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Isobel and me: medieval sanctuary and Whig history

For the last fifteen years I have been having an intense dialogue in my head with a long-dead historian, Isobel D. Thornley (1893-1941). Isobel is my best frenemy. Two pieces she wrote in 1924 and 1932 remain standard citations for one of my favourite subjects, medieval sanctuary; this is a feat of scholarly longevity that few of her contemporaries can boast. Having dug through the same documents—and benefitted enormously from following in her footsteps—I admire Isobel’s archival diligence and the boldness of her arguments. I also disagree with almost everything she says.

Isobel’s place in the interwar historical community in London is mostly forgotten: she does not appear in any directories of important historians of the past—neither the Institute of Historical Research’s London’s Women Historians, for instance, nor another of the IHR’s pantheons, Making History. Her name does live on in the form of the Thornley Bequest Fund, established when she left her estate to the University of London. Over the decades Isobel’s legacy has benefited hundreds of historians, both students and academic researchers, many of whom probably have no idea who she was.

Here, then, is something about her. Isobel was born in 1893, a child of the provincial middle class, raised in the East Midlands by a bank manager and his Scottish wife. She received a BA from University College, Nottingham, in 1915, and then an MA from University College, London, in 1917, under noted Tudor historian and founder of the IHR, AF Pollard. Her MA work garnered her the Alexander Prize from the Royal Historical Society and by 1919 she was settling into a teaching position at UCL. Over the next decade, her career as a historian prospered under Pollard’s patronage, as she published a book of translated sources and several studies relating to treason and sanctuary. She spent a year in the US at Vassar College in 1925-26 and had reached the rank of Lecturer at UCL by 1928.

Then, in 1930, aged about 37, Isobel resigned her position at UCL. I don’t know why. There may have been some malign reason, or perhaps she simply found teaching a bore. Her father’s estate gave her an independent income, so she could afford to do without a university salary. Isobel was active through the 1930s at the IHR and in scholarly associations. In that decade she completed several important pieces of scholarship, including a 1938 luxury production of the Great Chronicle of London, co-edited with City of London archivist, AH Thomas.

Image credit: Sanctuary knocker replica at Durham Cathedral. Photo by Nicholas Mutton. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Isobel’s peaceful scholarly life was, of course, disrupted by the outbreak of the war in 1939. She took up war work with a government department and stoically suffered the anxieties of the Blitz. After her house in Highgate was damaged by a bomb in September 1940, she wrote in a letter to a friend at Vassar, “Though the water still drips through the roof in one place, I really have nothing to grumble at. However, we are looking for anything and everything to happen between now and Easter.” Tragically, “everything” did happen: Isobel’s house was hit directly on 5 February 1941 and she was killed, at the age of 48.

We have no way of knowing how Isobel felt about her place in the interwar academic world. She was by no means alone as a woman historian in London in these years, but she was not amongst those of her generation who tackled “the woman question” in her research. For explicit testaments to Isobel’s personality, we have only a faintly damning encomium in her Times obituary—“she will be remembered for her keen enthusiasm, generous helpfulness, and warm sympathies.”

If her obituary makes her seem mild, implicit in her publications is a quite a different scholarly persona: uncompromising, audacious, and somewhat prickly. The continuing influence of her work on sanctuary is not due to a precocious modernity; her sententious writing style probably seemed old-fashioned in the 1920s. It is, I think, the clarity and the no-nonsense tone that continues to convince many readers, even though her interpretations are unquestionably Whiggish, congruent with the views of her mentor Pollard. Sanctuary was a “great evil,” for it allowed criminals to escape punishment. In her account, “bold” and forward-thinking civic leaders allied with the judiciary to destroy the “hoary” popish institution of sanctuary and bring England into Protestant modernity.

I disagree with Thornley’s interpretation of English sanctuary on many fronts, too many to rehearse here (quick version: it was much more complicated). The difference in our views goes beyond our interpretations of the records, but instead relates to our fundamental assumptions about the nature of political power. Unlike some earlier writers on sanctuary (such as Charles C. Cox), Isobel had no sympathy for sanctuary seekers. For her, the moral lines were stark: secular governing authorities were on God’s side and criminals (assumedly from the underclass) deserved hanging. Isobel’s optimism about the fundamental probity of judicial and political systems has allowed me to recognize my own much more distrustful and cynical approach to political and legal regimes. I am not sure how much of our difference of perspective is due to our personal inclinations and how much to our respective environments. I don’t know what Isobel would make of politics in 2018; I suspect my frenemy and I would also not have agreed about that.

Featured image credit: Sanctuary ring on a door of the portal of the Virgin, on the western facade of Notre-Dame de Paris (France). Photo by Myrabella. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Find the missing millions

A young man in my clinic avoids eye contact. Peaked cap pulled low, he directs his unfocused gaze into a corner of the room. Recently diagnosed with hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, he doesn’t know whether to believe this news, how to process it, or what it means for his future. He would rather bury it and move on with his life. Likely transmitted at birth or early in his childhood, this infection has travelled with him ever since, and has been found—only by chance—because he underwent blood tests for another reason.

This man is one of 260 million who are HBV-infected. That’s 4% of all humanity. To put this number in context, imagine filling Wembley Stadium with people selected to represent a cross-section of the global population; among them, we would find a startling 3,500 cases of HBV infection. And the virus is not a transient passenger, but has integrated into host liver cells where it can be resident for many decades. The infection is frequently “silent”—not causing symptoms—which means that the majority of those who live with HBV are unaware of it until organ damage eventually declares itself after many years. These end results can be devastating: liver scarring, organ failure, and hepatocellular cancer. For the large numbers who are infected at birth or in early childhood, this means disease and death in the prime of young adult life. The global impact of HBV is apparent from mortality data. While death rates for most cancers are declining over time, liver cancer deaths stand out as continuing to climb.

