Timeline - Issue 3

TIMELINEISSUE 3 LENT 2016ABINGDON SCHOOL'S HISTORY PUBLICATION

Is Putin a repeat of the past?

PUTIN:THE RED TSAR

FEATURE ARTICLE

EXTERMINATION OF THE CATHARS

KAISER WILHELM I: A BIOGRAPHY

THE SOVIET SIDE OF THE SPACE RACE

ALSO FEATURING:

Timeline Magazine Issue 3 | 1

WELCOME

TIMELINEMAGAZINE

EDITORIAL editor Archie Williams direCtor oF Art ANd deSiGN Blake Jones SPeCiAL tHANKS David McGill Sam Farrar

WRITERS David Loong Charlie Landells Jo Law Archie Williams Nicholas Lockett William Sheffield Alasdair Czaplewski John Hobby Calvin Liu Stepan Khovanov Edward Turner-Fussell Matthew Johnson Oliver Williams Louis Brosnan

Original Design by Asten YeoPrinted by Cambrian Printerswww.cambrian-printers.co.uk

Why bother? What is the point of history? Is it, as Jeremy from Peep Show put it, just ‘read-ing incredibly boring books about dead people killing each other with bayonets and ty-phus’? Tragically, there are a very high number of people out there who take just such

a view, that things slip out of the present and into the so-called “past,” where these events slowly collect dust and become more and more irrelevant until, finally, they are forgotten about altogether. One day, the Paris Attacks will be as far removed from the “present” as to seem as topical as ex-termination of the Cathars (an event you can find out more about in this issue): it will be the haunt of crazy intellectuals in tweed jackets getting overexcited and using extravagant hand gestures on history documentaries late at night on BBC 4.

This is, of course preposterous. In the momentous and uncertain days in which we now live, the only frame of reference we have is history, no matter how old. To find out if we are, indeed, being plunged into a new Cold War we must study history: we must look at the great ‘Red Tsars,’ which we do in this edition. Or where can we see how best to deal with the breakneck influx of immigrants from the Mid-dle East and North Africa but by seeing how the world has reacted before to the many immigration crises we have previously weathered? Ironically, to understand our present and the future it may bring, we need to understand our history. It doesn’t matter how old these events are, human nature always remains constant, and this is key.

But I believe there is another side to the subject. There is a real joy to history for its own sake- not just out of pragmatism. The way people lived in Ancient Egypt, the development of sound recording or the extent to which our British culture is barbarian in nature can be just as riveting and enrich the way we understand our world and the people in it as any article linked to current affairs. The great history we have inherited, like one massive swirling period drama, can play out before us in great and riveting style and can be simply mind blowing. History is neither dry nor fusty, it is a pleasure.

And so, in that vein, I give you issue 3 of Abingdon’s own history magazine.

2 | Timeline Magazine Issue 3

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTSFEATURES

Putin: The Last of the Red Tsars 8A comparison of Putin to his predecessors

2016 US Presidential Elections 4Populist Revolt or Dynastic Cycle?


INTRODUCTION

ANCIENTSAncient Egyptian Society 12The Antikythera Mystery: The Two Thousand Year Old Computer 14

MIDDLE AGESAre you a Barbarian? 17Dies Irae: The Extermination of the Cathars 20

EARLY MODERNWhat if the Spanish Conquest of South America had failed? 24The Butterfly Effect on History 27

MODERNAnd Not To Yeild: Exploration and the British Empire 29The Early History of Recorded Sound Part 1 34Sundown: The British Empire and the Great War 38

CONTEMPORARYThe Soviet Side of the Space Race 42Immigration in the 20th Century 45

BIOGRAPHYKaiser Wilhelm I: Crown from the Gutter 50

PERIODS


FEATURE


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2016 US PRESIDENTIAL

ELECTIONS: Populist Revolt or Dynastic Cycle?

David Loong weighs up the current candidates in the upcoming US elections

and their historical predecessors.

FEATURE ARTICLE


FEATURE

November 4, the day Americans go to the polls to put a new President into office, is less than a year away. Yet, blood has already been shed all over

the 24 hour news cycle, radio waves and campaign trails. On the one hand, you have a relatively ordered Democrat-ic caucus (supporters or members of a specific political party or movement), underpinned by the experience and cen-trism of Hillary Clinton, in a clean clash with the economic populism of Bernie Sanders. On the other hand, a crowded, raucous Republican battle has seen the candidates with no political experience surge past a plethora of governors and senators of varying levels of economic and social conservatism.

Commonalities can be seen in both races, however. While Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz lead a popu-list revolt against the fundraising net-works of establishment candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, leftist apathy against the Democratic establishment poses a real challenge to Clinton’s cam-paign. The focus of the election will in-evitably return to a traditional two -party standoff come the general election, but this cycle establishments in both parties face a war on two fronts. This begs the question is this a freak election cycle?

One need only look at history to realize it is actually not.

Donald Trump remains the poster boy of the grassroots revolt. Grassroots movements utilize collective action from the local level to affect change at a high-er level: be it local, regional, national, or international, bottom-up, rather than top-down. Boisterous, radical and dan-gerously flippant, his only concrete pro-posals have been to build a Great Wall of America on the border with Mexico and obliterate half of federal tax revenue. His persona finds roots in his time as an entertainer on The Apprentice and his almost burlesque self- aggrandization in both business and politics. Trump, how-ever, is not buoyed purely by sheer force of personality, however. He finds his base in the Middle American Radical: the MAR for short.

From the end of WWII through the Nixon presidency, the two- party system was only weakly ideologically delineat-ed. Not unlike the pre -Civil War parties, Republicans and Democrats both had economic and social progressives and re-actionaries. In the 1960’s, the most con-servative Southern Democrat was leaps and bounds further to the right than the typical liberal Northeastern Republican. Then, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1963 Civil Rights Act

leading to mass revolt of white voters. A similar figure to Trump is George Wal-lace, a demagogic segregationist, who sought support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by us-ing rational argument, attracted a lot of the lower -middle to middle class White vote in rebellion against the nation-al Democratic party. While he is most known for his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door”, unabashedly oppos-ing any civil rights progress, he also cam-paigned on economically populist ideals. This is not unlike Trump’s simultaneous demonization of both Mexican immi-grants and establishment business inter-ests an appeal to the alienated, socially conservative but economically repressed (mostly white) voter. Trump can trum-pet juvenile foreign policies and abrasive race identity politics all he wants because the MAR remains a small but significant political force to be reckoned with.

Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon without a single day in political office rides a sim-ilar wave of anti -establishment anger: however, his power base is largely deeply evangelical. Trump’s extravagant life-style, as well as his largely unimpressive reading of The Bible has landed himself deep uncertainty amongst key religious conservatives. Religious conservatism was largely muted on the political scene

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FEATURE

until Reagan’s election. Assisted by en-ergetic televangelists like Jerry Falwell, Reagan’s campaign mobilized previously passive evangelical conservatives. Since Reagan, candidates like Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee (he’s also running this cycle, but polls too low to be a serious contender) presented huge challenges to normally more moderate establishment candidates in recent Republican prima-ries. Carson’s parry with Trump for the top polling spot reflects how evangelicals have also turned against the Washington establishment.

Jeb Bush is the father of all establish-ment candidates, so much so he almost forgot the candidate part of the campaign. Essentially, former Florida governor and brother of ex -President George W. Bush leveraged the one thing experts thought mattered above all else in American pol-

itics: fundraising networks. A huge com-munity of donors bet early and big on Bush, allowing him to wield a formidable advertising presence. However, his re-cent stumbles in media interviews and debates have highlighted his key flaws as a candidate. Running on a largely unorig-inal platform of relatively moderate con-servatism, support for legal immigration, Common Core ( a program which details what K–12 students should know in En-glish language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade), neoconservative foreign policy (meaning that he advocates the promotion of democracy and promo-tion of American national interest in in-ternational affairs: much like his brother George W. Bush) as well as some tax and spending cuts Bush fails to strike a chord with this decades’ Republicans, who largely associate the Bush name with the

political massacre the party suffered after the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this way, the dynastic cycle appears to be com-ing to an end for the Bush family, which since the 90’s enjoyed a foremost spot in the moderate Republican conscience. Now, candidates like Rubio, Kasich and Fiorina contest the establishment vote more convincingly than Bush.

On the other side of the spectrum are the democrats. Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ mother of the establishment. First Lady to President Bill Clinton, New York Senator and Secretary of State, she has the strongest political resume in na-tional politics. Surprisingly defeated by Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries, she retained political connections and an image of of experience and wisdom amongst the electorate. Despite a num-ber of political setbacks this cycle in the Benghazi and email scandals, she still emerges as the strongest contender for the Democratic nomination. Her hus-band, Bill Clinton espoused a centrist ideology, doing away with government bloat where necessary while remaining cautious on social progressivism. Hil-lary has followed the trend, but has been pulled to the left by Bernie Sander’s en-ergetic campaign.

Bernie Sanders, favorite of the mil-lennials and Democrats’ hard left base, has been running a campaign on free col-lege tuition, massive government tax and spend policies, as well as social and civil liberalism. While his run is not unheard of in US political history (think Michael Dukakis, George McGovern, and other deeply liberal Democratic candidates), his potential for success is new. While McGovern lost in a historic landslide to Reagan, Sanders’ polling has been pos-itive nationwide, and continues to grow as his name recognition increases. His populist campaign has hence been some-what of a historical upset. Whoever ends up as the nominee of their party, or in-deed President elect of the United States may be dashing and electric populist, or deeply matured and calculating, but the force of political history will always be forbearing. •

Further ReadingFear and loathing on the campaign trail of ‘72 Hunter S ThompsonTeam of rivals, Doris Kearns GoodwinThe politics book, Paul Kelly

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Soldiers firing an M120 in Iraq


FEATURE

PUTIN: The Last of the

Red TsarsDoes Vladmir Putin buy into the legacy of

the great communist leaders of the USSR? Jo Law investigates this claim.

Since the collapse of Tsarism in the revolutions of 1917, Russia has failed to release itself from the autocratic grip it thought had ended with the accession

of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Instead of standard Tsars new “Red Tsars” devel-oped, working under the cloak of Marx-ism while in reality offering very little improvement over oppression faced un-der the Tsars. The supposedly “Social-ist” USSR turned out to share the same key principles as Tsarism with the most infamous Red Tsars being Vladimir Le-nin, Josef Stalin and - to a certain extent - Nikita Khrushchev. All three leaders pursued policies startlingly reminiscent of the Tsarist days with autocracy, bru-tality and brinkmanship all flourishing. It therefore becomes important to know whether the current leader of Russia is one of them. This could have astronomi-cal effects over what we read in our news-papers over the coming years.

Vladimir Putin may be described as an autocrat, and his loathing of democ-racy and elections is well known. Al-though regular parliamentary and pres-idential elections are held in Russia they are scarred by mass corruption; voters are bribed, ballot boxes stuffed and in-ternational observers dismissed from polling stations, for fear that Putin’s au-tocratic rule of Russia could, at the will of the people, slip away from him. This is strikingly similar to the events that unfolded under the very first Red Tsar,

Vladimir Lenin. Lenin came to power through a well

organised coup d’état in which he over-threw the Provisional Government af-ter storming the Winter Palace on the morning of 8 November. Lenin imme-diately showed himself to be dismissive of democracy when on 25 November the Bolsheviks flopped in Constituent As-sembly elections with 168/703 seats, the Russian people clearly showing their dis-approval for Bolshevik control. With the Assembly continually rejecting Lenin’s wishes of sovietism he grew tired of it and dispersed it in January 1918. As well as loathing democracy, Putin also holds another key autocratic trait of media control. Putin and his cronies run every major news network in Russia from 24 hour news stations to national newspa-pers. Through these outlets Putin is able to moderate what his citizens hear and what they don’t. Very recently Putin has been using this influence to spout propa-ganda speaking of Russia’s victimhood, convincing people that they have been unfairly attacked by the West through sanctions and NATO’s expanding influ-ence. This use of propaganda against the West has been seen before, also by Lenin. He relentlessly attacked the Whites, suc-cessfully brainwashing many peasants into a hatred of his enemy as they grew to believe that the Whites, mainly fighting for democracy, were puppets of France and Britain.

Putin has also been known to use

An anti-West march in Russia, the rocket says 'Privately to Obama'

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•


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more sinister methods when dealing with political rivals. One very recent example is the shooting of liberal, anti-Putin pol-itician Boris Nemtsov on 17 February 2015. An outspoken critic of corruption in Russia and organising a protest against the war in Ukraine, Nemtsov was shot just 100 metres from the Kremlin. Al-though it may seem farfetched to see this as similar to the purges of Josef Stalin, when looking deeper many similarities arise. During the “Great Purge” of 1936-39, tens of millions of potential political opponents were killed due to Stalin’s paranoia at “new and dangerous ideas”. Obviously Putin is not as psychopathic as Stalin in his oppression of political ri-vals but his calculated nature is perhaps more effective. His more focused killing sciences the most vocal of critics - which Putin has mainly performed through im-prisonment - while also insuring inter-national outrage is kept to a minimum. Putin’s choice of allies is also worrying as he seems to have no qualms over who they are no matter how awful they are. The prime example of this is Putin’s close relationship with Bashar al-Assad of Syria. It was his initial oppression that led to the current war in Syria while he is still the main cause of death and ter-ror in the country primarily through his continued use of barrel bombs on inno-cent civilians. A 2015 report by the Syr-ian Network for Human Rights found “49 major massacres displaying obvious traits of sectarian or ethnic cleansing”. The Putin-Assad relationship is worry-ingly similar to that of Stalin and Hitler before WWII, in which they agreed to peace and partitionment of Eastern Eu-rope through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin, much like Putin, had no con-sideration for the ethnic brutality of Hit-ler towards the Jews, which somewhat mirrors Assad’s treatment of Sunni Mus-lims both through treatment during war and their long term policy proceeding it. Only through Hitler’s attack of Russia in 1941 that the pact became annulled.

