleon’s soldiers bringing home the Rosetta stone, modern Egyptologists are able to read hieroglyphics.

With the political situation in turmoil and France beset by external enemies as well as internal troubles, Napoleon seized power along with a group of political allies and became first consul in 1799, his position further cemented by the results of an election that was rigged in his favor.

Even though peace was soon signed with France’s principal enemies, Austria, Great Britain and Russia (Prussia joined them later), these nations would over the coming years form new coalitions against France, and would in time ground Napoleon and his empire down.

A vigorous domestic reformer as well as a soldier, Napoleon’s reign saw France being modernized in a many fundamental ways. His legal system, the Codé Napoleon, remains in use in France and in many countries around the word today. Napoleon reorganized the French civil administration to be one based on merit. He also founded the Banque de France, as well as reforming the French education system and implementing a new tax code. Always a tireless micro-manager who was interested in controlling the minutest aspect of his realms, he wrote a staggering number of letters and dictates throughout his life. Once, when he had left France to embark on one of his many military campaigns, he wrote a letter back home demanding that a provincial priest who had given a bad sermon would be severely admonished. This restless energy and capacity for overwork was one of Napoleon’s greatest strengths, even though he was unable to remain fully as vigorous later in life as his health deteriorated.      

Over the coming sixteen years after becoming consul in 1799, Napoleon waged war almost continually against France’s enemies. Having soundly defeated the Austrians, Prussians and Russians in battle many times, he reached the zenith of his power in 1807, when he met Tsar Alexander of Russia on a barge floating in the Neman river to sign the treaty of Tilsit, in effect dividing Europe between these two absolute monarchs. Relations between the two men were initially cordial, but Napoleon, who effused about Alexander that “Were he a woman, I would have taken him as my mistress”, never got the measure about the cool-headed and cunning tsar.

One of Napoleon’s most severe weakness, besides his total ineptitude when it came to naval warfare, was his inability to modernize French trade and finance. In The Ascent of Money, previously reviewed on this blog, Niall Ferguson asserts that British trade and finance remained superior to France throughout this era, which, together with the power of the Royal Navy, enabled the island nation to stay in the fight and bankroll France’s enemies. In effect, Napoleon’s empire was funded by victories on the battlefield that brought riches through plunder, a modus operandi that was inefficient and unsustainable in the long run. The bonds of the Banque de France were never equal to those issued by the British, and naval dominance meant that overseas trade could deliver prosperity much more reliably than plundering Vienna for a third time.     

An effect of the trade imbalance was that Napoleon tried to browbeat his defeated enemies into agreeing to an embargo of British goods, called the continental system. This hurt the economies of the German states, as well as Russia. Napoleon’s anger over Tsar Alexander’s transgression against the continental system were one of the factors that led to the greatest military blunder of his career. In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with an army more than 600 000 strong. Even though he captured Moscow, the Russians retreated from his armies and burned everything that could be of use by the French, and the brutal winter soon started to take its toll. In November 1812, the shattered remnants of Napoleon’s armies crossed the Berezina river and retreated into Poland. This fatal defeat, which robbed the Grande Armée of most of its veterans as well as most of its cavalry, led Napoleon’s rivals to declare war against France once again. Even though Napoleon fought bravely and with great ability to defend his empire, his efforts were in vain. Roberts points out that critics who dismissed Napoleon as a spend force by this point are wrong, he remained a battlefield commander of great ability, but ultimately France’s enemies were too numerous, its armies too depleted and its population too tired of war.

After a short Exile to the Mediterranean Island of Elba, Napoleon briefly returned to power in 1815, but was defeated by a combined force of British and Prussian soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon’s defeat was not inevitable, but a series of bad decisions led to him being defeated by Blücher and the Duke of Wellington, who had previously shown great ability while fighting against the French armies in the Peninsular war. Exiled for a second time, this time to the remote pacific Island of Saint Helena, Napoleon died in 1821, most likely of stomach cancer, the illness that had claimed the life his father and several other family members.  

