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After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 by John Darwin (2007)
Empires exist to accumulate power on an extensive scale…
(After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 page 483)
Why did the nations of Western Europe rise through the 18th and 19th centuries to create empires which stretched around the world, how did they manage to subjugate ancient nations like China and Japan, to turn vast India into a colonial possession, to carve up Africa between them?
How did white European cultures come to dominate not only the territories and peoples who they colonised, but to create the modern mindset – a vast mental framework which encompasses capitalist economics, science and technology and engineering, which dominates the world right down to the present day?
Why did the maritime states of Europe (Britain, France, the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) end up either settling from scratch the relatively empty places of the world (America, Australia), or bringing all the other cultures of the world (the Ottoman Empire, Hindu India, Confucian China and Shinto Japan) under their domination?
For at least two hundred years politicians, historians, economists and all kinds of academics and theoreticians have been writing books trying to explain 'the rise of the West'.
Some attribute it to the superiority of the Protestant religion (some explicitly said it was God's plan). Some that it was something to do with the highly fragmented nature of Europe, full of squabbling nations vying to outdo each other, and that this rivalry spilled out into unceasing competition for trade, at first across the Atlantic, then along new routes to India and the Far East, eventually encompassing the entire globe.
Some credit the Scientific Revolution, with its proliferation of new technologies from compasses to cannons, an unprecedented explosion of discoveries and inventions. Some credit the slave trade and the enormous profits made from working to death millions and millions of African slaves which fuelled the industrial revolution and paid for the armies which subjugated India.
Lenin thought it was the unique way European capitalism had first perfected techniques to exploit the proletariat in the home countries and then applied the same techniques to subjugate less advanced nations, and that the process would inevitably lead to a global capitalist war once the whole world was colonised.
John Darwin
So John Darwin's book, which sets out to answer all these questions and many more, is hardly a pioneering work; it is following an extremely well-trodden path. BUT it does so in a way which feels wonderfully new, refreshing and exciting. This is a brilliant book. If you were only going to read one book about imperialism, this is probably The One.
For at least three reasons:
1. Darwin appears to have mastered the enormous revisionist literature generated over the past thirty years or more, which rubbishes any idea of innate European superiority, which looks for far more subtle and persuasive reasons – so that reading this book means you can feel yourself reaping the benefits of hundreds of other more detailed & specific studies. He is not himself oppressively politically correct, but he is on the right side of all the modern trends in historical thought (i.e. is aware of feminist, BAME and post-colonial studies).
2. Darwin pays a lot more attention than is usual to all the other cultures which co-existed alongside Europe for so long (Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Safavid Empire, the Chinese Empire, Japan, all are treated in fascinating detail and given almost as much space as Europe, more, in the earlier chapters) so that reading this book you learn an immense amount about the history of these other cultures over the same period.
3. Above all, Darwin paints a far more believable and plausible picture than the traditional legend of one smooth, consistent and inevitable 'Rise of the West'. On the contrary, in Darwin's version:
the passage from Tamerlane's times to our own has been far more contested, confused and chance-ridden than the legend suggests – an obvious enough point. But [this book places] Europe (and the West) in a much larger context: amid the empire-, state- and culture-building projects of other parts of Eurasia. Only thus, it is argued, can the course, nature, scale and limits of Europe's expansion be properly grasped, and the jumbled origins of our contemporary world become a little clearer.
'Jumbled origins', my God yes. And what a jumble!
Why start with Tamerlane?
Tamerlane the Eurasian conqueror died in 1405. Darwin takes his death as marking the end of an epoch, an era inaugurated by the vast wave of conquest led across central Asia by Genghis Khan starting around 1200, an era in which one ruler could, potentially, aspire to rule the entire Eurasian landmass.
When Tamerlane was born the 'known world' still stretched from China in the East, across central Asia, through the Middle East, along the north African shore and including Europe. Domination of all of China, central Asia, northern India, the Middle East and Europe was, at least in theory, possible, had been achieved by Genghis Khan and his successors, and was the dream which had inspired Tamerlane.
Map of the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan
But by the death of Tamerlane the political situation across Eurasia had changed. The growth in organisation, power and sophistication of the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria, the Muslim sultanate in north India and above all the resilience of the new Ming dynasty in China, meant this kind of 'global' domination was no longer possible. For centuries nomadic tribes had ravaged through Eurasia (before the Mongols it had been the Turks who emerged out of Asia to seize the Middle East and found the Ottoman Dynasty). Now that era was ending.
It was no longer possible to rule the sown from the steppe (p.5)
Moreover, within a few decades of Tamerlane's demise, Portuguese mariners had begun to explore westwards, first on a small scale colonising the Azores and Canary Islands, but with the long-term result that the Eurasian landmass would never again constitute the 'entire world'.
What was different about European empires?
Empires are the oldest and most widespread form of government. They are by far the commonest way that human societies have organised themselves: the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, the Greek and Roman Empires, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Chinese empire, the Nguyễn empire in Vietnam, the Japanese Empire, the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, the Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, to name just a few.
Given this elementary fact about history, why do the west European empires come in for such fierce criticism these days?
Because, Darwin explains, they were qualitatively different.
Because they affected far more parts of the world across far more widespread areas than ever before, and so 'the constituency of the aggrieved' is simply larger – much larger – than ever before.
Because they were much more systematic in their rapaciousness. The worst example was surely the Belgian Empire in the Congo, European imperialism stripped of all pretence and exposed as naked greed backed up by appalling brutality. But arguably all the European empires mulcted their colonies of raw materials, treasures and of people more efficiently (brutally) than any others in history.
The result is that it is going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, for the trauma of the impact of the European empires to die down and become what Darwin calls 'the past' i.e. the realm of shadowy past events which we don't think of as affecting us any more.
The imperial legacy is going to affect lots of people, in lots of post-colonial nations, for a long time to come, and they are not going to let us in the old European colonial countries forget it.
After Tamerlane is divided into nine chapters:
Eurasia and the Age of Discovery
The Early Modern Equilibrium (1750s – 1800)
The Eurasian Revolution (1800 – 1830)
The Race Against Time (1830 – 1880)
The Limits of Empire (1880 – 1914)
Towards The Crisis of The World (1914 – 42)
Empire Denied (1945 – 2000)
Tamerlane's Shadow
A flood of insights
It sounds like reviewer hyperbole but there really is a burst of insights on every page of this book.
It's awe-inspiring, dazzling, how Darwin can take the elements of tremendously well-known stories (Columbus and the discovery of America, or the Portuguese finding a sea route to India, the first trading stations on the coasts of India or the unequal treaties imposed on China, or the real consequences of the American Revolution) and present them from an entirely new perspective. Again and again on every page he unveils insight after insight. For example:
Take the fact – which I knew but had never seen stated so baldly – that the American War of Independence wasn't about 'liberty', it was about land. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756 – 63) the British government had banned the colonists from migrating across the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley (so as to protect the Native Americans and because policing this huge area would be ruinously expensive). The colonists simply wanted to overthrow these restrictions and, as soon as the War of Independence was over (i.e. after the British gave up struggling to retain the rebel colonies in 1783), the rebels set about opening the floodgates to colonising westward.
Victorian apologists claimed the British were able to colonise huge India relatively easily because of the superiority of British organisation and energy compared with Oriental sloth and backwardness. In actual fact, Darwin explains it was in part the opposite: it was because the Indians had a relatively advanced agrarian economy, with good routes of communication, business hubs and merchants – an open and well-organised economy, which the British just barged their way into (p.264).
(This reminds me of the case made in The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson that Cortés was able to conquer the Aztec and Pissarro the Incas, not because the Indians were backward but precisely because they were the most advanced, centralised and well organised states in Central and South America. The Spanish just installed themselves at the top of a well-ordered and effective administrative system. Against genuinely backward people, like the tribes who lived in the arid Arizona desert or the swamps of Florida or hid in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, the Spanish were helpless, because there was no one emperor to take hostage, or huge administrative bureaucracy to take over – which explains why those areas remained uncolonised for centuries.)
Cultural conservatism
Until about 1830 there was still a theoretical possibility that a resurgent Ottoman or Persian empire, China or Japan, might have reorganised and repelled European colonisers. But a decisive factor which in the end prevented them was the intrinsic conservatism of these cultures. For example, both Chinese and Muslim culture venerated wisdom set down by a wise man (Mohammed, Confucius) at least a millennium earlier, and teachers, professors, civil servants were promoted insofar as they endorsed and parroted these conservative values. At key moments, when they could have adopted more forward-looking ideologies of change, all the other Eurasian cultures plumped for conservatism and sticking to the Old.
Thus, even as it dawned on both China and Japan that they needed to react to the encroachments of the Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, both countries did so by undertaking not innovations but what they called restorations – the T'ung-chih ('Union for Order') restoration in China and the Meiji ('Enlightened rule') restoration in Japan (p.270). (Darwin's description of the background and enactment of both these restorations is riveting.)
The Western concept of Time
Darwin has a fascinating passage about how the Europeans developed a completely new theory of Time (p.208). It was the exploration of America which did this (p.209) because here Europeans encountered, traded and warred with Stone Age people who used bows and arrows and (to start with) had no horses or wheeled vehicles and had never developed anything like a technology. This led European intellectuals to reflect that maybe these people came from an earlier phase of historical development, to develop the new notion that maybe societies evolve and develop and change.
European thinkers quickly invented numerous 'systems' suggesting the various 'stages of development' which societies progressed through, from the X Age to the Y Age and then on to the Z Age – but they all agreed that the native Americans (and even more so, the Australian aborigines when they were discovered in the 1760s) represented the very earliest stages of society, and that, by contrast, Western society had evolved through all the intervening stages to reach its present state of highly evolved 'perfection'.
Once you have created mental models like this, it is easy to categorise all the other cultures you encounter (Ottomans, Hindus, China, Japan, Siam, Annamite etc) as somewhere lower or backward on these paths or stages of development.
And being at the top of the tree, why, naturally that gave white Europeans the right to intervene, invade, conquer and administer all the other people of the world in order to 'raise' them to the same wonderful level of civilisation as themselves.
18th and 19th
I've always been a bit puzzled by the way that, if you read accounts of the European empires, there is this huge difference between the rather amateurish 18th century and the fiercely efficient 19th century. Darwin explains why: in the eighteenth century there were still multiple European players in the imperial game: France was the strongest power on the continent, but she was balanced out by Prussia, Austria and also Spain and Portugal and the Dutch. France's position as top dog in Europe was admittedly damaged by the Seven Years War but it wasn't this, it was the Napoleonic Wars which in the end abolished the 18th century balance of power in Europe. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the new top dog, with a navy which could beat all-comers, which had hammered the French at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar, and which now ruled the waves.
