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John Reader (1) (1937–)

Auteur de Africa

Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent John Reader, voyez la page de désambigüisation.

10+ oeuvres 1,864 utilisateurs 30 critiques 1 Favoris

A propos de l'auteur

John Reader holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Geographic Society.
Crédit image: via YouTube

Œuvres de John Reader

Africa (1997) 1,055 exemplaires
Cities (2004) 216 exemplaires
Man on Earth (1988) 198 exemplaires
Kilimanjaro (1982) 17 exemplaires
Mount Kenya (Elmtree Africana) (1989) 5 exemplaires

Oeuvres associées

National Geographic Magazine 1983 v164 #1 July (1983) — Photographe — 23 exemplaires

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Date de naissance
1937
Sexe
male
Nationalité
UK

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Critiques

I thought that I might get a bit bored with this book but, in fact, found it quite fascinating. It's a fairly broad-ranging study of the history of the potato from its origins in Peru to its role as a major food for the world.
By Inca times, potatoes were well and truly established as the staple food of the high Andes, grown in rotation with the indigenous quinoa and kañihua, on land lengthily fallowed and fertilised by herds of domesticated llama and alpaca. Maize displaced potato production at lower altitudes, but this intensified its continuation higher up, at 2,500 metres and above, where maize would not grow. Under the Incas, people were obliged to build terraces and irrigation systems for maize, and tend the crop, but organised labour also increased all-round efficiency.

According to John Reader (the author) every man accompanying Pizarro was obliged to take arms when called upon to do so, but there were only four professional soldiers among the men whom Lockhart identified by occupation. The expedition's largest contingent consisted of artisans: six tailors, two black-smiths, two carpenters, one cooper, one swordsmith, one stonemason, one crier and one barber. Next came the professionals: notaries, secretaries and accountants - twelve in all, who were required to make records of all transactions, double-check the arithmetic, certify the legality of agreements and generally ensure that the bureaucratic foundations of the new colony were soundly laid (as well as compensate for the fact that Francisco Pizarro himself could neither read nor write). I'm not sure that this gels well with the official figures which indicate 180 men and 30 horses......so a lot of men not accounted for in the figures above

The Spanish certainly had intentions of staying in the new world.Though it was only in November 1519 that Cortés and his party had first set foot in Tenochtitlan - soon to be renamed Mexico City — by 1526 even the introduction of European kitchen vegetables was advanced enough for commentators to remark that carrots, caulflowers, beans, turnips, horseradish and lettuce were cheaper in the city markets that year.' But it was wheat that the Spanish really wanted to see under cultivation and it was difficult in the tropical lowlands. But in the higher elevations in central Mexico, wheat thrived. From Mexico, wheat farming followed the Spanish advance into South America. Virtually everywhere it could be said that while many of the sights and smells of the New World bewildered visitors, they could usually count on fresh-baked bread in the Iberian tradition to remind them of home." And as with bread, so with meat.
No one knows precisely how many people lived in the region before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. Even so, the work of historical demographers strongly suggests that the total population probably fell by over 90 per cent in little more than a century. An authoritative estimate of the decline in the Andes, for example, concludes that where some 9 million people had populated the region in 1520, there were just 600,000 in 1620. Like secret allies, European diseases effectively cleared the way for the Spanish colonisation of South America. There was little contest for the best arable lands when traditional owners were succumbing to smallpox, and little conflict between tillage and pasture when such vast tracts of both were being vacated and left untended.

The date of introduction of the potato into Spain was at least as early as 1570. The historian William H. McNeill has said that the availability of the potato as a food source in northern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; changed the world's history ... without potatoes Germany could not have become the leading industrial and military power of Europe after 1848, and no less certain that Russia could not have loomed so threateningly on Germany's eastern border after 1891.
It's hard to understand to day the death rates of medieval Europe.Of every 100 babies born in St Botolph's parish during the years that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were drawing the crowds to London's theatres, fewer than seventy lived to see their first birthday. Only forty-eight saw their fifth, and at the age of fifteen only twenty-seven or thirty of the original cohort were still alive." And nearly 40 per cent of Bergamo's population were registered as paupers in 1575.Similarly in 1630, Madrid too found that 40 per cent of its population were paupers.

