Book Review: The Romanovs 1613-1918

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

From cosmopolitan Saint Petersburg on the banks of the Neva to far off Vladivostok by the Japanese sea, Russia is a continent sized country that remains mysterious and inscrutable to most westerners. It stretches from Europe to the far east, a meeting point between east and west that has developed its own culture and is part of neither. For more than three hundred years Russia was ruled by a succession of tsars and tsarinas from the house of Romanov. In his latest book, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the tale of this dynasty from its first tsar, Michael, to the revolution in 1917 that toppled the regime of tsar Nicholas II.

To most people, Montefiore asserts in the introduction, the reign of the Romanovs probably conjures up images of the 1917 revolution, of failure, backwardness and brutality. All this is true, in one guise or another. But the saga of the house of Romanov is also one of success, of vast territorial expansion, of great military victories and the taming of an ancient and savage land. There were arguably many failed tsars and tsarinas, but there was also Peter the Great and Catherine the great, Alexander I who doggedly fought his way to Paris in 1814 and Alexander II who freed the serfs and nearly conquered Constantinople. Although Russia under the Romanovs wasn’t industrialized or modernized to the full extent that Western European nations were, the country changed irrevocably during three centuries of Romanov reign. The autocracy that Bolshevik revolutionaries toppled in 1917 was a hybrid mix of ancient customs and sleepy gubernias as well as rapid economic growth in fledgling industries supported by western expertize. Reading The Romanovs paints a picture of a reactionary monarchy adopting to modernity at a leisurely pace, either by sheer necessity or because of a fascination with the west.

The fist Romanov tsar, Michael, governed a country significantly smaller than today’s Russia, that was steeped in orthodox traditions. His noblemen, or boyars, wore long beards and flowing robes while their women were forced to wear a veil in public and live in specially appointed quarters of the house, not mixing with the menfolk. Moscow was called the new Jerusalem, and from this hallowed city the tsar wasn’t simply governing an offshoot of the true church but acting as a protector of orthodox Christianity. Like so often in its history, however, Russia was assailed by enemies from without who had access to more modern weapons and technology. Defeating the well drilled armies of Sweden and Poland was not possible at the time, so Michael opted for a peace treaty, which gave him time to focus on rebuilding his realm after many years of strife. Russia grew in influence under Michael and his son Alexis, but wasn’t respected by its neighbors as a great European power.

That changed when Peter the Great ascended to the throne in the 1680s.  Described by Montefiore as a “hyperactive despot”, Peter was determined to modernize Russia and make sure his country was afforded the respect it deserved. An eccentric, larger than life character, Peter’s court contained more debauchery than all Game of Thrones episodes combined. Carriages transporting guests to lavish parties were drawn by bears and army of dwarves was made to wear ridiculous costumes while amusing the court with a song and dance routine. The partying was so intense that some of Peter’s closest advisors later died from liver failure. Alchoholism, as Montefiore asserts, seems to be very much a Russian national pastime. During the Great Northern war of 1700-1721, Russia asserted its supremacy at the cost of the declining Swedish Empire and the harried Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At long last Russia was no longer regarded by the European nations as a backward rural cousin. Even if he succeeded in raising Russia’s prestige on the international stage, Peter failed to achieve domestic harmony, and had long been distrustful of his eldest son’s deeply held orthodox conservatism. When he suspected his heir was hatching a plot to overthrow him, he was arrested and tortured, before he died in captivity shortly thereafter.    

The next significant stage of Russian expansion came under the reign of Catherine II, who ascended to the throne roughly forty years after Peter’s death. When the young Prussian princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg came to Russia to marry the future tsar Peter III, she sensibly changed her name to the shorter and more Russian sounding Catherine, and set about learning the language that her new countrymen spoke. Most Romanov marriages weren’t particularly happy or amicable, as Montefiore notes, and the union between Catherine and Peter was no exception. Her husband was an ardent Prussophile, who opposed the war that Russia was waging against Frederick II. Even though the Russians had the upper hand by the time he became tsar, he immediately sued for peace with his childhood hero. Frederick, who couldn’t believe his good fortune, naturally accepted the suggestion of an alliance between Prussia and Russsia. On the homefront, Peter was a reasonably well liked and capable ruler, who instigated some needed reforms. Nevertheless, he was ousted by a military coup d’etat led by Catherine less than a year into his reign. Clad in military uniform, Catherine led the guards regiment to overthrow her husband and seize power. Her reign is widely regarded by historians as a high point for imperial Russia. Her armies conquered Poland, Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, while Catherine herself reigned as an enlightened monarch, inspired by the ideals of continental radicals like Voltaire.  She recognized serfdom as an unnecessary evil, yet she never went so far as to actually free her peasants from their feudal yoke. In order for Catherine to rule with vim and push, she had to be constantly in love, and took a string of paramours during her reign. The most notable being the dashing and highly intelligent cavalry officer Grigory Potemkin, whom she later named viceroy of Novorossiya, modern day Ukraine.

When Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, possibly an even bigger Prussohpile than his father, storm clouds gathered over Europe. It was a time of revolution, and the tentative start of the age of industry. A moral conservative who probably wished he had been born a German instead, Montefiore notes that Petersburg under Paul started to look like a German hamlet from the seventeenth century instead of the fashion forward modern city it had been during Catherine’s reign. The consummate armchair general, Paul knew what was best for the Russian military despite not knowing anything about the military. Wearing an elaborate uniform, he took part in daily military parades where he publicly humiliated and admonished the nobles who displeased him. Needless to say, Paul was murdered in a coup d’état a few years later and his son, Alexander, succeeded him. 

Mysterious and underrated by history, the first half of Alexander’s reign came to be dominated by a Corsican artillery officer whose lightning rise had made him the master of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte. As Napoleon’s Grande Armée tore through Europe, Alexander took part in a series of coalitions with the other great powers of Europe, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain, to thwart the burgeoning French empire. Initially, these efforts were somewhat of a failure as Alexander, eager for glory, ignored the advice of his one-eyed but redoubtable commander, Mikhail Kutuzov. Instead of retreating before the French advance, Alexander was determined to defeat Napoleon’s army. The ensuing battle of Austerlitz, that took place in December 1805, was Napoleon’s greatest triumph, outnumbered and outgunned, he managed to defeat the combined armies of Austria and Russia. After defeating Prussia in detail and inflicting another crushing defeat on Russia during the battle of Friedland in 1807, Napoleon was the master of Europe. The only thing that could bring him down by this stage was an invasion of Russia and a subsequent march on Moscow. This looked unlikely, but as Leonid Tolstoy observed in War and Peace, a scorpion has to sting. Angered by Alexander refusing to take part in his blockade of British trade, Bonaparte invaded Russia in 1812. At first things went well enough for the Grande Armée, but when fall turn to winter, the tables were turned on the French. After enduring the humiliation of abandoning Moscow and watching Napoleon burn the capital, subzero temperatures handily saw off the Grande Armée. Two years later Alexander rode into Paris at the head of his army and doffed his bicorne hat at blushing French ladies.  His quiet but dogged determination had helped him steer Russia through a dire national crisis and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Alexander’s reign represents the final successful chapter of Romanov saga. According to Montefiore, it was all downhill from that point. Popular unrest grew steadily as the Russian people demanded liberty and relief from harsh working conditions. Occasionally they got some reforms, but even the attempts of Alexander II to bring liberal Western values to Russia failed. Although he freed the serfs from their ancient bonds of servitude, this was too little too late. And it wasn’t just their social policies that were antiquated.  When it came to technology and industry, Russia was pretty much on the back foot throughout the nineteenth century. Nicholas I was jolted out of his lifelong obsession with military parades and gaudy uniforms when Russian armies were soundly thrashed by the French and British during the Crimean war. Heartbroken that his military was hopelessly obsolete and his life’s work had all been for nothing, he fell ill and died before Russia was forced to sue for a humiliating peace. Losing wars to more technologically advanced nations soon became a regular occurrence, with the occasional triumphant skirmish in the Caucasus restoring some miniscule amount of prestige to Russian arms. The last tsar, Nicholas II, suffered a humiliating defeat against Japan in the Russo-Japanese war, before he was defeated once more by the German Empire during World War I. This latest military debacle, combined with food shortages and dire conditions for workers, led to uprisings and eventually a Bolshevik revolution that was to cost Nicholas not just his throne but also his life. The tsar and his family were arrested by Bolshevik soldiers and executed by a firing squad in 1918. Rumors abound of how one of their daughters, Anastasia, survived, but those who long for the return of the Romanovs shouldn’t hold their breath. The old Russia of the tsars was transformed into a worker’s paradise, small hamlets and onion shaped domes replaced by steel plants and brutalist apartment blocks.