When Putin first came to power, in 1999, there was a widespread expec-tation that he would be the leader to turn Russia around. Initially he spoke out against corruption and took action against over-powerful oligarchs. Nikita Khrushchev, becoming Russian lead-

er in 1955, also showed this promise through his “Secret Speech” in which he condemned Stalin and spoke of a new Russia. From all accounts neither of their potentials failed to materialise. Putin soon ditched his reformist ideas after problems in the Russian econo-my mainly due to the financial crash of 2008 and the oil price collapse. Putin reverted to nationalistic pride to main-tain his popularity turning Russia into a victim of western expansionism, which the sanctions post his annexation of Crimea did nothing to quell.

Khrushchev lost his way after the Hungarian uprising in July 1956. Imre Nagy, a western-looking reformer, took over from the Stalinist Nikolai Rakosi and requested to leave the Warsaw Pact

(the Soviet NATO). Khrushchev deemed this unacceptable and soon after sent 1,000 tanks into Budapest who, even fac-ing fierce resistance from the desperate Hungarian people, were able to re-estab-lish a Soviet government. Khrushchev’s foreign policy during the Cold War was an extremely dangerous one of brink-manship. After many years of this policy it finally peaked when, in 1962 Khrush-chev launched what could be perceived to be one of the most dangerous actions to be taken by anyone in history; putting medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba 100 miles from the US at the height of tensions between the two superpow-ers. Next to nothing was gained from

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FEATURE

Further ReadingStalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag MontefioreThirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert F. KennedyPutin And The Rise Of Russia: The Country That Came in from the Cold, Michael Stuermer

Khrushchev actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis while it was the nearest that the world has come to annihilation. While it is mostly speculation, Putin is showing many traits of a leader willing to see how far he can push the West, espe-cially NATO. Putin knows full well about NATO’s policy that an attack on one is an attack on all yet he still invades Turkish airspace leading to the very recent shoot-ing down of a Russian jet over Turkey af-ter over ten warnings to leave. If Putin

ever grows to match Khrushchev level of brinkmanship we will all grow up in an extremely dangerous world.

Obviously Vladimir Putin differs greatly from the three previous leaders - as they all do from each other - but he shares the three key principles: autoc-racy, brutality and brinkmanship. His corruption of democratic elections - ren-dering them completely useless - reflects that of Lenin’s abolition of the Constit-uent Assembly while his support for Bashar al-Assad shows his contempt for ruthless behaviour. Putin is also playing a dangerous game with his annexation

of Crimea and obvious willingness to ex-pand West into former Soviet colonies. What is most worrying however, is the fact that even though these states are members of NATO Putin may not be de-terred from an attack; when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 NATO pledged to protect its sovereignty. Putin tested this agreement and found it to be false. He will have undoubtedly gained confidence from this; maybe the larger NATO members really aren't worried about the fate of their fringe members. If Putin is anything like his predecessors he will undoubtedly find out. •

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From left to right: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev - some of USSR's most notable leaders

Ancient Egyptian Society

12 | Timeline Magazine Issue 312 | Timeline Magazine Issue

ANCIENTS

Egypt, in a variety of different ways, has had an impact on later cultures. Egyptian concepts and imagery are found everywhere. Ancient Egyptian civilisation

lasted more than 3000 years and went through a variety of ‘periods’ and shifts in cultural, religious, and political beliefs and situations.

Religion was a key factor in Phara-onic Egypt and guided every aspect of life. Art, festivals, measuring, and ob-serving the stars derived from religious purposes.

Deities represented natural forces; gods being in animal, human and ma-terial forms. The gods were conceived of as actively controlling the world and were approached by means of worship and sacrifices so that these forces would continue to function according to Maat, the divine order. After the founding of

the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, the power to perform these tasks was con-trolled by the pharaoh, who was himself a god in human form, or at least, the di-vine representative of the gods. Egypt recognised an immense number of gods but they were never grouped as a whole, systematically.

Creation: Before the creation of the world, there was Nu, a watery chaos. Egyptian myth states that a stone emerged from this chaos, and on it the first god, Atum, created himself and the world. He then spat out Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of rain. They had two children; Geb, the god of the earth, and Nut, the goddess of the sky. And so the elements of the earth were created. Nut and Geb had four children named Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys. The end-less amounts of gods are almost all linked

to one another either as a family or by oth-er means of creation.

Many parallels can be seen in the An-cient Egyptian Creation myths with later religions. For example, there are great similarities between the Egyptian and Hebrew religions. The fact that there is a creation story at all is one. The second day in the Hebrew tradition concerns the creation of the sky, while the Egyptian second day concerns creation of air and the same pattern continues throughout the several days of creation. These dog-mas of Ancient Egypt have greatly influ-enced modern religions today, includ-ing Christianity. This can be seen in the Egyptian concept that the universe orig-inates from a single creator and that all life will one day return to the deity from whom the universe emerged. The idea of a personal god was also influenced from the Egyptians. The gods existed on earth

Nicholas Lockett presents a picture of one of the most enduring and yet most mysterious of ancient societies.

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ANCIENTS

with men and oversaw the community, allowing the popu-lace to uphold the moral value of every Egyptian. This sim-ilar aspect can be seen in Christianity; that God is personal and Christians must uphold their worship to God and his teachings to reach heaven.

The Afterlife:The most significant concept to the Ancient Egyptians was the afterlife. Spiritual ideas played major parts in the ancient Egyptian passion over the afterlife. Ancient Egyptians be-lieved that every human being received Ka at birth, which is a life-force or essence which creates the difference between a living and a dead person, once the Ka left the body, that per-son died. The Ba was the ‘personality’, similar to the Christian idea of the ‘soul’ and is portrayed as a bird with a human head. The ancient Egyptians believed that in order to begin the journey to the afterlife, the Ka and the Ba must be reunited with the body after death, which is why mummification was so important.

This custom of mummification had the greatest of all in-fluences on the history of medicine as it familiarised the idea of cutting open the dead human body. It was in Egypt, mainly in Alexandria, that it became possible for Greek physicians to systematically dissect the human body, which religion for-bade in their own country.

The journey to the afterlife was an essential part of Egyp-tian life. Many people would save all they had simply to pur-chase a sarcophagus in order to receive a proper burial, in order to begin the journey for the Egyptians had a singular goal; not as much transmutation to an afterlife, but immor-tality. This was because the afterlife was an endless period of existence that was not to be feared by any Egyptian. The hi-eroglyph for a corpse was translated literally as `participating in eternal life’.

Women in Ancient Egypt:An exception to most other ancient societies, Egyptian women achieved equality with Egyptian men. There was no division made in terms of gender, only in classes of soci-ety. While women could become Pharaoh only in very spe-cial circumstances, they were otherwise regarded as totally equal to men as far as the law was concerned. They could own property, borrow money, sign contracts, initiate di-vorce, appear in court as a witness, etc. Of course, they were also equally subject to whatever responsibilities came with those rights. These economic and legal rights were not con-fined to a single social class, but were available for all levels of Egyptian society.

Marriage was purely a social arrangement for econom-ic and property regulation and religious doctrines did not enter into marriage. While Egyptian women could earn some wealth, they entered into marriage contract with their


Further ReadingThe History of Government - Ancient Monarchies and Empires, S.E FinerThe Legacy of Egypt, J.R HarrisA History of the Middle East, Peter Mansfield

husbands to ensure that the husband would provide for them and their children.

Egyptian women were even entitled to divorce. Divorce was not uncommon in Ancient Egypt and either partner could in-stitute divorce for fault such as adultery, inability to conceive, or abuse or even for the simple reason of a lack of compatibility between the couple. Divorce was not something of disgrace, and it was very common for divorced people to remarry. This ancient concept shows great similarity to the contemporary Western no-tions of marriage, unlike that of other cultures that existed at the time or after.

Thus, Ancient Egypt, on the one hand had great influences and similarities to the civilisations that came after it, for example, one could argue that it set the building blocks for Greek and Roman cultures. On the other hand, this Ancient civilisation had the be-liefs and concepts of many modern day concepts in the form of gender equality etc. Ancient Egypt, grounded in its religion, re-mains a greatly unknown and mysterious part of history. •

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When Blaise Pascal creat-ed his mechanical cal-culator in 1642, many thought its ability to handle huge volumes of

complicated calculations, its portability, and its relative ease of use made it rep-resent a huge advancement in analogue computing. Little did they know that the Antikythera Mechanism had beaten them two it, two millennia beforehand. A small-sized box containing clever gears, dials and Greek inscriptions, it used physical components to calculate the positions of heavenly bodies and track important events, as well as act as a solar and lunar calendar valid for hundreds of years. The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, in fact, changed the way we look at ancient technology, and was so influential that af-ter the writing of this article, the Physics department did a whole exhibition on it.

Discovered in 1900 by a group of Greek divers looking for sponges off the island of Antikythera, on the edge of the Aege-an, the importance of the Antikythera device was not noticed for another two years by staff at the Athens National Mu-seum of Archeology - in fact, it was largely ignored, passed off as a lump of corroded wood and bronze. Found in a shipwreck containing other important Greek arti-facts, the fragments got far less attention than the more obviously important stat-ues, finely-worked pots, coins, and other finds. While the segments of the device were investigated briefly in May 1902, all further enquiries at the time halted

until 1951. What followed was a series of studies on the object of increasing depth - including X-ray and gamma-ray imaging - culminating in a 70-page paper in 1974 summarising the findings. But still very little is known about this amazing feat of engineering. what was the Antikythera Mechanism, and why was it so difficult to divine its original purpose and work-ings? What do we know for sure about the 2000-year old computer, and what is there left to find out?

First, I will describe the functions and workings of the mechanism. There are 82 known fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism, that were found on the sea-bed in either the initial expedition, or later, or came to light after years in stor-age. Seven main fragments contain most of the gears, faces and inscriptions of the device, as well as some of the original wooden casing. On the face of the device, there was a large dial displaying the eclip-tic, each sign of the zodiac taking up 30º of the circle. Outside of that spun a disc divided into the months of the Egyptian calendar (written in Greek), featuring the five Sothic intercalary days, inserted into the calendar to make the cycles sync up. This dial would be spun until the current date matched the zodiac sign on the out-side ecliptic face. This could be achieved by using a hand-crank on the side, which simultaneously turned all of the inner gears, cycling through dates on the out-side dial and, by use of many ingenious mechanisms hidden below the casing, cal-culating sun position, moon position, lu-

nar phase, eclipse cycles, calendar cycles, and even the positions of the planets.

Suspended on the outer ecliptic dial on independently moving mounts were the five planets the Greeks knew of (Mer-cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), the moon, and the sun. By matching the position of each body to the zodiac sign, it was possible to read off the position of the planets at any given date, important for religious ceremonies. However, these bodies did not just follow a crude circu-lar orbit: they would actually accelerate and decelerate to account for the ec-centricities in their positions in the sky as viewed from earth because of their, and our, elliptical orbits. This clever use of gearing was the first of its sort in the world, as far as we know. Markings on the Antikythera Mechanism’s exterior also gave information such as the longitudes of certain stars at different points, useful for navigation, and the pointer on which the moon indicator was mounted rotated to display the phase of the moon at any given time.

The back of the device had yet more functions. The Saros dial could predict solar and lunar eclipses, another smaller one indicated whether the numbers 0, 8,

THE ANTIKYTHERA

MYSTERYThe Two Thousand Year Old Computer

Alasdair Czaplewski dives below the surface of the Aegean to describe the workings and application of the oldest computer we know of.

EVENTS

or 18 should be added to the Saros wheel’s output to make the predictions accurate to the hour. The Metonic dial is a spiral of information on the back, which allowed conversion between the solar calendar on the front face, and a lunar one within the spiral, which featured a spinning and ex-tending pointer to track the current time. Largely automated, these functions all took their information from the date in-put on the front and the power provided by the hand-crank. Another smaller dis-play could track the current Olympiad, as well as the dates and locations of several different sacred games, while another re-corded which cycle the Metonic dial was following within the Callippic, equivalent to four Metonic cycles, periods of about 19 years synced with both the solar year and the lunar month. All this bewildering amount of information allowed accurate recording of time, date, planetary posi-tions, and navigational aids, as well as cal-culating the timings of the most import-ant events in the religious calendar.

But where and when did the An-tikythera device actually come from, and what ancient civilisation could possibly have had the technology needed to come up with such a machine? It is suggested that the device was probably constructed in about the year 87 BCE. The tin-bronze alloy from which it was made was too corroded to accurately date, but coins found on the wreck would confirm that it was most likely created in this period - as would the Koine Greek inscriptions, pin-pointing the time and place to Greece in the 1st or 2nd century BCE.

