Tribes by David Lammy

Tribes by David Lammy promises much, delivers something, but ultimately fails to convince. Its problem lies in the very nature of its vision, not that this is wrong, misguided or anything less than laudable. This ultimate failure to convince, in fact, derives from the overall vision‘s inability to confront the very issues that the author identifies at the start.

David Lammy is a British politician, currently a member of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. In Tribes he attempts to evaluate the political landscape, beginning with a theoretical analysis of why class and other grander identities have become fragmented into what might seem to be smaller, interest-led groupings that he calls ‘tribes’. Many readers might expect this analysis to be developed, but instead the author pursues a personal reflection on some of the ideas raised. And, as the book progresses, the context becomes more personal still, before a final section attempts its rational, credible and, given what preceded, impossible finale. The approach renders the book very readable, but less than satisfying after its promise of theoretical discussion.

The author is a remarkable man. He was born to a Guyanese immigrant family in north London’s Tottenham, brought up by a single mother and then attended the cathedral choir school in Peterborough. London University preceded Harvard Law School, where he became the first black British graduate. In Silicon Valley he became a lawyer and then was elected as a Member of Parliament on behalf of the Labour Party. And then he was a government minister. These are just a few of the facts of this brilliant man’s life – thus far! His wife is white and his children are mixed race, whatever that means, since we are all mixed race, if we are human.

But in a quest for identity of the type that seems to obsess modern people, David Lammy sought out a DNA analysis. The results suggested a mix of origins, one of which linked to the Tuareg of the west African Sahel. The author spends much time and resources researching this link and then, as far as possible, experiencing it at first hand. Though ultimately this association is revealed as tenuous at best, perhaps even illusory, the author’s willingness and enthusiasm to pursue it illustrates a point he makes early on in the book, that identity nowadays seems more strongly felt on a personal rather than group basis. Except, of course, where the group has the ability to bolster and confirm the personal.

David Lammy introduces Maffesoli’s concept of neo-tribes, communities of feeling, to identify a contemporary trend of seeing one’s own personal identity purely in terms of a group identity. Thus, rational approaches to certain issues which, by the nature, are universal, become devalued as neo-tribes develop their own internal values and explanations. It is the fact that these are identity-conferring minority positions that provides the focus for the neo-tribe identity. Fragmentation in our social, economic and religious life fosters the replacement of universalism. This is a crucial point.

A few pages on and David Lammy identifies practically how this behaviour, even propensity, has been exploited by the political Right. He cites two successful electoral slogans - “Make America Great Again” and “Take Back Control”, to which might be added “Get Brexit Done” - as examples of labels that brought success to campaigns by exploiting group fears above rational arguments, thus defeating rational analyses that recognized, or at least attempted to recognize, the true complexity of the issues discussed. The slogans denied this complexity and offered an illusion of simple solutions. David Lammy persuasively illustrates how these simple emotive but inaccurate messages prevailed over the complex, unclear, yet accurate counter argument.

Still in the introduction, he quotes a survey that claims almost two thirds of UK voters still believe the oft-falsified claim that the country sends 350 million pounds a week to the European Union. David Lammy follows this by stating that there still exists a group of deluded individuals who think that Arsenal are the best football team in north London. By way of balance, I will remind him that about thirty-five years ago the philosopher AJ Ayer wrote that it ought to be impossible for a logical positivist to support Tottenham Hotspur. Joking aside, the author thus illustrates that once accepted by a neo-tribe, a falsehood can retain its own internal illusion of truth.

But people do support Arsenal and others Tottenham. They can’t both be right if they assert they follow the ‘best’ team. From the internally accepted values from within the group, however, they can both be right. Even a moment after chanting “what a load of rubbish” at their own team, such a tribe would unite if the same sentiment were to be expressed by the opposition. Welcome to the Conservative Party, which is forever internally divided, but externally as united as Stalin’s allies, until purged, then largely silent. And who cares if the message is irrational, impossible, implausible or even irrelevant? The tribe will back it to exclude others. And it works.