The Napoleonic epic gives any biographer a treasure trove of material, and Roberts has used all of this to great effect. Napoleon the Great is a thoroughly enjoyable read that is sure to delight anyone with even a remote interested in history, and tells the tale of one of the most fascinating men who ever lived. It is true that the ears waged by Napoleon led to the deaths of many, both soldiers of civilians. It is also true, Roberts is careful to mention, that not all wars fought by Napoleon were his fault. Yes, his invasions of Spain and Russia were naked acts of imperialist aggression, but he also tried to make peace with Great Britain and her allies repeatedly, but was most often rebuffed and had to go to war only once diplomacy had failed.

In answering the question of whether Napoleon managed to achieve his dreams and ambitions, Roberts points to his childhood heroes, Alexander the great and Julius Caesar. Before Napoleon any ambitious young man wanted to be like Alexander the great and Julius Caesar. After Napoleon, any ambitious young man wanted to be like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.         

Book Review - Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet

Book Review - Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet
By Lyndal Roper

As one of the most famous and consequential characters in European history, Martin Luther is an obligatory part of any high school’s history curriculum. We all know that Luther’s famous 95 theses, nailed to the Wittenberg church’s door in in 1517, challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, especially on the issue of granting indulgences.  Luther’s ideas led to a schism in European Christianity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648. In Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet, Oxford historian Lyndal Roper gives contemporary readers a close personal look at the father of protestant Christianity, a complex character whose religious and philosophical belief continually evolved, both before and after the moment he nailed his theses to the church door. Over the course of reading the book one constantly has to remind oneself that Mrs. Roper wasn’t actually there to witness the events and talk to Luther first hand, his life and actions are so comprehensibly laid bare that you could be forgiven for thinking that was the case.

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony in 1483, but his family soon moved to the prosperous mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans, was a man of great stature and authority, who worked tirelessly to rise through the ranks and eventually became a mining inspector, a post which afforded his family a comfortable life. His hard work and toil were no doubt helped by the fact that Luther’s mother, Margarethe, came from a relatively prosperous mining family. It was Hans Luther’s wish that his eldest son should study law, since lawyers were much in demand in the busy mining town, and a trained lawyer would be of much help to the family. For Martin, however, his brief stint at law school proved to be an unhappy one, instead, Martin entered St Augustine’s monastery at Erfurt in 1505 to study theology and become a man of the cloth. This decision enraged Hans, who thought it a monumental waste of time, and showed little understanding for his son’s choice of career. Naturally this must have stung Luther, but he soon found other mentors to look up to for guidance within his religious order, the first and most importance of these being the noted preacher and theologian Johann von Staupitz. An anxious Luther confessed all his sins, real or imagined, at great lengths to Staupitz, who counselled Luther to pursue an academic career as a tonic for his theological self-flagellation.   

Even though he had chosen his own path in life, Luther was unhappy with the austere monastic life of a Dominican friar. He later attributed the lack of sleep, poor rations and freezing winter days spent preaching outside wearing nothing but a thin woolen robe for his poor health later in life. In 1507 Luther was ordained in Erfurt Cathedral and the following year, having earned his bachelor’s degree in bible studies, Staupitz invited him to come and teach at the newly formed University of Wittenberg, where he served as dean. Luther accepted his invitation, and his life took a turn for the better. He got on with his  work and enjoyed life in Wittenberg among his university students and colleagues. In 1512 he became a doctor of theology, reaching an important academic milestone.

At this point, the rest of Luther’s life could have been that of a rather anonymous provincial theology professor, content with his lot in life. However, it was not to be. Although criticism of the papacy was nothing new, the advent of the printing press meant that ideas could now travel far faster and further than what had been previously possible. Luther’s 95 theses were an attack on the authority of the papacy and its bloated administration, published in a form common for theological debates at the time. The theses spread all over Germany in a matter of months and became a source of debate and controversy. The core of Luther’s ideas, which he later expanded upon as he redoubled his attacks on the papacy, was that salvation lay in faith alone, and so could not be gained through alms or good works, and that all doctrines not found in scripture were to be discarded.  Essentially every man was to be his own scholar and interpreter of the bible, and did not need to look to a priest for answers. Luther was excommunicated and declared a heretic for opposing the Catholic Church, and at the Edict of Worms in 1521 he stuck to his beliefs when confronted by the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Charles V.  

