About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks A REview

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About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

David Rooney

New York; W W Norton and Company Inc, 2021.

"What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were  desirous to explain to one that should ask me; plainly I do not know." St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.

The book under review by an internationally acclaimed Horologist  is a study of time from two rather distinct perspectives. The first part is a well researched study of early ventures into time-keeping in different parts of the world and his discussion of  the history of mechanical time keeping by investigating the construction of large mechanical clocks from the thirteenth century on wards is lucid and valuable. Inexplicably ne changes track and meanders into the impact of time and clock culture on modern civilization and goes on to claim that standardization of time led to exploitation, tyranny and oppression. Whether the mechanical clock with its relentless motion signaling the passage of time had anything to do with these rather unsavory developments is open to debate.

Human beings have always  found the movement of the stars  or rather the planets both mysterious and fascinating. The length of the noon day shadow seemed to vary according to the movements of the celestial bodies giving the first device of measuring time: the sun dial. The Chinese invented the clepsydra which sounded out the hours. And ancient Greece had its Tower of Winds which seems to have been an early observatory.

The tower of Winds has miraculously survived the tumultuous passage of time, though its exact function is still largely a matter of conjecture. With the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin texts as part of the great cultural shift that Historians call the Renaissance, mechanical means for time measurement were soon discovered and there was an early instance of civic competition when cities, states and communities started building clock towers all over in order to proclaim their status as free cities and progressive civic entities. The first mechanical clocks were introduced in 1275 and by 1600 nearly 200 clock towers existed all over Europe. 

The clock tower in the Italian city of Chioggia was characterized by a sophisticated mechanism consisting of intermeshing gear wheels driven by falling weights, an early attempt at the escape mechanism which lies at the heart of all mechanical time keeping. Apart from this clock, the designer of this device, Jacopo de Dondi constructed in Padua in 1344 a n astronomical clock which gave the relative position of the planets vis a vis the Earth, a planetarium in short. The other important step towards sophisticated time keeping is seen in the Salisbury Cathedral

One of the oldest clock towers still running on its own medieval design is the tower attached to the cathedral at Salisbury. Unfortunately sacked during the awful days of the attack on Church during the reign of Henry VIII, the tower and its clock survived destruction. The history of all these experiments in design and execution of time measurement is ably brought out in the book. 

The author has bought into the Foucauldian paradigm that science and the growth ( I will in a subsequent Book Blog Review Seb Falk's The Light Ages). The imposition of this interpretive element in this book is a distraction and it interrupts the otherwise well constructed narrative.

The author has tried to take a global approach to the issue of time keeping and its History and has adequately explored other cultures like Islam, India and China. One major drawback lies in the fact that time keeping is closely tied to Astronomy and therefore the transition from the Ptolemaic view to the Copernican view of the Universe is a sine quo non for a comprehensive investigation.

In the sixteenth  century the Roman Catholic Church made serious attempts to reform the Calendar as the celebration of Easter was seriously out of sync with the planetary motion. Apart from reforming the calendar steps were taken to measure the meridian and take correct readings of the sun as it passed over the spring equinox. Cathedrals in France and Italy were designed to function as Solar Observatories and the readings provided played an important role in reforming the Calendar, David Rooney has ignored this vital aspect and is a serious flaw.

Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast A Review

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Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast

Marjoleine Kars

New York: The New Press

2020

This years Cundill Prize has this surprise nomination. A book based on primary sources and one that by and large eschews the sordid pieties of identity politics and ideological posturing. Based on archival material found in the Hague and London, this book deals with the Slave Revolt in 1763 that convulsed the Dutch plantation of Berbice in South America. The entire narrative is derived from the Judicial proceedings instituted against the rebels who were captured after the rebellion had been militarily suppressed.

Extracting historically accurate information from evidence that was generated during the course of a highly charged trial in which the witnesses were facing charges that could lead to the imposition of the death penalty, is a challenging task in that the "re-enslaved had every incentive to lie distort and omit". The Slave who rebelled and risked his life for freedom from enslavement oppression and systemic violence according to the author was scripting his own history by acting out a praxis of negation of his existing social and political reality and striving to recreate an alternate society whose inchoate shape and contour is only fleetingly captured by the sources of the period. Dr Kars has situated the Slave Revolt in a framework that is partly Historical and partly Anthropological and thus a thick description of the events from a Geertzian perspective.

The records are all imperial records, regnant with the implied superiority of white rule and the illegitimacy of the cause of the rebels. The right to use extreme was assumed to be beyond debate and the testimonies gathered in large folios like the one illustrated below contain the records of over 900 witnesses. The rebels could not speak Dutch and 

so their statements had to be translated by an interpreter who in turn made sense of the statement and conveyed the meaning in contemporary Dutch. This  double translation affords opportunities for mistranslation and error. Ranajit Guha has drawn attention to this feature of Official Records in his pioneering paper, "The Prose of Counter Insurgency".

