The Enemy of All Mankind
Several years ago, I read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I never reviewed it here on the Margins, though a large sticky note on the inside cover listing a number of thought-provoking questions suggests that I intended to.*
As far as I was concerned, it was kick-in-the-head brilliant. So when Johnson’s most recent book, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power and History’s First Global Manhunt, appeared on a list for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I raised my hand and said “Pick me! Pick me!”
I’ve got to say that while Enemy of All Mankind is an excellent book, it did not blow me away the way The Ghost Map did. In all fairness to Johnson, that may be because I know a fair amount about a number of topics he deals with. Someone less familiar with the Sea People,** the Mughal empire, the Indian Ocean trade, and the British East India Company might well enjoy the same sense of jaw-dropping revelation that I felt reading The Ghost Map.
Nonetheless, Enemy of All Mankind*** is well-worth the read. Johnson makes a compelling case that a single (admittedly brutal) attack on an Indian treasure ship by seventeenth century British pirate Henry Every played a critical role in shaping the global economy.
The story at the heart of the book could be the basis for a thriller: Henry Every leads a mutiny on a British trading ship. Once captured, he and his fellow mutineers turn pirate and sail to the Gulf of Aden where Indian ships carrying Muslim pilgrims to and from the hajj to Mecca present fat targets. The pirates attack and seize a rich ship (which may or may not have had a Mughal princess as a passenger) and subsequently become the objects of a global manhunt. And though his crew is captured and hung, Every is never found.
As he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses his core story as a springboard for discussing bigger issues. He outlines the history of piracy, beginning in ancient Egypt, and explains why pirates caught the public imagination in seventeenth century Britain. **** He traces the rise of the Mughal Empire in India, succession struggles within the Mughal dynasty, the lives of women in the Mughal court, and the economics of the hajj pilgrimage. He explains the economic base of the British East India Company, it’s shaky position in seventeenth century India, and the changing treatment of pirates in the British court system. Finally, Johnson pulls all his threads together in a rigged courtroom scene in which not only Every’s crews but Britain’s international reputation were on trial.
Johnson ends Enemy of All Mankind ends with an open-ended discussion of what might have happened to Every. A satisfying conclusion to a story with as many questions as answers.
*Not now, however. I’ve read enough about epidemics in recent weeks and my guess is that you have, too. Maybe I’ll circle back to it in happier times.
**A topic that has been on my future blog post list for several years. Perhaps its day has come.
***A legal term that referred to pirates because their crimes typically occurred outside the jurisdiction of any given state. Since then it has been applied to other types of criminals, including slave traders, professional assassins and war criminals.
**** Hint: The new invention of the popular press created a mass audience and then need to amuse it. In the absence of other nationally known figures, pirates were the pop stars of the period.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Roosevelt, Lindbergh, American Isolationism, and a Book Review
I must admit, I bagged Friday’s blog post. I simply wasn’t sure what I could write that was meaningful and/or appropriate in our current troubles. My inbox over the last week has been filled with carefully crafted statements of alliance or calls to action. Many of them are a nervous, well intentioned attempt to enter the difficult conversations in which many of us are now involved. The best of them are rooted in personal experience, offer a list of suggested actions, or look at a very specific angle of systemic racism. I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the conversation.(1)
But I am currently involved in a deep research dive on Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the isolationist movement in the United States during the same period, and the challenges journalists faced in reporting both stories (and later reporting on World War II). It was uncomfortable reading even before the murder of George Floyd changed our collective conversation in tragic, powerful and important ways. It is more than uncomfortable now. At a minimum, I am reminded of the high cost of remaining silent.
I’ve decided that the best thing I can do with this blog is what I planned to do all along: share the books I’m reading and stories from the past, being a little more conscious of how current events echo stories from the past.
Take a deep breath, I’m going in.