The nineteenth century feels different because Britain's world-encompassing dominance was different in kind from any empire which ever preceded it.
The absence of Africa
If I have one quibble it's that I'd like to have learned more about Africa. I take the point that his book is focused on Eurasia and the Eurasian empires (and I did learn a huge amount about Persia, the Moghul empire, China and Japan) and that all sub-Saharan Africa was cut off from Eurasia by the Sahara, but still… it feels like an omission.
And a woke reader might well object to the relative rareness of Darwin's references to the African slave trade. He refers to it a few times, but his interest is not there; it's in identifying exactly where Europe was like or unlike the rival empires of Eurasia, in culture and science and social organisation and economics. That's his focus.
The expansion of the Russian empire
If Africa is disappointingly absent, an unexpected emphasis is placed in each chapter on the imperial growth of Russia. I knew next to nothing about this. A quick surf on Amazon suggests that almost all the books you can get about the Russian 'empire' are about the fall of the Romanovs and the Bolshevik Revolution and then Lenin or Stalin's creation of a Bolshevik empire which expanded into Eastern Europe after the war. That's to say it's almost all about twentieth century Russia (with the exception of a crop of ad hoc biographies of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great).
So it was thrilling to read Darwin give what amounts to a sustained account and explanation of the growth of the Kingdom of Muscovy from the 1400s onwards, describing how it expanded west (against Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden), south towards the Black Sea, south-west into the Balkans – but most of all how Russian power was steadily expanded East across the vast inhospitable tundra of Siberia until Russian power reached the Pacific.
It is odd, isn't it, bizarre, uncanny, that a nation that likes to think of itself as 'European' has a huge coastline on the Pacific Ocean and to this day squabbles about the ownership of small islands with Japan!
The process of Russian expansion involved just as much conquering of the 'primitive' tribal peoples who hunted and trapped in the huge landmass of Siberia as the conquest of, say, Canada or America, but you never read about it, do you? Can you name any of the many native tribes the Russians fought and conquered? No. Are there any books about the Settling of the East as there are thousands and thousands about the conquest of the American West? Nope. It is a historical black hole.
But Darwin's account of the growth of the Russian Empire is not only interesting as filling in what – for me at any rate – is a big hole in my knowledge. It is also fascinating because of the role Russian expansion played again and again in the game of Eurasian Risk which his book describes. At key moments Russian pressure from the North distracted the attention of the Ottoman Empire from making more offensive thrusts into Europe (the Ottomans famously encroached right up to the walls of Vienna in 1526 and then again in 1683).
When the Russians finally achieved one of their territorial goals and seized the Crimea in 1783, as a result of the Russo-Turkish War, it had the effect, Darwin explains, of cracking the Ottoman Empire open 'like an oyster'. For centuries the Black Sea had been an Ottoman lake and a cheaply defensible frontier. Now, at a stroke, it became a massive vulnerability which needed costly defence (p.175).
And suddenly, seeing it all from the Russian perspective, this sheds new light on the timeworn story of the decline of the Ottoman Empire which I only know about from the later 19th century and from the British perspective. For Darwin the role of Russian expansionism was vital not only in itself, but for the hemming in and attritional impact it had on the other Eurasian empires – undermining the Ottomans, making the Chinese paranoid because Russian expansion around its northern borders added to China's sense of being encircled and endangered, a sense that contributed even more to its risk-averse policy of doubling down on its traditional cultural and political and economic traditions, and refusing to see anything of merit in the Westerners' technology or crude diplomacy. A policy which eventually led to the Chinese empire's complete collapse in 1911.
And of course the Russians actually went to war with imperial Japan in 1905.
Numbered lists
Darwin likes making numbered lists. There's one on almost every page. They rarely go higher than three. Here are some examples to give a flavour of his careful, forensic and yet thrillingly insightful way of explaining things.
The 18th century geopolitical equilibrium
The geopolitical revolution which ended the long equilibrium of the 18th century had three major effects:
The North American interior and the new lands in the Pacific would soon become huge extensions of European territory, the 'new Europes'.
As a result of the Napoleonic war, the mercantile 'zoning' system which had reflected the delicate balance of power among European powers was swept away and replaced with almost complete control of the world's oceans by the British Navy.
Darwin gives a detailed description of why Mughal control of North India was disrupted by invasions by conquerors from the north, first Iran then Afghanistan, who weakened central Indian power at just the moment the British started expanding from their base in Bengal. Complex geopolitical interactions.
The so-called stagnation of the other Eurasian powers can be characterised by:
In both China and the Islamic world classical, literary cultures dominated the intellectual and administrative elites – the test of intellectual acumen was fitting all new observations into the existing mindset, prizes went to those who could do so with the least disruption possible.
Cultural and intellectual authority was vested in scribal elites backed up by political power, both valuing stasis.
Both China and the Islamic world were profoundly indifferent and incurious about the outside world.
The knowledge revolution
Compare and contrast the East's incuriosity with the 'West', which underwent a cognitive and scientific revolution in which merit went to the most disruptive inventors of new theories and technologies, and where Darwin describes an almost obsessive fascination with maps. This was supercharged by Captain Cook's three huge expeditions around the Pacific, resulting in books and maps which were widely bought and discussed, and which formed the basis of the trade routes which followed in his wake, and then the transportation of large numbers of convicts to populate Australia's big empty spaces (about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868).
Traumatic impact of the Napoleonic Wars
I hadn't quite realised that the Napoleonic Wars had such a traumatising effect on the governments of the main European powers who emerged in its aftermath: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. Very broadly speaking there was peace between the European powers between the 1830s and 1880s. Of course there was the Crimean War (Britain, France and Turkey containing Russia's imperial expansion), war between Austria and Prussia (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War. But all these were contained by the system, were mostly of short duration and never threatened to unravel into the kind of general conflict which ravaged Europe under Napoleon.
Thus, from the imperial point of view, the long peace had four results:
The Royal Navy's policing of all trade routes across the Atlantic and between Europe and Asia kept trade routes open throughout the era and kept costs down for everyone.
The balance of power which the European powers maintained among themselves discouraged intervention in either North or South America and allowed America to develop economically as if it had no enemies – a rare occurrence for any nation in history.
The post-Napoleonic balance of power in Europe encouraged everyone to tread carefully in their imperial rivalries.
Geo-political stability in Europe allowed the growth across the continent of something like a European ideology. This was 'liberalism' – a nexus of beliefs involving the need for old-style autocratic power to be tempered by the advice of representatives of the new middle class, and the importance of that middle class in the new technologies and economics unleashed by the industrial revolution and in founding and administering the growing colonies abroad.
Emigration from Europe to the New World was a trickle in the 1830s but had become a flood by the 1850s. Between 1850 and 1880 over eight million people left Europe, mostly for America.
This mass emigration relieved the Old World of its rural overcrowding and transferred people to an environment where they could be much more productive.
Many of the emigrants were in fact skilled artisans. Moving to an exceptionally benign environment, a vast empty continent rich in resources, turbo-charged the American economy with the result that by the 1880s it was the largest in the world.
His chapter The Race Against Time brings out a whole area, an entire concept, I've never come across before, which is that part of the reason European colonisation was successful was it was so fast. Not just that Western advances in military technology – the lightning advances in ships and artillery and guns – ran far ahead of anything the other empires could come up with – but that the entire package of international finance, trade routes, complex webs sending raw materials back home and re-exporting manufactured goods, the sudden flinging of railways all across the world's landmasses, the erection of telegraphs to flash knowledge of markets, prices of goods, or political turmoil back from colonies to the European centre – all of this happened too quickly for the rival empires (Ottoman, Japan, China etc) to stand any chance of catching up.
This sense of leaping, hurtling speed was turbo-charged by literal gold rushes, whether in the American West in the 1840s or in South Africa where it was first gold then diamonds. Suddenly tens of thousands of white men turned up, quickly followed by townships full of traders and artisans, then the railway, the telegraph, the sheriffs with their guns – all far faster than any native American or South African cultures could hope to match or even understand.
And this leads onto another massive idea which reverberates through the rest of the book and which really changed my understanding. This is that, as the spread of empire became faster and faster, reaching a kind of hysterical speed in the so-called Scramble For Africa in the 1880s (the phrase was, apparently, coined by the London Times in 1884) it meant that there was something increasingly shallow about its rule, especially in Africa.
The Scramble for Africa
Darwin says that most radical woke historians take the quick division of Africa in the 1880s and 1890s as a kind of epitome of European imperialism, but that it was in fact the opposite, and extremely unrepresentative of the development of the European imperialisms.
The Scramble happened very quickly, markedly unlike the piecemeal conquest of Central, Southern of North America, or India, which took centuries.
The Scramble took place with almost no conflict between the European powers – in fact they agreed to partitions and drew up lines in a very equable way at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Other colonies (from the Incas to India) were colonised because there were organised civilisations which could be co-opted, whereas a distinctive feature about Africa ('historians broadly agree about one vital fact' p.314) was that people were in short supply. Africa was undermanned or underpeopled. There were few organised states or kingdoms because there simply wasn't the density of population which lends itself to trading routes, settled farmers and merchants – all the groups who can be taxed to create a king and aristocracy.
Africans hadn't progressed to centralised states as humans had in Eurasia or central America because there weren't enough of them. Hence the poverty and the lack of resistance which most of the conquerors encountered in most of Africa.
In fact the result of all this was that most of the European governments weren't that keen on colonising Africa. It was going to cost a lot of money and there weren't the obvious revenue streams that they had found in a well-established economy like India.
What drove the Scramble for Africa more than anything else was adventurers on the ground – dreamers and fantasists and ambitious army officers and business men and empire builders who kept on taking unilateral action which then pitched the home government into a quandary – deny their adventurers and pass up the opportunity to win territory to a rival, or reluctantly support them and get enmeshed in all kinds of messy responsibilities.
For example, in the mid-1880s a huge swathe of West Africa between the desert and the forest was seized by a buccaneering group of French marine officers under Commandant Louis Archinard, and their black rank and file. In a few years these adventurers brought some two million square miles into France's empire. The government back in Paris felt compelled to back them up which meant sending out more troops, police and so on, which would cost money.
Meanwhile, modern communications had been invented, the era of mass media had arrived, and the adventuring soldiers and privateers had friends and boosters in the popular press who could be counted on to write leading articles about 'the white man's burden' and the torch of civilisation and ask: 'Isn't the government going to defend our brave boys?', until reluctant democratic governments were forced to cough up support. Modern-day liberals often forget that imperialism was wildly popular. It often wasn't imperialist or rapacious governments or the ruling class which prompted conquest, but popular sentiment, jingoism, which couldn't be ignored in modern democracies.
