HISTORY

deaths at the hands of the state. Among them was Bell, who eventually became a Protestant and thus ‘proved’ his old opponents correct in their claim that compromise was corrupting.

Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that Clitherow refused to plead in order to deny the authorities a propaganda victory over defiant Catholics, and so as not to exacerbate Catholic divisions. She succeeded in the former

GILLIAN TINDALL

KIRKCALDY TO CALCUTTA

THE INNER LIFE OF EMPIRES: AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY

★

By Emma Rothschild (Princeton University Press 483pp £24.95)

I WANT TO like this book. Emma Rothschild has found a potentially wonderful subject, and the amount of digging she has done in different archives in Scotland, England, France and the United States, even as far as Hawaii, is impressive. Her starting point was earlier research she had done on Adam Smith for a book about the Enlightenment, and Smith is an intermittent but presiding figure in this one. Investigating a parliamentary election in Smith’s home town of Kirkcaldy, she came across a man named John Johnstone and, through him, unearthed the letter-book of one of his elder brothers, James. This trail led to eleven Johnstone siblings, born in Lowland Scotland in the 1720s and 1730s into a family of lawyers and factors with a ramshackle country seat but no money to support a landed lifestyle. Their energy and ambition were typical in that era of burgeoning trade and empire. The Johnstones made their way in Edinburgh, in London, in the East and West Indies, in the plantations of Virginia, in military and naval service, in speculation and in politics. Spouses, in-laws and long-standing family associates (sometimes the same people) swelled their numbers, as did children (legitimate or otherwise). It is the copious correspondence of this band, their reports to various company and state departments, their wills, annuities, bonds, mortgages and marriage settlements, their representations and protests to those in higher office, their own pronouncements in Parliament (three of them were eventually MPs), other people’s pronouncements on them, their subterfuges and alliances, and their epitaphs, that form the basis for this study of the times in which they lived.

It ought to be fascinating, and, incidentally, much of it is. William, the eldest of the brothers and a fr iend in youth of Adam Smith, sought his fortune on the far side of the Atlantic, where he eventually acquired a huge amount of property, married an heiress and ended as one but not the latter. This is an uncompromising book on an uncompromising woman, with little effort to dress up new, deeply researched arguments in the guise of a popular biography. But it seethes with passion: that of the men and women who killed and were killed, and of the authors in unearthing the murky realities behind the life and death of a Catholic icon. To order this book for £15.99, see LR bookshop on page 12

of the richest men in England (and a firm supporter of slavery). John joined the East India Company in the days when those who spent years in the subcontinent became deeply ‘Indianised’; he became a sworn enemy of Clive and his attempted reforms, and applied for the job that was eventually given to Warren Hastings. However, he ended his life back in England as an opponent of slavery. Two more brothers followed him eastwards; we learn, almost in passing, that one died at the age of eighteen in the Black Hole of Calcutta.

It is clear that Rothschild does not regard this fact as particularly significant in the context of the themes that interest her – the development of trade and empire, consumer goods, economic theory, political institutions, ideas of freedom, medical science and mineralogy, the spread of information and literature, the philosophy of David Hume (who was another associate of the family): in short, everything commonly summed up by the term ‘the Enlightenment’. The Johnstone brothers were not intellectuals, but this was the ambience in which they lived, and their sisters at home were included in it too. These independent-minded women variously went in for divorce, strong Jacobite sympathies and a ferocious quarrel with Mother about the ownership of a parcel of India textiles.

Slavery was the most contentious topic of the period, and the author reverts repeatedly to the story of Bell or Belinda, who was brought by John and his wife from Bengal to Scotland and later indicted there for drowning her newborn baby. The court case provoked a law-changing debate as to whether Bell was really a slave and whether, in the United Kingdom, she was still her master’s property; it is also unclear whether or not the baby was stillborn and if putting its body in the r iver might simply have been a Hindu practice. All this is interesting – but instead of telling the tale once, fully, the author’s chosen method of writing means that she has scissored it up into many d i f f erent, repetitive par t s under headings such a s ‘Experiences of Empire’, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and ‘Histories of Sentiments’.

