Category Archives: education

by Joel | 21 September 2024 · 5:45 am

1848: Nationalism’s Icarus Moment

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:

Never before or since have Europeans seen common hopes smashed so rapidly as in 1848, the year of democratic revolutions. In February and March, after a disguised King of France escaped the wrath of his people, populations across the continent rose up against princes and kings, unified as never before, seeming to act according to one script. Divisions of nation or religion that had caused countless wars no longer seemed to matter, and even terms like “east” and “west” became secondary. The watchword was self-rule. Crowds demanding rights and democracy forced divine-right rulers to retreat and negotiate, from Italy and France through central Germany and into Bohemia, Prussian as well as Austrian Poland, all of Hungary (including Transylvania), and even farther east, into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the heart of today’s Romania), still under nominal Ottoman rule. Everywhere in this vast space, Europeans were telling the same story: they were leaving feudalism behind for better lives under democracy. If kings or princes survived, they would be bound to constitutions, as was the norm in Britain or the Netherlands.

But as early as April, the push for democracy was exposing divides among populations that few had imagined existed, and the stunned princes began surging back, making use of resources, some old (like a well-trained military), others new and unexpected. For the Habsburgs, virtually every national group turned out to be a potential ally against German and Magyar democrats, but they also exploited class divisions, playing peasants off against urban liberals, and urban liberals off against suburban proletarians. When pogroms broke out across Central Europe in 1848, the House of Habsburg also revealed itself as the defender of Jews and their property against urban mobs, who claimed that Jews stood with their ethnic enemies. That house was not only a bastion of the old order but also a defense of life and liberty against an emerging new order, of liberalism and national self-determination, but also of seemingly intractable interethnic feuding.

By the fall of 1848, the Habsburgs and other monarchs were rebounding, even if the final victories were not scored until the spring and summer of 1849, when imperial authorities closed down the elected parliament in Austria and crushed the democratic revolution in Hungary, with the assistance of Croat, Austro-German, Serb, and Romanian forces recruited from within Habsburg territories. The fighting between Hungary’s democrats trying to establish their national state and these nationalities became so intense that the region became a staging ground for ethnic cleansing: Magyar, Serb, and Romanian forces staked claims for territory by expelling ethnic others and burning their villages.

The difficulties of making a transition from feudalism to freedom were shocking because Habsburg subjects had not known the full extent of the realm’s complexity. The historian Joseph Redlich wrote much later that censorship and poor internal communications had kept the various parts of the monarchy ignorant of one another. There was little critical higher education, and for the elites, the “state almost completely coincided with German Austria,” and they assumed it would govern from Vienna with no concern for the “nationally foreign” inhabitants of the Sudeten and Alpine countries. Little was known about Czechs and South Slavs, and few anticipated that people speaking in their names might demand independence.1 Inhabitants of Central and Eastern European were neighbors who got to know one another only after they had to deal with one another as free human beings for the first time.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, Germany, language, military, nationalism, religion, war

by Joel | 20 September 2024 · 5:24 am

Crucible of Serb Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 142-144:

Beyond Poland, only Hungary possessed a large group of nationally conscious gentry. As in Poland, the challenge for the patriotic gentry was to extend its notions of national consciousness to a largely illiterate peasantry. But in contrast to Poland, a Hungarian political entity—the Hungarian kingdom—continued to exist, even if the king was Habsburg. Within that kingdom, institutions thrived that were controlled by the Hungarian gentry, above all a parliament and schools that inculcated in children a sense of duty to the Hungarian nation. The challenge was building even more schools in a largely agricultural country and spreading the message to areas where Hungarian was not spoken.

Yet Serb patriots faced challenges unknown to their neighbors. There had been no kingdom of Serbia for hundreds of years, and over the centuries, the Serb nobility had gradually faded away, either on the field of battle or through emigration, Islamicization, or simple reduction to poverty. In general, the Ottoman rulers did not impose Islam, but they encouraged conversion by reserving positions of influence and distributing land to their coreligionists. Landowners, administrators, and the wealthy tended to be Muslims, and Orthodox Christian peasants formed an underclass of sharecroppers. It was unthinkable that a Christian could have a position of authority or command over a Muslim, whether in the economy or in the state. When a Serb national leadership emerged, it was from the more successful livestock farmers and village notables.

