Timeline - Issue 4

TIMELINE ISSUE 4

ABINGDON SCHOOL'S HISTORY PUBLICATION

AUTUMN 2016

FEATURE ARTICLE

LIBYA: SHIFTING SANDS How Libya became the playground of America ALSO FEATURING: THE STROY OF CHARLEMAGNE

WHY BRITAIN LOVES A HEROIC FAILURE

1921: IRISH INDEPENDENCE

WELCOME

TIMELINE MAGAZINE

EDITORIAL Archie Williams DIRECTOR OF ART AND DESIGN Blake Jones SPECIAL THANKS David McGill editor

WRITERS Jonny Hitchens Matty Johnson Luke Tuite-Dalton Stepan Khovanov Alexander Hann William Sheffield Louis Brosnan Jacob Lillie Oliver Williams Yonatan Gadaev Nick Harris Charlie Landells John Hobby David Loong Original Design by Asten Yeo Printed by Cambrian Printers www.cambrian-printers.co.uk

‘I,’

cries Romeo in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s play whose name I scarcely need clarify, ‘am fortune’s fool!’ And indeed with the burden of history which we have inherited by virtue of belonging to a species capable of recording its past, it is so easy in this world to feel trapped by the forces of historic inevitability. As we observe the alarming rise of Islamic State, and with the imminent release of the Leveson Inquiry, it is hard but to feel sharply reminded of the chain of causality that so often comes back to the actions of the Western World, and shapes the way we see the problems which face us today. And after many of us went to make our votes about Britain’s role in the EU last summer, I wonder how many put their cross on the paper while recalling the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, or Yalta in 1945, o-r even the Vienna Congress of 1815?

Much has changed, but all too much, it would seem, has remained the same as we decide on our future as a nation and the role we wish to play in affairs on the continent, the same debate that has dogged the British people since the Norman Conquest.

Whether we are indeed simply the playthings of these grand historical forces and at best can aspire to be a catalyst of change or if we are actually capable of making a major difference and affecting the course of history is a debate we have covered in this edition in our Historiography section with two parallel articles both stating their cases. But whatever you believe, I think it is hard not to find the events themselves fascinating, even if only for the rewarding task of imagining how people lived in societies totally different from our own, be it life inside a Norman Motte and Bailey Castle (which you can find about in the Middle Ages section of this issue) or the way people lived in the paranoid atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia (similarly covered in the modern section), and it is in this spirit that I welcome you to this, the fourth edition of Timeline, and thank our writers for their help in both this and last term’s edition.

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 INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS FEATURES

Charlie Don't Surf

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The Vietnam War in American Culture

The Trial of the Century The Dreyfus Affair

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INTRODUCTION

PERIODS MIDDLE AGES Charlemagne: Father of Europe Medieval Castle Design and Development

12 16

EARLY MODERN The Qing Dynasty: The Great Khan of China What if Charles I had won the English Civil War?

20 23

HISTORIOGRAPHY The Biography of Great Men The Marxist Theory of History Why Britain Loves a Heroic Failure

26 30 34

MODERN The Early History of Recorded Sound Part 2 The First Russian Revolution Irish Independence: Was It Inevitable?

Stalin's Terror

37 41 44 48

CONTEMPORARY Singapore: Swamps to Skyscrapers Libya: the Country of Shifting Sands

50 53

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 FEATURE

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Tracer fire lights the night sky as US and South Vietnamese forces conduct operations

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FEATURE ARTICLE

Charlie Don't Surf: THE VIETNAM WAR IN AMERICAN CULTURE The cultural legacy of the Vietnam War is investigated by Jonny Hitchens' study of its depiction in music, film and literature to establish how the war has been remembered in America.

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ietnam. Perhaps the most unpopular war in the history of the United States, and the one that most divides opinion among Americans themselves, second only to the Civil War. The conflict sparked a nationwide protest movement and defined an entire generation of Americans as either weary, battle-scarred veterans, or layabout, ‘draft- dodging’ hippies. In the 1960s the American public were still recovering from two other devastating East Asian combat fronts; the Pacific theatre of World War II and, more recently, the horrific ‘forgotten’ Korean War. Cold War paranoia was setting in. As U.S. President John F. Kennedy put it ‘This generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war.’ That did not stop Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, from ordering both the first bombing campaign in North Vietnam and the first American boots on the ground, thereby setting in motion one of the most iconic and infamous wars of the 20th Century, fought to try to stop the ‘domino effect’ of Communism in South East Asia. Vietnam’s legacy, howev6 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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er, was not limited to the history textbooks and the conversation of aging veterans; in fact, it cemented itself into popular culture and media with greater force and presence than arguably any other major global event of the later years of the century. American music, film, television and even literature were influenced by the war to an incredible extent unimaginable to the youth of today.

There is a clear reason for this: The Vietnam war had the draft.

Thousands of unsuspecting young men were forced off to a war halfway around the world, something inexplicable and unforgivable for those with other plans for the next decade of their lives. Simply, the war ripped an entire generation of young Americans apart. There are two main emergent themes that dominated thus cultural movement of the Sixties and Seventies, and demonstrated the unpopularity and resentment directed towards the Vietnam War: the horrors of the war itself, and the plight of veterans returning to their home country.

The grisly, unglamorous horrors of war as experienced by U.S. servicemen in

A US combined attack in rural Vietnam Vietnam are represented predominantly through the medium of film, as the visuals allowed for gore, deafening explosions and the like. Filmmakers dealing with Vietnam almost all show brutality and hopelessness in their movies, such as Platoon and Hamburger Hill, both showcasing the utter despair and tragedy that countless Americans endured. Some movies attempted to put a darkly comedic spin on the whole affair, such as Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, now a modern classic and one of the most famous war films ever made, which follows a group of drafted Americans through boot camp and the war. Although the film does not by any means sugar-coat the experience of war, it is full of bleak humour and ironic moments.

Films like these are very rare, because the majority of the American population take Vietnam extremely seriously, further reinforcing the war’s status as one of America’s very darkest periods. Few Vietnam films have a ‘happy ending’, but an exception to that rule is the very recently made 2006 film Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale who went on a dramatic weight loss pro-

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EVENTS gramme for months before filming and then filmed the scenes in reverse chronological order, allowing him to gain weight as shooting progressed, for the scenes to be reversed for the final cut. The film details the bleak, hellish experience of a U.S. Air Force bomber pilot after he is shot down and captured on an illicit mission into neighbouring Laos. Based on a remarkable true story, the pilot is eventually rescued – but only after several long months of starvation, disease and torture at the hands of his Communist captors.

In popular music, too, generally rock, the Vietnam experience was portrayed – written into songs by bands as famous and influential as the Rolling Stones and The Doors. In fact, much of what is now known as ‘Vietnam music’ was not originally written about the war, but was later adopted, such as The Doors’ 1967 song The End, which contains the lyrics:

‘This is the end … of everything that stands, the end’ This represented well the apocalyptic nature of the war as seen through the eyes of American soldiers, with the annihilation of civilians, napalm bombing and the savagery displayed by both sides in the conflict and was selected by Francis Ford Coppola to be a song that haunts the soundtrack of his overwhelming adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now. The brutal reality of the war as the lower classes saw it (they generally could not escape the draft, not having access to university) was passionately portrayed in the famous song Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The song spoke of the injustice the poor of America were subject to:

‘It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no senator’s son, no It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t know fortunate son Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes, Oh, they send you down to war, Lord, And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”

Oh, they only answer “More! more! more!”’

The plight of veterans returning home to the country that they had served, often for reason and motives incomprehensible and unjustifiable to them, was another very common theme touched upon in Vietnam-era culture, most famously through the character of Lieutenant Dan in Robert Zemeckis’ film Forrest Gump, itself adapted from an earlier book. Seen by many today as a great tragedy, the treatment of American veterans by their own government, and even more so by their fellow citizens, is a highly sensitive subject that rouses anger among those who lived through it. No support was given to those with what would now be diagnosed as PTSD, and the U.S. Government did not provide nearly enough financial and welfare support for those who had served and were trying to readjust. As a result of this, over 150,000 Vietnam veterans committed suicide shortly after returning home, and the suicide rates among Vietnam veterans is higher than any other group in America still, even today; higher than those who went to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Veteran Karl Malantes, author of the bestselling Vietnam War novel ‘Matterhorn’, describes in an interview he gave, being jeered at and even spat on by anti-war protestors on his return home from a tour in Vietnam. He remembers the complete shock and disbelief he felt, followed by rage at how this was allowed to happen.

One of the movies that covers the feelings of emptiness and desperation felt by these veterans is ‘Dead Presidents’, in which a young, hopeful, underprivileged man just out of high school is caught up in the frenzy of war and volunteers. He comes back a psychologically broken man, and is unable to find long-term work. Through the necessity to feed his family, he robs a cash transport truck, is caught and sent to prison for decades. In a final, awful twist, in court he appeals for a shorter sentence, drawing on his traumatic experiences in Vietnam to justify his crime, if only a little. With impossible coldness, the judge denies him any leeway, and, to top it off, tells the man that he

is a disgrace to his country.

Some music, mainly of the post-Vietnam years, reflects on the unique and terrible fate of many Americans who return home transformed, often not for the better. The country singer Johnny Cash sums it up in his song ‘Drive On’:

‘Took them twenty-five years To welcome me back, But it’s better than Not coming home at all, Many a good man I saw fall, And even now, every time I dream, I hear the men and the monkeys In the jungle scream.

Drive on, it don’t mean nothing, My children love me but they don’t understand, Drive on’ One of the most iconic songs, with many interpretations but a strong link to Vietnam veterans, was written by the band The Animals, and acts as a deeply heartfelt proverb against the war:

“Oh mother, tell your children not to do What I have done, And spend your life in sin and misery in the house of the rising sun It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, And God, I know I’m one.’

Although the Vietnam War may now belong to the past, and holds little significance for those outside the combatant nations, it was one of the 20th century’s defining events. As with any other war, it is important to remember the suffering of those troops, and also the brutal, almost comedic futility of this particular war, as the Northern Vietnamese Communists swept into the Southern capital city of Saigon on April 30th, 1975. After U.S. personnel had been withdrawing from the country for several months. The very day after they were gone, the city fell and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, the name it bears to this day. Vietnam became a fully fledged Socialist republic, with the war’s sole achievement was to buy time. •

Further Reading

The Vietnam War: a Concise International History, Mark Atwood Lawrence From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud Goodwin We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Douglas Bradley and Craig Werner Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 7

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THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY: The Dreyfus Affair

Archie Williams writes a history of the Dreyfus Affair, the most contraversial trial of the nineteenth century, in which France was turned on its head.

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015 was the 20th anniversary of the infamous trial of O J Simpson, the american sportsman accused of murdering his wife and a waiter with whom she was having an affair. And little wonder- on the 3rd October 1995, when the agonising final formalities of the trial were concluded live on television, telephone call volume decreased by 58%, water usage decreased, and trading on the New York Stock Exchange almost halved. A congressman cancelled a press conference, saying to journalists ‘not only would you not be here, but I won’t be here either.’ An estimated 480,00,00 USD were lost in terms of productivity. To use a cliche, a nation truly seemed to hold its breath. It was called ‘the trial of the century’- and in a century that also saw the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, the execution of the Ceausescus in Romania and the famous Lindbergh kidnapping, it was the trial of a football player that captivated the world and is testament to the power of a legal case to divide a country, and come to symbolise the political feeling of an era.

I say these things because it could not have been far from the minds of Simpson’s jury, sworn in in November 1994, that it was almost a hundred years to the day after the start of another ‘trial of the century’, one that would split France into two camps and draw in public opinion on a scale that inflicted wounds that have yet to heal. For it was on a damp October morning in 1894 that a certain artillery captain of Jewish origin, Alfred Dreyfus, was called to the of8 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

fice of his superior ‘in bourgeois [civilian] clothing’ to be told that he was accused of treason, in passing secrets of national importance to the German Army. He was asked to confess, and a revolver was passed over the desk in order to offer him “an alternative way out”. Though surprised, Dreyfus showed strength of character in refusing to confess or use the revolver. Icily, he said that he ‘wanted to live to prove his innocence’.

This stand was characteristic of him- having been educated in a war college where one of the directors openly stated that ‘Jews were not desired’, he had had to learn to stick up for himself. He had lost marks in exams for the vague reason of lacking in ‘likeability’, which- though crucial in warfare- is a conveniently vague reason to mark someone down, and only slightly more legitimate than the actual reason Dreyfus found life so difficult. But this young Jewish family man still had his greatest trial ahead of him, and he was taken off to Cherche-midi prison in Paris. He was illegally placed in solitary confinement and subjected to round the clock interrogation.

Dreyfus, of course, was innocent. The evidence linking him to any sort of espionage was a sheet of paper, torn in parts, promising to deliver French documents to the German military attache in paris, the fantastically named Max Von Schwartzkoppen. The nature of the secrets did seem to point to an artillery officer, and Dreyfus as an Alsatian who had left after it was annexed

by Bismarck’s new German Reich in 1871, but still often visited family there, was •

Dreyfus, the man behind the divisive trial, looking back in his old age a suspicious individual. So his loyalty may have been questionable on these grounds alone. But, like in military college, it is highly probable that his jewish heritage had a lot to do with his treatment. The reasons for anti semitism in France at this time were complex, and largely to do with the success of Jewish and protestant capitalists at a time of economic development, accelerated by a need to catch up with their new and boisterous German neighbour. They were seen as not proper Frenchmen, especially in the vitriolic Catholic-run press. And it was in one of these journals, la Libre Parole, that news was first broken. Its virulence made the case and antisemitism impossible to separate from the outset- many in France wanted this case to become a show of force to put not only Dreyfus, but all France’s Jews in their place. And for the time being it looked that way- in a closed court, the handwriting of the note was studied. It was

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similar to Dreyfus’, but not similar enough.

