Ian Hopkinson

Author's posts

Aug 04 2025

Book review: A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge

My next review is of A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge. This is a collection of 47 chapters on different aspects of geographic borders. The book is divided into three parts, the first “histories” talks about borders through history, the second on “legacies” is about borders we see today – often the unusual – and how they came to be. The final, shorter, part is on “externalities” – on borders in the air, sea and time. The chapters are standalone so its easy to dip in and out – if that is how you prefer to read – it makes reviewing more difficult since 47 separate stories can’t be summarised in a short blog post.

The histories section starts with the border between Lower and Upper Egypt which dates back to 4th millennium BC. We know this was a border because ancient Egyptian records reference kings of the Upper and Lower Kingdom. Ancient Egypt was divided into administrative regions called “nomes” – like counties – which persisted for the enormous period of 3200 years until the Muslim invasions of 640CE.

It was a revelation to me how recent the idea of a modern nation state is – really just the last 300 or so years, and how the world was not neatly tessellated with states until quite recently. To be fair there are sufficient border disputes to argue that the world is not neatly filled now. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often seen as the birth of the modern nation state – although the written agreement is rather thin on details. The rise of the modern state was a combination of political developments but also improved mapping from the 16th century – accurate mapping being a pre-requisite for establishing borders.

I was excited to learn of the Marcher Lords and the origins of the Marquis title; the Marches are border areas whose lords were given greater flexibility in, for example, raising an army, in order to defend borders. Marquis is the French term for such a lord. The ability to raise an army is a risk to the state – as the Roman Empire discovered on several occasions.

The legacies section talks about interesting borders in the present day. I think my favourite is on the borders in Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau – a Belgian town surrounded by a Dutch one, as a result of the Holy Roman Empire and various feudal lords. It isn’t even as simple as a single boundary – there are something like 30 parcels of land in the town, some as small as 50 metres on a side. There are also a couple of German and Italian towns embedded in Switzerland.

This section also contains stories of accidental invasion, the most benign of these are the Swiss “invasions” of Liechtenstein. These are generally because the border is heavily forested in places and there is no indication on the ground as to the location of the border – these have happened repeatedly in the last 50 years. Other borders suffer more fractious disputes – the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute is in the news as I write.

Bir Tawil on the Egypt – Jordan border is an area the size of Surrey claimed by neither state because to claim it would mean giving up claim on a more lucrative piece of nearby land. This is one of many places where post-colonial borders – often drawn along lines of latitude or longitude – have led to problems in the present day. This is partly because they paid no attention to features on the ground but also because, at the time they were set, the precision with which longitude could be measured was not that high.

Surprisingly this also effects the USA, where in addition to lines of latitude and longitude treaties often contained later-to-be-discovered-vague geographical references. I read a whole separate book on the borders of the US states. The origins of the District of Columbia, where the US capital sits are also discussed – originally this was a square plot of land demarcated for the capital so that no state had an advantage in the federal government, later it lost the land on one side of the Potomac River. In the modern era this has led to an anomaly where the many residents of the capital are democratically under-represented – they only gained a democratically elected mayor in 1975.

The externalities section covers the prime meridian – where the zero for longitude is set, time zones, the international date line, Antarctica, Eurovision, various landlocked countries, maritime boundaries and boundaries in the air and space, or rather the boundary between air and space. It is eclectic, to say the least. I found the chapter on maritime boundaries particularly interesting – I was surprised how recently the law on territorial waters came into force (1994).

This made good holiday reading, it is written in an engaging style and chapters are of a handy length to read sitting in the garden in an hour or so. The sources and further reading section is excellent if you want to learn more about any chapter.

Postscript: I made a note to myself that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia map of Australia was not reproduced in the book, so I link it here. To be fair it would not reproduce well in black and white at the scale of the book.

Jul 11 2025

Book review: The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth

As I enter retirement I have started going to an actual bookshop for my non-fiction reading, The Book-Makers – A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth is the fruit of this approach.

My Goodreads account shows I have read 618 books since I started using the site about 10 years ago – it is fair to say I am a big fan of books.