However, the exact location of the device’s origin is uncertain. One possi-ble contender for the manufacturers of the device is Corinth, a city-state where all of the astronomical observations necessary could have been made. Not all of the data that had to be programmed into the machine could have been re-corded in other areas of Greece, and the connections to Syracuse (and so to the school of Archimedes) could provide the workmanship and mathematical exper-tise. Pergamon, a Greek state in Anato-lia, was also a great centre of learning with its important library, making it a contender. The wreck however also con-tained Rhodian vases, implying a link to the island of Rhodes - home of the •


ANCIENTSEVENTS

The face of the device

The depths of the Aegean where the mechanism was found


ANCIENTS

Further ReadingGears from the Greeks, Derek de Solla Price

Computing: a concise history, Paul E CeruzziAncient Greece: a very short introduction, Paul Cartledge

EVENTS

astronomer Hipparchus, whose theo-ry of lunar motion is incorporated into the workings of the device, indicating he may have had some part in its design. However, new evidence coming to light in 2014 suggested that the device was dated at around 200 BCE, and was possi-bly even of Babylonian origin. The truth is we may never know. What is fairly cer-tain from the coins on the wreck and the gear settings in the device is that it was lost fairly soon after its supposed cre-ation in 87 BCE when the ship carrying this remarkable treasure went down off the coast of Antikythera.

The instruction manual for the de-vice, the ‘man page’ of the Antikythera Mechanism, was inscribed inside the back doors of the casing. It detailed the use of a piece of mechanics that would not be matched until the late 14th cen-tury, and possibly not even then. Its gear schematic is far too complicated to explain, featuring miniature cogs of ex-actly the right circumference and tooth number to produce the desired cycle length or degree of movement, with pins connecting gears acting as sliders to re-strict movement or reverse the direction of the cog’s movement. Several examples of shafts running perpendicular to each other are common, as well as complex gearing to convert one revolution of a cog to the desired revolution speed on the pointers. The small size of the com-ponents and the precision of the work-manship are remarkable. It is easy to see the value of this mechanism to all who would have come across it. Nobody really knows where the Antikythera wreck was heading; the value of the goods it carried suggests it may have been taking a trib-ute from Rhodes or Asia Minor along the well travelled trade route to Rome, perhaps for a triumph. This is another mystery about the device that will most probably remain that way.

The Antikythera device, then. A highly advanced piece of machinery that would not be matched in function or complexity for millennia, capable of tracking planetary movement, predict-

ing eclipses, and acting as a calendar for important events and rituals accurate to within hours. Its sprawl of tiny gears and intricate workings drove a device of beautiful workmanship and illustration, lost for thousands of years between the waves of the Mediterranean, determined

not to give up the secrets of its creation and workings. One can’t help but marvel at the skill of those who created it - and wonder exactly who they may be. For now though, we must be content with all the knowledge we have of the two-thou-sand year-old computer. •

The Antikythera mechanism has been preserved and recorded since its discovery in 1900

17 | Timeline Magazine Issue 117 | Timeline Magazine Issue 1

CONTEMPORARY

WHY YOU ARE A

BARBARIAN

We owe much more to our barbaric ancestors than we have hitherto given them credit for, according to Calvin Liu.

MIDDLE AGESANALYSIS



MIDDLE AGES

‘ME? A Barbarian? You can’t be serious, I’m wearing a suit!’ I hear you say as you indulge yourself in the façade of

civilisation, assuming a false sense of confidence from the shelves of library books that surround you. Well, you might have more in common with the savage Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 A.D then you’d care to admit. From the clothes that we wear, the sports that we do up to the language that we speak, we owe an immense debt the ‘barbaric’ tribes who took over from the falter-ing Roman Empire during the Migra-tion Period of 376 to 800 A.D. We are so much under their influence that one might even question whether it’s right to call them ‘barbaric’, or us ‘civilised’.

TrousersDuring early and mid-antiquity trousers were only worn by the famously barbar-ic peoples like the Persians (as shown in the film 300), the Scythians and Huns, mostly rough and horse-riding nomads. Hence it’s not hard to imagine how they gained their barbaric associations. Both the Romans and the Greeks scorned and ridiculed trouser-wearers. The Greeks mockingly called them "θύλακοι" (thu-lakoi)- literally meaning ‘sacks’. The rich-est amongst the Romans wore elaborate togas, with multiple layers of thin linen cloth wrapped around their bodies with an undergarment called the tunica, whilst poorer ones wore togas made of thick and coarse wool. The mobility and insulation offered by trousers weren’t needed until their ventures into Gaul and Germania. When part of the Roman legions finally

adopted the Feminalia and the Braccae (two early prototypes, one calf-length, the other covering the ankles) from the bar-barous Celts that they fought against. The popularisation of the trousers in Europe happened almost simultaneously with the invasion of the barbarians, becoming an inseparable part of the people’s daily clothing in the early 4th century, when Rome was finally replace by Frankish and Germanic kingdoms. As John Green, the presenter of the History Crashcourse on Youtube remarked, ‘There a history les-son in that…when people had to choose between civilisation and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals’. Food for thought next time you put on your school trousers.

EnglishStrictly speaking everyone who doesn’t

ANALYSIS

The Barbarians attack Rome, destroying statues and buildings


MIDDLE AGES

speak Greek is a barbarian. In Greek, the word βάρβαρος (barbaros) is an onomatopoeic word describing the bab-bling of a person speaking a non-Greek language. It is the antonym of πολίτης (politēs), which describes the Greek ‘cit-izens’. The word was then taken up by the Romans to apply to all non-Roman peo-ples. Whilst it is arguable that all Europe-an languages are thus barbaric, English is definitely the most barbaric of all. English has her fair share of words from Latin roots, however, English is influenced by more sources than perhaps any other Eu-ropean languages. The Proto-Germanic Old English traces its roots to Anglo-Sax-on, brought about by the Germanic tribes who took over in around 400 A.D. after the Roman retreat. They gave us basic daily words like ‘house’ and ‘men’, whist naming four days of the week, Tuesday to Friday, after Anglo-Saxon gods. Then Viking raider brought with them milita-ristic words like ‘axe’, ‘ransack’ and ‘die’. Clerical Latin and French became the fa-voured language under the Norman court that came with William the Conqueror in 1066 A.D, giving us a posh versions of words like ‘mutton’ for lamb and ‘beef’ for cow. However, one must be extremely pedantic in calling English a ‘barbarous’ language’ when the language is given new layers of sophistication with the intro-duction of each ‘barbaric’ linguistic influ-ence. On the contrary, one can argue that they make English a much more civilised language.

Football Whilst a healthy game of footy is no harm to anyone (I’m obviously ignor-ing the depredations of certain Chelsea supporters on public transport), the nation’s favourite sport traces its lin-eage deep into the abyss of barbarism. The civilised Romans showed great disdain towards the sport. The famous senator Marcus Tullius Cicero (circa 106BC- 43BC) recorded an incident in which a man was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into the barber shop. The kicker, presumably, is of barbaric origins. It is also popularly

believed that the first game of football was played around 700 AD, by the An-glo-Saxons who ruled Britain then, with the heads of their enemies slew in bat-tle. However, the ‘civilised’ Roman and Greeks could be as sports-crazed as the modern football fan. The Greeks were famous for their Olympic games, part of a pan-Hellenic alliance of the ‘Five Sacred Games’. The Romans and their successor the Byzantines were obsessed with chariots races. The Emperor Jus-tinian, who managed to, against the tides, rescue Rome and Carthage from barbarian hands, was nearly overthrew in the Nika Riots in 532 A.D. The Emper-or being a supporter of the ‘Blues’, the opposing ‘Greens’ managed to launch a riot that nearly killed him and his wife, the legendary Empress Theodora. Over 30,000 rioters were killed and Constan-

tinople had to be rebuilt from scratch.So, just to conclude, not only is it

unfair to called these colourful people ‘barbarians’, simple because they didn’t leave behind slave-built aqueducts, bloodstained colosseums on top of yield-ing such delightful specimens of the likes of Nero and Caligula, our own ‘civilisa-tion’ in fact owed much to these rough but pioneering people. It is simply fas-cinating to see how the Vandals, native the coniferous Germanic woods, fight their way through Gaul and Hispania to become the rulers of North Africa from the ancient seat of Carthage. The Huns bringing their herds from the steppes of the far east to the frost covered Alps. They are clearly no more barbaric than the warmongering Greeks or the hedo-nistic Romans, or even us for that mat-ter. •

Further ReadingThe Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Peter HeatherSPQR, Mary BeardTerry Jones’ Barbarians, Terry Jones and Alan Ereira

ANALYSIS

Typical Barbarians


MIDDLE AGES

The Papacy and its subordinate churches were a political or-ganisation of unparalleled pow-er and longevity in medieval Europe. In a time where death

was omnipresent, knowledge scarce and religion held in great regard, the posi-tion of the Catholic church as an arbiter of affairs both secular and religious gave it great power. However, its religious au-thority was always being threatened by enemies within – Heretics – and without – Infidels and heathens. One exception-al example of this was the way in which

Pope Innocent III treated the Cathars. It was one of the first examples of an inter-necine, full-scale war between Catholic orthodoxy and heresy, and set a trend for aggressive papal responses to heresy that lasted until the seventeenth century.

The origins of the Cathars lie in cer-tain sects of Eastern Orthodox mission-aries who gained some religious traction in areas of southern France in particu-lar. They introduced ideas unfamiliar to Catholics that induced the establish-ment of a heretical movement there. The key differences between the Catholic

and Cathar theologies were major, but not impossibly vast. Cathars believed in a singular God who was opposed by an extremely powerful enemy who was not himself divine; there was a good force (God) and an evil force (Satan) locked in constant struggle. This was within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. More bi-zarrely, they had some very strange ideas on creation that were not necessarily in line with any potential interpretation of Genesis supported by conventional theology. This evil power had created all physical things and therefore they were all inherently evil. As we shall see, this dealt some pretty harsh blows to Cath-olic orthodoxy and the foundations of their faith. Most unconventionally, they believed that Jesus was not the son of God. He was instead an angel sent by God to redeem mankind who never took hu-man form and therefore his death and re-birth are meaningless; only his teachings are important. This is not a belief easily reconciled with the concept that Jesus ‘died for our sins’, because it explicitly says his death is meaningless. The Pope did not take as much exception to this as he ought to have done, which perhaps reveals that he was more concerned with the political and material rather than

DIES IRAEThe Extermination

of the CatharsEdward Turner Fussell studies the Pope's vendetta against a Medieval French Cult and what it shows us about the

nature of religious violence.

EVENTS


MIDDLE AGES

theological validity of his faith.Pope Innocent III was mainly con-

cerned with the rejections by the Ca-thars of the underlying motivations and actions of the Crusading movement, therefore undermining his own strug-gles in the Holy Land. Cathars saw the city of Jerusalem, the True Cross, the Sepulchre, and all other relics as reli-giously worthless as they were earthly things and therefore inherently evil. Relics were and are central to the Cath-olic faith, embodiments of the Saints and God’s power, which made the Cathar po-sition more challenging to the orthodox viewpoint. Cathars were also pacifist and to them the idea of a ‘Holy War’ was ri-diculous, thus placing itself further in the path of the Papacy. Finally and most worryingly, the Cathars were organised, with their own bishoprics and dioceses that offered a real alternative to Cathol-icism as an organised faith; many no-ble families subscribed to the faith, not merely peasants and maverick ministers, and this gave the church military and fi-nancial resources to add to its religious ones. Innocent realised that the Cathars were a growing threat from within and that their dissension from the main-stream placed them outside the accept-

able bounds of differing theological opin-ion. Therefore, Pope Innocent III began to set in motion the ponderous mass of orthodoxy that compromised the Roman Catholic faith in order to deal with this (to his mind) insidious threat.

The Pope did not immediately revert to fire and sword. Firstly he attempted to return the Cathars to the fold with a missionary campaign headed by the Cistercian monastic order. Perhaps this was a miscalculation on his part, for the Cistercians were as thoroughly es-tablishment as the Pope himself. They embodied many of the flaws of the Cath-olic Church, being far wealthier than the peasantry, and consequently being seen as disconnected and decadent. Es-pecially when compared to the honesty and simplicity of the Perfects, the Cis-tercians seemed corrupt and lofty, which prevented them from having an impres-sion on the uncomplicated farmers and workers of Languedoc. Frustrated at the abnormal independence and resilience of the Cathar faith, Innocent then aimed to counter the moral authority of the Perfects with the nearest Catholic equiv-alent, the Dominicans. They were a far better choice; they genuinely believed in their vows of poverty and suffering while

other monastic orders preferred to accu-mulate wealth and spend it extravagant-ly. Despite this attempt by the Pope to unseat the Cathars without violence for a second time, there was no mass con-version through the simple fact that the Dominicans were no different from the Perfects in their devotion and approach; they were unable to outstrip their theo-logical rivals in their piety and therefore no reason was seen by either peasants or nobles to return to the mainstream Catholic faith.