She seems unable to let any of the material she has so painstakingly gathered speak for itself; she is constantly telling us what to think and, worse, watching herself write. She starts by telling us that ‘the history of the Johnstones is a story of the multiple or multiplier effects of empire’ and that her book is ‘a new kind of microhistory’. ‘The new possibility’, she claims, ‘in late-modern

LITERARY REVIEW July 2011

10 HISTORY

microhistories, is of connecting micro- and macrohistories by the history of the individuals’ own connections.’ But that is what microhistory is: there is nothing very new about it, and one is discouraged at the outset by the pretentious academic claims made both by the author and on her behalf on the jacket. Near the end too, we are back with convoluted sentences on ‘the tr ipartite understanding of enlightenment in modern historiography’: no one who has read the book with attention that far is going to need this sort of elbow-jogging.

This is in many ways a brave and able book, but it could have been so much better. And much of the good detail is rendered oddly flat by the author’s apparent total

PETER JONES

SUBJECT OR OBJECT? THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF

SLAVERY: VOLUME 1, THE ANCIENT

MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

★

Edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge

(Cambridge University Press 620pp £110)

THE ROMAN JURIST Gaius (fl c AD 160) got it in one: ‘The principal distinction in the law of persons is this, that all human beings are either free or slaves.’ We call them ‘chattel’ slaves, as in ‘goods and chattels’, ‘chattel’ being from the same root as ‘cattle’ (property was defined in ter ms of quadrupeds). In his chapter on Aquilius’s law relating to unlawful killing (287 BC), Gaius begins by discussing the unlawful killing of a slave, a slave-girl or a ‘four-footed beast of the class of cattle’: for legal purposes, they are all one category (Greeks called slaves andrapoda, ‘man-footed things’). The derivation of ‘chattel’ is also cognate with ‘capital’, meaning both ‘punished with death’ and ‘trading stock, accumulated wealth’. The root is the Latin caput, meaning ‘head’ – nothing but head-count mattered. Or did it? It is easy to assume that slaves were a sort of sub-human species, going mechanically about their probably disgusting tasks all day every day, starved, abused and regularly beaten to keep them up to pace. Whether they worked the mines in Attica or Spain, or were in gangs that worked on huge farms in Italy, or just the sexual playthings of their masters, their lot was indeed a pretty gr isly one. But people captured by pirates or in war could be worth a lot: fancy coming across the ancient equivalent of an Alfred Brendel or Warren Buffett! Welleducated slaves served in high office in the imperial palace in Rome. We know where Cicero’s priorities lay when he wrote to his chum Atticus in 54 BC about Caesar’s invasion of Britain: there was no hope of ‘any imperviousness to place. Although the Johnstones travelled the world, there is no perception of the effects of this on them, no sense of climate, vegetation, or houses, nothing on the influences of the empire on design, even when oriental tea-cups are sent as a present; no mention is made of what anyone wore. There is not even a brief description of eighteenth-century Calcutta or Grenada, or New York (where brothers Alexander and Gideon both spent time), and no word-picture of Edinburgh. The one fleeting reference to the ‘barren hills’ of the Border country that was the Johnstone home comes like a welcome sip of water in a desert. But it is the only one. To order this book for £19.96, see LR bookshop on page 12

booty from there except s l aves – and I don’t imagine you will expect any of them to be overendowed in the literary or musical departments’.

Further more, skilled slaves cost a lot of money. They also needed clothing, feeding, water ing and housing (we hear of people volunteering to become s l aves for the chance of a regular meal). One would not routinely kick them for fun before breakfast any more than we would the washing machine or car, today’s slave and animal substitutes. They needed looking after if they were to give good service (there were dedicated slave doctors).

Are you being served?

Upper-class Romans seem to have been relatively liberal about freeing them. Presumably the prospect of manumission encouraged acquiescence (according to Jane F Gardner, one of the contributors to this collection), but, g iven the alter native, a slave might have regarded that as a win-win. As freedmen under the empire, many continued to work for their masters; others set up their own businesses. We have many monuments erected by freedmen proudly recording their subsequent success and riches. These were the lucky few, certainly, among the perhaps 100 million slaves created over 750 years of the empire (Walter Scheidel’s estimate). So saying that slaves were technically without any human r ights tells one something of the greatest importance but of little practical significance.

This is where the twenty-two essays in the Cambridge History come in, with nine on the Greeks and twelve on the Romans, written by academics from the UK, Greece, the USA and Canada. Topics covered for both cultures include the literary response, slave supply, the effect on the family, economy and society, material evidence and

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LITERARY REVIEW July 2011