260 million [people] are HBV-infected. That’s 4% of all humanity.

If undiagnosed or untreated, the consequences of HBV infection on health, wealth, and happiness can be diverse, impacting negatively on employment, economic productivity and education, on child-bearing and child-rearing, on social interactions, on well-being and longevity. In many parts of the world, a spotlight on diagnosis is not enough. There must also be a sustained commitment to match case-finding with education, clinical assessment, monitoring, and therapy. Living well with HBV can be attained. If the diagnosis is made and the right care follows, we can avert long-term disease, fulfil life potential, banish stigma, and prevent transmission.

The cliché about the tip of an iceberg is hard to avoid for HBV, but in this case we deal with not one but many icebergs, where few cases of infection are diagnosed, fewer have access to drugs, and still fewer have their infection appropriately suppressed on treatment. The large global burden of disease, the significant consequences of undiagnosed HBV, and the invisible nature of early infection underpin the urgent need for robust efforts and sustained, meaningful investment into better diagnosis. This year, the World Hepatitis Day theme of “Finding the Missing Millions” calls us to action and to account.

And how to find these millions? The challenge is a huge one, and this question is not easily answered. The problem has been neglected, and a large burden of disease is focused in lower income countries, where resources for diagnosis and treatment are scarce. Education and information are lacking, and stigma can be a substantial barrier. To make strides, we will first need to build awareness, work with individual communities to dispel barriers, and improve understanding. Multiple agencies have roles to play in this process, ranging from government and health-care providers to schools, public health bodies, charities, and the NGO sector. Diagnosis requires provision of quality-assured laboratory or portable “point-of-care” tests, and investment in clinical and laboratory personnel and infrastructure, with particular recognition of the needs of vulnerable and marginalised groups including antenatal women, migrants, and prisoners. We can learn from, and build on, the experience, approaches, and care provision that have emerged from the HIV epidemic.

My patient is just one of the “missing millions” who has been “found,” yet for him there is still a struggle ahead as he comes to terms with the reality of a long-term infection whose source is unknown, and that cannot be cured. Let us not underestimate the complexities and challenges of this personal journey. I am, however, optimistic for him. He has an engaged and supportive partner. He has care provided through a multi-disciplinary team including his primary care physician, specialist nurses and pharmacists, and a team of expert hospital doctors. He has access to a consistent supply of quality assured medication, and will be assessed regularly with blood tests and scans. He is fit to work, can earn a living, and enjoy his young family. I hope he does all of these things, and that for every one of the missing millions we can do more to offer this better, brighter future.

Featured image credit: Photo by Charlotte Zaidi.

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How Oscar Wilde got his big break

In the late 1870s, when he was still a student, Oscar Wilde gathered his college friends for a late night chat in his Oxford room. The conversation was drifting to serious topics.

“You talk a lot about yourself, Oscar,” one of them said, “and all the things you’d like to achieve. But you never say what you’re going to do with your life.”

The punch bowl was empty, the tobacco had been smoked, and the lights were turned down low.

“What are you going to do?” the friend asked.

Wilde turned solemn. There was a long pause.

“God knows,” Wilde finally replied. Then, turning serious, he offered, “I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”

Between the ages of 24 and 28, Wilde set about trying all these careers in turn.

After leaving Oxford in early 1879, he moved to London. He was not going back to Ireland but was staying on in England “probably for good,” he said. What would he do there? His prospects for employment were thin.

“It’s a great advantage to have done nothing at all, but it’s best not to overdo it,” became one of his favourite expressions. The romance of doing nothing would soon be dispelled by the reality of not having an income commensurate to his tastes.

On the death of his father, in 1876, his mother discovered that the family’s properties were not owned outright by the Wilde estate, and that the income on their fishing lodge at Connemara and their house at Bray would need to be shared. Inured to extravagance as Oscar was, money was to prove a lifelong concern.

“We have genius. That is something,” his mother declared, praising what would remain in the family, regardless of their dwindling bank balances. How to make genius pay, however, was a matter Wilde was attempting to figure out. A year after graduation, he had grown impatient and bored. “Not having set the world quite on fire as yet” was so annoying, he thought.

Oscar’s mother suggested that he count his blessings that he didn’t have to work in a shop or beg for food.

“We have genius. That is something,” his mother declared, praising what would remain in the family, regardless of their dwindling bank balances. How to make genius pay, however, was a matter Wilde was attempting to figure out.

Between 1878 and 1880, Wilde curried favour among those who might be able to help him, dividing his attention between prominent figures in education and art. At the request of the wicked Cambridge don Oscar Browning, Wilde stalked Paternoster Row behind St. Paul’s Cathedral, in search of a suitable Bible. He also offered his services as a personal shopper with excellent taste in neckties. When institutional “education work” proved impossible to get, Wilde volunteered his erudition to the painter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and offered his skills as a Greek translator and an editor of classical plays. He published a poem on England and reviewed – once for the Irish Daily News and twice for the Athenaeum.

For all his hustling, he was hardly making a living, let alone making his name.

By the late nineteenth century, Aestheticism had been in the air for several decades in Britain. Its prime movers had reached middle age and had recently been satirized as a hoary gang that still thought of themselves as “the aesthetic young geniuses.” William Holman Hunt, Michael, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were in their fifties. So was Matthew Arnold, the stylish promoter of “Sweetness and Light”, as a shield against Philistinism. John Ruskin had done much to enthuse and direct art criticism, but he was a decade older and now mentally unstable.

