Thursday, 30 January 2014
Transgression and bodily adornment
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
The First World War: Right- and left-wing interpretations?
[I post this with trepidation as it is likely to open all sorts of flood-gates of abuse.... What I want to do in this very personal essay, which has turned out to be far longer and more rambling than I envisaged, is to argue that there are ethical undertones to the different readings of the Great War that have grabbed the headlines of late and that therefore there are political stances that underpin different historical standpoints. These need not equate with the proclaimed stance of the writers in question. We need to be entirely up front about that and not pretend that one side's view represents truth and the other myth. I will try to show, first, that the revisionist view of the war is as partial as the straw man myth that it aims to dismiss. I will then move to argue that there are non-empirical steps taken within the historical methodology adopted which are inseparable from a particular set of political ideals which implicitly underpin the reading espoused. I will finally argue that the revisionist view, in its exclusion from the debate of a range of issues, is motivated, consciously or otherwise, by what I consider to be fairly unpalatable assumptions. I also contend that a historian who espouses such a reading without seeing these underpinning assumptions can justly be castigated as not possessing the imaginative or critical ability appropriate to the status of a good practitioner of the discipline.]
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First of all, since I will talk about others' inherent biases here, let me come clean at the start about my own position. I am not a WWI specialist of any kind, but then again nor are a number of those who have sounded off thus far. I have had a passing hobby interest in the conflict (as a wargamer) for 20-odd years but won't pretend to any more than that. In other words I am not going to dispute the fact that there are hundreds, thousands of people who know more about the war than I do in any sort of empirical terms. I couldn’t tell you what exactly happened at Loos or Messines or the Chemin des Dames, or at any number of other battles, or even, with the smaller ones, where they fit into the chronology; I couldn’t tell you who commanded whom, where and when; I couldn’t describe the organisation of a German division; I couldn’t tell you the difference between a Mk.I tank and a Mk.IV or between a Spad XIII and a Sopwith Pup – actually maybe I could have a stab at that last. Anyway, if you could, well done you. I can always look them up. Where I take my stance is in the rather more complex area of the writing of history, and the ethics and politics thereof, something which I have been professionally interested in. This has led me to a slightly macabre obsession with what I have termed (and I admit that I am quite proud of this coinage) ‘Haigiography’ (see what I did there?) - the attempts to rehabilitate the British high command in the First World War and to re-package the war (or rather restore the war's original packaging) as a Just War against tyranny. My family, like most, lost several members in the conflict, one of whom was listed as missing presumed dead (blown to bits in other words, or mutilated or decomposed beyond identification) at Arras, and the powers that be couldn't even take the trouble to spell his surname properly on the memorial. That puts me in the opposite camp from the likes of Dan Snow and his family. For that I make no apology.
***
There has been a good deal of ink spilled in recent weeks over the commemoration of the Great War, particularly since Michael Gove dismissed 'left-wing historians' as propagating a 'myth' about the war as a fruitless waste of life. Part of the response to Gove's characteristically ill-informed outburst(1) rightly concerned his depiction of rival interpretation as a myth. Another component concerned whether the view of the Great War as a futile and badly-conducted mess was really a left-wing view. Richard Evans correctly identified a number of writers critical of the war and its conduct who could by no means be considered as left-wingers: his old sparring partner Niall Ferguson, for example; Alan Clarke; etc. Empirically, that may be fair enough, but there are serious problems with the ad hominem refutation. To my mind it involves making an important category error in conflating the documented political stance of the historian with the implicit political and ethical assumptions that underly the reading. What I hope to demonstrate is that there can be serious discrepancies between the two but that serious grounds for a critique of a historian's work and indeed of their ability at the critical skills essential to the discipline are furnished when a historian proclaims adherence to one political viewpoint while penning history that is at least implicitly motivated by notions incompatible with such a stance. I will also propose that, while the critique of the First World War can originate from a variety of political positions, the view castigated by Gove actually is left-wing in its assumptions, while those of the 'revisionist' view in developed, Haigiographic form cannot be other than reactionary.
Let us take the critical view first. As is clear from Richard Evans' description, a number of possible starting points exist for such a position. Some critique originates from a judgement of the national interest - as in Ferguson's work - which is by no means incompatible with right-wing political views. Other criticism of the war's conduct takes as its starting point a purely 'operational', military historical view. Thus Max Hastings' (a journalist rather than a historian) criticisms of the British high command in 1914 are not out of keeping with his view of the war as a just conflict in defence of international law, against German aggression, in defence of small nations. From what little I recall of Clarke's The Donkeys, the starting point was more on these tactical and operational lines, though I may misremember. Thus a criticism of the First World War need not originate in a left-wing political stance. It need not. But I would maintain that the particular critique identified by Gove and others actually is, fundamentally, only compatible with political and ethical assumptions that sit more readily on the left than the right. It is not often that I will admit to Michael Gove being correct about anything so, to whoever got 20 January 2014 in the sweepstake, well done!
The interpretation of the events of 1914-1918 as a European and even global tragedy, in which something like ten million soldiers lost their lives, as well as millions more civilians and still millions on top of that who were physically wounded or maimed or psychologically damaged, in a war that could have been averted had the ruling class (principally perhaps but certainly not only in Germany) had the will, sacrificed simply on the altar of the bragging rights of nations, fits uncomfortably with any political characterisation other than left-wing. The tactical or strategic competence or otherwise of the high command is essentially irrelevant to such a reading, although if incompetence could be proven it might add to the indictment. Some would say that a certain heartlessness in the high command is a requisite of effective military leadership, even in a somehow ethically justifiable, 'just war'. Someone like U.S. Grant , willing, in Lincoln's words, 'to do the arithmetic' might end a war more quickly and at less cost than someone, like George McLellan, obsessing about risk and drawing out the war and the casualty list as a result. What is at stake at the end of the day is the reading of the war as a waste of human life and a refusal to accept national honour and patriotism as any sort of justification for slaughter.
[Incidentally, let me clarify at this point that the justification of slaughter on the altar of the class struggle may unproblematically be a left wing reading of a sort, but it is not one that I share and is one that I would similarly - and fundamentally on directly analogous grounds - castigate as bad history.]
At this point it is worth pausing to consider the nature of the reply to Gove's attack made by Labour shadow education secretary, Tristan Hunt (who at least has a PhD in history, unlike some we'll encounter). This is classic Labour Party gutlessness. Hunt typically makes no stand on any sort of actual left-wing principle, and instead air-brushes out those socialists like Keir Hardie who urged the troops not to go, and all those on the Left - in several countries - who rightly pointed out that the troops had much more in common with the soldiery on the other side than with the ruling class that was sending them to war. Instead, he characteristically dances to the Tory tune and panders to the populist Daily Mail vote by arguing that the Tories had nothing to teach the Left about patriotism in 1914. Well, good for them; we all know the Dr Johnson quote about patriotism.
***
Let us turn, then, to the so-called revisionist view. What, it seems to me, is crucial here is a consideration of historical motivation. It is, let me be clear, entirely compatible with my idea of good historical practice to want to question received ideas; it seems to me, too, to be similarly commendable to want to set the record straight where analyses have been manifestly unjust to a particular group or person. With that in mind one might consider the initial move to reassess the popular ideas of the Great War to be consistent with no particular political viewpoint.
Certainly the revisionist view has made a goodly number of important points, all of which are worth knowing about. These, to be fair, mostly confront the extreme version of what one might very loosely call the 'Blackadder view'. Attacks were not always unsuccessful; generals did not always send their men over the top in the same old way; the British army command did try new and more flexible tactics; troops weren't kept in the trenches all year round; the British certainly had no monopoly on blood-thirsty high commanders or military incompetence; some generals were quite good; some were actually popular with their men; in the end the war on the western front was a clear military victory for the Entente Powers. And so on. This is all fair enough and still not necessarily consistent with a specific political stance.
The problem for me is that revision has gone way beyond that, and become the distorted Haigiography that I mentioned earlier. Here is a crude version of the genre, possibly - who knows?- even a parody, though far from a misrepresentation of many. It is written by self-proclaimed 'historian' Dan Snow. ("The History Guy" on Witter - sorry, Twitter. No, really.) Like most of this sort of thing, it sets up a straw man (the so-called Blackadder view) before peddling an argument that becomes staggering in its sophistry. Now it may be that somehow Snow doesn't see the political and ethical implications of what is written here. Maybe the article is ghost-written. It will be less insulting to Snow's intelligence though to assume that his views are consistent with those implicit in the argument actively being made. If not, and if he cannot see this, then I think the honest thing for him to do would be to cease work in the historical sphere immediately.