Pope Innocent III decided what he could not crush with words he would crush with the mailed fist of a Crusade. On 17 November 1207 he called upon the King of France, Phillip Augustus, to take up his sword and crush the obstreperous Cathars in their homeland of Langued-oc. Phillip Augustus, threatened in the North by the English and to the East by Germans, begged the Pope to select an alternate crusader so that he might keep his throne against these potential aggres-sors. He was also concerned in a way that Innocent was not about the consequences of declaring war on other Christians and knew the Cathars to be peaceful and kind, not at all a rational target for a crusade. The Pope, however, had seated deep •

EVENTS

From left to right: kinghts attacking the Cathars, rounding them up, putting them to death, Pope Innocent III


MIDDLE AGES

into his mind the idea that the Cathars represented a terrible threat to Catholi-cism from within. He accused the Cathars of attempting to mislead people with their simplicity and that they were all ‘Satanic Traps’. Apparently, the price for defying the will of God is everlasting damnation, but the Pope was keen to ensure that the Cathars were sent down to the Stygian Pit in record time.

The candidate the Pope would se-lect for his dirty work was Earl Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester (who nevertheless spent most time in France), whose son would later rebel against King Henry III of England. Oddly, de Mont-fort had abandoned the Fourth Cru-sade in 1204 in disgust at killing other Christians. Presumably his charity did not extend to wayward Occitan yokels and their masters, or perhaps the (met-aphorical) medieval transmutation of blood and sweat into gold entranced him. Whatever the case, his future ac-tions and words portray him as a zealot, unstintingly devoted to the cause of or-thodoxy and the suppression of Heresy. Pope Innocent then directed the two rulers of the most prominently Cathar regions, Count Raymond of Toulouse and Count Raymond-Roger of Beziers, to root out and exterminate the Cathars in their lands. While neither was a Cathar, both sympathised with the faith, which had more truth and credibility than any Papal pontificating emanating from Rome. In January 1208, the Pope found a pretext to begin his campaign. A knight in service to Count Raymond murdered the Papal Legate, Peter of Castelnau, and consequently gave Innocent cause to de-clare the Cathars as a militant threat and initiate a Crusade. The Pope mustered all his sanctimony in a riptide of condemna-tion;

‘[They are] sharpening their tongues to crush our souls [and] they are also in reality stretching out their hands to kill our bodies; the perverters of our souls have become the destroyers of our flesh’.

This statement seems ludicrous; considering the pacifism of the Cathars and the fact that they were a small (if growing) sect within the truly gargan-tuan Catholic population, they couldn’t possibly pose a threat to Papal authority – they also had no real desire to in and of itself, only as a consequence of their dislike for opulence. Nevertheless, the Pope ordered de Montfort to begin his ‘Crusade for Peace’.

In order to reduce the danger to de Montfort, the Pope excommunicated Count Raymond and ordered his vas-sals to desert him. Simultaneously, he declared the Cathars to be a great-er threat to Christendom than the Muslims and must therefore be com-pletely annihilated. In 1209 the Ab-bot of Citeaux, Arnauld-Amalric, was made commander of the bloodthirsty mob that passed for the Army of God. Count Raymond attempted to patch things up with the Pope but received no clemency. The defining moment of the Crusade came when the Papal Armies

reached Beziers. When asked how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics, Ar-nauld-Amalric replied chillingly, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’ And so it came to pass that every man, wom-an and child of Beziers – some 20,000 people, according to the Abbot - were slain. A wave of terror passed before the hosts of heaven, with news of the massacre spreading rapidly. Villages and towns surrendered to the Abbot in the hope of clemency yet received no more than the sad souls of Beziers. At Carcassone, Count Raymond-Roger sacrificed himself to save his city, deliv-ering himself to the attackers. This did not matter to the Pope, who had him imprisoned, his lands confiscated and given to de Montfort. The latter there-after cut a rack of ruin across Langued-oc, finding every centre of Cathar wor-ship and burning the heretics alive at the stake.

In desperation, the local nobles called upon King Peter of Aragon to end the madness with force. Peter marched

EVENTS

The coronation of Philippe II Auguste in the presence of Henry II of England


MIDDLE AGES

over the Pyrenees with an army bol-stered with escaped Cathars, but was de-cisively defeated at the battle of Muret in 1213 by de Montfort. Thus, with the last flame of hope for the Cathars ex-tinguished, de Montfort was rewarded with the lands of the lords of Langued-oc; no mean area of land. He was unable to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, however; on 25 June 1218 he was killed laying siege to Toulouse by a boulder lobbed from a catapult.

In 1216 Pope Innocent III died and was replaced by Pope Gregory IX, who in 1233 established a new office to deal with any resurgence, any slight hint of heresy. This was the Inquisition, the body that would come to inflict such horrors on the Protestants and Jews in the future. In 1244 the last remnant of the Cathars fell at the mountain fortress of Montsegur, with only a few straggling survivors escaping (ironically) to Ita-ly where they vanished into obscurity. The final vestiges of resistance were efficiently rooted out by the Domini-cans, whose attentions the Cathars had spurned four decades ago.

What had Innocent and Gregory achieved? To their mind, they had van-quished a threat to Catholic robustness against the savage and skilled warriors

of the Muslim world, and also restored lands to the correct veneration of God. However, they had unleashed a force that they couldn’t control or influence, a trend towards extremism and intol-erance that was generally unjustified even after the rise of Protestant faiths. They condemned Europe to decades of war and bloodshed within and without Catholic lands as a result of the prece-dent set by the Crusade. The aftershocks of the Crusade are still felt today, with the Catholic reputation for repression caused by the Inquisition. The culture of Languedoc was gutted by the crusade, not to mention the immense human cost of Papal vanity and paranoia. For the Cathars, the Day of Judgment had come and gone, leaving their lives and faith in bloody ruins. •

Further ReadingThe Perfect Heresy: the Life and Death of the Cathars, Stephen O’SheaThe Popes: a History, John Julius Norwich Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324, Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie

EVENTS

The town of Beziers


A raging Aztec leaping over the body of a Spaniard he

has slaughtered


EARLY MODERN

What if the Spanish

Conquest of South America had failed?

The destruction of the Aztec way of life was by no means assured and this could have had massive implications, according to Oliver Williams

It is easy to imagine that the success of the Spanish conquest was inevita-ble thanks to their superior weapons, tactics and leadership. It was also the devastating effect of European diseases

that aided the Spanish as much as their technology, killing up to 20,000 Aztec troops in Tenochtitlan alone. However, if we look in detail at the events of the 1519 conquest, it is clear that on occasion Cortes’ Conquistadors stared into the face of defeat. Without the continued and long-lasting support of many indigenous allies such as the Tlaxcalans, the conquest could not have been achieved.

Under certain circumstances the Az-tec Empire could have triumphed against the Spaniards. Smallpox, for instance, was a major cause of Aztec deaths during Cortes’ invasion. If smallpox had never arrived in South America, it would have given the Aztecs the advantage at the battle of Le Noche Triste in July 1519, where the Spanish led a failed attack on the capital. Cortes decided to flee after being driven back by Aztec forces, and

barricaded the army inside. Without the smallpox epidemic during the 3 month siege, Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor, may have survived and escaped the city, or even fought back. He would then have been able to launch an ambush on Cortes and scatter his forces, leaving New World technology in the hands of the Aztecs.

Due to the vast quantity of warriors he commanded, the Aztec emperor would certainly have been able to launch a full-scale attack on the Spanish and their al-lies had he been wary of the attack. This would have again had the same effect as the Battle of Cempoala in April 1520, with Cortes’ men scattered and vulnerable to further bombardments, leaving the invad-ers stranded and taken prisoner. Cortes’ invasion relied upon Aztec superstition almost as much as his allies and weaponry. It is quite likely that, because of the intri-cate Aztec culture, if there were no com-ets in the sky the Aztecs could have been successful. As crazy as this may sound, in Aztec culture comets were a bad omen, signalling impending doom. This played

into Cortes’ hands, when they docked on the coast next afternoon. The Aztecs believed them to be Gods, and were in constant fear of them. If no comets were sighted, it would have been quite possible that Moctezuma would have simply en-gaged the invaders on landing.

So what would have happened after the defeat of the Spaniards?It is interesting to speculate how the Az-tecs would have adapted and changed had the Spanish invasion of 1519 been foiled. Using trial and error and interrogating Spanish captives (of which there were bound to be some) the Aztecs could have gained the knowledge of forging steel, horse riding and even using guns. If this were to develop Aztec military tech-niques, their immediate aim would be to decimate the former allies of the Spanish, including the Tlaxcalans, who played a vi-tal role assisting the Spanish army in the conquest. This would have had a dramatic effect on later Spanish and indeed French or British campaigns. Had the constant •

ANALYSIS


EARLY MODERN

invasions extended over years or decades, Conquistadors would surely have faced Aztec warriors with swords and possi-bly even guns, instead of simple obsidian (stone) daggers, spears and arrows.

You could then imagine the possibili-ty of Aztec conquest and rivalry with oth-er native South American tribes such as the Iguazu, and more clashes with Span-ish troops led by Cabeza de Vaca in 1542. Buoyed by their resistance to the Span-ish and their new-found technology, the Aztecs would have had the capability to expand their empire south, reaching into Mayan territory and toward the Incan Empire. This would have forged a new major power in the New World, with two possible outcomes: the Old World powers form an agreement to take the empire by force and divide it into provinces, such as what was eventually to become of China during the Qing dynasty, or the Aztecs begin trading goods with the English and French and gain armed support to defend their Empire.

The former of these possibilities does not end well for anyone; the European alliance would take heavy losses in the forms of men and money, but will most likely prevail, while the latter would have established Aztec authority in South America. The new trading alliance would frighten the Spanish invaders and prevent further bombardment of the newly for-midable Aztec Empire. This would pro-vide economic gain for the English and French, whilst also giving cultural and medical support to the Aztecs, helping them overcome disease and halt barbaric practises such as human sacrifice.

In the long term the Aztec victories would have affected life in Europe, espe-cially for the Spanish. Realistically, after several more invasions, due to constant epidemics and repeated attacks, the Aztec Empire would have been most likely de-stroyed after around 150 years. However, let us ponder upon what would have hap-pened if the Aztec army survived such at-tacks and continued into the 17th century. This would draw interest from other Eu-ropean powers such as England, and thus possibly leading to British rule of South

America, altering the culture and tradi-tion there for years to come. This would happen in the Indian Provinces, follow-ing the rise of the East India Company in the 1600’s. This would also have had serious implications for Spain, who lat-er used American silver to fund military campaigns in Europe, such as the Span-ish Armada of 1588. If they did not have the resources to fund wars and battles in the New World due to the lack of money, Spanish, and therefore Catholic influence would not have been so widespread.

How might we look at Aztec civilization today?It is important when discussing this topic not to stray too far from reality, so in that sense we can never be sure if or how Az-tec society could have stayed afloat in the post-reformation world. Would it have developed fast enough to keep up with European advances?

Let us speculate that the Aztec Em-pire could have survived beyond the 16th century but still eventually collapsed sometime during the next 200 years due to constant invasions and external pressures, like the Mongol Empire after the death of Kublai Khan in 1294. The Spaniards justified their invasions in the 1500’s by portraying Aztec civilization as barbaric and bloody, giving us images of murder and sacrifice. Diaz del Castillo, Cortes’ assistant, claimed that he wit-nessed Aztec priests ripping the heart out of someone while it was still beating, however, due to the lack of surgical tools and medical equipment at the time, this was unlikely to have been accurate. If the Conquistadors had never succeeded, we

may have seen more details of Aztec cul-ture undistorted by Spanish rumours, and view them in less stereotypical terms. Al-though it is unlikely that the Aztecs could have survived past the early 19th century (with European imperialism on the rise), we may have developed a different under-standing of their culture and been in pos-session of more facts rather than basing our opinion on Spanish stories of barbaric human sacrifice. But this is all, of course, hypothetical. •

Further ReadingThe Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, Miguel Leon-Portilla

Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, Michael D. CoeThe Mythology and Religion of the Aztec, Jesse Harasta

ANALYSIS

A typical conquistador


EARLY MODERN

The ButterflyEffect on HistorySometimes, the smallest events can have a massive effect on the couse of History. Charlie Landells gives you more.

Near misses happen a lot in day to day life. Picture this: you’re approaching an intersection at 61 miles per hour, instead of say, 62. Just in front of you,

another driver barrels through a red light and across the intersection from the right. If you’d been travelling 62 miles per hour, you could’ve been involved in an accident. In fact, any number of things could’ve led to that. If the other driver stopped for a drink, if he kissed his wife goodbye, if he paused to read a map, you could be dead. This is called ‘The butterfly effect’, and it's something that is hardly noticed, but needs to be recognised.

The butterfly effect, at its heart, is the idea that the disturbance of the air by a single butterfly is enough to change the weather patterns all over the world; though its use has widened to refer to any seemingly minor event that can have earth shattering implications. The term "but-terfly effect" itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz, and is based in Chaos Theory and sensitive dependence on ini-tial conditions, first described in the liter-ature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890 and popularized by Pierre Duhem's 1906 book. The idea that one butterfly could eventual-ly have a far-reaching ripple effect on sub-sequent historic events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Brad-bury about time travel, although Lorenz made the term popular. In 1961, Lorenz was using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, when, as a shortcut on a number in the sequence, he entered the decimal .506 instead of enter-ing the full .506127 the computer would hold. The result was a completely different weather scenario.

