Nepal

History

The history of Nepal began in, and centres on, the Kathmandu Valley. Over the centuries Nepal's boundaries have extended to include huge tracts of neighbouring India, and contracted to little more than the Kathmandu Valley and a handful of nearby city-states. Though it has ancient roots, the modern state of Nepal emerged only in the 18th century.

Squeezed between the Tibetan plateau and the plains of the subcontinent - the modern-day giants of China and India - Nepal has long prospered from its location as a resting place for traders, travellers and pilgrims. A cultural mixing pot, it has bridged cultures and absorbed elements of its neighbours, yet retained a unique character. After travelling through India for a while, many travellers notice both the similarities and differences. 'Same, same', they say, '…but different'.

The Kiratis & Buddhist beginnings

Nepal's recorded history kicks off with the Hindu Kiratis. Arriving from the east around the 7th or 8th century BC, these Mongoloid people are the first known rulers of the Kathmandu Valley. King Yalambar (the first of their 29 kings) is mentioned in the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, but little more is known about them.

In the 6th century BC, Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born into the Sakya royal family of Kapilavastu, near Lumbini, later embarking on a path of meditation and thought that led him to enlightenment as the Buddha. The religion that grew up around him continues to shape the face of Asia.

Around the 2nd century BC, the great Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka (c 272-236 BC) visited Lumbini and erected a pillar at the birthplace of the Buddha. Popular legend recounts how he then visited the Kathmandu Valley and erected four stupas (pagodas) around Patan, but there is no evidence that he actually made it there in person. In either event, his Mauryan empire (321-184 BC) played a major role in popularising Buddhism in the region, a role continued by the north Indian Buddhist Kushan empire (1st to 3rd centuries AD).

Over the centuries Buddhism gradually lost ground to a resurgent Hinduism and by the time the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims Fa Xian (Fa Hsien) and Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang) passed through the region in the 5th and 7th centuries the site of Lumbini was already in ruins.

Licchavis, Thakuris, then darkness

Buddhism faded and Hinduism reasserted itself with the arrival from northern India of the Licchavis. In AD 300 they overthrew the Kiratis, who resettled in the east and are the ancestors of today's Rai and Limbu people.

Between the 4th and 8th centuries, the Licchavis ushered in a golden age of cultural brilliance. The chaityas (stupas) and monuments of this era can still be seen at the Changu Narayan Temple, north of Bhaktapur, and in the backstreets of Kathmandu's old town. Their strategic position allowed them to prosper from trade between India and China. It's believed that the original stupas at Chabahil, Bodhnath and Swayambhunath date from the Licchavi era.

Amsuvarman, the first Thakuri king, came to power in 602, succeeding his Licchavi father-in-law. He consolidated his power to the north and south by marrying his sister to an Indian prince and his daughter Bhrikuti to the great Tibetan king Songsten Gompo. Together with the Gompo's Chinese wife Wencheng, Bhrikuti managed to convert the king to Buddhism around 640, changing the face of both Tibet and, later, Nepal.

From the late 7th century until the 13th century Nepal slipped into its 'dark ages', of which little is known. Tibet invaded in 705 and Kashmir invaded in 782. The Kathmandu Valley's strategic location, however, ensured the kingdom's growth and survival. King Gunakamadeva is credited with founding Kantipur, today's Kathmandu, around the 10th century. During the 9th century a new lunar calendar was introduced, one that is still used by Newars to this day.

The golden age of the Mallas

The first of the Malla kings came to power in the Kathmandu Valley around 1200. The Mallas (literally 'wrestlers' in Sanskrit) had been forced out of India and their name can be found in the Mahabharata and in Buddhist literature. This period was a golden one that stretched over 550 years, though it was peppered with fighting over the valuable trade routes to Tibet.

The first Malla rulers had to cope with several disasters. A huge earthquake in 1255 killed around one-third of Nepal's population. A devastating Muslim invasion by Sultan Shams-ud-din of Bengal less than a century later left plundered Hindu and Buddhist shrines in its wake, though the invasion did not leave a lasting cultural effect here (unlike in the Kashmir Valley which remains Muslim to this day). In India the damage was more widespread and many Hindus were driven into the hills and mountains of Nepal, where they established small Rajput principalities.

Apart from this, the earlier Malla years (1220-1482) were largely stable, reaching a high point under the third Malla dynasty of Jayashithi Malla (1382-1395), who united the valley and codified its laws, including the caste system. The mid-13th century saw the de facto rule of Queen Devaladevi, the most powerful woman in Nepal's history.

After the death of Jayashithi Malla's grandson Yaksha Malla in 1482, the Kathmandu Valley was divided up among his sons into the three kingdoms of Bhaktapur (Bhadgaon), Kathmandu (Kantipur) and Patan (Lalitpur). They proceeded to fight with each other over the right to control the rich trading routes with Tibet.

The rest of what we today call Nepal consisted of a fragmented patchwork of almost 50 independent states, from Palpa to Jumla, and the semi-independent states of Banepa and Pharping, most of them minting their own coins and maintaining standing armies.

One of the most important of these was the Nepali-speaking Khasa empire (Western Mallas), based in the far west in the Karnali basin around Sinja and Jumla. The kingdom peaked in the 13th and 14th centuries, only to fragment in the 15th century. Its lasting contribution was the Nepali language that is spoken today as the unifying national language.

Nepal's most profound export was perhaps its architecture; in the 13th century the Nepali architect Arniko travelled to Lhasa and the Mongol capital in Beijing, bringing with him the design of the pagoda, thus changing the face of religious temples across Asia.

The rivalry between the three kingdoms of the Kathmandu Valley found its expression in the arts and culture, which flourished in the competitive climate. The outstanding collections of exquisite temples and buildings in each city's Durbar Square are testament to the huge amounts of money spent by the rulers to outdo each other.

The building boom was financed by trade, in everything from musk and wool to salt, Chinese silk and even yak tails. The Kathmandu Valley stood at the departure point for two separate routes into Tibet, via Banepa to the northeast and via Rasuwa and the Kyirong Valley near Langtang in the northwest. Traders would cross the jungle-infested Terai during winter to avoid the virulent malaria and then wait in Kathmandu for the mountain passes to open later that summer. Kathmandu grew rich and its rulers converted their wealth into gilded pagodas and ornately carved royal palaces. In the mid-17th century Nepal gained the right to mint Tibet's coins using Tibetan silver, further enriching the kingdom's coffers.

In Kathmandu King Pratap Malla (1641-74) oversaw that city's cultural highpoint with the construction of the Hanuman Dhoka Palace, the Rani Pokhari pond and the first of several subsequent pillars that featured a statue of the king facing the protective Temple of Taleju, who the Mallas had by that point adopted as their protective deity. The mid-17th century also saw a highpoint of building in Patan.

Around 1750 King Jaya Prakash Malla built Kathmandu's Kumari Temple. Not long afterwards came the Nyatapola Temple in Bhakatapur, the literal highpoint of pagoda-style architecture in Nepal.

The Malla era shaped the religious as well as artistic landscape, introducing the dramatic chariot festivals of Indra Jatra and Machhendranath. The Malla kings shored up their position by claiming to be reincarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu and establishing the cult of the kumari, a living goddess whose role it was to bless the Malla's rule during an annual celebration.

