4. "The Anglosphere Challenge" by James C. Bennett (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

James C. Bennett coined the term "Anglosphere" to describe countries where English is the native language or (as in India) serves as a lingua franca for the well educated. But language is not all that America, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places have in common. Bennett argues that the peculiar island history of England produced a set of institutions that other advanced nations in Europe and Asia lacked--the common law, respect for private property, continuous representative government, a culture that nurtures civil society and entrepreneurial enterprise. It is thus no accident that the Anglosphere has excelled in innovation and economic growth and, Bennett believes, will continue to do so.

One minor correction: I din't coin the term Anglosphere; Neal Stephenson did in his novel The Diamond Age. However, in so far as I can tell,nobody else used the term in the six years between the publication of The Diamond Age and my first public use in January 2000, in Canada's National Post. Stephenson is the father of the term; I'm sort of the godfather.

Oxford University professor of human genetics, Bryan Sykes, follows up his best-selling popular books on recent European DNA studies with a book specifically about the "Isles" -- England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Casting a wide but useful net, he provides a grounding not only in the geography, climate history and human prehistory of the two islands ... but describes the mythology about, and early scientific investigations into, the origins of the people there. These are far from just academic preoccupations. In past centuries, English kings made their claims for sovereignty based on tales of Trojan settlers and Arthurian prowess. Every medieval commentary and discovery was followed with intense royal interest. Well into the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rights of kings were linked to ancient origins. Not surprisingly, later Victorian efforts at phrenological and morphological interpretation of the island's peoples (the shape of their skulls and features of their bodies) comes in for some hard knocks in this book. But Sykes gives those pioneer scientists full points for effort, thoroughness, and a methodical approach. Their efforts might now be dashed upon the rocks of genetic information, but their tables, charts, line drawings and descriptions of hair colour, skin tone, and body shape across the British Isles reflect the sincere interest of generations past, attempting to answer the question "who are we?". In many ways, Professor Sykes continues their efforts.

Fair warning then that much of SVC's bulk comes from providing the context for how humans lived in Great Britain and Ireland through the millenia, plus past narratives they cobbled together about their origins and superiority to neighbours near and far.

Those familiar with Sykes' earlier books will find much that is added and elaborated from his work on the female line of descent in Europe (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by our mother, from her mother, ad infinitum). In the The Seven Daughters of Eve, he assigned female names (e.g. Ursula, Helena, Jasmine) to particular genetic markers as an easier way for the reader to keep track of the geography and prehistory associated with each lineage. Readers will need to consult Wikipedia for a cross-reference to the nomenclature that scientists actually use for these markers. The results of scientific study of maternal bloodlines indicates that the European population has been largely stable, and heterogenous, and dominated by seven female lineages for tens of thousands of years.

In starting the Oxford Genetic Atlas Project soon after the millenium, he and his colleagues began to also collect male (or Y-chromosome) lineage information. This time, he discovered five male genetic lineages which dominate both the European and island population. Again, he provides human names to these markers, and again, readers will need to head to Wikipedia to translate his names into the specific scientific terms for each marker. The results of his research on male lineages re-emphasizes the antiquity of the genetic makeup of Great Britain and Ireland. While two great streams of peoples apparently came to the islands from the south (apparently along the coast from Spain) and from the east (west along the south shore of the Baltic), they share a great deal genetically with the other peoples of western Europe.

Sykes began his research at a time when DNA samples could only be gathered from blood. As a result, a certain amount of his story involves the diplomacy necessary to deal with blood donation services, schools, and civilian donors through the years. More recently, a simple swab from the inside of a person's cheek is all that's necessary for DNA genotyping. Gone are the elaborate refrigeration, shipping, and handling methods for blood samples. As a result, through a commercial entity separate from the university (Oxford Ancestors Ltd.), Sykes now provides answers to finer-grained questions about individual DNA variations. Those descended from the "seven mothers and five fathers" nonetheless share near-identical DNA with a much smaller group of people. It's those people, often sharing surname or point-of-origin, who are often of interest to the genealogist. Sykes can help determine if you're a "northern Smith" or a "southern Smith," for example.

In summary, after statistical analysis of roughly 50,000 DNA samples in Great Britain and Ireland, Sykes discovered deep continuity of the maternal lines in the isles, undisrupted by the Romans, Celts, Picts, and Saxons we know from written or archaeological history. And there's a great deal more stability in paternal genetics than scientists had assumed. They can at least make the case for "family trees" in existence for many thousands of years, which (through tracking their mutation rates from east to west) ended up in Great Britain after the end of the last Ice Age (roughly 12,000 years ago) and have been there ever since. Again, the genetic "foundation" of the isles appears to be widely shared with other parts of Europe ... and seems to have been in place roughly by 10,000 years ago ... as the glaciers retreated from the northern parts of the continent.

A dramatic illustration of the depth of the continuity is the match of mitochondrial DNA genetic material of a 9,000 year old skeleton (Cheddar Man) with a school teacher who lives near where the skeleton was excavated.

The peoples of Great Britain and Ireland, like most of their cousins in Scandinavia, Spain, and the nearby continent, are descended largely from Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers. The subsequent changes in the material culture ... the use of metals and agriculture ... were therefore adopted by local people. Ideas moved. People less so. This is contrary to what had been assumed, or idealized, through most of the last few centuries of European historical speculation.

The implications for modern history and politics are substantial. The DNA of modern occupants clearly shows that most of them are descended from folk long on the islands (especially on the maternal side) and much of the ebb and flow of paternal lines of DNA reflects the mere shifting of relative percentages in the population. There was no wholesale replacement. More a patchwork quilt that roughly parallels our understanding of wider European genetic history. There's little in the way of a specifically Roman influence, just a few possible Mediterranean or African markers. Barely a statistical blip. The Normans come and go almost unseen in the genetic record (largely because they were essentially transplanted Vikings already widely represented in the British and Irish gene pool). Where dramatic imports of genetic lines is noticeable (the so-called "Genghis Khan effect" seen in Viking advances in the north or Irish migrations during war with the Picts of Scotland), it was moderated by the fact that the Scandinavians and Irish themselves shared many genetic families with the occupants of the British Isles. And in the case of the northern islands (Shetlands, Orkneys), it's clear that conquest was by Viking families as much by individual bloodthirsty warriors. Uniformity of genetic stock seems largely absent everywhere in Europe, within the scope of the "super-families" identified by Sykes and his professional colleagues.

The Audience

SVC is a book written for the general public, and is certainly within the reach of motivated high school students. Even a keen middle school student might find pieces of history and geography that would inspire them. Strangely, for such a solid summary of natural and cultural history, there is no bibliography and mighty few footnotes. This isn't very reassuring, since in the few areas he touched upon where I've done my own reading of the academic literature, his summaries are a bit dated and perhaps more generalized than necessary. Nonetheless, it's a fine beginning to one's education.

As mentioned above, anyone interested in the geneaology of Great Britain and Ireland should consider this book their primer on the history and geography of the isles, and the biological and mathematical facts underlying DNA historical reconstruction. No doubt, as science continues to refine its analytical techniques, we'll see smaller and smaller variations in DNA giving us finer and finer insight into the movement of peoples in western Europe. As data sets grow and computation tools appear, the variations, and sub-sub-variations, of Sykes' dominant lineages will no doubt provide many more fascinating insights into history and prehistory.

It will be interesting to see if further elaborations of the genetic data will continue to support Sykes' hypothesis about the predominantly Palaeolithic origins of most of Britain and Ireland's inhabitants.

What about the Anglosphere argument?

If the author's research holds up in coming years, this book is a clear contribution to the argument that Anglo-Saxon influences on English individualism were cultural, not racial. The Anglo-Saxons came to England with genetic inheritances that were diverse and widely shared with the island peoples they displaced. Their influence in the ultimate genetic ratios of modern Britons and Irish citizens is therefore hard to discern. Sykes does much to make the case that the Celts and Picts were also largely indistinguishable at the genetic level ... and virtually identical in female lineages. His modern distribution maps certainly show variation from east to west, from south to north, and between Britain and Ireland. Yet his overall story is one of amazing continuity.

Table of Contents
=============
1. Twelve Thousand Years of Solitude [1]
2. Who Do We Think We Are? [20]
3. The Resurgent Celts [44]
4. The Skull Snatchers [59]
5. The Blood Bankers [78]
6. The Silent Messengers [92]
7. The Nature of the Evidence [110]
8. Ireland [120]
9. The DNA of Ireland [147]
10. Scotland [165]
11. The Picts [177]
12. The DNA of Scotland [186]
13. Wales [219]
14. The DNA of Wales [231]
15. England [241]
16. Saxons, Danes, Vikings, and Normans [255]
17. The DNA of England [267]
18. The Blood of the Isles [277]

Made during the war, with Olivier taking time out from his service with Fleet Air Arm, it does emphasise patriotic ideals, in particular ideals of England. As it happens, none of that was invented by the film-makers – the lines, the images, the concepts are there in Shakespeare’s play, which is what makes them so interesting.

Cinematically the film is mesmerizing, beginning and ending with a panorama shot of Elizabethan London, carefully recreated from contemporary prints. Famously, Olivier accepted and incorporated into the film the sheer theatricality of the play. We start with a raucous performance of “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France”, during which the Chorus, played by Leslie Banks, urges us to expand the play in our imagination to take in England and France, and opens out first into the Boar’s Head Inn, where Falstaff is dying, then the two courts, the armies and the battles themselves. William Walton’s music spreads through the film.

The opened up scenes are not particularly realistic though the battle and the sight of the dead afterwards affect one with melancholy about the horrors of war, no matter what modern critics might say. But it is all artificial, with scenery, costumes, group shots based quite clearly and enchantingly on late mediaeval miniatures. The film was shot in Technicolour, another thing the programme notes see fit to apologize for (it did seem amazing to those unsophisticated audiences in the forties, honest) and the artificial look of it adds to the splendour of the film and makes it a more consistent work of art than Kenneth Branagh’s “gritty and realistic” version made forty-odd years later. Of the two, it was Olivier who served in Fleet Air Arm, having returned to Britain in 1941 from Hollywood, and there have even been stories of him having been recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to build up support for Britain in the United States while it was still a neutral country.