Elsewhere, in a Daily Heil article (and do please note the place of publication) where he claims that the officer class who led Britain into the maelstrom were as much victims as anyone else, Snow claims to have learnt his WWI history at school from 'Blackadder'. That, evidently, is the historical education your seven to eleven grand a year buys you at St Paul's… Caveat emptor. I know that, at the state school I attended, what we were taught about WWI bore no resemblance to what is now being peddled as the 'left-wing orthodoxy' spoon-fed to children by horrid, biased schoolteachers. Be that as it may, Snow is descended from a WWI British general, he's public school- and Oxford-educated, married to a daughter of one of the land's wealthiest aristocrats and, as with most British army officers in the Great War, his family connections are hardly irrelevant to his position (though he does at least have a first-class degree in history, and that puts him ahead of some in this discussion). That he seems clearly to be parti pris in support of the British aristocracy and military establishment is perhaps therefore no surprise. Let me be clear, though, the article is not composed of lies, falsifications or untruths, as such. What it does is to select another set of facts and spin them in a particular way to make a particular argument in support of a political position, and then to pretend that that spin is 'the truth', debunking 'myths'. The attitudes and decisions behind such selection and spin are what need to be brought to the surface.
To caricature Snow's article, only very slightly, essentially the war really wasn't so bad and anyway the toffs had it worse than the rest while the oiks were jolly glad to be out there. Those of us whose origins lie in working-class families with members listed as 'missing', in the new euphemism of the war, on the western front should all actually be grateful to the aristos for risking their lives to allow the chaps to get out into the fresh air, have a decent square meal and get the clap off French prostitutes. Huzzah! Cor blimey, God bless you, mister Snow. You're a real gent, gov, and no mistake. Excuse me while I tug my forelock.
…. OK, you may justly charge me with being a bit unfair in, as an actual historian, using my blog (readership at best 500 hits a day, some of whom redirected from some - shall we say? - less wholesome websites) to take to task a little journalism by someone no better qualified than our MA intake last term: a simple summary of other people's actual research like an undergraduate essay, and not an especially good one at that. But Snow's piece, he says, has had over a million readers and, even if only an intellectual pot-boiler in itself, it does sum up a series (and style) of arguments that I find grossly misleading and offensive and which constitute, as I hope to demonstrate, Bad History to the same degree as the equally caricatured 'myth' they take aim at. It will mislead a lot of people.
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| Some of the chaps, taking time off from army food banquets and banging Mademoiselle from Armentières to have an absolute bally load of fun in the special Passchendaele adventure playground, thoughtfully provided for them by the kind-hearted gentry |
Even at its best, the revisionist argument remains partial. Not every unit on the Somme in 1916 was ordered to advance towards the enemy in a more or less straight line - but some units were. If, as one 'revisionist' writer has been argued, it was tactically essential for British troops in the attack to carry those 60lbs of equipment with them into No-Man's Land, why was that not also true for their French allies and German enemies? It is pretty difficult, with all the will in the world, to avoid the 'donkey tracks' on some fronts, especially the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia. It's difficult to see the fruitless uphill frontal attacks against Bulgarian positions at the Battle of Doiran (18-19 September 1918; a Graeco-British defeat), when the war was all but over, as anything other than a senseless waste of human life - pointlessly adding another 10-12,000 to the war's 'butcher's bill'. Haig was popular; a lot of very bad generals (most notably the afore-mentioned Geo. McLellan) were very popular with their men so you don't get far on that line. It becomes a little difficult to push praise of Haig and the rest too far for their competent and flexible handling of a novel position with new and insurmountable tactical problems when one considers a series of points.
Snow regurgitates: "Rarely in history have commanders had to adapt to a more radically different technological environment. British commanders had been trained to fight small colonial wars, now they were thrust into a massive industrial struggle unlike anything the British army had ever seen." In fact, of all the western combatants in 1914, the British (after their experience of smokeless powder, magazine rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery, trenches and barbed wire in South Africa in 1899-1901, where the officer class hadn't exactly distinguished itself) had the best and clearestidea of what new forms of firepower could do on a large scale. Since the Franco-Prussian war, forty-three years previously, the German and French armies had had less experience of modern warfare than the British. And yet, in spite of the country having been steadily geared up for a war for years (viz the naval arms race with Germany), the British went to war with a small (if impeccably trained) professional army, in which no commander had had any experience or training in handling a formation larger than a division, in which the C-in-C Sir John French pooh-poohed his subordinate Horace Smith-Dorrien for having trained the cavalry disproportionately (in his view) in dismounted fighting. Even Snow's account of his ancestor is filled with criticism of British preparation. Somehow, the British went to war, in spite of being as aware of the possibility of war as any other nation, in spite of their Boer War experience, with the view that a force of 80,000 men (from a population of 46 million) would somehow be sufficient, would somehow last long in a modern war on a European scale. By way of comparison, and as the high command well knew, in 1914 the French were fielding an army ten times that size from a slightly smaller population. As they doubtless didn't know but could have guessed, the German Empire mobilised a slightly larger army (800,000 or so) from a population of 65 million. If the nature and scale of this war really took the British military high command by surprise, that is something that, in terms of culpability, is really pretty difficult to put a positive spin on. The fact that they subsequently (albeit slowly - more slowly than their opposite numbers - see below) did their best to put that right amounts to little by way of mitigation.
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| Passchendaele in 1916 before the battle... |
More importantly, French and German infantry tactics evolved faster than British, even though they started from a lower base. That the French turned up for the Great War dressed for the Franco-Prussian is well known; less widely appreciated are the facts that the German army still employed attack in deep, fairly close-order columns and, like the French, still brought their regimental standards forward into battle, something the British army had stopped doing in 1880. '[W]ithin three years the British [sic] had effectively invented [sic] a method of warfare
still recognisable today', says Dan Snow or his researchers. The tactics that the revisionists praise the British command for having developed by 1917 were, in outline, in use by the French at least by the middle of 1916. On the first day of the Somme, while the British lost 60,000 casualties in a day, the French attacks - using some of those tactical methods - broke through the German lines for some distance. There were reasons for the difference in the degree of success, but none that entirely gets the British command off the hook, especially when requests to divert men and resources to support the French success were turned down. By not taking a properly comparative view, even justifiable revisions of the stock view of the incompetent British high command nevertheless, misleadingly, only tell part of the story, and thereby, you might reasonably argue, become as bad history as the myths they claim to dispel.
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| ... and after. "Huge artillery pieces fired with pinpoint accuracy - using only aerial photos and maths they could score a hit on the first shot." (Snow) That dashed Jerry had to run about all over the place before we got him. |
So, although it has produced a welcome increase in nuance, the debate on tactical competence cannot be considered over. This is a pretty narrow element of the analysis, however. If one is thinking about the inevitable political content of history, which is ultimately the main point of this essay, one is entitled to ask what motivates a historian to try to exonerate the officer class, especially when that argument pushes far beyond the establishment of corrections to earlier views. And some of this work has very much done that. One might take as an extreme case the apparently best-selling book by one Gordon Corrigan, not an historian but an ex-army officer, which dismisses the negative view of the war as 'poppycock' and even goes so far as to deny that the generation of the 1914-1918 combatants was a 'lost' generation. I find that distasteful. Demographically, one in ten of France's active male population was killed; France did not recover from the war for decades in demographic terms. Similarly, while Snow's piece does mention the numbers of British dead, although estimated on the low side (he claims 'just over 700,000'; other sources give figures 100,000 or so higher) he glosses this ('[a]lthough more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict…') with sophistic arguments about percentages, saying that a higher percentage of British troops died in the Crimea and a higher percentage of the population during the Civil Wars, as though that in any way justifies those brute, absolute figures. What is being presented here, firstly, is a pretty hollow attempt to exonerate the British high command by saying that British troops stood a higher chance of dying in a worse (if smaller) mess produced by the British military elite's organisational incompetence a half century earlier. As for the Civil War, what Snow is doing here is presenting an estimate - we simply don't have robust data even for the sizes of armies and numbers of battlefield casualties, or overall population, for the Civil War - as a fact with the same epistemological status as the hard data from WWI. So ponder, for now, the moral, ethical and political motivation that must surely lie behind such arguments. Ponder how well it sits with what I have argued before to be the fundamental ethical demand at the heart of serious historical enterprise. Ponder whether someone who writes such arguments without thinking of these issues or who simultaneously claims to take a political position incommensurate with them could seriously be considered competent.
