Rise of Christianity: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 15

I first read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at about the age of 14 in a copy borrowed from my local public library.  It was a huge battered old volume with thick slightly yellowed paper.  It looked old enough to have been around since not long after the fall of the Roman empire itself.

I had picked it up purely for its subject matter.  I had no idea who Gibbon was or that it was a classic.  I just read it.  Thinking about it, it was probably a nineteen thirties reprint of a Victorian edition.  One of the things about it was that it had a lot of footnotes.  The editor was fond of finding fault with Gibbon.  And when it got to chapter 15 which covers the rise of Christianity they got to be almost every page.   It was a bit like reading an argument. 

The editor was far from happy with Gibbon’s dismissive attitude towards Christianity and made this crystal clear.

I didn’t have any doubt whose side I was on.  I had already got to like the author and the more strident the footnotes finding fault became, the more convinced I was that Gibbon was on to something. Like a lot of people,  I was quite gullible as a teenager and its possible that I wouldn’t have spotted Gibbon’s skepticism left to myself.  If you take Gibbon’s account at face value he at no stage argues directly against the truth of the Gospel.  The sarcasm and derision all have to be inferred.  But with an obviously outraged voice sounding off  all the time it was hard to miss.

Dr Johnson once said of Paradise Lost that all admire it but few have wished it longer.   I dare say he could have said the same about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.   Personally I could happily absorb another couple of volumes of Gibbon, though I suspect I’m in a minority there.  The quantity of annotations in the one I first read must have added 5 or even 10% to the number of pages, this back in the days when paper costs were not insignificant.  I can’t imagine it made the publication remotely more salable.  But there it is.   Some people just have to have their say regardless.

So what was Gibbon’s attitude to religion?  The text leaves it open to interpretation.  The honest and obvious approach would be to give you the facts and let you make your own mind up.  But that would be a bit dull.    This is especially the case given the impact reading Gibbon on Christianity had on me and continues to have.  And it is not as if nobody else has ever noticed.  The book was mired in controversy over exactly this from as soon as it was published.  So I am hardly on my own.

I hope any Christians listening will forgive me – I understand that is a process Christ specifically approved of.   I may not have many listeners, but I have enough to be pretty sure at least some of them must be believers purely on statistical grounds.  I don’t actually want to offend anyone,  and I will do my best not to deliberately provoke.

If you are someone who has a faith you may not find my treatment of this subject sympathetic. In fact you won’t.  Because it isn’t.  But if I am to do this part of the book justice I can’t really avoid tackling it in a way that fits with my view of what Gibbon was saying, and what he was saying was pretty damning.

So lets get started.  The early history of the Church is a scandalous one.  Whatever you think of modern Christians one thing is for sure, they are a sight better than their predecessors.  The rise of Christianity in the time of the Roman empire was accompanied by coercion, deceit and led to a river of blood.  I am talking about Gibbon’s book not trying to outdo Richard Dawkins.  But if you are a Christian with doubts,  contemplating the early history of the Church is a pretty good place to start to see just how much of its origins are only too human rather than divine.

I am of course lucky.  It takes no great act of heroism on my part to scorn religion.  That freedom is very much a part of the debt we owe to the courageous men and women who created the Enlightenment.  Gibbon is one of those in whose debt we are.  The skeptical tone of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was one of the many ground breaking features of the book.  It still has some power to shock even today, at the time it was serious stuff indeed.  Religion was still an issue that could get you killed.

Given the power of the Church at the time – and there are still blasphemy laws on the statute books in the UK even today – it is little wonder he takes an indirect approach.  He opens by giving himself an excuse.  It is up to theologians to describe religion in its pure form. As an historian his job is to describe what actually happened.  If he finds error and corruption it is only natural given he is describing the behaviour of a weak and degenerate race of beings.

The first question Gibbon sets out to answer is how the teaching of Christ managed to spread so effectively.  He dismisses what would in his day have been the obvious explanation – that it was true – as not worth discussing. After all, truth and reason do not often find a favourable reception.  So leaving that one he identifies 5 secondary explanations.

1. The zeal of the Christians themselves.
2. The offer of a future life, which had not been available from paganism.
3. Miracles – who isn’t impressed by a suspension of the laws of nature after all.
4. The pure and austere morals of the Christians.
5. The unity and discipline of what he calls the Christian republic.

The Christians weren’t the first people to be zealous about their religion, and indeed they inherited their single minded devotion to their beliefs and intolerance of others from the Jews among whom Christianity had its origins.  The Jews had a very different attitude from the Romans.

The Romans were polytheists and pretty pragmatic ones at that.  Their pantheon was flexible. It could be extended to accommodate new gods as when the need arose, or could be reinterpreted.  As the empire expanded so did its theology.  Egyptian gods picked up a new market in Rome – no doubt being used by teenagers to annoy their parents.  Sun gods from the East found a niche too.  When they first came into contact with the German tribes they found parallels between German gods with their own.

Jewish intolerance of other religions was usually just part of the mix in the religious ecosystem of the Roman empire.  The Romans most of the time could handle this.  The Jewish faith was a long established one with time honoured traditions.  The Romans themselves valued tradition so could respect the Jews position.  Given that the Jews made no effort to convert others it rarely proved to be a threat to order or stability, so there was no particular reason not to tolerate it.   But a few emperors did run into difficulties.  Caligula tried to get his statue erected in the temple in Jerusalem with potentially violent results.  This particular crisis was diffused by the timely death of Caligula, but both Vespasian and Hadrian had to resort to extreme measures to maintain order.

Hadrian in particular went to some lengths to extinguish a troublesome group. He had originally been sympathetic to the Jews allowing the temple destroyed by Vespasian to be rebuilt.  But he later fell out with them and ended up with a full scale rebellion on his hands.  The Romans had more trouble than might have been expected dealing with this and ended up having to deploy large numbers of troops to sort it out. This no doubt explains why the victorious Hadrian, normally prone to finding non-violent solutions, was perhaps a bit over the top in his reprisals.  Jerusalem was demolished and ploughed into the ground. Jews were sold into slavery and transported elsewhere in the empire. When it was rebuilt, Jerusalem was laid out as a pagan city celebrating Hellenic culture called Aelia Capitolina and Jews were forbidden to live there.

