Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy

Marcus Daniel. Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ix + 386 pp. $28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-517212-6.

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Observers of contemporary journalism will readily note that character-based politics are as prevalent in the United States as jeremiads bemoaning the sorry state of such personalized political discourse. We should be talking about the issues, commentators insist, rather than about the “distractions” of politicians’ personal lives. Marcus Daniel, a professor of history at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, has seen this story before in his work on the political journalism of the early American Republic, and challenges the idea that these laments--and the personalized politics they decry--are unique to the modern media climate.

In Scandal & Civility, Daniel aims to show how what he calls the “politics of character” played a crucial role in the formation of political discourse in the first decade of the U.S. government under the Constitution. In so doing, he hopes to enlighten discussions of contemporary politics that promote a golden age narrative, part of the “Founders Chic” that David Waldstreicher identified nearly ten years ago, in which the Founding Fathers, uniquely in American history, debated issues civilly and respectfully with a moral code superior to that of our own time.[1] Not so fast, argues Daniel: “political life in the postrevolutionary United States,” he writes, “was tempestuous, fiercely partisan, and highly personal” (p. 5). As evidence, Daniel suggests that we look to those who produced and disseminated political news: the printers and editors of U.S. newspapers.

From this group, which numbered well into the hundreds by 1790, Daniel devotes a chapter each to six of the most prominent printers and newspaper editors of the 1790s. Three were Federalists, including John Fenno, publisher of the Gazette of the United States, an early attempt at a “court” paper; Noah Webster, who, though more famous for his speller, edited the American Minerva as a supporter of the national government; and William Cobbett, whose idiosyncratic writing in and editing of Porcupine’s Gazette defied pure partisan labeling. Matched against these stalwarts of the Washington administration and national government were some of the most prominent printer-editors of the early Republican Party: Philip Freneau, the first to challenge Fenno in his role as editor of the National Gazette; Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of the printer, scientist, and statesman, who made the Aurora a must-read for opponents of the late Washington and Adams administrations; and William Duane, who used his ink-stained pulpit to champion the 1800 presidential campaign of Thomas Jefferson.

Based on both archival research in the personal records of these editors and their associates as well as extensive analysis of their publications, Daniel uses these six men as representatives of key motifs of the hyper-partisan “politics of character” that pervaded during the 1790s. According to his typology, the six most important elements of this politics were nationalism, the invention of the Republican Party, desacralization, demoralization, personality, and infidelity. Each of these is paired with a printer to shape the narrative structure of each chapter. At his strongest, Daniel uses his subject’s biography to clearly articulate and illustrate both the nature of the period’s political climate and its integral connection to the world of print. In the chapter on Cobbett and “the politics of personality,” for instance, Daniel skillfully shows how Cobbett’s disdain for and open flouting of the niceties of standard eighteenth-century editorial practices launched his career and drew a massive audience to his sensationalistic defenses of the Washington administration and attacks on both national Republican leaders and local officials in Pennsylvania. While this head-first approach to politics was enormously successful for a time, Daniel carefully narrates how Cobbett’s attacks eventually backfired, drawing political prosecutions for libel at both the state and federal levels as well as a civil suit. Daniel’s focus on character also leads him to pay careful attention to language, which opens up key insights into, for example, arguments about the use of the term “aristocrat” and Webster’s appropriation of the idea of “demoralization.”

Daniel fuses several strains of recent scholarship on the political history of postrevolutionary America, political journalism, sentimentality, and freedom of the press. First among these is the rich and rapidly expanding literature on the political press itself, including the work of Jeffrey L. Pasley, Waldstreicher, Todd Estes, Paul Starr, and such popular historians as Eric Burns, among others. Daniel pushes back at the structural narrative that underlies much of this work, which borrows heavily from Jürgen Habermas’s social theory of the public sphere. He sees printers not as the infrastructure of a political movement or as part of a framework for politics but as gadflies operating on the margins of high politics who nonetheless had the wherewithal to push debates. In doing so, they deployed the language of sentiment and emotion, an aspect of the Revolution to which historians are granting a great deal of attention. Yet Daniel shies away from a narrative that he believes places too much emphasis on honor and civility. Politics, in his view, was not simply personal; the language and actions of political partisans during the period, he suggests, were based on real ideological concerns. Finally, Daniel argues that we must recalibrate our understanding of Americans’ attitudes toward the press. Studying these men, he contends, demonstrates how rapidly the world of public and private collapsed in the political world, erasing distinctions that had long been key both to defending the freedom of the press and to prosecuting libel.

Although the life stories of these editors drive the narrative of Scandal & Civility, at times the book’s structure limits the effectiveness of Daniel’s analysis and underplays key threads that run through the life stories of his chosen subjects. For instance, the subjects he chose for the study interacted with one another a great deal. Fenno and Freneau did battle in the early 1790s with their competing newspapers, and Cobbett deeply influenced the political journalism of Fenno’s son, John Ward Fenno. Duane found work in Philadelphia largely due to the influence of Bache, and when Bache died in the 1798 yellow fever epidemic, it was Duane who took up the mantel and masthead of the Aurora newspaper. Their interactions, as scholars such as Pasley have shown, had enormous implications for the development of political newsmaking in the 1790s. By dividing their stories from one another, we lose a sense of how the battles within the printing trade shaped and influenced the larger story told in the pages of newspapers.