I find distasteful the denigration, for the simple reason that it took the form of poetry, of contemporary primary source material, written by men who were there and who in many cases lost their lives. What, politically, one might again reasonably ask, motivates a writer to deny the validity of a corpus of genuine source material simply in the interest of abstract, clinical, sanitised operational analysis? Some have gone as far as to question the psychological or mental suitability of these 'mere poets', a view which really cannot be categorised other than as mindless right-wing militarism. Certainly, for me, I would find the mental state of a Wilfrid Owen or a Siegfried Sassoon, deeply troubled by the slaughter, far less a cause for concern than that of an automaton who went through the experience of the trenches without suffering any adverse effect, let alone that of someone who actually enjoyed it (Ernst Juenger?). Ponder whether the explaining away of a corpus of primary material constitutes good history. Ponder the ethical and political motivation for doing so - let alone those for impugning the mental health of those sources' authors.
For what little it's worth, I think I might prefer to be commanded by someone who took a critical stance to the whole business than by someone who simply, slavishly and unquestioningly obeyed. Who knows? We have recently had it pointed out that the casualty rate among officers was higher than that among ordinary troops, as though this changes the 'lions led by donkeys' view. That doesn't follow. All armies make a particular effort to kill the other side's officers because doing so tactically disables a larger number of the enemy army. Dan Snow claims that it was the officers' job 'to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.' Not so. What a field officer is there to do is to lead and command, sure, but it is most certainly nothis job to get himself killed in heroic acts of derring-do - for precisely the tactical reasons just mentioned; it would leave his men leaderless. Acts of battlefield heroism may demonstrate courage - and I don't believe anyone ever seriously doubted the bravery of these men - but say little about military competence or - to be fairer - appropriate military training. As an analogue for what I mean (it may not be entirely apt but it'll serve) during one battle in the Boer War (maybe the Modder River but I forget), Lord Methuen, in command of the British army, abandoned his command post to lead platoon level attacks, when his operation got bogged down. This was courageous, for sure, but it abdicated any sort of control over the battle. My point, of course, simultaneously defends 'Chateau Generalship' to some degree, but, as mentioned, operational analysis is a pretty small part of the historical whole. Dan Snow claims that 'most [generals] visited the front lines every day'. Most. Every day. The front-line trenches. That is a claim that cries out for actual demonstration. And 'more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured'. Note the sleight of hand here and again ask about its motivation. This includes wounded and captured - and, um, what's a decent general doing getting captured? That couldn't be a reference to Townshend at that triumph of British Imperial arms, the siege of Kut al-Amara could it? 50-70% of the imperial forces captured there died in miserable conditions in Turkish captivity while Townshend spent the remainder of the war in comparative luxury. The figure for actual British/imperial generals who died in the war is 58, not all in action, compared with 900,000 other ranks. Well that's all right then. Some might say it was their war after all. I'm not sure I would, but articles like some of those I have read, not just Snow's, are enough to turn even wishy-washy lefty liberals like me into raging Jacobins [Haigiographers: ask a friend what a Jacobin is].
Casualties among the officer corps might lead to the promotion of competent, experienced men from the ranks below, but few are the armies in which this is uniformly the case, and the army of the British Empire in 1914-18 certainly wasn't one such. Field Marshal Slim, who made it to that rank from private, is well-known is precisely because his case was effectively unique. What officer casualties led to instead was the appointment of ever younger men of the right sort of social class to field command. From 1916 - so after only two years of slaughter (well done, chaps!) - the British did stop directly commissioning officers into the army in the old way but officers from the right class could be very young. Anthony Eden (an old Etonian, needless to say) was battalion adjutant at 18. Just three weeks ago I was looking at the memorial window in Worcester Cathedral to a seventeen-year-old captain killed in action in the Great War. That was no less a tragedy for his family than the death of a relative in the war was for any other family, of course, and it is a pretty unimaginable burden for a seventeen-year-old to be put in charge of a combat unit. But is it surprising that young lads like that got killed? You might even say that that burden made things worse for them than for new recruits, just told what to do and maybe looked after by more experienced soldiers. It's not a suggestion I would take issue with. But spare a thought, too, for the men put under the orders of these teenagers. The Worcester man was a captain in a British imperial African unit, which raises an extra, unsavoury element of the 'revisionist' view, to which I will return. But hey, if I was going to go over the top into No-Man's Land and into the teeth of barbed wire, artillery and Maxim Gun fire, how better to do it than behind some brave but inexperienced teenager whose ideas of war came from the playing fields of Eton?
For all that the revisionists have made the picture more sophisticated - and they have - the conditions of trench war, especially during the early years, were horrific. Not so in Dan Snow's idea of the war. He wants us to believe that many men enjoyed the war. Not of course that we might question their mental state… But to see that this is at best a gross distortion, just skim the Imperial War Museum’s recent volume of WWI photographs. Again it does not get you away from brute statistics. The British army is said to have suffered 20,000 cases of trench foot in late 1914 alone. The overwhelming weight of contemporary witness to front-line experience suggests something horrific, which it simply won't do to explain away with the fact that they did get a square meal and some time away from the front. Snow omits to mention that frequently even 'rest areas' lay within German artillery range so that troops could be and were killed even when their unit was officially 'out of the line'. Here is an old veteran, Arthur Savage (not a poet as far as I’m aware), interviewed at the age of 92:
“My memories are of sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. They knew they were going to lose a leg. Memories of lice in your clothing driving you crazy. Filth and lack of privacy. Of huge rats that showed no fear of you as they stole your food rations. And cold deep wet mud everywhere. And of course, corpses. I’d never seen a dead body before I went to war. But in the trenches the dead are lying all around you. You could be talking to the fellow next to you when suddenly he’d be hit by a sniper and fall dead beside you. And there he’d stay for days.”
Ah, c'mon now, Mr Savage, you know you loved it really…
In my own family lore, the story goes that my grandfather's family knew his Uncle Joe wasn't coming back again on his last spell home on leave, when he sat with what would now be called a hundred-yard stare, by the fire, still obsessively listening for the sound of German miners. The war had got to him. When the war got to Dan Snow's ancestor, the general, he retired, commendably enough to give the job to a younger and better-suited man. That option wasn't open to men like my Granddad’s Uncle Joe. And they couldn’t even be bothered to spell his name right. If he'd written an account, even his testimony would doubtless now be rejected by the revisionists as irrelevant, what with him being clearly a bit, you know, psychologically unfit, …
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| More larking about in the puddles. What jolly japes. |
The blinkered aspects of the narrowly military historical revisionist camp are further pointed up by briefly considering the period after the war. Returning troops came home to a bad situation. Any understanding of 'shell-shock' was at best rudimentary. Then there was mass unemployment and the Great Depression. The likes of Douglas Haig, by contrast, returned to comfort, honours and glory. They are claimed to have 'done what they could' for their men, although in all fairness men of their position and influence could have done way, way more, had they had any sort of political will. But then Haig in later life became, like many of his class, something of a fascist sympathizer, even on the account of his loyal historian Gary Sheffield – a fact which alone gives the lie to the revisionist ‘Great Just War for Civilisation’ argument
***
What I have wanted to do thus far is to demonstrate that the revisionist view is no less partial than that which it claims to confront - although that which it claims to confront comes frequently from satire, and the point of satire is frequently to exaggerate, but let's let that pass. Its most common target, Clarke's The Donkeys, wasn't even a work by a proper historian - indeed Clarke evidently later admitted that he made up the 'lions led by donkeys' quote himself. What I have also wanted to do is to suggest that, just that there are political reasons to paint the war misleadingly as a heartless and deliberate slaughter of the working class by the ruling classes, there are similar political and ethical choices that lie behind the attempts to exonerate or rehabilitate the British high command, the officer classes and so on. All the selection of facts, the prioritising of some sources over others, the spinning of the casualties, emphasising the relative rather than the absolute: these are all the results of consciousdecisions independent of empirical accuracy. It is entirely disingenuous, in other words, to claim simply that all this represents 'the truth', devoid of political intention.