This episode may well have been a key one in the development of Christianity.  The early Christians had been a purely Jewish sect which at this time were pretty obscure and far from the mainstream both metaphorically and literally.  They were known as the Nazerenes and had had to abandon Jerusalem and base themselves in Pella about 60 miles away.  The combination of believing the Messiah had already been and gone with observance of traditional Mosaic law doesn’t seem to have been a winning formula.

The destruction of Jerusalem created an opening for the Nazerenes.  They artfully elected themselves a Gentile leader called Marcus, dropped Mosaic laws, and positioned themselves as a non-Jewish group.  This enabled them to escape the ire of Hadrian and gave them access to the holy city of Jerusalem.  This was a good career move.

Although the abandonment of their Jewish connections seems to have been simply a pragmatic reaction to a changed situation, it opened up opportunities.  Their offering was no longer niche, it had gone mass market.

If you want to follow my extended review of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the beginning, and who wouldn’t?  It starts with Augustus founding the empire.

History of the World by H.G.Wells and a challenge to Niall Ferguson

H.G.Wells – thanks to Wikipedia for the image

When I was very young, 12 or 13 maybe, I acquired a paperback of  H.G.Wells’ History of the World.  I probably bought it a jumble sale but I may have just found it left on a train.  It remains the only book which having read, I instantly went back to the first page and read it again.  I think my interest in history dates from reading this book.

It is really well written and is a gripping read.  It whizzes through the entire history of the world starting with the formation of the planet itself and skipping deftly through geological time before ramping its way through ancient, medieval history and on to the present day.  The pace gets increasingly breathless as we approach the modern age.  I think it is about 200 pages in all if that.

There is a big debate in history about whether the emphasis should be on the great men and big deeds of individuals, or in teasing out the fundamental forces behind what is happening.  Are there underlying patterns that the events conform to?  Or is history made by the strength of will of particular individuals.

Wells was either unaware of this debate or reckless of it.  He just tells the story.  If a trend or a technological development catches his eye, he describes it.  If he comes across an interesting character, we get their story.  The two that have stuck in my mind in all the years since I read the book are King Asoka of India and Frederick Stupor Mundi, the astonishing Holy Roman Emperor.

The book ends rather suddenly in 1944 – this being when Wells was writing.  Fortunately the events he is describing were well enough known that most people would know what came next, so it wasn’t a cliff hanger.  I don’t know if he ever brought it up to date after the war.  (Thanks to Google I found this written in 1922 which is pretty close to it.  A Short History of the World by H.G.Wells.)

This book came to mind reading Niall Ferguson’s moan in today’s Guardian about the teaching of history.  Most of what he says doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.   History teaching may not be perfect today, but it was dismal in the past.  I used to read history text books for fun as a kid but the idea of actually studying it formally was made to seem horrific by the way it was taught in school.  What he describes in a tone more suitable to the Monty Python four Yorkshiremen sketch than a serious bit of analysis sounded a lot more interesting than what I had served up to me when I was at school in the seventies.

But nonetheless, I do think that Ferguson does have one good point.   He complains that students nowadays are given a Smorgasbord of disconnected topics without seeing the overall arc of history.  This seems like a valid criticism – though when I was at school you could make exactly the same complaint.  For some reason the curriculum I happened to follow went from the Stone Age to the end of Roman Britain, then leaped to the Tudors.    

What is needed is a simple well written book, no more than 300 pages and possibly even shorter, that does what Wells book does, just tells the story of how we got here in a compelling way.   What should this book cover?

It should begin with scientific theories of how the planet formed.  Science and history are’t really different things.  They both tell us about the world we live in.   It should cover evolution.  At the end of the days we are the products of evolution after all.  You could easily fill the first third of the book and only get to the emergence of homo sapiens.  Then go through the origin of the various civilisations that have existed and still exist.  Don’t ignore non-Western ones, but celebrate the West appropriately as the most successful one to date.  And above all, include the stories of individuals.  Kings, scientists, musicians, playwrights and merchants have all left their mark.  And we are all interested in people.  

The big thing is to make sure it reads well as a story.  H.G.Wells understood that instinctively as a master story teller.  Get the story right and everything else should fall into place.  In the Guardian, Ferguson complains that a lot of  history undergraduates don’t know who the British general at Waterloo was.   You wouldn’t forget that if you had an idea of the drama surrounding that particular day.  If there is indeed a core of key facts, dates and people that everyone should know it must be possible to get it all down in a readable form that will be very memorable.

Who should write such a book?  I can’t think of many people who could do a better job than Dr Ferguson himself.

Read the original whinge by Niall Ferguson here.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/29/history-school-crisis-disconnected-events

If you have any better suggestions for improving history education feel free to add a comment.

Niall Ferguson: Civilization – Is the West History? Medicine

European imperialism gets a bad press these days.  Somehow, world domination just doesn’t seem to be regarded as a valid goal any more.  But when European rule was at its height in Africa, there was an argument that it was a force for good.   It had the mission of civilising the world.  And as the Africans were the most savage, they were naturally the most in need of being civilised.

No empire in history tried as hard to run a civilising mission as the French.  They had originally gone to Africa attracted by the profits available from slavery.  But come the French Revolution there was an outbreak of idealism.  The slaves were freed.  Some were even given the vote.  In Senegal, France’s black subjects went from slaves to French citizens.  Even an African army was created.

The process opened doors to individual Africans in ways that rather undermine the idea of colonial empires being designed purely to oppress the natives.   There was even a black deputy in the French Parliament by 1914 – the grandson of a slave was helping give laws to the French themselves.  This comes as something of a jolt.  We after all, are supposed to be the enlightened liberal ones.  Racist attitudes belong in the past surely.  Well we’ll get onto that a bit later.  First there is another benefit of colonialism to look at.

The biggest issue for the majority of Africans was not political influence but health.  Life expectancy on the African continent was a fraction of that for Europeans – and that gap still exists today.  The gap is being narrowed by the  huge amount of aid that is given to Africa to improve facilities and to provide medicine.  It is often forgotten is that this process actually started in the colonial period.

There was a bit of self interest in this.  Disease was one of the biggest obstacles to European rule.   When the first yellow fever vaccine was developed in a microbiology lab in Senegal, one of the consequences was to widen the range that white men could safely travel and so help with further conquests.

The scramble of the European powers for Africa was certainly motivated by conquest.  But the conquerors took their medical knowledge with them and shared them with their new subjects.  Traditional health options had been limited to witch doctors: great for ethnic authenticity but with a low success rate.  Modern medicine and health practices started the improvement in life expectancy in Africa.   In 1905 the French even set up the world’s first national health service in Senegal. As Niall points out, there were measurable benefits to colonial rule.

