The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan

 

The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan

The Earth Transformed is truly planetary in its scope and ambition. It's 658 numbered pages don't even include introductory material, plates, index, or the very comprehensive footnotes: to see those you will have to go to the publisher's website at bloomsbury.com and search there. It is unfortunate that there doesn't appear to be any mention of the whereabouts of the footnotes in the published edition. Just as well that they are online though because this is already one bulky tome and to include the thousands of footnotes would make it too awkward for use.

Frankopan takes us back temporally 4.5 billion years to the formation of the earth and forward into the future. We travel upwards and outwards from the earth’s core to ocean depths and land masses, then through the atmosphere to the farthest reaches of the solar system. Even more impressive is the scale of his learning. He has not only mastered the histories of most cultures in most parts of the world, he has also immersed himself in all the latest research on anthropology, biochemistry, climatology, dendrochronology, epidemiology, all the way through to zoology, and goodness knows how many other disciplines besides. 

However I am concerned about one or two errors of fact and interpretation that I have come across. Most of my knowledge, especially over such a vast purview, is general and fairly superficial. Often it's acquired through my pursuit of literature, rather than academic research into say ethnology. So when I come across statements that from this limited perspective I know to be inaccurate, it weakens my confidence in the project as a whole: what if there are similar mistakes present in other areas I know far less about? I'm very impressed by the breadth of Frankopan's learning, but I don't have the means to assess its depth. Here are two examples that have caused me concern:

• John Newton is castigated on page 363 for hypocritically writing hymn lyrics about being set free from his chains in Christ while having participated in the slave trade. There is a massive error of fact here and an even bigger failure of perspective. The words quoted are not by Newton, they are a 21st century insertion into his hymn Amazing Grace in a reworking of it as a contemporary worship song, one I have sung myself in Church. It's easy to look up Newton's words in the Olney Hymns, on which I wrote a dissertation while studying English Lit at Cambridge. If you do so you will not find the offending words but you will notice that the insertion is not even in the same metre as Newton's original. But that's piffling compared to the implied charge that Newton's sympathies were all with the slave traders. He certainly was sent to sea as a boy, press ganged into the Navy, became a slave himself at one point, and sailed on a number of slave ships. He led an unimaginably hard life in those days. However he rejected this wicked past and took a very prominent part in the abolition movement, writing pamphlets and preaching powerfully against slavery, and mentoring the young William Wilberforce. Is Frankopan unaware of these salient facts? Or is he going along with a contemporary campaign to discredit Newton, also manifest in Empireland, reviewed elsewhere in this blog?
• Also on the subject of British involvement with slavery, on page 366 Frankopan badly misrepresents Lord Mansfield's handling of the notorious Zong* massacre. Mansfield, who was Chief Justice at the time, is stated to have approved of the slaughter by throwing overboard of a number of slaves on the grounds that they were merely chattels, on a par with farm animals. This totally horrifying view is probably nonetheless a fair statement of British Law at the time. However the case actually came to Mansfield on appeal, after the lower court had found for the ship owners and against the insurers. Mansfield summarised the findings of the jury in the lower court as above, but clearly did not approve of their view, because he decided in favour of the insurers and against the wicked ship owners. That Mansfield was a prominent abolitionist I again discovered through literature: an anniversary programme on the BBC was trying to establish that Jane Austen was a firebrand social activist on the basis of a single remark in her novel Mansfield Park - and also on the much more substantial grounds that its titular setting emblazoned the name of a known abolitionist, Lord Mansfield. Suspicions aroused, I checked it all out on Wikipedia...

It is very much to be hoped that these errors will be corrected in any future edition, and especially that there aren't more lurking in areas where I don't have sufficient knowledge to discern them. Nevertheless the focus of The Earth Transformed is not on particular details but on the state of our interactions with our home planet, and its strength is in its mind-bogglingly comprehensive overview . If you have ever bemoaned the fissiparation of knowledge into ever tinier areas of specialism that become more and more remote from one another and from the awareness of ordinary people, fear not! Peter Frankopan is out there: he gets it and is doing something about it. He wants to see how raft after raft of new discoveries stack up together, and thus give a big picture – a Frankopanorama - of what we are doing to the planet and what it is doing to us.

