Global Inequality: a New Approach for the Age of Globalisation (London, 2016). Milanovic, B.

Abstract

Milanovic’s Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation seeks to create a new model for explaining the patterns in the growth and decline on inequality in the world, remodelling Kuznet’s hypothesis to take account of the rise of a “global plutocracy” and wage stagnation in the Western middle classes. In doing so, he has some pessimistic forecasts for the immediate future of the middle classes in the West and makes timely warnings against neglecting income and wealth inequality in favour of ‘existential inequality’.

Biography: Sam Tarran is an MA student in History at the University of Birmingham, focusing on political institutions in medieval Europe. His undergraduate degree is from Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalisation is not a new book. Despite the fact that it was published relatively recently, it still feels necessary to recount the context in which Milanovic wrote and released it. So much has happened since that it can feel like another world, already part of ‘history’. At the time, inequality both within and between countries felt important. The Occupy movement had ended but was still in the mind’s eye. The world was just beginning to creep out of the Great Recession. The public of many countries, after nearly seven years of economic decline, wage pressure and austerity policies, were feeling restless. Many, after Occupy, public sector cuts and the (initial) electoral success of Syriza in Greece, thought it would be the political left that would make hay. It is only with hindsight that many now claim that it was historically predictable that the populist right would capitalise.

Milanovic published his book in 2016. Since then, we have had Trump, Brexit, the ‘cultural wars’ and Covid-19. The arguments over economic inequality now feel traditional and unfashionable. The book is still, therefore, underread, but despite it falling foul of current Twitter trends, it somehow feels timely. Overall, Milanovic’s analysis and argument – well-written and engaging as it is – would benefit from a deeper survey of pre-modern historical periods and the world outside the West. He also discusses potential solutions that are politically and socially impossible.  Where Milanovic is most interesting is his warning against overly focusing on ‘existential inequality’, defined as the unequal “legal treatment of different groups” based on factors such as race, disability, sexual preference and gender (p. 226). This, he argues, is unhelpful as it feeds identity politics, splitting the public into communitarian interest groups who, once their own campaigns and needs are sated, will not aid others. This inhibits the collective action needed to create real change and blocks the discussion of the “harder” questions of how to solve wealth and income inequality both domestically and globally. Reducing income inequality, he points out, also helps with gender and race equality, although he does not offer any substantive examples. If Milanovic’s point was relevant then, his pleas are urgent now. We have, somehow, forgotten about income and wealth inequality.

Milanovic seeks to analyse inequality on a global level and ‘not as a national phenomenon only, as had been done for the past century’ (p. 2). In this, he alludes to the works of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, a previous generation of political economists who sought explanatory power on a planetary scale. There were, however, other works published post-2010 on this topic. Milanovic himself cites Thomas Pikkety’s Capitalism in the Twenty First Century, published in English in 2013. There was also Jason Hickel’s The Divide: a Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, published in 2017. The Great Recession had also spurred new academic interest in the subject from a historical perspective. Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives, is a collection of works (edited by Steven Jensen and Christian Christiansen) which seeks to ‘historicise Piketty’. Piketty’s work is reformist, seeking to save capitalism from within by recommending measures such as a global redistribution of wealth, effectively scaling up the tax-and-spend policies of the West. These suggestions were enthusiastically met by some at the time, but their chance of success appears difficult to envision. Witness, for example, the new ‘progressive’ President of the United States threatening sanctions on Britain and the EU for daring to implement new taxes on America’s digital giants. Milanovic is similarly bold in his recommendations, but understandably less optimistic about their success. Despite the many graphs, statistics and discussion of the Gini co-efficient, the work remains very accessible. The language is largely in plain English and the analysis, even for a layman such as this reader, is relatively easy to follow.

From the outset, he sets out themes that, post-Brexit and post-Trump, we recognise instantly: the rise of a global middle class based primarily in Asia, the income stagnation of the middle to lower-middle classes in the West, falling social mobility, and the ‘emergence of a global plutocracy’ (p. 3). Milanovic re-posits the Kuznets hypothesis – that industrialisation leads to higher and later reduced income inequality – as “waves” to take account of our secular stagnation, where periods of intense technological innovation increase inequality before political pressure and educational attainment reduces it again. The technological changes post-1980 have facilitated the rise of finance and tech billionaires who, through the newfound portability of their skills and capital, have become disconnected from their national polities. Milanovic is cold in his analysis of this group until the final chapter, when he just holds back from condemning the hypocrisy of a global top 10% that produces 50% of world carbon emissions flying in private jets to preach about climate change.

Like many economists and economic historians, Milanovic is most comfortable when discussing his model in the context of periods and countries from which we have plenty of data. His analysis therefore skews modern and towards the US and UK. He is on less firm footing when he moves into the early modern, medieval and non-Western worlds. At one point, he freely uses the term ‘capitalist’ in relation to cities in the late Middle Ages. He would have been better discussing income inequality and ‘surpluses’ in the High Middle Ages, when monasteries thrived, guilds were formed, trade increased, fens were drained, and a Latin aristocracy expanded its influence into the former European periphery.^[1] Ironically, it was in the following period, in the aftermath of the Black Death, that political agitation among the middling sort began, just as the polities of Europe were starting to expand their bureaucratic reach and depth.^[2] A discussion of these periods and a reconciliation of this apparent contradiction – one may expect agitation to come during the period of greater growth and inequality – to his model would have been illuminating. Instead, Milanovic largely skips straight from the fall of Rome to the ‘commercial revolution’ of sixteenth century Italy. The skipping of the medieval period and eurocentrism is a common problem in attempts at global histories, particularly those focused on inequality. The sources, unfortunately, are inconvenient. Medieval records can be patchy and incomplete. Records from outside the West present problems of language and cultural interpretation. A collaborative approach is necessary to bridge these gaps, but pressures of time and resources can make this difficult.

Milanovic, from focusing on inequality within countries, moves to inequality between countries. Here, he does not seek to explain why the West is richer than the East, which has been done elsewhere. Instead, he predicts that the fast-growing economies of the Global South, namely in Asia, will soon begin to move through the Kuznets waves in much the same way as the West. In doing so, they will face similar challenges to the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the middle classes seek enfranchisement. Further, the Citizenship Premium that we in the West currently enjoy for being born in wealthier countries is slowly being eroded as location becomes a less significant factor in one’s income potential.

So, what are Milanovic’s predictions for the future? He wisely cautions against specific forecasts in Chapter 4, pointing out that economists often extrapolate existing trends in the future without taking account of the unexpected, referencing Taleb’s Black Swans, large-scale, often unpredicted events with far-reaching consequences, such as tsunamis or political assassinations. Few writers of the 1970s, for example, predicted the Reagan-Thatcher boom and the collapse of communism. Indeed, some even predicted a convergence between the two, with the Soviet bloc liberalising slightly and the West becoming more statist. He therefore resists specific predictions but does venture some ideas. His belief that the Great Convergence will continue, no matter what happens to China’s economic growth, is hardly controversial. He shows, however, that the Convergence is largely an Asian phenomenon, which means global inequality is likely to continue to grow unless Africa also begins to converge.

He is also pessimistic about the future of Western middle classes, who he argues will continue to be squeezed by globalisation, automation, and the more debateable assertion that education has, more or less, hit its quantitative and qualitative limit. As capital and, increasingly, labour become more difficult to tax, his solution is more punitive inheritance taxes to reduce the power of “endowments” and tax policies that encourage share ownership and financial asset ownership among the lower and middle classes. He compares the systems of Taiwan and Canada to illustrate how this approach can be as effective as a traditional tax-and-spend system. In the next breath, however, he says this is pointless without increased accessibility to quality education, contradicting his own comments on education earlier on.