The only logical conclusion, then, seemed to be that Dreyfus had forged his own handwriting. And it was on this evidence, as well as ‘secret files’ deemed too sensitive to be shown to the press or indeed to the court, that Dreyfus was convicted. Many openly expressed their regret that France had abolished the death penalty. All the same, Dreyfus had to face a humiliating ceremony of having his rank badges torn off and sword snapped in half in front of his colleagues.

This, according to witnesses, he took with dignity and calm before being placed on a boat for Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

And that should have ended the case.

Dreyfus may have gone away, but the case didn’t. His family campaigned tirelessly for a review of the case. Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, the new head of the french army intelligence, also became embroiled after he found letters from Ma-

jor Walsin-Esterhazy to Schwartzkoppen.

The major had clearly long been in contact with the Germans, probably to cover the fact that he was perpetually in debt, and for a price had disclosed several items of military intelligence. Doubts surfaced about Dreyfus’ guilt, even as he feverishly hovered between life and death in solitary confinement half a world away. However, the French staff had gone too far to admit their error. A forged letter was produced further incriminating Dreyfus, and Picquart was posted to Tunisia. However, at this time an emerging group of so-called Dreyfusards began pushing for a review, and in 1897 they were joined by the already-famous author Emile Zola. They made it necessary to try Esterhazy, but the proceedings were nothing short of farcical.

Before his trial, he was told what defensive line to take by his superiors and was naturally acquitted, destroying all credibility

Picquart may have had. However, all this had created a lot of interest in the case.

When the traitor Esterhazy walked out of the courtroom, anti-dreyfusard riots broke out across France, showing little regard for private property or public order. The case had taken on a new dimension.

Zola was not impressed. Indignant at Esterhazy’s return to the army, in January 1898 he penned one of the most brilliant articles in modern journalism which gave the case the importance it continues to be seen with today. Entitled J’accuse, in 4,500 words addressed to the President himself he tore into the French army elite and the government, naming names and at with no intention of allowing the truth to cloud his anger, including plenty of exaggerations and oversights.

But that did not matter- the newspaper it was in sold 200,000 copies that day in Paris alone. And what an attack it was: • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 9

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Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people's cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.

Zola was put on trial and imprisoned for a year, but public opinion was already inflamed. Alarmed by the unrest that was striking France, the new minister of war Godefroy Cavaignac decided to publicly reappraise the evidence that had incriminated Dreyfus. It was at this stage that the forged letter referenced earlier was exposed for what it was- a forgery, and a shoddy one at that. The man responsible was put in prison, where he proceeded to slit his throat, and became a martyr to the anti-dreyfusards. Tension was such that the crisis was becoming of national importance; Dreyfus was discussed again and again in the government. The supreme court now got involved, despite widespread allegations at the time in a totally unrelated but no less humiliating affair in Panama where a billion francs were ‘lost’ in bribes to the French government.

This was the largest monetary corruption scandal of the 19th century, and especially topical at the moment with Panama once more becoming a headache for many political figures. But the court still concluded that the evidence against Dreyfus was flimsy to the point of being laughable, and the 1894 Judgement was overturned in solemn silence. It was now in the hands of the army to decide how to act.

In the summer of 1899 Dreyfus came home. He was put on trial in Rennes- public interest was such that the city was in a state of virtual siege. One of Dreyfus’ lawyers was even shot on his way to a hearing, though he recovered and bravely returned to continue his sterling defence. Nevertheless, on the 9th September 1899 Dreyfus was once again found guilty, though his seven man jury was only one vote away from an acquittal. His life sentence was, however, reduced to ten years. On the eve of the Universal Exhibition of 1899, for which the Eiffel Tower was being constructed, the Third Republic wanted all to be reconciled. With an amnesty to all who had fallen onto the wrong side of the law in Dreyfus’ name, they hoped that they had put the matter to bed. Dreyfus, for 10 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

one, accepted his sentence.

But the Dreyfusards were not going to stop. With foreign powers discussing boycotting the Exhibition and a surge of feeling after Zola’s death, asphyxiated in his own home after a chimney blockage, no one was planning to let sleeping dogs lie. And the 1902 elections which brought the left into power made a climate even more favourable for Dreyfus’ deliverance. The case was reopened in 1903 by the new Minister for war, who was amazed to discover that almost every document in the archives relating to the case was a forgery. The next two years were spent disassembling the case piece by piece, and by the start of 1906 Dreyfus was in the strange position of being held in jail after all the charges against him had been officially

dropped. It took until the Summer of 1906 for the civilian Supreme court to cancel the judgement passed on him. But even that delay wasn’t too bad, relatively speaking. The French army only officially acknowledged his innocence in 1994.

Dreyfus went back to the army, promoted to the rank of colonel, a rank he would have attained had his service not been interrupted. Serving with distinction at Verdun, he was the only soldier involved on the affair to serve in the War after Picquart, to whom he owed so much, died in a riding accident 6 months before the Germans invaded Belgium. The affair had many results as unexpected as they were diverse. Antisemitism did not go away- it persists to this day, and reached something of a height in the days of

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Left to right, the key figures of the turbulent case: Dreyfus, Esterhazy, Zola. the Vichy government set up in France after the German invasion. One Austrian Jew felt Dreyfus’ story illustrated the difficulty Jews faced living on a largely hostile continent, and as a journalist was present at Dreyfus’ degradation ceremony in 1895. His name was Theodor Herzl, and in his quest for a solution to the problems facing Europe’s Jews he would set up the Zionist League in 1897, fifty years before the creation of the state of Israel.

Dreyfus still can divide people. In 1994,

the French military archivist was sacked for saying that Dreyfus’ innocence was ‘a thesis generally admitted by historians’. For this was no ordinary case- it took on a life of its own. There was talk amongst foreign powers of France being on the brink of Civil War in this period. It is also worth considering in the background to the German invasion of 1914- the army was still reeling from the ‘affair’, which exposed the backwardness of a force that famously charged into German Bullets in that year wearing red trousers. It

shows that an army doesn’t only live or die on figures of steel production and rates of fire, but depends on the soldiers in it and the trust they can feel for one another. The story also shows the power of racial hatred and fear of ‘aliens’, brought into sharp focus by the current refugee crisis. Would that I could believe such a witch hunt as faced Dreyfus was impossible in our time, but it is a function of history to see if we as a race are able to escape the legacy of our shameful past. •

Further Reading

The Dreyfus Affair, Piers Paul Reid The History of Modern France, Jonathan Fenby A Short History of the Jewish People: From Legendary Times to Modern Statehood, Raymond P Scheindlin Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 11

 MIDDLE AGES

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CHARLEMAGNE: Father of Europe

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Luke Tuite-Dalton's life of the only man to control most of Europe between the Roman Empire and Napoleon; the legendary King of the Franks, Chalemagne.

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The Court of Charlemagne

harlemagne (Charles the Great) was the second king of the Franks, and was crowned Emperor Augustus by Pope Leo III in 800 in an attempt to revive the Roman Empire in the West. Thus began the Holy Roman Empire, based in the town of Aachen, now in Western Germany. Renowned for expanding the territory and power of his Kingdom and beginning a revival in learning, he became leader of the greatest Empire in Europe between the Roman Empire and the First French Empire.

His power and prestige (as well as physical height) rendered him the epithet ‘magnus’, which eventually stuck to his first name, Carolus.

Today he is generally regarded not only as the founding father of both historical French and German monarchies, but also as the father of Europe: his vast empire united most of western Europe for the first time since the Romans and under his rule what is known as the “Carolingian renaissance” encouraged the formation of a common European identity – some trace the idea of the current EU to the concept of a united Europe as envisaged by Charlemagne.

Charlemagne was born in 742-8 A.D. in Francia. He was the eldest son of Pippin the Short, a Frankish noble and mayor of palace (manager of household of King) under the Merovingian King Childeric III, whom he eventually deposed in 751, with support of the pope. In 768, after the death of his father, Charlemagne took over as joint King with his brother, who died mysteriously just three years later. His passions included learning, hunting, fighting, the church and women. He had five wives, five known mistresses and at least 20 children. In fact all modern Europeans are highly likely to share Charlemagne as a common ancestor. He slept every night with a book (perhaps Augustine’s City of God) under his pillow in an attempt to learn to read, although this was unsuccessful. At this time it was rare for a ruler to try to learn to read and write – traditionally an occupation reserved for monks. Although Charlemagne was pious, he did not allow this to interfere with his enjoyment of life or war campaigns.

Charlemagne was comfortable with being a warrior and a conqueror. Indeed he fought often – during his 46-year reign, he launched more than 50 military campaigns. Traditionally going to war after a spring assembly, the subsequent distribution of loot was a crucial element of Carolingian rule. Charlemagne could rely on powerful and numerous (100,000) troops, unparalleled in the occident at the time. In spring he used commoners but Royal vassals were also always ready to mobilize and consolidate conquered lands.

His success rested primarily on novel siege technology and excellent logistics. His heavy cavalry were well armoured and equipped with the renowned Frankish metal-craft and swords (so renowned that the Muslims sought the products). Moreover, he made great use of horses as a quick long distance method of transport, critical to build and maintain such a large empire.

He conquered the Lombards in northern Italy in 774 when they threatened the papacy, as his father had done previously.

Significantly the pope did not turn to the Byzantine Empire for help because of the rumoured heresies, such as iconoclasm and • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 13

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their military weakness at the time and he welcomed the help Charles; Imperator Augustus from Charlemagne. This strengthened the Carolingian bond with the papacy and caused a geopolitical shift of the papacy and power from the Mediterranean to the north, which is still apparent today.

He invaded the territory of the Avars (dominant force in central Europe for over two hundred years) in the 790s, seizing so much booty that, for the rest of his reign (nearly 20 years), the entire economy of his empire was financed on the basis of this plunder.

Later, he conquered the Saxons of north eastern Germany in a crusade-type war, which lasted thirty years and included large numbers of civilian casualties, as well as the 14 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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virtual exterminations of several peoples and forced conversions to Christianity. It was the first real sustained mass forced conversion in European history. It was a brutal war and in 782, after a Saxon rebellion in which high ranking Franks were killed, 4500 Saxons were beheaded in one day in the Massacre of Verden, an act that was frequently looked at admiringly by historians in Nazi Germany. By the time of his death, Germany or the Eastern Frankish realm resembled what it is like today.

He conquered Bavaria, defeated revolts in Aquitaine and Saxony, and took some of Spain against the Muslims in another crusade-type war. However he did not get as far south as he had hoped, after having to withdraw his siege from Saragossa.

Returning through the Pyrenees, the Basques ambushed the rear of his forces at the Battle of Roncevaux, killing many including the military leader Roland, who became a heroic figure in France. In 810 and 11, he strengthened coastal defences against the North-men. The king of the Danes, having subdued Frisia and Saxony, claimed that he would attack Aachen, but his death brought this threat to an end as his successor made peace. However people paid the North-men a lot for their protection, leaving the empire without much money.

The development of scholarship, literature, art and architecture under Charlemagne’s reign and the following era is often referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance. In ruling an empire, which covered some 1,200,000 square kilometres, he saw the advancement of learning as part of his task. His court became the centre for foreign scholars, such as Alcuin (first to use the modern question mark) from Northumbria who ran the Aachen school and scriptorium, and he himself was interested in biblical and secular learning, and sought information about astronomy.

He encouraged the learning of the seven Liberal Arts and ordered Bishops to set up schools in their dioceses so that people of all classes could have access to education (capitulary law of 789). Through expansion, he came into contact with different cultures and their learning, and he increased the provisions for schools and scriptoria throughout his kingdom. Scriptoria were where monks could copy books with parchment, which was more durable than papyrus - 90% of ancient texts survive because of an increased reproduction of texts at that time. He made various reforms and tried to correct and standardise the spelling and handwriting in his kingdom.

The Carolingian minuscule script was developed, which led to fewer errors and more efficiency. It is linked with the way we write today. He also wanted to standardise the fast evolving form of Latin in literature and restore the original.

He thought that education could help unify his Kingdom and develop the understanding of the divine law.

Charlemagne wanted to create a Christian Kingdom and to increase the effectiveness of the church, which required uniformity and discipline. He saw the protection of the church and the condemnation of heresy as a part of his mission and made sure that

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EVENTS bad monks and priests lost their positions.

He also wanted to educate the priests and monks so that they could read the Bible and sing the masses for the unification of the church and spread of religion. Another part of his mission was to root out Paganism and he fought wars both against Pagans and Muslims (whom he also described as Pagans). He used Christianity to unify his peoples. He himself tried to conform to the model of a biblical king (David or Solomon) with his wisdom. His alliance with the papacy helped lend legitimacy to his position and in return, he protected the Pope. In 800 on Christmas day, he was crowned Emperor by the pope who wanted to reward him for protecting him from the threats of various powerful aristocrats in Rome. This caused tension with the Byzantine Empire, and in order to reinforce his position, Charlemagne formed an alliance with the Abassid Caliphate, then the predominant global muslim power.

The clergy supported him, approving of his desire to deepen the piety and morals of his Christian subjects, through a greater understanding of the faith.

Charlemagne’s reign also saw various reforms and improvements, with the codification of laws (capitularies) and the introduction of new laws, the building of roads and other infrastructure and the cleansing of “highway” robbers and thieves. He believed that he had to increase the social, political and educational organisation of his society and keep the administration and legislation uniform throughout his Empire. His kingdom was divided into 350 counties, each with a count answering directly to him. Local regional governors were subject to regular inspections. In 793/4, he abandoned the Gold standard currency (shortage of Gold due to competition with Byzantine Empire) and took on a new standard silver currency, which remained strong during his reign and improved and simplified commerce. Some new laws took power away from nobles, letting the peasantry participate in commerce for example. In order to supervise administration, mainly of justice, in far parts of his dominions, Charlemagne exploited the use of the

Europe during the time of Charlemagne temporary ‘missi dominici’ (lord’s envoys) fully, making them a regular part of his administration. They were chosen by the King (initially from all classes but afterwards from the nobility who were less likely to take bribes) and usually went in pairs (a layman and an ecclesiastic) to a district stranger to them.

