Areopagitica and the problem of regulating AI

How do we regulate a revolutionary new technology with great potential for harm and good? A 380-year-old polemic provides guidance.

In 1644, John Milton sat down to give a speech to the English parliament arguing in favor of the unlicensed printing of books and against a proposed bill to restrict their contents. Published as “Areopagitica”, Milton’s speech became one of the most brilliant defenses of free expression.

Milton rightly recognized the great potential books had and the dangers of smothering that potential before they were published. He did not mince words:

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but …do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men….Yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

Apart from stifling free expression, the fundamental problem of regulation as Milton presciently recognized is that the good effects of any technology cannot be cleanly separated from the bad effects; every technology is what we call dual-use. Referring back all the way to Genesis and original sin, Milton said:

“Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.”

In important ways, “Areopagitica” is a blueprint for controlling potentially destructive modern technologies. Freeman Dyson applied the argument to propose commonsense legislation in the field of recombinant DNA technology. And today, I think, the argument applies cogently to AI.

AI is such a new technology that its benefits and harms are largely unknown and hard to distinguish from each other. In some cases the distinction is clear. For instance, image recognition can be used for all kinds of useful applications ranging from weather assessment to cancer cell analysis, but it can be and is used for surveillance. In that case, it is not possible to separate out the good from the bad even when we know what they are. But more importantly, as the technology of image recognition AI demonstrates, it is impossible to know what exactly AI will be used for unless there’s an opportunity to see some real-world applications of it. Restricting AI before these applications are known will almost certainly ensure that the good applications are stamped out.

It is in the context of Areopagitica and the inherent difficulty of regulating a technology before its potential is unknown that I find myself concerned about some of the new government regulation which is being proposed for regulating AI, especially California Bill SB-1047 which has already passed the state Senate and has made its way to the Assembly, with a proposed decision date at the end of this month.

The bill proposes commonsense measures for AI, such as more transparent cost-accounting and documentation. But it also imposes what seem like arbitrary restrictions on AI models. For instance, it would require regulation and paperwork for models which cost $100 million or more per training run. While this regulation will exempt companies which run cheaper models, the problem in fact runs the other way: nothing stops cheaper models from being used for nefarious purposes.

Let’s take a concrete example: in the field of chemical synthesis, AI models are increasingly used to do what is called retrosynthesis, which is to virtually break down a complex molecule into its constituent building blocks and raw materials (as a simple example, a breakdown of sodium chloride into sodium and chlorine would be retrosynthesis). One can use retrosynthesis algorithms to find out the cheapest or the most environmentally friendly route to a target molecule like a drug, a pesticide or an energy material. And run in reverse, you can use the algorithm for forward planning, predicting based on building blocks what the resulting target molecule would look like. But nothing stops the algorithm from doing the same analysis on a nerve gas or a paralytic or an explosive; it’s the same science and the same code. Importantly, much of this analysis is now available in the form of laptop computer software which enables the models to be trained on datasets of millions of data points: small potatoes in the world of AI. Almost none of these models cost anywhere close to $100 million, which puts their use in the hands of small businesses, graduate students and – if and when they choose to use them – malicious state and non-state actors.

Thus, restricting AI regulation to expensive models might exempt smaller actors, but it’s precisely that fact that would enable these small actors to use the technology to bad ends. On the other hand, critics are also right that it would effectively price out the good small actors since they would not be able to afford the legal paperwork that the bigger corporations can. The arbitrary cap of $100 million therefore does not seem to address the root of the problem. The same issue applies to another restriction which is also part of the European AI regulation, which is limiting the calculation speed to 1026 flops. Using the same example of the AI retrosynthesis models, it is easy to argue that such models can be run for far less computing power and would still produce useful results.

What then is the correct way to regulate AI technology? Quite apart from the details, one thing that is clear is that we should be able to experiment a bit, run laboratory-scale models and at least try to probe the boundaries of potential risks before we decide to stifle this or that model or rein in computing power. Once again Milton echoes such sentiments. As a 17th century intellectual it would have been a long shot for him to call for the completely free dissemination of knowledge; he must well have been aware of the blood that had been shed in religious conflicts in Europe during his time. Instead, he proposed that there could be some checks and restrictions on books, but only after they had been published:

“If then the Order shall not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons, ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books already printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into a list, that all may know which are condemned, and which not.”

Thus, Milton was arguing that books should not be stifled at the time of their creation; instead, they should be stifled at the time of their use if the censors saw a need. The creation vs use distinction is a sensible one when thinking about regulating AI as well. But even that distinction doesn’t completely address the issue, since the uses of AI technology are myriad, and most of them are going to be beneficial and intrinsically dual-use. Even regulating the uses of AI thus would entail interfering in many aspects of AI development and deployment. And what about the legal and commercial paperwork, the extensive regulatory framework and the army of bureaucrats that would be needed to enforce this legislation? The problem with legislation is that it is easy for it to overstep boundaries, to be on a slippery slope and gradually elbow its way into all kinds of things for which it wasn’t originally intended, exceeding its original mandate. Milton shrewdly recognized this overreach when he asked what else besides printing might be up for regulation:

“If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of; it will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them, shall twenty licensers?”

This passage shows that not only was John Milton a great writer and polemicist, but he also had a fine sense of humor. Areopagitica shows us that if we are to confront the problem of AI legislation, we must do it not just with good sense but with a recognition of the absurdities which too much regulation may bring.

The proponents of AI who fear the many problems it might create are well-meaning, but they are unduly adhering to the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principles says that it’s sensible to regulate something when its risks are not known. I would like to suggest that we replace the Precautionary Principle with a principle I call The Adventure Principle. The Adventure Principle says that we should embrace risks rather than running away from them because of the benefits which exploration brings. Without the Adventure Principle, Columbus, Cook, Heyerdahl and Armstrong would never have set sail into the great unknown and Edison, Jobs, Gates and Musk would never embark on big technological projects. Just like with AI, these explorers faced a significant risk of death and destruction, but they understood that with immense risks come immense benefits, and by the rational light of science and calculation, they thought there was a good chance that the risks could be managed. They were right.

Ultimately there is no foolproof “pre-release” legislation or restriction that would purely stop the bad use of models while still enabling their good use. Milton’s Areopagitica does not tell us what the right legislation for regulating AI would look like, although it provides hints based on regulation of use rather than creation. But it makes a resounding case for the problems that such legislation may create. Regulating AI before we have a chance to see what it can do would be like imprisoning a child before he grows up into a young man. Perhaps a better approach would be the one Faraday adopted when Gladstone purportedly asked him what the use of electricity was: “Someday you may tax it”, was Faraday’s response.