In The Romanovs, Montefiore gives a detailed account of the imperial family’s three centuries long reign. Interspersed with matters of state are more personal accounts of the sovereigns’ private lives that makes you feel like a trusted courtier at the Winter palace, observing the imperial spectacle first hand. Like the best Russian novels, The Romanovs has more characters than you can possibly be expected to remember and ends in abject tragedy. I would recommend it heartily.  

Book Review: Breaking Rockefeller, the incredible story of the rivals who toppled an oil empire

By Peter B. Doran

Any economist worth his salt will tell you that our economy is built around fossil fuels. If the price of oil goes up, the price of everything else goes up as well. Despite all the talk about a low-carbon economy being just around the corner, our society is still reliant on a small number of oil producing countries in South America and the Middle East. A sound grasp of energy policy is of paramount importance if one wishes to understand the global economy, yet I would wager that few know the history of the oil industry, let alone how the precious black liquid that gives us respiratory disease and makes our planet increasingly less habitable is extracted from the ground. In Breaking Rockefeller Peter Doran tells the story of how a pair of swashbuckling entrepreneurs joined forces during the early twentieth century to dethrone one of the richest men who ever lived and change the petroleum industry forever.

When oil wells were discovered in the US Midwest during the nineteenth century, it triggered an oil rush where countless fortunes were made and many more were lost. Boomtowns sprung up virtually overnight, where the usual assortment of con men, fortune tellers and prostitutes suckled from the teat of low grade kerosene.  No one disliked this heady euphoria more than a soft-spoken accountant named John D. Rockefeller from Richmond, New York. As a young man, he travelled to ramshackle boomtowns like Titusville in Pennsylvania, and learned firsthand about the conditions for oil men on the ground. Gifted with a knack for business that bordered on genius, he drew two important conclusions that eventually made him the wealthiest man in the world. Firstly, that crude was worthless unless it had been refined, and whoever controlled the refineries was in command of a vital chokepoint that the entire industry relied on. Secondly, that by exercising monopoly power he could eliminate “wasteful” competition that drove down prizes and hurt profits. During the following decades he went about acquiring several oil refineries and rigged the marked in his favor by collaborating with railroad magnates to suppress his competition. Those who refused to pay fealty to Standard Oil were subjected to savage prize wars that Rockefeller’s multi headed hydra could endure but mom and pop oil producers could not. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Rockefeller dominated the global petroleum industry from Standard Oil’s monolithic headquarters on 26 Broadway in New York. From his swiveled chair in the boardroom, he looked down on twin rows of formerly mighty oil magnates who payed fealty to him like cowering satraps.

Meanwhile, in London ‘s bustling Houndsditch, an enterprising merchant by the name of Marcus Samuel had made himself a fortune selling mementoes and gifts adorned with seashells to vacationing brits. His business, the Shell transport and trading company, had come a long way since those early days, and his business interests now spanned the globe. Marcus was a hard working businessman with an eye for making a good deal, and when great quantities of viscous black oil suitable for kerosene was discovered in Baku, Samuel was not about to miss out on the action. His contacts in the far east would gladly buy as much kerosene as he could bring them, but this would not be easy. Since the oil tankers of his day were little more than barges filled with highly flammable liquid, and sailors liked to enjoy a cigarette or two after a stressful day of sailing, oil tankers were barred from passing through the Suez Canal. This meant that Marcus’s kerosene had to sail halfway around the world reach his prospective buyers in the far east, and the increased costs this entailed meant there was no way he could compete with Standard Oil. In a brilliant example of disruptive technology, that gadfly word we read in management journals but no one really understands, Samuel hired the best and brightest engineers to manufacture a new kind of oil tanker, one that was safe enough to traverse the Suez Canal. This revolutionary new supertanker included many safety features that had never before been incorporated on a seagoing vessel, and their basic design is similar to what you would find on today’s oil tankers. His new fleet enabled Samuel to transport kerosene to his eastern markets at competitive prices and compete with Standard Oil.

On the wind-swept island of Sumatra, the Royal Dutch Oil Company was in a bind. Their existing oil wells were running dry, and to stay in business they needed to find a new well as soon as possible. The inhospitable climate meant that equipment was soon corroded with rust, thick mud impeded transportation and a host of exotic diseases culled the workforce at an alarming rate. It was a sign of the company’s desperation that they abandoned the tried and true method of simply digging into the ground at random and hoping to strike an oil well, and instead turned to a team of geologists. During the early twentieth century, any bare breasted oilman would have scoffed at the ridiculous notion of sending out scientist to discover oil, but this time it worked, and Royal Dutch was saved from bankruptcy when the geologists uncovered a vast new well. Henceforth, scientific methods would play a big role in finding new reserves of oil.

The growing number of gasoline powered cars meant that kerosene was no longer the most prized petroleum commodity. For Royal Dutch, this meant that the useless transparent liquid they used to dump in abandoned quarries and light on fire was now worth holding on to. When an energetic young man named Henri Deterding assumed control of Royal Dutch in 1900, their new Sumatran oil wells were overflowing with petrochemical bounty and the future of the company looked bright.

Meanwhile, in the United States, public opinion turned against the towering monopolies, so called trusts, that dominated the American economy. Legendary progressive journalist Ida Tarbell ran several exposes on Standard Oil’s questionable business practices that led to a growing clamor to break up the company. Behind a seemingly impenetrable wall of carefully concealed secrets and bolstered by an army of lawyers, Rockefeller and his directors prepared themselves for a lengthy siege.

At the height of his mercantile powers Marcus Samuel could have engineered a joint venture with Royal Dutch that was hugely beneficial to his own business, but poor judgement meant that he squandered his chance to make the deal of a lifetime. His work at Shell was soon overshadowed by his wish to climb the social ladder. Serving as the mayor of London and receiving a baronetcy meant that he started to manage his business poorly. He soon became easy pray for the dynamic Deterding, who exploited Samuels vulnerability once Shell started going into the red, and forced him to sign a merger deal that consigned the former seashell merchant into a largely ceremonial role. The newly formed Royal Dutch Shell, the company that me and you would call Shell, whose crimson seashell now adorns countless gas stations, was born.

This merger was a threat to Standard Oil, but according to Doran, Rockefeller could probably have fended them of if his business wasn’t fighting a protracted legal battle against the federal government at the same time. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had to be broken up. The Standard Oil trust was duly chopped up into thirty-four smaller pieces, several of which, like Chevron and Exxon, remain in business today. For an in depth look at the heady days of the so called progressive era, I recommend that you read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s splendid The Bully Pulpit, previously reviewed on this blog, but it is sufficient to say that this was heralded as a triumph of the ordinary man against the omnipotent trusts. In reality, Standard Oil’s regional departments were able to weather the storm since they were well stocked with hidden capital and assets. Like the reinforced bulkheads between the separate compartments on Marcus Samuel’s oil tankers, the individual pieces of Standard Oil swiftly became highly profitable. As a matter of fact, Rockefellers own vast fortune grew larger after the carve-up. Despite this, Standard Oil’s dominion over the global petroleum marked was broken and the oil business looked vastly different from the way it had done a decade before The Standard was split up.

Mr. Doran tells the tale of these tumultuous, petroleum soaked times with a sure grasp of the facts, which he manages to present in a way that is digestible for the layman. Breaking Rockefeller is very well written and at times it feels as much of a page turner as a bestselling novel. The cast is full of eccentric and memorable characters and the dramatic plot gives an insight into how the fate of the global economy became intertwined with the market price of crude oil. As Doran himself notes at the end, the future of the energy industry is uncertain and nothing can be known for sure other than that we are probably going to be using oil for the foreseeable future. After reading Breaking Rockefeller I would wager that the landscape of tomorrow’s energy market will be decided by a combination of technological advances and tally ho entrepreneurs with an eye out for making a deal. 

