Train Reading - introducing Richard Hakluyt's Voyage and Discoveries 1

My present train reading is Richard Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation edited, abridged and introduced by Jack Beeching (Penguin 1972). The illustration, from the Wikepedia article on Hakluyt, is the stained glass window in Bristol Cathedral celebrating Hakluyt's life.

First published in 1589 with the final and greatly enlarged version appearing between 1598 and 1600, the book is a compendium of every voyage and commercial report that Hakluyt could get his hands on. The first two reports in the edition that I have date to 890, with the majority falling to the period 1553 to 1596.

Hakluyt's intent in collecting and publishing material was practical. Practical in the sense that he wanted to make the information available for use by others. Practical in the sense that he was promoting and presenting the English commercial interest. Practical also because the work undertaken by Hakluyt allowed him to amass a considerable fortune.

Today Voyages and Discoveries is interesting in part as travel yarns, in part because it presents eye witness accounts of events and commercial activities at a critical time in English and European history. This period saw the beginning of the colonial period with the early growth of the first overseas European empires; it saw England begin the challenge to the interests of Portugal and especially Spain (think Drake and the Spanish Armada) that would lay the basis for a wholesale land grab and the establishment of its own Empire; it also saw Europe's commercial and trade focus final shift from the traditional land routes towards the sea.  

Richard Hakluyt was born at Eyton in Herefordshire in 1553, the second of four sons. His father, also Richard, was a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners whose members dealt in skins and furs. Richard Snr died in 1557, Richard's mother soon after. A cousin, yet another Richard Hackluyt, became his guardian. Cousin Richard  was a barrister and a member of the Middle Temple'

Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church Oxford. awarded his MA in 1577. He was ordained as an Anglican minister in the following year.

Hakluyt decided to dedicate himself to what we would now call geography while still a schoolboy at Westminster. Visiting his guardian whose conversation was illustrated by "certain bookes of cosmographie, an universall mappe, and the Bible", the boy resolved to "prosecute that knowledge, and kind of literature". At Oxford, he set out to read all the printed or written voyages and discoveries that he could find and began to give public lectures on geography following his graduation. 

In 1582 his first publication, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons,  appeared , establishing his reputation. The following year, he was appointed chaplain and secretary to Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador to the French court, a position he held until 1588, where he investigated sources as well as collecting intelligence on Spanish and French activities. 

Following his return, Hakluyt held important positions at Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and was personal chaplain to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I. He was the chief promoter of a petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted to the London Company and Plymouth Company (referred to collectively as the Virginia Company) in 1606.

The combination of his publications, his church roles, his commercial activities and inheritances from two of his brothers had made him a wealthy man by the time he died in 1616. He had married twice, but there seems to have been only one son who squandered his wealth following his death. 

Today Hakluyt is principally remembered for his writings and his efforts in promoting and supporting the settlement of North America by the English through those writings. His works were a fertile source of material for Shakespeare and other writers. He also encouraged the writing of historical and geographic works by others. In 1846, the Hakluyt Society was founded to printing rare and unpublished accounts of voyages and travels. A house at his old school carries his name. 

In my next train reading post I will look in more detail at the book and its context.

Border myopia - Its impact on economic and policy analysis

This post returns to one of my recurrent themes, the way in which boundaries affect our thinking.

Keeping things very simple, all of our economic and policy analysis and the statistics on which that analysis is based is boundary focused.

Take economics as an example. Modern economic analysis was formed during  a period that saw the rise of the nation state. It is state focused. The simple equations underpinning much economic policy focus on the state entity, relegating the international relations between that state entity and the rest of the world as a residual, an add-on. Important, but secondary.

You can see this in the way the old theory of comparative advantage is applied. As a theory, it attempts to explain why people might choose to specialise in particular activities. I am a good doctor but a great gardener. Comparative advantage dictates, however, that I should focus on being a doctor if that provides a greater return, buying in gardening services even if those services are not as good as those I might provide myself. This approach was then generalised to countries seen as economic entities, dictating that trade and benefits between countries would be maximised if those countries followed the route dictated by comparative advantage. I, Australia, am great at primary production and minerals. I should specialise there. That will maximise local benefits in part because it also maximises the return to others.