Let’s start with the second accusation. Presumably, it refers to the enraged Henry’s order to kill the French prisoners after he finds that some of the renegade French had murdered all the baggage boys, unarmed and too young to fight. The “Henry V is a war criminal” school usually avoids discussion of the scene where a number of English soldiers and officers mourn the death of the boys and exclaim at the wickedness of it all because they would have to acknowledge that Shakespeare does not depict Henry as either particularly bloodthirsty or criminal. In fact, it is clear that the killing of the French prisoners is uncharacteristic and is ordered in response to a great wrong. In several other episodes, the taking of Harfleur, the release of the men who had spoken up against him before the battle (“Oh let us still be merciful”), the easy agreement to the French Herald’s plea after Agincourt, these all present a man who has a great heart as well as an ability to win battles against great odds.

The first accusation is simply untrue. The film may have left some of the scenes out but it is quite clear, despite the very funny “business” on the stage of the Globe, that Henry’s claim to various French dukedoms is doubtful to say the least. There is a strong hint that “now, that England’s youth is on fire” it might be a good idea to take them to fight in France rather than allow the country degenerate into a series of civil wars as had been the case under Richard II and Henry IV. And there is more than a hint of the machinations of the Church, whose bishops and archbishops effectively bribe Henry to go and fight in France, which is what he really wants to do, and not think of depriving them of some of their property.

The problem is that neither the “realistic and gritty” Kenneth Branagh nor the “Henry V was a war criminal just like George W. Bush in Iraq” school of thought, as personified by Nicholas Hytner, Director of the National Theatre, can ever get around the truth that King Harry Plantagenet, the fifth of that name in English history, is Shakespeare’s hero. In that series from Richard II to Richard III that depicts the tragic disintegration of England, Henry V is the one heroic and attractive character, whose early death is mourned throughout the long action of the three Henry VI plays.

There is, throughout the play, an image of England and of the English King that is essentially different from France. The French King is not an unattractive personality but he is weak and has been buffeted by history. The Dauphin is a fool and a braggart, a man who causes trouble through his thoughtlessness. The French nobles have no link with the people. The only truly attractive character is the Herald as he becomes more and more impressed by Henry.

England, on the other hand, is its people; the King is the King of all and the yeomen are as important if not, indeed, more important than the nobles. Although, the core of the play is England as reality and as idea, there is a kind of a proto-Union in the delightful vignette of the four captains: Gower, Fluellen, Jamy and McMorris, representing the four parts of it. They dispute, quarrel and drink together and there is an undying link between them.

In the night before the battle, the French nobles and the Dauphin sit in their own tent and alternate between dismal premonition and braggadocio. The Dauphin, spends not a minute of his time on his troops – they are there to serve him and the nobles. If anything is mourned it is the destruction of its flower at Crecy, though the lesson of that has not been learnt by anyone except the King of France. The heavy and heavily decorated armour in which the knights have themselves mounted onto their unfortunate horses symbolizes France in the same way as swiftness, lightness and, above all, ingenuity symbolize England.

In the night before the battle, Henry leaves his nobles without a single complaint from them, puts on a cloak and walks through the camp, making sure he visits every tent (“a touch of Harry in the night”). He talks to soldiers as well as captains; he listens to their complaints and to their fears; he meditates on the duties and responsibilities of kingship, in some ways echoing his own father’s thoughts on the head that wears the crown lying uneasily. Of course, he does not have his father’s bad conscience, having inherited rather than usurped his position. Nevertheless, he acknowledges his responsibility for whatever horrors might come in the morning.

There is an interesting discussion between two soldiers in which one expresses the view that if the King’s cause be wrong (the very fact that an ordinary soldier can think such a thing is astonishing) he will pay a heavy price for the battle and its outcome:

“I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument?”

To which another soldier, one who is considerably more rebellious in his attitude to the King, replies:

“Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.”

Henry hears it all and thinks his own heavy thoughts.

His prayer at dawn is interesting. He does not pray for victory but for his soldiers to lose their fears:

“

O God off battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposèd numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.”

When he addresses his troops he addresses them all on both occasions. They are all his friends, his brothers:

“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile This day shall gentle his condition:”

(The film uses the alternative reading of “base” instead of “vile”.)

The battle is won by the yeomen archers and their craft as much as by the outnumbered nobles and the image of England as the land where all are one and the King is at one with all, is complete.

As a coda one sees Henry wooing the French Princess Katharine, who is obviously greatly taken by him, telling her that he is a plain speaking English soldier, who loves her but who will not produce flowery language for her sake. She must take him as he is but as he is he will be hers. This is a wonderful English theme, developed by numerous writers in subsequent centuries.

One can read too much into Shakespeare’s lines. He is, after all, the man who in “Macbeth” produced a description of a totalitarian state that has never been rivalled in force and pithiness. But there is a thread that runs through the Chronicles, a thread that clearly would have been comprehensible and acceptable to all his viewers, high and low: of an England that is a special country, where great things can and shall be done by all; where the yeomen are as proud of their identity as are the nobles; where the King is the King of all who owes his duty to his subjects as they owe theirs to him. When this breaks down as it does throughout the period of the Wars of the Roses, there is trouble and darkness.

“Henry V” was most probably written and first performed in 1599, only a decade after England had withstood and triumphed over a great danger from Spain, in the middle of yet another Irish rebellion and a time when folk memory could still recall accounts of the century long civil war that preceded the Tudors. A look across the Channel would have shown countries where civil warfare seemed almost endemic. There have been numerous interpretations of Shakespeare’s attitude to war – was he glorifying it and praising Essex’s incompetent attempt to subdue Tyrone’s rebellion (probably, if he knew which side his bread was buttered on) or undermining it by the presence of such contemptible braggarts as Pistol and cowardly thieves like Bardolph and Nym? The answer, one suspects, is both, which is a happy thought for all those critics and producers. How else could they pretend that they understand what Will said than Will did himself?

Aside from Brazil (ceded to the Portuguese), the New World could have been completely Spanish. But for various reasons the Spanish were not interested in the lands above 30 degrees north latitude. Their activities in the Caribbean, Cuba, Mexico, and eventually Peru kept them plenty busy. The lands to the north seemed uninteresting by comparison — no ready supplies of gold, no large civilizations to plunder, cold waters, forbidding forests, and lands that were not well-situated for the sugar plantations and other large-scale agricultural ventures favored by the Spanish and Portuguese.

Thus North America was colonized much later than Central and South America — and not by the Spanish and Portuguese but by the French (limited mostly to the great valley of the St. Lawrence) and the English. Yet it appears that North America was discovered first, by venturesome sailors from the English port of Bristol who maintained an active trade with Iceland starting in the 1300s and who fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland as early as 1481. News of these fisheries — and land or islands sighted to the west thereof — filtered down to Portugal and Spain, probably inspiring (in part) the voyages of Columbus. Landfall by the English was officially made on June 24, 1497 by John Cabot, a Venetian (or perhaps Genoan) pilot in the service of King Henry VII. No one knows exactly where Cabot’s crew landed, but it seems likely to have been in northern Newfoundland.

Despite the fact that the English seem to have discovered new lands to the west before the Spanish did, their colonization efforts lagged. The Spanish and Portuguese were well-entrenched to the south decades before the English tried to plant their first colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of Virginia in 1586. Yet this colony failed, as did other colonial efforts (e.g., that at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1606). It was only in 1607 that the English succeeded in planting a permanent colony at Jamestown on Chesapeake Bay. It took a long time for a confluence of interests — in profits by English merchants, in profits and geopolitical positioning by the crown, in religious freedom and economic self-advancement by those individuals who might plant a colony — to come together.

For over a hundred years, the merchants of the western ports (especially Bristol) saw no need for permanent colonies and were happy to seasonally harvest the bounties of the fisheries off the North American coast, with a bit of fur trading added to the mix for extra profits. There was some interest by the crown and the London establishment in having a military presence in modern-day Virginia or North Carolina as a bulwark against Spanish claims (or as support for the privateers who preyed on Spanish shipping), but evidently that interest was not strong enough to justify dedicated colonial efforts in the 16th century. The western merchants eventually became interested in the lands north of Cape Cod for timber and related products, and the London merchants eventually became interested in Virginia and the Carolinas as a potential location for growing crops (such as tobacco, dyes, and cotton) that they otherwise would have sourced from the Spanish or Portuguese.

It seems that the English crown took no great interest in North America from the 1480s on to the 1620s, and was happy to allow adventurers to explore the coast, privateers to harass the Spanish, and western sailors to fish off the coast without royal interference or organization. Benign neglect was the order of the day, and the result was a long, tentative period of trial by error, with no serious commitment to settlement of North America.

The would-be colonists themselves were long absent, too. Who would want to venture across the Atlanticto a land that would bring no immediate returns (such as the shiploads of gold and silver removed from Mexico by the Spanish) but instead only years of toil and the ever-present possibility of attack by hostile natives? You’d have to be crazy (which I think the original English settlers pretty much were).

So the English started slow in the North America. In future posts I’ll explore in greater depth what happened once they got serious; but first I need to do some more reading.

Returning to Columbus, it is an unfortunate accident of history that in America we celebrate Columbus Day. As far as I’m concerned, there is no reason for us to commemorate the legacy of Spanish influence in the New World. I realize that Columbus Day is celebrated mainly by Italian-Americans. Yet they could just as well take John Cabot — the Venetian Giovanni Cabotto — into their hearts, and thereby honor America in the Anglosphere and the tradition of common law, private enterprise, and individual freedom that we have inherited from the English.

(Cross-posted at one small voice.)

[cross-posted on chicagoboyz]

History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).

By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.

The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.

Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.

Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.

Relentless demands for tribute from a series of North African city-states were to plague successive American administrations until a consensus formed about the need for an overseas US defense. Structuring this unified response to piracy awaited a reformation of the relations between the States … and the development of a formal Constitution in 1789. Having successfully, painfully, created a Constitution, the lines of national authority and responsibility became clearer. The debate about whether gold or gunpowder was the best solution to the Barbary pirates went on for many years. Here we see the first of many echoes of American foreign policy in our time.

