The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
byJohn Lewis Gaddis
(Oxford University Press, 2004)
History is a construct, a matter of perception; it's also personal and
fixed firmly in our particular present. And, according to most of the reviews
which I've read, the same seems to apply to people's perceptions of
the merits and faults of this book.
I found it entertaining,
engaging, and effortlessly readable - but then I am intrigued by works
which ruminate or pontificate on 'how' and 'why' we 'do' history. It
reads rather like having a chat with your favourite college professor
(perhaps after you've finished their particular course) in the relaxed
atmosphere of a bar given the lightness, informality, and humour of the author's
tone; and in that sense it is a reflective book which doesn't seem
surprising when you understand the book is derived from a series of
(somewhat valedictory) lectures. I found it a thought provoking work,
even if I didn't wholly agree or share in all of its theses. It meanders
through a vast number of (rather self-conscious) metaphors to make many
of its points and returns to some of them a little too often to labour
certain aspects, which at the end - in seeking to come full circle - I
felt left the book feeling somewhat inconclusive, but then that too
seemed to be the overarching point: that history is essentially
unknowable, or, to put it another way, history is a construct, a matter
of perception ...
As a historian presently exploring my own
approach, I have to confess, I am rather drawn to this kind of academic
navel gazing. Hence I've no doubt I shall at some point return to The Landscape of History for a repeat reading.
On History by Eric Hobsbawm
(Abacus, 2008)
Make no mistake. This is a heavy-weight set
of meditations on historiography. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, but
in parts it is highly dense and heavy going. Some years ago now I did
my first degree in a distinctly Marxist Anthropology Dept., and so I was
surprised (and somewhat startled!) to find I could follow and found the
chapters on Marx particularly illuminating. Likewise, I found the later
chapters on the 'Annales', History from Below, counterfactuals, and,
post-modernism/identity history all made very fruitful reading. Hobsbawm
is widely regarded as a formidable historian, and, as a first taster,
in reading this book I can well see why!
For a more comprehensive overview of Hobsbawm and his works this is an interesting article: reflecting upon Hobsbawm's Long Century by Joseph Fronczak (June 2017)
Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.1756-1905 by Ian J. Barrow
(Oxford University Press, 2004)
This book describes itself as: "A unique study of
British possession and territorial legitimacy in India as represented by
colonial maps, this book focuses on various strategies used by
map-makers and surveyors to embed a past into their narratives, and
concludes that maps were used both to demonstrate a history of territory
and, importantly, to justify the possession of land in colonial times
in the Indian subcontinent."
An
interesting and curious read. Making History, Drawing Territory covers a remarkable amount of ground
(excuse the pun) for such a slim book, yet tends to spend more time
saying what it's going to say rather than actually saying it! The author
does seem very aware that he is writing in the shadow of several rather
more substantial works in this field, most notably Matthew Edney's excellent Mapping an Empire (University of Chicago Press, 1999), yet most interestingly Barrow strives to shift the
hitherto predominant focus of academic enquiry in this field away from
the purely scientific to consider the more social aspects of analysis
and interpretation, and thus opens up a number of intriguing questions
which perhaps a longer and more in-depth examination might have made for
a more rounded and satisfying work - instead it reads rather like a set
of five loosely connected essays introducing similar themes, in this
sense it's an excellent 'primer' text. A worthwhile and engaging read
nonetheless. Incorporating a rich array of primary and secondary
sources, as well as fold-out reproductions of many maps, I would
certainly very much recommend this book to anyone interested in the
history of cartography, British imperialism, and the trigonometrical
survey of India.