Smyth’s book is about people who make or made books, divided across 11 thematic chapters. The chapters are ordered chronologically. Books are defined quite broadly, when he talks about Benjamin Franklin (under non-books) he includes newspapers, advertising and bank notes.

The chapters can be grouped into wider themes. The first of these are the technical aspects of printing: printing, binding. typography and paper. The Book Makers starts with Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) who was an apprentice of William Caxton, who introduced the first printing press to England in 1476. de Worde’s contribution was the large number of titles he printed, and what he printed – literature for the masses. The thing that struck me about the printing and binding is that these were distinct process in the early years of print, a customer would buy the printed pages of a book and take them elsewhere for binding. This explains how the books in country houses often have such uniform appearance.

The metal type used to print is a recurring theme, it has its own chapter with John Baskerville (1707-75) and his wife, Sarah Eaves (1708-88) who took over his business after he died. Baskerville was late to printing – his first book was printed when he was 51. His goal was to produce the most beautiful books possible, drawing on his experience in calligraphy and “japanning”. You may be familiar with the Baskerville font which he created in 1752. Later we find Thomas Cobden-Sanderson throwing his type into the Thames so that his business partner wouldn’t get hold of it! Metal type is the heart of printing, and sets of metal type are shared and inherited between printers – this can be traced by the characteristic wear on individual letters which is revealed in the print they produce.

Also in this theme of the technical aspects of printing is the manufacture of paper, something Smyth describes as a neglected area for historical study. Paper production went from 55 tonnes per year in 1805 to 25,000 tonnes in 1835 as a result of the continuous paper production process that Nicolas-Louis Robert patented in 1799. He died a pauper since patent protection was not well-established and he didn’t have the means to defend what was clearly a lucrative idea. This huge increase in production of paper means that it finds more applications – in toilet paper, advertising and flyers. It becomes a throw-away commodity.

There are a group of chapters that talk about publishing beyond the book: cut and paste, non-books, extra-illustration and a variety of recent print innovations (zines, artist books and so forth). The “cut and paste” chapter visits Mary and Anna Collet two women at Little Giddings – a religious community near Cambridge – in the earlier part of the 17th century. Their great work was the “Harmony”, a biblical text which attempted to harmonise the five books of the Pentateuch. It was made by very literally cutting and pasting text (often at the word level) from copies of the bible, augmenting the text with illustrations similarly harvested. This was a work of sufficient quality that Charles II praised it.

Extra-illustration, also called Grangerism, is a similar practice found around the start of the 19th century. In extra-illustration enthusiastic amateurs produced enhanced versions of books by adding illustrations they had sourced elsewhere. The name is after James Granger’s Biographical History of England which helpfully lists all know images of each of the biographical characters it introduces – a book made for Grangerism. I am partial to a bit of a sort of extra-illustration of my own, coincidentally I labelled my post on this Obsession – Grangerism seems to have been an obsession in at least some cases.

There’s one chapter on lending libraries – in particular Charles Edward Mudie’s (1818-90) lending library which was massive in the later part of the 19th century – distributing books across the UK and the rest of the world. Authors not included in Mudie’s library were at a disadvantage in the commercial market. Commercial lending libraries largely disappeared with the arrival of public libraries from the 1920s. I was interested to learn that WH Smith had a lending library, rail users with the appropriate subscription could pick up a book at one station and leave it at another.

Finally, there are couple of chapters on small presses. William Morris had a small press (Kelmscott Press) – but the focus here is on Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and his Dove Press. Morris and Cobden-Sanderson focussed on the retro, printing high quality volumes in small print runs, harking back to the techniques and styles of early printing (and even manuscripts). Smyth notes that the quality of paper, ink and print does not increase massively over the long term but the efficiency with which it can be done increases greatly.

A chapter is devoted to Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press which was active a little later and focused on printing modernist works in small print runs. She attracted some high profile authors before they were famous, and engaged in political activism through her press. Virginia Woolf ran a similar press – Hogarth which still exists as an imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Woolf and Cunard appreciated their presses as a way of publishing their own work. It seems both of them enjoyed the sometimes messy and manual process of book making.

I must admit I found the final chapter on “Zones, Do-it-yourself, boxes, artist books” a bit anti-climatic perhaps because I don’t consider things happening in my lifetime as “history”!

