Hilary Mantel, history and individuality

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was on my reading list for some time, but I found its enormous bulk forbidding. I am not much of a reader of fiction. How could I possibly get through a novel of well over 600 pages? To make it even more daunting, it is a work of historical fiction. I like my history unadulterated, sticking to the facts, statements documented by footnotes, claims analysed. Wolf Hall is about the other Cromwell, not Oliver, about whom we know a good deal, but Thomas, courtier at the court of Henry III. But having got Joel Polack off my back I tackled this book, and am riveted. In a conversation with historian, David Starkey, Hilary Mantel talks about the point in history where we know little and nothing, and at this point imagination takes over, fiction fleshes out the person behind the documents and historical records that are available. A lot is known about Thomas Cromwell the court functionary, but little about Thomas Cromwell, the man, the abused child who ran away from home, became a hired soldier, than a keeper of accounts and records, member of Parliament, a loyal servant, friend and confidant of Cardinal Wolsley, a loving husband and father. It is this unknown or little known side of Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel explores, vividly, brilliantly, so that we get a page-tuning account of Tudor politics and the machinations behind Henry III's love life, Anne Boylen's ambitions, and the issues confronting the Catholic Church, the throne and the nobles. Hilary Mantel asks fundamental questions about how history is told and remembered. Her recreation of the sixteenth century world of Thomas Cromwell is so convincing that it never occurs to the reader to question the authenticity of the story. Perhaps Thomas Cromwell was not like he is depicted in this book, perhaps had his enemies told his story he would have come through as quite a different person. But this is true of all history. What we know is what someone with a vested interest decided to tell us.

The benefits of colonization

The New Zealand Company had quaint views about expropriating Maori land. Maori land could be bought cheaply in its view, as Maori would be rewarded by their being 'civilized' [Patricia Burns, Fatal Success, p. 52] Wakefield, writing about the 'Exceptional Laws in favour of the Natives of New Zealand' quoted an anonymous authority that Colonization was a 'great and unwonted blessing when one party was 'immeasurably inferior to the other'. New Zealanders looked up to the Englishman 'as being eminently superior to himself, that the idea of asserting his own independence of equality never entered his mind …' [Ibid p.53] Wakefied not only knew little about the Maori, he also refused to learn from the literature around at the time. Polack's book, at least his his first book, Travels and Adventures had been published, as well as books by missionaries and other travellers. It was debated in the House of Lords and the House of Representative. The debates were widely reported in the newspapers. But presenting the reality undermined the fantasy and the fantasy was necessary for the huge profits investors hoped to make from the settlement of New Zealand. Deliberate ignorance and turning a blind eye to reality was useful for turning a profit. This was true in the early nineteenth century, it was true in the twentieth century. Killing Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Muhammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 were similarly cloaked in the guise of spreading democracy, a profit motivated objective grounded in ignorance of the prevailing conditions.

Greed and the colonization of New Zealand

Having talked and written about Joel Polack, I thought that I had finished with him, but he kept coming back to me. I am now reading Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. It is an invaluable account of the founding myths of New Zealand and perhaps a key to understanding the sources of power and wealth in present day New Zealand. The men behind the New Zealand Company met for dinner in the room of the banker, John Wright in 1839. The bank was somewhat shaky, though people didn't know it at the time, it needed a rapid injection of funds. Some of the men at the meeting were younger sons, who would not inherit their father's wealth, so they needed other means of generating wealth. They were looking at a profit of 500% from the colonization of New Zealand. Some of their ideas were pie in the sky. Then they got wind that the British government planned to step in, establish British rule, and put an end to the wild speculation in land expropriated from the natives at ludicrous prizes to be on-sold to speculators. They had to act quickly to forestall this. On the advice of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a dreamer, and a persuasive con man, they despatched a hastily acquired ship, the Tory with William Wakefield, E. G's. younger brother with instructions to buy up as much land as he could in a hurry. Arriving in Wellington harbour, he found that there was nowhere near as much suitable land as he had hoped, but this didn't stop him from buying, by playing off one Maori chief against another, and by deliberately clouding what he meant by buying the land. The first settler ships left England before the arrival of the Tory was confirmed, and certainly before the settlers had an idea of where they were coming to, what would await them, and what they bought with their money form the NZ Company. What awaited them was nothing like the colony of rural England that Wakefield promised. Wakefield believed in the British class structure with a ruling landowning gentry. He didn't believe that a pauper could become a successful landowner and prospective employer. Paupers were somewhat inferior beings. He did not appreciate that people, in many cases highly skilled workers, became paupers because advances in technology replaced hand work with machinery and made many craftspeople redundant. New technology, land enclosures, made the rich richer and the poor much poorer. Politicians were concerned about poverty, but not about the growing inequality. There is a striking parallel with what is happening in New Zealand now and what was happening in England in the years after the Napoleonic wars. Those with capital get richer, those without have to give up all hope of owning their home and have to resign to being tenants for the rest of their lives at the mercy of their landlords.

