Thinking Class

#080- Prof. Alan Macfarlane - England's Rise, Anglo-America's Fall And An Ascendant China

• John Gillam

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Alan Macfarlane is a historian and anthropologist who taught at the University of Cambridge for 34 years. He is now Professor Emeritus of Anthropological Science and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His comparative work spans England, Nepal, Japan, and China, with a particular focus on the origins and nature of the modern world.

In this conversation, Alan and I think out loud about the history of the English people's relationship with money, how this compares with China, the cyclical nature of civilizations, whether Alan thinks China will suffer a collapse, the effectiveness of China's political system (and its surprising meritocracy), the historical nature of class relations in England and why our view of the aristocracy is not quite right, and the historical context of gender relations, specifically women's freedom and rights, and much, much more.

My first conversation with Alan 

My Second conversation with Alan 

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SPEAKER_00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Alan McFarlane. Alan taught at the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, for 34 years and is now Professor Emeritus of Anthropological Science and a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. As an anthropologist and historian, Alan has worked on England, Nepal, Japan, and China with a key focus on the comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In this conversation, Alan and I think out loud about the history of the English people's relationship with money, how this compares with China, the cyclical nature of civilizations, and whether Alan thinks China will suffer a collapse, the effectiveness of China's political system and its surprising meritocracy, the historical nature of class relations in England, and why our view of the aristocracy is not quite right, and the historical context of gender relations in England, specifically women's freedom and rights, and why our understanding of history has been skewed since the Second World War and much, much more. You've got to listen to all of my conversations with Alan if you are interested in learning more about the English people, their culture, their history from a true scholar who has come up with some surprising findings. And we speak about many of these in my previous two conversations with Alan. Links are in the show notes. Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow Thinking Class on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice, and on Substack. And you get the chance to ask questions of my guests, which go into a special QA. Should you become a paid subscriber? Let's grow Thinking Class together. Enjoy the show, classmates. Alan McFarlane, a dear friend of the show. Welcome back to Thinking Class. Thanks so much for joining me. It's a pleasure. Alan, we have really gone deep into the various characteristics of the English people in the conversations that we've had and indeed their relations with the Celtic fringe of the British Isles, too. And I think there are still some rocks to be lifting up and looking underneath. And let's get into those a day. I think it'd be good to talk about the relationship with money, a little bit about sexual relations and also class and politics. So all of those things which you said to me at the end of our last conversation, you would not speak about at the high table table at Cambridge. So on that note, Alan, in the culture of capitalism, one of your many books, you write about the English people's understanding of the nature of evil and specifically with regards to money. Let's begin there. How would you describe the English people's relationship with money, how it's developed over time, and perhaps where we can we can see it in literature and society?

SPEAKER_02

Well, there's there's a certain ambivalence of the famous biblical um statement, which some people don't get quite right, is not money is the root of all evil, it's the love of money that is the root of all evil. And um in that sense, um the English are fairly evil, because uh it's been, in my reading, for uh over a thousand years, a very monetized economy. Most peasant societies, money is important, but it's usually important on the fringes of most people's lives, peasants and others live in mainly non-monetized economies, and money is important for the traders and merchants, but not for the mass of the populace. In England, because I argue it's been a capitalist trading market kind of society with highly individualized property and um very sophisticated coinage. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, had the most sophisticated silver coinage in Europe, and they were important traders. So from the Anglo-Saxons onwards, the English have been not exactly obsessed with money, but money is just a very useful tool and not something to be frightened of. I learned from my parents and grandparents that money was something you really didn't talk about. Uh you just assumed you had the money, and the uh upper middle class and upper class have therefore tended to make as much money as possible, but not it's not a dinner table subject. Um the second ambivalence is from Christianity, because Catholicism particularly historically was very wary of money. You weren't, for instance, allowed to lend money at interest, um, supposedly in Catholic societies, and money was the or the love of was the root of a lot of evil. And therefore, although Catholic monasteries and Christian orders were very successful economically, and the papacy was extremely wealthy, um, there was also a supposed um prohibition on the naked pursuit of money. So the English have had this sort of ambivalence, but it it's probably along now, I discover to a certain extent, with China the most uh interested in money, and as a result, it made many of the important legal and other um reforms which would be the basis for modern capitalism.

