The gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus inside the Temple of Zeus at Olympia

Neil Faulkner is the author of A Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics, to be published soon by Yale University Press. In this regular blog, he comments on the London 2012 Olympics in the light of the wisdom (or lack of it) of the ancients.

Article by Neil Faulkner

The ancient Olympics were held in honour of Zeus, the king of the gods, the master of the heavens. Half the festival was given over to religious rites, including a huge blood-fest on the third day, when a hundred oxen were sacrificed at the supreme deity’s altar.

The stadium (for foot races) and the hippodrome (for equestrian events) comprised grassy banks around earth tracks. All the prestige architecture was in the religious sanctuary. This was dominated by the monumental Temple of Olympian Zeus.

Inside the temple sat an enormous cult statue of Zeus enthroned made of gold and ivory. Zeus was so big that, had he stood up, his head would have gone through the ceiling. The statue was one of the most awesome sights in the ancient world.

What great monument overlooks the Olympic Park in Stratford today? What is London 2012’s equivalent of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It is, of course, the Temple of Capital. The Westfield Shopping Centre.

If you have tickets for the games, you will almost certainly have to pass through it to get in. It is all designed that way. If, more likely, you do not have tickets, you can still visit the Temple.

Remember that this complex has been planted in the middle of one of the most deprived urban areas in Britain. Remember, too, that very few of the people who live there have tickets. But at least they can visit the Temple. They might even venture onto the first floor to gawp at the treasures stacked inside.

Westfield shopping centre, Stratford

Gawp is all they could do. We are talking wall-to-wall designer shops where virtually every price tag is in three figures. We are talking £1,000 handbags, £5,000 coats, and £10,000 diamond watches. We are talking an in-your-face display of the greed of the modern super-rich.

And the customers? Obviously not the local scruffs peering in the windows. So who? It does not require much imagination. Of the 8.8 million tickets, one in four is not on sale to the general public. No less than 2.2 million tickets have been held back as freebies for athletes, officials, VIPs, top sporting bodies, corporate sponsors, and guests thereof.

This means 2.2 million freebies for the rich. I am sorry to be blunt, but that is what it means. I promise you that the IOC guest seats and the corporate hospitality seats at the men’s 100m final will not be occupied by benefit claimants from Stratford or even bank clerks from Croydon.

Expect bumper sales on the first floor of the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford this summer – each £1,000 handbag a little offering to the God of Greed.

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A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics

Dr Neil Faulkner is research fellow at the University of Bristol, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and codirector of several field projects. A freelance archaeologist and historian, his previous books include Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt against Rome and Rome: Empire of the Eagles. He lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

A Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics is published in April 2012.

Palmerston: A Biography

Palmerston: A Biography was widely acclaimed upon its publication in 2010, for being the first comprehensive biography of the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), a grand and fascinating figure in Victorian politics who became foreign secretary, prime minister, and one of the defining figures of his age. In an exclusive extract from this acclaimed book (out now in paperback) David Brown outlines the life of this prolific politician, a man whose varied career resists easy historical categorisation.

Extract from Palmerston: A Biography by David Brown

ON 18 OCTOBER 1865 Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, died, two days short of his eighty-first birthday. He had just completed his ninth year as Prime Minister and as he lay dying at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire he could, had he been in a nostalgic frame of mind, have looked back on a career spanning almost six decades and one that included, in addition to two terms as Prime Minister, almost nineteen years as Secretary at War, fifteen years as Foreign Secretary and two more as Home Secretary. It had been a good innings by any standard. As William Gladstone would observe, ‘Death has indeed laid low the most towering antlers in all the forest’.

It is striking, however, that Palmerston’s public career took a long time to peak. He was already forty-five when he first entered the Foreign Office in which he was to make his reputation, and by the time he became Prime Minister, in 1855, he had already lived his threescore years and ten. In its obituary, The Times suggested that, ‘Had he died at seventy he would have left a second class reputation. It was his great and peculiar fortune to live to right himself.’ Many had sought to write Palmerston off, politically if not vitally, when he was seventy. Disraeli, for one, sneered from the opposition benches, that Palmerston had become an ‘old painted pantaloon’, and was ‘really an impostor, utterly exhausted, and at best only ginger-beer and not champagne’. Yet, although increasingly frail and gouty, Palmerston in 1855 was neither ‘second class’ nor ‘exhausted’. Such a man would hardly have been able to press his claims to the premiership on the basis that his appointment was, quite simply, ‘inevitable’, had he neither political backing nor physical stamina enough to substantiate them; Palmerston had both. It was precisely because he had impressed himself on the public stage so effectively by 1855 that opponents and critics were keen to undermine him.

Palmerston, ca. 1830s-1840s.

Yet, the ambiguous nature of Palmerston’s immediate posthumous reputation points to an important aspect of his life, which was long and varied, colourful and active, but while incontestably ‘significant’, it remained ambiguous in its apparent import and impact. Palmerston was born five years before the French Revolution of 1789 and yet lived to see the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and his death came only five years before Bismarck united Germany and altered the balance of power in Europe for ever. Born into the genteel world of Georgian high society, Palmerston lived and eventually died at the head of a heavily industrialised, swaggering imperial nation. The Pax Britannica was also the age of Palmerston. Politically, at home, he lived through dramatic change too: he entered Parliament in 1807 by the rottenest of routes, accepting the seat of Newport, Isle of Wight, on the strict understanding that he never set foot in the place; he left Parliament, according to one recent account, a much reformed and more democratic place and despite his well-known antipathy towards the working classes, believing them likely to kill their children for a drink (what then might they do with the vote?), had emerged as a popular hero to rival any later charismatic leader: Palmerston was the ‘People’s Minister’, long before anyone thought to call Gladstone the ‘People’s William’.

Just as he lived through turbulent and changing times, Palmerston’s reputation has similarly suffered the vagaries of historical fad and fashion and early biographers, determined to see him as ‘something’, created a variety of apparently contradictory portraits and images. Here was the Regency dandy who liked parties more than politics, and yet, standing at a tall desk so that he would not be able to fall asleep at his work, Palmerston happily attended to the minutiae of office, working from seven in the morning to one o’clock the next such that, as one bus driver was reported to observe, ‘ ’E earns ’is wages; I never come by without seeing ’im ’ard at it’. The amorous and charming Lord Cupid was also the abrasive Lord Pumicestone who vexed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to such an extent that they may well have been drawn to agree with those German conservatives who discerned in Palmerston signs that he was the son of the devil. Politically, too, he defied neat categorisation. As Edward Whitty lamented, essaying a pen portrait of the new Prime Minister in 1855:

The difficulty of daguerreotyping Proteus would be comparable with the perplexity of a biographer in attempting a sketch of the career of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston. For, though the individuality is, at all stages, identical, there are four different personages to deal with – Palmerston, who was the raging young Pittite; Palmerston, the adolescing Canningite; Palmerston the juvenile Whig; and Palmerston the attainingyears-of-discretion Coalitionist. There is none of the Ciceronian symmetry in the career – beginning, middle, and end; it is all beginning.