While the theory of comparative advantage is still popular, it dropped out of favour because of its inability to properly explain international trade. Comparative advantage is based on difference, yet trade seemed to be dictated by commonality and overlap. Similar countries with apparently similar factor endowments traded more with each other than countries with varying factor endowments.

All this analysis was based on geographic national boundaries. It was focused on trade between entities. But what if those boundaries have reducing meaning? What happens then? How does it affect the analysis?

In similar vein, Australians treat the states within the Federation as though they are economic entities. In one sense they are. But what does it actually mean to speak of the NSW economy? Is there such a thing as compared to a series of regional economies of which Sydney is the largest and therefore dominates the statistics?  Mind you, the definitions of Sydney itself have changed over time. What do we mean by Sydney? Indeed, what do we actually mean by the word economy?

At a different level, Australian policy makers make considerable use of ARIA, a measure of remoteness from major centres with its sub-classifications of major city, inner regional, outer regional, remote and very remote. The Australian Bureau of Statistics describes the intent in this way:

The concept of remoteness is an important dimension of policy development in Australia. The provision of many government services are influenced by the typically long distances that people are required to travel outside the major metropolitan areas. The purpose of the Remoteness Structure is to provide a classification for the release of statistics that inform policy development by classifying Australia into large regions that share common characteristics of remoteness.

The intent of ARIA is summarised in the last sentence: ARIA provides a statistical classification intended to "inform policy development by classifying Australia into large regions that that share common characteristics of remoteness."  Sound reasonable? Well, what does it actually mean? In 2006, Darwin and the small NSW town of Balranald were both classified as outer regional, while Armidale was classified as inner regional. Under what conditions did it make sense for Darwin and Balranald to be treated as identical in policy terms, while Armidale was different? Do social or economic policy measures based on ARIA classifications make any sense at all? Why should an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory be treated differently in policy terms from an equivalent Aboriginal community in NSW simply because the first is classified as remote or very remote, the second as outer regional?

I first came across the interacting problems created by boundaries and statistics based on boundaries many years ago and have been struggling with it ever since. Problems have become more intense with the growing importance of measurement and of performance indicators based on measurement.

It's become an absolute pain from my viewpoint, for now you have to constantly ask two questions: are the boundaries correct for the purposes they intend to serve; and then given the answer to one, are the indicators used appropriate?  In both cases, the answers are often no.

A further difficulty lies in our sometimes inability to actually recognise that boundaries and boundary conditions are deeply embedded in the analytical structures we use.We just take them for granted. As an aside, I wonder to what degree the decline in geography as a discipline has reduced our ability to recognise spatially distributed difference?

All this is just a further gripe at this point. However, I am pretty sure that I will be returning to the issue!

Sunday Essay – maps, myopia and the Aboriginal story

I have always been fascinated by maps. As a child, I had maps pinned all over my bedroom walls. Maps of country towns, road maps, a map of the world with the Empire and Commonwealth still marked in red as it was on the little globe of the world. Then there were the many atlases around the house of varying ages, some dating back to my parents’ childhood with their political boundaries of now vanished countries.

On wet Saturday afternoons, Brother David and I would sort our stamps, counting them, putting them in order. Here we used the Stanley & Gibbons catalogue as a basic resource,  Again, it was a geography and history lesson. This is the first Confederate postage stamp showing Jefferson Davis and placed in circulation in October 1861, five months after postal service between the North and South had ended.

This love of maps carried through into an interest in geography despite the sometimes boredom at primary school of having to draw maps of Australia or NSW with the rivers and boundaries carefully marked. Indeed, at one point that interest was so great that I expected to major in geography at university.

That was not to be. I was more interested in human rather than physical geography, The broad introductory nature of that first year course simply didn’t grab. In fact, I found it quite boring. I therefore put geography aside for history and economics, although my general interest in the subject continued.