I want to suggest, nevertheless, that there are also some serious methodological problems lying behind much 'revisionist' work, qua history:
1. That it is narrowly military, and narrowly tactical at that
2. That it concentrates to an unjustifiable degree purely on the years of the war, or its immediate prelude, choosing its time frame as narrowly as possible to suit its argument
3. That it concentrates on the British army while ignoring the comparative aspect presented by other armies, not least because that would attenuate many of its arguments
4. That it attempts to explain away or negate a considerable corpus of contemporary primary source material
That last point leads to others, which relate more directly to my own stance on history writing, as repeatedly outlined in this blog:
1. That it does the latter (point 4, above) in an attempt to sanitise the war by concentrating on operational analysis, and
2. That it is thereby unethical and breaches the fundamental, implicit ethical demand at the heart of the historical endeavour
For now, let us accept that the debate on the conduct of the war is now more nuanced and subtle than it was, and that it has some way to run. Those are both Good Things. Let us also assume that, even then, the case could be argued empirically either way. If that is the case then, even if we assume that we went into the subject with a completely unbiased mind (were that possible), we choose on the basis of politics or ethics between one reading or the other, where the empirical cannot help us decide. In other words we enter the space of what Derrida would call différance. This is where (for all that is such a misused term) deconstruction comes into history, to isolate and open up those spaces of the undecidable where writers (and readers) make choices based upon their political or ethical preferences. It comes into play when historians make a choice to privilege one type of unimpeachable contemporary evidence over another. In other words to expose all the decisions that go into how to write up an argument such as that in, say, Dan Snow's piece. It matters to do this because it helps us to be honest enough about the inescapably political nature of all historical writing, rather than claiming one view (ours) to somehow represent an unalloyed, objective truth and the other (theirs) to be a distorted politically-motivated myth - as is all too often the case (on both sides but lately more on the Right) in this discussion. As regular readers of this blog know, I think that there is a humanist demand at the heart of history that allows us to choose between readings.
Either way, given that the tactical argument is indecisive and even irrelevant, in order to progress, the debate has at this point to change terrain and become above all one over whether or not this was a war worth fighting. The ‘revisionist’ view (not actually that revisionist since it first saw the light in a controversial German book published over half a century ago) alleges, first, that German militarism caused the war and, second, that, had the war been lost it would have led to a Europe dominated by a near-fascist, militarist German Empire. German atrocities are used to claim, somehow, that the Second Reich was getting on for being as bad as the Third.
It is really at this point that the serious problems start to open up in the ‘revisionist’ view as any sort of 'good history', even in straight empirical/methodological terms. As may have become clear already, in my view the revisionist discussions of the war’s causes are riddled with contradictions that make them very difficult to place coherently alongside the attempts to exonerate the ruling/officer class from claims of ineptitude. Numerous countries were geared up for a war in 1914 for all sorts of reasons. That didn’t make war inevitable. Anyone (like me) who took history O-Level in the 70s or early 80s knows that the whole period between 1871 and 1914 was peppered with crises that could have led to war, but didn’t. There was no prima facie reason why Franz Ferdinand and his wife’s shooting by Gavrilo Princip (who, ironically, very nearly survived the war he started before succumbing to TB in an Austrian jail in April 1918) had automatically to lead to war any more than the Agadir crisis of 1911 had done. The German aristocracy and royalty were still hob-nobbing with their British and other counterparts (and relatives) right up to the war’s outbreak. And so on. As I tell my students, nothing in history ever ‘had to be that way’. Plenty of good historians who know far more than I do have countered the 'wicked Hun' argument on many empirical grounds and without necessarily coming from any sort of unique or shared 'left-wing' political angle - even if those writers who have espoused the attempts to blame Germany have frequently overtly been of the Right (e.g. Max Hastings).
Further, to move from the fact that many troops believed that they were fighting to defend their land from aggression to the argument that that was what was definitely at stake in the war is to commit another ‘category error’. After all, many German troops, Austrian troops, Russian troops, all thought they were fighting for something similar.
Claims for a somehow proto-Nazi German inhumanity, worse than that of the other belligerents, that had to be stopped to make a better Europe are difficult to substantiate. They ignore the many genocidal statements produced by British and French statesmen and others about wiping out all Germans. It is impossible to say how Franco-British troops would have behaved towards German civil populations had the war been waged on German soil. You could at least say that the history of the Boer War presents sufficient reason not to be too sanguine. The revisionists also ignore the exploitation of the manpower resources of their African and Asian Empires (I don’t only mean as soldiers) by Britain and France. Before you argue that that was somehow ‘different’, just stop and think for a minute about what rather – shall we say? – tricky assumptions underlie the idea that the exploitation, degradation and even massacre of white westerners was worse than that of non-Europeans in conquered colonies. Again we enter the sphere of argumentative decisions and their inescapable politico-ethical implications. I’ll see your German atrocities and raise you an Amritsar Massacre, gas-bombing in Morocco by Spain and France and in Abyssinia and Libya by Italy, and the bombing and strafing of civilian settlements by French and British air-forces in Syria Mesopotamia and the North-West Frontier - all after the war, all in the world allegedly saved from German military despotism by the sacrifice of 17 million lives. While acknowledging that the alleged British use of mustard gas in Mesopotamia and Waziristan is at best unproven, one has to remember that RAF commanders (Trenchard and Harris) and politicians (Churchill) urged its use against ‘savages’ whom, they claimed, were not covered by the Geneva Convention.
Here's another point, which seems to be overlooked by those arguing (Eurocentrically) that Britain went to war in August 1914 simply as a Just Crusade in defence of plucky Belgium and international law. Britain declared war on 4 August. On 5 August, British forces began hostile operations against the German colony of Togoland. On 7 August, still a week before any British troops had even landed in France, British troops invaded, incidentally - and more than a little ironically - ignoring the 'Congo Conference' of 1884-5, signed by Britain and France, that had agreed on Congo Basin neutrality in the event of a European War and which the German governor had offered to respect. By 25 August, a few days after the Battle of Mons, British troops ignored similar German offers of neutrality to invade Cameroon. By September, operations had begun against German Namibia. And so on. The British Empire had its eyes on other issues than the violation of Belgian neutrality.
The treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, dating to 1839, which provided the pretext for the British declaration of war, was signed overtly to protect the newly created kingdom from aggression and annexation either by France or by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, against whom the Belgians had just risen in revolt to achieve independence. Small wonder that Bethmann-Hollweg called it 'a scrap of paper' and justifiably saw it as merely a pretext for activating the Entente Cordiale. For most of the war, King Albert did not view the British and French as technically his allies, maintaining instead that his country remained only a violated neutral party in the conflict. It also seems to have been forgotten that the French Plan XVII envisaged at least the option for a French offensive through Belgium, an option taken up in the event.
Weakest of all in the 'Just War' revisionism are arguments about what 'would have' happened had the war been lost. No decent historian hangs an argument on a counter-factual (a claim that something that didn’t happen would have happened if something that did happen hadn’t happened) for the simple reason that it is unprovable and untestable. But then, to be frank, there are, in my estimation, few enough decent historians among the ‘revisionists’ and, among that group, proportionately not many writers who qualify as historians of any sort, rather than journalists, retired army officers and writers of popular tactical studies. The simple truth of the matter (and this is a simple truth) is that no one knows what would have happened had the First World War been avoided, or lost. It might have turned out that way; it might not. There are so many variables, so many imponderables, in so many spheres that there is no - there can beno - ‘balance of probabilities’ to deploy either way. One can as easily argue that a German victory would have produced a situation roughly comparable to that after 1871.
Nevertheless, one lands the real killer blow against the rather silly ‘what if’ justification for the 'just' Great War by looking at its actual results. The militarist German-dominated Europe envisaged in the counter factual just mentioned would have been worse than the one that did actually eventuate, worse than fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the influenza epidemic … how, exactly? Surely a war allegedly fought to prevent one particular outcome but which, even when won, at the cost of millions of dead, produced an even worse situation is the very definition of pointless slaughter.
The commemoration of the war should focus on it as a global tragedy, something put very well here by Margaret MacMillan, Dan Snow's auntie, as it happens. Only by doing so can we challenge the ideas that helped bring the war about. Banging on about courage, patriotism and national honour, celebrating national victory and apportioning national blame only does the opposite, perpetuating the factors that took Europe and her empires over the precipice.
***
Let me, at last, conclude. What I have been at pains to stress is that there is - as there always is - a process of deliberate selection at work in revisionist history-writing. That deliberate selection and the choice to spin data in one way or another are not driven simply, empirically, by the data themselves. A choice is made to play down the horrors and loss of the war. A choice is made to do this in order to justify the war as a Just Conflict. We see the deliberate, selective narrowing of analytical foci to suit the argument being made - whether thematically, geographically or chronologically. In some cases I have argued that that makes the work in question bad history. In other cases we can identify motivations, such as to exonerate a particular class, which only sit comfortably on the right. The justification and celebration of the war for virtues such as patriotism and honour, sits still more comfortably in that area. Some of the arguments deployed, ignoring the imperial context, are based ultimately on attitudes that can only be described as racist. Now, let me be very clear here - read this bit as though I am saying this very … slowly … and … clearly - that does notmean that writers who have made arguments ultimately on these grounds are racists. It means that there is an assumption that underpins an argument that they have made which, if you excavate and scrutinise it properly, is based upon some fairly unpleasant, racially-based attitudes. This leads me to propose two alternative conclusions. There are only two. One is that the writers are actually pretty happy with that and so are happy enough to be identified with the socio-political attitudes and positioning that their work implies (Max Hastings) - and all well and good. The other is that they haven't bothered to think this through - in which case we can justly say that they are pretty damn poor historians. Thus I contend that revisionism is reactionary.