All of which has served, all too often, to create a portrait of Palmerston as a mixed bag of contradictions and a man frequently out of tune with his times. Yet it is not enough to dismiss Palmerston as a cynical opportunist, a dangerous politician (and lover) or a cavalier adventurer. If there is no obscuring the fact that this is a complicated life to unravel, then equally there is no avoiding Lord Palmerston. His life and career are interwoven with, and profoundly affect, the course of modern history.

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Whether a satisfactory biography of Palmerston can be written remains something for others to judge. My intention in this study has been, as far as possible, to ‘make sense’ of Palmerston. He emerges here, I hope, as neither behind nor ahead of his times, but very much of them. I have attempted to understand the Palmerston mindset (indeed, perhaps it is necessary first of all to assert that I believe that there was one) but also to consider how Palmerston was perceived by his contemporaries. I agree with Jonathan Parry that Palmerston was ‘the defining political personality of his age’, but this is not Carlylean ‘great man’ history; rather what follows is offered primarily as a prism through which to view (Whig-Liberal) nineteenth-century Britain while it is to be hoped explaining the life and career of one of its principal characters.

In January 1843, Palmerston’s eye was caught by an article in the Edinburgh Review. The former Foreign Secretary, now sitting uncomfortably on the opposition benches, was evidently struck by what he took to be a distillation of the essence of good statesmanship and copied out an extract by hand:

The statesman who in treading the slippery path of politics, is sustained & guided only by the hope of fame, or the desire of a lofty reputation, will not only find himself beset with incessant temptations to turn aside from the line of strict integrity, but the disappointment he is sure to meet with will probably drive him to misanthropy, perhaps even irritate him to tarnish by vindictive treachery a virtue founded upon no solid or enduring principle. But the statesman who looks in the simple performance of his duty, for consolation & support amid all the toils & sufferings which that duty may call him to encounter; who aims not at popularity, because he is conscious that continued popularity rarely accompanies systematic and unyielding integrity; who, as he is urged to no questionable measures by the hope of fame, so is deterred from none that are just  by the fear of censure such a man may steer a steady course through the shoals and breakers of the stormiest sea; & whether he meet with the hatred or gratitude of his countrymen is to him a consideration of minor moment, for his reward is otherwise sure. He has laboured with constancy for great objects he has conferred signal benefits upon his fellow men. Nobler occupation man cannot aspire to, sublimer power no ambition need desire; greater reward it would be very difficult to obtain.

Statue of Palmerston in Palmerston Park, Southampton

To many of his critics, this would have seemed the very antithesis of the Palmerstonian approach to politics. Very often Palmerston was viewed as a superficial politician, forging policies based on a crude appreciation of national honour and power and justifying and grounding those policies in a selective reading of a vociferous patriotic opinion. Yet there is a case to be made for seeing the abrasive Lord Pumicestone, the amorous Lord Cupid and the threatening ‘devil’s son’, cavalier hero and anti-hero of Regency parties and Victorian parliaments, as something more than the jaunty, irreverent and opportunistic politician of popular caricature. Colourful though he might have been, Palmerston was not sufficiently charismatic to sustain a parliamentary career of almost half a century (more than thirty of those years in the highest offices of state) by sheer force of personality alone. Remembered as the quintessential gunboat diplomat, Palmerston resorted to such bullying in only two cases of any great significance, against China and against Greece, and important though such episodes are, they do not define his foreign policy, let alone his political character. Nor does his oft-quoted advice to George Goschen in 1864 when Prime Minister, that the government could not ‘go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum’, denote a domestic politician of narrow horizons and negligible reforming spirit. By the same token, Palmerston has long remained an elusive character: moving politically from Tory to Whig to Liberal; from reactionary eighteenth-century throwback to enlightened harbinger of late nineteenth-century democracy; the flamboyant and apparently disreputable society beau who was in fact a near teetotal workaholic.

Crucially, Palmerston was very much rooted in a clearly identified intellectual tradition. His exposure to the ideas of the Enlightenment during his days as a student at Edinburgh University at the beginning of the nineteenth century were to provide an intellectual framework within which he would subsequently approach political life. It was not, therefore, mere hyperbole when, sixty years after leaving the city, Palmerston returned to Edinburgh in 1863 and claimed that he was ‘proud to acknowledge – that if I have been in any way successful in public life, and if I have been enabled to steer my course in a manner satisfactory to my own conscience, and meeting the general approval of my fellow-countrymen . . . it has been that in these three years that I passed in this city, I was furnished by able hands with charts and compasses which taught me how to steer my course, to avoid many of the dangers to which the voyage of life is exposed, and to pursue in safety the career which I was destined to fill.’ Palmerston pointed, in particular, to the value of having been ‘taught that liberality of sentiment which perhaps in those days was not so generally diffused as in the days in which we live’, and stressed the progressive and forward-looking nature of those ideas. Though the liberal idealism of that period had now grown into mid-Victorian orthodoxy in matters of politics and ‘social organisation’, at the time, Palmerston said, those same ideas ‘were struggling against prejudice and limited ignorance for ascendancy in the minds and actions of mankind’. If his commitment to those ideals was sometimes questionable in practice, Palmerston should not be dismissed as a politician lacking principles. His belief in liberal progress, conceived within the carefully prescribed limits of moderate concession to responsible opinion, was sincere and informed his understanding of his political responsibilities and obligations.

Palmerston was also a flamboyant politician. This has, no doubt, affected historical assessments of his seriousness. Thus, as George Francis noted in an article in Fraser’s Magazine in 1846, rather than crush opponents with well-worked arguments, he was just as likely to dodge difficult situations with mockery. Palmerston, he wrote:

Possesses himself of considerable power of ridicule; and when he finds the argument of an opponent unanswerable, or that it could only be answered by alliance with some principle that might be turned against himself, he is a great adept at getting rid of it by a side-wind of absurd allusion. He knows exactly what will win a cheer and what ought to be avoided as calculated to provoke laughter in an assembly where appreciation of what is elevated in sentiment is by no means common.

Palmerston was serious in his approach to politics, but he was also acutely aware of the need to carry popular support with him. ‘As Lord Carlingford used to say, the secret of Lord Palmerston’s popularity lay in the fact that he was “understanded of the people”.’

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David Brown is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde. A former Hartley Institute Fellow and lecturer at the University of Southampton, he has written numerous articles on Palmerston and nineteenth-century British politics.

Palmerston: A Biography is out now in paperback from Yale University Press (the hardback is currently 20% off with the offer code BIOG1, until the end of February).

Float in Dusseldorf featuring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The UN’s relationship with Iran is at an all time low; the IAEA’s recent nuclear inspections in the country were a failure; military conflict with Israel seems increasingly likely. Is the West heading towards a new Cold War with Iran, or is this simply alarmism? Should Obama have adopted the tougher approach? Trita Parsi answers these questions in his new book A Single Roll of the Dice, which provides the first objective assessment of the high-stakes diplomatic sparring between Washington and Tehran during Obama’s first term.