Charlemagne died on the 28th of January 814, at the age of about 66, and was buried in Aachen Cathedral. His canonization in 1165 was orchestrated by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. It has been said that on his deathbed he was trying to correct the Latin version of Gospels with the help of learned Greeks and Syrians, and summoned Archbishop Hildebold of Cologne to give him his last sacrament.

Before dying he made the sign of the cross, and sang the psalm verse ‘into thy hands O lord I commend my spirit’.

Latin poetry composed at his court praises Charlemagne in Virgilian terms as a patron of the arts, ruling from a new Athens, and as the father of Europe and his legacy

continued well into the Middle Ages (such as in the Song of Roland). The Capetians who ascended to power in France in 987, taking over from the dislocated Carolingian Dynasty even tried to marry Charlemagne’s descendants and began to call their children Charles in the 13th Century. Since 1950, the Charlemagne Prize has been awarded by the city of Aachen for distinguished service on behalf of European unification – recipients include Tony Blair and Winston Churchill and ministers and presidents of the European Commission. Moreover, the treaties of the European Union are made not made in French and German territories but old Carolingian patrimony such as Brussels (Carolingian partible inheritance led to divisions which have lasted e.g. after Treaty of Verdun). In many European languages, the very word ‘king’ derives from his name, a development parallel to that of the name of the Caesars in the original Roman Empire. Charlemagne is still an emblematic figure in the construction of contemporary Europe. •

Further Reading

Charlemagne: King of the Franks, Cameron White Emperor of the West: Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, Hywell Williams The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History Peter H Wilson Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 15

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EVENTS

A study of how the changing circumstances of the rulers of England resulted in the transformation of how castles were constructed, by Alexander Hann.

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Caerphilly Castle, Wales

EVENTS

MIDDLE AGES

Medieval Castle Design and Development

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Hampton Court Palace

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astles have played a pivotal role in European history right from the Iron Age, through the middle ages, to the invention and widespread use of gunpowder and beyond. Highly defensible and able to control large areas, they were essential for any king, prince or warlord. The earliest “castles” were in fact not castles at all but really more like forts. They were Iron Age villages perched on high ground and surrounded by earthworks and a wooden palisade. They were the central focus of the area at the time but now there’s hardly any visible evidence left of their existence, apart from some earthworks. When William of Normandy, later William I or The Conqueror, invaded England in 1066 he set about enforcing his rule with Motte and Bailey castles, the first “real” castles. The Motte was a large earth mound on which perched a wooden or (if time and money allowed) stone tower called a Keep, the most defensible part of the castle and the last line of defence. The Motte was surrounded by a ditch and often had a wooden palisade at the top and this coupled with the steep slopes made it very difficult to assault. In front of the Motte was large open flat area called a Bailey which contained several buildings or even a small village which serviced the castle. This Bailey was also surrounded by a wooden palisade and a ditch. Motte and Bailey castles were ideal for William’s fast conquest of Britain as they could be built very quickly and cheaply. As he advanced north up the country, he would build them out of local materials (earth and wood) and leave garrisons of 18 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

Motte and Bailey Castle soldiers to defend that area. However they were not permanent: they were susceptible to attack by fire due to the large amount of wood and this wood would rot over time so most Motte and Baileys were abandoned or built over by later designs. Oxford Castle was an example of an early Norman construction in wood, but was later rebuilt in stone in the 11th century. In the 1100s medieval engineers partially overcame the problems of the Motte and Bailey by surrounding the Keep with a thin stone wall instead of a wooden palisade. These are called Shell Keep castles and are relatively rare. They were partially successful but the wall had to be thin in order not to weigh too much and cause the Motte to subside. The style had all but vanished after the 1200s as they had been replaced by fully fledged stone castles.

In 1070 the first Norman stone castle, the White Tower of the Tower of London,

was constructed by William the Conqueror and this started a trend of building stone castles which epitomised the Norman era.

They were a progression from the Motte and Bailey design and came about because of the stronger position of the Normans in Britain, and increased stability of the nation. They were more expensive, took longer to build but were longer lasting and more defensible. The rectangular Keep was remade in stone (usually limestone or sandstone as it was easy to work); often with the Motte flattened (to avoid collapse). However the Keep would have been built higher than all the other parts of the castle so as to allow archers a better viewpoint and to be higher than the wooden climbing frames used by besiegers to scale the walls. As well as stone being more defensible, as the greater strength allowed for higher structures and greater resil-

MIDDLE AGES

ANALYSIS ience to missiles and objects pelted at the walls, stone castles were also more pleasant to live in: the chambers could be bigger, better protected from the wind and rain and large fireplaces could be lit inside (an obvious issue with the wooden Motte and Bailey castles). Rochester Castle in Kent is a fine example of a Norman square keep castle.

Once the Keep had been built, it was often surrounded by a lower stone curtain wall which enclosed the Keep and the domestic buildings such as the kitchen, butteries, great hall and the quarters of the domestic workers. The curtain wall would have often been 1.5 metres thick or more and would be solid as it was filled with rubble and cement which made it even harder to demolish. It may also have been studded with arrow slits for archers to fire out of and had square towers along its length.

However stone castles did have their drawbacks: they were incredibly expensive, one castle was worth up to 40% of the King’s annual income; they took a very long time to build, from 5 to 10 years; they were very expensive to maintain as they were large, cold and frequently leaky; and besiegers quickly learnt flaws in their design. One common method of attack on these castles was that attackers would mine under the corner of a tower, causing the whole thing would collapse.

Many of these problems were solved by the introduction of a style of castle known as concentric castles. A concentric castle is defined as a castle with two or more outer walls and they were the pinnacle of medieval defensive castle design. They were first built in the mid-1200s but some of the most notable examples were built in the 1290s and early 1300s, especially by Edward I in North Wales as means of defence against rebellions such as that of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. The design was probably brought to Europe by the crusades in the Middle East where the earliest concentric castles have been found. The two sets of walls posed two separate obstacles for the attacker to overcome. The outermost wall was always lower than the inner Keep allowing for archers to have a clear view and fire over the outer wall onto any oncoming attackers. The me-

dieval designers also overcame the problem of undermining the corners of a tower by making them circular and so less likely to collapse. Any attackers may also have to enter the castle through a heavily defended gate house or barbican complete with a long winding passage to allow defenders more time to shoot at them; holes in the ceiling (called murder holes) to drop harmful substances like boiling water or oil, tar, quicklime or rocks; a portcullis to drop over the entrance and occasionally a drawbridge over a moat or ditch.

The medieval concentric castles, such as Caerphilly in South Wales and Krak des Chevaliers in modern day Syria, were virtually impenetrable and so the only way they were ever taken was through a long siege: trying to starve the occupants out.

However most had a well to supply them with water and some even had their own

port to supply them. The main flaws with concentric castles were that they were extremely expensive (for example Edward I spent £22,000 on Caernarfon Castle, more than the annual income of the treasury) and that they took so long to build that often by the time they were built, they were not needed anymore.

However the age of castles for defence was to come to an end. With the invention of gunpowder, castles couldn’t withstand the power of a cannon and other than a few examples such as the Device Forts of Henry VIII, which were more of artillery forts, castles simply became stately homes and status symbols, such as Hampton Court Palace built in c.1514, with very little defensive value. Castles had fallen right out of fashion by the 1500s and instead diplomacy came to the fore as a method for defending nations and people. •

The Tower of London

Further Reading

Castles: A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval England, Marc Morris Wild Ruins: The Explorer's Guide to Britain Lost Castles, Follies, Relics and Remains, Dave Hamilton Battle Castles: 500 years of Knights and Siege Warfare, Dan Snow Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 19

THE QING DYNASTY The Great Khan of China

Louis Brosnan investigates the conquest of China by the Mongols, establishing a dynasty which would last over 250 years.

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veryone has heard of the Mongols, the horse riding, village pillaging savages that inhabited and precariously ruled over most of Asia and Eastern Europe in the middle ages. Most of the time simply arriving to take what they want and then departing, continuing to migrate across the great plains. So it may come as a surprise that 120,000 Mongols invaded, conquered and subjugated the whole of China, founding a 300 year dynasty which presided over 600 million people and dominated the Asian region.

The story of the Qing dynasty begins in modern day Manchuria and Mongolia where a group of 3 semi-nomadic tribes (known as hordes) existed, the hordes were called Haixi, Jianzhou, and Yeren. These three tribes, collectively known as the Jurchens, were locked in constant tribal feuding throughout the 1400’s, both between each other and within. Murdering the Khan was common and due to the decentralized nature of the tribe the ascension of a new Khan was almost always met by civil war and bloodshed. Naturally they all fell under the sphere of influence of the current Ming Emperors in Nanjing. The Ming interfered somewhat to demand tribute and the Jurchens served as Imperial bodyguards called Green Bannermen, in return the Jurchens were given titles, land and left to themselves.

By the 1550’s tensions began to escalate along the border. The Jurchens no longer satisfied with

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EARLY MODERN

EVENTS

their own lands began to raid Ming territory (as Mongols are prone to do) even killing the Imperial guard in Funshun and supporting a larger Mongol invasion. This naturally sparked outrage by the Ming, who orchestrated a vicious counterattack defeating the army of the Jianzhou Horde and burning many towns as well as expelling them from the Ming court. In response, Jianzhou formed a confederation of states with similar interest and the need for protection. Most Jurchen tribes submitted, but those including the large Haixi tribe were invaded and subjugated under Nurhaci (whose father and grandfather were murdered by Ming aggression). Nurhaci now controlled the central lands of all the Jurchens and so sought unity to solidify his rule. He did this by declaring a new nation and the state of Manchu was formed in 1580.

In 1583 with a united Manchu state behind him, Nurhaci began his campaigns against the Ming. During this time he reorganised and modernised his army including forming the Eight Banners, a military administration which rivalled the Ming’s. The Banner armies were the Qing’s elite troops and eventually the title of bannerman become hereditary (similar to a knight). Bannermen were well paid and given generous rewards for their service and the Banner armies were prominent up to the arrival of europeans when their skill with the sword and bow were

nullified by guns. By the 19th century the responsibility for defending the realm had fallen to the regional, lower quality levies called Green Standard armies but nevertheless the Banner armies remained legends of Manchu Culture.

In 1603 Nurhaci was recognised as a Khan (regional name for emperor) by his fellow Mongols further west in Khalkha which was a very prestigious event. Lastly he proclaimed himself heir to China by a dubious family connection to the Jin Dynasty (1151-1234AD) before dying in 1626. Nurhaci’s son Huangtaiji continued his father’s anti-Ming foreign policy and took up his claim to the throne, naming himself first emperor of the Qing Dynasty and conquering Liaodong province from them. He also suppressed the use of the word Jurchen, officially changing the state culture to Manchu, a symbolic move to break ties with the Ming and glorify his people. The word Jurchen had connotations with servitude (similar to a serf ) and was used by the Ming to refer to what they saw as inferior people.

Ming rule of China was chaotic at the best of times, administering and empire of that size with no legal basis or efficient law and order service proved tricky. The Ming relied (as most emperors since 500 BC had) on the mandate of heaven, a shared belief that the Emperor's right to rule is given by the gods and that opposition to the emperor is disrespecting the gods.

However a crucial flaw in its use by the Ming was the idea that times of trouble (natural disasters, famine etc.) were signs that the current ruler was inadequate in the view of the gods. This ‘clause’ of the mandate had brought down many an emperor and so it is no shock that a poor harvest in 1644 caused a peasant revolt which sacked Beijing. Revolts in general were common and the Ming knew how to control the populace, but this one was supported by a Ming official, Li Zicheng and so caused a crisis of confidence in the Ming court climaxing with the Emperor hanging himself upon being captured in accordance with his code of honour. The revolt now swelled in size and when the Ming general Wu Sangui was attacked he could do nothing but risk asking for aid from the former vassals in the north by way of a tenuous alliance. Sangui opened the Shanhai Pass (a gate of the Great Wall of China) on the provision the Manchu would help crush the revolt. Upon doing this the Manchus partially reneged on their understanding with the Ming, they moved their capital to Beijing and began to take control of China. Many Han (ethnic chinese) people disliked the Ming rulers and so defected en masse to the new Qing Dynasty, in fact the defection was so great by 1648 the Manchu army was 75% ethnic Han. The Manchu were a minority in their own army but this setup was successful and the Qing had • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 21

EARLY MODERN conquered all of China by 1662. Normally having a ruling class which differed in culture and religion to the people spells disaster for a large empire, so it is testament to the diplomatic and administrative tact of the Qing in assimilating and maintaining power. First a mass marriage was arranged between Manchu women and Han officials and a policy of cultural harmony was established, including many laws which promoted the blending of cultures. Next the Qing officially claimed the mandate of heaven in a grand ceremony, now giving them legal right to the emperorship. Over the next 50 years a process of diplomatic, administrative and cultural integration began. Most manchu emperors adopted Han traditions and language, also the original Manchu gods were renounced in favour of Taoism (a mix of Confucianism and Buddhism) which was the majority religion of China at the time.

All this to aid in the management of the empire they seem to have gained control of almost overnight.

The dynasty then flourished for the next 200 years, in this period most emperors were quite progressive and the formerly oppressive regime was relaxed in some areas, such as allowing open borders with neighbours and reducing the size of the military all with the aim to promote growth and prosperity. However this came with a price and the free movement policy, besides allowing merchants to come and go also allowed christian missionaries to propagate into China. This was the first of many dents to the Qing’s imperial power, as people converted to the new western faith tensions grew and anti-government activists began to organise. It was at this point that the Empire went into decline, under pressure from the christian influences and aggressive British opium trading the country began to lose unity. Meanwhile externally, successive defeats to western powers highlighted the outdated nature of the Qing society and damaged confidence.