This, unfortunately, is the pattern of the book: some good economic analysis, followed by political assertions that are often less reinforced by evidence, then proposed solutions that are politically unpalatable. Another example is his proposal to resolve the conflict between the high numbers of migrants and the typical internal resistance to immigrations: implement discriminatory policies against migrants which make clear they do not share the privileges of ‘native’ citizens. As Milanovic himself intimates, this is unlikely to be accepted by anyone, except, ironically, the migrants themselves. In that sense, Milanovic falls into the classic economist (perhaps, even, academic) trap of proposing ‘evidence-based policy’ that ignores specific social and political contexts. His predictions for Asian societies may also be helped by a consideration of the local and non-economic forces impacting on politics and demographics in the region. To some extent, we have the benefit of hindsight here. China has continued to grow apace, but its burgeoning middle class seems as compliant and pacified as ever thanks to its continued prosperity and Xi’s increasingly aggressive nationalism. This may prevent China moving up its own Kuznets wave any time soon.

His model and his analysis would have greater power and more nuance if it were more greatly supplemented by extended historical discussion of the non-Western and non-modern worlds and the powerful forces that exist outside of economics. Nevertheless, Milanovic’s work is comprehendible, sweeping, and at times gripping. Its structure is logical and helpful. He manages to explain complex economic phenomena for a general audience without being patronising. Further, its message – that inequality will continue to exist despite globalisation, and that we ignore it at our peril – feels incredibly relevant as it struggles to cut through the noise of contemporary political fashions.

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Bibliography

Bartlett, R., The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1994)

Christiansen, C.O., & Jensen, S., Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives (London, 2019)

Hickel, J., The Divide: a Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (London, 2017)

Piketty, T., Capital in the Twenty First Century (Paris, 2013)

Watts, J., The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge, 2009)

Notes

[1] See, for example, R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1994)

[2] J. Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge, 2009)

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country by Tom Hazeldine

Abstract

In this review of Tom Hazeldine’s The Northern Question, David Civil explores how Britain’s geographic cultural constructions and regional inequalities have impacted on the nation’s politics from the Industrial Revolution to Brexit. The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country, Tom Hazeldine, London, Verso Books, 2020, ISBN: 9781786634061; 290pp.; Price: £20.00.

Biography: David Civil is the MHR’s Spotlight Editor and completed his PhD in History on the concept of meritocracy in 2020. 

A Northern parliamentary seat flipping in a by-election from Labour to Conservative for the first time in its history may immediately bring to mind recent, post-Brexit political developments. We might instinctively reach for the language of ‘left-behind’ voters or highlight the significance of ‘Red Wall’ constituencies to explain this unprecedented electoral shift. And yet this by-election in Workington took place in 1976. It saw the return of 35-year-old Richard Page for a Conservative Party under the new leadership of Margaret Thatcher. In 1979 the seat would return to Labour, until the 2019 General Election when it flipped to the Conservatives as part of their assault on the so-called ‘Red Wall’. The notion of ‘Workington Man’ appeared to capture the impact of Brexit in ripping apart old loyalties and traditional voting patterns. Yet as Page’s triumph in 1976 demonstrates, these developments have a long history. The Editor of the New Left Review, Tom Hazeldine sets out to explore this history in his recent book, The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country. Post-Brexit Northern England, Hazeldine claims, has propelled itself to the ‘foreground of national attention for the first time since the socio-economic crisis of the Thatcher years’ (p. xii). By exploring the interaction between nation-state, social class and geographical region, The Northern Question hopes to ‘let some light in through several windows’ to illuminate a debate whose importance is only going to grow in the next decade and beyond (p. xiv).

Hazeldine’s historical survey begins in Chapter 2, framing the North as the ‘Badlands’ which for the most part refused to adopt the ‘intense feudalism of the Midlands and the South’ (p. 31). If the burdens of serfdom were ‘generally lighter’ in the North ‘rural benightedness – the absence of towns and literacy – was correspondingly deeper’ (p. 31). For Hazeldine, it is clear that evidence of Northern disadvantage vis-à-vis their Southern neighbour is visible even during the early modern period. Even under pre-modern conditions ‘not even a member of the royal line could scrabble together quite enough strength in the North to reign in defiance of Establishment opinion’ (p. 33). In a theme that runs throughout The Northern Question, ‘the sine qua non of governing England was to have its southern heartland on side’ (p. 33). This whistle-stop tour ends with the historical event or process which gave the North its defining characteristics in the national imagination: the Industrial Revolution. Chapter 3 traces how the forces of industrialism and revolt intersected throughout the nineteenth century as the exponential growth of the factory system was accompanied by Luddites, Chartists, and democratic reformers. Despite these upheavals, ‘the pre-industrial mould of British politics remained unbroken, with fateful consequences for the North once its commercial fortunes began to slide’ (p. 70). Drawing on Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, Hazeldine claims that ‘even in the land of long chimneys’, business survival still hinged on the ‘attitude taken by the traditional landowning and monied interests of the South’ (p. 70). Chapter 4, focusing on the ‘capital-goods phase of the manufacturing revolution’, expands on these themes to demonstrate how despite the mirage of Northern prosperity, ‘Liverpool and Manchester wealth holders were second only to Londoners in their readiness to put money into foreign undertakings’. It is at this point, at the start of the twentieth-century, that Hazeldine’s ‘declinist’ thesis begins to emerge in full force: ‘For the North it was a case of so far and no further: from now on, it would have to sink or swim with its nineteenth-century coal mines, textile mills, steelworks and shipyards’ (pp. 72–73).

The repercussions of The First World War loosened Lancashire’s grip on British India, the biggest outlet for its cotton goods. In Hazeldine’s words, ‘outpaced by late-start competitors in Europe, America and the Far East, dependent on imperial privileges approaching expiry, the world’s first industrial region was about to experience the ground giving way beneath it’ (pp. 89–90). Chapter 5, entitled ‘Dereliction’, gives an indication of Hazeldine’s assessment of the British state’s response. Despite the parliamentary breakthrough of the Labour Party, the two wings of the labour movement took turns to court disaster through the timidity of its leaders in the face of the General Strike and the Great Depression. By 1934 unemployment fell back to single digits in London and the South East but in the North and Scotland remained stuck above twenty percent (p. 93, pp. 105–06). It would take the full mobilisation of national resources over the course of The Second World War to reduce the concentration of economic activity in the South East and to achieve ‘the rationalisation of Outer Britain that peacetime politics at Westminster had singularly failed to deliver’ (p. 113). Chapter 6 analyses how this rationalisation was squandered by both Labour and Conservative governments determined to keep the pound strong and British imperialism intact. Regional policy, as proclaimed by post-war governments of both stripes, came to involve ‘merely a modest stimulus to private-sector investment and job creation, aimed at indemnifying the ruling parties against accusations of neglect, should slump conditions return to the industrial towns of northern England, Scotland and Wales’ (p. 116). Instead of overhauling the Northern manufacturing base ‘before the resumption of commercial competition from continental Europe and Japan’, Hazeldine claims, Attlee was ploughing ‘limitless amounts of money’ into a ‘clandestine nuclear-weapons programme’ (p. 120, 115). This neglect, he argues, continued into the 1960s. Harold Wilson’s modernisation programme, which helped the Labour Party win the 1964 General Election, was sacrificed, Hazeldine claims, on the altar of ‘slavish monetary orthodoxy’ (p. 134). Wilson’s ‘prolonged exposure to the official mind acculturated him to the innermost impulses of the British state, instilling a reverence for the monarchy, for centralisation and for the pound sterling’ (p. 132). In Hazeldine’s terms, throughout the twentieth century the representatives of labour were just as ‘complacent as those of capital’ (p. 122).

