history
Orwell everywhere: Truth-telling in a post-truth age
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of a certain English radical began to appear in the literary pages – the subject of fresh biographies, critical reappraisals and even fictional reimaginings. Meanwhile, and completely out of the blue, my teenage son set aside the Game of Thrones series and began to read said radical’s greatest novel – a futuristic, dystopian satire on the prospects for English socialism, written in the middle of the twentieth century. Now he’s moving on to the essays. It’s all a bit mysterious. George Orwell is trending. But why? [More here.]
Who do you think you Uhr? A review of David Marr’s Killing for Country
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian
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Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could hope to find on the shelves. Clearly, the book holds enormous significance – enormous personal significance – for its author. But Marr brings the same forensic approach to this narrative of the frontier wars as he did to his celebrated biography of Patrick White, to his monographs of Tony Abbot and George Pell, and to his indispensable account of the Tampa/Children Overboard affair and Pacific Solution, Dark Victory. It is a magnificent achievement, and a necessary intervention, on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native peoples.
It was the discovery that his great-great-grandfather had served with the Native Police that set Marr off on this bold endeavour. The son of Edmund Blucher Uhr, scion of a poorly connected family with pretentions to Irish nobility, Reginald Uhr and his brother D’arcy were both officers in this notorious outfit, which cleared land of its Aboriginal owners at the behest of the squattocracy, avenging attacks on farmers’ livestock and ‘dispersing’ troublesome gatherings. ‘Dispersing’ was a euphemism, of course, but so too was ‘police’: as even contemporaries understood, the NP was a quasi-military unit, not a tool of law enforcement. It’s estimated that over 60 years it murdered more than 100,000 people.
The NP began its campaign of killing in the Darling Downs in 1848, but its brutality reached its feverish peak as it moved north in the 1860s, in the wake of Queensland’s break from New South Wales. Its campaigns were characterised by a basic asymmetry, as the belligerents in the frontier wars operated according to different principles: the Indigenous peoples saw themselves as redressing grievances through evening up the score, while white retaliation was inordinate. A pattern quickly established itself. Colonial expansion led to Indigenous resistance, which led in turn to further dispersals. Notwithstanding that these acts of violence were often met with disapproval by the colonial authorities, the indulgence shown towards them was baked in, in a way that gives the lie to the idea that the NP was dispensing justice. The reality is that it was clearing the land of black bodies.
This picture is complicated by the fact that the NP comprised units of eight to ten such bodies under the command of a single white one. But in Marr’s telling, this organisational structure was something of a genius-stroke, in that it drew on the multinational nature of the Indigenous population and on the profound connection to place – to country – that characterises Indigenous society in general. As he puts it:
What made them strange and dangerous to each other was being away from their own country, the country that made them who they were. Here was a deadly conundrum. While officially denying their attachment to land, colonial authorities would rely on that profound attachment – and the divisions it provoked – to raise a black force that would strip them of their country.
Such an arrangement also allowed the NP to characterise the murdering as what a US Republican might call ‘black on black’ violence. The recruitment of Aboriginal men gave white officers a handy alibi when questioned by their superiors.
Why would the killers need an alibi? The question may sound ridiculous, but conservative history warriors who criticise histories such as these, will often suggest that their authors are guilty of projecting modern values backwards (this is the so-called ‘black armband’ charge). But what emerges from these grisly pages, and from the accounts of the contemporary outrage directed against the clearances, is a picture of a system of ‘justice’ founded on a gargantuan hypocrisy – hypocrisy being the compliment that vice implicitly pays to virtue. In other words, many of the men in this ‘story’ knew full well that they were involved in an immoral undertaking, and commentary that attempts to downplay this reality is, itself, unhistorical. This is not to say that the picture is simple: history is a tragedy, not a morality play. It is simply to agree with the author that if it is possible to feel pride in one’s country, it should be possible to feel ashamed of it too.
