Tag: History

Feb 16 2026

Book review: The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse

My next review is of The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse. I’ve long had a professional interest in data visualisation, William Playfair is a name frequently mentioned in terms of the invention of several types of chart (line, area, bar and pie charts).

Playfair led an interesting life, fleeing from the French Revolution at one point, and spending several spells in debtors prison.

He was born in Scotland in 1759 and died in 1823. His brothers James and John are notable in the own right as an architect and mathematician respectively.

He apprenticed as an engineer in Scotland and went on to work as a draughtsman for James Watt in Birmingham at the Boulton and Watt works between 1777 and 1780.

It is not discussed in this book but Watt and Boulton were probably close to the origin of engineering drawings as we know them now. They needed them to ensure the parts of the engines they sold, made by multiple manufacturers, would fit together. They also had a business model which saw them paid on the basis of how much money they saved their customers. So Playfair would have a combination of the technical skills required to produce data visualisations, and work for a business that had some call for them. It is interesting to note that another person noted for his innovative visualisations was Charles Joseph Minard, a civil engineer.

Playfair would also likely have had knowledge of Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) – a sort of timeline diagram, which plotted the lives and deaths of famous people in history, and the New Chart of History (1769) which showed world history in a similar manner. Priestley was a member of the Lunar Society, as was Matthew Boulton.

At the end of his contract with Watt and Boulton Playfair took on their document copier business, arising from an idea by Erasmus Darwin, patented by James Watt. Playfair seems to have set up the manufacturing process for the machines to a high standard but then left to set up his own business.

This business followed on from the type of manufacturing work that Boulton did, making small metal items with machines. It did not go particularly well, he resumed attempts to set up a manufacturing business on moving to Paris in 1787. His view was that the French were trailing the British in their Industrial Revolution so represented a better opportunity than England, where he would always be competing with Boulton. When in France he also made a proposal to replace the “Machine de Marley” which supplied water to Versailles from the Seine – in this he was unsuccessful. He also set up a bank, as well as being involved in the Scioto Company, which looked to sell land in America to French refugees – an issue here was that the company didn’t actually own any land in America!

Playfair left Paris in 1792, as the Reign of Terror started – he had been peripherally involved in the French Revolution at the beginning but later he became strongly opposed. Supporting the British government in their war with Napoleon – he worked as a journalist, proposed a semaphore telegraph scheme and played some part in a scheme to damage the French economically with a scheme for forging French “assignats” – a form of paper currency used in revolutionary France.

It was just prior to moving to Paris that his writing career started, and his first published works in data visualisation: The Commercial and Political Atlas. The data visualisations were the key novelty here, Atlas uses charts to illustrate economic data. Playfair was showing an increasing interest in economics, meeting Adam Smith in 1787, and also writing a pamphlet on interest rates The regulation of the interest of money. He also edited a version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations after his death.

He also wrote extensively on politics, propounding his views on Jacobins, Catholics, the Irish, and the economy. I was a bit lost here since Bellhouse never tells us what a Jacobin is or the broader historical and economic background. Playfair was in favour of a landed gentry continuing to run the country, and against reform of the parliamentary system. Reviews at the time seem to indicate he was a poor writer with not particularly profound opinions. His British Family Antiquity had the side-effect of bankrupting his publisher, although not Playfair himself (this time).

In his desperation for cash he engaged in low level extortion, effectively writing to people he felt might have money and describing how someone was about to write terrible things about them and he was the man to stop them, for small renumeration. One gets the impression from Bellhouse that this was not uncommon at the time.

Ultimately his attempt to set up a bank in England led to his being imprisoned in debtors prison. His Original Security Bank was established in 1797. It provided notes of convenient denomination in exchange for Bank of England notes. It was clearly designed to take advantage of an evolving situation in banking – the Bank of England had recently stopped exchanging paper money for gold as a result of the war with the French. It presented high “regulatory risk”, in fact the founders, Playfair included were briefly imprisoned for forgery.

