China’s place in world history. The past; the future

China’s transformation over the last three or four decades into the second greatest economy in the world has been nothing less than sensational, an achievement that will be applauded by Smart phone owners made in China  but bearing a non-Chinese brand name. Chinese civilisation is very ancient and predates the late flowering of the West. Chinese cultural memory is strong. Their recent humiliations of the nineteenth century, such as the Opium wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 [Qing Dynasty], when the West deployed recently developed technology, are unforgotten and a more assertive response to the West has been hinted at in the past. These include the anti-Japanese History book riots of 2005 and now the ‘air defence zone’ in the South China Sea [23 November 2013]. The Chinese population burst with energy, more than the Islamic Fundamentalist surge, and talk in the Sempringham eLearning office is to direct that energy not into scheme for military action but into rejoining and extending the fabulous glories of Chinese ‘high culture’, a culture indicated in the V&A exhibition, Masterpieces of Chinese painting 700-1900 [26 October 2013 – 19 January 2014]

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham eLearning. [ehistory.org.uk]

It’s the basket case again!

It's the basket case again! [basket as in Ukraine, bread basket of Europe]. The news from Kiev, 2 December, gave me a jolt and a dose of deja vu. The East [Russia] and the West [the European Union] at ‘loggerheads’ over the Ukraine. That's why Hitler got the Germans to start war in 1939, for Lebensraum [room to feed the German population with space in the Ukraine to grow food: the Ukraine was known as the bread basket of Europe]. Adolph would be splitting his sides with laughter in his grave, well he would if he was there but we were informed by the Star, founded in 1978 by Richard Desmond’s Express Newspaper Group that 1. Freddie Starr ate a friends hamster and 2. Hitler was alive [and well, of course] on the Moon, a myth that seemly continues to this day in Yahoo answers [see below]. Post Eddie Shah and Today [published from 1986; the first dtp-produced newspaper] the late ’70s and ’80s were a time of change in British journalism [from what to what? Answers in under 14½ words, please, on a postcard]

Then, when  the war was coming to an end, Hitler was sent to the moon for safe-keeping. "using rocket technology, the Nazis sent Hitler to a secret base on the moon," the Sun reports. The 2012 movie Iron Sky depicts the Nazi's returning from this moon base to establish a Fourth Reich [Yahoo answers]

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

The extent and nature of connection in history

In September [2013] a headmaster predicted most exams would be undertaken only by computer/tablet devices within 10 years. Five days later a news report stated that Lloyds List [substantially a ‘factual’ publication related to shipping and insurance], with a 279-year print history, will be available only in electronic format after 20 December 2013. A survey indentified that only 25 subscribers read the paper, as distinct from the digital, edition. These two items indicate that the digital and computer revolution sweeps on but can further consequences be predicted? How many saw a link between the development of out-of-town retail parks and diminished ‘High Street’ prosperity? It can be claimed that there is no necessary connection: improved access to high streets and parking provision could have made different situations.

These comments bring to mind how historians seek to establish connections between events. In the Sempringham office we admire the approach of Michael Oakeshott on these questions [see On History, Basil Blackwell, 1983]. Oakeshott claims historians can not provide overarching reasons for historical events but only evidence that one event was connected to another. Oakeshott provides a memorable analogy, quoted in Undergraduate History Study – The Guide to Success by Gilbert Pleuger [Sempringham, 1997]:

‘When an historian assembles a passage of antecedent events to compose a subsequent he builds what in the countryside is called a ‘dry wall’: the stones (that is, the subsequent event) are joined and held together, not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes. And the wall, here, has no premeditated design; it is what its components, in touch, constitute.’ [On History, p. 94]

If this view is accepted then History students are freed to see the analysis and claims of ‘causal connections’ presented in History books as historian's attempts to pattern History in a step to understand and present the past but that is not the same as to claim that such analyses are a 'picture' of what really was the past.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

Numbers in History, statistics, testicles

Numbers have had an important part in our understanding of the past, both in war and peace. Voltaire and Napoleon, among others I am sure, have had the aphorism ‘God is on the side of the big battalions’ attributed to them and numbers notoriously played a big part in Western Front trench attritional warfare 1914-18. The centenary for the commencement of the Great War will be well marked next year. With the development of electronic technology and computers, counting and recording numbers has become easier. Interesting, if not significant, correlations are sought, particularly in the area of health. It is numbers [of deaths] that have led to the ‘special measures’ for 14 hospital trusts in the UK. A report, publicised by the BBC [10 Sept 2013], has stated there is a link ‘between the size of a father’s testicles and how active he is in bringing up his children …’. Published correlations between life-style patterns and health are numerous.

From the point of view of the study of the past, the trouble with numbers, that is statistics, is that they can divert from at least part, if not all, the central focus of History study. The focus is Man in society in the past. Individuals ought to be the irreducible foundation of History. The sense of this comment is illustrated by the example of statistics on unemployment. When it is reported that unemployment is lowered to, say, 3.7 per cent it should be remembered that each one of the men and women who make up that 3.7 percent is 100 per cent unemployed and their life is hugely damaged by that.

Update 5 June 2014. [Original post 20 Sept. 2013.]

It is not only the Sempringham blog that draws attention to obsession with numbers. Is there a sense of Wallace-Darwin type synchronicity here? The BBC magazine published an article on 26 May 2014 by James Fletcher that highlights ‘spurious correlations’ and he mentions the ‘spurious correlation’ between margarine consumption and divorce. A Harvard student has created a website titled ‘Spurious Correlations’ that invites vivid examples. As Michael Oakeshott, On History, Basil Blackwell, 1983, persuasively elucidates, only evidence of connection between one circumstance and another is justification for a claim of relation between the two: coincidence is not enough. That means margarine is freed from all culpability!

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

The two grand strands in national identity can be uneasy bedfellows

Since the French Revolution and Napoleon’s military artistry western commentators have readily emphasised the political dimension of nationalism, represented by state institutions, and the social element that is connected to cultural expressions has received less attention. With the evident energy of the Islamic world in its contact, some see it as conflict, with ‘the West’ and in the increasing competition within Islam between the Sunni and Shia sects, the cultural creation of social identity, and thereby an influence on national identity, receives more attention. The ‘Islamic World’, especially Syria and Egypt, illustrate this political and social tension. Europe is not free from these situations; the Basque independence movement is an example.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

The Northcote-Trevelyan Report, 1854

‘China's Premier Wen Jiabao promised stable growth, anti-corruption efforts and better welfare provision as he opened an annual session of parliament’ the BBC reports on 5 March 2013. That news item calls to mind that achievements and contributions to human happiness can be overlooked in History. Reports of corruption in China reach British news more and more and news of corruption in Russia, Latin America, Africa, India … the list lengthens, is not infrequent. Corruption can be seen to be as corrosive to the ‘rule of law’ that is as important, it is argued, as representative government in the quality of governance. It was two Englishmen whose civil service reform, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854, set the benchmark for fair administration. Civil servants were to be appointed on merit, not patronage, and trained and the administrative and policy operations kept separate. These tenets were followed throughout the British Empire over generations. Historians can accept the privilege to reveal ‘quality-of-life’ benefactors from the past.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.