Today brings the news that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA – the UN’s nuclear agency) has declared its latest inspection visit to Iran a failure. According to the Guardian, the Iranian regime has blocked access to a key site suspected of hosting covert nuclear weapon research. This unfortunate news follows a series of alarming developments in the country’s diplomatic relationship with the outside world, including Iran’s recent threat to extend its oil embargo on Europe, and the deadly blasts in Thailand that have been pinned on Iranian ‘assassins’ targeting Israeli diplomats. With recent sources in Washington declaring that there is a “strong likelihood” Israel will attack Iran between April and June this year, there is increasing justification from politicians (although not from Obama, yet) for a military intervention from the US.

“We are going to have to take a new approach to Iran": Obama on the US program “This Week” in January 2009

Rewind to January 2009, when Obama (still President Elect, having yet to be sworn in) talked about “a new approach” to dealing with Iran and that “engagement is the place to start.” Obama said he wanted to adopt “a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness on being willing to talk” to the Iranians. These remarks suggested a clear departure from the often pointed and deprecatory speech that continued between Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and President Bush.

Back in 2009 Obama’s diplomatic approach was seen as a breath of fresh air, but in light of recent developments, have these efforts failed? Was the Bush administration’s emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a better approach? How can the United States best address the ongoing turmoil in Tehran?

A Single Roll of the Dice by Trita Parsi (published this month) provides a definitive and comprehensive analysis of the Obama administration’s early diplomatic outreach to Iran and discusses the best way to move toward more positive relations between the two discordant states.

Trita Parsi

Parsi, a Middle East foreign policy expert with extensive Capitol Hill and United Nations experience, interviewed 70 high-ranking officials from the U.S., Iran, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Brazil – including the top American and Iranian negotiators – for this book. Parsi uncovers the previously unknown story of American and Iranian negotiations during Obama’s early years as president, the calculations behind the two nations’ dealings, and the real reasons for their current stalemate.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, Parsi contends that diplomacy has not been fully tried. For various reasons, Obama’s diplomacy ended up being a single roll of the dice. It had to work either immediately or not at all. Persistence and perseverance are keys to any negotiation. Neither Iran nor the U.S. had them in 2009.

Perhaps in 2012, diplomatic persistance will prevail. For those interested in the background and context of America’s skirmishes (thankfully still verbal) with Iran, Parsi’s excellent book provides an illuminating account.

“With the eye of a Washington insider, Trita Parsi assembles all the pieces of this complex puzzle in an original and persuasive way. I am aware of no one who has subjected the Obama administration’s policy on Iran to this kind of sustained scrutiny. Parsi displays a nuanced understanding of the historical context and an exceptionally fine-tuned appreciation for the political conditions and vulnerabilities of both Iran and the United States.”–Gary Sick, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs

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A Single Roll of the Dice

A Single Roll of the Dice is out now from Yale University Press.

Trita Parsi is president of the National Iranian American Council and a former Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 2010 he received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and he is frequently consulted by Western and Asian governments on foreign policy matters.

Advertisement for Bach Trumpets and Cornets (1925)

The Trumpet and The Bassoon are the latest editions to be published in the acclaimed Yale Musical Instrument series, a suite of books that trace the history and development of a particular instrument from its origins to the present day. Here we take a look at these two fascinating new titles, as well as the Yale Musical Instrument Series as a whole.

For those studying an orchestral instrument, there is certainly no shortage of textbooks and resources to help you hone your musical chops and excel at those dreaded Grade exams. However, for those that want to learn about the history of their instrument, its construction and development, how composers wrote for it, and perhaps most importantly, how it was played, there is a surprising scarcity of scholarly resources available.

The Yale Musical Instrument Series aims to correct this, offering detailed histories of a growing number of orchestral instruments, including the flute, trombone, oboe, clarinet and timpani. The books are written by both leading scholars and performers, and offer a unique and in-depth insight into the history of a particular instrument from its earliest uses to its present day repertoire. The books contain a wealth of musical examples, performer profiles and quirky facts and are excellent resources for both serious music students and curious amateurs. For those interested in composing for a particular instrument, these books also make valuable reading, helping to unpick those peculiar idiosyncrasies that make each musical instrument unique.

Take a look at a handful of recent books in this series:

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The Trumpet - published this month

The Trumpet

In the first major book devoted to the trumpet in more than two decades, John Wallace and Alexander McGrattan trace the surprising evolution and colourful performance history of one of the world’s oldest instruments. They chart the introduction of the trumpet and its family into art music, and its rise to prominence as a solo instrument, from the Baroque ‘golden age’, through the advent of valved brass instruments in the nineteenth century, and the trumpet’s renaissance in the jazz age. The authors offer abundant insights into the trumpet’s repertoire, with detailed analyses of works by Haydn, Handel, and Bach, and fresh material on the importance of jazz and influential jazz trumpeters for the reemergence of the trumpet as a solo instrument in classical music today.

Wallace and McGrattan draw on deep research, lifetimes of experience in performing and teaching the trumpet in its various forms, and numerous interviews to illuminate the trumpet’s history, music, and players. Copiously illustrated with photographs, facsimiles, and musical examples throughout, The Trumpet will enlighten and fascinate all performers and enthusiasts.

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The Bassoon - published this Summer

The Bassoon

This welcome volume encompasses the entire history of the bassoon, from its origins five centuries ago to its place in 21st-century music. James Kopp draws on new archival research and many years of experience playing the instrument to provide an up-to-date and lively portrait of today’s bassoon and its intriguing predecessors. He discusses the bassoon’s makers, its players, its repertory and its audiences, all in unprecedented detail.

The author examines the acoustical consequences of various design changes to the bassoon, from its invention in 16th-century Italy, through its redesign in 17th-century France as a four-piece instrument, to the dominance of the Heckel-system bassoon in the early 21st century. He also offers new coverage of the bassoon’s social history, including its roles in the military and the church and its global use during the European Colonial period. Separate historical chapters devoted to contrabassoons and smaller bassoons complete the volume.

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The Clarinet - Out Now

The Clarinet

The clarinet has a long and rich history as a solo, orchestral and chamber musical instrument. In this broad-ranging account Eric Hoeprich, a performer, teacher and expert on historical clarinets, explores its development, repertoire and performance history. Looking at the earliest antecedents of the clarinet, as well as related instruments such as the chalumeau, basset horn, alto clarinet and bass clarinet, Hoeprich explains the use and development of the instrument in the Baroque age.

The period from the late 1700s to Beethoven’s early years is shown to have fostered ever-wider distribution and use of the instrument, with the creation of a repertoire of increasing richness. The first half of the nineteenth century, seen as a golden age for the clarinet, brought innovation in construction and great virtuosity in performance, while the following century and a half produced a surge in new works for the instrument from many composers. The author also devotes a chapter to the role of the clarinet in bands, folk music and jazz. Throughout his authoritative treatment of the instrument, Eric Hoeprich brings to his book the fruits of his long experience as performer and teacher, and also as collector, maker and restorer of clarinets. This will be the definitive volume on the instrument.

