Tag: History

Jul 02 2023

Book review: The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan

frankopanIt is rare that I am menaced by the sheer size of a book but The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan has done this to a degree. The Silk Roads, by the same author is similarly massive. So in a break from my usual habit I am going to review as I read.

The book is about the interplay of climate and humanity, and how humanity impacts the environment with an attempt to cover history across the world rather than focussing on Western Europe.

The extensive footnotes for this book are found in a separate downloadable pdf.

0 – Introduction – Frankopan is a year younger than me – born in 1971, and his early memories were shaped by news reports of acid rain, the fear of nuclear winter and Chernobyl – all stark demonstrations of man’s potential impact on the environment.

1 – The World from the Dawn of Time(4.5bn-7m BC) – The earth’s environment has always been changing, in deep time there was a much lower concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. Those animals we see around us are the result of evolution through multiple cataclysmic environmental events.

2 – On the origins of our species (7m BC-12,000BC) – Climate change in central Africa and growing social groups led to speciation of the hominid group. We started large scale manipulation of the environment – managing forests with fire – 65,000 years ago.

3 – Human interactions with Ecologies (c.12000-c.3500BC) – End of the Younger Dryas and the start of the Holocene is a key point for civilisations, the climate becomes more benign and stable and larger settlements start to grow.

4 – The first cities and trade networks (c3500-c2500 BC) – the first cities are founded, and arguably the first anthropogenic climate change takes place. With cities came hierarchies, ownership and vulnerability to shocks and disease.

5 – On the risks of living beyond one’s means (2500BC-c.2200BC) – One such shock is the great drought of 2200BC, often seen as a global phenomena but actually rather complicated with different regional effects and an impact which was perhaps most obvious on the ruling class.

6 – The first age of connectivity (c.2200-c.800BC) – the environment provides resources unevenly, and so trade is necessary as societies become more sophisticated, these trade networks lead to interdependence so when one society falls others are impacted. The trade is not just in goods but also in ideas.

7 – Regarding Nature and the Divine (c1700-c.300BC) – Religions which we still see today arose several hundred years BC, and many of them made references to the environment. The ruler was often an intermediary to the gods/control of the weather – rain being particularly important. Even in this time there were exhortations to preserve the environment.

8 – The Steppe Frontier and Formation of Empires (c.1700-c.300BC) – the Eurasian steppes provided a catalyst for the growth of empires in the neighbouring region, alongside the domestication of the horse in about 3000BC. This combination provided rapid transport, and the flatness of the terrain made expansion easy. There is also an interplay between nomadic and pastoral peoples.

9 – The Roman Warm Period (c.300BC-AD c.500) – the Roman Empire grew at a time of benign and stable climatic conditions – and fell when those climatic conditions changed. Contemporary writers noted the pollution in Rome and other big cities. We can see the lead of the Roman Empire in Greenland ice cores.

10 – The Crisis of Late Antiquity (AD c.500-c.600) – the decades from 530AD saw multiple volcanic eruptions leading to global cooling, food shortages, and the rise of disease (the Justinian plague) and the fall of empires.

11 – The Golden Age of Empire (c.600-c.900) – the Prophet Mohammad’s agreement with the ruling elite in Mecca in 628AD provided an Arab identity that grew to an Empire stretching across North Africa and into Spain. Trade grows with sub-Saharan Africa. These patterns are replicated in the Americas and the Far East. Literacy grew in the eighth century with the introduction of paper from China. Empires started to decline in the 9th century as another warmer drier period started.

12 – The Medieval Warm Period (c.900-c.1250) – the Medieval Warm Period was both warm, and stable with unusually low levels of volcanic activity. During this time there was a large growth in global population, and Northern Europe saw significant growth. This growth was a result of improvements in crops and technology, as well as the benign climate.

13 – Disease and the formation of a New World (c.1250-c.1450) – the 13th century saw the rise of the Mongol empire, under Genghis Khan, stimulated by wetting weather in the steppe leading to more productive pasture when other areas were suffering drought. But the wet weather and the extensive trade networks of the Empire led to the rise of Black Death. Interesting parallels between post-Plague and post-1918 influenza Europe – the roaring twenties.

14 – On the expansion of Ecological Horizons (c.1400-c.1500) – the 14th and 15th century saw the fall of some of those empires that rose during the earlier more benign and stable weather, more driven by the instability of large empires than by climate change. It also saw the European "exploration" of the world and the large scale transport of plant and animal species across the world.

15 – The Fusion of the Old and the New Worlds (c.1500-c.1700) – the European "discovery" of the New World introduced a massive migration of flora and fauna around the world, potatoes, tomatoes,chillies from the New World to the Old. Pigs, sheep, goats and cattle from the Old to the New.

16 – On the exploitation of Nature and People (c.1650-c.1750) – the new sugar, tobacco and cotton industries required a large workforce, resistant to malaria, and Africans fitted the bill – this chapter to about slavery.

17 – The Little Ice Age (c.1550-c.1800) – the Little Ice Age has long been known but its magnitude was quite variable around the world, many things have been ascribed to the Little Ice Age but connections and causality are tenuous. The 17th century saw significant developments in military technology and spending on professional armies in Europe. There was also a large rise in urbanisation. Variable weather, uncertain crops hit some countries hard.

18 – Concerning Great and Little Divergences (c.1600-c.1800) – 1600-1800 was the period in which the economies of Europe diverged from those of Asia and Africa, and in Europe the North pulled away from the South. The introduction of the potato to Europe was important, as was maize and manioc (cassava) to Africa.

19 – Industry, extraction and the Natural World (c.1800-c.1870) – markets became truly global with wheat from North America cheaper to ship from Canada to Liverpool than from Dublin to Liverpool. Colonialism was at its height with Britain leading the world and the Americans expelling indigenous people from their own lands.

20 – The Age of Turbulence (c.1870-c.1920) – new resources became ripe for exploitation like rubber, guano and tin. Industrialisation proceeded apace. Concerns about climate began, and the Carrington Event and the Krakatoa eruption started scientists thinking about global impacts. Global pandemics made an appearance for both people and animals.

21 – Fashioning New Utopias (c.1920-c.1950) – the middle years of the 20th century saw a new wave of exploitation with oil, copper, uranium and more recently lithium becoming important resources. Colonialism receded but was replaced by corporate and government interference in states. In the Soviet Union ecological damage, and great human upheaval was driven by the dash to modernise but in a communist rather than capitalist framework.

22 – Reshaping the Global Environment (the mid-Twentieth Century) – the USSR and the USA started large scale environmental modification projects, see Teller’s proposals to use nuclear explosions to change just about anything.

23 – The Sharpening of Anxieties (c.1960-c.1990) – in the sixties the USA and USSR got heavily into weather modification, and the Americans into Agent Orange in Vietnam. The USA programme was conducted in deep secrecy, and when it was revealed there was an outcry which lead to a treaty banning such environmental modification. This led to a wider thaw of Cold War interactions.

24 – On the edge of Ecological Limits (c.1990-today) – the 1990s saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Industrial China. It also saw the discussions over climate change heating up.

25 – Conclusions – Frankopan’s conclusion is rather gloomy, he highlights how we are failing to act on climate change but then points we may suffer worse consequences from volcanic activity, or an asteroid strike!

There are themes across the whole book, in the environment we see periods of stable climate interspersed by periods of change – particularly driven by volcanic eruptions. From the human side we see the growing scale of civilisations, larger civilisations with more connections are more vulnerable to instability and the fall of other civilisations. We see ever increasing urbanisation and exploitation of the environment at ever greater scale.

Although initially intimidating, I found The Earth Transformed rather readable – perhaps because I saw each chapter as a separate essay.

Feb 28 2023

Book review: On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

on_savage_shores.Another book from those I follow on Twitter, On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock which is about the Indigenous people who came to Europe in the early years of the invasion of the Americas.

The book is divided thematically into six chapters titled Slavery, Go-betweens (covering translators), Kith and Kin (the transport of families, and the adoption of Indigenous people – mainly boys – by Spanish men), the Stuff of Life (about products such as potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and so forth), Diplomacy, and Spectacle and Curiosity (about Indigenous people as entertainment).

The focus is on Meso- and South America and the 16th century, when most of the interactions were with Spain and Portugal. There is some mention of colonisation of North America which was more related to Britain, and Brazil which was an interest to the French.

I think the thing that struck me most was the number of Indigenous people in Europe, particularly in Spain, from the very start of the 16th century. I had been aware from reading the history of various scientific expeditions that one or two Indigenous people were often brought back to show off in court. But On Savage Shores highlights that in fact thousands of people were brought, often crossing the Atlantic several times over a period of years. Many were brought explicitly as slaves but others came as diplomats, translators, companions although it is unclear in many cases how voluntary their travel was.

The second aspect which struck me was how active, and engaged in the Spanish legal systems and the Royal courts the Indigenous visitors often were, this was in part because Indigenous people were familiar with legal processes in their own countries. Furthermore courts both legal and Royal are an excellent source of primary documents, it is one of very few ways the Indigenous people were documented. Documents generated by Indigenous people are rather more sparse – there are a handful of pre-invasion codices, some spoken poetry captured in writing at a later date and legal-like documents created to support land claims and the like in Spanish courts. Many of the European records are of those seeking emancipation, quite often successfully. 

Columbus very clearly went to the New World with a view to capturing slaves – he had visited the Portuguese slaving fortress, Castle of Sao Jorge da Mina in Ghana prior to his visit and was evaluating the Indigenous people and their suitability for slavery from his first visits to the Americas. To the end of the 16th century something between 1 and 2 million Indigenous people were taken as slaves with most remaining in the Americas but some being brought back to Spain. In the same period about 300,000 Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas. In theory Spain banned slavery in the mid-16th century, however it wrote itself a number of exceptions which meant the practice was to effectively continue in large volumes for many years.

As well as slaves the Europeans took people they saw as suitable as translators, they also took the children of important Indigenous leaders and some that acted as diplomats – taking their cases to the Spanish Court. For these people the level of coercion is difficult to ascertain. There were certainly a number who came to Europe voluntarily but others had little choice.

A recurring theme is the adoption of sons into the families of, for example Walter Raleigh, Christopher Columbus, and Hernando Cortés. This practice seems to have some basis in Indigenous practices and the adopted sons often gained relatively high social positions back in Europe. Similarly there is a Brazilian boy, Essomericq taken at age 15 by the French in 1504 who became a pillar of the community in France before dying at the age of 90 – although his story is somewhat in question having been recorded sometime after he died by a descendant with a point to prove.

There was a huge population collapse across the Americas due to European diseases in the fifty years after Columbus landed, the diseases travelled faster than the European invaders. The movements of Indigenous people need to be seen in this context, first of all the trans-Atlantic passage was a long grim voyage for all – taking in excess of 6 weeks in the 16th century. Added to this Indigenous people were vulnerable to European diseases, and frequently died in transit or within a few weeks of arriving in Europe. All Europe got in exchange was syphilis. Some of the Indigenous people travelling to Europe were looking for advantage from Spanish support back in their home countries which were in turmoil.

On Savage Shores was revelatory for me, it changed the way I thought about Indigenous people and, to a smaller degree, the Spanish invaders. The switch in viewpoint makes Indigenous people, just that – people – rather than exhibits. On Savage Shores is also an enjoyable read, the focus on one period and one region probably keeps it to a manageable length down a bit. It feels like there is scope for a second book focussed on North America.

Sep 14 2022

Book review: Writing and script – A very Short Introduction by Andrew Robinson

writingA very short book for this review, Writing and script – A very short introduction by Andrew Robinson – this fits in with my previous review on Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu. In some ways the “very short” format stymies my reviewing process which involves writing notes on a longer book!

Robinson makes a distinction between proto-writing and fully writing, the first proto-writing – isolated symbols which clearly meant something – dates back to 20,000BC. Whilst the first full-writing defined as “a system of graphic symbols which can be used to convey any and all thought” dates back to some time around 3300BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It first appeared in India 2500 BC, Crete (Europe) 1750BC, China 1200BC and Meso-America 900BC. In common with humanity itself there is a lively single origin / multi-origin debate – did writing arise in one place and then travel around the world or arise separately in different places?

When I am reading books relating to history I am very keen to pin down “firsts” and “dates”, I suspect this is not a good obsession. As for mathematics the earliest full-writing was used for accountancy, and bureaucracy!

An innovation in writing is the rebus principle that allows that word can be written as a series of symbols representing sounds whilst those symbols by themselves might convey a different meaning.

I was excited to learn a new word: boustrophedon – which means writing which goes from left to right and then right to left on alternate lines – it is from the Greek for “like the ox turns”. Writing in early scripts was often in both left-right and right-left form and only stabilised to one form (typically left-right) after a period of time. I have been learning Arabic recently (which is read right-left) and was surprised how easy this switch was from my usual left-right reading in English.

Another revelation for me is that a written script is not necessarily a guide to pronunciation – in English it broadly is, some languages do a better job of describing pronunciation in the written form but other languages like Chinese, the core script is largely about transmitting ideas. Arabic holds an intermediate position – accents were added to an alphabet comprised of consonants to provide vowels and thus clarify pronunciation.

As well as the appearance of scripts, Robinson also discusses their disappearance, this happens mainly for political reasons. For example, Egyptian Hieroglyphics fell into decline through invasions by the Greeks and then Romans who used different scripts. Cuneiform was in use for 3000 years before dying out in around 75AD.

Deciphering scripts gets a chapter of its own, classifying decipherment efforts in terms of whether the script was known or unknown and whether the language it represented was known or unknown. Given a sample of a script the first task is to determine the writing direction, and the number of distinct elements. This second task can be challenging given the variations in individual writing styles and, for example, the use of capitalisation. The next step is to identify the type of script (an alphabet – standing for vowels and consonants, a syllabary – standing for whole syllables , or  logograms – standing for whole words) – on the basis of the character count and other clues. The final step, of decipherment, requires something like the Rosetta stone – the same text written in multiple languages where at least one is known – names of people and places are often key here. A broad knowledge of languages living and dead is also a help.

The chapter on How writing systems work expands further on the alphabet/syllabary/logogram classification with a separate chapter on alphabets – I particularly liked the alphabet family tree. Greek is considered the first alphabet which included both consonants and vowels, earlier systems were syllabaries or just contained consonants.

Japanese and Chinese writing systems are covered in a separate chapter. I don’t think I had fully absorbed that Chinese characters were a writing system equivalent to the Latin alphabet, and so can express multiple languages. Kingdom of Characters focus on Chinese elided the fact that Japanese has troubles of its own, particularly in the number of homophones, Japanese speakers sometimes sketch disambiguating characters with their hands to clarify their meaning.

The book finishes with an obligatory Writing goes electronic chapter which highlights that text speak (i.e. m8 for mate) is an example of the rebus principle in action. Robinson also highlights that the electronic publishing has not ended or diminished the importance of the physically printed language, the opposite is true in fact.

This book packs a lot into a short space, it provides the reader with interesting new facts to share (I liked boustrophedon), it would not be a substantial holiday read but a great introduction to the field.

Jul 10 2022

Book review: The Art of More by Michael Brooks

the_art_of_moreThe Art of More by Michael Brooks is a history of mathematics written by someone whose mathematical ability is quite close to mine – that’s to say we did pretty well with maths at school but when we went to university we reached a level where we stopped understanding what we were doing and started just manipulating symbols according to a recipe.

The book proceeds chronologically starting with origins of counting some 20,000 years ago and finishing with information theory in the mid-20th century with chapters covering arithmetic, geometry, algebra, calculus, logarithms, imaginary numbers, statistics and information theory.

It is probably chastening to modern mathematicians and scientists that much of the early work in maths on developing the number system, including zero and negative numbers, was driven by accounting and banking. Furthermore, much of the early innovation came from China, India and the Middle East with Western Europe only picking up the ideas of zero and negative numbers in around the 13th century.

Alongside the development of the number system, the ancient Greeks and others were developing geometry, the ancient Greeks seemed to go off numbers when they discovered irrational numbers – those which cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of integers! Geometry is essential for construction, surveying, navigation and mapmaking – sailors have often been competent mathematicians – through necessity. Geometry also plays a part in the introduction of accurate perspective in drawings and paintings.

Complementing geometry is algebra, developed in the Arabic world. Our modern algebraic notation did not come into being until the 16th century with the introduction of the equals sign and what we would understand as equations. Prior to this problems were expressed either geometrically or rather verbosely.

Leading on from algebra was calculus – the maths of change. It started sometime around the beginning of the 17th century with Kepler calculating the volumes of wine barrels whilst he was preparing for his wedding. There was further work on the infinitesimals through the century before the work by Newton and Leibniz who are seen as the inventors of calculus. I was struck here by how all the key characters in the development of calculus Newton, Leibniz, Fermat, Descartes and the Bernoullis all sounded like deeply unpleasant men. Is this the result of the distance of history and the activities of various proponents for and against in the intervening centuries? Or were they really just deeply unpleasant men?

Doing a lot of calculation started to become a regular occurrence for sailors, as well as people such as Kepler and Newton working on the orbits of various celestial bodies. John Napier’s invention of logarithms and his tables of logarithms, published in 1614 greatly simplified calculations. It converted multiplication and division into addition and subtraction of values looked up in his tables of logarithms. The effort to create the tables was massive, it took 20 years for Napier to prepare his first set of tables, containing millions of values. Following Napier’s publication in 1614 logarithms reached their modern form (including natural logarithms) by 1630. In addition mechanical calculating devices like the slide rule were quickly invented. I grew up in a house with slides rules, although by the time I was old enough to appreciate them electronic calculators had taken over. Napier was also an early promoter of the modern decimal system. Logarithms also link to exponential growth, highly relevant as we still wait for the COVID pandemic to subside.

Historically the next area of maths is the invention of imaginary numbers, if you don’t know what these are then I’m not going to be explain in the space of a paragraph! There is a link here with natural logarithms through Euler’s identity which somewhat ridiculously manages to link e, pi and i in one really short equation. I was not previously familiar with Charles Steinmetz who introduced complex numbers into the analysis of electrical circuits responding to alternating currents – although it is a very elegant way of handling the problem and a method I used a lot at university. Largely when we talk about complex numbers we are discussing the addition of i, the square root of -1, to our calculations. But there are additionally quaternions, invented by William Hamilton, which add three complex numbers: i,j and k to the real numbers but the limit is octonions – a system of seven complex numbers and the real numbers. I am curious as to why we cannot have more than 7 flavours of complex numbers.

Statistics is my area of mathematics, I’m a member of the Royal Statistical Society. I think the thing I learned from this chapter was that the word "statistics" has its origins in German and "facts about the state". I quite liked Brooks’ description of p-values which seemed particularly clear to me. Brooks highlights some of the sordid eugenicist history of statistics, as well as the more enlightening work of Florence Nightingale and others.

The book finishes with a chapter on information theory, largely based on the work of Claude Shannon but with roots in the work of Leibniz and George Boole. George Boole invented his Boolean logic in an attempt to understand the mind in the mid-19th century but his work on "binary" logic was neglected for 70 or so years until it was revived by Shannon and other pioneers of early computing.

This is a fairly informal history of mathematics, I found it very readable but it includes a number of equations which might put off the completely non-mathematical.