At its worst, annual expenditures for buying hostages or buying peace in North Africa approached 20% of the US national budget. A permanent American navy was finally approved by legislation and subsequent appropriation. American attitudes became more actively vindictive toward the North African states as that navy became more effective at the turn of the 19th century. Punitive raids, rather than painful supplication, became the norm and a permanent American fleet patrolling the Mediterranean was born.

Oren notes that for the first forty years of its existence, European nations did little to assist America and its merchants in the Mediterranean. It was only with the growing American ability to project permanent force into the Mediterranean that the US was treated with respect by European naval powers. The War of 1812 disrupted efforts to protect American shipping in the region but at its conclusion, a newly sophisticated and muscular American fleet emerged which was able to reassert itself. From that point forward, the Americans presented themselves as an independent and confident trading alternative to the Europeans (primarily the French and British). The various provinces of the Ottoman Empire responded accordingly. They dropped their demands for payment and shifted instead to leveraging American commercial interests against the Great Power squabbles of the European continent. In an echo of later eras, America was “far away” and therefore preferred as a source of Western trade goods without the associated imperialist baggage.

For ante-bellum America, having reached sufficient naval strength to limit North African piracy, commercial sights shifted further east … to Istanbul and to the newly accessible Egypt and Levant. American traders had little compunction in competing to open trade with an autocratic Ottoman Empire since they’d received so little support or acknowledgement from the Europeans in earlier years. Trade expanded quickly.

At the same time, America was experiencing another wave of religious fervour (the so-called Second Great Awakening). Millennial beliefs in America for the first time began referencing events in the Holy Land … involving conventional conversion of the peoples there to American variants of Christianity, or the “restorationist” beliefs which increasingly saw the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as the final step in the End Times.

Both streams of religious belief (proselytization and colonization-before-Second-Coming) were to send a growing numbers of American Christians into the Levant, and into an Ottoman Empire that had long maintained control over religious groups through carefully prescribed rights (the millet system for managing dhimmi).

Needless to say, almost everyone in the region (ruler and ruled) was antagonistic or, at best, indifferent to the arrival of religiously fervent Americans … Americans determined to upset the status quo of “heathens, infidels, and apostates.” Americans were subject to banditry and assaults and vindictiveness from the full range of other religious communities that were living on sufferance in the Ottoman Empire.

Those seeking to live in the Middle East to be on hand for Christ’s Second Coming were largely unsuccessful in establishing the agricultural stations that would support them. Disease, violence, and local ecological and economic collapse had kept regional populations very low … shockingly so by modern standards. In this impoverished environment, idealistic Americans with North American expectations were at a distinct disadvantage.

For those Christian missionaries seeking to convert the populace, the political environment was just as tenuous. Ottoman rule was relatively decentralized so local rulers could quickly shift their attitudes toward American Christian activity as local circumstances and popular attitudes demanded. Despite a great deal of investment and effort by the American Board of Commissioners, American missionary conversions were almost non-existent.

In the course of establishing these missions, however, two American obsessions were to have momentous impact on Middle Eastern history: modern medicine and education. Indeed, the roots of American influence in the region can largely be traced to the even-handed provision of health care and modern education to the local peoples of the Middle East by the missionaries of this era. The origins of the Middle East’s current educational and medical infrastructure have been largely obscured for political reasons but America’s role was significant in most parts of the Ottoman Empire. Missionaries were never really safe in the Middle East, however, and Oren provides accounts of their difficult lives, and often traumatic deaths, throughout much of his book. For better or worse, these folk did set standards and expectations for the educated classes which remain to this day. Their efforts, far into what is now eastern Turkey and Iran, positively influenced almost all the various Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sects of the region.

Finally, under the category of “fantasy,” new ship technology meant that restless Americans could explore or play the tourist in the Middle East to an extent never before possible. A new bowdlerized translation of the Arabian Nights triggered yet another wave of fantasizing amongst the literati of America. The French occupation of Egypt had exposed the world to the very ancient culture there. In initiating the field of Egyptology, they’d also started a European interest in the aesthetic elements of Egyptian art and architecture. Educated Americans were not immune to the widespread “wishful thinking” about the Middle East that took place as Europe was increasingly able to force its will on the different far-flung portions of the Ottoman Empire.

By the 1830s, the romanticism about the area had evolved to the point where Algerian dress became fashionable for elite European soldiers (the so-called Zouave style), and, a decade or two later, American civil war units were to die by the hundreds in North African pantaloons and loose jackets.

As America drifted toward civil war, its involvement in the Middle East was reinforced by technological events (the development of the steamship and the rapid growth of American industrialization). Andrew Jackson had created formal relations with the Ottoman Empire, showing only limited concern for the constant antagonism in the region towards the religious Americans, now settling there in greater numbers.

The Ottoman Empire sought to counterbalance European power by congenial relations with the one industrialized country without apparent ambitions to dismember it. Through much of the 19th century, America was variously seen as the champion of both minority interests and of Ottoman independence. While the friction between American religious aspirations and its commercial and geopolitical interests persisted, American influence in the area was generally seen as benign.

Just as the War of 1812 was to disrupt American involvement in the Middle East, the outbreak of the American Civil War disturbed relations with Europe. Perhaps the most immediately disruptive effect was the self-imposed embargo of Confederate cotton and an associated Union blockade. Egypt had been expanding its cotton industry since the 1820s but still lagged the southern United States in productivity because of its primitive farming methods. With Southern cotton off the world’s markets, Egypt reaped an immense but temporary financial boom for its ruler, the Albanian Muhammad Ali. Ali’s efforts to modernize Egypt, and the post-Civil War crash in Egypt’s cotton industry were set the stage for that nation’s relations with Europe and America for several generations.

The Ottoman Empire, returning the Jacksonian favour of earlier years, supported the North … reflecting its own preference for stability and the integrity of its Empire. Dithering European powers attempted to maintain as much neutrality as possible. Only the British had the naval wherewithal to maintain a real independence from Union attempts to control Confederate shipping (cf. the Trent affair).

As the Civil War concluded, America stood out as the pre-eminent military power of the Americas, on a rapid pace to match or exceed the technological and military expertise of Europeans. A huge number of experienced soldiers and generals were released from service and they became a natural resource for the Ottomans … offering European-style military expertise without the imperial dangers of hiring actual Europeans. American shipbuilders and armorers were to find welcome markets in the Middle East, especially in the temporarily flush Egyptian autocracy.

Oren offers a fascinating chapter on the role of Yankee and Confederate generals in Egypt’s short-lived 19th century attempt at independent modernization. Generals of the stature of Sherman and Grant made triumphant tours through the region. Accounts of the luxurious accommodations of the Pasha …and the dire poverty, filth, and disease of the ordinary Egyptians were repeated theme in memoirs.

In support of such recollections were books like Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, which did much to make his reputation, and was a largely satirical description of his travels through the Holy Land in the company of religious pilgrims just after the Civil War. The recurring pattern of American beguilement with the exotic, followed by disillusionment with the corrupt, cruel, and impoverished is found in much American literature of the time. American romanticism about the Middle East during this period was also to find expression in the creation of the “Shriners … best known in America for their parade go-karts and a North American network of free hospitals for children. Surely the “Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine” must stand as one of the great modern anachronisms of American culture.

On a playful tangent, Oren recounts how Frederick Bartholdi’s initial attempt to create a giant female statue for the Egyptian Khedive in 1871 (Egypt (or Progress) Bringing Light to Asia) for the entrance of the new Suez Canal was morphed 15 years later into Lady Liberty on Bedloe’s Island off New York City.

The Canal’s completion in 1869 was to place a new geopolitical importance on Egypt, and a new burden on Egyptian leadership to maintain fiscal and political stability around the canal. By 1882, European responded to the insolvency of the Egyptian autocracy with invasion. This not only placed local Americans at great immediate risk from Egyptian reprisal on all Westerners but inevitably concluded significant American involvement in the military modernization of the Egyptian military. The generation of Civil War vets who’d made the Middle East home traveled back to America in anonymity.

The tail-end of the 19th century was a time of American prosperity and burgeoning power. It was the high-water mark for Protestant faith (and associated self-confidence) in the nation, and included American ambivalence about the propriety of imperialism. The destitution of much of Asia and Africa was highlighted by reports from American trading enterprises and missionaries across the planet. Americans were the sole industrialized nation who’d yet to participate in the European imperialism sweepstakes of the era. But what religious and moral and social obligations did the nation have, blessed as it was by God and Nature?

The dramatic growth of the US Navy, the Spanish-American War, and subsequent American aggressiveness in the Caribbean and Philippines were to spell new opportunities and obligations for American power, faith, and fantasy. Most ironically, it was US naval strategist Alfred Mahan who coined the term “Middle East” in a 1902 paper meant to distinguish the East generally, from the geopolitical significance of the Arabia, Persia, and the Gulf.

From its earliest days, America had engaged Jewish citizens as emissaries and diplomats in the region. It should be recalled that Hebrew studies at America’s institutions of higher learning were considered central for Protestant clergy of the established denominations. By the mid-19th century, American Jews such as Edwin de Leon and Uriah Levy (the first Jew to reach commodore rank in the US Navy) were actively engaged in protecting American interests (commercial and religious) in the Middle East.

The changing demography of the America during the end of the 19th century was also to signal a shift in the role American Jews would play in the Middle East. The “restorationist” enthusiasms of many Protestant sects lent indirect support for a new social movement, Zionism. The anti-Semitism of Europe led many commentators (including Mark Twain) to focus for the first time on the utility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

As the twentieth century dawned, American Christian activities in the Middle East continued to focus on education and medicine (conversion had continued to be very unsuccessful). Americans were to be initial bystanders at the two great events of the era – the butchery of Greeks and Armenians that is associated (controversially) with the Young Turks, and the Great Power struggle of the First World War which dictated the structural demise of the Ottoman Empire. America’s initial neutrality was to partially protect its citizens from harm but these experiences … deep humanitarian concern for minorities in Europe and the Middle East, and widespread domestic loathing of European imperialism, … were to frame the American political paradox ever after.