Darwin on every page, describes and explains the deep economic, trade and financial structures which the West put in place during the nineteenth century and which eventually underpinned an unstoppable steamroller of annexation, protectorates, short colonial wars and long-term occupation.
The Congress of Berlin
The Congress of Berlin helped to formalise the carving up of Africa, and so it has come to be thought of as evil and iniquitous, particularly by BAME and woke historians. But once again Darwin makes you stop and think when he compares the success of the congress at reaching peaceful agreements between the squabbling European powers – and what happened in 1914 over a flare-up in the Balkans.
If only Bismarck had been around in 1914 to suggest that, instead of rapidly mobilising to confront each other, the powers of Europe had once again been invited for tea and cake at the Reichstag to discuss their differences like gentlemen and come to an equable agreement.
Seen from this perspective, the Berlin Congress is not so much an evil colonialist conspiracy, but an extremely successful event which avoided any wars between the European powers for nearly thirty years. Africa was going to be colonised anyway because human events have a logic of their own: the success was in doing so without sparking a European conflagration.
The Scramble for China
The Scramble for China is not as well known as its African counterpart, the competition to gain 'treaty ports' on the Chinese coast, impose unfair trading terms on the Chinese and so on.
The Scramble for China by Robert Bickers (2011)
As usual, though, Darwin comes at it from a much wider angle and makes one massive point I hadn't registered before, which is that Russia very much wanted to seize the northern part of China to add to its far eastern domains; Russia really wanted to carve China up, but Britain didn't. And if Britain, the greatest trading, economic and naval power in the world, wasn't onside, then it wouldn't happen. There wasn't a genuine Scramble for China because Britain didn't want one.
Why not? Darwin quotes a Foreign Office official simply saying, 'We don't want another India.' One enormous third world country to try and administer with its hundreds of ethnic groups and parties growing more restive by the year, was quite enough.
Also, by the turn of the century, the Brits had become paranoid about Russia's intentions to conquer Afghanistan and march into North India. If they partitioned China with Russia, that would mean policing an even longer frontier even further way against an aggressive imperialist power ready to pounce the moment our guard was down.
This is an absolutely brilliant book. I don't think I've ever come across so many dazzling insights and revelations and entirely new ways of thinking about a time-worn subject in one volume.
This is the book to give anyone who's interested not just in 'the rise of the West' but how the whole concept of 'the West' emerged, for a fascinating description not just of the European empires but of all the empires across Eurasia – Ottoman, Persian, Moghul, Chinese and Japanese – and how history – at this level – consists of the endless juggling for power of these enduring power blocs, the endless and endlessly
complex history of empire-, state- and culture-building. (p.490)
And of course it all leads up to where we are today: a resurgent Russia flexing its muscles in Ukraine and Crimea; China wielding its vast economic power and brutally oppressing its colonial subjects in Tibet and Xinkiang, while buying land, resources and influence across Africa. And both Russia and China using social media and the internet in ways we don't yet fully understand in order to undermine the West.
And Turkey, keen as its rulers of all colours have been since the Ottoman days, to keep the Kurds down. And Iran, as its rulers have done for a thousand years, continually seeking new ways to extend its influence around the Gulf, across Syria and to the Mediterranean, in eternal rivalry with the Arab world which, in our time, means Saudi Arabia, against whom Iran is fighting a proxy war in the Yemen.
Darwin's books really drives home the way the faces and the ideologies may change, but the fundamental geopolitical realities endure, and with them the crudeness and brutality of the tools each empire employs.
If you let 'morality', especially modern woke morality, interfere with your analysis of this level of geopolitics, you will understand nothing. At this level it always has and always will be about power and influence, dominating trade and ensuring raw resources, and behind it all the never-ending quest for 'security'.
At this level, it isn't about following narrow, English notions of morality. Getting hung up on that only gets in the way of grasping the utterly amoral forces at play everywhere in the world today, just as they've always been.
Darwin stands up for intelligence and insight, for careful analysis and, above all, for a realistic grasp of human nature and human society – deeply, profoundly flawed and sometimes pitiful and wretched though both routinely are. He takes an adult view. It is absolutely thrilling and a privilege to be at his side as he explains and analysis this enormous history with such confidence and with so many brilliant ideas and insights.
Sir Stamford Raffles: collecting in Southeast Asia 1811-1824 @ the British Museum (November 2019)
Beauty and barbarism (a note on Banastre Tarleton)
Artist and Empire @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley (2015)
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin (2012)
The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012)
Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson (2011)
The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham (2009) Chapters 1 – 8
After Tamerlane by John Darwin (2008)
China: A history by John Keay (2008)
Victoria's Wars by Saul David (2006)
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson (2004)
1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World by Frank McLynn (2004)
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson (2003)
American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 by Alan Taylor (2001)
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild (1999)
Battle For Empire: The Very First World War by Tom Pocock (1998)
Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery by James Walvin (1992)
Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (2)
The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham (1991)
The Boer War 1899-1902 by Thomas Pakenham (1979)
Imperial fiction
The Narrow Corner by W. Somerset Maugham (1932)
The Gentleman in the Parlour by W. Somerset Maugham (1930)
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham (1925)
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham (1919)
Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume four
Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume three
Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume two
Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume one
Rudyard Kipling: The Best Short Stories
War Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling (1990)
Debits and Credits by Rudyard Kipling (1926)
A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (1917)
Actions and Reactions by Rudyard Kipling (1909)
Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling (1904)
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
The Absent-Minded Beggar by Rudyard Kipling (1899)
The Day's Work by Rudyard Kipling (1898)
Youth by Joseph Conrad (1898)
Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (1898)
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' by Joseph Conrad (1897)
South Sea Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson
An Outcast of The Islands by Joseph Conrad (1896)
The Seven Seas by Rudyard Kipling (1896)
Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River by Joseph Conrad (1895)
The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling (1894)
The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson (1894)
Many Inventions by Rudyard Kipling (1893)
The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson (1892)
Barrack Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling (1892)
The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling (1891)
Life's Handicap by Rudyard Kipling (1891)
Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling (1888)
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1888)
by Simon on November 15, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, British Empire, European History, History, War
Tagged 19th century, Afghanistan, Africa, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000, Amazon jungle, America, Appalachians, Assyrians, Athenian empire, Australia, Austria, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Aztec, Aztec Empire, Babylonians, Baltic states, Battle of Trafalgar, Belgian Congo, Bolshevik revolution, capitalism, China, Columbus, Confucian China, Confucius, Cortes, Edwin Williamson, Egypt, Egyptians, emigration, empire, empires, Europe, Florida, Genghis Khan, Great Zimbabwe, Hindu India, imperialism, Inca Empire, Incas, India, Iran, Islam, Japan, John Darwin, Kingdom of Muscovy, Lenin, Louis Archinard, Mali Empire, Meiji, Ming dynasty, Mohammed, Persian Empire, Persians, Pissarro, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, Roman Empire, Russian Empire, Saudi Arabia, Seven Years War, Shinto Japan, Siberia, Slavery, South America, Spain, Stalin, Sweden, Syria, T'ung-chih, Tamerlane, the Arab world, the Balkans, the Battle of the Nile, the Black sea, the Chinese Empire, the Chinese Revolution, the Congress of Berlin, the Dutch, the Kurds, the Mamluk state, the Mississippi valley, the Mongols, the Mughal Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, the New World, the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese, the rise of the West, the Royal Navy, the Safavid Empire, the Scientific Revolution, The Scramble For Africa, the slave trade, the Turks, the Yemen, Tibet, Turkey, Western Europe, Xinkiang
Posted by Simon on November 15, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/after-tamerlane-john-darwin/
Our Lord has done great things for us, because he wanted us to accomplish a deed so magnificent that it surpasses even what we have prayed for… I have burned the town and killed everyone. For four days without any pause our men have slaughtered… wherever we have been able to get into we haven't spared the life of a single Muslim. We have herded them into the mosques and set them on fire… We have estimated the number of dead Muslim men and women at six thousand. It was, Sire, a very fine deed. (Afonso de Albuquerque describing the Portuguese capture of Goa on 25 November 1510, p.286)
In 1500 the Indian Ocean was the scene of sophisticated trading networks which had been centuries in the making. Muslim traders from the 'Swahili Coast' of Africa traded up the coast to the Red Sea and across land to Cairo, heart of the Muslim world, while other traders crossed the ocean eastwards to the coast of India, where Hindu rajas ran a number of seaports offering hospitality to communities of Muslims and Jews in a complex multi-ethnic web.
The trading routes were well established and the commodities – such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace – were managed via a familiar set of tariffs and customs. Even if you were caught by one of the many pirates who patrolled the sea, there were well established procedures for handing over a percentage of your cargo and being allowed to continue on your way.
All this was dramatically changed by the sudden arrival in 1497 of the super-violent Portuguese, who had orders from their king and from the pope:
to destroy all Muslim bases and ships
to establish European forts at all convenient harbours
to bully all local rulers into proclaiming complete subservience to the King of Portugal
to build churches and convert the heathens to Christianity
This is the story of how an idyllic, essentially peaceful, well ordered and multicultural world was smashed to pieces by the cannons, muskets and unbelievable savagery of barbarian Europeans. This book is a revelation. I had no idea that the Portuguese 'explorers' of the 'Age of Discovery' were quite such savage sadists.
Massacre of the Miri
Probably the most notorious incident, which epitomises the behaviour and attitudes of the invaders, was the massacre of the Muslim pilgrim ship Miri.
The Portuguese sent their ships to conquer the Indian Ocean in large groups or 'armadas'.
On September 29, 1502, the fourth great Portuguese Armada spotted a large merchant ship carrying Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca. The ship, the Miri, was identified as belonging to al-Fanqi, thought to be the commercial agent representing Mecca – and the interests of the Muslim Mamluk dynasty in Cairo – in Calicut, one of the commercial seaports on the west India coast.
Portuguese Captain Matoso cornered the pilgrim ship which surrendered quickly, the captain and passengers imagining they would be able to buy off these 'pirates' in the traditional manner. But these were not pirates; they were Christians or, as they would come to be recognised around the Indian Ocean, sadistic, uncivilised barbarian murderers.
Commander of the Armada, Vasco da Gama, ignored all the offers of gold or cargo. His Portuguese crew plundered the ship, stole all its cargo and then made it plain that he planned to burn the ship with all its passengers – men, women and children – on board. As this realisation sank in the civilian passengers desperately attacked the Portuguese with stone and bare hands, but were themselves shot down by muskets and cannon from the Portuguese ships.
On October 3, 1502, having gutted the Miri of all its valuables, the Portuguese locked all the remaining passengers in the hold and the ship was burnt and sunk by artillery. It took several days to go down completely. Portuguese soldiers rowed around the waters on longboats mercilessly spearing survivors.
