Category Archives: History

Arts, Education, History

(Short Essay) The Agricultural Revolution

1730

ALONGSIDE the Industrial Revolution came a revolution in agriculture. When agriculture first began, selected grass seeds were sown so that gradually improved varieties with larger ears were produced; in this way wheat and barley were developed from grasses. In the same way livestock rearing used selection. The principle of selection and selective breeding was long established. It was only in the eighteenth century that they became scientific in approach, and then development became rapid. The first step in this new agricultural revolution was the invention of a seed drill by Jethro Tull in 1701. This simple device, which pioneered sowing in rows and facilitated weeding, was improved eighty years later by the addition of gears to ensure the even distribution of seed.

Charles Townshend resigned from the British government in May 1730, at the age of 56, to begin a new career as an agricultural improver. Townshend, who became known as “Turnip” Townshend, observed the progress that the Dutch farmers were making by using scientific methods, and applied what he learnt on his own estates. He found that he could keep livestock through the winter by feeding them on turnips. By reserving a field or two for growing turnips as a fodder crop, he eliminated the need to slaughter most of his flocks and herds each autumn. The animals could be kept alive through the winter and slaughtered as and when there was a demand. This development meant that for the first time within the British Isles fresh meat became available all the year round. It also reduced the need to use expensive spices to disguise the taste of rotting meat, improved the safety of food, and allowed the cattle to grow bigger. By 1732 the average bullock sold at Smithfield cattle market in London weighed 550 pounds, compared with 370 pounds in 1710. There were many gains from just one change in practice.

Selective breeding by Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell led to the creation of a new breed of sheep, the Leicester, in 1755. Five years later Bakewell started experimenting with selective breeding of beef cattle, and by 1770 he had produced animals with deeper, wider bodies on shorter legs, animals that carried much more meat. He worked on the simple idea that “like produces like”, each year only breeding from the most suitable stock.

Crop rotation was developed in a more scientific way, to ensure that each farm produced the maximum amount of food. This intensification of agriculture led to a marked increase in food production in Britain and other European countries following similar paths. By 1770, the UK was producing a surplus of potatoes for the first time. The potato had until that time been grown exclusively as a subsistence crop; now there was a surplus that was available for sale at markets and in shops.

In 1772 Thomas Coke started a programme of selective animal husbandry that would result in the creation of Devon Cattle, Suffolk pigs and Southdown sheep. By 1780 the agrarian revolution was well under way, with higher quality seed in general use, more scientific crop rotation (pioneered by Jethro Tull in 1720), more efficiently designed tools and generally increased productivity. Thomas Jefferson wrote rather apologetically in his Notes on Virginia about the extensive nature of agriculture in America at that time. “The indifferent state of agriculture among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely. It is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.”

In other words, it was the pressure of a high population density that produced the revolution, the intensification of agriculture in Europe. But the need to produce more food throughout the world would eventually come, as population levels rose.

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review – ‘Hitler’s Scapegoat: The Boy Assassin And The Holocaust’

REVIEW

NOVEMBER 7, 1938. A moody looking teenager walked into the German Embassy in Paris, which was proudly flying its swastika flag. In the boy’s pocket was a small pistol he’d bought earlier.

He asked to speak to an official and was sent in to talk to a young lawyer called Ernst vom Rath. Seated behind his desk, vom Rath greeted the boy politely. The boy sat down awkwardly and then, shouting out that he was acting on behalf of the persecuted Jews, he pulled out the gun and fired.

His aiming was “atrocious”, as it commonly is among those not properly practiced in the use of guns. Three of his five bullets missed vom Rath entirely, one passed through him and did no harm, but the other damaged his spleen, pancreas and stomach. Vom Rath was doomed: he took two days to die from his gunshot wounds.

Stephen Koch provides a gripping book and narrative which tells the whole story of the 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, who made history by being the first Jew to take up arms against the Nazi regime.

Yet the assassination and its tragic aftermath are full of bitter ironies. For one thing, poor Ernst vom Rath was, in fact, no Nazi, but rather a vociferous critic of the government he was serving: Grynszpan “very likely shot the one man in the embassy who secretly agreed with him”.

It’s seductive to imagine Herschel Grynszpan’s act as one of supreme defiance on behalf of his people – as a heroic, youthful stand against Fascism, while dithering politicians were kowtowing, appeasing and making “peace at any price”.

 

THE immediate and devastating effect of the shooting, though, was an even more terrible persecution of the Jews. For the Nazis used it as an excuse to unleash Kristallnacht, the pogrom that many consider to be an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Just hours after the death of vom Rath was announced, Synagogues across Germany were burned to the ground, Jewish shops and businesses were looted and destroyed and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, stripped of their property and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen – prison camps, not yet death camps.

Elsewhere on that fatal night, more than 100 Jews were murdered by knifing, burning or brutal beating.

Herschel Grynszpan, pacing in his French prison cell, was in agony on hearing the news. “At night,” he wrote to a friend, “I dream about the ghetto, about Jewish women and children running away . . . God, oh my God! I didn’t want that.”

The funeral of vom Rath was an absurdly grandiose affair, staged in a huge hall in Dusseldorf. The dead man was hailed as “the first martyr to fall for the Third Reich” and his coffin was illuminated by huge spotlights “a la 20th Century Fox”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ evil genius of propaganda, was given space to broadcast the party’s official interpretation of the assassination. “The Jew Grynszpan represents world Jewry.” He added: “The shooting in Paris was world Jewry’s attempt to shoot down the German people”. Any reprisals were therefore being justified.