It’s not surprising therefore that we can find examples of the effect throughout history. What is surprising, if not unset-

tling, is the difference a split second can make in the course of an entire planet. Suppose I create an event that randomly shifts everyone 1/4 second some forward - some backward. What would the result be? Well - probably about the same num-ber of people would be killed in these kind of random accidents - but - it wouldn't be the same people. Some of the people who would have been killed will survive near misses, and some of the people who had near misses would have been killed. 1/4 second difference and different people sur-vive and different people die. What would the result of that be? Girl A and Girl B are shifted in time. Girl B who would have lived dies and she would have had two chil-dren, one of which was the one who intro-duced Hitler's parents to each other who

otherwise wouldn't have met save for this person. Had the never met - Hitler would never have been born and World War II would never have occurred - all because of the 1/4 second difference. Despite what you may think - this may not be an extreme example at all because for Hitler to have been conceived, trillion upon trillions of events had to occur exactly the way it did. If you change anything then Hitler would never had been born - and for now I'll ask you to assume that if Hitler were never born that it would have had a big affect on the events of the 20th century. In fact - if Hitler had never been born - I wouldn't have been born either. It may be said that I exist because so too did Hitler - and the same applies to you.

Let’s see some real life examples. It’s •

HISTORIOGRAPHY

The shooting of Bismark


EARLY MODERN

all well speculating theoretical events and the effect they can have - but does it real-ly happen? My example given above may be somewhat exaggerated, but we can see small decisions affecting the course of a whole war. For example, Squadron Lead-er Le Roux of 602 Squadron was flying his Spitfire Mk 9 on a sweep through the French countryside the morning on the 17th July 1944. Seeing a German staff car on a lonely road in Normandy, he immedi-ately attacked. Chris Le Roux nearly suc-ceeded in killing the German Commanding General, Erwin Rommel. Diving on his car, he caused it to overturn near the village of Sainte Foy de Montgomerie, and Rommel was flung into a ditch and sustained a frac-tured skull, having to leave the front for a crucial period of time. This undoubtedly hindered the German cause at the time, and helped hasten the end of the Norman-dy Campaign by the removal of one of the most capable German commanders.

Yet another example of this occurred in the US Navy in 1941. The unpopular decision by the commander of the Pacific Fleet to stay out of harbor one more day on the 6th December 1941 meant that three of the USA’s carriers (Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga) were saved from

the attack at Pearl Harbor. Arguably this gave the US the head start they needed in the Pacific War, and ultimately the victo-ry they achieved. Japanese confidence in their ability to achieve a short, victo-rious war also meant other targets in the harbor, especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, were ignored, since—by their thinking—the war would be over before the influence of these facil-ities would be felt. But these very instal-lations allowed the carriers of that fateful squadron to take the fight to the Japanese at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, the start of a series of Blows for the Japa-nese Navy that would ultimately frustrate their expansionist ambitions and assure allied victory in the East. Thus this small, folly decision by one man decided the fate of the Earth as we know it today.

Further examples include that of the failed assassination of Bismarck, and his later role in hastening the unification of Germany. The formal unification of Ger-many into a politically and administra-tively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Ver-sailles Palace's Hall of Mirrors in France, and arguably led to both WW1 and WW2 through faults in the structure of the sys-

tem, such as too much power being placed in Germany’s hands. If you were to extend this, you could argue that Bismarck, ad-mittedly indirectly, caused the Russian Revolution as WW2 has exacerbated long term issues in the country. So whoever failed to kill him earlier caused WW2, or something along those lines. And yet, had Ferdinand Cohen-Blind succeeded in May 1866 in killing him rather than just wounding him, the history of the world could be completely transformed. Amaz-ingly, Bismarck was able to apprehend his own attacker despite two of the bullets having entered his body. He then proceed-ed to walk home, and then was able to suc-ceed in his quest to unify Germany.

In conclusion, what I’m trying to say is that through real life examples and theoretical ones, it stands clear how the smallest of decisions and timing can affect the fates of countries, lives, and the world itself. Turkey’s recent decision to down a Russian aircraft could lead to a very dif-ferent world within the next decade. It’s a straightforward idea, but it’s interesting how you can break down the largest events on history and pin them to just one tiny de-cision. A scary thought as much as a com-forting one, in my opinion. •

Further ReadingBismarck: A Life Jonathan Steinberg

Victory in the Pacific, Karen FarringtonRise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L Shirer

HISTORIOGRAPHY

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button demonstrates this idea by presenting how unlikely it was that a certain girl would be hit by a car


MODERN

Archie Williams looks at what motivated those who explored the British empire and what drove them to

such great feats of human endeavour.

AND NOT TO YIELD

Exploration and the British Empire


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When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, The location of the Source of the Nile was unknown, Central Asia was as well

understood by geographers as the surface of the moon, and it wasn’t known whether the North Pole lay on land or sea. The world was truly one of possibility, where people in Northern India could look out of their windows and not be truly sure what was over the next hill. Maps of Africa went blank once you went a few millimetres in from the coast, labelled simply as ‘regions unexplored’. By Victoria’s death in 1901, most of these problems were solved thanks to the actions of explorers, who managed to make maps, secure trade, collect specimens and- in the end- allow the empire to expand. But why did these people act in this way? Why was the study of these geographical question marks so important for people in the British Empire? And why is it that so many were willing to face death in their endeavours? Attempts to study these motives- some good, some bad- must, I believe, go straight to the heart of the motives for the British Empire itself and even begin to penetrate the psyche of those who lived in it.

Perhaps the first amongst all Victorian explorers is the venerable and extraordinary Dr. Livingstone. A missionary-turned-explorer who devoted much of his life towards the development of the African hinterland and the suppression of the Arab slave trade, which thrived long after the slave trade elsewhere in the world had become unfashionable. From his humble and difficult upbringing as a factory boy in Scotland to his refusing an offer to be driven every day to university by a local businessman as it would make him late for his first lecture- instead he got up at 5:00 every morning to walk to Glasgow to get there by 8:00- he had shown this remarkable drive from a very early age. And this continued right through his career, and so determined was he that he forced his heavily pregnant wife to go with him on expeditions; resulting in her becoming an alcoholic, losing faith in God, and finally dying of Malaria. Although in himself not all that successful (as a missionary he only made only one convert who would go on to lapse and as an explorer

his ideas about the Nile watershed which he perished trying to prove can today be shown as ridiculous by a quick visit to Google Earth), he represented a certain desire that seems to recur in the letters and diaries of imperialists throughout the Victorian era- the genuine desire to do good. He spent much of his time when he wasn’t in Africa preaching to the British about the need to stop the Arab slave trade, and proposed that his exploration of rivers could make them into ‘God’s Highways’ (a favourite phrase of his) down which could come English goods to allow the development of legitimate trade as opposed to slaving and, eventually, this would allow ‘civilisation’ to develop. And all this in the name of Christianity, a force used to break traditional tribal loyalties and allow these seismic social shifts to occur. Whatever you may think of this as a theory, and whether the dismissal of tribal culture as not being a form of ‘civilisation’ is appropriate, the fact remains that his ideas, and indeed the ideas of the many other missionaries who pushed the bounds of Empire in the name of Christianity, were immensely powerful. Exploration of this was considered by many to be the purest form of Empire, that dealt just with its core function- the enrichment of humanity in general.

But not all of the Exploration that took place in the British Empire was done with such high minded motives. A lot of it was spurred on by the chance to make money. And nowhere was this more the case than in the wheeler-dealing forebear of the British Raj that was the British East India Company. Many were prepared to take extraordinary risks to life and limb in order to further the trading sphere of the ‘Honourable’ Company, which would slowly expand to control much of India before the British Government took over in 1786. One classic example of such activity is the fascinating life of James Flint, who had been shipped out to the East as a child in 1736 in the belief that children learned languages quicker than adults. He was taught ‘Mandareen’ and became Chinese in every way except racial, adopting their dress, manner and even the more sinicized surname ‘Flink’. He became the senior linguist of the company, and was put in charge of negotiating with local dignitaries in Ningbo to gain trading rights for the

British in that port after they had been restricted to a small trade in Canton as a result of the Emperor's notoriously xenophobic attitude. When he couldn’t find someone to parley with, he decided to take it higher- to the Emperor himself. He sailed alone up the Yellow River and kept going, becoming the first European within 100 miles from the Forbidden City, breaking new ground never before seen by a Westerner with two Mandarin

EVENTS

The explorer Livingston being attacked by a lion


MODERN

guides. The Emperor Qianlong heard of this and decided to talk with him and recalled officials from Canton to investigate charges of their being stingy with trading rights. Concessions were granted, but only for Canton. Partially successful, the Emperor lost his temper and had Flint arrested and sentenced to three years’ detention then permanent exile from China. But seeing as his guides were strangled, he appears to have been

let of lightly. And yet, all this heartbreak for the sake of increasing the amount of indian cotton the EIC could sell to the Chinese and the amount of tea they could export? It seems unbelievable, and yet many would perish trying to sort new trading outposts for the company and the chance to get rich. In this modern age when corporations are accused of being too powerful, it is worth remembering that half of India was governed by a group

of men in an address in Leadenhall Street, able to bank with the lives of explorers by virtue of their being shareholders.

But it would be a mistake to attribute all exploration of the British Empire to a bunch of businessmen and some religious fanatics. Perhaps one of the most enduring consequences of this drive for exploration was the scientific discoveries that could be made, and one prime example of this was Alfred•

EVENTS

The explorer Livingston being attacked by a lion


MODERN

Russel Wallace. To read his immensely popular book The Malay Archipelago, one cannot but respect this man: going out alone to islands which today are still not fully explored, armed with a rifle and some arrack to preserve insects in, which he had to always keep snakes in to stop it being stolen and drunk by locals and always with the threat of money running out (he had to sell almost all his specimens to keep the trip going). But he was able to record his 8 years of adventure on returning to England in a fantastic book, and it is indeed amusing to hear him comment on the use of the schoolboy trick of cupping a hand in the armpit and squeezing it- ‘a deep trumpet note,’ as he describes it in fantastic victorian fashion. It's scientific impact was huge: he managed to bring up intelligent ideas on continental drift (giving his name to the ‘Wallace Line’ between Australia and Asia and studying its manifold ramifications- both geological and biological), collect a remarkable 126,000 specimens (including over 80,000 beetles), and then returned home to encourage Darwin to publish his Origin of Species. At times, he even stumbles on elements of Darwin's theory on his own, like when he observes that locals bring wounded by falling fruits shows that perhaps not all edible things in nature were ' organised with exclusive reference to the use and needs of man'. All this fed into a feeling held by many living in Britain at the time that the pursuit of scientific knowledge was one of the highest possible goals one could strive for, and many were prepared to take great risks just due to their own curiosity.

One of the most common accusations levelled at those who explored the world in this period is that they were only working to expand the territory and influence of their own countries. And nowhere was this more apparent than in ‘the Great Game,’ the struggle for supremacy in Central Asia between British India and Tsarist Russia, amounting at times to a proxy war. People were sent out to court Central Asian leaders and survey possible invasion routes into India, Afghanistan, Tibet and other countries. In the 19th Century, there wasn’t a more politically important region to explore than this, and men were picked from all jobs both military and

civilian to do so. One example, now largely forgotten thanks to his shunning of public attention (he refused a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire and didn’t publish many books), was Ney Elias. As the son of a Jewish merchant, he joined the family business and went out to China. He exhibited his drive to explore from early on, conducting several expeditions up the Yellow River, before making his name in an epic crossing of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia before moving into Siberia in the midwinter of 1873 up to St Petersburg. Having travelled almost 5,000 miles largely on foot, it is no surprise that the Indian Civil Service employed him when he fell on hard times to use his ability for their gain. He spent the next 15 years as a spy, explorer and diplomat in Asia, going on 6 major and countless minor assignments to places as diverse as Turkestan and Burma. Often on his own initiative, he worked to organise treaties and agreements in order to ensure British influence and stave off the nefarious designs of the Tsar. He retired in 1896 and died soon afterwards, but his extraordinary life had without doubt expanded British power in India slightly further outward and helped build British

influence. And the hope that they would be able to paint a little bit more of the world map pink was indeed a motivation for many explorers at this time- a concept which now, having watched the dramatic and total implosion of Empire, to us seems both ridiculous and foolish. Whether it is appropriate to judge historical figures by today’s principles is an interesting debate and sadly one which the scope of this article doesn’t allow for, but we must be careful not to simply dismiss exploration at this time as being done only by the bombastic and contemptibly vainglorious- while Elias had worked to expand and protect the empire, the last thing he could be accused of was arrogance.

But there is one thing that repeatedly struck me in the course of my research. Some people seem to have always just had a compulsion to explore. You might recall the response of George Mallory, when he was asked by a journalist why he was so determined to climb Everest, when he simply said ‘because it’s there’.

EVENTS


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In some cases, it seems that the individual explorer doesn’t fit into any of the motives which I have hitherto been able to neatly split into paragraphs- they have the compulsion to explore and achieve irrespective of personal cost. Go and read Wade Davies’ fantastic Into the Silence. Its account of the early mountaineering expeditions to Everest by a group of damaged First World War veterans is hypnotic, and its description of the death of Mallory and Irvine on the way up (or down?) from the peak is nothing short of heartbreaking. But it is the drive of these men- Mallory kept moving even though a thick fog descended over the peak and made climbing impossible, a fog which would ultimately probably cause him to lose his footing and fall to his death, and another member of the expedition who drove himself until he literally choked up his entire throat lining but nonetheless kept going- that hits you. After the horror

of the First World War, people hurled themselves into every sort of activity that could provide a thrill, be it automobile racing, aviation or mountaineering. This idea of personal distinction can be seen as an attempt to break out from the impersonal nature of the First World War, where you have bodies too mangled to be recognisable and people being killed by artillery so far away that the dead could not even have seen the people who who fired the shot that killed them. People were inspired by the idea of an individual achieving the great- Kathleen Scott, whose husband Robert Falcon Scott had died in 1912 in Antarctica, recalled receiving hundreds of letters from soldiers who had taken inspiration from Scott’s expedition.