All in all it was a fine example of:
The honour code of the fidalgos with its rooted hatred of Islam and its unbending belief in retribution and punitive revenge. (p.144)
the honour code which, as Crowley emphasises, inspired the Portuguese voyages of conquest and terror.
The Calicut massacre
It helps to explain this behaviour, and put it in context, if you know about the Calicut Massacre. Back in December 1500 the Second Portuguese India Armada, under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, had gotten frustrated at the slow pace at which his ships were being filled with spices at Calicut, the largest spice port on the western coast of India, despite having made an agreement with its raja or zamorin.
To hurry things along Cabral ordered the seizure of an Arab merchant ship from Jeddah, then loading up with spices nearby in the harbour. Cabral claimed that, as the Zamorin had promised the Portuguese priority in the spice markets, the cargo was rightfully theirs anyway.
Incensed by this theft, the Arab merchants around the quay started a riot and led the rioters to the 'factory' or warehouse which the Portuguese had only just finished building to store their booty. The Portuguese onboard the ships in the harbour watched helplessly while the Calicut mob successfully stormed the 'factory', massacring 50 of the Portuguese inhabitants, including some Franciscan friars.
Once the riot had quietened down, Cabral sent to the Zamorin asking for redress. When it wasn't forthcoming, Cabral seized around ten Arab merchant ships in the harbour, confiscating their cargoes, killing their crews, and burning their ships. Blaming the Zamorin for doing nothing to stop the riot, Cabral then ordered all the guns from his fleet to bombard Calicut indiscriminately for a full day, wreaking immense damage, killing many citizens and starting fires which burnt entire quarters of the town.
Crowley shows us again and again how one bad deed, a bit of impatience or a slight cultural misunderstanding was liable to blow up, in Portuguese hands, into explosions of super-destructive wrath and mass murder.
The crusader mentality
It helps to understand the Portuguese approach a bit more if you realise that the Portuguese kings – John I (1481-1595) and Manuel I (1495-1521) – didn't send out explorers and scientists – they sent warriors. And that these warriors were still steeped in the aggressive anti-Muslim ideology of the crusades.
Crowley's narrative sets the tone by going back nearly a century before the Portuguese entered the Indian ocean, to describe the 'crusade' of an earlier generation when, in 1415, Portuguese crusaders attacked Ceuta, an enclave of Muslim pirates on the north coast of Africa. The Ceuta pirates had been a pest to Portuguese shipping for generations, and the Portuguese finally had enough, stormed and sacked it.
Having established the sense of antagonism between Muslims and Christians, Cowley leaps forward to the next significant moment, to when the Muslim Ottoman armies took Constantinople in 1453. The fall of Constantinople to the Muslims sent shocks waves throughout Christian Europe.
It made Christian kings, and their peoples, all over Europe feel threatened
It cut off trade routes to the East, for spices and so on
1. The quest for new routes to the spice trade
In other words the fall of Constantinople provided a keen commercial incentive to navigators, explorers and entrepreneurs to come up with alternative ways of reaching the Spice Islands by sea. While in the 1490s Christopher Columbus was trying to persuade the King of Spain to fund his idea of sailing west, around the world, to reach the Indies, the King of Portugal was persuaded to fund expeditions in the opposite direction – down the coast of Africa with the hope that it would be easier to cruise around Africa and reach the Spice Islands by heading East.
The spices in question included the five 'glorious spices' – pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace – but also ginger, cardamom, tamarind, balms and aromatics like wormwood, Socotra aloe, galbanum, camphor and myrrh.
Also brought back from India were dyes like lac, indigo and dyewood and precious ornamental objects and materials like ivory, ebony and pearls. All these good fetched up to ten times as much on the quaysides of Lisbon or Venice as they cost to buy in Calicut. But that was when they had been transhipped from warehouses in the ports of the Middle East. The conquest of Constantinople reduced the transhipment trade and led to a more aggressive attitude from Muslim traders, which badly hurt the commercial prosperity of Venice, in particular.
2. Outflanking Islam
But the aim of the explorers was not only to get commercial access to the spice trade. throughout the Middle Ages it had been widely believed that Christianity had been carried by the apostle James and others, deep into Africa, into Arabia, and even as far as India.
So there was a military element to the expeditions. Christian strategists thought that, if the explorers could make contact with the Christian communities which were believed to exist in faraway India, and were able to link up – then together they would be able to surround, the European armies attacking from the west, the newly awakened Indian Christian armies attacking from the East.
In other words, alongside the element of exploration, ran an aggressive continuation of the fierce anti-Muslim, crusading mentality of John and Manuel's medieval forebears.
This helps to explain the unremitting anti-Muslim hostility of the commanders of all the great Portuguese Armadas to the East. Not only did their kings demand it, not only was it part of their explicit, written instructions (which survive to this day), but their conquering mentality was backed up by the full force of the pope and the Holy Catholic Church.
The whole European apparatus of state power, religious intolerance, and the technology of war – metal armour and huge shipboard cannons – was brought to bear on the inhabitants of the Indian Ocean.
Wage war and total destruction… by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed. (The Regimento or instructions given by King Manuel I to Dom Francisco de Almeida in 1505)
Thus it was that warrior-sailors like the Sodré brothers or the du Albuquerque cousins received orders quite simply to destroy all Muslim ships and trade between the Red Sea and Calicut.
Sadism and intimidation were seen as legitimate tactics. The reader loses count of the number of local hostages, ambassadors and civilians who are taken by the Portuguese who, if anything displeases them, proceed to hang their hostages from the yardarms, before dismembering them and returning their scattered body parts to their horrified relatives waiting on shore. This happens lots of times.
When Vicente Sodré intercepted a large Muslim ship carrying a full cargo of treasure, commanded by the wealthy and well-known merchant Mayimama Marakkar, Vicente had Marakkar stripped naked, tied to the mast, whipped and then subjected to the Portuguese practice of merdimboca or 'shit in the mouth' – the name says it all – with the added refinement that the Portuguese forced Marakkar – an eminent and pious Muslim – to eat pork and bacon fat (p.141).
Deliberately offensive, determined to rule by Terror, fuelled by genocidal racism, unflinching, unbending and merciless, the Portuguese conquerors, in this telling, seem like the Nazis of their day.
Conquerors
So this is the story which Crowley's book tells: the story of how tiny Portugal, at the far western tip of Europe, managed in thirty or so years, from the late 1490s to the 1520s, to establish the first global empire in world history – in reality a set of connected outposts dotted along the west and east coasts of Africa, the west coast of India – before moving on to explore the East Indies – all the while pursuing this policy of unremitting intimidation and extreme violence. It's a harrowing read. Noses are slit and hands chopped off on pretty much every page.
Conquerors is divided into three parts:
Reconnaissance: the Route to the Indies (1483-99)
Contest: Monopolies and Holy War (1500-1510)
Conquest: The Lion of the Sea (1510-1520)
Over and above the narrative of events, we learn a couple of Big Things:
1. How to round the Cape of Good Hope
The navigational breakthrough which allowed all this to happen was the discovery of how to round the Cape at the southernmost tip of Africa. For generations Portuguese ships had hugged the coast of Africa as they tentatively explored south and this meant that they struggled with all kinds of headwinds, shoals and rocks, particularly as they rounded the big bulge and struggled east into the Gulf of Guinea. The net result was that by 1460 they had established maps and stopping points at the Azores, Madeira, but only as far south along the African coast as the river Senegal and Sierra Leone.
The Great Breakthrough was to abandon the coast altogether and give in to the strong north-easterly winds which blew sailing ships south and west out into big Atlantic – and then, half way down the coast of Brazil, to switch direction back east, and let the strong west winds blow you clean back across the Atlantic and under the Cape of Good Hope. See the red line on the map, below. This immensely significant discovery was made in the 1460s.
That's if things went well. Which they often didn't – with calamitous results. Crowley reports that of the 5,500 Portuguese men who went to India between 1497 (the date of Vasco de Gama's first successful rounding of the Cape), 1,800 – 35% – did not return. Most drowned at sea.
All the armadas suffered significant loss of life to shipwreck and drowning.
Outward and Inbound routes of the Portuguese Indian Armadas in the 1500s (source: Wikipedia)
2. The accidental discovery of Brazil
The Second Portuguese India Armada, assembled in 1500 on the order of Manuel I and commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, followed the strategy of heading west and south into the Atlantic in order to catch easterly winds to blow them round the tip of Africa. But the ships went so far that they sighted a new land in the west, landed and claimed it for Portugal.
It was Brazil, whose history as a western colony begins then, in April 1500, though it was to be some time before anybody made serious attempts to land and chart it, and Crowley makes no further mention of it.
3. Rivalry with Venice
I knew the Portuguese were rivals with the Spanish for the discovery and exploration of new worlds. I hadn't realised that the creation of a new route to the Spice Islands rocked the basis of Venice's maritime trade and empire.
Venice had for generations been the end point for the transmission of spices from India, across the Indian Ocean, through the Red Sea to Suez, across land to Cairo, and by ship to Italy. This was all very expensive, especially the transhipment across land. Venice was rocked when the entire supply chain was jeopardised by the new Portuguese sea route, which resulted in huge amounts of spices and other exotic produce ending up on the quays of Lisbon at a fraction of the Venetian price.
With the result that the Venetian authorities sent spies to Lisbon to find out everything they could about the Portuguese navigators, their new routes and discoveries. They also sent emissaries to the Sultan in Cairo, putting pressure on him to either take punitive measures against the Portuguese, or to lower the taxes he charged on the land journey of Venetian spices from Suez to Cairo and on to Alexandria. Or both.
The sultan refused to do either. Venetian fury.
The rivalry of Venice is sown into the narrative like a silver thread, popping up regularly to remind us of the importance of trade and profit and control of the seas 600 years ago, and of the eternally bickering nature of Europe – a seething hotbed of commercial, religious and political rivals, all determined to outdo each other.
Prester John and a new Crusade
Medieval Christendom was awash with myths and legends. One such tale concerned a mythical Christian King who ruled in wealth and splendour somewhere in Africa, named 'Prester John'.
When King Manuel sent out his conquerors, it was not only to seize the spice trade of the Indian Ocean, but to make contact with Prester John and unite with his – presumably massive and wealthy army – to march on Mecca or Cairo or Jerusalem, or all three, in order to overthrow Islam for good and liberate the Holy Places.
Vasco de Gama had this aim at the back of his mind as he set off to round the Cape, and so did Afonso de Albuquerque who, at the end of his life, was still planning to establish Christian forts on the Red Sea and to locate the mysterious John in a joint crusade against the Muslim sultan of Cairo.
If anyone was Prester John it was the self-styled 'emperor' of Ethiopia, who some of the Portuguese did travel to meet, although he turned out – despite all his pomp and pageantry – to be completely unprepared to help any kind of European Christian Crusade against his Muslim neighbours, not least because they completely surrounded and outnumbered him.
Still, it is important to remember that the whole point of funding these expensive armadas into the Indian Ocean wasn't primarily to open up new commercial routes: for the king and his conquerors, that was a happy side aim, but the Key Goal was to link up with the kingdom of Prester John and the imagined Christian kingdoms of the East, in order to exterminate Islam and liberate the Holy Places.
Crowley's approach – more adventure than analysis
Crowley's approach is popular and accessible. He prefers anecdote to analysis.
Thus the book's prologue opens with a giraffe being presented to the Chinese emperor in Beijing in the early 1400s. This had been collected by the Chinese admiral Admiral Zheng He, who led one of the epic voyages which the Yongle Emperor had commissioned, sending vast Chinese junks into the Indian Ocean in the first decades of the 15th century. The flotillas were intended to stun other nations into recognition of China's mighty pre-eminence and had no colonising or conquering aim.