More critically, the structure undermines two key themes: the French Revolution and the spread of nationalism. The “politics of character” as Daniel describes it functioned largely as a response to the events in France (and, on occasion, Haiti), in particular the Jacobin Terror of 1793-94. Such a transformative event asks for more than the divided attention it gets. This omission is all the more unfortunate because Daniel himself has clearly done extensive reading in and been strongly influenced by the history of the book and the press during the French Revolution. Similarly, Daniel does not sufficiently develop the leitmotiv of nationalism and national character, despite using it as the framing device for the first chapter on Fenno. By choosing to focus explicitly on these six printers and their political journalism, Daniel misses an opportunity to link the development of nationalism to the efforts of other printers and editors. Mathew Carey, among the most important printers and publishers of the postrevolutionary era, published the American Museum as an explicitly nationalist magazine for five years in the 1780s and 1790s. Others, in particular high Federalists, attempted to create a national literary culture through their clubs and publications in New York and Philadelphia.[2] Even Wesbter’s efforts to create a national lexicon receive only brief attention in the chapter on his life. Nationalism was clearly on the minds of these printers and editors as they worked, and the issue could have been more deeply and fruitfully analyzed.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, in the final balance, Scandal & Civility is a strong contribution to scholarship on the postrevolutionary press. Daniel’s insistence that we pay close attention to the language of the press in addition to its structure and economic circumstances is a welcome intervention. More important, Daniel strikes a blow against the perception of politics as a high art practiced only by elites. These men of mostly modest heritage stood shoulder to shoulder, and occasionally toe to toe, with Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Washington.

Notes

[1]. David Waldstreicher, “Founders Chic as Culture War,” Radical History Review 84 (2002): 185-194.

[2]. On this topic, see Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forms of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: OIEAHC, University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

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Reviewed by Joseph M. Adelman (Johns Hopkins University). This review was originally published on Jhistory (September, 2011). Republished courtesy of Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net). URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33923

Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance

David Lyon. Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 192 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7456-4156-0.

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National identification cards are everywhere, and, as David Lyon demonstrates in this timely, well-argued book, a subject in need of careful analysis because of the pervasive ways in which these cards, along with the population databases to which they are tethered, are structuring our everyday existence and, in so doing, raising important questions about personal freedom and the meaning of citizenship in modern societies.

Almost every country has some kind of national ID card program; they are mostly mandatory; many of them require fingerprints; and a small but growing number include additional biometric information. ID cards are also high up on the political agenda of those countries that do not have them. In the United States, the implementation of the Bush administration's Real ID program, which would have made state driver's licenses into a de facto national ID card, has encountered widespread resistance from both the public and the states. Australia's proposed Access Card has similarly run aground, as have ID card schemes in Canada and France, and the Japanese Juki-Net system is leading only a stunted existence. The British, on the other hand, approved the Identity Cards Act in 2006--only to see the program scrapped by the new Conservative government.[1]

A number of different arguments have been advanced over the years in support of such cards. In addition to their obvious (or at least assumed) role in enhancing domestic and international security, proponents argue that national ID cards can make it easier for citizens to interact with government agencies (and sometimes the private sector as well), increase government efficiency by both reducing welfare and tax fraud and facilitating access to public services by qualified individuals, provide the validation needed for e-government, help combat identity theft, and facilitate trans-border travel in a more mobile, liquid modernity. The issue that Lyon addresses in this book is how these national ID cards--and the processes, databases, information systems, and protocols on which the functioning of these identification systems depends--are altering the meaning of citizenship in the modern world.

Over the past decade, Lyon has written widely on various aspects of surveillance and identification. Identifying Citizens pulls together many of his ideas on surveillance, security, and identity, and the book needs to be read in particular in conjunction with Playing the Identity Card, a companion volume of theoretical explorations and national case studies, which Lyon edited with Colin Bennett.[2] Lyon's main argument in the current book is that the process of identifying citizens necessarily leads to the intensified surveillance of the population, which, he says, happens "when organizations pay close attention, in routine and systematic ways, to personal data" (p. 5). Before the computer age, most identification documents were issued locally, and, in view of the difficulty in maintaining any centralized register, the identification process focused on verifying the authenticity of the documents themselves. What is novel about modern identification systems, especially those using new electronic ID cards, is that the identity of the carrier is now established by querying the personal information contained in networked, searchable databases--above all, computerized national population registries--which encode and disseminate the data that define the administrative identity of the person. Lyon's arguments here about the ways in which ID cards, ID numbers, computers, and population registries are intimately linked in modern population identification systems are spot-on. However, one point where I would disagree with him is his claim (p. 42) that the focus on stop-and-search authority diverts attention away from these linkages because this argument itself overlooks the fact that in most instances it is only through such encounters that the state actively attempts to determine the identity of any given individual.

The more expansive the scope of the social state, the more intense its security concerns, and the greater the desire to leverage this information for commercial purposes, the greater will be the scope of this routinized collection of personal information. Moreover, this active process of "identifying" the individual is by no means a neutral, technical process, Lyon argues, because the finer the granularity of this identifying information collected by the state, the greater will be the potentiality for treating citizens differently according to their respective administrative identities. In fact, the very purpose of querying these databases is to determine whether the individual does or does not possess those particular characteristics that can prove that he or she is a legitimate member of the community, whether he or she is eligible for some specific privilege or service, or whether the person should be selected for further scrutiny as a potential welfare cheat, unregistered worker, criminal, or terrorist. Chapter 1 provides a brief survey of the historical roots of modern concerns with the legibility of the population. Lyon traces these back to the need for more effective government in colonial contexts, efforts to combat crime, and the need to identify and mobilize the nation's resources for war. He is particularly concerned that, despite the not unreasonable claims that modern identification systems can provide greater security and convenience for the holder, these systems will be forever burdened politically by these "negative histories" (pp. 37-38) that are seemingly hardwired into their most elemental structures and that serve to amplify, rather than neutralize, historical patterns of discrimination.

