It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, October 10, 2022
Colonial America Is a Myth
Pekka Hämäläinen - TIME
There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes something like this: Columbus stumbles upon a strange continent and brings back stories of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing New World as possible. Even as they clash, they ignite an era of colonial expansion that lasts roughly four centuries, from the conquest of Hispaniola in 1492 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Between those two moments, European empires and the nascent American empire amass souls, slaves, and territory, dispossessing and destroying hundreds of Indigenous societies. The Indians fight back but cannot stop the onslaught. Resourceful and defiant though they might be, they are no match for the newcomers and their raw ambition, superior technology, and lethal microbes that penetrate Native bodies with shocking ease. Indians are doomed; Europeans are destined to take over the continent; history moved irreversibly toward Indigenous destruction.
But there is another story we can tell, challenging the notion that colonial expansion was inevitable, and that colonialism defined the continent, as well as the experiences of those living on it.
Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. By 1776, various European colonial powers together claimed nearly all of the continent for themselves, but Indigenous peoples and powers controlled it. The maps in modern textbooks that paint much of early North America with neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial claims for actual holdings.
From the beginning of colonialism in North America to the Lakotas’ final military triumphs, a multitude of Native nations fought fiercely to keep their territories intact and their cultures untainted, frustrating the imperial pretensions of France, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and eventually the United States. When American history is detached from mainstream historical narratives that privilege European ambitions for power, European perspectives, and European sources, the record shows instead—time and time again, and across centuries—that Indians blocked and demolished colonial projects, relying on sophisticated political systems of kinship that allowed for flexible diplomacy and war-making, continuously reshaping borders on the continent and thwarting colonial ambitions.
Both Red Cloud’s War and the Battle of Little Bighorn—in which the Lakota Indians and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies defeated the U.S.—have entered the history books as flukes, blamed on poor leadership and on a canny enemy familiar with the terrain. Seen from the Native American perspective, however, Red Cloud’s War and Custer’s Last Stand appear not as historical anomalies, but as the logical culmination of a long history of Indigenous power in North America. They were more expected than extraordinary.
There are many examples of similar inversions that occurred with other notable battles: the Pequot and Raritan massacres of 1637 and 1644, respectively, seemed to mark the sweeping collapse of Indigenous power in the Northeast. In truth, the massacres exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule. The wars with the far more numerous and larger Native nations stretched the colonists near their breaking point. At midcentury, colonial settlements in North America consisted of some two dozen seaside towns and a handful of forts of little consequence on the coastal plains; curbed by Indigenous power, the English colonists had spread up and down along the Atlantic coast, latching onto its sheltering estuaries and managing only fleeting inroads into the continent’s interior. The Appalachians and the lands west of them remained largely unknown to white people.
The violent clashes between Native Americans and colonists during the late 1670s, which came to be known as Metacom’s War, or King Philip’s War to the English, were a shocking calamity to the colonists, even in apparent victory. New England had lost six hundred soldiers, roughly ten percent of its strength, and at least a thousand colonists had died. The colony suffered the loss of a staggering £150,000 in property at a time when £100 was a very comfortable yearly salary. More than a thousand colonial homes had been burned, and some two dozen towns had been either destroyed or severely damaged. The English would not reoccupy their prewar borders until 1700.
At the end of the seventeenth century, nearly simultaneous Indigenous rebellions against European imperial ambitions in all regions of North America almost thwarted English, French, and Spanish colonists. Although suffering defeats, Native Americans had rolled colonialism back in different corners of the continent, forcing colonists to retreat, recalibrate their ambitions, and reconsider their ingrained ideas about Native peoples. What made the Indigenous resistance so effective throughout the 18th and well into the 19th century were their systems of kinship and diplomacy which allowed them to recruit soldiers from several nations and forge strategic alliances that played colonial powers off of one another.
When the Indian wars finally came to an end in 1877, the United States was both imperious and exhausted. Since its founding in 1776, there had been more than sixteen hundred official military engagements with Native Americans. Moreover, while fighting Indians, the U.S. had descended into a draining and demoralizing Civil War that had claimed as many as 750,000 American lives. When peace finally came, the U.S. committed to completing not one but two reconstructions, of the American South and of the Indigenous West. Compared to the reconstruction of the American South, which involved conciliatory elements, the Indigenous reconstruction was, on the whole, harsh and vindictive, featuring more “civilization programs,” boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian to save the man,” and land policies that labeled Indigenous territories “surplus land.”
The four-hundred-year struggle to keep the continent Indigenous had stretched colonists from the European powers, and then the U.S., to the breaking point again and again. The enormous range of Native nations and the sheer depth and multiplicity of their resistance had frustrated the colonists, if it did not kill them. Some nations relied on naked force and numbers to corral and punish colonial powers, while others sought alliances with them. Some forged ties to other Native nations and reinvented themselves as confederacies, such as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, who were the dominant imperial power in the heart of North America for generations, and in the early nineteenth century the Comanches and Lakotas built empires of their own, in part to survive colonialism. Instead of fighting these Indigenous powers, the colonists placated them. They desperately wanted to be allies and not enemies. They sided with power.
Smaller nations relied on more nuanced and delicate tactics. Rather than confronting colonial powers directly in battle, they evaded them by making themselves small and inconspicuous, using the striking environmental variety of North America. The Catawbas, Shoshones, Utes, Nez Perces, Blackfoot, Seminoles, and others found refuge in deserts, mountains, and swamps, evading the settler empires that struggled with difficult and strange terrain, while the Shawnees, “the greatest travellers in America,” countered colonial displacement with a highly organized Indigenous diaspora. In the lower Mississippi Valley, the petites nations made themselves into forceful regional powers through strategic mobility, calculated violence, and expedient alliances, keeping just ahead of the imperial gaze of the surrounding colonial empires.
