Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. CUP, 1985 (1994).  

The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, perhaps accrues more condemnation than any other leading figure of Indian nationalism. Ayesha Jalal challenges the orthodox British and Indian interpretations of Jinnah with The Sole Spokesman, a book that examines Jinnah within the context of the All-India Muslim League and the Gordian knot of Indian politics. One of the most successful lawyers in the British empire, Jinnah began his political life as an Indian nationalist, not a Pakistani separatist. But Gandhi's religious revivalism offended Jinnah's taste for secular legalism; in response, Jinnah drifted out of the Indian National Congress as Gandhi rose to power in the 1920s. Jinnah began pursuing a policy of protected electoral rights for Muslims. Opponents found Jinnah unwilling to break even after substantial electoral defeats that revealed the tenuous grip he held over typical Muslim interests. Despite the odds, he "stayed in the saddle" and relentlessly pursued his objective of securing Muslim political rights throughout the subcontinent (and not just in the eventual regions of Pakistan). He played a dangerous game, and though he never got what he wanted--constitutional protections in a united India--he did not quite lose. His political positions sometimes appeared foolish (even dangerous), but not from the slim purchase that served as his foothold for power--he created a perceived need for a strong Muslim center.

            The British empire, throughout the early twentieth century, enhanced the power and status of India's provincial governments in order to undermine the drive for nationalist politics under the banner of Indian National Congress or the Muslim League. Strong provincial politics, the British thought, could prevent a national revolution. But in response, the Muslim League began to whisper communalist fears into the ear of Muslim majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal; the Muslim League hinted that only a strong nationalist Muslim movement at the center could protect Muslim interests in the periphery. The Muslim League consolidated their gains during the Second World War, when the Congress National Party rallied behind Gandhi's 'Quit India' movement, which quickly led the British to arrest all the major figures of Congress. The League, on the other hand, offered wider support for the war effort. As the war concluded in Allied victory, the raj freed the leaders of Congress and pursued further negotiations for a transfer of power, thus ending the Muslim League's brief dominance in the politics of domestic India.

            At the close of the war, the Muslim League's siren call of 'Hindu India' exacerbated communal tensions (and led to real bloodshed), but gave Jinnah an increasingly powerful stake in the politics of self-rule vis a vis the British raj and Congress. Interestingly, Jinnah did not speak the same language as the Muslims in Punjab and Bengal--the very Muslims he tried to cater to ensure they supported his drive for a strong center. Ensuring the capitulation of Punjab and Bengal into the house of the Muslim League required some manipulation on the part of Jinnah, for he gambled with their money. "The Punjab and Bengal would never vote to partition their provinces," Jalal writes, "and if they realised that a vote for Pakistan was a vote for partition, they would reject Pakistan." Thanks to Jinnah's party operatives, voters on the periphery never quite gathered that this would be the eventual outcome of a Pakistan's independence. Indeed, Jinnah did not want such an outcome, but he came to accept it when Mountbatten and Nehru rushed the process along in the spring and summer of 1947.

            As the hour sounded on Indian independence, Jinnah found himself at the head of a Pakistan that poorly suited the interests of most Muslims--a 'mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan' that perpetuated communal and inter-state violence well into the twenty-first century. Jinnah fought for Muslim rights in India, but instead he received Pakistan. Viceroy Mountbatten, the last leader of the British raj, receives a poor score from Jalal for failing to understand Jinnah's complex political position, and instead ripping apart Pujab and Bengal in the drive towards Indian independence. The penultimate viceroy, Archibald Wavell, receives a compassionate and high score for his astute understanding of Jinnah's political position as well as the federalist structure required to ensure maximum Muslim League cooperation. In Jalal's argument, the partition of India was a horrible mistake, not a political necessity.