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The Trombone – Out Now

The Trombone

This is the first fully comprehensive study of the trombone in English. It covers the instrument, its repertoire, the way it has been played, and the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts within which it has developed. It explores the origins of the instrument, its invention in the fifteenth century, and its story up to modern times. And it reveals the hidden histories of the trombone and its players in different periods and different countries.

The book looks not only at the trombone within classical music, but at its place in jazz, popular music, popular religion and light music. Herbert examines the development of written repertoires in the sixteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of the instrument in the seventeenth century, its descent into obscurity in the eighteenth century and its re-emergence in the expanded symphony and opera orchestras and military bands of the Romantic era. The popular music explosion of the nineteenth-century brought amateur players and showmen soloists. The impact of jazz was fundamental to the trombone, providing an alternative to the conservatoire tradition. By the late twentieth century its techniques had filtered into the performance idioms of almost all styles of music and transformed ideas about virtuosity and lyricism in trombone playing.

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The Timpani (and other percussion) – Out Now

Timpani and Percussion

A history of percussion instruments from the Old Stone Age to the present day. Jeremy Montagu, a performer, historian, and curator of musical instruments, discusses common and uncommon percussion instruments from all parts of the world, tracing their development and use through the ages and across cultures.

After exploring the origins and antiquity of percussion instruments, Montagu investigates their appearance in the Middle Ages, in particular the nakers, tabors, cymbals and triangles that are immediately ancestral to those we use today. He then describes instruments of the Renaissance and Early Baroque, High Baroque (from which we can trace surviving instruments and specific music), Classical, Romantic and Modern periods. Montagu follows the development of orchestral and band percussion from the late-18th century, moving from the introduction of the “Turkish music” to the modern pop bands, military, marching and concert bands, and concert and studio orchestras. The work concludes with a wide-ranging survey of world percussion, covering instruments commonly played in schools, colleges and orchestras. It incorporates appendices on playing techniques, technical matters, and the sociology of drummers, and features many illustrations.

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Books in the Yale Musical Instrument Series are available from Yale University Press.

Vestibule of the Asylum, Van Gogh (1889)

The award-winning writer and broadcaster Richard Cork is one of the world’s most respected art critics and historians. His new book The Healing Presence of Art is an enthralling account of the great artists who have painted for hospitals, the way they have depicted medicine and the effect of art on the mental state of patients and doctors. Here he discusses Vincent Van Gogh’s time in an asylum towards the end of his life, and the beautiful, poignant paintings he produced during this turbulent period.

Article by Richard Cork

Although my new book is filled with outstanding masterpieces of western art made in hospitals, perhaps the most miraculous are the paintings produced by Vincent Van Gogh during his turbulent time in an asylum. Even today, when Van Gogh’s international reputation is higher and wider than ever, we have intense difficulty understanding how he managed to paint such a sustained series of masterpieces. After mutilating his ear and struggling to retain his sanity, this vulnerable young Dutchman dreaded the sudden onset of each new bout of epileptic seizure. But somehow, he carried on painting for another turbulent year and — against all odds — produced his finest work before succumbing to suicide.

The eloquent letters written to his brother Theo reveal just how dramatically Vincent veered from panic and hopelessness to incisive, stubborn resolve and back again. As early as September 1883, seven years before he killed himself, Van Gogh confessed to Theo that, “because I have a need to speak frankly, I can’t hide from you that I’m overcome by a feeling of great anxiety, dejection, a ‘je ne sais quoi’ of discouragement and even despair, too much to express. And that if I can find no consolation for it, it might all too easily overwhelm me unbearably.”

These words proved sadly prophetic. But Vincent, having wisely abandoned his doomed attempts to become an art dealer and a priest, developed as a painter with astonishing courage, inventiveness and flair. Although unable to sell his work, Van Gogh was sustained by its momentum even when, in May 1889, he was admitted to a mental home near the village of Saint-Remy-en-Provence. The attending physician, Dr. Theophile Peyron, recorded on the certificate of entry that his 36-year-old patient had been “stricken by acute mental derangement, with hallucinations of his sight and hearing, which led him to mutilate himself by cutting off his ear.” The affliction was terrible enough to make Vincent remain in the asylum for an entire year. Even so, this illness did not prevent him from pursuing his art with a remarkable sense of discipline, concentration, audacity and, above all, passionate commitment.

Van Gogh, fortified by medicine, hoped that his mind would never again succumb to what he described as moods of “indescribable mental anguish when the veil of time and inevitability seemed for the twinkling of an eye to be parted.” Although Dr. Peyron came to the hesitant conclusion that Vincent was suffering from “a state of epilepsy”, and warned Theo that “if this should be confirmed one should be concerned about the future”, he was encouraged by his patient’s initial progress. After recurrent painful nightmares during the first few weeks of his stay, Van Gogh’s sleep improved along with his appetite. Despite his distress, he seemed adept at discovering continual inspiration in whatever surroundings confronted him. A few weeks earlier, he had bravely asserted that “if I had to stay for good in an asylum, I should make up my mind to it and I think I could find subjects for painting there as well.” The prophecy was borne out to spectacular effect at Saint-Remy, where he painted many of his most vibrant canvases.

Irises, Van Gogh (1889)

Within a week of arriving at the asylum he was hard at work on paintings of the garden, one of which turned into a superlative image called Irises. At first sight it appears a festive work, revelling in the piercing clarity of the violet-blue flowers as they thrust and wave with an exuberance worthy of a Hokusai print. After a while, though, more disturbing elements demand attention. The irises and their blaring green leaves fill the canvas with insistent movement, as if jostling for room in the confined picture-space. They crowd round the solitary white flower in their midst, provoking the suspicion that Vincent equated their clamorous behaviour with the more disturbed patients confined inside the asylum’s walls.

In one letter, he described life in the asylum and informed Theo that “there is someone here who has been shouting and talking like me all the time for a fortnight; he thinks he hears voices and words in the echoes of the corridors, probably because the nerves of the ear are diseased and too sensitive.” Vincent explained to Theo that, “as there are more than thirty empty rooms” at the asylum, he had been given “one to work in.” He lost little time in hanging on its walls his unframed works, one of which can be seen in a gouache study of this new studio. He longed to animate the whole asylum with his art, telling Theo that “it would be splendid to hold an exhibition in all the empty rooms, the large corridors.”

Mountainous Landscape Behind the Asylum, Van Gogh

Van Gogh was irrepressible as an artist for much of his stay in the asylum. Towards the end of May 1889 he described his excitement over the view from his bedroom, where “through an iron-barred window I see a square field of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective like van Goyen, above which I see the morning sun rising in all its glory.” Soon after Dr. Peyron allowed him to work in the field, he began an extended sequence of views which amount to the finest series of paintings he produced at Saint-Remy. The first canvas, Mountainous Landscape Behind the Asylum, is one of the most outspoken in its desire to use nature as a metaphor for his own emotional condition. The turbulence of the wheat, heaving in its enclosure like an angry sea, surely refers to Van Gogh’s view of his plight within the institution’s walls. He described the painting to Theo on 9th June, explaining that the foreground contained “a field of wheat ruined and hurled to the ground after a storm.” Vincent must have been conscious of the fact that he, too, was trying to recover his shattered composure “after a storm.”