                                                                                         

           

                           

Book Review: Red Plenty

By Francis Spufford

Today it is hard for most people to imagine our economy being organized according to anything but a capitalist system. We take the miracle of the marketplace for granted, and millennials like myself don’t remember a time when America and the West competed against the Soviet Union to see who could produce the most prosperous society. During the famous “kitchen debate” in 1959, when the economies of both the United States and the USSR were growing at a rapid pace, Nikita Khrushchev debated Vice President Nixon in an exhibition hall that showcased the wide range of consumer goods available to the ordinary American worker. The challenge for Khrushchev, was to provide the average soviet citizen with the same abundance that the Americans enjoyed, but achieve this through the means of a planned economy instead of one based on supply and demand. Having suffered more than any other nation in a devastating war that nearly tore the world asunder, and having weathered brutal purges where untold millions died of starvation or in labor camps, the USSR now finally had a chance to leave hardship behind and become the worker’s paradise that it was always supposed to be. With every factory run by the government, centralized and efficient, Soviet citizens would soon be drinking the sweet nectar of mass produced consumer goods from the horn of plenty.  

Red Plenty has the unusual distinction of being a book that doesn’t fall into any particular genre. While this may seem a bit eccentric and weird, I assure you that whether it’s fiction, non-fiction or a bit of both, it’s one of my best reads this year. Where Western tales often transport us to a faraway place in another land, Russian folk tales, or skazki, always take place in a kingdom that any Russian peasant would vaguely recognize. The characters may be invented, but their names sound comfortingly Russian. There is an abundance of food on everyone’s table, which in itself would have seemed like science fiction to any medieval Russian, but the food is the kind that they would have recognized. A skazki takes place in a world that is similar to the Russia that they know, only a bit more photogenic and less full of coal dust and famine. Red Plenty can best be described as a modern day skazki, telling a tale of a kingdom that closely resembles the Soviet Union during the twentieth century, and portraying a moment in history when it seemed that a Communist planned economy would soon produce Ilyushin jet planes that flew truer than any Boeing, as well as vintage upon vintage of Romanian champagne more flavorful than Krug or Möet. 

The plot of Red Plenty is loosely centered around the ideas of an imaginary Soviet mathematician, who figures out a revolutionary way to increase the efficiency of state production, or at least that is what he thinks he is doing. These bold reforms then travel through a sluggish bureaucracy and impacts Soviet society on every level. The story is told through the eyes of a loosely collected cast of characters who inhabit every rung of the social ladder, from leading scientists and politicians to shady fixers and local part apparatchiks. These characters are themselves intriguing and colorful, but I get the sense that the story isn’t really about any of them. Just like the impersonal and monolithic Soviet Union, where individualism was strictly frowned upon, the main character is the society that they inhabit, its potential, ideals and aspirations as well as its cruelty and lack of respect for human lives. The Soviet Union was an inscrutable realm full of seemingly impossible contradictions, a place where logic reigned supreme and everything was about the common good, yet the liberty and happiness of the individual was of scant importance, and Red Plenty magnifies these contradictions to brilliant dramatic effect.

What a great shame then, that the continent sized country that promised to turn itself into a paradise on earth never lived up to its promise. At the beginning of the story the economy is humming along with record growth, and the Americans are wondering if they should be worried, yet by the late nineteen seventies Soviet production is caught in a spiral of diminishing returns, the red colossus unable to provide adequately for its citizens and at the same time maintain a military powerful enough to compete with the Western alliance. The worker’s paradise has turned into a nightmare, where perfectly fine raw materials are being ruined by being turned into a tractor that nobody wants, which will spend the rest of its days rusting away ignominiously on a field in Kazakhstan. The reign of terror and potato shortages that Khrushchev dreamed of supplanting with a contented land that enjoyed a surfeit of goods is gliding inevitably down a slippery slide, in the process of reverting to the place that a Russian peasant had to live in when the skazki had been told and the embers of the bonfire withered out.             

Most fairytales are about a prince rescuing a princess, not a mathematician with an idea about increasing industrial productivity by three percent, yet Red Plenty is easily one of the best fairytales I have ever read. The fact that Francis Spufford teaches writing at Goldsmiths College in England seems obvious when you delight in how well written the book is. He has a sure grasp of the writer’s art, and has done extensive research in order to write his eccentric almost-fairytale. Red Plenty is one of the best and most thought provoking books I have had the pleasure of reading in a long time. It may not belong in any recognizable genre, but trust me, it’s all the better for it. 

Book Review: Diana, Closely Guarded Secret

By Ken Wharfe, with Robert Jobson

When Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in an automobile accident in Paris in 1997, her loss was felt keenly all over the world. Just as they had on the night of her death, the media were in a frenzy, and the now infamous tunnel in central Paris was on the front page of every newspaper. Known as the people’s princess, for her ability to empathize with the downtrodden, her many charities, her great beauty and her innate sense of style, the Princess of Wales has remained an object of public fascination, and much has been written about her. Diana: Closely Guarded Secret is unique in the sense that it offers a very candid personal account of the last years of the princess’s life, and the book caused quite a stir when it was first published in 2002. A revised and expanded second edition was published this year, in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Princess’s death.

Diana: Closely Guarded Secret was written as a response to what Mr. Wharfe perceived as an attempt by certain parts of the establishment to smear Diana’s memory and drag her name through the mud after her death. Her bitter and drawn-out divorce from Charles, the Prince of Wales, and her determination to champion sensitive causes such as HIV/AIDS, as well as her outsized public profile, were causing discomfort in lofty circles. Mr. Wharfe’s book tells the story as he himself saw it, and leaves nothing out, Diana’s good sides as well as her bad ones are all in there, and it is up to the readers themselves to decide what the Princess of Wales was like, after having seen all sides of her complex and fascinating character.        

Inspector Ken Wharfe, who served as Diana’s personal protection officer from 1987 to 1993, came to know his charge well during the almost seven-year long period they spent together. A personal protection officer (PPO) from the Scotland Yard’s Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department is no mere bodyguard like the muscled brutes who shove pop stars into their limousines or the heavily armed Secret Service agents who guard the president. Mr. Wharfe clearly has a great sense of pride when he tells of how every PPO is trained to protect their charges no matter what situation they may find themselves in. The tools of their trade consists mainly of information and communication, to be able to keep out of trouble and keep diplomats and royalty safe with a minimum of fuss. They must be able to blend in seamlessly wherever their charges go, therefore they wear tailored suits and smoking jackets, with their sidearm concealed in a special holster that doesn’t create an unseemly bulk. In other words, a PPO needs to have the concentration and martial prowess of a special forces operative as well as the suaveness of Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me.  

Naturally, guarding one of the most recognizable and popular celebrities in the world was often a quite glamorous assignment, but Mr. Wharfe originally got the job after he had proved himself guarding the Waleses two young sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. The two young boys came to form an affectionate bond with their protection officer over the years that followed, and Mr. Wharfe was often involved in their pranks and bouts of spirited fisticuffs. Mr. Wharfe recalls how, when staying at Prince Charles’s summer retreat, Highgrove, they would knock on his door and one of them would proceed to ask in a mischievous voice if he wanted to fight. The next moment they would surge into his room and throw themselves at him, forcing him to protect his vital parts as the punches rained down upon him. Diana once asked him to take her sons with him to the Scotland Yard firing range and let them hone their marksmanship, an excursion that the two boys enjoyed mightily. They were both capable shots, but Harry in particular was a highly adept marksman, even at so young an age. He credits Diana with giving the boys a grounded upbringing and helping to raise them into two fine young fellows, who will be able to carry the monarchy into the twenty-first century.