            The book's arguments require its author to justify Jinnah's action ex post facto; Jalal's detective work makes use of her sources to paint an overwhelmingly vivid portrait of Muslim politics (though Jinnah himself could use a little more color). In Jalal's book, Jinnah stands as a preference-reading politician facing exceptional circumstances--a depiction that stands somewhat odds with more compassionate sketches of him, such as found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At her best, Jalal reveals the political limitations of Jinnah, and the personal limitations of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, and Mountbatten when confronting Jinnah's complex legal mind. The book represents an important corrective to the popular depictions of Jinnah as an uncompromising man hell-bent on creating 'Pakistan' in a search for political power. Jinnah, rather, attempted a practical and legal approach to Indian independence, but found that Hindu and Muslim revivalism created a slick slope that he could not easily slalom. Many thousands perished upon the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, but Jinnah--the 'sole spokesman'--cannot bear the sole blame for the complex realities of the region's post-colonial politics. From village, to province, to nation, and from Congress, to Raj, to League, Ayesha Jalal's study traces a witheringly difficult path through India's colonial history.

Gopal, Sarvepalli. Jawaharlal Nehru: a biography, Vol. 1.  HUP (1976).     
 
In the final years of the British raj, Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as India's preeminent statesman and as a model of pragmatic leadership. The journey to that position led Nehru though the lecture halls of Harrow and Cambridge, but also a discipleship under Mahatma Gandhi, and nearly ten years imprisonment in British gaols. He emerged, in the end, as India's first prime minister and one of the longest tenured statesmen of the last century. 

The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal's three volume biography emphasizes Nehru's steadfast development from a romantic nationalist into a courageous pragmatist. In the process, Nehru navigated four tense decades as a leading member of the Indian National Congress, the nationalist organization which used the tools of non-violence and non-cooperation to pry India away from an exhausted British empire. 

The independence of India was not an historical inevitability. Nationalist aspirations lacked shape and spirit prior to Mahatma Gandhi's entrance on the scene in 1915. In the shadow of Gandhi's lean, ascetic frame and his unyielding emphasis on social reform, Nehru and Congress overcame their association with British privilege and gave Indian nationalism a distinct, powerful, and popular voice. Their campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence ebbed and flowed the like a tide throughout the interwar years. They rallied the uneducated masses, and rattled the nerves of the British raj. 

After years of struggle, the world-wide political conflicts surrounding the Second World War served as a catalyst to the fall of the British raj. The war opened the final chapter in Nehru's struggle for independence. The United Kingdom relied upon India as the second pillar of its military efforts; Britain brought India--a fifth of the world's population--into the war unasked. The war also depleted the resources of the Indian civil service, and required the British to hand increasing portions of power to domestic Indian interests and domestic Indian bureaucrats. Winston Churchill, Britain's war-time leader, nevertheless attempted to hold on to India with the mass arrest of Congress leaders and offers of post-dated settlements for independence. But the war strained the British to the breaking point and made a rapid compromise towards independence the only honorable political recourse. 

Nehru's Congress led the negotiations. Against Gandhi's wishes, Nehru accepted Muhammad Ali Jinnah's demands for a separate Pakistan. In the face of rising communal violence, Nehru firmly held the reins of Congress, and prevented the emergence of a strong ethnic Hindu party. Nehru merged social reform into Indian independence, and thus paved the way for a more liberal, democratic India even as Congress rejected further British intervention. He channeled the forces of nationalism, revivalism, and modernization as he and his allies established one of the largest countries on Earth. Gopal's first volume concludes at the dawn of an independent India on 14 August 1947; Nehru served India as prime minister until 1964. His premiership eventually wrestled with the creation of Pakistan, violent tensions with communist China, and all the challenges of the Cold War.

Gopal's biography expertly evokes the political environment surrounding Nehru's development, but the author also soberly demonstrates how personal attachment moderated Jawaharlal Nehru's political life. With touching devotion, Nehru's father and mother abandoned bourgeois comforts to follow their son into the dangerous politics of swaraj. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, emerges as a moderate and patient hero in the first half of the book; he openly acknowledges his relentless pride in his son's efforts, yet helps to curb Jawaharlal's radical, youthful tendencies. With the backing of his parents, Jawaharlal devoted himself to the cause of an independent India, and began disciplining his political ideas with a cautious ear towards Gandhi's sympathy for the Indian poor. Gopal also rises to the occasion when depicting the troubled but deeply felt marriage between Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. Nehru's personal relationships with his father, mother, wife and mentors conditioned his political involvement with touches of humanity and sudden bursts of patient compromise. 