Regardless of wealth, Serbs possessed a sense of national identity. Percentagewise, probably more Serb-speakers were conscious of their identity as Serbs, than Polish-speakers were of their identity as Poles. This is a bit of a mystery. There were no Serb political institutions, and unlike Polish or Hungarian elites, even the wealthiest Serb peasants in Ottoman territories could not read and write. Still, Serb-speakers across a vast space, who might never meet one another, nevertheless felt they were linked. That feeling partly had to do with the Serb Orthodox church, the one institution that the Ottomans permitted to survive, with separate legal jurisdiction for Orthodox believers as well as recognition of Serb identity (as opposed to Greek or Bulgarian). The Serb church assumed almost all civil authority of the defunct Serb state and kept that state’s memory alive by canonizing Serbian kings. Humble worshipers were reminded day in and day out that people of their own language had once ruled them and should do so again. The Patriarchate of Peć, a self-governing Serbian branch of Orthodoxy under the Patriarch of Constantinople, referred to the territory under its jurisdiction as the “Serbian lands.” From 1557 that territory included Kosovo as well as old Serbia and also areas farther north in Hungary.

But equally important was a cultural form that no institution could control, the Serb practice of epic folk poetry, maintained from time immemorial, of Serbs gathering in small circles or in their homes and listening to poems sung to the accompaniment of a one-stringed instrument, the gusle. The songs, produced from memory, could last for hours and were passed down from generation to generation because they gave people consolation and a way to make sense of oppression. Best known is the dramatic “Kosovo cycle,” which recounts the glories of medieval Serbia, up to a moment of heroic sacrifice at the battlefield of Kosovo, where a Serb force met a larger Turkish army on June 28, 1389.

A battle did take place on that date, one of several through which the Ottoman Empire expanded northward, into new territories. The historical facts are unglamorous. The Serb kingdom had been shrinking since death of its last great ruler, Dušan, in 1355. In June 1389, the vassals of the leading Serb prince Lazar met the armies of the sultan on Kosovo polje, the field of blackbirds, and both Lazar and the sultan were killed. The battle was not decisive. After the sultan’s successor consolidated his position, he made Lazar’s widow accept his authority. Her daughter Oliviera entered the sultan’s harem, and her son Stefan fought for the sultan, for example in 1396 at Nicopolis against Hungary, where he saved the day for his brother-in-law. In the meantime, his father, Lazar, had been sanctified in the Serb church. During the following century, all Serbian lands gradually came under Ottoman domination as the empire spread its influence north and westward.

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Filed under economics, education, Hungary, language, nationalism, Poland, religion, Turkey, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 18 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

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Filed under Bohemia, democracy, Eastern Europe, education, England, France, Germany, Hungary, language, Slovakia

by Joel | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, labor, language, nationalism, religion

by Joel | 13 September 2024 · 6:50 am

What Unites East Central Europe?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 3-4:

What unites this dramatic and unsettling history is a band of countries that runs from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and Black Seas, between the much larger, historically imperial Russia and Turkey in the east, and Prussian and Austrian Germany in the west. These small countries constitute East Central Europe, a space where more of the twentieth century happened—for good and for bad—than anywhere else on the planet.

If one seeks a simple explanation for the energies that caused this area to produce so much drama and so many new concepts, a glance at the map suggests nationalism: no other region has witnessed such frequent, radical, and violent changing of borders to make nations fit states. Two maps, one from 1800, one from 2000, tell the basic story: a shift from simplicity to complexity, from one small and three large multinational powers to more than twenty national states.