Despite my interest in maps and in geography, my sense of spatial awareness was not well developed. By spatial awareness, I simply mean the geography of a place or area; size, distances, rivers, plains and mountains; I understood in a general abstract sense, but I didn’t feel it. This was a bigger weakness than I realised at  time. 

I am not a geographical determinist, but life is shaped by geography. I was researching and writing on the history of places and periods when I didn’t actually properly understand the geography.  These are the ruins of Ancient Thera on the Greek island of Santorini. It took a visit to the Greek Islands in 2010  for me to begin to properly understand the geography involved, including the importance of water; water to sail on, water to drink.

Just as I didn’t properly recognise my limited spatial awareness, I didn’t recognise the way that those maps I loved were affecting my sense of geography, creating hard lines in my mind based on boundaries and human constructions such as railway lines. Those lines helped determine what I looked at, how I interpreted things. Actually, the world wasn’t like that at all. Our obsession with hard lines, with order, actually distorts the way we see the past.

Today, we have a further very particular problem. Modern communications and transport patterns are actually destroying our sense of spatial awareness. The loss of MH70 is a case in point. There was genuine surprise at our inability to find the plane. People had simply forgotten how big the Southern Indian Ocean is. 

Our diminishing sense of spatial awareness combines with our interest in lines and maps to change the mental mudmaps we use to interpret the world. We see the world in terms of a series of dots linked by lines along which we travel. While the length of those lines is determined by travel times, instant communications effectively compresses the dots. The world outside those dots and lines progressively vanishes from our consciousness.

If you look, you can see this effect in operation in your own world.

Do you use Google maps? Ten years ago, you would have got a road map or street directory to plan your trip. You would have had to check the route in some detail, work out where to turn etc. Now many people rely on the GPS system and just do as they are told. It’s convenient, but it means that at the end of your trip your knowledge of the route is far less than it once would have been.

As an alternative, consider the expressway. Even twenty year ago, you would have wound through towns and villages, stopping as required. Today, the modern expressway bypasses all those places, with people stopping at the now ubiquitous service centres. The towns and villages that you once knew are progressively being expunged from memory unless, of course, you have a particular personal or business reason to go to them.  

These issues are on my mind at present for a number of reasons, partly professional, partly personal.

The recreation of the Aboriginal history of what is now Northern NSW before 1788 is like putting together a jigsaw made up of many fragments. It is not possible to be definitive, merely plausible. So long as you provide your evidence, your story can then be challenged by others.

I am often asked how do I know, how can I know, what is my evidence?  Part of the answer lies in the archaeological record, the material that survives from various periods of the long Aboriginal occupation of this continent. Part comes from early settler records or ethnographic studies. This material dates from the time of disruption and poses many problems, not least of which is our inability to draw any certain connections between the the position at the time of European intrusion and that holding in past aeons. This problem become progressively more intense the further back into the past we go.

A further complication lies in the way in that Aboriginal history, our views of the Aboriginal past, have acquired accretions, barnacles if you like, from evolving perceptions of that past within the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities alike. People always re-interpret history to suit current needs. It can be extremely uncomfortable for both historian and reader where the evidence fails to support or even conflict with current beliefs.

Geography is central to any navigation of this mine field. In his 1832 book, the writer William Breton refers to Corborn Comleroy as the name given to the large area occupied by what we would now call, among other things, the Kamilaroi. He notes that the Corborn Comleroy travelled to Port Macquarie for ceremonies.  So far so good, but where did they come from, how did they get to Port Macquarie, what does it tell us about links?

The Kamilaroi  language group occupied a large swath of inland NSW from the Upper Hunter probably into what is now Queensland. Michael O’Rourke considers that those attending the Port Macquarie ceremonies would have travelled from the Mooki or Peel Rivers up onto the southern tip of the New England Tablelands through the Nowendoc district, across the tributaries of the Manning River to the Ellenborough River and then down to the Hastings. This makes sense, but only if you know the complex geography of the area.