In relative terms then the North did not ‘tread water’ during the ‘golden age of capitalism’ and during the 1970s and 1980s, Hazeldine claims, ‘it would be forced below the waterline, never to re-emerge’ (p. 136). This intensification of Northern decline is explored in Chapters 7 and 8. As growth slowed and the seemingly existential crisis of stagflation began to grip the British economy in the 1970s, mass redundancies developed on top of existing regional disparities. Unemployment provoked a profound response from the industrial working-class and the 1974 ‘Who Governs Britain?’ General Election which brought down the conservative government of Ted Heath represented a ‘remarkable victory for the industrial ranks of Outer Britain’ (p. 144). This working-class momentum was undone in Hazeldine’s account, however, by conservative Labour governments led consecutively by Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. An alternative political economy advanced by Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry between 1974 and 1975, and embodied in the Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering cooperative, was ostracised in favour of ‘sound money and an open market economy’ (pp. 145–46). For Hazeldine, the Labour government’s cowardice in the face of the forces of capital reached its apogee with the IMF crisis of 1976. This represented the moment that the financial crisis of the post-war state was ‘resolved on City terms at the cost of a lingering recession in Outer Britain’ (p. 150). In these chapters Hazeldine deploys his central argument with the greatest persuasiveness. By highlighting how social democrats like Callaghan and Dennis Healey laid the groundwork for neoliberalism, The Northern Question argues there was something inherent in the British state which meant that at regular historical intervals its default was to side with the forces of capital at the expense of the interests of labour. In this sense, by using the North as a lens, Hazeldine portrays Thatcherism more as an intensification or consolidation of pre-existing patterns of political economy rather than as a revolutionary ideology. In Hazeldine’s account Thatcherism governed from the south and ‘tightened the austerity introduced by Callaghan’s Labour’ (p. 159). Rather than portraying the period as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ where alternative visions of Britain’s political economy competed for ascendancy, Hazeldine characterises the 1970s as one long march to free-market neoliberalism.^[1]

While this is a contestable interpretation of the ideological shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, the fact that neoliberalism consolidated its grip over British politics in the 1990s and 2000s is less open to question. The final two chapters of The Northern Question tells the story of this consolidation and brings the narrative up to the contemporary moment where neoliberal ascendancy appears to be assailed on all sides. Hazeldine’s lens becomes a little blurred when exploring New Labour: on the one hand, he repeats familiar tropes that the Blairite Labour Party represented Thatcher’s ‘greatest achievement’ (p. 177); on the other, he highlights how deindustrialisation in the North was ‘buffered by the stimulants’ of higher public spending, which increased by over six percent a year in real terms between 1999 and 2006 (p. 180). These stimulants would quickly be withdrawn, however, following the 2008 financial crisis. The North East lost fourteen percent of its public sector workforce under the coalition while the South East shed less than three percent. Under David Cameron’s prime ministership median household wealth in London increased by fourteen percent while it fell eight percent in Yorkshire and the Humber. For Hazeldine, Brexit and the 2017 General Election were consequences of these regional disparities. Three parallel voter insurgencies left their mark on the post-2008 distemper:

a Brexit revolt that originated in opposition to Maastricht among City mavericks and Tory voters in the market-town South, but then pivoted to attract northern working-class communities left behind by the New Labour boom and reeling from Conservative-Lib Dem austerity; the left-inclined 2014 Yes campaign for Scottish independence [. . .] and a Corbynist upsurge pitting a millennial precariat against a still largely Blairite Parliamentary Labour Party (p. 197).

While Corbyn managed to hold together an electoral coalition from amongst these various insurgencies in 2017—making the Labour Party’s first Commons gains in a General Election in twenty years—this was achieved by capturing major Northern cities and obfuscation on Brexit. In the aftermath of the election the Brexit movement and the Corbynite Labour Party increasingly faced in opposite directions. The final chapter of The Northern Question entitled ‘Taking a Stand’ explores the consequences of this divergence. Considering his damning indictment of Harold Wilson’s leadership of the Labour Party, it is surprising to see Hazeldine claim that Corbyn should have stuck to the ‘Wilson model’ of ‘personal neutrality’ over Brexit. In the end Corbyn and John McDonnell, ‘pinned their economic programme to a Brexit stance indistinguishable from that of the London establishment against which a large part of the Leave vote had been directed’ (pp. 212–13). In terms of seats, the General Election of 2019 turned on a Labour collapse in the deindustrialised small towns and former pit villages of the Midlands and the North. In these ‘red wall’ regions, 750,000 Leave voters switched to the Conservatives while hundreds of thousands more stayed at home (p. 207). If it is straightforward to demonstrate that Brexit cut across traditional political loyalties and divisions, explaining why remains one of the most contested issues in contemporary Britain. Too many commentators rush to proclaim a loosely conceptualised cultural politics as the key dividing line, yet it is clearly more complicated than this. For Hazeldine, ‘Brexit handed a political weapon to a class and region that had been denied one by Labourist hegemony for so long’ (p. 220). Yet as Will Davies has recently argued, much of what is labelled ‘populism’ is ‘really a longing for some version of the state that predated neoliberal reforms’. The slogan ‘take back control’ appealed to older Brexit voters precisely because they could remember a time when the state was ‘in command of its own economy and able to deliver social security to its own citizens’, a product of the very ‘labourist hegemony’ that Hazeldine deplores.^[2] Throughout The Northern Question post-war social democracy is attacked for its repeated capitulations to the forces of capital and characterised as an ideological formation that includes everyone from Dennis Healey to, staggeringly, Dominic Cummings who, Hazeldine claims, ‘wrapped the official Vote Leave campaign in social-democratic colours’ (p. 203).

While it is clearly possible to attack post-war social democracy for its failure to adequately subdue the forces of capital, the reduction of this changing, nuanced and electorally successful ideological formation to a handmaiden of capitalist power speaks to a broader problem with The Northern Question. Namely, that Hazeldine lacks a compelling explanation for why the North has been so neglected by successive governments or rulers over at least two centuries beyond the fact that the British state inherently sided with the forces of capital (a byword for ‘the South’) over those of labour (a byword for ‘the North’). Now there is of course a large amount of truth in this reasoning. British institutions proved uniquely adept at preserving the interests of landed and financial interests and co-opting dissenters to stifle unrest. While the interests of the North might have been consistently marginalised, however, they were marginalised for different reasons over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At its worst Hazeldine’s approach simply lumps social democrats and neoliberals together into a large amalgam called ‘the establishment’. By adopting Hazeldine’s perspective we learn nothing about the consequences of the profound ideological and conceptual shifts of modern British history; about the impact of the welfare state or the rise of the free market. This largely stems from Hazeldine’s ‘declinism’.^[3] The Northern Question is heavily indebted to the work of the political theorist Tom Nairn. Alongside fellow New Left intellectual Perry Anderson, Nairn advanced the thesis that the British polity was uniquely conditioned by the absence of a truly bourgeois revolutionary moment.^[4] Instead the aristocracy absorbed the emergent bourgeoisie from the early-nineteenth century, preserving the ancien régime and dooming any attempt at modernisation to failure.^[5] There is no acknowledgement in The Northern Question, however, to the fact that this thesis has been powerfully challenged in the intervening decades.^[6] Declinist critiques are bound-up with a variety of cultural assumptions about the nature of work, Britain’s place in the world and its transition to a welfare state. The latter, which played an important role in the development of Britain’s service economy, is barely mentioned by Hazeldine. In many ways, as the likes of Jim Tomlinson have argued, New Left critiques like The Northern Question end up mirroring a Thatcherite narrative of modern British history if for largely different reasons.^[7]

At the start of his account, Hazeldine informs the reader that to understand the North we must ‘delve into the politics of Westminster and Whitehall, observing these proceedings from a northern perspective, to see what English history looks like when stood upon its head’ (p. 23). Later on, he is critical of recent ‘party-political musings’ which, while treating the North as a significant electoral player, tend to project southern assumptions onto the region. These musings, he claims, ‘are not the same as asking what the region itself wants’ (p. 214). Yet voices from the region are exactly what The Northern Question lacks.

