Books I wish I hadn’t read?
And one I’m very glad I did
I have two more weekends to go before jetting off to Hyderabad. Things are busy:
one article revision, one article text and a book chapter to submit before I go,
the inevitable paperwork of handing over jobs,
packing up my office (now nearly done - hurray!),
various injections (mostly done),
refining my packing list(s) (yeah, I’m a multiple lists person, and this item will be ongoing pretty much until the day I go. For a fascinating historical take on list making as a skill, and generally incredible read, check out Lambourn, Elizabeth A., Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, Asian Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2018). I’m pretty sure I’ve plugged this book here before and I probably will again because it is just that good),
getting our roof fixed (now underway, but it keeps raining… a lot), and our washing machine fixed (or replaced, and then we can do all the laundry and hang it out… in the rain).
I could go on, but if the next couple of posts suggest a mind wandering in space and time, then they will be an accurate historical record. It’s mostly a lot of fun, though! And I’m delighted that reading is carrying on regardless. It was a habit I dropped for a long time and then picked up again in 2019. I now have a shiny new Kindle so that I can keep it up while staying inside my luggage limit, but this week I’m very much reflecting on old-school paper-brown books, picked up in old-school nooks-and-crannies book shops.
Finishing one book, that I very much did not want to take with me and thinking about which, if any, of my physical books I do, has got me thinking about many things, from the ways in which we build relationships with texts and things. (I have, for example, read Jane Eyre five times now, but never the same copy, but am deeply attached to my uncle’s old copies of Lord of the Rings, despite never having actually opened these particular volumes.)
It has also confronted me with the question of whether a book read is ever a negative experience. I’m not sure that I’ve ever found reading a book to be a waste of time. Even when they have been terrible, I’ve always recognised that I’m reading that terrible Krimi/romance/fantasy novel for a reason. Sometimes a book doesn’t need to be deep. It just needs to be fun. But what about things we wish we hadn’t read?
Up to now, I’ve had scenes from books I wish I hadn’t read. I love Iain M. Banks’ visual style of writing and the fabulous creativity of his sci-fi worlds, but he definitely had a gift for the horror I wish I could just scoop out of my brain and leave in a box somewhere.
The book I’ve just finished is something different. I don’t regret reading it - it wasn’t a waste of time. It taught me things. It made me laugh. But it also made me sad and angry and horrified and I don’t know, if I had known that before I started, whether I would have begun in the first place.
The book in question caught my eye in the book sale box of a vintage railway shop, I think. It looks properly old, with wavy edges to its yellowed pages and the lovely texture of moveable type under the fingertips. Its title and the preface suggested relevance to many of my interests:
Isles of Illusion was published in 1923 and presents the letters of an anonymous author (actually Robert James Fletcher), an English tutor/teacher who decided to move to the South Seas after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s accounts of life on Samoa. It was published by his friend, Bohun Lynch, to whom he was writing.
I am always fascinated to read things written in, rather than set in, historical moments. Both can be brilliant, but there is a difference between reading, say, Jane Austen, writing about her life in early 1800s England and an author writing stories set in early 1800s England. As a historian I could break out the difference here between primary sources and secondary sources, and that is some of it, but what always captures me is the difference between what seems obviously in need of description or explanation looking from outside and what seems to need explaining from inside a world.
Here, then, is a book about themes that interest me: sea travel, long-distance mobility before the aeroplane (or at least, before regular air travel), encounters between different worlds, written from inside that world. It comes from a period I don’t research but that should have made it a break from work. The letters started with enough sharp observations to reassure me that Fletcher was a decent writer and a wry and often funny commentator on the world around him.
Then, as the book unfolded, I found myself drawn along Fletcher’s own journey, and what an ugly journey it was. The South Seas were not the paradise he both hoped for and mocked himself for expecting. The author struggles with poverty, loneliness, alcoholism, severe mental illness, malaria and other tropical diseases, but most of all, the book felt to me like the unfolding brutalisation of an individual, and in turn, the brutalisation of others by him, by an idea.
That idea is the subject of extensive debate among historians: racism. Specifically, the question of scientific racism, or the concept that people can be arranged into genetic, or inherited, groups, which can (and should) be arranged in hierarchies from better to worse types of person, is historically vexed. When, where and how did it begin? Is it just one expression of what seems to be a pretty-much universal human impulse to categorise people as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘we’ and ‘other’, or is it something different?
One hypothesis is that scientific racism was a development of the Early Modern period, which grew out of a cluster of changes, including increased European contact with other parts of the world (giving European thinkers more and different information with which to construct their ideas of ‘we’ and ‘other’); growing European dominance in social relations with people in other parts of the world (making it seem more plausible to European thinkers that they might be at the top of a hierarchy rather than just in a different place on a horizontal plane); the growth of the transatlantic slave trade (which provided a very clear economic incentive for inventing ways of looking at the world that might justify doing things to (some) people that would otherwise unacceptable); and the rise of theories of science and categorisation in European intellectual circles (which made it make sense to a lot of European thinkers that everything from plants to rocks to people could and should be understood in terms of strictly distinguished groups, or taxonomies).