Some of his key findings:

• The earth has always been in a state of flux. Conditions were originally unrecognisably different from anything we experience today and would have been lethal to contemporary life forms. Changes have come in the form of cataclysms: asteroid impacts, massive volcanic events, the collisions of continents, soaring and plummeting temperatures, orbital changes for both the earth and moon… There have been periods of relative stability too, when the various forces that circulate energy round the world have been in balance: but only until the next catastrophe. The idea that the state of the world is pretty much a given, roughly what it is now, is an illusion deriving from our ignorance of the deep past.

• Climate is an important driver of this flux. Frankopan is not in any way a climate change denier. The research he quotes shows a clear correlation between higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the past and raised temperatures, and between lower levels and reduced temperatures. The connection is indisputable. Climate change deniers have to accept that the world’s climate is changing, as the evidence is there: but they attribute this to “natural cycles,” in a naïve way that omits to examine the role that levels of CO2 play in those cycles. Does it matter how the CO2 gets there? It’s still going to warm the planet, however it comes, isn’t it? So why add more when there's already a problem? Stop junking our atmosphere, you oil barons!

• Climate directly impacts human history, including pestilences, famines, migrations, the economy, the winners and losers of political struggles and so on. So for example, a wetter climate across Central Asia allowed the hordes more fodder for their horses and enabled repeated incursions Westward into Europe: a period of stable warmth supported the crops that underpinned Roman prosperity and expansion: rainfall promoted the rise of South American civilisations and droughts led to their fall. However this requires more nuance than many recent historians have given us. Why for example did the Romans succeed in benefitting from the Roman Warm Period in ways that their many rivals, Etruscans, Persians, Carthaginians, Dacians, did not? Was it military might? Or better administration? Or those beautifully engineered aqueducts that enabled the expansion of Roman cities? Or why did a grassier steppe enable the Mongols to spread West, but did not lead to Europe spreading East? What were the cultural differences that set Eastern expansion against Western defensiveness? 

• These questions militate against pure climatic determinism, thus putting human agency back into the mix. Was one people better organised, or more adaptable, or technologically or culturally better resourced than another, to resist adverse conditions and benefit from favourable ones? Like other forms of fatalism, climatic determinism robs us of decision. As it defines human strategies and policies for making the most of the conditions we inhabit, this enquiry – how we deal with the conditions that confront us - is of first importance. 

• Volcanic eruptions are a constant bass underpinning this vast song of the Earth. Huge clouds of particles block out the Sun, suspend photosynthesis, reduce plant growth and plunge the world into famine, often for years at a time. Some concentrated bouts of eruptions seem to have permanently altered the entire biosphere: but even the lesser eruptions of historical times have brought massive effects. My take on this is that recurrent proposals to artificially introduce reflective particles into Earth’s atmosphere in order to combat global warming by shielding us from solar radiation is absolute lunacy. We will duplicate the effects of all those eruptions: less photosynthesis, reduced crops, smaller harvests, it all adds up to starvation for the world’s burgeoning human population. Worse, it will actually be counterproductive since photosynthesis is the leading means of reducing atmospheric C02. Please, anybody who reads these words, speak out against this dangerous stupidity!

So how to make use of this monumental opus? It is so wide-ranging yet so detailed that any attempt to absorb it in one go is certain to fail: I really tried! In fact I'm a second read through now, to try to pick up on all the matter that flooded past me first time, and that's why this review keeps being updated. Like this book, Frankopan’s earlier and very popular The Silk Roads took a very broad survey of its subject through time and space, but The Earth Transformed feels like it is telling multiple stories rather than just one. This may be why it tends to exhaust rather than inform. Much better to take it as a reference book. Dip into particular epochs or cultures or places in the massive index, read what amounts to an essay on the subject you are exploring, then investigate further using Bloomsbury's footnotes, while checking out names, places, movements, technologies etc on Wikipedia. All the best with that!

* Zong was the name of the slave ship concerned.