As to the opposing view, the idea to stress the scale of damage and slaughter, the incompetence of generals where it existed, the disproportionate chances and opportunities for the elite over the rest, the disallowing of the justification of any of this by appeal to nationalism, patriotism, honour (personal or national) - yes, this does only sit comfortably on the political left. As some of you know, I think this stance sits with fewer contradictions alongside the implicit ethical demands of the historical project and that that therefore makes it better history, but that case is argued elsewhere.
I am happy enough to own up to being a left-wing academic historian, and confess that that shapes how I conceive of and write about history. It behoves all of us to be honest about their choices and not to pretend that they exist independently of political, social or ethical belief, let alone that they represents the single 'truth' of the matter. That really is Bad History.
-----
1: Not to be undone in their jockeying for position to be Cameron's successor, Boris Johnson penned a piece demanding Tristram Hunt's resignation for denying that 'it was the Germans that started it'. It was in the Telegraph and so intellectually piss-poor that it's not even worth the link.
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
An Analysis of the Situation in France
For Francophiles like myself, occasionally exasperated by the way the country works, here is a pertinent analysis of the problems of the republic.
"The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of government--an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together with a military force of another million men--; this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten. The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many at-tributes of the Executive power; the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local, territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun--the work of centralization, together with the range, the attributes and the menials of government."It comes from the pen of ... Mr Karl Marx, towards the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Still seems to me to be a valid analysis.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
Great Myths of the Migrations, no.1: The Huns and Deformed Skulls
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| A deformed skull from an 'Alamannic' context |
If there is any aspect of 'Hunnic' archaeology that might be called 'well-known', I suppose it is the 'fact' that the Huns had deformed skulls. Roman authors said they were misshapen beasts and so when people found artificially deformed skulls (effected by binding the child's head between boards) they leapt to the conclusion (not least by ignoring the ethnographic traditions within which Ammianus and the others were writing) that these must be Huns. And that is the interpretation you will find in most books on the subject (my Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West included, although I do strike a note of caution).
However, it is rather less straightforward than that. For one thing, I think I am right in saying that the known individuals with deformed skulls are more often women than men,
whereas the Romans were talking about Hunnic warriors. Be that as it may, here (right) is a map of deformed skulls up by Joachim Werner a long time ago (redrawn in an article about the cemetery at Sézegnin in Switzerland - where the symbol in the box is - where the three examples were all female). It is almost certainly out of date although I don't think the overall pattern has changed very much. The map has been generally used to argue that the Huns had a cultural influence on the Germani whom they subdued, so that the latter adopted the 'Hunnic' practice of skull deformation. In a rather circular argument, this is then used as proof that the Huns deformed their skulls...
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| Joachim Werner's map of cranial deformation |
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| The western European section of Werner's distribution map |
Note at this stage that there is no reason to associate the examples on the steppe specifically with the Huns rather than the other groups that inhabited the region.Indeed in the Volga area the rite is known as early as the 2nd century.
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| Cranial Deformation in the 'Age of Attila' |
The picture only becomes more complex if you sort out the burials by date. Let's look, first, at the distribution of burials of individuals with deformed skulls from the actual time of Hunnic domination north of the Danube. Let's take this as, say, c.400 to c.450, although Hunnic domination of the areas now in Germany can't seriously be postulated until the 430s at least and was probably never very intensive, breaking up within a couple of decades at most in any case. At right I have crudely rubbed out the later examples and left only those dated by Werner to the 5th century - remember, first, that there may be some new examples here and there and, secondly, that there may be some missing in south-eastern France. Undated examples have been left on. You'll note that here the Hunnic Empire's 'core area' is even emptier than in the overall picture. Remember too that, if anything, the Steppe distribution of cranial deformation at this time is moving back eastwards... The real area of density in Europe is to the west of the Huns, and - and this is the really odd thing - largely west of the Danube, inside the Roman Empire. This part of the world was being infiltrated by all sorts of shadowy small peoples, even the existence of some of whom isn't certain (Skiri, Turcilingi, Rugi, Gepids, Heruls etc., etc.) but if this is a barbarian practice then it originates inside the old limes. Maybe these people were trying physically to distinguish themselves from the provincial Romans? Either way, if we were allowing the archaeological evidence to speak for itself we would hardly see this map as proof that cranial deformation was something introduced into the west from the steppes via the Carpathian basin.
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| Cranial deformation at the end of the 5th century and in the 6th century |
Now let's look at a slightly later situation. In the map at left I have rubbed out all the examples from the 'age of Attila' (and the undated ones, which probably is an error) and left only the ones from the end of the 5th century and the 6th century. Remember again that there are new discoveries and the southern French examples missing. Now there is a cluster of deformed skulls in the Hunnic Empire's core area - but dating to after the end of that Empire! The main area of distribution has shifted to an area just west of the middle Elbe, with some outliers on the Rhine. If I reinstated the undated examples there would be a thin thread of possible examples connecting the two groups shaded in green. The western distribution, as it happens, is not dissimilar from the distribution of supposedly 'Thuringian' metalwork from the same sort of period (see below, right). If anything, then, when this rite spread to the Merovingian world, it may have been a sign of Thuringian identity but, from these distribution maps, there is precious little evidence to suggest that the Thuringians adopted it from their Hunnic overlords.
What a closer study of the distribution suggests is that the fifth-century practice of cranial deformation originated among the mix of people west of the Hungarian stretch of the Danube and then spread out to east and west. By this stage there are very few examples in the Steppes region. In the east the practice's appearance may be something to do with the competing political identities in the complicated political 'interregnum' that lasted in the area from the collapse of the Hunnic realm to the establishment of Avar hegemony over a century later. The maps to the right (from Barbarian Migrations) show how the Elbe and connecting rivers were a real artery of cultural exchange in the fifth and sixth centuries, as they had been earlier. That the practice of cranial deformation should have spread to the Thuringians along this route is unsurprising. Here it may have become a sign of Thuringian ethnicity, as that interesting realm spread its hegemony over other groups in trans Rhenan barbaricum during the later fifth century. I argued in 2007 that the presence of 'Thuringian' metalwork was related to this, even if I suggested that those buried with it might be those claiming Thuringian identity in local politics, rather than actual Thuringian immigrants. Some valuable work is being done, using isotope analysis, on whether women with deformed skulls have married in to particular communities from outside. If they are they could represent a different element of the process. But either way I think we have to get away from the assumption that deformed skulls necessarily have anything to do with Huns.
* Map from Christian Simon, 'La déformation crânienne artificielle de la nécropole de Sézegnin GE.' Archäologie der Schweiz/Archéologie Suisse/Archeologia Svizzera 2 (1979), pp.186-88.
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
Happy New Year
To all our readers (and professors, senior lecturers and lecturers ... ho ho).
And thanks to everyone who contributed genuinely to the 153000+ hits this site has had in 2013. I say 'genuinely' because perusal of the analytics of this site's traffic sources reveals hits directed here from - shall we say? - special interest sites. I don't understand this internet thing so I don't know how this happened - I'm bemused as to how this site could be of interest to perusers of sites featuring, ahem, scantily-clad women but there we are.
I hope 2014 brings you peace.
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
The Peoples of Northern Europe (Part 1): Introduction and Preliminary Discussion
[This is the first part of my chapter for the Cambridge Archaeology of Late Antiquity on 'The peoples of northern Europe', which means an attempt to summarise the archaeology of Ireland, northern Britain, Germany and Scandinavia between about 300 and about 650, discuss interpretations of this data and their problems and suggest some new conclusions.]
