miscellaneous factZ

7/10. Well written and fascinating, particularly in its clear demonstration of the way the French just ‘gave up’ (both generally in the inter-war period and in 1940 itself). I would have preferred more analytical clarity regarding exactly when things went wrong and why — at some moments Horne seems to be suggesting that a sufficiently active response by the French in the first few days (between the 12th and the 14th of May) might have made a decisive difference in reversing the tide, at others that the Germans superiority in weapons, tactics and men (quality, not necessarily quantity) meant that France was doomed from the start. The relative success of the few British salleys against the Germans make me incline more towards the former possibility. I also think this view may be warranted by the concerns evinced so frequently by those within the German General Staff (and Hitler himself) about the vulnerability of their flanks, as well as the huge convoys through the Ardennes, in the first few decisive days of the battle. If this is the case, it shows that what is today considered one of the greatest and most brilliant military victories of all time might well have ended up as another failed Schlieffen plan.

6/10. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 by Richard Evans

This book promises much but ultimately rather disappoints, largely because of its tendency to lose focus, sprawling into this of that side-avenue. Partly this must be due to a lack of clarity as to what the book is about — an impression strongly reinforced by the book’s afterword which does much to illuminate the intentions and the author.

Is this a narrative history? An analytic investigation of the of public health provision, focusing especially on the 1892 epidemic? A wide-ranging overview of Hamburg society and the mentality of its dominant classes, a marxist-influenced study of class tension and conflict or …? The author does not seem to be sure. The result is rather a mish-mash.

At some points we seem to be investigating the political and social reasons for Hamburg’s poor public health outcomes, in particular the constant fighting between the different ‘fractions of capital’ (in particular the merchant/lawyer senators and the property-owners) over the provision of public goods, at others having a detailed description of working class living conditions, and at another a history of medical approaches to cholera and other diseases in the 19th century, and at another describing in detail how the ‘dominant’ classes used charitable support both in general, and after the 1892 epidemic, to exercise social and moral ‘control’.

Of course, it is possible these different approaches and angles could have been woven together to produce a single rich and compelling whole. But this is not so. To take the main focus of the book — which I take to be the Cholera epidemic of 1892 together with its causes and outcomes. By the time I had finished the more than 700 pages I was still unsure as to what, in Professor Evan’s view, were the main reasons for Hamburg’s terrible performance in comparison with other German (or European) cities. To pick just a few of the possible ones:

1. The failure to develop sand-filtration for the public water supply. Was this in turn due to:
   • The form of the Citizens’ Assembly, in particular the ability of the property owners to block improvements that might result in reductions in their profits.
   • Early investment in a new water system which then made it relatively more costly to upgrade later (Hamburg was one of the first cities in Germany to develop an external resevoir).
   • Ideological opposition (see next items)
2. The ideological commitment of Hamburg’s ruling groups to ‘Trade’ and ‘Laissez Faire’
   • Reinforced, perhaps, by direct self-interest in the case of ship-owners and others for whom quarantine meant serious disturbance to their work or enterprise
3. The inefficient governance structures (in particular the operation and make-up of the Senate and Burgomaster)
   • Hamburg’s governance compared particularly poorly with the more efficient, though also more, authoritarian action of the Imperial government (particularly that of the Imperial Health Office and Koch).
4. Continuing support in medical circles (and in administrative positions) for ‘miasmatist’ rather than ‘contagionist’ theories of disease (especially in relation to Cholera)
5. The inadequate living conditions of the poor especially in the ‘Alley Quarters’.
6. Incorrect medical treatment either due to lack of medical knowledge or incompetence.
7. The (in)ability of different socio-economic groups to follow the medical instructions provided — whether because of wealth (e.g. ‘rich’: able to have their servant boil all their water, ‘poor’: unable to resist the fruit which is suddenly cheaply available because normally denied it), literacy (can one read the instructions distributed), respect for ‘authority’, etc.

One would not expect to have a single explanation put forward but it would be useful to have some indication of which of these items were the more important, particularly where different reasons are substitutes not complements. For example, at several points Evans appears to indicate that the water-supply was the single biggest determinant of death by far (he cites a particularly illuminating comparison of a set of apartments that drew its water from two different sources). But if this is so then almost all of the focus should be on the water-supply question and why this public good was not present in Hamburg when it was elsewhere. No doubt, in answering this, one will be lead onto many of the other items as secondary causes but it an important step will have been made in stratifying, and thereby clarifying, the analysis. Furthermore, from this perspective an explicit comparative analysis with other localities becomes essential. While Evans does perform this to some extent, it is largely in terms of the behaviour of the localities in 1892 (e.g. re. imposition of quarantine) rather than the more important investigation of why those localities had sand filtration while Hamburg did not — in particular why had they found the political will to provide this important public good while Hamburg had not? In particular, why were the property-owners in Bremen, Berlin and elsewhere not able to block these same kinds of public infrastructure projects?