The most engaging sections of the book are those where Hazeldine explores the cultural products of the region, from the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the late 1950s to the ‘feel-good musicals of the New Labour boom’ embodied in The Full Monty (p. 220, 18). By the end of The Northern Question, it is difficult to know what the North is beyond a byword for industrialism and manufacturing or to identify what makes it distinct. This partly stems from Hazeldine’s materialist approach and partly from the reductionism of the North-South binary itself as a lens. A much more fruitful approach would be to explore how this division of Britain became ingrained in the national imagination, compressing other regional or local identities. The Midlands, for example, is rarely the subject of such historical scrutiny. Where the Midlands is cited, it is usually grafted onto the North or South and rarely treated as a region in its own right. Hazeldine falls prey to a similar trap. ‘On a statistical basis’, he argues, ‘much more of the Midlands belongs on the northern side of the regional divide’ (p. 13). Hazeldine acknowledges that cities like Birmingham followed their own ‘distinct trajectory’ and has a ‘different story to tell’ than that explored in The Northern Question (p. 14). Yet he is forced to acknowledge where significant movements and processes spill over from ill-defined, contested and largely imagined regional boundaries. While it is undoubtedly true to say that the North-South divide continues to dominate discussions of regional inequality in modern Britain, there is a pressing need to explore the Midlands as a space of identity formation and political upheaval. The recently launched ‘Midlands Identities Project‘, a one-day interdisciplinary conference supported by both The MHR and the Institute of Historical Research, could therefore not be timelier.

While the North-South divide might be an unrepresentative cultural construction, it undoubtedly retains a considerable grip over the national political, economic and cultural imagination. Hazeldine concludes The Northern Question with a powerful fact: the contemporary North accounts for one-quarter of the UK’s population and parliamentary constituencies as well as one-fifth of its GDP. While these economic indicators may be trending downwards, they do so from a great height. In this sense, Hazeldine argues, ‘the problem of the North isn’t going away anytime soon’ (p. 222). The North may benefit ‘from open bidding between the major parties for support’ but it is far from clear that it will settle for what Hazeldine identifies as the ‘post-war norm’: the ‘dispending of palliatives to take the edge of structural economic change’ (p. 214). If his book fails to grapple with the contradictions and contestations inherent in Britain’s image of the North today, as well as amongst those who live there and lay claim to a Northern identity, Hazeldine’s historical survey is a timely reminder that the contours and constraints of contemporary politics are always liable to change, often in unexpected and surprising ways.

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Bibliography

Anderson, P., ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23 (1963), pp. 26–53.

Blackburn, D., ‘Penguin Books and the Marketplace for Ideas’, in L. Black, H. Pemberton & P. Thane (Eds.), Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester, 2013), pp. 224–51.

Davies, W., This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain (London, 2020). 

Edgerton, D., Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006). 

English, R., & Kenny, M., ‘Public Intellectuals and the Question of British Decline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3/3 (2001), pp. 259–83.

Hall, P.A., ‘Social Learning and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain’, Comparative Politics, 5/3, (1993), pp. 275–96. 

Nairn, T., ‘The British Political Elite’, New Left Review, 23 (1963), pp. 19–25.

Tomlinson, J., ‘Thrice Denied: “Declinism” as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century’, Twentieth Century British History, 20/2 (2009), pp. 227–51.

Notes

[1] For the 1970s as a ‘marketplace of ideas’, see: P.A. Hall, ‘Social Learning and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain’, Comparative Politics, 5/3, (1993), pp. 275–96; D. Blackburn, ‘Penguin Books and the Marketplace for Ideas’, in L. Black, H. Pemberton & P. Thane (Eds.), Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester, 2013), pp. 224–51.

[2] W. Davies, This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain (London, 2020), p. 16.

[3] For the notion of ‘declinism’ see:  J. Tomlinson, ‘Thrice Denied: “Declinism” as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century’, Twentieth Century British History, 20/2 (2009), pp. 227–51.

[4] See for example: T. Nairn, ‘The British Political Elite’, New Left Review, 23 (1963), pp. 19–25; P. Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23 (1963), pp. 26–53.

[5] For a good overview of this account, see: R. English & M. Kenny, ‘Public Intellectuals and the Question of British Decline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3/3 (2001), pp. 259–83.

[6] See for example: D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006).

[7] Tomlinson, ‘Thrice Denied’, p. 235.

Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye, The Churchill Myths (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Abstract

This article reviews The Churchill Myths, co-authored by Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham, Bill Schwarz, Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London, and Richard Toye, Professor of History at the University of Exeter. The book follows the trajectory of Winston Churchill’s uses in the popular memory of the post-war period, suggesting that the legends of 1940 have remained a central element throughout, but also tracking the changing nature of elements around these stories, such as a greater attention to his personal character. Although the authors make a convincing case in many respects, it leaves some significant aspects of competing ‘Churchill myths’ and change over time underexplored. 

Key words: American politics, Brexit, British politics, Conservative Party, Cold War, film, India, memory, Second World War, Wales, Winston Churchill.

Biography: Alex Riggs is a University of Nottingham PhD History student, funded by Midlands4Cities. His research focuses on the 1970s and 1980s American left, especially their efforts to forge coalitions through electoral and grassroots politics.

A spectre is haunting Britain. The spectre of Winston Churchill. That’s the argument of Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye in The Churchill Myths. Certainly, any follower of British politics will need little convincing of Churchill’s continued relevance. As the authors point out in the book’s key rationale, Churchill has been deployed constantly in the debates around Brexit. Most prominently, Brexiteers have deployed an advocate for a ‘global Britain’ that confronted a German-dominated Europe, but Remainers too have cast him as a pro-European concerned with the implications of Britain cutting adrift from the continent.^[1] Indeed, the period since the book’s finalisation propelled Churchill even further into the centre of political discourse, with the 75^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests all prompting further discussion of his legacy.^[2] Therefore, Fielding, Schwarz and Toye bring the subject necessary scholarly attention.

As they stress, the book’s subject is not Winston Churchill. It is about memory of him,

‘the many, contrary manifestations of the various Churchill legends and the common, invariant properties which make the range of individual stories recognisably instalments in a common process of codification, resulting in Churchill as myth’ (Emphasis original).^[3]

This history is uncovered across three chapters. The first, ‘Brexit May 1940’, tackles Churchill’s political uses, highlighting his utility for a range of political actors in various conflicts and crises, from the Cold War to Brexit. The next, ‘The Churchill Syndrome’, goes over similar ground, again exploring the evolution of his British and American political deployments. It also introduces interesting theoretical concepts, particularly ‘reputational entrepreneurship’, whereby self-interested custodians use particular memories to build a sense of solidarity within communities by defining what they are for and against. This is linked with the concept of a ‘resonant core’ to memories that is always present, whose surroundings are constantly changing over time.^[4] This represents important overlap with the ideas of the political theorist Michael Freeden, whose morphological approach to ideology similarly uncovers core concepts, but suggests significant fluctuations in the peripheral concepts that surround its centre over time.^[5] Finally, ‘Persistence and Change in Churchill’s Mythic Memory’ is largely focused on dramatic depictions, highlighting the battles that Hollywood producers had with Churchill and his aides to get a biographical treatment to the big screen and his numerous depictions ever since.^[6]

The authors convincingly show how the Churchill myths’ adaptability has kept them relevant through the post-war era. They highlight how the myth of an unshakable Churchill arose from early Cold War fears about Soviet expansionism. This was embraced by a diverse range of figures including liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who praised his rhetorical ability ‘to give shape and character, colour and direction and coherence to the stream of events’, something essential for democracy to survive in this context.^[7] Then as fears of national decline grew in the 1960s, Churchill became a symbol of Britain’s lost might. In the context of fears around the decline of Britain’s Empire, economy and culture, conservative commentators like the historian John Lukacs portrayed his death in 1965 as the simultaneous passing of the hierarchical, traditional society that sustained its great power status.^[8] Most recently, The Churchill Factor, written by perhaps Churchill’s most enthusiastic ‘reputational entrepreneur’ Boris Johnson, depicted him as an anti-establishment figure, taking a meek, out-of-touch political elite to task for their belief in the limits of national power and using his rhetorical might to restore national esteem.^[9] The authors suggest that in the age of Brexit’s political deadlocks, Johnson’s narrative of a ‘man of destiny’ smashing through national malaise has become dominant over popular views of Britain’s wartime leader.^[10]

