Meredith F. Small's "Inventing the World"

Meredith F. Small is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of Our Babies, Ourselves; What's Love Got to Do with It?; and Female Choices. She writes frequently for Natural History Magazine, Discover, Scientific American, and is a commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Small applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inventing the World; Venice and the Transformation of Western Culture is a great touchstone for the book because it presents several ideas that were invented in Venice that remain critical today. The very thesis of the book is that my list of over 200 Venetian discoveries (objects as well as ideas) have shaped the modern equivalent, so it’s not a surprise that page 99 sports one or two of those.

Looking at page 99 is also fun because it happens to land in the middle of the chapter “The Art of Medicine and the Idea of Public Health.” What could possibly be more relevant today than that? The page begins:

Although many believe that Louis Pasteur, and somewhat later Robert Koch, were the first to understand that small particles we now colloquially call “germs” were responsible for spreading many diseases, these men were certainly not the first to think about contagion. In 1362 Ibn al-Kathib, an Arab intellectual and physician, wrote about contagion after seeing what plague had done. He pinned it to goods and ships coming into foreign ports and commented on the fact that not everyone died, only some and that suggested the possibility of immunity. His thinking was heretical at that time, especially in Muslim culture. And long before Pasteur, Padua professor and anatomist Girolamo Fracastoro proposed in his book De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis (1546) that disease as passed along by tiny particles. He called them fomites, a word that has been translated from the Latin as “spores” but actually means “tinder,” as in to make a fire, and that’s what Fracastoro meant—these fomites started the raging fire of infection. He also made the enlightening suggestions that these spores could move from person to person in bodily fluids, they could survive for a very long time, and while the spores themselves were not infected, they were the causal factor of an infection.

Fracastoro came to this conclusion after many years of studying syphilis, which was rampant in Europe at the time. He was also the first person to suggest mercury as a cure for syphilis; he ran various controlled studies using mercury to prove his point. Fracastoro was also the first person to describe typhus, a pandemic. Fracastoro was a professor at the University of Padua which was part of the Venetian Republic and considered the intellectual heart of Venice.

Two pages later in the chapter, I describe how Venetians invented quarantine in 1348, but on page 99, I make the point that the government was clearly attuned to the contagious nature of plague. Although they didn’t have evidence, they were able to figure it out because of the economic foundation of the city. By the 14th century, Venice was an established trading nation building its wealth as boats came and went into the Venetian lagoon. The city also attracted foreign traders who acted as middlemen for their countries. Venice was and still is a very cosmopolitan place attracting people and contagion from all over.

Venice also had the advantage of a government that was more egalitarian than others during that time although aristocrats eventually outweighed commoners in their power. But even so, the city was run by committees always worried about corruption, and policies were aimed at protecting the collective rather than self-interest. And so, they instituted a 40 day (quaranta in Italian and Veneziano, the language of Venice) isolation period against people and their goods to protect against an unseeable threat, just as we do today.

Visit Meredith F. Small's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Golan Y. Moskowitz's "Wild Visionary"

Golan Y. Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Catherine and Henry J. Gaisman Faculty Fellow at Tulane University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Continuously battling difficult feelings, the artist soon began long-term psychotherapy. As he put it, he “keeled over. I just really ran out of steam and I was too frightened. I just lost it. And a very good friend of mine then paid for my first session [of therapy]. He said, ‘You have to help yourself.’ And I went and I stayed for 10 years.” Speaking of his therapist, Bertram Slaff, who was also gay and Jewish, Sendak would later admit, “I wanted him to hammer me straight, but of course that failed.” But the artist would later praise Slaff, telling Rolling Stone, “a large part of my 20s was spent on the analyst’s couch. And it enriched and deepened me and gave me confidence to express much that I might not have without it.” Slaff and Sendak had much common ground from which to draw during their years of dialogue. Like Sendak, Slaff loved the arts and had even made several earlier attempts at playwriting. In the summer of 1954, while attempting to write a play in a rented house on Nantucket, Slaff would meet a flamboyant writer who lied about his age and invented his family’s past. This writer, Coleman Dowell, would become Slaff’s domestic partner, as well as a close friend of Sendak’s for decades. While Slaff’s playwriting fell by the wayside, Dowell’s daring novels would earn him the friendship of authors like Gilbert Sorrentino, John Hawkes, George Whitmore, and Edmund White. Like Sendak, Dowell was an alienated queer artist concerned with complexities of “the self” and accompanying questions of the physical body, and he too partnered romantically with a psychiatrist interested in the arts.