Luther also attacked clerical celibacy, and married Katharina von Bora, a former nun. According to Luther the need for clergy to stay above the desires of the flesh was utter nonsense, since man was born into sin and led sinful lives no matter how devout they were, sex and procreation within the bonds of matrimony was as natural as passing water after drinking too much ale.    

Being an atheist myself, much of Luther’s criticism of the Catholic Church seems entirely reasonable, such as the abuse of the sale of indulgences, yet as Roper points out Luther’s motivations are hard to sympathize with for a modern reader. When German peasants, inspired by Luther’s writings, rebelled against their feudal lords, Luther sympathies lay firmly with the lords. He saw temporal matters as being entirely the domain of the aristocracy and the ruling classes, Roper writes, and so did not care much for the demands of the peasants. This led to Luther losing much of his popular support, and over time he became more of a symbolic character as the founder of a new branch of Christianity, himself less and less able to personally influence events.

Roper’s genius lies in being able to both place Luther’s actions in a historical context which is easy to understand, while also shining a light on all aspects of his character, good and bad. Luther was certainly an entertaining host and a good friend to many, imbued with a simple and rustic sense of humor. But he was also somewhat of a zealot, who turned potential allies into enemies because he refused to compromise on even the most trivial aspects of his beliefs. Perhaps it was that very stubbornness that enabled him to publish his theses in the first place. Luther was also an anti-Semite, and a virulent one at that, even by the standards of his time.

For all his many flaws, it is undeniable that Martin Luther irrevocably changed Christianity and the history of Europe. Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet succeeds in explaining Luther’s life and legacy to the modern reader. At times Roper delves perhaps a little too deeply into the finer points of scripture and theology, but overall, she manages to keep up a coherent and interesting narrative throughout the book.    

 

                                                                

Book Review - Harold Wilson

Book Review - Harold Wilson

By Ben Pimlott

Defining a man who has been labelled by contemporaries as well as political scholars as a particularly enigmatic, controversial and mysterious character was never going to be an easy task. Harold Wilson, a humble grammar school boy from Yorkshire became Labour leader and later prime minister during a time of great turmoil, both foreign and domestic, for Britain. Wilson stills holds the record for winning most general elections, four in total, and served as prime minister between 1964-70 and 1974-76.

Wilson joined the front benches as a fresh-faced technocrat in the post-war Atlee Shadow Cabinet, and slogged doggedly to prominence in the Labour Party. For more than a decade during the sixties and seventies he shaped the political weather and helped legalize abortion and homosexuality as well as outlawing capital punishment and founding the Open University, yet his name seems curiously omitted from Labour history if you listen to contemporary politicians. The achievements of Clement Atlee are widely celebrated while a former leader who is a lot more controversial than Mr. Wilson, Tony Blair, still looms large in the national debate.

It is a great shame that Mr. Pimlott is no longer with us, his honest and perceptive biography of Wilson paints the most accurate portrait to date. This new edition, published in 2016, features a foreword by Peter Hennessy that places Wilson’s life and works in a contemporary context. Or at least it did until the general election in early June of 2017 upended old truths about the electoral prospects of the Labour Party. I had thought that this review would be easier to write after the general election, instead it became a fiendishly difficult project. Mr. Corbyn’s success, who Mr. Hennessy comprehensibly thrashed in the foreword, while holding Wilson aloft as an example of a past grand master whose deft touch the Islington leftist sorely lacks, could mean that we are facing a watershed moment in British, as well as European, politics. Like Mr. Hennessey I firmly believe that we can learn a lot from Wilson, but perhaps not in the way he thought. To get to the root of this conundrum, and get the measure of this mammoth biography, a brief plunge into British history and the life of Harold Wilson is required.