Once lead down this route the reader must be increasingly concerned about the weight, and attention, Evans focuses upon socio-ideological explanations (made particularly noticeable by the frequent intrusion of Marxist historiographical language and approach — an influence made explicit in the afterword). As Evans acknowledges in respect of most other disease outcomes Hamburg did little worse than elsewhere in Germany. If this is so how much does the 1892 epidemic really tell us about the society and politics of Hamburg (and vice-versa)? Perhaps if Hamburg had not invested early in its water supply, it would have had an ‘out-of-date’ one by 1892? Perhaps if Veresman had been Burgomaster more rapid and effective steps would have been taken early on that would have dramatically reduced the impact? Perhaps if Hamburg had been more authoritarian (rather than more democratic) the Senate would have been able to improve the water-supply earlier?

This brings me on to my final comment. The contemporary relevance of the book is emphasized in several places, for example on the back-jacket text and in several of the blurbs — Gordon Craig’s NYRB review extract quoted on the cover reads “… about the contemporary relevance of this book there can be no question”. Of course, we should allow for the fact that this was published in 1987 when the AIDS epidemic was receiving very widespread attention. But one does need to ask exactly what one does learn from this book regarding public health? That we should invest in public goods projects? That it is good for medical science to be accurate and correct? That one should respond rapidly to an outbreak of a contagious disease?

Surely the answer to all of these is yes. The devil, of course, is in the detail. how do we trade off the benefits of rapid and sharp response, which is likely to involve sharply restricting movement of persons and goods, against the costs of such restrictions both socially and commercially? What institutional structures will result in adequate investment in public goods and rapid response to public concerns? Are there tensions between responsiveness to concerns (e.g. via full representative government!) and effectiveness in action (which might necessitate a single executive office with significant power and autonomy)? Finally, if the answers to these questions are reasonably obvious (e.g. its Democracy stupid!) then what prevents a polity, whether today or in the 19th century, from acting in the correct way? (Answer: entrenched powers and vested interests — but how did these come into being and how are they overcome?).

The test then of Evans’ book is whether it supplies us with interesting answers to these, more nuanced, questions. In this regard the book, I feel, comes up short. Without a comparative analysis at the social, and more importantly, political level in other German (or European) cities how can we know whether Hamburg’s terrible experience was the result of a common generalizable pattern or mere historical accident?

In sum this an interesting book albeit a little lengthy and heavy-going in places. Confused as to its structure and purpose it largely fails to deliver on its promise to answer the main question posed on its jacket: “Why were nearly 10000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg while most of Europe was left almost unscathed?” As such it is also limited in the light it can throw on public health problems today. Nevertheless the reader will have been left with a wide-ranging coverage of a whole variety of 19th century topics, most significantly the two items explicitly mentioned in the title: Hamburg and Cholera.

7/10. Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise by A Simpson, University of Chicago Press, 1984. More history than legal analysis. Interesting throughout but meandering slightly towards the end. One quote I wish to memorialize, which though rather apart from the main thrust of my book, made me wonder once again about the general tension between ‘definiteness’ (assertiveness/simplicity) and ‘correctness’, especially in the arena of public policy and democratic politics. Is it always necessary, as the quote suggests, for successful campaigns to simplify and exaggerate in order to obtain an effect?

In the period immediately before the case of the Mignonette [1884], controversies over the protection of sailors and passengers had been inflamed by the activities of the radical MP for Derby (1868-80), Samuel Plimsoll, ‘the sailor’s friend’, whose approach to the problem favoured prior intervention [i.e. regulation] … He [Plimsoll] concentrated first simply on unseaworth ships as a cause fo mortality and started a campaign to amend the law with a resolution in the House of Commons in July 1870. His most effective appeal was to public opinion through the publication of Our Seamen in 1872, attacking the ship-owners of the over-insured, overloaded “coffin ships”, which caught the public imagination. Plimsoll was no doubt careless with his facts, ill-informed, and sometimes violent in his language; but perhaps successful campaigns require devils, conspiracies and simple solutions. [emph added] In reality ships were lost for a variety of reasons, and unseaworthiness was only one of them.