Marr does not make a show of such feelings. In his television appearances, he will often adopt the sort of demeanour that (I imagine) sends conservatives round the bend: the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger eyes; the casual, cruising exasperation at the politics he doesn’t share, and is, therefore, self-evidently preposterous. But here the tone is even and controlled. One notes the slightly ironic adjectives and the occasionally sardonic descriptions. (‘He recruited blacks as guides. He also shot blacks who stood in his way. Somerville was a genial and unscrupulous gentleman of the warrior class.’) But in general he lets the material speak for itself. Goodness knows, there’s plenty of it. As Marr notes – again, a little sardonically – one good thing about the colonists is that they wrote plenty of fine letters home.
The attitudes evinced in those letters, or the language in which those attitudes are couched, will no doubt distress most contemporary readers, and it would be vacuously polemical to assert that nothing’s changed. It has. Nevertheless, it is the achievement of this book to invite us to reflect on the many connections between contemporary Australia and its bloody past. That past is not a foreign country. It just speaks in thicker accents than we are used to.
David Marr, Killing for Country: A Family Story (Black Inc.; $39.99; 468pp)
The eighth day of creation: how the new cultural technologies take us into the posthuman
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap forward in humankind’s mastery over unruly nature. Referring to the movie Elysium (2013), which depicts a world where biotechnologies are only available to the very rich, Bastani’s only political concern is whether the new genetic technologies will be privately or socially owned. All other questions are beside the point, at least as far as he is concerned. As he puts it, with alarming insouciance: ‘Before editing the human genome at scale such efforts should be subject to vigorous public debate. But how much difference is there between improving nutrition for health outcomes and optimising our biological programming? Not much’. [More here.]
Threshold Dwelling in the Ruins of Llano del Rio
In the desert's shifting realms, mirages dance with possibility and impossibility. Amidst the stark expanse, a threshold-like bardo blurs distinctions between creation and collapse, thriving and weakness....
The remnants of war – lessons unlearnt
I’m walking around the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. I’ve looked at the military aircraft in the front courtyard which looms large but doesn’t yet give too much away of what the Vietnam War was all about. It feels very American with each piece of used equipment stamped with U.S. Army Continue reading »
The forgotten war heroes of Borneo
Many Australians are aware of the assistance Papuan New Guinea locals and Timorese locals gave allied forces in World War II. But few know of the assistance Borneo locals provided to Australians during both the Japanese occupation of the island and in the Allied effort to retake it. This extract from the book, Forgotten Heroes: Continue reading »
Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics – review
In Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics, Toby Seddon analyses drug control policy and argues for a paradigm shift that decentres the West and recognises China’s historical and contemporary influence. Unpacking the complexity of drug law as a regulatory system, Seddon’s well-argued, insightful book calls for more inclusive, evidence-informed and democratic policymaking, writes Mark Monaghan.
Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics. Toby Seddon. Oxford University Press. 2023.
Based on forensic archival research, Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics by Toby Seddon is beautifully written and deeply insightful. Its central thesis is that we must decentre the West, especially when thinking about the origins of drug policy. Viewing drug policy from a Western vantage point is a blip because, as Seddon shows, China has long been a key player on the global stage, but drug policy analysis, with some exceptions, has not always recognised this. In this way, drug policy analysis has fallen into the trap of Occidentalism, providing a distorted view of the West’s prominence. Seddon sets out to show the folly of this and succeeds. Furthermore, he demonstrates that there are signs of regression toward the mean as China once again is becoming a primary global player, particularly through the belt and road initiative.
In drug control, inanimate objects – drugs – are not banned, but transactions that would otherwise constitute lawful economic activity are criminalised.
A defining feature of Seddon’s writing is the remarkable capacity for distilling complex historical narratives into an easily digestible schema. We see this clearly in the introduction, where he proposes a tripartite structure of race, risk and security arcs as ways to think about the origins of what has only recently become known as the “drug problem”. We are also introduced to another key idea that drug laws function through controlling the circulation of goods, ie, they are regulatory systems. In drug control, inanimate objects – drugs – are not banned, but transactions that would otherwise constitute lawful economic activity are criminalised. This is about the control of personal property rights. The right to personal property is not explicitly eroded through prohibition, but some transactions in relation to them become impermissible and there is no legal recourse for the right to conduct these transactions. In outlining this, the entire premise of drug control shifts from one of a struggle between the forces of prohibition and legalisation to understanding legalisation and prohibition within a broader system of regulation.