Slaff might have offered Sendak valuable insight related to his own experience as partner to Dowell. His clinical research surely also spoke to Sendak, focusing in part on the emotional plight of gifted youth, whose creative interiority isolated them from the wider society. Slaff’s publications on adolescent psychiatry would advocate against pathologizing those whose distress reflected merely the suffering of a misunderstood, “creative personality,” rather than a character disorder. Interestingly, in an era that still used coded language for homosexuality, terms like “creative” and “artistic” also referred to gay people. This understanding may have colored Philip Sendak’s uneasiness about the fact that his two sons were working as artists.

Page 99 offers a revealing glimpse of my book’s contents. It presents a turning point in Sendak’s life, following his aborted attempt to move to Manhattan in his twenties in order to begin life as a working artist. Having returned to his parents in Brooklyn, he addresses his emotional challenges through professional analysis. Though this page does not discuss Sendak’s creative works, which comprise a significant portion of each chapter, it spotlights his interior grappling with the social expectations of his time, as well as his solidarity with like-minded observers and outsiders – companions who modeled the ability to maintain child-like faculties of sensitivity and critical awareness into their American adulthoods.

This page also conveys the layering of cultural realities within which the artist moved and created. As the last two sentences suggest, Wild Visionary explores not only Sendak’s personal alienation in American life but also his location in a family with conflicting aspirations. Like other immigrants, the Sendaks strove to achieve American success, as well as to maintain a meaningful connection to their traditional culture and lost worlds. These aspirations cannot be separated from Sendak’s experience of gender and sexuality. For Jewish and other minority immigrants, “becoming American” often meant revising one’s own performance of masculinity, femininity, and other affective and bodily mores in order to better suit the expectations of the dominant culture. As I argue, traditional Eastern European Jewish sensibilities had offered more room for queer fulfillment than did the rigidly binary masculinity and femininity of early and mid-twentieth-century America. At very least, the Old World seemed to offer such fulfillment by nature of its location for immigrants’ children as a theoretical, imagined space of family memory and legend, an ambiguous alternative beyond the strictures imposed through acculturation.

American-born children of twentieth-century immigrants, Sendak included, experienced the particular challenge of emerging between worlds. Raised in crowded, immigrant “ghettoes” that, by Sendak's adolescence, were shrouded in Holocaust mourning, these children never directly knew the lost Old World, nor could they fully belong to the “new” one, at least not without the emotional repercussions of leaving behind those who had sacrificed and lost on their behalf. As my book explores, Sendak navigated this liminality by creating art that tackled these complex feelings, employing the rich symbolism of his own childhood to speak to larger questions about socialization, self-preservation, and the creative resilience required to survive the modern world.

Learn more about Wild Visionary at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.R. Oldfield's "The Ties that Bind"

John Oldfield is Professor of Emancipation and Slavery at The University of Hull.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ties that Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820-1866, and reported the following:

If readers open The Ties that Bind at page 99, they will find a discussion of the role of women in the boycotting of slave-produced goods. Whether as consumers or arbiters of taste, particularly in the domestic sphere, women took a lead in the non-consumption campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, these campaigns were often framed in gender terms. The Quaker activist William Allen declared that women were “universally considered as the MODELS of every just and virtuous sentiment.” Their example, therefore, in “ABSTAINING FROM THE USE OF WEST INDIA PRODUCE [would] silence every murmur – refute every objection – and render the performance of duty as UNIVERSAL as their INFLUENCE.” A great deal of support for the boycotting of slave-produced goods undoubtedly came from women. As early as 1788, the British poet Hannah More urged a close friend “to taboo the use of West India sugar in their tea.” If anything, non-consumption gained in momentum during the nineteenth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, many ladies’ associations actively promoted abstinence from slave-produced goods, including sugar, coffee, and cotton. Another tactic was to put pressure on local shopkeepers to sell only Free Labor produce, thereby making explicit the connection between antislavery, consumption, and the world of goods.