Harold Wilson was born into a lower middle-class family in Yorkshire in 1916. His father, Herbert, was a chemist and his mother a housewife. The Wilsons were never rich, but through hard work and grit they managed to carve out a moderately prosperous life for themselves. Pimlott notes that Margaret Thatcher, born nine years later, was born too late to remember the harsh economic times that plagued the Wilsons during the post-World War I period. Wilson was a gifted and hardworking young man, and went on to win a scholarship to a grammar school before later attending Jesus College at the prestigious Oxford University. Wilson was only moderately engaged in politics during his studies at University, but later went on to do economic research regarding unemployment and the trade cycle for the progressive economist William Beveridge. During World War II Wilson served as a specialist in Whitehall, and after the war he served in the Atlee government as Secretary for Overseas Trade. Wilson’s background is important because it marks him as perhaps the most economically literate prime minister in British history.

The Atlee postwar Labour government has been widely celebrated by party historians as Labour’s finest hour, when landmark legislation was enacted which led to the creation of the Welfare State, with the NHS as the jewel in the crown. A couple of years in, however, the party leadership was increasingly demoralized and bereft of ideas. When Atlee suggested introducing some modest charges to the NHS to pay for increased military expenditure he soon had a cabinet rebellion on his hands. The Labour party, like most left of center parties in Europe, consists of a diverse coalition of social democrats and democratic socialists. As Pimlott notes repeatedly, the alchemy of the Labour party is especially volatile, some semblance of party unity is often necessary to achieve electoral success, and the task of keeping the party together is a difficult and thankless one. In the cabinet revolt that followed the defense spending row the leader of the Labour left, Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, a coalminer’s son who served as minister of health and had recently spearheaded the creation of the NHS, quit in protest. He received unexpected support from Wilson. Up until now Wilson had been regarded as a policy mandarin, not part of either the Labour left or the right. By swinging to the left to resign with Bevan, Wilson endeared himself to the left wing of the party, but it was widely assumed that his career was over.

This turned out not to be the case. Wilson soon returned to the Shadow Cabinet as the shadow chancellor, now under the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, a leader who belonged on the right wing of the Labour party. During the following years the Gaitskell right clashed repeatedly with the Bevanite left. Wilson, who was now regarded as a creature of the left, was distrusted by the right wing and Gaitskell regularly plotted do to away with him. Wilson did his best to keep his head down while connecting with the membership rank and file and digging his trench deep in the crimson soil of the party. After Gaitskell passed away due to a sudden illness, Wilson successfully ran for Labour leadership in 1963.

Wilson has consistently been accused of being a tactician with little overall strategy, but during the early sixties he cleverly and consistently maneuvered to position the Labour Party in such a way that it could become the natural party of government. Speaking during his first party conference, Wilson laid out a bold vision where Britain would be modernized in the “white heat of technology.” Wilson’s long-term plan was to link Labour in the minds of the electorate with modernity, meritocracy and economic planning. The last part of his vision was in vogue at the time, when the Soviet Union enjoyed strong growth, and is also a legacy of his earlier mentor William Beveridge. When the 1964 general election dawned, Britain had endured thirteen years of conservative rule. There was a widespread longing for something new, as well as a sense that British industry was becoming obsolete and needed to be modernized. The incumbent Tory prime minister, Lord Alex Douglas Home, who was the last to enjoy the distinction of being elected from the House of Lords, was a soft target for the quick witted, high-tech Wilson. In a commons debate Wilson called the hapless prime minister, who had admitted that he used matchsticks to think through economic problems, “the fourteenth lord Home”. A flabbergasted Douglas Home responded by saying that surely his opponent was the fourteenth Mr. Wilson, a jibe at his rural middle-class background.

Labour won the 1964 election on a promise to fundamentally reform and renew the British economy. After thirteen years in the wilderness, everything seemed to be going Labour’s way. The press liked Wilson, the public liked Wilson, the Labour left were overjoyed that they were no longer out in the cold and the right were in no position to oust him any time soon. The rosy mood of these early days contrast sharply with the bitterness and acrimony that were to haunt the later years of Wilson’s reign, and the disastrous wilderness years Labour endured during the eighties and nineties.

This was largely down to the fact that Wilson promised the world but failed to deliver on his radical promises. During his tenure as prime minister, Wilson had the misfortune of constantly being at the mercy of events outside his control. Britain’s decline from global empire to nation state within Europe meant that the pound was dangerously overvalued, and the economy was severely hamstrung as a result. Costly military bases maintained overseas certainly didn’t help either, even if they kept up the illusion that Britain was still a heavyweight global player.  