As it was the Original Security Bank was quickly wound up, as a result of competition and mismanagement and it is from this bankruptcy that Playfair’s multiple trips to debtors prison arose – the first in 1809. He seems to have come off badly relative to his partners in the bank. Being imprisoned for debt meant that his ability to go into business in future was very limited, hence he leant heavily on his writing. The early 19th century was a different time in terms of how bankruptcy was handled – imprisonment in special debtors prison was routine – a practice that ended in 1869 Debtor’s Act. Playfair formed friendships with other debtors whilst in prison, and these were pretty much the only people he could go into business with – several were outright fraudsters and so this did not go well for him.

In the background to all this he was married to Mary Morris possibly in 1780 when their first child, John, was born although wedding banns were read for them in 1795. They had four children, one of whom was blind and thus needed support throughout her life. One wonders how much Playfair was responsible for the financial support of his family.

I have mixed feelings about this book, it is pretty readable but although the author mentions and illustrates Playfair’s work on data visualisation one gets the impression his interest is more in economics, politics and debt. This may simply be an accurate reflection of Playfair’s life but I was more interested in the data visualisation side of his career.

Jan 12 2026

Book review: Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

Following on from my earlier reviews of books on autism this one is of Neurotribes: The Untold History of Autism and the Potential of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman.

The book is chronological with a couple of lengthy forewords and an introduction by Silberman describing his original contact with the autistic community stemming from the Silicon Valley culture in 2000.

It is easy to see autism as a modern illness, before the eighties clinically defined autism was very rare. However, even under the strict original definitions there were people like 18th century scientist Henry Cavendish who we would identify as autistic. Cavendish did the same walk every day, changing it only once when he met some people on his usual route after which he always used his new route, he ate a leg of mutton every evening. He attended the Royal Society once a week, where his colleagues were touchingly neuroaffirmative – they valued his contributions but knew to talk in his presence to elicit his input rather than talk to him directly – which would cause him to flee. Cavendish flourished because he came from a wealthy family which could support both his scientific tendencies and his personal oddities.

The term “autism”, as we understand it now, was first used almost simultaneously by Leo Kanner in the US in the diagnosis of “early infantile autism,” and Hans Asperger in Austria with the diagnosis “autistic psychopathy” in papers published in 1943 and 1944. The term autism had been coined by Paul Bleuler in 1911 to describe certain symptoms of schizophrenia – a focus on an inner world or the self. Autism was seen as a childhood presentation of schizophrenia.

Asperger worked in the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, he saw his role as finding the special skills of his patients which could be developed so that they could go on to lead fulfilling and hopefully independent lives.

The Children’s Clinic was to become central to the Nazi euthanasia program which saw the murder of nearly 800 children. A survey from a similar institute in Saxony in 1920 had asked effectively “Would it be ok if your child died in our care, you know, a bit “accidentally”.” to which the answer in some cases the answer was “Why are you asking us? Get on with it”. It was here that the Nazi eugenics programs originated. Asperger was at least complicit in this and his work was consequently ignored until the late eighties.

Kanner was Jewish born in the Ukraine 1896 but had left his job as a doctor in Germany in 1923 largely for economic reasons. He had written a book called Child Psychiatry in 1935 and went on to be the head of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He later employed two of Asperger’s former colleagues in his clinic at Johns Hopkins, they were Jewish and had fled the Nazis.

Until the 1950s the standard “treatment” for autistic children and indeed anyone with mental illness was institutionalisation in organisations with names like “Home for Non-educable feebleminded children”. As an aside the original name for the UK’s autistic society was the “Society for Psychotic Children”! Over the years various scandals were unearthed regarding these institutions. It wasn’t until the seventies that the US and UK moved to a legal framework in which disabled people had a right to education rather than institutionalisation.

Both Asperger and Kanner had a very narrow view of what constituted autism seeing it has having a very strict set of criteria, restricted to children. Under their criteria incidence was something like 4 in 10000 children. It wasn’t until Lorna Wing’s work in the eighties that Asperger’s work was finally recognised and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was updated with new, broader diagnostic criteria. It was from Wing that the term “autistic spectrum” came into being. Even in the early nineties there was debate as to whether autism existed in adults. Nowadays the incidence of a more broadly defined neurodiversity is somewhere in the region of 15-20% of the population.