For if ever an Empire was built on its heritage, it was the British empire. You can still barely move in London for memorials of one kind or another, and regiments still take pride in victories

over 200 years old (an officer of the South Wales Borderers charged at Gallipoli with the words ‘remember Rorke’s Drift boys, remember Rorke’s Drift’). William Ernest Henley’s poem about the values of Empire being ‘[borne] through life like a torch in flame,’ and on death ‘[flung] to the host behind’ was a true one- perhaps a purpose exploration served as far as the British public was concerned was the feeding of this almighty folklore that the Empire was built on. And what could be more stirring to the British heart, and more inspiring even today, than the image of Captain Scott looking up as he walked onwards, with the forlorn hope that he could be first to the pole, and surveying the scene before him before looking back down and pushing on, despite the immense hardship he must have been experiencing. As Tennyson wrote in his poem Ulysses, a line which today graces the grave of Captain Scott.

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. •

Further ReadingThe Great Game, Peter HopkirkLivingstone, Tim JealInto the Silence, Wade Davies

EVENTS

From left to right: Livingstone, Qianlong, Wallace and Scott


MODERN EVENTS

Phonautograph: A: the mandrel with lampblacked paper, BC: the horn or sound-box to collect the sound waves, a: the stylus assembly, bc: the diaphragm assembly, k: the winding handle


MODERN

On the 9th April 1860 a Frenchman by the name of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sat down in front of a strange looking machine, turned the handle and sang a French folk-song into it. Not particularly remarkable, you might think. And yet what he had just made by

doing this would go on to become the earliest surviving intelligible recording of a human voice. He had just made a phonautogram, and the strange looking machine that had made it was called the phonautograph.

Scott de Martinville had invented the phonautograph several years earlier, and had modelled it on an analog of the human ear, indeed, versions made by contemporaries used parts of a real human ear. It was the first machine that could capture and record airborne sound, such as speech, and it roughly worked like this: you spoke or shouted into a box or horn, representing the ear canal, which channelled the vibrations of your voice down to a membrane or diaphragm representing the ear-drum, which would vibrate accordingly. The action of this would cause a linkage to move and so vibrate a hog’s bristle, under which would be revolving a soot-coated piece of paper wrapped around a barrel or cylinder. This was mounted on a threaded screw, so that the barrel moved laterally as well as revolving under the hog’s •

THE EARLY HISTORY

OF RECORDED

SOUND Part 1

The quest to record and replay sounds, which we take for granted today, was a long and complicated process, as William Sheffield shows us in the first of two parts of his history

of the beginning of audio recording.

EVENTS


MODERN

bristle, allowing for a longer recording. As the hog’s bristle vibrated it would scrape off some of the soot and so trace a wavy line on the paper that exactly corresponded to the vibrations of your voice. In this way you could achieve a drawing termed a phonautogram of your voice, traced as a spiral wavy line on the paper on the barrel. This phonautogram of, say, someone singing, could then be studied for scientific interest, and the waveforms of the different sounds could be examined, something that had been impossible before.

However, the phonautograph, wonderful though it was, could not reproduce the sounds; it could not play them back. You couldn't put the phonautogram back into the machine, turn the handle again, and get the sounds of your own voice back out of the horn. It just didn’t work like that - it’s all to do with the tracing being in two dimensions and not three. Strangely enough, the technology to play back the phonautograms didn’t arrive until the late 2000’s, and in 2008 recording historians managed to do a high-quality scan of the 1860 phonautogram, put it into a computer program, and get a sound out. What they got was the sound of Scott de Martinville singing Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, that hadn’t been heard since that day in 1860. In fact, they originally ran the recording through the computer at a faster speed than it was recorded at, and believed it was the voice of a young girl!

It wasn’t until 1877 that anyone apparently had the idea that the sound that had been recorded could be reproduced or re-emitted, as it were, by the machine. However, in 1877, Charles Cros, another Frenchman, had the concept that the phonautograph could be modified in such a way that a phonautogram would be used to then make a corresponding indented line

in a metal barrel. This could then be put in something like a reverse phonautograph - the groove in the barrel would, if turned at the same speed as the original recording, cause a needle, properly termed a stylus, to be vibrated. This would in turn vibrate a diaphragm, which would create sound waves in the air, amplified by a conical trumpet or horn. This would then allow you to hear again the speech originally recorded.

This was an astonishing idea, no-one had even conceived of hearing recorded sound reproduced before, but he didn’t know if it would work in practice, and, tragically for him, never even had a trial machine made. To make the original recording that could be played back, Cros suggested that either a normal traced-line phonautogram be made, and then used in a photoengraving process to get a corresponding engraved line on a metal barrel, or, in recording, a hard stylus would operate on a zinc barrel coated with wax. As this stylus vibrated and the barrel revolved,

wax would be scraped off in a wavy line, exposing the zinc beneath. The barrel could then be immersed in acid, which would react with the exposed zinc and thereby etch a corresponding wavy groove. This was an important and surprisingly forward-thinking idea. Cros called his device the paleophone, or ‘voix du passé’ (past-voice), which was in concordance with his idea that his invention could be used to make a vast ‘sound library’ of archival recordings that could be handed down to future generations. However, before he put his ideas into practice, Edison across the Atlantic announced his new invention, and Cros was sidelined. Cros died in 1888, never to see the archival recording library that he had envisaged come to pass.

In 1877 Thomas A. Edison, an American inventor, was experimenting with ways to record telegraph messages by embossing morse code on paper with an electromagnet. These embossed ‘lumps and bumps’, he said, could then be ‘read’ again and a corresponding electrical signal emitted - in the process the speed of transmission would be greatly improved to hundreds of words a minute. Edison realised that the vibrations of his speech could be embossed, with the stylus moving up and down with the vibrations, instead of side-to-side as with the phonautograph, as the ‘lumps and bumps’ on the sheet. If the sheet was then passed under the stylus at the same speed, the stylus would be moved up and down by the bumps at the same frequencies, vibrate the diaphragm, and create sound waves. Edison thought that a spirally grooved

EVENTS

A replica of the Kruesi/ Edison tinfoil phonograph


MODERN

cylinder, properly termed a mandrel, over which the sheet could be wrapped, would be mechanically easier than a disc, and that tinfoil (the precursor to the standard household aluminium foil of today) would better hold the impressions made by the stylus. He had a simple machine made, and sometime in the middle part of 1877 first attempted to make the iconic recording of the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, shouting it into the diaphragm. He then rewound the mandrel, and played the recording again. Edison said that he “was never so taken aback in my life” when he heard his own voice coming out of the machine quite clearly.

Edison announced his device on the 21st of November 1877, and gave the first public demonstration on the 29th. However, recording on a sheet of tinfoil was far from ideal - the recording could only really be played back once, as the stylus flattened out the marks in the tinfoil as it rode over them. Consequently, Edison’s historic recording doesn’t survive, although he did re-enact it in 1927, but not on tinfoil. Also, using tinfoil meant that the recording had a lot of background hissing and spitting, or ‘pink noise’ (real tinfoil is hard to find nowadays, and most demonstrations now use aluminium foil, which is actually much better).

The speed at which the recording had to be made to achieve any degree of clarity and the physical limits on the length and diameter of mandrel employed meant that only about thirty seconds of sound could be recorded at most, and Edison’s Phonograph, as he called it (or a voice-writer) remained the preserve of exciting demonstrations at scientific or popular gatherings. A recording made by reporter at one of these demonstrations in 1878 survives, and has been played back by computer scanning technology - it’s too fragile to be played with a stylus. Only a few hundred copies of the the Tinfoil Phonograph were ever made. Nevertheless, Edison patented his

phonograph, the first device made for recording and, crucially, reproducing sound, on the 19th February, 1878. Edison drew up a list of what his new invention could be used for, namely: dictation, ‘talking books’, elocution instruction, recording music, “archiving family sayings”, toys, talking clocks, and archiving dying languages. In particular the position of ‘recording music’, which was to become the major use of his machine much later, was dictated by the very limited playing time. With regard to toys, Edison did much later manufacture the ‘Edison Talking Doll’, but the idea failed, regarding which Edison said “The voice of the little monsters [was] exceedingly unpleasant to hear”.

However, Edison didn’t see an immediate future for the Tinfoil Phonograph, except perhaps for dictation once the machine was improved, and turned his energies instead to the electrification of New York City.

At this point several other inventors and scientists began to build on Edison’s Tinfoil Phonograph and to develop his ideas. An engineer by the name of Frank Lambert built his own version of Edison’s phonograph, which is now known as the ‘Experimental Talking Clock’. He aimed to create a permanent recording and probably build a talking clock (hence the name), and so he used an integral solid lead cylinder to record on directly, dispensing with the flimsy, impermanent tinfoil. Because of this, the recording is the earliest surviving recording able to be played back with its own technology, and can still be heard today. It contains Lambert clearly enunciating the hours (although he misses out 10 o’clock!) and what may be bells. At one point it even sounds like he is blowing his nose, but this and other parts of the cylinder are thought to be recorded in reverse.

Next of course the ‘phonograph’ itself was improved by Tainter and Bell to become the Graphophone, which in turn led to the ... - but that is for next time. •

EVENTS

Further ReadingFrom Tinfoil to Stereo, Oliver Read and Walter WelchOld Gramophones, Shire Classics BooksAll the historic recordings mentioned in this article (with the sole exception of Edison’s original) can be found and listened to on the Internet. I would strongly encourage you to do this. No amount of words can be any match for hearing these amazing recordings for yourself. I would recommend to anyone interested what I did in my researches, namely exploring the many hundreds of early recording websites. A good place to start would be ‘www.tinfoil.com

Descending: Edison, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Lambert


MODERN

Although the Empire grew after the 1914-18 War, John Hobby shows that the Great War actually made the decline of Empire inevitable.

The first world war marked the end of four great empires; Ger-man, Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian. Britain on the other hand emerged from the war

with extended imperial territory stretch-ing from Singapore to the Suez Canal, from the Cape to Cairo. However the end of the war in 1918 also marked the begin-ning of the end, as controlling these colo-nies would become increasingly difficult in a post war world. Britain’s colonies had committed vast numbers of men and resources to the war effort, crucial to the Allied victory, and expected something in return.

The Home FrontAfter the joyous crowds at Trafalgar Square had dispersed, Britain no lon-ger seemed like a country that had just achieved an incredible military triumph. Various political, economic and social problems created by the Great war. Ob-viously, the war had ripped holes in the British economy, with Britain incurring debts equivalent to 136% of its gross na-tional product, meanwhile the USA, Brit-ain’s biggest creditor, began to emerge as the world’s strongest economy. Combined with this, Britain did not return to pre war normality as many people had expect-ed. More British workers than Germans were involved in strikes in 1919 and by

1921 unemployment reached its high-est point since records began and staple British industries such as coal and steel also declined. The government also made budget cuts in an attempt to ward off in-flation and tend to the nation's huge debt. This included cuts to public housing and health schemes which were vastly un-

popular. Many people blamed war for this economic slump, especially the working class who had been the worst affected. This was significant as despite the huge casualties among the working class, they had become a much more powerful polit-ical force. This meant that their dissatis-faction with the economic state of Britain

Sundown: The British Empire and the Great War

ANALYSIS

The Amritsar Massacre


MODERN

mounted pressure on the government, as they began to feel government spend-ing on troops stationed in colonies was a waste of money, and this pressure from the working class further accelerated de-colonisation in the British Empire.

IndiaIndia had been one of Britain's biggest contributors during the war, paying £146 million to the war effort, as well as almost 1.5 million Indian volunteers for the British forces (out of a total of 2.5 million British troops). These Indian troops were vital to Allied triumph in Mesopotamia and Palestine. However the hardships of war had taken its toll, and the coinciding Influenza pandemic of 1918 provoked discontent in the In-dian population, resulting in the Mon-tagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919. These British promises greater autonomy in India were contradicted by the fact that the majority of power still lay in the hands of the viceroy and the India Office in London. These Anti-British attitudes were bolstered when 379 people were killed in the Amristar massacre, which encouraged Gandhi's first civil disobe-dience campaigns. Conditions created by the First World war meant British control in India slowly began to unravel, however it would take until after the sec-ond world war for the arduous journey to come to an end.

DominionsThe white-run British Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa significantly to the war ef-fort, their soldiers fought in large num-bers on the Western Front and at Galli-poli, and from December 1916 Dominion ministers participated in meetings of Lloyd George’s Imperial War Cabinet. Following the War, the Dominions de-manded separate representation at the Paris peace conference in 1919, and new territory in the form of League of Na-tions mandates was awarded to Austra-lia, New Zealand and South Africa. This marked an important point in their slow progress towards autonomy within the Commonwealth.

