Porter’s Pensées

Through the eyes of a modern liberal Marxist, almost everything that is happening in the world today – the reaction against globalism, harnessed to various brands of nationalism and racism – can be interpreted as a symptom of a late and declining capitalism, rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions’. According to Marx, it’s the Left and the working classes who should be profiting from this. That may have been a mistake. Even if not, however, it appears we have to go through some crazy history first. Donald Trump is a marvellous embodiment of that, almost the quintessential ‘late’ capitalist, and a complete mess of internal contradictions in himself. He’s also terrifically entertaining, isn’t he, in a horror movie kind of way, so long as we have an ocean between us and him? I for one never anticipated that the approach to Götterdämmerung would be quite as colourful as this.

Otherwise I’ve been expecting something like this for years. This is a piece of mine from November 2009 giving some of my reasoning then. (It was for the LRB Blog: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/11/20/bernard-porter/come-back-karl/.)

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Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that capitalism would need to get redder in tooth and claw before it was undermined by its internal contradictions. The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country, which is why, by my way of thinking, it could only be kept alive by tyranny – a premature baby in an incubator was the metaphor I liked to use. In the West it had been shown that enlightened capitalist societies could smooth away their own roughest edges, by taking on board social democracy, the welfare state, decolonisation and the like. All this seemed to put the kibosh on the old man’s gloomy prognostication of capitalism’s needing to get worse before it exploded, releasing us into a brave new socialist world that not even Marx could describe in detail (consistently with his belief that it was the material base that determined intellectual superstructures), and that I, for one, was not at all confident that I would come to like. Happy days.

Then came Thatcher, Reagan and 1989; smashing the incubator that was the only thing keeping the Communist weakling alive, and reversing the social democratic ‘advances’, as we had seen them, of fifty years. All this really did seem to be driven by underlying economic imperatives. (Thatcher and Reagan were only riding them.) Since then events have followed Marx’s closer predictions almost uncannily: globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, the undermining of democracy, the triumph of a capitalist discourse (railway ‘customers’ rather than ‘passengers’), the decline of socialist ideology, and a succession of capitalist crises, each worse than the last – but none of them as yet showing any sign of being the last. Come back Karl; all is forgiven. You were right. (Up to ‘the revolution’, that is. Maybe. For that, we’ll have to wait and see.)

As a historian, and fully aware of past British xenophobia – indeed, I’ve written about it – I can’t recall any other British government since the 17th century which had a policy of getting rid, in one way or another, of ‘aliens’ who were currently living in Britain. This is a notable, and worrying, ‘first’ for Theresa May.

Of course living in a foreign country broadens the mind. That’s why the organisation known as ‘Democrats Abroad’ (http://www.democratsabroad.org/) is making such huge efforts to register the American expatriate vote for the forthcoming presidential election. Its assumption is that US citizens living in Europe, say, are much less likely to vote for Trump than stay-at-home Americans. That must be right. For a start they must be affected by the almost universal derision that Trump receives in nearly all branches of the European media, where he is seen as not only wrong but also a clown. They’ll have spent much of their time being quizzed on him, almost incredulously, by their European friends. That will have been embarrassing for them. (I experience the same kind of discomfiture in Sweden, being quizzed about Farage.) Then, they will have come across ways of doing things – national health arrangements, for example – differently from how they do them in America, and found that they actually work. Thirdly, they’re probably less stupid, and almost certainly more open-minded, than most of Trump’s constituency. Travel can have this effect. And together they can muster many millions of votes. They could make the difference.

One thing that living abroad has done for me – apart from broadening my mind, I hope – is to give me another string to my professional bow. I used to be asked to review books on British imperialism and the secret services, my two main areas of historical expertise. Now I get books about Scandinavia, too. (See for example https://bernardjporter.com/2014/01/28/the-almost-nearly-perfect-people/.) I’ve just received Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, from the Literary Review. That will keep me pretty busy for at least a week, probably at the expense of my blogging duties. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The Tories aren’t as stupid as they’re made out. In fact, part of their cleverness has always lain in pretending that they are dumber than they really are. That’s how they escaped the guillotine (or hangman’s noose) in French revolutionary times – who could believe that these British upper-class twits could be worth executing? – and why we still tolerate them today. Boris Johnson’s main value to the Tories is to perpetuate this cuddly, eccentric image, so we won’t get too angry with the obnoxious ones with the real power; like – in the last government – George Osborne.