The Reaper, Van Gogh (1889)

Towards the end of June he started work on a painting called The Reaper, and brought it to virtual completion before suffering a serious breakdown for several weeks. The choice of theme may well have reflected an awareness that a mental crisis was imminent, for when Van Gogh resumed work on the “terribly thickly painted” picture in early September he informed Theo that “I see in this reaper — a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task — I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping.” The toiling peasant could embody Van Gogh’s realisation that he was engaged in a struggle against mental illness to complete the task he had set himself as an artist. But he insisted that “there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.”

Trees in Front of the Entrance of the Asylum, Vincent Van Gogh

In one mood, Vincent transformed a view of the Hospital at Saint-Remy (Trees in front of the Entrance to the Asylum) into an ecstatic image, rejoicing in the vigour of trunks and foliage as they soared high above the buildings. “I tried to reconstruct the thing as it might have been”, he explained, “simplifying and accentuating the haughty, unchanging character of the pines and cedar clumps against the blue.” During the first few months of his stay in the asylum, he recovered from the initial shock of other inmates yelling and screaming in nearby rooms, at night as well as in the day. He started talking to them, even though they were incapable of coherent replies. And he reported in a letter to his sister that, “though there are some seriously ill here, the fear of madness that I felt has already largely disappeared. Although one is always hearing howls and cries like beasts in a zoo, the people here understand each other very well and help each other when they fall into a fit.”

This optimism did not prove well-founded. Soon afterwards, Van Gogh suffered a gruelling attack while at work in the foothills near the asylum. The onset of a mistral, blowing a half-finished painting off its perch, seems to have precipitated his collapse. A protracted fit of yelling left his swollen throat acutely painful for days, and he even attempted suicide by gulping down his own paints. Nightmares and hallucinations dogged Vincent. Hidden away in his room, where he struggled to cope with this alienation by working harder than ever on self-portraits filled with an unbearable sense of strain, Van Gogh felt tormented. “If one could resign oneself to suffering and death, surrender one’s will and love and self!” he wrote. “But I love to paint, to meet people, to see nature.”

Eventually, in April 1890, he announced to Theo that his period at the asylum should now be terminated. But his sense of regret was intense. He could not bear the thought of leaving the South, with all its fertile inspiration, and going north to live with Dr. Gachet, an avid collector of Impressionist art. Auvers-sur-Oise, where Gachet had a house, was only an hour from Paris, and at first Van Gogh managed to paint some outstanding images under the doctor’s care. But this final burst of blazing productivity could not be sustained for long. Just over two months after he left Saint-Remy in May 1890, he wrote a letter to Theo describing his new paintings. It sounds purposeful enough, but one passage is sadly revealing: “I’d like to write to you about many things, but first the desire has passed to such a degree, then I sense the pointlessness of it all.”

Four days later, Vincent went out into the summer fields and clumsily shot himself in the chest with a revolver. His brave and arduous attempts to recover mental stability with medical help had all failed, and he died two days later. On his death-bed, when the distraught Theo asked him why he had decided to commit suicide, Van Gogh only managed to reply with another, equally anguished question: “Who would imagine that life could be so sad?”

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The Healing Presence of Art

Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster, exhibition curator, and former Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University and Senior Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals is published later this month and can be pre-ordered now from Yale University Press.

Leonardo Live offers a tour around the blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery

Leonardo Live gives those who missed the National Gallery’s amazing exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan another chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime collection of the great master’s works.

To describe The National Gallery‘s recent Leonardo da Vinci exhibition as a ‘blockbuster’ would be an understatement. Early-morning queues, huge thronging crowds and even a nefarious market for forged tickets illustrated the feverish popularity of this extraordinary exhibition, which enchanted art lovers and critics alike with its never-before-seen collection of works, ground-breaking restorations and top-notch da Vinci scholarship.

This historic exhibition is now sold out, and due to the fragility of the paintings, the exhibition cannot tour. For those that missed the show, the highly-praised exhibition catalogue is available, combining stunning reproductions of the extraordinary works included in the exhibition with meticulously researched essays from the best Leonardo scholars.

However, if you are one of those people who needs the full museum experience, you might be interested to hear that beginning today, art lovers around the world will be able to re-live the National Gallery’s once-in-a-lifetime exhibition thanks to a satellite-delivered HD film, to be shown at selected cinemas around the world.

Leonardo Live offers an unprecedented opportunity for audiences worldwide to experience da Vinci’s works at their temporary home in the beautiful National Gallery. After limited screenings in the UK in November 2011, an expanded presentation of Leonardo Live featuring bonus content is now available at movie theaters around the world, starting today. Check your nearest cinema by visiting the Leonardo Live website.

Watch the preview video for this exciting event…

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More About the Exhibition Catalogue

Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan

The catalogue ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ focuses on a crucial period in the 1480s and ’90s when, as a salaried court artist to Duke Ludovico Sforza in the city-state of Milan, freed from the pressures of making a living in the commercially-minded Florentine republic, Leonardo produced some of the most celebrated – and influential – work of his career. ‘The Last Supper’, his two versions of ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’, and the beautiful portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Ludovico’s mistress (‘The Lady with an Ermine’) were paintings that set a new standard for his Milanese contemporaries.

Leonardo’s style was magnified, through collaboration and imitation, to become the visual language of the regime, and by the time of his return to Florence in 1500, his status was utterly transformed. Works in this catalogue represent the diverse range of Leonardo’s artistic output, from drawings in chalk, ink or metalpoint to full-scale oil paintings. Together with the authors’ meticulous research and detailed analysis, they demonstrate Leonardo’s consummate skill and extraordinary ambition as a painter.

The catalogue has received huge praise from art critics, including the Telegraph’s In Richard Dorment:

The superbly produced catalogue by Luke Syson and Larry Keith is as measured, thoughtful, and original as any I’ve read. In terms of art history, their understanding of Leonardo is the new gold standard.

It truly is a beautiful book, and it makes a magnificent accompaniment to the National Gallery’s landmark exhibition.

Page spreads from 'Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan'

Joe Louis vs. Louis-Schmeling fight (June 19, 1936)

Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (now published in paperback) is the definitive biography of the most famous African American of the mid-twentieth century: his life, the complex cast of characters around him, and his importance to civil rights. In this exclusive extract Randy Roberts explains why Joe Louis, often overshadowed by more famous successors like Cassius Clay, was in fact a dazzlingly influential figure, not just in the world of boxing, but in the ever-changing racial and cultural landscape of 20th-century America. 