Gopal is somewhat less successful in explaining Nehru's early rise to power in the United Provinces. Nehru's appeal as a well-travelled, well-educated, mid-career nationalist emerges clearly, but why did Gandhi and Annie Besant devote so much attention to the young man as early as 1914?  These connections remain somewhat mysterious in Gopal's present volume. Ostensibly, Motilal's connections as a powerful and wealthy lawyer played a decisive role helping his son meet these individuals, but the nature of the connections stands uncertain to a reader (such as myself) less familiar with the early years of the Indian nationalist movement.

Despite that one difficulty, Gopal presents the story of Nehru's development with candor and confidence. 

Many statesmen marshaled nationalist sentiment in the twentieth century: Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt; Stalin, Mussolini and Mao. Among them all, Gopal's Nehru emerges as the most effectively peaceful and virtuous in his rise to power, and the most magnanimous in his use of authority.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.                                                    

                     W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
                   "He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"

This is one of my favorite Yeats' poems. He came to mind the other day while watching Harold Pinter's Betrayal, the film version with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley. 

Irons and Kingsley play, respectively, a book agent and a book publisher. They reminisce about conversations concerning Yeats, but never actually manage to say anything meaningful about him, or his poetry. They merely decorate their lives with Yeats' name. The authors they publish, on the other hand, publish vain and literate autobiographical novels that sadden the two friends--they know they have not discovered a Yeats, just a few lads that can sell a book or two. The two friends have sold many, many books and they have read many more, but they sense they will not find a Yeats. Instead of finding a Yeats--or even earnestly searching for one, the two friends struggle half-hardheartedly over the love of a woman (Patricia Hodge). All three cast stones at one another--they wanted fire, but all they found were sparks. They live entrapped in bourgeois comforts and predictability. 

Well, anyhow. They never did say anything about Yeats. I suppose I might as well. "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." The speaker has confessed his poverty--he also suffers from a poverty of words. All the rhymes depend upon pure repetition of entire words, rather than merely repeating sounds. Cloths, light, cloths, light; feet dreams, feet, dreams. He lays these few words before us--tread softly.

Taylor, A.J.P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. Penguin Books (1963). 

[Jon Singer Sargent. 'Gassed.' 1919. @ The IWM.] 


The First World War began in 1914. It officially concluded on 11 November 1918. The war brought Europe to a new awareness of the consequences of modernity: the expendability of men, the ruthlessness of technology, and humanity's terrible ability to undertake warfare. Some of this, of course, was merely a reminder of age old problems. But some genuinely new horrors appeared during the First World War. Poison gas, submarine warfare, complex trench systems, and the widespread use of the machine gun all left an indelible mark on human thought.

Many nations were involved (though hardly the whole world) and the political actions surrounding the conflict can easily overwhelm the specialist and non-specialist alike. Therefore A.J.P. Taylor, one of the great popular historians of the last century, worked with Penguin Books to create The First World War: An Illustrated History, a book that aims at popularizing knowledge about the 'war to end all wars.'

To understand the causes and motions of the First World War, Taylor must paint a complex picture. Complexity is sometimes inhumane--we cannot process all the relevant facts. In the face of complexity (regardless of its honesty) the mind simplifies reality into a handful of abstract components; the human mind then easily creates, distributes, manipulates, misinterprets, and discharges these poor components. Taylor therefore inserts photographs into his narrative, for it is harder to forget a fact when it's tied to a face. The process amplifies themes otherwise forgot. The photographs bring home the disparities between the soldier's life in the trenches and the general's life in the tent. But they also effortlessly track the development of technology, the comforts of union work, the thrill of enlistment, and the uncertain motions of mass populations. [In a written summary, I cannot do justice to the effect of mixing photographs with serious history; suffice to say, 'It works.' It is not enough to look at the photographs; to understand their content and full meaning, one must closely read the book.]

Why did the war begin? The first gunshots flew into the body of the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to Habsburg Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. The shots symbolized a threat to the increasingly moribund Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and its prestige as a Great Power of Europe. In pursuit of imaginary conspirators in the Serb government, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia with the backing of Germany. These countries did not intend for the invasion to start the First World War. Against the views of other historians, Taylor argues that tension in international relations was relatively low at the outbreak of European-wide war, especially compared with previous years. So again, why did it happen? Was Germany war-mongering? Were France and Russia? Can we blame capitalism, or the generals?

