• Blog
  • Welcome!
  • Reviews
  • Phriends and Fenomena
  • Contact
  • Readers’ Gallery
    • Readers’ Gallery 2
    • Readers’ Gallery 3

Jay Spencer Green

~ Novelist and Ne'er-Do-Well

Jay Spencer Green

Monthly Archives: February 2019

Book Review: Respectable: The Experience of Class, by Lynsey Hanley

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by jayspencergreen in Birmingham, Book review, Sociology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Book reviews, Books, Lynsey Hanley, Reviews

respectable

I was predisposed to regard Lynsey Hanley’s book favourably, having very much enjoyed her previous work, Estates, and finding that we had a similar background, albeit separated by a decade or so. While Hanley was raised on the Chelmsley Wood council estate in Solihull, I was fortunate enough to grow up in the slightly more salubrious Shirley: my parents were both born into poverty but benefited from postwar employment levels, so that by the time I was born my father had been promoted to foreman in the factory where he worked, enabling my mother to work only part time and the pair of them to take out a mortgage on a house beyond the boundary of Birmingham itself, albeit only barely. The similar backgrounds and biographies are germane to my enjoyment of Hanley’s book, not because they generate a sense of solidarity or recognition, or not only because of that, but also because they go some way to explaining our mutual interest in sociology and our fascination with the issue of class.

Whereas Hanley recounts discovering the middle class for the first time at Solihull Sixth Form College, my first encounter took place at a younger age, 14, when I joined the local tennis club. It was there that I first met not just the middle class but also snobbery, as well as contempt, and disdain, both for me and for ‘my people’. Having been fortuitous and privileged up to that point, it was not until my teenage years that I became conscious of not being good enough, of being observed from the outside and judged negatively, as wanting. It was at this point that class became for me a reality, a lived experience. When I subsequently moved to Manchester and found sociology was an A level subject on the local college curriculum, I took to it like a duck to water.

It was sociology that allowed me – and Hanley – to make sense not just of our place in the world but also of the world itself. And this brings me to the most striking revelation I experienced while reading Respectable: That those who find themselves growing up in the heart of their class rarely have to give their social location a second thought because everyone surrounding them reaffirms the same set of values; they never have cause to doubt nor need to reflect upon the intrinsic merit of their own class habitus (they are “working class and proud of it” or else they are “born to rule,” the “creme de la creme” as one of my schoolfriends – the son of two teachers – put it before going off to work for Lehman’s and DeutscheBank). For other specific class fractions, however – those on the boundaries between two classes, those who have moved between classes (up or down) – class becomes an obsession. Indeed, it is fair to say that this obsession with class and the concern with self-worth are in themselves part of the habitus of these particular class fractions; these are the benighted folk who comprise what may be called the “anxious classes,” that part of the middle class worried about falling into poverty, those upwardly mobile from the working class concerned about keeping up appearances, and those who engage in conspicuous consumption, the nouveaux riches, keen to demonstrate their social mobility. And, of course, Sociologists! It is class as these groups experience it, which is to say, self-consciously, that is really at the heart of Hanley’s book. Not that the book is any the worse for that. The arguments and observations are well supported, making good use of the canonical texts in the Sociology of Class (Paul Willis, Wilmott & Young, Pierre Bourdieu, etc.). But because it uses Hanley’s own experiences anecdotally as a way of introducing topics, it really only provides a phenomenology of the class migrant’s experience of class. Those who have spent their entire lives within their own class may have an entirely different view of class than that described here.

Hanley expresses her admiration for Richard Hoggart’s mid-20th-century classic The Uses of Literacy and to some extent has succeeded in producing a 21st-century version. While this is admirable, it means the book is accompanied by all the attendant vices of Hoggart’s book, particularly the tendency to wander off-topic for the sake of enumerating or recording particular events. Nonetheless, I found very little to disagree with and much to like, within the confines of the account she provides. It would have been interesting to have heard the voices of the people Hanley left behind in her movement between classes. Did they all fail to make it into the middle class? Are any of them better off financially than she is, and if so, how come? What is their view of class? We don’t know. What Hanley has really given us are the pathologies of a particular way of thinking about class, and the reader may conclude that the importance she ascribes to issue is nothing more than the result of her own upbringing. I’m inclined to agree. For a more comprehensive measure of the role and importance of class, I would suggest the need to add a macroscopic perspective, such as that provided by Pickett and Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level, as well as a historical dimension, such as that given in Conor McCabe’s The Sins of the Fathers. Which is not to say that Hanley’s book is not illuminating and a joy to read, only that vignettes, however beautifully and intelligently drawn, are only windows into a life, not maps of an entire world.

Respectable: The Experience of Class, by Lynsey Hanley. 2016. 240 pp. Allen Lane.

Book Review: The Slave Ship, by Marcus Rediker

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by jayspencergreen in Book review, Books, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Book reviews, Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship

Rediker

The cover of my edition of Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship features a quotation from the Sunday Telegraph describing it as “A truly magnificent book.” Such is my prejudice that I imagine Telegraph readers coming to Rediker’s work not to be educated about the shaping of race and class in the Western hemisphere by the Atlantic slave trade but to bask in reminiscences about the source of their wealth or enjoy some tales of derring-do among the savages. An education is what they will receive, nonetheless, whether they like it or not.