The story was carried forward by the demands of East European nationalists to control territory, demands that triggered resistance, because they contested imperial power and the European order. Since the 1820s, the work of nationalists has brought independent states into being in three stages: the first in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin produced Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; the second, in 1919, when revolution and peace making generated Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland; and most recently, in the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia broke peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Yugoslavia fragmented violently into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, two entities in Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Hungary became de facto independent in 1867, when the Austrian Empire divided into Austria-Hungary; after 1920, it emerged much reduced from World War I, two-thirds of its territory going to its neighbors.

What can be debated is whether the degree of violence, especially in World War I, was necessary to break loose the nation-states that now constitute the map of Eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary was more resilient than critics gave it credit for and only began unraveling in the final year of a war that had been costly beyond any expectations. And there was little relation between intention and outcome: World War I did not begin as a war of national liberation. Yet by 1917, as the causality lists soared and any relation between intention and outcome was lost, it was interpreted to be one. It was a war for democracy—for Wilson’s national self-determination—and that helped spawn the new nation-states.

At the same time, without the cause Gavrilo Princip claimed to represent (that South Slavs should live in one state), there would have been no assassination, no Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia (which had trained Princip and supplied him with his pistol) in July 1914, and no war. Seen in rational terms, the Habsburgs’ belief that Serbia, a state of three million, represented a challenge requiring a full-scale military assault launched from their state of fifty-two million, seems one of history’s great overreactions. But Princip, the frail eighteen-year-old rejected from the Serb army for his small stature, embodied the challenge of an idea, the idea of ethnic nationalism, and the Habsburg monarchy had no response other than naked force.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, education, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, war

by Joel | 29 August 2024 · 8:52 am

A Polynesian in England, 1775

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 38-39:

PEOPLE WHO ENCOUNTERED Mai grew to love his playful and curious manner of speech. He freely invented his own words and expressions. A bull was a “man-cow.” Snow was “white rain.” At a country estate where he stayed, he referred to the butler as “king of the bottles.” He called ice “stone water.”

One morning he was stung by a wasp. When asked what had bitten him and caused his hand to swell, he replied that it was a “soldier bird.” Later, a member of the local gentry pinched him a bit of snuff to snort. “No thank you,” he replied. “The nose not hungry.”

His hosts were pleased to learn that he was an excellent cook. Banks asked Mai to roast an assortment of fowl in a traditional Polynesian style. Mai constructed an umu, an earth oven. He dug a hole, built a fire there, then partially filled it with stones. He laid the birds in the pit, wrapping them in butter-smeared paper, for want of his usual plantain leaves. He covered it all with dirt and let the mess of fowl smolder for hours. The result was scrumptious. “Nothing could be better dressed, or more savory,” gushed a critic. “The smoldering pebble-stones and embers…had given a certain flavor to the fowls, a soupçon of smokiness, which made them taste as if a ham accompanied them.”

And so it could be said that barbecue—or at least a South Seas strain of it—had arrived in Great Britain.

At the estates he visited, Mai liked to practice his marksmanship and became a devoted hunter, especially during grouse season. Much to the chagrin of the local groundskeepers, the trigger-happy Mai “popped at all the feathered creation which came in his way”—not only grouse but chickens, geese, even ducks haplessly playing in a pond. “His slaughter of domestic birds,” the observer lamented, “was by no means inconsiderable.”

Guns lay at the heart of why Mai had volunteered to travel to England in the first place. He knew he had to master firearms, to collect them, to understand their inner workings and the ammunition that made them lethal. “He had a sense of mission,” wrote historian Michael Alexander in his book Omai: Noble Savage, and he knew that “these people he had come amongst held the key to his intrinsic purpose, the avenging of his father.”

Other times, Mai would set aside his fowling piece and revert to the hunting techniques he’d learned as a boy. A friend later recalled how Mai crouched in a stubble field and crept up on his prey. “His eye sparkled,” the friend reminisced, when “on a sudden, he darted forward like a cat, and sprang upon a covey of partridges, one of which he caught and took home alive, in great triumph.”

