The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical writing: the best-written work on this year's shortlist
Plus the best-written previous winner this century
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IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘This is the story of how a great and mighty civilisation – Mediterranean Islam – was slowly penetrated and subjugated by the fractious states occupying the lands lying north of the Great Sea. And through that story this book offers a challenging view of European imperialism: it was the Mediterranean and its hinterlands – not sub-Saharan Africa, Asia or the Pacific – which witnessed the most historically and politically significant sphere of imperialism and inter-imperialist rivalry from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries’: the best-written work on the shortlist for this year’s PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical writing. The winner will be announced this evening (22nd of November).
—‘The earth turns and the curving shadow sweeps round the globe. The sun sets, the moon rises, and all that is familiar feels suddenly strange’: the best-written winner of the prize this century. This choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century.
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The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2024 shortlist
Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds
Pennock Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984–1985 by Robert Gildea
Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949–1990 by Katja Hoyer
Sea of Troubles: The European Conquest of the Islamic Mediterranean and the Origins of the First World War by Ian Rutledge
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim
The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios
The best-written of these is
INTRODUCTION
This is the story of how a great and mighty civilisation – Mediterranean Islam – was slowly penetrated and subjugated by the fractious states occupying the lands lying north of the Great Sea. And through that story this book offers a challenging view of European imperialism: it was the Mediterranean and its hinterlands – not sub-Saharan Africa, Asia or the Pacific – which witnessed the most historically and politically significant sphere of imperialism and inter-imperialist rivalry from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
There is also one especially important reason why the European conquest of the Islamic Mediterranean was very different from all those better-known episodes of European conquest and colonialism (in the Americas, in Africa and the Pacific). Because the conquest occurred over a much longer period the opponents – the conquerors and the conquered – had known each other for a very long time.
From the Arab conquests of the eighth century to the point at which our narrative begins, the Mediterranean was dominated by Islamic powers. European crusaders reconquered some territory in the twelfth century, but in the mid-fourteenth century the forces of Islam recovered and began an assault on Europe’s eastern flank. An Islamised Turkic tribe from Anatolia, the Ottomans, crossed over to Europe at the Dardanelles and subsequently defeated the Christian rulers of the Balkans. In 1453 they captured Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire and last bastion of Eastern Christianity. The sixteenth century witnessed the spread of Ottoman power south, through Syria and Palestine, and west, along the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean, as they crushed the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Arab and Berber emirates of the Maghreb. By the mid-eighteenth century around four-fifths of the Mediterranean’s shores and hinterlands were in the hands of two Muslim polities, the Ottomans and the Alaouite Sultanate of Morocco, the latter being the only remaining independent Muslim state, shielded by the towering Atlas Mountains.
Of these two, the Ottomans were overwhelmingly the greatest. Contrary to the traditional orientalist historiography, at the moment when the histories of Christian Europeans and Ottoman Muslims became fatally intertwined – the mid-eighteenth century – they were on an equal footing in many relevant respects: culturally, materially, in their level of economic development, and in their living standards. Indeed, Islamic civilisation was still regarded by Christian Europe with awe, fear and, sometimes, admiration.
Our story begins at this time because this was when European powers began to show an interest in exploiting the political difficulties emerging within the Mediterranean’s dominant power.1 In the nineteenth century that interest gradually became one of economic, political and military penetration and engendered an intense rivalry between Britain, France and Russia as they sought domination of the Great Sea and its Islamic hinterlands. At the end of that century this rivalry took a fateful turn as there occurred a major realignment of these imperialist powers; and three more imperialists, Italy, Austria-Hungary and Germany, began to seek their share of the spoils. These developments, in the race to acquire what remained of the Islamic Mediterranean would eventually set off a chain reaction of violence which, in its totality, became the primary cause of the First World War.
In the mid-eighteenth century, most of the Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, a vast Islamic power which – although past its zenith – was still regarded by Christian Europe with awe and fear. However, by the end of the First World War, this great civilisation had been completely subjugated, its territories occupied by European states.