These circumstances created a vacuum.

While Aestheticism waited for a saviour to step into the breach, a London cartoonist named George Du Maurier seized the opportunity to satirize the movement’s idiosyncrasies.

Du Maurier’s pen more or less single-handedly created the general interest in Aestheticism that prevailed in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Thanks to his lively sketches, the movement’s artists became celebrities.

Wilde came to Du Maurier’s attention because he was a hanger-on of the celebrated painter, Whistler. “Maudle” and “Postlethwaite” disembarked in the pages of Punch in 1880. Disguised only by these gag pseudonyms, Du Maurier made the pair a feature.

They boosted Aestheticism. They talked like arty folk. They were pretentious and silly. Sure, Maudle and Postlethwaite personified foppery, but along the way, they also became beloved of British and Americans alike.

In the twinkling of an eye, Maudle and Postlethwaite became a sensation. “These remarkable people have had a great success in America,” Henry James observed, adding that the duo contributed “to the curiosity felt in that country on the subject of the English Renascence,” another of the names for Aestheticism.

The Punch effect was profound.

Punch had such cultural clout that it sprung the door open for Wilde, allowing him to walk straight onto the aesthetic scene. In doing so Du Maurier not only gave Wilde prominence he didn’t have before, but he invented Wilde’s public persona. Like today’s semi-famous hangers-on or B-list celebrities, Wilde was until then merely human wallpaper against which other stars shone more brightly.

By 1881, Wilde still hadn’t found a profession, a fact Du Maurier satirized by picturing Maudle as a guidance counsellor advising that “to exist beautifully” was a career in itself.

It is hard to underestimate the force of the aesthetic craze that seized Victorians. What began simply as the product of a single caricaturist’s pen had, by spring 1881, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon. Its next beneficiaries were two of the biggest names in English theatre, Gilbert and Sullivan, who brought out Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride in spring 1881.

This timing was extremely fortuitous for Wilde.

Soon after, he was offered an American lecture tour from theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte whose Gilbert and Sullivan satire of Aestheticism was touring the US. Who better to promote the satire than a man who was so very laughable for his beliefs about poetry and beauty?

Wilde’s motives for accepting Carte’s offer were equally mercenary. His first play, Vera, had failed and his finances were stretched. The invitation could not have come at a better time. And so, on Christmas Eve 1881, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde wrapped himself in a fur cloak, boarded the SS Arizona at Liverpool, and sailed towards the adventure of a lifetime. It was in the United States, during a gruelling year-long lecture tour, that Wilde would really begin to make his name.

Featured image credit:  Oscar Wilde, photographic print on card mount, circa 1882, by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons . 

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Remembering Joseph Johnson

Given his near half-century career, the Romantic-era publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) left behind a notably small archive. We know from a letter he wrote on today’s date in 1799 that he destroyed some of his correspondence and business documents while serving a two-year sentence for seditious libel in King’s Bench Prison (imprisonment was a fate that progressive publishers were all too familiar with during the 1790s). Even allowing for Johnson’s cautious document purge, surely his post-prison years (he continued to publish for nearly a decade after his release) would have generated hundreds if not thousands of letters and accounting notes. Perhaps more of Johnson’s papers will emerge before long, but for now, the two hundred letters held by the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, alongside a couple dozen pieces of correspondence flung across various other libraries and private collections in Britain and the United States, comprise the extant Johnson archive.

I was reminded of this precious and fragile record of Johnson’s life and work when I first saw his tombstone in the All Saints’ Churchyard in Fulham. The memorial script composed by Johnson’s close friend, Henry Fuseli, is now so worn that it’s barely legible, and even from a few feet away it begins to look more like rows of discolored mottling than a testament to one of the most important publishers in British history. Fortunately, Thomas Faulkner transcribed the epitaph in his History of Fulham (1813):

Here lie the remains of Joseph Johnson, late of Saint Paul’s, London, who departed this life on the 20th day of December, 1809, aged 72 years. A man equally distinguished by probity, industry, and disinterestedness in his intercourse with the public and every domestic and social virtue in private life; beneficent without ostentation, ever ready to produce merit, and to relieve distress, unassuming in prosperity, not appalled by misfortune, inexorable to his own, indulgent to the wants of others, resigned and cheerful under the torture of a malady which he saw gradually destroy his life.

Image credit: Joseph Johnson tombstone. Used with permission of the author.

Robert Musil, Austrian philosophical writer, once said that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” which is mostly not true, especially in Big Heritage Britain, but Johnson’s grave certainly isn’t easy to find in the All Saints’ Churchyard. The sexton I spoke to didn’t know where it was, nor, for that matter, did he even know Johnson was buried there. The true celebrity of All Saints, it turns out, is abolitionist Granville Sharp, Johnson’s close contemporary. With the 2007 campaign to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade, Sharp’s tomb was fully restored thanks to the efforts of television producer John Sheppard (Sharp also has a memorial tablet in Poets’ Corner). The sexton pointed out the location of Sharp’s tomb in the north-west corner of the churchyard, and so I headed in that direction, guessing that Johnson might be somewhere nearby. This fuzzy conjecture worked out well: Johnson’s tomb is in fact right next to Sharp’s, looking like a weatherworn “before” to Sharp’s carefully re-engraved “after.”

Image credit: Tombs of Johnson (left) and Sharp (right). Used with permission of the author.

This very propinquity, in fact, made me wonder if Johnson and Sharp had gone in for matching plots. An exchange of letters between them would offer a more traditional mode of scholarly evidence for the possible friendship of two of the era’s great political actors, but there are no letters between Johnson and Sharp, even though Johnson published a number of tracts in support of abolition and is listed first among the booksellers for Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Would it be too Burkean to wonder if neighboring gravesites alone might serve as evidence for ante-mortem relationships?