SPEAKER_00

So that trait of money being central to society, you say, and have found that it's been there since the Anglo-Saxon periods. Uh I wonder if there was ever a point where it it sat more finely in balance with other aspects of human life. So, for instance, and I'd be interested to hear you expand on your views on this, because I know you've talked about community never really being found per se within English society wherever you've gone to look for it, though there was a civil society and civic institutions that uh existed, even if people were very individuated. Um, but I wonder if they used to sit more finely in balance, because uh I've been reading Thomas Carlyle recently, and he takes that line that you have uh just uh described, which is there is a there's a there's almost an obsession with it. And because he's writing in the period of the Industrial Revolution, he he talks about the English worshipping mammon, uh, the idea of just uh self-gain and the the worship of of um of money above all else. Uh and uh he he goes on to say that the the cash nexus, this idea that the transaction is above all and it has just shallowed and thinned out uh relations between people is something that is very present within English society, within the Industrial Revolution. What was there ever a time where the love of money didn't end up superseding all else that might matter in life, from what you're reading?

SPEAKER_02

Well, um Carlisle is a romantic and thought it was something to do with the depravity of modern civilization since the Industrial Revolution or whatever. Um, and I wouldn't totally disagree with that. I don't think money trumps everything. Um, there are other things which are equally important for most Englishmen through history: friendship, love, um uh happiness of various kinds, which are not necessarily um something which you can buy. Um as the ambivalence is there in two of the Beatles songs, of course. One is um you can which praises money as money, money, money, you can buy everything with money, and the other um says you can't buy love with money. So there is an ambivalence. I I don't think there was any great shift. In other words, up to the Industrial Revolution or up to the Protestant Reformation, or there was a different kind of world. The key thing is what you can buy with money. In most societies, it's fairly limited what you can purchase. Many things aren't um exchangeable in terms of money values. Um, as far as I can see from medieval court records or um agricultural estate accounts or uh the legal system, there was very little that was outside the purchase of money. And indeed, this is famously put, and I think I quote it, I can't quote it from memory, in my piece in the culture of capitalism, in a quotation, a famous quotation from Shakespeare, where he says, Um money uh you can buy anything. You turn black into white, you can turn prostitutes or whores into upright women, you can turn our sin into salvation if you have money. Uh just get me money and I can change the world. And this is late sixteenth century, and um I think you know he was roughly right, you could more or less, you can buy your way through the class system, you could buy education, you could buy salvation by having lots of uh obituaries for yourself, or whatever it was, um, so there wasn't very much, and the English were really, really interested in it. I mean, the giant famous Jai both, which actually Napoleon didn't originally, but he's associated with it, that uh England is a country of uh shopkeepers. The original was it, it's a country run by shopkeepers, but both sayings are roughly right. As far as um continentals were concerned, when they looked at the English and money, they said it the country's just obsessed with money, you know, they have no honor and they have no uh dignity and they they're just scrabbling around on uh trying to get a bit more money. Um I thought this was just a very Anglosphere kind of reaction. But the more I I've studied Chinese history and been to China, I find that exactly the same attitude uh through Chinese history. And that Chinese have been very good with money as they are now. It's deep-rooted, and they're very interested in money. Their motivation is pushed by the fact that it's such an unstable situation with uh people dropping from the top to the bottom and massive uh calamities and famines and so on, that you really have to spend your life trying to accumulate and protect yourself against that. The English being much wealthier historically, uh, it wasn't driven so much by um an obsession to avoid famine and so on. Uh a lot of it was driven by the fact that um social status and money were so tightly uh interlinked. In other words, if you wanted to move up the social ladder or preserve your position, then the only way to do that was to make money. And you could buy your way up the ladder uh and prevent yourself from falling. And therefore, money and um the approbation of your um friends and neighbors and everyone else was really basically um uh founded on your monetary position.

SPEAKER_00

Perhaps we could do a comparative uh study here, uh at least on the fly between uh those in England and the relationship with money uh uh amongst the English people compared to, say, China. Uh how how do the Chinese approach the the concept of money and what is their relationship with it?