In Sea of Troubles, Ian Rutledge reveals how the Mediterranean – the fault line between Europe and Islam – became the most important centre of European imperialist rivalry. Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary and Russia all jostled for control of the trade, lands and wealth of this Islamic region. This competition made their conquest a far more difficult and extended task than they encountered elsewhere in the world. As rivalries intensified in the early twentieth century, events would spiral out of control as the continent headed towards war.
Sea of Troubles is a sweeping and fascinating account of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, told from all key players’ perspectives. Ian Rutledge masterfully investigates over three centuries of European imperialism in the Islamic Mediterranean, showing that it was the chain reaction of their violence in this region that was the primary cause of the First World War.
RECOMMENDED:
The Hessell-Tiltman Prize - previous winners this century
Boomerang: How the Afterlife of Empire is Breaking Britain by Kojo Koram (2001)
Peacemakers by Margaret Macmillan (2002)
The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow (2003)
Rubicon by Tom Holland (2004)
The Boys' Crusade by Paul Fussell (2005)
The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward Perkins (2006)
That Neutral Island by Clair Wills (2008)
The White War by Mark Thompson (2009)
A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010)
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson (2011)
The Information by James Gleick (2012)
The German War by Nicholas Stargardt (2016)
God's Traitors by Jessie Child (2015)
The Long Shadow by David Reynolds (2014)
Black and British by David Olusoga (2017)
Russia in Revolution by S. A. Smith (2018)
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee (2019)
The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand (2020)
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee (2021)
Russia in Revolution by S. A. Smith (2022)
The Pursuit of Perfect by David Olusoga (2023)
The best-written of these is
PROLOGUE: ‘SURPRISE THE WORLD’
The earth turns and the curving shadow sweeps round the globe. The sun sets, the moon rises, and all that is familiar feels suddenly strange. In an age before street lights, link-boys carry torches to see city-dwellers home, while in the countryside starlight and moonlight are the only guides. The footpads are out, a darker blackness against shadow, so for safety’s sake men walk together when they roll back from the coffee-house, the tavern and the club. And in the eighteenth century clubs are everywhere: clubs for singing, clubs for drinking, clubs for farting; clubs of poets and pudding-makers and politicians. One such gathering of like-minded men is the Lunar Society of Birmingham. They are a small, informal bunch who simply try to meet at each other’s houses on the Monday nearest the full moon, to have light to ride home (hence the name) and like other clubs they drink and laugh and argue into the night. But the Lunar men are different – together they nudge their whole society and culture over the threshold of the modern, tilting it irrevocably away from old patterns of life towards the world we know today. That is why I wanted to write about them.
Amid fields and hills the Lunar men build factories, plan canals, make steam-engines thunder. They discover new gases, new minerals and new medicines and propose unsettling new ideas. They create objects of beauty and poetry of bizarre allure. They sail on the crest of the new. Yet their powerhouse of invention is not made up of aristocrats or statesmen or scholars but of provincial manufacturers, professional men and gifted amateurs – friends who meet almost by accident and whose lives overlap until they die.
So who are they?
First to enter is Erasmus Darwin, doctor, inventor, poet and – half a century before his grandson Charles – pioneer of evolution. (Enormously gifted and enormously fat, eventually he has to cut a semi-circle in his dining table to fit his stomach.) Then comes Matthew Boulton, flamboyant chief of the first great ‘manufactory’ at Soho, just outside Birmingham, followed by his anxious Scottish partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame. Another member is the ambitious young potter Josiah Wedgwood, and eventually, in 1780, Joseph Priestley arrives, the preacher with the stuttering voice and flowing pen, the chemist who isolates oxygen and becomes the visionary leader of Rational Dissent.
This quintet forms the core. But around them weave other stories, a string of names that take on shape as they turn up in their top-coats and breeches, driving newfangled carriages, talking of freedom, of riots and reform, love and laughing-gas. Among them are the Scots chemist James Keir, reliable as a rock; the clockmaker John Whitehurst, who works with minutes but dreams of millennia, the age of the earth itself. Then come the doctors: the diplomatic William Small who seals their early friendships, and the austere William Withering, who brings digitalis into mainstream medicine. And a wilder note sounds with the arrival of two young, idealistic followers of Rousseau, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Thomas Day.