I’m not sure why I was surprised to find that Johnson’s grave is now virtually forgotten. Probably it had something to do with the energy of Britain’s memorial industry, which is at last offering long-overdue testimonies to many of the Romantic era’s political and print culture heroes, such as John Thelwall, Thomas Wakley, and Mary Wollstonecraft (whose statue, set to be crafted by Maggi Hambling, will soon grace Newington Green). Probably my surprise also had to do with the Romantic era’s own virtual obsession with grave markers and epitaphs, not to mention the well-worn pilgrimage paths leading to the graves of John Keats and Percy Shelley in Rome and the Wordsworth family graves clustered in the shadow of St. Oswald’s Church.

Of course, there’s a vast difference between impresario and star. Even “impresario” seems too glamorous for Johnson, or perhaps I should say too glamorous for Johnson’s conception of himself, for surely some share of glamour, and so too of enduring historical charisma, must accrue to the publisher who gave the world the first works of Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and Malthus, and who launched and loyally supported the careers of Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth. To read Johnson’s surviving correspondence and the few contemporary anecdotes about him we have is to realize that he would likely have wished to rest quietly amidst proximate greatness, his own tomb’s limestone slowly washing away with the seasons, but to recognize what Johnson was able to achieve as a publisher during a time of brutal political repression is to understand that we ought not respect this wish. We forget at our peril what we owe to the printers, publishers, and booksellers who took such great risks to keep truth in circulation during an era of repression. So here are some directions: pay Joseph Johnson a visit.

Featured image credit: All Saints’ Church, Fulham.  Used with permission of the author.

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Living with hysteria: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the semiautobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” was a first-wave feminist determined to live a fully actualized life of work for the common good. Born in Connecticut in 1860, she was a lecturer on ethics, labor, and feminism, and was also the niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Charlotte grew up in poverty and was particularly interested in bettering the economic straits of women. Her family moved so often that she was largely home-schooled and self-taught.

As a young adult Charlotte avidly read the work of British biologist Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe Darwin’s central idea from Origin of Species. Spencer took an evolutionary perspective on humans as well, and thought women to be cut out only for lives as mothers and helpmeets. And the relatively uneducated Charlotte, isolated within her family by their itinerant ways, was both fascinated and terrified by such an idea.

For, if Spencer were right, as motivated toward accomplishment as she was, her destiny was in the domestic realm. Did her intelligence (she’d taught herself to read by age three) mean she was an evolutionary anomaly? If so, would a husband ever accept her unquenchable desires to learn and to improve the economic status of women everywhere?

In preparation for the battles that her intellectual gifts were sure to present for her, Charlotte willed herself to become a superwoman. Programmatically, she exercised, read, and wrote. She became an impressive athlete. She started a religion—that didn’t, admittedly, seem to have much to do with God but focused, instead, on ethical living. She preached for protestant congregations. She wrote. And she began having some success with publishers.

Meanwhile, this powerhouse of a young woman struggled with episodes of depression. They had begun by age 15.

By the time she was 21, Charlotte had fallen in love with her best friend. The late 1800s was an age in which deep, romantic attachments among young women were common; generally such friendships included hugging, hand-holding, and sleeping together. But they weren’t usually sexual. Charlotte, however, did feel passion for her friend Martha, and was heartbroken when Martha became engaged to be married.

As Martha’s wedding approached, Charlotte formed a sexual attraction to Charles Walter Stetson, a penniless poet and painter who, she believed, had proposed to her only seventeen days into their acquaintance. (In his diary Walter interpreted the events of that evening very differently. Charlotte demanded that he declare his intentions. What he’d said, roughly, in response was that he was open to contemplating marriage with her if that was the direction their relationship took and if he ever began selling enough of his poems and paintings to support a family.)

Almost immediately, Charlotte and Walter fell into the habit of writing each other long, nightly letters. From hers, Walter learned that Charlotte had in mind for herself a productive life as a speaker and writer. From Walter’s, Charlotte learned that he expected a traditional marriage—one in which the wife was subservient, did not have intellectual pursuits, and would be available for sex whenever he happened to want it.

Image credit: Photographic portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Credit: “Charlotte Perkins Gilman c. 1900” by  C.F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In their three years of courtship, Charlotte’s feelings for Walter fluctuated between hot and cold. She called the times of little feeling for him “relapses”—which suggests that they were episodes of her recurring depression. Occasionally during these years, Charlotte was prescribed cocaine and opiates. They greatly helped her mood. And in correspondence with at least one friend she suggested they use them together, as a sort of party drug.

Walter and Charlotte were married in 1885 and had a marvelous first night of lovemaking and a thoroughly pleasant morning after. Then things began to fall apart. After three months of marriage, Charlotte was pregnant. And after the baby was born she fell into a psychotic depression—the most horrible episode of illness she had ever encountered. She came under the care of a doctor Silas Weir Mitchell, the world’s leading expert on hysteria. He offered two cures.

Men he sent to the late-19th-century equivalent of Outward Bound. It involved strenuous outdoor exercise in the western mountains of the United States. Superbly athletic Charlotte might have thrived under Mitchell’s cure for “nervous” men.

Unfortunately the treatment for women was the “rest cure”: stay in bed and have no intellectual output whatsoever. Limit the intellectual input. Charlotte could have none of the drugs she had come to enjoy. And under the rest cure she didn’t improve a whit. In fact, as her rest continued she approached a madness she recognized as irremediable, and she refused further care. Scrambling for health, she made fundamental shifts in her marriage. As she returned to her intellectual pursuits, her health started to improve.