In other words, the process of identification always entails what Lyon has elsewhere called social sorting, which is simply another way of describing the ways in which the politics of difference are built into databases and identification systems.[3] Chapter 2 explores the functioning and politics of computerized social sorting. Here Lyon argues that the subtle exclusionary bias that seems to exist in all identification systems as their most primal raison d'être is becoming more pronounced in conjunction with the broad shift in public mood from the focus on concrete risks to a new concern with "precaution," which requires the open-ended collection of personal information in an effort to forestall the occurrence of precisely those risks that can never be rendered determinate or calculable. This precautionary imperative, which often justifies the integrative function creep that Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have called the "surveillant assemblage,"[4] poses obvious dangers to civil liberties, and for Lyon the question is "can identification processes which inevitably are 'sorting systems' yet be made compatible with the desires of ordinary citizens not merely for national security but also for human security ... which is both more global and more personal" (p. 58)?

In chapter 3, Lyon advances two different sets of arguments. First, he takes over Niklas Rose's idea of the "securitization of identity," i.e., the predication of the enjoyment of certain rights or freedoms--such as rights to vote or social services, the right to cross borders, the right to purchase goods at a distance, use the Internet, or even communicate (as I learned on my last trip to Germany, where I was forced to prove my identity in order to buy a new SIM card for my American cell phone)--upon proof of identity or entitlement. However, he then argues with John Torpey against Rose that, although one should not see this securitization of identity simply as evidence of the expanding of the tentacles of the state, certain actors--such as the state--are much more weighty or important in this process than others (p. 69). In the next chapter, Lyon extends this argument by taking up Louise Amoore's suggestion that this expanding use of identification cards as a means of access can be understood as a novel mode of "governance by identification" (p. 90), and here he rightly suggests that the spread of national ID systems is giving rise to "a particular way of seeing the world--indeed, of being in the world" (p. 63).

The second set of arguments that Lyon makes in chapter 3 relate to what he calls the "card cartel." As I noted above, a number of different arguments have been advanced on behalf of national ID card systems, and commentators have often noted the opportunism with which these arguments have been employed in different contexts. In this chapter Lyon argues that, in addition to the long-standing interest of the state in identifying and controlling its citizens, the spread of national ID card systems has been influenced by a number of high-tech corporations (with technology protocols and, increasingly, biometrics conditioning the operation of these systems). But rather than explaining the spread of these systems in terms of either economic or technological determinism, Lyon argues that the bases on which identification systems engage in social sorting always reflect the political culture or the political unconscious of the societies in which they operate: "New ID schemes tend to create citizens in the image of the leading motifs of the societies that give them birth. In societies dominated by consumption, it is unsurprising that citizenship is subtly recreated in terms of consuming.... Equally, if the leading motifs informing 'citizenship' are ones designed to root out and outlaw certain specified groups, then identification processes will reflect this" (p. 81). And here, as well as elsewhere in the book, Lyon's arguments reflect his belief that, whatever the specific context and motive advanced, such systems are valued precisely because of their intrinsic function of sorting and discriminating among the individual members of the population.

External borders are one of the chief points at which citizen identities are administratively verified. In addition to governance by identification, chapter 4 also discusses the interoperability of identification systems and their relation to mobility, modernity, and the need for identification at a distance in response to the intensification of movement across national borders. Here, Lyon argues that the International Civil Aviation Organization in particular has played a pivotal role in promoting the globalization of interoperable identification systems and standardized, machine-readable ID cards and in "policy laundering" by permitting national politicians to present domestically unpalatable ID card policies as an unavoidable response to requirements imposed by a politically unaccountable international authority.

Chapter 5 addresses the role of biometrics in identification systems. According to Lyon, the very availability of biometric technologies tends to increase the frequency with which vulnerable groups are required to identify themselves. In this way, they tend to reinforce the pre-existing negative stereotypes of such persons. But Lyon also makes a set of more intriguing arguments about the relationship between the human body and biometric information about the body. The purpose of biometrics is to establish a perfect connection between an individual body and the set of personal information associated with an individual identity, that is, to definitively attach this information to a specific living person. Lyon argues that the particular intimacy of such biometric data will require a rethinking of the meaning of bodily integrity, although he shies away from using the word "privacy" to describe this intimacy. This attempt to privilege certain kinds of information runs contrary to the privacy concept that informed the major pieces of privacy legislation from the 1970s. These laws, which were passed in response to the advent of precisely the networked databases that Lyon is describing here, were an attempt to respond to the growing realization that the real danger to personal privacy came not from the misuse of privileged data, but rather from the everyday collection, processing, and electronic dissemination of personal information that enjoyed no special protection. Since any piece of personal information could--depending on the context and the way it was combined with other pieces of information--be used to the disadvantage of the individual, privacy advocates argued that the individual had the right to control the initial collection and subsequent use of personal information. Despite the fact that Lyon has always preferred to emphasize the importance of political control over surveillance systems rather than the defense of privacy rights, his argument here appears to pivot incongruously on the belief that bodily, biometric information ought to be privileged in some way or another.

Lyon concludes his discussion of biometrics by suggesting that the biometricization of identity can never reach its holy grail and provide a definitive verification of an individual identity, because biometrics are caught in a vicious circle: The same categories of biometric information (fingerprint or facial recognition algorithms, for example) that are gained by abstracting certain characteristics from the body are, in the process of identification, simply projected back upon the body as they define or construct the corporeal self (p. 125). There is no privileged access to the reality of the body outside of the biometric language through which it is constructed.