The cosmopolitan Mallas also absorbed foreign influences. The Indian Mughal court influenced Malla dress and painting, presented the Nepalis with firearms and introduced the system of land grants for military service, a system which would have a profound effect in later years. Persian terminology was introduced to the court administration and in 1729 the three kingdoms sent presents to the Qing court in Beijing, which from then on viewed Nepal as a tributary state. In the early 18th century Capuchin missionaries passed through Nepal to Tibet, giving the West its first descriptions of exotic Kathmandu.

But change didn't only come from abroad. A storm was brewing inside Nepal, just 100km to the east of Kathmandu.

Unification under the Shahs

It took more than a quarter of a century of conquest and consolidation, but by 1768 Prithvi Narayan Shah, ruler of the tiny hilltop kingdom of Gorkha (halfway between Pokhara and Kathmandu), stood poised on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley, about to realise his dream of a unified Nepal.

Prithvi Narayan had taken the strategic hilltop fort of Nuwakot in 1744 and had blockaded the valley, after fighting off reinforcements from the British East India Company. In 1768 Shah took Kathmandu, sneaking in while everyone was drunk during the Indra Jatra festival. A year later he took Kirtipur, finally, after three lengthy failed attempts. In terrible retribution his troops hacked 120 pounds of noses and lips off Kirtipur's residents; unsurprisingly, resistance throughout the valley quickly crumbled. In 1769 he advanced on the three Malla kings, who were quivering in Bhaktapur, ending the Malla rule and unifying Nepal.

Shah moved his capital from Gorkha to Kathmandu, establishing the Shah dynasty, which rules to this day, with its roots in the Rajput kings of Chittor. Shah died just six years later in Nuwakot but is revered to this day as the founder of the nation.

Shah had built his empire on conquest and his insatiable army needed ever more booty and land to keep it satisfied. Within six years the Gurkhas had conquered eastern Nepal and Sikkim. The expansion then turned westwards into Kumaon and Garhwal, only halted on the borders of the Punjab by the armies of the powerful one-eyed ruler Ranjit Singh.

The kingdom's power continued to grow until a 1792 clash with the Chinese in Tibet led to an ignominious defeat, during which Chinese troops advanced down the Kyirong Valley to within 35km of Kathmandu. As part of the ensuing treaty the Nepalis had to cease their attacks on Tibet and pay tribute to the Chinese emperor in Beijing; the payments continued until 1912.

The expanding Nepali boundaries, by this time stretching all the way from Kashmir to Sikkim, eventually put it on a collision course with the world's most powerful empire, the British Raj. Despite early treaties with the British, disputes over the Terai led to the first Anglo-Nepali war, which the British won after a two-year fight. The British were so impressed by their enemy that they decided to incorporate Gurkha mercenaries into their own army.

The 1816 Sugauli treaty called a halt to Nepal's expansion and laid down its modern boundaries. Nepal lost Sikkim, Kumaon, Garhwal and much of the Terai, though some of this land was restored to Nepal in 1858 in return for support given to the British during the Indian Mutiny (Indian War of Independence). A British resident was sent to Kathmandu to keep an eye on things but the Raj knew that it would be too difficult to colonise the impossible hill terrain, preferring to keep Nepal as a buffer state. Nepalis to this day are proud that their country was never colonised by the British, unlike the neighbouring hill states of India.

Following its humiliating defeat, Nepal cut itself off from all foreign contact from 1816 until 1951. The British residents in Kathmandu were the only Westerners to set eyes on Nepal for more than a century.

On the cultural front, temple construction continued impressively, though perhaps of more import to ordinary people was the introduction, via India, of chillis, potatoes, tobacco and other New World crops.

The Shah rulers, meanwhile, swung from ineffectual to seriously deranged. At one point the kingdom was governed by a twelve-year-old female regent, in charge of a nine-year-old king! One particularly sadistic ruler, Crown Prince Surendra, expanded the horizons of human suffering by ordering subjects to jump down wells or ride off cliffs, just to see whether they would die.

The Ranocracy

The death of Prithvi Narayan Shah in 1775 set in motion a string of succession struggles, infighting, assassinations, feuding and intrigue that culminated in the Kot Massacre in 1846. This bloody night was engineered by the young Chhetri noble, Jung Bahadur; it catapulted his family into power and sidelined the Shah dynasty.

Ambitious and ruthless, Jung Bahadur organised (with the queen's consent) for his soldiers to massacre several hundred of the most important men in the kingdom - noblemen, soldiers and courtiers - while they were assembled in the Kot courtyard adjoining Kathmandu's Durbar Square. He then exiled 6000 members of their familles to prevent revenge attacks.

Jung Bahadur took the title of Prime Minister and changed his family name to the more prestigious Rana. He later extended his title to maharajah (king) and decreed it hereditary. The Ranas became a second 'royal family' within the kingdom and held the reins of power - the Shah kings became listless figureheads, requiring permission even to leave their palace.

The hereditary family of Rana prime ministers held power for more than a century, eventually intermarrying with the Shahs. Development in Nepal stagnated, although the country did manage to preserve its independence. Only on rare occasions were visitors allowed into Nepal.

Jung Bahadur Rana travelled to Europe in 1850, attended the opera and the races at Epsom, and brought back a taste for neoclassical architecture, examples of which can be seen in Kathmandu today. To the Ranas' credit, sati (the Hindu practice of casting a widow on her husband's funeral pyre) was abolished in 1920, 60, 000 slaves were released from bondage and a school and a college were established in Kathmandu. But while the Ranas and their relations lived lives of opulent luxury, the peasants in the hills were locked in a medieval existence.

Modernisation began to dawn on Kathmandu with the opening of the Bir Hospital, Nepal's first, in 1889, the first piped water system, limited electricity and the construction of the huge Singha Durbar palace. In 1923 Britain formally acknowledged Nepal's independence and in 1930 the kingdom of Gorkha was renamed the kingdom of Nepal, reflecting a growing sense of national consciousness.

The arrival of the Indian railway line at the Nepali border greatly aided the transportation of goods but sounded a death knell for the caravan trade that bartered Nepali grain and rice for Tibetan salt. The transborder trade suffered another setback when the British opened a second, more direct trade route with Tibet through Sikkim's Chumbi Valley (the real nail in the coffin came in 1966, when the Chinese closed the border to local trade).

Elsewhere in the region dramatic changes were taking place. The Nepalis supplied logistical help during Britain's invasion of Tibet in 1903, and over 300, 000 Nepalis fought in WWI and WWII, garnering a total of 13 Victoria Crosses - Britain's highest military honour - for their efforts.

After WWII, India gained its independence and the communist revolution took place in China. Tibetan refugees fled into Nepal in the first of several waves when the new People's Republic of China tightened its grip on Tibet, and Nepal became a buffer zone between the two rival Asian giants. At the same time King Tribhuvan, forgotten in his palace, was being primed to overthrow the Ranas.

Restoration of the Shahs

In late 1950 King Tribhuvan was driving himself to a hunting trip at Nagarjun when he suddenly swerved James-Bond-style into the expecting Indian embassy, claimed political immunity and was flown to India. Meanwhile, the recently formed Nepali Congress party, led by BP Koirala, managed to take most of the Terai by force from the Ranas and established a provisional government that ruled from the border town of Birganj. India exerted its considerable influence and negotiated a solution to Nepal's turmoil, and King Tribhuvan returned in glory to Nepal in 1951 to set up a new government composed of demoted Ranas and members of the Nepali Congress party.