In 1851, again under the urges of famine, a large rebellion occurred. It was slowly defeated but was significant for its anti-manchu sentiment noting the foreign nature of the Qing and it looked as

EVENTS

if the dynasty would be deposed sooner rather than later. However the dynasty did not go quietly and began a period known as the Tongzhi Restoration. Similar to the later Japanese Meiji Restoration, whereabouts a council of loyal Manchu officials began the huge process of westernizing china, including adopting a western army style and banking system. However it was too little too late and by the early 20th century the Qing were under imperialist pressure from Britain, France, Russia and Japan as well as internal resistance to westernization, an opium epidemic and nationalist movements. All this became too much for the Qing and as a result legal power was ceded to the new (Nationalist) Republic of China, as part of these negotiations the Qing dynasty were separated from politics and the last emperor Puyi abdicated on 12th February 1912 ending 3 millennia of Imperial Chinese rule and starting the civil war and continued factionalism that constitutes modern communist china. The Dynasty’s last Hurrah came in the form of rulers of Manchukuo a Japanese vassal state 1942-1945 with Puyi as emperor, after that the dynasty faded into the history books. •

Further Reading

China’s Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, Richard J. Smith China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing, William T. Rowe The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, Valerie Hansen 22 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

WHAT IF CHARLES I HAD WON THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR? Oliver Williams considers how Britain may have been different if the English Civil War had not ended in a victory for Cromwell and Parliament.

EARLY MODERN

K

ing Charles I was a monarch of the 17th century in every sense.

He believed in absolute rule; that he was appointed by God and Parliament existed for the purpose of serving him. In 1628 he was told otherwise. The Petition of Right forced the King to cut back on taxation and im-

ANALYSIS prisonments without trial. This prompted a series of disagreements leading to the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, in which Parliament presented the King with a list of grievances, and looked to seize control of the army. Charles attempted to arrest 5 men in the House of Commons, but was unsuccessful. Many pledged their alle-

giance to either Parliament or the King, and in 1642, civil war broke out between Royalist and Parliamentary forces. After Royalist losses at Hull, Marston Moor and finally Naseby, the King was executed for ‘treason’ on the 30th January 1649. However, it is interesting to speculate what could have happened if Charles’ Royalists had won.

To decide what may have occurred, we must first consider whether Charles’ victory was decisive, or inconclusive.

What if we were to assume that Charles could win unconditionally, with a decisive victory at one of the major battles? After a conclusive victory at Edgehill, the first battle of the war, (1642) the King could have advanced through to London, and reclaimed his throne unchallenged. Without New Model Army victories at Marston Moor (1644) or Naseby (1645), Charles’ cavaliers might have earned a definitive victory over Cromwell’s forces, preventing the King’s execution in 1649. The direct consequences of this sweeping win would have been Parliament’s loss of power; an army under royal control, and eventually the execution of Cromwell and other key opposition figures. In the years after the King’s victory, reforms could also have been made with regard to religion. Archbishop Laud was an Anglican who had Catholic tendencies, and Charles himself was married to Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic. A royalist victory would have ensured the church never entered the Puritan phase, so closely associated with the Interregnum (1649-1660).

Another implication of a royal victory would have been to divert focus away from fighting in Scotland and Ireland, and help to restore economic stability in England and diminish divisive religious differences in the Kingdom. At this point in time, the Irish population were around 85% Catholic, meaning that most people wished to divide the country into Protestant north and Catholic south. We might have seen the 1921 partition of Ireland almost 300 years earlier! Scottish Presbyterians, meanwhile, were content with simple, protestant services, and wanted minimal interference from the English church and the government in London.

If Charles did not interfere in Scottish affairs, he would not need to waste time and resources in the North.

Let us now say that the King contin-

EARLY MODERN

ANALYSIS ued the stalemate through the years after the battle of Edgehill, not allowing a single Parliamentarian triumph, but not gaining conclusive royalist victory. Charles would not have been able to regain absolute power. With both sides weakening, the King would be offered a settlement.

Charles would probably honour the agreements and concessions made before the civil war, such as the Grand Remonstrance, but not ones made during the conflict. This would place him in power once more, but in a more democratic form of government, under a parliamentary compromise. With hindsight, we know that Charles II eventually came to power this way in the Restoration Settlement of 1660, and, ironically, that the monarchy was more popular because of it. If people had never experienced a country without a King, our constitutional monarchy may not have evolved as it did.

With Charles I’s execution, the precedent of removing a monarch from power had been set. This may have had greater influence on the world today than you may think. The death of the King inspired many radical writings and pushed enlightenment ideas into view. For example, the work of English philosopher Hobbes, including his famous Leviathan, published in May 1651. This book was arguably as relevant to contemporary French disturbances (the Fronde of 1649-52) as those in England, and Hobbes was able to spread his words of enlightenment using his fluency in many languages including Latin, French, Spanish and Greek. Another man who was influential in the rise of radical ideas was Rousseau, a French philosopher that inspired the work of Maximilien Robespierre, a leading Revolutionary of the 18th century. Without these reformist publications, the French Revolution (1789) may not have resulted in the death of Louis XVI four years later.

Perhaps, even the 18th century American War of Independence may have been different, had the ability to remove authority not been demonstrated years earlier.

It could have resulted in independence from taxes, but still under British Monarchy, like what would eventually happen

to Australia in 1901. However, the American Colonies may also have never had the drive to overthrow the government, if the idea of removing authority had never been set in motion. Could America possibly have remained under British rule until the 19th century?

But how would Government in the United Kingdom, have changed, if Charles I had won the English Civil War? The 21st century sees a parliamentary democracy, with the King or Queen as figurehead.

Had Charles’ reign not ended with his execution, I believe that the royal family today would have a more practical role in political decisions, and have more of a traditional purpose as opposed to today’s expensive institution, which will cost the taxpayer a total of £40 million this year alone in the so-called ‘Sovereign Grant’.

However, the actual cost of the monarchy is higher, taking into account additional security costs and royal visits. Maybe, discontent over this could lead to the downfall of the monarchy due to popular vote, along the lines of an American republic.

Perhaps, we might have been voting in June 2016 for this, rather than for Britain’s future in the European Union? But this is all, of course, just hypothetical. •

Further Reading

The English Civil Wars: 1640-1660, Blair Worden Civil War: The History of England, Peter Ackroyd Leviathan, Hobbes Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 25

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THE T BIOGRAPHY OF GREAT MEN In companion with the piece on the Marxist view of history, Nick Harris explains why he feels that it is Great Men who are the drivers of historical change.

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he Great Man (or indeed woman) view of history was explained by Thomas Carlyle in 1841: ‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men’. In other words, this essentially means that the events of history can be attributed to the actions of specific individuals. These individuals use their intelligence, charisma or skill to manipulate their power in a way that produces a historical impact. The first thing to point out is that the word ‘great’ can be misleading in this context as it bears no relevance to an individual’s righteousness or strength of character but only to their prominence in history and the significance of their actions.

The word ‘great’ is one we are stuck with thanks to Carlyle, who did entitle his book ‘On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History’.

With that description, examples will

HISTORIOGRAPHY

ANALYSIS

instantly appear in your mind perhaps including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, and rightly so. These are all men who have at the very least been some of the greatest actors of history and at the most have affected social and political culture for generations after their own deaths.

Towards the end of the Second World War, SS officials at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other extermination camps received orders to increase the number of Jews, homosexuals, Roma and others being killed whilst more guards and soldiers were sent to abet this. This was part of Hitler’s personal manic and sadistic plan to wipe out these, in his view, undesirable races before the war ended. In diverting resources towards this, the Holocaust in its enormity and scale is more significant to us today. One hundred and forty years earlier, Napoleon was ma-

rauding around northern Italy conquering nation and defeating Austrians. As part of the peace deals with many of the states within the region he re-organised them into new countries such as the formerly known Duchy of Modena, which was transformed into the Cisalpine Republic. In creating these new countries Napoleon ensured that their constitutions contained parts of what became the Napoleonic Code such as the ending of serfdom, freedom of religion for many repressed minorities, such as the Jews as well as elections for the first time replacing the remnants of the feudal system. This example would be enforced throughout Napoleon’s conquests, and the rich liberal democratic legacy that Europe enjoys now can be therefore traced back to him in part and to the collection of policies known as the Code Napoleon. These are just snapshots of these ‘great’ men's’ careers but

it is not necessary to be one of these pre-eminent politicians or generals for the theory to apply. On the 15th May 1846 the Importation Act, a proposed law to remove import tariffs on grain and so increase supply for starving peasants, was passed after being introduced by Robert Peel’s Tory government. This bill did not have the support of Peel’s own party and was only passed by a coalition of Whigs and Radicals (Peel’s official opposition). Peel’s decision therefore to act in the interest of decreasing the price of bread and other foodstuffs for the majority and to go against his own party shows that a singular politician placed at a turning point in history could dictate Britain’s free market economic policy for the next 70 years.

These examples are just one among many in these men’s lives and these are a few among millions in the number of individuals who have influenced history. However, what • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 27

HISTORIOGRAPHY

these examples do provide is an example of how a great man’s decision can resonate down the centuries.

Although Carlyle’s writing style has many fine qualities, he can become rather obsessed with the military qualities of great men. What lends the theory even greater credence is the philosophers, thinkers and religious leaders whose ideas have reverberated through history to an even greater extent than those we have already discussed.

Take Confucius, for example, whose philosophy was the bedrock of Chinese civilisation for over a millennium, and still carries much currency today. Or imagine a world without Jesus or Mohammed every being born. Myself, I can not comprehend or even picture world without Christianity or Islam.

And one can not put forward the case that any other man could have taken their place.

ANALYSIS

Jesus and Mohammed both presented a unique interpretation of existing religious ideas and rebuilt them into entirely new denominations. Perhaps, the most ironic figure who forms part of this vein of argument is Marx himself. Marx, along with the too often forgotten Engels, looked at the world and formulated a revolutionary vision of history and economics that would change both the way academics study the past and would engineer the ideas that would cause revolutions across the world in Russia, China and Cuba.

You are likely to read on the opposite page the main counter argument to this theory, which, although often attributed to Marx, was devised by Herbert Spencer who, among other things, interested himself in the sociological applications of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This argument is that

such men who may seem prominent during their lifetime were put in this significant position by the conditions in which they lived and that these social and economic conditions determined their actions. This is somewhat true, in the same way that any animal or person is influenced by the words, idea and environment that surrounds them.

It could even be argued that the social and economic conditions in question were caused by the actions of someone else and then exploited; it is very rare to find circumstances which spring up on their own and go on to have a large impact. For instance, through his wars against Austria and the states of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon fragmented the union of German countries.

This disintegration was then capitalised on by another individual, Otto von Bismarck, who was able to exploit the waning influence of Austria to propel Prussian to an insurmountable role in the management of what would become the North German Confederation, and later the German Reich.

Therefore, these social and economic conditions, which are often quoted by those in opposition to this theory as the answer to all historical questions, should be thought of as opportunities rather than circumstances and, in many cases, a sa result of a previous great man’s actions besides.

Great Man Theory is at its most fundamental level an argument that the individual can have an effect on the outcome of events through his actions. To reject it is to deny the impact of other characters on us through our own lives. If you accept that others can have an effect on you, then that can be extended to an historical argument. The more power one has, the more people one can affect and as the most powerful men of world history, some of whom I have mentioned, have clearly delivered great consequences on the people they rule thanks to their actions and ideologies. This is not limited to repercussions on people as we can observe their actions extending or even creating political theories and social environments. Whilst to say history is wholly the biography of great men may be an oversimplification, they are still the starring characters and the prime movers of the plot. •

Further Reading

On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts The Churchill Factor, Boris Johnson 28 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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THE MARXIST THEORY OF HISTORY By contrast with the last piece, John Hobby explains why it is not Great Men but class struggle that defines human history.

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I

t can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking Great Men are solely responsible for the course of history. It is easy to think without Bismarck we would not know Germany as anything more than a geographical term or to think without Cromwell we would still be living under an Absolutist Monarchy. While it is undeniable that these individuals are responsible for the turn of events that ensued as a result of their actions, to focus solely on these Great Men would be missing the point.

Marxist Theory of Historical Materialism sees all events in history as being driven by social and economic forces.

These forces, or material conditions, are summarised as being the relations people have between each other in order to

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provide themselves and their families with basic necessities such as food, water and a roof over their heads. These material conditions are then in turn responsible for creating the ideology of a people, as opposed to traditional theories that suggest that people’s ideology and subsequent actions are responsible for changes in the world we live in.

In almost all civilisations of the past 10,000 years, people have been divided into classes according to their personal wealth and position with one class ruling above everyone else. Marxist theory states because these people are from the same social background with similar economic means they will share the same ideology, and seek to look out for their own interests. This is where the

idea of class struggle comes in.

To show how change is brought about by a change in material conditions, the first example I will use is a time before civilization even existed. Early humans faced competition from predators that were superior in almost every way. The three key adaptations that allowed us to survive, never mind create civilisations were the opposable thumb, our incredibly variable voice box and the complex human brain. The opposable thumb when used in combination with an advanced brain allowed us to use tools to kill animals more easily, and the voice box (also in combination with our incredible brain) allowed us to develop language and work together. These two inventions, language and tools allowed

humans to hunt far more efficiently, and this was not the work of some trumpedup great man, rather a historic inevitability. This presented a change in our relationship with our environment which led to development, sound familiar? It should.

The next big step came with the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic Period (around 10,000 years ago). With the domestication of plants and animals productivity increased enormously which allowed the first ever food surpluses. These food surpluses allowed permanent settlements to pop up, as Man no longer needed to live a nomadic life in search of food, as well as a growing population. Now that people were able to produce more food than they needed, • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 31

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it allowed some people to stop working the land and develop technology such as metal tools and clay pots that allowed agriculture to become even more productive. At this point, you may have noticed I have not yet mentioned a class struggle, and that is simply because class systems did not exist quite yet. One of the most successful of these civilisations were the Sumerian people, based between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This civilisation relied heavily on irrigation channels 32 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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to waters its crops, and in order for the digging of these channels to be as efficient as possible, administrators were required. In around 3,000 BCE these administrators began to develop a form of writing to keep a record of irrigation channels and later transactions, but the fact that only the privileged Administrators were literate placed them above the labourers, and this was where the first class system developed.