More recently various scholars have examined evidence for ideas which obviously share a lot of content with scientific racism in earlier centuries, from the Middle Ages and Antiquity.1 There is certainly material to find. People have, historically, been capable of treating each other appallingly and of finding reasons why that is okay (in the circumstances, or because it is ‘those’ people, or because it is still better than it used to be, or because ‘they’ did something to deserve it… The list is long and we’re still very good at it.)
Studies have identified things like the idea of inherited characteristics being used as the basis of moral or social judgements and the caricaturing of features considered specific to particular regions or groups of people.
And yet…
This is definitely not a judgement on my part that is complete. Reading this book has nudged me again on a journey that is far from over. It has taught me to be alert for things that I may yet find.
And yet…
I am not seeking to excuse the many and terrible ways in which the worlds that I study (the first millennium Western Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean) divided people up and justified treating some people dreadfully. Sex, religion, language, disability, regional origin and, yes, inherited characteristics, could all be used to categorise people, with huge consequences for their status and treatment. Sex and religion were perhaps the most important of these categories.
And yet…
As I read this book, my overwhelming reaction as historian, trying to understand the horror unfolding on the pages before me, was that I had not encountered this in the sources for the first millennium. I have not seen, in the sources of those distant times, so often dismissed as a Dark Age, people dehumanised so casually, so pervasively and so brutally as they were in Fletcher’s letters. I have not seen evidence for the total disregard for, and intentional annihilation of, basic social relationships, from families and romantic couples to communities and nations, and across such wide swathes of time and space.
In the first millennium, in the aftermath of a major battle, or the end of a war, towns might be depopulated, women and children enslaved, men killed or deported. Those moments resonate with pain, but cities were rebuilt, prisoners were often ransomed back. Above all, those moments were not perceived as the ‘new normal’, but as a conscious interruption of the normal for punishment and pacification.
Ranking cruelty is always invidious and often not very insightful. I’m not establishing a podium here. However, recognising differences, even if they cannot be quantified, feeling as a scholar that what you see in one time or place is not like what you are familiar with in a time and a place you know well is central to figuring out what makes one time and place not like another, what made it tick and how one situation might have become another.
In the end, I am not sorry for reading Isles of Illusion. It wasn’t the experience I usually look for in my bedtime, non-work reading (and I was prepared, from first principles, for a significantly different world view, including racism and colonial exploitation. It just exceeded those expectations by a significant order of magnitude), but perhaps the central challenge of history is not to look away.
More importantly, it has brought home something to me that will make me look more closely and wonder more acutely when I return mentally to the places and times I study: how were people categorising each other, with what consequences? And how flexible did they think those categories were? What was individual perspective and what were social norms? And if I think what I found in Isles of Illusion really is different from what I see in earlier periods, why?
If that seems like a sad and inconclusive note on which to end, well… it is a bit inconclusive. And it is and should be sad that people lived the short, cruel lives presented in the pages of Isles of Illusion. I used to think that a historian’s job was not to bring emotions to our study. Now, I think that one of our most important duties is to bear witness that the people we study were people, as deserving of our emotional connection as any other people. We do not need to condemn to evaluate and feeling compassion does not prevent analysis. But we can’t change the past, so the realisation that it might help us to move forward better, personally and socially, can also be some kind of comfort.
I can do a little better than that, though. Here is a book I am very glad I read, which came to me by similar serendipity. This time, it was via an online book store having a sale on a day when I needed to buy something else and realised it was worth getting one more thing to reach the free postage limit. (It looked excellent, but without those particular circumstances, it also looked way outside my topic, period and general approach and were were saving for the roof repairs (see above).)
Humanity’s Burden makes light work of some hardcore science and a vast span of history.2 It’s case is that malaria, and the things people have done in relation to malaria, from trying to treat it, understand it or avoid it, have had a deep and often unrecognised impact on human history. Sometimes, it perhaps over-eggs the custard: it can be tempting once you identify an explanation for a lot of things, to try to explain a lot more things with it. Nevertheless, I’m sold on the core argument, the story is told beautifully and if you are interested in big stories that provide a framework for making sense of a lot of other big things, this is one of the best books I’ve read!
That’s it from me for this week. Back to honing that packing list… But happy reading meantime, and one thing I love about long haul flights is curling up with a good er… e-reader.
For example: Gomez, Michael A., African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018) examines the development in medieval Arabic sources, especially from the 12th century, of ways of describing different populations, especially in Africa, that have a lot of similarities with some of the later ways in which scientific racists framed their categories. Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores… well, the invention of race in the European Middle Ages (though with a strong focus on England in the 13th century). Coming at the discussion from a different angle, Hsy, Jonathan, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter, Arc Medievalist (Arc Humanities Press, 2021) looks at how the medieval past can be used by modern communities to combat racial narratives in the present. A slightly earlier study brings together scholars on a range of periods, topics and communities, going back to Antiquity and through the Middle Ages: Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin H. Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
For the full reference: Webb, James L. A., Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria, Studies in Environment and History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).