Some say that the potential risks from AI are too great to allow for such a liberal approach. But the potential risks from almost any groundbreaking technology developed in the last few hundred decades – printing, electricity, fossil fuels, automobiles, nuclear energy, gene editing – are no different. The premature regulation of AI would prevent us from unleashing its potential to confront our most pressing challenges. When humanity is then grasping with its last-ditch efforts to prevent its own extinction because of known problems, a recognition of the irony of smothering AI because of a fear of unknown problems would come too late to save us.

Book Review: "Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia", by Gregory Wallance

It may seem hard to believe now, but in 1865, by the time the Civil War ended, Russia was America's best friend in Europe. The two countries enjoyed a healthy diplomatic relationship, buoyed by trade and a mutual distrust of Great Britain; Russia was the only European nation to support the Union during the war. America sent formal condolences when Tsar Alexander was assassinated; Russia did the same when Lincoln was shot.

By 1891 it was all over. American mistrust of Russia was so pronounced that all diplomatic relations had cooled. It has never been the same since. What changed? Many factors played a role, but a significant one was the publication in 1891 of a now forgotten book by the journalist, writer and explorer George Kennan. Titled "Siberia and the Exile System", it documented in vivid detail the brutal, cruel, unsparing system of Siberia exile, inflicted by Tsarist Russia on its people for the most trivial misdemeanors.

"Into Siberia" is the vivid account by Gregory Wallance of the Ohio-born and raised George Kennan's two visits to Russia, first in the 1860s as an employee of Western Union with the mammoth goal of laying a trans-Siberian telegraph line that would connect Europe to America, and then again as a journalist formally authorized by the Tsarist regime to document the exile system in Siberia. Ironically, the Russian monarchy and government thought that Kennan's coverage of the system would invoke sympathy in the rest of the world for its need; little did they know that they were letting a fox in the henhouse.

Wallance excels at two things in particular; firstly at describing the almost unbelievably stark and brutal Russian landscape, populated by neck-deep snow, fatal temperatures well below -40 degrees and fierce indigenous tribes who had hardly had any contact with their more modern countrymen, and second at describing Kennan's epic journey into this wasteland. He is also exceedingly good at charting the stunningly inhumane treatment of prisoners and their families at the hands of the Tsar and his officials; the book opens with an unforgettable description of a pillar at the border of Siberia at which men and women cried uncontrollably, because the journey past this pillar was almost certainly one from which they would not return.

It's hard to not be thoroughly inspired by Kennan, a sickly young man who, determined to prove that he was strong of body and character, undertook the almost impossibly dangerous and exotic journey in 1865 to Siberia. His letters home remind one of other brave explorers staying cheerful in the face of danger or death - Shackleton, Cherry-Garrard, Lewis and Clark. He seems like the epitome of "what does not kill you makes you stronger", deliberately laughing in the face of the most infernal of natural and human elements, braving bears, deadly storms, an endless land without direction, fierce tribes and meagre to no supplies of essential food and clothing. He had not just genuine curiosity but genuine empathy for the savage-looking tribes he met, learning their ways and their dialects and working together with them to survive, learn, rescue trapped companions. The first book he wrote after coming back, "Tent Life in Siberia", was an unprecedented account written by a sharp-eyed journalist with a gift for evocative prose which taught Americans about Russia.

"Siberia and the Exile System" was equally vivid. From the pillar at the Siberian border to the innermost reaches of the labor camps, Kennan was given free access by the Tsar and his regime to the prisoners and their families. What Kennan saw horrified him: men with barely anything on their backs marched for hundreds of miles - Bataan death march style - in the most inclement weather, until many of them died on the way; their wives facing an impossible choice of remaining behind and starving to death or accompanying their husbands into conditions so stark that they would starve anyway or would be raped or have to sell themselves into prostitution. The bodies of children in frozen embraces with their parents were not an uncommon sight. Perhaps worst of all were the reasons why these prisoners were condemned to hell in the first place. Most prisoners were condemned to Siberia on trumped up charges based on the flimsiest criticism of the Tsarist regime. Freedom of speech, Kennan saw, was a complete joke in Russia (sounds familiar?).

Everything that we read later about the gulag system had their origin in those horrific exile camps set up by a cruel, indifferent, repressive Russian regime. When Kennan wrote his book, Americans and Russians alike were appalled, albeit for different reasons. For the first time, Americans had their eyes opened to the reality of a country which they had considered their friend. For Russians the book was shocking for the level of detail and the convincing arguments with which Kennan exposed the crudities of their so-called civilization. Reading Kennan's account 50 years later was the best education that his namesake who was the more famous Kennan - the American diplomat George Kennan of containment fame - could get. In his memoirs and writings, the younger Kennan often credits his lesser-known ancestor for grounding him in the realities of the Soviet Union.

After Kennan published "Siberia and the Exile System", Russian-American relations permanently deteriorated. After the murder of Tsar Nicholas, Lenin effectively set up the state as an outlaw state, defined in opposition to the capitalist countries. It is of course impossible to escape a feeling of deja vu reading Kennan's account. There seems to be an almost unbroken thread from Alexander through Nicholas, Lenin, Stalin and all the way to Putin in the repression exerted by Russian strongmen and their henchmen on their own people. Reading this story of a 139-year-old tragedy, one can be forgiven for feeling pessimistic about the future of Russian democracy and human rights. While the internet and new modes of communication have alerted the rest of the world to Russian leaders' excess, it is time for another hardy soul of George Kennan's gifts, resilience and unbounded concern for human welfare to again lay bare the soul of this vast, inscrutable land.

Book Review: "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life" by Jonathan Alter

I first saw Jimmy Carter with a few other students during my first year as a graduate student at Emory University where he remains a visiting professor - I still remember the then 81-year-old briskly striding in with his signature broad, toothy smile and the energy of a man half his age. The amusing thing was that when he opened up the floor to any question that we wanted to ask him, the first question someone asked right away was whether LBJ was responsible for JFK's assassination. Without batting an eyelid Carter said no and moved on.

Now I am finishing Jonathan Alter's comprehensive biography of Carter and it's a revelation. The book's main goal is to show that Jimmy Carter is a much more complex human being and president than what people believe, and it succeeds exceedingly well in this goal. Carter was a highly intelligent, immensely hard working and, most importantly, a good man in the wrong job. But even then, the things he accomplished were very substantial. Most important were his two signature foreign policy achievements - giving the Panama Canal back to Panama, and brokering a peace between Israel and Egypt which has lasted up to to the present day. The Camp David Accords in particular showed a commitment over thirteen days that is without precedent before or since; Carter simply refused to give up, even when Begin and Sadat were on the verge of going home multiple times. The other huge achievement - albeit one that now seems like a mixed blessing - was to normalize relations with China. He also campaigned for human rights at a time when it wasn't fashionable for American presidents to do so, abandoning American presidents' traditional cozy relationship with anti-communist dictatorships.

