Tuesday 21 June 2016

Underhand tactics win the day for East India Company


Lord Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, oil on canvas 
(Francis Hayman, c. 1762)
On 23rd June 1757 the Battle of Plassey (Bengali: পলাশীর যুদ্ধ, Pôlashir Juddho) was won by the British East India Company over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies. This battle consolidated the Company's presence in Bengal, and allowed them to dominate the sub-continent for the next hundred years.

Plassey lies on the banks of the Bhagirathi River, about 150 kilometres (93 miles) north of Calcutta and south of Murshidabad, then capital of Bengal (now in Nadia district in West Bengal).

Prior to the battle Robert Clive, Commander-in-Chief of British India, and soldier of fortune undermined the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah by bribing the his disgruntled army commander, Mir Jafar, promising him that he would make him Nawab if he won.

Siraj-ud-Daulah had a numerically superior force but Mir Jafar, along with his co-conspirators assembled their troops near the battlefield but made no move to actually join in when the fighting started. Siraj-ud-Daulah's army with 18,000 soldiers was defeated by 3,000 soldiers of Clive’s in just forty minutes.

After this battle the East India Company wielded enormous influence over the new Nawab and consequently acquired large concessions which enabled them to increase their revenues and military might which they used to push the other European colonial powers; the Dutch and the French out of South Asia.

My debut novel, Sinclair, begins on board an East Indiaman bound for Madras in 1786. I have based the beginning of the story on what happened to a real ship called the Halsewell which set out from Gravesend on New Year’s Day of that year with a contingent of fresh soldiers and military supplies for Fort St George in Madras. In the book I have called the ship the Sherwell as I have changed and added to the characters on board the original ship.

Like the real Halsewell the Sherwell never reaches its destination; it was brought to grief on the Dorset coast just 6 days later in one of the worst storms of the century.


Loss of the East Indiaman Halsewell by Robert Smirke
Of the 240 passengers and crew on board only 74 survive, my hero Sinclair is one of them. Find out how two young men; Dr James Sinclair and Captain Frank Greenwood, both on the brink of successful colonial careers with the East India Company rebuild their lives and search for meaning and love in the aftermath of this disaster in my new book called Sinclair which will be available this autumn.

Tuesday 14 June 2016

Liberté, égalité, fraternité - but not for women



We are interested in all things French at the moment it seems form the BBC's new block buster drama on the life of Louis XIV and Versailles to Euro 2016. France as we all know is the home of revolution, of Liberté, égalité, fraternité but what is not so well known is that women were barred from political rights even as they were being proclaimed to be universal and inalienable and in 1793 were deemed to lack sufficient education to participate in the nation's political life and by the autumn of that year they were also barred from participating in clubs and societies.

But not all Frenchmen and revolutionaries were against women's rights. Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (September 17, 1743–March 28, 1794) was one such man. In 1786 at the age forty-two, he married the twenty-two year old Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), with whom he forged a loving relationship. The pair shared similar political convictions and developed a solid intellectual partnership.

Like her husband, de Grouchy was committed to bringing about major judicial and political reforms in France; and her own experiences of convent schooling had left her with fierce dislike of the Church and a commitment to secular values. They both dreamed and worked towards a liberal, rational and democratic France. 
In 1790 as the French Revolution was well under way her husband called for “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship” but he was widely opposed on the grounds that women were innately inferior and destined to only to be wives and mothers.
In 1791, along with Thomas Paine, the Condorcets founded la Société républicaine [the Republican Society], sometimes credited as the first republican society in France; and Mme de Condorcet translated Paine's writings for the journal of the Society, La Républicain ou défenseur du gouvernement représentatif [The Republican or defender of representative government].
In the autumn of 1792, the Marquis was elected to the National Convention of the newly constituted first French Republic, and became chairman of the Committee on a Constitution. He proposed what became known as, “La Girondine” a constitution that was rejected in favour of the Jacobin Constitution, in June 1793 and his impassioned defence of La Girondine led to an order for his arrest and he was forced to flee from his beloved France.
Separated from one another de Condorcet wrote until he was found dead in prison cell under suspicious circumstances while his wife worked on her own text known as Lettres à Cabanis sur la sympathie [Letters to Cabanis on Sympathy], in which she sets forth her own ideas on achieving “a society of happiness” and struggles with the question of what holds society together while her own life and the life of the nation was being rent asunder as the Terror raged.
Sophie was rendered penniless by her husband's proscription and death and to support herself, her child and her sister she opened a shop and put aside her writing and translation work for years until she eventually published a translation of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in 1798, adding eight letters, Lettres sur la Sympathie, commenting upon this work.  This became the standard French translation for the next two centuries. Her eight letters on sympathy were however ignored by historians of economic thought, and were only recently (2008) translated into English.
In the French Revolution we see for the first time the issue of gender as a constitutional condition for the possession of political rights and it is a sad irony that the women of France would not achieve the ballot until 1944, and many of the advancements in civil law passed in the euphoria of the 1790s were withdrawn by Napoleon, and not again fully secured until the last half of the twentieth century.
The Marquis de Condorcet was symbolically re- interred in the Panthéon in 1989, in honour of the bicentennial of the French Revolution and Condorcet's role as a central figure in the Enlightenment. He started his academic life as a mathematician then transferred those skills into social and political affairs developing a model he called “social arithmetic”. He could be called the ‘father of statistics’ because he advocated the use of statistics and probability theory, to the financial reforms, the reform of hospital care, jury decision-making and voting procedures.
Sophie's contribution to modern political and economic thought is now being properly evaluated and recognised particularly in the United States where her contribution to the discussion on the nature of liberty is now being widely acknowledged. In a world of political and social turmoil she advocates that educators and social reformers should nurture 'sympathy'  the feeling for others induced by imagining yourself in another’s place and imagining how you would feel. In this way, people would be led to strive to maintain good relations with their fellows and provide the basis both for specific benevolent acts and for the general social order. 
Sympathy may be an old idea but I think its a good one and many of our politicians and economists would do well to consider it once more.
Sources:
The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought edited by Robert William Dimand, Chris Nyland
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/histfem-condorcet/
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/rousseaus-theory-of-sentiments-57752.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_de_Condorcet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet


Sunday 12 June 2016

Euro 2016 Liberté, Égalité, Footé

In Europe we are obsessed with all things French at the moment. No it's not because of terrorism, the Euro, fashion, the strikes or the sophistication of French culture - it's the football or more precisely the UEFA Euro 2016 Competition.

The BBC has tapped into the trend with a new multi-million pound drama, Versailles which is proving to be a hot, steamy romp of sex and violence at the court of Louis XIV and with an impressive trailer for the football with a host of commentators and sports stars dressed in 18th century costume, parading with the tricolour in hand and proclaiming - Liberte, Egalite Foote! Who says 18th century history is not relevant today?




Wednesday 1 June 2016

June - is it the most romantic month of the year?


Tourism promoters on the Caribbean Island of Nevis have declared June the island’s Official Month of Romance. Nevis is undeniably gorgeous but where did this tradition of June romance and weddings come from? 

Let's start at the beginning - was it the Romans? 

The month of June gets its name from the Latin name for the month which was Junius which in turn is named after the Roman goddess Juno. Juno was the daughter of Saturn and sister and wife to the chief god Jupiter (the ancient immortals were prone to incest. I suppose it comes from having so few immortals to choose from!)  Juno was the patron goddess of Rome and the Roman Empire she was called Regina ("queen") and, together with Jupiter and Minerva their daughter she was worshipped on the Capitol (Juno Capitolina) in Rome. As well as being the goddess of marriage she was also the goddess who watched over the finances of the empire and her temple on the Arx (one of two Capitoline hills), was the Roman mint, so she had her hands on the purse strings too.



In ancient Rome, the period from mid-May through mid-June was considered inauspicious for marriage. Ovid says that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis, the high priestess of Jupiter, about setting a date for his daughter's wedding, and was advised to wait till after June 15. Plutarch, however, implies that the entire month of June was more favourable for weddings than May. This may have been because there are several meteor showers disturbing the heavens in May. So it seems that the Roman’s were not too keen on June weddings despite the name of the month.

Was it the Medievals?

There is a popular belief that the tradition of June brides in northern Europe began in 1500s and that it is associated with bathing. Folklore dictates that the common people took a bath once a year, in May, when the weather was warm enough for a young person to take off their clothes and wash and that with this annual grooming ritual out of the way they could get on with the business of marriage and mating.



It is certainly true that many people, especially the poor, covered their chests in goose fat and sewed themselves into their clothes for the winter in an effort to ward off the cold and diseases. They were then cut out of them in the spring when they washed, the fetid clothes were burned and new ones were put on. Which must have made anyone feel better and smell more fragrant. Of course there is no denying that a clean vest is better than a rancid one if you’re after a bit of loving but it’s hardly enough to get someone to the altar.

In her book, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538-1840 (CUP, 1990), Ann Kussmaul concludes that there was no immutable season for English weddings, they happened at all times of year but having said that she goes on to identify a trend but it was not for weddings in June even though the term 'honeymoon' referred to the first moon of after the summer solstice on June 21, a term which became synonymous with 'time following the wedding.'  

Was it the weather?

It seems that our ancestors got married either in early spring before the main agricultural work of the year had begun or in the autumn when it was over. What is more it seems also that after dancing around the Maypole and having a bath our ancestors were prone to a bit of illicit frolicking in the hay. 


Over the summer months when our young ancestors were clean and fragment and they could get out into the fields and woods away from their parents’ supervision they frequently got themselves pregnant. So their romantic frolics under the summer sun and the honeyed moon led them to altar in the autumn and christenings in spring.


So perhaps June was the most romantic month. It was a time when young people discovered each other, discovered sex, formed bonds that would last the rest of their lives. Today a June a wedding is a beautiful thing whether it's in Nevis or the local Town Hall.

See my collection of 18th century inspired wedding dresses and gowns 
https://uk.pinterest.com/juliaherdman107/

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