Diagnosis is about providing support – Wing saw that a lot of children needed support – he daughter included – and were failed by diagnosis. At one point a researcher says that for their research work in autism they applied diagnostic criteria rigorously whilst in private practice they were more permissive so that their patients could get the support they needed. All through the period covered by the book some autistic people have made it through to independent adulthood but it has been dependent on the support they are given. As Kanner said “if one factor is significantly useful, it is a sympathetic and tolerant reception by the school”.

If the environment changes to make life easier then there is less need for diagnosis. We could think of the “diagnosis crisis” as an “environment crisis”, we are building environments – particularly schools which are increasingly challenging for neurodiverse people.

The film “Rain Man”, released in 1989, was an amalgam of several people in real life familiar to the screenwriter Barry Morrow. It produced a sea change in the way autistic people were viewed by wider society.

All through the book parents and their children are central. Many times clinicians observed parents to be rather obsessive about their children’s condition and more often than not at least a bit autistic themselves. Even some of the clinicians involved were neurodivergent. Major figures in the book like Bernie Rimland started their journey as parents of autistic children determined to do their best for them. This is reflected today in the parents of autistic children, who in my experience have very deep knowledge of the bureaucratic systems to navigate in order to get support.

For a long time the focus of parents and the medical establishment has been finding a cure for autism, and there has always been a population of snake oil salesmen willing to sell that cure (or at least find a cause to blame). Autism was variously attributed to mothers, vaccines, vitamin deficiencies and ultimately genes depending on the mores of the time. Treatments were at times absolutely brutal – until quite recently electrocuting autistic children to change their behaviour was legal. This is where the anti-vaccine movement comes in rising to prominence as a result of the large increase in autism diagnosis due to the change in diagnostic criteria.

Nowadays more and more autistic people are saying they are not looking for a cure but rather a society that provides relevant accommodations. The cause of autism is generally seen as genetic, not a result of parents, the environment, vaccines or medicines.

The final chapters talk about autistic people being able to speak for themselves, starting in the late eighties with Temple Grandin. It is from this period that the terms neurodiverse and neurotypical come. The internet is core to this – social media often work well for autistic people since much of the social complexity is removed. One wonders how banishing children from social media will work for this group. The role that social media plays is not a new thing, in the early to mid-20th century ham radio and science fiction provided a community for many who would now be described as somewhat neurodivergent.

I loved this book, it is highly readable and it speaks to my concerns not only for my son but also for me.

Nov 19 2025

Book review: Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

This review is of Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a book of everything we know about Neanderthals. The aim of the author is to be fully up to date and reveal some of the conversations that academics working on Neanderthals are having now. The story is told across 16 thematic chapters.

Neanderthals first appeared approximately 400,000 years ago and became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Know Neanderthal sites were long concentrated in Western Europe, particularly France and Spain but more recently remains have been found much further East, well into Asia. They shared the world with early H. Sapiens and the Denisovans.

Neanderthals lived against a backdrop of repeated Ice Ages but they were but there were lengthy warmer periods, in fact the Eemian period, centred on 100,000 years ago was warmer than today.

The first Neanderthal remains were excavated in 1812-16 but not recognised as such. The original eponymous remains were found in the Neander valley south west of Dusseldorf in 1856, a Neanderthal skull was discovered in Gibraltar in 1848 but not recognised as such until 1864. These remains entered the scientific time when (white, male) Western European scientists were eagerly trying to demonstrate the superiority of the white race and so they were seen in this light. I wonder whether, if they were discovered now, they would be considered a separate species.

The remains we have amount to several hundred individuals, including 30 or so nearly complete skeletons, DNA sampling has been done on 30 or so individuals with high resolution genomes measured for 3. The remains cover individuals from stillborn infants, through children and adolescents to adults. Individuals over 50 are rare, this is true across all of the archaeological record; estimating the age of an older individual from bones is hard, and they are more fragile. Many of the skeletons shows signs of injury and disease.

The Neanderthal bones paint a picture of a species very similar to us, a little chunkier with well-developed upper arms. They appear to have been highly mobile which reflects modern hunter-gatherer societies.