The Yongle emperor was succeeded in 1424 by the Hongxi emperor who decided the expeditions were a waste of time and so banned further ocean-going trips, a ban which within a few decades extended to even building large ocean-going vessels: small coastal trading vessels were allowed, but the Ming emperors hunkered down behind their Great Wall and closed their minds to the big world beyond.
One way of looking at it, is that the Hongxi emperor handed over the world to be colonised by European nations.
The point is Crowley gets into this important issue via an anecdote about a giraffe, and doesn't really unpack it as much as he could.
A few pages later, the main text of the book opens with a detailed account of the erection of a commemorative cross on the coast of Africa by Diogo Cao in August 1483. It was one of several he erected on his exploratory voyage down the west African coast.
In both instances Crowley is following the time-honoured technique of starting a chapter with an arresting image and dramatic scene. The problem is that when he proceeds to fill in the background and what led up to each incident, I think his accounts lack depth and detail. For example, my ears pricked up when he mentioned Henry the Navigator, but Henry's life and career were only fleetingly referenced in order to get back to the 'now' of 1483. I had to turn to Wikipedia to get a fuller account of Henry's life and importance.
Once on Wikipedia, and reading about Henry the Navigator, I quickly discovered that 'the invention of the caravel was what made Portugal poised to take the lead in transoceanic exploration', because of the light manoeuvrability of this new design of ship.
A 15th century Portuguese caravel. it had three masts and a lateen or triangular sail which allowed the caravel to sail against the wind.
Crowley certainly has some pictures of caravels, and describes them a bit, but doesn't really give us enough information to ram home why their design was so game-changing.
It may be relevant that Crowley studied Literature not History at university. He is continually drawn to the dramatic and the picturesque, and skimps on the analytical.
To give another example, Crowley periodically namechecks the various popes who blessed the armadas and gave instructions as to the converting of the heathen and fighting the Unbeliever. He briefly mentions the famous Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, whereby Pope Alexander VI brokered the deal deciding which parts of the New World would belong to the rivals Spain and Portugal. But there is nowhere any real analysis of the enormous role the popes and the Catholic Church played in the geopolitics behind all this exploring and conquering.
Instead, Crowley is continually drawn to the most vivid and melodramatic moments: battles are described in terms of who got an arrow in the eye, and strategy is more seen as deriving from the raging impatience of this or that Portuguese commander than from higher-level geopolitical imperatives.
The personal, not the wider geo-political situation, is what interests Crowley in Europe and Indian and Islamic politics.
Crowley's style
Crowley writes the short staccato sentences of a popular thriller – fine if you're looking for poolside entertainment, but not enough if you're looking for something with a little more analysis and insight.
It was time to move on. However, the wind thwarted their departure. The wind turned. They were forced back to the island. The sultan tried to make peace overtures but was rebuffed. Ten nervy days ensued. (p.67)
This is thriller writing, or the prose style of a modern historical romance.
Either Crowley, his editors or his publishers decided that hos book would be best marketed as popular, accessible, hair-raising history. Thrilling, gripping and often quite horrible history.
In the rain, with the continuous gunfire, in a tropical hell, soaking and sweating in their rotting clothes, they were increasingly gripped by morbid terror that they were all going to die. (p.275)
He gives us gripping individual scenes, but not so many real insights, let alone overarching analysis or ideas.
Thus, despite the book being some 360 pages long, and including lengthy end notes, I felt I'd only scratched the surface of these seismic events, had been told about the key dates and events, and seen quite a few hands being cut off – but was left wanting to understand more, a lot more, about the geographical, economic, technological and cultural reasons for the success of Portugal's cruel and barbarous explorers and empire makers.
This feeling was crystallised when the book ended abruptly and without warning with the death of the bloodthirsty visionary, Afonso de Albuquerque, in 1415.
For sure he was a central figure, who grasped the strategic importance of seizing Goa, who tried to storm Aden, who arranged a native coup at Ormuz, who burned Muslim towns and ships without mercy, who chopped the hands and ears off his hostages by the score. By page 330 he had become the dominant figure of the book, almost as if it the book was at one stage intended to be a biography of just him.
So the book ends with his death in 1515 but … the Portuguese Empire had only just got going. There would be at least another century of colonising effort, in Brazil, on the coast of Africa, and further East, into Malaysia, Japan and China. A century more of adventures, wars and complex politicking.
None of that is here. Crowley briefly refers to all that on the last pages of his book, before a few sententious paragraphs about how it all led to globalisation and modern container ships. But of the real establishment and running of the Portuguese Empire which stretched from Brazil to Japan there is in fact nothing.
The book's title is therefore a bit misleading. It should be titled something more like The generation which founded the Portuguese empire. That would excuse and explain his relatively narrow focus on de Gama, Cabra and Albuquerque, and on the king who commissioned their exploits, Manuel I. Maybe adding Manuel's dates – 1495-1521 – would make it even clearer.
In fact, with a bit of rewriting, the book could have become Manuel I and the conquerors who founded the Portuguese Empire: that accurately describes its content.
The current title gives the impression that it will be a complete history of the Portuguese Empire – which is why I bought it – and which is very far indeed from being the truth.
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire on Amazon
Portuguese India Armadas Wikipedia article
by Simon on July 6, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Africa, European History, History, War
Tagged 2015, Aden, Admiral Zheng He, Afonso de Albuquerque, Africa, Age of Discovery, al-Fanqi, Brazil, Cairo, Calicut, Ceuta, Christianity, Christopher Columbus, Conquerors, Constantinople, Diogo Cao, Dom Francisco de Almeida, empires, Ethiopia, Europe, fidalgos, Goa, Henry the Navigator, Hindu, imperialism, Indian Ocean, Islam, Italy, Jeddah, Jews, King John I, King Manuel I, Madeira, Mamluk dynasty, massacre of the Miri, Mayimama Marakkar, Mecca, merdimboca, Ming dynasty, Muslim, Ormuz, Ottoman Empire, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Pope Alexander VI, Portugal, Portuguese Empire, Prester John, Red Sea, Roger Crowley, Roman Catholic Church, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spice Islands, Suez, Swahili Coast, the Azores, the Calicut Massacre, the Cape of Good Hope, the Gulf of Guinea, the Hongxi emperor, the Muslim world, the papacy, the pope, the Red Sea, the Yongle Emperor, Treaty of Tordesillas, Vasco da Gama, Venice, Vicente Sodré, zamorin
Posted by Simon on July 6, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/conquerors-roger-crowley/
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 @ V&A
A stunning exhibition of 70 banners, scrolls, fans and ink paintings covering well over 1,000 years of Chinese art, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The audiobook is voiced by Juliet Stephenson and is over 2 hours long. This is a big and densely detailed exhibition.
For me Chinese art is a completely new world with almost no bearings or fixed points. I know nothing of Chinese history and recognise none of the artists' names and know nothing about the aesthetics of Chinese art, the conventions and rules or the schools and movements. The exhibition displays the work by chronological theme, but I've stuck to the dates of the dynasties which define Chinese history, giving me at least one framework to cling on to.
Tang Dynasty 618-907
The first room concentrates on silk banners showing Buddhist deities. The earliest banner dates from 729 (contemporary with the Venerable Bede in England and just before the Battle of Poitiers in which the Franks stopped the advance of Islamic armies into France). Buddhism, boddhisatvas, banners and offerings. There is a fascinating film of how silk was prepared and treated with alum and gum before painting, as well as an ancient painting showing the process being carried out
Itinerant monk accompanied by a tiger (9th century)
Song Dynasty 960-1279
Buddhism faded, secular subjects, the visible world and landscapes became more popular. Visual explorations of changing weather and the shifting qualities of natural light. The Emperor ruled over 100 million people! Art merged decorative and subtle landscapes with philosophical ideas. Paintings began to be autographed in contrast with the anonymous Tang banners.
The Summer Palace of Ming Huang
There are three Chinese philosophies: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. The Taoist ideas of Yin and Yang were developed and incorporated into theories of art: the active Yang is represented by hills and rocks; by contrast, the passive, feminine Yin is embodied in rivers and lakes.
The Nine dragons scroll was painted about 1244 and shows nine shapes or incarnations or activities of the dragons beloved of Chinese legend. Like many of these artworks, it is not a painting to be hung on a wall but a scroll, meant to be kept in a safe storebox and occasionally taken out, unsfurled and appreciated. From right to left.
Nine Dragons scroll. Detail of a dragon
Most if not all of the images incorporate texts and poetry. The calligraphy of the Chinese characters is just as important as the image itself and the style of both can be highly individual and distinctive. Images and poems were produced by a self-consciously artistic scholar-gentry class.
Thus the text of the poem by the northern Song emperor Huizong describing the flight of the 'auspicious cranes' is given just as much space as the image itself.
Auspicious cranes poem and painting by the Emperor Huizong (1112)
Yuan Dynasty 1271-1368 (pronounced 'un')
Kublai Khan and his Mongols conquered China and proclaimed a new dynasty in 1271. The scholar-gentry class was dismissed from power and influence. The era is one of solitary, isolated scholars and artists creating wistful, nostalgic poems and images full of nostalgia. Ghostly brushwork in pale ink is typical of the 'apparition' painting of the time.
Wu Zhen, Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dongting 14th century
There were four masters of the Yuan Dynasty
Read more about the art of the Yuan Dynasty
Ming Dynasty 1368-1644
After Mongol domination, the Ming represented a return to rule by ethnic Han Chinese, leading to a long period of prosperity and stability. Silk and expensive pigments reappeared. The capital moved from Bei-jing ('jing' meaning capital and 'bei' north) to Nanjing ('jing' meaning capital, 'nan' meaning 'south'.)
There is a lovely scroll of Court Ladies in the Inner Palace, playing Chinese forms of golf (!) and football (!). There was renewed scholarly interest in past art and techniques and history.
Du Jin (active 1465–1509), Court Ladies in the Inner Palace
There are many more portraits of real people and places – for example, Tang Yin whose civil service career was ended by wrongful accusations of bribery made a painting called 'Pure Dream Beneath a Paulownia Tree', with accompanying poem:
For this lifetime he is divorced from the thought of rank and fame
This pure sleep is no longer filled with the dreams of grandeur.
Wen Zhengming created an album of views of The Garden of The Inept Administrator, 1551.
Garden of the Inept Administrator, Wen Zhengming
These serene, philosophical and mature images were created soon after England suffered the bonfire of vandalism of the Henrician Reformation, followed by the burnings-at-the-stake of Bloody Mary and the further artistic destruction of Edward VI. Hard not to compare our brutal philistinism with the depth and civilisation of these images. Paintings with names like:
Spring Clouds in the Linggu Mountains
Deity with Phoenix
Pomegranates, Autumn Mallows, Chrysanthemums, Blue Magpies
Qing Dynasty 1644-1911 (pronounced ching)
The rise of Traditionalism, the urge to copy what were now seen as the Old Masters of the Chinese tradition, in subject matter, brushstroke, style and calligraphy.
Landscapes in the manner of the Old Masters by Wang Jian
The Colours of Mount Taihang by Wang Hui
Portrait of Wang Shimin by Zeng Jing, 1616
Clouds and Mist in the Mountains by Fa Ruozhen, 1690
The Palace of Nine Perfections by Yuan Jiang, 1691
Prosperous Suzhou, 1759
Bamboo and Rocks by Zheng Xie, c 1762
The story of classical Chinese painting ended in the early 20th century, amid the influx of western influences – perspective, realism, the horizon – and the social upheavals accompanying the end of the Chinese empire in 1911. What a tradition! What wonderful awesome works of art!
Teachers' resource image bank of the exhibition (pdf)
About the exhibition, on the V&A website
Excellent review of the exhibition
The Arts desk review
by Simon on January 3, 2014 • Permalink
Posted in Art, China, Exhibition, History
Tagged art, Buddhism, Du Jin, exhibition, Fa Ruozhen, Huizong, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900, Ming dynasty, Nine dragons, Qing dynasty, Song dynasty, Tang dynasty, Tang Yin, V&A, Wang Hui, Wang Jian, Wen Zhengming, Wu Zhen, Yuan dynasty, Yuan Jiang, Zeng Jing
Posted by Simon on January 3, 2014
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/masterpieces-of-chinese-painting-700-1900-va/