There is much in Tribes that it is rational, clearly expressed, credible and heartfelt. It is a superb snapshot of where British politics and society now reside, precariously in opposing camps, ideologically armed, but often not agreeing on a language where debate might happen, where sensible question is usually answered by an irrelevant, unrelated positive soundbite.

The book’s overarching message, however, is flawed, since by the end we have returned to the necessity of acknowledging and recognizing the complexities of real issues. We must trust our rationality and engage in the politics of discussion and debate. Global problems need global solutions. Working in isolation will foster failure. Messy international cooperation and thus, effectively, globalization is the only way out of local problems. The difficulty with such a laudable, deliverable and sensible analysis, however, is that it fails, repeatedly, in the face of soundbite slogans that seek and achieve short-term, but identity-giving non-solutions. Remember Vote for Victory?

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman is a deeply disturbing book. This scenario that unfolds around the life of its principal character and narrator, Harrison Opoku, always feels uncomfortably real. For the most part, these are scenes that inner-city dwellers pass every day, whilst the denouement, thankfully, is still rare, despite such events often appearing to be daily occurrences.

Harrison Opoku is eleven years old, secondary school year seven to British readers. He is into many things that interest inner-city kids. He is athletic and regularly tells us he is fast he is faster than most, especially when wearing his new branded trainers, if brand logos can be drawn on in felt tip, that is. We doubt, however, whether his assessment is based on more than a competitive dash to the next lamppost along a pavement containing just a few old ladies and gentlemen.

He is prone to the exaggeration of youth, with most experiences being the best, biggest, coolest in at least a million years. He is also prone to the novelty of youth, where the mundane is revealed as special. This is one of Stephen Kelman’s great achievements, in that one feels authentically inside the psyche of this near-pubescent boy without ever being forced into the experience.

Harri is competitive, regularly awarding points to himself in make-believe games that often involve such spectacular activities as spotting particular governments going around inside a Launderette machine. He lives in a tower block in a place that feels like London but could be anywhere in Britain. One does sense an oppressiveness, a claustrophobia pervading the thoughts of all concerned. Everything is local, to the extent that the end of the street is really quite distant.

Harrison Opoku, however, was not British born. He came from Ghana and still has vivid memories of his African family and their culture. To say he is a child of two worlds, or two cultures, however, would be a mistake. Harry lives his own life, the only life he has, and it comes with whatever amalgam of beliefs and cultures he has thus far assimilated. He is a black, African kid, it is true, but labelling him as such ignores the fact that the greatest influence on his life is the here and now. And the here and now is inner-city Britain.

He goes to school, where he meets some teachers who cope and some who do not. School is a priority, but it is well down the list, it seems. His friends and acquaintances largely attend the same institution and some of them can be trusted, whilst some of them can be trusted to shaft you. Some of them steal your dinner money. Some of them sell you drugs. Some of them prick you with compass points in the thigh to make you cry out in class and get into trouble. Some of them carry knives. And use them.

In this big anonymous city, Harry inhabits quite a small world. He has a crush on Poppy, whom he thinks might also have a crush on him. He never strays far from home, because that may be someone else’s territory, a different gang, who are likely to treat you like an immigrant. And there has been a problem. A boy is dead, stabbed, and the police have taped off the crime scene. But for Harri, what has happened is close to home, perhaps too close, and he resolves to solve the crime that currently baffles the police. He devises a strategy and plays at its enactment. This involves becoming an expert in fingerprinting, in making casts of footwear imprints, of noticing and collecting evidence. Someone, surely, must be noting his activity.

Throughout Pigeon English, Harri talks to the pigeon who picks up the feed he leaves outside his window. The pigeon seems to know what Harry, himself, suspects. And thus we move between the serious and playful, fact and make-believe, with the boundaries marked by postcodes, street names and imagining lives that only those involved may see. We learn to inhabit this eleven year-old’s world, to share its novelty and understand its reality.