During the first years as Diana’s PPO, the state of the Waleses marriage was not known to the public, but the palace staff knew that something was amiss. After having been married in a fairy tale wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, the pair had started to drift apart in the years that followed. A contributing factor to this estrangement was the fact that Charles kept seeing his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, after he had been married to Diana. The Prince of Wales himself maintains that he only resumed his acquaintance with Camilla after his marriage with Diana had reached breaking point. Even though she regularly attacked her husband for his infidelity, Diana herself had a string of lovers during the course of her marriage. It was Mr. Wharfe’s job to make sure that his charge was kept safe at all times, his job was not to pass judgement, and he even stayed with Diana and one of her longtime lovers, a dashing army officer, in the countryside cottage where they would spend many weekends together. It is true that Charles and Camilla were sometimes less than fully discreet when choosing their rendezvous, but Mr. Wharfe points out that the Prince of Wales should not be seen as callous or heartless. He is a compassionate and thoughtful person, and his charity, the Prince’s Trust, has helped thousands of young people escape poverty and drug abuse over the years.        

Naturally, having to play the role of the dutiful wife while her marriage was crumbling wasn’t easy for Diana, and at times she was under considerable psychological strain, but Mr. Wharfe steadfastly denies those who would question the state of her mental health during this period. She did an incredible job copying with the demands of her station and raising her two young boys while maintaining her marriage during a difficult time. Anyone would have had trouble keeping up a public façade in such a difficult situation, he maintains.

That nature of Mr. Wharfe’s job meant that he witnessed many deeply personal moments in the princess’s life, and was a trusted voice during the difficult times she went through. Getting away from the stresses of her marriage and a feverish press-corps was essential to allow Diana to recharge and spend quality time with her boys. The task of arranging such getaways, and maintaining a low-key but effective security, fell on Mr. Wharfe’s shoulders. The Princess was particularly fond of Necker Island, the private retreat of billionaire businessman and entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. She visited the island several times together with her friends and family, but its remote location was not a deterrent for the paparazzi. The moment they learned that she was staying at the island, they would rent a ramshackle collection of small boats and descend upon the island like a fleet of buccaneers. It seems incredulous that their entourage did not include a press officer, as the task of negotiating a truce with the paparazzi was sometimes carried out by Mr. Wharfe. The procedure was simple, in exchange for a few days of peace and quiet, a photoshoot would be arranged where the princess and her children would frolic on the beach, while the paparazzi were given ample opportunity to take their pictures. This worked surprisingly well on many occasions, but Mr. Wharfe had some explaining to do to his superiors when they returned home. Once, when they thought the paparazzi were getting a bit close to Necker Island, Prince William and Prince Harry used makeshift catapults to lob water balloons into the encroaching skiffs with great success, a feat that delighted all of them, including their mother, to no end.               

During the waning years of her marriage with Charles, Diana devoted herself to growing her profile as a philanthropist and goodwill ambassador. Her stature was great, but Mr. Wharfe argues that she may have been overly optimistic when she expected to carry on as before after her divorce, when she would no longer be married to the heir to the throne. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that the rest of “The Firm”, as the British monarchy is referred to, were not entirely pleased with Diana trying to establish a rival power base. The monarchy has since then been forced to modernize and adapt to the modern world, a change that Mr. Wharfe credits Diana with bringing about. This did not come easy, however, as her devotion to shining a light on those afflicted by HIV/AIDS, a feared diseased and a highly controversial topic at the time, wasn’t looked upon kindly by everyone in the Palace hierarchy.

It is clear that Mr. Wharfe considers himself and his former colleagues at the Scotland Yard to be the finest bodyguards in the world, and it is equally clear how little he thinks of the security detail that was responsible for Diana on the night of her death. Given the fact that he protected Diana for many years without her getting as much as a scratch, and the fact that her protection team on that fateful night in Paris had only been in charge of her security for a couple of weeks, I can understand his frustrations. Mr. Wharfe, like many others, believes that her death could have been avoided, and pulls no punches when he dissects the events of that fateful night. Tensions with the paparazzi were already running high before Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, left the hotel, and the driver was far above the legal drinking limit when he got behind the wheel. He and Dodi then egged each other on and attempted to outrun the paparazzi, which was foolish and irresponsible, argues Mr. Wharf. The last thing he would wish, however, is that Diana is only remembered for the circumstances of her death and the marital turmoil that preceded it.  She may have been hard to deal with at times, but throughout her life the Princess of Wales reached out to the most vulnerable and downtrodden in society, making sure the direness of their plight was heard by all. Her determination to make the most out of each and every day inspired those around her, and her great sense of humor and mischief made sure that there was hardly a dull moment for those around her. Reading between the lines, that is how Mr. Wharfe would like his former charge to be remembered, not as a saintly character placed on a pedestal or an out of touch diva, but as someone whose empathy and down to earth manners truly embodied the epithet the people’s princess. 

Book Review: The Greatest Knight, The Remarkable Tale of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English thrones

By Thomas Asbridge

In 1861, a young French scholar named Paul Meyer attended an auction at Sotheby’s in London. On sale were a collection of rare medieval texts that had not been read for hundreds of years. Meyer, who was presumably feeling like a kid in a candy shop, was amazed by the rich scholarly material on offer. Of particular interest was an ancient tome which seemed unassuming at first but appeared to contain the biography of a previously unknown medieval knight. Unfortunately, it was sold to an eccentric collector and disappeared into the labyrinthine depths of his poorly catalogued collection. It wasn’t until two decades later that Meyer, by this time a distinguished academic, managed to recover the manuscript. The contents of its musty pages exceeded his wildest expectations, as it chronicled the highly eventful life of William Marshal, a legendary knight who served as the regent of England and helped issue the Magna Carta. The manuscript gave a fascinating glimpse into the life of a knight during a time where few historical sources existed, and has fascinated scholars ever since. The Greatest Knight is the tale of William Marshal’s life, a man who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most powerful knights of the realm and, during the course of his long life, served five English monarchs.

William was born into a tumultuous time, when the aristocracy had plunged the nation into civil war as the empress Matilda (she had previously been married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, thereby the title, England never had an emperor) led a revolt against the deeply unpopular King Stephen. The English people suffered great hardship as the war grew long and bitter. In fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if King Stephen had been more competent, but in the words of medieval scholar Walter Map he was “…of notable skill in arms, but in other things almost an idiot”.  Among those whose fortunes were laid low by the war was William’s father, John, a minor nobleman who backed Empress Matilda and drew King Stephen’s ire. He was forced to hand over his son as a hostage in order to guarantee his good behavior. This meekness turned out to be short lived, and when William’s father once more defied the king, he threatened to have his young son executed. This didn’t trouble John awfully much, as he let it be known that, should he lose one son, he had the anvils and hammers to forge even finer ones. By the standards of modern parenting, this might seem harsh, and Asbridge speculates that this could have had an adverse psychological impact on the young William, but luckily for him, the almost an idot king had a big heart. He could not bring himself to kill the young boy, and decided to let him live.

This royal clemency allowed a twelve-year-old William to travel to Normandy and learn a knight’s trade from his mother’s cousin, a renowned lord named William of Tancarville. Our William quickly showed an appetite for swordplay and jousting. When Flanders invaded upper Normandy, he got his first taste of action and was knighted during that same campaign. A few years later he left the Tancarville household he took up jousting full time, where he quickly made a name for himself. According to Asbridge, jousting matches during the early medieval period wasn’t as organized as they later came to be. When I mention jousting, you might picture the extravagant and chivalrous displays where one knight charges against another while assorted nobility regard the proceedings from a nearby stand. Back in the twelfth century, however, jousting mostly involved rivaling packs of armed and dangerous young men with some form of lineage meeting up on a dusty field and trying to take one another captive for ransom. In fact, a recurring theme in The Greatest Knight is that during Marshal’s lifetime the very notions of knighthood and chivalry were being defined for future generations of knights, who would look back upon this time as a lost golden age. Much like Marion Cotillard’s character in Midnight in Paris who looked back wistfully on la belle epoque. Success on the jousting fields of Europe earned William fame, practice in the ways of war, and money from the captives he ransomed.