In making these arguments, the authors deploy an impressive range of material. Given the abundance of Churchill films, this medium is particularly prominent, especially 2018’s The Darkest Hour. These dramatic depictions are effective in evidencing the centrality of 1940 to Churchillian memory, with this a consistent element throughout- even 1972’s Young Winston, based on Churchill’s first autobiography, My Early Life, treats events decades before the war as foreshadowing his future greatness.^[11] This medium also functions effectively in showing the changes that have occurred around this myth. Richard Burton’s 1974 portrayal presented a stoic individual, but his more recent biopics  celebrate his eccentricities, presenting his tempestuousness and bouts of depression as representative of his humanity, in contrast to the distant, stuffy Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.^[12] Political opinion is also drawn upon, including interventions from figures as diverse as John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage, providing a good range of popular and elite discourses and showing his constant utility in the post-war period.^[13]

The Churchill Myths also reveals some of the key silences in these depictions. In pinpointing the 1940 fixation of these sources, the authors highlight a contradiction in conventional attitudes- on the one hand, Churchill is the man of destiny, singlehandedly steering Britain away from defeat in 1940. Yet on the other, he appears to have been incapable of deploying these talents at any other moment, with his decades of ministerial office before and after the war rarely invoked, and practically irrelevant to the war once the United States and Soviet Union joined the conflict in 1941.^[14] This means that a series of events that challenge his status as a unifying national hero, including but not limited to, his sending of troops to quell striking miners in South Wales as Home Secretary, his staunch support for imperialism, and his 1945 election defeat, are either glossed over or unexplained.^[15] Even when they are mentioned, such as his pro-Empire intervention in the debate on Indian home rule in the 2002 film The Gathering Storm, they represent his honesty compared to the devious Conservative leadership, not his unrelenting imperialism.^[16]

However, this point also reveals one of the book’s flaws. Although the authors are correct in highlighting 1940 as the central Churchillian myth, these silences are by no means universal. Directors may not be rushing to dramatize Churchill’s role in the Tonypandy riots, but his actions still have an important impact on memory of him in South Wales.^[17] On a global scale too, the 1943 Bengal Famine has shaped Indian memory of Churchill, with the exacerbation of mass starvation by his wartime policies also fuelling a more critical history, and crucially one not centring on 1940.^[18] These critiques make passing visits to the narrative, mentioned in criticisms from John McDonnell and Richard Burton, but a more detailed sense of how they fit within an analysis of the Churchill myths or why they have sprung up in particular contexts is not included.^[19] Had they been, The Churchill Myths would have produced a more comprehensive analysis, one that highlights the plurality of memories implied by its title.

A closer analysis of these silences could have also brought further insights into the moments when Churchill is more obscure in political discourse. For instance, it is mentioned that John Major made little use of Churchill during his premiership and that no Churchill films were made between 1982 and 2002 and again between 2004 and 2017, yet no explanations are offered for why this was the case.^[20] A more nuanced analysis of Churchill’s American deployments would have also been possible through this approach. Though the authors correctly highlight his use by all post-war American presidents, a search of Presidential public papers reveals that this has been far from equal over time. For instance, Jimmy Carter invoked Churchill thirteen times, but his successor Ronald Reagan found 125 occasions to quote the former Prime Minister.^[21] Through closer examination of these deployments, a clearer understanding of why Churchill was especially useful for certain actors and less so for others could be achieved, with Reagan’s confrontational policy towards the Soviet Union making Churchill’s warnings over appeasement and post-war Soviet ambitions convenient.^[22] Similarly, the defection of many Southern Democrats to the Republican Party also meant Churchillian wisdom about the merits of switching parties was applicable.^[23]

 Patrick Finney’s Remembering the Road to World War Two provides a useful example of this approach. Focusing on the historiography of appeasement, Finney situates historians’ work within the various contexts they were writing in, contrasting the critical outlook of the immediate post-war years of high confidence in Britain’s great power status with the more sympathetic view of the declinist 1960s and ‘70s, where the limits on policymakers’ freedom of action were stressed.^[24] Such an analysis brings important insight, and a similar approach more grounded in particular contexts would have given the book a more detailed sense of changes in this mythology over time. Moreover, given that the appeasers are ever present in stories told about Churchill, narratives that rehabilitate them by implication challenge the significance and necessity of Churchill’s intervention, addressing the content of Finney’s study would have added considerable important context.

On occasion in The Churchill Myths, such a structure is used to good effect. For instance, it takes Andrew Roberts’ biography of Churchill as an illustration of the context of internal struggles in the 1990s Conservative Party. The authors underline how Roberts highlighted Churchill’s racism not as a criticism of these attitudes, but as a critique of their inconsistency with the overly welcoming immigration policy of his 1950s premiership, a symptom of the Tory ‘wetness’ that was a concern of the party’s right in the context of John Major’s acceptance of European integration.^[25] This is a perceptive analysis, and more frequent application would have added much to The Churchill Myths. This could serve as a means to ask some of the overarching questions about modern Britain, to assess whether the persistence of 1940 suggests a stagnant period, or its constant reinterpretation implies a more dynamic era. This would have also provided an opportunity to include the historiographical discussion that the book lacks, and thus put it into dialogue with this scholarship, as well as providing an opportunity to historicise these works, especially their 2000s proliferation.^[26]

In summary then, The Churchill Myths provides a timely and readable intervention in contemporary debates about Churchill. In a relatively short book, the authors reveal important historical insights, showing the adaptability of Churchill over time to suit a variety of political purposes, but also the staying power of his heroic leadership in 1940 as the defining Churchill myth. Yet that brevity also leaves the reader wanting more, with issues over competing Churchill myths and its significance for broader questions in both British history and particular contexts underexplored. Fielding, Schwarz and Toye demonstrate the variety of issues that can be viewed through the lens of Churchill’s memory but leave historians with plenty of angles still to discover.

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Bibliography

Primary Bibliography 

Carter, N., ‘This is the moment to learn the wartime generation’s lesson’, The Times, May 8, 2020, p.5.

Limaye, Y., ‘Churchill’s legacy leaves Indians questioning his hero status’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-53405121, accessed 01/04/2021.

Walker, P., ‘Boris Johnson says removing statues is to ‘lie about our history’’, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/12/boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd, accessed 30/03/2021.

‘Advanced Search’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search?field-keywords=Churchill&field-keywords2=&field-keywords3=&from%5Bdate%5D=01-01-1961&to%5Bdate%5D=04-05-2021&person2=200295&items_per_page=25, accessed 06/04/2021. 

‘Advanced Search’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search?field-keywords=Churchill&field-keywords2=&field-keywords3=&from%5Bdate%5D=01-01-1961&to%5Bdate%5D=04-05-2021&person2=200296&items_per_page=25, accessed 06/04/2021.

‘Has the town of Tonypandy forgiven Winston Churchill? | ITV News’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhYQ13z4dYc, accessed 01/04/2021. 

‘Remarks at a Campaign Rally for Senator Don Nickles in Norman, Oklahoma’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-campaign-rally-for-senator-don-nickles-norman-oklahoma, accessed 06/04/2021.

‘Statement on United States Defence Policy’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-united-states-defense-policy, accessed 06/04/2021.

Secondary Bibliography

Connelly, M., We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Abingdon, 2004). 

Fielding, S., Schwarz, B., Toye, R., The Churchill Myths (Oxford, 2020).

Finney, P., Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National, Identity, Collective Memory (Oxford, 2011). 

Freeden, M., ‘The Morphological Analysis of Ideology’, in M. Freeden, L. Tower Sargent and M. Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford, 2013), pp.115-137. 

Noakes, L. and Pattinson, J. (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London, 2013). 

Smith, M., Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London, 2000). 

