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f o r e i g n p a r t s b o ok s hop in ‘a poor, cold, strong and remote country, among a turbulent people’. To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington: when the difficulties of invading Afghanistan are over, the real difficulties begin. 20% discountonmosttitles Many British officers who set out from the Punjab at the head of a 20,000-strong army regarded the expedition as a hunting trip. They equipped themselves with every luxury, one regiment employing two camels to transport its stock of cigars, another travelling with a pack of foxhounds. But hunger, thirst and exhaustion amid crag and abyss, as well as incessant harassment by guerrilla warriors, soon disillusioned the invaders. One likened their advance on Kandahar to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. By mid-1839, though, they had foisted Shuja on a sullen Kabul. Macnaghten, an obtuse pedant who considered the Afghans naughty children, to be bullied and bribed by turns, became the British political agent. Call our order hotline 0870 429 6608 literaryreview@bertrams.com All major credit and debit cards accepted His task was to build an Afghan national army – a painfully familiar project – to prop up Shuja so that British forces could withdraw. Instead Afghan hatred of the Christian and Hindu intruders crystallised into a jihad, led by Dost Mohammad’s ruthless son Akbar. Sporadic outbursts of violence culminated in the murder of Burnes and Macnaghten, whose dismembered torso was hung on a meat hook in the Kabul bazaar. Having neglected to quell the uprising, to fortify the garrison or to safeguard his supplies, General Elphinstone, a gouty bumbler who had last seen action at Waterloo, embarked on the most ghastly evacuation in British history. In blizzard conditions his long column, swollen by 12,000 camp followers and an immense baggage train, crawled out of Kabul. Afghans, later characterised by a Scottish officer as a ‘race of tigers’, attacked it ferociously. They butchered stragglers, seized pack animals and plundered bullock ConferenCes spring 2013 “Jane austen’s Men”: Jane austen soCiety ConferenCe 16 February 2013 “anglo-saxon london”: the london anglo-saxon syMposiuM 2013 13 March 2013 Writers and their libraries 15 – 16 March 2013 featuring the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, by Dirk Van Hulle: ‘Writers’ Libraries and the Extended Mind’ shifting territories: Modern & ConteMporary poetiCs of plaCe 22 – 23 May 2013 in association with the British Academy Literature Week For details: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events tel: +44 (0)20 7664 4859 | email: iesevents@sas.ac.uk carts. Many soldiers, most of whom were sepoys, froze or starved to death. More were killed in precipitous passes, their foes on the heights firing long-barrelled matchlocks ( jezails), which outranged British muskets. The jaws of one ‘terrible defile’ became choked with corpses. Akbar accepted the surrender of a few women, children and wounded men, whom he treated chivalrously. Nearly all the rest were slaughtered. Mounted on a dying pony, a single European, assistant surgeon William Brydon, reached the safety of Jalalabad. The catastrophe seemed to shake the foundations of the British Empire. Lord Ellenborough, who succeeded the discredited Auckland in 1842, reversed his policy, restoring Dost Mohammad after the assassination of Shuja and accepting the Himalayan boundary of the Raj. But Ellenborough also authorised the dispatch of an army of retribution to punish the Afghans and salvage British prestige. It massacred, pillaged, raped and destroyed on an epic scale, razing villages and burning much of Kabul, including the splendid 17th-century bazaar in which Macnaghten’s lacerated torso had been displayed. (Interestingly, Dalrymple’s Afghan sources accuse the British of preternatural brutality, particularly towards women, the very charge that the British have always levelled against the Afghans.) Far from restoring national honour, needless to say, Ellenborough’s savage reprisal sowed seeds of enmity that even now spring up as armed men. As Burke maintained, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Despite the fate of Elphinstone’s army there have been three further British incursions into Afghanistan, all fatal and futile. The first of them prompted Gladstone to inveigh against the irredeemable guilt of unnecessary war. The last is a monument to the vanity and folly of Tony Blair, who wanted to walk tall next to George W Bush and was culpably ignorant of history. Leaders will have no excuse in future. William Dalrymple’s Return of a King is not just a riveting account of one imperial disaster on the roof of the world; it teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 45 Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 6 september 2012 | Literary Review 4 INDESIGN classifieds new.indd 4 24/01/2013 15:44