Baltic - the future of Europe: Oliver Moody

 

The motivation for this timely book is renewed Russian aggression in Europe. Post Cold War stability has been severely shaken up following the invasion of Ukraine. Various countries formerly within the Soviet sphere are asking themselves, “Who will be in Putin’s sights next?” Formerly neutral nations – Finland and Sweden – have abandoned neutrality and joined NATO, despite Russian warnings, in search of security: but Donald Trump’s blinkered America First rhetoric has left them wondering whether they made the right choice. It was shocking to see all the various actions of Russian sabotage, harassment and surveillance listed together in one volume. Moody leaves us in no doubt that Russian hostility, only just below the level of open warfare, always testing and probing for vulnerabilities, is the reality of European political life.

Oliver Moody is a journalist who has worked for The Times in Northern Europe since 2018 and is a thoughtful contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. As well as seeking a strategic overview of the situation in the Baltic region, he is concerned to introduce us to some its lesser known nations, particularly the frontline states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They, together with Finland and Poland, will be first up in any Ukraine-style assault on Western Europe. Do they have the resolve and the resources to make Putin think twice? And what sort of support might they receive from other European powers?

I had a personal motivation for choosing this book. I am married to a Finn and frequently travel there to meet up with friends and family. I know firsthand how Finns reacted to the Ukraine war and to America’s recent anti-Europe stance. Having declared independence from revolutionary Russia in 1917, and fought a war of survival against them in 1939, and having Europe’s longest land border with them, Finland is seriously worried about the ambitions of their long term enemy. 

I have also been to Tallin via a ferry from Helsinki, shortly after Estonia’s exit from the Soviet empire. There I witnessed for myself the economic devastation visited on the country by their former masters. I wasn’t there very long, but the sight of a grandmother standing by the side of the road, trying to sell a couple of chipped teacups to be able to get a bit of bread for her family, has stuck with me. I also witnessed the sense of kinship with Finland, whose businesses were investing heavily in the country and already helping to bring about the Estonian resurgence so manifest today.

I certainly learned a lot about Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (“the Baltic states”) from Baltic – as Moody rightly supposes, like most English speakers I have just about heard of them but have little further knowledge. There are potted descriptions of their pre- and post-Soviet histories, literature, national myths, musical traditions and other cultural strata, leading to an assessment of their resilience, particularly in terms of the strength of their sense of identity as peoples who have been subjected to russification and are determined never ever to go back there again. 

Baltic expects that the nations in the region will have national psyches that are reflected in their legends and cultures and are played out in their political and strategic aspirations. Estonia’s “Singing Revolution” is a great case in point: that country’s powerful choral traditions led its people to gather and sing as an act of resistance that helped to break Russian rule. 

Nonetheless Moody’s assessment has a rather nineteenth century feel to it, reminiscent of all those people who went about collecting folk songs, collating local tales into national epics whose episodes were then interpreted by leading artists of the day, championing their languages against those that had cultural ascendancy over them, and generally cultivating the late Romantic nationalisms that united some nations – Italy, Germany – and are still creating subdivisions in others – Basque and Irish separatism and the break up of Yugoslavia, among others. Finland is a great example of late 19th century nationalist awakening: Elias Lonnröt collated various folk tale fragments into the Kalevala, which were then iconised in music and paint by Jean Sibelius and Axeli Gallen-Kallela, and went on to challenge both Russian political and Swedish cultural hegemonies. Their new sense of identity made the Finns ready to seize their own destiny in 1917. 

This ferment undoubtedly brewed up negative as well as positive cultural effects. Arguably imperialism, colonialism, the first world war, and fascism are all dreams of romantic nationalism which soured into nightmares. An increasingly sceptical Europe turned from its Christian roots and made idols of its nations, which ended up, in the way of idolatries, devouring their children…

So is Moody right to look to a strong sense of national identity as the best way to repel Russian domination? He certainly does justice to the complexity of the issues in the Baltic states. After Stalinist russification Estonia was nearly 50% Russophone, so a key aim of the newly liberated nation was to suppress that alien culture, phasing out the teaching of Russian in schools, and closing down Russophile political parties and media. It’s very telling that although many people of Russian heritage are unhappy with these changes, none of them are so unhappy that they choose to return eastwards. 

But it’s also troubling for readers in a UK context, where the great aim seems to be to downplay ethnic and cultural difference so that we can all get along. Does this mean we are effete westerners who no longer have enough sense of our cultural and historical identity to resist 21st century aggressors and oppressors? Is cultural homogeneity too high a price to pay for national resilience? Do we need to become politically and culturally more conservative to withstand Russian ambition, and perhaps add to the growing list of “strong men” playing at identity politics among contemporary world leaders? Let’s hope not – but Baltic might have benefitted from further interrogation of these underlying issues.