There are also other, more minor achievements that are now forgotten - appointing more liberal federal judges (even more than Trump), deregulating the airline industry, appointing more African-Americans to important government positions than many of his predecessors, restoring a sense of decency and common sense to the White House after the tumultuous years of Vietnam and lackluster years of Ford, being the first Democratic president to woo evangelicals (the last before they turned Republican) and popularizing alternative energy and climate change at a time when few people cared about it. There's no doubt that the binary classification of Carter as "failed president, great ex-president" is flawed and reality is more complex.

The book is also fabulous at exploring Carter's childhood and background in rural Georgia as a farmer and his education in nuclear engineering at Annapolis. Carter grew up as the son of a farmer and general store owner, Earl Carter, who competed with his son in daily tasks and sports and was a fair if harsh father. Carter's mother Lillian who lived to see her son became president was quite liberal for her time, and astonishingly joined the Peace Corps and went to India for a few months for public service in her sixties. Alter does not shirk from criticizing Carter's poor record on civil rights before he became president (at one point he was friendly with George Wallace). Carter was a product of his time and grew up in the segregated Deep South after all, but this does not excuse his reluctance to take a stand even in matters like school desegregation. Of course, the defining relationship that Carter has had is with his wife Rosalynn who he married when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen; they have been married for more than seventy-five years now. Rosalynn has been a commanding presence in his life, and he often sought advice from her along with his other advisors during the most crucial moments of his presidency.

Carter's main problem was that he was dour, practical and business-like and almost completely lacked the warmth, optimism and PR skills that are necessary for political leaders to win over not just minds but hearts. He was the strict father who wants to lecture his children about what's best for them. His grim fireside chats about consumption and self-indulgence, while sensible, did not go down well with the American people.

In addition, while he did a good job during his first two years, Carter was completely overtaken by global events during his second two, most notably the Iranian Revolution, Soviet aggression and the oil crisis that hiked up oil prices. The book does a good job showing that while Carter was not responsible for these events, he was as clueless in understanding the situation in Iran as anyone else.

There is an excellent account of the Iranian Hostage crisis in Alter's biography which includes many details that I did not know. It seems like a real tragedy since it was a comedy of errors in some sense, albeit one which the US had yoked itself with since installing the Shah of Iran in a coup in 1953 (there is an excellent account of how Mohammed Mosaddegh's democratic government was toppled in Stephen Kinzer's book "All the Shah's Men"). The hostage crisis was essentially triggered by the Shah being allowed into the US for medical treatment. He had fled from Iran after the Ayatollah had been reinstalled and flown in from exile in France.

The Shah's case was engineered by a lobby prominently led among others by Kissinger - the man's villainy continued unabated even after leaving the Nixon administration. He and his cabal greatly exaggerated the Shah's medical condition and forced Carter to admit him into the US on humanitarian grounds; he was in Mexico, and the Kissinger faction wrongly made the case that Mexican hospitals weren't equipped to diagnose and treat him. This was the last straw since it told the Iranians that the US was about to embark on another 1953-like adventure. This wasn't true, but at this point cooler heads weren't prevailing.

Also complicit in the disaster was Carter's hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, an early neoconservative. A dissenter was secretary of state Cyrus Vance who strenuously advised against letting the Shah in, having a good idea of how perilous the situation in Iran was. As it turned out, Carter was blindsided and ignorant of the internal situation in Iran and ended up letting the Shah in (before hurriedly getting him out again).

The irony was that the die had been cast by Carter's predecessors, especially Eisenhower and Nixon, and Carter himself had very little interest in adventurism abroad, but the Shah was America's burden to bear, and Carter's actions were conflated with previous ones by the Iranians. Once the hostages were taken Carter's hands were tied for months, his approval ratings plummeted and the way was paved for Reagan (and Ben Affleck and his team in 'Argo').

I always feel that the fractured relations between the US and Iran constitute one of the great international tragedies of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Both countries have a rich heritage and have so much to offer each other. If the US had not completely thrown in their lot with Saudi Arabia and Israel and instead been friends with Iran, we would have had a powerful ally against Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. As it happened, the current Iranian regime is certainly nothing to praise and funds terrorist groups like Hezbollah. But it's important to note that it was largely US actions in the 1950s that led to the present state of affairs.

In retrospect, it appears obvious how someone like Reagan who was just fundamentally better at being a people pleaser and projected sunny optimism could defeat Carter. Fortunately Carter's career was just beginning at the end of his presidency, and in the next three decades he did very significant human rights work, including eradicating guinea worm from Africa and working on Habitat for Humanity, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process and becoming a far more deserving recipient than most others who got the prize. Now 97, he still teaches Sunday School in Plains, GA. What we need today is the pragmatism and intelligence of Jimmy Carter and the optimism of Ronald Reagan.

A fantastic book, well worth its almost 800 pages, and likely the definitive biography of a remarkable man for many years to come.

Book Review: "The Jews of Spain", by Jane Gerber

Jane Gerber’s “The Jews of Spain” is a superb and comprehensive look at the history of the Sephardim - one of the two major branches of Jewry, the other being the Ashkenazim. The Sephardim originated in Spain and today occupy a place of high prominence. While the Ashkenazim are better known, about sixty percent of Israel’s population consists of the Sephardim.

Two main qualities mark the Sephardim. One is common to all Jews, which is the ability to persevere and thrive against all odds through centuries. The other is more unique and was the flourishing of their numbers under Muslim rule. Except for Germany in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th, Jews have not thrived anywhere else so well after they were driven out from the Roman Empire.

The book starts with the miserable fate of the Jews in Spain under the Visigoths; the Jews had fled there after being persecuted under the Roman Empire. It was in 711 AD when the Arabs under Tariq invaded Spain and defeated the Visigoths that their fortunes changed. This was largely because of the tolerant, creative and far-ranging Umayyad Caliphate that moved to Spain from Damascus, with Abd-Al-Rahman I founding its branch in Spain. The Umayyad Caliphate marked one of the highlights of the history of Islamic Civilization, making its home in Cordoba at first and then in places like Seville and Toledo. Not only did it allow Jews to practice their religion freely but it employed them in almost all important professions. Jews still did not have all the same rights as Muslims, but they could trade, study medicine and the arts and sciences, compose poetry and music and generally take part in the political life of Islamic Spain to the fullest history. There were many notables among Jewish intellectuals, with perhaps the peak reached by Hasdai Ibn Shaprut who became vizier and foreign minister.