This is an excellent book for people who love books, I found the parts about the early years of printing when the form of the book had not solidified most interesting.

Jun 16 2025

Book review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom

My next review is of The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom, a book I found via a review in New Scientist. It is about the contents of cuneiform tablets, mainly from the library at Nineveh close to Mosul in modern day Iraq. The library at Nineveh was compiled under the direction of King Ashurbanipal who ruled Assyria from 669BC to 631BC. The library was sacked in 612BC by the Babylonians. Cuneiform is a script written by impressing a stylus on wet clay tablets to produce wedge shapes. The clay tablets make an excellent preservation medium particularly when the library containing them is burnt, thus firing them. The library at Nineveh contained 30,000 tablets from a period of over 1000 years – the Assyrians were well aware of this deep history. In total we have about 500,000 tablets written in cuneiform in the Sumerian and Assyrian dialects of the Akkadian language. The contents of the tablets are very varied; there are works of literature, personal letters, instruction manuals for exorcists, medics, lamenters and even a meeting agenda.

The Library starts with a chapter on the cuneiform writing system, it originated in Uruk in around 2700BC descended from earlier, simple tally marks used in the area as early as 8000BC. Cuneiform is a subtle writing system and scribes took pride in both their “penmanship” and also the way the language was used in this respect it reminds me of the written Chinese language. However, it seems writing had a different status than it has now, many of the tablets in the library and elsewhere appear to have been written out as teaching aids indeed elsewhere the practice tablets of students are found as part of the structure of buildings. Poems such the Epic of Gilgamesh are found in multiple versions and stages of “completeness” as it evolved over time. One gets the impression that Mesopotamia maintained a strong oral tradition but specialists had access to written records.

Subsequent chapters cover different themes (The Power of the Gods, Magic and Witchcraft, The Treatment of Disease, Reading the Signs, Messages in the Stars, Literature, The Waging of War, Lamentation), with each starting with a dramatic vignette followed by a discussion in detail about the elements of the vignette and how they fit into wider Mesopotamian culture. I see from their biography that Wisnom is a poet and playwright as well as an academic Assyriologist, I can see how these vignettes and the wider analysis of cuneiform text is informed by this.

To modern eyes the Mesopotamians are bound up in exorcists, gods, omens, signs in the sky – seemingly highly superstitious. However, these are a pre-cursor to modern science – this is very obvious in the case of astronomy where the Babylonians who kept detailed and accurate astronomical records which allowed them to predict phenomena such as eclipses. More widely the search for omens led to a great deal of observation, and the predictions arising from those observations had a logical, internal consistency. They were building a model of the world but based on what we now know to be largely the wrong underlying data.

I particularly enjoyed the section on extispicy – the art of divination via the entrails of a sacrificed animal, typically a sheep and usually the liver of the sheep. The Mesopotamians were very keen on their extispicy, as a measure of this they had names for five distinct parts of a sheep heart but one vague term for the human heart. They had quite a scientific approach to their extispicy, there were written guides and sometimes multiple people interpreted the same liver to check for consistency. The output of an extispicy was a yes/no answer.

Lamentations form a big chunk of the library, these are ritual chants bemoaning a poor state of affairs to the gods. They have two purposes, one is to appeal to the gods for support after a calamity has happened, the other is to describe a possible calamity to the gods as an appeal not to carry out the calamity. There three types of lamentation: balags, ershemmas and ershahungas the first two of these are named for the instruments that accompanied them whilst the third sounds like a more choral.

The book finishes with a chapter on A Day in the life of Ashurbanipal which acts as a handy summary of the preceding chapters and a chapter on the life of cuneiform and Babylonian culture after the fall of the Assyrian empire – the last written cuneiform dates to around 80AD. Reading the book I was puzzled as to why I had not heard more about Mesopotamia but having finished I realise I had, the Old Testament has strong parallels to Mesopotamian myths as do ancient Greek myths. The signs of the zodiac and the way we measure time in hours, minutes and second come from ancient Mesopotamia.

This is quite a big book but it did not feel like a chore to read it. I was struck by the detail in which we know about Mesopotamian lives – certainly those around the King. There is an extensive annotated biography – perhaps learning cuneiform will make a suitable retirement project!