SPEAKER_02

Well, there's several similarities and several differences. One of the similarities is that you can describe the English as a nation of shopkeepers or ruled by shopkeepers, and the English are obsessed with money. I mean they don't talk much about it in the upper middle classes, but everyone is very, very interested in money in this country, as the French and others observed. We just seem to be a money-grabbing kind of um trading merchant kind of place, um, not with any honour like the French. Um and that can be said of the Chinese too. They're a nation of shopkeepers in the sense that they love buying and selling and making small profits. And um, my Chinese friends, some of them are very good entrepreneurs, they're the best entrepreneurs, the best moneymakers in the world, probably, which is why so many of them are very, very rich now. And they work very hard and they're very honourable about their dealings, at least with large sums of money. So they're trustworthy, and as the British found when they went there. So they're a nation of shopkeepers. But there are differences. One basic difference is that the reason for this is somewhat different. England was a very affluent country from very early on, and the making of money was therefore an obsession, not because of desperation or trying to ward off some evil, but really to climb the social ladder because England didn't have a caste system and almost anything could be bought, um, including social status, particularly through education, uh, educating all children. The British um loved to uh add to their property and make money in trading and merchant activities so that they could climb the social, the very greasy social ladder. Um, the Chinese motivation for making money is not that at all. The way you climb the Chinese social ladder is through education, entirely different since the year 605, when the formal uh acceptance of the uh examination system by the emperor was was decreed in 605 AD, which is quite a long time ago, and before that it had been in practice to a large extent like that since the Qin Emperor. The way you got up to the top or the middle of China was you took competitive examinations, and if you were clever and successful or occasionally bought it or were lucky, you became various levels, and then if you were extremely good, you got up to the imperial um palace. So the the Chinese weren't making trying to make money for that reason. They were trying to make money because China is a was a desperately poor and insecure place for almost everyone. Um perhaps over 1% who were, at least financially, more or less all right, the Mandarins, although they could lose everything in a flip of a coin in uh some of the hierarchies. But um for the rest, um, it was a land of famines, floods, political turmoil, um, all sorts of insecurities. And you never knew when you would be cast into destitution and your children would starve to death or you'd have to sell them off. And that therefore, hedging your bets and uh accumulating surpluses. And I see this even with current Chinese I know, who are always very keen to try and improve their financial situation because they don't know how long it'll last. This is why I suppose uh China has almost the highest savings rate in the world, something like the Chinese um save about 30% of their income, which if you compare it to those countries which only save you know five or ten percent at the most. And it's one of the reasons why tariffs or trumps will have a any effect at all in China, because um, they they just save 25% rather than 30%, whatever. Um the Japanese are the same, they they save less huge savings in Japan and roughly for the same reasons that though it wasn't as insecure politically as China, um, there were uh constant um difficulties that people faced. And so the motivation's different, but the mentality, which is a love of money and what it can buy, is very similar.

SPEAKER_00

I was not anticipating asking this question, but now you started to talk about Chinese rise to prominence, wealth, individual wealth, uh uh wealth at the level of the nation. Uh and and and comparing it to what we see with Britain now, a highly indebted country at the national level, and individuals who who certainly don't save as much as they used to, whereas they did in the past, and you spoke about the mercantile class and the the the wealth of England going back a long way, which you've written extensively about? Do you subscribe to that notion that Ibn Khaldoun put forward, the the Asabiah cycle, the uh the uh strong men create good times, or should I say hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Do you think that if you were to compare the West, which is fraying at the edges with regards to its its public finances, you could perhaps argue with regards to its morality, its ability to carry out uh decisive political maneuvers, and then you compare the the Chinese who have up until very recently had hard times of their own and now are looking rather imperious. Do you think that that's what's going on here? That you've got the cycles, the civilizational cycles going on, and one day that the Chinese, once they've had their decadence, they may well end up falling into that same cycle, or do you think it's all a bump?

SPEAKER_02

Well, you've asked about 10 questions then.

SPEAKER_00

Um You're a professor emeritus at Cambridge, you can definitely handle 10 questions on the go.