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Filed under Britain, education, food, language, migration, Polynesia

by Joel | 7 August 2024 · 6:18 am

Defining the Physical Caribbean

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 26-29:

The Caribbean region, defined broadly, includes the islands within and adjacent to the Caribbean Sea, as well as the coastal areas of South and Central America that share a common cultural and economic history, notably Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. There are three main island groups: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos archipelagos. Another line of islands fringes the north coast of South America and includes Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, while Trinidad and Tobago lie to the south of the Lesser Antilles and the three Cayman Islands are located west of the Greater Antilles. The total land area of the Caribbean islands is relatively small: some 91,000 square miles, roughly the size of the United Kingdom. Cuba is by far the largest island, and its 42,803 square miles represents nearly half the total (insular) land area. At the other end of the scale, Barbados covers 166 square miles and Aruba only 77.

Most of the islands are sovereign states, but the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and Anguilla are among the last colonies in the world. While its political status remains disputed, Puerto Rico is technically an internally self-governing territory of the United States, and Martinique and Guadeloupe are overseas départements of France. Several countries are territorially fragmented, like the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, while the Bahamas’ national territory comprises more than 700 islands, ranging in size from Andros to tiny uninhabited cays. The mainland countries of Guyana and Suriname (83,000 and 63,039 square miles, respectively) are much larger than any of the islands.

The geological evolution of the Caribbean Basin is the key to understanding the geographical distribution and relative sizes of the various island groupings.

…

The islands of the Lesser Antilles consist of two volcanic arcs, an inner arc and an older outer arc. The inner arc, known as the Volcanic Caribbees, comprises the islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, western Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada. These rugged, mountainous islands have 25 dormant and potentially active volcanoes, nine of which are on the island of Dominica, and they include the highest peaks in the eastern Caribbean, Soufriere (4,813 ft.) on Guadeloupe and Morne Diablotins (4,747 ft.) on Dominica. The scenically beautiful Pitons in St. Lucia are examples of extinct volcanic plugs. The process of volcanic island formation is being monitored carefully in the Grenadines, where a submarine volcano called Kick-’em-Jenny will one day emerge above sea level to form a new Caribbean island.

There have been 17 volcanic eruptions in the islands’ historical record. Unfortunately the andesitic volcanoes typical of the eastern Caribbean, formed when two plates rub against each other, are capable of extremely violent and explosive eruptions. The worst volcanic historical disaster occurred in 1902 on Martinique. At the climax of a series of eruptions by Mount Pelée, a pyroclastic flow, a cloud of superheated gases and ash, raced down the volcano’s flanks and annihilated the town of St. Pierre in less than two minutes. Nearly 30,000 people were either incinerated or asphyxiated. There were only two survivors, one of whom was Auguste Ciparis, incarcerated in the town dungeon on a charge of murder.

The geologically older outer arc, the Limestone Caribbees, is the second chain of islands including Anguilla, St. Maarten, St. Bartholomew, Barbuda, Antigua, eastern Guadeloupe, La Desirade, and Marie Galante. The volcanoes that created these islands are long extinct. Their land surfaces were weathered and eroded long ago, then submerged under warm tropical seas, where limestone formed. Later they were raised above sea level again, so that today these islands are flat with low-lying hills.

The Lesser Antilles are more commonly subdivided into the Leeward and Windward Islands, a nomenclature that has nothing to do with their geology. It may be attributed to Columbus, who sailed westward through the Dominica passage—between Guadeloupe and Dominica—during his second voyage, to shelter from a hurricane in the lee of the northern Lesser Antilles. Two early English sugar colonies were established in the Leeward Islands group. Antigua is a relatively flat island—one of the Limestone Caribbees—whose forests were quickly cleared for sugar plantations. St. Kitts, geologically part of the Volcanic Caribbees, has fertile volcanic soils on the coastal plains surrounding Mount Liamuiga, which provided opportunities for early planters to grow sugarcane.