Boris’s shielding of Osborne, however, couldn’t last for ever. People were beginning to suss the latter out for the gratuitously austerian Chancellor that he was. That was in line with the tide of world opinion, which was turning against extreme free market capitalism on several fronts.

So the Tories’ next cunning plan has been to disown Osborne and his policies, just like that. Osborne himself was dumped unceremoniously. There was to be no more obsession with ‘balancing the books’. State intervention, now, would facilitate growth. Housing would be taken out of the hands of the ‘market’ alone. Rogue capitalists and rich tax-avoiders would be clobbered. Social inequalities would be ironed out. The slogan now was a State – a State, mark you – that works for everyone, not just for the fortunate few: the implication being, of course, that the previous government, Cameron’s, which Teresa May had been part of, had only worked for the toffs. As Cameron’s successor as Tory leader (and as prime minister), May seems to be embarking on a total makeover for the party that she herself once castigated as being perceived, at least, as the ‘nasty’ one. This could mark a political revolution as remarkable as any that New Labour (now Old Labour) would have brought about. And that without a single vote being cast – on this issue, at least. (The Brexit vote, and the political chaos that that unleashed, obviously played its part.)

A number of questions arise from this. The first is, can she keep it up? It’s easy to spell out wonderful ideals, but then also to stumble, in part because of circumstances beyond the idealists’ control. Look at Obama. That is, if we can credit that May really is an idealist, and not just a cynical manipulator of phrases, for party political gain. Will her more Right-wing backbenchers and rich backers be content to travel this new road? I imagine her new xenophobic rhetoric (below) might help. The Nasties will love that.

Secondly: where does it leave the Labour Party? Many of May’s new aims and objectives have been taken right out of Jeremy Corbyn’s book. That leaves Labour with hardly a single original progressive policy to stand on. It’s going to find the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, a less easy target than the monstrous Osborne. With its (ill-deserved) reputation for financial inefficiency, that could well hold Labour back. And then there’s the ‘immigration’ thing to factor in.

That is the Conservatives’ really clever stroke, of course. Opinion is fairly widespread already – it’s what boosted the Brexit vote – that people’s jobs, houses, school places and chances of being treated in British hospitals have been undermined by mass immigration in recent years. It is probably not true; but the new government’s sympathetic response to it – wanting to replace foreign doctors by Brits, to force employers to reveal numbers of immigrant workers, and so on – will feed and boost this prejudice. Disaffected ex-Labour voters will feel they’re being ‘listened to’ at last. That also spells danger for Labour.

The nationalist tone of much of the rhetoric coming from the Conservative camp just now suggests another kind of danger. As a self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the world’, though still a fond Englishman (and soon a Swede, I hope), I resented and feared her slight on my kind of internationalist: ‘a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. I’m alarmed by the physical attacks taking place against foreigners on English streets just now, which have proliferated greatly since Brexit. If May and her government are going to play that ‘nasty’ card over the next few years, it could be dangerous not only for the Labour party, but for the country, and even for the world; for this new exclusionary nationalism is not, of course, confined to us.

This is exactly the combination of appeals which has given rise to fascist movements in the past. Hitler was popular because he purported to be both a nationalist and a socialist (Nazionalsocialismus). Mussolini did the same. Donald Trump and Marine le Pen seem to be going down this road. It should be said that it doesn’t have to lead to Fascism. Way back in British history, Disraeli’s appeal to working-class voters was similar: in his case it was ‘social reform’ allied to ‘patriotism’. Let’s hope Theresa May’s nationalism goes no further than her illustrious Conservative predecessor’s did. She’s obviously not stupid; in fact she’s proving herself to be very canny. But the danger is there. It may depend on how Brexit goes. And we’re not there yet, of course.

I’ve just watched an entire Trump speech on my i-phone (Manheim, Pennsylvania, October 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY89pjXa-EU). Yes, pity me. It lasted over an hour but could have been boiled down to a minute: ‘Make America great again’, ‘Crooked Hillary’, and ‘Me, me, me’. Yet the audience was apparently huge (we weren’t shown it), and yelled its approval ecstatically (we could hear that). Clips on TV news don’t quite convey the monotonous flavour of it: monotonous, but also mesmeric. It reminded me of minimalist music. There was no serious argument, nothing substantial, quite a few straight lies, a lot of cheap jibes, and repetitions, especially of words and phrases he knew would get his audience’s most poisonous juices flowing: Obama, Clinton, Wall Street, Washington, Mexicans, the intellectual elite.… But you’ll know all that.