Notes

^[1] S. Fielding, B. Schwarz and R. Toye, The Churchill Myths (Oxford, 2020), pp.8-9.

^[2] N. Carter, ‘This is the moment to learn the wartime generation’s lesson’, The Times, May 8, 2020, p.5; P. Walker, ‘Boris Johnson says removing statues is to ‘lie about our history’’, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/12/boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd, accessed 30/03/2021.

^[3] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, p.11.

^[4] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.72-73.

^[5] M. Freeden, ‘The Morphological Analysis of Ideology’, in M. Freeden, L. Tower Sargent and M. Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford, 2013), pp.124-25.

^[6] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.143-44.

^[7] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.40-41.

^[8] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.35-36.

^[9] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, p.23.

^[10] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.27-28.

^[11] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.125,138

^[12] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.139-40.

^[13] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.9-10,79-80,84-85

^[14] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.111-12.

^[15] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.122-24.

^[16] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.133-34.

^[17] ‘Has the town of Tonypandy forgiven Winston Churchill? | ITV News’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhYQ13z4dYc, accessed 01/04/2021.

^[18] Y. Limaye, ‘Churchill’s legacy leaves Indians questioning his hero status’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-53405121, accessed 01/04/2021.

^[19] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.69-70,108-09.

^[20] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.86,138.

^[21] ‘Advanced Search’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search?field-keywords=Churchill&field-keywords2=&field-keywords3=&from%5Bdate%5D=01-01-1961&to%5Bdate%5D=04-05-2021&person2=200295&items_per_page=25 accessed 06/04/2021; ‘Advanced Search’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search?field-keywords=Churchill&field-keywords2=&field-keywords3=&from%5Bdate%5D=01-01-1961&to%5Bdate%5D=04-05-2021&person2=200296&items_per_page=25, accessed 06/04/2021.

^[22] ‘Statement on United States Defence Policy’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-united-states-defense-policy, accessed 06/04/2021.

^[23] ‘Remarks at a Campaign Rally for Senator Don Nickles in Norman, Oklahoma’, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-campaign-rally-for-senator-don-nickles-norman-oklahoma, accessed 06/04/2021.

^[24] P. Finney, Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory (London, 2011), pp.192-94,200-02.

^[25] Fielding, Schwarz and Toye, The Churchill Myths, pp.88-89.

^[26] M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Abingdon, 2004); M. Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London, 2000); L. Noakes and J. Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London, 2013).

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (London, 2020)

Biography: Sian Webb recently submitted her PhD thesis, ‘A Land of Five Languages: Material Culture, Communities and Identity in Northumbria, 600-867’, that was joint supervised by Chris Loveluck in Archaeology and Peter Darby in History.  She focuses on early medieval cultural history, material culture and medieval studies.

The year is 1014 and The Battle of Clontarf rages in Dublin. It is a setting which in many cases immediately sparks images of men fighting and dying for their male lords, kings, plunder and the glory of battle.  As this is happening, a man in Caithness far away on the north-eastern coast of Scotland spied twelve figures entering a weaving shed. These women were the Valkyries.  As the Irish and Norse fought in Dublin, they wove a tapestry with a thread of human entrails and loom-weights of skulls. This is how Friðriksdóttir opens her exploration of women living in the Viking world. Whilst warfare, and medieval battle in particular, is often envisioned as a strictly masculine affair in modern popular consciousness, this vignette from the thirteenth-century Njáls saga reintroduces a feminine aspect.

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World is a rich cultural history of the lives of Viking Age women, constituting a worthy addition to the existing scholarship on this topic.  In this endeavour, the setting is apt. Women from goddesses such as Freyja and Valkyries like Sigrún, to extraordinary, albeit human, women accounted for in Icelandic sagas, such as the Viking Guðriðr Þorbjarnardóttir, are shown to be deeply complex individuals.  They all are shown to have a rich mixture of virtues and vices with the capacity to display the full range of emotions.^[1] They could be honourable, brave and wise whilst also able to make mistakes and be ruthless in their anger. These women did not appear as static images nor as moral lessons set in black and white. As Friðriksdóttir brings together the threads of her study it is evident, as she states in her introduction, that these are reflections of real people and emerge from a society wherein women were essential for their work and the wisdom they possessed.

Friðriksdóttir’s monograph emerges from a shift in the scholarly appreciation of the complexity of the culture and identities of the people, both men and women, of the Viking Age (ca. 790-1066 CE). Her study is largely confined to Viking settlements in Northern Europe and the British Isles, though she does at times bring in evidence from the Baltic region.  In this monograph, she provides an overview of the evidence at hand bringing together shared attributes shaping the lives and identities of women throughout the regions of Viking settlement.  This widening appreciation of Viking culture and society began in the 1970s with the seminal work The Viking Achievement: The Society and Culture of Early Medieval Scandinavia by Peter Foote and David Wilson, in which the authors devoted very little space to the discussion of raiding and violence, delving instead into the rich culture and artistically constructive activities of the period.^[2] Two decades later, Judith Jesch opened the discussion of the place of women in Viking society.^[3] This monograph brought together a wide variety of  material sources and toponymy to bring gender studies into a scholarly tradition that had long ignored the presence and involvement of women in all aspects of life.  The study of Viking women and their potential for active involvement in raiding and warfare culture was reinvigorated in 2017 by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, et al. with their paper ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’.  The team used genome-wide sequence data to confirm the biological sex of a Viking individual in a well-furnished grave and disprove previous assumptions that the individual must have been male based on the weaponry and material culture with which it was buried. The team concluded by cautioning against basing our understanding of the past and potential of the people who lived then on generalised assumptions of cultural norms and stereotypes.

As Friðriksdóttir states, the term ‘Viking’ does not only refer to those who were chiefly interested in violence, pillaging and raiding, though these encounters did occur particularly in the earlier period of their activity. ‘Viking identities’, according to her, also encompass the mobility of the people in question. Those were groups of people actively involved in trade routes that stretched from Asia to the western fringes of Europe, in travel and in the settlement of short- and long-term colonies.^[4] In these endeavours, women were more than able to take an important role, whether or not they were actively involved in raiding and warfare. As seen in the opening vignette, women were inextricably linked with spinning and weaving. Textile production opened a considerable path to social mobility, as Viking mobility relied on ships and their sails. These objects, along with the production of clothing suitable for long sea voyages in arctic seas, required years of effort that would largely be the work of professional women.^[5] This mobility and the opportunity for women to engage in high-level political activity is reflected both in sagas and in presence of high-status female graves at the sites of important Viking Age power centres.^[6]

In order to provide an accurate and fully developed image of Viking women, Friðriksdóttir brings together a wide variety of sources both material and textual, including runic inscriptions, the text and imagery carved on runestones, toponymy, picture stones, Viking Age art and archaeological sources alongside textual evidence provided by the sagas and from annals and other historical texts produced in Ireland and other European areas.  This approach requires a synthesis of materials from a wide variety of academic fields spanning Viking and Medieval studies and the growing appreciation of material culture in history that began in the 1990s with scholars such as Judith Jesch, and continued to gain strength through the early 2000s, with works such as the collected volumes Land, Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking Period Settlement, (Cardiff, July 2001) and Cædmons Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede: Six Essays.^[7]  This approach continues to prove fruitful, attracting a growing number of scholars focusing on a range of topics on which textual sources are less forthcoming.^[8]

Each individual type of source, from material culture and archaeology to textual vignettes, offers its own window into the study of the cultures and communities of the past. Without a wide source base, information from different fields of knowledge loses some key contextual elements, skewing our understanding of past societies and the identities that grew within them. By bringing a wider base of sources together to form an integrated approach, it is possible to work towards an understanding of how all pieces fit together. Insights gleaned from different sources can provide context and balance out the weaknesses and biases present in each individual type of source. This balance of sources is adeptly managed by Friðriksdóttir, leading to the wonderfully complex and richly layered depiction of the lives and opportunities of Viking women shown in Valkryie.