"Men are reluctant to believe that great events have small causes," Taylor notes. "Therefore, once the Great War started, they were convinced that it must be the outcome of profound forces. It is hard to discover these [profound forces] when we examine the details. Nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong."

After Austria-Hungary's violent (and supposedly face-saving) diplomatic maneuver, it was Russia's turn to act. Russia thought of itself as the defender of the Balkans, but also worried about Central Power dominance over Constantinople; in pursuit of secure access to the Mediterranean, Russia declared war.

"Now intervened a vital factor of high strategy... The plans for mobilizing [millions of conscripts] rested on railways; and railway timetables cannot be improvised. Once started, the wagons and carriages must roll remorselessly and inevitably forward to their predestined goal."

General mobilization could, conceivably, lead to defensive build ups along the border rather than outright war. But at the time, everyone believed in the value of offense over defense. They could have learnt otherwise from the Russo-Japanese war, or the Balkan Wars, or the American Civil War. Tragically, they did not. The most important country to partake in this error was Germany, for Germany believed it could not win a war on two fronts against Russia and its ally, France. The late General Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1892 to 1906, had generated a plan to mitigate the problem of a war on two fronts. The Germans would put nearly "all their armed weight into the west to knock out France before the slow machine of Russian mobilization could lumber into action." So once Russia mobilized to threaten Austria-Hungary, the Germans looked at their timetables and determined that they must declare war on France and knock it out of the war before Russia could complete its muster.

Taken to caricature, the Schlieffen Plan calls for arguing with one fellow, and then immediately turning and slugging his silent little brother. Perhaps the French were not quite as innocent as a little brother. Anyhow, innocent or not, France got slugged.

The First World War, then, seems to have been imposed upon statesmen by railway timetables and grand strategies drawn up by dead men. Que será, será. Germany declared war on France; Germany's invasion of France required passing through Belgium; the Belgians refused; Germany invaded Belgium; Britain declared war on Germany; Germany invaded France; Britain sent over an expeditionary force; France mobilized; Russia mobilized; Austria-Hungary (eventually) mobilized; the Ottoman Empire entered the war; Italy entered the war; others entered the war; 37 million people died. ¿Que será, será?

The generals never intended to engage in trench warfare, and the men were completely unprepared. The railroads allowed generals to move men up to the front with unprecedented swiftness, but once there the soldiers could only slog through the mud to reach their objectives. Thus, the railroads could help the generals rapidly reinforce their defensive positions, but the railroads did not help nearly as much when going on the offensive. Stalemate ensued. By stalemate, I mean the inability to knock one's opponent out--sort of like a stalemate in chess, only with poison gas, mass bloodshed, and even more massive bombardments.

"The machine gun completed the contrast between the speed with which men could arrive at the battlefield by rail, and the slowness with which they moved once they were there. Indeed they did not move at all. The opposing lines congealed, grew solid. The generals on both sides stared at these lines impotently and without understanding. They went on staring for nearly four years."

Few generals, nevertheless, saw an alternative to offensive warfare; despite its near universal futility, the generals justified their offensives in various ways. Joffre wanted to keep the British under his wing, Haig wanted to prove his loyalty to the French, Nivelle 'formed a picture' of victory, and Ludendorff felt Germany was running out of time (though the Germans had, to their limited credit, rediscovered the lost art of surprise and tactical initiative).

The politicians and civilian ministers could not counter the generals; the generals could not influence the politicians. Thus, hare brained schemes were beaten back and forth like a tired pony rather than like a tennis ball; there was no play and much cruelty.

Incessant warfare required incessant support from home. Politicians rallied the masses to uncertain causes; later in the war, the masses would rally politicians to uncertain causes. Decisive victory, a useful promise for ensnaring support, also ensnared the promisee.

The Americans, meanwhile, preached peace and idealism from the other side of the world, and yet profited tremendously from the war effort. The Germans ineptly stumbled into war with the Americans, first by yielding to the German admiralty and allowing unrestricted submarine warfare, and second with the idiotic Zimmermann telegram that suggested (weirdly) that Mexico's revolution-weakened government declare war on the United States. The Americans eventually lost 88,000 men. Their excellent timing ensured they partook in Allied victory. Wilson, before the American congress turned on him, helped end the war with the idealistic tone with which it had begun. Clemenceau, the French Prime Minster, noted that while God only needed Ten Commandments, Wilson ambitiously suggested Fourteen Points.