Even though a devaluation of the sterling was necessary, Wilson knew that it would be considered a betrayal against the country. Labour was especially vulnerable on this point, since they would be accused by the Tories of being Bolshevik spendthrifts and gravediggers of the empire if they dared to devalue. After a successful snap election in 1966 that increased Labour’s majority, the agony of a devaluation denied grew steadily worse. I have never read any book of any kind, including books about macroeconomic theory, where inflation gets such a prominent role. At the time it was the ghoul whose gnashing teeth that kept Wilson and his Chancellor, James “Jim” Callaghan, awake at night. Devalue and be crucified by press and public, or keep the bloated pound and condemn any dreams about the white heat of technology to the dustbin. Added to this misery were recurring problems with industrial relations, an issue you would think that a Labour government should be able to handle, but apparently, they were not. A white paper on industrial relations labelled In Place of Strife ironically caused massive strife between Wilson and the Unions, with the unfortunate side effect, from Wilson’s perspective, of strengthening Jim Callaghan’s relations with the Unions and making him a dangerous contender for the party leadership.

On the foreign policy front, the Vietnam War was raging in the Far East, and president Johnson, as well as many Tories, consistently pressured Wilson to send British troops to Vietnam. To Wilson’s immense credit he steadfastly refused to give in, and never sent a single British soldier to Vietnam. Even when dealing with a communist insurgency in the lush jungles of the Far East, the need for devaluation reared its ugly head. To keep the British economy above the waterline, Wilson was dependent on American largesse, which meant that he couldn’t condemn the war in public. This in turn meant that he was soon under attack from the student left for being soft on the Vietnam War, a smear that was extremely unfair. Another foreign policy hotspot was Rhodesia, a British colony in Africa that broke away in the 1960s and declared white minority rule. Wilson was equally unwilling to send troops to Rhodesia, a fact he loudly declared out of fear that, you guessed it, would impact on the sterling and lead to runaway inflation. He settled for sanctions instead, which British oil companies deftly bypassed with help from their French colleagues. It is a great shame that Tony Blair didn’t share Wilson’s wisdom in avoiding unwise foreign entanglements.

As the 1960s rolled on and the euphoria of Labour’s 1966 election success wore of, the Wilson administration became increasingly embattled. In 1967 the government finally devalued, a move that helped restore the balance of payments to a surplus two years later. On a televised broadcast shortly before the devaluation, Wilson made a disastrous gaffe when he assured the public that “the pound in your pocket” wouldn’t lose its value. Although he went on later in the speech to say that prices would rise, Wilson’s detractors merrily crowed about the “pound in your pocket” for the rest of his political career. The economy was shaky following devaluation, but started to improve leading up to the 1970 election, one that Labour unexpectedly lost. For Wilson, this was a grave setback, as it is believed he had planned to retire a year or two later and hand over the reins to a chosen successor. Instead he had to lead the Labour party in opposition, at a time when the question of whether or not Britain should join the EU (then called the European Community) was hotly debated. Wilson had tried to join the EU in 1967, but had been rebuffed by French president de Gaulle. The new prime minister, Edward “Ted” Heath finally led Britain into the EU in 1973. The Labour party was dangerously split on the issue of Europe, and it took all of Wilson’s political experience as well as his mastery of the art of managing Labour’s different ideological factions to keep the party together.

Under increasing pressure from militant trade unions, Heath called a general election in 1974, and lost. Wilson was back in office after four years in opposition. Pimlott writes that Wilson was by now a changed man, no longer the energetic modernizer he had been during his first tenure as prime minister. The post 1974 Wilson was content to delegate and let his by now competent and experienced ministers get on with their job. Having been on the front bench almost constantly since 1945, Wilson’s health had started to decline, which was one of the main factors behind his resignation in 1976. He was succeeded by Jim Callaghan, whose popularity plummeted catastrophically during the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. Callaghan was trounced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 election, and Labour spent the next 17 years in the political wilderness, riven by vicious internal strife.