Although Nepal gradually reopened its long-closed doors and established relations with other nations, dreams of a new democratic system were not permanently realised. Tribhuvan died in 1955 and was succeeded by his cautious son Mahendra. A new constitution provided for a parliamentary system of government and in 1959 Nepal held its first general election. The Nepali Congress party won a clear victory and BP Koirala became the new prime minister. In late 1960, however, the king decided the government wasn't to his taste after all, had the cabinet arrested and swapped his ceremonial role for real control (much as King Gyanendra would do 46 years later).

In 1962 Mahendra decided that a partyless, indirect panchayat (council) system of government was more appropriate to Nepal. The real power remained with the king, who chose 16 members of the 35-member National Panchayat, and appointed the prime minister and his cabinet. Political parties were banned.

Mahendra died in 1972 and was succeeded by his 27-year-old British-educated son Birendra. Nepal's hippy community was unceremoniously booted out of the country when visa laws were tightened in the run-up to Birendra's coronation in 1975. Simmering discontent with corruption, the slow rate of development and the rising cost of living erupted into violent riots in Kathmandu in 1979. King Birendra announced a referendum to choose between the panchayat system and one that would permit political parties to operate. The result was 55% to 45% in favour of the panchayat system; democracy had been outvoted.

Nepal's military and police apparatus were among the least publicly accountable in the world and strict censorship was enforced. Mass arrests, torture and beatings of suspected activists are well documented, and the leaders of the main opposition, the Nepali Congress, spent the years between 1960 and 1990 in and out of prison.

During this time there were impressive movements towards development, namely in education and road construction, with the number of schools increasing from 300 in 1950 to over 40, 000 by 2000. But the relentless population growth (Nepal's population grew from 8.4 million in 1954 to 26 million in 2004) cancelled out many of these advances, turning Nepal from an exporter to a net importer of food within a generation. It is also widely accepted that a huge portion of foreign aid was routinely creamed off into royal and ministerial accounts.

During this time over one million hill people moved to the Terai in search of land and several million crossed the border to seek work in India (Nepalis are able to cross the border and work freely in India), creating a major population shift in favour of the now malaria-free Terai.

People power

In 1989, as communist states across Europe crumbled and pro democracy demonstrations occupied China's Tiananmen Square, Nepali opposition parties formed a coalition to fight for a multiparty democracy with the king as constitutional head; the upsurge of protest was called the Jana Andolan, or People's Movement.

In early 1990 the government responded to a nonviolent gathering of over 200,000 people with bullets, tear gas and thousands of arrests. After several months of intermittent rioting, curfews, a successful strike, and pressure from various foreign-aid donors, the government was forced to back down. The people's victory did not come cheaply; it is estimated that more than 300 people lost their lives.

On 9 April King Birendra announced he was lifting the ban on political parties. On 16 April he asked the opposition to lead an interim government, and announced his readiness to accept the role of constitutional monarch. Nepal was a democracy.

Democracy & the Maoist uprising

In May 1991, 20 parties contested a general election for a 205-seat parliament. The Nepali Congress won power with around 38% of the vote. The Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) won 28%, and the next largest party, the United People's Front, 5%.

In the years immediately following the election, the political atmosphere remained uneasy. In April 1992 a general strike degenerated into street violence between protesters and police, and resulted in a number of deaths.

In late 1994 the Nepali Congress government, led by GP Koirala (brother of BP Koirala) called a midterm election. No party won a clear mandate, and a coalition formed between the CPN-UML and the third major party, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), the old panchayats, with the support of the Nepali Congress. This was one of the few times in the world that a communist government had come to power by popular vote.

Political stability did not last long, and the late 1990s were littered with dozens of broken coalitions, dissolved governments and sacked politicians.

In 1996 the Maoists (of the Communist Party of Nepal), fed up with government corruption, the failure of democracy to deliver improvements to the people, and the dissolution of the Communist government, declared a 'people's war'. The insurgency began in the poor regions of the far west and gathered momentum, but was generally ignored by the politicians. The repercussions of this nonchalance finally came to a head in November 2001 when the Maoists broke their ceasefire and an army barracks was attacked west of Kathmandu. After a decade of democracy it seemed increasing numbers of people, particularly young Nepalis and those living in the countryside, were utterly disillusioned.

Royal troubles

On 1 June 2001 the Nepali psyche was dealt a huge blow when Crown Prince Dipendra gunned down almost every member of the royal family during a get-together in Kathmandu. A monarch who had steered the country through some extraordinarily difficult times was gone. When the shock of this loss subsided the uncertainty of what lay ahead hit home.

The beginning of the 21st century saw the political situation in the country turn from bad to worse. Prime ministers were sacked and replaced in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005, making a total of nine governments in 10 years. The fragile position of Nepali politicians is well illustrated by Sher Bahadur Deuba, who was appointed prime minister for the second time in 2001, before being dismissed in 2002, reinstated in 2004, sacked again in 2005, thrown in jail on corruption charges and then released! Against such a background, modern politics in Nepal has become more about personal enrichment than public service.

Several Maoist truces, notably in 2003 and 2005, offered some respite, though these reflected as much a need to regroup and rearm as they did any move towards a lasting peace. By 2005 nearly 13, 000 people, including many civilians, had been killed in the insurgency, more than half of them since the army joined the struggle in 2001. Amnesty International accused both sides of horrific human-rights abuses, including executions, abductions, torture and child conscription.

The Maoist insurgency has, ironically, only worsened the plight of the rural poor by diverting much-needed government funds away from development and causing aid programmes to suspend activity due to security concerns. Until there is real social change and economic development in the countryside, the frustrations fuelling Nepal's current insurgency look set only to continue.

Nepal's 12-year experiment with democracy faced a major setback in October 2002 when the sour-faced King Gyanendra, frustrated with the political stalemate and the continued delay in holding national elections, dissolved the government. Gyanendra again dissolved the government in February 2005, amid a state of emergency, promising a return to democracy within three years. The controversial king has not been helped by his dissolute son (and heir) Paras, who has allegedly been involved in several drunken hit-and-run car accidents, one of which killed a popular Nepali singer.

Entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2004 and the creation of the regional South Asian free trade agreement in 2006 may offer some long-term economic advances but the country remains deeply dependent on foreign aid, which makes up 25% of the state budget and over two-thirds of Nepal's total development budget. The aid industry has come under increased criticism for failing to generate the economic and social development that had been expected. Recent years have seen a move away from the megaprojects of the 1960s and '70s to smaller-scale community cooperation and microfinancing.

Everything changed in April 2006, when parlimentary democracy was grudgingly restored by the king, following days of mass demonstrations, curfews and the deaths of 16 protestors. The next month the newly restored parliament reduced the king to a figurehead, ending powers the royal Shah lineage had enjoyed for over 200 years.

The removal of the king was the price required to bring the Maoists to the negotiating table and a peace accord was signed later that year, drawing a close to the bloody decade-long insurgency. The pace of political change in Nepal was remarkable. The Maoists achieved a majority in the elections of 10 April 2008 and a month later parliament abolished the monarchy by a margin of 560 votes to four, ending 240 years of royal rule. Former Maoist ‘terrorists’ became cabinet ministers, members of the People’s Liberation Army joined the national army and an interim constitution was drafted to help bind the former guerrillas into the political mainstream. A renewed optimism in the political process was palpable throughout Nepal.