Living near the River Thames I’m
often struck by the fact it is so empty these days. It was much busier when I
was a child, so the decline in river traffic is a fairly recent phenomenon. I
suspect the Thames hasn’t been so quiet in centuries. Photographs and old newsreels from the last
century show it teeming with all sorts of vessels, from great ships, powerful
tugs, and the lovely distinctive Thames sailing barges, down to small skiffs
and tenders. Today the river traffic is mostly tourist party boats, the
fast commuter clippers, and the even speedier rib boat rides. But the Thames is
still a “working river” – tug boats still haul barges filled with the city’s
waste down river, and at high tide large cruise ships occasionally make
their incongruous way upstream to moor alongside HMS Belfast. Sometimes,
sitting near a window in my flat, catching a glimpse of one of these out of the
corner of my eye as it passes by can be quite disconcerting; as, masked by the
riverfront buildings, these ships look like a tower block that has decided to
up sticks and slink off through the city. These happenings are made all the
more eerie because their massive engines are so silent, yet the powerful
vibrations of their screws turning in the comparatively shallow channel of the riverbed
manage to rattle all the cutlery in my kitchen drawers.
Look At Life - Report on a River, 1963
It’s impossible to live by the
river and not become fascinated by its history. In the narrow maze of riverside
streets, many of which are still cobbled, you can find echoes of the past. Old
signs; converted warehouses and disused pumping stations; old docks and inlets; waterman’s steps; and cosy old pubs, such as the Prospect of Whitby or the Town of Ramsgate, that have been in business for hundreds of years. Then there’s
the ever changing weather and the regular rise and fall of the tides. It often
feels like the river has its own micro-climate which is distinct from the rest
of the city, as here a mile’s distance can make all the difference between rain
and shine.
Not far from where I live is a
curious site, beside Millwall. Set back from the paved riverside walkway and preserved
in a shallow grassy hollow are the archaeological remains of a massive slipway.
Consisting of a huge set of heavy timbers (now sadly decaying), laid out in
long rows running parallel to the river; these piles are the remains of a
shipyard – called, Napier Yard (at low tide, if there’s not too much mud, you
can sometimes see these great wooden timbers extending down the foreshore). It was here, 160 years ago this year on November 3rd, that one of
the great feats of Victorian industrial engineering was launched – the SS Great Eastern. Or, at least, this was
the date on which the launch of the ship was attempted. In actual fact, it took
a further three months to float the ship off the slipway. Its great weight
meant that the timbers had subsided more than had been expected, particularly
at the bow end, which meant the ship was not sitting level. Thousands of people
had gathered that November day to watch the launch and so must have been
disappointed when the huge ship failed to budge. Charles Dickens was among
them, and penned the following word sketch while observing his fellow spectators:
“They
delight in insecure platforms; they crowd on small, frail, housetops; they come
up in little cockle boats, almost under the bows of the great ship … Many in
that dense floating mass on the river and the opposite shore would not be sorry
to experience a great disaster, even at imminent risk to their own lives.”
(quoted in Croad, p. 156)
Sadly a workman in the Napier
shipyard was accidentally killed during the failed launch. When the crowds did eventually
disperse I can’t help wondering if Dickens stopped by at The Grapeson nearby Narrow Street, a favourite haunt of his (and
mine) on which he is said to have based his description of "The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" inn in Our Mutual Friend (1865). The original steam powered rams were not strong enough to push the
ship down the timbers, and so, with the use of hydraulic rams and a
conveniently higher tide than usual the ship was eventually launched sideways
into the river as planned on January 31st 1858.
At the time the Great Eastern
was the largest ship afloat. Designed by the famous engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the ship suffered a number of setbacks in its early career which have
dogged its memory with many people still thinking of it as an unlucky ship, yet
the crowning achievement of its working life was celebrated last year, when –
150 years before – on July 27th 1866, the Great Eastern arrived at Newfoundland, having set off two weeks
before from Ireland, the ship had successfully laid the transatlantic telegraph cable that began a revolution in global communications. Arthur C. Clarke gives
a fabulous re-telling of this historic feat in his book, How the World was One: Beyond the Global Village:
“In
the Atlantic Cable, the fabulous ‘Great Eastern’ met her destiny and at last
achieved the triumph which she had so long been denied.