NASHVILLE, TN, Dec. 07, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE-- LIG Assets, Inc. (OTC PINK: LIGA) (also known as the "Leader in Green Assets" or "LIGA") announces the results of the two tests conducted by LIGA CEO Allan Gillis and LIGA's partner company LiveStor America regarding the successful catching and transporting of Asian Carp. These tests focused only on the Silver Carp, which feeds on various types of plankton causing the removal of the food source for native fish species. Each mature female Silver Carp (one-year-old) can produce a million eggs per year. LiveStor America's tests were set up with guidance from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and the Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Resources Agency which recommended conducting the test program on Lake Barkley in Kuttawa, Kentucky.
The main issue with harvesting Asian Carp is that they degrade very quickly once they die, which is usually with two hours of gill netting capture. If not processed quickly or packed on ice the carp will spoil quickly and then they are then only fit for sale to the fertilizer industry which is the lowest cost return of all four possible revenue streams. If the Asian Carp are not in a degraded condition once they reach the fish processing facility they can be used for human consumption such as fish fillets or industrially commercial applications such as fish meal, lobster/ crab bait and fish oil.
The purpose of the following tests were to see if we could keep Asian Carp alive for twenty days to facilitate transport to Asia. I was advised by our researchers in Canada that, if we could keep the carp alive in the small T-250 pound system for ten days we could likely make adjustments to our larger forty foot live seafood transport sea containers to make this Asian transport possible.
The first test was with industry standard seafood storage crates and the newly released BioNovations Traystor crate using a modified T-250 live seafood holding, biofiltration system. After ten days, eleven fish of the initial twenty one carp were still alive and all survivors were in the BioNovations Traystor crates. After 14 days the small T-250 system could not handle the ammonia levels and the remainder of the fish in the Traystor crates system died. According to Lig Assets CEO Allan Gillis this was a not totally unexpected result.
The second test conducted gave the Company the results that LiveStor was looking and hoping for. This test was done using just the Traystor crates with sixteen fish with a constant supply of lake water and the Asian Carp placed in a stack of Traystor crates on the deck of the floating dock. This test lasted 7 days with no mortality, testing was stopped due to time restrictions. This method proved LiveStor America can quickly and safely transport the Asian Carp directly to the processing facilities using the BioNovations Traystor crates.
What this testing program has proven is that Live Stor America working with Live Ship Ltd. should be able to safely move large volumes of Asian Carp alive for up to ten days. This opens up the transport of Asian Carp from any point in America affected by the invasive species Asian Carp to a central process facility ensuring the highest value for the product.
What we are most excited about is our recent approval from the Department of Fisheries in Canada allowing Live Stor America to import Asian Carp into Canada for Lobster /Snow Crab bait. This invasive species product must be frozen and cut in pieces. The bait industry on the east coast of Canada uses hundreds of millions of pounds of bait per year, and the existing lobster/snow crab biomass of herring and mackerel are in decline due to over fishing and warming water temperatures on the east coast.
Live Stor America this week has ordered its first 53 ft. semi-truck load of 42,000 lbs. of Asian Carp to be shipped to Nova Scotia in late December; 50% of this load is pre-sold to date.
"The testing program in Kentucky enabled me to look at this Asian Carp issue as an outsider who has a vast international subsea construction history and a family history in the fishery business and I came up with some unique methods to remove the Asian Carp using modified industrial-scale fishing methods. I will provide a video and a podcast later next week which will better explain my thinking," stated Gillis.
LIGA and LiveStor's CEO Allan Gillis will be creating a video and podcast to discuss in detail the entire process. LIGA will issue a news release in the very near future alerting interested parties the exact time and place the video/Podcast will be made public on the Companies websites.
LIG Assets, Inc. in association with Robert Plarr is the emerging "Leader in Green Assets" -- focused on exclusive green, renewable energy and sustainable homes, living systems, technologies and components to be utilized in the residential and commercial real estate acquisition and development projects currently under way and now individual product sales, as well as rapid expansion into other sectors via acquisitions, mergers and joint venture partnerships. LIG Assets, Inc. trades on the pink sheets under the ticker symbol "LIGA".
LIGA Homes in association with the Company's other wholly-owned subsidiary, LIG Developments, LLC., a steel framing manufacturing and design entity incorporated under the LIG Assets corporate umbrella will fast track LIGA Homes' development as an emerging pioneer in the green and renewable energy sectors having successfully created the world's first earthquake, flood, hurricane and fire resistant homes and structures that are 100% fully sustainable and disaster resistant – from individual green systems and homes to fully sustainable communities and commercial centers - completely revolutionizing the sustainable and renewable construction movement forever!
For additional information about LIG Assets, Inc., Robert Plarr, and/or how to purchase our exclusive homes, structures, products and technologies or to subscribe online to LIGA's free Shareholder Newsletter for regular updates and alerts regarding important Company developments Please visit the Company's website atwww.LeaderInGreenAssets.com -- also follow LIGA at Twitter.com/LIGAssets.
Live Stor is a live seafood storage and distribution company located in North Sydney, Nova Scotia that is revolutionizing the way live lobster and snow crab are shipped worldwide. Live Stor's system for eliminating or minimizing stress from "catch to plate" reduces mortality, improves health, freshness, and taste, therefore increasing market value and supplier profit. The Company's proprietary supply chain system developed by BioNovations minimizes product stress to improve health and longevity while providing system for care of product at all points of the supply chain. This reduces total cost of live seafood distribution and increases market value by delivering a fresh, premium taste experience.
The BioNovations live seafood transport container allows Live Stor the ability to ship seafood over long distances and extended periods of time, both over land and sea. Both of BioNovations transport trailers and ocean faring containers minimize carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, resulting in a much lower carbon footprint than traditional methods such as air freight. Up until now live seafood holding and transport systems came with an inherently high mortality rate. BioNovations systems are specifically designed to provide highly controllable environments and have significantly reduced mortality rates associated with long term storage and long haul transport. As a result, the cost of storing and shipping live seafood will greatly reduce loss of life during transport, thereby maximizing the use of the targeted species and increasing the payload.
President – LIG Assets, Inc.


