MONTREAL — University of Maryland professor Marjoleine Kars has won the US$75,000 Cundill History Prize.
Kars received the honour on Thursday for "Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast," published by the New Press.
Raised in the Netherlands and based in Washington, D.C., Kars is noted for her work on the history of slavery.
In a news release, jury chair Michael Ignatieff praised the book as "superbly researched and narrated."
The international Cundill prize, which is run by McGill University, recognizes non-fiction history writing in English.
This year's runners-up, who each receive US$10,000, were U.K.-based Canadian scholar Rebecca Clifford for "Survivors: Children's Lives after the Holocaust,'' from Yale University Press, and Paris Nanterre University professor Marie Favereau for "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World,'' published by Belknap Press.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 2, 2021.
Author Marjoleine Kars wins the prestigious 2021 Cundill History Prize
CBC Radio · Posted: Dec 02, 2021
Ideas53:59 Cundill History Prize 2021: Marjoleine Kars
It was the biggest and most successful slave rebellion in the Caribbean — until Haiti's revolution decades later. And it likely would have been completely forgotten, were it not for a chance discovery by historian Marjoleine Kars.
Her book about the uprising, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast, was announced today as this year's winner of the Cundill History Prize, with its award of $75,000 US ($95,494 Cdn).
She recounted her startling discovery to IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.
"I was in the national archives in The Hague. I'm Dutch… And so I was poking around, and I found all these records about a place I had never heard of — called Berbice," she said.
Berbice was a series of Dutch plantations founded in the mid-eighteenth century in what's now Guyana, named for the river along which the plantations were situated. It was also the site of an astonishing slave rebellion in 1763.
"Most rebellions are quickly suppressed. They don't last very long: hours, maybe days. And this one went on for more than a year."
Professor Kars asks in her book: "How did they pull this off?" The answer is complex, but the reason is simple: life as a slave was absolute misery.
Slave rebellion
After enduring the horrors of being captured and surviving the transatlantic crossing, West African slaves brought to Berbice had to toil in the blazing sun for 10 hours a day, six days a week, with maybe a day off at Christmas. Disease was rampant, while whippings and torture — even of children — were commonplace.
After a localized insurrection was put down in 1762, resentments boiled over a year later. Rebelling slaves began their attacks on a Sunday morning, while the Dutch were at church. Some of them had just enough time to bury their valuables before fleeing.
Kars traveled to the sites, many of which remain unexcavated. Yet she could touch the history of Berbice with her own hands, as the ground — especially after it rains — will yield up "all kinds of pottery shards and pieces of clay pipes that would have been used by enslaved men and women."
Those who didn't escape were often dealt with as harshly as the slaves had been.
"The rebels also set their sights on plantation managers and overseers… because of their predatory behavior toward enslaved women. Plantation managers in general were notorious for raping women under their command," Kars writes.
The rebelling slaves were led by a man named Coffij. He envisioned a kind of dual state arrangement: the Dutch would stay on their side of the Berbice River, the now-free slaves on the other, and the two sides could even establish trade relations.
Coffij, the leader of the largest slave rebellion in the Caribbean to date... slipped out of history with barely a notice. - Marjoleine Kars
But life as rebel slave was nearly as hard as being a slave. They had to feed and arm themselves, as well as procure and train their own armed forces. At times, they forced other slaves into service — and in doing so, came to resemble the overlords they were fighting against.
A similar reversal took place on the Dutch side. Help from across the Atlantic was slow to come, and the delays meant that the few soldiers they did have had to do the work of the escaped slaves. So one group of soldiers actually mutineed, and joined the rebels.
A coup that ended a dream
After over a year of fruitless negotiations with the Dutch, internal divisions and exhausted spirits, a coup was mounted against the leader, Coffij. In keeping with West African tradition, he killed himself.
"Coffij, the leader of the largest slave rebellion in the Caribbean to date, a man who had dared to dream of a new colonial order, who, had he succeeded, might well have governed the first Black republic, slipped out of history with barely a notice."
The Dutch later interrogated hundreds of the surviving slaves, leaving behind exceedingly rare records that reflect the voices of slaves from over two and a half centuries ago. They also convey the complexity of their lives:on the one hand, their factionalism, and conflicted self-interest; and on the other, their astounding bravery and resilience.