The test works well but I should perhaps begin by qualifying this point. My book is not specifically about women or about gender relations. Rather, its focus is on two inter-related themes; the creation of what we might call a constituency for antislavery ("opinion building") and the importance of international co-operation ("transatlanticism)". As I argue in The Ties that Bind, antislavery was never a parochial British affair, any more than it was a parochial American affair. Instead, it was an international movement that bound together British and American reformers in dense transatlantic networks that, in turn, depended on reciprocity and trust. Women, however, played a crucial role in raising public awareness about slavery, whether as consumers or producers. Many women, as the test reveals, were involved in the non-consumption of slave-produced goods. They also distributed tracts and pamphlets and, in the USA, at least, involved themselves in collecting signatures for antislavery petitions, sometimes canvassing door-to-door. Others were part of transatlantic networks that formed a kind of international “sisterhood.” The Boston Antislavery Bazaar, to take an obvious example, depended a great deal on contributions from British women, including artefacts that they had designed and created themselves. The Boston Antislavery Bazaar was one of the most successful of all antislavery endeavors. Its endurance, moreover, highlighted the importance both of “consumerism” -- page 99 appears in a chapter entitled “Consuming Abolition” -- and international co-operation. In this sense, the test speaks directly to the central themes of The Ties that Bind, urging readers to consider how eighteenth and nineteenth-century antislavery activists worked together to create a constituency for abolition.

Learn more about The Ties that Bind at the Liverpool University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Salmon's "An Event, Perhaps"

Peter Salmon was born in Australia but now lives in the UK. His first novel The Coffee Story was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written for the Guardian, the Sydney Review of Books, the New Humanist, as well as Australian TV and radio. He has received the Writer's Awards from the Arts Council of England and the Arts Council of Victoria, Australia.

Salmon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.’ Or, as Baudelaire put it twenty years earlier, ‘God is the only being who, in order to rule, does not even need to exist.’

It is one of the fundamental ‘properties’ of ideal objects is that their interactions must be logical and formal. Their essence must be independent of any set or sets of circumstances. An isosceles triangle, a perfect circle, horseness, cannot be affected by space or time, or they are not ideal. For Husserl, language as spoken is problematic. Elements of expression can only stay non-real because they take place in what he calls the ‘sphere of solitary mental life’ – self-consciousness, immediately and absolutely present to itself. This privileged sphere is abandoned, and its contents contaminated, when they enter the realm of the empirical, the real, circumstance – when they are said out loud.

For example, I may have a meaning-intention in my mind, but it cannot, by definition, be delivered in a pure state to my interlocutor (we will later see this problem re-emerge in Derrida’s argument with the speech act theories of Searle). So Husserl proposes a perfect language in which meaning is absolute and absolutely transparent, and that happens ‘in the blink of an eye.’ This is the interior monologue. Thus, in what Derrida notes is a paradoxical move, Husserl attempts to fix the essence of ex-pression (to press outward) in the unexpressed, in ‘the voice that keeps silence.’ ‘Self-presence must be produced in the undivided unity of a temporal present so as to have nothing to reveal to itself by the agency of signs.’

Two objections present themselves. First, as Derrida has argued, the guarantor of the ideality of language is, in fact, speech. Second, what is this ‘in the blink of an eye’? Husserl is once again seeking a unit of time so small it no longer exists, the absolutely punctual in the flowing thisness of the temporal.

But Derrida is out-phenomenologising Husserl. Is what Husserl is describing what actually happens? Is the experience of absolutely self-present meaning true to our experience in any recognisable sense?

What happens when we speak, in all the ways outlined above, and including the voice in our head? Philosophy, alongside…

I would love it and hate it if the reader opened at this page! First the love - it is all about Husserl, with whom I became obsessed while writing the biography – most of what was cut was about his work. My aim with the book was to present Derrida as a philosopher, that is, doing what philosophers do, trying to explain how complex and interesting life is. He has too often, particularly in the Anglosphere I think, been treated as either a semiotician (ok) or a fraud (not ok) that I wanted to go back to his grounding, and his grounding is Husserl.