After King Stephen died of natural causes, which in itself is miraculous when you consider how unpopular he was and how many would have wanted to murder him, he was succeeded by Henry II. His long reign was a time of relative peace and prosperity for England, and Henry is one of the key figures who came to determine many of the events in William’s life. When Henry II needed an accomplished knight who could tutor his young son, also named Henry, he chose William Marshal. William was only a few years younger than his ward, and the two of them soon started to become a regular fixture at the tournament field. They both enjoyed crossing lances and partying, and we are given the impression that their relationship was an amicable one. The relationship Henry the boy king had with his father was unfortunately a lot less amicable. After having crowned his son king while he himself was still alive, in order to avoid a messy succession after his death, Henry the younger was constantly frustrated with his father’s inability to share power and wealth. His extravagant living meant that he was often short of money, something which his father proved unwilling to lavish upon him in sufficient quantity. This festering antagonism eventually led to a revolt against his father, but Henry II moved with customary ruthlessness to check his son’s ambitions. Richard II came to outlive his son, who died suddenly of illness aged twenty-eight. 

After returning from a trip to the holy land, William served the old king during the final years before his death in 1189, when he was succeeded by his second son, Richard. The new sovereign honored the promises that Richard II had made to William, and allowed him to marry Isabel of Clare in the same year. He was 49, she was 17, but the marriage was by all accounts a happy one despite the age difference, which wasn’t in any way uncommon at the time. His marriage also granted him large estates in England, Wales, Normandy and Ireland.

When Richard, later to be known as The Lionheart, departed for the holy land in 1190 in order to wage a crusade, William was thrown into the thick end of politics, serving in the council of regency which looked after the realm in the king’s absence. William was by now one of the most influential men in the realm, and had to tread carefully around the king’s paranoid younger brother, John. When The Lionheart returned from his not very successful crusade, which had failed its chief objective of taking Jerusalem, he directed his considerable talent for waging war against the French instead. The Lionheart and William Marshal made a formidable team, and cut a bloody swathe through the French. The fact that Normandy doesn’t belong to England anymore can be attributed to Richard’s untimely death, killed by a stray crossbow bolt when besieging a castle in northern France.

When you realize that no English king since has been called John, it tells tells you all you need to know about the man who succeeded Richard I. If King John sounds familiar it is probably because he is the unpopular and cruel king who reigns when the saga of English highwayman bandit Robin Hood is said to have taken place. The Lionheart may not have had much time to spare for modernizing agricultural production or building new works of infrastructure, but as a general and commander in-chief he was only matched by the great Saladin. His successor, however, soon acquired the unfortunate nickname “Softsword”, as his brother’s hard won gains gradually slipped away and the great Angevin empire that Henry II and Richard I had built started to come apart. Palace intrigue during the time of King John was rife with suspicion and paranoia and William, although he was a shrewd diplomat most of the time, choose to turn most of his attention to the west, to his wife’s ancestral lands in Ireland. One might think that King John wouldn’t mind his adventures on the Emerald Isles, but the king had long eyed Ireland as his own sphere of influence and his natural suspicion towards anyone made him restless of William’s intentions. The rest of King John’s reign after William had headed west was quite similar to what had happened up to that point, that is, everything was a complete shambles. When the noblemen of the realm rose in revolt against their reviled king, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Many western historians look to this “great charter” as one of the high points of western civilization, and it did have some good bits in it to be sure, but Asbridge downplays this document somewhat and points out the fact that it was soon broken by King John, who probably never intended to keep his word.

When the very unpopular and much reviled king died from dysentery in 1216, England was plunged into chaos once more and the Angevin empire that William had loyally served throughout his life teetered on the brink. He was named protector of John’s young heir, Henry III, and devoted considerable energy to stabilizing the realm. Despite the fact that he was now in his seventies, William was bestowed with the energy of a man half his age, and even took to the field of battle at the siege of Lincoln, where he defeated the forces of the French king and the nobles supporting his rival claim to the throne. After a subsequent peace accord was signed, William had saved the Angevin realm and his young charge, King Henry III, was to have a long and prosperous reign.

William Marshal lived a life that was far longer and more adventurous than most of his contemporaries, but in 1219, aged 72, his health failed him and he died from a sudden illness surrounded by his family. Not many knights died peacefully in bed, and fewer still served five monarchs during the course of their life. William’s legacy helped shape the England we know today and he remains the perfect representation of the medieval ideas of chivalry. He lies buried in London’s Temple Church, should you wish to pay a visit, and his statue stands next to the throne reserved for the royal sovereign in the house of lords.

The Greatest Knight offers a rich and nuanced glimpse of England during the early middle ages and the life of one of the greatest defenders of that realm. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in history. It was an act of great good fortune that Meyer, the French scholar, rescued that seemingly mundane manuscript that proved to contain such an interesting tale. Perhaps it can also be considered a touch ironic that it took the efforts of a diligent French scholar to preserve for posterity the tale of the greatest of all the knights of England.         

     

Book Review: The Silk Roads, A New History of the World

By Peter Frankopan

Mankind’s history is simple. After our ancestors climbed out of the primordial swamps, history progressed in a rapid succession of momentous occasions, much like the intro for the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory Theory. Industrious men with beards set about constructing mighty cities like Athens and Corinth. The ancient Greeks were the forefathers of science and philosophy, and Roman engineering was the most advanced the world had ever known. Vasco Da Gama sailed around Africa, the steam engine was invented in England, and the Dutch sold tulips. After the Mayflower set sail for the new world, America was born, and the glorious history of Western civilization proceeded straight as an arrow from that moment onwards. Meanwhile the people at the edges of the map, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and many other, were busy doing whatever. Probably nothing of consequence. According to historian Peter Frankopan, most people in the west are at best a slightly ignorant and uninterested when it comes to the part of the world, Asia, where most people lives and has lived throughout history. Even in academia eastern history is a bit of a fringe subject whose scholars are forced to grab hold of whatever crumbs happen to fall of the table when looking for research funding. In writing The Silk Roads, Frankopan is determined to shift our mental models of the world and how we view history itself, a grand undertaking to be sure, and one could mean his latest book will be regarded as essential reading for anyone harboring intellectual curiosity.

Far from being a backwater of no consequence, the vast stretch of land between the Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean has for millennia been the nerve center and main highway of civilization. Great cities whose sublime splendor have been lost to time were strung out like the beads of a finely crafted pearl necklace along this route, where tradesmen and explorers travelled to find their fortunes. Not just people and goods, but also ideas and philosophies as well as all the major religions of our time, can thank what Frankopan calls the silk roads for having hundreds of millions of followers. Technological advances such as paper, the compass, gunpowder, mathematics, and countless others travelled along these trade routes to the west. This influx of wealth and ideas also had a darker side, as virulent diseases such as the black plague were also spread along the same trade routes.

Western historians have long thought that the death of Ögedei Khan saved the countries that Theresa May’s Brexit Team is preparing to do battle with from complete annihilation. According to Frankopan, this line of thinking shows how westerners are unable to place their history in the proper context. It has never really occurred to anyone in the west that the Mongols might not have been that interested in what we had to offer.

Having masterminded a campaign of breathtaking daring and complexity that smashed the combined armies of eastern Europe in a matter of days, Genghis Khan’s greatest general, Subotai the Valiant, was set to invade Western Europe when he was reached by the news of his Khan’s death. It was certainly true that the need to be present at the Khan’s funeral hindered his invasion plans, but Frankopan argues that one other good reason that the invasion of Western Europe never came about was that there wasn’t anything particularly valuable to plunder or steal east of Constantinople. Having seen the vast wealth of cities like Baghdad, Merv and Samarkand, overflowing with silks, gold, and precious gems, a smokehouse full of otter bladders situated on a bleak Flemish hillside was hardly a great prize. It might sound harsh but it is undeniably true that, at the time, the cities of Western Europe were lagging behind their eastern counterparts when it came to wealth and sophistication. Niall Fergusson said as much in Civilization, which I have previously reviewed on this blog.

Such was the importance of the east that when Columbus set out to sail around the world, he wasn’t looking for the Americas. Instead he sought to find a new route that could be used to transport spices to Western Europe. The continent that impeded his way, however, led to Europe rising from the mists of obscurity to seize a commanding role in global affairs for the next half century. The silver mines of South America bequeathed great wealth to the Spanish who, alongside the Portuguese, became incredibly powerful and influential. International trade and commerce were the underpinnings of the new age of empire, at the start of which a cash strapped England was left to gaze longingly at her southern rivals. This disillusionment proved to be short lived, for The British Empire that followed when Spain and Portugal were no longer in the ascendant was the largest empire the world had ever seen. Even during these heady days of colonialism, however, when the royal navy ruled the oceans and London was the nerve center of the world economy, mastery of the silk roads was crucial for the well-being of the empire. The rise of Russia in the nineteenth century was a cause of great concern to the British, since their vast lands constituted the gateway between east and west. The Crimean War is a conflict few people ever stop to think about, and the reasons why it was fought can often seem hard to grasp. When you consider the fact that Russian control of the black sea could jeopardize Britain’s access to its resource rich colonies, however, it all starts to get much clearer.   

