Roger Crowley's "Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire"

Roger Crowley read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul. He has traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean basin over many years and has a wide-ranging interest in its past and culture, as well as in seafaring and eyewitness history. He is also the author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World, and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas.

Crowley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, and reported the following:

I rather wished this had been the Page 98 test, as 99 is a chapter end in the US edition, little more than a short paragraph. However it describes the deteriorating relations between the Portuguese, newcomers to the Indian Ocean, and the ruler of Calicut, a key city on the West Coast of India for the trade in spices.

Conquerors traces the efforts of the Portuguese to find a sea route to India – 60 years of intense and quite single-minded effort down the coast of Africa. When Vasco da Gama finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and crossed the Indian Ocean, he arrived with two objectives. To grab a share of the rich spice trade with Europe, and to hunt for Christian allies against the Islamic world. Instead the Portuguese found the trade of the Indian Ocean fully in the hands of Muslim merchants and that the raja of Calicut, far from being a Christian, was a ‘heathen’ – they were unaware, when they first arrived, of the existence of Hinduism. Page 99 clarifies this misconception and tilts the balance of the Portuguese presence from peaceful trade to armed violence – to the role of ‘Conquerors’.

The little known story of the Portuguese discovery of the world is the subject of my book. It focusses particularly on the crucial thirty year period from their arrival in India until they almost controlled the whole ocean. It’s something of an epic of maritime skill, ruthlessness and limitless ambition, in which a few thousand European incomers armed with a superior technology – ship-borne bronze cannon – attempted to monopolize the hub of world trade, encircle Islam and recapture Jerusalem. It’s rich in extraordinary episodes of courage and violence, trading deals, messianic crusading dreams and sea battles, for which there are excellent eyewitness accounts. By 1515 the Portuguese had laid the foundation of the first global empire –a crucial kick start to the rise of the West in world history.

Visit Roger Crowley's website.

Writers Read: Roger Crowley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn's "The Cotton Kings"

Bruce E. Baker is Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle, and Barbara Hahn is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Cotton Kings describes a crucial moment in the book and illustrates two of our main points. First, it demonstrates how cotton brokers in the early twentieth century, the smart ones anyway, used the agricultural calendar as the basis of their trading strategy. Second, it shows how two of these cotton brokers came to New Orleans before the turn of the twentieth century and built a network of bull traders that wrested control of the market away from bear traders based in the corrupted New York Stock Exchange. William P. Brown and Frank B. Hayne did make fortunes, especially in 1903 when they cornered the world’s cotton supply, earning millions of dollars and pushing the price of cotton up to enrich the farmers as well as themselves. Still, corrupt practices on the New York Cotton Exchange continued to keep prices artificially low, enriching bear traders but spelling disaster for hard-pressed farmers and manufacturers dealing with volatile prices for their raw materials. The moment this page describes, in 1909, sees Brown and Hayne building an ever bigger network of bull traders, backed by cotton manufacturers in the South. This new network cornered the market again and threatened to effect a permanent squeeze. But then, as one observer noted, “all the bears [got] so scared that they [had] to call for the policeman,” and the case eventually wound up in the Supreme Court.

The “summer shortfall” was the key to Brown’s trading strategy. He bought up cotton futures contracts that would mature in the summer months before the new crop began to come to market in August. If he could buy enough futures contracts, and if he had enough money to pay for the cotton, he could demand the sellers deliver the actual cotton they had promised. As supplies of cotton ran short, the sellers would have to buy cotton for whatever price it was available, even if they lost money on each bale. If they could not meet their contracts, they risked being kicked out of the exchange. Brown would become the only person with cotton available, and sellers would have to buy it from him (at a high price) just in order to sell it back to him (at the low price promised in the contract).

Page 99 therefore captures a great deal of the drama of cotton futures trading and its main characters, and captures the argument of the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Cotton Kings at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Theresa Kaminski's "Angels of the Underground"

Theresa Kaminski is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She is the author of Citizen of Empire: Ethel Thomas Herold, An American in the Philippines and Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific.

Kaminski applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test, as Ford Madox Ford set it out, works for my book in revealing both its quality and its scope. The page centers on one of the angels, Yay Panlilio, revealing how she became involved in anti-Japanese resistance.

On page 99, the reader is plunged into Japanese-occupied Manila in January 1942. Yay, a Filipina-American newspaper reporter and undercover intelligence agent for the United States Army Forces Far East (USAFFE), had been trying to figure out how to help the troops that had withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsula in a futile wait for reinforcements. She’d wanted to go with them, to drive a truck, do anything to help, but a USAFFE officer had been dismissive--she was only a woman, what use would she be?

Yay remained in Manila, unaffected by the Japanese roundup of Allied civilians for internment because of her Filipino heritage. She took every opportunity to observe the enemy forces and assess their strengths and weaknesses. When a Japanese businessman, a prewar acquaintance, asked Yay to help launch radio station PIAM, the mouthpiece of the occupation, she agreed.

Yay was presented with broadcast scripts tightly controlled by Japanese censors, still she concocted phrasing Japanese translators would not fully understand but her English-speaking audience probably would. Using ‘innuendo so obscure sometimes that only mental telepathy could decode it,’ she cautioned Filipinos about how to deal with occupation forces, gave advice to the Voice of Freedom broadcasting from Corregidor, and passed along military information to USAFFE officers.

It worked, at least for a while. Yay stayed at it as long as she could, until the Japanese caught on and she had to flee Manila. Even then, she declined to sit out the remainder of the war doing nothing. Yay headed to the hills east or the city, where she joined up with guerrilla forces and continued her fight from the field.

Learn more about Angels of the Underground at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mario Erasmo's "Strolling Through Rome"

Mario Erasmo is Professor of Classics at the University of Georgia specializing in the Legacy of Classical Antiquity. He is the author of several books, including Death: Antiquity and Its Legacy and Reading Death in Ancient Rome and the volume editor of A Cultural History of Death in Antiquity. His forthcoming Strolling Through Florence: The Definitive Walking Guide to the Renaissance City (IBTauris) offers step-by-step strolls through historic sites and streets in the shadow of Brunelleschi's iconic dome.

Erasmo applied the “Page 99 Test” to his 2015 book, Strolling Through Rome: The Definitive Walking Guide to the Eternal City, and reported the following:

Every step in Rome is a walk through the annals of history. In antiquity, the area around the Theatre of Marcellus between the Capitoline Hill and the Tiber River on Page 99 is no exception. It was the location of the Circus Flaminius where the Triumphal processions of victorious generals set out and it was the focus of the Emperor Augustus' architectural program that elevated his sister Octavia and her son Marcellus to Imperial status. In the Middle Ages, the powerful Orsini family that produced several popes over the centuries turned the area of the theatre into fortifications and in the Renaissance, architect Baldassarre Peruzzi converted it into a palace complex. The Theatre of Marcellus was the second stone theatre in ancient Rome. For the Emperor Augustus who obsessed over his public persona, the opening gala ceremony did not go as planned when his chair broke within view of the assembled guests. The ruins of the monumental entrance to the Porticus of Octavia are now connected to the church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria named for the former medieval fish market located here. The three columns of the Temple of Apollo Medicus Sosianus were uncovered during intensive excavations of the area in the 1920's when Mussolini sought to liberate ancient ruins from medieval additions as part of his city-wide campaign to cast himself as the emperor Augustus presiding over a modern-day Roman Empire with the restored monuments of ancient Rome at its centre.

Contrasting against Imperial pomp, the ruins around the Theatre of Marcellus are at the edge of the former Jewish Ghetto whose boundaries were first delineated by Pope Paul IV Carafa in 1555 after centuries of migration from the area of modern day Trastevere on the other side of the Tiber River where Jews first settled in the 1st century BCE in the first Jewish Diaspora. The population increased following Vespasian's Jewish campaigns that brought thousands of Jewish slaves to Rome largely used for the construction of Flavian era monuments, including the Colosseum. A funerary monument on the Via Appia Antica of three former Jewish slaves from this period indicates that some gained their freedom. Largo 16 Ottobre 1943 adjacent to the theatre and the Great Synagogue of Rome (Tempio Maggiore) commemorates the location where Nazi trucks parked when Nazis threatened to round up Jews to transport them to concentration camps unless 110 pounds of gold were delivered in 24 hours. Jews and non-Jewish Romans raised the amount but the Nazis returned and took more than 2000 Jews away. The walls of the Ghetto came down at the end of WWII but a section remains a block away from the theatre in Piazza Costaguti that is now at the centre of a thriving Jewish community.

The Page 99 Test: Death: Antiquity and Its Legacy.

Writers Read: Mario Erasmo.

--Marshal Zeringue

David A. Bell's "Napoleon: A Concise Biography"

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. Born in New York and educated at Harvard, Princeton and the École Normale Supérieure, he previously taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of three prize-winning books, most recently The First Total War (2007).

Bell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Napoleon: A Concise Biography, and reported the following:

Napoleon: A Concise Biography is a very short book, so page 99 actually brings us close to the end. It covers events in the spring of 1815, when Napoleon Bonaparte had already been defeated and sent into exile on the island of Elba. But then he dramatically escaped, landed on the French coast, and marched to Paris He attracted enthusiastic support along the way and returned triumphantly to power. He would not stay there for long, however: just one hundred days. In June he would lose the battle of Waterloo, and be forced back into exile, this time on the small South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he would die in 1821.

The principal paragraph on page 99 recounts the beginning of the Hundred Days. It also refers back to a particularly dramatic confrontation between Napoleon and the army of the restored Bourbon dynasty (the “encounter at Laffrey”) with which I opened the book:

It was under these conditions that Napoleon fled Elba on February 26, 1815, easily evading lackluster British and French patrols and landing on the French coast three days later. As he marched north to Paris, he met with an increasingly enthusiastic response from stunned onlookers, and his talent for stage-managing dramatic events for maximum effect, as in the March 7 “encounter at Laffrey,” had not deserted him. More such events followed. His longtime subordinate Marshal Michel Ney had sworn an oath of loyalty to Louis XVIII, and on hearing of Napoleon’s return promised to bring the emperor to Paris in an iron cage. On March 14 Ney changed sides again and tearfully embraced his old master. Five days later, the army defending Paris declared its loyalty to Napoleon as well. Louis XVIII, who had pledged to die rather than abandon his capital, abandoned his capital and fled the country. On March 20, tens of thousands of Parisians, many of them weeping hysterically with joy, welcomed Napoleon back to the city.

Learn more about Napoleon: A Concise Biography at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: David A. Bell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael A. McDonnell's "Masters of Empire"

Michael A. McDonnell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (Hill and Wang, 2015), Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War (2013), and The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (2007), winner of the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s History Prize. His work was included in the Best American History Essays 2008 and he won the Lester Cappon Prize for the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 2006. He has received numerous research scholarships and grants in the United States and Australia and has served as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his family.

McDonnell applied the “Page 99 Test” to Masters of Empire and reported the following:

To my surprise, there was an image on page 99. While I’m not sure what that says of the “quality of the whole,” it is in fact the key to unlocking much of the story that is told in the book. The image is of pictographs from the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. It consists of drawings by Native ogimaag, or chiefs, representing their doodem (pronounced doh-dem) – or as we sometimes call them, their clan. These were their signatures. And they are almost the only written ‘texts’ we have from many Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To view this image, see: http://bit.ly/1Q12YQT

Recently, scholars such as Heidi Bohaker and Michael Witgen, working closely with Native communities, have tied these pictographs to the social and political organization of the Anishinaabeg – or the real, or original peoples. We often know them only by the names Europeans gave them: the Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Nipissing, Algonquin and Mississauga. But they all spoke Anishinaabemowin, and they were all, as they put it, “Allies to each other and as one People.” They were connected across the massive expanse of the Great Lakes region by language, trade, and kinship. This made them one of the most powerful Native nations in the colonial period.

Once these connections became clearer, I was able to put together a story centered on an Anishinaabe Odawa community at Michilimackinac – a narrow strait that connected Lakes Huron and Michigan (at present day Mackinaw City, Michigan). Here, a large - and growing - group of Ottawa (or Odawa) managed to use their extensive kinship ties, their mastery of the canoe, and their strategic location to carve out a central place for themselves even in the midst of European imperialism.

And while few people today appreciate the role of the Anishinaabeg in shaping the early colonial history of North America, most contemporaries at the time were well aware of the dramatic impact the native peoples of the Great Lakes had on the course of human events. The kings of France, ministers in London, and imperial and military officers in America, including George Washington, feared – and respected – the Anishinaabeg. They played an influential role in shaping French colonial efforts, the Seven Years’ War in America, and the conflict we now mistakenly call “Pontiac’s War.” And it may be no exaggeration to say that they played a part in lighting the fuse that would ultimately ignite the American Revolution.

Visit Michael A. McDonnell's website, blog, and Twitter perch.

Writers Read: Michael A. McDonnell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher R. Oldstone-Moore's "Of Beards and Men"

Christopher R. Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair, and reported the following:

Page 99 offers a fair reflection of what is on offer in Of Beards and Men: the Revealing History of Facial Hair. It discusses the self-fashioning of medieval French kings and crusaders, who helped establish a strong conceptual link between virtue and the shaved face that endures to this day. I write that “Louis VII was [in 1144] setting two precedents for French royalty: piety and beardlessness. Over the next three and a half centuries, the former was not regularly observed, but the latter was. It proved easier to look virtuous than be virtuous.” King Louis was also leader of the Second Crusade, and his knightly retainers similarly shaved or cropped off their beards in the style of the holy pilgrims they saw themselves to be. Earlier pages of this chapter provide the background for this style choice by explaining how and why medieval church theologians favored shaving as a symbol of spiritual and moral discipline.

This account of medieval kings and knights relates to the larger story of masculine virtue in the Middle Ages and subsequent eras. It illustrates how the church successfully promoted shaving for clergy and laity as part of its effort to steer all men to a life of pious mindfulness of spiritual rather than worldly purposes. Though men of the Renaissance countered these ideals with a forthright and bearded humanism, this older idea of shaven virtue endured, reborn in new guise in later centuries. These longer trends, in turn, illustrate some of the key themes of the book, particularly the fact that over the course of Western Civilization from Hellenistic Greece to our own day, shaving has remained the default mode of ideal manliness, interrupted only by relatively brief bearded eras. Explaining this lopsided pattern, and its peculiar timing, tells us a great deal about changing formulations of masculinity over time. In this respect, the history of men truly is written on their faces.

Learn more about Of Beards and Men at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miguel de Baca's "Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture"

Miguel de Baca is Associate Professor of Art History at Lake Forest College. He specializes in modern and contemporary American art history and American studies.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, I discuss Truitt’s use of small painted sketches on paper to work out a larger, sculptural problem having to do with what she called “lines of force” (essentially lines between colors on the painted surfaces of her sculptures). I link these sketches back to drawings Truitt made in Tokyo in 1965 and 1966, largely based on the memory of American white paled fences, which also hearken back to the subject of her first sculpture made in a minimalist style, First (1961)—a sculpture that is the subject of the first chapter of Memory Work.

Truitt’s three years in Japan were full of personal turmoil. The artist had emerged into the New York art world in 1963 with a much-vaunted solo debut at André Emmerich Gallery. The show was one of the very first to introduce minimalism, and Truitt was by all means a pioneer of this style. However, she moved to Tokyo in 1964 on account of her husband’s career in journalism, and this, I think, caused a great deal of worry about being able to keep up with her newfound success from half a world away. Her works on paper from this period reveal an anxious linkage to formal and conceptual tendencies that would be realized sculpturally later.

Indeed, until now, the sculptures that Truitt made in Japan have been understood as an anomaly in her practice, exacerbated by the artist’s own statements about the work, which she destroyed in the early 1970s. In Memory Work, however, I argue that Truitt’s time in Japan was a crucial bridge between her early work and the particolored wooden columns for which she is known and celebrated today. Particularly important is the theme of memory of landscapes, architecture, and geographies from both her personal past as well as American cultural history, as is plainly evident in her drawings. There is much to learn from the fact that Truitt resorted to memory in order to find her way through a present creative impasse.

Learn more about Memory Work at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Graeme Gill's "Building an Authoritarian Polity"

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His books include Symbolism and Regime Change in Russia and Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics.

Gill applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Building an Authoritarian Polity: Russia in Post-Soviet Times, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, the results of the 2007 parliamentary election in Russia are discussed. This election, and the campaign that preceded it, highlights the way in which the Russian authorities manage political parties and, through them, the so-called "systemic opposition" in Russia. Through a combination of promoting a popular leader, tilting the electoral arena significantly in favour of the ruling party, and a lop-sided campaign, Putin and his supporters were able to achieve a decisive electoral majority which helped to consolidate authoritarian rule. But the structuring and manipulation of the electoral process was only one part of the broader strategy of building an authoritarian political system that has been followed since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

There were three other broad components of this strategy: the restriction and structuring of the activity of civil society forces so that they were directed into safe channels, the building of a relatively coherent administrative structure that answers to the president, and the stabilisation of elite relations so that conflict and division do not break out within that group. This strategy has not been completely successful in any of these areas, and there have at times been clear instances where the attempt to implement the strategy produced results significantly short of what was desired. In particular, the strategy was much less successful under President Yeltsin than it has been under President Putin. Nevertheless, the strategy was followed by both presidents, so that the picture of Yeltsin as the democrat being replaced by Putin the autocrat is a caricature. And it is due to the efforts of both that Russia has reached the stage of authoritarian rule that now characterises it.

Learn more about Building an Authoritarian Polity at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell's "The Murder of King James I"

Alastair Bellany is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England. Thomas Cogswell is professor of history at UC Riverside. His books include The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Murder of King James I, and reported the following:

The Murder of King James I is essentially a book about a book—a 1626 pamphlet, The Forerunner of Revenge, that alleged that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham had poisoned King James I of England, an allegation that would play a remarkable role in the tumultuous politics of England’s century of revolution. Unlike most political libels, The Forerunner openly advertised its author, George Eglisham, a Scottish physician. But who was George Eglisham? What drove him to write his dangerous book? And how did he write it so well?

We began with only a handful of clues, but several serendipitous finds and a lot of old fashioned archival legwork eventually allowed us to understand the man and the forces that drove him to write his sensational tract.

Page 99 [inset; click to enlarge] finds Eglisham in 1612, the year his fortunes were made. He is in Holland, having rushed north from Paris to assist James I’s campaign to remove the anti-Calvinist Conrad Vorstius from the chair of theology at Leiden. Eglisham would write two caustic philosophical critiques of Vorstius’s supposed atheism—we reproduce the title-page of one at the foot of page 99—and James rewarded his efforts by granting him the title of royal physician. The Vorstius pamphlets also revealed some of the talents Eglisham would later deploy against Buckingham—linguistic and rhetorical facility, self-confidence bordering on arrogance, a taste for the dramatic, and a passion for the politics of personal destruction.

We also came to realize that his year in Holland was part of a bigger story about Eglisham’s cosmopolitanism. As a Catholic Scotsman, Eglisham was an outsider in his own country, forced to acquire an education in the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium) and to work in Rouen and Paris. James’s favor allowed him a comfortable living in London, but when forced to flee England in 1625, Eglisham would find safe haven in Catholic Brussels, where his transnational connections provided the support, opportunity and ideological perspective to write his devastating exposé of the Jacobean court’s murderous poison politics. The lesson was clear: to understand the strange history of The Forerunner of Revenge, we had to explore the complex entanglement of British and European politics.

Learn more about The Murder of King James I at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue