Tag: History

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 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.

Mar 19 2025

Book review: Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin

My next review is of Africa is not a Country: Breaking stereotypes of modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin. It follows a thread of books I have read on Africa and Black people in the UK and elsewhere, this was prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Africa is not a country is about viewing Africa from an African perspective. It is comprised of 8 parts, the first of which is a thumbnail sketch of the author, and his family, and where he grew up in Lagos. Faloyin is Nigerian with part Yoruba and part Igbo background although he was born in Chicago and now lives in London. He paints a vivid picture of his upbringing very unlike my own, mainly because his family is clearly very sociable and loves cities (or at least Lagos).

The second part goes on to talk about how the 54 countries of Africa came into being, starting with the Berlin Conference in 1884, in which the Western powers agreed to divide up Africa; no Africans participated, despite requests. One thing that struck me was that outside the conference politicians as senior as Gladstone in the UK knew that what they were doing was wrong. The US refused to sign the General Act of the conference, despite being participants. It isn’t clear whether this was a decision made on moral grounds. The 54 countries is something I think I will return to as a number, for comparison Europe has 44 countries, half the number of people and a third of the land area so we might expect Africa to be rather more diverse than Europe.

As a British European I don’t like to dwell too long on the colonial period. This part of the book highlights the preference of the British to out-source the colonisation problem to private companies, in particular the Royal Niger Company, which was taken over by Unilever (a former employer of mine) in the 1920s and only ended its existence in 1987. King Leopold II of Belgium’s subjugation of the Congo (essentially for his own personal gain) is spine-chilling – over the 20 years after the Berlin conference half the population, 10 million people were killed.

The division of Africa into arbitrary countries that did not follow ethnic or any other native pattern had consequences in the post-colonial period; the countries created at independence were naturally unstable so conflict was inevitable. However, the African consensus is that it is best to stick with these countries rather than attempt a wholesale reorganisation. This is not a peculiarly African problem, we can think about the fighting as Yugoslavia fell apart, and the Soviet Union, and the secessionist movements in Spain or Irish reunification.

Many of my early memories of Africa represented in the UK were of Band Aid, and the Ethiopian famine (1983-5). Faloyin sees this as the birth of modern white saviour imagery (I don’t disagree with him). Band Aid projected an image for all of Africa of famine and misery whose inhabitants could only be saved by the intervention of white Westerners – this theme has been repeated endlessly since then. It feels like things are changing though, for the 30th anniversary of Band Aid in 2014 there was a pretty large backlash with musicians with African backgrounds refusing take part. Of the leaders of the Aid/Relief movement Bob Geldof, for his part, essentially said the means justified the ends whilst Lenny Henry was more reflective on the appropriateness of the “white saviour” narrative.

The theme of representation gets a reprise in a later part of the book where Faloyin talks about representations of Africa in the movies which are usually highly stereotypical. This chapter is genuinely laugh out loud funny, as the author says it is a pastiche of Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa“. I hadn’t appreciated quite how revolutionary the film, Black Panther, was in terms of it’s representation of Africans. Actors in Black Panther did not act as generic Africans, they took on national or region speech and habits. Somewhat to my surprise Faloyin cites Coming to America as an earlier film in the same vein – sadly from Hollywood this appears to represent the full list of African films.

Faloyin talks about the story of post-independence democracy in seven types of dictatorship: cold war dealmakers, god-playing colonial masters, revolutionary heroes, opportunistic families, civil-war peacemakers, founding fathers and (rarely) unhinged madman with taste for human flesh. He does this through brief sketches of 7 post-independence leaders Siad Barre, Sani Abacha, Robert Mugabe, Paul Kagame, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Obiang Nguena Mbasogo, and Muammar Gaddafi. Some of these dictators have fallen, but others and others like them remain in place. All of them have been supported to some degree by the West or the Soviet Union – sometimes both!

The chapter on looting is perhaps the most shameful for a British European since it is ongoing; the “Scramble for African” in the 19th century is beyond our reach – it happened in at least our great-great grandparents time. But in terms of looted artefacts it is my generation, people like me, in museums in my country who hold a tight grip on the artefacts taken (violently) by British forces during the Scramble with little obvious will to return them. Much of this discussion is based on the Benin Bronzes, these were not just taken, the sophisticated cities that held them were destroyed. Faloyin states that 90% of Africa’s cultural artefacts are now outside of Africa but of the 900 or so Benin Bronzes held by the British Museum, 800 or so are in storage. When Benin Bronzes went on (loaned) display in Cotonou, capital of Benin 275,000 people went to see them.

France, Germany, and Belgium were also heavily involved in looting artefacts – the Germans seem to have a particular enthusiasm for human remains which fed into their race science research.