SPEAKER_02

You can, but only one at a time, and have to remember which ones I'm answering. Um let's take the last one, falling into decadence. Um, I don't think the Chinese, from my reading, will fall into decadence. They this kind of drive to succeed and and to be secure um doesn't tend to um decline as far as I've can seen in particular individuals or particular families. Um the the wealthy people I know in China go on, they don't rest on their laurels, so to speak. And I think as a civilization that'll be the case, um so that there will not be this kind of uh cycle. The the um Ibn Khaldun um wonderful three-stage theory, um perhaps one can put it more um in the the kind of metaphor or the the description he gave, which was based on what is observed in North Africa, which was that you have um people living in cities who are fairly decadent and just observing uh interest in money and and small uh small things, and around them are all these ferocious martial um people who Are highly moral and um energetic and vigilant and so on. And these, the wolves around the cities, um, come in and destroy these decadent people in the city. And that's the first stage. Then they come in, and then the second stage is that they gradually become themselves decadent, and then third stage is another lot come down and do the same thing. So this is a three cycle. Um it was put in a much longer timescale by some of the great theorists of the early 20th century, people like Spenker and Toynbe and others, who wrote great works examining history. And of course, if you examine history over a long period, it's um almost impossible that any civilization won't become decadent. I mean, it was the central theme of Gibbon's great work on uh the four decline and fall of the Roman Empire, that basically the Romans lost their martial uh vigour and the rest of it, and uh the Roman Empire collapsed. And no doubt if you examined all the other great empires, the same sort of thing happened. Um but one interesting thing about China, which confirms my idea that they won't go through this cycle, is that they're the only empire that hasn't collapsed. Um there are four great um civilizations, I should have said any civilization that hasn't collapsed. There are four great civilizations which started some 6,000 years ago or 7,000 years ago across the planet about the same time. Um Egypt, um, Mesopotamia, Middle East, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River Valley. All these started at the same time, and they all went, or three of them went through this cycle. They they succumbed to the barbarians at the gate, and are no more. I mean, just the remains of their civilizations are there. The Chinese started and they're still there. And they're basically not much changed in now, for example, their their writing system is exactly the same, their Taoist philosophy is the same, um, their character, as far as I can see, is not much changed, their mode of agriculture is much the same. So they survive and survive and survive, and um they certainly they tame the barbarians, which is another interesting thing, something that Hill Calderon hadn't seen. But what happens in China, because it's such a vast um civilization, is that the barbarians come in, most famously the Mongols, and then the Manchus, and then the Westerners, which is happening now. And for a while uh they rampage across and and kill a lot of people and um set up their own rulers and so on, and then they become Han. So it's the barbarians become not decadent but Chinese, which is what is roughly happening now. Um the West has rampaged across China for the last two generations, changing its laws, um, changing its politics a little bit, completely changing its or uh changing its economics a lot, changing its family systems, its love marriages, its culture, um, its education, medicine, everything has been hugely modified by Western. But it hasn't destroyed China. And I think the rollback is beginning to occur when they can start to change us a bit more, because we haven't been uh paying attention at all to what they're like.

SPEAKER_00

China's political system right now, as you've just outlined, this the the the civilization itself is ancient, six thousand years old. Uh clearly at various times where it had it has had uh supremacy or superiority, it has not always been uh under state-led capitalism or uh under the rubric of the Chinese Communist Party. What why do you think that system works in China? Is it something that is aligned to the Chinese character in some way? Is it or is it something else?