Friðriksdóttir draws the reader in by the textual vignettes provided by the sagas.  These texts draw readers into a portrayal of the world as seen by the saga authors and their audience, bringing a vibrancy of colour and life to the discussion of the past.  It is balanced by the evidence provided by the wide variety of complementary sources discussed above.  A wide range of women from the sagas help to provide evidence for the shape of life for women from varied backgrounds, from wealthy and influential women who controlled the lives of their families to young women who become trapped in awful cycles of poverty and abuse.  The depiction of Valkyries and deities from the sagas provide further insights into cultural understandings of the nature of women and their ability to be brave and strong or cowardly and deceitful.  Whilst Friðriksdóttir shows a careful and studied handling of the sagas, the book could benefit from a deeper discussion of the difficulties presented by these sources for the benefit of the reader.  These difficulties include the mixing of Christian and traditional belief systems for the saga authors and how this may tinge the text.  Another difficulty that could have been discussed is the chronological diversity of the sources.  The saga authors often wrote about things that happened centuries before their own time.  Ideology and cultures evolved and adapted to the new problems and opportunities presented by different times.  This introduced further potential for incidental misrepresentation of what would now have been a different culture from the saga author’s own contemporary reality.

The book is structured around a life cycle, delicately following the trails of women’s lives in the lands touched by Viking culture from birth through to death. Along the way, Friðriksdóttir examines how age, marital status and social rank affected their identities through material culture, burial and osteological archaeology, and sagas. She considers infancy and childhood for female offspring, discussing infanticide and the argument that female infants may have been more likely to be left to die from exposure in times of hardship, offering a balanced view on all sides of this argument. In this, she sets runic evidence that suggests a population balance skewed in favour of men alongside burial evidence and law codes that indicate the depth of love that Viking families could show for their daughters and the protections granted to children and pregnant women regardless of the infant’s sex.^[9]

Chapter 2 focuses on the social world of teenage girls, discussing the cultural beliefs and family honour that shaped their lives and potentially restrained their opportunities. Yet, this period of youth and young adulthood also brought with it the potential for women to take a role in craft and trade work, to act as poets (skáldmær) or a more physically active role in violence and warfare.^[10] The following chapter turns to adulthood, the lives and status of married women, and female agency and divorce. In it, the author discusses personal adornment, women’s involvement in craft-working and trade, and opportunities for travel and leadership roles.  Women were valued for their intelligence and abilities, personal attributes that could prove to be attractive qualities in a partner. Even after marriage, however, women were able to initiate a divorce if marital relations broke down.

Much of the adult life of fertile women would be spent in a cycle of pregnancy and the nursing of young children, along with miscarriages, healing from childbirth and the potential of death associated with childbirth. These concerns and the importance of motherhood form the core of Chapter 4. The chapter brings these topics to life through evidence from sagas showing the bravery of pregnant women, as well as mothers who could be wise leaders of their communities, loving supporters of their families and ruthless in their attempts to secure the future wealth and social rank of their sons and daughters.^[11]

If women survived their childbearing years, they were statistically more likely to outlive their partners. Chapter 5 focuses on this shift in the life cycle with an examination of widowhood in Viking culture. In this endeavour, Friðriksdóttir looks at the actions of widows in sagas alongside the evidence of influential women available from runic inscriptions and grave goods.  Widows were able to consolidate considerable wealth as businesswomen and remain active in their communities as commissioners for the construction and upkeep of bridges and roads.^[12] The transition between older belief systems and the new Christian religion brought additional opportunities for widows who displayed their new faith by commissioning stone crosses blending Christian and traditional imagery with runic inscriptions.^[13]

The monograph concludes with the experience of elderly Viking Age women and their treatment in death. Viking Age burials indicate that communities held older women in positions of considerable influence and dignity.^[14]  Evidence found in sagas, graves containing staffs, amulets and medicinal plants, and the iconography of women holding staffs and branches found on the Kirk Michael cross slab (123) on the Isle of Man suggest that older women could be valued as professional seeresses (völva or seiðkona) and for their role in traditional magic (seiðr).^[15]

Overall, Friðriksdóttir builds a vivid image of the complex realities of life for women in Viking settlements. Women could be constrained by societal expectations, yet Viking Age culture allowed opportunities for both physical and social mobility.  Women took positions of importance in their families and communities from their youth to the end of their lives. They could be ruthless and vengeful or wise and honourable, characterised by a mixture of virtues and vices. The balance of sources provides a detailed consideration of the realities of life for Viking Age women, and the textual vignettes drawn from sagas make the work endlessly engaging for both academic readers and non-specialists interested in Viking history.

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Bibliography

Brink, S. and Price, N. S. (eds). The Viking World. (New York, 2008).

Cambridge, E. and Hawkes, J. (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World (Philadelphia, 2017).

Frantzen, A. J. and Hines, J. (eds), Cædmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede: Six Essays (Morgantown, 2007).

Fleming, R., Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (London, 2011).

Foote, P. and Wilson, D., The Viking Achievement: The Society and Culture of Early Medieval Scandinavia. (London, 1970).

Friðriksdóttir, J. K., Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World. (London, 2020).

Gilchrist, R., Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (New York, 1994).

Gilchrist, R., Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge, 2012).

Hayeur Smith, M., The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic (Florida, 2020)

Hedenstierna-Jonson, C., Kjellström, A.,  Zachrisson, T., Krzewińska, M., Sobrado, V., Price, N., Günther, T., Jakobsson, M., Götherström, A. and Storå, J., ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 164/ 4 (2017), pp. 853-860.

Hines, J., Lane, A. and Redknap, M. (eds). Land, Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking Period Settlement, at Cardiff, July 2001 (Abingdon, 2004).

Hyer, M. C., and Owen-Crocker, G. R., The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World (Exeter, 2011).

Jesch, J., The Viking Diaspora (Abingdon, 2015).

Jesch, J., Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge, 1991).

Jones, S., The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. (London, 1997).

Sørensen, M. L. S., ‘Gender, Material Culture, and Identity in the Viking Diaspora’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 5 (2009), pp. 253-269.

Wicker, N. L., ‘Christianization, Female Infanticide, and the Abundance of Female Burials at Viking Age Birka in Sweden’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 21 (2) (May 2012), pp. 245-262.

Notes

^[1] J. K. Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World. (London, 2020). Pp. 10-11.

^[2] P. Foote and D. Wilson. The Viking Achievement: The Society and Culture of Early Medieval Scandinavia. (London, 1970).

^[3] J. Jesch, Women in the Viking Age. (Woodbridge, 1991).

^[4] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 12.

^[5] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 85.

^[6] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 107-108.

^[7] J. Hines, A. Lane and M. Redknap (eds). Land, Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking Period Settlement, Cardiff, July 2001 (Abingdon, 2004); A. J. Frantzen and J. Hines (eds). Cædmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede: Six Essays. (Morgantown, 2007);

^[8] For Viking studies, material culture is invaluable.  See: N. L. Wicker, ‘Christianization, Female Infanticide, and the Abundance of Female Burials at Viking Age Birka in Sweden’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 21 (2) (May 2012), pp. 245-262; M. Hayeur Smith, The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic. (Florida, 2020); M. L. S. Sørensen, ‘Gender, Material Culture, and Identity in the Viking Diaspora’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 5 (2009), pp. 253-269. This process can be seen throughout medieval studies. See: E. Cambridge and J. Hawkes (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World, (Philadelphia, 2017); S. Jones. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London, 1997); M. C. Hyer and G. R. Owen-Crocker. The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World (Exeter, 2011); R. Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. (New York, 1994); R. Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge, 2012).

^[9] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 24-25, 35.

^[10] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 52, 54-55, 58-59.

^[11] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 118, 128-129, 142.

^[12] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 162.

^[13] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 162-163.

^[14] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 173.

^[15] Friðriksdóttir. Valkyrie. Pp. 179-180, 183.