Politically, the most useful purpose the Jews of Spain served was to mediate between the Byzantine and Christian kingdoms and Muslim lands. In some sense, because they were equally loved and hated by both religions, the Jews could do this balancing act well as neutrals. The Jews of Spain assimilated Arabic and moved smoothly between Arabic and Hebrew, often translating texts between the two. Even more valuably, they translated important Greek texts on science and medicine into Arabic; later these Arabic texts were translated into Latin by Christian scholars during the translation movement of the 10th and 11th centuries. The Jews of Spain thus served as a critical conduit between the Muslim and Christian worlds, diplomatically trading and interacting with each world while performing valuable functions for both. Jews became great and far flung traders, braving pirates and trading precious pearls, textiles, spices and other goods. The Radhanites were a particularly prominent group of Jewish merchants who went back and forth between Spain and as far as India and China. Some of these Jews even made their homes in India and China, becoming for instance the Bene Israelites of Maharashtra in India.

This useful and productive existence came to an end with the Reconquista and the Christian invasions of Spain. After a period of more repressive and less tolerant Islamic regimes that included the Almoravids and the Almohads, the Jews started seeing a period of decline. After this brief resurgence, the Christians decisively defeated the Muslims in the Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Within the next few decades both Cordoba and Seville fell to the Christians, and only the Islamic Kingdom of Granada remained. When Granada fell to the Christians, the fate of Spain's Jews was sealed.

The next two hundred years marked a period of severe decline for the Jews of Spain. Many started converting under Christian pressure. But the real blow came when Isabella and Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile unified the country. At first somewhat tolerant of the Jews, in 1478 they approved the dreaded Spanish Inquisition that started hauling converted Jews before feared magistrates like Torquemada, torturing and extracting false confessions from then. Finally the watershed came in 1492 when Isabella and Ferdinand issued the famous edict of expulsion that gave the 300,000 Jews of Spain the stark choice between converting or fleeing. The foremost intellectual among those expelled was the scholar Maimonides whose Mishneh Torah and Guide to the Perplexed remain, even today, touchstones of Judaism. Maimonides found refuge in Egypat. But many others left Spain and went to Portugal, where the Portuguese Inquisition was even worse. So pernicious were its methods that many Jews became marranos - underground Jews who quietly practiced their religion so cryptically that nobody knew. These crypto-Jews evolved a form of their religion that would have been almost incomprehensible to their ancestors. From these marranos arose some of the most prominent Jews of later years, including Spinoza.

When Portugal also denied the Jews sanctuary they dispersed to other parts of Europe and the Middle East. By this time the plight of Jews in Europe had become even more dire. The Black Death of 1347 had created an atmosphere of acute paranoia in which Jews were accused of perpetuating the blood libel and poisoning wells. Even the Catholic Pope cautioned against such unfounded rumors, but it did not stop violent pogroms erupting in which Jews were massacred wholesale and burnt alive. England had already banned the Jews a long time ago, and apart from scattered pockets in France like Bayonne, they could find no respite. It was at this point that the Jews saw their second resurgence in the Ottoman Empire - in Turkey.

The remarkable story of the Turkish Jews is a story unto itself, but in Istanbul under the Ottoman Emperors Suleiman, Bayezid and others, the Jews achieved a prominence that they had only achieved under the Umayyad Caliphate. Interestingly, it was here that they met the Ashkenazim who had come from Europe, and for a long time the much more affluent and educated Sephardim looked down upon their Ashkenazim co-religionists as uncouth and poor. Most importantly, and as a testament to the freedom they enjoyed, they were allowed to establish their own printing presses in the 15th and 16th centuries. The printing presses allowed them to keep not just their religion but many of their religious books alive. Once again they served as mediators with Christians in Europe. One of the most remarkable among these was the Portuguese marrano Dona Gracia, a self-taught Jewish woman who became a wealthy Jewish trader after fleeing from Portugal, led an underground pipeline for Portuguese Jews who were being targeted by the Inquisition and successfully organized a boycott of an Italian port after Jews there had been targeted by the papacy.

Unfortunately once the Ottoman Empire weakened in the 17th century and the Christian Kingdoms imposed a series of harsh punitive measures on the Jews there, they had no choice but to flee. The last part of the book describes this flight. The Jews of Turkey went in two different directions. Some went to Southeastern Europe, Greece and the Balkans. The others went to the Netherlands which in the 17th century was the most progressive country in Europe. Here the Jews found plenty of opportunities for trading and banking. One of the most important Jews here was Spinoza who was ironically excommunicated by his own people at the age of twenty-four and had to spend the rest of his life as a lens-maker to support himself. Nevertheless, he became the father of the Jewish Enlightenment and inspired many other philosophers in Europe.

From the Netherlands some Jews made it to South America, especially Brazil. But once Brazil was threatened by Portugal, a small group of Jews started out on a journey in 1654 to a hitherto unexplored country where they would establish the most important Jewish community of modern times - the nascent United States. Over the next one hundred years, Jews became successful traders and professionals in a secular republic, fought in the American Revolution and established thriving communities in many states, even making it as far as the Ohio Valley. The United States was to see two other great waves of European Jewry, one in the mid 19th century and the other in the early 20th century. They were welcomed with memorable words written on the statue of liberty by Emma Lazarus, also a Jew. But the Sephardim got here first, way back in 1654.

Sadly, the plight of the other wave of Ottoman Jewry was much worse. Greece was taken over by the Nazis and tens of thousands of Greek and Macedonian Jews were sent to the death camps. Once the war ended, scattered bands of Jews from all over Europe, the Middle East and survivors from the concentration camps started making their way back, looking for family and friends. Shattered to find most of these missing, they made their way to the only place that would give them spiritual solace - Israel. Today the majority of Israeli Jews are Sephardim.

The Sephardim retained a love for their ancestral country that was striking. After the Bosnian war in the 1990s, many petitioned the King of Spain to give them refuge back into a country which their ancestors had left hundreds of years ago. The ties that bound them to Spain were deep and invisible. Today when the Middle East is a cauldron of ethic and religious conflict between Israel and the Arab Nations, it’s worth remembering that historically, Jews had been treated much better by Muslim kings than by Christian ones. Their history in Spain and in the Ottoman Empire is testament to their doggedness, the resurgent creativity and their sponge-like capacity to absorb critical elements of the surrounding culture while staying true to their roots. It’s a glorious and moving history, and Jane Gerber tells it well.

Book Review: "The Pity Of It All: A Protrait of the German-Jewish Epoch", 1743-1933, by Amos Elon

Amos Elon’s ‘The Pity of It Al’ is a poignant and beautiful history of German Jews from 1743-1933. Why 1743? Because in 1740, Frederick of Prussia liberalized the state and allowed freedom of worship. The freedom did not extend to Jews who still had no political or civil rights, but it did make it easier for them to live in Prussia than in the other thirty-six states of what later came to be called Germany.