SPEAKER_02

It does work amazingly well, and one of the first things Westerners have to realize is that you can't get rid of it or replace it or with something better called democracy of our kind. The head of Singapore, um uh the founder of Singapore was asked whether democracy would work in China, and he said, of course not, as much to make, which is the same answer you have to give for Russia too. You can't run Russia in the Western-style democratic way, and attempts to force it to do so and are doomed. Um the reason it works for various things. Firstly, although this is circular arguing, the system is based on this Confucian philosophical system, which basically sets everything in a hierarchy, and it it gives two hierarchies of superior and inferior upper chain. It's a bit like the feudal system, but it's not based. Um the feudal system is based on contract. You you decide to be the lord of someone and they decide to be your um vassal. In the Chinese system, it's based on birth. Um, you are the son of your father, you are the grandson of your grandfather. A woman traditionally was inferior to a male, a younger brother was inferior to an older brother. And so you get a chain from yourself through generations of ancestors of um protection and patronage from above, and deference and respect and um help from below. That is one great chain which goes back to 500 BC and the work of Confucius and other philosophers. But it's exactly parallel to the political chain, so that in exactly the same way you are um linked to the person on the chain above you, up, up, up, up to the end to the emperor. And it goes down and up. So power goes up and down through this familyistic system because the emperor is your father as well as the emperor. And this system to as a way to um hold together vast numbers of people is extremely effective. I haven't worst worked out the mathematics, but if you look at the English political local government system, we have four layers. We have uh the the center, and then we have counties, and then we have towns, and then we have villages. So there are four layers. And with that you can encompass whatever number of villages there are in England. The Chinese have five layers, and the mathematics is such, I imagine, that it's exponential. So by just by adding one further layer, every village and town in China is linked up through five stages up to the top. And in each case, the the system works by electing someone at the bottom, um, who is then in the local canon, local elected um organization of the village or the small town, and you have a party secretary. So you have a parallel system of the political and the elected. They then choose someone who goes to the next level, which is um the big city or town, then to the province or to the county, and then to the province, and then to China. So this way, up through the system, the the six or eight hundred people who we sit in the great hall in uh Beijing, meeting and clapping and so on, those people are the final stage up, and above them are the nine members of the Politburo and so on. And so it's a tiered system in which everyone doesn't vote for someone above them, but it they are interlinked by a certain delegation of authority up, and then it works the other way around. But when the center decides we're going to build a new motorway across Eurasia, then they tell everyone, and then it goes down, and everyone gets on board. So it's it's just like the language. The language is absolutely extraordinary and brilliant for holding together 1.4 billion people because everyone can simply read it and everyone knows it, and so everyone speaks the same language. So China has not been a nation in the sense that nations are imagined communities. I feel British. No one in China, I suspect, thought they were Chinese until 40 years ago. Um, and it might have been under Chairman Mao that they began to feel Chinese. And if you asked someone in some part of China who they were, they might say Chinese. Nationalism is only a very recent product, and it's basically a reflex, reflex action against Western nationalism. Chairman Mao and others saw what Western nationalism, uh the nation-state, was doing to them, and they took it on board, and now nationalism is universal in China because all schools encourage it and so on. So China was not never united by we the Chinese. It was united by this linguistic, political, and uh other tributary systems in a way that has worked for 6,000 years. So um there's something going for it.

SPEAKER_00

That's that's fascinating. I have been learning little bits about the uh China from from the inside track, people who've been working with the Chinese and within the institutions of late. You're you're you're the the next person who's come along and taught me much that I don't know because I just see things uh that are written over here in in the British media. Most recently, a friend of mine who uh was over there doing some work within the government on some kind of programme. He's not actually a government employee, but he was he was over with the foreign office. Said he he came away, having spent time amongst lots of seasoned members of the CCP in this this huge conference hall for a few days, absolutely um beguiled in some way by the talent and the intellect of the leaders of the country uh and all of the states and the little tributaries that go into the states as you've just described them. Um he said it was unsettlingly meritocratic and not quite like the system you'd expect from the outside looking in. And because he works very closely with British politicians, he realized just how uh little we have in ways of allowing true political talent to one go to the top, but two, to actually hold them to account in the job that they have. And he was talking about how there are all these KPIs and various targets that needs to be to be hit, and if they don't, they're just gone. And um, it's uh it's it's a remarkable thing to hear because obviously, if you think about the Chinese Communist Party, you conjure up images of almost the Soviet Union, you know, lots of um uh smudging the figures to be able to get things done. And effectively, if you're ideologically on point, then you just get waved through, and that's that doesn't really matter about how good you are. Uh, but he came back with an inside track that said something totally different, which is yes, I'm sure there's some ideological component to it, but genuinely you have to perform, and if you don't perform, you you're you're you're not long for your career. Uh it's uh it's fascinating. Well, well, thank you for for describing that a bit.