Ten of these men became Fellows of the Royal Society but only a few had a university education and most were Nonconformists or freethinkers. This placed them outside the Establishment – an apparent disadvantage which proved a real strength, since they were unhampered by old traditions of deference and stuffy institutions. They came from varied backgrounds but when they edged towards rows they agreed to differ, turning back to the things they shared. ‘We had nothing to do with the religious or political principles of each other,’ wrote Priestley. ‘We were united by a common love of science, which we thought sufficient to bring together persons of all distinctions, Christians, Jews, Mohametans, and Heathens, Monarchists and Republicans.’ Like a living unit, the group stretched to encompass the awkward and odd: only rarely was there an absolute impasse. Their passionate common exchange and endeavour was of a type that would never be possible again – until today, with the fast, collaborative intimacy of the Internet.
To begin with they came together simply through the pleasure of playing with experiments, what Darwin called ‘a little philosophical laughing’. They caught at discoveries with delight, sure that every find could help them to crack the elusive codes of nature. And Nature, on every hand, offered herself for investigation. The great vogue for collecting that had grown through the previous century now reached new peaks. Sometimes the collections were ‘evidence’ in an argument, like the unsurpassed collection of minerals and fossils amassed at the start of the century by geologist John Woodward, to prove the revolutionary thesis that fossils were indeed the remains of ancient organisms, not patterns in rocks, or mysterious designs placed there by God. At other times, the whole of the natural world suddenly became ‘collectible’, as if knowledge were conveyed directly, visibly, tangibly by the objects in a cabinet of curiosities. When Peter the Great asked the philosopher Leibniz in 1708 what he should collect, the answer, it seemed, was ‘everything’:
Such a cabinet should contain all significant things and rarities created by nature and man. Particularly needed are stones, metals, minerals, wild plants, and their artificial copies, animals both stuffed and preserved … Foreign works to be acquired should include diverse books, instruments, curiosities and rarities … In short, all that could enlighten and please the eye.
However, Peter’s daughter-in-law Catherine the Great (another great collector) disparaged this old, baroque style of freakish accretion: ‘I often quarrelled with him’, she wrote, ‘about his wish to enclose Nature in a cabinet – even a huge palace could not hold Her.’
Nature would not be confined. In the mid-eighteenth century, across Europe, in Britain and in America, ordering the vast and complex riches of Nature became a priority. This was the age of great scientific expeditions. When the naturalists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander travelled with Captain Cook on his voyage to the South Seas from 1768 to 1771, they brought back 1,000 new species of plants, 500 fish, 500 bird skins, numberless insects and hundreds of drawings. It was against this background that Erasmus Darwin translated Linnaeus, wrote his epic poem The Botanic Garden and developed his own controversial theories of evolution.
In exploring such matters Darwin and his friends were part of the great spread of interest in science that extended from the King and the Royal Society to country clergymen and cotton-spinners. When people talk of eighteenth-century culture this is the swathe that is often missed out: the smart crowds thronging to electrical demonstrations; the squires fussing over rainfall gauges; the duchesses collecting shells and the boys making fire-balloons; the mothers teaching their children from the new encyclopaedias with their marvellous engraved plates of strange animals and birds and plants.
Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles Darwin). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical.
They kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals, launched balloons, named plants, gases and minerals, changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms, and plotted to revolutionise its soul.
Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men is a vivid and swarming group portrait that brings to life the friendships, political passions, love affairs, and love of knowledge (and power) that drove these extraordinary men. It echoes the thud of pistons and the wheeze and snort of engines, and brings to life the tradesmen, artisans, and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern age.
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, The Lunar Men captures the creation of the modern world with lucid intelligence, sympathy and wisdom. Jenny Uglow is also the prize-winning author of Nature's Engraver, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories and most recently, In These Times.