Wartime turbulence led to social revolution in Russia and political revolution in Germany; it facilitated the Easter 1916 uprising in Ireland; Austria-Hungary tumbled into pieces; the Ottoman Empire collapsed into Turkey; Britain and France carved up the Middle East to protect their interests in the Far East and Africa. While Britain and France seemed to gain, it must be kept in mind that political revolution could and did happen in Europe in the early twentieth century. The idea of overturning the capitalist-democratic political order was much more alive at that time then it is today, and this influenced the actions of statesmen. Taylor does not play much with counterfactual, but he strongly suggests the contingent nature of history. France and Britain could not assume survival, much less complete victory, even as late 1918. Perhaps the most significant political event was the sudden emergence of Soviet Russia; many of the allies sent soldiers into Russia to prevent the communists from winning the civil war in Russia--they failed to stop Lenin, but they did create lasting animosity and distrust between Soviet Russia and the rest of the world.

Taylor writes history with characters, not just faceless social forces. And to that effect, Taylor constructs pen-portraits of the various leaders. He sketches the sad eyes of a helpless Kitchener, the highest ranking officer to die during the conflict. He tracks, in images and words, the clever political wheeling of Lloyd George on his way to becoming Prime Minister of Britain. He crosses the channel to present Joffre, Neville, and Petain, as well as Moltke and Hindenburg. It would be helpful to have a more thorough presentation of the leaders and the political forces in Russia and Austria-Hungary. But then again, a book intended as a quick read already stretches to 295 pages.

Taylor's sympathies lie with the "Everyman," especially the Everyman that served in the trenches; he holds less regard for the Everyman that worked in the factories, and perhaps even less for the countless bureaucrats that put together efficient timetables for troop deployments, but no timetables for withdraw (and certainly no realistic timetables for victory).

"In all countries, the majority served and suffered for unselfish causes which they did not fully understand. The war was beyond the capacity of generals and statesmen alike." Donkeys led lions.

With the war over, the Allies rejected Wilson's pleas for conciliation and demanded justice through retribution. In hindsight, the terms of justice left such a scar on Germany as to help bring Hitler to power. But no one saw this at the time. With the war over, Lloyd George needed votes, and so he led Britain in joining the call for retribution.

Taylor writes: "In the age of mass warfare, nations had to be told that they were fighting for some noble cause. Perhaps they were. At any rate, the peoples could not be told to forget their crusading beliefs merely because the war was over. The statesmen who had won the war had to make peace with the same emotions and the same weapons."

And so the cry rang out: 'Hang the Kaiser! Make Germany pay!' The Kaiser abdicated his power in the throes of revolution. Germany never proved able to pay very much at all. But the emotion of injustice never need stem from truth. Lloyd George did, however, persuade both allies and constituents to wait for quieter days to determine reparations; the interwar wrangling over reparations created much ill-feeling.

Paradoxically, even as the First World War "cut deep into the consciousness of modern man," it failed to dramatically alter the European way of life. States toppled, but not as many as one might expect for the unprecedented cost in flesh and blood. No nations were enslaved, and no capital cities erased from the map. The battles were largely confined to small geographic spaces, especially when compared with the Second World War, a massive conflict with truly global influence that broke out only twenty years later. 

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. Anchor Books, 1997 [1996].

Jon Krakauer, author and outdoor thrill seeker, sensed a kindred spirit when he first wrote an article on Christopher McCandless for Outdoor magazine. In pursuit of McCandless' essence, Krakauer travelled across America, and did not stop working on the story until years after he had completed the initial piece of journalism. The resulting book, Into the Wild, was one of the most popular pieces of adventure writing of the late twentieth century. Instead of sensationalizing McCandless brief story, Krakauer offered a humane depiction of a boy in search of the love of his life: the American wild. McCandless sought a transcendental experience; he perhaps did not quite find one, but Krakauer patiently salutes his journey nevertheless.

The most famous chapter in McCandless' life began when he graduated with honors at Emory University. He promised his parents he would apply to law school, but instead he donated $25,000 in savings to charity. He then shuffled off his identity and wandered off into the American West. He lightened his load with each step, and abandoned most of his possessions along the way. He ditched his car when it suffered a dead battery (but not before hiding the plates to prevent easy identification). After two years of wandering under an assumed identity, he hitchhiked to Alaska.