Indigenous power in North America reached its apogee in the mid- to late nineteenth century, which, at first glance, appears counterintuitive. This was the period when the country emerged onto the world stage with its “monstrous contiguous economic territories,” inspiring awe and fear in Germany and fueling an impression as the “greatest menace” in Italy. Subduing independent Native nations and erasing their sovereignty seemed to the imperial U.S. a straightforward problem of plying its overwhelming military might and technological advances, including railroads. But the Indigenous nations, too, reinvented themselves, in part as a response to the rising American empire. The powerful Comanches reduced much of the Mexican Republic to an extractive hinterland, enabling them to reign over an oversized section of the hemisphere. The Lakotas, relying on their equestrian mobility, their broad alliance network, and their generations-long experience of blocking colonial ambitions, emerged as the leading guardians of the Indigenous continent. Over a period of seven decades, they foiled U.S. expansion again and again, protecting in the process scores of smaller and more vulnerable nations. Looking east from the North American West, the history of North America emerges as a single story of resolute resistance that kept much of the continent Indigenous for generations.
Set against the deep history of the Indigenous continent, American history looks fundamentally different. So does the American present. Today, sovereign Indigenous America persists in the dynamism of modern Native communities, in the endurance of traditional ways of life, and in the continuation and evolution of the primary Indian response to colonialism: resistance.
'Stranger Things' music coordinator on reigniting love for Kate Bush
Agence France-Presse October 10, 2022 The 63-year-old Kate Bush, pictured here in an undated photo, has returned to the top of the music charts after her "Running Up That Hill" song was featured in the hit Netflix drama "Stranger Things." Trevor LEIGHTON FISH PEOPLE/AFP/File
The woman who picked Kate Bush for "Stranger Things", creating an unlikely summer smash, says Bush's song allowed the world a much-needed sigh of relief after the stress of the pandemic.
As the Emmy-winning music coordinator for the Netflix show, Nora Felder takes a big part of the credit for turning "Running Up That Hill", a song first released in 1985, into arguably the defining song of 2022.
After Bush's song featured on season four in May, it saw an 8,700-percent boost on Spotify, hitting the number one slot around the world.
"No-one imagined what it would become. It swept the world," Felder told AFP.
"I think the song was a way for the world to exhale, to let go of their breath.
"The primary message of the song is stepping out of your shoes and understanding what the people around you are going through, that sometimes it's a long road to the top.
"And I think we all felt trapped and didn't know what was going to happen with the pandemic and everything else."
'Kate is very particular'
Felder's job is more than just sitting around thinking of great tunes for a scene. Her day is filled with budgets, copyright negotiations, hiring bands and composers.
"I'm usually involved in the very early stages of the scripts," she said.
"It helps me a lot to have the stories in my head, to start building song ideas before it's shot. When I get to know the characters, that's when the ideas start coming to me."
It was a tense moment when she approached Bush's representatives, not knowing the singer-songwriter was already a fan of the show.
"Because Kate is very particular about how her songs are used, I took a lot of time preparing the context and what it meant to the story and the characters," Felder said.
"Kate approved it because she understood and accepted the vision that the Duffer brothers (the showrunners) had created."
It was a huge relief.
"I did have other selections but that was the best one. This song ticked all the check marks -- the message behind the song, the way it built, the way it resonated with everything Max (the character) had gone through."
'Open their ears'
Felder's other major success in season four was using "Master of Puppets" by Metallica.
She credits the love for character Eddie, who plays the song, with helping it connect to non-metal fans.
"Because the audience fell in love with Eddie, it made them open their ears to the song that exemplified him. They are tough on the outside but on the inside, there's an emotionality," she said.
"'Stranger Things' is magical. People love the characters so much that it allows them to keep their mind open."
Metallica sent Felder flowers on the day she won the Emmy for music supervision last month.
"And they followed me on Twitter. I'm still a little kid with certain bands, and I was thinking: 'Oh my god, Metallica followed me!'" she said.
Felder began her career in music production, assisting on albums by Paul Simon, Sinead O'Connor and Iggy Pop, before moving into soundtracks on "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" and TV shows like "Ray Donovan" and "Baskets".
With another season of "Stranger Things" in the pipeline, the pressure is on.
"With what happened this year, I suspect a lot of artists are going to be hoping they can be the next 'Running Up That Hill'," she said.
"Who knows, maybe there will be another one or two."
Salon October 10, 2022 Michael Moore / Shutterstock
Remember when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election? No, I don't just mean win the popular vote: Win it all and win big. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's political projection site, had Clinton's chances of winning at 71.4 percent. Frank Luntz tweeted on Nov. 8, 2016, "Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States." One GOP insider declared that for Trump to win, "it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of 'Death to America.'" Pundit after pundit, on the left and the right, joined the chorus of mainstream news outlets to declare that the election was Clinton's.
There was, however, one lone voice of dissent: Michael Moore. In July 2016, Moore wrote "Five Reasons Trump Will Be President." That article mostly went unnoticed by mainstream media after the election, when everyone finally realized Moore was right but it was way too late to make a difference.
Fast forward to the 2022 midterms and we find ourselves in a similar scenario, but turned upside down. Now the media is basically repeating again and again that Democrats will lose in November, while Moore is suggesting the opposite. Moore isn't just echoing the widespread notion that Democrats could hold the Senate while losing the House. He is suggesting that voters "are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy."
That prediction is likely to cause hyperventilation at all points of the political spectrum. Could he really be right?
To make his point, Moore is going beyond armchair punditry and sending out what he is calling a "tsunami of truth," where each day leading up to the election he offers one specific factual reason why he is right and why it makes sense to be optimistic.
If an 18-year-old high school student can beat a Republican incumbent in Boise, Idaho, Moore argues, something is happening that the media can't see.]
In his second installment, he covered the story of the recent election for the Boise Board of Education, in which Republican Steve Schmidt, an incumbent, was up for re-election. Considering that Trump won Idaho's capital city with 73 percent of the vote, it made sense to assume Schmidt would win again. But as Moore explains, Schmidt had been endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials "smut-filled pornography." According to Moore, they even showed up at local Extinction Rebellion climate strikes brandishing AR-15 assault rifles.
So in a surprising turn of events, the Idaho Statesman, Boise's daily news paper, chose not to endorse Schmidt because he refused to denounce the Idaho Liberty Dogs. Instead, the paper endorsed his opponent, an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of Extinction Rebellion.
Rajbhandari won. A teenager beat a Republican incumbent in a traditionally red city in one of the reddest states. Moore's point is that if these kinds of seismic shifts are happening at the polls in Boise, there's reason to think that this election won't follow traditional patterns. Voters, he believes, have had enough of the power of right-wing extremists and the threat they pose to democratic values.
