I’ve strayed outside my own territory to read a book by a colleague, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper. I’ll start by saying it’s definitely a commitment as the book is 650 pages long (before counting the footnotes). However, I’ve found it completely gripping and was glad to have some long train journeys this week. This is a subject – Asian political and intellectual history from about 1900-1930 – that I knew next to nothing about beforehand. The book ranges across the whole of Asia including China and India, and follows the activists on their travels to Europe and the US, whether voluntary (seeking support) or not (sent into exile). So – to use an awkward metaphor – the book joins up unknown dots. It also completely brings home the immorality of empire, with none of the imperial powers – Britain, France, the Netherlands – coming out of it with any honour as they resisted realising that the days of empire were drawing to an end. The political developments, including the spread of actively revolutionary ideas and movements after the Bolshevik revolution, dominate the narrative; but I also relished the cultural elements of the story, including the popularity of English and French detective novels in the late 19th century or the proliferation of new journals as ideas spread along seaways and railways.

Here’s a longer and more informative review for those who know more about this subject than I do. One blurb on the back, from Peter Frankopan, describes the book as reading like a thriller. It absolutely does. An excellent beach paperback for the summer.

There are some books whose success mystifies me. One was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which I tried when it was published and couldn’t get past p50. I tried with Homo Deus recently and got as far as p138 before giving up. Despite my fondness for Big History, I just can’t figure out what it’s about. As far as I can tell, there’s no original body of research underpinning a popular synthesis (unlike, say, Oded Galor’s interesting new book The Journey of Humanity, or a book like Joseph Henrich’s big cultural history The Weirdest People in the World).

But nor is there in Homo Deus a structured synthesis of other people’s work – ample references of course, but what’s the actual analysis and argument? I could cheat and look at some reviews by people who have actually read the whole thing.* But I think 138 pages gives it a fair shot at grabbing my attention, and it has failed, despite the positive blurbs from Jarvis Cocker and Kazua Ishiguro, and the many millions of sales and high profile fans.

No doubt somebody will explain why I’m wrong.

*OK, I cheated. Here’s a helpful review in the LRB by Steven Shapin who read the whole thing, found the argument and sums it up (‘technology has given us the power to reshape ourselves as a species and it’s full of risks’). I get the sense he wasn’t overwhelmed but is politely positive anyway.

A terrific book I read in proof has arrived here: it’s The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization by economic historian Harold James. As the book notes at the start, this is a time of the polarisation of ideas about how to interpret the economy, society and politics. Nationalism is on the up and globalisation has become a dirty word. Well, the key point of the book is that the disputes about the world are in part due to the way different uses of the same word can lead to muddled thinking. “This book starts from the notion that moments of profound social transition spark new questions and inspire new vocabularies.” And yet fuzzy concepts obscure discussion rather than clarifying it. The book seeks to clarify potential differences in meaning, so that communication can perhaps become an exchange of ideas more than an angry shouting past people with opposing views.

The chapters each take a word, often an ism: capitalism, socialism, populism, globalism, but also technocracy, democracy, hegemony, debt, and more. They take a journey trough the history of how each term has been deployed, reflecting the changes in society along the way. The complex and changing politics of debt are a great example, and this chapter is a masterly and brief aerial view of why various types of debt – personal, corporate, sovereign – have become so problematic in the 21st century. The historical perspective is essential (I was very struck by Danny Quah’s pointing out on social media today that 2021 is as far from 1980 as 1980 was from 1939…. this is sobering if you remember 1980 as an adult). The debt chapter compares well with David Graeber’s much-praised vast tome Debt, in terms of setting out key political issues of our own time.

I also particularly liked the chapters on technocracy and populism; one could do worse than start students out with these two chapters before diving into the more extensive literature. Again, they have a clarifying focal length, just enough detail to start orienting oneself in these debates of competing isms and politiks. Professor James has the capacious knowledge that makes this possible and a wealth of historical details. Who knew that technocracy was a term born of World War 1, introduced by Californian engineer William H Smyth? He saw it was the means to ensure science and technology servied society. Technocrats took another giant leap forward with World War 2, with the recruitment of science into the comprehensive war effort and then the managerialism of the post-war era. Periodic revolts against the technocrats have occurred, such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential polemic After Virtue; but they are essential despite the constant need to maintain a balance between experts (techno-) and people (-cracy) which will inevitably shift over time.

Of course there are omissions but the point is clarification of terms, not exhaustive analysis. As the book concludes: “Words matter: … language can empower citizens.” This is exactly why ‘fake news’ and misinformation have had such a malign influence, why authoritarians control the media, why ‘woke’ and ‘neoliberal’ and many more words can become terms of abuse. We are indeed in a war of the words, and I recommend this book as ammo.