AfricaAs for Africa, it quickly became involved in the war as the majority of African

territory was under European control in 1914. However, due to hypothesised racial problems, Britain did not deploy a large African army to Europe. This is not to say British Africans did not contrib-ute to the war, there was a 20,000 strong South African Native Labour Contin-gent behind the lines of the Western Front, as well as African troops fighting in the neglected African theatre. The rewards for such contributions were minimal. At the Paris Peace conference Germany’s African Empire was divided

up among the Allies, who showed little interest in offering self determination to black Africans. Post-war, only Egypt and South Africa made progress in this direction. However Egypt only gained nominal ‘independence’ and Britain still held the Suez Canal. Elsewhere in Africa, white settlers enjoyed political and land privileges denied to the black population. This resulted in widespread discontent among the majority black population, and set the foundations for an independent Africa.•

ANALYSIS

The British troops in Egypt

The Carribean Mutiny


MODERN

CaribbeanCaribbean forces saw service in several of the main theatres of war. The long-standing West India Regi-ment fought in Cameroon and West Africa, and the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) served in the Middle East and France. After the War in 1918, soldiers of the BWIR mutinied as a protest to being forced to work manual labour and at blatant racism in the British Army. The Caribbean League, a nationalist group who campaigned for independence formed as a result of the mutiny. This is significant as it shows organised resistance against British colo-nialism.

The Middle EastBritain emerged from the War as the dominant force in the Middle East after the demise of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Britain acquired two man-dates; Palestine and oil rich Iraq, also taking the op-portunity to establish a protectorate in Persia (now Iran) and occupied Afghanistan. This British dom-inance in the region was short-lived. British troops were forced out of Afghanistan and Persia quickly. Revolts in Iraq were crushed by RAF squadrons in 1922 and Arab-Jewish tension resulted in great un-rest in Palestine. Britain retained control of Iraq and Palestine for another 14 and 30 years respectively, but tensions were created following the war that led to their independence. The Empire may have grown in the Middle East, but all it had done was take over existing problems and create new ones.

The Great War made Britain’s colonies yearn for autonomy after the sacrifices they had made on the the sandy plains of Palestine or the boggy fields of the Western front. In many cases Britain failed to live up to the expectations many of her colonies had in mind, which sowed the first seeds of discontent in Britain’s foreign soil, and whilst I agree there was no obvious immediate change, this marked the beginning of the end for Britannia. •

Bombay, present day Mubai, 1919

for years the nerve centre of the British Raj

Further ReadingThe Pax Britannica Trilogy, Jan MorrisA Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East, James BarrRaj: the Making and Unmaking of British India, Lawrence James

ANALYSIS


MODERNANALYSIS


CONTEMPORARY

Sometime ago, while I was watching a BBC programme ‘How Russia won the Space Race’, one of my friends passed me and, noticing the title of

the programme, said, ‘Yeah, but Russia didn’t win anything!’ His words made me realise that not many people here know much about ‘the other side’. And I want to change that. Many people can still re-member, the lunar landing on July 20, 1969, effectively ending the Space Race. But it was much more than that and went on long before and after the landing. It played an important part in both the USSR’s and the USA’s civil and military development, as well as being crucial in their propaganda campaigns.

When the US dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, the USSR was al-ready racing to catch up in the first round of the arms race. The Soviet Union suc-ceeded in building an atom bomb four years later and successfully tested it on the 29th August 1949. But building the bomb wasn’t enough. You had to get it to the enemy to have an impact. The US used B-29 Superfortress bombers to de-

ploy their bombs. The Soviets planned on doing the same, but their bomb was too heavy (over 5 tonnes – 4.898 approx. for Fat Man and 4.399 approx. for Little Boy), as the Soviet tactic was strength in numbers. So, while the US built small, technologically advanced bombs, which could be dropped from a bomber, the USSR made loads of simple bombs,which were, however, too heavy for bombers. This meant that they had to come up with another way to deploy their bombs. And so, the missile development and construction began.

The main man behind the pro-gramme was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. He had been interested in rockets and their development from a young age and worked in research for a long time. Korolev was so important to the team, that he was always called the Chief De-signer without mentioning his name

to protect him from assassination. In 1957, Korolev created the world’s first inter-continental ballistic missile, the R7 Semyorka (Seven). It was a two-stage rocket and had a maximum payload 5.4 tonnes, meaning it could now carry the bomb to its target. The R7 was success-fully tested on 21st August 1957, when it flew from Baikonur (Kazakhstan) to the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The main problem with the R7, as an ICBM, was that it took a long time to start, disrupting the possibility of a first or retaliatory strike. Shortly after, other rockets, such as the R16 were developed. These were much better suited to the task, so the R7 was forgotten. Korolev, however, planned to use it to get to space, his dream for a long time.

Korolev started small. Before 1957, little was known about space and what’s out there, so he didn’t want to risk send-

The Soviet

Side of the

Space Race

Stepan Khovanov shows us how misguided it is to say that the Space Race was won by the Americans by highlighting the triumphs of Soviet Engineering during the latter half of the 20th Century.

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The Sputnik


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ing humans first, neither did he have the technology yet. Korolev decided to send a simple radio transmitter first and see how it was affected. Nobody, even the Soviet Pre-mier at the time, Khrushchev, believed that Russia could do it before the USA. Howev-er, this didn’t discourage Korolev and he kept working until, on 4th October 1957, he launched Sputnik (Satellite), the first man-made satellite to reach space.

The press soon got the news, as, all around the world, people prepared and lined up to catch a glimpse or hear a signal from Sputnik. At first, the Soviets kept quiet about their success, but when they realised that the general population could hear and see Sputnik, the USSR encouraged people to try and find it. In the end, we will never know if this function was built intentionally or if it was just a nice by-product. It was a huge success for the USSR and a failure for the USA, especially since later, in early De-cember, the Vanguard rocket carrying their own satellite failed to lift off and exploded.

Khrushchev was so impressed that he asked Korolev to reciprocate with some-thing bigger. As a result, on the 3 of Novem-ber 1957, Sputnik 2 was launched, this time carrying a living organism – a dog called Lai-ka. The experiment was ‘space-breaking’, but Laika didn’t survive, because of the fail-ure of the climate controls in the capsule.

Laika proved that a living organism can survive in space. The next obvious step was to launch a human being into space. Poten-tial cosmonauts were trained for every-thing, as nobody actually knew what it was for a human to be in space. Serious work-outs (running 5km, 700m swim and para-chute jumping every day, as one cosmonaut described it) was followed by psychologi-cal training, where the candidate was shut alone in a dark, soundproof room to get used to the loneliness of space, which was in turn followed by a rigorous challenge in the form of a wildly-spinning capsule to prepare them for the overloads experienced at lift-off. People joked that candidates were often showing off their dinner, when they entered the capsule. Finally, two men were selected – German Titov and Yuri Gagarin.

Sources differ on why Gagarin was cho-sen over Titov. Some say he was voted in by other group members, others say that Korolev, while interviewing each candi-date, liked Gagarin’s smile and chose him, because he believed that he would enchant the whole world with his smile. Some •

EVENTS

Descending: the R7, the Voskhod and

the MIR


CONTEMPORARY

even believe that on the night before the launch, Gagarin went straight to sleep, whereas Titov tossed and turned, and this lost him his chance, as it was believed that Gagarin would be able to stay calm, whereas Titov wouldn’t. Once again, people didn’t believe that the Russians could launch Gagarin, as all previous tests kept exploding and/or failing to reach space.

On 12th April 1961, Gagarin entered the Vostok (East) capsule and lifted off successfully just after 9 am Moscow time. Gagarin was delivered into orbit without injury and now he had 75 min-utes of peace and quiet, while his craft was circling around the Earth.

Gagarin had to take every precaution not to end up circling the orbit forev-er, so he started to re-enter the atmo-sphere. In order to do that, the landing capsule had to separate from the rest of the spacecraft. However, the straps hold-ing the capsule malfunctioned and didn’t release, causing the capsule to spin dan-gerously.Gagarin said ‘flames flew by the window and there was a burning smell in the cabin’, as the spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere. Finally, the air friction

melted the straps and the capsule sepa-rated, allowing Gagarin to parachute out safely, although he did land several hun-dred kilometres off course. After being found by the search team, Gagarin was promoted to major and was invited to the Kremlin amid celebrations.

Interestingly, American astronaut Allan Shepard was scheduled to be the first man in space on the 6th March 1961, but before Shepard was launched, the NASA tested the flight effects on a chim-panzee, named Ham, on 31st January . A mistake in the navigation system sent Ham’s rocket on a wrong trajectory. Al-though Ham was eventually recovered, NASA postponed Shepard’s flight, al-lowing him to launch only 4 weeks after Gagarin.

Nobody, either in the development team or the government, wanted to stop there. And on 18th March 1965, two cos-monauts, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Le-onov, lifted off in a Voskhod 2 (Sunrise) capsule. Once in orbit, they inflated a special canvas airlock and Leonov crawled through it to become the first man in open space. When he tried to get back into the capsule, Leonov found that

his spacesuit had expanded, due to high-er pressure than the surrounding vac-uum, meaning he couldn’t get into the capsule. To deal with this problem, Le-onov manually deflated his suit and that allowed him to get back into the capsule after the frightening experience.

The Soviet space programme contin-ued successfully for many years, long af-ter both Korolev and Gagarin died. The USSR built Mir (World), a permanent space station in Feb 1986. In Dec 1991, the USSR split, but the station contin-ued working and the now-Russian crew, along with some American astronauts, continued working on it, until in Sep-tember 1997, a cargo ship approached too fast and crashed into one of the modules of the station. It was decommissioned 6 months after and replaced by the In-ternational Space Station (ISS). It still circles the Earth, hosting teams of astro-nauts. In fact, there are 2 US, 3 Russian, 1 Japanese, 1 Danish and 1 Kazakhstan personnel aboard the ISS right now. Space is international now, but think for a second where we might have been, if not for Korolev’s Sputnik and the resul-tant Space Race. •

Further Reading Voices of the Soviet Space Program, Slava Gerovitch

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, Doug MillardCosmonauts in Orbit: The Story of the Soviet Manned Space Programme, Gene and Clare Gurney

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Through the ages immigration has been a major political and economical issue. There is somewhat of a dilemma involved, whereby the moral

question is asked: should we accept that poverty is something that will drive people into countries of higher economic stability, understanding that we will suffer as a result of it, or is it more fair to attempt to resolve the situation in the country itself, and stop the migration passage? In this day and age, when the rise of UKIP has made immigration a major electoral issue, these questions must be addressed.

The start of the First World War saw an influx of refugees into Britain from Belgium. In September 1914 the British government offered 'victims of war the hospitality of the British nation.' The Belgian refugees, who totalled over a quarter of a million people, were the largest refugee movement in British history. The British Government accepted the responsibility for the reception, maintenance and registration of Belgian refugees, while at the same time sought out assistance in housing the refugees with local authorities. On 21st September 1914, a letter appeared in the Express and Star from a number of local residents saying that a proposal to open a hostel in the neighbourhood had met with approval. Encouraged by the substantial contributions, they had offered to provide accommodation for twenty-five refugees. This offer had been accepted. The same day a letter was written to Horatio Brevitt, Wolverhampton Town Clerk, from Mrs E F Gibbons, a member

of a local refugee committee, forwarding offers of help they had received to assist the Belgian refugees. Mrs Gibbons also offered the services of herself, Mrs Spain, Miss Cremonini and Canon Hanley to represent the Roman Catholics at the next meeting. This letter was read out at the Meeting of Executive and Trades Committee, the committee that dealt with labour matters in Wolverhampton. On hearing the letter the Mayor suggested that a sub-committee be formed to look into the whole subject of the Belgian refugees.The most lasting cultural legacy of this particular crisis was the creation of a certain fictional Belgian detective by Agatha Christie, a character who has

become so ingrained in our fiction.Another aspect of immigration is the

desire to escape. Italy in 1955 was a very poor country. During World War Two, Italy - ruled by the Fascist Mussolini - had initially fought alongside Nazi Germany. Yet the Italians became increasingly anxious about their role in the war and about Fascism, and in 1943, Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, deposed Mussolini. Italy then switched sides in the war and supported the British allies, but suffered huge loses in northern towns and villages as the Nazis tried to take revenge. After the war, following a referendum, the monarchy was abolished and a republic was established. However, the •

IMMIGRATION in the 20th CenturyThe Refugee Crisis is nothing new, and the past 100 years have been marked by frequent exoduses of people to the West- Matthew Johnson shows what lessons we can learn from these previous crises.

PARALLELS

A group of Belgian refugees


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economy was slow to grow, especially in the south, which was less industrialised. With no jobs and no prospects, it was not surprising that many people decided to try their luck in 'rich' America. There was a thriving trade in illegal immigration, encouraged by the dockyard owners, who knew that they could get cheap labour from immigrants until they had paid for their passage over. Once they had paid their fare, the immigrants were left to make their own way.

With immigration comes hatred and discrimination. This is evident when mass immigration continued in the 1950s, so did the rise of racial violence and prejudice. Many areas including Birmingham, Nottingham and west London experienced rioting as white people feared the arrival of a black community. On one hand, these men and women had been offered work in a country they had been brought up to revere. On the other, many were experiencing racial prejudice they had never expected. Legislation had allowed people from the Empire and Commonwealth unhindered rights to enter Britain because they carried a British passport. Under political pressure, the government legislated three times in less than a decade to make immigration for non-white people harder and harder. By 1972, legislation meant that a British passport holder born overseas could only settle in Britain if they, firstly, had a work permit and, secondly, could prove that a parent or grandparent had been born in the UK. In practice, this meant children born to white families in the remnants of Empire or the former colonies could enter Britain. Their black counterparts could not. While government was tightening the entry rules, racial tension meant it had to try to tackle prejudice and two race relations acts followed. In 1945, Britain's non-white residents numbered in the low thousands. By 1970 they numbered approximately 1.4 million - a third of these children born in the United Kingdom.