In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last elections. As Moore explains it, "Only because of the slave states' demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans' #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy."
That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history." He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."
No. 10 on Moore's list is Mathew DePerno, Republican candidate for attorney general in Michigan. Like nine other candidates in the 30 state attorney general races this fall, DePerno is an election denier. But he's not just a common, garden-variety election denier; he was allegedly personally involved in a voting system breach. That's right: the Republican candidate who hopes to become Michigan's top law enforcement official is under investigation by the current attorney general for "unauthorized access to voting equipment."
But that isn't the half of it. DePerno also thinks that the Plan B birth control pill is a "form of murder." Moore explains that DePerno "believes that 'life' doesn't begin at conception — he insists it begins BEFORE conception and it should be against the law for anyone to interrupt a sperm on its way to do its 'job.'" As if that weren't enough to categorize DePerno as batshit extreme, he has attacked his opponent with memes that include the white supremacist symbol of Pepe the Frog while comparing his campaign to delivering Michiganders a "really big red pill." Not a Plan B pill, which he likens to fentanyl.
Confirming Moore's view that DePerno's extremism will only going to appeal to a narrow Trumper base, the twitter replies to DePerno are uniformly critical and sarcastic. Like this: "I did nazi that coming. (actually, I did.)." Or this: "I want what you are smoking." Or this post, from @NeverTrumpTexan, "You could just say you were Nazi. It is much easier than what ever that is." Surveying the 50 most recent replies to his tweet, among which include one from Keith Olbermann, every single one is critical and sarcastic.
Moore's 45-day "tsunami of truth" is a clever way to tap into the energy he has described as "Roevember." Moore coined the term back in August, when a funny thing happened in Kansas. Six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansas held an election, which included proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. In a surprising shift from typical voting demographics, turnout for the vote was massive, 60 percent higher than in 2018 — and Kansans overwhelmingly voted to reject the anti-abortion amendment.
So if we're seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.
Which leads us to wonder why the media isn't covering that story, but is still offering the same stale script about Biden's low favorability and Republican chances of taking back both the House and the Senate. Even Jen Psaki, Biden's former White House press secretary turned MSNBC commentator, offered the downer view that the president wasn't helping his party win.
Media coverage matters. And the fact that the media is largely sticking to pre-established coverage patterns doesn't just mean that it's missing the story, as Moore claims, it also means it's likely influencing the outcome of the election — and not in a good way.
Scholars of media effects know that when news coverage focuses primarily on negative personality coverage, i.e., the "horse race," turnout is depressed. When media focuses on policy, however, including contentious issues like abortion, turnout improves. So all the attention to Biden's supposed unpopularity is not helping.
Further, if the news media tells you the results are a foregone conclusion, that also depresses turnout. I mean, if you are told over and over again that you are going to lose no matter what you do, why bother voting? Even more important, research shows that if the media suggests an election will be close, turnout increases. Some scholars have speculated that the fact that right-wing news outlets reported that the election was close in 2016 elevated the Trump vote, while smug reporting from more liberal outlets, assuming Clinton would win easily, depressed her vote.
Yet almost all news media in the weeks before a major election focuses on predicting the outcome, rather than debating the issues. What's more, the flurry of attention paid to polling, and all the hand-wringing over whether the polling is accurate, only exacerbate the problem. Obsessing over whether or not a given candidate or party will win does almost nothing to help energize voter turnout and engage citizens.
But there's more. For decades, media scholars have described what they call the "protest paradigm." These are the predictable patterns journalists follow when covering protests. They include, for example, a habit of focusing on "small, inappropriate samples of individual protesters," which leads the audience to misunderstand the true nature of the larger movement. The protest paradigm also refers to the news media's habit of allowing elites to frame the story, which misses the positions of average citizens. Even worse, Indiana University professor Danielle Brown explains that this type of coverage "favors spectacle, conflict, disruption and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo."
Moore suggests the media is "either too overworked or too lazy or too white and too male to open their eyes and see the liberal/ left/progressive/working class and female uprising that is right now underway."
We can observe many of the same habits when the press covers elections. And given that this election in particular could be understood as a protest vote — protesting the assault on women's rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, democratic rights, etc. — it makes sense to think of this election more in terms of a mass movement than as an example of democracy as usual.
Framing the upcoming vote as a mass uprising of nonviolent civil resistance is exactly Moore's plan. As he explains, his goal isn't just to offer the public another version of the truth; it is also to call out the problems with media coverage. "Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong," he writes. "They are simply regurgitating old narratives and stale scripts. They are either too overworked or too lazy or too white and too male to open their eyes and see the liberal/ left/progressive/working class and female uprising that is right now underway."
Moore has a long history of questioning the status quo and bucking conventional thought patterns. Whether getting booed off the Academy Awards stage for opposing the war in Iraq or being the lone voice predicting that Trump would win, Moore has never shied away from disagreeing with the pundit class and political elites. But he doesn't just do it for shock value; he does it because he's paying attention to the political climate in ways the mainstream media tends not to.
Is Moore right that there will be a tsunami of voters determined to defeat the enemies of democracy? The only way to learn the answer is to stop trying to read the tea leaves and focus on making it happen.
Three US-based economists given Nobel Prize for work on banks
In this Nov. 7, 2017, file photo, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke attends a ceremony awarding them both with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government, on Capitol Hill in Washington. 2022's Nobel Prize in economic sciences has been awarded to three U.S.-based economists “for research on banks and financial crises.”The award to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig was announced Monday, Oct.10, 2022 by the Nobel panel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
This year's Nobel Prize in economic sciences has been awarded to the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, and two U.S.-based economists, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig, "for research on banks and financial crises."
The prize was announced Monday by the Nobel panel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
The committee said their work had shown in their research "why avoiding bank collapses is vital."
Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10.
Unlike the other prizes, the economics award wasn't established in Alfred Nobel's will of 1895 but by the Swedish central bank in his memory. The first winner was selected in 1969.
Last year, half of the award went to David Card for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market. The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for proposing how to study issues that don't easily fit traditional scientific methods.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
French author Annie Ernaux won this year's Nobel Prize in literature Thursday. The panel commended her for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly mine her experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s.