By 2008 a new government was formed, with former guerrilla leaders Pushpa Kamal Dahal (known by his nom de guerre Prachanda, which means ‘the Fierce’) as prime minister and Dr Baburam Bhattarai as finance minister. Ironically the ‘People’s’ armed struggle was led by two high-caste intellectuals.

There has still been plenty of potential for political instability. Calls for greater representation by groups such as the Madhesi of the Terai (who make up 35% of the population and live in the most productive and industrialised part of country) have resulted in a familiar pattern of economic blockades and political violence, and are only the beginning of many more possible claims. Political violence has continued to simmer in the Terai. The wounds of the People’s War will take a long time to heal. Over 1000 Nepalis remain unaccounted for, victims of political ‘disappearance’ or simple murder and finding justice for these crimes may prove elusive.

Moreover, after 40 years and over US$4 billion in aid (60% of its development budget) Nepal has remained one of the world’s poorest countries, with seven million Nepalis lacking adequate food or basic health and education. Nepal has one of the lowest health spending levels and the third-highest infant mortality rate in the world. The majority of Nepalis have continued stoically with their rural lives but until the government delivers on real social change and economic development in the countryside, the frustrations that fuelled Nepal’s recent political violence will remain unresolved.

Fiction and Britain's Middle East Mandate

Britain’s involvement in the Middle East between the wars proved a rich seam for authors of adventure stories. Michael Paris shows how these, in turn, helped to reinforce the imperial mission.

Between 1914 and 1918 adventure fiction for boys and young men was dominated by heroic tales of the Western Front, the war in the air or at sea. After 1918, however, and while many stories of the Great War continued to be published, authors began to seek new sites of adventure in which to locate their stories. Many were attracted by the new imperial territories of the Middle East. Here were unlimited opportunities for thrilling tales of young Britons bringing peace and order to a region made unstable by conflict, contrasting honest and upright Britons with cruel Turks, untrustworthy Arabs and rascally Egyptians. Such stories not only offered opportunities for manly heroics in an exotic location but served a patriotic purpose, for they justified the British presence in the Middle East, demonstrated the great advantages of British imperialism for indigenous peoples and allowed those of a more squeamish disposition to resolve through literature some of the tensions created by the occupation of the Middle East.

In 1919, as part of the territorial settlement of the region, Britain was given a League of Nations’ mandate for the old Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, Basrah (now in Iraq) and for Palestine. The region had a long history of lawlessness and violence and the inhabitants owed loyalty only to their tribal and religious leaders. Under the control of a high commissioner appointed by London, Britain’s declared mission was to prevent inter-state rivalry and tribal feuding after the upheaval of the war. The real purpose of the new administration, of course, was to safeguard British investment and maintain order in a useful staging post for the overland route to India and the Far East. However, in Iraq, a number of local secret societies opposed the occupation and in the summer of 1920 resistance to British control was encountered in one province after another. In July Iraq erupted into full-scale rebellion, especially around Baghdad and in the Kurdish north. Although there was little agreement between the dissident groups, the country was enveloped in turmoil and the army and Royal Air Force were in almost constant action. By autumn punitive raids by the RAF, constant military patrols and the building of fortified blockhouses had curbed the worst of the violence. In 1921, in an attempt to settle the insurrection, the Cairo Conference decided to create an Iraqi kingdom under the Hashemite prince Faisal ibn Hussein, son of Hussein ibn Ali, former Sharif of Mecca. But while Iraq now had a king, the British continued to run the country – backed by a strong military presence. Although Faisal was not popular with all Iraqis, the new government settled the worst of the troubles, yet discontent continued to simmer below the surface. Many Iraqis disliked the British occupation, which suggested that little had really changed since their Turkish masters had been ousted.

The burden of barbarous countries

In fiction no realistic comparison between the ‘Terrible Turk’ and the new British administration was ever made. British control was always welcomed. In the 1919 edition of Harry Golding’s popular Wonder Book of Empire, for example, Britain’s whole Middle Eastern policy was justified because:

Our Empire has been welded by blood and tears, by the courage and hopes of many generations, toiling and sacrificing for England’s glory. And although we have made serious mistakes, we have no cause on the whole to be ashamed of the way in which we have administered our heritage ...We may all be sure that better times are in store for the peoples who have passed under the sway of the British Empire, which, whatever its faults, is founded upon the bed-rock principles of justice, humanity and freedom.

In the same year, Herbert Strang, a well-known and popular author of adventure stories, who had written for the government’s propaganda department at Wellington House during the war, echoed the sentiment in his novel, Tom Willoughby’s Scouts. Here, one of the imperialist administrators of the story, Major Burnaby, claims ‘Greed offers no real basis for an empire’ and compares this ‘grab-all’ approach of some nations with the enlightened British model of empire:

Britain has never sought to dominate other countries and people. Our Empire is a gradual, almost an accidental growth: much of it has been thrust upon us ... We have taken up the burden of rule in barbarous countries ... or countries like India and Egypt where civilisation has decayed, and which but for us would either be bear’s gardens or hotbeds of slavery and oppression. I don’t say that our motives have always been of the purest or our ways the best; but I do say that we have never, as a state, set before us the deliberate aim of grabbing what doesn’t belong to us, forcing all civilizations into our particular mould, and subjugating all other nations by sheer brutal terrorism.

In With Allenby in Palestine (1919), a story of the wartime campaign in the Middle East, Lieutenant-Colonel F.S. Brereton wrote enthusiastically of this last crusade which had freed the Holy Land:

Christendom discovered itself once more, after long weary years, in possession of Jerusalem, the sacred city, while the downtrodden peoples, in Turkey, in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia, breathed freely after years of subjection ... Christians, Armenians, Arabs, Mohammedans, and Jews welcomed the arrival of the British with acclamation.

But despite Brereton’s wishful thinking the people of the region did not ‘acclaim’ the victory. They rejected the benign hand of British imperialism and refused to see the advantages of British rule. Thus in a later novel Brereton had to deal with this reality. In Scouts of the Baghdad Patrols (1921) he explained that this was caused by the unstable nature of the Arab. ‘Your Arab is a peculiar person’, he suggested:

First and foremost he’s more often than not a highly-cultured, well-bred fellow. But he’s a born fighter. An habitual wanderer. A pilferer and a cut-throat. So heaps of ’em, now that they haven’t got the Turk to fight, turn upon the British, who came here to help ’em. They’re forever raising little wars and skirmishes ... You’ll learn that an Englishman has to be wary, especially when he puts his nose outside the city.

Such a comment reveals much about the curious relationship that existed between Arabs and Britons during the interwar years. It reflected an attitude widely held by orientalists and in government departments. On the one hand the Arab was a noble son of the desert, chivalric and cultured, on the other a despicable cut-throat who could not be trusted. But in Brereton’s novel, around Baghdad at least, a sort of peace is established by the army, dedicated peace keepers, who shoot rebels only when absolutely necessary, and with the essential help of the local Boy Scout troop formed by the young sons of British civil and military residents in Baghdad who offer friendship and moral example to the local Iraqi youth.