Seddon refers to regulatory systems as ‘exchangespace’. […] The basic premise of exchangespace is that ‘market behaviour and regulation are not separate realms but two sides of the same coin’.
Seddon elaborates on this over the following chapters and in doing so demonstrates a depth of research and scholarship that is genuinely cross-disciplinary, bringing in economics, sociology, history, political economy as well as insights from criminology, regulation theory and socio-legal perspectives. There is, however, method to this, which shapes and is shaped by the development of a new conceptual framework. Drawing on the work of Clifford Shearing and others, Seddon refers to regulatory systems as “exchangespace”, and this is painstakingly outlined in Chapter Two. The basic premise of exchangespace is that “market behaviour and regulation are not separate realms but two sides of the same coin”. The dimensions of exchangespace can be summarised as:
- Regulation operates in networks consisting of multiple dimensions and participants.
- Nodes are a key element of networks and facilitate communication across them. Analysis of networks should, therefore, look at the nodes because these are the locus within a system where various resources are mobilised in order to govern effectively.
- Not all nodes exert the same amount or kind of power in the network. The most economically powerful nodes can distort the smooth operation of the entire system.
- Networks adapt overtime. Consequently, policy does not stand still, it evolves and emerges in often unpredictable ways.
Seddon encourages us to focus on the network conditions that led to increasing control of certain substances (what we know as drugs), whilst permitting or at least freeing the trade in others (coffee, alcohol and tobacco) and to view these as complex systems.
Seddon encourages us to focus on the network conditions that led to increasing control of certain substances (what we know as drugs), whilst permitting or at least freeing the trade in others (coffee, alcohol and tobacco) and to view these as complex systems. In complex systems, the outcomes of policy depend on understanding where the starting point is. However, identifying starting points is almost impossible, not least, as Seddon contends, because we don’t yet have the theory and methods at our disposal to do so. The best we can do, then, is to try and understand elements of the wider network; that is, which nodes are exerting power in which contexts while acknowledging that these systems are unpredictable and constantly changing. Seddon uses this framework to explain the origins of Cannabis Social Clubs in Catalonia and the complex politics behind the patchy implementation of Heroin Assisted Treatment. In this way, we can start to explain the ways in which, for example, overdose prevention centres have been established in some locations and not others, or why and how drugs were decriminalised in Oregon, a decision that may now be reversed.
Seddon demonstrates how the origins of the current system can be traced to colonialism […] in the nineteenth century, even if we cannot pinpoint the exact starting point.
A complex system like drug policy can never revert to an earlier stage of development. Oregon’s post-decriminalisation society will not be the same as its pre-decriminalisation society. Fortunately, however, complex systems do have path dependency, and so it is possible, as Seddon does in Part II (Chapters Four and Five), to outline the chain of events that has led to the contemporary global drug regulatory system. Seddon demonstrates how the origins of the current system can be traced to colonialism (the race arc) in the nineteenth century, even if we cannot pinpoint the exact starting point. The key lesson here is that we need to look East rather than West to understand this. Here, the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century are a key reference point.
Taking an exchangespace perspective we see that the Opium Wars (1839-1842) were more than just about one country (Britain) establishing a right to export its products (opium) to a large market (China). More accurately, they represented a military contestation that focused on the boundaries between legal and illegal trade – a contestation that lies at the heart of drug control. The burgeoning temperance movement proved a powerful node alongside increasingly powerful US economic interests, which contributed to the realigning of opium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a product requiring control. The Opium Wars also represent – in the form of the second opium (Arrow) war – the first moment that drug control (as opium control) became a multinational affair. In this way we can draw a direct line from the Opium Wars to global drug prohibition fifty years later.