Investigating a murder, dodging the dealers, not stepping on the cracks in the pavement, it’s all a game. Until it isn’t.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology is a monumental achievement. Its scope is vast, its size is daunting, its scholarship and vision both quite breath-taking on every one of its 1000-plus pages. Ostensibly, it claims to be an analysis of the origins, politics and economics of inequality, but it goes considerably deeper and further than its brief. This work is nothing less than a snapshot of global economic history and politics taken at the time of writing. Though the historical element might be seen in different forms via the lenses of centuries and assumed perspectives, the book’s analysis of current political issues was always going to be subject to faster change.  I doubt whether Thomas Piketty himself would have predicted that, just a few months after his work’s publication, the global economic and political landscape would be redrawn by a new, microscopic virus. But that is exactly what has happened. And, given the effects on wealth and asset distribution the author attributes to the capital-destroying wars that dictated the history of the twentieth century, one wonders what a post-Covid analysis of the mechanisms that create and maintain inequality might look like. One suspects that the political prescriptions in the book’s last chapter may just, out of sheer necessity, have been rendered more likely.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century charted the origins and extent of inequality in human societies. Capital and Ideology follows on by examining current and historical circumstances and mechanisms that determine its extent and influence its propagation. The book charts comparisons of inequality across countries, continents, cultures and eras. In doing so, its author uses much more than statistical comparisons. Historical and cultural perspectives are offered. Economic analyses are suggested. Crucially, societal structures are analysed, especially those of triumvirate societies, where the ownership of religious, scientific and military power provide the justification and the means of establishing and maintaining skewed ownership of assets. Though the book covers much ground, many different civilizations, locations and eras, the overall analytical focus is never lost.

A criticism of such an achievement may seem petty, but the book could have profitably dealt with one of its weaknesses much earlier. A constantly aired opinion of Thomas Piketty’s work is that, like all socialists, he wants everyone to be the same, to compress all to the same lowest common denominator. This, the criticism continues, would stifle creativity and drive in any society that tried to implement his recommended policies or even tried to address the obvious and growing inequality caused by market capitalism. Readers of Capital and Ideology, however, will have to wait until the book’s last chapter before reading this passage.

“A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is.”

Let’s juxtapose this quote from page 967 of Thomas Piketty’s book with the following: “Above all, we will listen to the people who have felt left behind by the last few decades of economic growth and want to have control of their future. (We) will give the public services the resources they need, supporting our hospitals, our schools and our police. We will help people and families throughout their lives…” This latter passage is quoted verbatim from the webpage of the British Conservative Party, from the manifesto upon which they fought their successful campaign for the 2019 election, an election where an unprecedented number of voters from disadvantaged communities (largely as a result of previous Conservative governments’ priorities) opted to vote for the party in the hope they would honour a promise to “level up” the country. There seems to be electoral kudos in levelling, despite the opinion of right-wing politicians who extol the need for libertarian individualism married to economically deregulated separatism. Thomas Piketty analyses such tendencies and offers a paradigm to explain these shifting political alliances.

Capital and Ideology is the perfect text for anyone needing an update on the world. It has so many succinct and pertinent analyses that even a list of its insights would be a tome in itself. Some examples will suffice.

For instance, if anyone finds it hard to understand why certain elite groups from Western democracies might now be sympathetic towards Putin’s Russia, Thomas Piketty can enlighten.

“It is important to note that it is very difficult to measure and analyse income and wealth in postcommunist Russia because the society is so opaque. This is due in large part to decisions taken first by the government headed by Boris Yeltsin and later by Vladimir Putin to permit unprecedented evasion of Russian law through the use of offshore entities and tax havens. In addition, the postcommunist regime abandoned not only any ambition to redistribute property but also any effort to record income or wealth. For example, there is no inheritance tax in postcommunist Russia, so there are no data on the size of inheritances. There is an income tax, but it is strictly proportional, and its rate since 2001 has been just 13 percent, whether the income being taxed is 1000 rubles or 100 billion rubles.”