The greatest strengths of the book are, first, Lyon's analysis of the relation between ID cards and the databases on which ID cards systems depend for their functioning; second, his multifaceted account of the intrinsic and apparently inescapable exclusionary or discriminatory effects of such surveillance technologies; and, third, his description of the role of identification systems as a mechanism of governance and the ways in which they are shaping our being-in-the-world. In the concluding chapter on cybercitizenship, Lyon restates many of the arguments that were advanced in previous chapters and asks whether it might be possible to conceive of an ID card system that would not have the negative consequences that he has analyzed in such detail. The answer, Lyon suggests, may be found in an ethics of care, whose basic thrust would be to explicitly compensate for the stigmatizing, disciplinary effects inherent in governance through identification. However, while an ethics of care may make us more conscious of these problems, in his next work Lyon's task will be to more fully explain the status and functioning of this ethic of care. That is, Lyon must reconcile the question of how one can at the same time categorize and classify people, without incurring the discriminatory consequences that, as he argued throughout this volume, may well be intrinsic to the identification process itself.

Notes

[1]. “ID card compensation ruled out as MPs approve abolition,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11319766.

[2]. David Lyon and Colin Bennett, eds., Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security, and Identification in Global Perspective (New Brunswick: Routledge, 2008).

[3]. David Lyon, Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Automated Discrimination (New Brunswick: Routledge, 2002).

[4]. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, "The Surveillant Assemblage," British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (December 2000): 605–622.

[5]. Louise Amoore, "Governing by Identity," in Bennett and Lyon, eds., Playing the Identity Card, 21-36.

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Reviewed by Larry Frohman. This review was originally published on H-German (August, 2011). Republished courtesy of Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net). URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30999

Britain, Ireland, and the Second World War

Ian S. Wood. Britain, Ireland, and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ix + 238 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-2327-3.

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Ian S. Wood’s Britain, Ireland, and the Second World War provides a valuable survey of the impact that the war had on Ireland and how it affected relations among the governments of Eire, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain. The author covers a number of major topics including the neutrality of Eire, the impact that the war had on Northern Ireland, the response of the IRA to the conflict, and Britain’s relations with the Irish governments on both sides of the border.

Eamon de Valera’s determination to keep Eire officially neutral is given a central place in Wood’s study. “With our history, with our experience of the last war and with part of our country still unjustly severed from us, we felt that no other decision and no other policy was possible,” de Valera announced to the Irish people on 3 September 1939 (quoted, p. 1). Wood provides the context of this quote with a clear review of the events leading up to the creation of the Irish Free State, the partition of the island, and de Valera’s own rise to power which culminated in the new Irish constitution of 1937. Under this constitution, Eire, as the Irish Free State was now known, cut many of the symbolic ties that had bound it to the United Kingdom. Even before war broke out, de Valera was preparing for Irish neutrality by insisting on the return of the Treaty Ports to Eire, a policy that Wood characterizes as “an affirmation of full sovereignty” (p. 26).

Historians have long understood that Irish neutrality, or more accurately, nonbelligerence, tilted strongly in favor of the Allies. Dublin cooperated with Britain on intelligence matters, supplied the Allies with valuable weather information, and made secret military plans to coordinate with British forces in case of a German invasion of Ireland. Irish cooperation with Britain reflected not just a policy of practical self-preservation but, as Wood points out, a genuine desire by de Valera and the majority of the population of Eire to see the Allies defeat Nazi Germany, albeit not at the cost of Irish neutrality. Indeed the formal neutrality of Eire was almost universally supported by the Irish people. Wood concludes that Eire’s informal help, in particular intelligence cooperation, “was of no small importance to Britain and her allies, and was indeed the hidden side of the Irish state’s neutrality” (p. 58). Irish citizens, with no interference from their own government, served the Allied cause directly as workers in war-related British industries or as volunteers in the British forces. Wood accepts the estimate that over 50,000 Irish citizens served with the British. Irish soldiers were numerous enough for the British army to organize an Irish Brigade. Wood expresses a great deal of admiration for these Irish volunteers whom he sees as having overlooked narrow Irish nationalist concerns to confront the evil of Nazism.

At home, the Irish state did its best to limit the impact of the war which was euphemistically referred to as the “Emergency.” While wartime shortages and the need for an expanded defense force could not be ignored in Eire, official censorship kept news of the conflict to a bare minimum. Aside from the mistaken but deadly German bombing of Dublin in May 1941, and the bodies of dead sailors and airmen that washed up on Ireland’s coast, the violence of the Second World War bypassed Eire. Dublin’s studious adherence to the forms of neutrality, most famously displayed by de Valera’s public trip to the German embassy to pay his respects on the death of Hitler, seem unnecessary to the author. Wood believes that the crimes of the Nazi regime warranted official condemnation even from a neutral state.

Wood also examines the impact of the war on the northern side of the border. Unlike Eire, Northern Ireland was formally at war along with the rest of the United Kingdom. However, as Wood ably demonstrates, the experience of the Second World War in Northern Ireland was distinct from that of the rest of the United Kingdom. One major difference was that Northern Ireland was exempt from military conscription. Despite attempts by Stormont’s Unionist government to have the province included in the draft, London decided at the start of the war that the resistance that conscription would face from the nationalist community made the move counterproductive. In fact, Wood claims that sectarian divisions remained at the heart of life in Northern Ireland, despite the province’s active participation in the Second World War. British and American servicemen stationed in Northern Ireland were often shocked by the pervasiveness of sectarian tensions. Wood provides a telling incident regarding BBC programming during the war. When a radio broadcast called the Irish Half Hour was introduced for the benefit of Irish nationalists serving in the British military, Northern Ireland’s prime minister, Sir Basil Brooke, pushed for an Ulster Half Hour as a counterweight. When the new unionist-centered program played a traditional nationalist song the prime minister publicly protested. “In the midst of a global conflict consuming thousands of lives,” Wood writes, “these exchanges vividly capture all of Northern Ireland’s unresolved cultural and sectarian divisions” (p. 81).