My first reaction, as an intellectual elitist, was predictable. So perhaps was my second: which was to wonder what has gone wrong with my beloved USA to render such a monstrous candidate, and his popularity, possible? Surely it can’t be only the effect of late-stage capitalism (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/10/trump-the-long-view/)?

My third reaction was perhaps a little more worrying. What does this tell us about democracy? If Trump wins the presidential election, it will undoubtedly be democratically. If there is any electoral gerrymandering in this contest, as there probably was in George W’s, it will come from Trump’s opponents. (In the Manheim speech, he already prepared us for that.) A majority of the American people, or of those who bothered to vote, would have wanted him to win. They may have been stupid, misled, even cheated, but their will would have prevailed. So there can be no complaints.

For my part, this will only confirm the doubts I have had about ‘democracy’ for many years. I’ve never been an uncritical supporter of the idea, as so many others are. I’ve always rated good government higher than self-government, so long as that good government embraces fairness, justice, tolerance, peace, equality, opportunity, and a string of other ‘progressive’ qualities that I would place higher on my list of political desiderata than ‘democracy’ per se. In principle, I would prefer to live under a liberal autocracy than an oppressive democracy, if this were possible. Of course the choice is never as stark and simple as this; but I admit to a smidgeon of regret at the departure of tyrannical regimes which at least made an effort to maintain economic equality (the USSR), or gender equality (Saddam’s Iraq. Or so they say). The ‘democracies’ that allow exploitative capitalism, or the subjection of women to a religious majority, appeal to me less. I might have said that as one of Britain’s colonial subjects in the 1950s, if I’d known about some of the home-grown tyrannies that would replace Britain’s over the next twenty years. (I didn’t, because I didn’t foresee that, and I was a principled anti-imperialist at the time.)

The democrat’s answer to this, of course, is that democracy is more likely to implement these other progressive values than autocracy and colonialism are. That rests on a faith on the inherent progressiveness and rationality of human nature, which will always apparently rise to the surface when people are given control over their own affairs. It’s this, I’m afraid, that I can’t quite credit. When I hear the opinions of some people, and particularly Americans – if only because they seem more willing to air their prejudices (I’ve given an extraordinary example in an earlier post: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/) – I rather doubt any people’s inherent goodness and rationality. Trump’s support confirms this. This makes democracy a very unreliable guarantor of liberal political virtue. It may be the least bad one, as (I think) Churchill said once. But with men like Trump around, we can’t rely on it. That might be taken as a defence of our own, British, highly un-democratic upper-class dominated political system, serving, as it does, to temper the excesses of the mob. Disliking Farageism as I do – our equivalent to Trumpery – I can see some point in that. But it’s a painful one.

The last time that people in Britain – some of them, at any rate – got seriously exercised about ‘inequality’, as opposed to simple ‘poverty’, was a hundred years ago. The key work then – the rough equivalent of Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2010) and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality (2012) today – was Leo Chiozza Money’s Riches and Poverty (1905), which purported to show that 87% of private property in Britain was owned by 2.25% of the population, with the remainder – nearly 40 million people – having to make do with 13% of the national wealth. That’s much in line with what is claimed today. For Edwardian socialists the wealth gap will have come as no surprise. Chiozza Money’s great contribution, however, was to quantify it. And he wasn’t a socialist, but a passionate free trader, and a Liberal MP.

That greater equality could be espoused by economic Liberals in the 1900s may have had something to do with the fact that inequality, at least to this extent, wasn’t seen as a necessary concomitant of the free market. One of the great gurus of market economics, John Stuart Mill, actually believed that it would have the opposite effect, ironing out the inequalities which he and his kind tended to associate with feudal privilege. If that didn’t happen eventually, he wrote in the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), he for one would favour socialism. He was as good as his word, declaring his conversion (privately) in 1871. (Not many people know that.) It was this supposed convergence between free marketism and broad social equality that enabled most nineteenth century Liberals to embrace political as well as economic liberalism. Today of course the two are opposites. The final separation took place during the ‘Great Reaction’ of the 1980s, and Thatcher’s ideology of ‘the free economy in a strong’ that is, illiberal, ‘state’. Capitalists now usually regard inequality as a positive good: ‘incentives’, ‘trickle down’, and all that.

