Discoveries

Over the course of the past couple of months I’ve been delving back into the box of family genealogy, trying to find documents that prove a direct line from my maternal grandfather. But the box contains lots of things, many of which have been looked at many times without understanding their full significance.

Take this note from my grandmother to her cousin Henry, written some time in the 1970s. My German great-great-grandfather, about whom I know very little, is here declared to have been born in Hamburg and moved to St. Thomas in his twenties. He later moved to Baltimore and started a sugar processing business. My grandmother says it was bankrupted because of the civil war. He had married in Baltimore and he and his English-born wife moved north to Pennsylvania.

Family legends are often full of half-truths, myths and outright lies, whether through ignorance, snobbery or conscious deceit. What’s interesting to me here is that a) Adolph Ahrens was supposed to have been born in Hamburg, which I don’t think I knew, and b) he left Germany for the Caribbean instead of moving directly to Baltimore. Both of these things ought to be possible to prove with some determined digging.

Genealogy is all about provability… Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills goes into exhaustive detail about why. (For instance: the only “proof” I have of this grandmother’s birth date is an entry in the family bible, since birth certificates weren’t issued in Pennsylvania until 1906, eight years after her birth; this, plus the fact that she listed this date on every official document throughout her life. It isn’t really proof. It’s really only a series of strong, accumulated suggestions. But typos were and continue to be common even on important documentation such as a birth certificate, so even when you have one it’s not a guarantee of accuracy.)

Defenestrations

Though I have been quite intrigued, I have never played any of the boardgames designed by Cole Wehrle, such as Pax Pamir, Root, and John Company. But the designer’s notes for his games have lead me to some interesting books, such as Return of a King by William Dalrymple and Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, so I trust his book recommendations. A few days ago on BlueSky, he mentioned that he was starting to learn to play Cuius Regio a new game on the Thirty Years War, and he was pairing it with reading the classic history on the war by C.V. Wedgwood. He writes: ‘ I’ve wanted to read this book for so long, and it does not disappoint. I can’t believe she was so young when she wrote it (late 20s!). ‘

Naturally, this got me to look for the book and I found a digital copy through the library. I am about a quarter of the way through it, sometime in 1621. The Thirty Years War got started in 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague, when an assembly of Bohemian Protestants threw a couple of Catholic regents and their secretary out a second floor window of a castle (they all survived). This event is more accurately termed the Third Defenestration of Prague; there were two earlier defenestrations in 1419 and 1483.

The Thirty Years War concluded in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia which is often cited as marking the origin of the nation-state system. There is much destruction ahead of me in the book.

Lessons from the East India Company

In my last post I wrote about William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842. This is the second book I’ve read by Dalrymple, the first being The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, published in 2019. Dalrymple recently wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World” discussing the parallels between the East India Company and today’s Big Tech.

The East India Company did a really good job of subverting the British state. But in 1772 the East India Company ran out of money, and started asking for bailouts. The company was too big to fail, and its stock was owned by 40% of the House of Commons. In 1773 trying to claw some money back the British state came up with the Tea Act, shipping the tea to America to undercut the colonial merchants. This provoked the American Revolution. Dalrymple cites John Dickinson:

This “almost bankrupt company,” having been occupied in wreaking “the most unparalleled barbarities, extortions and monopolies” in Bengal, had now “cast their eyes on America, as a new theater, whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty,” wrote the American John Dickinson. Within three years, America declared independence.

In 1788 Parliament impeached Warren Hastings, former governor-general of Bengal, but he was eventually acquitted. It took another 70 years before the British tamed the East India Company, only after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with 800,000+ lives lost. At that point the state dissolved the company’s navy and absorbed its army into the Crown.

When Dalrymple finished The Anarchy in 2019 he noted thankfully that today’s corporations did not have private armies. Things aren’t quite as clearcut in 2026. Starlink operates at the whims of Elon Musk, technology that has played a significant role in the fighting in Ukraine. Palantir holds a $1.3 billion contract with the Pentagon for its AI targeting program. Google and Amazon hold a $1.2 billion contract to supply AI and cloud services to the Israeli government.

But the British state did in the end tame the East India Company. In our own times, the Chinese state has cracked down on its big corporations, e.g. Alibaba and Tencent. Still, as Dalrymple says:

History shows that when a company starts acquiring the attributes of a state — the revenues, the courts, the treaties, the capacity to make war and peace — its transformation can damage the parent country at least as much as the territories it exploits. Its lobbying corrupts the legislature. It captures the treasury, because the corporation’s solvency becomes a public interest. It converts foreign policy into an extension of a balance sheet. And it shows that the threshold, once crossed, is astonishingly hard to recross. The window in which any of this can be undone closes fast.