Northern Ireland was not untouched by the war as Belfast was bombed by the Luftwaffe, war-related industrial production almost eliminated unemployment, and nearly 50,000 volunteers served in the armed forces, but it remained fundamentally unchanged. Wood views the war and the postwar creation of the British welfare state as a missed opportunity to change the trajectory of the history of Northern Ireland. Wood criticizes Stormont for failing to push for some fundamental changes during this period. He characterizes the Unionist governments as “simply coasting along, averting their gaze from the chasm of misunderstanding and prejudice which partition, devolved government, and world war had failed to close” (p. 192).

Unlike Dublin’s desire to avoid and ignore the war as much as possible, the Irish Republican Army welcomed the conflict as yet another episode of an English difficulty that could be made Ireland’s opportunity. Although prewar divisions in the republican movement along left-right lines continued, the IRA officially opened its war against Britain in January 1939, months before the invasion of Poland by Germany. The IRA of this period was focused on ending partition, not overthrowing Dublin's government. In a vain attempt to force the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland the IRA launched a bombing campaign in Britain. The attacks quickly sputtered out, but republicans were encouraged by the actual outbreak of the war in September to seek aid from Germany. Nazi aid never amounted to much, in large part because of informal but effective cooperation among the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Garda Siochana, and British intelligence. In addition, the policy of interning known republicans that was introduced in both parts of Ireland reduced the effectiveness of the IRA. Despite the high degree of cooperation, Wood points out that dealing with the IRA remained a point of contention in public between Eire and the United Kingdom. While de Valera’s government saw no problem with its own execution of two IRA members convicted of murdering an Irish detective, Dublin loudly protested the hanging of two IRA men convicted of playing a role in a fatal bombing in Britain and the execution of IRA volunteer Tom Williams for the killing of a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. 

Wood examines in some detail the German sojourns of Sean Russell, the traditionalist IRA chief of staff, and Frank Ryan, a champion of the republican Left. Despite the policy differences between them, both men cooperated with the Germans to further the goal of Irish unification. Wood is harshly critical of the IRA for failing “to see any moral imperative in the need to destroy the Third Reich and its monstrous tyranny across Europe” (p. 117).

The last major topic covered by Wood is Britain’s relations with both Irish governments. British sentiment was divided over Eire. Neville Chamberlain’s government had pursued good relations with Dublin and had agreed to return the Treaty Ports to full Irish control in order to end the Economic War. Many British government and military officials, such as British representative to Dublin Sir John Maffey, continued to have a basically positive attitude toward Eire even after Dublin refused to enter the war. On the other hand, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was very bitter regarding Irish neutrality. Churchill’s offers to Dublin to work for Irish unification if Eire declared war on Germany came to naught as de Valera recognized that Churchill did not have the backing of Stormont for his plans. In fact Anglo-Irish relations were so strained that the Irish military took the threat of British invasion every bit as seriously as that of German invasion. While Churchill was as aware as anyone about the secret cooperation that Dublin offered to the Allies, Wood suggests that the prime minister, ever a staunch imperialist, had never come to terms with the desire of Irish nationalists to leave the British Empire. Churchill also did not trust de Valera. This mistrust must be linked to Churchill’s direct involvement in the events of the Irish Revolution. Churchill’s anger at Irish neutrality was not even assuaged by the Allied victory over Germany. He singled out Eire for criticism in his victory speech of May 13, 1945. In his response a few days later de Valera told his radio audience that if Britain had invaded Eire for its own purposes, as Churchill suggested it could have rightfully done during the war, than British policy would be no different from that of Nazi Germany. Ironically, as Wood points out, Churchill’s attack, and de Valera’s response, was a major political coup for the Irish leader as the exchange completely erased any negative feelings that the Irish public had over de Valera’s condolence visit to German ambassador Hempel after Hitler’s suicide. Like the policy of neutrality itself, de Valera’s speech was almost universally hailed in Ireland.

While Anglo-Irish tensions were bound to happen London also had difficulties with the government of Northern Ireland. Wood argues that Northern Ireland never fully lived up to its potential as part of the British war effort. Each of Northern Ireland’s three wartime prime ministers urged London to extend conscription to the province but the British never took the step and voluntary recruitment was disappointing. Among the unionist community, memories of the slaughter of the Great War were fresh and there was the added concern that veterans would return to find that their jobs had been taken by men who has not served. Nationalists in the North were understandably reluctant to join the British forces in great numbers. Industrial production in Northern Ireland was also somewhat disappointing and labor disputes were more common in the province than in other parts of the United Kingdom. However, in general Wood argues that Stormont cooperated with London to try to promote the maximum war effort from the people of Northern Ireland and the British were grateful for the strategic bases that the North provided.