Self-determination on the other side of the Atlantic always seemed to come at the existential peril of religious and ethnic minorities. And there would be American diplomats, businesspeople and missionaries on hand at every turn to document the horrors in detail.

America’s late participation in the Great War meant that its public focus remained on genocidal events in Anatolia through 1914 and 1915. Americans donated generously to the relief work and US Navy ships were to deliver aid for a widespread famine in the region at the time. Nonetheless, in passages reminiscent of later commentary on the holocaust of WW2, individual Americans despaired at their inability to ameliorate (let alone halt) the savagery. They took their own lives, died of broken health or after torture in Turkish prisons. The commitment of these individuals to the welfare of local peoples (who’d completely rejected American religious beliefs over the course of a century) is something worth remembering.

One of the most challenging issues for President Wilson before America entered the war was the British intention to create an international mandate over the Holy Land, and to engage the support of American Jews by supporting a Jewish national home. Even before America had joined WW1, Wilson had responded to the plan negatively. How did one oppose colonialism while simultaneously supporting a Jewish national home? Indeed, how were Americans generally (both Christian and Jew) able to reconcile their religious beliefs about the centrality of Jerusalem and their secular commitment to self-determination.

For a number of prominent American diplomats and regional experts, the quandary could not be resolved. They were determined to convince the President that any statement in support of Zionism was dangerous and should never be made. British intentions were made clearer, and US presidential ambiguity was swept aside, with the Balfour Declaration, and American Jews departed for Canadian boot camps, unimpeded, to serve in WW1.

America’s late entry to the trenches of WW1 ensured its role in “making the peace” in Europe but since its troops had never fought in the Middle East, America was a bystander to the British/French negotiations which attempted to slice the Ottoman Empire into functional fiefdoms. All the compromises, hypocrisies, and inadequacies of the process were immediately evident, however, to the many people in the region who’d been educated in the network of American educational institutions. The wave of nationalist belief in the Middle East, reinforced by the success of the Japanese in setting their own course earlier in the century, was the stepchild of American values of modernity taught by Christian missionaries.

Allied with these efforts was a new era of American fantasy manufactured by the post-war reminiscences of American reporter, Lowell Thomas. Reputedly spending all of two days in the desert, Thomas recast T.E. Lawrence as an American-style champion of Arab independence. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published widely after his death in 1935, is well-regarded to this day. Orientalism of the Lawrence of Arabia variety continued well into the Sixties. One contemporary of Lawrence was heard to say that the only accurate thing about the David Lean movie was “the sand and the camels.”

Post-war settlements in the Middle East satisfied no one, and brought only constant discord amongst its peoples. They did, however, spell the beginning of a new era in the Middle East … as American domestic consumption of petroleum products outstripped supply and a new American consortium of oil companies (the Iraq Petroleum Company, formed in 1921, muscled into the European monopoly. Americans got their oil (23.75% of all petroleum extracted from the Middle East) without the headaches of mandates and administration.

Meanwhile, Christian missionaries (against great odds) had continued to provide modern medical care to the populace of what is now Kuwait. Amongst their patients, by 1914, were the men of Abd al’Aziz ibn Saud. Over time, their role in caring for Gulf Arabians created much goodwill. Some twenty years later, when it was ibn Saud’s desire to circumvent the exclusive club created by Anglo-French companies to control Middle East oil, he turned to American businessmen and oil explorers.

On June 1st 1932, engineers from the Standard Oil Company of California (SOCOL) struck oil on the barren island of Bahrain. On that basis, intensive negotiations over exploration rights began that were ultimately won by SOCOL and sealed with gold bullion loaned from a British bank. SOCOL became CASOC (California Arabian Standard Oil Company) now Chevron which became Aramco and then Saudi Aramco. With the discovery of Dhamman Number 7 in 1938, the era of Saudi Arabia dominance of the oil industry began.

It was to be the children of Middle Eastern missionaries who dominated the American diplomatic and oil business cadres of the region for many years. The merging of religious and economic interests in the southern Gulf was to recast the region, yet again, as an American story – of exploration, perseverance, and missionary fervour.

At the beginning of World War II, America was firmly ensconced in Saudi Arabia, Germany was making belated offers of gold to ibn Saud, and American obligations to keep the Saudis happy (with money and broader geopolitical influence) were to enter a new phase.

Events in Palestine had gotten increasingly tense but America was, by and large, able to escape responsibility for any of them. By the time that the three Allied leaders met in February of 1945 at the Yalta Conference, it was clear that the US would have a central role in how the post-war Middle East would be managed despite the fact that the topic was largely ignored there.

In one of the most unsettling portions of Oren’s book, an ill, almost giddy, Roosevelt equivocates with ibn Saud about America’s support for Zionism during a face-to-face meeting on the USS Quincy in February of 1945. Promising “ibn Saud never to assist the Jews at the Arab’s expense” and proffering “assurances for Saudi Arabia’s defense, to do everything ‘short of war,’ to strengthen Syrian and Lebanese independence,” Roosevelt had attempted to square the circle in light of the imminent need to resettle thousands of displaced Jews from Europe.

Roosevelt’s comments on the meeting left the impression that it had been colourful but insignificant. Contemporary observers weren’t so sanguine. As we now know, the President could not have been more wrong. Access to oil and support for Zionism could not be easily reconciled.

Post-World War II efforts by America to assist the people of North Africa and the Middle East to gain independence from European powers were successful but they created their own set of expectations and first among them was that America would solve the region’s problems, soonest.

With the fusing of Palestine and Arabia on the deck of the USS Quincy, we enter territory more familiar to modern readers. Oren’s discussion of the creation of Israel and Harry Truman’s religious values is worth careful review, as is the resistance of much of the State Department. Robert Kaplan’s book The Arabists outlined the role that the descendants of American missionaries in the Middle East played in determining US diplomatic attitudes through the 20th century.

In any event, Power, Faith, and Fantasy continues to inform for another 120 pages but the tale is entirely familiar, if only in its litany of deaths by violence and misadventure. A grim tale, though well told.

And Finally

Oren has largely succeeded in creating a comprehensive history of America’s relations with the Middle East over the last 225 years. Verging on the encyclopedic, it makes its case that the themes of Power, Faith, and Fantasy are effective in organizing the story. Of the three, Fantasy is the most nebulous and therefore the least compelling. The American appetite for the adventurous and exotic has certainly seen expression in the Middle East. Whether it warrants promotion to the same league as commercial and religious interests is debatable.

Reading about Americans taking their faith really seriously is also a rather disconcerting. Our own era is filled with folk who hold their views deeply unless they might conflict with someone else’s. The self-confidence (if not the self-sacrifice) of American missionaries, explorers, and merchants certainly seems like ancient history.

Who’s best served by this book? An intelligent high school student or undergraduate, most certainly. A general reader needing a reference work (and a reference to other references) can’t go wrong. Power, Faith, and Fantasy is hardly a leisure read but I did find it compelling enough to make it through from beginning to end (paying some overdue library fines in the process).

Nor can I claim enough background to critique the content in detail. I’m sure experts in each country, and each time period, would have nits to pick. Oren manages to be pretty even-handed by taking people at their word, but avoiding any attempt to gloss over events as being the “fault” of one side or the other. Choosing his themes, he can work with the realist, idealist, and populist branches of history to good effect.

In fact, reading Michael Oren’s book has whetted my appetite to re-read WR Mead’s Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed The World. Little wonder that Mead himself provides a glowing back cover blurb. Oren mines the same rich vein of common sense by relating key American appetites (usually contradictory) to the vagaries of history.

Oren fares less well when he’s required to provide bridging text between the periods of history he describes. His attempts to cast the reader’s mind to earlier periods by drawing parallels are painful to read. His history is great. His poetry and metaphor can perhaps be left to one side.

As for the author’s ability to form a conclusion about his subject, it certainly felt at times that he knew the Middle East better than America. The American link to British values established during the Glorious Revolution is skipped because of his self-imposed outline. But if you think that American values in 1776 sprung out of the head of Zeus, you miss much of the frame of mind that Americans evidenced till well into the 20th century. Iceland and Cornwall had plenty of experience with Barbary corsairs before Americans were being enslaved in the late 18th century. It seems a fact worth noting. American Protestantism is not exclusively an American story. Reconciling the values of liberty and security have been the Anglosphere struggle for many centuries. Americans have lived out their best hopes, and worst fears, through their vulnerabilities of commerce and the passions of their spirituality, much as their British ancestors. The British role in the Middle East from 1800 onward can certainly be cast as nefarious, but do we see any parallels between British faith and American faith at the time? It’s not a question answered in this book.

The role of America as victim, partner, teacher, doctor, father, and fixer in the Middle East extends far back beyond our personal recollections. It should give us pause when judging current efforts. Americans were trying to convince 19th Egyptians that impaling their rebellious peasants on fence-posts was counter-productive. They’ve been well-meaning, relentless, self-absorbed, and ultimately more and more powerful throughout the centuries. American power, faith, and fantasy are still at play in the Middle East and the history of those themes, and their depth, is important to consider when reading the papers or a news website.

Oren quotes Philip Roth: "History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable." We may not be able to anticipate the unexpected but Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy gives us some hope we can predict some inevitable factors in play for America in that troubled land.