The principal factor in this poverty was the change in farming practices that saw farmers turning away from food production as their primary activity and concentrating instead on the production of raw materials for manufacturing industries at home and abroad. Especially wool. Increasingly, cornfields were transformed into sheep pastures. Add to this the fact that agricultural productivity was inherently low and you have what is politely called 'the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century. Among those who spent the greatest proportion of their available income on food - the small farmers, artisans, labourers and the very poor - rising prices eroded their diets, in terms of both quality and quantity. And labourers didn't own the land.

It would be stretching the point to say that the potato actually fuelled the industrial revolution. Many factors were involved. Even so, the potato's contribution was huge and incontestable. But opposing the introduction of the potato into the European diet was the the Doctrine of Signatures held that the most effective medicinal plants were those which in some way mirrored the condition to be treated. It recommended red beetroot juice for anaemic women, for instance, and prescribed the yellow celandine as a cure for jaundice. In the case of the potato, the principles of the doctrine of signatures were inverted. Instead of being regarded as a treatment of leprosy, the potato was deemed to be its cause - and proscribed. This was more than enough to deter potential consumers from eating potatoes.

A document quoted by Vandenbroke explains what it was that persuaded people to set aside their prejudices and begin growing potatoes as their staple food - war:........ this vegetable spread and gradually multiplied in the Vosges because of the proximity of Alsace. Since this province was nearly always the first arena of war in Europe, the peasants valued a ground-crop that could feed the people, their cows and their pigs and give a good yield. It was never exposed to damage by the ravages of war, for when an any camped for a month on a field of potatoes, the farmer could still harvest them when the army had left. But, wherever local communities depended on a store of grain for their survival, outright starvation was the usual and anticipated result of an extended military campaign.

Birth rates were high but death rates were stunning. Figures are well documented and truly shocking. In some of the Italian foundling hospitals, up to 80 and 90 per cent of babies died before they were one year old. In Paris, the figures indicate that foundlings comprised fully 36 percent of all births in the years 1817-20: of 4,779 babies admitted to the Maison de la Couche in 1818 alone, 2,370 died within three months. In France overall, between 20 and 30 per cent of all children born during those three years were abandoned to their fate in the foundling hospitals. But with the introduction of the potato , populations began to rise again. However, it was not until the mid twentieth century, as quantitative science became an integral part of anthropological research, that statistical data could validate the general contention: wherever the potato had been adopted, populations had increased. There was a direct correlation. Even a small village in central Spain" experienced a late eighteenth-century upsurge in population and prosperity when farmers channelled water from a stream and began growing potatoes in fields which had been good only for olives and almonds until then.

