Book Review: Failed, what the ”experts” got wrong about the global economy

By Mark Weisbrot

The world economy is, by any measure, resting on shaky foundations. With the Eurozone and Britain facing a lost decade and the US in the middle of a recovery that only seems to affect the stock markets, you would have to look at China and other countries in the developing world to see any meaningful growth. Conventional wisdom, peddled by the likes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank and the World Trade organization (WTO), has it that governments need to start tightening their belts and live within their means, Budget deficits has to be brought under control, inflation kept stable and markets have to be opened up to international trade. This is to be achieved by adopting neoliberal agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization of public utilities. For the countries that do all this, growth will come, eventually. At least that is what they are told. In Failed, Mark Weisbrot, Co-director for the Center of Economic and Policy research in Washington D.C, questions the core principles of this policy approach and show the countries that have enjoyed solid growth during the last decades are those that have done the exact opposite.

The preface to Failed brilliantly sets the tone for what is to follow. A prominent South Korean economist from Cambridge University explains that his country started out in the 1960s as a poor and rural backwater, yet has now managed to achieve living standards comparable to those in the West. If South Korea had followed the recipe I describe in the previous paragraph, his people would still be living in mud huts. South Korean prosperity was not created by austerity or opening the country to free trade and volatile capital flows. Instead the government invested in their own production base and infrastructure, erecting trade barriers to promote domestic industries capable of developing new technology and providing highly skilled jobs. Without this there wouldn’t have been any Samsung or Hyundai. He even goes so far as to call the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO “the unholy trinity”.

The chapters that follow takes a closer look at some of the most glaring economic policy failures of recent years and seeks to cure what the author refers to as amnesia within in the field of economic study, where the hard-earned wisdom of past scholars has been replaced by a rigid neoliberal doctrine and a Washington consensus. A great portion of the book is dedicated to South America’s economic development during the last fifty or so years. The lessons learned by that region serves as an excellent summary of the central message in Failed, and charts a blueprint for a way forward for troubled countries in Europe and beyond.

During 1960-1980, Per Capita GDP in Latino America grew by a healthy 3,3%, and poverty rates declined. During the following 20-year period, 1980-2000, Per Capita GDP grew by a paltry 0,4%, while poverty rates increased slightly. What was the cause behind the two lost decades? According to Weisbrot, America has long exerted its influence in the region to suppress or remove governments it doesn’t like, and make sure that their own interests are well cared for. The US has long viewed left wing governments in Latin America with barely disguised hostility, on occasion going so far as to overthrow them in a coup, like Richard Nixon did in 1973 when the Chilean military with the aid of the CIA overthrew Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende. He was succeeded by Augusto Pinochet, an authoritarian dictator amenable to Western interests. According to Weisbrot, quiescent leaders peddling neoliberal politics and paying fealty to the IMF were the main causes for the lost decades between 1980 and 2000.

When the Latin American people had finally had enough by the turn of the millennium and decided to change things, their situation improved markedly. During the last twenty or so years several left leaning governments have been elected in landslide victories across the region, with the effect of poverty rates and inequality being reduced. When Lula da Silva ran as the Workers Party candidate for president in the 2002 Brazilian election, he campaigned against neoliberalism and a US backed free trade deal, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The American investment bank Goldman Sachs were so afraid of the former factory worker that they developed a special “Lulameter” where they calculated his chances of winning the election in real-time. Lula proceeded to win the election and form a progressive government that heralded a sharp break with the neoliberal policies of the past and provided solid economic growth for Brazil after decades of stagnation. This story was repeated in several Latin American countries during the 2000s, to the barely disguised dismay of many western countries and institutions. This I can attest to personally. The Economist magazine, which I read every week, seems to have an almost pathological aversion to any government in Latin America which is even remotely left of center, while they savor Venezuela’s current woes with barely contained glee. Its editorials lambast reckless spending and excessive government debt, in effect proposing the same failed remedies that led to the lost decades of 1980-2000.

It is startling, writes Weisbrot, when you consider that the positive economic development Latin America saw during last two decades or so have either gone completely unreported in the West or been dismissed as a “commodities boom”. What’s especially painful to adherents of the Washington consensus, according to Weisbrot, is that Latin America managed to recover by kicking the IMF to the curb, which has led to their influence being drastically reduced and the region becoming more independent. This standoff between the Latin American nations and foreign creditors was apparent when then president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, purposefully defaulted on the country’s sovereign debt. Argentina’s citizens enjoyed one of the highest living standards in Latin America, until the country was struck by an exceptionally nasty recension during the years 1998-2002. Those who looked to the IMF for help were soon disappointed, all the organization had to offer were stringent demands for paying down the country’s national debt. This was a blatant attempt to get a better deal for its creditors, at a time when Argentina was engulfed in crisis. Refusing the IMF’s draconian demands, Kirchner made the bold move of defaulting on the debt, something that only “failed” nations like Congo and Somalia had done before. The experts predicted a calamity, but the IMF folded and Argentina went on to make an exceptionally strong recovery that the editorial staff of The Economist refuses to acknowledge to this day.

It is with great sadness that Weisbrot notes Europe has been unable to what most of Latin America did and send the IMF packing. The recession that was sparked by the financial crisis in the US could have been much less severe if European institutions had acted decisively to stimulate the economy and create more aggregate demand. Greece might have needed a bit of structural reform, he admits, but the kind of abject misery that the country has been subjected to by the unelected troika of the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank was completely unnecessary. The Eurozone crisis unmasks the IMF, according to Weisbrot, as little more than a creditors cartel attempting to strong-arm its hapless debtors into ever more concessions. Worst of all, so called Article IV consultations, internal documents by the IMF, reveal that the fund and the rest of the troika used the Eurozone crisis to force policy changes on the affected nations that their electorates would probably never have voted for had they been on the ballot. These unwelcome initiatives included reducing labor protection and lowering the pension age. What’s unique when it comes to Europe’s woes, Weisbrot writes, is that this kind of financial shock treatment used to be reserved for poor and middle income countries, and had never previously been used against wealthy nations with high standards of living. As a European I read his chapter on Europe with resignation, our continent is no doubt in great financial and political trouble, and the outlook for the EU and its member states mostly seem to get worse each day. Around the world, Europe has become a byword for stagnation and failed policies. It is staggering, Weisbrot asserts, that policymakers, economists and the general public have not thoroughly investigated the causes of the Eurozone crisis and come up with anything else than austerity, a cure that seems to have been as effective as a medieval doctor using leeches to bleed his patient. Just one more concession, one more cut to public services, and a recovery will be around the corner, we keep hearing, yet the situation keeps getting worse and worse. 

Failed offers a fresh perspective on the economic woes that plague Europe and many other parts of the developed world, and points to tried and tested policies that could offer a way out of stagnation and lackluster growth.    

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