But I would hate it because my reason for this approach is to produce a clearer, more quotidian Derrida – in no way to simplify, but hopefully to make more explicable for the general reader. To do that I did have to ask the reader to do a little bit of heavy lifting early on, and this section is right in the midst of that. Frankly, brain-wise, it’s the plum in the middle of the hardest bit – so if you, the reader, are ok with this, the rest of the book is a breeze, frankly.

To attempt to paraphrase myself, Derrida found it odd that philosophy, that great written field of human endeavour, always dissed writing in favour of speech. Husserl took this to a limit where he thought only the voice we have in our head is uncontaminated, and therefore true.

Derrida points out that language is, in its essence, social. The words we use pre-date us, the things we say create thought (rather than capturing it), and if there were no interlocutors, language would not even exist. Every thought you have (right now) is a collegiate experience in many ways.

Thus Husserl, so philosophy. The model of a thinking thing inside us, that produces thoughts, turns them into language, and the transmits them, fully formed and perfect, to another person is bunk. Things are, says Derrida, much, much more complicated than that. And a lot more interesting…

Visit Peter Salmon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danilo Mandić's "Gangsters and Other Statesmen"

Danilo Mandić is a Postdoctoral College Fellow in the Department of Sociology, where he lectures on war, forced migration, political sociology and research methods. His research focuses on social movements, nationalism, ethnic relations, civil war and organized crime. He is interested in conceptualizing organized crime as a neglected non-state actor and in understanding the interrelations of states, social movements and illicit flows of people, goods and ideas in regions with separatist disputes.

Mandić applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World, and reported the following:

Indeed, page 99 [inset, below left; click to enlarge] is a good page to illustrate the book's themes. It is about the notorious "Yellow House," a site of an organ trafficking ring run by criminal elements within the Kosovo Liberation Army, a separatist movement in the Balkans. Victims were brought to the cottage, their organs were taken out and transported via an elaborate route across the mountains to an airport on their way to Turkey. My book explores how mafias - like the one conducting this organ harvesting - are embedded not just in local communities and cultures, but in the violent ethnic politics that disrupts many regions of the world. Rribe, this village in northern Albania, is a perfect illustration of this. Underlying every successful organized criminal racket is a set of connections - kinship, friendship, tribal, clan, ethnic, etc. - within local communities. Many localities around the world operate on the kinds of fear and coercion that residents of Rribe experienced because their village was terrorized by gangsters.

The "page 99 test" appears to work. Yet I cannot help but wonder if its widespread adoption will further feed into our aversion to long-form and dense prose? If we all start using this test, will our alienation from anything that takes time to read grow? Are we doomed to evaluate books not even by their cover, but by a randomly-selected snippet completely out of context? Would it perhaps have been better if my book had failed this test miserably by having an empty 99th page, leaving the reader no choice but to read the whole thing?

Learn more about Gangsters and Other Statesmen at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nimisha Barton's "Reproductive Citizens"

Nimisha Barton serves as Director of Equity and Inclusion at an independent school in Los Angeles and as a diversity and inclusion consultant for institutions of higher education. She has published her research in French Politics, Culture and Society and the Journal of Women's History. She has also received awards and fellowships from the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Western Society for French History.

Barton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945, and reported the following:

When you open my book to page 99, you land a couple of pages into Chapter 4, “Mothers, Welfare Organizations, and Reproducing for the Nation.” Here, I lay out the local welfare terrain in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, arguing, “most municipal leaders in charge of local welfare bureaus saw a potential payoff in the population boost that large numbers of foreigners afforded a French nation laid low by demographic woes.” After surveying some of the bilateral treaties guaranteeing immigrants from certain states welfare assistance, I then turn to the most significant entitlement that large immigrant families who migrated to France in overwhelming numbers before 1945 received: family allocations.

Browsers using the Page 99 Test would get a fairly accurate picture of the main argument of the book. Reproductive Citizens argues that reproduction served as an all-important avenue to obtaining social citizenship rights based on marriage, child-bearing, and child-rearing in modern France. This was because, at the time, France suffered from a terrible crisis of depopulation worsened by the disastrous bloodletting of World War I, during which 10 percent of the French male population was killed. Moreover, I show how the expansive and supportive French welfare state served as one of the key pillars of reproductive citizenship that many immigrants enjoyed, whether they were formally French citizens or not.