From here the first slave societies

developed in Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, where a ruling class is massively outnumbered by a slave population who work the land and produce the goods that allowed these slave societies to become so rich. Often these slave societies were not overthrown by their slaves, but managed to retain control for so long that infighting within the faction weakened the civilisation to such an extent they could be easily be conquered by external forces, such as happened with the Roman Empire.

Then came the feudal monarchies.

Systems in which a peasant owns what he produces on ‘his’’ plot of land, but is forced to give a portion to his local lord as tribute, usually in the form of grain.

This land-owning aristocracy make up the ruling class, with a centralised monarch who looks after the interests of the aristocracy.

These systems are overthrown, sometimes (though not always) violently, by the middle class to create a bourgeoisie or capitalist society through actions like Magna Carta or the English Civil War, encroaching on the privileges of feudal rulers. A capitalist society relies on private ownership of the means of production and- unfortunately- often exploitation of the lower class who are forced to sell their labour in order to survive (thankfully to a lesser extent today).

Private companies buy this labour which allows them to produce goods and subsequently turn a profit by selling goods back to society.

From here, Marx believed the working class would eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie to establish socialist society, going on to set up a global communist utopia with no nations or private property. This is obviously yet to happen (with a few notable exceptions) but I believe this does not invalidate the argument that material conditions being the driving force of history.

So far I haven't gone into great detail into great detail about about why historical events such as Revolutions happen.

Marxist believe the contradictions built into the political and economic systems in place grow over time until they eventually become a block on human productivity, at which point change needs to be made to the system. The ruling class will try and prevent this change in an at-

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ANALYSIS tempt to cling to their power by resorting to reactionary policies, and the only way society can make the adaptations needed is to overthrow the people blocking the change - a revolution.

An often neglected revolution, The English Civil War is a prime example of one of these situations. You may see the conflict as a group of brave Parliamentarians rising up to rid England of an absolutist monarch in defence of English Liberty. I would say the roots of this conflict lie much earlier and much deeper, around 200 years earlier in fact.

15th Century England’s Feudal society reached her developmental limits, agricultural technology improving to such an extent it was becoming limited by the small peasant plots. A slump in grain prices ensued as well as a huge rise in the price of luxury goods which put huge pressure on the life of the ruling aristocracy. As a result the aristocracy tried to squeeze more money out of the peasants and the King tried to squeeze more money out of the archaic tax system. As the aristocracy’s power fell, a merchant class began to emerge in towns, spurred by the growth in international trade.

These merchants became incredibly rich, but the feudal system had no role in government for those with wealth but no social status, as the aristocracy tried to keep the power in their hands (seeing a trend?). This crisis began to develop over the 16th century as the House of Commons began to fill up with rich men of little status seeking political power. This resulted in Parliament seeking a way to increase its role in government all the while James and Charles tried to retain the power. These tensions culminated in the Civil War which Parliament obviously won, resulting in Parliament taking an integral role in government while later kings were reduced to figureheads as Capitalism established itself.

Marxists don't completely ignore the role individuals play in history however, but they do believe history cannot be created by individuals alone, that events can only happen when conditions in a society reach a crisis point. The idea

that history is made by people in wigs or funny hats will only mystify the past and simply cannot explain it. That being said, individuals in charge at key moments of a revolution or war can be the difference between success and failure, but this is not the same as making history. These ‘Great Men’ who can be the dif-

ference between success and failure also do not drop out of the sky! These people are made and shaped by the times they lived in, the social and political conditions of they were exposed to, Cometh the hour, so too cometh the man and not the other way round. History is not made in a vacuum. •

Further Reading

Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx What Happened in History? Gordon Childe Man Makes Himself, Gordon Childe Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 33

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34 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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WHY BRITAIN LOVES A HEROIC FAILURE Why is it that the British people fixate over their historic failures? Matty Johnson looks at examples of this.

F

rom the Eddie the Eagle to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Britain has prided itself on its outright failures.

There’s always something the British people see as fundamentally admirable about losing, going down allguns-blazing, fighting for all its worth, fighting to the last man. But what is it about us Brits that makes us so attracted to intrepid defeats? It is commonly thought that failures like these are the result of Britain’s decline of power, however my viewpoint differs and I set out to produce an alternative argument. This article explores examples of and reasons for the central characteristic of an entire nation.

In May 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin began his journey to the Canadian Arctic to become the first to complete the NorthWest Passage, an unmapped area of the arctic encompassing 70,000 square miles. Franklin set out with 134 men, an extraordinarily large number, given the logistical struggles they would face with supplies etc. However, it was discovered that in September 1846, Franklin’s ships had been trapped by ice just off King William Island. Franklin died a short while later in June 1847, and in spring of 1848, most of the 105 survivors attempted to travel south on foot, and reach safety 850 miles away. There were no survivors, with the furthest distance reached being just 80 miles from the ships. The Franklin expedition had been a complete disaster. And had produced the worst loss of life in the history of polar exploration. Franklin would get a memorial in Westminster Abbey, and another in the Painted Hall of the Old • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 35

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Sir John Franklin Royal Naval College in Greenwich, as well as statues in central London, Hobart (Tasmania), and in his birthplace of Lincolnshire, in a true elevation of an epic failure to heroic status.

This example of Sir John Franklin is important, as his rise to heroic failure occurred in the 19th, not 20th century. He is one of many examples of failures being celebrated as heroes in British culture that can be found as far back as 19th Century: Mungo Park who died while tracing the Nile, Rollo Gillespie, a soldier who died while leading a reckless attack during the Anglo-Nepalese War, to name a few. It is important to note the date of these heroic failures, as they happened before Britain began to decline, meaning such glamorised failures cannot be a result of British decline, as they in did in fact occur at a peak time of British power.

ANALYSIS Further examples of heroic failure can be seen at the Battle of Isandlwana 1879, where 1,800 British troops were overwhelmed by 20,000 Zulu warriors 11 days after the British Empire commenced an invasion of Zululand, South Africa. The battle was a considerable failure for the British, incurring 1,300 casualties, and only inducing around 900. This battle has been used in the 1960s as a symbol of Britain’s changing imperial values in an era of decolonisation, especially in the film Zulu (1964), examining the moral ambiguities of empire.

The British Empire has, for better or for worse, given us much of our national identity, but while we often saw it as noble and worthy, it was in fact frequently oppressive and violent.

Issues such as slavery, which existed up until 1834, as well as the violent military force that protected existing colonies and conquered new ones, confronted the idealised perception of nobility and perfection. These issues destroy the illusion that Britain was based on consent rather than compulsion. This line between idealism and reality demanded a cultural conception of the empire that subdues its forcible and violent nature, highlighting stories that depict the empire on a positive light. These stories predominantly involve failures as their heroes because it helps Britain to see itself as something other than conquerors and oppressors.

By presenting an alternative vision of the empire, failed heroes maintain the pretence that the empire is about things aside from power, force, and domination.

It would seem profoundly wrong to write an article on British heroic failures and not at least mention the infamous cavalry charge of 1854 that Lord Cardigan led whereby “into the valley of death, rode the six hundred”. George Orwell quoted that: “In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff is done by small minority. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it’s worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats…The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction”. In fact, the companion poem Tennyson wrote about the successful Charge of General Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade is hardly ever seen in Britain today. William Russell claimed, “our Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness, and by the brutality of a ferocious enemy”; the charge went horribly. Since the crushing defeat, Britain has gone on to idolise the men that failed so horribly; we “honour that charge they made, honour the Light Brigade, noble six-hundred”.

Britain’s heroic failures, as great and noble as the men that died were, are elevated for the sole reason to help hide the uncomfortable realities of imperialism. The British Empire was created by conquering a vast amount of land far beyond the shores of Britain, something that could only have happened as a result of deliberate and aggressive intent. British tendency to celebrate failure comes from the desire to be seen as a gallant loser, rather than an outright victor. •

Further Reading

Franklin: The Tragic Hero of Pol`ar Navigation, Andrew Lambert The Washing of the Spears, Donald R Morris The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith 36 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

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THE EARLY HISTORY OF RECORDED SOUND Part 2

Following on from last edition, WIlliam Sheffield completes his early history of recorded sound, charting the fall of the phonograph rise of the gramophone.

I

n the first half of this article, which you may recall from the last issue of Timeline, the very beginnings of sound recording were explained, from the first step of the Phonautograph, to the immediate success of Edison’s Tinfoil Phonograph. In this, the second half of my brief article on the dawn of recorded sound, it shall be seen how how others took Edison’s concept of recording sound and ran with it, and how the beginnings of the multi millionpound enterprise we know today as the ‘recording industry’ came to be.

Edison, unable to see any immediate further development that could be made to his Tinfoil Phonograph, put it to one side in 1879 after initial interest and enthusiasm waned, and turned his attention instead to his work with electricity, in particular the electrification of New York City. However, other inventors and entrepreneurs saw potential in his idea. In particular, Alexander Graham Bell (he of telephone fame), his cousin Chichester Bell, and his laboratory technician Charles Sumner Tainter (whose significance in the history of sound recording is often underrated), working at the Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C. thought that they could improve the phonograph, and make the records more durable. They believed that wax would provide a better recording medium, and in 1881 deposited one of their experiments, an Edison Tinfoil Phonograph with a recording on wax pressed into the grooves,

with the Smithsonian. They conducted many further experiments, recording on discs, wax, cardboard and glass, and even trying to make moulds and presses to make duplicate records. Many of their experimental recordings were given to the Smithsonian, and consequently still exist, including one with the recorded voice of Alexander Graham Bell himself.

In 1885 they approached Edison with their improvements and work they had done to his phonograph, and asked him if he should like to go into partnership with them to exploit these improvements. Edison, incensed that anyone else was playing around with ‘his invention’, refused to have anything to do with them.

Unperturbed by this, the Volta Group

applied for patents and were given them in 1886, whereupon they went into manufacture of their new ‘talking machine’. Instead of tinfoil wrapped around the mandrel, Tainter had developed long, thin, spirally-wound cardboard tubes, which could then be coated with wax and put on the mandrel, and on which the recording could be cut in a groove of varying depth, rather than embossed like the tinfoil phonograph. They called their machine the “Graphophone” in a canny avoidance of Edison’s patents on the name ‘Phonograph’, and first marketed the machine for dictation in offices. The waxon-cardboard tubes had a longer playing time than the Tinfoil Phonograph and could be removed from the mandrel. • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 37

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An early Graphophone They appeared perfect for dictation; a businessman could record a letter on a cylinder, and once it had been listened to and typed up (on the new invention ‘the typewriter’) by the secretary, the surface of the wax, containing the grooves which held the recording, could be shaved off to allow for re-use. Once all the wax was shaved, the cylinders were easily disposable. However, the machine was not a great success - few were rented for dictation purposes.

However, Mr Edison, never one for sitting still, had tried to take matters back into his own hands. In 1886 he recommenced work on the phonograph, and in 1888 he brought out the Perfected Phonograph, which he also intended to be used for dictation. This machine was a little like the Graphophone, as it recorded on wax and was listened to through speaking tubes, but the cylinders were completely made out of wax, and had a greater diameter than the Graphophone ones. Furthermore, it was powered by an electric motor, whereas the Graphophone’s power was provided by a foot treadle, just like sewing machines of the period. Even though this machine appeared better, the dictation side of business did not take off, and instead the invention went in a new direction.

Salesmen had already begun attaching coin-in-the-slot apparatus to phonographs so that the public could listen to recorded 38 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

music, and soon ‘phonograph parlours’ opened up all over America, where for a small fee one could listen to music through listening tubes in a shop containing many of these coin-operated phonographs. This was wildly popular, and it didn’t take long for Edison and other companies, such as the Columbia Phonograph Company (which later became the Columbia Graphophone Company, and eventually Columbia Records), to latch on to this popular desire for recorded music. Surviving commercially recorded entertainment wax cylinders date from about 1893 onwards. The selections recorded were mostly music hall songs, military marches, and vaudeville recitations. They provide a fascinating glimpse into popular culture and ordinary people’s tastes in the period.

Around this time the material used to make the wax cylinders changed. The dictation cylinders had been made out of soft wax (normally a mixture of paraffin wax, palm wax, and stearic acid), as they only had to be played back once or twice, but these entertainment cylinders had to be of a harder material to withstand repeated plays on coin-operated phonographs, and yet still be of a soft enough material to achieve good, deep-cut groove during recording of the piece. This improved material was the ‘brown wax’, but in reality contained little wax at all, instead being composed of a metallic soap, aluminium

stearate. However, there was still no good way to copy a cylinder - often artists would perform into several phonographs all recording at once. There was certainly no way of editing a cylinder! Copying methods were developed, by linking up a reproducing phonograph with a recording one, but to take the sound waves direct via a rubber tube made the resulting copy sound hollow and distant, and to connect the recording and reproducing styli using a pantograph, although it produced a clear copy, wore out the original cylinder quickly. The cylinder speed was finally standardised to give a compromise of fidelity and length of recording at 160 revolutions per minute, which gave two minutes playing time.

All these cylinders were recorded (and indeed reproduced) acoustically - the performer played, spoke or sung into a large horn, which channelled and focused the sound waves towards the diaphragm, which was connected to the cutting stylus, vibrating it. Acoustic cylinder recording was an art and a science in itself - each instrument had to be the right distance from the horn, and violins had to be equipped with horns themselves to make them loud enough to be picked up!

Edison had already realised that the Perfected Phonograph, or ‘Class M’, as it developed into, was not great for the domestic use that people wanted - not content with listening to a phonograph in public, they wanted one in their own home.

The Class M was electric and powered by large glass Edison-Lalande cells, which would spill potassium hydroxide if broken. Consequently Edison brought out three different models of phonograph for domestic use, powered by clockwork spring motor: the Home was the largest and most expensive of the three, the Standard was slightly smaller in size and price tag, but no less well built, and the Gem was a small tinplate machine which was cheap but woefully underpowered. Metal horns were used for acoustic amplification. The phonograph was embraced by the people, and the industry grew. However, another invention was emerging and developing which looked set to take over from the phonograph all together.