By now, the basics of the slave trade are well known, including its triangular pattern; ships starting in Bristol or Liverpool carried manufactured goods to Africa, which were traded for slaves, who were carried to the Americas and sold to work on the plantations, where the raw materials-cotton, tobacco, and sugar-were bought to undergo modification in the factories and mills of Lancashire, Birmingham, and elsewhere up North, for sale in, among other places, Africa. The slave trade was thus perfectly integrated into the other new markets generated by the Industrial Revolution. It was a business just like any other, a reality that tends to escape analyses of slavery that focus on the barbarity and captivity endured by the slaves to the neglect of the logic behind both.

Not that there isn’t plenty of savagery and captivity to go around. The genius of Rediker’s book is that he has relied heavily on contemporary accounts of life on a slaver, from merchants, captains, sailors, and the slaves themselves. This lends a clarity, vividness, and depth to the story that, while not for the faint of heart, will leave readers in no doubt as to what went on and why. The answer to the big why, of course, is the pursuit of profit. The pursuit of profit explains pretty much everything. But what Rediker manages to tease out in his account are the nuances, the subtle tensions, the balancing act that capitalists have always had to perform, in order to extract labour from the exploited. Anyone who has worked in a factory will recognize, or at least understand, the wheedling, coercion, and incentivization of behaviour deployed by ships’ captains to get the most from their crew and human commodities, even if the cat o’ nine tails is no longer the instrument of choice.

The journey from England to Africa typically saw the modification of the ship by skilled labourers-carpenters and smiths, for instance-who turned it in to a floating prison, a Guineaman, as the slave ships were universally referred to, before its arrival on the shores of such places as Benin, Congo, and Angola. In particular, this part of the journey saw the construction of the barricado, a barricade, a high, strong wooden barrier that stretched across the entire main deck of the ship and behind which the crew could retreat in the case of insurrection by the slaves; the barricado contained holes and a raised platform for the crew to fire their guns and cannon at the slaves, as well as a door that allowed only one person at a time to pass through. The barricado also turned the main deck into a kind of prison courtyard, so that when the slaves were allowed up onto the main deck for “dancing,” the crew could keep an eye on them and fire down on them if necessary.

“Dancing” was, by and large, a euphemism for exercise. The slave merchant had no use for damaged goods, so it was important in terms of maximizing his profit that the slaves he sold in the Americas be fit for work. This necessitated some sort of “humane” treatment, so slaves were fed and watered, but at the same time, the captain had to ensure that fit, strong slaves were never in a position to revolt. “Dancing” thus took place in manacles and leg irons, with slaves supervised and motivated by crew members, under instruction to keep the slaves both healthy and acquiescent. This was a tall order, as you might imagine. Slaves understood the meaning of captivity, even if the technology was new to them, and would do everything in their power to escape or deprive the slaver of their labour. Suicide was common, either by hunger strike or leaping to the sharks that followed the Guineamen knowing there would be food. The ships were thus also equipped with netting around the sides of the decks to prevent such attempts-because the slaves believed that when they died their souls would return home, many drowned not just defiantly but happily-and with the speculum oris, an instrument used to force open the jaws of those recalcitrant slaves refusing to eat. The slave merchants knew there would be deaths on board their ships-cramming as many bodies as they could onto their ships was a recipe for epidemics-but death was always factored into the equation when gauging likely profits. Merchants had a good idea how many deaths to expect, providing mass suicides could be prevented, hence the expectation that the captain would nip any form of resistance, passive or otherwise, in the bud, pour encourager les autres.

Class tensions asserted themselves, too, in the relationship between captain and crew. Few sailors appear to have wanted to sign up on Guineamen. The mortality rate was exceedingly high for crewmembers, the captains were notoriously barbaric, and the morality of slavery was naturally an issue. Many sailors signed up either to get out of prison or to avoid prison. Captains would scour the taverns of port cities with a couple of reliable mates, often family, in search of likely crew, who they’d attempt to get drunk and, with the connivance of a tavern owner in on the scam, draw into debts of such magnitude that they found themselves the next day with the options of either signing up or going to jail. This was no way for a captain to generate loyalty and devotion among his crew, but then he only required their obedience, not their love, and he relied upon the perception of a shared interest in survival once the slaves were on board to solicit the crewmembers’ allegiance. Rediker describes how captains’ personalities and attitudes slowly changed during the journey. Sweetness and light to the crew on the way to Africa, he would turn into a brute to slaves and crew alike once loaded and bound for the Americas. Crews did mutiny, but rarely in unison with slaves, and with a view to selling the slaves themselves on occasion. By and large, though, the captains and mates formed a cohesive group dedicated to realizing the profits at any cost, and so to the extent that they depended upon the crew to do this, the captains would do anything in their power to elicit compliance. A ratio of 8 or 10 slaves to every one crewmember was considered sufficient to meet all needs, including repression. However, once the ship had deposited its cargo in the Americas, many crew became surplus to requirements and would be travelling back to England with nothing to contribute to the bottom line; on the contrary, they constituted a cost insofar as their wages would be paid on arrival. Consequently, toward the end of the second stage of the voyage, just as the slaves were receiving improved treatment to ready them for market, the captains would try to alienate those crewmembers who would not be needed for the journey home, so that they’d jump ship in the Caribbean rather than face the final leg under the captain’s command. This persecution of the crew was deliberate and at the behest of the merchants, who sometimes gave explicit instructions to the captain that they dispose of superfluous crew, even though such a practice was illegal. Rediker tells us that the slave ports were crammed with these pitiful wretches, former crewmembers crippled by disease or unable for one reason or another to get passage home.