When this is placed alongside the fact that Europe in general and the European Union in particular is a global outlier in the extent of its greater equality of wealth and income and we can see immediately why the libertarian, individualists of the political right, who for example favour Brexit for the United Kingdom, might also cast an envious glance towards Russia’s largely unregulated treatment of wealth, no matter how it was amassed.

Thomas Piketty offer numerous such insights. He analyses India’s castes, charts the French Revolution, analyses politics in the USA and takes long hard looks at colonialism and empires. And what is more, all of this is accomplished with transparency and fluidity, so that at no stage does a reader feel presented with a mere list. The analysis of current political strands is particularly enlightening.

Piketty rejects the term “populism” as meaningless. He prefers to use “identitarian” to describe the tendency for many voters in democracies to retreat behind promised protectionism and fortified borders to exclude foreigners. In doing so, he sums up both cause and effect in a single idea, a summary that is both more accurate and more enlightening than “populism” in terms of understanding the political direction being followed. But he goes beyond description and offers analysis of motives. He cites, for example, evidence relating to Poland and Hungary, both of whom currently have governments that have displayed tendencies to restrict freedom or roll back liberalism, even to the extent that they are at odds with a European Union they were once eager to join. Many observers are perplexed by this phenomenon, noting that both countries have benefitted hugely from European development aid and inward investment. Piketty’s analysis, however, examines net transfers and finds that for both countries, capital flow has consistently been out of the country and towards Europe’s epicentres of wealth. And electorates are aware of this bloodletting. The only solution, he maintains, is greater political integration, not less.

He analyses politics in the USA, though obviously not in great depth. He does, however, make enlightening points about race to illustrate how the Democrats became transformed from the party of southern slavery to the natural home of the “ethnic” vote. It is a process that happened over a century, from the Civil War, when the Republicans were the champions of opposition to slavery through the New Deal and into the late 1960s, when it was the Democrats who espoused civil rights.

The author spends much of the early part of the book identifying the structure of triumvirate societies, where a peasant majority is ruled by an alliance between warrior and priestly classes who, combined, rarely accounted for more than ten percent of the population. He then shows how this structure developed into proprietarianism, which preserved the right of the ruling classes to own property. This later evolved into capitalism when the owners of property increased the scale of operations and created industrialization. He makes a convincing case in relation to the political control claimed by an alliance of religion and sword that was used to justify and then preserve property ownership of the ruling minority. Piketty offers the following, again late in the book:

“I have defined proprietarianism as a political ideology based on the absolute defense of private property; capitalism as the extension of proprietarianism into the age of large-scale industry, international finance, and more recently to the digital economy. At bottom capitalism rests on the concentration of economic power in the hands of the owners of capital. In principle, the owners of real estate capital can decide to whom they wish to rent and at what price while the owners of financial and professional capital govern corporations according to the principle of “one share one vote”, which entitles them, among other things, to decide by themselves whom to hire and at what wage.”

And then there arose democracy and later war. It was not that wars had been unknown in the pre-modern era, but he suggests that the industrialization of war after the dawn of the modern era rendered it more thoroughly and extensively destructive than it had previously been. Because of its destruction of property and the creation of debt via interruption of economic life, war threatened proprietarian societies in a way they had never before experienced. Democracy also threatened ownership directly unless it could be manipulated, of course, and both of these threats to the classes born to own had to be managed. Ownership had previously coped with war losses, the twice national income debt in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, having been turned to the owners’ advantage by the issuing of bonds their capital bought and a century of poor people’s contributions rendered lucrative to their owners via interest and redemptions.

Democracy posed a new type of challenge to the owners of assets, and still does. So, to explain how systems of inequality can be maintained after everyone, at least in theory, has an equal say, Thomas Piketty needs to examine in detail how politics have changed over the last century. He now finds there exist four almost equally popular political ideologies. He writes:

“In 2017, 21 percent of voters could be classified as “egalitarian internationalists” (pro-immigrant, pro-poor); 26 percent are “inegalitarian nativists” (anti-immigrant, pro-rich); 23 percent are “inegalitarian internationalists” (pro-immigrant, pro-rich), and 30 percent are “egalitarian nativists” (anti-immigrant, pro-poor).”