It didn’t go that smoothly though.  Although there might be a case to be made that Africans were benefitting from French rule, the Africans themselves were keen to maintain an open mind on the matter.  For example, an outbreak of bubonic plague in Senegal was treated in the most up to date scientific knowledge which involved destroying infected buildings.  The owners didn’t follow the logic and it led to the first general strike in colonial history.

With the turn of the century a more sinister strand of scientific thought came to influence the approach of Europeans to Africans.  Germany at the time led the world in science.  One of the ideas that was current was that of eugenics.  This had been pioneered by Francis Galton who was basically applying lessons learned from the work on evolution of his cousin Charles Darwin.  If our adaptations are down to our genes, and that these adaptations are what leads to progress, does it not make sense to take seriously the effects of genes and to look for ways to optimise the gene pool?

These ideas were prevalent throughout Europe, but fell on particularly fertile soil in Germany.  They chose to put them into practice in their newly acquired colony of Namibia in Africa.  In Namibia the German colonists treated the supposedly inferior Herero natives as little better than animals, even simply shooting them if they got in their way.  In the end this led to a revolt.  The revolt was put down with extreme severity.  The Germans using mortars and machine guns had little difficulty in expelling the tribe of the Heraro into the desert where they were herded into concentration camps.  Genocide had arrived in the twentieth century.  Out of 80,000 Heraro at the time of the revolt only 15.000 survived.  If that wasn’t bad enough, the corpses were used for ‘biological racial research’.  The findings when published discovered that negro blood was inferior and should not be mixed with European blood.

But the supposedly superior Westerners were soon showing anything but racial superiority during the First World War.  This huge civil war within western civilisation led to the biggest river of blood the world had ever seen.  France in particular was being bled dry. The French were soon so short of manpower that they needed Africans to fight for them.  They offered French citizenship in return. The offer proved popular. The French had picked up the eugenics bug too, but as the French often do they came up with their own twist.  Their research had indicated that the less developed nervous systems of the Africans made them less susceptible to both pain and fear.  They were therefore ideal infantry material.

In 1917 this was put to the test and the Senegalese were pitted against the Germans.  But the Senegalese were deployed as canon fodder to spare French losses, so the Germans didn’t have what might have been a useful lesson in suffering defeat at the hands of supposedly racially inferior troops.   In fact by contrast, it fuelled the further development of racial theories.  Surveys of captured Senegalese prisoners of war were used in the production of eugenics textbooks.  These were later to give rise to the awful consequences in World War Two.  We all know the horrors that that led to.

So what did I make of this programme?   It was as ever interesting and engaging.  Some very good points were made.  But it wasn’t remotely what it was billed as.  What was the role of medicine in the triumph of the West?  Well all we learned was that it helped in the colonisation of Africa. A bit.   Though on the evidence presented it would be just as reasonable to conclude that it was the colonisation of Africa that helped the development of medicine.

It is good to be reminded of a few key points that are obvious enough when you think about them, but which it is tempting not to think about.  Racism is not some hangover from the distant past that we have now grown out of.  It was an offshoot of scientific thought at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Eugenics was not a minority viewpoint of a few fanatics, it was the mainstream.  And when you look at it, it isn’t even that unreasonable given the state of scientific knowledge at the time.  Certainly it was advocated by some pretty talented people.  And it had a real influence on history and people’s behaviour.  And that influence was just about as bad as it was possible to be.  Even if it had just been the unfortunate Herero tribesfolk that would have been bad enough.  It isn’t reason to fall out of love with science and progress, but it is reason to think things through.  Niall slipped in a sly dig at the believers in man made climate change at one point.  I believe in man made climate change but I hate it when its supporters use the ‘all scientists agree that it must be true’ line.  All scientists have agreed on things that have been disastrously wrong before.

Final verdict – good show and well worth watching.  Please get around to making the one that would have actually fitted into the series.  That would have been good too.

I have got quite a lot of coverage of Niall Ferguson now.  You may find these links interesting.

Civilization – Is the West History Part 1 Competition

Civilization – Is the West History Part 2 Science

Civilization – Is the West History Part 3 Property

Nial Ferguson – For or Against?

A Socialist reads the Hobbit Part 3 – The Hobbit by J.R.R.Tolkien

We have established that Tolkien was, albeit unconsciously, a socialist.  How does this new insight help us understand what is going on at the start of the Hobbit?  Lets have a look at the book.

The opening sentence deserves to be included in any list of great opening sentences for a novel.  ‘In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.’  But before we get any further we get a description of how well appointed and comfortable this hole is.  Hobbits are materialistic creatures and are not likely to be fobbed off with any notion of reward in an afterlife for good behaviour in this one.  Our hero, Bilbo Baggins is pretty down to earth, quite apart from actually living in a hole in the earth.  One of the things we are going to get throughout the book is frequent references back to egg and bacon, and making cups of tea.  These are the things that Bilbo misses about home while he is out having his adventure.  Simple pleasures.

Bilbo is a very respectable individual.  He is very polite and a stickler for manners.   In his first conversation with Gandalf you might almost think of him as a bit snobbish. He doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t employ people.  He starts off the book being a bit dull.   You can apparently tell what opinion a Baggins will have on any subject without going to the trouble of actually asking him.  But his status is such that he is free to go on an adventure if he wants to.   The only issue is whether Gandalf the wizard can persuade him to give up his stable life style for something a bit unpredictable.  This is by no means easy.  Bilbo has several issues that trouble him about the prospect.  The one that particularly bothers him is that there is no guarantee of regular meals.

Like Bilbo himself, Gandalf is free of social commitments and can engage in projects that he deems worthwhile.  The case in hand is an injustice that needs putting right.  A colony of dwarfs have been deprived of their property and livelihood by a dragon.  Gandalf is putting together a team to redress this,  with some exiled dwarfs providing the bulk of the manpower, or should that be dwarfpower, for the expedition.  He has picked out Bilbo as a burglar

Gandalf’s first problem is Bilbo’s reluctance to consider leaving his comfortable home.  To get round this he contrives a bonding session.  Bilbo finds that thanks to Gandalf’s plotting he has the dwarfs turning up at his hole.  This gives him a chance to get to know the dwarfs and decide whether he really wants the burglar gig.  The package on offer is reasonably attractive, with a 14th of the treasure payable on completion.  Expenses, presumably funeral expenses, will still be payed in the event of the quest failing.  We, like Bilbo, get to know a bit about the dwarfs.  The leader is Thorin Oakenshield.  What, not the Thorin Oakenshield you are probably asking?   Yes, him!  One of the crafty tricks by which we are drawn into the imaginary world in which the book is set is alluding to things as if we should already have heard about them.  It is one of the ways Tolkien achieves the depth of his world the so many people who read his work comment on.  So we learn that Thorin is a very famous.  Gandalf has artfully tricked Bilbo into providing supper for a not just for any old dwarf, but a celebrity dwarf. 