Late antique studies rarely encompass the barbarians who lived beyond the Rhine and Hadrian’s Wall; even the applicability of the term ‘Late Antiquity’ to some regions under discussion has been debated.[1] Much of the ‘late antique problematic’ has concerned specific issues of long-term Roman socio-cultural continuity; it has tended to focus on the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean; and it has frequently dwelt upon especially Christian religious topics best confronted via written sources, largely absent beyond the limites before the seventh century. Yet there are powerful reasons to include northern barbaricum within a late antique archaeology. Exclusion perpetuates the idea that Romans and barbarians lived in separate, opposed worlds. This notion must be questioned if we are not to render rather hollow a key founding principle of late antique studies, that the ‘decline and fall’ of the Western Empire should not be seen as marking a chasm within European history. An examination of the peoples north of the imperial frontiers allows us to explore the extent to which the West’s political demise was (or was not) a dramatic shift, and why. Even histories written within the traditional ‘decline and fall’ paradigm have tended to ignore these northerners.[2] Discussion usually ends once the barbarians have migrated, foreclosing any understanding of migration’s causes and mechanisms. Relations between Rome and the regions beyond Hadrian’s Wall and the Rhine could be intimate or sporadic but the Empire remained an important presence. The Western Empire’s fifth-century disintegration therefore affected different areas in varying ways. Nonetheless, in this survey of these ‘barbarians’ between the start of the fourth century and the middle of the seventh, we will see that change was dynamic throughout Late Antiquity, not just in the dramatic fifth century.
Political Geography
The principal late antique political development among the northern peoples was the third-century appearance of larger confederacies along the imperial limites. On the lower Rhine frontier the Franks emerged, their name probably meaning something like ‘Fierce People’. This grouping presumably incorporated the Sicambri, Bructeri, Chattuarii (recorded well into the early middle ages, who may be related to the Chatti) and Chamavi reported by earlier historians and ethnographers. Whether there were two Frankish confederacies, on the Lower and Middle Rhine, seems debatable at this date; the Ripuarian (river-dwelling) Franks are not attested as such until the seventh century, though the Romans certainly referred to the Franks closest to the sea as Salii (‘Salty’ Franks). In the angle left by Roman withdrawal from the Upper Rhine and Danube agri decimates, the Alamanni – ‘All-Men’ – emerged. The relationships between this group and the earlier Suebi and any link between its formation and migrations from northern Germania are again debatable.[3] More recent interpretations see an active Roman role in this confederacy’s formation within the abandoned provinces. The third new group in Germania Magna was that of the Saxons, the first certain reference to whom comes, again, in the third century. The Saxons incorporated the Anglii (Angles), Eucii (Jutes) and Frisii attested by the early imperial writers.[4]
Behind these new confederacies were other Germanic-speaking barbari: the Burgundians, the Vandals and the Lombards, whose initial location is unclear. By the later fourth century the Burgundians bordered the Alamanni to the east; the Lombards spread their power along the Elbe; and, by the early fifth century, there were Vandals close enough to the Rhine for them to be driven across that river by the fall-out from the establishment of Hunnic hegemony in the Carpathian basin. A group of Sueves accompanied the Vandals in that migration. Who they were is problematic. Like the Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards, they bear a name recorded by early Roman geographers, which may be significant. They possibly represent an Alamannic faction (with whom the name Suevi is sometimes associated). Between these groups and the Danube frontier, where Sarmatians, Goths and later Huns were to be found, in the fourth century we catch the last glimpses of the Marcomanni (‘Border Men’), once a great and threatening confederacy, and the Quadi. By the late fifth century, these had been replaced by equally shadowy groups: Skiri, Rugi, Juthungi, Gepids and Heruls.[5] The Heruls are particularly interesting, appearing in and around the Bay of Biscay as well as on the Danube in the fifth century, serving the Byzantine Empire in the sixth and apparently still retaining contact with groups based in Jutland.[6] The distribution of these peoples is noteworthy. The new confederacies are located on the imperial frontiers (counting the North Sea as a frontier) whereas the peoples in the band behind have names attested since early imperial times (though one should not necessarily assume a direct a linkage).
During the fifth century, the Elbe valley fell under the sway of a newly-emergent confederacy, the Thuringians, while Jutland and neighbouring islands may have been taken over by the Danes, first mentioned in sixth-century historical sources.[7] Otherwise, little is known of Scandinavian political geography. The Bavarians, another new people, come into view in the late sixth and seventh centuries, around the upper Danube.[8]
North of Hadrian’s Wall, picti appear in the sources. Whether their name is a genuine ethnonym or a simple Latin description (‘the painted Men’) is unknown. Irish sources call the seventh-century Picts ‘Cruithne’, a Q-Celtic rendition of a word like ‘Pritani’ (Britons), but this is difficult to push back into the fourth century. Back-projection from the ‘early historic’ period bedevils popular conceptions of the Picts. Ammianus claims there were two principal groups of Picti: Verturiones and Dicalydones. Once believed to have been located around Strathearn, the bases of the Verturiones may instead have been further north, towards the Tay, where Anglo-Saxon sources later mention people with a similar name. If, as seems plausible, the Dicalydones may be linked to the earlier Caledonii, place-names suggest that their core lands probably lay north and west of the Forth estuary.[9] We are traditionally accustomed to populating the region between the Hadrianic and Antonine Walls with groups described as ‘British’: Votadini, Selgovae and so on. These peoples, attested by early Roman geographers, also show up in place-names and sometimes reappear in the post-imperial era. The Votadini are the Gododdin, for example, and the Maetae are probably the Miathi mentioned in Adomnán’s Life of Columba.[10] However, Roman sources refer to all people north of Hadrian’s Wall as picti. It seems most plausible to propose that, as in Germania, a new confederacy had emerged, incorporating earlier, smaller units.[11] The core lands of the southern Dicalydones may have lain around the Forth but their confederacy stretched as far south as the Wall. From around 600 we can perceive a Pictish kingdom (perhaps two) north of the Forth (now certainly styling themselves Picti) and an emerging Scottish kingdom in Argyle. The latter straddled the North Channel; its principal royal dynasty, the Dal Riata, also competed for the overkingship of the Ulaid (see below). Between the Forth-Clyde line and Hadrian’s Wall we can now detect some small kingdoms (such as the Gododdin) claiming a British identity. By the mid-seventh century those on the east had been conquered by Anglo-Saxon Bernicia, while a British kingdom based upon Dumbarton, sometimes referred to as Strathclyde, encompassed the western regions.[12]
Irish politics are difficult to establish without written accounts. Early Roman geographers had given detailed accounts of Ireland’s rivers and numerous peoples but it is usually thought that in the late Roman period large, if loose, political units existed, possibly those referred to in later Irish legendary material. By the end of our period, however, Irish politics had taken on the contours they were to retain throughout the remainder of the first millennium. The southern region later known as Munster (Mumu or the Kingdom of Cashel) formed a confederacy, the leadership of which was fought over by various branches of the Eóganacht and others. Eastwards, across the River Barrow, lay the Laigin (later Leinster) and to north of them, in what became Meath (Mide: the middle), the kingdom of the Southern Uí Néill, with kings usually drawn from the Clann Colmáin. West of the southern Uí Néill was the confederate kingdom of Connacht. The region to the north was divided from east to west between the confederacies of the Ulaid (whence Ulster), Airgíalla and the Northern Uí Néill. I have used the term confederacy to represent the loose realms ruled by a Rí Ruirech (a king over kings). The title was usually competed for between branches of royal houses from different kingdoms.[13]
Part 1: Preliminary Analytical Points
a: Ethnicity and ethnic ascription
Ethnic identification remains a hotly debated topic in late antique archaeology. The problem reaches back to the early twentieth century and the development of the notion of the archaeological ‘culture’, defined by pottery and other artefacts, house-types, burial styles and so on repeatedly occurring together in a particular region. Such ‘cultures’ could be categorised by material cultural features (e.g. the prehistoric ‘Beaker Folk’) or by a type-site (such as Hallstadt for the Iron age culture). These are acceptable ways of organising data; the problems arose when cultures were believed to represent actual peoples and their spread or decline to mark conquest or absorption of, or by, other peoples.[14]
By the second quarter of the twentieth century Roman- and Germanic-Iron-Age Cultures (henceforth capitalised for clarity) were normally identified with historically-attested peoples. In the 1920s, for example, a series of volumes by Nils Åberg discussed the archaeology of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Ostrogoths and Visigoths.[15] Early medieval ‘barbarian’ peoples were essentially defined by their metalwork, above all by their jewellery. This contrasts with Early-Roman-Iron-Age archaeology in Germania Magna, where pottery types were often used to identify different Kulturgruppen between the Rhine and Scandinavia.[16] Sometimes linking Culture and people is a reasonable working hypothesis, as with the ‘North Sea Coast’ Culture and the Saxon confederacy, or perhaps the Przeworsk Culture and the Vandals.[17] In other areas, the reverse side of the coin is encountered. The ‘problem of the Picts’ discussed in a classic 1955 edited volume was, largely, that they had no Culture.[18] Apart from the enigmatic symbol stones, the Picts seemingly had no archaeological manifestation. Finally, some culture groups were defined essentially by the unsophisticated expedient of labelling a particular area’s archaeology according to the ethnic group known from written sources to have occupied the region during the centuries in question. The best example is the Černjachov-Sintana-de-MurešCulture associated with the pre-migratory Goths. This meets none of the strictly archaeological requirements of a Culture, being (as, most notably, in its ‘mixed-rite’ cemeteries) a mélange of influences and characteristics. The claimed spread of the Culture (and thus, allegedly, of Gothic people) is even argued from absences: weapons are not (always) placed in burials.[19] This argument would be ruled out of court in any discipline that followed the rules of logic. The concept of the Culture far surpassed its analytical utility.