Indeed, in the world view of the Nazis, the Jews and the Bolsheviks – more or less the same thing, as they saw it – were committed to a war of genocide against the Aryan/Germanic people, who must therefore fight a titanic, apocalyptic war of self-defence to save themselves.

Herschel, a Polish Jew by origin, was born and raised in Hanover. He was a clever, somewhat sickly boy, standing barely 5ft, dark-eyed and given to silent brooding.

When he was 15, he was sent to Paris to live with his aunt and uncle, while his family remained in Germany. Despite increasing persecution, they trusted that “Germany was still a nation of laws”.

On October 27, 1938, there came a knock on their door and the Grynszpan family were told to report to the police station – “a mere formality”. Taking only their coats and passports, they complied.

They never saw their home of more than 20 years again.

Along with some 18,000 other Polish Jews from all over Germany, the family were marched to the train station. Once on a train, the Gestapo moved down the crowded carriages, confiscating everything of value from the helpless passengers.

Two kilometres short of the Polish border, they were herded off the train and marched through the driving rain.

The sick and elderly who couldn’t walk were beaten in bloody savage attacks. “They shouted, ‘Run! Run!’” recalled Herschel’s father, Sendel, in later years.

Finally, they were shoved across the border and abandoned without any money, food, clothes or shelter.

On November 3, in Paris, Herschel received a distressing postcard from his sister – the final straw that triggered the murder of Ernst vom Rath.

On it, Berta wrote about their “great misfortune”, saying the family had no money. She begged for him to send some. But her brother had no money to send.

They were living in an army barracks, sleeping on sacks stuffed with straw, eating gruel and “snatching at bread tossed into the starving throng from trucks . . . In 11 days, nobody had been able to change clothes.”

Later, Berta would be just one more victim who vanished in the Holocaust, although we do not know the details. Miraculously, the rest of Herschel’s family survived and finally made it to Israel after the war.

When France fell in 1940, some 19 months after the killing of vom Rath, young Herschel was handed over by French authorities to the Gestapo, who planned to use him for a show trial to prove that “it was the Jews who started it”. But the trial never happened.

 

COMPLEX legal wranglings ensued, in which, the author suggests, Herschel himself played a cunning role – even at one time claiming that the real reason he had shot vom Rath was because they were homosexual lovers.

It was a lie, but a clever lie, embarrassing the Nazis and making it impossible for them to use the case as evidence of a widespread Jewish conspiracy.

Herschel’s dignified words are also on record: “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish . . . My people have a right to exist on this Earth.”

His final fate, like that of so many in this most awful of all wars, is unknown, but he certainly died before its end. Despite the uncertainty, Koch writes him the most handsome of epitaphs:

“He had been history’s pawn, a brave and foolish boy . . . he died for his people, forgotten and alone.”

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, United States

Book Review: Lords Of The Desert

REVIEW

Traditional and conventional wisdom has it that after 1945 Soviet Russia swiftly became Britain’s most deadly foe, while our great ally was the United States.

But this orthodox version of history is now in urgent need of reassessment according to James Barr’s magnificently researched new book. He demonstrates that the U.S. was just as determined, if not more so, to destroy Britain’s global power and influence as Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

The United States wanted to establish itself as the new global hegemon. According to Barr, this meant subverting Britain at every turn and, as the author shows, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. He infers that, while Britain had an official enemy in the shape of Russia, it had, too, a much more insidious and unofficial enemy in the U.S.

This process culminated in Britain’s total humiliation when the United States pulled the plug on Britain’s failed attempt to seize back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Some five years earlier the U.S. had sabotaged a carefully-planned attempt by MI6 to take control of Iranian oil production – a move which sent a message round the Arab world that British influence was severely dented if not doomed.

American contempt for Britain started even before World War II was over, with a disastrous visit to Egypt in 1942 by Wendell L Wilkie, the Republican opponent to Franklin D Roosevelt for the Presidency two years earlier.

Wilkie arrived in Cairo full of vim and admiration for the British. Then he had dinner with a senior British official and was filled with horror: “What I got was Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes,” he recorded.

These men, executing policies made in London, had no idea the world was changing. And Wilkie had no doubt that Winston Churchill was to blame.

His hostility was increased further by a disastrous mix-up when Churchill paid a brief visit to Washington after the United States joined the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Wilkie wanted to meet Churchill to establish his credentials as an international statesman, ahead of the 1944 presidential elections.

Churchill, in turn, was eager to meet Wilkie, then the favourite for the Presidency. He tried to phone Wilkie to arrange a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately, though, the switchboard operator put him through to the wrong extension number. Barr records:

“I am glad to speak to you,” gushed Churchill.

“Whom do you think you are speaking to?” came the reply.

“To Wendell Wilkie, am I not?”

“No,” came the answer. “You are speaking to the President . . . Franklin Roosevelt.”

The President then banned Churchill from meeting Wilkie, who was mortally offended when the event was cancelled.

This was just one of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings which set the tone for Britain’s post-war relationship with the U.S.

At bottom, both countries were determined to gain access to oil, already known to exist in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.

In an underhand move, the U.S. tried to hire Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer, to guide them in finding oil reserves. Thesiger stayed loyal to the British: he was in fact hard at work on their behalf, at one stage carrying out oil exploration under fake cover for an organisation called the Anti-Locust unit.

 

THIS is a splendidly written book. It demonstrates the early perspicuity of a young Tory researcher called Enoch Powell who sought out Anthony Eden (then a highly regarded former foreign secretary) shortly after the war to give him advice.

“I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans,” the young Powell told the elder statesman.

Eden looked at him as if he was mad. But Powell had the last laugh. Eden was later to reflect: “I had no idea what he meant. I do now.”

– Lords Of The Desert by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster for £20, 416pp

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