The Nobel Peace Prize went to jailed Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian group Memorial and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties on Friday.
Nobel committee press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2022
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2022 to
Ben S. Bernanke
The Brookings Institution, Washington DC, U.S.
Douglas W. Diamond
University of Chicago, IL, U.S.
Philip H. Dybvig
Washington University in St. Louis, MO, U.S.
"for research on banks and financial crises"
Their discoveries improved how society deals with financial crises
This year's laureates in the Economic Sciences, Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, have significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises. An important finding in their research is why avoiding bank collapses is vital.
Modern banking research clarifies why we have banks, how to make them less vulnerable in crises and how bank collapses exacerbate financial crises. The foundations of this research were laid by Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig in the early 1980s. Their analyses have been of great practical importance in regulating financial markets and dealing with financial crises.
For the economy to function, savings must be channelled to investments. However, there is a conflict here: savers want instant access to their money in case of unexpected outlays, while businesses and homeowners need to know they will not be forced to repay their loans prematurely. In their theory, Diamond and Dybvig show how banks offer an optimal solution to this problem. By acting as intermediaries that accept deposits from many savers, banks can allow depositors to access their money when they wish, while also offering long-term loans to borrowers.
However, their analysis also showed how the combination of these two activities makes banks vulnerable to rumours about their imminent collapse. If a large number of savers simultaneously run to the bank to withdraw their money, the rumour may become a self-fulfilling prophecy—a bank run occurs and the bank collapses. These dangerous dynamics can be prevented through the government providing deposit insurance and acting as a lender of last resort to banks.
Diamond demonstrated how banks perform another societally important function. As intermediaries between many savers and borrowers, banks are better suited to assessing borrowers' creditworthiness and ensuring that loans are used for good investments.
Ben Bernanke analysed the Great Depression of the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in modern history. Among other things, he showed how bank runs were a decisive factor in the crisis becoming so deep and prolonged. When the banks collapsed, valuable information about borrowers was lost and could not be recreated quickly. Society's ability to channel savings to productive investments was thus severely diminished.
"The laureates' insights have improved our ability to avoid both serious crises and expensive bailouts," says Tore Ellingsen, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
The laureates explained the central role of banks in financial crises
The Great Depression of the 1930s paralysed the world's economies for many years and had vast societal consequences. However, we have managed subsequent financial crises better thanks to research insights from this year's laureates in the Economic Sciences, Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. They have demonstrated the importance of preventing widespread bank collapses.
We all have some sort of relationship to banks. Our regular income is placed in a bank account and we use the bank's means of payment, such as mobile banking apps or bank cards, when we shop at a supermarket or pay a restaurant bill. At some time in our lives, many of us will need to take a large bank loan, for example to buy a house or apartment. The same applies to businesses—they need to be able to make and receive payments and to finance their investments. In most cases, these services are also provided via a bank.
We take for granted that these services function as they should, perhaps with the exception of brief technical problems. Sometimes, however, all or parts of the banking system fail and a financial crisis arises. Important banks collapse, borrowing becomes more expensive or impossible, prices plunge for property and other assets. If this progression is not stopped, the entire economy can enter a downward spiral of rapidly increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. Some of the biggest economic collapses in history have been financial crises.
Important questions about banks
If banking collapses can cause so much damage, could we manage without banks? Must banks be so unstable and, if so, why? How can society improve the stability of the banking system? Why do the consequences of a banking crisis last so long? And, if banks fail, why can't new ones immediately be established so the economy quickly gets back on its feet? In the early 1980s, this year's laureates, Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig laid the scientific foundation for modern research into these issues in three articles.
Diamond and Dybvig developed theoretical models that explain why banks exist, how their role in society makes them vulnerable to rumours about their impending collapse, and how society can lessen this vulnerability. These insights form the foundation of modern bank regulation.
Through statistical analysis and historical source research, Bernanke demonstrated how failing banks played a decisive role in the global depression of the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in modern history. The collapse of the banking system explains why the downturn was not only deep, but also long-lasting.
Bernanke's research shows that bank crises can potentially have catastrophic consequences. This insight illustrates the importance of well-functioning bank regulation, and was also the reasoning behind crucial elements of economic policy during the financial crisis of 2008–2009. At this time, Bernanke was head of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, and was able to put knowledge from research into policy. Later, when the pandemic hit in 2020, significant measures were taken to avoid a global financial crisis. The laureates' insights have played an important role in ensuring these latter crises did not develop into new depressions with devastating consequences for society.
Bank crises led to depression
The work for which Bernanke is now being recognised is formulated in an article from 1983, which analyses the Great Depression of the 1930s. Between January 1930 and March 1933, US industrial production fell by 46 per cent and unemployment rose to 25 per cent. The crisis spread like wildfire, resulting in a deep economic downturn in much of the world. In Great Britain, unemployment increased to 25 per cent and to 29 per cent in Australia. In Germany, industrial production almost halved and more than one third of the workforce was out of work. In Chile, national income fell by 33 per cent between 1929 and 1932. Everywhere, banks collapsed, people were forced to leave their homes and widespread starvation occurred even in relatively rich countries. The world's economies slowly began to recover only towards the middle of the decade.
Before Bernanke published his article, the conventional wisdom among experts was that the depression could have been prevented if the US central bank had printed more money. Bernanke also shared the opinion that a shortage of money probably contributed to the downturn, but believed this mechanism could not explain why the crisis was so deep and protracted. Instead, Bernanke showed that its main cause was the decline in the banking system's ability to channel savings into productive investments. Using a combination of historical sources and statistical methods, his analysis showed which factors were important in the drop in GDP, gross domestic product. He found that factors that were directly linked to failing banks accounted for the lion's share of the downturn.
The depression began with a fairly normal recession in 1929 but, in 1930, it developed into a banking crisis. The number of banks halved in three years, in many cases due to bank runs. These happen when people who have deposited money in a bank become worried about the bank's survival, and so rush to withdraw their savings. If enough people do this simultaneously, the bank's reserves cannot cover all the withdrawals and it will be forced to conduct a fire sale of assets at potentially huge losses. Ultimately, this may drive the bank into bankruptcy.
