#nonfiction #books #memoir #history #war

During World War I, a British archeologist singlehandedly forged a multitude of Arabian tribes into a unified army, leading them to victory over a decaying Ottoman Empire, in so doing bringing Arabia into the modern world, i.e. that of Western-style national statehood. This hero would become the legend known as Lawrence of Arabia, the white man who donned desert garb and with his Arabian comrades conquered Damascus. At least, that’s the story of the movie, as I understand. The story told by T.E. Lawrence himself in his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather more complex and ambiguous.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s own account of his role in the Arab Revolt, written some years after events from his notes and diaries (though most were lost) and going through several iterations before its final version. From the outset, Lawrence recognises that the Arab Revolt played only a minor part in the Allied victory in World War I, and that if it was critical to this victory, it was so in the sense that British authors tend to ascribe a sense of crucial importance to any single operation because it was part of the totality of the war effort (see also dambusters etc.). Nor does Lawrence suggest he tells his story because he was uniquely instrumental to the events of the Arab Revolt. By his own words, he tells his story because he was there. As such, he is as much, or perhaps even more, of an unreliable narrator as you might expect. Nevertheless, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is assuredly not a heroic tale or adventure novel about how good old British pluck saved the day. Instead, we accompany a profoundly emotionally conflicted man into a struggle where he is forever doomed to be an outsider to both his own and his adopted peoples. On top of which Lawrence is emblematic of so many of the pathologies of 1920s English repressedness that his memoir could double as a psychoanalytical field manual. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now the sort of historical artefact that requires a 100 page introduction (which my copy duly has), and on the whole, the surface level war story of a few brave fighters facing overwhelming odds is the least interesting part of it.

#nonfiction #books #politics #history

With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

#books #nonfiction #history

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book Late Victorian Holocausts, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.