On 11 June 1987, the face of British politics changed when four non-white politicians were elected at the same General Election. Today there are 41 non-white MPs. Campaigners say that equal representation would require at least 55 black MPs in the House of Commons.

The inquiry into the police's handling of the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence led directly to new anti-discrimination legislation passed in 2000. In the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new movement of people began, some fleeing political persecution, others seeking a better life in Western Europe. The growth of asylum seeker applications contributed to a new growth of immigration to the UK. Between 1998 and 2000, some 45,000 people arrived from Africa, 22,700 from the Indian sub-continent, 25,000 from Asia and almost 12,000 from the Americas. Some 125,000 people were allowed to settle in the UK

in 2000. But the rise in asylum seeker arrivals has seen a rise in racial tensions.

Between 2007 and 2011, large numbers of undocumented migrants from the Middle East and Africa crossed between Turkey and Greece, leading Greece and the European Border Protection agency Frontex to upgrade border controls. In 2012, immigrant influx into Greece by land decreased by 95% after the construction of a fence on that part of the Greek–Turkish frontier which does not follow the course of the Maritsa River. In 2015, Bulgaria followed by upgrading a border fence to prevent migrant flows through Turkey. Instability

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and the second civil war in Libya have made departures easier from the north-African country, with no central authority controlling Libya’s ports and dealing with European countries, and migrant smuggling networks flourishing. The war could also have forced to leave many African immigrants residing in Libya, which used to be itself a destination country for migrants looking for better jobs. The 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck involved "more than 360" deaths, leading the Italian government to establish Operation Mare Nostrum, a large-scale naval operation that involved search and rescue, with some migrants

brought aboard a naval amphibious assault ship. In 2014, the Italian government ended the operation, citing costs to be too large for one EU state alone to manage; Frontex assumed the main responsibility for search and rescue operations. The Frontex operation is called Operation Triton. The Italian government had requested additional funds from the EU to continue the operation but member states did not offer the requested support. The UK government cited fears that the operation was acting as "an unintended 'pull factor', encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and

unnecessary deaths". The operation consists of two surveillance aircraft and three ships, with seven teams of staff who gather intelligence and conduct screening/identification processing. Its monthly budget is estimated at €2.9 million.

And so immigration crises are nothing new- this century alone has payed witness to many more than we may give credit to when the current crisis is brought to mind. The immigration crisis in Syria started when anti-government demonstrations began in March of 2011, part of the Arab Spring. But the peaceful protests quickly escalated after the government's •

PARALLELS


CONTEMPORARY PARALLELS

A line of refugees with the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron

Migrants waiting on a disused traintrack


CONTEMPORARY

violent crackdown, and rebels began fighting back against the regime.

By July, army defectors had loosely organised the Free Syrian Army and many civilian Syrians took up arms to join the opposition. Divisions between secular and Islamist fighters, and between ethnic groups, continue to complicate the politics of the conflict. More than four years after it began, the full-blown civil war has killed over 220,000 people, half of whom are believed to be civilians. Bombings are destroying crowded cities and horrific human rights violations are widespread. Basic necessities like food and medical care are sparse.

The U.N. estimates that 7.6 million people are internally displaced. When we also consider refugees, more than half of the country’s pre-war population of 23 million is in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, whether they still remain in the country or have escaped across the borders.The majority of Syrian refugees are living in Jordan and Lebanon, where Mercy Corps has been addressing their needs since 2012. In the region’s two smallest countries, weak infrastructure and limited resources are nearing a breaking point under the strain.

In August 2013, more Syrians escaped into northern Iraq at a newly opened border crossing. Now they are trapped by that country's own insurgent conflict,

and Iraq is struggling to meet the needs of Syrian refugees on top of more than one million internally displaced Iraqis — efforts that we are working to support. An increasing number of Syrian refugees are fleeing across the border into Turkey, overwhelming urban host communities and creating new cultural tensions. Mercy Corps is working in these areas as well to help families meet their basic needs and find work. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are also attempting the dangerous trip across the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Greece, hoping to find a better future in Europe. Not all of them make it across alive. Those who do make it to Greece still face steep challenges — resources are strained by the influx and services are minimal.

The mass immigration crises through the years show a very clear pattern of political unrest, due to the outbreak of war. While war may fuel immigration, it reduces the chances of foreign countries accepting migrants, due to the instability it would cause. This can clearly be seen in the Jewish immigration crisis during WWII, where Britain, eventually, stopped immigration from Germany all together. And that is just one example of countless cases where people have been displaced by war or other factors- we can now only wait to see how the current crisis will end. •

Further ReadingExodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century, Paul CollierThe British Dream: Successes and Failures of Postwar Immigration, David GoodhartBloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, Robert Winder

PARALLELS

A boat filled with migrants


Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig of Prussia was born sec-ond in line to the throne by his elder brother and as such never expected

the crown. The title held by his father, The Kingdom of Prussia, was formed of lands constituting eastern Germany, Silesia, the lands around Danzig and a few smaller duchies in western Germany. It had only recently risen to ascendancy within the region and, especially at the time of Wil-helms birth on the 22nd March 1797, was still only one of hundreds of states that made up the area of modern day germany. His family – the Hohenzollerns - had ruled these lands for nearly 400 hundred years and had slowly grown in power. The polit-ical situation of his family is complicated but suffice to say that they were dominant in the region, then known as the Holy Ro-man Empire.

During his childhood he was educat-ed by Johann Delbrück, a fairly balanced man, and besides the normal princely ed-ucation he also taught Wilhelm the skills for court, how to be polite and courteous as well as how to communicate with his peers. These skills would serve him well for his future political and diplomatic needs and be noted by many foreigners who met him.

At the age of 11 he began a pivotal time in his life working with the army, he devot-ed most of his time to this. It would soon become clear that a great deal of his future views and opinions would be shaped by his time among the troops. He was said to be

an excellent fighter and when placed in the commanding role an inspiring lead-er. He won an iron cross for his service at the Battle of Bar-Sur-Aube in 1814, one of Napoleon’s final battles and one of the last of The War of the Sixth Coalition. From this he began a long term grudge against the French which would resurface later on in his life. Through his late teens and early twenties he rose through the ranks building strong friendships with many commanders as he went. Eventually he be-came the army’s spokesperson to the king, as you might expect given his upbringing he was pro-military and argued, as speak-er, for high military spending and profes-sional training. In 1829 after abandoning a long term lover he married Augusta von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, the marriage was more for position and children than a for any other reason, indeed most who knew the couple saw how Augusta was intellectually superior and that their rela-tionship was loveless. Augusta was known for her great interest in politics and was fairly progressive in stance. This occasion-ally brought her into conflict with her hus-band who had more traditional ideals.

Wilhelm’s father died in 1840 leaving the crown to his childless brother, and suddenly Wilhelm and his political views

were thrown into the limelight as he be-came the heir to Prussia and, later in 1853, prince regent to his mentally ill brother. It was around this time that his, at first, staunch conservatism came into play, ini-tially refusing to sign the document setting up a Prussian parliament, although he did later decide to refuse his brother's dying wish of repealing the constitution. He was also notoriously iron fisted when it came to revolts, particularly during the March revolutions of 1848. Pressed by lack of food and poor living conditions the workers and middle class of northern germany rose up against their respective rulers. Among the many aims of the rebels one was of pan-nationalism and unity of the german states this was the first flames of a grow-ing consensus among the different german peoples that they should form one nation. However it directly challenged the views of the aristocracy and rulers who were eager to crush it. Characters such as Wilhelm may have been over eager, indeed his use of grapeshot as crowd control during an uprising forced him into a short period of exile in Great Britain and earned him the nickname Kartätschenprinz (Prince of Grapeshot).

In 1861 his brother died leaving Wil-helm as King of Prussia, he inherited not

Louis Brosnan portrays the fascinating and enigmatic character of the first King of the German Empire.

KAISER WILHELM IA CROWN FROM THE GUTTER

BIOGRAPHY KAISER WILHELM I

only the title but also a number of political feuds, previously handled by his brother particularly with the predominantly lib-eral Landtag (A political assembly similar to Parliament). Being of his conservative character and seeing internal politics as menial and below him, he preferred not to get involved. Instead he delegated most of his administration to his newly appointed and Minister President, the brilliant Otto von Bismarck, and Wilhelm henceforth adopted an observational role in regard to politics. There is great debate over who had the power, Wilhelm had the love of the people, his government and the army while Bismarck controlled the running of the country and its stability, both could have made life uncomfortable for the other but realised that it was not in their interests. Even though Wilhelm had the final say on what Bismarck implemented and did there are a number of occasions where his threat of resignation forced Wilhelm to abide by him. It demonstrates an unusual degree of dependency not seen elsewhere on the European political landscape at this point in history.

Bismark was by all accounts a re-sounding statesman and quickly became the master of a very complicated time in the geopolitical landscape. It is really Bis-marck who is accredited with most of the work done to unify the german states. It is

impressive that he managed to engineer three aggressive wars with neighbouring countries without incurring the wrath of a larger coalition, something difficult to do at the time as the web of alliances made it hard to contain conflicts (it was this same web that escalated into WW1). This can mainly be put down to his excellent flat-tery and diplomatic skills. Another reason for his resounding success was the fact that he was given total control of his sec-tion of government without interference from Wilhelm, this allowed the state to run

more smoothly and for more deals to be struck. As a direct result of this in 1866 the North German Confederation was formed, largely under the orders of bismarck, with Wilhelm as its president. It was the descendant of the much more loosely or-ganized German Confederation and was more progressive than its predecessor. It constituted the first step to unification for Germany and while no territory changed hands it greatly advanced Prussia’s power and legitimacy as ruler of the Germans by securing their dominance and control over most of the region.

Another master of his age was a man named Helmuth von Moltke, commonly recognised as one of the fathers of mod-ern warfare. An excellent tactician and strategist, von Moltke came to work un-der Wilhelm in 1857 as Chief of General Staff and held that position for the next 30 years. In that time he recreated the Prussian Army and reformulated mod-ern military doctrine, within this two new policies emerged. Firstly von Moltke rec-ognised the use of firearms as a defensive weapon and the growing size of armies to allow flanking moves as more pertinent than piercing a line. Secondly he reorgan-ised the way an army was supplied and re-based, realising the importance of spread-ing forces out and not grouping armies in one spot. From these reforms the Prus-sian army became one of the most effi-cient fighting forces in 19th century eu-rope. Like Bismarck his effectiveness was helped by his ability of total control of •


BIOGRAPHYKAISER WILHELM I

The corronation of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1871

his sphere of work, a decision that worked greatly in Wilhelm’s favour. Only under the most capable statesman of the age and one of the most capable generals would Germany be unified, and Wilhelm’s allow-ing them a large amount of carte blanche marks him as a very talented leader of men. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian war broke out over the French held territories in Alsace-Lorraine. Wilhelm was inclined to press these claims as the area was eth-nically German and his long held conser-vative chauvinistic ideas compelled him to unite what he now saw as his kingdom. The war went well for Prussia and this was partly due to his good connections with his generals spawned from his early days and his well trained and equipped army due to his earlier reforms.

On the 18th January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles Wilhelm I of Prussia became Wilhelm I German Emperor. This was the moment when the German con-federation became the German state a sin-gle political entity and functioned as one country. Wilhelm disliked the title awarded

to him – German Emperor – as it nuanced that he was emperor of the German peo-ple and not of the geographical area, this challenged his idea of divine right to rule chosen by god rather the title expressed a more elected role similar to that of a repub-lic. He would have much preferred Emper-or of Germany as it gave him power over the land instead, the problem with this is that the individual monarchs that make up the North German Confederation were willing to make them their leader in name but the title Emperor of Germany would effectively strip them of their lands and titles, they were unsurprisingly unwilling to do this. Another problem with Emper-or of Germany was that it would lay claim to lands outside his current domain such as Luxembourg and Switzerland (histor-ically considered as Germany) this would infuriate other nations such as Austria and Russia. So for Wilhelm the best he could do was accept what his brother had once called a ‘crown from the gutter’ given by the people, not least to unify his people but to advance his power and prestige. These

traditional ideas of sovereignty hark back to the days of Caesar and the Roman em-perorship who was also offered the crown of the people but was refused in hope of getting a crown installed with divine right and premise.

Nevertheless in the following years Wilhelm tightened his grip on the country having achieved many of his earlier aims, he began to suppress some movements which had been tolerated during his earli-er years, notably banning socialism, using the pretext of an assassination attempt, in the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 (again with Bismarck's support). This was aimed at weakening the perceived threat of social-ism sweeping europe but also represented many of Wilhelms long held views of the Monarchy and Aristocracy, showing once again an archaic view of power.

Finally at the age of 90 in 1888 he passed away and was given a full state fu-neral. As well as this over a 1000 memorials were erected to him in the coming decades showing people's gratitude to their be-grudging Emperor. •

Further Reading George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War One, Miranda Carter

Bismarck (Routledge Historical Biographies), Edgar FeuchtwangerIron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947, Christopher Clark


BIOGRAPHY KAISER WILHELM I

Otto Von BismarckAugusta Von Preussen

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Timeline - Issue 3

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