In Part III (Chapters Six and Seven) Seddon turns to the political nodes of the regulatory network, focusing on “what is at stake when drug laws and drug policy become a matter of political contestation”. The idea here is that within exchangespace, it is impossible to stand outside of politics, as the system is inherently political. Politics is a powerful node. This section draws heavily on Loader and Sparks’ conception of public criminology and the strategies that can be used to add coolant to heated debates.
To hand over decision making to experts is to abandon any hope for democratic politics as it replaces one system of domination (populist politics) with another (experts).
For Seddon, this should not simply mean that populist ideas – such as the “war on drugs” – are replaced with technocratic, evidence-based decisions. To hand over decision making to experts is to abandon any hope for democratic politics as it replaces one system of domination (populist politics) with another (experts). Arguably, that is why it has become more commonplace to speak of evidence-informed or evidence-inspired policy. However, Seddon provides a way out of that impasse by stating that “better politics” is required more than better evidence. This has two dimensions. First, we need a more careful analysis that focuses not only on the impact or harms of current drug policies (eg, criminalisation, stigmatisation, racist stereotyping) as they occur, but considers in depth and precision how the arcs of race, risk and security perpetuate this system. Secondly, on a practical level, a more cosmopolitan, comprehensive and inclusive deliberative democracy is required which can yield discernible change. Reforms in Catalonia and Oregon point to how this can be done, but also its precarity. Scaling it up and bringing in the voice of people who use drugs as part of a social movement is essential.
The text brings us almost full circle to how a better politics might lead to a more sophisticated, fairer form of market regulation.
Seddon points to the success of prison reform movements in France in the 1970s or the radical politics of mental health campaigning organisations which sought to foreground the voices of survivors of the psychiatric system as providing a blueprint. To this we could add decades of campaigning by disability rights activists, which have shown how positive change can occur with these strategies. There is no reason why drug policy should be any different. In this way, the text brings us almost full circle to how a better politics might lead to a more sophisticated, fairer form of market regulation. Ultimately, for Seddon, this means shifting the focus of social and political science away from the way the world is, towards the deeper thinking on the kind of world we want. This is the book’s challenge. It is us up to us to deliver.
Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: OneSideProFoto on Shutterstock.
Remembering the victims of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands
Protests marked the 70th anniversary of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll
Originally published on Global Voices
Bikini Atoll nuclear test site. Marshall Islands. Photo by Ron Van Oers / UNESCO. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO
Pacific communities marked the 70th year of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in Marshall Islands by highlighting the demand for justice and accountability.
March 1 is Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day, but in Marshall Islands it is commemorated as Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day in honor of the victims of Castle Bravo, the codename for the thermonuclear bomb test made by the United States military.
The 15-megaton bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll was the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. It created a mushroom cloud that reached 40 kilometers into the atmosphere and its radioactive fallout affected nearby inhabited atolls. The US military conducted 67 nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.
The tests vaporized at least two islands and forced the permanent displacement of communities contaminated by radioactivity. Cancer cases and other serious diseases linked to nuclear testing went up over the next several decades.
Reparations were made but the toxic consequences of the testing continue to inflict damage up to this day. Civil society group ICAN emphasized that the Castle Bravo testing “is a story of how life on the Marshall Islands was uprooted, lands contaminated, and people left to struggle with the consequences for generations.”
Public assemblies in Fiji and the Marshall Islands marked the 70th anniversary of the Castle Bravo testing with calls for justice.
FWRM led the chants at the Nuclear Victims Solidarity March at USP Laucala Campus in Suva today.
It has been 70 years since the Castle Bravo explosion on 1st March 1954.#NuclearFreePacific #PeoplePower pic.twitter.com/etKO1i9pgJ
— Fiji Women's Rights Movement (@FWRM1) March 1, 2024
Some veterans and descendants of those who were evacuated from their homes also joined the event.