Pimlott, who wrote Harold Wilson in the early nineties, looks back on the Wilson years with a healthy dose of forgiveness for all its shortcomings that the press did not feel at the time his resignation. Having experienced the success of Margaret Thatcher, the failure of Harold Wilson no longer feels so bad, he quotes one contemporary columnist. Unemployment was nearing one million when Wilson left office, which was considered dire at the time, but after Mrs. Thatcher that number had risen to three million. The fact that voters hadn’t rebelled en masse and the Tories were still in power at the time is something Pimlott seems to have found both disappointing and a bit depressing. Only a few years later, however, Labour under Tony Blair would go on to win a landslide victory in 1997, and today Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party looks like it could win a general election if and when Theresa May’s desperate coalition with the DUP collapses.

Harold Wilson is a very fascinating read. Pimlott paints a vivid picture of one of Britain’s great statesmen, as well as the history of the Labour Party and of the country itself. One gripe is that Pimlott assumes everyone is as knowledgeable of Labour Party history and Whitehall bureaucracy as himself, and doesn’t offer any explanations even when one might occasionally be needed. I recon myself to be fairly knowledgeable about British politics, yet I often had to go online and look things up. All in all, Harold Wilson is a fascinating biography, that succeeds in both illuminating the recent past as well as gifting its readers with a better understanding of issues that continue to be highly relevant to contemporary British politics, such as the internal strife of the Labour Party, Britain’s attitude to the EU and its need to find a new role for itself in a post imperial age.   

                   

    

                                                                   

Book Review - The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin

Book Review - The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin

By Roger Moorhouse

The Second World War is easily the most well-known conflict in human history. It was also the deadliest, with estimations of the total number of casualties running as high as eighty-five million people, including civilians. Most aspects of the war have been widely studied, yet historian Roger Moorhouse found to his chagrin that the non-aggression pact signed in August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union has largely been relegated to a footnote in history. It is often explained as merely a temporary convenience, as both sides were intent on going to war with one another, yet the pact lasted for nearly two years, during which Soviet raw materials fueled the Nazi war effort and German technological expertise enabled the Soviets to expand their industrial capacity. In The Devils’ Alliance, Mr. Moorhouse delves deeply into every aspect of the nonaggression-pact that shook the world, and tries to answer whether the pact was a temporary necessity born out of realpolitik or if, had the Germans not invaded the USSR during the spring of 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the war could have been radically different.

Germany, as Henry Kissinger helpfully pointed out in World Order (previously reviewed on this blog) has always suffered from being nestled smack bang in the middle of Europe, with potentially hostile nations to the east and west. In the eyes of the Western democracies, Adolf Hitler’s strategic position looked shaky during the build up to the war. Having agitated against the evils of communism for most of his political life, a détente between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seemed very unlikely. In the event of a conflict against Britain and France, Germany’s eastern flank would be terribly vulnerable against an opportunistic Soviet attack. The Nazi high command had also grasped this fact, however, and during the summer of 1939 a tentative dialogue was initiated between the two regimes. At the same time, Britain and France made an attempt to eke out a diplomatic agreement with the Soviets that was almost comical for its ineptness. Weeks before the pact with Nazi Germany was signed, a joint delegation led by a British admiral and a French general arrived in Moscow. They had crossed the Baltic on a decrepit old steamship, a journey that took the better part of six days, and upon their arrival in Moscow the soviets were annoyed that neither half of the Anglo-French duo had the authority to negotiate a robust deal. Moreover, Mr. Moorehouse notes drily that the British admiral, an aristocrat by the name of Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, was perhaps not ideally suited to rubbing shoulders and making small talk with the sons and daughters of a proletarian revolution.

In contrast to the allies quaint doddering, the Germans looked a much safer bet. Stalin had never held the Western democracies in very high regard. His suspicion is understandable given the fact that they had sent troops to fight against the Bolsheviks in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution. Merely a couple of days after talks with the British and French had broken down, the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, visited Moscow to much fanfare. A pact of non-aggression that included economic exchanged was signed between Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, on August the 23^rd. The pact became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and when it was signed Stalin declared a toast to the continued good health of the Führer. When news of the pact reached the West on the following day, it struck like a bombshell. At a stroke, this worsened the prospects for the English and the French. They could no longer hope for Soviet assistance in the event of a war breaking out, and the Americans were still firmly against being drawn into another European war.