Barbados is a relatively flat island like Antigua. Its forests, too, were quickly cleared for agriculture; its fertile, clayey soils were rich in lime and provided ideal conditions for the cultivation of sugarcane. The geological origin of Barbados, however, is different from that of other islands in the eastern Caribbean.

…

The Greater Antilles are larger, more mountainous, and more geologically complex than the Lesser Antilles. They are located along the northern boundary of the Caribbean Plate and include Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. The oldest rocks were once part of an ancient volcanic island arc, formed more than 100 million years ago, which disappeared under tropical seas and were overlain with sandstones and limestone. About 10 to 4 million years ago, the islands of the Greater Antilles were formed during a period of violent tectonic activity and mountain building that thrust the older rocks up above sea level again.

Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico are thus composed of various sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks that have been folded, faulted, and fractured. In places they have been sculpted into mountain blocks, plateaus, and steep escarpments. The islands are topographically similar, with central upland mountain ranges circumscribed by flatter coastal plains, the accessibility and good soils of which provided opportunities for human settlement and plantation agriculture. The highest peaks are Pico Duarte (10,417 ft.) in the Dominican Republic’s Cordillera Central, and Jamaica’s Blue Mountain (7,405 ft.). Many mountain ranges in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and eastern Jamaica are rugged, inaccessible, and deeply dissected by streams and rivers, producing spectacular, steep-sided, forested river valleys.

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Filed under Caribbean, education, migration, nationalism

by Joel | 2 August 2024 · 6:04 am

I’ve quoted many passages from Matthew Madden’s painstaking translation of Chan Samoeun’s uniquely detailed memoir of an especially horrible era in Cambodian history, for reasons that echo the translator’s poignant Afterword quoted below.

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 637-640:

I still have a special affinity for the early chapters of Prisoners of Class, which capture so many details of 1975 Phnom Penh at the moment of Khmer Rouge victory. I feel almost greedy for those details; I collect any photograph, map, or description from the city’s past that I can find. I feel a deeply personal connection with and nostalgia for what I am now coming to think of as “Old Phnom Penh,” and very fortunate that I got to know it well in the last years before it began to change dramatically. With the breakneck pace of economic investment and development, seemingly devoid of coherent urban planning, increasingly little of Old Phnom Penh remains now, at least on the surface. I have been taken completely off guard by the speed and scope of the transformation in recent years, which is hard to overstate. (This has been a common topic of conversation with Samoeun, as he feels a similar disorientation.) The city had changed so little during my first several years there, and still looked so much like it had in pictures and film from before the revolution, like an insect trapped in amber, that I never imagined I wouldn’t be able to just continue revisiting old haunts or exploring landmarks whenever I liked, finding them much as they had always been, or that everything was about to become so different, so quickly.

It is truly the passing of an era.

Passing, too, is the generation of people who lived through the most turbulent, defining, and transformational eras of modern Cambodian history in the twentieth century—the post-colonial “golden age” of Sihanouk and the Sangkum (1954–70); the Khmer Republic and civil war (1970–75); and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). It is a generation now grown unexpectedly gray-haired and frail. In my early years in Cambodia, including when I first discovered Prisoners of Class, this generation constituted the backbone of Cambodian society. They were the parents, the shopkeepers, the maids, the farmers, the doctors and nurses, the taxi and cyclo drivers, the policemen, the politicians—all of the aunties and uncles of Cambodia. At that time, only the youngest Cambodians, those about my age and younger (I was born in 1977), had no memories of Khmer Rouge rule. For everyone else, virtually the entire adult population of the country, the Khmer Rouge era was fairly recent memory, and the effects of it were pervasive. (And in rural areas, especially, a sizable percentage of that population had themselves once been Khmer Rouge in some form or other.) I somehow don’t know that I ever truly appreciated that this would change.