Policeman of the world

By the mid-1920s the British government had reluctantly accepted that in return for control of a substantial part of the Middle East they would have to take responsibility for policing the inter-tribal or inter-racial quarrels and take the opprobrium that role would bring. Alan Western’s 1937 novel, The Desert Hawk, although specifically concerned with keeping order in Palestine, is relevant here. As the author explains, the League of Nations turned to Britain as ‘The Policeman of the World’ to maintain order in this troubled country. As he expressed it:

Foreign troops marched through the streets of Jerusalem and once again a certain measure of peace was restored. But in trying to hold the balance of justice evenly the British have earned the dislike of both parties, who would rather have favouritism than justice. Both Jew and Arab think the British are too lenient with the other side, and both are eager to take matters into their own hands and settle it once and for all with a good deal of bloodshed.

The complexities of peacekeeping in Palestine are reduced to a simplistic but exciting narrative in which the major role is taken by Captain John Benson of military intelligence, who, disguised as a Bedouin chieftain, fights to maintain order and gradually earns the respect of many characters on both sides for his sense of fair play.

Benson is closely modelled on T.E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – perhaps the most romantic of all the Great War heroes, ‘the Silent Sentinel of the Sand’ and the ‘man who won a war on his own’, as one boys’ paper put it. Lawrence perfectly suited the mood of the times: brilliant, brutal, unconventional, having little patience with the official mindset. His wartime adventures in the Middle East almost certainly underpinned other fictions set in the region. Percy Westerman’s 1923 serial ‘The White Arab’, published in the serial paper Chums, for example, related the adventures of Denis Hornby, the 19-year-old ‘ace’ of the British secret service and his quest to discover who was inciting rebellion in the Middle East (Bolsheviks, of course). Lawrence’s influence is also obvious in the 1935 novel Biggles Flies East by W.E. Johns. This wartime adventure, set in 1917, has Biggles going undercover in Palestine to foil the plans of the German Lawrence, ‘El Shereef’. But the real villain turns out to be the Prussian, Erich von Stalhein, destined to become Biggles’ arch-enemy through two world wars.

Captain Benson lives in Jerusalem with his family but is frequently away on mysterious trips into the desert disguised as an Arab. His job is to track down and deal with those who would drive Jew and Briton into the sea. On one particularly hazardous mission against foreign agents attempting to stir up a holy war he is rescued by his 17-year-old son, who has just learned to fly. Although on this occasion war is avoided, Western ends on a pessimistic note – there is no peace in Palestine. The land is quiet but it is a watchful quietness, with the two ancient antagonists eyeing one another like boxers. The great danger is averted, though for how long?

That question can only be answered by the quiet men who go about their business without advertisement, who learn of trouble before it comes and institute steps to stop it, and who often go to a lonely death without even a line in the papers to say how they died. These men serve not only their own country, but the whole world, in the cause of peace ... Lawrence of Arabia was a man such as this, but whereas his fame will ring down the centuries, there are many who bring off work of tremendous importance whose names will never be known. The risks are terrifying; the reward is small; but the tradition of service remains an ideal to all who wish the name of England to be coupled with that of Peace.

Western apparently saw little hope for a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. What is interesting is that he seems to accept the fact that unceasing vigilance is the price Britain must pay to ensure peace throughout the Empire and mandated territories – the White Man, particularly the Englishman, must continue to bear his burden.

Peace from above

In reality peace was often maintained in morally dubious ways. Looking for a cheap but effective way of pacifying trouble spots in the Middle East and elsewhere, the British government decided to use the Royal Air Force. A handful of aircraft could cover the vast distances involved far more effectively than ground troops, identify dissidents and troublemakers and, through aerial bombing, deliver swift punishment to wrongdoers and rebels at a fraction of the cost of the old punitive columns. Aircraft were cutting edge at the time, sleek, fast and deadly, the essence of modernity, their presence a strong signal of Britain’s technological superiority.

The military argued that air strikes were humane and could be delivered with surgical precision that would take out only the guilty, the smart weapon of their generation. However evidence does not seem to substantiate this: for example, the bombing of Kurdish rebels in Suleymaniyah, the capital of Kurdistan, in May 1923. British intelligence learned that Kurdish insurgents were based in the city and the RAF was ordered into action. They first dropped leaflets ordering the dissidents to surrender or face aerial attack. The leaflets also acted as an early warning for the innocent to leave before the bombers arrived. But as one Kurdish woman later noted, ‘few of us could read, and we had no idea what an air raid was like so we stayed’. When the rebels failed to respond, the air force bombed the city on several occasions, causing considerable damage and killing or wounding many. The rebels fled into the mountains and the army occupied Suleymaniyah. Though air reprisals achieved little and killed more innocent civilians than rebels, for the RAF it was simply a case of following orders. As one pilot later patronisingly explained:

I had a job to do. My first loyalty was to my commanding officer. If the Kurds hadn’t learned to behave in a civilized way, we had to Spank their bottoms ...this was done with bombs and guns ...

Disquieting stories about the RAF’s conduct during these operations soon reached London, particularly reports that pilots frequently machine-gunned innocent civilians. Apparently patrolling pilots had been told to attack anyone who looked hostile. This was taken to mean anyone carrying a gun. But in a country where carrying a rifle was a normal means of protection, it was almost impossible to distinguish rebels from law-abiding subjects. Some pilots went further and considered all local inhabitants as fair game. Winston Churchill, alarmed at one report that women and children had been deliberately gunned down, wrote to Lord Hugh Trenchard, commander-in-chief of the RAF:

To fire wilfully on women and children is a disgraceful act. I am surprised you did not order the officers responsible to be court-martialled.

Trenchard’s only response was to ensure that his field commanders in Iraq censored their reports before they were forwarded to Whitehall.

The RAF have apparently never issued any details about its operations in 1920s Iraq. It wasn’t until the 1990s that documents were released that revealed it considered a whole range of new weapons to maintain order in the Middle East in the 1920s. These included delayed action bombs, non-lethal gases, liquid fire, phosphorous bombs and metal crowfeet, to be scattered in rebel areas to maim livestock and unwary humans. This was not how popular fiction portrayed peacekeeping operations.

Rollicking adventure

In 1935 Captain W.E. Johns, the creator of Biggles, published his novella, The Raid. In this story Flight-Lieutenant Guy Baring is part of the air policing operation. As he explains to a an archaeologist, the art of keeping the peace is to bomb the right targets:

Nowadays we don’t go for the lads themselves: they can hide up in the caves, anyway. We go for the stock, and they have no means of protecting them. When a village gets on its toes a squadron of machines only has to make a demonstration and our dark skinned brothers get worried, very worried. They aren’t afraid for themselves, or the women, who can be replaced in the next raid, it’s the thought of their prized pieces of furniture grazing on the hillsides being hurt that brings them in, all agitato, with the pipe of peace in one hand, and a hatchet to bury in the other.

What follows is a rollicking adventure of flying, fighting and high excitement as the gallant young airmen foil yet another attempt to drive the British out of Iraq and reduce the region to anarchy. The effect of this sort of writing by Johns and the many others producing such fiction was to reduce the conflict in the Middle East to exciting adventure and heroic escapades that captured the imagination of their readers and offered an explanation of why the British had undertaken the thankless task of acting as the world’s policeman. But such ‘actions’ often had terrible consequences for those caught in the crossfire.

Alternative enemies

Leo Charlton was an ex-RAF senior officer who had left the service after serious disagreements about policy and procedure and had turned to writing. In his novel Near East Adventure, published in 1930, two Englishmen working in Iraq make friends in one particular village. Through a series of misunderstandings, the local RAF squadron assume the Iraqis are rebels and attack them, causing several fatalities. When the squadron commander later discovers his error he tells the Englishmen:

Thank God you both survived to put us right. Your friends cannot be brought back to life, but the tribe can be fully compensated for their death. We can’t afford to lose the friendship of [Chief] Beni Sokhr.

