Book Notes

Kelly, Jack, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World, 2004

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Cross-fertilizing with an earlier review of Macfarlane and Martin’s Glass: A World History, “Gunpowder” tracks technological change across a wide sweep of historical time and space from the perspective of one material. Most people can quote chapter and verse of conventional wisdom about gunpowder. The short form is “invented in the East, brought to fruition in the West.” While generally correct as far as it goes, the actual details of gunpowder’s history in both East and West justify Kelly’s detailed effort at a work for the public (without a forest of footnotes). And suitability for the public should be emphasized. At 250 well-written pages, this is a quick and enjoyable read that will whet your appetite without entirely slaking it. It does have the feel of a series of vignettes or magazine articles recast as a book. But fortunately, from the Anglosphere perspective, the content justifies attention.

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

From comedy troupe Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

As described by the Times recently, Monty Python member Terry Jones has written a book which attempts to correct the good press that the Romans have been getting for the last two thousand years by outlining recent discoveries of the technical accomplishments of the pre-Roman Celts in Britain. They weren’t such “barbarians” after all … they built their own roads, and created their own metallurgical masterpieces, innovated with the chariot in war, and were probably nice to their kids, as well.

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Macfarlane, Alan/Gerry Martin Glass: A World History, U. of Chicago Press, 2002
(available in the UK as The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World)

[cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings]

Readers of this blog will already have seen occasional references to the work of British social anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane. While Macfarlane’s writing on the origins of modernity offer a great deal to Anglosphere discussions, he is also an author with much wider interests. With co-author and historian Gerry Martin, he’s written a fascinating book on glass. More specifically, the history of its adoption by cultures across Eurasia, its particular uses in each region and time period, and the ultimate impact which it had on thought and society.

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Harris, Stephen, Canadian Brass: The Making of a Professional Army 1860-1939. 1988, U. of Toronto Press.

[Cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Was Canada Ever Serious? The Canadian Militia and Military Since Confederation

In a recent post, I reviewed an excellent book on Canada’s role in the Boer War. Canadian social values, actively encouraged by the media and the elites of the day, led to the self-confident assembly and transport of thousands of young Canadian men halfway across the planet. Little more than a decade later, Canada again found itself engaged in a war not of its making. And again, tens of thousands of farm boys, factory workers and office staff risking their lives in the trenches of WW1 Europe. Why? Better yet, why aren’t they still doing it? How did a nation that prides itself on G8 status somehow spend the last sixty years doing a U-turn in its attitude toward the military?

The story, it turns out, gives us a better sense of the modern Anglosphere and the role that each of the Big Five (UK, US, Canada, NZ and Australia) play on the modern stage. Canadian Brass is an excellent place to start because it tells the story of British, and then Canadian, military culture in the eighty years after Confederation, and the domestic myths which drove and shaped international military participation.

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[cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings]

Miller, Carman, Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War, 1899-1902. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. (Ppbk 2003, 584pp.)

In the first part of 2005, after working my way through many of the books in the Annotated Bibliography from Jim Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, I became interested in the dramatic turn-of-the-20th century rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States. Books written at the time, which promoted the unity of the English-speaking peoples, cited the Spanish-American War and the Boer War as events which changed the public’s mind about whether America and the British Empire could get along. I needed to familiarize myself with these two wars.

After I read First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country A World Power (Zimmermann, W., 2002) … about the Spanish-American War era, Lex suggested a book by Professor Carman Miller called Painting the Map Red.

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