The book begins with the story of the first prominent modern German-Jewish intellectual, the fourteen-year-old, barefooted Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin through a gate reserved for “Jews and cattle”. Mendelssohn was the first Jew to start an enduring tradition that was to both signal the high watermark of European Jewry and their eventual destruction. This was the almost vehement efforts of Jews to assimilate, to convert to Christianity, to adopt to German traditions and ways, to become bigger German patriots than most non-Jewish Germans while retaining their culture and identity. In fact the entire history of German Jewry is one of striking a tortuous balance between assimilating into the parent culture and preserving their religion and identity. Mendelssohn became the first great Jewish German scholar, translating Talmud into Hebrew and having an unsurpassed command of both German and Jewish philosophy, culture and history. While initially he grew up steeped only in German culture, a chance encountered with a Protestant theologian who exhorted him to convert. This encounter convinced Mendelssohn that he should be more proud of his Jewish roots, but at the same time seek to make himself part and parcel of German society. Mendelssohn’s lessons spread far and wide, not least to his grandson, the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn who used to go to Goethe’s house to play music for him.

Generally speaking, the history of German Jews tracks well with political upheavals. After Prussia became a relatively liberal state and, goaded by Mendelssohn, many Jews openly declared their Judaism while forging alliances with German intellectuals and princes, their condition improved relative to the past few centuries. A particularly notable example cited by Elon is the string of intellectual salons rivaling their counterparts in Paris that were started in the Berlin by Jewish women like Rachel Varnhagen which drew Goethe, the Humboldt brothers and other cream of German intellectual society. The flowering of German Jews as well-dot-do intellectuals and respectable members of the elite starkly contrasted with their centuries-old image in the rest of Europe as impoverished caftan-wearers, killers of Christ and perpetuators of the blood libel. Jews had been barred from almost all professions except medicine, and it was in Prussia that they could first enter other professions.

When Napoleon invaded Prussia, his revolutionary code of civil and political rights afforded the German Jews freedom that they had not known for centuries. The Edict of 1812 freed the Jews. They came out of the ghettoes, especially in places like Frankfurt, and the Jewish intelligentsia thrived. Perhaps foremost among them was the poet Heinrich Heine whose astute, poignant, tortured and incredibly prescient poetry, prose and writings were a kaleidoscope of the sentiments and condition of his fellow Jews. Heine reluctantly converted but was almost tortured by his torn identity. The Edict of 1812 met with a tide of rising German nationalism from the bottom, and Jews quickly started reverting back to their second-class status. Heine, along with Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz who started one of the first scientific societies in Germany, had trouble finding academic jobs. The Hep! Hep! riots that started in Wurzburg and spread throughout Germany were emblematic of the backlash. Significantly, and again in potent portend, this was the first time that German intellectuals took part in the violent anti-Semtism; later when the Nazis took over, the legal basis of their murderous anti-Semtism was undergirded by intellectuals, and it was intellectuals who drew up the Final Solution in 1942 at the Wannsee conference. Jews in record numbers started to convert to escape discrimination.

For the next few decades, straddling this delicate and difficult balance between adopting two identities was to become a hallmark of the Jewish condition in Germany, although scores also converted without any compunction. Writing from Paris in 1834, Heine issued a warning:

“A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French revolution will seem like a harmless idol. Christianity restrained the martial ardor of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered savagery will rise again. The mad fury of the berserk of which Nordic Gods sing and speak. The old stony gods will rise from the rubble and rub the thousand year old dust from their eyes. Thor with the giant hammer will come forth and smash the granite domes.”

Extraordinarily prescient words, especially considering the Nordic reference.

The next upheaval came with the European liberal revolution of 1848. As is well known, this revolution overthrew monarchies - temporarily - throughout Europe. For the first time, Germany’s Jews could agitate not just for civil but political rights. A record number of Jews were appointed to the Prussian parliament by Frederick William IV. Unfortunately even this revolution was not to last. Frederick William reneged on his promise, many Jews were either ejected from parliament or made impotent and another rising tide of nationalism engulfed Germany. The next few decades, while not as bad the ones before, sought to roll back the strides that had been made.

It’s in this context that the rise of Bismarck is fascinating. Bismarck dodges many stereotypes. He was the emblem of Prussian militarism and autocracy, the man who united Germany, but also the liberal who kickstarted the German welfare state, pioneering social security and health insurance. When he declared war on France in 1870, patriotic Jews not only took part in the war but funded it. “Bismarck’s Jews” procured the money, helped Bismarck draw up the terms of French capitulation and occupation at Sedan. Among these, Ludwig Bamberger and Abraham Bleichroder were the most prominent - Bleichroder even used stones from Versailles to build a large mansion in Germany. While praising these Jews for their contributions to the war effort, Bismarck stopped short of saying that they should be awarded full rights as citizens of Germany. Nevertheless, in 1871, Bismarck passed an edict that banned discrimination on the basis of religion in all civil and political functions. It seemed that the long-sought goal of complete emancipation was finally in sight for Germany’s Jews.

But even then, as patriotic Jews signed up for the Franco-Prussian War, a dissenting note was struck by another Jew. Leopold Sonnemann was the publisher of a leading Frankfurt newspaper. In editorial after editorial, he issued stark warnings both to Jews and gentiles of the rising militarism and rigid social order in Prussia that was taking over all of Germany. He warned Jews that ironically, their patriotism may cost them more than they bargained for. Sonnemann was another prescient Jew who saw what his community’s strenuous efforts to conform were costing them. Sonnemann’s predictions were confirmed almost right away when a recession hit Germany in 1873 that was among the worst of the previous hundred years. Immediately, as if on cue, anger turned toward the wealthy Jews who had apparently grown fat and rich during the war while their fellow citizens grew impoverished. In 1879, a prominent Protestant clergyman named Adolf Stocker started railing against the Jews, calling them a “poison in German blood”, echoing paranoia that was leveraged to devastating effect by another Adolf a half century later. The Kaiser and Bismarck both disapproved of Stocker’s virulent anti-Semitic diatribes, but thought that it perhaps might make the Jews more “modest”. To say that this was unfair retaliation against a patriotic group who had bankrolled and helped the war efforts significantly would be an understatement.

Even as Bismarck was propagating religious freedom in Germany, anti-Semitic continued to grow elsewhere. Interestingly, in France where Jews had a much better time after Napoleon, Arthur Gobineau published a book arguing for Nordic superiority. About the same time, the fascinating but deadly English-German Houston Chamberlain, son-in-law of Wagner, published the massive “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” in 1899 that became a kind of Bible for the 20th century pan-German Völkisch movement that fused nationalism with racialism. Both Gobineau and Chamberlain were to serve as major ‘philosophers’ for Hitler and the Nazis. In France, the Dreyfus affair had already exposed how fragile the situation of French Jews was.