So that’s all right, then!

In the interwar period dissent in the Middle East was widespread: in Iraq, Palestine and Egypt and in the Sudan, where authors also set a number of exciting tales. But most novelists found it impossible to believe that any indigenous people could reject the imperial vision and so were driven to find a reason for the unrest, a scapegoat upon whom they could pin the blame for the continual agitation throughout the Empire. In popular literature, at least, the blame was usually attributed to Muslim fanatics who wanted a holy war against Europeans, or more commonly, the Bolsheviks who were desperate to destroy the British Empire and who incited the locals and provided arms and money. In a high proportion of the novels about the Middle East it is Communist agitators who incite rebellion. In both W. E. Johns’ novels, The Raid and Desert Night, it is the Communists who are to blame, as they are in Railton Holden’s 1930s novels, Wings of Revolution and The Hornet’s Nest. The latter may be taken as a typical example. An English officer interrogates an informer to find out what lies behind the current unrest, ‘Is it a Moslem rising?’ he asks,

‘Not on your sweet life!’ Retorted the Londoner,

‘It’s the Bolshies.’

‘Russians?’

‘No! Bolshies, Russian Bolshies if you like, German Bolshies, Swedes, Frenchies, Wops and Greasers. The work-shies of every bloomin’ country in the world… Out for summat for nowt ...’

According to popular opinion, then, rebellion against the British was the work of outsiders – troublemakers and fanatics who stirred up the indigenous peoples and who made them forget the enormous advantages of living under British rule. But while the British pacification of the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s in reality created a legacy of bitterness and hostility that endures to this day, at the time it was portrayed as a noble endeavour; after all, as one old imperialist proudly wrote in the 1930s, ‘... the soul of England is the mightiest force for good in the world today’.

Michael Paris is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Central Lancashire

All the World's a Prison

When the European powers began exporting convicts to other continents, they did so to create a deterrent and to establish new settlements across the world. Clare Anderson traces the history of punitive passages.

Standing on the rocks of Kourou, looking out over the muddy red-brown waters that lap the shores of Guyane, or French Guiana, it is just about possible to make out the contours of three islands: Île Saint-Joseph, Île Royale and Île du Diable. The imperial history of this small archipelago began when Guyane became an outpost of the French empire in the 1760s and sick colonists sought refuge in the more salubrious climes of what they called the Îles du Salut: the Salvation Islands. After 1852, Guyane grew famous and eventually notorious as a place of convict transportation. As the penal colony expanded, its offshore islands became part of a constellation of convict locations scattered along its coast and rivers, facing outwards over the sea and across the borders with Brazil and Suriname. Today, Guyane is best known as the place in which the French military officer Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned and from which Henri Charrière (played by Steve McQueen in the 1974 film Papillon) escaped. With penal transportation to the colony lasting for just over a century, Dreyfus and Charrière were just two among tens of thousands of convicts. It was not until 1953, following convict desertion on a massive scale and humanitarian concern about the fate of ex-convicts who, under French law, were not allowed to leave Guyane, that the last remaining convicts were liberated and the penal colony was closed.

France had first sent convicts to Guyane following the coup d’état of 1797. However, coinciding with an epidemic outbreak of what we now know was yellow fever, almost all of them died. The few who survived were repatriated to France. In the decades that followed, politicians and penal reformers in the French metropole discussed at length the desirability or otherwise of establishing penal colonies, often through comparison with those of British Australia, including in New South Wales. It was half a century later, however, in 1848, that transportation was again used. The June insurgents were transported to the French colony of Algeria and, following Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 1851, more political convicts joined. French Guiana opened a year later. From then until 1953 around 53,000 convicts and, after 1887, approximately 17,000 relégués (repeat offenders) were sent there. This was slightly fewer than the number of convicts transported from Britain, Ireland and the colonies to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales between 1787 and 1840, but about the same number as those sent from British India to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal between 1858 and 1942. The Guyane convicts came not just from France, but also from its imperial possessions: Algeria, La Réunion, the Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique), Madagascar and French Indochina. Most of the convicts were ordinary criminal offenders, though political prisoners such as Dreyfus were also sent. Included in their number were just a few hundred women, some of whom were volunteers from metropolitan prisons. The convict population was, though, overwhelmingly male. 

Slavery had been abolished in the French empire in 1848 and, to a large extent, convicts presented a solution to the inevitable labour crisis that followed. The first convicts to arrive were put to work clearing the dense forests for cultivation and in building works. They gradually moved, by 1857, from the initial settlement on the Îles du Salut to the mainland settlement of Maroni. A network of convict sites across the colony expanded and shrank over time according to their relative success and failure.

Convicts were employed in diverse forms of labour: not just land clearance and infrastructural development, but at various times in the tannery, lime kilns and workshops for the manufacture of shoes, boots and clothes. They cultivated coffee, sugar cane, betel nut and cotton and worked in logging wood in the timber camps. Mortality rates during the first decades were appalling. In the 1880s the average life expectancy of a convict was calculated at seven years, six months and seven days. For European convicts it was even worse: just five years, five months and three days. With transportation criticised in Paris as little more than a death sentence, after 1867 all European convicts were shipped to a new, apparently less deadly penal colony in the Pacific: New Caledonia. Until transportation to the Pacific was suspended in 1896, Guyane received only convicts from the colonies. After that date, transportation from metropolitan France to Latin America was resumed. 

The penal history of French Guiana is part of a global story. Around the world, transportation was underpinned by sometimes incompatible ambitions: to create a deterrent; to employ convict labour in opening up frontiers, colonies and borderlands; and to populate newly colonised locations with what in Guyane were called transportés-colons(transportation-colonists). Political repression and forced labour combined to change the face of nations, empires and colonies and to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. Convicts took various, interconnected routes to penal sites across the world, which were closely associated with other forms of punishment (including imprisonment in jails and hulks), as well as indentured labour, military impressment, enslavement and the incarceration of indigenous people. Across a range of sites around the world, convict transportation and penal colonies left significant demographic, cultural and other legacies that are still evident today. 

The number of convicts sent to key penal locations by European powers, 1415-1953.

Among European powers, it was Portugal that first used convicts for the purpose of imperial expansion. It enrolled felons into its army and navy to conquer the North African presidio(fort) of Ceuta in 1415, in return for a pardon. It later transported convicts from Portugal to locations including Goa, São Tomé, Brazil, Mozambique and Angola, with considerable circulations between the colonies. During the great age of imperial expansion that began around the year 1700, the Spanish, Dutch and British also transported convicts overseas from Europe, as well as between their imperial possessions in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. The Spanish shipped convicts to and around forts in the Americas, Cuba and the Philippines. Dutch flows (from the 17th century) spanned the Indian Ocean, with convicts transported between Java (in modern Indonesia) and the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). Convicts were sent from Britain and Ireland to the Americas, including Virginia, Barbados and Jamaica. These destinations were not penal colonies; rather convicts were sold into indentured servitude and shipped alongside other such workers. Following the closing of the American colonies to convicts at the end of the War of Independence, the British experimented with convict transportation to West Africa (which proved a disaster) and, ultimately (and successfully), to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Norfolk Island and Western Australia. The 167,000 or so convicts shipped to the Australian colonies included a significant minority of courts martialled soldiers and imperial subjects convicted in the West Indian and other colonies, including the Cape Colony, Hong Kong and Mauritius.