Table of Contents
======================

Prologue: A Passage to Glory [3]
Introduction: Recovering a Pivotal Past [9]

Part One: Early America Encounters the Middle East
1. A Mortal and Mortifying Threat [17]
2. The Hostile and Ethereal Orient [41]
3. A Crucible of American Identity [51]
4. Illuminating and Emancipating the World [80]

Part Two: The Middle East and Antebellum America
5. Confluence and Conflict [101]
6. Manifest Middle Eastern Destiny [122]
7. Under American Eyes [149]

Part Three: The Civil War and Reconstruction
8. Fission [177]
9. Rebs and Yanks on the Nile [190]
10. The Trumpet That Never Calls Retreat [210]
11. American Onslaught [228]
12. Resurgence [246]

Part Four: The Age of Imperialism
13. Empire at Dawn [257]
14. Imperial Piety [273]
15. Imperial Myths [297]
16. A Region Renamed and Reordered [307]

Part Five: America, The Middle East, and the Great War
17. Spectators of Catastrophe [325]
18. Action or Nonaction? [340]
19. An American Movement is Born [351]
20. Arise, O Arabs, and Awake! [367]
21. The First Middle East Peace Process [376]
22. Fantasies Revived [398]

Part Six: Oil, War, and Ascendancy
23. From Bibles to Drill Bits [407]
24. An Insoluble Conflict Evolves [420]
25. A Torch for the Middle East [446]
26. The Middle East and the Man from Missouri [475]

Part Seven: In Search of Pax Americana
27. Harmony and Hegemony [505]
28. The Thirty Years' War [550]
Epilogue: A Profound and Visceral Gratitude [595]

But as enjoyable as these aspects are, other people could, and in fact have written about them. What makes the book unique, and uniquely valuable, is watching Barone tease out the very roots of the partisan electoral politics at which he is master. For it was in the run-up to the Revolution of 1688 (traditionally, the "Glorious" Revolution, unless you are an Irish Catholic) that the electoral pattern to which Americans and Britons (and Canadians and Australians, and now many others) have become acustomed, first emerged. As Barone put it, that was the point in history when Parliament became an institution, expected to meet continuously, rather than an event called for a specific time and for a specific purpose.

As the King's party, which became known as the Tories, and the constitutionalist opposition, which became known as the Whigs, became coherent national entities, they learned to fight elections, both Parliamentary and local, as part of a concerted national campaign, contested by networks of local activists using a coherent nationwide strategy, message, and communications channels. In the two decades prior to 1688, virtually every phenomenon of modern electoral politics could be discerned, at least in embryo. Even modern bloggers were presaged by the network of pamphleteers on both sides, mostly vicious, libellous, and highly partisan rumor-mongers. Sound familiar? Even sock-puppetry was not unknown.

Barone, whose political reportage in the US is unmatched, covers the Parliamentary elections in the run-up to 1688 almost as a contemporary election, and very effectively. You can almost imagine yourself in one of the partisan coffeehouses in London that served as informal political headquarters, waiting for the election results to come in from the countryside -- not exactly instant results, but quicker than the resolution of the 2000 Presidential election! What is interesting is how, once partisan electioneering become the standard, the system's dynamics were so similar to contemporary elections, despite the great differences in society from then to now. Of course the franchise was limited to the minority of males who met the property qualifications, but the system still functioned, within these limits, in a recognizable manner.

Looking at the patchwork of qualifications in the different constituencies that elected members of Parliament, one is reminded of the current American presidential primary systems -- each state different, some with a broad franchise, where any voter can participate; others more limited, where only previously-registered party members can vote; still others, the "caucus" states, where only party activists can participate. Yet lack of uniformity is just accepted and worked with, as the first parties in the seventeenth century worked within their own limitations and irregularities.

The one area in which I would have liked to have seen a deeper discussion was the issue of the larger context of Catholic-Protestant rivalry throughout Europe. Although Barone is right about the extent of the Counter-Reformation's successes by the time of the Stuart succession crisis, and the resultant siege mentality this produced in Britain and the Netherlands, in fact the religious wars were over at that point.  The Catholic Church had essentially reconsolidated itself within the limes of the Western Roman Empire, and although it was always hopeful of further progress against Protestantism, it was not actively pushing it.  The Vatican, in fact, was primarily concerned with preventing France from gaining hegemony within the Catholic world and thus establishing the dominance of civil power over churchly affairs -- from what we now know, they were very justified in doing so.  Thus the Vatican saw James II as a French pawn and preferred his defeat -- which is why the Pope ordered a Te Deum sung when King Billy prevailed at the Boyne -- a fact not always well-known in contemporary Northern Ireland.

The Protestants in England and Scotland were viewing the situation through the lens of 1588, and so were really boxing with historical ghosts. It was not that there wasn't a real danger of extinction of Parliamentary government -- but that danger stemmed from the new post-Renaissance centralist ideology of "benevolent" despotism. Ironically, Phillip II of Spain, the master of the Armada, had actually been reasonably observant of English constitutionalism when he had been in England as consort to Mary -- far more so than a Stuart raised in a Bourbon court might have eventually been. The conflict of 1588 was a religious struggle waged on a constitutional pretext -- the legitimacy of Elizabeth's succession to the throne. The conflict of 1688 was a constitutional struggle with a religious pretext -- James's Catholicism. This is the difference a hundred years made.

This boxing with historical ghosts seems to be a generic Anglosphere bug.  The American revolutionaries were similarly attributing to George III the ambitions of James II, which was just absurd, although the Quebec Act seemed on the surface like a parallel to James's use of the Irish to buttress his power vis-a-vis Parliament.  Ironically the English constitutionalist objection to the American assertions of autonomy for their legislatures recalled James's triangulation of the English, Scottish, and Irish parliaments to reclaim power for himself.  Both sides in the American war of independence were thus claiming the Revolution's mantle.

For the American reader, the big payoff is at the end, where Barone makes it clear how much the events of 1688 overhung the events of 1776 and 1789. Imagine if you will that the states of the American South attempted to secede from the Union tomorrow. No matter what the causes, it would be impossible for the legacy of 1861-65 not to overhang our perception of such an event and color our views of it. Now consider that the American Civil War happpened almost a century and a half ago. Then recall that in 1776, the Glorious Revolution was a mere 88 years in the past. A long-lived man or woman in that year could have related firsthand childhood memories of the events. Perhaps some Minutemen in Boston were able to hear an ancient relate, firsthand, the memories of the Boston crowd confronting James II's appointee, Edmund Andros, as Hawthorne later imagined it. Certainly most adults had heard their parents' or grandparents' accounts of the Glorious Revolution and its events in America, and it was that Revolution that was taken as the model for our own; its battle-cries and slogans borrowed, its Bill of Rights evoked and later imitated.

Barone's book comes as a welcome addition, in this four-hundredth anniversary of the Anglosphere's planting in America, and the three-hundredth anniversary of the first of the four great Unions of the Anglosphere, of the new and growing realization of the essential continuity and identity of the Anglosphere's culture and politics.

[cross-posted on chicagoboyz]

The Ghost Map is a retelling of the events and consequences of a famous outbreak of cholera in Golden Square Soho, London in the late summer of 1854. As a result of dogged investigation by a polymath doctor (Dr. John Snow) and a gregarious Anglican assistant curate (Dr. Henry Whitehead), the ultimate cause of cholera was pinpointed, and practical steps were taken to contain the disease. Because the cholera bacteria was too small to see in the microscopes of the day, the efforts to control the disease were not only constrained by the tools of science but also by the competing theories of disease etiology (causation).

The major competitor at the time was the "miasmic" or "bad air" theory ... bad smells were the basis of disease. Johnson opens his book with a detailed and hair-raising chapter on how the Victorian city of London managed the feeding and waste management for two million closely packed humans. Suffice it to say, people got their hands "dirty" ... and conducted daily animal slaughter and recycling on a scale, and at a level of detail, that would put the modern industrialized world to shame. The humble and poor of the London would have quickly recognized the lives of garbage-pickers in Mexico City or Mumbai, however. Pity for a moment, those designated to collect each day's supply of dog excrement on the London streets, recycled for use in the tanning industry. Nothing was wasted ... in a way that would make any Hollywood Indian proud.

The cholera bacteria normally feeds on plankton, and the latter requires light for survival. Under ordinary conditions, cholera should little affect human populations because it is not concentrated enough to trigger disease on ingestion. In crowded city conditions, however, where concentrations of cholera in the runny stools of the sick can find easy transport to fresh water sources, and in turn new hosts, the cholera bacteria can rapidly evolve into terrifyingly lethal strains. The result is colonization of the intestinal track, rapid shedding of the mucosal lining, a constant evacuation. Such a vicious strain formed in the bowels of a single sturdy Soho infant. As the dehydration and slow decline of the baby took hold, the mother emptied the messy diapers into a basement cess pool, which happened to be but a few feet from the casings around the well water of Broad Street, London. Cross-contamination occurred. As the baby suffered out of sight in the tenement building, the locals outside were pumping the much prized Broad Street water for their families in the surrounding streets. The water also made its way out of London to those who particularly prized its taste and clarity. Some folk began dying within hours of drinking the water. Others took days to die. A few survived. Many others fled the small section of Soho, shuttering stores and homes as the spectre of cholera, and its unknown source spread fear and heartbreak through Golden Square. The pump continued to supply a fresh, but dwindling, supply of cholera bacteria to the community.

As Johnson notes, imagine if you took a weekend trip and returned home to find 10% of your neighbours dead and the death carts making their way down the streets, carrying them to their graves. Such was the Broad Street cholera epidemic. Certainly not "London's most terrifying epidemic" as the book's subtitle would claim. London was used to waves of epidemic disease, including the plague, throughout its two thousand years of existence. But the hundreds who died on Broad Street in the mid-19th century were to have an out-sized impact on our world and on urban history of the planet.

Part of the myth surrounding the events of the epidemic is the removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump by the Board of Governors of the local parish. Over the course of the next few days, the incidence of cholera in the community dwindled and finally halted. Apocryphal tradition claims that the waterborne theory of cholera transmission was proven that day. The reality is far more complex, and it is that complexity that makes The Ghost Map a fascinating and worthwhile read.

As mentioned, Johnson begins his book with the "status quo ante" picture of London waste management. Building up a day by day description of the progress of the disease through Golden Square (house by house, family by family), he interleaves the biographies of the principal protagonists of the Broad Street story. Surprisingly, the Broad Street cholera epidemic is more a pivot point of the larger subject of cholera control rather than genesis. Dr. John Snow had written on the disease before the epidemic, and it was some years later before his efforts (along with those of curate Whitehead) were to have an impact on the medical community.

Ironically, it was the appearance of the London Great Stink of June 1858 which was to have the biggest impact ... the Thames had become so foul that Westminster and the Houses of Parliament were uninhabitable. Clearly, miasmic theory of disease dictated that Londoners should experience a wave of disease. Yet all they were doing was gagging on the smell. The Stink triggered a massive investment in waterworks and sewage treatment which was to consume London for years, and reroute London's waste away from the Thames (or at least far downstream to where ocean tides could move the sewage out to sea).