As sentiments against the Jews grew again, German Jews again became disillusioned with conversion and conformity. The Kabbalah movement and other mysticism-based theologies started to be propounded by the likes of Martin Buber. Rather than keep on bending over backward to please an ungrateful nation, some sought other means of reform and escape. Foremost among these was the centuries old dream of returning to the promised land. Theodor Herz picked up the mantle of Zionism and started trying to convince Jews to migrate to Palestine. Ironically, the main target of his pleas was the Kaiser. Herzl wanted the Kaiser to fund and officially approve Jewish migration to Palestine. Not only would that reduce the Jewish population in Germany and perhaps ease the pressure on gentiles, but in doing so, the Kaiser would be seen as a great benefactor and liberator. In retrospect Herzl’s efforts have a hint of pity among them, but at that time it made sense. The ironic fact is that very few German Jews signed on to Herzl’s efforts to emigrate because they felt at home in Germany. This paradox was to prove to be the German Jews’ most tragic quality. Where Herzl sought emigration, others like Freud and Marx (who had been baptized as a child) sought secular idols like psychoanalysis and communism. This would have been a fascinating theme in itself, and I wish Elon had explored it in more detail.

As the new century approached and another Great War loomed, the themes of 1870 would be repeated. The ‘Kaiserjuden’ or Kaiser’s Jews, most prominently Walter Rathenau, would bankroll and help Germany’s war with England and France. Many Jews again signed up or patriotic duty. Without Rathenau, who was in charge of logistics and supplies, German would likely have lost the war within a year or two. Yet once again, the strenuous efforts of these patriotic Jews were forgotten. A young Austrian corporal who had been blinded by gas took it upon himself to proselytize the “stab in the back” theory, the unfounded belief that it was the Jews who secretly orchestrated an underhanded deal that betrayed the army and cost Germany the war. The truth of course was the opposite, but it’s important to note that Hitler did not invent the myth of the Jewish betrayal. He only masterfully exploited it.

The tragic post-World War 1 history of Germany is well known. The short-lived republics of 1919 were followed by mayhem, chaos and assasinations. The Jews Kurt Eisner in Bavaria and Walter Rathenau were assasinated. By that time there was one discipline in which Jews had become preeminent - science. Fritz Heber had made a Faustian bargain when he developed poison gas for Germany. Einstein had put the finishing touches on his general theory of relativity by the end of the war and had already become the target of anti-Semitism. Others like Max Born and James Franck were to make revolutionary contributions to science in the turmoil of the 1920s.

Once the Great Depression hit Germany in 1929 the fate of Germany’s Jews was effectively sealed. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, a group of leading Jewish intellectuals orchestrated a massive but, in retrospect, pitiful attempt to catalog the achievements of German Jews. The catalog included important contributions by artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, playwrights and politicians in an attempt to convince the Nazis of the foundational contributions that German Jews had made to the fatherland. But it all came to nothing. Intellectuals like Einstein soon dispersed. The first concentration camp at Dachau went up in 1936. By 1938 and Kristallnacht, it was all over. The book ends with Hannah Arendt, protege of Martin Heidegger who became a committed Nazi, fleeing Berlin in the opposite direction from which Moses Mendelssohn had entered the city two hundred years earlier. To no other nation had Jews made more enduring contributions and tried so hard to fit in. No other nation punished them so severely.

Book Review: "Against the Grain", by James Scott

James Scott's important and utterly fascinating book questions what we can call the "Whig view" of history, which goes something like this: At the beginning we we were all "savages". We then progressed to becoming hunter gatherers, then at some point we discovered agriculture and domesticated animals. This was a huge deal because it allowed us to became sedentary. Sedentism then became the turning point in the history of civilization because it led to cities, taxation, monarchies, social hierarchies, families, religion, science and the whole shebang of civilizational wherewithal that we take for granted.

Scott tells us that not only is this idea of progress far from being as certain, linear or logical as it sounds, but it's also not as much of a winning strategy as we think. In a nutshell, his basic thesis is that the transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentism was messy and mixed, with many societies sporadically existing in one or the other system. The transition from agriculture to city-states was even less certain and obvious, with agriculture emerging about 10,000 years ago and the first modern city-state of Uruk I in Mesopotamia emerging almost seven thousand years later, around 3000 BC. Until then people existed in temporary and fluctuating states of agriculture and hunter-gatherer existence.

Perhaps an even bigger message in the book is regarding the very nature of history which basically tells us the stories it preserves. Cities form the core of history because they leave traces like large monuments, but life outside cities which can be far more extensive - as it was until very recently - leaves no traces and is discounted in our narratives. The fact is that even after agriculture and the first city-states came along, cities were often temporary and fragmentary and often dispersed because of disease, famine, war, taxation or oppressive rulers, floods and droughts and reformed, much like an anthill. Then the population would live off the land as hunter-gatherers for some time and form city-like complexes again when the time was ripe. As part of his evidence that cities were by no means obvious, Scott makes the argument that the first civilizations formed around waterways and not in the plans and mountains. These civilizations were mixed models of hunter-gatherer and city-like existence at best.

Once we assume that cities were by no means enduring or certain, we can start questioning the wisdom of other narratives associated with them. For instance take the all-important nature of grains (wheat, barley, corn and rice) being the major staples of the world, then as now. Scott makes the brilliant argument that unlike other crops like potatoes and legumes, grains became the staple of city-dwellers not because they were objectively better in terms of nutrition but because they could be easily taxed because they were above-ground, ripened all at once and could be counted, assessed and carted away. But grains often consigned city residents to a monoculture, unlike hunting and gathering which could take advantage of a variety of food sources on land, water and brush.

The same arguments apply to domestication of animals. As Jared Diamond showed in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel", most of our modern diseases and pandemics can be traced back to diseases of animal or zoonotic origins, so domestication was hardly the wholly blissful invention we assume. With domesticated animals also came rats, sparrows, crows and mice which are called commensals, These brought other sources of destruction and disease. Finally, taxation which was a major feature of cities and which contributed massively to critical developments like slavery and writing could become very oppressive.

All this meant that cities were hardly the nuclei of civilization progress that we assume them to be. Not surprisingly, especially in a hybrid model, city dwellers often fled the unsanitary, tax-heavy, monoculture-rich environment of cities to a more flexible and open hunter-gatherer environment. In fact the vast majority of the population lived outside cities until very recently. Now, no means is Scott making the argument here, popular among "back to nature" paleo-enthusiasts, that hunting and gathering was fundamentally a better existence. He is saying that hunting and gathering continued to have advantages that made, until very recently, a permanent move to cities far from desirable, let alone inevitable. Unfortunately because cities leave archeological traces, we fall into the mistaken assumption that the history of civilization is the history of city-states.