The strategic and economic importance of these silk roads has remained undimmed even though the heydays of the British empire are long gone. When oil grew in importance and Western prospectors searched far and wide for hidden reserves of the black gold, the largest oil fields in the world were to be found in places like Russia, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Then as well as now, countries in the west are affected by what happens in oil producing countries and to this day great powers jealously guard their interests in that region. It is not just oil that they crave, countries in Central Asia that you might  associate with Borat’s rustic home village in Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy film contains some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals such as gold, copper, lead and uranium. Far from having to make do with just one plasticy VCR recorder, like poor Borat did, the nouveu rich elite of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan frequently travel to places like London and Dubai to stock up on luxury goods.    

Frankopan’s great enthusiasm for telling Western audiences an alternative spin on the history they grew up with reading in musty textbooks is both admirable and infectious. He has obviously done a great deal of research and is passionate about the subject he writes about. Unfortunately, I sometimes felt that he treats the history of Western Europe in the cavalier fashion that he accuses its historians of having treated the east, although if you want to read a book about the Roman or British Empire there are quite a few other options available. Another annoying niggle was the unreasonably high amount of simple spelling and grammatical mistakes that I found when reading The Silk Roads. You usually don’t find this with books from reputable publishers, and you would have thought that Bloomsbury could afford to hire someone to read through the script a couple of times. My complaints notwithstanding, The Silk Roads is a very enjoyable read that offers a new and fresh, to Western audiences at least, perspective on history as well as the world we live in today

Book Review: Berlusconi: The Epic Story of the Billionaire Who Took Over Italy

By Alan Friedman

Ask anyone about famous Italians and odds are that they will scratch their head and answer Julius Caesar and Silvio Berlusconi. No other living Italian has played such a prominent role in shaping the future of the country as Berlusconi has. Every Italian seems to have an opinion of Silvio Berlusconi, he is a man you either admire or detest, his larger than life character making indifference all but impossible.

Berlusconi is not an official biography, but when the man himself was approached by Alan Friedman, he agreed to be interviewed and open his private archives. Nearing the end of a long and eventful life, Berlusconi obviously feels the need to tell his life´s story with his own words, which seems entirely reasonable given all the rumors about his personal life and allegations of corruption that has dogged him for many decades. However, and Friedman is astute enough to not play softball with the old man. Berlusconi touches upon all the scandals, corruption and sensationalism that one might wish to hear about, and charts the Milanese businessman’s unlikely rise from humble beginnings.

Born into a working class Milanese family in 1936, Silvio Berlusconi’s fortune is very much self-made, his father was a bank teller and his mother a housewife. During Silvio’s early years, the second world war was raging in Europe. When the allies bombed German held Milan in 1943, Silvio and his family were forced to flee the city and briefly lived in the Swiss countryside. When the war ended, the Berlusconi family returned to Milan and Silvio resumed his studies. He eventually studied law at the university of Milan, where he graduated in 1961. Berlusconi was a bright young man with plenty of drive and ambition, but most importantly he was, as he frequently informs Mr. Friedman, “the most handsome guy on the beach”. He had a passion for music and started a band with some of his friends, which eventually led to Berlusconi working as a cruise ship crooner, singing jazz songs and serenading the passengers every evening. He worked long hours, something he didn´t seem to mind since he enjoyed what he was doing and was popular among guests as well as the staff. One of his band members from those days, Federico Gonfalonieri remains a business associate and close friend.

The life of a cruise ship crooner wasn´t enough for Berlusconi, who was soon drawn to the construction industry. During the nineteen sixties the Italian economy was witnessing a post war boom. Salaries for ordinary people were rising steadily, the economy was robust and there was great demand for housing. A natural dealmaker and salesman, Berlusconi wanted in on the action. Using his family connections, his father having risen from a humble bank teller to one of the managing directors of the small Banca Rasini, Berlusconi was able to attract financiers for buying and developing a plot of land in central Milan. Berlusconi was adept at utilizing the contacts at his disposal, and since there was a boom going on it wasn´t too difficult to attract buyers and investors. Berlusconi´s meagre budget meant that he employed friends and relatives to work on the development while he himself worked long hours fulfilling a plethora of roles ranging from entrepreneur, architect, construction foreman and salesman. The development project went well and, buoyed by his success, Berlusconi soon set about grander property schemes as his fame and wealth grew. 

When the property market collapsed in 1963, the young developer ran into serious trouble. It is a testament to Berlusconi´s skill as a dealmaker and his solid work ethic that he managed to pull off his biggest deal yet in this adversarial climate. Unable to find any individual buyers for the apartment complex he was developing on the outskirts of Milan, Berlusconi got the idea to try and convince a pension fund to buy the whole development. The board, which finally relented and travelled all the way from Rome view the construction site, made no secret of their reluctance to close the deal. Like a young Napoleon requisitioning canons from hundreds of miles away in order to batter down the enemy’s fortifications at the siege of Toulon, Silvio pulled out all the stops to beautify his construction site and woo the pension fund’s board members. He had birch trees shipped in from Holland and uprooted an entire lawn he had bought from Salesian monks. Family members were press ganged into volunteering whatever furniture they could spare in order to furnish the display apartments. When one holdout director was blocking the sale, Berlusconi was able to charm his secretary and ask her to book passage on the midnight train from Rome to Milan that her boss was going to travel on. Hiding behind a newspaper, Berlusconi waited until the hapless board-member was seated next to him, before he pounced. During the hours that followed he succeeded in persuading him to invest in the development, and they parted amicably as best of friends. Faced with adversity, Berlusconi had at last come through in spectacular fashion. Throughout his life he has remained steadfast in his belief that he can convince anyone of anything as long as he can get face to face with them and deploy his charm, something he tried to do many years later when George W. Bush geared up for the invasion of Iraq. His flair for the theatrical, for setting the stage where his showmanship and razzmatazz comes into full bloom, can be traced from the real estate development he tried to beautify all the way to the 2002 NATO summit in Italy and frequent meetings with Muammar Gadhafi in his Bedouin tent, where the two leaders used to happily pose before the cameras.

Before Berlusconi entered the scene and shook things up, Italian television was dominated by Rai, the staid and conservative government owned network. At midnight all broadcasting ceased and viewers would be shown a test card with the occasional loud beep to remind them to turn off their TV-sets. Television was considered a public good that the state provided to its citizens, and what little advertising Rai showed was discreet and toned down, and didn´t increase sales for the products they showed in any measurable way. Berlusconi explains to Mr. Friedman that watching those ads was like pissing in your pants, “You get a kind of warm sense of well-being, but nobody notices anything”. Naturally, this uncharted territory, where no media executive had gone before, beckoned Berlusconi like a siren’s call. Establishing himself in the labyrinthine and often corrupt world of Italian media, starting on a small scale in his native Milan, Berlusconi’s media empire grew rapidly. Spearheaded by his flagship channel, Canale 5, Silvio Berlusconi soon became the new face of Italian television. Before they knew what hit them, the Italians were treated to American movies and sitcoms, interspersed with glitzy ads for all kinds of consumer products. Knowing his audience well, Berlusconi’s flagships shows featured scantily dressed ladies dancing to the latest pop music as well as bawdy- working class humor. Having been shown something they didn’t know that they wanted, the Italian people quickly acquired a taste for ostentatious Berlusconi-style entertainment. Italy’s intellectual community complained about superficial consumerism, but now that the genie was out of the bottle it proved impossible to put it back in. Berlusconi’s successes meant that he was a national celebrity as well as one of the richest men in Italy.

The latter he proved beyond doubt by buying the Ac Milan football team in 1986. As a young boy, he used to talk football with his father when he returned home from work each night, now Berlusconi owned team that both he and his father had always loved. Over the years Berlusconi hired a number of successful coaches and helped lead Milan to several Champions League victories.        