May 15 2025

Book review: Retirement – the psychology of reinvention by Kenneth Shultz

Once again I am broadening the scope of my reading with Retirement – the psychology of reinvention by Kenneth Schultz. I picked up this book second-hand for only a few pounds from World of Books (link above) which might be counted as part of my retirement financial planning.

I was made redundant a couple of years ago but then worked as a contractor for UNOCHA for a little over a year, finishing at the end of 2024. Last month I turned 55. Potentially I am retired but intend on doing some consultancy work, so this book is very relevant to my current circumstances.

Retirement is divided into six chapters covering the (1) wider context of retirement, (2) early planning for retirement, (3) challenges in the lead up to retirement, (4) the transition from work to retirement, (5) the psychology of retirement, and (6) reinventing yourself in retirement. Each chapter is comprised of two page spreads with their own title, occasionally extending to four pages. The text is broken up into short chunks and is heavy with graphics. There are frequent references to other research, with key figures presented in infographics. All in all it is an easy read without feeling too patronising.

The context chapter talks about how work is often a very central part of our lives. Work is not only important for financial reasons, but also for social reasons and how we value ourselves. Also in the first chapter is a short discussion of the each of the decades of retirement from your fifties through to your eighties, Shultz notes that we are likely to live 10 years longer than our parents. Health plays a fairly prominent role: whilst our health potentially declines in retirement we have more time to address health and fitness issues.

For me the chapters on early planning and the lead up to retirement are a bit late and I won’t be alone in that. As many as 50% of people retire involuntarily, often for reasons of caring for another or their own illness, redundancy no doubt plays a significant part too. All of these apply to me to some extent. The IFS has shown that, in the UK, as many as 20% of men at 55 are economically inactive, with a proportion of those indicating they are retired (see page 8, figure 2 in this report).

As we move into retirement a degree of anxiety is not unexpected but often there is a honeymoon period for the best part of a year before boredom strikes. Sometimes this is a bit of a lonely mission – only 20% of couples retire in the same year, women often find retirement more difficult because they have done the majority of housework which they then continue to do in retirement so the event seems a bit of anti-climax.

Many of us hope to do some paid work in retirement, 34% according to one study but fewer – 14% – actually manage it. Not mentioned in this book but my observation from very limited data is that consultancy works for the former employees of larger companies which have some semi-formal scheme for consultancy with their own retirees. Mentoring also gets a mention here as valuable work for the retiree.

Others go for a full-on second career or start their own businesses, perhaps completely unrelated to their pre-retirement career. Volunteering is another option – it has very high retention rates, of 80%, for those that chose to volunteer for things that interest them.

Somewhat surprisingly one of the risks of retirement is the “busy ethic”, throughout our working lives busy-ness is valued and in retirement there is a tendency to try to replicate that. Typically retirees get most benefit from having a four or five hobbies/activities and those that work best are generally those they had some time for prior to retirement.

As stated in the subtitle this book is informed by psychology and there are numerous places where you can evaluate your personal preferences according to a variety of models. For example, in a section on coping with setbacks Schultz talks about fixed and growth mindsets which are informed by cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Although the author is American the research he cites covers at least the UK, as well as the US. There is perhaps an over-emphasis on funding healthcare which belies his home country. This book makes very little mention of financial planning for retirement which is a whole, very large, topic of its own. Schultz mentions that paid financial advice is good for giving you confidence in your retirement plans.

Quite a lot of the fifth chapter is on relationships with other family members in retirement, these can be a bit strained as retirement perhaps puts you together rather more than you have been used to although I can’t help thinking that COVID has changed that, with families forced together full-time for an extended period and working from home more common in the aftermath. Grandchildren and (adult) children are mentioned throughout the book. I suspect more and more families will find themselves in the same position as me as an older parent – my son is 13, so going by our example we won’t have grandchildren for another 30 years and my son is in no position to look after me!

The final chapter talks mainly about the activities you might undertake in retirement including travel, various clubs (some retired friends are trying to persuade me to take up crown green bowling!), gardening, exercise, paid work (as mentioned above), and volunteering. There are some pages on time management and self-assessment here too.