A Jewish settler at the 'Frontier of Chaos”

Joel Polack, Artist, Writer, Traveller and Entrepreneur.

I gave a talk about Joel Polack this week. Polack was a monkey on my back, an unfinished project that I kept coming back to, adding a little information here and there. In the end I knew almost too much about him. I had to marshal all this information into a coherent narrative. I hoped that I would be able to do this by giving this talk. My small audience knew little about Polack and came along not because they thought that this is a rivetingly interesting topic, but because they came along regularly to these talks [Kia Torah] or came along to support me. In the event the general opinion was that this was quite an interesting talk. It did, however, raise a challenging question: Why bother with Joel Polack? Would he be of interest were he not a pioneering Jewish settler? What was his, or my contribution to New Zealand historical narrative. Polack had, by and large, a bad press in New Zealand history. He was not liked by his contemporaries, he was a snob, rather aloof and up himself. The Times described him as a grog seller and someone who acquired his land dishonestly. Polack sued the Times and won his case, but the New Zealand historical narrative was largely shaped by those who disliked him, missionaries, Busby the New Zealand resident, and members of the Legislative Council. He is not viewed by and large as a highly educated man, with wide reading and broad range of interests, almost certainly the most educated man in pre-colonial New Zealand. His ideas on New Zealand colonization were largely overtaken by the work of the New Zealand Company, which purchased in great haste large tracts of land for a pittance from Maori chiefs, who didn't understand the concept of the alienation of the land, and flogged off the land to speculators who had no idea of where the land was and what it was like. It was a hugely profitable exercise, but hardly ethical. Similarly in other parts of New Zealand, but particularly in Auckland a grab bag of setllers rushed to expropriate as much land as they could and then cash in on these. Although Polack bought land from Maoris, he also appreciated the value that Maoris placed on their land. So there arose questions from this talk about the nature of history, who writes it, and what line they try to paddle.  To read the text of my talk go to:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oy2qQZiF2oZI6HOrgPULtDrddmcpRFHPC2y3ECh4xgw/edit?pli=1#heading=h.3khpiq38px2t

Thoughts about football, capitalism and corruption

Yesterday I watched the Hungarian Under 20 team being soundly beaten by Nigeria. It was a good game, but the better team won. While the corruption of FIFA is an ongoing news to the point of tedium the FIFA Under 20 competition is run very successfully in New Zealand, providing entertaining football and an opportunity for the stars of the future to shine. That the FIFA executives are corrupt is no news and hardly surprising. How could FIFA award the World Cup venue to Qatar, a country with no footballing tradition, more suited to camel racing? There is a lot of money at stake in world football, and the temptation to profit from this and abuse the system is too tempting. This, after all is what capitalism is all about; exploit financial opportunities for your own personal; benefit. And seeing these lovely young men from Hungary struggle against the Nigerians made me think of the glory days of Hungarian footfall, and how Hungarian football declined over the years. Under communism, excellence, funded by the state, mattered, be it excellence in sports or the arts. Once communism collapsed there was no business case for supporting the arts or sport. No one made money from it. The great football clubs ran out of money, the stadiums were run down and the quest for excellence was lost. This is true not only of Hungarian football, but also of the football of other footballing nations. England can hardly put together a credible national team, even if its football competition is world renowned. It is cheaper to buy hired players from all parts of the world than to create an environment where your own young players can flourish and grow. Arsenal Manchester United, Manchester City are some of the most glamorous clubs in the world, but there is hardly an Englishman playing for any of these. And Ferencvaros, once the breeding ground of some of the greatest footballers, can now scarcely foot the bill to stay in a top competition.