The pact also included a secret clause that divided Poland between the two regimes. This secret clause came into effect a month later, when the Nazis invaded Poland and the Soviets followed suit a couple of weeks later. As Hitler’s panzers struck west to attack France the following year, Stalin was busy gobbling up the Baltic states to add their territory to the Soviet Union. When German soldiers marched into Paris during the summer of 1940, Britain had to come to terms with the lonely prospect of being the only major European country still standing against the Nazis. For Hitler, the war had so far gone spectacularly well, and Stalin was also mightily pleased with what the pact had helped him achieve.

Yet for all this superfluous bonhomie between the scum of the earth and the bloody assassin of the workers, the pact came with some obvious complications. For adherents to Communism or Nazism, a great deal of ideological acrobatics was now necessary to explain the new geopolitical circumstances. Communists all over Europe, who had for years been vehemently opposed to Nazi Germany, suddenly had to justify the necessity of a pact with their worst enemy. Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British communist party, refused to tow the Comintern’s line, and welcomed the British declaration of war against Germany. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter, but following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he regained his lost standing in the party. After the war the USSR saw fit to commemorate him with a postage stamp for leaning against the wind. For the Nazis, the pact was equally uncomfortable, not least because Hitler in his work, Mein Kampf, had railed against communism and declared that it needed to be exterminated from the face of the earth.

Such ideological conundrums could at first be brushed under the rug, both sides benefited from the mutual economic exchange, but it wasn’t long until tensions flared. Soviet delegations to German factories clutched long lists detailing the different schematics for various components they were interested in obtaining. The German’s soon got into the habit of keeping their more sensitive projects classified and tried to make sure that the Soviets only got to inspect older fighter planes and tanks that were scheduled for decommission. The shipments of raw materials they had been promised in return had a curious habit of almost drying up when Stalin didn’t think he needed the German’s goodwill. When the Germans were becoming seriously annoyed by this practice, Stalin decided it was time to turn on the taps. Russian cargo trains started rattling westwards laden with oil and wheat with startling alacrity. At a summit in Berlin in December 1940, when Molotov visited the capital to negotiate plans for a new phase of deeper cooperation, the talks did not go well. The rival delegations talked past each other, the Germans giving lofty declarations that they would carve up the world between them, while the Soviets were interested in more urgent matters such as the precis demarcation of territory in eastern Europe. Molotov left without anything of import having been decided, and the future of the pact did not look promising.

Yet for all this mutual mistrust Stalin had no wish to go to war in 1941, and he trusted that Hitler would honor his commitments. Even when German forces were massing on the Polish border during the months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin ordered that the raw materials should keep flowing and that everything should be done to appease Hitler. In the end, Hitler’s invasion ended the pact, which was pretty much the outcome that had been predicted in the West, but the short-lived treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union remains an interesting topic of academic study. As Mr. Moorehouse notes, Hitler and Stalin had a lot of similarities, and both seemed to mistrust the Western allies more than each other. Not the best foundation for building lasting cooperation perhaps, but that probably wasn’t what either side had in mind to begin with. For a more in depth look at the ambiguous relationship between Hitler and Stalin, and the events immediately preceding the invasion, I would recommend John Lukacs’s excellent June 1941: Hitler and Stalin.          

The Devils’ Alliance is a very interesting read and one that I would recommend for anyone with an interest in history and the Second World War. It delves into the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact from several angles, geo-political, economical and ideological, as Mr. Moorehouse walks the reader through the implications of perhaps the most shocking and unexpected diplomatic treaty signed during the Second World War.      

Book Review - 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed

Book Review - 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed

By Eric H. Cline

For the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, the late bronze age was a period of great prosperity. The Egyptians, the Minoans, the Hittites, the Babylonians and many other kingdoms flourished during this time. Their economies were based on extensive trade networks with their neighbors as well as far off lands, and they erected splendid palaces from which they governed their burgeoning realms. Conflicts flared up from time to time, but disputes could often be solved with diplomacy, and many diplomatic treaties of a sort that we would recognize today were signed during this time. By learning how to forge bronze, a new and miraculous super alloy, they could field standing armies equipped with powerful weapons as well as tools for construction and agriculture. Yet, for all their sophistication and splendor, these civilizations all went extinct, or were at least greatly reduced in stature, following tumultuous events that took place around the year 1177 B.C. Eric Cline, professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, draws on his deep knowledge of the era, as well as recent archeological evidence, in an attempt to sift through the ashes and explain what lay behind this calamity.