But now, the vast majority of people in Cambodia have no memory of those events. Nobody younger than about their late forties or so—and current demographics skew overwhelmingly young—has even so much as an early childhood memory of the realities of Democratic Kampuchea, and nobody under their late fifties or so has any memory of life in pre-war Cambodia. And those numbers keep going up every year from this writing. And now many of those who do remember, especially those who were grown when the Khmer Rouge captured power, are dying out slowly, soon to be quickly. Samoeun’s thick black mop of black hair has now turned silver. Before long there will be nobody at all left who remembers what happened, and the country that they knew will have finally passed, transformed, to an entirely different cohort of forward-looking Cambodians. It will all belong to the past, to the history books.

Thus Prisoners of Class is and will remain a precious link to history, a priceless document to remind later generations of the now almost unthinkable things that occurred, to memorialize the heroic travails and losses (and crimes, lest we forget) of the now-passing generation. In the preface to Prisoners of Class, the author laments that “in Cambodian society we have very few articles or books describing the real lives of people who lived in any era of our history.” How fortunate indeed that that young man felt compelled to write down everything that he and his family saw and experienced while the memories were so fresh. How fortunate that he thought to include so many details! And how fortunate that he had the heart of both a chronicler and a poet. Though he almost certainly did not appreciate it at the time, that labor of personal writing would become a historical treasure memorializing, for all time, not just him and his family, but his entire generation, a whole era, a whole country, for future generations of Cambodians—and now for the world outside of Cambodia as well.

So now, with this translation, it is my hope and aspiration to give this important historical document an even wider distribution, a stronger foothold, a larger audience, to preserve and propagate a witness of a not-so-distant but rapidly receding past, for many more people in many more generations to come. May it become an essential and immortal resource for all those who seek to understand Cambodia’s turbulent twentieth-century past.

Matthew Madden, 17 September 2023

Mekong River Press has also made several chapters freely available online, as well as photos and maps of people and places cited in the book.

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by Joel | 5 July 2024 · 5:27 am

Prudence of Tokugawa Isolation

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 43-46:

Events outside Japan in the seventeenth century emphasized the prudence of the Tokugawa seclusion. This was the Age of Expansion—and not just for Europeans. In China, the Ming Dynasty was coming to an end at the hands of the Manchus, people the Ming once ruled. The Manchus gained control of Inner Mongolia before moving south and taking Manchuria and then Korea in 1637. They took the capital, Beijing, in 1644, prompting the Ming emperor to commit suicide. They spent the rest of the century subduing the remainder of China, defeating the last resistance in Taiwan in 1683. They would later add to their empire Outer Mongolia (1697) and Tibet (1720) to make the largest Chinese empire in history.

India had expanded to, then fallen victim to the expansion of others. The Mogul emperors had consolidated the vast subcontinent under their rule, adding the last big piece, Afghanistan, in 1581. By the end of the next century, however, the government had fallen into decline. Its infighting and inefficiency would eventually weaken and divide India to the point where the British could become the real rulers.

In Russia, Ivan the Terrible was creating an empire at the same time as Japan had been fighting its civil wars. Russians crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia and by 1584 had defeated the Tatars. They went on to colonize Siberia over the next several decades, reaching the Pacific Ocean by 1639, thereby becoming neighbors of Japan.

The Europeans continued to explore, conquer, and settle. In contrast to Tokugawa’s stable Japan, a chaotic Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 between Catholics and Protestants, which slowly engulfed the European continent. By its end, Germany was in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead from disease, famine, and massacre. The Tokugawa strategy of seclusion then seemed like the wise choice. The only question was how long it could last.

The 250 years between the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603 and the first American attempt to force Japan to abandon its seclusion in 1853 were not years of stagnation in or outside Japan. In Japan there was political stability but also long-term trends toward urbanization and bureaucratization. A middle class of merchants emerged: people who accumulated wealth but did not necessarily control land. Nor did they have the same obligations and restrictions as the government and ruling class.