Krakauer does not merely trace the steps of this journey--he interrogates the psyche and soul of every person he can find who met Chris McCandless along the way. Among others, McCandless befriended a lonely widower in the deserts of Southern California, a foot-loose romantic couple, and a Midwest machine operator. He left his mark on many, and for someone who prided himself as an isolated and independent young man, he nevertheless seemed to pursue genuine connections with many human beings. But after many adventures, he decided to try his hand at yet another. Therefore he made his way north.

In April 1992 Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness. In an age without uncharted territory, McCandless refused to carry a good map, or any navigation or radio equipment whatsoever. He forced his way into ignorance in hopes of better surprising his senses; he sought to develop an anachronistic type of self-reliance. Moving along an old miner's trail, he eventually found shelter in an abandoned bus. He read a stack of paperbacks he brought with him into the wild, with authors like London, Pasternak, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, as well as lighter stuff like Crichton. He shot and ate small game. He dug up edible roots and vegetables. He was proud, but he was also lonely, and scared. In July, he tried to leave the wilderness, but a stream that ran chest-deep in April had, in the face of an incessant summer sun, grown into a river surging with glacier rot and snow melt. The raging waters blocked his path. There was no leaving the wilderness. He returned to the abandoned bus. He grew increasingly lean, as did his margin for error. In August, he ate potato seeds that seized his system like a vice, and left him severely weakened; he could no longer digest enough calorie intake for his bone-lean body to sustain itself. He starved to death.

McCandless had survived 112 days in the wilderness. Less than three weeks later, a group of Alaskans discovered his skeletal, lifeless frame tucked into his sleeping bag and resting quietly in the abandoned bus.

Jon Krakauer's biographical essay, Into the Wild, deservingly became a best seller, and launched Krakauer into the highest order of American outdoor writing. For Krakauer pursues the story of McCandless' life and death with relentless questions and carefully carved detail. He traces McCandless' journey, not only in Alaska, but from his childhood onward.

Krakauer's Chris McCandless comes across as earnest and insistent, but perhaps not very intelligent or mature. He read deeply of the aforementioned authors, but not very broadly, and perhaps missed out on many of the most beautiful lessons that reading can offer. The lessons of empathy, forgiveness, and justice never fully captured his efforts, nor his imagination. But Krakauer uses a number of tools to show the importance of McCandless, not just as a person, but within the complex fabric of human life. McCandless epitomizes endurance and youth, naïveté and education; he stared so intently at the stars, and listened so intently to the sound of the wind shifting across the plains, that he felt himself transported far beyond the place his feet touched the ground. He moved beyond himself, and so joined the panoply of reckless wanderers that have sought self-realization in the American west.

In a particularly marvelous series of chapters, Krakauer breaks free from the narrow confines of biography and places McCandless' experiences in conversation with others who have died in the wilderness, as well as those who have barely survived. He places McCandless somewhere between inebriated self-delusion and euphoric expression; McCandless, in Krakauer's assessment, most closely resembles a young monk that chose to abstain from society as part of a vigorous test of self-worth. He may not have always been wise, but he pursued wisdom.

Near the end of the book, Krakauer reveals McCandless' vulnerability to the most universal of sensations: the shock of discovering your parent's imperfections. The recognition of parental imperfections threatened two aspects of the self. First, it upset McCandless' appreciation for his parents' model of adulthood; second, it challenged McCandless' assumed ability to achieve his own ideals. After all, if his parents could not live up to the values they taught their son, how could he possibly hope to achieve his own ideal behavior? McCandless began to disdain his parents for masking the origin of their marital relationship (McCandless' father refused, for a time, to end one marriage before starting another), and for their American materialism as expressed in houses, cars, and expectations of education. An average boy might merely fidget through a period of adolescent angst, but to a distrustful idealist like McCandless, his parents' transgressions gave him the necessary fuel to break all ties and vanish into the American landscape. The severing of all traditional social bonds eventually cost him his life, but it was a life he did not mind spending. He traded his complicated, well-to-do East Coast life for a simpler one, but the exchange destroyed him. [I wonder if McCandless is the capitalist-democratic version of Faust--instead of trading his soul for luxury, knowledge, and power, he must trade his life for simplicity and self-reliance.]