Linking a Culture to ethnicity is problematic. The principal difficulty comes from assuming that ethnicity leaves a passive archaeological manifestation. Ethnicity is a question of belief – in one’s own group or groups’ reality and/or in the difference of others. Objects, naturally, can have no ethnic identity; no ethnic ascription can emerge from a purely archaeological reading of the material.[20] Material culture can be manipulated to convey signs about ethnicity or other group identities. Pottery, for instance, can reveal attitudes to food production and beliefs about cooking, often part and parcel of the ideas making up a belief in a particular group-identity. However, the relationship between material culture and ethnicity – even where it exists – is complex. Moerman’s classic study revealed that members of the South-East Asian Lue could list a series of characteristics which they felt defined their group. When scrutinised, however, it emerged that many of these features were very rarely observed any longer or were used by neighbouring groups too.[21] Pohl has revealed a similar state of affairs in post-imperial Europe.[22] Larrick recorded the African Loikop Samburu belief that different spearheads had associations with neighbouring peoples, and to convey the ethnic characteristics (bravery, cunning, etc.) thought to typify those peoples. They were, however, used within Loikop society to signify different age-grades.[23] This would play havoc with any attempt to map ethnic groups from the archaeological distribution of spearheads. Material culture associated with one group could clearly be used to emphasise other forms of identity among its neighbours. The Late Roman army’s adoption of features such as trousers to express the ferocity supposedly characteristic of barbarians is one example. At a different level of society, slaves’ shaggy hooded cloaks were said to be barbarian (like many slaves themselves).[24] Among the barbarians, Roman imports were employed to denote social and political status and power.[25] It is perfectly possible that other material cultural forms crossed ethnic boundaries in analogous fashion. For a secure ethnic identification of material cultural traits we need reliable written sources; throughout late antiquity, barbaricum produced none of these. The only documentary accounts are external, Graceo-Roman ones. The nigh-insurmountable problems involved in using these sources to discuss barbarian society are well-known, if not always acknowledged.[26]
It has been insufficiently acknowledged that ethnicity is multi-layered.[27] A fourth-century barbarian warrior from North Sea Coastal Germania might have been treated as a Saxon by the Romans and adopted this confederate identity in particular circumstances. Among Saxons, however, he might have stressed a lower-level ethnic identity, perhaps ‘Angle’, ‘Jute’ or ‘Frisian’. These groups are attested before the appearance of the Saxon confederacy, and again after the fifth-century crisis. They were probably subsumed within the confederacy but this does not imply their ‘disappearance’ or ‘reappearance’, still less testify to ‘incomplete assimilation’.[28] It rather suggests such identities’ reordering according to their perceived political value. Similar processes may have occurred among the Pictish confederacy, where several early Roman peoples reappear in the post-imperial era, and among the migratory and later Goths.[29] Crises among larger groups are often marked by the reappearance of other ethnicities, presumably existing previously beneath the confederate identity. Thus, if material culture related to ethnicity it is now impossible to detect which level of identity that was.
The spread of material culture might imply an expansion of ethnic or political identity, if we can plausibly link the former with the latter, but the Lue and the Loikop examples give us pause for thought. A growth in the area covered by a Culture could imply population movement but it need not. Political ascendancy could lead to the adoption of the dominant group’s cultural forms by subordinated leaders, demonstrating the new roots of their power, but with few if any people changing location. Goods also move with trade and exchange; the frequent discovery of Roman artefacts’ in barbaricum – which naturally does not reveal Roman migration and settlement – constantly reminds us not to assume that the movement of material necessarily implies a migration of people. A repeated problem in the historical use of archaeology is the reading of material that spreads in the ‘right’ direction – that suggested by the traditional ‘barbarian migrations’ narrative – as revealing population movement, whereas the diffusion of cultural artefacts in the ‘wrong’ direction – in a direction running counter to the historical narrative – is read as representing trade or exchange.[30]
The archaeological record is not produced by chance but as the result of deliberate choice by historical actors.[31] Thus migration will only be archaeologically detectable where the migrants chose to make themselves visible in the material cultural record. This is by no means commonplace. Most late antique migrations are archaeologically invisible. Between the first and fourth centuries many thousands of people moved from barbaricum into the Roman Empire, leaving no almost material trace at all. The few archaeological signs of late antique population movements relate primarily to the Anglo-Saxon migration and some short-distance drift across the Rhine.
The extent to which even a rigorously-defined archaeological ‘culture’ matches an identifiable ethnic or political group or the movement of the latter is strictly limited. As a default position, straightforward one-to-one correlations should be treated as inherently implausible. This critically-aware stance remains uncommon in the Late Antique archaeology of the northern peoples, where crude ethnic ascriptions persist.
b: Banded barbaricum
The interpretation presented in this chapter draws heavily upon the idea of a roughly ‘banded’ barbaricum.[32] This is not presented as a hard and fast ‘fact’ but as a means of structuring and interpreting the data. As such it provides a framework, which can be refined, corrected or rejected with new research. We might initially imagine barbaricum as three bands. Closest to the limes, contacts with the Empire were dense and frequent. This band has been called a ‘buffer zone’ but this term is predicated upon the notions of a natural hostility between the Empire and its neighbours and of an automatic barbarian desire to invade imperial territory (hence the need for a ‘buffer zone’).[33] I will instead call this the ‘frontier band’. Behind this was territory where contacts with Rome were less frequent, possibly more structured and more politically important. The proportion of higher-value Roman artefacts to other imports is often higher. I will term this the ‘intermediate band’. Furthest away was the ‘outer band’, where contact with Rome was scarcer.
This schema requires caveats. It is immediately complicated by seaborne trade, which could bring Roman goods in some quantity and with steady frequency to areas far from the limes, like Denmark. It is also more analytically descriptive than geographically predictive; there is no algorithmic relationship between geographical distance from the frontier and the ‘band’ within which a settlement is found. Some sites within the fourth-century ‘Saxon homelands’ manifest relationships that would enable their consideration almost as a frontier region. Limited contacts with the Empire mean, conversely, that Ireland never shows ‘frontier band’ archaeological characteristics, even though no territory intervenes between the island and Rome’s British provinces. At a micro level, relationships can change over much shorter distances. Coastal ‘terps’ (see below) show steady relationships with the Empire, whereas those only slightly further inland reveal few or no Roman connections.[34]
The interpretation of Roman imports is also important.[35] There were many means by which objects could enter barbaricum: straightforward commerce, more or less as we would understand it today; diplomatic payment or gift; loot; the property of barbarian soldiers returning home after serving the Empire; and so on. We must also examine potential differences between the means by which objects were brought to barbaricum and the ways in which they were distributed thereafter. A barbarian leader might control a port of trade, to which Roman goods were brought in commercial transactions, but then distribute these to his followers as gifts. Before making confident statements close analyses are required of distribution patterns, the dating of material and the contexts within which objects are found; fine decorated Roman tablewares found in rubbish pits in settlements suggest very different contacts, and social use, from the same ceramics found in exceptional, lavishly-furnished burials.