In the last part of the book, Scott tackles the topic of "barbarians" versus city dwellers. Based on the ensuing discussion, it should come as no surprise that Scott is very cynical about the very word as invented by the Greeks and applied generously by the Romans. Clearly compared to the Roman and Greek city states, the barbarian countryside was often thriving and more desirable to live in. More importantly, the very distinction between barbarians and "civilized" folks is fluid and fuzzy - as is now well-known in the case of Rome, Romans could be barbarians, and barbarians could be Romans citizens (popularized recently in the Netflix show "Barbarians"). The fact is that Romans often willingly became "barbarians" because of the oppressive nature of the city-state.

Scott's book is one of the most important books I have read in years; it may well be one of the most important books I will ever read. The best thing about it is that it presents history the way it was, as a series of incidental, messy events whose end outcome was by no means certain. Whatever order we decide to impose on history is of our own making.

A Foray into Jewish History and Judaism

I have always found the similarities between Hinduism and Judaism (and between Hindu Brahmins in particular and Jews) very striking. In order of increasing importance:

1. Both religions are very old, extending back unbroken between 2500 and 3000 years with equally old holy books and rituals.

2. Both religions place a premium on rituals and laws like dietary restrictions etc.

3. Hindus and Jews have both endured for a very long time in spite of repeated persecution, exile, oppression etc. although this is far more true for Jews than Hindus. Of course, the ancestors of Brahmins have the burden of caste while Jews have no such thing, but both Hindus and Jews have been persecuted for centuries by Muslims and Christians. At the same time, people of both faiths have also lived in harmony and productive intercourse with these other faiths for almost as long.

4. Both religions place a premium on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and learning. Even today, higher education is a priority in Jewish and Hindu families. As a corollary, both religions also place a premium on fierce and incessant argumentation and are often made fun of for this reason.

5. Both religions are unusually pluralistic, secular and open to a variety of interpretations and lifestyles without losing the core of their faith. You can be a secular Jew or an observant one, a zealous supporter or harsh critic of Israel, a Jew who eats pork and still calls himself a Jew. You can even be a Godless Jewish atheist (as Freud called himself). Most importantly, as is prevalent especially in the United States, you can be a “cultural Jew” who enjoys the customs not because of deep faith but because it fosters a sense of community and tradition. Similarly, you can be a highly observant Hindu, a flaming Hindu nationalist, an atheist Hindu who was raised in the tradition but who is now a “cultural Hindu” (like myself), a Hindu who commits all kinds of blasphemies like eating steak and a Hindu who believes that Hinduism can encompass all other faiths and beliefs.

I think that it’s this highly pluralistic and flexible belief and tradition system that has made both Judaism and Hinduism what Nassim Taleb calls “anti-fragile”, not just resilient but being able to be actively energized in the face of bad events. Not surprisingly, Judaism has always been a minor but constant interest of mine, and there is no single group of people I admire more. The interest has always manifested itself previously in my study of Jewish scientists like Einstein, Bethe, von Neumann, Chargaff and Ulam, many of whom fled persecution and founded great schools of science and learning. More broadly though, although I am familiar with the general history, I am planning to do a deeper dive into Jewish history this year. Here is a list of books that I have either read (*), am reading ($) or planning to read (+). I would be interested in recommendations.

1. Paul Johnson’s “The History of the Jews”. (*)

2. Simon Schama’s “The Story of the Jews”. (*)

3. Jane Gerber’s “The Jews of Spain”. ($)

4. Nathan Katz’s “The Jews of India”. (*)

5. Amos Elon’s “The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish experience, 1743-1933”. ($)

6. Norman Lebrecht’s “Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World: 1847-1947”. ($)

7. Erwin Chargaff’s “Heraclitean Fire”. (*)

8. Stanislaw Ulam’s “Adventures of a Mathematician”. (*)

9. Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday”. (*)

10. Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Periodic Table”. (*)

11. Robert Wistrich’s “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad”. (*)

12. Jonathan Kaufman’s “The Last Kings of Shanghai”. (This seems quite wild) (+)

13. Istvan Hargittai’s “The Martians of Science”. (*)

14. Bari Weiss’s “How to Fight Anti-Semitism”. (+)

15. Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land”. (+)

16. Norman Cohn’s “Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (*)

17. Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made“ (+)

18. Edward Kritzler’s “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean” (another book that sounds wild) (+)

19. Alfred Kolatch’s “The Jewish Book of Why” (+)

20. Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s “Jerusalem” ($)

Book review: The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson

When the British army of regulars captured American troops during the Battle of New York, they contemptuously noted how they were surprised to see so many ordinary people among them – tanners, brewers, farmers, metal workers, carpenters and the like. That observation in one sense summed up the difference between the British and American causes: a ragtag group of ordinary citizens with little battle experience pitted against a professional, experienced and disciplined army belonging to a nation that then possessed the biggest empire since the Roman Empire. The latter were fighting for imperial power, the former for conducting an experiment in individual rights and freedom. The former improbably won.

Rick Atkinson shows us how in this densely-packed, rousing military history of the first two years of the Revolutionary War. The Americans kept on foiling the British through a combination of brilliant tactical retreats, dogged determination, improvisation and faith in providence. His is primarily a military history that covers the opening salvo in Lexington and Concord to the engagements in Princeton and Trenton and Washington's legendary crossing of the frozen Delaware. However, there is enough observational detail on the social and political aspects of the conflict and the sometimes larger than life personalities involved to make it a broader history. The account could be supplemented with other political histories such as ones by Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn and Joseph Ellis to provide a fuller view of the politics and the personalities.

Atkinson’s greatest strength is to bring an incredible wealth of detail to the narrative and pepper it with primary quotes from not just generals and soldiers but from ordinary men and women. His other big strength is logistical information. No detail seems to escape his eye; the number and tonnage of food and clothing provisions and shipping, sundry details of types of weapons, ships, beasts of burden and ammunition, the kinds of diseases riddling the camps and the medieval medicine used to treat them (some of them positively so - "oil of whelps" was a grotesque substance concocted from white wine, earthworms and the flesh of dogs boiled alive), ditties and plays that were being performed by the soldiers ("Clinton, Burgoyne, Howe, Bow, wow, wow"), the constantly-changing weather, the political machinations in Whitehall and the Continental Congress…the list goes on and on. Sometimes the overwhelming detail can be distracting – for instance do we need to know the exact number of blankets and weight of salt pork supplied during the eve of a particular battle? – but overall the dense statistics and detail have the effect of immersing the reader in the narrative.