With the miasm theory on the ropes, a second cholera epidemic in June 1866 in a different part of London encouraged the public health officials of the time to examine the water supply, and indeed to engage the services of Dr. Whitehead (Dr. Snow having died earlier of a stroke). Sure enough, using the methods made famous in our era by institutions like the CDC, the investigators were able to track back the spread of cholera to the East London Water Company's supply fouled at its source by nearby sewage, and piped promptly down to London homes and businesses. From that day forward, London paid a great deal of attention to the purity and construction of its water supply ... and was unaffected by subsequent cholera epidemics which swept through the Continent in the late 19th century.

Other cities around the world took note. A particularly savage cholera epidemic in Chicago in the 1880s triggered an equally dramatic public works project to separate drinking supplies and waste handling. As cities around the world followed London's model, the incidence of cholera dropped away from the experience of industrialized nations. Today, cholera is a Third World disease, and often a companion of war ... as an outbreak in Basra, Iraq in 2003 highlighted.

The Ghost Map is very strong in its careful description of the Broad Street epidemic, scraping away the public health myths and over-generalizations that have accumulated in the last 150 years, revealing in its place a story that is just as compelling, just as amazing. Snow's innovative use of street maps and diagramming to track the spread and results of the disease were to gain high praise from no less than Edward Tufte, 20th century guru of visual communication. And Curate Whitehead's deep compassion and intimate knowledge of the families in Soho was to be critical in allowing doctor and cleric to track down the origin and dispersal of cholera, family by family, in the months after the outbreak. Publishing their careful investigations, they met with indifference. As time passed, however, their approach and its results gained more and more prestige until their work at the turn of the 20th century was acknowledged as ground-breaking and exalted as one of the first steps in the modern advance against communicable disease. Their information was a key link in the efforts to change urban planning and construction into our own time.

Having told the story of Broad Street so well, admittedly with a bit of obligatory tut-tutting about class consciousness in 19th century London, Johnson turns more briefly to tackle the larger issue of what large, and relatively healthy, city life has wrought in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Here he falls back on more familiar authors of urban life such as Jane Jacobs, and he makes the case that the dramatic urbanization of world population in the last century is, in fact, the most "eco-friendly" way that we could occupy the planet. The concentration of humans allow economies of scale and distance that reduce energy consumption and optimize the very waste-handling and city infrastructure pioneered by the London engineers of the 1860s and 1870s.

He also notes how the success of Snow and Whitehead was very much about the sharing of information across the lines of class and profession. Turning to his own experience with the "311" service in New York City, he describes how the interaction of diverse urban communities with city government leads to a pooling of critical information and flexibility in response to crisis. The has the shape, indirectly and without acknowledgement, of a strong Wisdom of Crowds or Army of Davids argument.

As for our own time, Johnson makes an very interesting point about the challenges of communicable disease like avian flu or SARS. The evolution of scientific knowledge about the genetic level of life is progressing so rapidly that it can even out-compete the pace of natural selection in the bacterial and viral words. Those tiny and occasionally deadly entities must respond to human hosts in "reproductive time" while modern medicine is, a la Ray Kurzweil, now beginning to compete at "computational and chemical time." For Johnson, the window of our global vulnerability to epidemic disease will probably last for another decade or two, and then fall away. Science (and associated surveillance methods) will simply be able to move faster than the bugs.

The secondary challenge of artificially manufactured disease organisms, or bio-warfare, offers greater danger than the natural world but there too, Johnson feels fairly confident that science will increasing provide the tools for counteracting novel disease organisms. Maybe.

Finally, and in a way that seems rather more idiosyncratic to his own interests and background, Johnson makes a case for the ongoing danger of nuclear and radiological weapons. Here, he believes, science and technology do not work in our favour. There is no protection from a nuclear event, though medicine may ameliorate its impact. True enough. And true enough in 1950. In this arena, I believe our protections are political rather than scientific ... cause enough for worry, I suppose, if one believes that global politics isn't subject to rapid change.

Finally, it wouldn't be a recent book by an American science writer if there wasn't an obligatory swipe at Intelligent Design and the backwardness of Christian folk in accepting Darwinian principles. The great irony, of course, is that Johnson's book is written around the critical role that the exceptional compassion of a 19th century Anglican curate played in changing global health. Much like the latest round of breast-beating that greeted the anniversary of the role of the British in ending the slave trade, there's a comfortable blindness to the impact of Anglosphere Protestantism on the improvement of the lot in life of millions of the poor, most now who don't worship Christ. One would like to think that the fundamental values of Christianity will reconcile themselves eventually with the powerful good that can come from scientific understanding. And for those hunting for historical factoids in support of Christianity's positive role on human history, Dr. Whitehead in Soho in 1854 is a pretty good find. "By their fruits shall ye know them."

Here again, I think of the story of humble people in London, one hundred and fifty years before the Broad Street cholera epidemic, attempting to make sense of Newton's Principia (with the initial support of Anglican clerics!) and building a dynamic industrial and scientific community in the markets, coffee houses, and workingman's institutes of the city (reviewed in the book Practical Matter on chicagoboyz). Maybe it was just chance that led two Britons of modest origins, such as Snow and Whitehead, to have such a big impact on human history. Chance that somehow keeps showing up in the UK history, however, and latterly (with the Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug or the Rotary Club's role in the global eradication of polio) in places like America. As Johnson so eloquently writes, in most histories the great men take pride of place. In the story of Broad Street, and its impact subsequent human history, the great are bystanders. And it is the poor, named and known only in tragedy, who provide the grist for the tale told by investigators.

Professor Alan Macfarlane has written a fascinating book on the Origins of English Individualism but we've yet to have a scholar write a book for the general public on the impact of English Individualism over the last four centuries ... there's just too much of it, I suspect. The Ghost Map is a great example of the topic, approached inadvertently.

Taking Stock

Steven Johnson is an excellent writer so his book is a very enjoyable read just on style points alone. While his confidence in handling the material sometimes strays into smugness and political correctness, he provides a great service in revisiting the specifics of the Broad Street cholera epidemic. Progress toward the suppression of cholera was halting and delayed, even after its waterbourne origins were carefully described. But the many tangents and implications of those few fearful summer days in Victorian London create a context for the story that's deeply compelling.

If you have a teenager interested in the health or biological sciences, this is an ideal choice for birthday or holiday gift. Your search is over.

If you have a precocious middle schooler, you can open up a wealth of discussion on the topics of society, health, and "olde times" with this book. The "Ewwww" factor alone, in the introductory section on Victorian London's recycling, should keep boys fully engaged until the story grips them.

For an undergraduate in the sciences, here's the beach reading that will educate them, fascinate, and distract them from their schoolwork. And for the general reader of nonfiction, if the subject matter seems at all interesting, you'll really enjoy this book.

Table of Contents
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Monday, August 28 The Night-Soil Men [1]
Saturday, September 2 Eyes Sunk, Lips Dark Blue [25]
Sunday, September 3 The Investigator [57]
Monday, September 4 That is to Say, Jo has Not Yet Died [81]
Tuesday, September 5 All Smell is Disease [111]
Wednesday, September 6 Building the Case [139]
Friday, September 8 The Pump Handle [159]
Conclusion The Ghost Map [191]
Epilogue Broad Street Revisited [231]

[cross-posted at chicagoboyz]

While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men -- the so-called hikikomori (literally, "pulling away, being confined"). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms -- from friends, family, career, and society in general -- for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.

In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn't appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV"). Its particular set of symptoms didn't appear in Western countries, nor in Japan's Asian neighbours. Japan's increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country's economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.

The hikikomori vary in age and behaviour. Some begin their retreat in middle school. Others begin in high school. Some have the confidence to come out of their homes in the middle of the night and roam empty city streets. Others remain completely isolated in their bedrooms for decades ... with the essentials of life provided by embarrassed and anxious parents. These aren't the recluses or shy geeks familiar to Western culture. Nor are they agoraphobics, functioning well in their own homes but hesitant to step outdoors. The hikikomori haven't jumped to take advantage of phones or the Internet to establish social networks, as they've become available. Instead, they have chosen the one course that Japanese society provides young men to become asocial. Their families, deeply ashamed and disoriented, simply hide the hikikomori from the outside world: feeding, clothing, and providing for them. In their isolation, these young men read, sleep, daydream ... and deepen their estrangement from modern Japan.

Some hikikomori are helped by antidepressants, but during Zielenziger's extensive interviews with these boys and men, it became clear that they weren't so much delusional or depressed as deeply lost. They felt anxiety over their inability to fit into Japanese society, and at some point simply gave up trying to do so. Yet the nature of Japanese culture means that they didn't have the social or mental tools to establish an independent identity, to strike off in a different direction within Japan. They were bound to their families and neighbours for identity, yet deeply resented that same identity. Answering the question "what do I want?" seems impossible for them.

In many cases, the hikikomori were subjected to bullying in school by both students and teachers, a common trigger for initial retreat from public. In the West, bullying is seen as an aberration of the schoolyard but in Japan, it can persist for years and continue into the work environment. In tune with Japanese society generally, parents respond to that bullying with a "blame the victim" attitude -- what had the boy done to trigger the bullying? As a result, the hikikomori can come to distrust their parents. Most hikikomori are, by Zielenziger's account, estranged completely from their fathers, reflecting the distant role of fathers in many modern Japanese families. Occasionally, the hikikomori can even be violent with one or both parents.

Ironically, because Zielenziger was a foreigner, the hikikomori found it easier to talk about their experiences with him. The burden of "fitting in" was lifted when speaking to an American. Indeed, some of the hikikomori had found relief from their loneliness and inertia by visiting foreign countries. Some of the most poignant parts of Zielenziger's book relate the discussions he had with these young people. They assumed that, as an American, he would have unique words of wisdom that would give them a direction or orientation out of their loneliness and isolation. But the internal compass heading that most Western kids are encouraged to develop with toddler-hood can't be conveyed mechanically to the adolescents and young adults of Japan. Zielenziger seemed to be able to give temporary solace to the hikikomori with his very presence, and his writing is filled with real sympathy, but he didn't have a magical solution for these individuals, any more than their counsellors and physicians.