To be sure, there was more change taking place outside Japan than there was within. Much of this change would impinge sooner or later on Japan’s foreign policy as well as its domestic harmony. While most writers focus on the technological changes of the era, social, political, and intellectual changes were just as important. If Europe’s seventeenth century was the Age of Expansion, its eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment, which laid the foundations not only of modern science but of democratic conceptions of government as well. Notions such as the divine right of kings, raison d’état, and the innate superiority of a ruling class were on their way out. While Japan remained secluded in the fifth reign of its Tokugawa Shogunate, the English philosopher John Locke was publishing his Second Treatise on Civil Government, emphasizing the triune values of individual liberty, the sanctity of property, and equality under the law. Montesquieu’s treatise advocating a separation of government’s basic functions into separate institutions, De L’Esprit des lois, followed in 1748. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s appeal to the “general will” of the people in Le Contrat Social followed in 1762. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued the advantages of free trade in 1776. And James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788. These works presaged an Age of Revolution. But in Japan none of this would be discussed: the most influential philosophers were Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane.

A small school of Japanese writers began both to lead a return to ancient Japanese literature and to critique Chinese influences on Japan—influences they deemed to be impure blots and accretions on Japanese culture. Thus, one curious effect of Japan’s self-imposed seclusion was that the Chinese became the foreigners. The philosophers advocated the revival of Shinto, an indigenous animistic religion in which many things, living and inanimate, had kami, or spirits. Hundreds of native folk tales were attached to Shintoism, many supporting the notion that Japan was the center of creation and the emperor was divinely appointed.

Shinto had been gradually eclipsed by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, each of which made its way to Japan through Chinese and Korean missionaries as early as the sixth century. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) was, not coincidentally, the son of a Shinto priest and was most influential in attracting attention to and reverence for classic Japanese literature—literature that included Shinto mythology. Mabuchi was succeeded in his endeavor by a disciple, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Motoori’s quest was to discover the true Japanese culture, now overlaid with so many foreign influences. He saw in Japan’s distant past an ideal society ruled by the descendents of Shinto deities— the emperors. His works and speeches became very popular. But his writing had more than nostalgic undertones. Demanding new reverence for the emperor was a subtle criticism of the Shogunate that ruled in the emperor’s name. And criticizing Confucianism was tantamount to criticizing the political leadership which not only had been schooled in Confucian thought but was— Motoori implied—subservient to China. And though the Shogun gave Motoori official honors, it was Motoori’s own disciple, Hirata, who drew the ultimate conclusion: that all gods were born in Japan and none outside, thus Japan and the Japanese were a category of creation all by themselves, one that was perfect and pure—when free from the corrupting influences of outsiders.

Hirata, born the same year that the Americans produced their Declaration of Independence, became the leader of a full-blown Shinto revivalist movement. That movement was subtly critical of the government, for which Hirata spent the last two years of his life under house arrest. Though he died before the opening of Japan, his disciples were later appointed to important posts in the government, bringing with them their ideas of Japanese cultural purity to the strategic conversation.

Perhaps fundamentalist ideas such as Shinto revivalism were also the result of the strange political climate in Japan. While politically stable and peaceful, social volatility threatened. Peace and stability had brought overpopulation and a recurring threat of famine, since trade was so severely restricted. This allowed merchant and artisan guilds, or kumi to monopolize a particular distribution, trade, or manufacture. The leaders of the kumi were rich and getting richer, and this naturally caused resentment in both the aristocratic class and the underclass. Women were feeling the brunt of a more and more regulated society under an increasingly fearful, conservative government: their dress, civic participation, businesses, and even leisure arts were more and more carefully proscribed. Meanwhile, the police were easily corrupted and the highest officials were profligate in their spending and increasingly arbitrary in their enforcement of laws. All of these consequences and benefits of seclusion would be starkly outlined when Japan was confronted by the need to reevaluate its strategy of seclusion.