Furthermore, he finds that there is now a tendency for there to develop an alliance between the two factions of nativism, an alliance that does not challenge property rights.

 

And, crucially, he finds that the social democrat model that made significant inroads into inequality in the middle of the twentieth century has now been transformed into an ideology of a Brahmin-like educated elite, leaving the votes of the losers in the distribution of wealth to be hoovered into an identitarian trap by the owners of an increasing share of property. This, in essence, is not dissimilar in character to the concept of false consciousness that Marxists find they have to apply in order to explain why masses of people regularly vote or act against their own interests. Here, Thomas Piketty offers a rational mechanism and a convincing argument by which false consciousness can be cultivated and exploited, an approach which does not fall into the distasteful trap of branding poorer people merely stupid.

There is so much in Capital and Ideology that it is almost impossible to review. Reading it comes close to a life-changing experience. Please do read it. Do persevere with its length. Take it at a steady pace and read something else, something contrasting, alongside. Readers will immediately and repeatedly find themselves amazed at the scholarship, the revelations and the rationality of the book’s argument. Anyone interested in our own times should regard it as essential reading. The presence of a virus, however, probably demands a companion volume, since the political and economic landscape is now surely transformed, just like war ripped up its design a century ago.

Eventually, Thomas Piketty champions the politics of social democracy as the solution to growing inequality and, eventually, environmental degradation. He cites the example of Sweden, in that:

“it shows that inequality is not the product of some essential cultural predisposition: in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system, which survived until 1909-11, to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once SAP came to power in the 1920s and then ruled almost continuously from 1932 to 2006.”

With the right policies and crucially an end to the retreat into identitarian separatism, the author sees a future where, during an individual lifetime, people can be as entrepreneurial and as successful as they like, but where tax systems and inheritance management ensure the recirculation of wealth and capital to ensure it does not become the permanent property of an ever-smaller elite. A still far from perfect Europe is the example, while the libertarian, identitarian deregulators pose the threat.

 

From The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s From The House of the Dead is not a novel. Though its principal character, its narrator, the upper-class Goryanchikov, is probably a fictitious identity, it is also probably the author, himself, masquerading, so the overall impression is that of a recollection of real experience. We do not know if the other inmates of the prison camp where the book is set are faithful descriptions of real people, but they certainly come across as such. If there is anything that lingers after reading this book, then it is the immediacy of its realism.

Dostoevsky spent years in such a camp, in Siberia, of course, after surviving his own execution via a last minute reprieve which arrived, apparently, as his executioners as were ready to take aim. It was a bit of a wheeze and quite often used by the Russian royals and their system. Perhaps they were always late in the signing of such orders, since they were probably preoccupied with the counting of their serfs’ earnings, or should I say the earnings from the serfs. One has to be careful to look after the welfare of one’s subjects, after all, because if these people were actually to starve to death, one would take a cut in income and one might have to run the fountains at Peterhof half an hour or less each month. I exaggerate, perhaps but one senses that Dostoyevsky did not.

And it is the detail of the descriptions offered by its author that bring this living death to life. When he describes how even a misplaced word or glance could result in a prisoner receiving literally hundreds of lashes, one begins to understand the nature of absolute power derived from God.

It is perhaps the descriptions of these beatings that linger the longest in a reader’s memory by the end of this book. Dostoyevsky, via Goryanchikov, of course, describes the state of the flesh on the backs of the persons who had just returned from their ordeals. He even allows those tasked with the delivery of these disciplinary measures to describe the minutiae of their technique. We learn, for instance, that the ultimate weapon for the corporal punishment artist is the birch. It was the particular flexibility of this wood that enabled the true expression of the beater’s persona, in that its ability to store energy meant that a few tens of lashes from the birch could be as destructive as a hundred from a cane. The reader should take note of the advice. It may come in useful.