Extract from Joe Louis: Hard Times Man by Randy Roberts

“When times get really hard, really tough, He always send you somebody. In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe. Joe Louis was to lift the colored people’s heart.”
—The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Thinking back, journalist Robert Lipsyte concluded that it was a ‘‘generational thing.’’ America seemed to be tearing apart at the seams in February 1964. Less than three months before, Lee Harvey Oswald had blown of the back of President John Kennedy’s head. The war in Vietnam had taken a dangerous, violent turn after the November assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. No longer was the United States supporting even a nominally democratic regime. Now it was underwriting a war conducted by a corrupt, inefficient military junta headed by a general who had named himself head of state. At home, Martin Luther King’s ‘‘dream’’ had turned into a nightmare. Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway, four black girls killed when a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church, violent protest marches throughout the South, Malcolm X rejecting integrationists’ goals —the ‘‘movement’’ appeared fractured. Culturally, the look of a new age was showcased on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 12, 1964, when four mop-topped musicians sang ‘‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’’ to ecstatic and screaming young girls.

By the last weeks of February, Miami had become the center of the racial and cultural discontent. The Beatles had arrived for a concert. Malcolm X had come as well, although he was not very forthright with the reasons. But reporters did not have to dig too deeply for the scoop. Malcolm X had become a fixture in the boxing camp of Cassius Clay, who was scheduled to fight Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship title. Malcolm stayed in the background, saying little to journalists, but always uncomfortably near the young challenger, smiling at Clay’s antics, looking very much like the cat that had caught the canary.

The Beatles meet Cassius Clay (Tuesday 18 February 1964)

What a story for the sportswriters who had descended on Miami for the fight. It seemed like the birth of a new America, fresh, vibrant, in-yourface. For younger reporters such as Lipsyte, Larry Merchant, and Jerry Izenberg, the story in Miami transcended boxing and even sports—it was about America, about history. Clay was a new America, a brash, confident, outrageous, entertaining spectacle. He was the epicenter of NOW. Just look at the pictures going out from Miami to the world—Clay knocking down the four Beatles, Clay in a serious conversation with Malcolm X, Clay with his mouth wide open proclaiming that he is the chosen one. He was an irresistible story, and the young reporters felt more alive, more hip, just being part of the scene.

A few days before the title match, Joe Louis appeared in Clay’s camp. Just a few months short of his fiftieth birthday and still deep in debt to the Internal Revenue Service, the former champion was in town for ‘‘walkingaround money.’’ The promoters paid him to show up for media events, talk to reporters, and generally lend his considerable prestige to a fight that was regarded as a gross mismatch in Liston’s favor. The contrasts between Clay and Louis were stark—Clay was young, articulate, and controversial; Louis was old, quiet, and bland. Clay seemed to dance on air like a pugilistic Astaire; Louis plodded dead-legged and heavy-footed. For Lipsyte, Louis was a ‘‘black Dwight D. Eisenhower,’’ a relic from his father’s generation, as much a memento of another time as a Roosevelt-Wallace campaign button. Yet the older sportswriters—such legendary scribes as Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Arthur Daley, and Barney Nagler—moved from Clay to Louis like a pack of paparazzi deserting a D-lister for a superstar.

Lipsyte did not understand. Later he cornered Nagler and asked why he and the others had wanted to talk to Joe. ‘‘How can you hang around that mumbling old has-been, when here’s this young beautiful hope of the future?’’ he asked. Cassius was the story. He was dynamic and interesting, and, something more, he was fun. Nagler looked at Lipsyte almost sadly, because he knew that he could never explain. ‘‘You should have seen him then,’’ he offered.

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Joe Louis in 1934 at the beginning of his career (Chicago History Museum)

Joe Louis: Hard Times Man is about Nagler’s ‘‘then’’—the roughly decade and a half between 1935, when Louis captured the attention of America, and 1951, when his career ended. For just short of twelve of those years Louis was the heavyweight champion of the world, defending his title an astonishing twenty-five times. No heavyweight champion has ever approached those figures. None have ever combined Louis’ power, longevity, and grace. It was as if Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio had been a single player, a single black player. Louis was like Franklin D. Roosevelt, a moral compass during a turbulent era. Along with Charles Lindbergh, Roosevelt and Louis were the most written-about men in America. From the middle of the Great Depression to the end of World War II, FDR and Louis were two of the most important physical presences and symbolic forces in America.

Joe Louis is the story of a man, and also of a sport. Boxing is no longer relevant to most Americans. It does not even rate its own tab on USA Today’s sports website. Instead, it is grouped with cycling, horse racing, sailing, soccer, the wnba, and several other activities in the ‘‘More Sports’’ category. No newspaper or sports magazine has a full-time boxing writer. This had not always been the case. In the nineteenth century, the most recognized and important athlete in America was boxer John L. Sullivan. In the twentieth century, that distinction would be a toss-up between boxers Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. It is doubtful that any boxer will compete for the title in the twenty-first century. For many Americans today, it is difficult to remember a time when boxing was vitally important, when the heavyweight champion was, in the words of Eldridge Cleaver, ‘‘as a symbol . . . the real Mr. America.’’ During Joe Louis’ years in the ring there were only two professional sports that consumed the interests of Americans: baseball and boxing. Winning a World Series ring was the pinnacle of team competition. Winning a heavyweight championship belt was the greatest individual honor. For this reason, I provide a detailed consideration of the meaning of that title for Americans. From the late nineteenth century until the Great Depression, John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, and Jack Dempsey helped define what it meant to be a man in America.

Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title in 1908, becoming the first black champion. Proud, articulate, and defiant, he challenged racial stereotypes. (Library of Congress)

Although the mythology holds that baseball is the National Pastime, boxing has been a more global and democratic sport. Winning the World Series has nothing to do with the world. But winning a world boxing championship does. Louis defended his belt against Americans, South Americans, and Europeans; people from around the world listened to radio broadcasts of his most important fights. In fact, somewhere close to one hundred million people heard the 1938 Louis-Schmeling broadcast. Furthermore, during the vast majority of Louis’ ring career, major league baseball was closed to black Americans. From the mid-1880s until 1946 ‘‘organized baseball’’ forced black players to perform on segregated teams in segregated leagues. When, finally, Jackie Robinson did integrate baseball, black and white sportswriters counseled him to be like Joe Louis. As Robinson said at the beginning of ‘‘baseball’s great experiment,’’ ‘‘I’ll try to do as good a job as Joe Louis has done. . . . He has done a great job for us and I will try to carry on.’’ The color line was never a mandated policy decision in boxing, so only in the ring could black and white athletes compete on anything close to an equal footing. And in the first half of the twentieth century, this made all the difference for millions of black and white Americans.

Although I am interested in the life and career of Joe Louis, in this book I focus in large part on the meaning of that life and career. What did it mean to be Joe Louis? What did Joe Louis mean to black Americans? How was the image of Joe Louis manipulated and presented to millions of people around the world? Why did Hans J. Massaquoi, the child of an African father and a German mother whose formative years were spent in Nazi Germany, decide in a true act of ‘‘double consciousness’’ to switch his allegiance from a fighter who shared his nationality to one who shared his race? From the beginning of Louis’ life, through his marvelous career, to his death, the twin themes of race and nationalism, issues that have vexed black Americans for more than one hundred and fifty years, had coiled around the champion like a snake.