Transportation was not exclusive to European empires. Into the early 20th century, imperial Russia shipped convicts to its far eastern territories, including Siberia and Sakhalin Island. Meiji-era Japan sent convicts to the northern island of Hokkaido between 1881 and 1907. Qing China, which lasted from 1644 to 1912, used convict transportation overland to open up its westernmost frontiers, including, after its conquest in the late 1750s, Xinjiang. After gaining independence from the Iberian powers in the early 19th century, the new nation states of Latin America set up offshore penal colonies, too, including Ushuaia in Argentinian Patagonia, Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha and Mexico’s Islas Marías.

Russian convicts on a boat to Sakhalin Island, 1890. Photo by Anton Chekhov

The number of convicts transported by the European powers was at least 680,000, an estimate likely to rise as the complex research necessary to piece together often fragmented archival material progresses. It does not include the 600,000 or so prisoners and military offenders conscripted into the convict forces of the French Empire between 1832 and 1972. Nor does it incorporate the 900,000 or so convicts shipped by imperial Russia, the (at least) 10,000 convicts transported to Hokkaido, the tens of thousands of Chinese convicts or the as yet unknown numbers of Latin American transportees. If we include the explicitly political transportations, deportations and resettlements of the 20th-century Soviet gulags and China’s laogai, the scale of convict transportation rises into the tens of millions: the full extent will probably never be known. From whichever vantage point we look, the geographical reach and numerical scale of global penal transportation was vast. 

***

One key pattern of the period is that during the early modern age convicts were often impressed into the army, indentured in labour contracts or forced into ‘voluntary’ banishment. They could work alongside soldiers and slaves at near-identical labour and in near-identical conditions. In the Spanish presidios, for example, they were shipped with and employed alongside soldiers and slaves in the building of military fortifications. Convicts also worked with slaves and indentured labourers on Britain’s American plantations. From approximately the end of the 18th century, coinciding with the development of new Enlightenment ideas about ideal forms of punishment and confinement, discrete, often isolated, penal colonies emerged, which could be sites of radical experiments in the treatment and rehabilitation of convicts. Though work remained important to convicts’ so-called moral reform, sometimes these colonies were places of penal innovation, too. In the Andaman Islands, for example, a radiating cellular jail was constructed in 1906, in which convicts would undergo an initially harsh incarceration before progressing to other penal stages served outside its walls. 

Political repression was always a feature of penal transportation, with some convicts transported for protest or rebellion. Many political convicts were educated and literate and wrote memoirs of their experiences. It is for that reason, perhaps, that they are best known. Some of the machine breakers and rural rebels convicted during England’s Swing Riots, when argicultural workers vandalised new machinery, were, for example, shipped as convicts to the Australian colonies in the early 1830s. The British transported dozens of Irish rebels to the convict hulks of Bermuda in the 1840s and to Western Australia following the rebellion of 1867. The Andaman Islands penal colony in the Bay of Bengal was initially established as a site for the transportation of thousands of mutineers convicted in the aftermath of the Great Uprising of 1857. Though the larger majority of convicts subsequently sent to the islands were ordinary criminal offenders, they continued to receive political convicts. These included so-called ‘fanatics,’ or Wahabis, in the 1860s and 1870s, Mapilahs from Kerala following the Malabar Rebellion in the 1920s and Indian nationalists, such as V.D. Savarkar, who were incarcerated in the cellular jail. 

If penal transportation was closely connected to military impressment, enslavement and indenture, as well as political repression of various kinds, it was also linked to other kinds of punishment. It was the usual less severe alternative to capital sentences, of death on the gallows or guillotine, and its enhanced use during the period from the late 1700s can in part be explained by a decline in execution rates in many contexts. It was usually seen as more severe than imprisonment and, in places such as France, where prisoners could be sent to the penal colonies after repeat offences, it was used as a particular deterrent against crime. Beyond its penal ambitions, it was also related to the desire to expand the frontiers of empires and nations. This was the case for French Guiana, as well as New Caledonia. Across the British Empire, convicts were used to colonise the Anti- podes after 1787, to build Bermuda’s naval dockyard in the Atlantic Ocean (1824-63) and to undertake military works on the rock of Gibraltar (1842-75). Fearing Russian invasion and wanting enhanced overland communication, at the turn of the 20th-century, the Japanese government transferred convicts from Kushiro to Abashiri, where they built a new road connecting the town to central Hokkaido.

Prisoners at work at the Noumea Penal Colony, New Caledonia, engraved by Gillot, c.1900.

The global dimensions of transportation are evident across penal systems, too, including through the ongoing mobility of convicts following their initial transportation via onward shipment or relocation. Across empires, convicts were not just sent outwards to the colonies, but between and around imperial possessions. In early modern times, this included extensive convict movement between the Spanish presidios in the Americas and the Philippines. Entirely separate regional circuits could develop in some contexts. The English East India Company, for example, shipped convicts from its Indian possessions to penal settlements in Mauritius and Aden, as well as Penang, Malacca, Singapore and Burma. After Britain’s possessions in India were transferred to Crown control following the Great Uprising of 1857, the government of India established a new penal colony in the Andaman Islands. It remained open, receiving convicts from all over the Indian subcontinent, including Burma, until the Japanese invaded and occupied the Andamans in 1942.

***

In many cases, as in Guyane, the imperial powers desired permanent settlement in their possessions, following an initial period of land clearance and development. Across the various settlements, convicts were put to work in cutting down trees, draining marshes and building basic infrastructure: roads, railways, bridges and bunds. They were otherwise employed in occupations that could promote self-sufficiency and economic productivity: growing food and raising livestock, timber extraction and in some places experimental agricultural production or resource extraction. Examples of the latter included convict work on tobacco and coffee plantations, in the breeding of silkworms and manufacture of silk and in coal, sulphur and tin mines. Often, convicts were either encouraged to stay on after completing their sentence, perhaps through land grants or the gifting of seeds or agricultural equipment. In many places, convicts were denied the legal right of return or, where they had it, the cost of repatriation was not paid, so they could not go back to their place of birth or pre-transportation settlement. In practice, then, in places such as Australia, the Bay of Bengal, Japan and New Caledonia, convict transportation constituted a means of permanent colonisation. This was to the detriment of indigenous peoples in sites as diverse as Van Diemen’s Land, Hokkaido and the Andamans, which were utterly devastated by the foreign occupation of their land. 

The profound impact of transportation on indigenous people, and ongoing controversies about their displacement, is one of its key legacies. Given its scale and reach, it is not surprising that penal transportation has left others – demographic, social and cultural – all over the world. It has been argued that, in some locations, the association between convicts and outdoor labour left local and migrant populations unwilling to take employment doing manual work. This was the case in both 19th-century Burma (the penal settlements closed in 1963) and in post-Second World War Guyane. Today, there are many thousands of genealogists in modern Britain, Ireland and Australia, for example, researching and constructing convict family trees. In the Andamans, the ‘local born’ descendants of convicts live quite differently from their mainland ancestors and are differentiated in the population categories of the modern Indian state. There are also descendants of convicts living in Guyane today, including in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where the huge Camp de la Transportation is being developed as a museum and archive. In heritage sites and museums elsewhere visitors can learn about convict life in places such as Hyde Park Barracks (Sydney), Port Arthur (Tasmania), Abashiri and Tsukigata (Hokkaido) and the Cellular Jail National Memorial (Andamans). They can ride the train to ‘the end of the world’ in Ushuaia, Argentina. History, of course, is constantly subject to a process of making and remaking. As with the case of Guyane, what is remembered and forgotten about its complex history of convict transportation – as also its relationship to imperial repression, indigenous people, slavery and free migration – has had profound implications for local identities today. 