The Page 99 Test works in other ways, though there are some drawbacks. On page 99, I blend an analysis of high-level international laws with local on-the-ground politics, and I demonstrate their overall impact on ordinary people. Indeed, the page closes with a description of how all these welfare laws and their application by bureaucrats affected the Gallners and Tcheskisses, an Austrian family of five and a Russian family of five, respectively, who lived in Paris between the two world wars. In this manner, it is very representative of the book’s approach: one that blends political, legal, urban, and social history in a vibrant story about a melting-pot immigrant neighborhood in Paris.

However, one of the main achievements of the book is that it is among the first to highlight the voices of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant women who migrated to France before 1945, and this is not apparent on page 99. In the past, most scholars of immigration in France have centered immigrant men in their analyses. By contrast, this book uses the stories of immigrant women to drive the narrative. In the process, it demonstrates that immigrant women stood at the crossroads of immigrant families and communities, on the one hand, and state and neighborhood resources, on the other. Through immigrant women, we can see the inner workings of welfare states and understand the potential of reproductive citizenship in modern nation-states.

Visit Nimisha Barton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael J. Brown's "Hope and Scorn"

Michael J. Brown is assistant professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, and reported the following:

The presence of intellectuals in American political life has elicited strong, frequently opposing reactions, including those indicated by this book’s title: hope and scorn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—one of the most visible intellectuals of the 1960s—called forth both.

Page 99 finds Schlesinger weeks into the role for which he was perhaps best known: special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger’s portfolio included Latin American affairs, and he believed the new administration could reset perceptions of United States policy in the region. While maintaining the strong anticommunism characteristic of both Kennedy and Schlesinger in the years before this moment in 1961, the administration could also signal that it was not merely the state apparatus of American business. This tack was the course of Cold War liberalism for which Schlesinger was a notable navigator. On page 99, however, he and Kennedy are headed for the shoals.

Planning for a US-supported landing in Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro had passed from the Eisenhower administration to the incoming Kennedy one. Though skeptical about the prospects for the operation’s success and its secrecy, Schlesinger was nevertheless responsible for drafting a public statement of the administration’s position on Cuba in the run-up to what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Rather than using intellectual capacities to craft good policy,” page 99 reads, Schlesinger “was in the position of using those capacities to legitimate bad policy.”

Schlesinger communicated his concerns about the operation to the president. At a planning meeting after which he was assigned to draft the public statement, however, Schlesinger felt cowed. While defense officials spoke of concrete military assets, Schlesinger—a writer, historian, and college teacher—had such intangible considerations to raise as the international standing and reputation of the United States. Instead of doing so, he remained quiet.

This episode points to questions that are central to Hope and Scorn: not only what intellectuals do in public life and how people respond to their presence but also what sort of presence—in particular contexts and at specific moments—they are. The planning meeting where Schlesinger “shrank into a chair at the far end of the table,” as he later recalled, was not simply a run-in between an “egghead” intellectual and military brass; it was an encounter between two kinds of intellectual. The military planners were technical experts—they spoke a specialized and, by virtue of that, authoritative language of tides, timetables, and take-offs from secret airfields. Schlesinger, by contrast, was a generalist and a humanistic one at that. The points he had to make were less quantifiable, less practical and therefore, Schlesinger felt, less forceful. They might have sounded like a line from Joe Biden’s recent victory speech: the United States leads by the power of its example rather than the example of its power. And Schlesinger thought the Cuban operation likely to set a very bad example, squandering the diplomatic opening possible in these early days of the Kennedy presidency. In that Cold War moment, however, around that policymaking table, the intellectual-as-defense-expert was so towering a figure that the intellectual-as-generalist did not merely lose the debate; he was incapable of entering it. Given the relish and effectiveness with which Schlesinger participated in ideological battles from the presidency of the second Roosevelt to that of the second Bush, it is a noteworthy silence.