The blanks and dense spots on distribution maps necessitate other caveats when using archaeological data on a regional scale. These can, in various times and places, show the different levels of archaeological interest in types and periods of settlement. They can also reflect geographical and ecological differences; blanks might represent ancient forest or mountains, or zones of heavy industrialisation and urbanism destroying evidence without record. Intensive agriculture might eradicate archaeological evidence without it being recognised. Conversely, especially in more recent times, ploughing can distort the map producing large numbers of chance finds. Sometimes a bias exists towards recognising some sites rather than others; furnished inhumation cemeteries, lavish bog-deposits or hoards have long been noted because valuable objects would be reported and sold when revealed by ploughing or building. Private and museum collections were often built on such finds[36]. Other sites would not be as observable. That leads to the key variable: the ephemeral nature of many types of site in barbaricum. Most settlements were built of wood, thus requiring a certain level of archaeological competence for their recognition. In some regions, the dead were disposed of in unfurnished and un-urned cremations, making cemeteries all but invisible. Some forms of house-building leave few or no traces, even where excavation techniques are quite advanced. Deep pits for rubbish-disposal and a general ‘cleanliness’ of sites will render them extremely difficult to find, even today, via field-walking or chance. One also needs to take account of the precise context within which finds were discovered – whether as rubbish in settlement sites or deliberately placed in burials for example – and this contextual information is often lacking. Everything we say must be taken as provisional and liable to modification.
c: The interlinking of imperium and barbaricum
This chapter contends that we should stop seeing the Roman Empire and the barbarian territories as opposed and confronting worlds – implicit in the term ‘buffer zone’ for example. By the time of the Tetrarchy the inhabitants of Ireland, northern Britain and Germania Magna[37] had been neighbours of a militarily- and culturally-dominant world power for 250 to 300 years. Military confrontations certainly occurred between the Romans and their neighbours[38]but we should remember that hostile encounters were never the only – and rarely the normal – form of interaction along the limes. They were only one aspect of a complex network of diplomatic relations.[39]
The expression of high status in fourth-century barbaricum is invariably coloured by Roman ideas. For barbarians the emperor was the fons et origo of real power. Historians and archaeologists have been wont to transfer comments on Germanic kingship from Caesar’s and Tacitus’ works (problematic though these texts are even for their own period) to the late Roman era but there is little evidence to suggest that these concepts persisted so long. We do not know how Roman idioms and objects were translated in their use by non-Romans but we cannot now identify any distinctively barbarian ideas of rulership in the late imperial era.[40]
The Alamans, for example, produced brooches that clearly imitated those issued to imperial officials. Possibly manufactured on high-status Höhensiedlungen (see below), they these may have been issued to royal followers as signs of status. In north-western Germania, Roman military metalwork was buried quite frequently in the cremation cemeteries of the ‘Saxon homelands’. Clearly, the families of Saxons who returned home after serving in the Roman army could think of no better way of symbolising the deceased’s prestige than to cremate them in their old uniform or publicly inter their ashes alongside badges of their imperial service. In the same part of the world, around 400, a wooden chair was included in a prestigious burial. This was carved with designs based upon the ‘chip-carved’ ornament that decorated official imperial metalwork. Copies of Roman coins were made in Scandinavia.[41]
The frontier band of barbaricum was saturated with Roman material cultural influence. At the site at the Oespeler Bach near Düsseldorf (D) imports of all sorts were found.[42] Even in areas quite far from the frontier, trans-Rhenan craftsmen had imitated Roman products since the early Roman period. By the fourth century, the ‘frontier zone’ of Germanic-speaking barbaricum might be seen as northern Gaul’s economic hinterland. Exports of Argonne ware are frequent there and bronze vessels evidently made on the Meuse were exported as far as Norway. Study of northern British artefacts shows similar patterns, especially but not only immediately beyond Hadrian’s Wall. In the late Roman period, influences from the Empire seem to have begun to penetrate Irish politics and society and perhaps became a significant engine of social change (see below).[43] This influence did not only take artefactual form. The appearance in Germania of inhumation, the standard fourth-century provincial Roman burial rite, has long been recognised as indicating imperial influence. Inhumation appeared in northern Britain too, probably in a similar cultural imitatio imperii.[44] Although approaches driven by the traditional ‘barbarian migration’ narrative have frequently argued that the Roman-barbarian frontier was deepening into the Empire, when read on their own terms the archaeological data are unambiguous in showing the opposite: the increasing ‘Romanisation’ of barbaricum. This should in no way surprise us.
‘Career migration’ into the Empire was, as mentioned, a standard feature of barbarian life. The late Roman army may or may not have recruited more barbarians than before but, with the separation of civil and military service, the opportunity for non-Romans to rise high in the army was certainly greater.[45] Alamans and, later, Franks did very well in the fourth-century military. One Frank, Bauto married his daughter to Emperor Arcadius and another, Arbogast, briefly (388-94) became the dominant western leader.[46] The Empire continued to intervene in barbarian politics, paying large sums to barbarian groups to keep others in check and periodically launching military operations. Diplomatic payments became extremely important in politics beyond the limes. Setting up and knocking down barbarian leaders remained essential to Roman frontier policy. As had been the case since the late Republic, losing barbarian factions tended to move to imperial territory for security. That north-western barbaricum was a periphery of the Roman Empire and the dynamics involved in this relationship are hugely important in understanding fifth-century history.[47]
Part 2 is here
Notes (See Bibliography)
Part 2 is here
Notes (See Bibliography)
[4]For the early histories of these confederacies, see Capelle (2004), pp.3-50; Drinkwater (2007) pp.43-144 passim; Pohl (2000), pp.29-38, 101-15; Springer (2004), pp.11-46.
[5]For discussions, of varying critical worth, of these people, see: Gepids: Bona (1976), pp.14-19 and passim; Goffart (2006), pp.199-203; Kharalambieva (2010); Heruls: Steinacher (2010); Goffart (2006), pp.205-10; Rugi: Goffart (2006), pp.110-14; Skiri: Goffart (2006), pp.203-5.
[7]For the Thuringians, see Schmidt (1983); (1987); (1997); Fries-Knoblach, Steuer & Hines (ed.) (2014). For the Danes, see Näsman (1999).
[8]See, with various interpretations: Goffart (2006), pp.218-21; Hammer (2011); Hardt (2003); Menghin (1990);
[9]A very good overview of northern Britain and Pictish origins may be found in Fraser (2009), pp. 15-67.
[12]For the Picts, see, again, Fraser, (2009), pp. 15-67. On the Britons and Anglians in the lowlands, Lowe (1999) is valuable.
[13]Mac Niocaill (1972) pp.28-41 for a brief description of the political geography. On early Christian Irish political history, see Ó Cróinín (1995), pp.14-62; (2005).
[14]For an excellent survey of the historiography of this topic with special reference to the archaeology of the peoples that concern us, see Brather (2004).
[19]For an excellent introductory survey of the Černjachov culture in English, see. Heather & Matthews (1991), pp.51-101.
[26]See the very naïve use of Tacitus’ Germaniain Ethelberg (2011); Thurston (2002), e.g. p.46. The use of the late Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to study ‘early Germanic’ society in Bazelmans (2014) & Nicolay (2014) is equally naïve. On Graeco-Roman ethnography, Balsdon (1979) is a useful catalogue of descriptions. Hall (1989) and Dench (1995) are essential. More recently, see Bonfante (ed.) (2011); Skinner (2012); Almagor & Skinner (ed.) (2013).
[28]Heather (1998); see also Heather (1996), pp.174-8, 299-303. The reappearance of the Frisians may be archaeologically visible: Nieuwhof (2011).
[30]A classic example is Heather’s discussion of ‘Černjachov Culture’ glassware moving back towards Scandinavia as evidence of trade, whereas objects (such as glass) moving in the opposite direction ‘demonstrate’ Gothic or other ‘Germanic’ migration. Cp. Heather (1996), pp.18-50 (and fig. 2.4) & pp.78-79 (and fig. 3.6).
[31]The foundational texts of ‘post-processual archaeology’, which stressed this point, are Hodder (1986); Shanks & Tilley (1987a); Shanks and Tilley (1987b)
[36]This information bias has been observed from the published catalogues of the Corpus der römischen Fünde in europäischen Barbaricum.
[37]Germania Libera is a modern term, invented in the 1920s. Alföldi, M.R.-, (1997); Neumaier (1997). That a barbarian territory could be ‘free’ would be oxymoronic in Roman thought!
[39]The classic overview of the frontier is Whittaker (1994). See also Lee (1993), Elton (1996a) and, recently, Kaizer & Hekster (ed.), (2010).
[41]Material in Saxon cremations: Böhme (1974). Höhensiedlung: Hoeper & Steuer (1999); imitations of Roman coins: Winge Horsnaes (2013)
[43] Roman bronze vessels in Norway: H.-W. Böhme et al. (1980), pp. 127, 129; Argonne ware export: Elton (1996a), p.79, fig.13; imports in northern Britain: Hunter (2007).
[44]Northern German inhumation: Kleemann (1999); Bemmann (1999). Northern British inhumation: Fraser (2009), pp.36-37
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