SPEAKER_02

And and well, if I can just add um a footnote to what you said about uh meritocracy and in there. Um this is uh something that increasingly strikes one. If you, for example, as I have read the autobiography of Xi Jinping, and yet many government officials and they've written the um ambassador to Britain at the moment and so on, you see that they've got there not only through um in intellect and ability, but through long and deep experience. There is no way in which you could get near the top of the Chinese political system if you hadn't been a uh a regional governor, um uh head of some very important institutions. In other words, you'd have had to do something equivalent to being Prime Minister of Britain or being uh head of France, Premier of France, because you would be head of some big country which was the size of this, and you'd have done that for ten years, and before that you'd have been equivalent to being head of a an English um county or several counties. And you have stage after stage, so that by the time you reach the top, you have deep experience and you have been successful in each of these jobs. If you have stopped a famine or done something useful, you will have been noticed. If you haven't been much good at it, you'll never climb any higher. So the people who run the place are extremely experienced and clever and above and also versatile. You see, our um leaders are puny and narrow. Um the normal um position of leaders of China for for centuries is that the leaders are rounded intellectual and aesthetic beings. And even now, the head of big uh multi-billion pound companies who I've met, government officials, Xi Jinping, Chairman Mao and others, they aren't just politicians. Uh Chairman Mao was a very good poet. He was a calligrapher, he knew a lot about Chinese history. Xi Jinping also writes poetry and and does calligraphy, and all these people are artists, musicians, they do the Qing, they so imagine Boris Johnson selected poetry or Donald Trump's essays on life. It's unimaginable. Um, so the the background of these people is the sort of people we see in our House of Commons, many of whom you wonder whether if they were in any other walk of life they would have achieved more than a very low managerial role of some kind. But you wouldn't get anywhere like that in in China.

SPEAKER_00

Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you're watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate. Switching gears back at least for a moment until we get on to another topic, toward England. So you've described the nature of the elite class, I suppose, in in China and its political system. And I know you've written extensively within your work about England and the English people over at least the last millennia. And you you've written a bit about class, rank, and nobility, and how there used to be a there was a shared culture by class and geography. Uh, I suppose the question is is um how would you describe class relations? You know, how we picture the the establishment, the aristocracy, and the the normal folk, the common people, and and how has it developed over over time?