The fear of more bank runs led to falling deposits in the remaining banks, and many banks were afraid to grant new loans. Instead, deposits were invested in assets that could be sold quickly in case depositors suddenly wanted to withdraw their money. These problems with obtaining bank loans made it difficult for businesses to finance their investments, as well as huge financial hardship for farmers and ordinary households. The result was the worst global recession in modern history.
Prior to Bernanke's study, the general perception was that the banking crisis was a consequence of a declining economy, rather than a cause of it. Instead, Bernanke established that bank collapses were decisive for the recession developing into deep and prolonged depression. Once a bank goes bankrupt, the relationship between the bank and its borrowers is cut; this relationship contains knowledge capital that is necessary for the bank to manage its lending efficiently. The bank knows its borrowers, it has detailed information about what borrowers have used the money for and what requirements are needed to ensure the loan will be repaid. Building up such knowledge capital takes a long while, and it cannot simply be transferred to other lenders when a bank fails. Repairing a failed banking system can therefore take many years, during which time the economy functions very poorly. Bernanke demonstrated that the economy did not start to recover until the state finally implemented powerful measures to prevent additional bank panics.
Why are banks necessary?
To understand why a banking crisis can have such enormous consequences for society, we need to know what banks actually do: they receive money from people making deposits and channel it to borrowers. This financial intermediation is far from a simple mechanical transfer, because there are fundamental conflicts between the needs of savers and investors. Someone who takes out a loan to finance a home or a long-term investment must know that the lender will not suddenly demand their money back. On the other hand, a saver wants to have at least some of their savings instantly available for unexpected outlays.
Society must somehow resolve these conflicts. If companies or households can be forced to repay their loans at any time, long-term investments become impossible. This would have devastating consequences. The economy cannot function without a financial system that creates enough readily accessible and secure means of payment. Imagine what would happen if you had to pay for your supermarket purchases with a claim on part of your house every time you went shopping.
Diamond and Dybvig's model
Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig showed that the problems we have described can best be solved by institutions that are constructed exactly like banks. In an article from 1983, Diamond and Dybvig develop a theoretical model that explains how banks create liquidity for savers, while borrowers can access long-term financing. Despite this model being relatively simple, it captures the central mechanisms of banking—why it works, but also how the system is inherently vulnerable and thus needs regulation.
The model in the article is based upon households saving some of their income, as well as needing to be able to withdraw their money when they wish. No one knows in advance whether and when the need for money will arise, but this does not happen at the same time for every household. Meanwhile, there are investment projects that need financing. These projects are profitable in the longterm, but if they are terminated early, the returns will be very low.
In an economy without banks, the households must make direct investments in these projects. Households that need money at short notice will be forced to terminate the projects early, and will consequently experience very poor returns, with only a small amount of money available for consumption. On the other hand, households that do not need to terminate projects early will enjoy good returns and higher consumption. In such a situation, households will demand a solution that allows them to instantly access their money without this leading to very low returns. Because this solution will be valuable, they will be prepared to accept somewhat lower long-term returns.
In their article, Diamond and Dybvig explain how banks naturally arise as intermediaries and provide this solution. The bank offers accounts where households can deposit their money. It then lends the money to long-term projects. Depositors can withdraw their money when they want, without losing as much as if they had made a direct investment but terminated the project early. These higher returns are financed by households that save for longer thus giving up some long-term returns, compared to if they had made a direct investment in the project.
Banks create money
Diamond and Dybvig show that this process is how banks create liquidity. The money in the depositors' accounts is a liability for the bank, while the bank's assets consist of loans to long-term projects. The bank's assets have a long maturity, because it promises borrowers that they will not need to pay back their loans early. On the other hand, the bank's liabilities have a short maturity; depositors can access their money whenever they want. The bank is an intermediary that transforms assets with long maturity into bank accounts with short maturity. This is usually called maturity transformation.
Savers can use their deposit accounts for direct payments. The bank has thus created money, not from thin air but from the long-term investment projects to which it has lent money. Banks are sometimes criticised for creating money, but here we see that this is precisely why they exist.
Vulnerable to rumours
It is easy to see that maturity transformation is valuable to society, but the laureates also demonstrate that the banks' business model is vulnerable. A rumour may start, saying that more savers than the bank can cope with are about to withdraw their money. Regardless of whether this rumour is true, it can send depositors rushing to the bank to withdraw their money in case the bank goes bankrupt. A bank run ensues. In an attempt to pay all its depositors, the bank is forced to recover its loans early, leading to long-term investment projects being terminated prematurely and assets being sold in fire sales. The resulting losses may cause the bank to collapse. The mechanism that Bernanke showed was the trigger for the depression in the 1930s is thus a direct consequence of banks' inherent vulnerability.
Diamond and Dybvig also present a solution to the problem of bank vulnerability, in the form of deposit insurance from the government. When depositors know that the state has guaranteed their money, they no longer need to rush to the bank as soon as rumours start about a bank run. This stops a bank run before it starts. The existence of a deposit insurance therefore entails, in theory, that it never needs to be used. This explains why most countries have now implemented these schemes.
Banks monitor borrowers…
In an article from 1984, Diamond analyses the conditions necessary for banks to take on another important task, namely monitoring borrowers to ensure they honour their commitments.
In reality, most investments are risky. Returns depend on factors such as general uncertainty and on how well the borrower has done their job. A borrower could try to avoid paying their debts by claiming that an investment failed due to bad luck. To prevent this, going bankrupt needs to be costly for borrowers. However, even borrowers who have done their jobs well and not wasted any money can sometimes go bankrupt, which creates unnecessary costs to society.
In his article, Diamond assumes that the bank can monitor borrowers at a certain cost. The bank makes an initial credit evaluation and then follows how the investment is progressing. Thanks to this, many bankruptcies can be avoided and societal costs are reduced. Without the bank as an intermediary, this type of monitoring would be too difficult or overly costly. All the individuals who have directly or indirectly invested in a project can hardly be expected to monitor that their money has been well managed. Instead, this monitoring is delegated to the bank.
…but who monitors the banks?
However, one difficulty remains. If the bank is monitoring the borrowers—who is monitoring the banks? In practice, we cannot rely on each depositor knowing whether the bank is doing its job properly. One of the conclusions in Diamond's article is that the way in which banks are organised means they do not need to be monitored by the depositors.