During the early nineteen nineties, Italy’s political establishment was rocked by a series of corruption scandals that upended the established political order. Into this power vacuum stepped the billionaire tycoon turned politician Silvio Berlusconi, with his newly founded Forza Italia Party. Berlusconi himself says that he feared for Italy if the communist party took power, which looked likely after the Christian Democrats, their main opposition, had imploded. The communists had at this point changed their name to the Democratic Party of the Left, but that did little to assuage Berlusconi’s fears. Forza Italia’s aggressive marketing and center right policies caught the public mood, no doubt Berlusconi’s TV channels had helped grease the skids, and in 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was elected president of Italy. However, his first tenure in office turned out to be short lived, after allegations of corruption, he was forced to resign the following year. All in all, Berlusconi served as Italy’s president on three occasions, 1994-95, 2001-06 and 2008-11. His days as a business tycoon were marred by allegations of corruption, which got steadily worse after he entered politics. His detractors say that Berlusconi only entered the political arena in order to dismiss cases filed against him and rig the judicial system, and that he has consistently strived so subvert the Italian judiciary. When Friedman touches on these issues, Berlusconi becomes irritated and tight lipped, yet he insists that all his life he has been subjected to a consistent campaign by communist forces to bring himself, his party and his businesses to ruin. Presumably so that Rai could get back to the business of showing twenty minute commercials where you didn’t know what product was being advertised.      

If what Berlusconi says is true, the Italian left has waged a consistent and incredibly effective campaign to plant false evidence and defame Berlusconi over the course of many decades. If his opponents truly were that crafty one wonders why they have consistently been unable to win an election and hang on to the reigns of government. The chance that Berlusconi is innocent of all the charges that have been levied against him over the years seems slim at best, yet it is undeniably so that Italy’s left wing has steadfastly opposed him on ideological grounds.

The charges of corruption aside, what we do know is that Berlusconi didn’t succeed in unifying Italy, and failed to deliver the structural reforms he promised. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Berlusconi legacy is one rich with bombast but short on substance. Italy today faces many problems, among others a potential banking crisis that has economists in the EU deeply worried, problems that grew worse or weren’t addressed properly during Berlusconi’s three terms in office. At the same time, Berlusconi can’t take the blame for all of Italy’s problems, the country has long had an unstable climate where governments that try to enact reforms are short lived. He certainly found himself addressing wobbly coalitions with all the staying power of wet cardboard and tried to do what was right from his perspective, even if that meant enacting legislation that helped his businesses.

During his time in office Berlusconi made some interesting friends, and to this day talks glowingly about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. During the early 2000s Berlusconi acted as a useful conduit between east and west, maintaining close relationships with the Bush administration as well as with the Kremlin. One glaring failure is, however, his inability to dissuade Bush from invading Iraq, something he tried to do but may in hindsight have been a pointless exercise. Another great friend was Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, a colorful autocrat who travelled with a retinue of female bodyguards and lived in a grand Bedouin tent whenever he visited foreign leaders. The intervention in Libya pitted Berlusconi against his nemesis, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy. He viewed Sarkozy as trying to thwart Italian interests in Libya, and after Gadaffi was ousted his country’s investments in the desert country plummeted. Italy’s eastern ties, however, still remain. The country was reluctant to launch sanctions against Russia after the annexation of Ukraine and still imports large amounts of Russian oil and natural gas.

During the Eurozone crisis, Italy’s economy was on the rocks, and Berlusconi’s enemies saw a chance to get rid of him at last. When Sarkozy loyalist and former French finance minister Christine Lagarde was named the new head of the IMF, Berlusconi came under intense pressure. Despite his best efforts, the new American president, Barack Obama, didn’t find him all that simpatico either. Some frantic political maneuvering notwithstanding, Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011. Reading between the lines, Berlusconi seems to have felt misunderstood by boring stiffs like Obama and Lagarde, the latter of whom visibly baulked when he tried telling her some of his bawdy jokes. Despite his age and his inglorious departure from office, however, Berlusconi still harbors political ambitions and remains a force to be reckoned with in Italian politics. 

Alan Friedman does an excellent job of telling the unlikely story of Berlusconi’s rise to become Italy’s most powerful man as well as his eventual downfall. Berlusconi’s own words lends credence to the story but, as Friedman himself admits, he’s not entirely sure who the real Berlusconi is. He is certainly someone who has a showman’s mentality who wants you to like him, no matter what room he is in, but getting at the real Berlusconi seems like a fruitless exercise. You get the feeling that the lengthy audience Freidman is granted to Berlusconi’s manor home is an attempt to burnish his tarred image, possibly for a political comeback, and that he is whoever he thinks he needs to be in order to get what he wants from you. All in all, Berlusconi is an excellent autobiography and a highly illuminating read if you are interested in current events and European politics, but who the real man is beneath all the bluster and Bunga-Bunga remains a mystery.

Book Review: Saving Capitalism, For the Many, Not the Few

By Robert B. Reich

“The thing is Bob, government would only get in the way when it comes to fighting poverty. We need to trust the free market and not intrude upon it with stifling regulations. All this red tape is what´s behind our problems. You don´t want monolithic, bumbling, government leading by committee, what you need is the unencumbered and flexible free market to swoop in and save the day”.

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, is a prolific debater who has attended countless seminars and discussions about the state of the economy. Squaring off against a conservative, he is time and time again confronted with the question over government versus the free market. The above quote is made up, but trust me, I have seen enough of these gatherings on YouTube to get a gist of how the debate usually goes. A frustrated Reich will try to explain why that question misses the mark entirely, while his opponent triumphantly declares the debate to be over. Saving Capitalism was born as a consequence of being asked the government versus free market question too many times. In this latest book, Reich lays bare the fundamentals of the US economy, explains what has gone wrong during the last few decades, and how one might go about fixing it. Just like in Aftershock, which I reviewed on this blog a little more than a year ago, Reich illustrates his points in a scholarly manner by showing a plethora of charts and diagrams. It occasionally feels like you are sitting in his lecture hall at Berkeley, but luckily the lecture is engaging a though provoking, not one of those where you have to fight the temptation to fall asleep.

Somewhere, in a galaxy far away, Reich explains, there might be a mythical free market, where no government ever intrudes and, the spirit of Ayn Rand smiles benevolently upon all who enter. On earth however, a market of any kind cannot exist in a state of anarchy. A market necessitates someone setting the rules that its participants must follow, and in most cases this would be the government. These rules protect the property of individuals and ensures that contracts are enforced. A haberdasher could go out of business if the wholesaler he or she has already paid for a shipment of hats decides to not deliver them and instead sell them to someone else. Our haberdasher needs the government to monitor the marketplace and force the wholesaler to deliver the hats that he or she is bound by contract to deliver. Without government there is no such thing as a legally binding contract, and as a consequence there is also no economy of a kind that we would recognize. This debate is oftentimes not a consequence of stupidity, Reich argues, instead it can be used as a way to misdirect and mislead others from debating the issues that really should be debated. If a government is necessary for the marketplace to exist, and the rules aren´t handed down from the heavens, shouldn´t we instead debate the current rules that govern the marketplace?  

As a European, access to high speed broadband is generally cheap, and I have several different operators to choose from in case I´m not satisfied with my current provider. In the United States, customers face higher prices for internet connectivity, and they are often forced to choose from very few service providers. Reich tells us this is because the market suffers from an existing pre-distribution upwards, to benefit the big cable providing companies at the expense of their customers. Big corporations in this industry bankroll the election of politicians, who in turn make sure that the regulators they appoint to scrutinize them are of a lenient disposition. When these regulators retire from their government job they may choose to start working for the very companies they were previously policing, possibly in the form of a lobbyist, in which case they will be frequenting the same restaurants and cocktail bars in Washington DC as their former colleagues. All of this adds up to a climate where big corporations are the most important constituency for politicians and regulators, instead of the American people they ostensibly serve.