But it was in Ireland that the influence of the potato was most dramatically seen - and felt. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the Treaty of Limerick (1691) finally gave the English a semblance of political and economic control over Ireland. The Protestant settlers held most of the valuable land and all of the country's social, economic and political privileges. A series of draconian Penal Laws were enacted in the early 1700s, under which Irish Roman Catholics could never vote or take a seat in Parliament; nor could they ever become members of a municipal corporation, aspire to become a barrister or a judge, or act as sheriff, or hold any office under the Crown. They could not serve in the Army or the Navy. No Catholic could buy or inherit land - or even receive it as a gift from a Protestant. No lease could be held by a Catholic for more than thirty-one years. Catholics could not enter the university or teach in a school. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds, nor have more than two apprentices.And the pattern of landownership established in the early eighteenth century was to remain intact for nearly 200 years: an untidy patchwork of over 2,000 large estates covering most of Ireland's land surface. The majority were between 2,000 and 4,000 acres in extent, though several dozen great estates each covered more than 50,000 acres. The confiscated properties included most of Ireland's best agricultural land; the vast majority were economically viable. It was probably this divorce of those who tilled the land from the owners of the land that led directly to the great problems of Ireland.
Although the potato was certainly being cultivated in Ireland during the early 1600s, it was only during the latter part of the century that it became a dominant part of the diet. So long as cottiers could feed themselves on potatoes, landlords could require them to work more intensively on the production of commodities for export. Grain was the most attractive proposition. Not least by virtue of 'Foster's Corn Law', which provided for a bounty to be paid on Ireland's grain exports, and a duty levied on imports. Ireland supplied 70 per cent of England's food imports in the early nineteenth century. But as long as prices were steady or rising in response to demand from England and elsewhere, farmers, middlemen and landlords prospered; and while potatoes flourished, the labourers were healthy and hard-working. But it could not last.
The golden age of the potato had not lasted long....fifty or sixty years perhaos. It’s beginnings lay somewhere in the two decades after in the Great Frost of 1740-41, and its close was confirmed by the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, which sent grain prices tumbling and farmers looking for other ways of paying the inflated rents they had agreed upon while the market was booming. By 1815 there were 4.7 million people in Ireland for whom the potato was the predominant item of diet, and of them 3.3 million had nothing else.' It was not just the fate of Napoleon that had been sealed at the battle of Waterloo. Ireland's doom was sealed there too. During the forty-five years immediately preceding the famine of 1845-7: no fewer than 114 Commissions and 61 Special Committees were instructed to report on the state of Ireland, and without exception their finding prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standards of living unbelievably low.
Forster (from the Quakers) visited Cleggan, where he found that: The distress was appalling far beyond my powers of description. I was quickly surrounded by a mob of men and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose figures, looks and cries, all showed that they were suffering the ravening agony of hunger ... In one [cabin] there were two emaciated men, lying at full length, on the damp floor, in their ragged clothes, too weak to move, actually worn down to skin and bone. In another a young man was dying of dysentry; his mother had pawned everything ... to keep him alive. What hope was there for the English working man, Engels asked, when faced 'with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other? Wages were forced down, and the mere presence of the Irish immigrants exercised a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil':

In January 1846,the people of Ireland were starving. Peel in effect was using the Irish crisis? as justification for a radical shift in policy that was as significant in its time as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. Repeal of the Corn Laws ushered in the era of free trade that established the viability of England's industrial economy in the late nineteenth century; in fact, it marked a crucial point in England's transformation from a small agricultural nation into a wealthy industrial power. Though to give him his due, Peel did try to do something for the starving Irish. In all, England spent a total of £33 million on corn for Ireland, according to a contemporary writer quoted by Redcliffe Salaman. Speculation was rife as the world's corn-bins were scraped for wheat, oats, rice and maize - any food-grain that the starving Irish would eat'. It's worth noting tht the Irish were not in good shape even prior to the potato blight.

Although the potato disease had taken all Europe by surprise in 1845, it had already been ravaging the potato crops of North America for two seasons by then. The first outbreaks occurred in 1843, close to ports on the east coast of the United States, around Philadelphia and New York, In the 1990s, the centre of origin and diversity of the organism responsible for the disease was traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico." It is believed to have migrated from there to South America several centuries ago, and from South America to the United States in 1841-2. And shipments that crossed the Atlantic during the winter of 1843-4 included a significant number of infected tubers. The disease was not prevalent enough to arouse concern in Europe in 1844, but a warm damp spring and early summer enabled it to build up to epidemic proportions in 1845. At its maximum range, the disease had infected an area that stretched 1,600 kilometres from the western shores of Ireland to northern Italy, and 1,800 kilometres from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden - potato farms across more than 2 million square kilo-metres of land laid waste in just four months. There was no ministry of agriculture, no government agency with the authority and the funds to assign a team of consultants to the problem, nor any form of government service that could study the disease and offer recommendations for its prevention, or cure. A defining moment came in late August, when a leading agronomist, Dr Rene Van Oye, unreservedly claimed that the one true determining cause of the potato disease was a fungus which, reproducing itself with astonishing rapidity and profuseness, had infected all the potato fields and was clearly contagious." Though it was years later that any reasonable treatment for the fungus was developed. Bordeaux Mixture was the world's first agricultural application to be worthy of production on an industrial scale; to this extent, the vine and the potato were catalysts for the creation and development of the agro-chemical industry which today wields such power in the production of food crops worldwide.
New strains of potato blight emerged in the early 198os that are resistant to Bordeaux Mixture and the succession of more powerful fungicides that have been introduced since the 1930s.