Krakauer writes with spirit and understanding; he traces the contours of McCandless' mind, as well as the terrain through which he traveled. Perhaps most importantly, the author uses his own experiences as a mountaineer to relate the essential impulses of McCandless' actions, and thus humanizes McCandless' apparently anti-social behavior. McCandless, rather than joining the ranks of mythic wanderers, becomes the brother of our strengths and weaknesses as human beings.

Is it a tragedy? Not quite. The story of Chris McCandless is something of a romance, a romance in which his love, the American west, not only failed to return his affection, but never even acknowledged his existence. It killed him without stirring a muscle.

     
       In Judith Brown's Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, revered political leader and social reformer Mahatma Gandhi wrestles with numerous Indian crises of modernity, from early battles against racism to the violent sunder of the Indian subcontinent into diverse new nations. Born in India but trained as a London barrister, Gandhi began life split between the influence of two cultures, one east and the other west. In his life in India, he entered a traditional arranged marriage while only a child, and stumbled into an early adulthood with his family's hopes upon his back. His family sent him to London to study law and secure an income suitable to his position in India's rigid caste system. He struggled to find his place in London, but achieved his family's aim and became a lawyer. Returning home, Gandhi's shyness and virtual absence of professional contacts prevented his attainment of a successful legal career in his homeland; as a consequence he traveled to South Africa for a slight commission.

The results of that journey changed his views, his life, and our world, forever.

The rank racism and writhing injustice of South African society sparked Gandhi into a career of peaceful yet rigid resistance against political and social oppression. He searched for fuel for his struggles; he found it in traditional Hindu philosophy, but also in Western ideals of equality and brotherly love; Gandhi had the audacity to insist the British empire live up to its ethos of equality, liberty, and self-government. As Gandhi fought South African injustice, he fused his influences into a wholly unique and inimitable outlook. And with that new outlook, he turned his gaze back to British India. Heeding his 'inner voice,' he reinvented Indian customs regarding family and marriage, and wholly devoted himself to the causes of a nascent Indian nation. He spurned modernization in favor of communalism, and pushed back against both capitalist and socialist economic policies. Throughout his life, Gandhi created symbolic images that riveted the imagination of the world: the furious bonfires of South African registration cards, the simple rotations of a wooden spinning-wheel, and a pilgrimage for salt on the shores of the village Dandi in defiance of British law. He ultimately perished at the end of an assassin's gun, itself an image suggesting humanity's rejection of Gandhi's pious obsession with non-violent satyagraha--truth force.

Judith Brown's biography expertly evokes the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader and multi-faceted genius who introduced a new sense of social reform, political opposition, and spiritual idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. The book charts Gandhi's intellectual, political, and spiritual development throughout his life, cradle to grave. In the process she unveils not only a uniquely powerful leader, but one caught in the maelstrom of rapidly evolving and modernizing political and social environments. She thus provides a complex interpretation of her subject's mind and times. 

Brown's Gandhi chose his political actions with a cultivated political instinct; but once he made a choice, he perceived that the Truth of that choice turned the selected action into a religious imperative. And until a greater religious imperative demanded that he take an alternative course of action, the Truth mired him in the political tides that naturally envelop any policy. Most political actors seem beholden to constituencies--but Gandhi was beholden to his soul, which proved no less a master. Thus, Gandhi confounded observers (Linlithgow, Wavell, even sometimes Nehru) as either an idiosyncratic charismatic leader or else a crafty Machiavel; but Brown sketches Gandhi as someone altogether human--someone possessed of a unique and ascetic blend of religion and political philosophy who forged the ultimately uncontrollable consciousness of the Indian nation.

Louis, Wm. Roger. Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher controversy. New Viewpoints (1976).                 