A lot has happened in Neanderthal studies since I first learned of them in the eighties. Archaeological techniques have improved greatly, isotopic analysis to tease out diet and migrations and most recently DNA analysis have brought great insights. From an archaeological point of view the earliest excavations in the mid 19th century were fairly haphazard and even after that excavation tended to focus on big bones and stone tools (lithics, as they are referred to in this book). Experimental archaeology means we have a very detailed understanding of how lithics are made.

Nowadays everything is collected in an excavation, and recorded in enormous detail. This means that, for example, lithics and stone fragments can be refitted to their core (the stone from which they were all made) which enables us to identify different “technology” strands for the production of stone tools. Neanderthal lithics were not just the result of bashing rocks together. They clearly had a very firm grasp of the qualities of the materials they used, where best to source stone, how to best process them and how to repair them. This goes way beyond the tool use of modern apes. Early H. Sapiens lithic technology is arguably more advanced but it is not night and day. It is not just stone that Neanderthals understood, they also worked with bone, animal skins, resins from birch – again very selective of the materials they used. They butchered animals to get the most nutritious and high calorie cuts. The Schöningen spears are a set of wooden Neanderthals spears preserved in sediment on the edge of an ancient lake shore dating back at least 200,000 years.

Hearths form an important part of the archaeological record for Neanderthals, in caves under appropriate conditions we can see fires that represent perhaps just a few days stay – the smoke from them is trapped in flowstone the material from which stalagmites are made. They paint a picture of small groups returning to locations over periods of thousands of years. Cave sites are central to the archaeology of Neanderthals – it wasn’t clear to me whether this is simply what is preserved (camps out in the open would be less likely to survive) or whether Neanderthals spent significant time in caves. In any case they are places of repeated visits rather than long term stays. Wragg highlights another preservation bias, we see more nearly complete skeletons than we expect and more delicate children’s bones. This suggests special treatment of the dead, there is also evidence in the form of butchery marks on Neanderthal bones suggest ritual cannibalism and very limited evidence of decoration of corpses.

Perhaps even more surprisingly there is evidence for Neanderthal art, most strikingly the Bruniquel Cave stalagmite structures dating to 176,000 years ago. There are also traces of pigments on a number of artefacts and also patterns carved into bone.

Neanderthals as a distinct group disappeared approximately 40,000 years ago, it is not clear why they died out. Prior to their extinction the DNA evidence shows that they interbred with H. Sapiens several times over a periods of many thousands of years. We retain a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA from this time. Their demise may simply have been down to chance, the humans found in Western Europe today are not the descendants of the earliest H. Sapiens found in the area – we originate from further East. Perhaps the disappearance of the Neanderthals is something similar, a chance repopulation after climatic change .

I was interested to see Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children novels cited a couple of times as an inspiration for Wragg and other archaeologists working on Neanderthals. I remember reading the books avidly at some point in the 1980s, Auel was clearly in advance of their time showing Neanderthals in a rather more subtle light.

I came away from Kindred with a picture of Neanderthals very similar to my distant H. Sapiens ancestors, at a glance it seems a Neanderthal and their encampments would look very similar to those of H. Sapiens. At this point I wonder whether it is valid to consider them a separate species. Are they a boxer dog to H. Sapiens border collie?

Sep 15 2025

Book review: Six Thousand Years of Bread by H.E. Jacob

Six thousand years of bread by H.E. Jacob is an idiosyncratic book, I picked it up because I was interested in the history of bread. It covers a great deal of history and religion with bread (and hunger) a central theme. I had expected a more technical focus on flour, yeast and the bread making process over time.

The author, Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a German-Jew – arrested by the Nazis in 1938, imprisoned in Dachau and then Buchenwald before being released and emigrating to the United States. He worked as a journalist and author throughout his life. Six Thousand Years was published in English in 1944, the result of 20 years of research.