The dominant regional power during this time was Egypt, which during the 16^th to 11^th centuries B.C. enjoyed great wealth and power. It was they who most forcefully battled the sea peoples, a marauding and migrating group of individuals of unknown origin who swept through the eastern Mediterranean during this time. Historically they have been blamed for toppling the late Bronze Age civilizations, but according to Mr. Cline the blame cannot be placed squarely on their shoulders. It might even be the case that they simply moved into abandoned settlements after the original inhabitants were ravaged by some other, untold, calamity. What we know, or at least what we know with reasonable certainty, is that the sea peoples invaded Egypt in 1178 B.C., and that Pharaoh Rameses III led his armies to defeat the invaders in a brutal and hard-fought campaign. Egypt began a period of decline during Rameses’s reign, his martial successes notwithstanding. Technological sophistication and the bountiful harvests provided by the annual inundations of the river Nile could not stave off the deleterious effects of a collapsing trade network and mounting unrest in the region. One other potential victim of the sea peoples was the ancient city of Troy, made famous by Homer’s magnum opus, The Iliad.

In trying to explain what lay behind the collapse of 1177 B.C., Mr. Cline turns to the concept of complexity theory, which in essence means that an outcome can brought about by a combination of many different factors. Just like our modern stock market is affected by many events of seemingly trifle significance, so the interconnected civilizations of the late Bronze Age were all, to some extent, dependent upon each other. There is evidence showing that armed conflict, famine, uprisings, climate change and earthquakes happened in or around this region during this time. It is possible that a combination of these factors could have brought about enough turmoil and instability to cause the late Bronze Age civilizations to collapse. After all, a civilization could probably recover from the odd earthquake or band of marauders, but if enough of these adverse events happen in close succession to one another, the impact of each individual event increases in severity. This could quite possibly spark an existential crisis from which there is no coming back. No definitive answer is provided, and to be fair to Mr. Cline it is quite impossible to give one, but complexity theory gives a very plausible explanation for how this collapse of civilizations might have come to pass.  

When reading 1177, one cannot help but wonder how stable our twenty-first century society really is. Just like the civilizations of the late Bronze Age we are part of an interconnected global system of commerce and diplomacy. We may not be dependent on foreign shipments of copper and tin to make bronze, but we certainly rely on oil and natural gas to keep our economies going. When it comes to potential harbingers of collapse such as war, famine, climate change and rebellion, we sure seem to tick a lot of those boxes as well. If it’s any consolation to worried readers, the great systemic collapse of the late Bronze Age wasn’t entirely bad news. Like a forest fire clearing away dead trees to make way for new growth, the fall of the late Bronze Age civilizations paved the way for the subsequent Greek and Roman empires to flourish. Scant consolation perhaps, but it’s all I can offer.

As the late Gore Vidal once remarked, a novelist may assign a motive to the actions of historical characters, where a historian may not. Mr. Cline is a most dutiful historian in this regard, offering several plausible explanations for what brought about the collapse of the late Bronze Age Civilizations. The target segment of 1177 seems to primarily be those who are historians or archeologists, or the layman with a keen interest in the time period. Sometimes I wish that he would focus on the grander narrative instead of going on a lengthy explanation of a comb found in soil sample 7A next to a middle eastern dirt road, but a sweeping narrative is naturally the domain of historical fiction and not a respectable professor of classics and anthropology. Considering the limited archeological evidence on offer, it is impressive that he is able to tell such a dramatic story of conflict and international intrigue, the occasional mentioning of soil samples and sub-stratas notwithstanding. All in all, I enjoyed reading 1177 B.C due to the fascinating glimpses it offered into a bygone age and the educated speculation as to how such a calamity could have come to pass.