As I look upon it now, page 99 of Hope and Scorn furnishes the browser with an indication, though incomplete, of themes that appear throughout the book. It does less well, perhaps, at giving the browser a sense of why the chapter that includes page 99 is titled “The Moralist and the Mandarin.” The latter was a label applied to Schlesinger by one of his critics later in the 60s: Noam Chomsky. Schlesinger in turn called Chomsky a moralist. Each had in mind with these titles a version of intellectuals’ political role worthy of scorn or at least criticism. Each pointed beyond these labels to a vision of the intellectual that could, instead, be a source of hope or at least help in public life—and which they themselves implicitly represented.

Learn more about Hope and Scorn at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Hayton's "The Invention of China"

Bill Hayton is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs), and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of China, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The question of who was, and was not, Han could be extremely divisive, particularly in Guangdong province, where older inhabitants still remembered the Hakka-Punti war. The compilers of different local-level gazetteers took different positions. For example, two counties, Shixing and Xingning both contained large numbers of Hakka-speakers: the Xingning gazetteer mentioned this fact but the Shixing book did not. The issue came to a head when a writer with revolutionary sympathies, Huang Jie, published his ‘Textbook of Guangdong Local History’.

Huang Jie had co-founded the ‘National Essence Society’ (Guoxue baocun hui) the year before to promote political change, with inspiration from a conservative view of the past. The society’s anti-Manchuism combined revolutionary zeal with the Social Darwinist fear that the Han race had to be preserved from the threat of extinction. This, the society argued, could only be done through the mobilisation of ancient culture. Huang Jie and his fellow National Essence Society members saw an opportunity in the education reforms to transform the thinking of the new generation by providing them with ‘national essence’ textbooks.

Huang Jie’s 1905 Guangdong History textbook stated baldly that, ‘Among the races of Guangdong are Hakkas and Hoklos who are not Cantonese and not of Han racial stock.’ This infuriated Huang Zunxian, then living in quiet banishment in the province, and provoked him into organising, along with fellow Hakka scholar-officials, a ‘Society for Investigating the Origin of the Hakka People’. The society used all its influence to lobby the provincial education authority which, eventually, agreed to have the sentence removed from the book. Huang Zunxian died in March 1905 but his struggle continued. Although other textbooks were published that specifically excluded the Hakka from membership of the Han, by 1907 the provincial authorities had agreed to remove all the offending sections. Thus, in his final act, Huang Zunxian demonstrated the emptiness of the notion of a ‘Han race’ by showing it could be expanded or contracted not by science but by political pressure from influential people. Henceforth, the Hakka and the Hoklo would be Han.

But empty or not, the idea of a Han race became the revolutionaries’ most powerful weapon. It enabled them to create alliances between literate officials and illiterate peasants. It was no longer sufficient to be a cultured Hua, or a member of the ‘yellow race’ – change could only come from the Han

This extract is part of the conclusion of my chapter about ’The Invention of the Han Race’. While many people might assume that the existence of the ‘Han Race’ is a scientific fact or even that everyone in China is a part of it, this chapter shows how it was actually written about for the first time in 1900. I explain how European ideas about the alleged differences between races were transferred to China and adopted by some of the most important thinkers of the day. These ideas were the focus of intense political arguments with reformers arguing for the unity of the ‘yellow race’ while revolutionaries were calling for action by members of the ‘Han race’. It took a few years but the ‘Han Race’ revolutionaries became more successful. However there were then arguments about exactly which groups within China could consider themselves to be ‘Han’. This final argument proves that the idea of a Han Race owes much more to politics than to science.

This is a very typical page from my book. Some of the names and terms might be unfamiliar, but don’t worry because I explain them all in the earlier pages. The whole point of the book is to bring the last 25 years of academic research to a general audience without any specialist knowledge. I examine how China came to think of itself as China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from race, I look at questions of history, nation, language and territory and show how a small group of intellectuals introduced new ideas to the country following their contacts with European and American thinking. I use the stories of particular individuals to explain how and why this happened. It’s a good read!

I wrote this book to tell the story of modern China in a new way. I wanted to show how it is a hybrid of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ ideas. So much of our understanding about China today is actually comprised of relatively recent innovations: the name of the country, its ethnic identity, its boundaries and even the idea of a ‘nation-state’ were all introduced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a lively tale.