But the tensions between that and the general good were already beginning to be discerned in the 1900s. The British economy was declining, relative to others, and becoming more and more dependent on banking, finance and cheap colonial markets to shore it up. Living standards for the mass of people were no longer rising, as in free market logic they were supposed to. Only the very rich were gaining, sometimes through obvious corruption – it was a great age for financial scandals – and, what was widely considered to be more shocking, flaunting their wealth in the faces of the poor. Mr Toad in The Wind and the Willows (1908) is a personification (or toadification) of this; bringing nemesis in the shape of the takeover of his mansion by the ‘Wild Wooders’ (stoats and weasels), who are obviously meant to represent the working classes. (Kenneth Graham was a banker in his former life.) Interestingly, Toad and his friends manage to win Toad Hall back by digging a tunnel beneath it and surprising the proles; which could be seen to represent the subterranean MI5, which was formally set up just afterwards, and used against the Wild Wooders in real life.

The tunnellers however didn’t have it entirely their own way in early twentieth century Britain. The working classes had their trade unions, growing in economic and political power, with the set-backs (like the Taff Vale judgment) soon set right again; and (since 1900) their ‘Labour Representation Committee’ in Parliament. The former were able to put pressure on governments with serious industrial strikes; the latter (as the Labour Party) formed two minority governments in the inter-war years, and then three majority ones after World War II which – with the support of the more cuddly of the Conservatives – pushed the ‘equality’ agenda forward some way. Workers’ rights and social democracy were two banners behind which (relative) egalitarians could broadly unite.

These of course are what is missing today. The unions were emasculated under the Great Reaction; socialism was demoralized by perceived failure; the working classes were marginalized with the decline of heavy industry, and increasingly demonized (according to Owen Jones, Chavs, 2011) as stoats and weasels. Chiozza Money’s Liberal audience had been shocked and frightened by the wave of galloping inequality he revealed. Stiglitz’s and Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s audiences may be equally shocked by their revelations of this second, more dramatic wave, but have less reason to be frightened. That’s the difference between then and now.

On our Swedish island for the weekend. Beautiful autumn weather, a blazing log stove, and plenty of wine. It seems a world away from Donald Trump; but of course you can’t avoid him even here, and if he is elected even Sweden will suffer the fallout. Apparently Stockholm is expecting an invasion of rats over the winter, mainly in Östermalm, the posh quarter. I wonder how many of them are my compatriots escaping from the sinking ship that is Brexit Britain? – Serious blogging to be resumed soon.

Liam Fox’s encomium to global free trade, delivered recently in Manchester, the original home of the idea  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/30/globalisation-poverty-corruption-free-trade-liam-fox), gives me an excuse to re-post this blog of mine from April this year, on the early Victorian version of the ideology, which Fox appears to have disinterred wholesale; and without having learned any of the practical lessons against it of the past 150 years. https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/30/global-utopia/. Take a look.

He’s right, however, to regard the European single market as an intrinsically anti-globalising institution in many respects. Theoretically, a country delivered from its protectionist rules should be able to trade more ‘freely’ in the world. That’s my worry.

Four or five years ago I had an unusually painful experience with one of my publishers, and decided to write about it for the THES. They eventually published the article, but only after it had been ‘lawyered’ almost to death. So, now that I have my own blogsite, I thought I’d recycle it in its original form. I doubt whether the publishers – Continuum – will bother to sue this very insignificant site; and in any case they no longer exist, having been taken over shortly afterwards by Bloomsbury, who are a different kettle of literary fish. So are the publishers I’ve had since then – mainly IB Tauris – whom I’m very happy with. My criticisms of Continuum don’t necessarily apply to them. So here it is. It may serve as a warning and a guide to young academics anxious to get into print.

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Here is my notion of the ideal academic publisher. He, or she – more likely the latter, these days – reads your book, or at least enough of it to be able to discuss it intelligently with you. She sends your proposal out to (paid) peer reviewers, and then, whether she accepts it or nor, feeds their comments back to you. She may give you advice of her own about the form the book should take, based on her knowledge of the academic market, as retailed to her by commissioning editors who have been out and about, scouring that market. She may also take you out for lunch. When you deliver the final manuscript (or file), she has it expertly read again, and passes more comments on to you. Academic authors need this; it’s often a lonely business writing books, and hard to be confident that you have yours right. You sign a contract, which you have had some input into first. You get an ‘advance’ on royalties – however small: for yours is only an academic book, after all. Then your publisher advises you about such matters as illustrations, if there are any, helping you to prepare them; and permissions and copyright, which of course she or her experts will be far more knowledgeable about than you. She will then get the book edited, either in-house or by independent editors: not only for spelling, grammar, consistency and ‘house style’, but also to spot inclarities and repetitions – always the most difficult things for an author to see – and, if you are lucky, to check facts. Obviously, the results of this – typically several pages of comments – are sent on to you.