But a plant breeder was already showing a way ahead. In 1926, Salaman reported with justifiable pride:"I was in possession of over a score of seedling varieties endowed with reasonably good economic characters which, no matter what their maturity, appeared to be immune to late blight?' It was an important breakthrough, offering real promise - after all the false starts - that it was possible to breed blight-resistant potato varieties that would spare farmers the cost of spraying and lost crops.

John Reader goes on to examine some of the impacts of the potato on Russia, China, and New Zealand. More than 35 million Soviet citizens were at risk of famine by 1921..... most of the country's specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution. But one who survived was an agricultural botanist, Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943). He proposed between eight and twelve centres-of-origin for crops (the number increased with Vavilov's development of the idea for the origin of the world's major food crops, located wherever the greatest genetic diversity of cultivated plants and their wild relatives was found: wheat in the highlands of the fertile crescent, rice in India (here Vavilov was wrong - Indonesia has the greatest genetic diversity of rice), maize in Mexico, brassicas around the Mediterranean, citrus fruits in China, walnuts in the Balkans ... and potatoes in the Andes.The agricultural research institute that Vavilov created was one of the largest and most active in the world, with a network of 400 research and experimental stations across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and close links with related establishments worldwide. By 1934, 20,000 people were working under Vavilov's overall direction. In all, more than 300,000 plant samples were available for study. I remember, in my earlier years showing a group of Soviet Scientists from one of the Vavilov Institutes around agricultural research stations in Southern NSW and the ACT.

The potato had a significant impact on the size of the Maori population too - just as it had in South America and throughout Europe. Captain Cook estimated the Maori population at around 100,000 in 1769. This was almost certainly an underestimate (Cook did not see what were probably more densely populated regions inland), but that hardly dents the significance of there having been some 200,000 Maori in New Zealand when Britain claimed sovereignty in 1840, ' seventy years later. Maori numbers tumbled after that, under the impact of colonial settlement, land wars, economic marginalisation, and disease.

There is a lot in this book though I think the author doesn't really give enough attention to the actual development and propagation of the Blight. Nor does he really explain what happened in the years from 1846 through to 1906 when Bordeaux mixture was developed.
But happy to give it four stars.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
booktsunami | 6 autres critiques | Dec 22, 2023 |
Very informative but not really driving home much in the way of underlying themes. Really shows how far reaching effects of slavery and colonialism are.
½
 
Signalé
BBrookes | 13 autres critiques | Nov 29, 2023 |
An excellent history of cities over the last 2000 years, with a brief look at Greece and Rome before that. Unfortunately my interests liie earlier.
 
Signalé
Rubygarnet | 2 autres critiques | Feb 10, 2023 |
In a book as splendid in its wealth of information as it is breathtaking in scope,
British writer and photojournalist John Reader brings to light Africa's geology and evolution,
the majestic array of its landforms and environments, the rich diversity of its peoples and their ways of life,
the devastating legacies of slavery and colonialism as well as recent political troubles and triumphs.
Written in simple, elegant prose and illustrated with Reader's own photographs,
 
Signalé
CarrieFortuneLibrary | 13 autres critiques | Nov 12, 2022 |

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