Skirting The Pamirs

We are continuing to follow on YouTube the Catalan adventurer Enric Luzán as he walks around the world, having started at the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona at the beginning of last November. Right now he is trekking through Tajikistan and is following the Pamir Highway. A portion of his walk has been along the Panj River that marks a border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan; he was walking entirely on the Tajikistan side and looking with great curiosity across the river at Afghanistan.

The Pamirs as a place name makes me think of the well-regarded historical board game Pax Pamir, designed by Cole Wehrle. This game is about the competition between Afghan leaders in the 19th century as they vie for autonomous control of the region amidst the “Great Game” being carried out between Great Britain and Russia over Central Asia. Wehrle’s design notes for the game give a number of book recommendations, the first of which is Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, by the Scottish historian William Dalrymple and published in 2013.

I quickly went to the library to fetch and read this book, which is an account of the First Anglo-Afghan War which was waged from 1839-1842. It is an excellent work of history, both in terms of its narrative style and the fact that Dalrymple was able to uncover some interesting archival material about the war such as 19th century epic poetry about the war that had not been previously translated into English. To do his research Dalrymple traipsed through Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 21st century war there.

At the end of his book Dalrymple comments on the parallels between the 21st century war and the First Anglo-Afghan War. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended disastrously for the British. Their objective was to install a pliant monarch in the region as a geopolitical counterbalance to Russian moves in the region. This Durrani monarch named Shah Shuja had been deposed several decades previously, the British returning him to power in 1839. A couple years later there was a general uprising resulting in the British and East India Company forces being driven from the region and Shah Shuja being killed.

The painting above is entitled Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Thompson from 1879. It shows Dr. William Brydon approaching the fort at Jalalabad following the retreat from Kabul in 1842. He was supposedly the only survivor of the retreat, though there were actually other stragglers.

More Musings on My Family's Past

Sometime between 1860 and 1870, according to census data, my paternal grandmother’s family shifted from being farm laborers to working in the textile industry. (Her mother Augusta’s father was a loom overseer by 1871; she married a municipal printer.) Unfortunately she died young, and had only two daughters. (My grandmother’s half-sister Lily was the mother of Dilys, who wrote out this family tree on the back of a dairy calendar. There was a big family feud I’ve never understood and anyone who ever knew about it is now dead, but my father and Dilys became quite close at the end and we invited her to my first wedding.)

I dip into genealogy on a very sporadic basis but at the moment I’m glad, because it turns out my siblings and I definitely qualify for Canadian citizenship since our maternal grandfather was born in Toronto, and I have a lot of the documentation required to prove it. Kind of collecting passports, says Numenius…

A Textile Center

Blackburn had been a wool weaving centre since the mid 13th century, with handlooms in houses providing much of the wool needed for trade especially following the settlement of Flemish weavers in the area. During the Industrial Revolution Blackburn’s population went from 5,000 to over 130,000. (The spinning jenny was invented a few miles away, driving the need for machine looms to turn Blackburn into the “weaving capital of the world.”) My grandmother’s family moved from just east of the Pennines to Blackburn; my grandmother worked in the cotton mills as early as age 15.

Housing for this population explosion was often provided by the mills. But what was it like? Small, cramped, damp. The Victorians could expect to lose a third of their children before they reached adulthood; how much higher would that figure have been when adjusted for these kinds of conditions? My grandmother had two surviving sisters and one brother, all of them living in a two-bedroom townhouse. The idea of laundry in a time before washing machines, in a part of the country where it ALWAYS rained and where the only indoor source of heat was a coal fire, makes me shudder. (I hung a full load of laundry outside yesterday; much of it was almost dry before I finished hanging it. California summers… And yet, most Davisites dry their clothes in a dryer. Not sure why.)

But this is where my grandfather’s family comes in: my great-grandfather was a plumber. Outhouses were common through the 1950s in this part of the world but indoor water supply needed installing, and plumbing provided the answer. Terry Pratchett’s Dodger is a fun glimpse into the rise of sanitation practices in London, but the extensive sewers put in by the Romans had no equivalent in smaller towns in the north.

The Blackburn Side

The piece I wrote on rhoticity in the northwest of England has had me pondering a bit about my father’s origins, origins he was so eager to leave behind. His father and grandfather were freemasons, which I imagine isn’t especially high among the reasons he wanted to leave (the weather, narrow-mindedness and lack of modern conveniences such as showers and central heating were certainly much higher on the list), but he was well educated in this old mill town and to his death he loved Blackburn Rovers, living to see them become Premier League champions in 1995.

Over the next few days I’m going to be focusing on his family of origin. What was life in this bleak town like in 1931, the date on this certificate? What was life like for my grandmother, who I last saw in the Blackburn Royal Infirmary in Blackburn in 1965? And how does the city make its way now, in the post-cotton mill era?

Hunting For Apples

I just read the travelogue Apples Are From Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared by British journalist Christopher Robbins. The title statement about apples is true, but there is a tragedy around its discovery which has ripples that unfortunately are of great concern today.