I wish I’d read this book in my forties since a big chunk of the book covers the run up to retirement. It has prompted me to take action, at a leisurely pace, as I enter my first few months of retirement.

May 02 2025

Book review: It’s a Continent by Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata

I picked up It’s a Continent: Unravelling Africa’s History One Country at a Time by Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata at Waterstones, I was looking for books on Africa – preferably written by Africans – this was one of a very limited selection on the shelf.

The authors identify as British-Nigerian and British-Congolese, you can read a bit more about them on their podcast website here. As they say at the beginning of the book, they are not historians and this is not a history text book. They describe it as a collection of stories you never heard at school which I think is fair.

The book comprises short chapters on each of Africa’s 54 countries (and one disputed territory). They focus on one element of the country’s history – varying between pre-colonial history, the colonial period and post-independence. Often they are focused on an individual, typically they are only a few pages long . They are fairly relaxed in style with the odd sarcastic aside. I can imagine they follow the style of the podcast.

Of my recent reading about Africa, An African History of Africa was a sweeping fairly academic chronological history of Africa which was not really tied to individual countries, and covered the independence movements fairly briefly. Africa is Not a Country is a more thematic book which is focussed on the present. As the author’s say, It’s A Continent is the stories of history we hear at school but for Africa rather than for Britain. It has the effect of making the countries of Africa feel more distinct.

One of the recurring themes was how countries gained independence, this is where the many-country coverage helps because common features arise. The world wars, particularly the Second World War produced an expectation of some payback for the lives and resources committed by the colonies to the war on the side of their colonial masters. Secondly, the US/Britain Atlantic Charter of 1941, which envisaged a post-War future, led to the foundation of the UN in 1945 which had self-determination (i.e. independence ) at its core. Furthermore the colonising forces, generally France and Britain, could no longer afford to manage their colonies. Germany had been forced to give up its colonies (centred around Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon) in the aftermath of the First World War, they were transferred to France and Britain.

The post-independence pathway shows a rather depressing regularity too with independence heroes either turning slowly more and more authoritarian or being rapidly replaced by despots (often from the army, trained and backed from outside the country). Madimba and Ukata reference this in their glossary, referring to a Coloniser Handbook and a Despot Manual.

It’s easy as a Western European to look down on the imperfect democracies of Africa. However, we have our own share of conflicts in Europe. Since World War 2 there have been three dictatorships (Spain, Portugal and Greece) which ended (early) in my lifetime. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have broken up fairly violently, Czechoslovakia seems to have managed to split peacefully but this is exceptional. There are a number of secessionist movements in Europe. The US is currently demonstrating how young democracies are not immune to returning to authoritarian rule. To this Africa has the added difficulty of artificial borders created by colonisers, infrastructure designed to extract resources from countries rather than support its residents, deliberate divide and rule policies during the colonial period and post-independence interference either as part of the Cold War or by the pre-independence colonists.

Reading through the chapters there were a couple of surprises, it turns out that Russia briefly had a foothold in Africa via the town of Sagallo in Djibouti which was “acquired” by Nikolay Ivanovich Ashinov in 1885. Ashinov appears to have been a complete con man and Russia quickly lost Sagallo to the French.

I was also surprised to discover that their are two European cities in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla which are heavily funded by the EU to prevent them becoming an entry point into Europe for African migrants. Unsurprisingly the Moroccans want them back.

One of the nice things about the book is its universal coverage, so as well as the big favourites like Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and so forth we hear of the small islands – Comoros, Seychelles, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cabo Verde, the Chagos Islands) and countries like Togo.

I was born in the seventies, I became politically aware around 1980 when the first wave of independence movements had passed and the final few were being completed – the formation of Zimbabwe was one of my earliest political memories. Over my lifetime the news stories from Africa have largely been of civil war, dictators and natural disaster (I’m including famine here, though that is rarely wholly natural). Britain largely sees itself as a fairly benevolent colonial power which is reflected in popular culture. Madimba and Ukata have a very different point of view which I believe is probably correct.

I enjoyed this book, to start with I was a bit put off by its casual style but it makes it rather engaging and readable. I am now curious about the foundation of the UN and its role in African independence movements.