If the bank cuts corners on monitoring borrowers, it risks large losses on its loans. The bank would thus be unable to repay what it promised its depositors and collapse. Therefore, it is in the bank's own interest to monitor its borrowers without the depositors needing to monitor the bank.
Even if the bank performs its monitoring duties well, it will incur losses on some of its loans. However, the risk that a major bank will collapse due to this is small, as long as the bank manages its lending activities in a responsible manner. This is because a bank grants loans to a large number of borrowers. Even if a few borrowers default on their loans, the losses across all loans will be small and predictable. Not putting all their eggs in the same basket reduces the average risk in the bank's loans portfolio. Thanks to the bank acting as an intermediary, the costs are reduced for bankruptcy and monitoring borrowers. This benefits society as a whole.
Diamond and Dybvig also present a solution to the problem of bank vulnerability, in the form of deposit insurance from the government. When depositors know that the state has guaranteed their money, they no longer need to rush to the bank as soon as rumours start about a bank run. This stops a bank run before it starts. The existence of a deposit insurance therefore entails, in theory, that it never needs to be used. This explains why most countries have now implemented these schemes.
Banks monitor borrowers…
In an article from 1984, Diamond analyses the conditions necessary for banks to take on another important task, namely monitoring borrowers to ensure they honour their commitments.
In reality, most investments are risky. Returns depend on factors such as general uncertainty and on how well the borrower has done their job. A borrower could try to avoid paying their debts by claiming that an investment failed due to bad luck. To prevent this, going bankrupt needs to be costly for borrowers. However, even borrowers who have done their jobs well and not wasted any money can sometimes go bankrupt, which creates unnecessary costs to society.
In his article, Diamond assumes that the bank can monitor borrowers at a certain cost. The bank makes an initial credit evaluation and then follows how the investment is progressing. Thanks to this, many bankruptcies can be avoided and societal costs are reduced. Without the bank as an intermediary, this type of monitoring would be too difficult or overly costly. All the individuals who have directly or indirectly invested in a project can hardly be expected to monitor that their money has been well managed. Instead, this monitoring is delegated to the bank.
…but who monitors the banks?
However, one difficulty remains. If the bank is monitoring the borrowers—who is monitoring the banks? In practice, we cannot rely on each depositor knowing whether the bank is doing its job properly. One of the conclusions in Diamond's article is that the way in which banks are organised means they do not need to be monitored by the depositors.
If the bank cuts corners on monitoring borrowers, it risks large losses on its loans. The bank would thus be unable to repay what it promised its depositors and collapse. Therefore, it is in the bank's own interest to monitor its borrowers without the depositors needing to monitor the bank.
Even if the bank performs its monitoring duties well, it will incur losses on some of its loans. However, the risk that a major bank will collapse due to this is small, as long as the bank manages its lending activities in a responsible manner. This is because a bank grants loans to a large number of borrowers. Even if a few borrowers default on their loans, the losses across all loans will be small and predictable. Not putting all their eggs in the same basket reduces the average risk in the bank's loans portfolio. Thanks to the bank acting as an intermediary, the costs are reduced for bankruptcy and monitoring borrowers. This benefits society as a whole.
Abstract: Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell’s later works of political satire, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell’s writing about the East and of the East in his writing
Figure 1: Cover of Douglas Kerr’s Orwell and Empire, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell’s later works of political satire—in particular, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell’s writing about the East and of the East in his writing, arguing not only that empire was central to the writer’s cultural identity but also that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognised, in shaping the artist he became.
Ivan Franceschini: Let’s start from the basics. George Orwell today is mostly known for his later works of scathing political satire, especially Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As these books have taken on a life of their own, they have overshadowed other aspects of the writer’s life and work, including that based on his experiences as a police officer in Burma in the 1920s, such as the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the short essays ‘A Hanging’ (1931) and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936). Still, as you point out in your book, Orwell’s legacy cannot be properly assessed and comprehended without considering this side of his work. You write: ‘The five years spent in Burma would be a lifelong point of reference [for Orwell], and became the paradigm for his idea of political injustice. But the country haunted him in other ways too, and Burmese landscapes and faces continued to visit his dreams. Memories of the Orient are to be found in all his books … but it is directly present in his writing only intermittently’ (pp. 13–14). Can you tell us a bit about how Orwell’s life came to be entangled with the Raj (that is, the British Empire in India) and ‘the dirty work of empire’? What makes his viewpoint so unique and important?
Douglas Kerr: Orwell belonged to a very specific and identifiable (but now almost extinct) segment of the British middle class—families whose members had served and lived in what was still called the Orient in the time of the British Empire. These people were known as Anglo-Indians. His father had worked for the Government of India as an officer in the department that oversaw the growing and sale of opium—a government monopoly. But, in fact, his family on both sides had links with imperial work and trade over generations. It was not surprising that the young Orwell decided to join the Indian Imperial Police and chose to go to Burma (which came under the administration of the Raj), where he still had relatives. He was there for five years. He said he soon came to hate being part of ‘the machinery of despotism’, and when he left the East in 1927, he never returned.
The argument of my book is that Burma was Orwell’s school of politics and power; it was his political formation. He came to sympathise with the Burmese and other colonised peoples, but he had seen the relationship from the other side, as an agent and inheritor of empire. He resigned from the police and became an anti-imperialist, but he couldn’t stop being an Anglo-Indian. This experience coloured all his later writing. You are right to say he’s best known for his late works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which became talismanic Cold War texts. What I want to do in my book is to turn Orwell upside-down, as it were, and privilege the early experience and writing: ‘A Hanging’, Burmese Days, and the rest. To move the centre of gravity.
IF: In the book, you take significant issue with the approach that you call ‘Orwell our contemporary’. As you write: ‘Much of what Orwell wrote has startling applicability to issues and predicaments today, and a great deal of secondary literature is devoted to elucidating this relevance. However, Orwell is not our contemporary. To approach him as such risks missing much that makes him most specifically himself. Like any other historical figure, to see him clearly involves judging his distance from where we now stand’ (p. 5). When it comes to empire, what elements of Orwell’s critique remain relevant today and which ones fail to live up to the expectations of contemporary readers? How is his case relevant to our present debates about the legacy of empire?