In 1887 Emile Berliner, an Americanresident German, had patented his version of the phonograph, which he called the ‘Gram-O-Phone’. This machine was

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EVENTS different to the cylinder phonograph in many ways. Firstly, the sound was recorded in a groove spirally on a disc, not on a cylinder, and the sound was recorded in a lateral-cut method, that is, the vibrations of the stylus in the groove were in the plane of the disc, from sideto-side, rather than up-and-down motion of the stylus in the groove on a cylinder.

Berliner put Cros’s earlier ideas into practice - the master record would be cut in a layer of wax on a zinc disc, which would expose the zinc under the groove.

The zinc disc would be immersed in a bath of acid, which would etch corresponding grooves in the zinc. This metal disc could then be used to create a master moulded stamper, from which many disc gramophone records could be pressed.

The earliest material for making the final records for sale was vulcanised rubber, but Berliner quickly changed to shellac (a substance with plastic qualities excreted by the beetle Coccus Lacca, which inhabits the Malay Peninsula). Early gramophone records were louder than cylinders, but no better in tonal quality. One advantage of the gramophone was that the stylus was propelled across the revolving record by the sheer force of the deep groove, so the machine, the gramophone, could be made with fewer precision parts than the phonograph, which needed a feedscrew to propel the stylus across the cylinder record surface. Speed of the gramophone records was standardised at 78 revolutions per minute, and in 1897 Berliner set up The Gramophone Company in England, which indeed survives today as HMV (“His Master’s Voice”, after the famous ‘Nipper the Dog’ trademark picture).

Edison at first still had no good way to copy cylinders for a mass market, one thing that the gramophone record makers could do easily to their discs, via a master stamper. But in 1902 he developed his ‘Gold Moulded’ process, which allowed him to easily make moulds from master cylinders, from which many copy cylinders could be cast. As grand as the name sounds, the new type of cylinders contained no gold - only gold foil was used in the electroplating process to make the moulds.

The fact that each cylinder sold didn’t have to be directly recorded (they could be cast) meant that Edison could introduce a new sort of ‘wax’ for the cylinders - the ‘black wax’, which was harder than the brown,

Edison with the Perfected Phonograph in 1888 which meant that the cylinders could withstand more plays - the force of the stylus wore down the groove with every play. Therefore Edison could now turn out more cylinders than ever before, and for the moment keep pace with the ever more popular gramophone.

However, a new problem soon emerged for Edison. The disc records were getting longer in terms of playing time - most were now three or four minutes long, but the cylinders still only lasted two minutes.

Therefore in 1908 Edison introduced the Amberol cylinder record, which had twice the number of grooves to the inch (making it 200), lasting four minutes. However, phonographs needed to have the necessary mechanics to track this finer groove, so as well as manufacturing specialised fourminute machines, Edison, ever loyal to his customers, provided kits for people to attach to their existing phonographs so that they could play four minute cylinders.

The Amberols were still made of wax, but this was soon found not to support the finer groove, and so Edison changed the material once again, and brought out in 1912 the Blue Amberols, manufactured out of celluloid. The blue dye added to the celluloid helped to reduce surface noise.

Nevertheless, despite Edison’s continued efforts to keep pace with the gramophone

and its popularity, the disc won out, and in 1929 Edison ceased all cylinder production, after experimenting with and selling vertical-cut disc records in vain.

So why did the disc triumph?

Firstly, there was the question of ease of handling and storage. Discs were more user-friendly than cylinders, being made of a harder material, which didn’t break quite as easily as the black wax cylinders (by the time the Blue Amberol celluloid ‘indestructible’ records were introduced, it could be argued that the gramophone had already won over the public to the greater extent, and the phonograph was on the back foot from there on). The cylinders took up more space in the home, in a cabinet, in terms of storage, whereas discs could be stacked on racks or shelves like books, taking up far less space.

Furthermore, there was the question of repertoire. The types of music recorded on cylinders had not really changed since their introduction, with only the addition of some now more popular types later on, and discs had more pieces on them that people wanted to hear, and were attracting the better performers and artists. In addition, in the last few years of cylinder production, the Blue Amberols were dubbed from Edison’s ‘Diamond Discs’, leading them • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 39

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Descending: The author’s Model B Standard Phonograph, c.1906, with 2/4 minute gearing attachment and an array of both 2 minute Gold Moulded black wax and 4 minute Blue Amberol celluloid cylinders; The Gramophone Company’s ‘Trademark’ model, the first reliable mass-produced gramophone, so called because of its appearance in the trademark ‘His Master’s Voice’ painting

EVENTS to have a inferior tonal quality to the (by now) far superior and more popular discs.

The shellac 78 rpm record survived well into the 1940’s and early 50’s, but was then replaced with the much more durable, user friendly and popular vinyl records. These were the 45 rpm ‘single’ and the 33 rpm ‘Long Player’ or ‘LP’ records.

They are making a comeback recently in public interest - it is nice to see people having more of an awareness of the sound recording methods of the past, even if they are still relatively recent in my terms!

It may seem a little exaggerated, but the wax cylinder Phonograph (not to forget the Graphophone) was, and I believe still is, a miraculous invention. Not only did it permit people to hear the recorded spoken word and music, something never before possible in all of human history, but it was the machine which preserved for us the voices of such famous and remarkable people as Bismarck, Florence Nightingale, Sir Henry Irving, Brahms, Alexander Graham Bell, Gladstone, possibly Queen Victoria, and of course Edison himself.

It is indeed truly amazing to hear these early recordings, to hear history come alive before your ears. Even such trivial things as home recordings stir the emotions; to hear a grandfather’s speech to his grandchildren made on his seventy-first birthday in 1894 certainly provokes thought. I believe it is one of closest things we have ever come to a ‘time machine’ - it makes the past just that bit more tangible, and yet just out of reach. You get but two minutes of the past in the room with the recorders, and this fleeting glimpse makes it somehow seem even more special. We are separated from the past via the Phonograph, the very instrument that brought us close to it, by a mere quarter inch of wax, only just out of reach, but lifetimes away.

I would like to leave you with these words, spoken by Sir Arthur Sullivan on a recording he made in October 1888... ...“astonished at the wonderful power you [Mr Edison] have developed, but terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record for ever”. •

Further Reading

I have produced a list containing a few links to videos and files of notable early recordings. If you enjoyed this article and should like to hear some recordings and find out more, I would be more than happy to email this to you...The best place to find out more and read around the subject is undoubtedly the Internet - there are hundreds of sites out there dedicated to early sound recordings and phonographs and gramophones. For the very earliest recordings (phonautographs &c.) I should suggest First Sounds .org, and for slightly later recordings (phonographs, cylinders &c.) Tinfoil.com. Don’t forget the YouTube videos out there either! These are excellent places to start, but if you are looking for a book, the best and most easily accessible to beginners is the one published by the Shire series, called simply ‘Old Gramophones’, by Ben Bergonzi.

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The First Russian Revolution

Stepan Khovanov writes the story of the first major threat to Tsarist Power in Nineteenth-century Russia that would inspire later generations of revolutionaries.

R

eading the title, you might be thinking of the 1917 Revolutions, either the February or the October one, or perhaps even the less famous 1905 Revolution.

But you would be wrong. This is about the 1825 failed Revolution against Nicholas I. Because of the month the Revolution happened, the rebels became known as the Decembrists. There were revolutions before, but they were just one monarch being exchanged for another, usually with the help of the army, and often were not expressive of the general will of the people rather the whims of disgruntled palace officials and aristocrats. However, the Decembrists were the first uprising against the whole system of autocracy, tsarism and serfdom. They didn’t want a new Tsar. They wanted to change Russia, to change its government and how it worked.

The Napoleonic Wars had just finished and the Tsar, Alexander I, decided to ease control a little over Russia’s western territories. The Kingdom of Poland received a Constitution and the serfs in the Baltic Region were freed. Serfdom was an agricultural system, in which the serfs (peasants) were the landowner’s property and he could do anything with them. Russia itself still had serfdom and was an autocracy, where only one person (the Tsar) ruled. The Russian elite hoped that reforms would also be implemented in Russia, which was seen as an equal of the Western countries, such as France and Britain, but their hopes weren’t fulfilled.

Alexander quickly lost the will to reform and just focused on keeping the status quo.

The lack of major reform angered the elite, who expected more. The most annoyed were the aristocrats who fought

in the war and saw the freedom of the West, when they liberated countries, like France, which had a democracy (at least, compared to Russia), no Tsar and no serfs. There was little or no political repression and no censorship. When it became obvious that Alexander wasn’t going to go ahead with the reforms, some of the officers decided to force him to.

In 1816, a society, called the Union of Salvation, was created in St Petersburg. It was a small group with no clear aims, but all members were united in their hatred of serfdom and autocracy. These things, among others, highlighted how backward and undeveloped Russia was, especially when compared to Western countries, like France and Britain. In their meetings, the members discussed the need for the overthrow of the monarchy, but nothing actually materialised out of their discussions yet. • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 41

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EVENTS After a while, it was decided that there was no actual need to revolt against the government, but instead they needed to work with the government to encourage reforms. Thus, the society was reformed in 1818 into the Union of Prosperity. It quickly grew to 200 members and its plan was to take lawful action in order to change the popular view and to highlight Russia’s problems to the masses. Paintings and articles in popular magazines were used to highlight the maltreatment of the serfs and the need of a constitution. Those problems were debated in the aristocratic salons as well which helped to spread the views further. The officer-members of the Union tried to abolish corporal punishment and to educate soldiers under their command.

But the Union was not to last. As the government became more oppressive and cracked down, members became certain that the only way to reform would be through uprising and revolution. As a result, the Union was disbanded in 1821.

In the same year, some of the members formed the Northern Society, based in St Petersburg, headed by Muraviev. At the same time, the Southern Society was formed, based in Tulchin in Ukraine, and led by Pestel, a former officer in the Army.

Tulchin was the town where the command of the Southern Army was based. This was important as the overthrow had to have the support of at least some of the military.

Even though they were separated, they were still the same organisation. Both had plans for reforms after the uprising, but the North wanted Nicholas to remain as a Constitutional monarch with a Parliament, whereas the South wanted Russia to become a Republic with no Tsar. They also differed on the land issue, as the North proposed that each peasant be given a small amount of land, but the South wanted to set up a ‘land fund’ that included government, Church and some landowner’s lands. The land from the fund would be given to the peasants and couldn’t be taken away from them. Pestel expected the landowners to go bankrupt, as they had no workforce, and so, their land would quickly become peasants’.

Generally speaking, the North was more moderate and the South, under influence from Pestel, became more radical.

On 19th November 1825, Alexander I Clockwise from top left: Pestel Pavlov, The Decembrists on Ruble, Public Excecution and Nicholas I

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died. With no children, he left the throne to his younger brother Nicholas, missing the older Konstantin out. Though Nicholas at first expected Konstantin to come to St Petersburg from Warsaw in order to rule, where he lived, but Konstantin gave up his right and didn’t come. As a result, it was decided that the people would swear an oath to Nicholas on 14th December. The problem was that Alexander’s will was kept secret, so it led to confusion.

The Northern Society viewed this as the perfect moment, as they hoped it would seem that Nicholas was illegally taking the throne with Konstantin still alive.

On 14th December, the officer members of the Northern Society led around 3,000 troops from the elite Guards regiments onto the Senate Square, now known as the Decembrists’ Square, in order to intercept the ministers and senators and to force them to swear to a ‘provisional government’. However, the senators already swore to Nicholas and left the Square. In addition, the expected leaders of the uprising didn’t even come to the Square.

With no leaders and no back-up plan the revolt ground to a halt.

Meanwhile, Nicholas quickly gathered loyal troops around the Square. Once the rebels were surrounded, Nicholas tried to reason and negotiate with the Decembrists, but they refused.

In the evening, seven cannon shots were fired and around 300 rebels and 1000 civilians became casualties. By 6 pm, the revolt was crushed. On the 29th December, a regiment, led by the Southern Society members, rose up in Ukraine. However, Pestel had already been arrested, so without the leader the regiment lasted just for a week, hoping to get support from the rest of the army, but was crushed by 3rd January.

Nicholas, not wanting another revolt, set up a commission to investigate and deal with the opposition. 121 people was arrested and charged. The 5 main leaders were hanged, 37 people were sent to Siberia and 31 - to penal servitude. All those convicted belonged to the highest aristocratic circles in the Russian Empire and the fact that it was families involved were so close to the throne highlighted the need for a information-gathering system. And hence the first Russian secret police, the Third Section of his Imperial Majesty’s own Chancellery or simply the Third Department, was created by Nicholas I in the same year.

The penal servitude was seen of by many as being too harsh and Nicholas was constantly asked to release them, but he always refused. Finally, after 30 years, Alexander II freed the surviving rebels. This created the image of him being a ‘good’ Tsar, who would pass reforms, but only lead to him ‘underperforming’ in the eyes of the people, which eventually resulted in his death.

This failed uprising inspired many revolutionaries decades after who fought for the same things. As Lenin once said “The Decembrists woke up Herzen” , the first Russian socialist, who started off a reaction which would result in the 1917 Revolutions.

Serfdom was abolished only in 1862, and the attempt to set up a constitutional monarchy was totally destroyed in 1917 when the Tsar abdicated totally, and he was replaced by the Provisional Government and then by the Bolsheviks, whose despotic control of Russia would have horrified Pestel. But unintended consequence is a funny thing. •

Further Reading

The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Patrick O’Meara The Decembrists, Kimberly Richardson The Princess of Siberia, Christine Sutherland Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 43

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IRISH

INDEPENDENCE:

Was it Inevitable?

In a timely article, Jacob Lilie analyses the movement for independance in Ireland, that would ultimately free it from British rule. But were the changes it sought inevitable?

T

his year marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland.