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Joe Louis: Hard Times Man

Randy Roberts is Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University. His previous books include biographies of the boxers Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson, and John Wayne (all nominated for Pulitzer Prizes); a history of American sports since 1945; and books on Charles Lindbergh, the Mike Tyson trial, and the Vietnam War.

Joe Louis: Hard Times Man is out now in paperback from Yale University Press.

Rain (1889, Vincent Willem van Gogh, oil on canvas)

Van Gogh: Up Close is a brand new exhibition and accompanying catalogue that offers a completely new way of looking at the art of Vincent van Gogh. Today we take a look at this exciting new project, which explores van Gogh’s approach to nature through his innovative use of the close-up view in the last years of his life.

Last month we focused on a number of exciting exhibitions (and their accompanying books) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion and Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, currently still running.

This month sees the opening of another trailblazing new exhibition at the museum, which sheds fascinating new light on Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch post-impressionist painter whose work, famous for its beauty, honesty and bold colour, has had a lasting influence on 20th-century art. Van Gogh: Up Close (February 1–May 6, and then at the National Gallery of Canada from May 25–September 3) focuses on the last tumultuous years of the artist’s life, a period of feverish artistic experimentation that began when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris in 1886 and continued until his death in Auvers in 1890.

About the exhibition

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
–Vincent van Gogh

Radically altering and often outright abandoning traditional painting techniques, van Gogh created still lifes and landscapes unlike anything that had ever been seen before. He experimented with depth of field and focus, used shifting perspectives, brought familiar objects ‘up close’ into the foreground and produced some of the most original works of his career; works that dramatically altered the course of modern painting. Through some 40 masterpieces borrowed from collections around the world, Van Gogh: Up Close is the first exhibition to explore the reasons and means by which this impassioned artist made such unusual changes to his painting style in the final years of his life.

When he arrived in Paris, van Gogh worked in the Montmartre apartment he shared with his brother Theo. He created a series of still lifes and paintings of flowers and fruit, focusing especially on aspects of scale, angle and color. In many of these works, objects may be seen from above, or are placed in a tightly cropped space providing no clues to their context or setting. Pieces of fruit appear to tip forward and threaten to roll out of the picture. Meanwhile, the close up views of grasses, wheat sheaves and tree trunks, which dominate the foreground of a number of the landscapes of this period, hint at more than just a detailed study of subject–they suggest a deep concern with representing the sensory and emotional experience of being outdoors.

Almond Blossom (detail), 1890, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

When van Gogh discovered the work of other artists in Paris, such as the Impressionist paintings of Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, and the pointillist works of Seurat and others, he was inspired to use lighter colours and to play with different kinds of brushwork in his own work. At about this time, he also began to acquire Japanese woodblock prints. He admired these for their decorative use of color and flattened compositions, and he embraced the ideas of Japanese artists who worked in close communion with nature, studying ‘the smallest blade of grass’ to better comprehend nature as a whole. Indeed, when he moved to Arles in 1888, van Gogh wrote that being in the south of France was the closest thing to going to Japan.

View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground (Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas)

The landscapes that he painted around Arles show Japanese influence in their deep views of the countryside and high horizon lines, while the landscapes he went on to create in Saint-Rémy and Auvers in 1889 and 1890 are tightly packed, more structured works. Dominated by a screen of trees or falling raindrops, these paintings suggest the immediacy and closeness of van Gogh’s surroundings. A year before he died, he wrote in a letter to his sister, “I… am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself.”

In his final works, van Gogh closed in on his subjects in even more dramatic ways, reducing the depth of field and maximizing the expressive impact of his brushwork and color. An intimately focused view of a clump of iris, a tangle of almond branches, and the vibrant patterning of an Emperor moth are just a few of the images in an audacious series of still lifes which mark the culmination of the exhibition.

(above: a video preview of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada)

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About the exhibition catalogue

Van Gogh: Up Close

Van Gogh: Up Close is the sumptuously illustrated exhibition catalogue that, like the exhibition, offers a completely new way of looking at van Gogh’s work. In this beautiful book  by art historian Cornelia Homburg (formerly chief curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum), one hundred key paintings dating from his arrival in Paris in 1886 to the end of his career, show how Van Gogh experimented with unusual visual angles and the decorative use of colour, cropping and the flattening of his compositions. In some paintings he zoomed in on a tuft of grass or a single budding iris, while depicting shifting views of a field or garden in others.

Van Gogh: Up Close not only reveals how these paintings became the most radical and innovative in the artist’s body of work but also demonstrates that, far from being a spontaneous or undisciplined artist, Van Gogh was well aware of the history of art and was highly conscious of his efforts to break new ground with his work.

Page spreads from the beautiful new book 'Van Gogh: Up Close'

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Van Gogh: Up Close is available now from Yale University Press.

Exhibition dates:
Philadelphia Museum of Art: February 1–May 6, 2012 (Dorrance Galleries)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: May 25–September 3, 2012

Coming soon on this blog…
The award-winning art critic Richard Cork will be writing about van Gogh’s turbulent time in an asylum towards the end of his life, and the miraculous paintings he produced there.

In the second part in our series of interviews with Marxist critic, literary theorist and philosopher Terry Eagleton, we ask him about his religious upbringing, academic background and approach to writing.

Terry Eagleton is a British literary theorist and is regarded as one of Britain’s most influential living literary critics. His books, which include On Evil, Why Marx Was Right, and the forthcoming The Event of Literature, are breathtakingly candid and refreshingly witty.

In this exclusive interview, Eagleton discusses the impact of his working class Irish Catholic upbringing, his views on religion, his academic training and his approach to writing.

Books by Terry Eagleton are available now from Yale University Press.

Fibre Optic Cables reach Kenya, 2009 (IT News Africa)

In the next instalment of her regular column, top economic commentator and What’s Next? author Lyric Hale discusses how the growing infrastructure of cloud servers, data centres and undersea fibre optic cables is having an enormous influence on the economic and political development of countries, particularly in Africa.

Author article by Lyric Hughes Hale

I live about thirty minutes from O’Hare, the second busiest airport in the world.  On Sunday nights I like to watch the endless stream of airplanes making their way across Lake Michigan in orderly single file, like pearls strung along an invisible necklace.  A hundred years ago, this beautiful sight would have been unimaginable.  And in another five hundred years, our descendants might find it quaint that we flew in metal boxes across the sky.  By that time, my son tells me, we could be travelling by means of underground vacuum tubes at speeds that will make it possible to go to Australia for the day, helping to destroy but not eliminate the tyranny of distance. He reminds me however that despite technological advances, there will always be limitations in the physical world that create natural boundaries, not only for human travelers but also for the transport of information.  I believe that these limitations will not affect all nations equally, and will alter geopolitics.