The major battles – Lexington and Bunker Hill, Long Island and Manhattan, Quebec and Ticonderoga, Charleston and Norfolk, Princeton and Trenton – are dissected with fine detail and rousing descriptions of men, material, the thrust and parry at the front and the desperation, disappointments, retreats and triumphs that often marked the field of battle. The writing can occasionally be almost hallucinatory: "Revere swung into the saddle and took off at a canter across Charlestown Neck, hooves striking sparks, rider and steed merged into a single elegant creature, bound for glory". The accounts of the almost unbelievably desperate and excruciating winter fighting and retreat in Canada are probably the highlights of the military narratives. Lesser-known conflicts in Virginia and South Carolina in which the British were squarely routed also get ample space. Particularly interesting is the improbable and self-serving slave uprising drummed up by Lord Dunmore, Virginia's governor, and the far-reaching fears that it inspired in the Southern Colonies. Epic quotes that have become part of American history are seen in a more circumspect light; for instance, it’s not clear who said “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” during Bunker Hill, and instead of the famous “The British are coming” cry that is attributed to Paul Revere, it’s more likely that he said “The regulars are coming.” Also, the British army might have been experienced, but they too were constantly impacted by shortage of food and material, and this shortage was a major factor in many of their decisions, including the retreat from Boston. Brittania might have ruled the waves, but she wasn’t always properly nourished.

The one lesson that is constantly driven home is how events that seem providential and epic now were so uncertain and riddled with improvisation and desperation when they happened; in that sense hindsight is always convenient. Atkinson makes us aware of the sheer miserable conditions the soldiers and generals lived in; the threadbare clothing which provided scant protection against the cold, the horrific smallpox, dysentery and other diseases which swept entire battle companies off the face of the planet without warning and the problems constantly posed by loyalists and deserters to American patriots. There were many opportunities for men to turn on one another, and yet we also see both friends and enemies being surprisingly humane toward each other. In many ways, it is Atkinson’s ability to provide insights across a wide cross-section of society, to make the reader feel the pain and uncertainty faced by ordinary men and women, that contribute to the uniqueness of his writing.

Atkinson paints a sympathetic and sometimes heroic portrait of both British politicians and military leaders, but he also makes it clear how clueless, bumbling and misguided they were when it came to understanding the fundamental DNA of the colonies, their frontier spirit, their Enlightenment thinking and their very different perception of their relationship with Britain. A excellent complement to Atkinson’s book for understanding British political miscalculations leading up to the war would be Nick Bunker’s “An Empire on the Edge”. While primarily not a study of personality, Atkinson’s portraits of American commanders George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Henry Knox, Charles Lee, Israel Putnam and British commanders William and Richard Howe, George Clinton, Guy Carleton and others are crisp and vivid. Many of these commanders led their men and accomplished remarkable feats through cold and disease, in the wilderness and on the high seas; others like American John Sullivan in Canada and Briton George Clinton in Charleston could be remarkably naive and clueless in judging enemy strength and resolve. Atkinson also dispels some common beliefs; for instance, while the rank and file were indeed generally inexperienced, there were plenty of more senior officers including Washington who had gained good fighting experience in the ten-year-old French and Indian War. As a general, Washington’s genius was to know when to retreat, to make the enemy fight a battle of attrition, to inspire and scold when necessary, and somehow to keep this ragtag group fighting men and their logistical support together, emerging as a great leader in the process. He was also adept at carefully maneuvering the levers of Congress and to keep driving home the great need for ammunition, weapons and ordinary provision through a mixture of cajoling and appeals to men’s better angels.

For anyone wanting a detailed and definitive military history of the Revolutionary War, Atkinson’s book is highly recommended. It gives an excellent account of the military details of the “glorious cause” and it paints a convincing account of the sheer improbability and capriciousness of its success.

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Book review: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

While a slightly academic and challenging read, this book (first published in 1967 and then reprinted twice) is a seminal contribution to revolutionary and pre-revolutionary history and a must-read, not just for understanding the American Revolution but also some of the most important issues we grapple with now. The book is entirely based on pamphlets - essentially the Twitter of their times, but far more intelligent - that were written by people across all social strata in response to events in the 1750s and 1760s. These pamphlets were remarkably flexible, spanned anywhere between ten and seventy pages, and contained a wide variety of writing, from scurrilous, sarcastic, bawdy polemics ("wretched harpies" was a favorite derogatory term - I have long since thought of making a list of choice insults of those times) to calls for populist revolution to reasoned, highly erudite writings. More than any other written form of the era, they contain a microcosm of the basic thinking that led to the revolution.

Perhaps more than any other book I have come across, Bailyn's book helped me understand how far back the roots of the revolution went, how entrenched in English political philosophy and especially libertarian philosophy they were, how simplistic and incomplete the textbook version of “no taxation without representation” is, and how many of the central issues of both 1776 and 2019 are rooted in the core of Americans’ view of their own identity and geography going back all the way to the settlers.

A few key takeaways:

1. It's easy to underestimate the outsized impact that geography had on the colonists' thinking. Decentralized control was almost de rigueur in the vast wildernesses bordering Virginia or Massachusetts, so the idea of central control - both by Parliament in the 1760s *and* by a federal government in 1787 - was deeply unpalatable to many people. The abhorrence toward virtual representation in Parliament was only a logical consequence. You gain a much better understanding of Americans' fondness for states' rights and their fears of federal power by understanding this background.

This decentralized thinking also led quite naturally to freedom of religion - Bailyn cites the prominent struggles by baptists in western Massachusetts against taxation by the Congregationalists as an example - and more haltingly and less successfully, for calls to abolish slavery which although they did not make their way into the Constitution, did lead individual states to abolish the institution and to stop the slave trade.

2. Almost the entire debate about independence was about where the seat of sovereignty lay. For the English it lay in Parliament, but the colonists argued that while Parliament did have some central rights (there were some strenuous attempts to distinguish between "external" taxation that Parliament could impose and "internal" taxation that was the people's right - this argument was rapidly dropped), the people had "natural" rights that were outside all authority including parliament's.

The colonists were inspired in this thinking by Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Hume and this foundation is well known, but Bailyn makes a convincing case that they were inspired even more by the early 18th century English libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and their predecessors, who in writings like the famous "Cato's Letters" argued against standing armies, lack of due process and absolute and arbitrary power. Some of these arguments went back to Charles I and the English revolution of the 1640s, so many of the leaders of the revolution had assimilated them way before 1776; Pennsylvania and New York even had written documents outlining some of the key provisions in the Bill of Rights as early as 1677. By the time the Stamp and Townshend Acts were imposed in the 1760s, taxation (which was a relatively minor grievance anyway) was only the last straw on the camel's back.

The biggest strength of the book is that it beautifully illustrates how thinking about decentralized control, natural rights and English libertarian philosophy was a common thread tying together so many disparate themes - independence, taxation and representation, abolitionism, religious freedom, geographic expansion, and finally, the great debate about the Constitution. The volume really reveals the core set of philosophies on which the country is founded better than any other that I have read. A groundbreaking contribution.