I was much much struck by generally pessimistic tone of Gregory Clark’s lengthy review in the JEL’s September issue of Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. These comments have wider implications for the application of economic tools (especially game theory) to the analysis of historical outcomes, particularly in relation to institutions, and I have therefore thought it worth excerpting from the review here (at some length).

When You Have More Variables than Data You Aren’t Explaining Anything

As noted, Greif defines an institution as a self-reinforcing set of behaviors. Greif pioneered in applying game theory to historical institutional analysis and his 1993 study of the Maghribi traders remains a classic of this still modest genre. This was certainly an exciting development for economists. For the first time, [sic] seemingly grounded the explanation of informal institutions in optimizing individual rational behavior. Behaviors that would seem to the layman to be based on blind irrational custom could be shown to be consistent with individual optimization. Given the incredible intellectual elaboration of game theory, and its meager harvest in terms of actual economic applications, the finding was welcome to both game theorists and to economic historians. [ed: a tough but fair assessment …] The Maghribi study also allowed for the possibilities of institutional change resulting just from changes in parameters. Since the equilibrium depended on certain parameter values, changes in transportation costs or observability could terminate the old equilibrium and lead to a new one. The 1993 article seemed to point to new micro foundations for institutions that would ground them in individual maximizing behavior.

But this book is almost certainly not what many economists who welcomed the 1993 article expected as the generalization of its ideas. Some indeed will be shocked by, and perhaps hostile to, the path Greif has taken. Were economists of a more literary bent, the word apostasy would be on their lips. In a search for generality, Greif concludes that such a set of limited rational actor assumptions is not constraining enough to describe real-world institutions. For a start, “multiple equilibria usually exist in the repeated situations central to institutional analysis” (p. 125). There have to be more constraints on the structure of the interaction to explain the equilibrium. These constraints include “cognitive norms” (p. 128) as well as “the social and normative foundation of behavior” (p. 143). Issues such as “losses of esteem,” “norms,” “fairness,” or “social exchange” have to be introduced. Also such social and normative behavior is “situationally contingent” (p. 144). [ed: and we now have so many parameters we could probably explain anything …]

Greif posits this as just an extension and elaboration of the original individualistic rational-actor game theoretic ideas. Once we are compelled to admit, however, into the explanatory apparatus almost the entire sociological zoo of ill defined and unmeasurable constructs, we lose all explanatory power. Explanatory power requires few objects and small degrees of freedom. Greif notes that “a useful feature of game theory is that it allows us to study all intertransactional linkages—economic, coercive, social and normative—simultaneously” (p. 147). But he does not seem to appreciate the price of this generality in terms of testability. All we are left with is the idea that people operating within institutions act as they do because, given the cognitive, intellectual, cultural, and normative constraints they face, their actions seem to them as being the best available. But, in an informal sense, we knew that already. Without any consideration of the ins and outs of game theory, we can appreciate that any lasting institution likely constitutes some set of self-reinforcing behaviors. Yanomamo males, for example, engaged in recurrent raids against other bands aimed at capturing women and revenging previous raids (Napoleon A. Chagnon 1983). This was clearly an institution in the sense of Greif and must be maintained by some kind of self-reinforcing set of behaviors. But we knew that, even if we had never studied game theory. So what insights have we gained from page after page of elaboration on the idea of equilibria and the elements that enter into them (pp. 124-53)? If we were able to reduce all such social equilibria to a game theory equilibrium of purely self interested rational individuals interacting with common knowledge that would be a radical, novel, and testable theory. This book denies that possibility, but without providing any alternative that has empirical content. [pp. 735-736, emphasis added]

The Problem of Too Many Equilibria (in Dynamic Games with Beliefs)

… Greif here starts from the basis that we will never be able to predict institutional structure from exogenous features of the situation—including institutional history. … Given the many potential stable equilibria in each institutional context, the outcomes are inherently unknowable. After the attention given to elaborating the theory of institutional stability and dynamics in the preceding 350 pages, this conclusion comes as something of a surprise. The structure and tone of the previous discussion is that of laying the groundwork for a theory of institutions. The reader now learns that the extended theory encompasses a perhaps uncountable number of possible institutional equilibria, so that there can be no advance prediction.