One of the more book’s arresting memories is how often such punishments appear to happen. After all, it’s the deterrent effect which is their most important function, so to be effective in this they should be used as frequently as possible. It will make them think twice, then thrice and so on…

But in the end, as the composer Laos Janacek concluded, it is the humanity of the people involved that shines through. Some of these people committed the most horrible crimes and most of them enjoyed relating their stories. And there was always, it seemed, an internal logic in their stories that arises to justify action, no matter how disastrous the effects may have proved, no matter how dire the consequences may have been. It is not that they were proud of what they had done, but its reality had become part of them, part of their present and future, as well as their past. One wonders if the royals and their loyals used to indulge similarly by recounting the histories of those they condemned.

Overall, one marvels at how these prison camp inmates simply get on with their lives. They eat their food, whatever it is, involve themselves in illicit trade, run their own drinking establishments, of sorts, and probably engage in conjugal acts of whatever character can be imagined. And they cooperate when they are not getting beaten. The next century had Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and frankly, little would appear to have changed, apart from the eventual ownership of the facility.

The Master of Petersburg by J M Coetzee

J M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg had a particular effect on this reader in that it prompted me to read From The House of the Dead by Dostoyevsky. It’s a book I have wanted to read literally for decades and have never been before properly begun. And the motivation comes directly from J M Coetzee’s analysis of the Fyodor Dostoyevky’s conscience, or perhaps his lack of it in The Master of Petersburg. Coetzee’s book is a novel. It does not claim to be history, nor does it base itself on historically recognizable individuals, except for the principal protagonist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But the scenario it examines becomes compellingly convincing, the dilemmas posed both credible and realistic.

The novel starts in 1869, a year when Fyodor Dostoyevsky was resident in Germany. The setting is more than a decade after his experience as a political prisoner in Siberia, a decade on from anything that is described in From The House of the Dead. The past may have been water under the bridge, but the flow was apparently continuous.

Dostoevsky has received a note saying that his stepson has died in St. Petersburg. There are administrative issues to settle, debts, possessions, people to inform, so the author returns to his own city and embarks upon the reconstruction of his stepson‘s life and death. There is an element here of who-done-what because the circumstances surrounding the end of the stepson’s life remain unclear.

The author has to live somewhere. There is a landlady and she has a family. There are the stepson’s contacts to trace, contacts which he made for a variety of reasons, not all of them completely legal. There are political movements to understand, perhaps penetrate, because that is the only reliable way to encounter untainted memories of a life passed away, a life that lived its own version of action. And, inevitably in Czarist Russia, there are police who are interested in the nature of every contact Dostoyevsky makes. They shed light not only with his stepson’s possible associations with the officially undesirable, but also on the author’s own past and the origins of his own incarceration as a political prisoner.

In pursuing this quest, Dostoyevsky encounters people and memories from his own past, and it has to be acknowledged that he has form. In reality, he can do nothing in this town in his own name without it being noticed by someone, registered by some authority. It is inevitable that something will be dragged up from the past, even if merely to facilitate interests in the present

And inevitably, the writer forms new relationships and these further complicate already complex relationships. There are debts to honour from the past and there will be new ones as a result of unfolding events, of that we are sure. There are previous associations. There is, eventually, perhaps the very reason that he himself came under the official scrutiny all those years ago, events that led to his conviction and incarceration as a political prisoner, and thus provided the experience that led to From The House of the Dead. And, most important of all, there is a contemporary political movement known to his stepson, involvement in which could potentially repeat the allegations and charges the previously led to his own conviction. People within those movements are aware of the author’s quest and his need for information. The problem with some of this information is that it comes with its own health warning.

But what J M Coetzee accomplishes in the midst of all this is a historical context, in The Master of Petersburg, is the creation of a scenario and as associated narrative that never enters polemic. We feel that we are in the same voyage of discovery as its principal character and we experience events alongside his own perception. We are never told what to think.

J M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg is a superb book that surprisingly even displays relevance to contemporary events. It reminds us that societies often can often be constructed by those with an interest in finding in the world precisely what they seek.