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a wonderfully gothic horror story of a woman going mad as she is forced to take an approximation of Mitchell’s rest cure. It is loosely based on what happened to Charlotte during her post-partum depression. But examining the actualities of her illness—and looking closely at her marriage, her social frustrations, and the treatment for hysteria she received—make the story even richer.

Was Walter a “nightmare husband” as she painted him in correspondence or was he the good, gentle man that her late-life autobiography described? Was Silas Weir Mitchell the fearsome physician that one passage of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” suggests he was? To what extent did the culture of Charlotte’s era contribute to what seems to have been a mental illness of biological origin? And what does Charlotte’s diagnosis of hysteria tell us about the struggles of women today whose physical symptoms of crippling pain or fatigue often get interpreted by doctors as hypochondriacal?

More resources on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (provided by author):

Cynthia Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford University Press, 2010)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Appleton-Century, 1935)
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of the Yellow Wall-Paper (Oxford University Press, 2010)
S. Weir Mitchell’s Doctor and Patient (J.B. Lippincott, 1901)
Charles Walter Stetson, Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson, ed. Mary Armfield Hill (Temple University Press, 1985)

Featured image credit: “sad-depressed-depression-sadness-505857/” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Wars of national liberation: The story of one unusual rule I

If someone was to make a ranking of the most controversial rules of international law, Article 1(4) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions would very likely make the top 10. The Geneva Conventions themselves probably need little introduction; these four international treaties were adopted in the aftermath of World War II and now form the core of international humanitarian law (IHL). Each of the Conventions is designed to alleviate human suffering during wartime by protecting a distinct category of persons: civilians, prisoners of war, wounded and sick troops, and so on.

Although the net effect of the Conventions was indisputably positive, by the 1970s it had also become apparent that they had a number of gaps and imperfections. Accordingly, in 1974 the Swiss government convened in Geneva a large diplomatic conference whose purpose was to “” IHL as it had been codified in the Conventions. Around 700 delegates from a vast array of states attended the conference and, after nearly four years of deliberations, agreed on the text of the two Additional Protocols. However, that outcome was far from preordained.

In fact, one draft rule—the one that later became Article 1(4) of the first Protocol—became a major stumbling block for the delegates. Discussions around its proposed text unexpectedly took weeks to complete and at one point almost led to the collapse of the entire conference. Even after the conference was over and the Protocols were signed, this provision continued to divide the international community, so much so that the split it occasioned has defined IHL ever since. So what is it about and what role does this controversial rule play today?

Article 1(4): the root of the Great Schism

To explain the controversy behind Article 1(4), it is best to start with the legal effect the drafters intended it to have. In this sense, the rule provided for an unprecedented legal fiction: it put a certain type of armed conflicts occurring within one state’s territory on par with inter-state wars. These were the so-called “wars of national liberation,” or, in the more technical language of the provision, “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”

Until the adoption of the Protocol, such situations had only been governed by the “elementary considerations of humanity” enshrined in Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, a single provision dedicated to “armed conflict[s] not of an international character.” By contrast, once Article 1(4) became a part of the corpus of IHL, wars of national liberation were equated with law with international armed conflicts. In other words, as the Protocol entered into force, hundreds of additional rules laid down by the Conventions and the Protocol suddenly became applicable to such situations.

Although many states welcomed this development as a logical and morally desirable by-product of the decolonization process, others were far less convinced. In 1987, US President Ronald Reagan denounced the entire Protocol as “fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed,” in part precisely because its Article 1(4) had given “special status to ‘wars of national liberation,’ an ill-defined concept expressed in vague, subjective, politicized terminology.”

Although many states welcomed this development as a logical and morally desirable by-product of the decolonization process, others were far less convinced.

Ultimately, the strong opposition to the Protocol by the US and others prevented the achievement of its universal ratification, in contrast to the original four Conventions. Therefore, the rules established by the Protocol still do not apply as a matter of treaty law to a significant minority of states, which causes considerable practical difficulties in armed conflicts that involve a combination of contracting and non-contracting states. Professor Yoram Dinstein, the doyen of the field, has rightly labelled this persisting divide in the international community as a “Great Schism.”

Destined to become a dead letter?

The irony is that after stirring up so much controversy at the conference and having sown deep divisions that last until the present day, Article 1(4) itself has made very little impact in the real world. On reflection, perhaps this isn’t really that surprising. After all, which state would readily agree that it is on the wrong side of a fight against “colonial domination,” “alien occupation” or a “racist regime”?

And indeed, those states for whom the rule had reportedly been “tailor-made”—that is, “Portugal, Israel, and South Africa”—made sure not to ratify the Protocol at all ( in the case of Israel) or at least to wait until their circumstances changed enough for the rule not to bite them anymore (Portugal ratified the Protocol after having relinquished control over its ex-colonies and South Africa did so after the end of apartheid). Basically for these reasons, George Aldrich, the former head of the US delegation to the 1974–77 diplomatic conference, argued in the 1990s that Article 1(4) was destined to become “a dead letter” that would never see application in practice.

Two decades later, as I was commencing my research on conflict internationalization, I had very little doubt that Aldrich’s prediction would hold true. Still, I felt I had to include wars of national liberation in the scope of the project. This was because conflicts falling within the remit of the provision would, at least in theory, transform from non-international armed conflicts to ones governed by the law of international armed conflict. In other words, situations such as those described in Article 1(4) and occurring in the territory of a contracting state to the Protocol form a distinct subcategory of internationalized armed conflicts. But would they ever become more than a theoretical possibility?