We also acknowledge Pacific nuclear test veterans and their descendants who joined @misa4thepacific Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day solidarity march at @UniSouthPacific today.
Lest We Forget.#NuclearJustice #NewClearWays #NukeFreeFridays #NukeFreePacific pic.twitter.com/nvSqkhlz7o
— PANG (@pangmedia) March 1, 2024
Kathy Joel was six years old in 1954 when her family was uprooted from their community.
I remember when I saw planes flying over my island, I was really frightened. We were evacuated by the US. Until now I long for my homeland. I always think about my homeland and I wish one day, with the help of our President, that I may set foot again on my homeland.
Kathy Joel was six years old when the #Bravo nuclear test spread radioactive fallout over the northern atolls of the #MarshallIslands, including Rongelap and Ailinginae. pic.twitter.com/jt7wTHyyLK
— Nic Maclellan (@MaclellanNic) March 1, 2024
Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, noted that resolving the issues related to nuclear testing has remained inadequate.
Our history is littered with overwhelming foreign disrespect for our Blue Pacific. Clearly, we were used as a testing ground – more like a testing laboratory. And we must ask the question, why was the most beautiful corner of the world, with the most beautiful and peaceful people, chosen for these horrific acts without our informed consent?
While we have come a long way in mending past grievances, regrettably, the terms of resolving nuclear legacy issues in the Marshall Islands have been inadequate, and therefore remain unfinished.
Peace Movement Aotearoa pointed out the political significance of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day.
Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day is a day to remember that the arrogant colonial mindset which allowed, indeed encouraged, this horror continues today – the Pacific is still neither nuclear free nor independent.
It is a day to celebrate the courage, strength and endurance of indigenous Pacific peoples who have persevered and taken back control of their lives, languages and lands to ensure the ways of living and being which were handed down from their ancestors are passed on to future generations.
Shaun Burnie, the international climate and nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International, also expressed solidarity with the people of the Marshall Islands.
The proud people of the Marshall Islands have retained their profound and deep connection to their Pacific home, despite all efforts to destroy that connection through displacement and contamination. That same determination is now evident in their response to the devastating impacts of climate change.
Q and A with Jill Liddington on As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38
Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Yorkshire has garnered interest over the past several decades, reaching vast audiences through the 2019 TV drama series about her life, Gentleman Jack. A highly educated landowner and businesswoman and intrepid traveller, Lister is best known for her diaries, which run to about five million words. Sections of the diary written in a secret code, cracked 50 years after her death, detail her intimate relationships with women, which led to her being dubbed “the first modern lesbian”.
In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), historian Jill Liddington speaks about her latest book, As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38, an annotated selection from Lister’s diaries which provides fascinating insight into her relationship with (or “marriage” to) local heiress Ann Walker and her working life.
Jill Liddington will give a talk at LSE, Was Anne Lister a pioneer feminist or ‘at heart nothing but an old Tory squire’? on Wednesday 20 March from 6.00 to 8.00 pm. Find details and register here.
Q: Who was Anne Lister and why do her diaries provide such remarkable evidence for feminist and lesbian history?
Anne Lister was born in 1791 and lived in and inherited Shibden Hall outside Halifax in West Yorkshire. From when she was a teenager, she started to write a diary, and the more confident she grew in herself and the more powerful she grew, particularly after she inherited Shibden Hall on the death of her uncle in 1826, she wrote more and more. The diary is extraordinary in that it is
estimated now to be five million words, of which a sixth is in a secret code she devised to describe the more intimate details of her life. It is this combination of romantic and sexual intimacy, entrepreneurial activity and intellectual breadth that makes the diaries so magnificent. In 2011, UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World Register.
It is [the] combination of romantic and sexual intimacy, entrepreneurial activity and intellectual breadth that makes the diaries so magnificent.
Q: When was the diaries’ code (describing the more intimate details of her sexuality and relationships) cracked?