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Filed under Britain, China, economics, education, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, South Asia, war

by Joel | 4 July 2024 · 12:24 pm

Pinpointing the SARS Outbreak, 2003

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-48, 50-51:

I wanted to go back to People’s Hospital [in Beijing], because I couldn’t stop thinking about the “courtyard problem.” By then, it’d become the site of one of the biggest and most difficult battles against SARS. Starting on April 5, about 222 people had been infected at the hospital, including ninety-three hospital staff across nearly half the departments. The emergency ward north of the outpatient wing was the most severely affected; that was where the courtyard was. On April 22, I had seen patients covered in white cloth being rolled out of there. Two days later, when our van passed by once more, the eighty-five-year-old hospital had just announced a full quarantine. Beyond the yellow quarantine tape, three nurses sat on the empty steps, holding their blue nurse’s caps. Their long wet hair was drying in the sun. As they sat in silence, one would occasionally comb her fingers through the hair hanging in front of her chest. Our van parked in front of the hospital for over ten minutes. Xiao Peng pointed his camcorder at them from a distance.

I felt that there must be a correlation between the twenty-nine patients I’d witnessed being transferred without proper protection and the high rate of infection now sweeping the hospital. I wanted to know more about what had happened. No one asked me to work on the story. I wasn’t even sure if I could make it at all, let alone get it on the air, but my team was willing to work with me….

I ended up getting an interview with Zhu Jihong, the director of the emergency ward. He confessed to me that, at the time of transfer, the twenty-nine patients I’d counted were all in fact infected with SARS. In fact, the emergency ward had already been battling known cases since April 5. But rather than report the cases, the real numbers were hidden from the World Health Organization when they came to inspect the hospital. The patients had been transferred to ambulances that drove around Beijing in circles until the inspectors left.

I’d spent a long time convincing Zhu Jihong to accept the interview. I said, “You don’t need to make any judgments or draw any conclusions, just describe what you saw, heard, and felt, that’s all.”

After a long pause on the phone, he said, “The memory is too painful.”

“Of course,” I said, “but pain can be cathartic, consolation for one’s sacrifices.”

Zhu Jihong led me through the emergency ward corridor. He leaned over, undid the heavy chain lock, and pushed the door open. He reached for the wall with his left hand and after some flickering the lights turned on. In the ashen light, the classroom-sized space was filled with blue IV chairs tagged with white labels that read: April 17, Thursday; April 17, Thursday …

The beds were littered with rumpled blankets, some of which had fallen to the ground. Chairs were upturned, four feet in the air, left there by people fleeing for their lives.

This was the courtyard I had been hearing so much about. It was a space wedged between four buildings. With the addition of a roof, it had become an indoor space, sealed off from traffic in the rest of the hospital. They’d used it as the IV room, where all the patients with fevers came to receive their drips. Twenty-seven beds sat shoulder to shoulder with only the space of a fist between them. Every day, almost sixty people had sat tightly together on the beds and among a few chairs. Even during the daytime, the room completely depended on artificial lighting. There was no airflow, no windows, only a ventilation panel connected to the central air conditioning system, which spread the germs across the whole hospital.

The patient files that piled up in a mound on a desk were yellowing with age. I hesitated for a second. Zhu Xuhong said with a dismal smile, “Allow me.” He opened the files, which said pneumonia. He pointed toward a blackboard. Next to the twenty-two names written in white chalk, nineteen read: pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia …

“In fact, it was SARS,” he said.

Even the patients had not known. It was like a taboo. No one in the hospital had even called SARS by its name. They’d called it “that thing.” The first patient had come in on April 5. The doctors suspected she was a SARS patient after seeing her chest radiograph. But the government announced that all cases were from outside Beijing. All public hospitals are managed by the government. And according to the standards for diagnosis and treatment in Beijing, the doctors could only diagnose someone who had a history of direct contact with a confirmed infected person.

…

On April 22, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention examined this hospital. He said, “When buildings are about to collapse, escaping is the only choice.” Two days later, People’s Hospital quarantined. Zhang Wenkang, the minister of health, was fired, and within one week, the army built the biggest field medical hospital in Beijing. There were 686 SARS cases there, almost one-tenth of all global cases.