The two of you discuss publicity, possibly with her marketing manager physically present, to which you, of course, will be able to contribute valuably, from your knowledge of the people, journals, societies and professional bodies who are most likely to take up the book: the key target audiences, in other words. The publisher, or her staff, will have contacts with general newspaper review editors and people in the non-print media, which will help. (‘I was talking with John Humphries the other day…’) During the long process of preparation and production she will keep in touch with you about developments, without your asking (because you won’t know what the developments are), and in general make you feel that the baby is still yours, even though you’ve passed it into nurse’s hands. If there’s to be a ‘launch’ (christening?), the publisher will suggest and arrange it. At the end of the day you can feel jointly proud of the bright young book that has emerged from this; and which it goes without saying she will have sent you the first copy of, hot from the press. She knows how you long to put it to your breast! That’s how academic book-birth ought to be.

I call it an ideal; but in fact this has been my experience of academic publishers for over forty years now, since my own first book came out under the Macmillan imprint in 1968. Publishing has changed in many ways since then: Macmillan no longer survives under that name, for example; but every publisher I have worked with since then (bar one) has closely conformed to this model. They are a wonderful species. But I’m now beginning to wonder whether they might not be an endangered one.

One hears alarming stories: of publishers struggling, even the entire print media’s struggling, in the face of electronic publishing, digital scanning, Kindle, and so on. Standards are falling. Advances are shrinking. One academic author of my acquaintance is being asked to pay A$ 4,000 to have her own book copy-edited. My own most recent experience of an academic publisher doesn’t quite mirror that. They didn’t have my book edited at all, in the sense described above. Nor did they send it out for peer review, either as a proposal or as a completed manuscript. Maybe they trusted to my reputation, which I suppose was flattering, but is not sufficient (another of my publishers has sent out a proposal for a fifth edition to readers); and took no account of the fact that this book was on a subject outside my normal area of expertise. They probably didn’t read it – showed no sign of it, in any case. They declined any help over illustrations, copyright, and ‘permissions’. When I requested a small advance to cover the unexpected cost of illustrations, they refused me – though that is the least of my complaints. They never wrote to keep me in touch about the progress of the book, even when they made substantial alterations to the form of it, and decided to change the publication date – with the result that I booked the wrong flight back to the UK. They took not a blind bit of notice of any of the valuable suggestions I made about review copies, publicity, and so on; and when I asked (after publication) what had become of the idea I had passed on to them earlier from the Foreign Office for a launch there (the book is about the building), calmly told me that this sort of thing was up to authors to arrange. They didn’t send me my first copy of the book until some time after they had stocked Amazon. It goes without saying that they never bought me lunch. Throughout the whole process I was made to feel that I no longer had any interest in the book. It was now theirs. Marx would have called this ‘capitalist alienation’.

Early on in our relationship I sensed that things were going wrong. The chap I was dealing with seemed only interested in ‘presentation’, to the extent of trying to force on me a title that bore no relation to the subject matter of the book, simply because he thought it might remind punters of another moderately successful work of mine: in the first draft of my contract, in fact, it goes under the name of The Absent-Minded Architects. He also didn’t reply to emails. As a result I asked if I could withdraw from our arrangement, repaying any expenses they might have incurred (they won’t have come to much); only to be told that if I did they wouldn’t allow me to publish the book with anyone else. I’m still not certain whether that has any legal basis; but I didn’t risk it, and it got me looking through our contract again, when I realized how very one-sided it was. In brief: they, the publisher, could cancel it if they didn’t like the book, but I had no corresponding right to cancel if I didn’t like them. My obligations were spelled out in detail; theirs, apart from some very material ones – a publication date, my royalties, copyright, and my ‘free copies’ – were not. Nothing, for example, about peer-reviewing, or editing, or marketing. I probably didn’t notice this at the time because these were part of my understanding of what academic publishers basically did. Other publishers I have spoken to agree. Most think the lack of peer-review, in particular, is ‘bizarre’.

After the book had been published I raised these specific questions with the publisher; only to be fobbed off with arrogant and anodyne responses: ‘we’re quite happy with our procedures; look at our list’ and the like. They also boasted of their success in winning an award recently, for ‘Best Independent Publisher of the Year’. (I looked up the citation. It was for turning the company around financially. Could that have been at the expense of the services they are supposed to provide?) What I wanted to know from them was whether my experiences with them were typical – whether they make a rule of not sending MSS to readers and editors, for example; of disregarding authors’ suggestions about marketing; and not keeping in touch generally – or whether I was simply unlucky. The fact that they refused to respond to these points, or to this article when I favoured them with a preview of it, should be borne in mind if they try to come back on it. They’ve had their chance. If they had deigned to engage with me I probably wouldn’t have gone into print in this way. So they only have themselves to blame.