Just as deductive methods cannot succeed, Greif asserts also that inductive generalization about institutional forms will also fail to reveal any patterns. This is because unobservable elements of the situation—beliefs and norms—are crucial to the determination of the outcome. The same observable elements will be associated with radically different institutional equilibria. … [p.737]

Case Studies (and Historical Anecdote) Aren’t Economics (or Economic History

[The empirical approach recommended by Greif] As conducted in the book, [this] is essentially the method of “analytical narratives” popularized by Greif and Robert Bates, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Weingast. An analytical narrative consists of matching institutional detail to a formal, or more often informal, interpretation of the situation as some kind of rational choice equilibrium, interpreted in the broad sense above (Bates et al. 1998). It is not clear how this is distinguished from such things as Harvard Business School case studies. As applied by Greif and his colleagues, an “analytical narrative” seems to be just an interpretation of an institution in terms of a loosely defined equilibrium. This is fine as an approach to generating hypotheses, but as an endpoint of analysis, as it generally is in the book, it offers little conviction. [p. 737]

In Conclusion: There Isn’t Much of a Future

… Greif intends in his book to develop at least the outline of a new, micro grounded theory of institutions. Stating, explaining, and elaborating this theory takes 503 densely written pages, including a primer on game theory. By the end, however, this reviewer, to the contrary, read it mostly as a demonstration of the impossibility of a systematic account of institutions along the lines he proposes. The efflorescence of concepts, combined with the constriction of possible empirical tests, makes … prediction and testing impossible. And this shows in the case studies conducted in the book. Each institution in his formulation has to be analyzed in its full idiosyncracy, aided by the expert judgment of the investigator as to the social and epistemological context. But, as we saw in the case of the Podesteria, that kind of analysis, even in the hands of a careful enquirer like Greif, is fraught with the danger of conflating conjecture and fact. Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics as a Science never led to his proposed science of metaphysics. Unfortunately Greif’s Prolegomena to a future institutional theory similarly serves mainly to indicate the barriers to a science of institutions.

7.5/10. Finished a few weeks ago this is another (rather earlier) example of Hastings’ skill in writing penetrating and engaging military history, as well as his willingness to be critical of existing ’sacred cows’. Among other things Hastings:

• Argues that the famous Mulberrys were probably a waste of time and resources.
• Shows how the Air Force extreme unhelpfulness (largely driven by their own ambitions and obsession with civilian bombing) was a serious handicap to the whole campaign.
• Supplies a sharp corrective regarding Patton’s reputation, pointing out that up against reasonable German opposition Patton did little better than anyone else.
• Shows clearly how it was Hitler, almost more than anyone else, who contributed to the disastrous collapse of German forces in August-October 1944 by his insistence that no retreat of any kind be considered.
• Provides many examples of the poor quality of equipment, leadership, and men, especially among the American forces and how these deficiencies hindered the Allied campaign. In particular, Allied tanks were almost never a match for their German counterparts and on any occasion that Allied and German troops met on anything near equal footing the Germans won.[^1] In addition he details several clear cases of simple cowardice or unwillingness to fight among the Allied troops and/or extremely poor leadership stretching from the lowest levels to the highest. This is not to criticize — who can say what they would do in such circumstances — and in many reflects the fact that while the Germans were a nation that had for many years been ‘obsessed’ with soldiering the Allied troops were ‘civilians in uniform’, but it does supply a useful corrective to those rose-tinted visions supplied by films such as The Longest Day or the newsreel footage showing Allied soldiers racing past cheering French civilians.

Finally, and as an aside, while good, the book also displays the limitations of the traditional book format as a method for presenting this sort of material (i.e. military history with its strong connections between the temporal and spatial aspects of events). At least for me, the attempt to render particular troop movements, or the direction of battles, in prose never really succeeds and one finds oneself constantly flicking back to the (rather limited) maps in an attempt to connect the descriptions of events, the failures and successes of particular thrusts, with their location, both geographically and within the overall direction of the campaign. Thus, it seems to me that it is that this kind of subject is the sort thing most suited to being integrated with the kind of approach proposed by the Microfacts / Weaving History project currently in the early stages of its development at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Here one would be able to marry maps with descriptions, photos with actions, time with space to provide a much clearer insight into what was going on.

[^1]: From p. 84 ff. “The American Colonel Trevor Dupuy has conducted a detailed statistical study of German actions in the Second World War. Some of his explanations as to why Hitler’s armies performed so much more impressively than their enemies seem fanciful. But no critic has challenged his essential finding that on almost every battlefield of the war, including Normandy, the German soldier performed more impressively than his opponents:

On a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher rate than they incurred from opposing British and American troops UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES . [emphasis in original] This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.