Clare Anderson is the principal investigator of a European Resarch Council Seventh Framework Programme-funded research project on convict transportation and penal colonies, based at the University of Leicester.

A History Of Contraception

A History Of Contraception: From Antiquity To The Present Day

Angus McLaren - Blackwell, 1990 - 278pp. - £25

History Of Childbirth, Fertility, Pregnancy And Birth In Early Modern Europe 

Jacques Gelis, translated by Rosemary Morris - Polity Press, 1991 - 326pp. - £39.50

'Shattered Nerves' - Doctors, Patients And Depression In Victorian England

Janet Oppenheim - Oxford University Press, 1991 - 388pp. - $27.95

The history of medicine used to be a peripheral subject confined largely to doctors who had antiquarian interests or who wished to celebrate their own interests – along with the march of medical progress. The subject was of little interest to historians. But the history of medicine is now a major branch of history, central to the study and understanding of any society and attracting gifted historians. Michel Foucault initiated a new historical industry in the study of power relationships and this has been particularly fruitful in the history of medicine. Recently historians have been looking at those subjects that were once no part of medicine but which became 'medicalised' and so part of the medical profession's struggles for power, both internal and external. New light on these problems can also blind. Many of those working in the field have no medical background and this can cause problems. All these books show how historians and doctors need each other.

Each of these books makes important contributions to the new tradition. All present their subjects from modern angles with extensive references (though these are sometimes difficult and tedious to follow because of the failure to put page numbers in the lists of notes or to indicate the whereabouts of the full reference). All the books will be useful to those who read, write, teach or research in these fields, and for many they will be invaluable.

Contraception (like abortion) is one of those subjects over which the medical profession struggled to gain control in order to do little or nothing about it. Angus McLaren's History of Coatraception is much more than just a history of the subject. Written by a professor of history, it avoids the approach that concentrates on progress and new discoveries and enters the field of the history and significance of fertility control. McLaren discusses population changes and attitudes to marriage and divorce; babies normal and abnormal, their care and sometimes their killing; fertility and infertility, including such practices as concubinage, the sharing of fertile wives and, recently, surrogacy; impotence and masturbation, abortion and miscarriage; drugs in pregnancy; and property rights in relation to fertility.

Discussion of (quite sophisticated) attitudes to contraception in Ancient Greece and Rome is followed by assessment of the question of birth control in the early Christian period, during which the initial preaching of equality between the sexes gradually gave way to the development of a male- dominated, hierarchical institution fiercely opposed to birth control and, it seems, to women in general. McLaren questions the common view that the 'Dark Ages' are of no interest to the historian of birth control. He points out that this period saw the change from 'the old Roman-style family' to the 'new symmetrical household', now without slaves and cherishing large numbers of children for their work potential. Meanwhile, throughout the Middle Ages, the Church increased its attempts to control sexuality and prevent the use of contraception.

Then came the gradual shift of the Church's objections to contraception from theological to medical arguments and gradually doctors became the 'experts' in all things sexual and procreative. By the nineteenth century fecundity was competing with gentility and, amid insufficient resources for both, gentility won. But well into the twentieth century powerful doctors continued to insist (on no evidence other than their own strong feelings) that control of conception was dangerous and harmful and led to serious diseases. Politicians were equally condemnatory. 'The woman who flinches from childbirth', declared Theodore Roosevelt, 'stands on a par with the soldier who drops his rifle and runs in battle', But this was going against the tide and family size was already diminishing. It seems that birth control campaigns are successful only when births are already declining.

Jacques Geli's History of Childbirth was published in France in 1984 and is researched largely from French sources. It is more anthropology than history, with much fascinating information and many anecdotes, some of them sad or gruesome. There is a particularly interesting account of pain in childbirth and its symbolic meaning in motherhood along with, until comparatively recently, lack of consideration for possible suffering of the infant.

Among the many other topics discussed are attitudes to pregnancy and to babies, positions for delivery and how these are socially determined, and the anthropology of monstrosities, 'imperfect beings' or 'nature's jokes'. There are also stories of a woman who gave birth to a bitch because her husband treated her like one, of women who ate their placentas and even their new- born babies, of babies emerging spontaneously several days after the death of their mothers – including twins in a grave later exhumed. We can read here of the dangers of redheads (believed to be the product of menstrual blood) and of the custom of preserving the umbilical cord with its Iigature, to give to the child at the age of three or four to see if it could untie it, a sort of intelligence test. The book discusses the interesting shift in vocabulary as doctors gradually wrested control of childbirth from midwives. For example, s'accoucher, to deliver oneself, gave way to etre accouchee, to be delivered, and there is a graphic description, with examples and quotations, of the lack of effort to resuscitate newborn babies up to the mid-seventeenth century. Was this a disguised form of infanticide?

This is a visual subject but unfortunately the book contains few illustrations. It also contains some mistakes which obscure some of the meaning of the text. It is not always clear whether these come from the translation or the original text. The presence of albumen in the urine of a pregnant woman is abnormal (p.48), so this does not explain the 'uromancy' described on p.48. The word 'probe' is used instead of 'catheter'. The malformations described as 'perforated anus or uretha' (p.174) are fanciful (these structures are normally perforated!); it looks as though what is meant is something like 'imperforate anus and atresia of the urethra'. Although it discusses the subject of 'face presentation', a comparatively rare condition, there is no entry for 'breech', the commonest malpresentation. This is described as 'feet first birth', which few readers would look for. These things annoy because it is such a good book.

Oppenheim's book is just as good despite her confusing equation of 'incapacitating depression' with 'nervous breakdown'. Nervous breakdown is a popular term for an inability to carry on normal life for psychological reasons, and there are many types. Although depression may be the commonest, I found myself constantly thinking of others (e.g. anxiety, schizophrenia, phobia, etc.). Nevertheless, here is a wealth of information and stimulating surprises for modern enthusiasts for the Victorian period. As the author says, it is impossible to read all the sources in this rich field, but her reading is impressively wide and covers psychiatric and medical texts as well as periodicals, diaries and letters, contemporary fiction and much else. Probably wisely, she makes no attempt to assess why the Victorians, both men and women, were so de- pressed, or even whether they were really more depressed than those before and after them. The fact is that many of them were depressed and exploring this gives a fascinating and unusual path into the Victorian world.

It is strange that the book contains no entry for 'religion', since this was important in depression. There is also little about anxiety, which plays such an important part in psychiatric disturbances. Neurosis is discussed briefly (p.8) but is not listed in the index, whereas anorexia nervosa, believed until the late twentieth century to be a rare disease, gets nineteen entries! Oppenheim is interesting on the subject of depressed Victorian gentlemen who consulted gynaecologists for relief but is curiously silent about the many thousands of depressed and hysterical women who came into the hands of the same gynaecologists and had their ovaries (and sometimes their clitorises) removed as a result.