Often touted as the catalyst for complete Irish independence, it helped set in motion a chain of events that made the Irish Question something that had could no longer be treated like it had been done so coldly as in the past. Independence, something that had been the unsuccessful goal of many nationalists for the last few centuries, was finally to be achieved one fateful night on the 5th of December 1921 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, bringing 120 years of political union between Ireland and England to an end. The issue of Irish Independence was one the had plagued the British government for many years and was seen by many as an inevitable triumph of freedom and liberty.

When one looks at the reasons for Irish independence, it is likely that many factors will be brought under the umbrella of poor British governance. The arguably callous nature of British governance is in my mind one of the greatest reasons for the triumph of a free Irish State. For many years, the government ignored the deplorable conditions of the common Irish people. The inaction to stop abusive and venal practices of landlords who raised rents to exorbitant fees and evicted vulnerable tenants at will was of great importance. Working the land was the primary means by which people made a living. Come the Great Famine in 1845, the fruits of the land were worthless, blighted by crop failure pulling the vast majority of people into lives of destitution and poverty. Yet the government took 44 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

little action until 1870 with the Land Reform Act. Stories of ships full of bread, butter and bacon heading for England abounded- food which could’ve been going to the starving Irishmen. In addition, any attempts by nationalists to assert themselves was met with excessive force.

A brutal program of suppression followed to the 1798 rebellion with British soldiers at free will to scour out United Irishmen and administer torture and extrajudicial killings. ‘No one slept in his own house,’ according to Robert Kee’s The Green Flag, out of fear of the British coming to exact revenge. Houses were burnt, half-hanging, pitch-capping and indiscriminate shooting were all commonplace as instruments of repression. Such brutal actions in a sense provided vindication to the nationalist cause. Heavy handed reactions to shows of discontent as proven elsewhere such as in the Russian Revolution or the Indian Independence Movement often just serve to fuel the flames and generate sympathy for those looking for change.

One can’t deny the importance of nationalist politics joining the political mainstream. Previously, such sentiments had been confined to secret societies and groups which could only have their voice heard through underwhelming shows of physical strength. Take for example Smith O’Brien’s uprising at Tipperary in 1848, which made nationalist action almost synonymous with folly. However in the late 19th century and early 20th century, nationalistic sentiment grew into political bodies with actual substance. These were groups that the British government •

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couldn’t treat like the previous nationalists. No longer were they merely a rag tag bunch of rebels but they were now the dominant school of political thought in Ireland. It wasn’t really possible to treat them with the same degree of disdain now that they had proven themselves an organised movement. In the 1918 general election, Sinn Fein won 73 of the 105 seats and subsequently declared an independent parliament, Dail Eireann. This ascendance to political domination helped to legitimize the cause of those fighting for Ireland in the War of Independence and paved the way to a negotiated settlement by the end of 1921.

Come 1914 and the onset of World War 1, Home Rule (the governance of Ireland by its own citizens which was to be brought into effect that year) was put on hold by the Suspensory Act. Many felt that although this was unfortunate, putting aside such matters was the patriotic thing to do at this time when Europe faced such a predicament. However for some this was unacceptable, along with the drafting of soldiers to fight. Certain members of society felt that

ANALYSIS they were under no obligation to fight for the British, let alone after the years of subjugation they had suffered in their eyes. As a result of the disarray brought about by the conflict, violent Republicans were able to actually rise up successfully (at least more than before) as they did in the Easter Rising. No longer were they under the watchful eye of Britain and the her vast network of informers that had been endemic before. Perhaps introducing conscription was one blow too far. One could only ponder about the course of Irish nationalism had Home Rule not been abandoned in 1914.

To some, national self-determination for Ireland was inevitable; a triumph for the people of Ireland who had been oppressed for centuries by a British government which frankly only concerned itself in Irish matters when its rule was threatened. But if Britain had been able to govern Ireland for centuries before this, surely this served as evidence that it was within their grasp to be able to compromise and maintain control.

Clearly, the odds were heavily in favour of those who sought an Irish Free State. Decades of poor British rule was the greatest issue, sowing the seeds of discontent amongst the Irish people. However in some ways we can’t truly see independence as inevitable. Despite misjudgements and follies in governance, it can’t be said that the British government held no regard for its Irish subjects and held this part of the kingdom in contempt. In many respects it sought to alleviate the suffering of its people. The Irish Poor Laws came into effect mostly in 1838 and Peel’s government did purchase $100,000 worth of maize from America in order to shore up the vast deficit in food arising from the Great Famine. Not only at a social level but at a higher political level did the British government try to reach an ends agreeable to the Irish. Irish parliamentary independence was granted shortly after the 1782 rebellion. It was only after fears about the violence and chaos that the kingdom could be plunged into after the 1798 rebellion that it was assimilated into a wider Imperial Parliament. Or one could point to the Home Rule Act of 1914, though it was put on hold. It is much too easy to sympathise with nationalistic tendencies and overlook the good that the British Government tried to take. The plight of a nation under colonialism just simply appeals to our democratic and liberal sentiments so that it is all too easy to decry the British as brutal imperialists without employing ourselves to look at the assistance they provided.

For much of the 19th century, the Irish question wasn’t truly relevant to many ordinary people. The problems of security of tenure and famine were much more pressing for them than independence from Britain. For many who did join societies such as the Irish Confederation, much only did so as a means of solving these problems. Irish independence was merely a vehicle with by which to achieve these things. If the British government would’ve dealt with these problems in a more hands on and earnest way, then it is probable that the membership of these nationalistic groups would’ve been greatly undermined.

Perhaps if the British government had won the enduring support of the Catholic Church, then the people would’ve been compelled to renounce the battle for independence. The Church was the only true national organization to which the peasantry belonged. It achieved

Further Reading

The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism, Robert Kee The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-49, Cecil Woodham-Smith Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916, Peter de Rosa 46 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

MODERN

ANALYSIS what many nationalist societies could only dream of, being a society that was local yet national at the same time, an organisation that held great loyalty and was also able to coordinate its loyalties into tangible action.

The priests were the only educated people who sympathized with the commoners and so held their great respect. At the upper echelons of the Church, Archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen deplored the Agrarian Secret Societies and Fenian Movement.

Even when it came to political bodies such as the Independent Movement in the House of Commons he was wary, feeling that such demands would incur the wrath of the British government. These denunciations were taken to heart by many ordinary Irish people and throughout much of its time, the Catholic Church was able to abate the strength of the independence movement.

For instance, it was the disapproval of local priests meant that Smith O’Brien’s rising of 1848 was severely undermanned- a leading cause of its failure. With effective maneuvering, the Church could have been

used by the British as a means of exerting influence and swaying the mood against Independents in Ireland.

In the nascent stages of the nationalist movement, many Irish people felt an overwhelming sense of loyalty to the British royalty anyway. Often regarded as the leading Irish nationalist in the 19th century, Daniel O’Connell, leader of the Repeal Movement which sought to abolish the Act of Union regularly pledged his loyalty to Queen Victoria and was careful in his choice of words to not suggest otherwise.

If the British government could channel this sentiment that was prevalent amongst many Irishmen, then surely complete Irish independence could be averted. If they were afraid of breaking their allegiance to the Crown, it would seem that there was something to salvage.

In my mind then, I feel as if despite overwhelming pressure, Irish independence wasn’t truly inevitable.

With appropriate concessions and measures, the British government

certainly could have quelled the grievances of the Irish people. Thus it would be simply lazy, to regard independence as destined to happen. Looking on from the Irish-Anglo Treaty, it must be said that despite independence, Ireland has faced some grievous challenges in the form of the Irish Civil War and the Troubles, not to mention various other events and periods. Incidents over the question of Irish Nationalism still arise today.

However, no country ever carves its own path without problems along the way.

Even though the British could have held on to Ireland, allowing it to become a free state was the right choice, I believe. In an age which saw much of the world move towards the tenets of democracy and republicanism, British rule over Ireland simply wasn’t compatible. To put the Irish at the reins of its own destiny has helped us to finally come to a peaceful and agreeable settlement for almost all, and should hopefully allow Ireland to prosper for many more years to come. •

Soldiers of the Irish National Army Free State Army with British supplied uniforms, weapons and equipment at the Battle of Dublin Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 47

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STALIN'S terror

Yonaten Gadeev chillingly maps the alarming history of Stalin's maniac pruges that would devestate 1930s Russia.

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fter the 1917 revolution, Russia was taken over by a civil war between the Reds and the Whites, during which Vladimir Lenin introduced the policy of war communism, which provided all the necessary resources for the army, mainly by seizing all the grain from the peasants without payment and taking full control of factories. Although this did help the Reds to win the civil war, the economy was ruined, as well as hunger within the rural Russia.

This increased the level of opposition towards Lenin and the Bolsheviks, made Lenin introduce the New Economic Policy or the NEP, which not only allowed peasants to sell their own grain and make profit, but also returned the small industries to their owners, which made Soviet economy to thrive. Furthermore, many peasants have quickly become rich by selling grain, which allowed them to employ other peasants and become businessmen, making them very rich and successful. They were called the kulaks. In this brief history of the Russia that Stalin inherited, we can see many of the issues that would be translated into the 48 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

Great Terror- simmering class tensions, the economic devastation of Russia and fear of opposition.

Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924, soon after Lenin’s death, and established power by eliminating most of his political opposition within his own party’s opposition. The most famous case is that of Lev Trotsky, who was very popular at the time as he organized the Red Army and the 1917 revolution. He fled and lived in exile for many years, before being assassinated in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940 by a KGB operative with an ice axe. Until 1929, Stalin continued to arrest and execute various important political figures, such as Zinoviev, the co-leader of the opposition along with Trotsky, in order to consolidate his power base.

At the time, the dominant economic sector in Russia was agriculture, which Stalin saw as preventing the Soviet Union from developing, which is why he decided to introduce new policies, which would make Russia to industrialise rapidly. He used forced collectivization, which meant that all agricultural units were forcefully

combined into collective farms, called Kolhoz. However, all crops that these farms produced would be taken away by the government and sold abroad into Europe, which at the time was suffering from the Great Depression. In return, Stalin imported construction materials, which allowed the USSR to start producing the five year plans,in which factories would be built.

This system allowed USSR to industrialise rapidly and develop quickly.

However, the problem is clear. Due to collective farms not making any money and having all their food taken away, many started to starve and get increasingly angry at Stalin’s policies. While peasants were very poor and had little influence, the kulaks were rich and were a dangerous opposition to Stalin. In response, Stalin began the repressions, starting to cannibalise the bourgeois kulaks, by arresting them and taking away all their land, money and valuables. This provided even more money for the building materials, as well as contributing to the agricultural collectivization. Also, this made all the peasants very afraid to criticize Stalin, as

MODERN

EVENTS they knew that they would be arrested or shot. These repressions particularly affected the collective farms. When Stalin found out in 1932 that one collective farm in Dnepropetrovsk was saving some funds in order to plant more crops next year, he was furious and had everybody, who worked there arrested, with its 14 managers facing execution for their scheme.

As the economy started to stabilize the repressions of the Kulaks ceased to be on such a large scale, but the nature of the terror changed. Stalin continued to arrest and execute many of his external political opposition leaders, such as Sultan-Galiev, a a Tartar counter-revolutionary, who was executed along with 20 other members of his organization in 1932. In total, in 1933, more than a million people were arrested, generally for anti- Stalinism.

The NKVD was the secret police that grew out of Lenin’s Cheka, and bore many similarities to the Nazi Gestapo. It mainly dealt with political criminals and general opposition to Stalin. It was the NKVD which made all the arrests and executions. Similar to Gestapo, it encouraged people to report each other for things like open criticism of Stalin and his rule. No matter whether the report was real or just made up to get rid of a personal enemy, the NKVD would normally respond and arrest the ‘“guilty” person. This lead to many people being scared of even the smallest rivalry as they knew that any person could make up a story and send it to the NKVD, resulting in the other person's immediate arrest. There were many cases when these strategies backfired, for example on one occasion a person about to be arrested wasn’t home, so rather than waiting the NKVD agents arrested the person who wrote the report and happened to live in the same house. Furthermore, there are plenty of cases that prove that reports people made on each other could be totally fake and not even logically possible, for example in 1938 the NKVD had 9 children and their parents arrested and imprisoned because a neighbour, frustrated by how loud the children were, reported them for- absurdly- planning to break into the Kremlin by digging a tunnel out of their 5th floor flat.

One of Stalin’s major problems concerned getting a workforce for the undesirable jobs in inhospitable regions, frequently having been devastated by the Civil War. The gulags were labour camps, designed for this as well as a form of punishment for its inmates.

They were usually located in Siberia, providing extremely cold weather, combined with practically no food given to the inmates, guaranteeing at least 70% of all inmates to starve or freeze to death within a first month. According to a former inmate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a book about Gulags called The Gulag Archipeligo and the Nobel Prize winning novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in mid-1930’s, a new ration system was introduced by the government, which set up a certain amount of work each inmate was supposed to do per day. If the inmate completed that amount, he (or she) would receive a fixed amount of bread (the most nutritious food available), if the inmate managed to exceed his work quota, he (or she) would receive more bread, while underproduction could lead to starvation. As you would expect, the majority tried to work harder and receive extra bread and, ironically, they were the ones to die fastest as they still ate very little,

but were using much more energy than normal. These government systems ensured that Gulags remained the arguably most brutal labour camps in history.

Even though Stalin did get rid of the majority of the opposition in 1924, due to his extremely harsh methods of ruling the Soviet Union, he constantly feared of being overthrown by the young and talented members of his party who were gaining popularity as Stalin’s policies increasingly failed to deliver results. This is why in 1934 he announced the general Clean Up of the communist party, which resulted in 18% of the party being expelled and either sent to gulags or executed without any trial, or after a brief show trial. This ensured that Stalin would remain in power as he used repressions to eliminate any potential rivalry. However, as this was not enough, Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov, a political activist and a former revolutionary, as an excuse to change the crime and punishment system, granting military courts the ability to execute people on the spot without any trial or detective work. This resulted in Stalin being able to easily eliminate nearly all of the opposition and potential threats to himself in the late 1930’s, during the Great Terror.