DK: Though he wrote eloquently against empire all through his career, he found it difficult to unlearn the cultural assumptions that came with his upbringing and his experience in the colonised East. From time to time, we can find in his writing casual descriptions of Burmese and Indian people which may strike a modern reader as patronising or disrespectful, or worse. And though he was perfectly clear that the empire was ‘an old-fashioned and rather shaky despotism’ that could not be justified and should be dismantled as soon as possible, he was not prepared to say either that it was all bad or that the nationalism which would inevitably succeed it would be, shall we say, unproblematic. All this is to say that to be anti-imperialist in the twenty-first century is a relatively simple matter, but for Orwell it was not so. And if we want to recruit him for our contemporary struggles, we should read him carefully first, and take account of the historical circumstances in which he wrote. My book tries to re-historicise Orwell in this way. He was born in 1903. He is not our contemporary.
Figure 2: George Orwell (back row, third from left) doing his police training in Burma in 1923. Photo source: The Guardian.
IF: Throughout the book, you point out several issues that need to be unpacked in discussing Orwell’s critique of empire. One problem is Orwell’s seeming self-representation as a lone critical voice of empire (p. 69). Clearly that was not the case. Why do you think he chose to represent himself that way?
DK: I may have exaggerated this a bit! In 1938–39, he was briefly a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was staunchly anti-imperial and worked closely with anticolonial activists such as C.L.R. James and Jomo Kenyatta. Across the world, much of the anti-imperial discourse, and activism, in Orwell’s lifetime was coming from members of the Communist Party, and there were reasons, going back to his experience in Barcelona, why he was deeply suspicious of the communists. It’s also the case that Orwell enjoyed thinking of himself as an isolated rebel, in the right, but doomed to failure. He was never good at joining things. After leaving the police, and apart from his year or so of membership of the ILP, the only organisation he belonged to was the anarchist militia in Catalonia—a doubly ironic affiliation. He became an English socialist intellectual, but he writes at length in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) about how ghastly English socialist intellectuals are.
He was actually quite sociable, but he behaved like a loner, and he was uncomfortable belonging to groups, so he didn’t pay much attention to others who were involved in the struggle against empire. You might say this is a bit egotistical and childish, but this anarchistic streak in him did ensure that he never thought or wrote to follow a party line. He went his own way. As for the anti-imperialist struggle, I’m not sure he really believed that the end of empire could be initiated in his lifetime. And though the British had delayed and delayed the inevitable, when independence came to the Indian Subcontinent, it came remarkably fast. There is surprisingly little reference in Orwell’s writing to the negotiations after the war between the Attlee government in London and the Indian independence leaders, nor to the actual achievement of independence by India and Pakistan, and of course Burma shortly afterwards. But by that time Orwell was in very poor health, of course, and struggling to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four.
IF: Another problem you highlight is Orwell’s ‘Eurocentrism’. In your book, you write that ‘an argument could be made for Orwell as a postcolonial writer avant la lettre, except that his work lacks one element that plays a vital part in postcolonialism, the resistance of colonised people against their oppression’ (p. 75). To support this point, you argue that Burmese Days is ‘a novel of colonial life [that] rarely enters the private life or the consciousness of local people’ (p. 39). Similarly, you point out how, in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘the local people are shown to be hopelessly incapable of mounting a real resistance to the masters, or of doing anything with their resentment, except standing around and jeering at Europeans. Local people do not make things happen: Burmese history is colonial history, and the British are the people who do things, to and for the Burmese’ (p. 32). What does this say about Orwell’s anti-imperialism?
DK: Yes, this is related to the previous question. I refer to this as a fascinating blind-spot in his outlook, and of course we have to adduce his Burmese experience here. At a young age, the age when his friends were starting university, Orwell found himself a white police officer in what was in effect an occupied country. He was in authority over thousands of thoroughly disempowered people, and I think he never quite got over the impression of the colonised as powerless. He says it was common for Europeans in the East to punch and kick their servants with impunity: we see this happening in Burmese Days. Nobody punches back. Look at the people in ‘Shooting an Elephant’—reduced to spectators of the white man’s actions. Later he understood that the liberation of colonised people must be in their own hands, but he found it hard to imagine them actually accomplishing it.
There was anti-British feeling in Burma when Orwell was there in the 1920s, and this could make his life as a policeman difficult, but the resistance in his novel Burmese Days is pathetic. The only formidable Burmese character, the magistrate U Po Kyin, wants to enrich himself from the British, not overthrow them. Orwell has a problem here I think, and a good place to explore it is in his writing about Gandhi, which tends to be hostile and, in the end, only grudgingly respectful. He thought Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience was unimpressive and Gandhi’s pacifism ridiculous in wartime. He acknowledged, but I think he could never really understand, Gandhi’s success in finally getting the British out of India.
IF: In your book, you argue that ‘Orwell’s quarrel with Empire was the basis of his quarrel with capitalism’ (p. 69). Can you tell us a bit more about this connection between empire and capitalism in Orwell’s work?
DK: Well, this is the classic Leninist line on empire as the last phase of capitalism. Perhaps a way to understand this is to see the fate of Gordon Comstock in the commercial world in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) as being essentially the same story as that of Winston Smith in the world of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both are eventually crushed by an ambient despotism: the Money-God and Big Brother. Orwell’s earliest writing about empire emphasises the economic motives of the nineteenth-century conquest of Burma, which was of no strategic value to the British, but was rich in natural resources. He always faulted Kipling for paying no attention to the fact that empire was a business. He’s quite consistent about this: ‘What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa.’
In The Road to Wigan Pier, he explains how he came to socialism through his experience of the exploitation of the poor in the empire—this is how the road to Wigan Pier begins in Mandalay. He learned his sympathy with the oppressed and exploited in Burma; when he looked around the north of England in the depths of the Depression, he saw a similar kind of injustice. This may have had its drawbacks, too. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he can see the poor living conditions of the English working class, but he doesn’t see much agency in the local people; he doesn’t have much to say about the trade unions or welfare agencies, for example. This may have been a habit of mind acquired in Burma. But in the bigger picture, he thought that empire enabled capitalism and capitalism enabled empire, and his anti-imperialism and his socialism were the same thing. He said Britain needed not just to free its colonised peoples, but to free itself, and that it couldn’t become a properly modern country until it had broken its dependency on empire.