What is apparent is Moody’s admiration for these small but tough and determined states. They are facing up to the challenges of Russian expansion and preparing to make Putin regret invading them if it comes to that. Having experience of Finnish “sisu” I get the attitude. They gave the Soviets a bloody nose in 1939 and if forced to are prepared to do it again: they have universal military service, up to date equipment and enough bunkers to shelter every single one of their 5 million population. Did you see the recent Scandinavia series on the BBC? It’s clear that Simon Reeves shares Moody’s admiration.

However facing down the overwhelming domination of Russia in arms and manpower will require some measure of unity among resisting countries. Moody evaluates the will to resist in each of the other states in the region, with varying results. Shakiest in his view is Germany, sadly enough as they are the largest West European nation in terms of population and economy. He sees them as still attached to the Ostpolitik of a now vanished era, hankering after the benefits of rapprochement with Russia in terms of trade and energy supply, and too ashamed of past militarism to convey deterrence in our period of heightened tensions. The description of shortages among German forces was both laughable and excruciating. There are signs that attitudes are changing and resources are being redirected: the question is, will it be too little, too late?

There are gaps in Moody's coverage. Sweden has recently joined NATO, like Finland, an example of Russian aggression producing the opposite rather than the desired effect, a strengthening rather than weakening of NATO. There was hardly any analysis of this, of how the Swedish people currently feel about it, or of the history and culture of Sweden, even though they are a much larger player than most of the others. There is a direct history of Swedish and Russian confrontation, for example Charles XII’s invasion of Russia (Poltova, where he was finally defeated, is in Ukraine). Sweden built castles across their then domains in Finland to keep the Russians out. Napoleon finally wrested the Grand Duchy of Finland from the Swedes and gifted it to the Czar, with whom he was temporarily allied, leading to a century of Russian rule.

An even bigger omission is some sort of handle on Russian motivation. Yes it is clear that Russia under Putin is deeply antagonistic towards the rest of Europe – but why? Is it the age old fear of invasion from the West, following in the footsteps of Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler? Is it the constriction of geography? Russia’s only westward subarctic maritime outlets are via the Black Sea and the Baltic, both leading to narrow straits firmly in the control of NATO member states. Or is it just the remembrance of past glories? Is it even a Russified version of that rather 19th century romantic nationalism in which Russia is the state destined to rule the world? Sadly this is the odious view of Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has backed the unprovoked onslaught upon Ukraine, and clearly identifies these massacres as the will of Jesus Christ. Or is Kirill perhaps simply too aware of what would happen to him if he didn’t support his master, who is not Jesus but Putin? We don’t know, but if we did we might be able to counter the poison. There are more economic, spiritual and cultural prosperities available to Russia as a participant with the West than as a foe. Why can’t they see them?

Some conclusions:

• Baltic leaves us in no doubt that Russia is a hostile actor towards Western Europe that demands a firm and determined response.

• Little states such as the Baltics are not fazed by this and in spite of their small size are confident that they can be tough enough to give Putin pause for thought.

• Europe has cultures and traditions, sadly often obliterated in the case of the UK, which are worth cherishing and should not be given up to the oblivion of Russification.

• Strategically the first step Putin will take against NATO is likely to be in the Baltic. This is the impetus behind the multiple incidents of sabotage and surveillance in the area. From a Russian point of view this aggressive campaign has had the negative effect of drawing attention to their strategy. The Baltic Sea must therefore be sealed off immediately in the event of any Russian military incursion. It sounds as though Finland and Estonia are already taking steps in the setting up of anti-ship missile batteries on both sides of the Gulf of Finland.

• It’s getting late to respond adequately but it is not too late! The region is revising its priorities, reallocating its resources and is on the road to readiness.

• It’s all a double edged sword for Ukraine though. I don’t see how Russia could even consider an assault anywhere else as long as they are bogged down in Ukraine. But if peace were to be achieved in Ukraine, as we all long for it to be, that would free Russia to pursue its ambitions elsewhere…