Lister, who was a great traveller, died in 1840 in Russia, and the diaries were packed away behind secret panels at Shibden Hall. Ann Walker, Anne Lister’s “wife” (they had an unofficial lesbian marriage in 1834 and lived together thereafter) inherited Shibden Hall, and on her death it went to indirect descendants, of whom the most important was John Lister. He was particularly interested in her politics, and between 1887 and 1892 he transcribed great sections of the diaries and had them published in the Halifax Guardian.
While working with a fellow scholar, Arthur Burrell, in about 1892, he succeeded in cracking Anne Lister’s code, though it wasn’t until decades later, after John Lister’s death in 1933, that an account of this was discovered in a letter by Burrell to the Halifax Librarian. He wrote, “The part written in code turned out to be entirely unpublishable. Mr. Lister was distressed, but he refused to take my advice, which was that he should burn all 26 volumes. He was, as you know, an antiquarian, and my suggestion seemed sacrilege, which perhaps it was.” Burrell continued, “The coded passages presented an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many “friends” […] this ver unsavoury document contained evidence that these friendships were criminal.”
We might wonder what made and Anne Lister’s lesbian relationships criminal. […]The 1885 Laboucher Amendment […] didn’t include women at all, but the words that scholars use, rightly, I think, is cultural silencing.
We might wonder what made and Anne Lister’s lesbian relationships criminal. The historical context is the 1885 Laboucher Amendment which harshened the criminalisation of male homosexual activity. It didn’t include women at all, but the words that scholars use, rightly, I think, is cultural silencing. Even though there was no law against lesbian relationships, they weren’t to be spoken about, which is why we didn’t know about the code being cracked until a few years after John Lister’s death in 1933.
Q: When did the diaries came to public attention, and how did your own fascination with them arise?
In the 1950s, two other scholars, Dr Phyllis Ramsden and Vivien Ingham, started working on the code. By that stage Shibden Hall had been taken over by Halifax Borough Council. Ramsden and Ingham wrote to the town clerk for permission to publish extracts, who agreed on the condition that they be approved by the local authority committee – essentially censoring the content about her lesbian relationships.
Things changed in 1967 because of the Sexual Offenses Act which decriminalised homosexuality. Again, it only pertained to men, but it allowed more lifting of the cultural silence for women. In 1984 the Guardian published a feature called “The 2-million-word Enigma”, (it was thought at that stage that the diaries were just 2 million words) based on an interview with Phyllis Ramsden and historian Dorothy Thompson, both based in Halifax. A local woman, Helena Whitbread then produced a book on the early Anne Lister in 1988, called, I Know My Own Heart, which had quite an impact. The Halifax Antiquarian Society (which John Lister had helped to form) held a day school in 1989 on Lister which I attended. It was the most disputatious day school I have ever attended, and I thought, there’s more to this woman than meets the eye. I went into the Halifax Archives and decided to write a history of the Anne Lister diaries, published in 1994 as Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax 1791-1840.
Q: Why did you decide to edit selections from her diaries into the volume Female Fortune, published in 1998, which covers 1833 to 1836?
I did a word count of the diaries using microfilm and found that they were double the initial estimate. I felt the only tactic as a historian was to take three or four samples of this four-million-word document. I looked at the very earliest diaries which Helena Whitbread hadn’t had access to, starting from when Lister was 15 and detailing her first lesbian relationship with Eliza Raine. I then decided to look at 1819 because I was teaching my students about the Peterloo Massacre, and then 1832, because it was the year of the Reform Act.
For Female Fortune, I focused on the 1830s. That period is interesting to me because it’s when Anne Lister is at her most powerful, after inheriting Shibden Hall, living there with Ann Walker. I wanted to look at the 1835 elections, and how she ran her estate.
Q: What persuaded you to go back after 25 years to work on a sequel, As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38 (2023)?
