Footnotes of History

Scrooge is practically tangible in the room with us today. Actually that’s me.

As usual it falls to the sensible people to do the important work of wishing you a Merry Christmas in an entertaining and informative way.

So in the absence of any sensible people on the FOH team, we’ve drafted in a glamourous assistant to do the work for us in this episode, which will be a short sleigh ride through some of the historic events we’ve covered on the podcast, as well as some we haven’t.

Our assistant will draw from the hat (ok Dan, beret) each time a number linking to a particular theme.

There are as always varying interpretations of the brief. For some reason, I singularly failed to make any of mine Christmassy, but Dan’s make up for it!

In case you can’t keep up with what is probably our greatest rapport to date (given that Dan sounds about 30 years older than usual due to inexplicable illness, probably not), what we discuss is listed below:

1 - The number of frost fairs held on the Thames in the 19th Century (1814).

2 - The actual number of governments there were in Revolutionary France in 1848.

3 - The number of print runs A Christmas Carolwent through in December 1843 (published on 19 December 1843).

4 - The number of armies on the march in the Hapsburg Empire in 1848

After much anticipation we release today our latest Footnotes main series episode: Number 35, on the Bryant and May matchgirls strike of 1888.

Listeners,

Today after a lengthy interlude, Dan and I release the second half of the Scramble for Africa episode.

It’s controversial of course since, despite our normal dismissal of all the virtue signalling in modern media about empire and European history, we actually found ourselves rather moved by the cold brutality of the operation.

Dan actually burst into tears, but out of deference to his ego, I cut this from the tape.

Okay that didn’t happen, but before we get too carried away by the number one mistake historians always make (i.e. imposing modern values on the past), two caveats:

1) The right of conquest of course was a recognised concept at the time and 2) many lands were bought rather than “stolen”.

As historians, our role – unlike the famous quote – IS to reason “why”.

This being said, it doesn’t get away from the fact that European leaders treated much of the continent as if it were essentially empty.

As well as the fact that they hid their imperial ambitions behind the veneer of respectability or “civilisation” (eg anti-slavery).

The Congress sounds cold and you’d be dead right:

It is a fascinating bureaucratic horror that saw a group of faceless civil servants draft the rulebook for late empire in Africa.

An interesting, if at times disturbing episode of a ruthless and impersonal governmental process applied to foreign lands, including:

• How the latecomers to empire used the moral high ground to blackmail the frontrunners
• The grotesque distortion of the meaning of free trade for imperial ends
• Bismarck as the civil servant’s pin-up idol: a mastery of bureaucratic greyness that subjugated a continent at the stroke of a pen
• Why the haplessness of one nation’s empire building actually won it more allies in Europe
• “PEC”: a single definition that was so bitterly controversial, it nearly caused a world war