text:
Q: Issues implementing a reduce in CUDA I am trying to implement a reduce in cuda, where I find the maximum element in an array. I have used this kernel for finding the minimum, and it works, but it doesnt work when I try to find the maximum. I have stepped through the algorithm repeatedly and can't find a bug. Any help would really be appreciated. (additionally, I get a different output when I uncomment the print statement there, which is also quite a headache....)
__global__
void findMaxAndMin(const float* const d_logLuminance, float* reduceCopy, int length, float* min_logLum, float* max_logLum){
    int idx = threadIdx.x + blockDim.x*blockIdx.x;
    if(idx >= length){
        return;
    }
    reduceCopy[idx] = d_logLuminance[idx];
    __syncthreads();

    //do a reduction with max

    for(int offset = 1;offset < length;offset = offset*2){
        if(idx % (offset*2) == 0){
            int compIdx = idx + offset;
            if(compIdx < length){
                float newVal = a_max(reduceCopy[idx], reduceCopy[compIdx]);
                if(idx == 0){
                    //printf("val %f \n", newVal);
                }
                __syncthreads();
                reduceCopy[idx] = newVal;
                __syncthreads();
            }
        }
        __syncthreads();
    }
    __syncthreads();
    if(idx == 0){
        *max_logLum = reduceCopy[0];
    }

}

A: There are several problems with the code. If it worked for minimum, you were lucky.

*

*I presume you launch more than one block (you use blockIdx.x). You repeatedly use the result of one block in another -- the reduceCopy[compIdx] may be set by another block. You cannot rely on this: you cannot predict the order of execution of the blocks or synchronize them. __syncthreads() is a barrier that works only within a single block!

*if(idx >= length) return is dangerous because it causes that not all threads will reach the following __syncthreads.

*you have __syncthreads() within a divergent conditional if(compIdx < length).

*a_max is undefined. Remember to always include the minimum working example. I can guess what that function is supposed to do, but maybe there is yet another bug lurking within it?
It seems to me that you have a good understanding on parallel reduction in theory, but the implementation fails because of the CUDA-specific behavior.
I would suggest you read some examples on how to do parallel reduction specifically on CUDA.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
PANEL ASKS FOR TRAUMA CENTER PLAN
Alan Bavley, Medical WriterSUN-SENTINEL
The lives of as many as 55 people who died in traffic accidents over the past four years in Palm Beach County could have been saved if a trauma center had been available at a local hospital, the county Emergency Medical Services Council says.
The EMS Council will ask the County Commission on Thursday to set in motion plans for developing a countywide trauma system to cut the death toll among highway casualties, stabbing and shooting victims and people injured in accidents at home and work.
"Saving lives, that's the whole purpose," said county EMS director Paul Milelli.
Milelli said the EMS Council will ask the County Commission to organize a trauma task force made up of members of the medical and business communities and other groups that will develop a plan for a trauma system.
A trauma system could be in operation as early as 1988, Milelli said. The county will have to commit at least $1 million to $1.5 million a year to keep it in business, he said.
The heart of the trauma system will be a a local hospital emergency room designated by the state as a trauma center. The center will have a full-time staff of specially trained doctors and nurses and an operating room and other facilities dedicated exclusively to treating trauma victims.
"You must have physicians available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, basically at the drop of a hat. I'd like them sitting there waiting (for patients)," Milelli said. "That's the expensive part."
Three local hospitals, St. Mary's in West Palm Beach, John F. Kennedy Memorial in Atlantis and Bethesda Memorial in Boynton Beach, have considered applying for state certification as a trauma center, Milelli said.
A county trauma system also would require special training programs for paramedics on rescue squads, a private or county-run helicopter ambulance for taking trauma victims from isolated areas or congested highways to the hospital, and agreements with rehabilitation facilities to accept patients once they are discharged from the hospital, he said.
"It's not such a big problem to create a trauma center. The bigger problem is coordinating with the other agencies," he said.
If a trauma system were established, all severely injured patients would be taken directly to the hospital with the trauma center, even if it meant bypassing hospitals that were nearer, Milelli said. The general procedure now in place is to take patients to whichever hospital emergency room is nearest, he said.
Milelli estimated that four to five patients a day would be sent to the trauma center; about half those patients would require an "all-out" life- saving effort by the center's staff.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
package com.github.ferstl.maven.pomenforcers.model;

import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.Map;

import com.github.ferstl.maven.pomenforcers.priority.PriorityOrdering;
import com.google.common.base.Function;
import com.google.common.base.Functions;
import com.google.common.collect.Maps;
import com.google.common.collect.Ordering;

import static java.util.Objects.requireNonNull;

public enum PomSection {
  MODEL_VERSION("modelVersion"),
  PREREQUISITES("prerequisites"),
  PARENT("parent"),
  GROUP_ID("groupId"),
  ARTIFACT_ID("artifactId"),
  VERSION("version"),
  PACKAGING("packaging"),
  NAME("name"),
  DESCRIPTION("description"),
  URL("url"),
  LICENSES("licenses"),
  ORGANIZATION("organization"),
  INCEPTION_YEAR("inceptionYear"),
  CI_MANAGEMENT("ciManagement"),
  MAILING_LISTS("mailingLists"),
  ISSUE_MANAGEMENT("issueManagement"),
  DEVELOPERS("developers"),
  CONTRIBUTORS("contributors"),
  SCM("scm"),
  REPOSITORIES("repositories"),
  PLUGIN_REPOSITORIES("pluginRepositories"),
  DISTRIBUTION_MANAGEMENT("distributionManagement"),
  MODULES("modules"),
  PROPERTIES("properties"),
  DEPENDENCY_MANAGEMENT("dependencyManagement"),
  DEPENDENCIES("dependencies"),
  BUILD("build"),
  PROFILES("profiles"),
  REPORTING("reporting"),
  REPORTS("reports");

  private static final Map<String, PomSection> pomSectionMap;

  static {
    pomSectionMap = Maps.newHashMap();
    for (PomSection pomSection : values()) {
      pomSectionMap.put(pomSection.getSectionName(), pomSection);
    }
  }

  public static PomSection getBySectionName(String sectionName) {
    requireNonNull(sectionName, "Section name is null.");