It is, by the way, remarkably difficult to avoid errors in all this. The Wikipedia entry on the Manning River given above suggest that the traditional custodians of the land surrounding the Manning River and its associated valleys are the Birpai people of the Bundjalung nation. That is factually incorrect. The Bundjalung lay far to the north separated from the Birpai by two other language groups.

To try to understand all this, I am constantly map checking. Herein there is now a problem. Whatever the strength of Google maps, it does not provide me with the right map size and detail that I need. What I really need is a good old fashioned Atlas that allows me to visually see the relationships between areas and especially rivers and mountain systems. Then and only then can I get full value from Google.

I accept that all this is probably a bit eye glazing, leading the reader to ask but does it matter? Yes, to my mind it does. If we can establish the broad pattern of Aboriginal life in Northern NSW and surrounding linked areas in 1788, then we have brought part of the Australian past into the light. If we do this, we have a better chance of interpreting some of the changing archaeological data, thus adding texture and depth to Aboriginal story over thousands of years.    

Australian life - varying colours

Gordon Smith's Australian outback tour continues. This shot shows the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

Even though most modern Australians have not been to the outback, the colours have become very familiar through visual representation. However, they are not the colours I grew up with, something I explored in The colours of New England photo essay back in 2009.

As that post shows, colour varies with geography, geology and climate, making for considerable variations across space.

The Mediterranean's 300 year drought

This piece by Kosta Pandos and Sunanda Creagh in The Conversation, Climate change hastened ancient civilisations' collapse: study, interested me. It reports on a new study that concluded that climate change sparked the political and economic turmoil that hastened the collapse of formerly prosperous civilisations in regions such as Greece and Syria towards the end of the 13th century BC. You can find the full study here.

The Conversation writers put it in the context of current discussions on global warming, although the study does no more than illustrate the importance of climatic shifts in a particular place and time in which I have an interest.

I commented once before that one of the things that I did not properly understand when I first did history and prehistory at University was the extent of climatic variation. If you look at just how dry the Greek Islands are today, you can see how a long drought might affect life. In similar vein, we now know that the troubles afflicting new settlement at Sydney were in part climate induced, while during the long Aboriginal occupation of this country there were multiple climatic variations.

The expansion in our knowledge of past variations in climate and their affects is really quite remarkable. 

Saturday morning snippets - bread, circuses and cultural necrophiliacs

A few things this morning that you may find interesting.

A link from Christopher Moore led me to this piece in the Canadian journal Foreign Affairs, Game of Thrones as History. This examines the relationship between R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series and medieval life. The message is summed up this way: "It's Not as Realistic As It Seems--and That's Good."

Ramana's The Salt Of The Earth provides a nice perspective on the mix in Indian life. It includes a link through to a story on the Americanisation of India.

In a discussion on What does "Asia" and the "Asian century" mean?, Ramana suggested that he certainly thought of himself as Asian!

This map from the Wikipedia article on Asia shows the spread of Asia as currently defined. The Wikipedia article is worth reading, for it draws out some of the difficulties in geographic labelling, including the way very old ideas continue to affect thinking today.

I missed this at the time, but historian Simon Schama has branded the popular Downton TV series as 'cultural necrophilia'. Really love that phrase! My thanks to the Idle Historian for the link.

On economics and the Australian economy, Malcolm Maiden's A year on, and no closer to resurrection provides a simple but useful summary of developments in the Australian economy over the last twelve months. It sets a useful context for some of the changes and stresses

Finishing with history, I found skepticlawyer's Panem et circenses an absolutely fascinating post because it provided another set of insights into one of the world's great empires. 

Australia v Europe

This one came from Brad Holland via Legal Eagle. I couldn't resist copying it.
The map shows Europe, or at least a large part of it, superimposed upon Australia. It gives a good visual feel for the size of the country. The European map itself is slightly odd, mind you. Perhaps dated would be a better word. Yugoslavia is still there, for example. Still, it gives you the picture. 

Postscript. My apologies on this post. The image link has become corrupted and I have been unable to find the original.