Several years ago I read Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island with delight. Great storytelling. Impeccable research. Repeated moments of “I didn’t know that!!” When I learned that she wrote an earlier book on America’s struggles between isolationism and intervention in the years leading up to World War II I was thrilled. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 more than lived up to my expectations. (Note the liberal use of color-coded sticky tabs > 
)
Olson explores how the issues of interventionism and isolationism split American society in the years before Pearl Harbor made those debates largely irrelevant. She centers the story on the larger than life figures who embodied the two positions: President Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. Neither man comes out looking good. Roosevelt often froze at the wheel: giving rousing speeches to the American public and then failing to take action for political reasons. Lindbergh, whom one journalist described as a “hypersensitive man who was insensitive to others,” translated his personal likes and dislikes into political positions,(2) with apparently little or no understanding of the larger context, and then used his celebrity status to push those positions. (In a spirit of full disclosure, the more I learn about Lindbergh, the less appealing I find him . Feel free to adjust for my distaste.)
But the story is more than a Clash of Titans. Olson takes us through the conflict in step-by-step detail, looking at grassroots activism as well as the actions of those in power. She introduces the reader to individual members of Congress who took positions on both sides of the conflict, bringing them to life in unexpected ways.(3) She looks at high-ranking officers in the American military who were anti-intervention and who actively worked to undermine Roosevelt’s pro-British policies. She outlines the workings of a covert British operation which created false news, dug up dirt on isolationist Congressmen, and helped form the OSS, precursor to the CIA. (Sound familiar? I refer you to my review of Agents of Influence.) She describes the formation and actions of isolationist groups like the America First Committee and the American Mothers Neutrality League and their interventionist counterparts, the White Committee (officially the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies) and the Century Group.
The one thing that is absolutely clear is that it was a dirty fight on all sides.
And yet, I came out with undiluted admiration for one player in the game.(4) Wendell Wilkie scuttled his own presidential campaign by supporting the passage of a contested conscription bill at the very moment that he accepted the Republication nomination to run against Roosevelt in 1940. When party members censored his action, he answered that he was “an American first, and a Republican afterward.” A hero by any standard as far as I’m concerned. And one we should all take as a model, regardless of our political persuasions.
1) Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while should have a clear sense that I am passionate about the need for diversity in our historical narrative. That passion is rooted in a deep belief in the importance of fighting for diversity, equality and inclusion. I doubt if it comes as any surprise that I am against police brutality and racism. And I am saddened by the fact that it is necessary for all of us to take a clear position because silence is complicity.
2) As do we all to some extent.
3) For example, the two ranking Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, who led the isolationist faction in Congress were both born shortly after the Civil War and couldn’t quite grasp the fact that the invention of warplanes and submarines meant that the United States was vulnerable to attack in a way that it had not been in their childhoods. Quite frankly, this made my jaw drop and led to several paragraphs of excited scribbling.
4) Two if you count Elizabeth Murrow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s mother. She only appears as a bit player, but she definitely caught my imagination.
Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War
If you’re interested in the American Civil War, you’ve probably heard of Dr. Mary Walker. You probably know that she:
1) Worked as a surgeon in the war
2) Is the only woman to have received the Medal of Honor
3) Wore pants long before it was common for women to wear pants.
All those things are true. But they are only a small part of Walker’s story. In Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War: One Woman’s Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women’s Rights, historian Theresa Kaminski paints a portrait of Walker as a whole person and sets her in a broader context than the Civil War. Walker was a shin-kicker by any standard. As Kaminski demonstrates, Walker wanted to “be somebody.” She also wanted to change the world for the better, whether it was reforming standards of women’s clothing or fighting for women’s rights.*
Like many crusaders, Walker did not play well with others. She was both thin-skinned and abrasive, quick to take offense and often offensive. She often took unpopular positions within the movements she supported. As a result, one of the most fascinating parts of Kaminski’s account is the way Walker’s contemporaries, fellow reformers and antagonists alike, systematically attempted to erase Walker from the narrative, with substantial success.
If you’re interested in Civil War medicine, the history of the women’s rights movement in the United States or kick-ass historical women, you’ll want to read Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War.
If you want to know more about Theresa Kaminski or Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War:
Check out her website: https://theresakaminski.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @KaminskiTheresa
Like her Facebook page: Theresa Kaminski Historian
Follow her on Instagram: Hers_torian
*Speaking of suffragists and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, as I believe we were.