Taken as a whole, Wood’s study stresses two basic facts about the Second World War and the British Isles. The first is that the relations among the two Irish governments and the British government were very much dominated by the continuing effects of the Irish Revolution and partition. Eire did not stay out of the war due to any sympathy for Germany or any antipathy to the Allied cause but rather because de Valera and the great mass of the Irish people believed that it was inappropriate to fight side by side with Britain as long as Northern Ireland remained a part of the United Kingdom. The government in Stormont, while dedicated to fighting the war, never flagged in its devotion to maintaining Unionist domination in Northern Ireland. London understood that partition had had a profound impact on Irish politics and treated Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the United Kingdom, while using the possibility of reunification to tempt Dublin into the war. Many British officials, Churchill being a notable exception, accepted that Eire’s informal cooperation was the best outcome that London could reasonably hope for as long as Ireland was divided. The second fact that Wood illuminates is that, despite near universal support for the policy of formal neutrality, many Irish citizens were directly involved in the war as military volunteers and industrial laborers in the United Kingdom. Thus, a true history of the period needs to acknowledge that while Eire avoided the full rigors of war, tens of thousands of its people experienced the conflict firsthand.

Wood expresses a great deal of respect for the Irish people from both sides of the border who fought against Hitler. He is critical of the fact that for a half-century after the end of the war Ireland studiously ignored the memory of its citizens who were veterans of the conflict. It has only been since the beginning of the peace process in Northern Ireland that Dublin has felt comfortable celebrating their service. While Wood’s revulsion at the Nazi regime is warranted, it is perhaps naïve of him to expect that the IRA should have rejected cooperating with Germany out of moral compunction. The IRA was primarily interested in ending partition and even left-wing republicans stood by the maxim: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” To Irish republicans the ultimate enemy was British imperialism, not fascism. Likewise, Wood questions the morality of Ireland’s neutrality in the face of Nazi barbarism. While he gives Eire full credit for unofficially helping the Allies, he fails to compare its pro-Allied nonbelligerence to the neutrality of other democratic states like Switzerland and Sweden.

Britain, Ireland and the Second World War is an admirable introduction to the history of the topic. As the author admits in his acknowledgments, the historiography on Ireland and the war is extensive, of high quality, and constantly expanding and he could not include everything. For instance, volumes 6 and 7 of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series published by the Royal Irish Academy now cover the whole period from 1939 to 1945. However, Wood makes no claim to have written a definitive history and his book has value for a general reader or for students in a course on Irish history. Aside from a few copy-editing errors, the book is well written and conveniently organized by topic. Wood also provides more than adequate background material for readers who are not specialists. While Wood focuses mostly on Ireland, as his book makes clear, it is impossible to separate the Irish experience of the war from that of Great Britain. Wood clearly demonstrates that even as Eire publicly trumpeted its sovereignty, its ties to Britain were extraordinarily close, and indeed inescapable. While most of the book is a summary of existing literature, Wood does contribute a good deal of primary research on Northern Ireland. His suggestion that the Second World War and its immediate aftermath constituted a missed opportunity for reform in Northern Ireland is certainly worthy of further investigation by historians.

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Reviewed by Daniel C. Williamson. This review was originally published on H-Albion (August, 2011). Republished courtesy of Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net). URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31015

The Archaeology of Politics and Power: Where, When, and Why the First States Formed

Charles Maisels. The Archaeology of Politics and Power: Where, When, and Why the First States Formed. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010. Illustrations. 300 pp. $60.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84217-352-7.

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This book offers a new interpretation of a much-discussed subject: the origin and evolution of early states. Challenging the prevailing assumption that the constellations of power that constitute these states are formed to "manage complexity by integrating proliferating sub-systems," its author, Charles Maisels, argues that no early states "served the people" (p. xvi). On the contrary, they were primarily constituted to privilege the elites who controlled them. While Maisels, like James Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), highlights the existence of societies outside state systems, unlike Scott, the focus of The Archaeology of Politics and Power is not on such societies but on early states. These are juxtaposed with one example, that of the Harappan civilization, through which the book seeks to demonstrate that complex societies need not necessarily be marked by the presence of the state.

The book's geographical scale is impressively ambitious. Through case studies, Maisels examines the development and character of states in and across various regions from Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia to northern China and the Andes in South America. In each instance, Maisels discusses the early settlement patterns, the beginning and elaboration of farming, the formation of hierarchies, and the character of urban centers. While four chapters, two at the beginning and two at the end, deal with different elements in the mechanics of state formation in a general way, it is what the author calls the "evidence-based trajectories" that seem far more interesting, and this review is primarily concerned with them (p. xvii).

Chapters 4 to 7 examine state societies across a wide arc--from Mesopotamia to the Andes. Maisels describes in detail the transition from hunter-gatherer groups to the existence of multiple city states in Mesopotamia. Sargon of Agade's attempt at unification of various entities into a single unitary state, Maisels states, had no ecological or economic rationale and was strongly resisted by the elite and by the citizens. In other words, the state that was created by this mighty ruler did not serve the interests of citizens but only fed "the ego and ambition of a king who would call himself 'king of the universe'" (p. 125). The book does not, however, try to engage with the absence of traits in the archaeological repertoire of Mesopotamia, which Maisels, in the case of the Harappan civilization, regards as marking a relatively egalitarian stateless society. The absence of palaces is one such trait. Interestingly, in the early city states of Mesopotamia, Norman Yoffee (Myths of the Archaic State [2005]) has pointed out that, as in the Harappan case, it is rather difficult to find palaces. Even later, "in the Third Dynasty of Ur at the end of the third millennium BC, there are magnificent temples and ziggurats, and we have a list of kings, but where is the palace?" (p. 228). While Maisels discusses the presence of a palace at Tell Mardikh, it may have also been useful to explain the absence of such residences in other places and what this implies for a model that considers this to be an important index of early states. 

