Taking Liberties

Fog in Channel...

I went to a lecture last night at Birkbeck with my colleague Jerry (who has an interesting BL Twittter feed on the Library's vast international organisations collections).  Richard J. Evans, the Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, was giving a public lecture to mark the European History Quarterly's 40th anniversary, and his subject was 'What is European History?'.

As the title suggested, much of the lecture was historiographical (e.g, Lord Acton's doomed plans for a cosmopolitan, non-national Cambridge History of Europe, A. J. P. Taylor's 1986 remarks in History Today - "European history is whatever the historian wants it to be").  The thrust of the lecture was that, in the UK, European history has in fact traditionally been 'Continental History', but that this has changed, not least because of the influence of the demands of publishing for a US audience and the welcome influx of scholars from the Continent to British universities.  Books purporting to be about Europe and sold in New York or Portland cannot not have a chapter about Britain.  Intellectual currents have also changed, and the Whiggish view that Britain stands alone from Europe, offering the benefits of liberal democracy, freedom and civil rights to those that would listen, has been replaced by ideological uncertainty, a greater sense of the complexity of whatever the historian wants Europe to be and, most recently, an alertness to the global.  These older, eddies, of course, may still be visible in recent work.

Some of the questions also revealed how Evan's contribution to Penguin's History of Europe series may be shaping up (and how it's word-count may compare with other, usually rather epic, European histories).  There was a hint of a return to social history; the role of poverty and wealth, even the importance of food and death should not be forgotten. Many of these things were connected to the wider world (the atmospheric dust from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia might, for example, lead to failed crops in France). 

These interconnections - the global, the social, Britain, Europe and the world - reminded me of the fact that this blog is now over a year old and its first post (16 September) wondered about what the collapse of the banks might mean for the political and social consensus in Britain.  We're just getting a sense of that now.

Les vacances

Summer hols: a kind friend put me up in Normandy for a week. On the train on the way back I gathered from Le Monde that the NHS has been dragged into the US newscycle as President Obama attempts to introduce his health reforms. This gives me the chance to add to an ongoing series of this blog: "things we didn't include for a number of reasons". In this case, Alexander Fleming's petri dish containing the first batch of penicillin, which would have been the star of a section on the birth of the NHS - or at least the relationship between the state, public health and medicine (as well as an in-gallery link to UK PubMed). We were able to include some of these issues in a section on the Welfare State, and in a series of audio excerpts and films from the 1940s. The current debate does, I think, underscore the ways that healthcare and social welfare inform a nation's idea of what is meant by a right.

Le Monde, by the way, was happy to quote what I assume was the [London] Times:

"Qui des Etats-Unis ou du Royaume-Uni a le meilleur système de santé ? La réponse est probablement : la France."

Taking the Time

I promised/threatened in my last post to mention the Tour de France, and it hasn't taken me long: the quotation of the TdF so far has to be from the current leader, Fabian Cancellara, who commented laconically on his 0.138 second retention of the yellow jersey after the third stage Team Time Trial, "Swiss timing – very precise." 

Time and timing has come up again, after I attended a wonderful commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, which included commentaries by the historian John Hemming, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the psychoanalyst Max Hernández. Curious about one of Peru's leading intellectuals, I was delighted to find this piece on Hernández's role in the co-ordination of a campaign to encourage punctuality - "La Hora sin Demora" (time without delay), as I'm always intrigued by geographical (and historical) differences in time-keeping and awareness.  And more pressingly, my eyes are still propped open after spending 8:45 pm Sat - 4:20 am Sun riding to Dunwich.  Matters of time and timing are everywhere, it seems.

The exhibition, of course, also implicitly acknowledged the role of time.  Chronology provided an underlying, inescapable structure, from Magna Carta to the Human Rights Act, even as it was given apparent second-billing to themes (such as the Rule of Law or Freedom of Speech and Belief), and led to the risk of accusations of 'whiggery'.  But time, and its control, are also tied up with the tensions implied by liberty, rights and freedoms, just as much as they are about property or space.  The control of time, historians such as E. P. Thompson argued, have been centrally important to the creation of a productive, - and docile - citizen and subject.