While many academic arguments suffer a stillborn-death, others crawl out of their initial environment and cheerfully permeate the field. The arguments of Robinson and Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians decidedly fit the latter category. The debates surrounding their arguments consumed many subsequent volumes, conferences, and journals. To assist in tracking the discussion (and to celebrate its proliferation) Wm. Roger Louis presents Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher controversy, a collection of articles and essays that wrestle with the themes of continuity, informal empire, and indigenous-European collaboration. Robinson and Gallagher challenge the notion that the major European powers felt a sudden, dramatic urge to divide and conquer Africa in the late 19th century. Rather, the authors argue that an impulse for economic expansion remained a constant throughout the entire Victorian era. Further, the official character of the expansion shifted between informal and formal empire not because of changing domestic opinion in European states, but because of changing local conditions among indigenous non-European territories. African politics especially determined the character of Victorian political practice, and not the other way around. From the fog of Victorian history, one principle emerges: "It is only when and where informal political means failed to provide the framework of security for British enterprise... that the question of establishing formal empire arose." The arguments of Robinson and Gallagher hold interest for three separate cliques of historians: economic historians, historians of Africa, and historians of generalized European imperialism. It seems that previous historians greatly over-estimated the 'divide and conquer' impulse of the late Victorian era, and incorrectly perceived the mechanics of imperial power. 

Robinson and Gallagher's theme of an incessant and expansionist Victorian spirit attacked the assumptions of economic historians of both the Leninists and free-market variety, both of which assumed that the Victorian political objectives drastically changed in the last decades of the 19th century. The theme of indigenous cooperation challenged the assumptions of African studies in regards to the mechanics of European hegemony. And all the themes together created a picture suggesting that historians of European imperialism greatly over-estimated the 'divide and conquer' aspect of the late Victorian era. As Louis writes, "This is history written with a vengeance."

The debates surrounding Robinson and Gallagher raise many interesting questions: Did industrialization lead to a continuous and constant 'spirit of the age?' Should academic history concern itself with generalized theory? More practically, to what extent should historians consider the influence of individual 'characters' like Disraeli, Gladstone, or Leopold II? Such questions plow the field and keep it fresh for future students of history. Casual readers, however, may have trouble digesting the book's engagement with the particulars of Leninist and liberal economic theory.  

          Why, after centuries of neglect, did Britain and the other European powers rush to appropriate nine-tenths of the African continent within sixteen years? In Africa and the Victorians, Robinson and Gallagher sought to provide a new answer, one that firmly refuted the traditional diagnoses of both the economic historians and the popular imagination. The authors (with the aid of Alice Denny) sought evidence from the records of late-Victorian cabinets and consuls. "If the workings of the mind of government can be deciphered," they argue, "it may then be possible to translate back from the symbols of policy-making into the terms of why the partition really took place." In doing so, they uncovered the workings of what they termed 'the official mind.' They discovered that the Evangelical revival and the rise of secular liberalism construed the spirit of the age, and that the spirit never experienced a sudden shift towards imperialism, but rather armed itself with formal imperialism only when informal efforts faltered against rising African nationalism. The late-Victorians sought, in each case, to safeguard the precious routes to India and the eastern empire. Contrary to the economic historians, simple statistics showed that African markets could not possibly explain the onrush of late Imperialism. Instead, Egyptian nationalism sparked the 1882 Suez intervention, and the Suez intervention in turn sparked the division of Africa. "The so-called imperialism of the late-Victorians began as little more than a defensive response to [indigenous] rebellions... the 'imperialism' of the late-Victorians was not so much the cause as the effect of the African partition." The Europeans, it seems, stumbled (rather than strode) into possession of Africa.

Robinson and Gallagher disagreed with the arguments of the economic historians, but they full-heartedly embraced the 'spirit of abstraction' that accompanies such debates. As a consequence, historic figures like Gladstone and Goldie, Chamberlain and Salisbury, Kitchener and Rosebery peak out from their graves, but never fully come to life. The ideas that inspired them remain mysteriously buried, for the authors offer no intellectual history of Victorian morality and its discontents. Surely such an examination would shed light on how liberalism and Evangelicalism interacted to create the predominate 'spirit of the age' that suffuses Africa and the Victorians as a necessary condition for both formal and informal modes of imperialism. Still, despite the book's brevity and abstractions, it unveils the tension of late-Victorian foreign relations, and provides a fascinating window into the tragi-comedy of imperial foreign policy and its unexpected consequences. 

Though imperialism does not represent one of my research interests, it stands as a dominant theme within the context of British inter-war politics. As a consequence, I necessarily have to understand something about imperialism to speak effectively to British political interests throughout the twentieth century. For that reason, I will post a few book reviews that reflect on British imperialism, particularly the key players involved in Britain's most important colonial holding--India.