Female Fortune received a fair amount of interest, including from the scriptwriter Sally Wainwright, who had grown up locally and was gripped by Anne Lister’s story. At that stage she was a jobbing scriptwriter and couldn’t get backing for a series about this little-known figure, and so both of us had to pursue other projects. Sally went on to become quite well known, and she returned to the idea. This time, when she pitched a series about Anne Lister’s life, the BBC said yes. What followed was Gentlemen Jack Series One which came out in 2019 on BBC One and HBO, introducing Lister to a new cohort of LGBTQ+ fans across the US and beyond.
Sally Wainwright (left) and Jill Liddington (right) in the Book Corner, 2022.
Q: As Good As A Marriage focuses on the relationship between Anne Lister and Ann Walker as one of its central subjects. What do these writings reveal about their “marriage”?
From 1836, after Anne’s father and aunt died, the couple were on their own, with their servants, at Shibden Hall, and we can see the marriage up close and personal. It was a volatile marriage, as we can sense from the following quotations from the diaries. On Thursday, 17th August 1837, Anne wrote in code:
“Slept in the blue room [ie, didn’t sleep with Ann Walker], my mind seems comfortably made up. Ann has been preparing Crow Nest [her own house] and has wanted to be away from here. [Shibden] for a long time. How lucky I have not to have introduced her to anyone [Anne was a consummate snob, and the fact she hadn’t introduced Ann Walker to anybody was vital] the sooner she goes, the better.”
Later that day: “She must make up her mind to go or stay. She ought to go properly [ie, decisively]. [The doctor] was right, I should have a great deal of trouble with her. Well, I shall suit myself. I can have excuse enough for being off anytime and letting her do her own way. But while she is with me, I must hold the rein tighter.”
When I first transcribed that, the colour drained from my face: you hold a rein tighter with a horse, it isn’t how you talk about your wife. However, the next day, Friday the 18th, Anne writes, again in code: “Slept with A [Ann], good kiss, [orgasm], she saying it did not tire her at all.” And on Saturday 19th: “Slept with Ann, and she lay down naked after washing, and stayed with me, I grubbling [caressing] her.”
How I interpret this shift is the volatility and complexity of this very unorthodox marriage documented in the diary. Anne Lister does use this coercive, harsh language about Ann Walker, but while she thinks and writes these things, she doesn’t do them. She’s often kind to Ann Walker, and vice versa. They look after each other when they fall ill, and there’s a loyalty there.
Q: What new insights do readers gain about Lister’s life as a landlord and entrepreneur from this latest selection from the diaries?
One of the things that saddened and annoyed Ann Walker was that after breakfast, Anne Lister would be off to her estate and business contacts, leaving her (Ann) behind. Increasingly by the late 1830s, Anne Lister was almost more interested in Shibden and the legacy she would her leave in her estate than she was in Ann Walker.
Increasingly by the late 1830s, Anne Lister was almost more interested in Shibden and the legacy she would her leave in her estate than she was in Ann Walker.
Anne Lister spent her days attending to business, seeing her tenants to find out if they had paid their rent and how they voted in the 1837 election. Though the 1832 Act excluded women from voting (and that remained so till 1918), if you were a landowner with enfranchised tenants, you could check how your tenants voted. Anne Lister doorstepped her tenants rigorously, not allowing any of them to deviate from voting blue, (for the Tories later the Conservative Party) and then checking this in the poll book. Almost every one of her 30 enfranchised tenants voted Tory. So, politically, she was very active and far more powerful than one woman with one vote would have been.
She was also a scholar and read very widely, including in science. She was very interested in geology and read everything by leading geologist Charles Lyell. She kept up to date as far as she could, though women weren’t allowed to go to university, let alone to be members of the learned societies. She read engineering books to aid her in developing her coal mines, which were profitable. She had also inherited Northgate House in Halifax which she turned into a hotel and casino – in the 1830s, “casino” meant a social room with music and drinking rather than a place where you would lose your shirt over a game of cards.
Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Elizabeth O’Sullivan on Shutterstock.
Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power? One man is...
Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?
One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.
Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.
I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.
We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?
He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?
Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.
But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.
Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.
Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.
Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.
It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.
This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.
And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.
And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?
But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.
It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.
Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.
The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.