Many important rights, such as freedom from detention without charge, are time-bound; measures of time, such as 42 days, were very much at the fore during the exhibition's gestation.  Many of the great nineteenth-century social movements charted in the section on social rights, concentrated on limited the hours worked by children, and eventually by all workers.  More recently, attention has been drawn to the 'double-day' demanded of many women, especially in the developing world.  Time still means much more than who wears a yellow jersey.

P.S., congratulations to the TL team for winning the Nominet Best Practice Challenge 2009 in the 'Open Internet' category. 

Taxing questions

What are parliaments for? They operate as courts, deciding cases and making laws. They are spaces for debate - as Churchill quipped, the ‘object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs’.

The more cynical might argue that they are a simply a machine for raising taxes. A certain amount of consent is needed to extract money from people, which is why kings have found it useful to have a parliament to approve their money-raising schemes over the years. Of course, things sometimes go wrong, as the section of the exhibition that considers the Civil War (Parliament and People) shows. Charles I, desperate for cash, could not in the end ignore parliamentary demands, with unhappy personal consequences.

In the 18th century, it was discovered that the ship of state could sail happily, and successfully of a sea of debt. Men in the city and overseas investors were relaxed about lending money, if asked by similar sorts of people meeting in parliament and subject to public scrutiny.

More recently, the eye-watering sums of money that have recently been made available to the banks have shown how democracies, with the assistance of the bond markets and central banks, can raise massive amounts of money, without causing too many political storms (at least so far). The recent pre-budget report has brought some of these debates centre stage. The 2.5% cut in the rate of VAT is also a reminder that parliament operates within a wider, European context, as 15% is the lower limit allowed in the EU.

But even in straitened times, there is cause for optimism, as the forthcoming 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us. Even at the moments of economic plight, as Europe struggled to feed itself after the Second World War, people believed that human rights were more important than ever.

It's crunchy. But is it Art?

The American writer Jonathan Franzen was on the radio this morning getting excited about the end of the credit boom. He was pleased at this particular correction, not only because it meant that the market was reflecting reality, but also because money-worries are a powerful source of human stories: pain, Franzen suggested, equals art.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to a private view of the current National Gallery exhibition, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, which was notable not just for reuniting a series of works (including portraits of van Eyck and his wife) but also a fantastic trio of two paintings and a sculpture of Philip II of Spain – stunning examples of patronage. (I was also trying to pick up some tips on how to conduct a gallery tour.)

These two things – the Renaissance and the connections between money and art – were the subject of two good presentations during the seminar at Birkbeck on Tuesday. Did the wealth created by bankers in 15th century Florence lead to the leap in creativity in sculpture, illumination, painting and fresco; or, as some art historians suggest, had art become a safer ‘asset class’ during a recession?

Perhaps there's a similarly complicated equation linking rights and the economy. This is particularly true in the 'Freedom from Want' section of Taking Liberties, which looks at how social rights have developed from the vagaries of the Poor Laws to the creation of the Welfare State. But the connection is also apparent in the 'Right to Vote' section: as the cities grew and more people had a financial stake in society, so did demands for the right to elect representatives to parliament. And in 'Liberty and the Rule of Law', the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817 takes place against the backdrop of economic dislocation and the demands for pay rises.

There may also be patterns in terms of art and its responses to the political and social situation, especially art that reflects individual’s struggles and hopes and fears for society. Ernest Jones (1819–1869), a Chartist (and acquaintance of Karl Marx) was imprisoned after the great demonstration of 1848. He drew a series of sketches, including an idealised Grecian landscape. In the image shown here, the home of democracy is contrasted with a bleak vision of 'the English Town', with dark factories called 'Bone Grinder & Co', menaced by 'the Army'. Three generations later, Olive Wharry’s scrapbook records, in a cartoon style that doesn’t avoid the horror of incarceration and force-feeding, her experiences as a suffragette in Holloway prison. And, from the generation preceding Jones, William Blake's notebook responds imaginatively to the landscape of London during the repression that followed the French Revolution.