Visit Bill Hayton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Fry's "MI9: A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two"

Helen Fry is the author of The London Cage, The Walls Have Ears, and over twenty books focusing on intelligence and POWs in World War II. She consulted on the docudrama Spying on Hitler’s Army and appeared in BBC’s Home Front Heroes.

Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, MI9: A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two, and reported the following:

MI9: the British Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in WWII provides the first history of this secret intelligence service for over 40 years. From page 99:

Back on Avenue Voltaire, Madame Maréchal answered the door to them and was confronted by one of them pulling out a revolver: Madame, the game is up!’ he said. He was in fact a member of the Secret Police. Elsie arrived back home from the Canteen and walked straight into the trap to find eight Geheime Feld Polizei (Secret Field Police of the German army), including the ‘airmen’. Now her interrogation and rough treatment began. They led her to believe that her mother was dead on the kitchen floor. Elsie stalled for time whilst thinking of a strategy of how to warn Nemo. She pretended that she had been to the Black Market and spent all her money. It was 4.30pm and she told them that she had to meet her chief at 5pm at the entrance to a large park. They swiftly bundled her out of the house and got on a tram. In the meantime, her captors had called for back up and extra Secret Police were waiting in the shadows near the alleged meeting point. As time marched on and there was no sign of the chief, the men became restless. After nearly 2 hours of waiting, they took Elsie to Gestapo headquarters where she underwent interrogation and was badly beaten.

Airey Neave learned about what had happened to Elsie because of the many reunions after the war and at a time when personal stories were shared. Many of the personalities who had worked with MI9 became a close-knit community and the ties which had bound them in the war continued in friendships afterwards. Neave wrote in his autobiography: ‘Under the portrait of [the head of the German air force] Hermann Goering, the bastards beat eighteen-year old Elsie until she was covered in bruises and unable to lie on her back for weeks. All night long the inmates of the prison of St Gilles could hear her heart-breaking sobs. I thought of her when, as an official at the Tribunal at Nuremberg, I met Goering in his cell three years afterwards.’

A few hours later Elsie’s father was brought in. He had returned home from work in Flanders to find the Secret Field Police in his home. He and Elsie were taken to St Gilles Prison where, at an opportune time, he whispered to her to say nothing and hold on.

MI9 has become the forgotten secret service of the Second World War and today members of the public have never heard of it. Therefore it is interesting to see if the Page 99 Test actually works to illuminate this unknown history. Page 99 showcases one of the strongest themes of the book, and that is the courage and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary women and men who led the escape lines and acted as couriers, helpers and guides across Western Europe. Page 99 tells the story of the betrayal of Elsie Maréchal, one of the last surviving veterans of the Comet Line, an escape line that operated from Belgian through France to the Pyrenees and into Spain. In 2019, I travelled to Belgium to interview 98-year old Elsie, a survivor of two concentration camps. Until that moment, the research had been quite academic and consisted of amassing data and stories from declassified files, but Elsie’s interview enabled me to get to the heart of the human stories and to understand the special relationship between MI9 and the people who risked their lives in occupied Europe when they could have chosen a different path. Most significantly in relation to the Page 99 Test, it was Elsie’s interview which was the transformative moment for my research. The airmen and soldiers who were rescued, if caught again by the Germans, would be sent back to prisoner of war camps; but helpers like Elsie faced a different fate – they and their families were shot or sent to concentration camps. Page 99 is the moment when Elsie and her family were betrayed in 1942 with devastating consequences and arrested by the Gestapo in what became known as ‘The Maréchal Affair’. Elsie’s spirit of defiance against the Nazis was still evident when I interviewed her over 75 years later. I was able to ask her why she risked her life at the age of only 16 to shelter Allied airmen whilst working for the Comet Line. Page 99 works for my book precisely because it lands at the point that transformed my writing and understanding of this history. This is where the book is taken to another level, intellectually and emotionally.

Visit Helen Fry's website.

The Page 99 Test: The London Cage.

The Page 99 Test: The Walls Have Ears.