Egypt, the subject of chapter 5, unlike Mesopotamia did not see a prolonged evolution of village life, and, in fact, the speed of state formation there is notable, unfolding "in under two millennia of neolithisation (5th to end of the 4th), with kingship emerging ... around 3600 BC)" (p. 139). Maisels delineates the process, from farming villages to regional capitals, as well as the role of conquest, rather than of acculturation, in the unification of Egypt. Through the merging of ideology with power, the Egyptian pharaoh is imaged as a cosmic facilitator and guarantor of the  farmers' efforts so that there would appear to be an "exchange of benefits" when the fruits of their labor were appropriated. Practically speaking, though, this extraction was made possible because of subjection and imposition. 

In the case of China as well (chapter 6), where the earliest state-level society emerges only by circa 1800 BCE, a similar trajectory is envisaged. To begin with, Maisels explores the beginning of millet cultivation that dominated north China and rice cultivation that was the crop of the South. Each of these had their own consequences since "northern wheat/millet dry farmers," the chapter states, "were predominantly the owner-operators of their farms, while southern wet-field rice farmers tended to be tenants of landlords" (p. 178). The author masterfully sketches the emergence of stratification in Dawenkou and Longshan in the North and Liangzhu, which is south and east of them, as seen in a variety of indicators ranging from walled towns to elite tombs. Maisels, though, only devotes some three pages to the emergence and character of the earliest state in China, as seen at Erlitou culture sites, with Erlitou as its center, and instead, focuses on the Shang state and its capital district of Anyang. The splendor of funerary riches, such as bronzes, jades, and even cowries, is strikingly captured. From the perspective of antiquarianism, the inventory of objects of the tomb of Fu Hao, the consort of one of the rulers, is specially fascinating in as much as it contained objects that, by then, were already a thousand years old and were derived from neolithic and chalcolithic cultures. Simultaneously, Maisels juxtaposes this luxury with terror and murder--in the form of the slaughter and sacrifice of human beings for burial in tombs. The average sacrifice had more than fifty human victims, mostly young adult males but also women and children, with beheading as the normal mode of sacrifice.

The final case study of this book concerns state formation in the New World Andean civilization whose agrarian basis was laid down in what is called the "Initial Period (1800-900 BC)" (p. 289). As in the case of Shang China, there is extensive presence of human sacrifice in the context of the first state, that of the northern Andes. In fact, as Maisels highlights, human sacrifice was an abiding theme in ritual iconography with artistic depictions of slashing the throats of captives to collect blood and is corroborated by the cut marks found on the anterior and lateral surfaces of the vertebrae on sacrificial victims at Huaca de la Luna. That the blood was actually drunk is also confirmed by residue analysis of goblets. Through such details and examples, the book tries to constantly reiterate that states did not emerge because they "answered the needs of society as a whole as it became more complex" but were created "due to the selfish human desire to privilege oneself" (pp. 352-353). To put it another way, states are not institutions that solve problems but form part of the problem since they are sustained at enormous cost to people and to the environment.

So far so good. But are there sophisticated urban cultures of complexity in the ancient world that existed outside state systems? Maisels seems to think that what he describes as the "Indus-Sarasvati Civilization" or the Harappan civilization is an example of a culture that is not state controlled. He sees this civilization as a kind of antithesis to other early states, since, in his opinion, this represented a sophisticated complex urban society that is marked by the absence of state formation. This short lived civilization (ca. 2600 -1900 BCE) is one that he considers as being "doubly remarkable, both because it was the only complex society either of antiquity or the modern world that operated without marked social stratification and the state; and, in what may be a related phenomenon, an agrarian society in which the villages were not oppressed by the towns" (pp. 48-49).

For Maisels, what is crucial is that the cities are lacking palaces and temples and there are no major disparities of wealth, power, and even  in comparative health  indicators. The absence of a state is also manifest, he tells us, in the lack of an iconography of power unlike other early states where the ruler is strongly represented in situations of armed combat and in the world of ritual. Also, unlike other states, neither is there adequate evidence of Harappan soldiers, nor are there fortifications that were built as defensive revetments. In fact, the author does not consider the walls around Harappan settlements as fortifications. Such walls, he argues, "were often too flimsy and easily penetrated to resist serious attack" (p. 63).  

Those who have studied the Harappan civilization will, however, be dissatisfied with Maisels's marshalling of evidence and his arguments. For example, the chronology of 2500 to 1900 BCE that he suggests for the urban phase of the Harappan civilization is flawed. There are Harappan beads in the royal graves of Ur that date from circa 2600 BCE. Again, the occurrence of a typical Harappan rectangular seal in the Kassite level of the fourteenth century BCE at Nippur, as well as the presence of such seals in the same dynastic context in Bahrain and Failaka suggest a much later date than 1900 BCE. So, it seems that the Harappan civilization came into existence by circa 2600 BCE and some part of it still survived around 1400 BCE. Furthermore, the thickness of the fortifications at key sites--from Dholavira in Gujarat where it is 8.4 meters wide to Kalibangan in Rajasthan where it varies between 3 to 7 meters and Balu in Haryana where it is 12 meters wide--makes the defensive character of such features, which Maisels runs down, very hard to deny.  

Most significant, Maisels has not carefully followed the debate on the political framework of the Harappan civilization, a debate that, it is necessary to underline, is not confined to American scholars as his citations to Mark  Kenoyer, Gregory Possehl, and Jim Shaffer suggest. His lack of engagement, for instance, with the work of Shereen Ratnagar who, two decades ago, published Enquiries into the Political Organization of Harappan Society (1991), in which she argued for the existence of not merely a state but an empire, is surprising. Similarly, some Indian scholars have pointed out that, like the Harappan phenomenon, later states including that headed by the third-century BCE Mauryan emperor Ashoka, also did not boast of the kind of iconography of power that is described in the book under review. Dilip Chakrabarti's The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities notes that "an Egyptian or Mesopotamian type of kingship need not be envisaged in the Indus context. In later Indian history, the king, despite the occasional use of grandiloquent titles, was a much more humble figure without the tell-tale archaeological evidence of his existence. For one thing, he does not strut around sculptural reliefs towering above ordinary mortals and cutting the heads of his enemies, and for another, he functioned within the well-formulated concept of the royal duty of looking after the well-being of his subjects."[1] Maisels is unlikely to agree with Chakrabarti's observations or Ratnagar's, monograph but surely he must engage with their arguments if he wants to convince his readers that the Harappan civilization was not state controlled.