Children have rights* too (*optional)

The last few years have seen a series of international declarations and conventions on human rights. States sign up to them, but they may not be implemented fully.

The UK is no different in this from other nations, and although it signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it exercises an opt-out, allowing the UK to detain child migrants and asylum seekers before deportation.

Today we read that the government will be signing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) in full. The UK Border Agency will have to put the welfare of the children first, before deciding whether to detain (at Yarls Wood, for example) or deport them. The exhibition will have a Clearvision tactile Braille book on the Rights of the Child on display. The label may have to be updated. It wasn’t particularly surprising to read this selection of headlines aggregated at Google News:

Asylum rules 'risk human rights' [BBC News]

A fair deal for children [New Statesman]

Ministers set to sign away key power over migrants [Daily Mail]

Liberty? Don't bank on it

"Events, dear boy, events".  This oft-quoted, and rather arch, observation attributed to the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came to mind today.  It's the last few weeks before the British Library exhibition Taking Liberties opens. The advertising hoarding is going up in the Library's piazza, and it seems right to take a moment to stop and look around for a moment.

Today's event is the fall of the investment bank Lehman Bros. Such was the stature of the bank (which was founded in 1850) that its collapse would have been unthinkable even a year ago, and it would have seemed ridiculous two years ago, when we began to plan the exhibition. It's a reminder, to paraphrase Supermac, that you never know what's around the corner. Meltdown Monday (15 September 2008) may take its place in the historical lexicon of financial woes alongside Black Monday and Black Wednesday.

In terms of the exhibition, it brings to mind the section on social rights, such as pensions, unemployment benefit, which looks at the pressures on the government following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression. We have footage of the Jarrow Marches and the first edition of Ellen Wilkinson's The Town that Was Murdered (1939). We link these protests to the development of the postwar welfare state.

But, in the course of writing these labels, we had to decide how to summarise the Great Depression which, some historians suggest, much of Britain weathered rather well.  Did for example, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which saw stocks decline for almost 89%, cause the depression, or was it a symptom?  As a teenager, I was a bit of a worrier, and I recalled reading JK Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929, to try and reassure myself that it couldn't happen again. Galbraith, I gathered, lay the blame on depressed corn prices and lack of regulation. This is relatively reassuring, and today's financial activities may just be the medicinal bloodletting that capitalism seems to require periodically for its health. 

However, further research reminded us that economic historians love to disagree. Perhaps, in fact, debt was to blame. Or problems in world trade. Or the expansion or contraction of the money supply...  Commentators today, and clearly this blog is no exception, have readily turned to 1929 as a comparison.One hopes that history is not that simple. The resulting panel text, visitors will be reassured to know, is much pithier. Events, dear boy, events...

The other event of today was, I'm pleased to say, altogether happier - but still touched on rights: in this case, copyright. As part of what's termed the C21st Curatorship Project, I had organised a colloquium on its "Past, Present, and Future". It was something of an experiment, as it involved Library staff and librarians, lawyers and researchers from other institutions. But it seemed to go very well, in part because of the audience, mostly because of the wonderful panel.

I was delighted to be able to introduce Professor James Raven, whose Business of Books (2007) won the Jeanne S DeLong Prize in Book History, and who guided us brilliantly through the complicated history of copyright; Tim Padfield, of the UK National Archives, who cast light on modern copyright; and Ben, the BL's enthusiastic intellectual-property manager. It was genuinely delightful to introduce the poet Wendy Cope, who spoke eloquently and in verse about what it feels like to be exploited as an artist by those who don't respect copyright. 

As I left, I noticed I had committed a Freudian email slip (e-parapraxis, anyone?), and sent a reminder around that "Wendy Copy" would would speaking.