The origin of apples was tracked in the 1920s to the Tien Shan mountains which run through northeastern Kazakhstan by a brilliant Russian botanist, geneticist, and geographer named Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was highly lauded by the Soviet state for his research on agronomy and the geographical origins of many crops, becoming the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Vavilov ran afoul of his onetime protegé, the scheming and ambitious agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko adapted his research so as to align with the Soviet policy of forced agricultural collectivization. To support his claims of making agronomic innovations that radically increased crop yields, he rejected both natural selection and genetics in favor of a modified sort of Lamarkianism. Lysenko became a favorite of Josef Stalin, and genetics research in the Soviet Union was destroyed. Over 3,000 biologists were dismissed from employment, and some were imprisoned and executed. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Rather than improving crop yields, Lysenko’s ideas did the opposite, and when implemented in China they would contribute to the famine there between 1959 and 1961.

Lysenkoism is much on my mind because of changes to federal funding administration that are being proposed by the US Office of Management and Budget. These changes are quite lengthy; former National of Institutes of Health program officer Elizabeth Ginexi provides a good summary of them. Her article is subtitled “Russell Vought [the director of OMB] is going to destroy American Science”. Probably the most significant change is that senior political appointees would be mandated to conduct a review of every grant before it is issued. Moreover, these appointees would be under no obligation to defer to the recommendations from peer review.

This proposal is open for public comment through July 13, and there has been a massive campaign to elicit comments opposing the new rules. I am presently working on my own comment. As of this writing 98,973 comments have been received. OMB may well ignore all the comments but such an outpouring provides a strong basis for legal action against any finalized rules.

Searching through the already-submitted comments, Lysenko has been mentioned in several hundred of them. Amusingly, someone has in jest submitted a comment as Trofim Lysenko. It concludes with the following:

I therefore urge OMB to finalize the rule and give America what every great centrally managed scientific system requires: political officers empowered to decide which science may live, which science must wait, and which science must be uprooted before it bears unauthorized fruit.

With ideological warmth and agronomic confidence,

Trofim Lysenko
Dictator Emeritus of Politically Convenient Biology
Former Specialist in the Suppression of Bourgeois Genetics

Sister States

There is a story on the front page of yesterday’s Davis Enterprise with the headline “Catalonia, UC sign agreement on research”. The first sentence of the story reads “In 1986 the Spanish region of Catalonia and the state of California fostered the first agreement between the regions as sister states, recognizing the long relationships of culture, geography and climate that exist between the two regions”.

The story describes a memorandum of understanding between University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Catalan Institute of Water Research (Institut Català de Recerca de l’Aigua) to collaborate on research on sustainable water resource management. The president of the government of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, visited California in May and came to the UC ANR offices in Davis to sign the agreement, which incidentally is where Pica used to work.

I’ve known about the sister state relationship for a while now, and as a Californian this story makes me feel validated to be delving a bit into Catalan culture from afar. Coming in August we will be taking a trip to the region and I will learn much more in person.

It is not too widely known but many of the 18th century Spanish explorers and settlers of California were Catalan. Some of these people include Gaspar de Portolá (from Os de Balaguer — my junior high school was named after him) , Father Junipero Serra (from Mallorca), Juan Crespi (also from Mallorca), Pedro Fages (the first European to climb Mt. Diablo, born in Guissona in Lleida Province), and Pedro Font (drew one of the first maps of San Francisco Bay, born in Girona).

Redemption In A Walnut Orchard

Last weekend I watched the Errol Morris documentary from 2003 on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. I followed this up with listening to a podcast interview from 2022 with his son Craig McNamara, which was produced not too long after Craig’s memoir of his difficult relationship with his father came out, entitled Because Our Fathers Lied after a line in a poem by Kipling.

Craig’s journey landed him not very far from here. In fact his interviewer, Michael Dimock, is somebody I have worked with: Michael is a regenerative food system activist who leads a group called Roots of Change. Craig became an organic farmer who has a walnut orchard near Winters, about 25 km west of Davis. Craig’s response to the Vietnam War as a young adult was in 1969 to wander south: he spent several years traveling through Latin America, working on subsistence farms, eventually ending up staying for a while on Easter Island. Agriculture got into his bones, and he returned to California and enrolled in UC Davis to get formal training in the agricultural sciences. He later bought the land and orchard near Winters with his father coming in as a financial partner.

This is one of these stories whose arc is multigenerational. After Robert left (or was fired from) his position as US Secretary of Defense he becomes president of the World Bank for 13 years, and meets with many heads of state all over the globe. Such travel does not make for a grounded life, but his son discovered such grounding on a bit of land near Putah Creek. The generations continue on there: Craig’s children Emily and Sean are both partners in the organic farm.