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f o r e i g n p a r t s j o s h g l a n c y The Sin that Wouldn’t Die Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II By Douglas A Blackmon (Icon Books 468pp £12.99) On30 March 1908, Green Cottenham went down to the railway station in Columbiana, Alabama, as normal. It was there that he would pick up casual labour transporting crates or picking cotton. In between shifts he whiled away his day playing dice and smoking tobacco with his fellow African-Americans. This day, however, turned out differently. Cottenham was seized by the local sheriff ’s chief deputy and accused of riding a freight train without a ticket. He appeared before a judge the following day. There was no evidence to convict him, so the judge declared him guilty of ‘vagrancy’ instead, a crime so vague that there was no defence. The purpose of this legal charade was not to lock Cottenham up in prison. Instead he was sentenced to work for the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company for three months of hard labour, plus an extra three months and six days’ work to pay off the costs of his arrest and sentencing. For this the company, a subsidiary of the giant US Steel, paid the county the considerable sum of $12 a month. Life in Pratts coal mine was a desperate affair. Each day was spent in chains, working underground ‘in a vast labyrinth of black rock tunnels, shared only by dozens of dirty mules and squadrons of desperate men’. Sodomy was rife, as was violence between the convicts, and vicious punishments were regularly meted out by the overseers. Cottenham entered this environment a strong, fit young man. Within five months, he had contracted tuberculosis and died. of the Civil War in 1865 and the Second World War. The leasing of prisoners to corporate interests by the state was a well-established activity in 19th-century America. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, it developed into a widely practised and often extra-legal means of providing free black labour to a rapidly industrialising Southern economy. The war had ended the specific institution of slavery, but there was no strategy for cleansing the South of its ‘economic and intellectual addiction to slavery’. Rather than face up to the task of creating an equal society, the most racist elements of Southern society went about turning the region into what W E B Du Bois called an ‘armed camp for intimidating black folk’. Elements of this armed camp included the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings and the Jim Crow laws. Through his diligent investigation into forced labour, Blackmon has unearthed and examined another important strand of post-Civil War Southern white hegemony. Under the convict-leasing system, African-Americans would be accused of any number of petty and often unprovable crimes, such as speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman or selling cotton after sunset. Their convictions were hurried through the local magistrate and their labour sold to local industrialists, thus ‘knitting together the interests of capitalists, white farmers, local sheriffs and judges’. Such was the labyrinthine and often unofficial nature of this system that it is difficult for Blackmon to produce exact statistics. But by 1877, the end of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, ‘every former Confederate state apart from Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black prisoners into commercial hands’. He estimates that by the end of the 1880s at least ten thousand black men in the South were slaving in forced labour. The numbers do not compare to the four million who were kept in slavery during the antebellum period. But the system was an important means of ‘terrorizing the The harrowing demise of Green Cottenham is a tale that becomes all too familiar in Douglas A Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. A white Southerner by birth, Blackmon, previously the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta, has delved deep into the archives to paint a detailed and powerful picture of neo-slavery in the American South between the end Convict wagons in Pitt County, North Carolina, 1910 f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 7