The immediate pre war era was the pinnacle of Stalin’s repressions, during which an astronomical one and a half million people were arrested and 600,000 were executed. Not only did Stalin get rid of all potential and real, internal and external opposition, but also issued an article 00047, which ordered all released former kulaks or political criminals to be re-arrested or shot immediately.

It seemed no one could escape Stalin’s net, and it was only Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 that put a stop to this madness, replacing one form of slaughter with quite another and forcing Stalin to seek societal cohesion above anything else.

Though by 1939 USSR was an industrialized, economically developing country, it must never be forgotten that in the name of progress as many as 1.2 million people had been murdered in a post-revolutionary purge that outdoes the worst excesses of the French revolution and, in many ways, even the dark days of Nazi rule in Germany. • Inmates at a work camp

Further Reading

The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Robert Conquest Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag-Montefiore Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 49

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EVENTS

SINGAPORE: SWAMPS TO SKYSCRAPERS

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lmost a year ago I was in Singapore on a bus going past countless “SG 50” signs and arguably, government propaganda.

The country was celebrating her 50 years of independence from Great Britain, and I couldn’t help but think that they seemed to be doing better than us.

You see, the most striking thing about Singapore to myself is it seems to be the living embodiment of incredible progress (ask anyone else and they’d probably say it’s so ‘clean’). In 50 years, the country has gone from clustered kampongs to bustling cityscapes, with an incredibly efficient infrastructure, a well organised welfare system, bustling trade partners, and an army 50 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

that looks like something out of the future of laser-tag gaming. What I want to find out in this article is: how?

50 years ago in 1966 Singapore looked something like a swamp, with mostly flat, tropical land and large bungalow-style huts. Little of this scenery survives, with Singapore quickly becoming a sprawling metropolis over its small and limited land. In fact, much of its new building projects have been undergone through the method of ‘reclaimed land’ (artificial), such as the famous, Marina Bay Sands. Modern Singapore was founded in the 19th century, thanks to politics, trade and a man known as Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.

During this time, the British Empire was eyeing a port of call in this region to base its merchant fleet, and to forestall any advance made by the Dutch. Singapore, already an up-and-coming trading post along the Malacca Straits, seemed ideal.

Raffles, then the Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (now Bengkulu) in Sumatra, landed in Singapore on 29 January 1819. Recognising the immense potential of the swamp-covered island, he helped negotiate a treaty with the local rulers and established Singapore as a trading station.

The city quickly grew as an entrepot trade hub, attracting immigrants from China, India, the Malay Archipelago and beyond.

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EVENTS

The history of Singapore's meteroic rise from British Colony to Asian Superpower is describe by Charlie Landells, who asks how this apparent miracle came to be.

Despite early successes, Singapore was almost entirely dependent on entrepôt trade, which was literally at the whim of the winds. Dutch trading power still threatened its economic health, and the opening of Chinese trading ports to Western ships placed Singapore in a precarious position. The soil on the island barely supported a small sago palm industry, and with the lack of natural resources, Singapore had to constantly look to trade for survival. True economic stability wouldn't arrive until the 1860s.

Major changes around the globe had an enormous effect on Singapore in the second half of the 19th century.

In 1869, the Suez Canal opened, linking

the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and putting Singapore in a prime position on the Europe-East Asia route. In addition, steamship travel made the trip to Singapore less dependent on trade winds. The shorter travel time not only saw entrepôt trade leap to new heights, but also allowed leisure travelers to consider Singapore a viable stop on their itinerary.

The blossoming Industrial Revolution thirsted for raw materials, namely tin and rubber. Malaya was already being mined for tin, much of which changed hands in Singapore. Rubber didn't enter the scene until 1877, when "Mad" Henry Ridley, director of the Botanic Gardens, smuggled the first rubber seedlings from

Brazil to Singapore. After developing a new way to tap latex, he finally convinced planters in Malaya to begin plantations.

To this day, rubber remains a major industry for Malaysia.

Singapore’s prosperity suffered a major blow during World War II, when it was attacked by the Japanese on 8 December 1941. The invaders arrived from the north, confounding the British military commanders who had expected an attack by sea from the south. Despite their superior numbers, the Allied forces surrendered to the Japanese on Chinese New Year, 15 February 1942. It was the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. The island, once feted as an • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 51

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EVENTS “impregnable fortress”, was renamed Syonan-to (or “Light of the South Island” in Japanese).

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the island was handed over to the British Military Administration, which remained in power until the dissolution of the Straits Settlement comprising Penang, Melaka and Singapore. In April 1946, Singapore became a British Crown Colony. In 1959, the growth of nationalism led to self-government, and the country’s first general election. The People’s Action Party (PAP) won a majority of 43 seats and Lee Kuan Yew became the first prime minister of Singapore.

In 1963, Malaysia was formed, comprising of the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo (now Sabah).

The move was meant to foster closer ties. However, Singapore’s merger proved unsuccessful, and less than two years later on 9 August 1965, it left Malaysia to become an independent and sovereign democratic nation.

Despite this, when it started life as an independent, separate country in 1965, Singapore’s prospects did not look good.

Tiny and underdeveloped, it had no natural resources and a population of relatively recent immigrants with little shared history. The country’s first prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew is credited with transforming it. He called one volume of his memoirs, “From Third World to First”. So how did this man create such a powerful nation?

First, its strategic location and natural harbour helped. It is at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, through which perhaps 40% of world maritime trade passes. It was an important trading post in the 14th century, and again from the 19th, when British diplomat Sir Stamford Raffles founded the modern city. Under Mr Lee, Singapore made the most of these geographical advantages. Second, under Mr Lee, Singapore welcomed foreign trade and investment. Multinationals found Singapore a natural hub and were encouraged to expand and prosper. And third, the government was kept small, efficient and honest—qualities absent in most of Singapore’s neighbours. It regularly tops surveys for the ease of doing business.

But the island city is not ideal. Although clean and orderly, it has harsh judicial punishments, a tame press and illiberal social policies. Homosexual acts, for example, remain illegal, and protest demonstrations are rarely permitted. Mr Lee saw his authoritarian style of government as an essential ingredient in Singapore’s success, emphasising the island’s vulnerability in a potentially hostile neighbourhood.

When Mr Lee passed on March 23, 2015, hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans took to the streets to pay tribute to the man’s relentless and selfless service to his country. Arguably its success lies solely on his shoulders, and to this day the country continues to grow and prosper under its trade and tourism. Relatively little resistance shows itself to Singapore’s Government, and opposition parties continue to exist. Put in simple terms, almost everyone’s happy enough to vote for the same again every election, and it seems to be working out for them. •

Further Reading

From Third World To First: Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew Singapore: a Biography, Mark R Frost Ten Cities that Made an Empire, Tristram Hunt 52 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

CONTEMPORARY

ANALYSIS

LIBYA:

The Country of Shifting Sands

David Loong analyses Libya's history, and finds that the problems the country is now experiencing are nothing new

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n a remarkable show of introspective honesty, U.S. President Barack Obama admitted in an April FOX news interview that the ‘worst mistake’ of his presidency was ‘probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya’, alluding to his leadership of the March 2011 intervention by NATO against former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, which took place in the throes of a bloody civil war and budding Arab Spring, and underscoring what was to become an inflexion point in U.S. Middle Eastern policy.

The civil war saw Gaddafi toppled and killed, and yet no consensus emerged, domestically nor internationally, about the reorganization of government.

Libya is now divided between warring rival governments and militant groups, and has also become a power vacuum effectively serving as a base for the socalled Islamic State and other terrorist

groups and by extension facilitating their efforts in establishing a caliphate across the Muslim world.

In that same interview, Mr. Obama lashed out against British PM David Cameron and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy for their placement of self-interest above a cohesive postintervention policy in Libya. He also indicated the sub-optimal outcome in Libya had discouraged him from intervention in Syria, a somewhat weak explanation for his own infamously unenforced “red line” for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which warned against the usage of chemical weapons, and much like Obama’s larger foreign policy, has been somewhat ineffective and lacking in force.

But what did Mr. Obama get so wrong about Libya? More critically, why is it that the Egyptian Revolution just a month before the military intervention in Libya ended in relative stability

(albeit relative tyranny)? The political history of these two countries seem to bear striking similarities: in his own bid for power, Gaddafi had based his Free Officers Movement of 1969 (a military coup against King Idris), on former Egyptian President Nasser’s 1952 coup against the Egyptian monarchy. Both Gaddafi and Nasser had espoused panArab nationalism and strong state intervention to build their respective national economies. Yet after the two governments were brought to their knees in 2011, why was it that Egypt resurrected itself in a new form while Libya plunged into the abyss of political and social chaos in which it now languishes? The key lies in Libya’s unique history.

Libyans had long been under the yoke of foreign subjugation and factional chaos since the Berbers and two other tribes settled the North African country in the Late Bronze Age. The Phoenicians established trading posts • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 53

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ANALYSIS

ANALYSIS

CONTEMPORARY to exploit inland minerals, eventually giving way to the Punic civilization, under which seafaring commercial cities such as Carthage would eventually arise. Further testament to foreign influence on Libya is seen through Libya’s capital, Tripoli, which owes its name from the Ancient Greek word “tripolis”, meaning “three cities”.

Then-called “Tripolitania”, Libya fell with Carthage, razed to the ground, during the Third Punic War with Rome, and was eventually annexed by the Roman Empire in 74 BCE. For subsequent centuries, Libya was assimilated into the Roman identity, with the quasi-city-states within its borders adopting Roman language, customs and modes of economic activity. However much of the institutionalized civilization was wiped away again with the decline of the Roman Empire, when Libya was sacked by the Vandals in the 5th century.

This caused the Libyans to flee for the hills and seek refuge with tribal chieftains (the remaining original settlers). They would resist re-assimilation into imperial frameworks.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian would make fleeting territorial restorations for the (East) Romans in the 6th century, but weak taxation, high costs of maintaining order and a series of unpopular governors meant that imperial control lay only in a handful of poorly defended coast cities, and the decline of imperial authority in the region did little to stabilize the chaos it had brought. This was in stark contrast to Egypt, which had also been claimed by Roman imperial forces, but had retained a strong national identity and culture well into its empire’s demise.

When the first Arab horsemen rode into Libya in 642, there was little of an order to overthrow. The ruling Shi’ite Fatimids imported a huge Arab population to change the fabric of Libyan society. They struggled with the surviving Berber tribesmen, who broke away in 1001 to join the Sunni factions. Always the plaything of larger geopolitical power struggles and weakened by Islamic factionalism (the schism between Sunni and Shi’ite was present then as it is now), Tripoli was eventually invaded by Hapsburg Spaniards in the 16th century, who turned over Libya to a Crusader order - The Knights of St. John- who would again lose Libya to the ascendent Ottoman Empire in 1551.

Facing conflict arising from the Jews, the slave trade and the local Moorish arab population, Tripoli fell into anarchy in the 18th century, with a series of coups by Ottoman military officers and with the First and Second Barbary Wars with the United States in the 19th century, and this simply meant that Libya entered the modern world as a melting pot of little cohesion and historied turmoil, which was worsened by the Italian colonization of Libya in the 20th century.

After two World Wars, and with a Cold War brewing, the United Nations was formed, and in a global campaign against colonialism, it voted to bestow independence upon Libya, and it was thusly that the post-colonial United Kingdom of Libya came into being in 1952, under King Idris.

Notably, the new Kingdom was a constitutional monarchy, with encoded civil rights that stopped short of constituting a secular framework of government. In 1959, Libya got an immense economic boost from discovery of vast oil reserves, and Libya saw a temporary period of economic • Timeline Magazine Issue 4 | 55

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The burning of the USA Philadelphia growth and relative prosperity.

However, in 1969, a young army officer named Muammar Gaddafi led a military coup d'etat against King Idris, enjoying general popularity for his opposition to the monarch’s perceived corruption and dependence on foreign powers. Despite

his original intentions of reform, Gaddafi’s regime later fell victim to the many woes of absolute dictatorship. While nominally a democracy, Gaddafi’s regime set up one of the strictest censorship structures in modern history, enlisting some 10% of the Libyan work force into “domestic

intelligence” gathering services. He became a kleptocrat, stealing the ownership of much of the oil-rich nation’s wealth. In addition to this, he also became involved in disastrous wars such as the “Toyota” war with Chad, he flouted international treaties and even sponsored the infamous Pan Am terrorist attack over Lockerbie, Scotland.

By the end of his tenure Gaddafi was seen as a manic pariah and ruthless dictator. He destroyed, not unlike the powers that came before him, any institutional semblance of a modern government, save for his “Green Book” that he propagated as if he were an African Chairman Mao. This is not to characterize the country’s history under Gaddafi as a complete trainwreck. Socio-economic progress, powered by the ongoing Libyan oil boom, brought a period of remarkable improvement in literacy, life expectancy and GDP per capita from 1969 through 1980. Yet the morally and financially corrupt behaviour of Gaddafi ensured that none of these developments would translate into the creation of strong governance institutions.

By 2011, anger at his regime boiled over with protests at the seemingly trivial January delays in public housing construction. A catalyst more than a cause, it spurred a draconian response from the government, and the consequent rapid defections revealed that Gaddafi had long ago lost the support of his officers and the general populace.

This story ends where it started: the infamous Civil War. It had all the trappings of Libya’s chaotic past - a misguided foreign intervention in the name of liberal civilization (which NATO, much like the Romans, had believed that they were bringing to North Africa), rabid Islamic factionalism (as was seen in the struggles between the Sunni Berbers and Shi’ite Fatimids in the 7th century), and the elusive non-cooperative tribesmen (who were as uncooperative then as they had been with attempted Roman rule). If Mr. Obama had though he ever stood a chance of producing a natural consolidation of the country, he had not studied Libyan history in appropriate depth. •

Further Reading

A History of Libya, John Wright Libya: From Colony to revolution, Ronald Bruce St John Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Maximilian Forte 56 | Timeline Magazine Issue 4

TIMELINE ISSUE

No. 4