Realpolitik In Ancient India
Renaissance Italy had Machiavelli. Nineteenth century Prussia had Otto von Bismarck. Ancient India had the Arthashastra*--a political manual attributed to Kautilya, chief minister to India's first emperor, Chandragupta Maurya , in the fourth century BCE.**
Kautilya described his subject as the science of being a king, which he summarizes as "the acquisition of what is not acquired, the preservation of what has been acquired, the growth of what has been preserved, and the distribution among worthy people of what has grown." All that acquiring, preserving and growing sounds pretty abstract, but in fact the Arhtashastra is a hard-nosed manual of practical government administration, with detailed instructions on how to manage a complex bureaucracy, organize a national economy and run a spy network. Kautilya doesn't hesitate to get down to the nitty-gritty of running an empire. He suggests a timetable for the king,** a strict curfew to help prevent crime, and rules for the management of slaughterhouses. (Not to mention detailed instructions for state operated breweries and state management of prostitution. The man doesn't miss a trick.****)
Kautilya explicitly say that the first duty of a king is to protect his subjects, but the idealism gets lost in the details of running an empire. Some things don't change.
* Variously translated as the Treatise on Polity, the Treatise on Material Gain and the Science of Material Gain. (You get the idea.)
**The text as it exists today may date from as late as the fourth century CE.
***Only 4 1/2 hours of sleep. Kings are busy men
****Sorry. I couldn't resist.
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
I've been looking forward to reading Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist ever since I heard him talk about it at a conference in April. Now that I've seen the book trailer, I'm even more excited about it. Take a peek:
[If you subscribe to History in the Margins by e-mail, you probably can't see the embedded video. Click on the title of the blog post and it will take you the blog site. It's worth the extra click. Honest.]
Wastrels and Fallen Women
Last week I reviewed Nicola Phillips' The Profligate Son. I immediately heard back from a regular reader of History in the Margins who likes to keep me on my toes.* He asked: "How comes it's always a guy that is a wastrel? Are there no Regency or Victorian 'ladies' that are wastrels?"
Not wanting to be guilty of inadvertent sexism, I gave the matter some thought before I answered. With the caveat that I am basically making this up, I think that only men were wastrels in the nineteenth century because you have to legally own--or be the prospective heir to--property in order to waste it. Prior to the passage of the Married Women's Property Act of 1870**, any money a British woman received from inheritance, investment or the work of her own two hands legally belonged to her husband. In theory a single woman or a widow could own property in her own right. In practice, male relatives generally controlled their property, too.
Since women didn't have control of property they could "waste", they couldn't be wastrels. They could however "fall"--losing what the Victorians considered to be a woman's greatest treasure, her innocence. The fallen woman is as common a figure in Victorian literature as the wastrel.
So what do you think?
1. Do you agree with the property link to wastreldom? (And if not, why not?) Can you come up with examples of female wastrels from the nineteenth century?
2. Absent female wastrels, who are your favorite Victorian "fallen" women in fact and fiction?
Curious minds want to know.
* Thanks, Dad.
**I'm focusing on British laws here because the discussion started with the trope of the wastrel in British novels. Similar laws were passed on a state by state basis in the United States, beginning in Mississippi in 1839. Other countries and cultures had different laws related to women and property. Islamic law, for instance, always recognized the right of a woman to own and inherit property.