In all, 124 people were executed. It was grisly, as Kars notes: "Some of the condemned were to have every bone broken on the rack with an iron bar, before dying from either a 'mercy blow' to the heart or a merciless blow to the skull. Others were to be burned at the stake with a regular fire, which took an hour, or with 'small fire,' where the victim smoldered alive for four hours. Some faced the additional torture of having their flesh ripped with hot pincers. The 'lucky' ones were hanged, their heads staked."
The remainder were pressed back into slavery. Up to a third didn't survive the uprising. And it was a "death trap" for European soldiers as well. "It seems unlikely that more than a third survived," Kars speculates.
Historical truth
Berbice never recovered economically under the Dutch.
But as dark as the history of Berbice is, the study of that history may represent a shaft of light. As a result of Kar's efforts, the historical records in The Hague along with their English transcriptions have been made free for Guyanese scholars to access. Kars also hopes that one day, the Dutch government may fund such scholars as a gesture of reparation so they can come to the Netherlands, learn Dutch and study the records in the original language.
Marjoleine Kars is resolute in her assessment of the: "I think beyond Guyana itself that this story has meaning."
The reason: history as a discipline of authentic inquiry is endangered, with attempts by the political right in the U.S. to suppress historical initiatives like the 1619 podcast and Critical Race Theory, or China's continued efforts to rewrite its own history to reflect the Communist party's interests and obliterate all other accounts. So for Marjoleine Kars, the study of history couldn't be more important than it is now.
"As more people claim a seat at the table and want to know more about their own history," she says, "I think that these attempts at simplifying the stories and making them all glorious, and making them all about the accomplishments of white people... just will not fly."
*This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.
Podcast with Marie Favereau, author of “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World”
Marie Favereau
Most of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on.
The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, Marie Favereau (Harvard University Press, April 2020)
Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, the empire that he built continued to shape, incubate and grow the political cultures it conquered. Even as the empire formally splintered, the ties that bound together the Mongols continued to play a critical role in the growth of new identities and cultures.
More information can be found in Marie’s article for Quillete: How the (Much Maligned) Mongol Horde Helped Create Russian Civilization.
In this interview Marie and I talk about the empire the Mongols built: how it grew, what it covered, and how it changed. We discuss how the Mongols changed those they ruled and those they bordered against, and the geopolitical system they built.
Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. She has been a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a research associate at the University of Oxford for the major project Nomadic Empires. Her books include The Golden Horde and the Mamluk Sultanate (published in French) and the graphic novel Gengis Khan.
Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.
Most of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on.
Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, the empire that he built continued to shape, incubate and grow the political cultures it conquered. Even as the empire formally splintered, the ties that bound together the Mongols continued to play a critical role in the growth of new identities and cultures.
More information can be found in Marie’s article for Quillete: How the (Much Maligned) Mongol Horde Helped Create Russian Civilization.
In this interview Marie and I talk about the empire the Mongols built: how it grew, what it covered, and how it changed. We discuss how the Mongols changed those they ruled and those they bordered against, and the geopolitical system they built.
Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. She has been a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a research associate at the University of Oxford for the major project Nomadic Empires. Her books include The Golden Horde and the Mamluk Sultanate (published in French) and the graphic novel Gengis Khan.
“The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” by Marie Favereau
12 May 2021 Non-Fiction
There is an aphorism, reported to have been spoken by minister Yelu Chucai to Ogodei Khan, Chinggis Khan’s first successor: “You can conquer an empire on horseback, but you cannot govern it on horseback.” Writers on the Mongols are fond of this line, usually inserted when Mongols begin to set up administrations in the settled lands they have acquired control over. The line’s wisdom is rarely questioned: historians, after all, tend to be sedentary themselves, and invested in a written culture that presumes paperwork must be the basis of office. It is accepted as a truism that steppe nomads had to get down off their horses in order to learn from settled states how to run an empire.
Yelu Chucai certainly tried to instill in the Mongols a conformity to Chinese-style administration. A scholar-official astray in nomad lands, his exertions to civilize them by his own lights easily win the sympathy of historians—a champion of written culture, of a classical tradition. But Yelu Chucai’s dictum was wrong, and he had no eye for the unwritten rules of an alternative, nomadic tradition.