--Marshal Zeringue

Haggai Ram's "Intoxicating Zion"

Haggai Ram is Associate Professor of Middle East History at Ben Gurion University. He is the author of Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran (1994) and Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (2009).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The desire of the [Egyptian] fellahin to hashish was, he [Russell Pasha] claimed, not a self-perpetuating force of nature. Nor was it a product of changeless racial and cultural attributes. It was a provisional and potentially short-term problem, one that would be resolved once their bodies stopped hosting debilitating diseases. Indeed, like many others within and outside the League of Nations, including the subcommittee experts, Russell was an avid advocate of modern science. Optimism, he thought, was not naiveté on his part; rather, it was a realistic assessment supported by recent history. “Thirty-five years ago,” he said, “drug addiction in the villages was practically unknown ... and the fellah ... did his twelve hours day without thinking of or needing a stimulant.”

Russell was also blunt with respect to [Dr. Joules] Bouquet’s broad generalizations about “Arabs.” Egyptians and Tunisians were not one and the same people, he insisted. On the contrary, they were “of totally different characters and habits.” Bouquet contended that lower-class Tunisians got high because they were irredeemably indolent—“laziness [being] the basic element in the character of Muslims,” and added: “They love doing nothing and musing the hours away.” Russell strongly opposed this view, saying that it did not apply to Egyptian peasants. “In point of fact, the fellahin of Egypt were a sober race, who did not touch alcohol.... The Egyptian fellah was on the whole an industrious person, did not drink alcohol, seldom nowadays had more than one wife and was fond of his children.”

Page 99 of the book, located at the very end of Chapter 4, is part of my exploration of colonial knowledge about cannabis produced in the interwar years. In particular, it relates to the debates about the drug that took place at the League of Nations Subcommittee on Cannabis in the years 1934-1939. Subcommittee experts engaged in lively and, at times, contentious debates about the nature of hashish and its psychoactive effects in the colonies and the metropoles. Even as they tried in earnest to add to previous outdated knowledge about the drug, they kept running into a thick ceiling of taken-for-granted class, racial, gendered and Orientalized ideas which ensured that the knowledge they produced could not catch up with changing global realities.

Page 99 is a convenient departure point for discussing my entire work. Having been primary recipients of this knowledge, Jews in Mandatory Palestine tended to steer clear of hashish, considering its use a form of "backwardness" linked to the realities of living among Arabs in the Middle East. Yet, while hashish was seldom used by Jews in Mandatory Palestine, the drug did attract new—Arab—devotees in the county. This hashish fever can be traced back to unprecedented global and regional controls over opiates and cannabis established in the interwar years. To overcome these obstacles, new circuits of exchange linked Palestine, and later Israel, to illicit supply chains in the Levant stretching from Lebanon, the producing country in the north, to Egypt, the consuming country in the south. With extensive, crafty trafficking operations carried out across its territory, a significant increase in hashish use occurred among Palestine's urban working-class Arab population. Hence, by the 1930s hashish smoking ran rampant throughout Palestine's urban centers, and many Palestinian Arabs could be seen wandering the streets intoxicated.

Following 1948, Jews had joined the local hashish scene due to new demographic and political realities—i.e. the expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine in the Nakba, and the country's massive repopulation by Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (aka Mizrahim). Some of these Jews used hashish in their countries of origin, and brought the habit with them to Israel. Other Mizrahim were not hashish smokers but had picked up on the habit in Israel owing to their increasing socio-economic and ethnic-cum-racial marginalization. This turned hashish into a Jewish "problem" where formerly it was considered an Arab one. Although the number of hashish smokers did not exceed a few thousand in the 1950s and 1960s, the habit concretized and dramatized the dominant Ashkenazi classes' anxieties about over-Levantinization. At the same time, it exacerbated the marginalization and criminalization of the Mizrahi underclass in Israeli society.

Page 99, which illustrates the ways in which colonial knowledge about cannabis was accommodated in Palestine-Israel, also showcases the transnational approach applied in the book. Exploring the transition from the Mandatory period to the post-1948 era through the perspective of hashish, the book examines the ways in which Palestine-Israel was situated in the region and the wider world, and how the latter two reached deep into it, penetrating and shaping it in matters concerning the commodity chains, consumption, and understandings of the drug itself. To paraphrase Sebastian Conrad, although the book does not seek to abandon national history altogether, it seeks to “transnationalize” it.

Learn more about Intoxicating Zion at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue