Déjà Vu All Over Again: Back to Afghanistan
A while back I blogged about Great Britain’s first disastrous attempt to invade Afghanistan.
That post barely scratched the surface of the story, so I was delighted when Shelf Awareness sent me Diana Preston’s The Dark Defile:: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842 to review.
In The Dark Defile, Preston tells the story of Great Britain’s ill-fated attempt to interfere in Afghani politics in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, handling the inevitable parallels between the 19th-century British experience and modern events with a light touch and solid historical research.
Paranoid about Russian expansion into Central Asia, the British government sent the Army of the Indus into Afghanistan in 1838 with orders to overthrow the existing ruler and replace him with a British puppet. The expedition ended with the slaughter of the British forces as they retreated from Kabul.
Reading The Dark Defile is like watching an impending train wreck in an old movie: You are at turns horrified and fascinated, all the while hoping for a last-minute save that never comes. Preston uses diaries, letters and official accounts by both major and minor figures to illustrate the series of personal, political, and military errors of the First Afghan War. While politicians in London suppressed reports in which the British representative in Kabul argued against the political coup, one elderly general was given command of the expeditionary force because the climate of Kabul would be good for his health. Troops were housed in indefensible cantonments; subsidies to Afghani tribal leaders were cut. And when Afghan forces rebelled in the streets, British leaders hesitated to send out their troops. In the end, only one member of the expedition survived.
The Dark Defile is more than just an account of Britain’s “Great Game” in Central Asia gone wrong. Preston ends with a critical assessment of Britain’s “conspiracy of optimism” in Afghanistan, and its impact on future relationships between Afghanistan and the west.
I talked so much about the book that My Own True Love read it after I was done. His review was pithier than mine: “That was a hell of a book. Heartbreaking.”
Pretty much sums it up.
The heart of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Prince Henry, the So-Called Navigator
I’ve been thinking about Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal today, and re-reading bits of Peter Russell’s excellent biography, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life
You remember Prince Henry. He’s the first in a series of names that you learned in grade school: Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, Dias, Magellan–maybe Henry Hudson if your teacher was into the Great Explorers and the Age of Discovery.
If you got hooked, you trotted down to the school library and checked out a biography–or three. (Not that I admit to having done anything of the sort.) They introduced you to the princely scholar who founded a school on the coast of Portugal where he taught new arts of navigation to his sailors. The visionary who sent men out explore the cost of Africa with the goal of reaching India. The gifted mathematician whose theories made oceanic navigation possible. The dynamic symbol of Portugal’s imperial destiny. In short, a heroic figure a nerd could love.
Not surprisingly, the story told in a biography suitable for a ten-year-old is little more than a series of half-truths. Even the nickname “the Navigator” is a misnomer, invented by nineteenth century historians eager to establish the Portuguese grandson of John of Gaunt as the forefather of British maritime success. In fact, the prince’s only personal experience of seafaring was trips along the Portuguese post and the occasional short hop to Morocco.
Henry was an ambitious prince, a would-be Crusader, a celibate Christian knight, a talented administrator, and a shrewd businessman. For more than forty years he funded expeditions of exploration along the west coast of Africa, pushing Portuguese seamen to sail further than they ever had before. By providing the financial support and intellectual stimulus for Portugal’s voyages of discovery, Prince Henry the Navigator transformed Portugal from a small, impoverished nation into Europe’s first maritime empire. Now that I think about it, a hero that a grown-up nerd can still admire.
Go, Henry.
Al-Khwarizmi Does the Math
Quick: multiply DVII by XVIII. Before you could work the problem you translated it into Arabic numbers didn’t you?
The person you can thank, or blame, for your ability to multiply and divide is the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 783-847), whose name lives on in a mangled form as “algorithm. (Honest. Take a moment to sound it out.)
We know very little about al-Kwarizmi’s life. His name suggests he was born in the region of Khwarazm in what is now Uzbekistan. There are suggestions that he was a Zoroastrian, who may have converted to Islam.
We know a lot about al-Kwarizmi’s work as a scholar in al-Mansur’s court in Baghdad. He introduced what were then called “Hindu numerals” to the Muslim world. He produced an important astronomical chart (zij) that made it possible to calculate the positions of the sun, the moon and the major planets and to tell time based on stellar and solar observations.
Al-Kwarizmi’s most important contribution to science was a ground-breaking mathematical treatise: al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jebr wal-Muqabala. The title translates to The Compendium on Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, but the book is most often referred to as al-jebr, or algebra. His treatise was a combination of mathematical theory and practical examples related to inheritances, property division, land measurements, and canal digging. He was the inventor both of quadratic equations and the dreaded word problem. (Some of his word problems became classics, which meant they were still giving schoolboys grief several centuries later.)
So, the next time you need to calculate how long it will take for two cars to meet in Dubuque if one car leaves Minneapolis going 60 miles an hour and the other leaves Peoria traveling 75 miles an hour? Thank al-Khwarizmi.
This post previously appeared in Wonders & Marvels.