Shutting Out the Sun began as a Western journalist following up a curious bit of Japanese sociology. As Zielenziger looked further, and sought root causes for the appearance of the hikikomori, he began to see very different patterns of social stress evident in the behaviour of young Japanese women. Yet another round of research let him see how more elderly men and women in Japan deal with current social realities. Considering these social behaviours separately, and then as a set, he began to see a common theme.

Japan's tremendous leap in material prosperity, based upon a culture that emphasizes "fitting it" demands a psychological price from the individual. In the end, Shutting Out the Sun becomes a detective story about the nature of Japanese society ... its unique and rapid adoption of industrialization in the late 19th century ... and its new challenge to harmonize a prosperous nation with a culture that has placed little emphasis on individuation.

[...] in Japan, there is no God but the 'ie,'[household] and no one to judge but the group. "Westerners have a long history of becoming individuals, and you have established how to create relations with others. But we don't share that experience in Japan ... I often think that our challenge now as Japanese is to come up with a new way to become individuals without relying on Christianity. [Hayao Kawai, President of Association of Japanese Clinical Psychology] p.70

Zielenziger summarizes the structure of his book in this way:

In this book, rather than focus primarily on politics or economics, my aim is to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within. First I examine the plight of the hikikomori, the young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society. After looking into their lives and those of their parents and caregivers, I explore the history and culture in which their tragic stories are embedded to approach some explanation for Japan's contemporary social deadlock. Then I examine a cluster of behaviours that seem more familiar to Western readers: the fixation on consumerism and brand names in the search for identity; women's painful lives and their reluctance to wed and have babies; and, finally, the high incidence of suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Then, I broaden the view to see how Japan stacks up against its closest neighbor and rival, South Korea. ... Finally, I speculate on how Japan's own survival strategy may come to resemble those of the hikikomori who negate themselves and their adulthood, and shut out the sun of vigorous self-affirmation and moral purpose. p.12

As mentioned above, Zielenziger's curiosity was piqued by the hikikomori, and a substantial part of the book focuses on their shared attributes. As he talked to the hikikomori and their parents, it became clear that the government and the Japanese health care system were largely uninvolved in trying to explain or ameliorate their behaviour.

Unlike Americans, Japanese don't naturally organize themselves into health-related pressure groups to draw attention to issues like this. (For years, Japan's disabled quietly accepted their third-class status.) In contrast to the nation's [page break] dense and intense economic networks, its social networks -- its tentacles of charitable and civic organizations -- are far less robust and efficacious. Only within the past half-decade, since 1998, has Japan enacted new rules permitting nonprofit organizations to incorporate without formal government approval, but contributions to nongovernmental organizations are still not tax deductible. p.44

Without a discrete civic response to the issue, and with general indifference on the part of the society as a whole, the phenomenon of the hikikomori has largely been ignored. What programs there are, at least seen in Zielenziger's description, seem ad hoc and often assembled by volunteers or psychology professionals who would, themselves, be considered oddballs in Japanese society. Creating a safe physical environment, sparing use of antidepressants, and the establishment of undemanding group interaction show some evidence of success with hikikomori. The pattern of hikikomori behaviour doesn't seem very amenable to purely pharmaceutical treatment, however, and the whole area of mental health therapy and clinical psychology is uniquely underdeveloped in Japan because of the dominance of the medical profession -- Japanese doctors benefit financially when prescribing drugs. Ironically, it's very difficult to get pharmaceuticals approved in Japan (introduction of the birth control pill and its variants was delayed for years) though the author notes that Viagra, and many antidepressants, were successfully "fast-tracked." Without an easy pharmaceutical fix available for hikikomori behaviour, the broader society has many incentives to simply turn away.

Escape to Shopping - How Young Japanese Women Cope

Part way through the book, after considering the specifics of hikikomori experience, and introducing the reader to the features of Japanese society which make addressing the issue difficult or impossible, Zielenziger introduces us to the role of Louis Vuitton (and brand obsession, generally) in Japan.

He had a chance to attend the opening of a flagship Louis Vuitton store in Japan and speak with the management. The store was huge, even by comparison with the corporation's French HQ. For Vuitton, and its managing director, it was a big financial risk but one that became possible after Japanese economic turndown in the 90s reduced local land prices. Vuitton has many smaller stores across Japan, and the prestige of a massive new store was meant to boost the sales and visibility of its entire chain. Young Japanese lined up for hours for the opportunity to buy limited-run handbags, other leather goods, and accessories. Despite the luxury prices, the enthusiastic clientele were by no means rich. They were largely lower and middle class Japanese -- saving for long periods to afford specific items - and avidly reading magazines about upcoming products. Zielenziger interviewed some of the young shoppers and found an almost talismanic worship of Vuitton's product line. He interprets such consumerism as a search for personal worth and authenticity. Not unusual per se in the modern world, but Zielenziger feels that the passion expressed in Japan for such products is beyond that normally seen in young people around the industrialized world. In Japan, it is a fundamental need to identify and authenticate through brand objects. In the rest of the world, Vuitton is admired but seen as only for the well-to-do. But the upper classes don't line up around the block in the rest of the world to await a store opening.

Many of those fervent Vuitton shoppers are the so-called parasaito singles … a generation of young Japanese women foregoing marriage and children for a life with fewer burdens and restrictions. Living at home, without obligations to care for children or obey mothers-in-law, they are young women with both free time and money, a first in Japanese history. Able to gain independence of a kind, avoid the tremendous expense of Japanese accommodation and child education, and skip the psychological isolation of a home life without a spouse, these Japanese women have found a way to escape the system to better effect than the hikikomori. Nonetheless, the cost to Japanese society may be just as significant.

In Zielenziger's account, the role of women in Japan is still rather grim by comparison with the West. Women are entirely responsible for child care but are deeply isolated once that child enters school. Infantilization of children, and a deep dependency of children on their mother continues until age 6. This creates unusually close mother-child connections but can also create dependency and control issues in later life. Women are also responsible for elder-care, of their parents and the husband's.

A mother is held responsible for a child's educational success. Despite government attempts to limit the hours Japanese children are at school, a whole new wave of "cram schools" keep kids at their desks memorizing facts from a very early age, well beyond the hours of public school. It is the mother's task to manage the logistics and coercion of such an educational treadmill. Meanwhile, husbands may spend the majority of their time during the work week entirely absent from the home. And spend the weekends sleeping, to recuperate.

Because of the structure of the Japanese economy, single motherhood is a financial and social impossibility. Abortion is a common method of contraception and family planning. Relations between the sexes within marriage can be rather hollow. Intimacy of any kind must survive many countervailing forces. Facing an unappealing future as wife and mother, young women have simply opted not to marry, not to have children, and in many cases, to have relatively little to do with men.

The glass ceiling is still very much in effect for Japanese women at Japanese corporations though the situation is apparently somewhat better at foreign-owned companies. The joys of shopping, especially for brand goods that might cast reflected status and glory, has become a vital source of happiness in the absence of alternatives.

[...]as Yamada and I talked, he seemed to envy Europeans and Americans for being able to escape from the powerful grasp of materialism through some form of spiritual practice -- whether through fundamentalist Christianity or twice-weekly yoga training, it didn't really matter. This private, personal search helps energize the individual and infuse his existence with meaning. Japanese, however, seem to have no such recourse. "In order to fill the void:" between worldliness and true inner peace, Yamada said, "all [we Japanese] can do is read manga, take trips abroad, or go shopping. It's awful. Shopping becomes an addiction, a tranquilizer." p.157

Zielenziger introduces the term "homosocial society" to describe day-to-day reality for many Japanese women ... and illustrates it with an image that contrasts dramatically with Western industrialized nations:

If you take a weekend stroll through Ebisu Garden Palace, or any of a dozen other modern Tokyo shopping centers, you will see what the anthropologists who label Japan's society "homosocial" really mean. You will find shops and cafes filled with smartly dressed women, eating Italian panini, sorting through Fendi scarves, or lining up for a matinee performance at the movie theatre. But -- unlike the scene in a typical American suburban shipping mall on a Saturday afternoon -- you will see almost no men. Of the people visible, 90 percent will be women, with only a handful of couples. Rarer still would be a man and a woman strolling together with their child.

Where is Dad? He is either at home sleeping, recovering from a stressful week at work and the after-work "drinking meetings" that are inseparable from his duties; or at the golf course, playing with his bosses or entertaining clients. Statistical surveys show that "sleeping" consistently ranks as the most popular weekend pastime of Japanese men. According to family counselors, most Japanese fathers devote little attention to their children. p.187

To accommodate the increasing reluctance of Japanese women to get married and have kids, a small number of Filipino women have married Japanese men and raised families. The roles of the sexes continue however, and Zielenziger briefly recounts his conversations with Filipino women living in Japan who are very lonely and unhappy. Their Japanese in-laws are content with the situation. But they aren't.

Affluent Japan needs to make social changes that better balance gender responsibilities, and place less emphasis on work for the sake of work. But that's easier said than done.

Suicide and Alcohol

After considering the role of young women in Japanese society, and the abandonment of marriage and family by the "parasaito singles," Zielenziger moves on, rather more briefly, to the sociology of depression, suicide, and alcoholism in Japan. Tales of Japanese sararimen being overworked to the point of death (karoshi), of train stations re-designed to stop men from leaping in front of the trains, and of vomit-strewn subway stations at midnight are familiar enough to those who've read about Japan during the last few decades.

Less commonly known, since the Japanese economic turmoil and stagnation of the 1990s, is the shift in suicide demographics. Suicide is primarily a male enterprise, but is now an adult rather than just adolescent preoccupation in Japan. In the face of reduced economic vistas, and a society that offers limited ways to be different and happy, suicide relieves the individual of the burden of social expectation. The potential loss of seniority or loss of a job places pressure on a Japanese individual that's literally unbearable. The response of Japanese society to such events is largely "it can't be helped."

Long before a suicide occurs, depression has made an appearance. The struggle to cope with years of depression without appearing different to one's neighbours and colleagues is common throughout the industrialized world. To do so in a Japanese context appears particularly daunting.