    PomSection value = pomSectionMap.get(sectionName);
    if (value == null) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("POM section " + sectionName + " does not exist.");
    }

    return value;
  }

  public static Function<String, PomSection> stringToPomSection() {
    return StringToPomSectionTransformer.INSTANCE;
  }

  public static Function<PomSection, String> pomSectionToString() {
    return PomSectionToStringTransformer.INSTANCE;
  }

  private final String sectionName;

  public static Ordering<PomSection> createPriorityOrdering(Collection<PomSection> priorityCollection) {
    return new PriorityOrdering<>(priorityCollection, Functions.<PomSection>identity());
  }

  private PomSection(String sectionName) {
    this.sectionName = sectionName;
  }

  public String getSectionName() {
    return this.sectionName;
  }

  private static enum StringToPomSectionTransformer implements Function<String, PomSection> {
    INSTANCE;

    @Override
    public PomSection apply(String input) {
      return getBySectionName(input);
    }
  }

  private static enum PomSectionToStringTransformer implements Function<PomSection, String> {
    INSTANCE;

    @Override
    public String apply(PomSection input) {
      return input.getSectionName();
    }
  }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


What happens if I get convicted of drunk or drugged driving in Ohio?
Some of those don't sound familiar. What is the Driver Intervention Program, for instance?
The DIP is a two- or three-day course during which participants learn about alcohol and drug abuse, addiction treatment resources, and what can happen if they receive additional OVI convictions. Enrolling requires paying a fee of $300-400. If you need to travel to participate, you must also pay for your own hotel, meals, and other expenses.
What are offender plates and an ignition interlock?
Starting in 2004, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) began issuing specially designed licensed plates to drivers who had multiple OVI convictions. The plates have a yellowish-orange background and bright red letters and numbers. Judges have the authority to require offender plates for any person found guilty of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Ignition interlocks work like Breathalyzers. Drivers must blow into a tube connected to the starter on their car's engine. If the device detects any alcohol, the car will not start.
You must pay for any offender plates and interlocks. The interlock also requires regular inspections and calibrations at your expense.
At least I won't lose my car, right?
No, at least not permanently after a first-time OVI conviction. Keep in mind, however, that your car will almost definitely get towed and impounded when you are arrested for driving while impaired. Reclaiming your vehicle from the police can be complicated and expensive, especially if the arresting officer seizes and suspends your driver's license shortly after charging you.
Wait. Did you just write that I can face OVI penalties even before I go to court?
Yes. If you refuse to provide breath, urine, and blood samples for alcohol and drug testing, you can lose your license to an administrative license suspension, or ALS. That can also happen if you have prior OVI convictions, if you register a very high blood alcohol content, or if you hold a commercial driver's license and were arrested while driving for work.
The rules on DUI license suspensions are complex and punitive. You can read more about this, as well as how you can appeal an ALS, by clicking over to this page on the Campbell Law website.
The very possibility that you may spend as much as a year with a suspended license before even going to court to defend yourself against an OVI charge highlights why you need advice and representation from a dedicated and caring Columbus defense lawyer.
What can happen if I get convicted of OVI more than once?
All of the penalties outlined above apply, but they become more severe. For instance, vehicle immobilization (e.g., booting) becomes mandatory after a second drunk or drugged driving conviction within a six-year period. A 10-year license suspension becomes a possibility with a third conviction, and a mandatory stay in local jail or state prison is imposed for a fourth conviction within a six-year period.
If you find yourself facing multiple OVI charges in Ohio, contacting a Columbus DUI lawyer as soon as possible can only benefit you.
Do drivers younger than 21 face the same OVI penalties as adults?
Generally, yes. Underage DUI penalties in Ohio can differ in terms of license suspensions and license points, but jail, fines, and court orders for treatment apply equally to drunk and drugged drivers of all ages.
Outside of the courts, young OVI offenders may be disciplined by school administrators or student conduct boards. A knowledgeable college student DUI lawyer in Columbus will be able to explain possible complications like these to teens, young adults, and their families.
Will pleading guilty to a different offense like reckless driving/reckless operation reduce my penalties?
There is no way to answer this question without knowing all the unique facts related to your case. If a prosecutor offers plea down from OVI, you should review the implications of accepting the proposal with an experienced OVI defense attorney.
How can I find a lawyer to help me with my DUI/OVI Case?
Our lead attorney, April Campbell, relies on her many years of experience prosecuting drunk and drugged drivers to now conduct successful defenses. She knows where officers make mistakes and how evidence from sobriety tests can be called into question. Trust Campbell to protect you from unfair OVI penalties.


In recent months, the U.S. stock market has seen record highs coupled with dramatic sell-offs, its volatility fueled by the sub-prime mortgage and credit crisis, the weak dollar, and oil prices heading toward $100 per barrel. At the same time, the public has grown increasingly worried about the state of the U.S. economy.
Yet these fluctuations have a direct impact on only a limited number of Americans. Nearly half of adults nationwide (46%) say they don't have any money in the stock market. And among the half who say they do, the vast majority (43% of Americans overall) say they have some long-term investments like retirement accounts but don't trade stocks regularly. Only 7% of Americans say they trade stocks and other funds pretty regularly.
Who Are the Active Traders?
Not surprisingly, household income is closely tied to market participation. A plurality of regular traders (38%) reports an annual, pre-tax, household income of $100,000 or more — an income level reached by only 15% of the general public. Among those with only long-term investments such as retirement accounts and bonds, that they do not trade regularly, 23% earn $100,000 or more, 37% earn $50-$99,999, and 30% earn less than $50,000. Two-thirds (66%) of those who have no money invested in the stock market report a household income of less than $50,000.
With retirement in the far future and thoughts of long-term financial security not an immediate concern, it may not be surprising that younger Americans are generally less likely than older Americans to trade stocks and other funds pretty regularly. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly one-fifth (21%) of adults nationwide are between the ages of 18 and 29. But only 12% of Americans who report trading stocks and other funds pretty regularly fall within this age range and they comprise almost a third (31%) of the adult population without any money in the stock market.
About half (48%) of regular traders and four-in-ten long-term investors (42%) are college graduates, significantly higher percentages than the proportion of college graduates among the general public. Of those without any money invested in the stock market, 64% have no more than a high school education.
Non-Hispanic whites are also slightly overrepresented among regular traders and those with long-term investments. While non-Hispanic whites make up roughly 72% of the American population, 76% of regular investors and 80% of long-term investors are non-Hispanic whites.
In addition, men as well as people who live in the suburbs and in the Northeast are among the most likely to trade stocks and other funds pretty regularly.
While Democrats outnumber Republicans nationwide by a 34%-to-26% margin in Pew's most recent surveys, regular traders lean the other way. Four-in-ten Americans who trade stocks regularly identify themselves as Republicans while only 24% are Democrats. Long-term investors are evenly split (31% identify with each political party). Those with no money in the stock market are more likely to be Democrats by nearly two to one (39% to 20%).
The partisan difference between regular traders and non-traders is not merely due to income differences. Among regular traders who earn $100,000 or more annually, 47% identify as Republicans and just 20% as Democrats. However, among those with comparable incomes but no money in the stock market the partisan split is roughly equal: 31% identify as Republicans and 27% as Democrats.
In a hypothetical general election matchup, Hillary Clinton holds a modest 8-percentage-point lead (51%-43%) over Giuliani among registered voters nationwide. But regular traders favor Giuliani by a substantial 20-point margin (56%-36%). The former New York City mayor holds a slimmer 50%-to-45% advantage among long-term traders.
What puts Clinton in the lead overall is her overwhelming support among the nearly half of Americans with no money in the stock market. By nearly two-to-one (61% to 32%) this segment of the electorate favors Clinton over Giuliani.
In the primary elections, however, stock traders' preferences are not all that different from the views of the rest of the country. If anything, the current frontrunners in both the Democratic and Republican primaries hold even larger leads among regular traders than they do nationwide. Among regular traders who are registered to vote and who identify themselves as Republicans or lean Republican, a 40% plurality names Rudy Giuliani as the candidate that they would most like to see win the GOP nomination. Mitt Romney, a candidate with a strong business and investment background, was favored by just 10% of both Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters overall and those among them who trade stocks and other funds pretty regularly.
Nationwide, Hillary Clinton is backed by 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters in Pew's September and October surveys, placing her well ahead of Barack Obama (25%). That lead is still greater (52% vs. 26%) among Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters who trade stocks and other funds pretty regularly.


A wide-ranging bill authorizing the use of medical marijuana for ailments from cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder was passed Monday night by the Iowa Senate, although it's unlikely to win approval in the Iowa House.
Sen. Thomas Greene, R-Burlington, a pharmacist who was the bill's floor manager, urged support for the measure. He said many ailing Iowans now face the choice of obtaining marijuana illegally or moving to another state. An estimated 12,555 Iowans have medical conditions that could benefit from medical marijuana, he said.
"We want Iowans to know we care about them here," Greene remarked.
"In the end, I think this bill strikes the right balance," Schneider said.
Medical conditions eligible for medical marijuana would include: cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, AIDS or HIV, hepatitis C, glaucoma, Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, Tourette's syndrome, any terminal illness subject to certain conditions, intractable pain, Parkinson's disease, muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, complex regional pain syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and any other chronic or debilitating disease or medical condition or its medical treatment approved by state officials.
But the Senate bill appears to face a major roadblock in House, where there aren't enough votes within the Republican caucus to pass the Senate bill, according to House Republican leaders.
"A lot of people say, 'Why is this taking so long?' Well, the reason why is education. A lot of us have learned about the benefits of cannabis. I beg our House colleagues to do the right thing," Zaun said.
Iowans are now allowed to possess cannabis oil for the treatment of epilepsy. But it's illegal to manufacture or distribute that oil in the state, and federal law prohibits its transportation across state lines. In practice, that makes it illegal for Iowans to obtain the product. The state law allowing cannabis oil was enacted in 2014 but is scheduled to expire in July, leaving no state law in its place.