Six Thousand Years is divided into six “books” with each book comprised of a number of chapters – about 36 in total. To avoid confusion I’ll refer to them as sections, the sections are as follows:

  1. The Bread of Prehistoric Man
  2. Bread in the Ancient World
  3. Bread in the Middle Ages
  4. Bread in the Early Americas
  5. Bread in the Nineteenth Century
  6. Bread in our Time

The first section on The Bread of Prehistoric Man covers the domestication of grain and the invention of the plough. Jacob lists the species domesticated grass from millet (earliest), oats, barley and wheat (also early), rye (late classical) and maize, suggesting Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the source of wheat based on the diversity of species there. The modern view is that domestication happened further north in the Fertile Crescent centred on Mesopotamia. He locates the invention of the plough in Mesopotamia although he mentions China, he thinks the ancient ploughs found there were too sophisticated to have been invented there. I think this reflects the understanding of China in the West at the time of writing.

Bread in the Ancient World covers the invention of bread in the Ancient World, primarily in Egypt where leavened (sourdough) bread is believed to have been invented. There are tomb paintings from the period showing Egyptian bakeries. Bread was a de facto currency alongside beer, and was very central to Egyptian life. Herodotus referred to the Egyptians as “bread eaters” and made fun of their habit of kneading dough with their feet. Also included in this section are the symbolism of bread in Judaism, early Christianity. The parts on Greece are oriented around mythology and religion whilst Rome is more political. I was surprised the degree to which wheat was imported to Greece and Rome from Egypt and the area around the Black Sea.

After the fall of the Roman Empire a lot of agricultural knowledge was lost, this led in part to an outbreaks of ergotism most notably in 10th century France. Also lost was knowledge of water (grain) mills, and certainly an understanding as to why they were prone to exploding (flour dispersed in air is very explosive). A lot of the background to this section is the animosity between the peasant growing and harvesting grain, and the miller – often milling on behalf of a lord who banned milling in the home, the baker and the townsfolk. There is also a section here on transubstantiation and the Reformation, as well as hunger – which was a recurring feature of life in the Middle Ages. Hunger seems to have arisen largely because of the way society was structured with the peasants growing grain very restricted in what they could do with the grain they had grown, and obliged to pay significant tithes.

Moving to the Americas we learn about the introduction of maize and potatoes to the West from the Americas. Again Jacob seems to be a bit mystified that non-Western peoples could breed maize and potatoes without Western intervention. Maize is in many ways superior to wheat, it grows more quickly in the climate of much of the Americas and requires little in terms of preparation to plant. The introduction of maize and potatoes to the West was quite rapid but there were suspicions about both. Rye was more successful in the Americas than wheat. Interestingly there was a rye / wheat divide in Europe with Germany, Poland and Russia eating rye bread almost exclusively and France and England eating wheat bread – this division weakened in the period after the French Revolution as white bread became aspirational.

The main focus of the 19th century is on the mechanisation of agriculture, starting off in the United States with mechanized reaping machines in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that roller mills were introduced which allowed white flour to be made more easily, and improved throughput. Bread baking in the US started to be mechanised. Elsewhere Justus von Liebig was working on artificial fertilizers which improved yields – this was on the basis of improved understanding of plant biology. In the American Civil War bread played a role – the North grew wheat, made bread and transported it on the new railway lines – the South grew cotton which you can’t eat nor could it be sold abroad and grain import imported. Furthermore, the North grew and harvested wheat with a reduced workforce, many having gone to fight, which they carried on doing after the war allowing America to dominate the supply of wheat to the global market.

The final section covers the first half of the 20th century including the First World War and the American Dust Bowl – a result of over-exploitation of the land to grow wheat. Interestingly the Americans identified the problem quite promptly, and started to address it with a programme of converting wheat fields to pasture and planting trees. It finishes talking about Hitler’s very direct policies of starvation, allocating starvation levels of food to non-Germans and Jewish people. He also talks about the horticultural revolution which led to the cold hardy wheat grown in Canada and the Soviet Union, and other northern. It is here that we see most clearly that 6000 years was written 80 years ago – Jacob considers Lysenko, the Soviet biologist, something of a hero and the battle over the health benefits of white bread when compared to more wholemeal bread was still on. These days Lysenko is known as an anti-Darwinist, and for his suppression of opponents through his political power. Obviously the book was written before the further Green Revolution of the 1970s which also impacted the growing of wheat.

6000 years is rather long and rambling but I found it pretty readable and the wider focus made me curious about, for example, the mechanisation of agriculture in 19th century. It is anachronistic in places, and I think in some areas our understanding has moved on.

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.