This magnificent but unlucky
ship had been launched seven years before, but had never been a commercial
success. This was partly due to the stupidity of her owners, partly to the
machinations of John Scott Russell, her brilliant but unscrupulous builder, and
partly to sheer accidents of storm and sea. Seven hundred feet long, with a
displacement of 32,000 tons, the ‘Great Eastern’ was not exceeded in size until
the ‘Lusitania’ was launched in 1906, forty-eight years later. She was the
brain-child of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the greatest engineering genius of the
Victorian era – perhaps, indeed, the only man in the last 500 years to come
within hailing distance of Leonardo da Vinci. […] He was as much an artist as
an engineer, and the remorseless specialisation that has taken place since his
day makes it impossible that any one man will ever again match the range of his
achievements.
Of these, the ‘Great Eastern’
was his last and mightiest. Though she was five times the size of any
other ship in the world, she was no mere example – as some have suggested – of
engineering megalomania. Brunel was the first man to grasp the fact that the
larger a ship, the more efficient she can be, because carrying capacity
increases at a more rapid rate than the power needed to drive the hull through
the water (the first depending on the cube of the linear dimensions, the second
only on the square). Having realised this, Brunel then had the courage to
follow the mathematics to its logical conclusion, and designed a ship that
would be large enough to carry enough coal for the round trip to Australia.
[…]
To provide storage space for the
huge coils of wire, three great tanks were carved into the heart of the ship.
The drums, sheaves and dynamometers of the laying mechanism occupied a large
part of the stern decking, and one funnel with its associated boilers had been
removed to give additional storage space. When the ship sailed from the Medway
on 24 June 1865 she carried 7000 tons of cable, 8000 tons of coal and
provisions for 500 men. Since this was before the days of refrigeration, she
also became a sea-going farm. Her passenger list included one cow, a dozen
oxen, twenty pigs, 120 sheep and a whole poultry-yard of fowl.” (pp. 71-73)
Presumably the majority of the animal 'class' of passenger didn’t make it all the way to Newfoundland.
After the
successful laying of the transatlantic cable the Great Eastern went on to lay
over 30,000 miles of undersea telegraph cables, including one across the
Arabian Sea from Yemen to India.
The ‘unlucky’ epitaph of the great
ship arose for a number of reasons, including a major explosion on board soon
after she was launched, plus the fact the ship bankrupted a succession of
different owners, but one of the most persistent legends is that the source of
her bad luck was discovered when she was eventually broken up over a period of
eighteen months on the River Mersey in 1889-1890. It was rumoured that the
skeleton of a dead riveter was found in the cavity between her inner and outer
hulls (some versions of the rumour even claim there were several skeletons,
including one of a child), but Arthur C. Clarke dismisses this – as he states
in a footnote: “This story is much too
good to be true, and isn’t.”
That said though, I can’t help but
find myself thinking of the ghosts of times past and the ships that once
populated this stretch of the river where I live when I wander along its banks. Looking out across the tidal reach here always
puts me in mind of a poem by Thom Gunn:
The Conversation of Old Men
He feels a breeze rise from
the Thames, as far off
as Rotherhithe, in
intimate contact with
water, slimy hulls,
dark wood greenish
at waterline – touching
then leaving what it
lightly touches; he
goes on talking, and this is
the life of wind on water.
By
Thom Gunn
Collected Poems (Faber, 1993)
It’s strange to think that the wooden timbers of the Napier shipyard have
outlasted all of it – the shipyard, the great ship, and even the Thames
shipbuilding industry itself. Looking at that field of timbers in their
serried ranks, and then casting your eye out over the stretch of water alongside, it’s
easy to picture the Great Eastern, that
majestic old ship (the prototype of those massive cruise liners which
occasionally chunter up and down this improbable channel), a visionary leviathan, long laboured into
being, eventually setting out from here to change our world forever. In many respects she
is the first true ghost of our modernity, and this is the very visible spot where she
was born.