The dwarfs turn out to be a bit of a mixture of calculating opportunists and wild eyed romantics.  On the one hand there is little doubt that they are motivated by a desire to regain their property and their treasure, and are prepared to pragmatically hire the expertise they need in the form of a burglar to do so.  On the other hand they have a bohemian side.  We see this when at one point in the evening they break out their musical instruments for a bit of improvised home entertainment.  It is the music that sways Bilbo to overcome his objections and sign up.

They set out the following day – as any time management guru will confirm, the best time to start anything is now.  So what have we learned?  Bilbo is not the world’s likeliest burglar.  He has no relevant qualifications or experience.  But he has volunteered for the role and is now honour bound to fulfill what is expected of him.  The dwarfs are not exactly superheros either.  Of the party, only Gandalf seems to have an appropriate skill set.

So it’s all very democratic and egalitarian.  In the world of the Hobbit you can have an adventure no matter who you are – its an equal opportunities when it comes to quests.  And you have the choice of whether to take part or not.  There is no government enforcing particular norms of behaviour. Everyone is free to participate, but there is no compulsion.  And given this environment, it brings out the best in people.  Bilbo could have chosen the safe and easy option, but he signed up and chose to take his chance.  In the rest of the book we’ll see how his choice came to have a profound effect on the kind of hobbit he would be.

A Socialist Reads the Hobbit Part 1

A Socialist Reads the Hobbit Part 2

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo

Dambisa Moyo (thanks to Wikipedia for image)

If you are going to write a book proposing that giving aid to Africa is a bad idea, you are going to find it much easier to do if you are African.  If you are an African with a very solid background in economics so much the better.  As it happens Dambisa Moyo is ideally placed.  She was born in Zambia and has studied at several top UK and US universities and worked at Goldman Sachs.  So she can say things that a European or an American might find it much harder to say.

This book is a very clear minded look at the problem of how to help Africa out of the poverty from which it has been trying to emerge since the end of the colonial era in the fifties and sixties.  The thesis is that far from being helpful, aid has actually hindered development in Africa.  We are invited to look at the the history of aid.  Billions of dollars have been spent.   Little has been achieved.  And that giving aid can actually be harmful isn’t the only notion that gets a good kicking in its pages.

First off – is democracy a good thing?  Yes of course, that is something we all believe in.  So isn’t it right to push for democratic governments in Africa?  Not really.  It turns out that if you look at how long a democratic regime lasts, its life span is highly dependent on the country’s per capita income.  In poor countries democracy doesn’t last long.  And it certainly isn’t the case that the most democratic countries have the fastest growth rates.  But it is the case that rich countries are more likely to be democratic than poor ones.  So it looks like the best way to encourage democracy is simply to make countries richer.  Adding strings to aid packages probably won’t help much and will appear patronising.

Aid itself, even in the best case, can be counter productive.  Moyo illustrates this with a hypothetical example.  A small African company makes mosquito nets, but too few of the population can afford them to seriously hold back malaria.  An aid donor comes in to solve this problem by funding the free distribution of mosquito nets.  This solves the problem for a while but in the process puts the local manufacturer out of business.  The anti malaria programme is now totally dependent on aid because there is no longer a home grown supplier.

But it gets worse.  If the government can rely on aid it doesn’t have to tax its population, so it no longer has a direct interest in the well being of its own economy.  Of course we’d all like to believe the politicians would still be motivated by patriotism and idealism.  But we are relying on their good character, not their self interest.

And realistically we know that not everyone who goes into public service does so in the public interest.  For the light fingered statesman, siphoning off aid into their own pocket is easy.  It is a lot easier to rob a distant donor than someone who is actually on the spot.

So has the huge quantities of aid given to Africa helped or hindered the development of the continent? With so many billions of dollars expended over such a long time it is hard to believe that it can have actually been harmful to the people receiving it. But this is indeed the case.  And many of the people involved in the process, people like World Bank officials for instance, know this full well. 

What are the alternatives?  Leaving Africa undeveloped doesn’t sound like a great deal for its inhabitants.  And it isn’t realistic.  With the population of the planet set to hit 9 billion by 2050 we need the food that African farmers can produce.  They must have access to the technology they need to increase food production.  And once they have produced it, they must be able to sell it on the world market at a price that makes it worth their while.

While aid is superficially attractive Moyo argues that the discipline imposed by raising money in the bond market where investors expect to see a return on their investment gives much better outcomes in the long run.  Or even the short run.  The few African countries that have chosen to raise money on the bond markets have had success in doing so.  But all the time aid is available governments can take the easy way out and avoid the hard work of making investments productive.

China is proving to be a much stronger help to African development than aid from the West.  The Chinese arrive with a different agenda.  They want Africa’s resources and are willing to pay for them.  They see clearly enough that to do this effectively they need to do more than just write cheques.  They are investing in the infrastructure as well, and offering educational opportunities to Africans in China. Africa has what China needs: China can offer what Africa wants.   And they are doing it with an aim in mind, to develop Africa’s economy to make it possible to use the resources to help the Chinese economy grow.  They don’t have the moral hang ups that Western aid donors have about human rights and promoting environmentally friendly policies, so they are easier to deal with.  Moyo has no trouble at all in titling a chapter ‘The Chinese are our Friends.’

Trade is the most reliable way to generate a sustainable economy, whether with China or anyone else.  It is here that we find the biggest obstacles.  Both America and Europe protect their markets and subsidise their farmers, locking out the much poorer farmers of Africa.  It has always struck me as perverse that sugar is so cheap in my local supermarket.  We all know how unhealthy a sugar rich diet is.  Shouldn’t the government interfere with the workings of the free market.  Increase the price of sugar to decrease the amount of obesity I have thought to myself.

It hadn’t crossed my mind that the free market was already being interfered with to prevent farmers in Africa competing.  African countries raise trade barriers against each other as well, so the desire to help your own producers out is a pretty universal one.   The biggest eye opener of the book for me was how similar the amount of aid given to Africa is to how much it loses through trade barriers.  That certainly puts a very different perspective on aid.

In summary, the take home message of the book is that Africa needs not aid but a leveling of the playing field on which it trades.  If aid is phased out while freer trade policies are brought in, Africa has the resources to respond and start its long delayed catch up with the rest of the world.  The Chinese approach of investing in the continent for profit has turned out to be a better one than the superficially more moral Western one.

The tone and structure of the book is a little confused.  The argument isn’t well developed – you get most of the points in the first couple of chapters and subjects are tackled at different levels.  She often slips into  economist jargon.  This makes bits of it hard work for non-specialists, but it can be interesting.  Do you know what fungible means?  I didn’t and had to look it up.  But she also explains some things about international finance in some detail in plain language which is really good for a general reader.   It isn’t that Moyo is confused about the point she is making,  she is very clear on that.  But I think she hasn’t decided whether this is an academic book or a popular book.  I think she could have written either or preferably both to very good effect. It is an important subject and one that deserves a wider audience.  It would be great if she could do a version of this book that can be read easily by non-economists.  In the mean time don’t let this last minor criticism put you off, this one is well worth putting the effort into reading.

Niall Ferguson: Civilization- Is the West History? Channel 4 Property

I was a bit disappointed with the episode on science last week, but this one was back on form.  There isn’t as much to say this time.  He looked at the histories of North and South America after colonisation by Europeans.  The Spanish seized all the land, enslaved the inhabitants and created a society where a small number of people owned nearly everything.  The natives were left without economic and political rights.  They remain poor to this day.

In North America by contrast the land was granted to a much larger group of people, and with land came the right to vote.  The United States was to become the world’s first property owning democracy.  It did very well out of it.  The fate of the native North Americans was not mentioned.  They obviously did not get to participate very much in either the property or the democracy.  African Americans were also excluded from the democracy bit.  Their role in the property side of the equation was to actually be property.

So, swings and roundabouts then.

Niall Ferguson was pretty clear though, that for all of its faults the American system of wide property ownership was the basis of the economic success of the United States.  The racism and genocide were flaws, but not ones that materially affected the rise to world dominance.

What I liked about this programme was the deft way small scale details were woven into the big picture.  We heard a few individual stories, a few tableaux from the history of the two continents and then the overall analysis supplied in plain language direct from Ferguson himself.  It was skilfully done and kept your attention for the full hour. He also has got hold of a good camera crew because the visuals are great.

But you do lose out a lot by this approach.  The historical narrative is simplified considerably.  I think French and Portuguese viewers would be surprised that their contribution to the development of America did not even get a mention.  And I am not sure that slavery in the South was really just a bit of an aberration with no economic effect in the long run. And as for property rights being key to American success, this was stated as a fact rather than made as a case.  Its an argument that is pretty well accepted, but it could have been developed a bit more in a series whose stated aim is to explain the power wielded by the West.

Well worth watching, but well worth thinking about afterwards as well.

Niall Ferguson Civilization Is the West History Episode 1 Competition

Niall Ferguson Civilization Is the West History episode on science

A Socialist reads the Hobbit Part 2

C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien had an argument once, about myths.  Initially C.S.Lewis dismissed myths because they were made up and so were untrue.  Not so, said Tolkien.  Yes they were made up, but that didn’t stop them reflecting the truth.  What did he mean?

It is quite a subtle point.  God made Man in his own image.  So everyone, no matter what they believe, carries with them some reflection of God himself.  This truth can be weak or distorted, but nonetheless the stories that men tell can still carry in them an echo of the divine being and therefore have some kind of truth in them.  Myths can be true, even if they are made up.  Tolkien was a Catholic, and in the case of Catholics they had an advantage in seeing the truth not shared by others.  The actual God had revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  The Church was founded by people who had met the living God and had passed his truth on from person to person in an unbroken succession.  So Catholics are closest to the truth and everyone ought really to sign up to get in on it.  But others could and do see enough of the truth to offer a valuable insight.

It is a neat formulation, and quite a useful one for a Catholic living in England.  Catholics are a large minority, but still a minority so Tolkien would have had to spend a lot of time working with non-Catholics – like his friend Lewis for instance – so it would be handy to have a frame of reference that enabled respect to be shown to other faiths.  I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea if more religious people thought that way.  Although they have stopped actually killing each other in Europe, the is still plenty of religious strife around the globe and this concept might reduce it a bit.

But I digress.   The basic idea of people being predisposed towards a concept even if they haven’t heard of it because it is deeply programmed inside them is an interesting one.  In fact, it does sound a bit like the way we all inherit certain characteristics as part of our evolutionary history.  Some attitudes are really deeply ingrained in us, almost as if they are a part of our being.  A good example of this is the taboo against incest.  Incest is universally regarded as wrong and siblings are rarely actually attracted to each other.  But there are cases where siblings brought up separately have found that they do find themselves attracted if they do meet as adults.

So the idea that we have inbuilt notions of what is right and how we should behave doesn’t seem to much of a stretch.  Replace God with evolution and Christianity with socialism, and you can use the Tolkien’s idea to explain why so many people end up as socialists even when there is no obvious point at which they ‘convert’ to the idea. If you are a socialist you may well think like I do.  It isn’t something that I consciously chose from a menu of available options.  It was just the one that chimed with the way I thought.

(If you are reading in America, I am well aware that socialist sounds a lot more negative in the US than it does in Europe for some reason. I hope this doesn’t put you off too much.  Just to be clear, just as there are many variations on Christianity, there are many strands to socialism.  Indeed Christians and socialists both share several characteristics and there is a reasonably big overlap of people who are both.  Not all socialists are Lenin any more than all Christians are Saint Ignatius de Loyola. )

So armed with Tolkien’s own intellectual trick, we can now reinterpret Tolkien.  He may not have overtly been a socialist, but he still inherited the trend towards socialism and so we can pick up socialist threads in his work.  In fact I suggest that he is one of the most socialist writers of the twentieth century.  You just need to look carefully to see what is really going on under the bonnet.

Postscript – Tolkien expresses the idea I have discussed here at some length in his poem Mythopoeia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoeia_%28poem%29 .  It is unusual amongst Tolkien’s work for a number of reasons.  For a start it is almost unreadable. Nobody will complain that it is too short.  I have read it twice, the second time purely to check that I had it right for writing this blog post.  I don’t have any plans for a third go.  It is a bit of a shock after the beautifully written stuff we are used to from Tolkien.  It is also very negative – again a rare trait for Tolkien.  And it is also a very direct statement of his beliefs and how he sees things.  As you see, I don’t recommend it. But given what I am doing with it, I though it necessary to give a reference so people can make their own minds up.

Constantine Supreme: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 14 Part 3

If you wanted to have a major summit meeting, by this time the place to have it was Milan.  This was where Constantine and Licinius met to celebrate the wedding of Licinius to Constantine’s sister and to sort out the details of their alliance.  But they didn’t have long.  Licinius found himself under attack by Maximin and Constantine was attacked by the barbarians.  

Constantine (Thanks to Wikipedia)

 

Maximin would no doubt have been watching developments and weighing up the new balance of power in the empire now that his ally Maxentius had been removed from the chess board.  Constantine’s possessions looked good on a map, and of course included Rome itself which was good psychologically.  But the East was where the money and the trade was.  With a bit of effort Maximin could still emerge as the top dog.  And he may well have been thinking as much of survival as anything else.  Gibbon commented that Constantine had probably calculated that if he wished to live he had to rule.  The same was true of Maximin.  

So before the other emperors were even aware that he planned a war, Maximin was already across the Bosphorus and deep in the territory of Licinius.  This advantage wasn’t bought without a price.  He had considerable losses on a forced march carried out through dreadful weather.  He laid siege to Byzantium which fell after 11 days and then proceeded to attack Heraclea.  He captured this as well, and then learnt that Licinius was pitching camp some 18 miles away.

After a show at negotiation, during which both sides tried to win over the other’s troops, a battle was fought. On paper it should have been a shoe in for Maximin who had some seventy thousand soldiers under his command against only thirty thousand for Licinius.  But the superior quality of the generalship of Licinius won out and he was victorious.  Maximin had advanced at tremendous speed, he now fled even more quickly.  He was seen the next day in Nicomedia.  According to Google maps this is a distance of 130 miles – or roughly the distance between London and Paris.  This was about the maximum speed it was possible to travel across land at the time.  

But running away didn’t help much.  He died in Tarsus three or four months later.  It isn’t clear what he died of, but his subjects don’t seem to have been particularly bothered by his death.  They transferred their loyalties to Licinius without any problem.  Licinius set about the now routine extermination of the whole family of the defunct despot.  Maximin’s children – a boy of eight and a girl of seven were killed.  As Gibbon puts it the compassion of Licinius was a very feeble resource.  He also killed the son of Severus – Severianus.  This was hardly justified.  The brief reign of Severus was by this point long forgotten.  (It was only in the last podcast, but you may well have forgotten it already too.)
 
But the execution of the twenty year old Candidianus was a really dark mark.  He was the natural but illegitimate son of Galerius, the friend and benefactor of Licinius.  His father had no doubt expected him to be looked after, so this really was an outrageous breach of faith as well as being pretty hard hearted.


But he wasn’t finished yet.  There was also the wife and daughter of Diocletian.  Galerius had married Valeria, the daughter of Diocletian and Prisca.  Valeria hadn’t had any children of her own but had been a loving step mother to Candidianus.  Maximin saw the advantages of marrying the daughter of one emperor and the widow of another and proposed to her.  (He already had a wife- but divorce was not a huge problem to the Romans.)


As Valeria, along with her mother and step-son, had fallen into the hands of Maximin on the death of Galerius this was tricky.  Her response was that it was too soon after her husband’s death to consider a new union without appearing disrespectful to his memory.  This infuriated Maximin who had her imprisoned in a small village in Syria, confiscated her property and put her undue pressure to reconsider.  This is how Gibbon describes that pressure:

Her estates were confiscated, her eunuchs and domestics devoted to the most inhuman tortures; and several innocent and respectable matrons, who were honored with her friendship, suffered death, on a false accusation of adultery.

Pathetically, and rather tragically, the aging Diocletian attempted to intercede on behalf of his family, with no effect.


I suppose if you are an emperor you probably don’t feel the need to turn on the charm. But we’ll never know whether Maximin would have worn her down and won her over in the end, because he lost out to Licinius.  This made the position of Priscus and Valeria even worse.  He sentenced them to death.  They went into hiding for a couple of years but eventually were recognised, captured and summarily executed.  They were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the sea. The antipathy of Maximin is at least understandable if not particularly noble.  What motivated Licinius has not survived in the historic record.  What is clear is that even by the abysmally low standards of Roman emperors he was a callous and brutal man.

His cruel treatment of the wife and daughter of a great emperor is one mystery.  It is also hard to account for why he then proceeded to pick a fight with Constantine, and the very year after he had defeated Maximin.  The ambitious character of Constantine was perhaps part of his calculation.  Since it was highly likely Constantine would be coming after him at some point it may have seemed like a good idea to strike while his troops were in good spirit after their successful campaign in the east.  Or maybe the opportunity that arose was simply to tempting to pass up on.  


Constantine had elevated a man called Bassianus to the rank of Caesar and cemented the deal by marrying his sister to him.  But in the process he had managed to alienate Bassianus in some way.  The newly minted Caesar and Licinius were soon in touch.  But Constantine got wind of the plot early on and quickly had Bassianus killed.  Licinius did not try to hide his involvement and instead started destroying the statues of Constantine.  Once again, the empire was at war with itself. 


Constantine advanced remorselessly, even though Licinius was far from a feeble opponent. The first battle was fought just inside the territory of Licinius, with Constantine overcoming a larger force.  This was rapidly becoming his trademark.  Licinius retreated but in good order, and a larger battle was fought in the middle of the Balkans.  This was indecisive but Licinius again retreated.  Constantine assumed he was heading towards the strong defensive position of Byzantium.  But in fact Licinius had retreated to Macedonia and as Constantine approached Byzantium Licinius was able to cut his lines of communication.  Licinius had put himself in a strong postion.  He appointed his general Valens as Caesar and opened negotiations for a peaceful end to the conflict.


Constantine had had the better of the campaign so far, but Licinius had proved himself a worthy opponent.  What looked like a reasonable compromise was worked out.  Licinius was left with a lot of what he had been in charge of before the war broke out, but ceded the Balkans and Greece to the Western half of the empire.  Three Caesars were appointed – two of Constantine’s sons and the one son of Licinius to fill the next rank.  The recent elevation of Valens to Caesar level was an obstacle to this arrangement.  So he was deposed and killed.  He had only reigned a few days.  Gibbon points out that this aspect of the treaty was a humiliation for Licinius.  I imagine it wasn’t exactly a ‘my how we laughed’ moment for Valens either.


Constantine was now undisputed emperor in the West, his writ running from the borders of Scotland to the tip of Greece.  For eight years the two halves of the empire existed in peace.  But the two men must have viewed each other with suspicion.  Meanwhile although there was peace within the empire, there was plenty of fighting going on on the borders.  Crispus showed himself to be a worthy successor to his father and grandfather by displaying skill and courage in battles with the Franks and Alemanni.  Constantine kept his own military skills finely honed fighting off a Gothic invasion across the Danube.  He crossed into Dacia and took the war back to the Goths themselves and forced them into a treaty where they were obliged to provide troops to serve the emperor when required.


While all this was going on Licinius was getting older and even less popular.  Eventually Constantine decided that the time was ripe to reunite the empire under the rule of one man, namely himself.   Without troubling to create any kind of pretext he simply invaded the provinces of Licininius.


Licinius responded with spirit and ability.  He gathered together an extensive army and fleet. He took up a strong defensive position at Adrianople.  This gave Constantine a tough obstacle, especially as he was attacking with a smaller force.  It took several days before Constantine could break through, but eventually the superior quality of his veteran and experienced troops paid off.   His personal courage was also a factor – though the story that he swam across a river with only 12 cavalrymen by his side and put thousands to flight the other side must have been made up.   What is certain is that he inflicted very high casualties on the Eastern army and Licinius was forced to retreat to Byzantium.  


But once he was there his situation was not too desperate.  He had a much larger fleet than Constantine and so could maintain his supplies.  It looked like a stalemate, but once again superior leadership swayed the result. This time it was Crispus who took the initiative leading his ships against the fleet of Licinius while it was in narrow waters where its superior numbers were not so advantageous.  After a battle of 2 days he proved victorious.  This changed the whole situation.  It was now possible to cut Byzantium off completely making it only a matter of time before the city ran out of supplies.  Licinius wasn’t really into the heroic last stand thing and slipped across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon with his family and treasure when it became clear what was happening.  He also appointed one of his chief ministers, Martinianus, as a Caesar – which I imagine must have been accompanied by one of those sinking feelings.  In the meantime Constantine built towers, catapults and battering rams to speedily bring Byzantium under his control.

Licinius still wasn’t ready to give in.  He raised yet another army and returned to attack Constantine while he was still occupied with Byzantium. Constantine divided his forces to meet the new attack.  Once again Licinius joined battle with superior forces, and once again was defeated. 


After this final battle Licinius surrendered.   He was promptly invited to Constantine’s victory banquet.  I can’t help wondering what they talked about.  ‘Boy, you kicked my arse there’  maybe.  But Licinius was still Constantine’s brother in law and had given Constantine a run for his money.  He must have had some level of respect for the murderous but resourceful and determined old man.  Martinianus wasn’t so lucky.  He was executed straight away.


But Licinius did not get off scot free.  He was imprisoned in Thassalonica, and later was found guilty of trumped up charges of conspiring with the barbarians.  So he ended up being killed after all.  Constantine was now the sole ruler of the Roman world.  The year is 324.  Constantine’s reign will become one of the most significant in Roman history.  If he had just moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople that would have been enough to keep his name on people’s lips.  And likewise, being the emperor who established Christianity as the state religion would on its own have secured his place in the history books.  But of course he did both.


In the next chapter Gibbon doubles back to track the rise of Christianity.  Before following him, I’d like to quickly review the state of the empire as Constantine inherited it.


For a start, Christianity had been pretty well supported by Licinius in the Eastern half of the empire.  He had certainly not persecuted the Christians and it is not inconceivable that he himself was a sympathiser or even an adherent.  The cruel behaviour that Gibbon attributes to him may well have been propaganda originating from Constantine’s court.  By 324 the years of official action against Christians was a pretty distant memory.  Constantine no doubt had a lot to do with the establishment of Christianity but he was probably not swimming too hard against the tide.


Another point that Gibbon alludes to is the economic decline of the empire.  This is confirmed by modern research.  A week or so ago I came across an interesting blog post reviewing the state of our knowledge about the scale of trade in the ancient Mediterranean.  One set of data caught my eye.  They had plotted the ages of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.  There is a huge drop in the numbers from about the time of the crisis of the third century.  It looks like the political crisis coincided with an economic crisis.  My speculation would be that it was the political problems that caused the economic crisis – but we have no way of knowing. What does seem clear is that Diocletian’s stabilisation of the government did not lead on to a revival in trade.  


We saw in Gibbon’s account that skills had declined in Rome when we heard about the shortage of good stone masons.  Moving the capital east may have been a response to the decline in the economic status of the city of Rome.  There was simply more wealth in the east.  The rise of Christianity might also have the same root cause.  As the economy contracted people’s lives became less secure.  The early Church’s welfare activities might well have been seen as a useful insurance policy in troubled times.


Chapter 15 was the most controversial part of Gibbon’s work, and can still be contentious.  It is also one of the longest chapters. I hope I can do it justice.





 

If you want to follow my extended review of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the beginning, and who wouldn’t, it starts with Augustus founding the empire.

Science – a killer app?

Galileo’s sketches of the Moon – was science one of the reasons for the rise of the West?  (Thanks to Wikipedia)

A lot of people have watched and enjoyed Niall Ferguson’s series on Civilization.  A lot of people have been infuriated by it as well.  One thing that has divided people is his use of the phrase ‘killer app’. 

Personally I found that a useful and evocative shorthand for what was going on.   But I can see why it strikes some people as a bit contrived.  I think this one is a matter of taste.  In the long run the critics will win on this one.  What strikes you as a neat turn of phrase the first time you hear it inevitably wears with repetition.  History is likely to judge against Niall on this one.

There is also a point for pedents.  Strictly speaking  a ‘killer app’ is an application so attractive that it justifies the purchase of the platform on which it runs regardless of what else it can do.  The canonical example is Lotus 1-2-3, the first spreadsheet, which was so useful for business that many bought PCs purely to be able to use it.  But we will ignore that.  It sounds like it means what Niall Ferguson seems to think it means, i.e., an application so deadly that it enables you to beat the competition with it.

But what about the more important point.  Has he correctly identified the six killer apps, or if you prefer,  the six factors that led to the predominance of the West.

I am not at all sure that science should be in the list.  There is no doubt in my mind that if you have any serious sized project it is very likely that the techniques of science will enable you to achieve your objective more quickly and efficiently.  But it is equally true that you can usually get what you want without using science at all.  If you have enough money and manpower few objectives are impossible.   Knowledge is useful, scientific or otherwise, and the more you have the more power you can exert.  But there isn’t anything about scientific knowledge that offers a unique advantage.

A good example is sea power.  European nations took to the science of astronomy enthusiastically to enhance the range and capabilities of their navies.  This was a good use of their resources and the investment paid back handsomely.  But it was applied to already existing ocean going technology that had been developed by trial and error and rule of thumb.  Science helped, and helped a lot, but it didn’t get the process going in the first place and didn’t motivate the creation of sea power in the first place. The Portuguese would have set out in search of spices whatever.  They chose to use the best tools available, but would have gone anyway.

To put it another way, had someone in India or China come up with the theory of gravity just before Newton, would it have made any difference to the course of history?  It is hard to see how it would have done.

Science is a useful tool, but it is also a valuable end in itself.   As the West got richer it was able to devote more resources to doing things that are fun.  Science was a part of this just as much as opera or novels.   People like and enjoy science for its own sake.  My feeling is that a lot of early science was done by men of leisure who were doing it for no better reason than they enjoyed it.  So to my mind, science is a consequence far more than a cause of Western dominance of the world.

My original review of the science episode of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: Is the West History?

Niall Ferguson: Civilization- Is the West History? Channel 4 Science

In the Middle Ages the Muslim world had the planet’s most scientifically advanced culture. It is easy to forget just how powerful they were.  At one stage the Ottoman Empire threatened Vienna.  In July 1683 the Christian world held its breath as the Turks surrounded the capital of the Holy Roman Emperor.  Leopold himself, ran away.  Ottoman victory seemed inevitable.  But supplies were short in the Turkish camp. A Polish army arrived and in a pitched battle saved the day.  Turkish cannons were melted down to cast a huge bell for the cathedral in Vienna.

It was a huge shock to the Ottomans.  It was the first time that they had been defeated by a Christian power.  It was also the first time that the moslem army was not as technologically advanced as its adversaries.  Science had been systematically studied in the West and applied to a wide range of activities including the production and deployment of arms.  The Muslim world had fallen behind.  How could they have got it so wrong?

Osman III was a contemporary of Frederick III.    He designed his own palace called Sansouci, without a care, but he took great care over the state he ran.  His court was small, efficient and without a trace of corruption.  The court of Osman III by contrast was a life of luxury sequestered away from the problems of reality.  The whole culture of government degenerated.  Lucrative civil service posts were sold to the highest bidder rather than the best candidates.   Meanwhile the Prussians were getting on with the business of education and scientific progress.  Religious toleration was practiced – but the Church was not allowed to get in the way of science.  The Turks by contrast were forbidden to even read printed material.  Printing was punishable by death.  Good news for calligraphers, bad news for scholars hoping to keep up with research in the West.

An observatory had been built in Istanbul early in the fifteenth century, which had been ahead of its time in the standard of work it carried out.   In 1577, following an unfortunately inaccurate astrological prediction of a battle against Persia, the observatory was destroyed.  It was a very different story in the West.   The Royal Observatory in London was to be founded a couple of decades later providing data for the likes of Isaac Newton to work on.   It was the West where science, with support from monarchs, was to flourish.  Frederick III offered prizes for the solutions to key scientific problems.

The link between science and military power was not lost on Frederick.  His military base in Potsdam ran the country to the extent that Prussia was described as an army that had a country.  The Prussians were particularly famous for the efficiency of its artillery.  The accuracy of its guns was helped enormously by the application of physics.  In London Benjamin Robbins, a Quaker of all things,  wrote a treatise explaining how to calculate a projectile’s path taking into account wind resistance.  It was translated into German by Euler, who added tables to aid its practical application.

In the nineteenth century an Arabic scholar presented a study to the Sultan explaining exactly that the Turks had to adopt Western ideas if they were to keep up.  A French technical expert was brought in to bring the Turkish armed forces up to date.  In 1843 the Sultan even moved out of the old Tokapi Palace and built a new western style residence.  But it was a facade.  Event the clock was built in Austria.  It wasn’t until Kemal Ataturk in the twentieth century that Turkey really began the root and branch changes it needed.

Ataturk’s vision was to create a secular form of government.  Islam played too dominant a role in the state.  The two needed to be separated.  He also founded a university along with an observatory, finally replacing the one destroyed four hundred years before.

We then move on to Israel from Turkey.  Israel is a Western country, albeit a new one, with secular values.  It is also one of the most scientifically oriented countries in the world.  Israel filed 9,000 patents last year, Iran filed 50.  Science is one of the things that enables a small country surrounded by implacable enemies, but its use of science gives it the ability to hold them back.  But is the East beginning to catch up?

Science is clearly not Niall Ferguson’s strong point.  I thought this programme was much weaker than the first one in the series.  Science may well have been one of the killer apps that helped the West come to dominate the world, but only circumstantial evidence is presented.  Isaac Newton gets a fleeting mention.  Robert Hooke is mentioned in passing.  If you didn’t know that Euler was a mathematician you would imagine that he was simply a translator from the one quick mention he gets.  Even the one man whose actual work is described – Benjamin Robbins the founder of scientific gunnery – gets less coverage than the political figures discussed.  We hear a lot about what science can do and how useful it is.  I would have liked a bit more about what it actually is.

But as a scientist I am probably a bit more sensitive about superficial coverage of science than most people would be.  It was another well structured fast paced and above all interesting show.  It is rapidly becoming the highlight of my week’s television viewing.

Note: this review was written as I was watching the programme – and although I have gone back and edited a few details it is pretty much as I first wrote it.  Consequently up until the last couple of paragraphs I may be paraphrasing Ferguson’s opinions rather than expressing my own. I have put my thoughts on whether Niall Ferguson is right when he calls science a killer app here.

My review of the 3rd episode of Civilization: Is the West History – Property
And here is the 4th episode of Civilization: Is the West History – Medicine

See my review of Ascent of Money here.

http://historybooksreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/ascent-of-money-by-niall-ferguson.html