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

Occasionally, quite rarely, in fact, one reads a book so powerful that it is impossible to review, at least until the dust its disturbance has scattered starts to settle. It can happen when something causes anger, revulsion, jaw-dropping admiration or raw emotion. And it is not often that such a book is from the non-fiction section, even rarer that it might be pulled from the shelves labeled Economic History.

But William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy is such a book. The Anarchy should be more literally entitled The Company, since it presents the history of a single commercial entity, couched in the form of a biography of a being that had a life of its own. The title does convey the author’s ultimate judgment on this entity but, given the detail of this history, it is probably an understatement, even generous in its recognition.

The book tells the story of the East India Company, the British one, not the Dutch one, not the French one. Surely there are similar corporate biographies elsewhere. They may even exist, but we can be sure that the impact, though possibly qualitatively similar, would be quantitatively less significant.

The bare and unadorned facts of this company’s history begin with its founding in the City of London in the late 16th century as a joint stock venture by a group of investors. It grew courtesy of its participation in the spice trade and slavery in the 17th century, before achieving almost imperial status in the 18th century, when it effectively ruled India. It continued to expand in the 19th century until its implosion in the middle of the century, when its sheer size took it down, after it had failed to cope with the consequences of the Indian Mutiny, which its own practices and policies had arguably caused. The book’s title, The Anarchy, indicates clearly the author’s position that this group was morally and economically a different kind of entity from a company, but the work is far from polemical. The term ‘company’ suggests at least some level of organization, cooperation or community. But, as Adam Smith noted in his Wealth of Nations, this company’s defining characteristics were personal profit, corruption, war, violence and political intrigue, always directed towards furthering its own, already monopolistic position. I understate.

In fact, William Dalrymple makes a little use of Smith’s judgment of the company’s activity, despite the fact that it fits perfectly with the characterization he offers. It is nothing less than a strength of his analysis that secondary sources of criticism, such as Smith’s, are largely ignored. Throughout, William Dalrymple relies on primary sources that relate directly to the company’s dealings in British politics, Indian politics and international trade. Listing such areas of activity might suggest that an air of legitimacy surrounds this corporate presence, but rest assured, this company was involved in mass murder, assassination, exploitation, profiteering, deception, and the list could go on to become a rogues’ gallery of transgression. People who doubt this analysis are free to remind themselves of Smith’s published opinion in 1770 that this, the only extant multinational corporation at the time, represented the anathema of free trade, competition or economic health, and the epitome of corruption, deception and graft, and this from the person who extolled the concept of free trade.

Two particular points lodge in the memory after reading this book. The first is a simple number, one half. There was a time in the early nineteenth century when half of Britain’s wealth - there were no GDP figures then of course - was derived from this company’s activity. They were selling drugs into China at the time and it was lucrative, despite their having to fight wars against the Chinese state to retain the right to do so. The second is the role the company played in the creation, for that can be the only word, of the Bengal famine, which was the greatest famine recorded in India’s history. Let’s ignore the firing of people out of cannon, double dealing and deception, alongside the expected naked exploitation and personal profiteering, all of which had their impact on the politics and economy of the United Kingdom, as well.

Anyone thinking that this might be a dry, over detailed, desiccated analysis of history should ignore their fears and be enlightened by this book. The Anarchy is a complete eye-opener to colonial history, the origins of wealth in our colonial societies and the consequences for the colonies. It should be read by everyone, especially those people who might admit even a residual pride in Britain’s Imperial past.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Mariozzi-Mariozzi-Rucli in Brahms, Beethoven and Rota and Palomares-Espi in Musica Iberoamericano

Live music in December 2020 is probably not the commonest of commodities wherever you live. In our corner of south-east Spain, we have some. In normal times, whatever that phrase might now mean, there would be at least the opportunity of attending two or three concerts a week in this area, but our new normal here has for several months changed the situation. Whether it is this new scarcity, this new normal, or indeed whether it is simply the quality of what we hear, I have no idea, but I can record without hesitation that everything now sounds more vivid, more committed and more beautiful. And so it was for the two chamber music events presented by Alfas del Pi’s Classical Music Society this weekend.