Government from horseback? Yes, it was entirely possible for Mongols. Some, in Iran and China, can be said to have dismounted, although even here they felt themselves contiguous to the steppe. In areas less removed from their origins it is easier to focus on how Mongols governed in a distinctively nomadic way: the center, while it lasted, of the Great Mongol Ulus; among the states it split into, Chagatay in Central Asia, and Ulus Jochi or the Golden Horde, based on the Qipchaq steppe. In The Horde, Marie Favereau sets out to demonstrate how Mongols did indeed govern from horseback in the vast territory granted to Jochi and his heirs.
While researching this book, Favereau was an associate in a project called Nomadic Empires: A World-Historical Perspective at Oxford University, exploring “the role of expansionist equestrian regimes in world history”. The principle investigator was Pekka Hämäläinen, whose 2008 title The Comanche Empire captured the public imagination and won several awards with its vision of a Comanche hegemony that deserves the name of empire—one suggestively similar to the Mongols, that operated on trade and gift exchange, where we see a horse people in control even over European colonies—just as Genoa’s and Venice’s ports on the Black Sea were guests of the Golden Horde. The Nomadic Empires project sought
to understand nomadic regimes on their own terms… and to rethink world history from supposedly peripheral vantage points, such as grasslands, steppe world, deserts.
The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, Marie Favereau (Harvard University Press, April 2020)
Now Marie Favereau has given the same treatment to the Golden Horde. Like the Comanche, the Golden Horde practiced “the longstanding Mongol policy of ruling through trade.”
Favereau’s keywords are flexibility, adaptability, plasticity. These qualities she sees as inherent to a nomadic outlook, the reason why nomads’ states remained robust through changing circumstances and conditions. We tend to call the Mongol Empire short-lived, both in its united form and as successor states. Seen “on their own terms”, however, disintegration from unity was not a failure but a time-honored tactic, divide and survive: a preventative, like strategic withdrawal. Such flexibility Favereau compares with the Lakota, political “shapeshifters”, of Hämäläinen’s follow-up book, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power.
Nomadic empires had a light footprint.
Nomadic empires had a light footprint—not only in records kept by writing cultures, which tended to ignore them, but on the ground (in spite of rhetoric around Mongol hooves). By a light footprint, I mean they were non-interventionalist by preference, only concerned to extract taxes, not to make societies over in the image of themselves.
Leading houses were less interested in regulating the daily lives of subjects than in enhancing their productivity.
The Jochids did not try to impose their vision of the land on sedentary peoples. When called upon to settle disputes, the khan’s judges usually respected local laws, including customary Slavic and Islamic law.
Favereau renames the well-known Pax Mongolica. For one thing, peace wasn’t a necessary part of it: “internal tensions were not incompatible with economic success.” Timothy May in The Mongol Conquests in World History had already proposed “the Chinggis exchange” as a replacement. Favereau removes attribution to the single figure of Chinggis Khan, and makes “the Mongol exchange”.
The Mongols enabled, maintained, and grew the most extensive exchange in people, goods, and ideas in the premodern world… This was truly the Mongol exchange; the various participants knew it was the Horde that made the network run, and they courted the khan in hopes of improving their own fortunes.
The “Golden Horde” was the Russian name for the Ulus of Jochi. “Horde” itself comes from the Mongol ordo (with variants orda and horda), meaning a court camp. Favereau adopts subjects’ and visitors’ shorthand of “the Horde” to refer by extension to the state. Since she presents non-nomad subjects, such as Russians, as members and participants of the state rather than merely its victims, this largely Russian usage is as valid as the name Mongols called it by, Ulus Jochi.
Beyond this state title, though, Favereau makes “horde” the basic word for Mongol political units everywhere. Recent books by Anne Broadbridge (Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire, previously reviewed in the ARB) and Bruno de Nicola (Women in Mongol Iran) have a special focus on ordos, in the word’s first sense of “court camps”, as owned and managed by women. In her advocacy for a general use of “horde” to apply to states and smaller outfits, Favereau does not engage with this work. The confusion of terms, then, has yet to be reconciled.