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f o r e i g n p a r t s b o ok s hop in ‘a poor, cold, strong and remote country, among a turbulent people’. To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington: when the difficulties of invading Afghanistan are over, the real difficulties begin.

20% discountonmosttitles

Many British officers who set out from the Punjab at the head of a 20,000-strong army regarded the expedition as a hunting trip. They equipped themselves with every luxury, one regiment employing two camels to transport its stock of cigars, another travelling with a pack of foxhounds. But hunger, thirst and exhaustion amid crag and abyss, as well as incessant harassment by guerrilla warriors, soon disillusioned the invaders. One likened their advance on Kandahar to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. By mid-1839, though, they had foisted Shuja on a sullen Kabul. Macnaghten, an obtuse pedant who considered the Afghans naughty children, to be bullied and bribed by turns, became the British political agent.

Call our order hotline

0870 429 6608 literaryreview@bertrams.com All major credit and debit cards accepted

His task was to build an Afghan national army – a painfully familiar project – to prop up Shuja so that British forces could withdraw. Instead Afghan hatred of the Christian and Hindu intruders crystallised into a jihad, led by Dost Mohammad’s ruthless son Akbar. Sporadic outbursts of violence culminated in the murder of Burnes and Macnaghten, whose dismembered torso was hung on a meat hook in the Kabul bazaar. Having neglected to quell the uprising, to fortify the garrison or to safeguard his supplies, General Elphinstone, a gouty bumbler who had last seen action at Waterloo, embarked on the most ghastly evacuation in British history.

In blizzard conditions his long column, swollen by 12,000 camp followers and an immense baggage train, crawled out of Kabul. Afghans, later characterised by a Scottish officer as a ‘race of tigers’, attacked it ferociously. They butchered stragglers, seized pack animals and plundered bullock

ConferenCes spring 2013

“Jane austen’s Men”: Jane austen soCiety ConferenCe

16 February 2013

“anglo-saxon london”: the london anglo-saxon syMposiuM 2013

13 March 2013

Writers and their libraries

15 – 16 March 2013

featuring the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book,

by Dirk Van Hulle: ‘Writers’ Libraries and the Extended Mind’

shifting territories: Modern & ConteMporary poetiCs of plaCe

22 – 23 May 2013

in association with the British Academy Literature Week

For details: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events tel: +44 (0)20 7664 4859 | email: iesevents@sas.ac.uk carts. Many soldiers, most of whom were sepoys, froze or starved to death. More were killed in precipitous passes, their foes on the heights firing long-barrelled matchlocks ( jezails), which outranged British muskets. The jaws of one ‘terrible defile’ became choked with corpses. Akbar accepted the surrender of a few women, children and wounded men, whom he treated chivalrously. Nearly all the rest were slaughtered. Mounted on a dying pony, a single European, assistant surgeon William Brydon, reached the safety of Jalalabad.

The catastrophe seemed to shake the foundations of the British Empire. Lord Ellenborough, who succeeded the discredited Auckland in 1842, reversed his policy, restoring Dost Mohammad after the assassination of Shuja and accepting the Himalayan boundary of the Raj. But Ellenborough also authorised the dispatch of an army of retribution to punish the Afghans and salvage British prestige. It massacred, pillaged, raped and destroyed on an epic scale, razing villages and burning much of Kabul, including the splendid 17th-century bazaar in which Macnaghten’s lacerated torso had been displayed. (Interestingly, Dalrymple’s Afghan sources accuse the British of preternatural brutality, particularly towards women, the very charge that the British have always levelled against the Afghans.) Far from restoring national honour, needless to say, Ellenborough’s savage reprisal sowed seeds of enmity that even now spring up as armed men.

As Burke maintained, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Despite the fate of Elphinstone’s army there have been three further British incursions into Afghanistan, all fatal and futile. The first of them prompted Gladstone to inveigh against the irredeemable guilt of unnecessary war. The last is a monument to the vanity and folly of Tony Blair, who wanted to walk tall next to George W Bush and was culpably ignorant of history. Leaders will have no excuse in future. William Dalrymple’s Return of a King is not just a riveting account of one imperial disaster on the roof of the world; it teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 45

Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 6

september 2012 | Literary Review 4

INDESIGN classifieds new.indd 4

24/01/2013 15:44

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