There are many ideas in this book that scholars with an interest in the emergence of complex societies will find convincing. Its argument, though, that the urban Harappan civilization was not a state society in the ancient world of state systems, is not one of them.

Note

[1]. Dilip Chakrabarti, The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123.

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Reviewed by Nayanjot Lahiri. This review was originally published on H-Asia (August, 2011). Republished courtesy of Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net). URL:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30942

The Emergence of the Hardware and Software Industries in China and India

Neil F. Gregory, Stanley D. Nollen, Stoyan Tenev. New Industries from New Places: The Emergence of the Hardware and Software Industries in China and India. Stanford: Stanford Economics and Finance/Stanford University Press, 2009. xvii + 255 pp. $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8213-6478-9; $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-6280-9.

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The book New Industries from New Places: The Emergence of the Software and Hardware Industries in China and India focuses on the evolution of hardware and software industries in India and China. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 provides the rationale for the study and a framework for understanding differences in industry performance in these two countries. Parts 2 and 3 follow the same structure with five chapters each for software and then hardware sectors. The five chapters for each of these sectors form the core of the analytical content presented in this book. These chapters provide a China-India comparative perspective on industry performance, factors of production, the role of management, the effect of the business environment and competition, and a summary of factors behind the success of these sectors in the two countries. Part 4 concludes with two chapters. One chapter focuses on different paths of development of hardware and software industries in the two countries and the final chapter sheds light on emerging trends in these sectors. 

The authors argue the importance of understanding the relationship between technological change and economic development during an era of economic reforms in India and China. The examination of the effects of differential technological change in these two related industries illustrates the success of Indian software and Chinese hardware sectors. Data from World Bank Investment Climate Assessment surveys and direct surveys of managers in China and India by International Finance Corporation are used. Chapter 1 provides a detailed description of the sample and sampling procedures and a discussion of the variables (e.g., firm characteristics). Chapter 2 offers a brief discussion of the conceptual framework--factors of production (labor, capital, land, intermediate inputs), management processes (quality, corporate culture, technology, international alliances), business environment (market competitiveness, institutions and infrastructure, government policy), and demand. These determinants are used to analyze the growth and development of firms in the hardware and software sectors. The legacy of the investment climate is discussed in the next chapter. China’s dependence on foreign direct investment, India’s limited integration in global supply chains, and the scope of the private sector or domestic private investment are the topics covered in this chapter.

The section on software industry (part 2 with five chapters) answers the following questions (p. 131): Why did the Indian software industry grow so fast as an export-oriented industry, and why did the equally fast-growing Chinese software industry thrive in its domestic market but not compete as an export business? The Chinese software industry’s growth is a function of its domestic market orientation and the need for adaptation to local conditions. Off the shelf software available in English sometimes did not fit local business practices. A majority of the Chinese software firms are foreign-owned--therefore, resources were not short in supply, including research and development investments. Government aided the industry through the creation of Special Economic Zones and by enabling foreign investment in the industry. The experience of Indian mangers is one of the main advantages combined with the provision of skilled labor. These two factors differentiate the Chinese and the Indian experience. International alliances (e.g., portfolio investment) rather than foreign direct investment helped Indian companies. Indian companies were not threatened by operations of foreign firms. Government regulations for software were not as stringent as those for Indian manufacturing firms (e.g., industrial licensing). Both governments provided infrastructural support and export promotion. However, China’s infrastructure (e.g., power supply) is considered superior to India’s situation for software industry. English-language proficiency is not considered to be as important as technical and managerial skills, and the broader ICT (information and communications technology) industry context. In fact, the Y2K issues boosted markets and allowed Indian firms to prove that they could be simultaneously cost-effective and sensitive to deadlines.

Part 3 shows why China’s hardware sector grew faster than the Indian hardware sector. The Chinese government encouraged foreign direct investment, provided infrastructural facilities, and emphasized quality certifications. The Chinese hardware industry’s international orientation helped its success.

The authors argue that the availability of skilled labor and high-quality management allowed Indian software firms to succeed in the international market. Although labor and management are important drivers of China’s success in hardware, foreign direct investment (access to latest technology and global supply chains), infrastructural investment, and government policies aided Chinese firms more than skilled labor and managerial skills. Both countries improved micro-investment climates: software parks in India and Special Economic Zones in China. International linkages for software in India and hardware in China are critical to their success. These linkages were facilitated by government incentives and policies. The final chapter discusses emerging trends. Both countries are investing in both hardware and software sectors. China and India are also investing in each other’s markets. While India may suffer from technical and skilled labor shortages, China may be affected by inflation and fluctuations in its currency. 

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary paths of hardware and software sectors in India and China. The strength of the book lies in the style used by the authors to present a large amount of data on firms to illustrate industrial and firm comparisons in two different countries. The book provides a good start for further in-depth analysis (e.g., case studies) of the combined effects of government policy, foreign direct investment, export market development, and corporate strategies on industrial and economic development. 

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Reviewed by Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen. This review was originally published on H-Asia (August, 2011). Republished courtesy of Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-Net). URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29377