IF: I was particularly impressed by how you managed to link Orwell’s work on the poor and downtrodden (such as Down and Out in Paris and London [1933] and The Road to Wigan Pier) and his views about colonised people expressed in his writings on empire. ‘Poverty was a kind of Orient’, you write (p. 55); what do you mean by that?
DK: It’s not me; though I think Orwell’s critics haven’t paid quite enough attention to it, Orwell himself makes this link specifically and often, in Down and Out in Paris and London but especially in the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier. There he says that, on his return from Burma, his thoughts turned to the English working class at first ‘because they supplied an analogy’. He saw a metaphorical relation between the English workers and the Burmese. I’m not sure which was the tenor of the metaphor for Orwell, and which the vehicle.
IF: There is an old debate about the boundaries between reality and fiction in Orwell’s Eastern writings. While Burmese Days is a work of fiction—although one drawing on Orwell’s experiences in Katha, in northern Burma—there have been long-running arguments about whether the experiences he discusses in the two essays really took place. One of Orwell’s biographers, Bernard Crick, went to great lengths to establish whether the writer had ever witnessed or participated in a hanging while in Burma, going as far as to calculate the exact number of executions that occurred during Orwell’s stay in the country, and to specify their type, in every location in which he had worked as a police officer. Did Orwell really shoot an elephant or witness a hanging? And, most importantly, does it matter?
DK: People were hanged in colonial Burma and people shot elephants. Did Eric Blair (George Orwell’s real name) shoot an elephant or witness a hanging? I have to say I don’t care enormously. Was Shakespeare a murderer? Almost certainly not, but he knew what it was like to be a murderer, so he was able to write Macbeth. I am interested in Orwell as a writer, and we should give him credit as a writer. He had lived in a place where these things happened; he knew what it was like. As you know, he often wrote in a way that blurred the boundaries of genre; and, after all, he doesn’t say if ‘A Hanging’ is actuality or fiction or a mix of the two.
We think of Down and Out in Paris and London as an example of documentary realism, but we know its incidents are rearranged and certainly some of them are made up. Then there’s the famous description of the working-class woman at the drainpipe in The Road to Wigan Pier. In the book, he says he saw her from the window of a train, but in his diary, he said he was in the street. This makes a difference to the way the reader sees the scene, but does it matter whether Orwell was in a train or in the street? I’m not sure it matters whether he really saw the woman, or embellished something he had really seen, or saw her in the street but remembered seeing her from the train, or just imagined her. In his brilliant essay ‘Marrakesh’, he describes watching a company of black colonial troops march past. As a ‘witness statement’, this is entirely uncorroborated. For us, it’s not a question of whether he really saw this sight, but of what he did with it to illustrate a truth about how empire works.
IF: In the book, you briefly note that in his final months, when he was exhausted and critically ill, George Orwell began drafting a new novel, tentatively titled A Smoking-Room Story. In your words, ‘in his imagination, [Orwell] was returning for a last time to the East’ (p. 15). You write that ‘A Smoking Room Story, barely begun, remains one of the most intriguing non-existent books in English literature’ (p. 163). What do we know about this novel and what does it tell us about Orwell’s developing views of empire towards the end of his life?
DK: In the Collected Works of George Orwell, you can find the notes and some early drafts he wrote for this novel, which he never finished—hardly even began, in fact. It’s set in the East, on a ship returning to Europe at just the time that Orwell himself left Burma to return to England. The story appears to centre on some scandal involving a young Englishman in the East, perhaps rather like Joseph Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim (1900), which Orwell knew well. In fact, the young Englishman in the East who gets embroiled in scandal was a favourite theme—I think of Kipling’s tales like ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, or Maugham’s ‘The Force of Circumstance’, or indeed Orwell’s Burmese Days itself. We can’t say very much more than that, but I find it poignant that, right at the end of his career and suffering from the illness that would soon kill him, and after the independence of India, Pakistan, and Burma, Orwell wanted to go back in his imagination to the colonial Burma of his youth.
IF: In the book, you discuss at length the parallels and divergences between George Orwell and others who wrote about the Empire—in particular, Rudyard Kipling. However, I am curious about another writer whose presence somewhat hovers in the background of your book and is examined only in passing towards the end: William Somerset Maugham. I remember reading some essays by Orwell in which he expressed a very positive view of Maugham. Also, as you write, ‘Maugham was the modern writer who influenced Orwell most, chiefly for “his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills” [these are Orwell’s own words]’ (p. 162). Most poignantly, in reading your critique of Orwell’s lack of attention to the voice and agency of colonised people, I could not help but think of the same criticism being levelled at Maugham in his time. What lessons can be drawn from reading the two authors side by side?
DK: You’re quite right; Orwell said he learned from Maugham above all writers, and I don’t spend enough time on him in the book. Maugham is one of a number of very gifted English writers who wrote about the East in imperial times—a group that includes Kipling, E.M. Forster, Edward Thompson, and Leonard Woolf. Maugham is a highly skilled storyteller, and Orwell thought Maugham’s example helped him to write more simply and directly, without romantic flourishes. There is a difference, though. All the writers I just mentioned, and of course Orwell himself, worked for some time in the East. Maugham visited and travelled as a professional writer in search of copy, like a journalist looking for a ‘story’. Hence, I think, the detachment from local life, which you mention, which is more marked in Maugham than in Orwell and the others.
I feel Maugham also has a deep, perhaps tragic, cynicism that Orwell doesn’t share. But there’s a general problem here that attends all colonial writing. If a colonial writer remains external to local experience, his or her representation of the colonised scene has an enormous blind-spot. But if they attempt to get inside the mind and experience and memory of local people, they are open to accusations of appropriation—a literary plundering equivalent to their compatriots’ economic and political appropriation—and even epistemic violence. This is the Orientalist bind, or one of them. I think Orwell was aware of it and it’s why he worked hard to promote the work of Indian-born English-language writers about the East, like his friend Mulk Raj Anand. This version of the postcolonial was where he saw the future.
Douglas Kerr is Honorary Professor of English at University of Hong Kong and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. His first book was about the war poet Wilfred Owen and much of his later work studies English literature about the East in colonial and postcolonial times. His most recent book is Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022) and he is general editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Conan Doyle.