(To be continued in Part II)

Featured image credit:  Geneva Conventions Certificate 1949-08-12 by  Swiss Federal Archives. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Shark Week 2018

With their huge, sharp teeth and menacing demeanor, it’s no wonder this ocean predator has long struck fear into the hearts of many. Thanks to films like Jaws and Sharknado, sharks have gained a reputation for killing and eating humans, yet there are under 100 unprovoked shark attacks each year, and even fewer fatalities—you’re more likely to be killed by lightning or a bee sting than you are by a shark!

As Discovery Channel’s Shark Week celebrates its 30th year, we have selected some facts for you to enjoy between shows—one for each day of the week.

You thought you’d never go in the water again…


Cage diving with sharks may seem like an enticing opportunity to get up close and personal with these fearsome creatures without the risk of being eaten, but it’s a damaging experience for sharks, which have a limited amount of energy. When cage diving occurs, shark activity in the area increases as the sharks detect the presence of potential prey (as well as shark “attractants” used by tour operators). However, they receive no payoff for exerting this hunting energy, consequently decreasing the species’ fitness.
When the hunt is on, the heat is on


When hunting, great white sharks have to be able to propel themselves forward in short bursts while also swimming long distances in very low temperatures. To do this, the shark has to increase its internal temperature so the muscles can perform by using its thermoregulatory system.


Image credit: Great white shark near Dyer Island by Olga Ernst. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


Could tuna be the next Jaws ?


You may not find the fish you put on your sandwich frightening, but maybe now you might: tuna and sharks share the same “super predator” genes! While tuna don’t have the genes that create the shark’s huge teeth, the two creatures do share certain predatory genetic traits, such as their fast metabolism and ability to swim quickly, enabling them to catch prey in inhospitable waters.


“Sisters before misters” applies to sharks too


Female solidarity is strong in the shark world. Studies show that closely bonded groups of female sharks are more resilient to male disturbance: when confronted by a male seeking a mate, groups of ladies are less likely to pair off with the male. In contrast, solitary females cycle through male partners more frequently.
Barcode scanning isn’t just for groceries


Thanks to a demand for shark fin soup in the Asian market, shark harvesting is rife despite the bans on capturing endangered species. At local fish markets, many sellers get away with illegally trading sharks by removing any distinctive features, such as fins and heads. However, DNA barcode scanning can be used to better monitor this, through the extraction of short strands of DNA that can be quickly analyzed. Such advancements will hopefully lead to a reduction in illegal trading.


Image credit: The blind shark is a species of carpet shark which inhabits shallow waters, similar to the epaulette shark. Image by David Breneman. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


Stress is felt in a fish out of water


Sharks can be accidentally caught in fishing nets alongside a fisherman’s regular harvest, but are later released back into the ocean. This catch and release can have a detrimental impact on sharks’ wellbeing: some sharks, including hammerheads, experience physiological changes and reflex impairment following capture, which suggests a higher vulnerability to fishing. Other sharks however, including nurse sharks, experience very little or no physiological changes and appear better equipped to being caught and released.
Coral reefs provide respite


As ocean acidification rises, sharks (along with other sea life) will have to adapt. Ocean acidification is occurring due to the increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some of which is absorbed by the ocean and increasing its acidity. The epaulette shark is able to cope with this: the shark is not only capable of withstanding low oxygen levels, but also short periods of elevated carbon dioxide levels, by inhabiting shallow waters and hiding in coral reefs.


Shark size doesn’t matter


Different species of shark are highly varied in their biology and behavior, but it appears that no matter the size of the shark, their anatomy is geometrically similar. For example, different species of shark have the same-sized fins proportional to their overall body size. In fact, the most important variance between different shark species is not their bodily proportions but their overall body length, as this is often linked to their diet.

Featured image credit: Great White Shark by Elias Levy. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Japan’s pivot in Asia

The 2016 Brexit vote and Donald J. Trump’s election as president of the United States were shocking to those in the West complacent about the sustainability of the liberal international order.

In East Asia, the Brexit vote served as a reminder of how abruptly the improbable could become entirely possible. Could the unwinding of long-taken-for-granted assumptions about regional order and its supporting institutions also take place in Asia? Trump’s election, not even five months later – and then his overture to Pyongyang – made these prospects even more tangible.

Tokyo is wary of Trump’s treatment of traditional American allies in Europe and Asia, and it is apprehensive about what compromises Trump might make in search of a ‘deal’ with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK.) Trump’s foreign policy behaviour makes strategic autonomy for some in Japan even more attractive.

In Tokyo, apprehension regarding how the different trajectories of China and the United States might affect Japan—muted somewhat by the Obama administration’s reassurances of a US “pivot” to Asia—is more apparent than ever.

Tokyo’s complex relations with China and the United States—its two most important bilateral relationships—were already fraught with knotty, albeit different, problems. Relations with China, the rapidly emerging power just offshore, were often characterized as “economically hot, but politically cold,” while the United States, Japan’s longstanding security guarantor, was bogged down in—and distracted by—wars in the Middle East.

Even before Trump’s election, Japanese strategists wondered openly how long the United States, its population tiring of foreign wars and operating under fiscal constraints, would continue to be willing and able to maintain its commitments to Japan.

These concerns are manifest in four policy domains: institutional change at home; diplomacy; the economy; and military balancing. Japan’s domestic institutions for foreign and security policy making have been adapted and enhanced. With intelligence reform, the creation of a new National Security Council, a reorganisation of procurement processes and arms export regulations under the Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency, as well as changes to parliamentary oversight of the Self-Defence Force, Japan is looking to enhance its capacity to respond to geopolitical events through a “whole of government” approach. Building on enhanced institutional focus, the Japanese government has pursued bolder foreign policy initiatives to diversify Japan’s economic, diplomatic, and security relations in the form of a Japanese “pivot within Asia.”

Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and President Donald Trump holding a Joint Press Conference by Cabinet Public Relations Office (内閣官房内閣広報室). CC-BY-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Economically, Japan is looking to reorient the regional centre of economic gravity away from China by pursuing new dependence-mitigating relationships with countries in Southeast Asia, Bay of Bengal, and East African subregions. Economic diversification throughout the ‘Indo-Pacific’ will also serve as the basis for new diplomatic and security partnerships. The Japanese government has attempted to strengthen diplomatic ties and align its geopolitical interests with important regional powers such as Russia, Australia, India, and the Republic of Korea – albeit with varying degrees of success. Such cooperation also allows the diversification of Japan’s security relationships for the purpose of enhanced external balancing.

Japan has not, however, given up on the United States’ capability and commitment to provide security and stability in the region. More than ever, Tokyo recognizes that it needs to step up as a US partner in Asia and ensure the alliance remains robust and fit for purpose in an age of new military challenges.

We acknowledge that US relative decline and the inevitability of Chinese regional pre-eminence may be oversold by some observers, and that Japanese strategic autonomy is less imminent than some in Tokyo would prefer. After all, Japan is in even faster decline vis-à-vis China than the United States, domestic political constraints on enhanced Japanese muscularity do persist, and Japan’s defence budget is well short of what would be required of an autonomous power.

This is why we view the Japanese pivot not as a radical overhaul of Japan’s grand strategy, but as a down payment on future autonomy. It is a posture designed to ensure the alliance commitment remains firm enough for Tokyo to benefit from Washington’s network of security partners, while it deepens other relationships and sharpens its own military capabilities. Tokyo continues to accumulate strategic resources that will improve its flexibility to adjust to potential regional crises or to a rapid deterioration in its security.

All this is happening at a time and place where decades and even centuries of hierarchy are melting away, where the new order is uncertain, where unprecedented wealth is being created, and where the consequences of change are welcome to some, feared by others, and—we have to be honest—unknown to us all.

Japan has been faced with this kind of uncertainty more than once since the end of World War II, and has managed to adapt its grand strategy mostly without major disruption to its society or regional stability. However, whether Japan can repeat its success again through incremental adjustment is an open question. Japan may well need to be bolder than it has been at any point in the post-war era.

Featured image credit: fuji mount pagoda japan mountain by oadtz. Public domain via Pixabay .

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Women artists in conversation: Tiff Massey Q&A [Part I]

Tiff Massey is a young artist whose work ranges from wearable sculpture to large-scale public interventions. She is the first African-American woman to graduate from Cranbrook Academy of Art’s MFA in Metalsmithing. She cites her influences as ranging from 1980s hip-hop culture and her hometown of Detroit to African art and Japanese fashion. Her work often implicates the viewer or wearer, incorporating them into dialogues about space, as well as racial and gender politics.

Massey is a 2015 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship awardee, as well as a two-time John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge winner and a Michigan Chronicle 40 Under 40 award recipient. She has participated in several international residencies including Ideas City (in Detroit, Athens, Greece and Arles, France) hosted by The New Museum of New York and with the Volterra-Detroit Foundation in Volterra, Italy. Her work has been widely exhibited in both national and international museums and galleries.

In the first of a two-part interview, she talks with Benezit Dictionary of Art editor, Kathy Battista, about her work as well as her vision for bringing art education to underserved areas of Detroit.

Kathy: The first question I have is about scale in your work. Are large sculptures like I Do, I Do, I Doooo related to similar forms found in your jewelry? 

Tiff: I started exploring scale when I was in grad school, around 2010. I wasn’t satisfied with a bracelet that I made out of wood. When placed it on the table, I noticed that the orientation would change, and I became fascinated with that aspect. So I increased the scale to 3 ½ x 8 ft long, expecting my colleagues to interact with it and they just respected it as sculpture and didn’t touch it at all. The only time people interacted with it was the procession of moving it from the shop to its location for critique. I’m not satisfied with the scale of a personal object or a work just for an individualized experience. In the public realm I am able to share my work with people who are not well versed in the arts and because I’m not satisfied with the scale of the jewelry, I often recreate the objects that are meant for the body larger for the landscape. So, yes, there is a relationship.

K: And when you say “the public,” are those pieces typically commissioned?

T: The first sculpture that I created was Facet and that piece is permanently installed in Detroit at The Belt. It was for ArtPrize, initially in 2010, and then I was asked to place the work in an alley that they were activating with art. My other pieces were commissioned. I’m currently working on matching a grant from the Knight Foundation to create one of Detroit’s largest sculptures, which will be installed permanently at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

Tiff Massey: Facet, steel, 216 x 54 x 6 (variable), 2010. Image courtesy of the artist.

The goal is to have it made of mirrored stainless steel – modeled after [one of my bracelets]. I am thinking 30 ft wide by 20 ft tall, but since it’s outdoors, it might need to be bigger. The idea is to have this submerged in the ground so people would be able to walk through the bracelet itself and into an interior space.

K: I love the ambition of your outdoor sculpture. Is this a feminist response to artists like Serra , Koons , and the other guys making big work?

T: Actually, it’s more like, “I’m here. You can’t deny me.” The objects that I choose are a different aesthetic. They are still shiny and reflective, but my background comes from 1980s hip-hop and growing up in Detroit. The imagery is very different from the line and the form and the spaces that they create within their works.

K: We’ve talked about how the big public work will be reflective. How does that connect to your mirrored works? 