It is fair to say there has been some progress on the return of artefacts to Africa but mainly in writing reports, with minor organisations returning a few artefacts with great fanfare, and foot dragging. Faloyin estimates that the number of artefacts under discussion for return is around 10% of the total.

Jollof, a rice dish from West Africa is a bit of a recurring theme through the book, clearly of critical importance to West Africans, and the author, but perhaps included for relief from some of the more serious chapters.

The book finishes with some vignettes with modern Africa, through protests in several countries, culture and the story of Botswana who fortunately discovered their diamond deposits after independence from the British and has thrived as a country since. Faloyin is optimistic about the future, he sees a young continent with a lot of positive things going on and perhaps signs of the end of the post-independence conflicts.

Feb 26 2025

Book review: 1666 – Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal

My next review is of 1666 : Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal. The book is centred on London, in the year 1666 with a substantial chunk on 1665 which provides background to the events of the following year. It was certainly a very eventful time, the plague of the title is the Black Death which made a return to London in the summer of 1665. The war is the second Anglo-Dutch War and the hellfire is the Great Fire of London.

It is only a few years after the Restoration. As an interesting aside I learnt of the Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 which appears to have forgiven all crimes committed during the Civil War, except for regicide. This is relevant since some senior figures in the navy had been involved in Cromwell’s government. John Milton benefited from it too, as someone imprisoned for his anti-Royalist views.

1666 is substantially about the “great men”, such as the king, his brother and the court but it contains quite a lot of rather smaller characters. I was intrigued by the reports from William Taswell, a schoolboy, whose autobiography was published posthumously in 1852.

Also mentioned, amongst many others are Margaret Cavendish, whose biography I read previously, and Aphra Behn – who sounds like a really interesting woman. In this book Behn travels to the Netherlands as a spy, she would later go on to become a prolific playwright. Rather inevitably Samuel Pepys appears frequently, as does another diarist, John Evelyn. Robert Hooke, John Milton and Isaac Newton also gain a couple of pages but it feels a little like they were bolted on for additional colour.

I must admit I read the section on the plague assuming that it was written after the COVID pandemic, and only realised after I’d finished that it was written in 2016. This highlights some of the similarities in pandemics across the years. In contrast to the present day, the 1666 plague led to a mass exodus from London. Those suffering plague were quarantined in their own homes, typically with their families, with fatal consequences for most concerned. At the time there was some discussion as to the wisdom of this type of quarantine. The government took steps to limit public gatherings which seem to have been largely obeyed. The plague was petering out in London by early 1666 but was starting to rage outside the capital. It killed around 100,000 from a population of 460,000 in London.

I have read books on plague, and as a child the Great Fire of London was a regular feature in history lessons. The Anglo-Dutch Wars are something I have not read about before. This thread of the story starts with the accidental destruction of the London in the Thames. Followed by a number of naval engagements where it seemed, to a large degree, that the weather was a determining factor – the navies of the English and Dutch were fairly evenly matched at this point. The English were possibly gaining the upper hand during later Summer 1666 but the Great Fire strained resources considerably. The Dutch successfully attacked the Chatham Docks in the summer of 1667, shortly after a peace was agreed which only lasted until 1672.

The “Pudding” of Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire started, is black pudding, not dessert. Providing a segue from the Angle-Dutch War: Thomas Farriner, the owner of the bakery where the fire started had a contract with the navy to make ship’s biscuit. Farriner was a jury member in the trial of Frenchman Robert Hubert who confessed to starting the Fire, he was found guilty and executed despite being clearly innocent (even at the time). This was an aspect of the Fire I had not appreciated as a child – there was a lot of suspicion, and even violence, against foreigners even as the fire raged on the assumption that the fire could not have spread so fast without help. The total damage was 70,000 made homeless, 13,000 houses destroyed, 87 churches, and 52 livery halls with a total financial loss estimated at £10,000,000 (about £2billion in current figures). Over the four year Blitz campaign during the Second World War around 70,000 buildings were destroyed but the population of London was nearly 9 million rather than several hundred thousand. The fire ran its course in 4 days and obliterated most of the city of London within the Walls.

The official death toll was 6 people, however Rideal highlights this was probably a large under-estimate; many of the elderly and infirm would not have been able to evacuate quickly enough and their bodies would have been completely consumed by the fire. Rideal also talks about the psychological impact of the fire, Pepys writes of his nightmares after the Fire and there are a number of accounts of people clearly permanently changed by the Fire. I can’t help thinking the Plague would have had a similar impact.

The book finishes with an epilogue containing paragraphs on key characters and what they did next.

I found this a very enjoyable read, it is relatively short with quite a narrow scope but it gives a gripping picture of London at the time. The themes of plague, fire and war “work well together”.