The role of alcohol in creating a safe social space for interaction between Japanese co-workers is also widely known. For some workers, the obligation to drink long into the night with colleagues, to never turn down a drink offered by a boss, creates a cycle of fatigue and depression that is overwhelming. As mentioned earlier, men often spend their weekends recuperating from long hours of work and drink during the work week. The pressure to work long hours and never take personal vacation time is only overcome by a recent national focus on statutory holidays ... everyone must stop work, and therefore everyone can, without fear of losing their job.

Regrettably, individuals caught in the trap of work-related alcohol consumption face the twin dangers of physical disintegration and burgeoning alcoholism. In an attempt to create an environment of social ease and community, yet another burden has been placed on the individual.

Having inventoried the stress that men and women face in Japanese society, Zielenziger takes a closer look at the issue of trust, and whether Japan's cohesive and productive society can really be described as high-trust.

Trust and the Individual's Challenge in Society

Academic Robert D. Putnam has noted the distinction between northern and southern Italians which translates well into the Japanese setting. Zielenziger bridges the two:

In districts of southern Italy such as Umbria and Sicily, by contrast, social and cultural life remains relatively threadbare. Politics there is somebody else's job to take care of. Laws are made to be broken. Fearing others' lawlessness, citizens demand sterner discipline. "Trapped in these interlocking vicious circles, nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy," Putnam has found. This lack of civic engagement made it harder for southern Italians to form guilds or mutual aid associations that might have led to wider prosperity.

Another political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, argues that "trust" --- as contrasted to what he calls "familism"-- generates wealth. Rich countries exhibit higher levels of social trust than poor ones, he thinks, and Japan's prosperity results from "networks based on moral obligation ... Something in the Japanese culture makes it very easy for one person to incur a reciprocal obligation over extended periods of time," he writes, without [pagebreak] ever defining what this "something" might be. Because it is prosperous, he says, Japan must be a highly trusting society like the United States." p.134-135

The Japanese networks I encountered each day -- the keiretsu of bank and manufacturing groups, or the tribal-like zoku of special interests within political parties -- do not bear out Fukuyama's argument. ... These networks -- closed, confined, and exclusive, as they are based on pre-existing relationships --- are not "trusting." They do not readily accommodate outsiders. They tend to be impenetrable and controlling, not open and sharing. They husband and broker information instead of distributing it, and use their internally created confidences to gain advantage over members of rival groups. Organized into rigid vertical hierarchies, various branches within the same company or ministry often refuse to even share information with one another. For example, the Japanese once hired a French hydrologist's firm to custom-build a water pollution control system, but would not share water samples that disclosed the precise nature of the pollutants the system should be designed to control. Even the contractor was an outsider, not part of the inside "network. p. 135

To Zielenziger, the co-operation of Japanese groups is different, in an important way, from the trust between individuals that might build a civic society of small-scale relationships.

Meanwhile, To The West

As part of his journalistic duties, Zielenziger was able to spend time in South Korea and talk to Korean scholars and health care providers to see if there was any parallel to the Japanese hikikomori in Korea. Apparently not. While occasional reclusive personalities are noted, nothing like the distinct pattern of retreat by young males exists. Some of this may well be due to the mandatory military service in Korea, beginning at 18, which provides both externalization and communal self-confidence to young Korean men.

Even more fascinating, Zielenziger gives us a brief historical summary of the role of Western Christian missionaries in Korea, beginning shortly after the opening of Japan in the late 1860s. Koreans were exposed early to a particularly American Protestant variant of medical care (hospitals for the poor) and public education (for women and the lower classes). Throughout the subsequent period of Japanese occupation, Korean Christians were seen as nationalists and modernists, and when Japan was defeated and the Korean War began, American Christian communities were major independent sources of food, clothing, and support for South Korea. These intellectual and material bonds sustained a Korean tradition of personal moral accountability. The process of shaking off the military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s was noticeably influenced by Christian Koreans and the deep-set idea of individual conscience. In the 90s, demands for reducing the influence of the chaebols (Korean business conglomerates) and increasing economic transparency were led yet again by political leaders well versed in the Western tradition of civil society.

Though Korea has struggled with more than its fair share of social turmoil (occupation, partition, military dictatorship, economic crisis), it has also defied the odds by creating a society that is increasingly responsive to citizen demands and global change, and increasingly prosperous. In fact, Korea is one of the few large nations that's a relative economic success story in the 20th century - making its way from the "lowlands" of per capita GDP to the "foothills" (see chicagoboyz review of Lewis' Power of Productivity). The Koreans actually improved their economic lot in comparison to the rest of the world in the last 50 years, unlike the Japanese, whose late 19th century economic boom had already set them apart from, and above, much of the world a century ago.

Like Japan, Korea has shown an ability to change its economic structure at a rapid pace. Unlike Japan, however, it also has made the shift to modernity in a way that lets its individuals create spheres of co-operation independent of government and broader society. The dynamism of Korean Presbyterian churches across western Canada, for example, is one of those cultural realities that brings Zielenziger's comments literally close to home.

Looking to the Future

If the Korea has chosen, or been able to choose, a path which avoids the plight of the hikikomori and the parasaito and the saririmen, Japan will be tackling these particular social issues on its own. There will be no other national model against which to judge itself, or to mimic, or with which it can work out a Japanese variation of a well-trod path. They'll be sorting these problems out themselves, without a playbook, and in quite unique circumstances.

Zielenziger:

Many things occur "only in Japan": that is, in their daily lives Japanese do many things that Westerners -- and even other Asians -- find slightly unusual. Take the many Japanese men who, to while away their long commutes to work, paw through thick manga or comic books, full of sadomasochistic violence without a hint of self-consciousness. Or the way businessmen bow respectfully when they speak to some invisible other on their mobile phones. Or the fact that long beyond infancy, many five- and six-year old children continue to sleep in the same bed with their parents.

Indeed, this obsession with appearance, with finding the right costume to wear out in the world seemed a direct expression of the modern Japanese's perilous quest to find identity. p. 151

The conclusion of Shutting Out the Sun focuses on the role of the United States in sustaining Japanese social isolation. The relationship has often been that of parent and child. From the forced opening of the American Black Ships in the 1860s to the devastation of the Second World War, to the artificially positive trading relationships of the post-War era, America has alternately disrupted and enabled the features of Japanese society.

In the last years of the twentieth century, an acid joke began circulating among Japan's intelligentsia: how, after years of being hectored by foreign competitors, most notably the United States, over its mercantilist trade polices and insular structure, "Japan bashing" had evolved into "Japan passing" and then into "Japan nothing." The joke insinuated that, while the attention of the Western world was turned elsewhere, especially toward China, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, Japan's prestige and global influence continued to wither away (In Japanese, the rhyming of the words bashingu, pashingu, noshingu only enhances the humor.) To me it seemed telling that the Japanese themselves were now describing their own once-prideful and glorious nation as one that might choose to stifle itself in seclusion, rather than seek to commingle more closely with the other cultures and economies of a shrinking globe."

To Zielenziger, Japanese society has made a trade-off at some level similar to the hikikomori - it is retreating from the world in many ways, yet deeply dependent upon it.

Relatively few Japanese permanently emigrate to foreign lands, and those who do abandon the mother islands choose to assimilate relatively rapidly into the culture of their new-found lands -- far more than say, Taiwanese- or Korean-Americans, for instance, who closely monitor events back home long after they have moved far away, and who choose, despite the great distance, [page break] to take an active role in home-country politics. Japanese-Americans quickly adopt an American lifestyle and sever almost all ties to the motherland, as if they immediately sense that, once departed, they may never be able to go home again. In addition, Japanese possess no universal religion or ideology to which citizens in other nations might easily relate.

A nation that cannot define itself clearly cannot hope to act in its rational self-interest. In periods marked by rapid social change, traditional identities dissolve and new ones must be forged. Yet for decades Japan was able to avoid this struggle for identity by immersing itself compulsively in its drive to catch up to the West, to makes its country, as opposed to its people, wealthy, to acquire products and an advanced lifestyle, and to mimic the consumption patterns it witnessed in foreign lands; to build the suburban towns, golf courses, and strip malls that seemed to bespeak a sense of prosperity. When its economic miracle finally broke apart in the early 1990s, however, Japan found it could not settle the most fundamental questions regarding its own character. What should it hope to be? p.262

One could blame America for this continued isolation, for indulging an economic system that was evidently closed in its food, construction, and banking industries, with opaque traditions of corporate governance, and which provided a lop-sided export-driven prosperity that left its domestic interest groups unchallenged. Cold War convenience might be used as an excuse. Indifference, perhaps, as well. But Zielenziger is unconvinced.

To simply blame American intervention for Japanese modern disaffection and disengagement, however, is to let the Japanese themselves rather lightly off the hook. Murakami [controversial Japanese author] fails to acknowledge how the defects so deeply embedded within Japan's own cultural fabric make its people unable to articulate for themselves a new vision and new goals -- even spiritual ones -- after their tradition-bound culture began to give way and the American occupation ended. For even at the most granular and personal levels, Japanese have been schooled to look outside themselves -- at group and contextual norms, rather than at inner conscience -- as a means to define moral purpose. Without really understanding themselves, of course, the Japanese cannot hope to understand others. Yet rather than recognize and work to counteract their innate loneliness, Japanese seem to relish their singular inwardness -- or seem, at least, resigned to their solipsistic fate, unable to imagine a different future in which they might interact and share comfortably with outsiders. p.265

Summing Up

As befits a senior journalist paired with an excellent editor (the famed New Yorker, Nan Talese), Shutting out the Sun is smoothly written, well structured, and makes compelling use of interviews and anecdotes. This book tells a story through the exploration of the lives of ordinary Japanese, and the academics/professionals who are attempting to help them. I get the sense that Zielenziger was challenged by his publishing team to really build a "big picture" around the plaintive personal stories he gathered in Japan. He has succeeded in large part. The challenges of the hikikomori, the parasaito, and the emotionally distressed are placed within the broader context of Japanese society. It's a disturbing picture, and one with significant geopolitical implications as the 21st century proceeds.

It's even noteworthy that Zielenziger introduces his book by describing the mental health issues of the women in the Japanese Imperial Household (Empress Michiko, and more recently, Crown Princess