T: I’ve been using mirrors since 2009. I was examining political subject matter and dealing with appropriation. One of my first pieces was a response to “The Fabric of Our Lives,” the cotton logo. So I created this piece The Fabric of Whose Life Muthafucka? It’s a mirrored cotton logo and then I wove my hair inside of it to create the cotton blossom. And within the logo, instead of plants, there are cutout images of figures, made from photographs of lynchings. At Cranbrook, I was slapping people in the face with this imagery, really confronting them with American history. A lot of people would say, “I don’t have anything to do with this” or “I don’t really know much about this.” Yeah, you do. There is no separation now. I started to like that aspect. Creating a space where people can’t get out of the work; they are a part of it because their reflection is actually in it.

I was the only black woman on campus and the first black woman to graduate from the metalsmithing department. The first black man was there with me too. People would want to have conversations with me that they wouldn’t have with the black men that were on campus, but when it came down to the work, I felt that my artist in residence, Iris Eichenberg, was fighting for me the most. My counterparts didn’t necessarily know how to talk or want to talk about the work, or they would think it was racist. I was like, how does that even function? Let’s unpack this.

Tiff Massey: The Fabric of Whose Life Muthafucka?, wood, acrylic, and hair, 10 x 12 x ¾ ins, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist.

Look out for the second part of this interview, where Battista will speak to Massey about her influences and beginnings as an artist.

In 2018 the Benezit Dictionary of Artists has devoted a year to commissioning new biographies to revising and expanding current entries on women artists. Read the previous posts in this blog series here.

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Who discovered Newton’s Laws?

Newton’s famous remark, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” is not in his published work, but comes from a letter to a colleague and competitor. In context, it reads simply as an elaborately polite acknowledgment of previous work on optics, especially the work of the recipient of the letter, Robert Hooke.

Newton’s laws of motion provide another set of examples of him standing on the shoulders of giants, as he makes explicit in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica when describing them. Newton credits one Galilaeus with the first two laws, and writes that the third law was demonstrated first by Johannes Wallisius, and then by Christophorus Wrennus and Christianus Huygenius.

At the heart of the laws of motion is an abstraction that Newton called quantitas motus (literally quantity of motion), which actually means mass times speed, paying attention also to the direction of motion. The modern term for this is momentum. Together, the three laws state that bodies can exchange momentum among themselves, but they can’t create or destroy it. If you are standing and then start walking forwards, by giving yourself a forward momentum, you give the Earth an equal backward momentum. Since the Earth is much more massive than you, the backward speed you impart to it is very, very small.

This concept of momentum conservation is more or less the starting point of the Principia. To this, Newton adds the gravitational force we now all know. In addition to these concepts and quantities, he then develops new mathematical tools to be able to solve for the paths of moving objects. With these, he successfully describes the orbit of a planet around the Sun (or more precisely, the dual orbits of the Sun and a planet around their centre of gravity). He then attempts to add in the Moon, and suddenly things get much more complicated. Since he cannot solve for the orbits of three (or more) bodies directly, he does the next best thing for a physicist: comes up with useful methods for approximation.

Later generations stood upon the shoulders of the Principia in many, many different ways. To give just one example from the 20th century, Emmy Noether created a theorem describing a very general relation between conservation laws (like Newton’s laws of motion) to the symmetries of the world (such as rotational symmetry).

But later generations rebelled against one aspect: Newton used lots of figures and prose in his proofs, whereas the mathematical notation we have inherited tries to pack everything into equations. This makes even translations of Principia pretty incomprehensible to a modern reader without expert commentary, even though the material itself may be quite familiar. Perhaps the most important modern commentary is Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar, where we can enjoy having a great 20th-century astrophysicist explain what Newton wrote, using modern mathematical language. Sometimes, what appear to be arcane geometrical arguments are actually the steps of Newton inventing differential and integral calculus as he goes along. In one famous section, Newton proves that a massive ball behaves gravitationally as if it were a massive point, and while doing so introduces a mathematical concept otherwise unseen until the 20th century (a Lebesgue integral); it is fascinating (and impressive) to see Newton use physical intuition to develop a construction that was formally developed centuries later for much more abstract mathematics.

In the 21st century, we live in a world that Newton could not have imagined. Even time is not absolute in the way everyone had previously assumed—this non-absoluteness is so ubiquitous that it has even snuck into our everyday lives through the workings of GPS devices. Does this mean that Newtonian dynamics is now passé? Not at all! Thanks to space travel and computers, the legacy of Principia is more active than it ever was. Anywhere spacecraft have gone, the relativity of space and time enters at the eighth or ninth decimal place, and if you want to land on a comet or something like that, the Newtonian principles are plenty good enough, just the calculations get complicated. The movie Hidden Figures is set in the early days of space travel, and behind the human drama a scientific drama also unfolds, as the protagonists bring the orbital equations rooted in the Principia to the new science of spacecraft dynamics, (often painstakingly so); eventually, the human “computers” teach themselves to program the newfangled digital ones, but the underlying physical equations remain at the heart of the calculations.

Weird and wonderful things are still being discovered. The animation below, based on a 2016 paper by Helena Morais and Fathi Namouni, illustrates the orbits of an unexpected class of solar-system denizens. These are asteroids orbiting the Sun with exactly the same period as Jupiter, but going around the opposite way, in a kind of orbital dance that not even crazy theorists expected before the 21st century. Though we can’t rule out the possibility that Newton did wonder about something like this, and said so in some cryptic comment in Principia…

Image credit: Orbits by Prasenjit Saha and Paul Taylor. Used with permission.

 

Featured image credit: Space, satellite, and window by NASA. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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