On Saturday 12 December in Casa Cultura, the society hosted a piano trio with what looked like at first glance a fairly standard program. The trio comprised the clarinet of Vicenzo Mariozzi, the cello of Francisco Mariozzi and the piano of Andrea Rucli. This was in fact the fourth concert of the trio’s mini tour with the same program and, if the other three venues had provided rehearsal time, then this fourth concert’s perfection might just have another explanation apart from the obvious and sustained virtuosity of the musicians.

We began with the Brahms trio opus114. Its gentle, almost flickering lines assemble to present a mind in turmoil. The phrases may be short, sometimes very short, but the statements are long and sometimes convoluted. But eventually this is direct music, despite its almost constant asides, whose surface a listener can enjoy at an aural glance. But there is much more here only just below the gloss. There is the aftermath of depression, an obvious, but, one feels, an unfulfilled desire to reflect on a past that has some powerful memories. There is nostalgia alongside fear of the future and the unknown. The music seems to reek of regret. Its style and hand are both utterly assured, but the composer is suffering new personal doubt, so we are presented with a contradictory and compelling mix of late Brahms, personal doubt expressed via assured technique, intangible feelings precisely described. It was a picture that Vicenzo Mariozzi, Francisco Mariozzi and Andrea Rucli conveyed via a remarkable skill of understatement.

In retrospect the next two works on the program formed a similar pair, an unexpectedly similar pair in that they seem to share an unusual conceptual framework. Beethoven was a young man when he wrote his opus 11 trio, the Gassenhauer. He wanted to show off. He wanted to make his mark on the city‘s life, future earnings being the goal. He thus wrote a serious trio that showed off his melodic, conceptual and compositional gift. But crucially he adopted a contemporary earworm for the main theme of the finale. It was a tune that everyone was whistling around the town. In Beethoven’s hands, it became a set of variations where the main variable is rhythm. This trivial little idea then becomes something grand, even grandiose at times, despite its humble origins. It was rather what Beethoven himself wanted to do in his own life.

The final piece in this program was the trio by Nino Rota. The work’s first two movements are both highly melodic and very rhythmic, but the musical language is couched in a style that can only be described as astringent neoclassicism. This may not be Hindemith, nor Stravinsky, but it is music with a hard, sometimes spiky surface. The finale, however, is like a scoop of ice cream on a crumbly biscuit, an almost hackneyed ditty that sits somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops. It’s a moment that reminds us not to take anything too seriously, except, perhaps, a sideways surreal and thus revealing view of life. Beethoven chose a silly ditty to self-aggrandise, whereas Rota seems to make fun of the whole process until, however, one realizes how beautifully written and constructed is the entire work. And the fact that this commentary deals almost exclusively with the impressions delivered by the pieces is testimony to the perfection that Vicenzo Mariozzi, Francisco Mariozzi and Andrea Rucli brought to the playing.

And then, on Sunday lunchtime Alfas del Pi Music Society presented a violin and guitar duo in Albir. It’s a combination and a concert we have heard before and hopefully we will hear again. The society’s vice-president, virtuoso violinist Joaquín Palomares renewed his performing partnership with guitarist Fernando Espí in a program they titled Música Iboamericana. In theory, these might be viewed as lighter pieces, an assemblage to pass a pleasant hour on a clear and sunny December day by the sea.

But the understanding between these two virtuoso musicians renders everything they play not only elegant but also exciting and ultimately moving. The program was the Serenata by Malats, the Brazilian Dances of Machado, a Milonga by Tavolaro, Amasia by Boutros, three of Manuel de Falla’s Popular Songs and two movements from The Story of the Tango by Piazzolla. The music went from bossa nova to tango, from Europe to South America, from folk music to dancehall, a journey which, when contrasted with the trio of the previous evening, really did illustrate how far music can transport an audience and the different places it can take us.