The Slave Revolt began in April 1763 and lasted a whole year. The slow communication across the Atlantic Ocean and the absence of adequate  military support resulted in an early collapse of the Dutch Administration headed by a young Governor Simon van Hoogenheim. The military contingent sent from Netherlands reached Surimane only in April 1764 and with the arrival of nearly 1000 well trained and armed soldiers, the Rebellion was all but over. Unlike the English East India Company which possessed a strong army, the Dutch Company did not have its own dedicated military and essentially outsourced defence and protection to mercenaries. The rule of trading companies like the VOC and the EIC which were both in transoceanic commerce and slaving required a reliable supply of armed men capable of inflicting extreme violence and in the post Hapsburg Low Countries, violence was privatized to maximize profit.

The Rebellion began in the with the rather ironic name, Goed Land Goed Fortun or Good Land and Good Fortune Plantation owned by Laurens Kunker and the rebel leader Cojii or Kofi was enslaved on that Plantation. The Slaves had a  number of grievances but the most important was their extreme anguish at the horrific punishments meted out to them by their Bomba and the Plantation Manager. The Plantation economy rested on a foundation of racial violence and fear that it engendered. Like Conrad's character, Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness the plantations all over the Atlantic world were populated by men driven by lust, power and an insatiable appetite for violence. It is no wonder then that the first thing that the rebels did was to murder the Planters, their families and in some cases the loyal slaves and the bomba.

The author is particularly good in teasing out strands of ideology and motives from the garbled accounts of the Rebellion provided by the rebels during their trial. The leadership for the movement was provided by the Amina a group of elite Africans from the Gold Coast. Coiiji and his "general" Accara were both from this ethnic group and so too was Atta, the man who deposed Coiiji and drove him to suicide. The leaders seem to have replicated the hierarchy on the Plantation while the overall ideological matrix was derived from West Africa. After the suicide of the rebel leader, nearly 5 human beings were killed so that their blood could by spread on the grave. By situating the events of the rebellion in a cultural context, the author has provided us insight into rebel culture and behaviour.

The Rebellion was crushed as the Dutch were able to muster a much larger force against the Rebels and also because the Amerindian tribes supported the colonial administration by cutting off all routes of escape. Does this make the indigenous people an accomplice of the enslavers. This question, a troubling one, confronts the reader. The author leaves us with little doubt about what she thinks. But we have to see the collaboration of Amerindians in colonial anti slave insurgency in the context of what they experienced at the hands of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the French.

I enjoyed reading this book and though it is not in the same league as The Black Jacobins by C L R James it is an important contribution.

Imperial Nostalgia, Race and Class in EmpireLand: A look at current "intellectual" fashion in Britain

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The cartoon by Low published more than sixty years ago sums up the state of play in Britain over its imperial past. Dragging statues of long dead slavers, writing trashy tomes about "Insurgent Empire" putting on an air of moral superiority by strutting about as enlightened or in the current usage "woke" activists on call to shore up the street mobs that validate the transition to a "post colonial" state of being are the latest excesses of the white academia both in Britain or USA. Shriller the noise of virtue signaling the greater the rewards in an a academic world where group think is more in demand than scholarship or independent thought. It is very nearly the end of Humanities as a field of knowledge and its displacement by Cultural Studies which claims to represent all the identify categories that are fashionable today. 

Imperial Nostalgia How the British Conquered themselves by Peter Mitchell, a journalist, is one of several boos that essays a bold analysis of cultural and intellectual climate in what is being recognized as the disruptive post-Brexit Era. It is amusing to read that the British are now reevaluating their post imperial standing in the world today. Having benefited by the plunder of Asia's wealth for over 250 years, we in Asia are only amused by the antics, both intellectual and academic, of those who claim that they are free of the taint of colonialism as they have embraced a vision of a pluralist, multi cultural,  inclusive Britain. Writing toxic polemic against Nigel Biggar, an Oxford academic, the author caricatures and misrepresents the highly nuanced and reasonable arguments of Biggar as if they represent an apologia for  an Imperial Past. It is only the victims of imperialism who have the right to assess it and  study it in much the same way as Germans cannot and ought not to study the Holocaust as any such study would either by compromised by political loyalty or directed towards an abject ideological goal. And this is really the heart of the matter. Imperial Nostalgia is mere chimera and is whipped up to re-inscribe  white Christian moral and intellectual hegemony. The non white human cannot represent himself.  He must be represented. And who better to do this than the white Liberal with Oxford and Cambridge pedigree. 

Akala, a British rapper has written an honest book, Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire,  and is well worth reading. There is no great sense of wonder and bewilderment at the demise of the Empire and Akala looks at the social setting of Britain today which is multi racial, particularly after the process of decolonization that set in after the Suez Crisis of 1956. White privilege is a reality and knee jerk genuflection towards Wokery is likely to hide that reality. Racism as an ideology was not a mere idle by product Imperialism as Akala argues. Its roots go deep into European History. The imperial tradition and its concomitant theory of History whether in the works of J R Seeley or in the more practical exuberance of Cecil Rhodes was fashioned over a period of time and Poets, Writers, Journalists and Explorers were all complicit in this task. Akala is certainly worth reading.