It is undoubtedly true that the Germans were much more efficient than the Americans in making use of available manpower. An American army corps staff contained 55 per cent more officers and 44 per cent fewer other ranks than its German equivalent. …

Events on the Normandy battlefield demonstrated that most British or American troops continued a given operation for as long as reasonable me could. Then - when they had fought for many hours, suffered many casualties, or were running low on fuel or ammunition - they disengaged. The story of German operations, however, is landmarked with repeated examples of what could be achieved by soldiers prepared to attempt more than reasonable men could.”

Consider a metal arm fixed by a pin. If it is hung vertically then the arm, no matter where it starts, will always end up in the same position. However, if you fix the arm (perfectly) horizontally it will stay forever in its initial position. The first case is ergodic: we converge independent of the starting point to some particular configuration; while the second is ‘path-dependent’ (or dependent on initial conditions): where you end up depends crucially on where you start. The question:

Is animal/technological/historical/linguistic evolution ergodic or path dependent?

More generally, how ergodic or path-dependent are the following processes?

• (Natural) Evolution
• Technological change
• Human history
• Communication systems such as natural languages
• Other symbol systems (e.g. games or mathematics)

7/10 (genre: 8/10). Nemesis covers a similar period (the last year or so of the Second World War) to Hastings previous Armageddon but focuses on the Pacific theatre rather than the European one. Though not quite as good as the outstanding Armageddon — in particular Hastings clearly did not have as good access to primary Chinese and Japanese sources — this was still very good: full of the excellent narrative exposition and sharp strategic judgments expressed in pithy phrases and lapidary sentences that are Hastings’ trademark.

For me the two most significant ‘facts’ I took away from the book were:

1. The incredible PR job McArthur managed to perform which resulted in a vastly inflated reputation (both at the time and for many years afterwards). Rather than being some great military hero/genius he was in fact a paranoid strategic incompetent, wasteful of the lives of his men, foolishing dismissive of accurate intelligence (because it conflicted with what he wanted to be the case) and endlessly obsessed, in a way unbecoming a military officer, with his own news coverage.

2. That the insanity of the military-dominated Japanese leaders — as well as their indifference to the suffering of both their own and other peoples — was such that the dropping of the first Atomic bomb (if not necessarily the second) was an entirely justifiable decision given the situation in front of the US leaders at the time. Furthermore this decision is also vindicated by posterity in as much that it does seem to have been central to precipitating a Japanese surrender and avoiding the vast suffering, both for the Japanese and others, that would have been involved in further continuance of the war (both from continued conventional aerial bombing, the blockade and a land invasion of the ‘home islands’).

8.5/10. A fascinating, brilliantly written book which despite its biographical nature is one of the best histories of the Vietnam War I have read.

Quotations taken from Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 [Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006].

The Red Terror

Op cit. p. 87:

In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer of 1936. On the republican side there was strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Frederica Montseny referred to a ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionara intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a more fatalistic attitude to the violence. … The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.

The White Terror

Op. cit p.94:

In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of 80,000 victims of the nationalists. If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentelman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.

9.5/10. One of the greatest works of history I have ever read. The command of primary sources is astounding and allows for any given point to be both grounded in ‘hard’ data and fascinating anecdote — a rare (and heady) combination indeed. This truly is a portrait of an entire world on a canvas that stretches from France to Turkey. While Braudel ‘Annales’ orientation means that there is perhaps a heavier load of statistics and the like than is usual for a historian — something I personally like and putting him someone between History, Geography and Economics — this never prevents the frequent rendering a lapidary judgement or illuminating aside. This is history as I dreamed it could be, vast, sprawling and all-encompassing yet still delivering insight and understanding, reaching, in its vast extent, the very limits of what it is possible for a single mind to achieve.

African Gold (p. 467)

It is probable that gold dust from the Sudan reached North Africa before the tenth century and led, after the year 1000, to the emergence in the South of coherent and spectacular states in the lop of the Niger and in the North, in the Maghreb, to the founding of new towns like Algiers and Oran. …

But Sudanese gold provided more than a basis for the prosperity of North Africa and Moslem Spain, the Western Islamic bloc which its isolation in the twelfth century from the chief trade routes obliged to be self-sufficient. This gold played its part in the history of the Mediterranean as a whole, entering general circulation from the fourteenth century, perhaps after the spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca of Mansa Musa, King of Mali, in 1324. North Africa with its supply of gold gradually became the driving force of the entire Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century it was invaded by Christian merchants who settled without difficulty in Ceuta, Tangier, Fez, Oran, Tlemcen, Bougie, Constantine, and Tunis.