Elaine Farrell, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison, (Cambridge, 2020) Review

Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland is a detailed resource which expands upon the existing scholarship of prison life and brings the administration of punishment in an Irish female convict prison into particular focus. Scholars have recently begun to reflect on how the implementation of nineteenth-century laws (such as the English Poor Laws) affected the wider lives of those inside an institution and this has been conducted through an analysis of the agency that imprisoned women showed in the face of increasingly punitive legislation.

Biography: Megan Yates is an ESRC PhD Student in the school of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. Her project is collaborative, working closely with the University of Nottingham and the National Archives. In her doctoral research, she focuses on the daily experiences of vagrants within the workhouses of the nineteenth century and across the Midlands.

In this heavily researched book, Elaine Farrell effectively synthesises studies around life in nineteenth-century institutions with new understandings of the selfhood, agency and life cycles that her female convicts displayed.^[1] Through the lives of Irish female convicts, the author conducts a thorough examination of Irish prison life, families, friendships, relationships, and wider network acquisition. It is in these places, Grangegorman, Mountjoy Female Penitentiary, and the Cork Female Convict Depot, that Farrell explores the experiences of incarcerated women and their interwoven identities inside and outside of the prison walls.

Farrell’s case studies detailing the convictions, treatment and opinions of these women will be a great resource for multiple branches of history, both in the institutional sense of how life in an Irish convict prison worked for these females, as well as for those studying the detailed experiences and lifecycles of people in nineteenth-century institutions.

Farrell’s focus also contributes more broadly to discourse surrounding crime and punishment, particularly the evolution of western punitive practices as she explores in her introduction the administrative pathway from Grangegorman prison to Cork Female Convict Depot. Her exploration of these prison institutions to some extent accords with Foucault’s examination of prison in Discipline and Punish and his suggestion that imprisonment was part of a much bigger carceral system that, Farrell thus goes on to argue, infiltrated every aspect of the lives researched in her case studies.^[2]

The incorporation of Irish women is a novel and impressive approach to the study of lived experiences and the positionality of her complicated case studies within the context of Ireland, politically, socially and culturally. The source base for this work combines both traditional and non-traditional resources as it utilises the official record of court transcripts, prison ledgers, annual reports and legislation, alongside personal testimony and inmate letters. Farrell uses a close reading analysis to unpick the rhetoric of these sources and interprets them through her vast knowledge of the Irish penal system in the mid-late Victorian era. She combines her analyses with other historical works for both Irish and British institutions and this marries her work with historiography on the Poor Laws including broad ideas about imprisonment, settlement and resistance.^[3]

Farrell employs a case-study approach to her sources through sub-chapters at the beginning of each main chapter which brings the human element to the front of her discussion. This structure takes the reader on a journey, an effective approach which envelopes the somewhat disjointed and difficult excerpts of narrative with the social circumstances of these women’s lives. It makes sense, due to the volume of material in each of her themes, to break this down here. This book is structured into five chapters to correspond with its five case studies. Farrell has themed her case studies based on wider societal issues that she interleaves with the stories of multiple women. This is important because otherwise, there is the danger of losing the human aspect of these cases and reducing them to broad-brush arguments. As proven in Farrell’s previous works, she demonstrates that these women were not exceptions and in doing so, she gives voices to ordinary women who might otherwise have been forgotten.

In the first half of Women, Crime and Punishment Farrell tells us about the everyday lived experiences of women in the convict prisons of Ireland. Farrell discusses sanitation, rebellion, work, schooling, length of incarceration and uniform. The female uniforms here stand out, because as Farrell notes, there were four different types, varying in style and colour to reflect the different status of the convicts. Farrell explores the ways in which women expressed individuality by altering their uniform through removing collars, tearing hems and wearing neckerchiefs. Although the convict uniform was implemented in English prisons by the mid-Victorian era, the differentiation of uniform based on a points system was not a practice that was replicated in the British convict system.^[4] Uniform was intended to de-individualize convicts and control their appearance. Farrell suggests that in the women’s prisons she studied, the uniform was a bargaining chip for good behaviour, although as she argues, this was hardly a successful penal model.^[5] Farrell’s exploration of the attitudes to the uniform from the perspective of the convicts wearing it is one small example of the many new aspects of convict life she shares throughout her chapters.

In the second sub-chapter, Farrell introduces us to the Carroll family. This complicated family of petty criminals frame the rest of her chapter which explores familial bonds maintained or dissolved during their detention. This chapter has disheartening elements whereby we learn of women who were abandoned by their families once they became institutionalised. Farrell goes through a particularly poignant case of a mother who, after five years of imprisonment, was unsuccessful in regaining custody of her child. Farrell’s dip into this story is particularly captivating as she expands upon the feelings these women would have experienced, not simply being incarcerated and imprisoned, but for some, recognising a lost relationship and maternal bond.

Farrell uses thousands of prison files including letters sent back to the prison after a convict’s release. These sources are comprehensive. The high number of exemplary cases in these chapters often encourages the narrative style to switch from one convict to another very quickly. However, this is representative of the short snippets of stories she finds in the archives. Although women such as Catherine Lavelle (depicted on the cover image) were well known and had exceptionally thorough sources, others had no more than one or two mentions in the archive. Intermingling these stories shows that Farrell is not trying to follow any one convict’s prison journey; instead, she brings to life the thorny and intricate lives of many women. Thus, Farrell’s methodology and data collection are made glaringly clear. She repeats the sample size often in this chapter and it is clear that she is confident in stating how representative this evidence is of Irish female convicts’ nineteenth century prison experience.

Women were also involved in the prison system as employees and Farrell discusses in later chapters, the bonds and relationships that could be formed between prison matrons and female convicts. In contrast, Farrell also describes the stigma and criticism female prison employees faced from their male counterparts for their ‘weakness’ in trusting and perhaps liking certain inmates. In further chapters Farrell pulls at the strings of convicts’ relationships, friendship, marital or extra-marital relations as well as their enemies and fights or conflict that occurred amongst inmates. She argues that her female convicts and convicts in general, are a lens through which to recover the voices and relationships of lower-class people who were not in a workhouse, an asylum or an industrial school but often shared traits such as poverty or mental illness. It is the first time, through this book, that the voices of such people have been centre stage. Farrell uses sources from the prison staff to form a picture of what happened to these women but also writes their stories from their perspectives in order to emphasise that they were real people with real lives and real stories to tell.

Farrell’s convict testimony and multi-dimensional sources demonstrate that the prison system was a pseudo society/community. It had its own set of rules visible through work and dietary regulations, correspondence regulation, and a points-based reward system. The females in this prison were deprived of many things but were likewise able to create friendships and maintain kinship bonds, even across institutions. This, Farrell argues, is a very personal experience and depends completely upon individual circumstances. Farrell herself is therefore right to argue in her conclusion that this book is heavily ‘saturated with further evidence of women’s agency’ in penal institutions and that her study has been possible because such significant identity documents exist in the form of letters, petitions, diaries.^[6] Farrell argues that convicted women are valuable to examine because their personalities came through in the documents. Sophisticated record linkage work in archives has allowed historians, such as Farrell, to recover multiple perspectives on prison life. As Farrell says, ‘these were ordinary lives captured on paper because of an extraordinary sentence’ and this concept will contribute greatly to a number of further studies into the identities of people long forgotten.^[7]

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Notes

[1] For example, Rebellious Writing: Contesting Marginalisation in Edwardian Britain, ed. by Lauren Alex O’Hagan, Writing and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 2020).

[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Peregrine Books, Repr (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982).

[3] K.D.M Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity, and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.1-245; David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014), pp.38-39.

[4] David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834-1914, Seminar Studies in History (London ; New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), pp. 38–39.

[5] Paul Carter, Jeff James, and Steve King, ‘Punishing Paupers? Control, Discipline and Mental Health in the Southwell Workhouse (1836–71)’, Rural History, 30.2 (2019), p.164.

[6] Elaine Farrell, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 257.

[7] Farrell, p.260.