EmpireLand How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnan Sanghera is a disappointing read.  It more or less traverses the same territory as Imperial Nostalgia but it also suggests that contemporary British society has become more sensitive to the presence of immigrants from the colonies. Can am Asian immigrant identify himself as a member of the British society. Gratuitous use of personal pronoun we us etc does not mean that the Asian immigrant is accepted as an equal member of White society. 

Sir Sidney Wadsworth ICS A Life in History and Memory

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A Judge in Madras: Sir Sidney Wadsworth and the Indian Civil Service, 1913 - 47.

Caroline Keen

New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2021.

Sir Sidney Wadsworth, ICS retired to the Isle of Man after he retired in 1947 and spent some of his retired life writing his "memoirs" which in the classic western sense was to remain a personal record of service, reflection and memory. However, his grandson, Simon Wadsworth took upon himself the task of rescuing the manuscript from the archives and getting Caroline Keen to flesh out the life and career of Sidney Wadsworth within the broader context of both Indian History and the administrative and judicial institutions of the Madras Presidency , where Wadsworth spent his entire official career. The result is a book rich in detail and is a significant addition to the growing literature of "Colonial Life and Careers". 

Before discussing the book we must address a particularly gross and intellectually vapid trend in "Imperial" and "Post Colonial" studies. White scholars seem to think that by aligning themselves with Black Lives Matter and ranting against the excesses of colonialism they rid themselves of both the guilt of their inherited past and the privileges which their colour has bestowed by virtue of colonialism, conquest and domination. Historical analysis based on empirical evidence rooted in a methodology that foregrounds reconstruction of the past is certainly more humane and enriching than the  ideological virtue signaling as represented by Priyamvada Gopal's Insurgent Empire.

The book under review fortunately avoids this trap of sliding into the quagmire of post colonial "discourse" by remaining focused on the life and the times in which Wadsworth lived. It makes no attempt at providing a Balance Sheet for the British Empire nor does it meander into the dead dreary sand of the "Idea of India" exposition so beloved of later day imperialists. It is perhaps a given that a young man in the late nineteenth century sent to the Colonies as a covenanted officer of the Crown would carry a sense of awareness of the immense power he wielded and towards the end of his life become a tad bit embarrassed over it as he approached the twilight of his life. And this indeed was the case with Sidney Wadsworth. "He was conscious of his own importance; but that very consciousness, while it may have given rise to a certain superiority of manner, also led him to put his work first and make it the paramount interest in life" (240). 

Sidney Wadsworth was born in 1888 and died in 1976, a life long enough to see the High Noon of Empire and the fading twilight into which Britain had descended by the early 1970s. He was educated in Sorbonne, Paris and he qualified for appointment to the Indian Civil Service in 1912 and was assigned to work in the Madras Presidency.  This Presidency for some reason was considered less desirable than the other two Presidencies and the sprawling provisions and commissionaires of British India. Having learnt Tamil he arrived in Madras just before the outbreak of World War I in 1913. Wadsworth's first posting was as sub collector of Vellore where he was trained by Sir Norman Majoribanks, the Collector. As the designation implies the first responsibility of the "Collector" was revenue assessment and collection, the Jamabandhi as it was termed in English revenue parlance. World War I saw him work as an army censor and later he was the sub collector of Gudur in Nellore District. Fort Galeria built near Lake Pulicat by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was not merely a trading post for innocent trade goods like Textiles and Rice but was also a notorious Slaving Port on the Coromandel Coast. The Dutch raided the coastal areas fr slaves whom they sent to Batavia. It is unfortunate that Caroline Keen, a trained Historian, has missed this vital fact.

After the war ended, Wadsworth was posted to the Board of Revenue. But soon he decided that he would like to serve on the Judiciary and went to London for six months in order to qualify for judicial appointment. He was admitted to the Middle Temple, the same one that Gandhi, the self styled "father of the Nation" had entered. Presiding over murder trials involving local women and medically challenged accused must have been quite instructive. As the district judge of Chingleput, Wadsworth has perforce to adjudicate disputes over water and water rights as the area was essentially irrigated by rain fed water stored in tanks and reservoirs. He succeeded in settling a serious dispute over the sharing of the Swarnamuki river waters by making the litigants agree to arbitration rather than judicial judgement and it is said that his decision is still in force in the region. After a stint  in Madura, Sidney Wadsworth was posted to Madurai and later became a Judge in the High Court of Madras. 

 As the High Court Justice he presided over the Sir Raja Annamali Chettiyar Case and several important cases. In 1947 he retired just after India became "Independent" and after the Partition of the country. 

This biography based on the personal memoirs of an ICS Officer in Madras during the years of British rule is an interesting book and an important one in that it provides us insight into the mind of an officer during the heyday of Empire.