I came to this publisher accidentally – they had just swallowed up the smaller firm I had originally approached – which was unfortunate. It was naïve of me not to have checked up on them. But herein lies a lesson for younger academics looking to publish their books: to take advice, and look around. You’ll find a number of publishers – I’m sure mine isn’t the only one – proudly advertising themselves as ‘academic’; which they are in the sense that they publish academic books. But they perform few of the other functions that most of us older academics have grown used to from academic publishers. So, young academic, be warned. If a no-frills type of publisher is what you want, like a no-frills airline – it gets you there, but in minimal comfort – then fair enough. (Of course, it would help if they pointed this out to you beforehand. At least you know what you’re likely to get from Ryanair.) But there are better, more helpful publishers out there, if your book is good enough; which will hopefully survive for some years to come. Secondly, you might try to get some reassurances about the services you expect them provide written into your contract. Otherwise you might be reduced to fuming impotently, in journals like this.

Bernard Shaw once famously dismissed all publishers as ‘rascals… without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. The one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them.’ I never up to now agreed with the first part of that, and still do not. But after my experience with Continuum, I’m coming round to the second. If publishers no longer have to get books type-set (we do that ourselves, on our computers), don’t get them peer-reviewed or properly edited, don’t help or advise on matters in which they must have more professional knowledge (like copyright), disregard authors’ usually pertinent advice about publicity, never consult about anything, and in general ignore us poor begetters of our books: what on earth is the use of them?

A small gripe. I get a bit fed up with Swedish friends suggesting – even jokingly – that I must have some latent ‘imperialist’ DNA in me because I’m British, and even more when they learn that I write about the British Empire. If they read my books (especially the latest, British Imperial) they’ll know that’s not true. More irritating, however, is the high moral ground they take to shoot these barbs (or jokes) down from. Sweden – that paragon of liberal social-democratic virtue – is entirely innocent of imperialism, even in the past. Isn’t that so?

Well, actually, it isn’t. OK, the Vikings were a long time ago; as were the Normans, who were ‘North-men’ originally, and subjected England to her most brutal colonial conquest in the eleventh century – amounting to almost a genocide in Yorkshire, where I live; and, in addition, bequeathed to her most of the noble families whose descendants became the leading British imperialists later on. (So, going back, our imperialism was all the Scandinavians’ fault.) Don’t be fooled, by the way, by the excuse that the Swedish Vikings, as opposed to the Danes and Norwegians, were peaceful traders rather than marauders. They did their share of raping and pillaging, albeit in an easterly direction; and traded in slaves. Later Sweden took several ‘proper’ colonies in Africa, eastern North America and the West Indies, abolishing slavery in the last of these a full twenty years after Britain abolished it in her empire; had an ‘East India Company’ just like England’s; ruled over Norway, Finland, northern Germany and the Baltic states at various times; did much of the dirty work in other nations’ colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (like the awful Belgian Congo); were the leading colonial settlers in Wisconsin and Michigan; and still could be said to exert what today is often called an ‘informal’ imperial sway all over the world, through IKEA, H&M and Clas Ohlson. (Far-fetched? But if the spread of American MacDonalds eateries can be described as ‘imperialism’, then so can this.)

All this isn’t to denigrate the Swedes in particular (God forbid!); but merely to show that any people can be ‘imperialistic’, and most have been at one time or another, ever since the Cro-magnons displaced the apparently much nicer Neanderthals (we’re not sure exactly how) 30,000 years ago. Imperialism, in other words, is a normal, and maybe even a ‘natural’, collective human activity. Sweden was implicated too.

But not of course any of my Swedish friends, who can’t be blamed for crimes committed before their time; as neither, however, can I. – There, that’s off my chest.

PS. Researching some time ago for a conference paper on historical British attitudes to Scandinavia – alas, never published – I found a couple of late-mediaeval/early-modern sources claiming that the European peoples as a whole originated in the forests of Scandinavia, swarming down imperialistically in hordes (waving their flat-pack swords, no doubt) to populate the whole of a previously quite empty continent. One of the names given to Scandinavia then, deriving from this, was vagina gentium. Oh dear.