Due to their high speed and low cost, it might appear that our communications networks have nullified geography, creating an even global playing field.  Even if we gave every person on earth an iPhone in order to overcome the digital divide, this would not be true. The Internet is physical.  It might sound ephemeral, but cloud computing is really is a just a fancy word for a noisy server farm right here on earth.  Connectivity is related to a hierarchy that begins with a device, which is dependent upon an access to a network. The network in turn is built upon a domestic backbone, linked to regional and international fibre optic pathways.

Invisible to the user are the undersea and terrestrial cables and data centers that contain all that is necessary to make our lives work today.  Getting these bits and bytes of data moving faster than they do now will force technology to confront the laws of physics. Data now travels through fibre at about two-thirds the speed of light.  Even if the speed of light could be obtained, this would result in latency, or delays, that make time sensitive applications like online trading or gaming between the US and Australia too slow to be viable.  As Internet latency becomes more of a competitive barrier for all applications, countries able to store, manipulate and move data quickly and cheaply will prosper and those countries that are literally out of the mainstream will suffer.  Remember dial-up Internet access? That is what it is currently like trying to play an online game with someone in New Zealand, even with the best possible connection and latest device.  The ping times are too great.

Australia and New Zealand are remote economies in telecommunications terms.   A study by Mark Obren and Bronwyn Howell of the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation, explains that in spite of huge investments in local broadband networks, these countries are more or less permanently disadvantaged whenever page load times, latency and long RTT’s (Round Trip Times) matter, which is most of the time internationally.

The overriding economic policy lesson for the Australian and New Zealand governments is that scale and distance cannot be ignored, even in respect of internet-enabled transacting. The economic and policy challenges in these countries are necessarily different from those in other localities. When analysing the benefits arising from investment in infrastructure, it is imperative that there is clarity about the extent to which that investment facilitates transacting within the local economy and where it facilitates international transacting. For small distant economies, investments focused upon improving local internet access infrastructure will have a material effect upon firms‟ economic performance only to the extent that those transactions are confined within the local economy – including on the basis of distributing locally-cached international data. Time-dependent interactive transactions will continue to be disadvantaged by distance. The claims that Australian and New Zealand government investment in ultra-fast local broadband access will facilitate a step-change in national economic performance fail to take account of the fact that whilst information might exhibit different economic characteristics, the technologies which transport and process it are still subject to decreasing returns arising from the unrelenting economics of scale, density and distance.

Which is ironic, because Australia is the only country in the world whose founding was a direct result of creating a uniform telegraph infrastructure between its states and territories.

So if Australia and New Zealand, with combined populations of only 25 million people are permanently sealocked, what is happening in other distant underserved markets? In order to provide international bandwidth, undersea cables and data centers are being built with amazing speed throughout the world.

Where is this development taking place? The map that matters is Greg’s Map (www.cablemap.info)  which is interactive.  Notice the location of cables that exist today, and cables that will be deployed shortly.

Existing cable infrastructure

Future cables in development

The growth is taking place in Africa.  7 out of 10 of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa, and it is also the world’s fastest growing telecommunications market, both in terms of cables linking the continent to the rest of the world, and in terms of terrestrial connectivity, overtaking Asia.

Michael Last, writing in Global Telecoms Business explains the phenomenon:

Nowhere else is telecoms growing as rapidly as in Africa.  Unencumbered by legacy systems, investment in terrestrial optical fibre networks is prodigious.  New technologies are quickly adopted, giving rise to a dramatic increase in mobile usage and business applications for a mobile platform.

We are in the middle of a three-year phase of fibre optic submarine deployment around Africa, by the end of which (2013)  the continent will be on a par with the rest of the world in terms of high speed connectivity.

Greg’s Map was created by Greg Mahlknecht, a software developer who just happens to live in South Africa.  I asked him to comment on what his cable map means for economic development in Africa overall.

The choke points in Africa are definitely the national infrastructure-the international links are coming along nicely and there is already a surplus and more connections will serve to drive these costs down even more.  It seems that once the connectivity is in the country, data centers follow and prices are driven down quite aggressively.  Here in South Africa, they literally can’t build the datacenters fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Greg also referred me to a colleague in South Africa named Steve Song (manypossibilities.net) who spends a lot of time thinking about the differential development of emerging economies based upon telecommunications infrastructure.  His map shows the locations where cables “land” in Africa.

African undersea cables (2013)

He agrees that Africa is poised for a boom, and made the following points:

• Coastal countries that have fibre landing points are definitely at  an advantage compared to their landlocked neighbours
• Countries with 3 or more cables landings (South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria) are poised to become regional hubs for sub-Saharan Africa
• National fibre infrastructure has not caught up in terms of competition to the undersea cables.  In many African countries it is more expensive to get to the coastal landing point than it is to get from there to Europe
• Every country on the continent has at least one national fibre project, many if not most are being financed and/or built by the Chinese

Chinese investment in Africa has been a prickly topic, though mostly related to resources.  I asked Steve what he thought about China’s role in telecommunications in Africa. “Mostly I think it is a quid pro quo.  The Chinese are making out like bandits but here in Africa we really need the infrastructure so it works out.”  Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, currently derives just under 15% of its revenue from its African operations.  Bolstered by vendor financing, Chinese government aid, and resource swaps, ZTE and Alcatel Shanghai Bell are also players in this market.  The Japanese who are also competing for African business are not as sanguine. According to JETRO, the Japan External Trade organization,  “There are important military and security considerations linked to China’s penetration of the African telecommunications market.”

Porthcurno Beach, Cornwall, England 1906: Submarine Cables

The role of telecommunications in geopolitics is not new. In Cornwall, England, the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum is dedicated to the preservation of the history of the undersea telegraph cables that were the backbone of British imperialism.

“Britannia rules the waves”, but from the 1850s until the 1920s, Britain ruled both under and over the waves – it had the world’s strongest navy and dominated the global submarine cable business. Britain’s dominant position in global politics, finance and trade helped entrepreneurs, like Sir John Pender, build a global business financing, laying and operating cables. No wonder critics likened it to a vast ‘octopus’ that destroyed or strangled competition. By the 1890s, the ‘octopus’ was the main reason why Britain owned two thirds of the world’s cables.

However, from the early 1900s, Britain faced increasingly strong competition from the United States, Germany and France in economic, military and political terms. Its rivals also expanded their cable networks, which finally began breaking the British monopoly. Faced with the additional threat of wireless telegraphy, Britain’s ownership of the world’s cables had dropped to a half by the mid-1920s.

So perhaps we have found a new metric by which to measure political power—the cables that link nations to other nations and regions, the networks which allow their citizens to communicate with each other, and the RTT, the round trip time for data to travel between continents.  It is the new Law of the Sea.

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What's Next?

Lyric Hughes Hale is a writer and contributor to a range of publications, including the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Current History and Institutional Investor.

What’s Next? Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale and Lyric Hale is available now from Yale University Press.

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