Still, her reasons to urge a replacement for the common “khanate” to signify a Mongol state are sound. Favereau argues that we need a collective word (for which “ulus”, with a sense of “people”, also qualifies).
Struggling to understand the alien political institutions the Mongols created, Persian administrators coined “khanate”, modeling it on their own “sultanate.” Persians thus emphasized the position of the khan. But while the khan was a leading figure, each regime was a collective power. Jochi’s ulus, Tolui’s ulus, and all the other uluses were jointly ruled…
Given the distributed nature of authority in Mongol society, terms such as “horde” and “ulus” are more useful in describing nomadic power formations than is “khanate”. And many contemporaries writing about Mongol rule did use the term “horde” to name this changeable sort of empire built on mobility, expansion and assimilation, diplomacy, and trade.
Power-sharing was an important tool of statecraft. This runs contrary to an instance of the “oriental despotism” trope that attributes Russia’s historical autocracy and continued cult of the strongman to Asian sources — to Russia’s Mongol age. On the contrary, khanship was consultative, and in Favereau’s story of the Golden Horde, later khans’ recourse to autocracy was a feature of its decline, weakening traditional institutions. Indeed, the concept of qubi (a “share” or “apportionment”) is key in Mongol political and economic arrangements. Favereau writes of circulation as a spiritual concept:
Trade was not intended to benefit the khan personally but rather to provide health for the empire and welfare for the people – health that was measured as much financially as spiritually, for circulation was intimately tied to the Mongol belief system…
The Mongols saw commodities as receptacles or mediums of something immaterial, and circulation of this immaterial something was essential to the cosmic balance of the world. Specifically, the qubi, the redistribution system, supported not only the living but also the dead… Through this complex interplay of the imminent, the transcendent, and the reborn in this world, the Mongols conceived of the things they shared, apportioned, and circulated among themselves as having a direct impact on the wellbeing of the society… It is hard to reconstruct how the medieval Mongols defined collective happiness, but they certainly believed that the circular movement of things was crucial in producing it. And that meant that the khan could hardly have a more important task than ensuring the fluidity of the redistribution system.
In modern English idiom “horde” has taken on a derogatory cast.
The book doesn’t always shift our gaze to see from a nomads’ perspective. Notably on diplomacy, more time was spent on reception and perception of strange Mongol diplomatic missives (one of these was actually called “perverse” in the narrative, which is certainly the recipient’s point of view!), rather than on Mongols’ internal logic and their view of causes of war. This was especially stark in the Chinggis section, being a briefly-told prequel before the main story of the Golden Horde.
In modern English idiom “horde” has taken on a derogatory cast. After all, with the stigma attached to steppe nomads, such terms as “swarms” and “breeding grounds” have been thought acceptable for use in respectable history into the 21st century. But Favereau gives us a Horde that was admired and celebrated by non-nomad subjects and outsiders in its own day. How did history forget, or learn to denigrate, what it owed to the geopolitical giant that was the Golden Horde? Favereau points to an anti-nomad turn in a later age of imperialism:
This legacy was eventually lost in transmission because of the anti-nomadic policies and ideologies that marked the Eurasian imperialism of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Latter-day empires understood agriculture and industry as superior to nomadism, economically and morally, and asserted that only from sedentary and urban circumstances could cherished notions of political consensus and religious freedom emerge. In the historical imagination fostered by liberalism, nationalism, and humanism—cast in Christian and Islamic terms—consensus-building and toleration were the exclusive province of the “civilized” and the “modern”, leaving the Mongols mere pirates of the land. That Mongol rulers developed unique, effective, and humane approaches to political negotiation and social integration became unthinkable.
Is it possible to govern from horseback—govern an empire with a range of peoples from urban to mobile? Yes indeed. This book answers Yelu Chucai’s “self-evident truth”, long retailed in histories of nomad-sedentary interactions. One can imagine a Mongol, back in the day, giving such a retort to the minister—that went unrecorded, as does much in settled people’s written archives. The Horde is a model of history that consults anthropology—the study of culture, to better interpret those historical stalwarts, politics and war. A Mongol enthusiast can only hope this book catches on with a general audience as have Hämäläinen’s related books on the Comanche Empire and the Lakota.
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