Jun 12 2022

Book review: Play it Loud by Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna

play_it_loudI took up the guitar a few years ago, and play in the manner described by Kurt Vonnegut, that’s to say with little skill but expanded horizons. I read The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port a while back and Play it loud by Brad Tolinska and Alan Di Perna is in a similar vein, a book about the electric guitar and the music that came from it. Whilst The Birth of Loud focused on Leo Fender and Les Paul and a period from the early fifties to the mid-sixties Play it Loud starts earlier and extends later and is broader in scope.

Play it Loud is divided into chapters which typically cover one or two people and one or two guitars, each illustrating a technical innovation or change in musical style. Broadly each chapter follows on from the previous one in time, taking us from the 1920s and thirties in the first chapter through to around 2015 by the end. It finishes with a timeline, which I liked.

The book starts with George Beauchamp in the 1920s and the first guitar pickups designed to pickup the vibration of the strings rather than the vibration of the guitar body, this followed the invention earlier in the century of the electronic valve amplifier and the paper cone speaker – both prerequisites for useful electric guitars. Guitars had been around for some time, and in the twenties guitar-based Hawaiian music was popular in the US. Hawaiian stringed music had its roots in Portuguese sailors in the 18th century. Beauchamp with Rickenbacker produced the first electric guitar based on this technology, the A-32 ‘Frying Pan’ in 1932. This was a cast-aluminium lap-steel style guitar.

The next development was the Gibson ES-150 in 1936 with a bar pickup that sat under the strings, rather than over them as for the Beauchamp pickup, ES stands for electric Spanish – it was the first of its kind. The guitar was made popular by the endorsement of Charles Christian, a Jazz guitarist, who was considered better than Django Reinhardt and Les Paul at the time. He was to die at the age of 25 of tuberculosis. This type of endorsement is a recurring theme, celebrated musician endorsements are massively valuable to guitar companies.

By the early fifties a number of people had realised that the guitar body was largely a place to hang strings and pickups and no longer needed to be hollow – the hollow chamber of the guitar is the amplifier in an acoustic guitar. Thus was born the Fender Telecaster and then the Stratocaster and, at Gibson, the "Les Paul". This is the period covered in The Birth of Loud. It is worth noting that Les Paul was one of a breed of musician/technician who were to recur with Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai in the late seventies and early eighties, who pushed forward the development of the guitar. I hadn’t realised but the very futuristic looking Gibson Flying V and Explorer models were born in this period of the late fifties – they were unpopular then but saw a resurgence in the early eighties.

The new solid-body electric guitar, Fender’s Precision Bass and new amplifiers meant that by the early sixties an electric four-piece band could fill a hall with sound (previously this required a big band or an orchestra and by the late sixties Jimi Hendrix could make rather more noise than that. At this point Tolinska and Perna highlight how the electric guitar fitted in with protest and counter-cultural – also citing Bob Dylan and his infamous switch to the electric guitar. His electric set at the Newport Country Festival was so short because it had only been brought together a few days earlier.

By the late sixties the quality of Fender and Gibson’s offerings was dropping, and players like Eric Clapton started looking for the discontinued Les Paul models. The drought in good quality guitars was to extend for a while, in the mid-sixties, when Fender and Gibson were dropping in quality Japan was producing a large number of cheap, low quality guitars. In this environment, an after-market parts market grew with names we recognise today like Seymour Duncan, Jackson Charvel and Larry Dimarzio. Japan was to later produce high quality guitars – Steve Vai chose Ibanez to make his signature model.

The book finishes with a chapter centred on Jack White of The White Stripes, and his enthusiasm for very retro, and not highly regarded guitars and amplifiers. This represents a thread running through the book, guitars are more than their technical components – the choice of guitar says something about what a players intentions are. So Eric Claption took up the discontinued Les Paul to ape the earlier blues players. The punk and garage bands were trying to get away from those blues roots, and cheap, plastic guitars fitted that vibe. They were also trying to get away from the comfortable middle class hobby guitarists (like me) who would happy spend a couple of thousand dollars on a signature or classic guitar because they could.

In common with my reading of The Birth of Loud I found myself googling for the guitars mentioned and thinking I should get one!