Rediker demonstrates how the trade played a part in shaping not just the economic relations between Britain, Africa, and America, but also the social relations and the perceptions of race and class of those involved. Captains often tried to purchase slaves who would struggle in mutual comprehension. If they spoke many and different languages, it followed that they would less likely form a cohesive unit, find common ground, and revolt. A lack of common language made insurrection less likely. Nonetheless, the common experience of captivity transformed slaves, for both themselves and the crew, from being members of discrete, sometimes even antagonistic, African tribes, into “Negroes”, pure and simple, and crewmembers into “White Men”, regardless of the colour of their skin. Race relations were simplified, in effect, because of the universal experience of slavery. Slaves became brothers and sisters regardless of origin, by virtue of their shared experience. New bonds were formed in the face of necessity. Hardship produced co-operation. Slaves may well have found themselves in their predicament as a result of capture by other Africans, but on board ship every African became a brother or a sister. And for the plantation owners who received them, the slaves’ origins were of little consequence; they were a source of labour power and nothing else.

The book closes with accounts of the insurrection by sailors in Liverpool in 1775, in which a thousand sailors wearing red ribbons and armed with muskets, blunderbusses, and cannons attempted to destroy the Mercantile Exchange, and of the role of the slave ship in mobilizing forces to ultimately abolish the trade in Britain. It isn’t part of Rediker’s remit to explore the social and economic factors that contributed to the demise of the slave trade in Britain, only to explain how the slave ship itself played a part in shaping the struggles of those who took part. He does so convincingly, engagingly, and perceptively. This is a book in the tradition of “history from below”, and I couldn’t help but compare it to Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch for the way it demystifies social relations and explains the interplay between class, race, gender, and empire. It isn’t really the kind of book you’re likely to buy as a gift, but it’s a compelling read, and you’ll be doing a really big favour for anyone you buy it for, even if it’s just yourself.

The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker. 2008. John Murray. 468 pp.

Buy My Books!

ALLi

The Alliance of Independent Authors - Author Member

Follow Jay Spencer Green on WordPress.com
jayspencergreen

jayspencergreen

Novelist and Ne'er-do-well. Dry English wit a specialty.

View Full Profile →

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Goodreads

Sites to See

Archives

  • October 2020
  • October 2019
  • August 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • December 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • September 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015

Follow me on

  • View Jayspencergreen’s profile on Facebook
  • View JaySpencerGreen’s profile on Twitter

Blog at WordPress.com.

crosspollenblog

We are the bees of the invisible. (Rilke)

ANDY C DIY

ANDY CARRINGTON PUNK-POET

Eric Boaro - Musicologist

Ritornate all'antico, e sarà un progresso • Let us return to the past; it will be a step forward (G. Verdi)

An American Editor

Commentary on Books, eBooks, and Editorial Matters

The Beachy Reader

plantladyreader

thrifted books, reviews and house plants

Meu Diário de Intercâmbios

Au Pair - Custodial - Bolsista Stipendium Hungaricum

Stephen Writes

Book reviews, and original bookish content

READ TO RAMBLE

KBbookreviews

Book Reviews, Bookish Talk, and Queer Book Recs!

BEFOREWEGOBLOG

Reading All The Books

Andrea Reads Books

On the Book Shelf.

MYMonkey MIND

Your Brain is a Radio that Does What its Told

Gil Reads Books

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" - Borges

BRAINCHILD

gehadsjourney.wordpress.com

Broken Tune's Blog

Liz Loves Books

The Wonderful World of Reading

Ocean of myths

Lonely Power Poles

Writing, Reviewing, Rambling

Jordi Ballart Macabich

Benvinguts al meu blog! Soc un escriptor i nedador aficionat, enamorat del mar i amb interessos molt variats...

Creatively V

Creatively inspired projects for socially minded arts and crafters

KC Freeman - Fantasy & Paranormal Romance

USA Today Best-Selling Author

DaisyandDragon

Book reviews to start with, who knows what else i'll write about!

Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub

Let's talk books!

Linda's Book Bag

Loving books and reading

The Reading Closet

Books, adventure and cups of tea!

PrincessofPages

Books

The Artsy Reader

Winstonsdad's Blog

Home of Translated fiction and #translationthurs

  • Follow Following
    • Jay Spencer Green
    • Join 108 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Jay Spencer Green
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...