This sector is only one of many examples where there is an existing pre-distribution of wealth in favor of those at the top, that is hurting not only American consumers but small businesses as well. Established actors don´t want competition from pesky startups, and prefer to buy them up or make sure they go out of business so they won’t have to compete. Otherwise they would be forced to provide lower prices and better services. This leads to a monopoly effect on the marketplace, where many sectors of the economy see fewer and fewer big actors take control, which hurts startups and smaller companies.  FDR once said that consumers and businesses large and small have the right to be protected from unfair competition, and there are currently laws on the books such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to prevent this, but they are not being enforced. Government regulators, fearful of jeopardizing a lucrative future career in the private sector, prefer to leave things as they are.

All of this no doubt sounds gloomy, and you might wonder why no countervailing power seeks to stop this, the answer is that these forces have been systematically hollowed out and weakened during the last few decades. As the number of American workers who are unionized has declined, the average hourly compensation of workers has declined almost in lockstep. As trade unions and similar institutions that look after the interests of workers and the middle class loose influence, the marketplace is rigged even more forcefully in favor of wealthy interests.

A long running myth that Reich wishes to bust is that in the marketplace, everyone is paid according to what they contribute to society, therefore, raising the minimum wage would be akin to taking a sledgehammer to the beautiful mechanism that is the underpinnings of the economy. If a hedge fund manager on Wall Street is payed millions of dollars a year while a high school teacher only makes 45 000 dollars, does that mean that the Wall Street guy is performing a service that is immeasurably more important to society? Ayn Rand though so, but Robert Reich, who unlike her has actually studied economics, does not. What the two are payed is not necessarily indicative of their relative worth to society. It merely tells us that the financial institutions that line the street adorned with a golden bull hold much more clout than all the teacher´s unions combined.

This outsized influence also shows when it comes to the shareholder value discussion. Fifty years ago, the titans of American industry saw themselves as catering to the interests of several disparate groups, customers, shareholders, employees, the community at large etc. During the last thirty years CEOs have been under increasing pressure to create value for shareholders, at the expense of all other considerations. This has led to a maniacal dash to pump up quarterly earnings while long term profitability and competitiveness has actually declined. More hard earned corporate savings are now spent on stock buybacks than on research and development. Reich presents the credible argument that in order to for capitalism to start working profitably again for everyone concerned, the countervailing power that labor unions, small businesses and other interest groups once had need to start becoming a factor again. Otherwise we will keep seeing this upward redistribution of wealth built into the system continue unchecked. There is actually some hope for this happening, Reich notes. A majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, supports ending subsidies to large multinational corporations and getting money out of politics, through a constitutional amendment or similar means.

Reich ends Saving Capitalism with an attempt to look through the crystal ball and predict what the future of the economy holds. Steadily rising industrial productivity means that a fixed amount of workers can produce ever increasing amounts of goods. Even if America cancels all trade with China and returned the simple manufacturing jobs the country has lost, it wouldn´t be enough to provide employment for everyone. As The Economist recently argued in regards to free trade, increased automation and rising effectiveness means that fewer people are now required to do the job. For example, let´s say that a factory was closed down in 1990, a hundred workers were laid off and the machines were shipped to China. Today, far fewer than one hundred workers are required to produce the same output. Taken together with the fact that the technology industry sees powerful actors such as Facebook and Google consolidating their power and influence, you start to see why it might be a challenge to find jobs for everyone in the future.

This needn´t be a problem, argues Reich. If the system is set up to benefit the many, then prosperity can be shared, freeing up humanity for the first time in recorded history from the drudgery of day to day toil. He suggests a universal basic income, a measure that was recently put to popular vote in Switzerland, as a way of making this system work. The challenge with a universal basic income, I might argue, is to keep citizens productive and hungry to innovate, but it is nonetheless an interesting proposition.   

Saving capitalism reads like a blueprint for shaking the economy out of lackluster growth and great inequality. Reich is a visionary economic scholar whose teachings are well researched and presented in a way that is easy to grasp. Those who have studied his previous works will already be familiar with much of what he says in Saving Capitalism, but Reich´s latest book is well worth reading. Even if you might not agree with his point of view, it helps widen the debate in a time when politicians are scrambling to come up with solutions to the great issues of our time.  

Series Review

The Sharpe Series, By Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series tells the story of Richard Sharpe, a foundling who fled the workhouse to join his majesty’s Britannic army. Fighting under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, Sharpe’s life of soldiering covers an exhaustive twenty-one novels, during which he fights in both the Indian and European theater. The first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, was written in 1981 and the last one, Sharpe’s Fury, came out in 2007. The novel series also saw a popular television spin off starring Sean Bean. Bernard Cornwell has written a great many excellent novels, but his own and Sean Bean’s careers both took off thanks to Sharpe.     

Having joined the army at a tumultuous time for the British Empire, Sharpe had his work cut out for him. During the early nineteenth century, Europe was ravaged by war. Conscription allowed massive armies, on a scale that had not been seen before, to be raised and deployed on the battlefield. After the turmoil of the French Revolution, a young artillery officer from Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte distinguished himself as a brilliant military leader, and crowned himself emperor of France. The British, ever fretful about the balance of power on the continent (see my review of Henry Kissinger’s World Order), aligned themselves with a series of coalitions in order to defeat the French. Dire socio-economic conditions forced a young Richard Sharpe to join the army, and geo-political ones necessitated that the French were to become his enemy.

As a young man Cornwell fell in love with an American woman and moved to the United States. He lacked a job to support himself but had grown up reading C.S Forester’s Hornblower novels, and had always wanted to be a writer. With Horatio Hornblower serving in the Royal Navy, Cornwell seized the opportunity to write a series of novels centered on a soldier fighting the Napoleonic Wars on dry land. With the stout work ethic that is expected of immigrants to the USA, Cornwell sat himself down at his kitchen table in New Jersey and started clicking away on his typewriter. After the successful publication of his first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, which centers on the Battle of Talavera in 1809, Cornwell became a full time writer. Chronologically, it falls somewhere in the middle of the series, when Sharpe has already risen to rank of captain and established himself as a shrewd commander.

The bulk of the series finds our intrepid solder fighting for Wellesley’s peninsular army in Spain and Portugal, but later additions tells the story of a young private Sharpe fighting in India against a slew of local warlords, including the feared Tipoo Sultan of Mysore. Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London can gaze upon the Tipoo’s macabre toy featured in Sharpe’s Tiger, an intricate automaton in the shape of a metal tiger sinking its teeth into a luckless redcoat’s throat. Turning the handle causes one of the redcoat’s hands to flap uselessly while a faint sound resembling a tortured scream emanates from the exhibition's mechanical innards.

Having survived the Tipoo and his tiger, Sharpe takes part in the battle of Trafalgar before the series turn to Europe and the long and harsh Peninsular war. The dramatic climax is, obviously, Sharpe’s Waterloo, which I am very much looking forward to. A prospective reader would be well advised to start with Sharpe’s Tiger, since it is the chronological beginning of the story as well as being a thumping good read.

I have praised Cornwell’s writing before on this blog. His language is relatively straightforward and accessible, yet he manages to capture the smell of gunpowder and the sound of the drummer boys sounding the charge. The only way you could possibly get closer to nineteenth century warfare would be to take part in the annual re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo, but then you would have to travel to a muddy field in Belgium and subject yourself to dodgy catering. Being British, however, it is not surprising that he is ever so slightly partial, and most of the French marshals are portrayed as foppish braggadocios.

A recurring theme through the series is the unfairness of British society at the time, particularly its military. This was an age where commissions tended to be sold to the highest bidder, and were very seldom awarded on merit alone. As a no nonsense career soldier Sharpe frequently clashes with incompetent officers fresh from England, who know nothing of war, and whose immaculate uniforms are better suited to the officer’s mess than the front line.

Through a combination of plundered French cash, bravery and dogged perseverance, Sharpe nevertheless manages to slowly and painstakingly rise through the ranks and become an officer himself. This was something that was slightly frowned upon at the time, since people thought that men promoted from the ranks would turn to drink. Sharpe’s first command as an officer is a detachment of Riflemen, where he meets the Irishman Patrick Harper, who becomes his steadfast companion for the duration of the war and helps him capture the eagle standard in Sharpe’s Eagle.   

Bernard Cornwell is one of the great writers of historical fiction, who manages to cater to a wide audience. His Sharpe series would be the perfect read for lazy days on the beach during the upcoming summer holidays.