SPEAKER_02

Um so coming back to the class system, the um I mean, taking Weber's definition of class, which is the um the ownership over the means of production, the the degree to which you control the means of production. Um the peculiarity of the English class system, uh, I was thinking about it this afternoon, could be summarized if you look at the four main groups. And if you apply to them the class system that you would find in France or Spain, at each level they're seriously different. Starting at the top, uh as Doc Mill and others pointed out, in France, Spain, Italy, and the continent, you have a blood nobility. That is to say, um you have a group of people who pass on their position um to their children who are legally separate from the rest of the population. They get tried by different people and are not subject to the ordinary laws. And so they are a nobilite. It's a caste. You can't marry into them, you can't marry out of them, you you it's a self-preserving caste, and that was what was um supposedly destroyed by the French Revolution, though it wasn't really, as Tockfield points out. England England doesn't have a caste, uh a nobility. You you should never use the word nobility about the English. You should use aristocracy, which means well born. And the son and children of aristocrats, many of them sink, they just disappear. Um and you can buy your way easily into them. And as Tockfield said, it's not a caste system like France, because you can marry into them. You can very quickly, and most of the aristocratic families now that existing haven't been here for more than one or two hundred years. They just bought their way in uh or been made peers by Boris Johnson or some such. So basically, we don't have a nobility, we have this very permeable aristocratic system. The next level, which is the level that basically runs, has his historically run England, the most poor one of the two most important um classes of England, are the gentry. Now, a gentleman, an English gentleman, as well, French and others' observers pointed out, is impossible to define. What is a gentleman? It's not a legal position, it doesn't give you any particular legal powers, or it's not blood-based, it's an ascription. People say you are a gentleman, and that is because you do the kind of things and you behave in the kind of way that a gentleman behaves. You have a nice country house, you send your children to good universities, you uh do a lot of noblest dublis, um acting as a magistrate, um, you speak and knock up a posh accent, you um spend your time hunting, shooting, fishing, um, not doing anything very much, but being a judge. Gentlemen. So as Tockville and others pointed out, you cannot translate gentlemen to gentil. It's a totally different set of bundle of meanings. So the English have this large group who basically run the country through the House of Commons and through local government traditionally. And that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. The nearest to it is perhaps in Japan, which has a samurai. So the samurai, but of course the samurai are armed and somewhat different. So that's the next level. The third level is a huge bunch of people who are fairly pretty wealthy. If they're in the agricultural sectors, they're called yeomen. And I live in a yeoman's house here, which was built 400 years ago, and it's a very pleasant large house, and you see their houses still in country villages around England. Again, there's no word or concept of what a yeoman is in any continental country. It means middle middle class, middle to verging on upper middle class. It means people who uh as defined in 16th, 17th century treatises, they wear um jerkins with silver buttons, they have good shoes, they eat extremely well, they are well educated, they act on uh local government at a lower level, and they send their sons and children or sons to universities and so on. So the gentry, I mean below the gentry are this very large agricultural class. They don't actually do much direct physical work in the fields, but they own enough property to have people working for them, servants and others. And alongside them is this other very big middle-middle class, which are um merchants and manufacturers and craftsmen and so on, who are also high status and independent and important in all the villages and towns of England. So there's this middling strata, which is very unusual. Usually the social structure of countries goes like this, a very small top, and then a huge uh set of poor people at the bottom. The English is bulged like this, and um so you then get down to what used to be called in um the peasants, meaning in French the the country dwellers of paysan. And as you know, I have argued in one or two books that they don't exist in England. We don't have peasants in the in their traditional meaning, meaning people who are tied, uh who are illiterate, who lived out their whole lives in one village and never move in the way that peasants in many parts of the world traditionally lived. They are um in Russia or Poland or Mexico or China, China or India. Well, not China, India. They're um tied to the soil. They're not serfs. Um well, they are serfs sometimes, but they're not slaves, but they are um very immobile and working incredibly hard. The English peasants are are not like that. Yeah, they are much wealthier, they're much more independent, and um in many ways different, so uh as I've argued elsewhere. So our social structure is unique. Japan is closest to it, perhaps. And then of course it was taken to America and has evolved into another parallel system there, and it's totally different. One interesting thing about China is that um it has some overlap with this, because the Chinese also, their peasantry is not like Indian peasants. I mean, having looked at uh accounts of villages and and talked to people, Chinese peasants, although destitute and very poor, as I mentioned often, they were very mobile, they were very money conscious. Uh one feature of peasants, as they're described in, say, Italy or Spain, is that they they don't they're not part of the money economy at all. They are basically on the edges of it, they barter and so on and so on, and they hardly have any um money uh in their lives. There's a famous Italian film called The Tree of the Wooden Clog, which is really about Italian peasantry in the 18th, 19th century. And the the central point is when some peasant finds a bit of money, and you know, he's so astonished and it changes his life and so on. So the English peasantry had a lot of money flowing around, as did the Chinese, and both were involved in handicrafts and making things and making money. So there's quite a lot of similarity uh lower down. And this is very important to realize because if you I'm working on a book on Shenzhen at the moment, and if you wonder how this extraordinary phenomenon of a new city of 20 million people was built up in 40 years, and how the people who were flowing in from remote peasant supposed villages in remote parts of China and were putting up each floor of these 80-floor buildings or 100-floor buildings in three days. Now, if you've got a load, I don't want to be disrespectful to my country of birth, but if you've got a load of Indian peasants coming in from some very remote part of India, they wouldn't be able to put up a uh a floor of a 80-story building in three days because they weren't trained to do that and they they worked in different ways. Chinese laborers who came into the west eastern cities were very sophisticated people. They were quite well educated and they were very collaborative, and they were used to design work and so on. So the peasantry of England and the peasantry of France, uh of uh China have some overlaps.

SPEAKER_00

It's remarkable the uh effectiveness of the Chinese state, the Chinese people uh in in modernity. Uh, it was also fascinating to hear you recap something which had become familiar in your work, which was the nature of the class system here in England. And I think it's interesting that the view people have of England and its class system is probably inverse to what you've described, in that they think that the aristocracy is indeed impermeable, that you can't get into it. It's this set of establishment that rules over everything, and it's purely to do with bloodlines and probably don't realize the size of the middle class. I think generally, then anyone who's outside of the aristocracy is just considered to be a have not in the eyes of many people. I mean, I've got German friends and others who say, you know, the class system is just so stark there. And in many ways, it's it's true. I mean, I uh at least you can see it within social relations, you know where people's social standing is quite quickly. But with regards to what you were talking about, the ability to actually move through the ranks and indeed the economic uh success, I suppose, of even the the normal folks is uh is is definitely interesting. Wrinkle. Alan, I know we're coming up to to the end and hopefully we'll get to speak again. But final question uh this time on sex relations within England over the years. So uh in our very first conversation, we spoke about how there was this incorrect view which had become uh popularized, I suppose, uh, following the 1960s, which was that England up until the Industrial Revolution was, as you just said, it was never really, is it was a land of peasants, and the Industrial Revolution changed things, shuffled everyone into towns, that kind of thing. Um, and it was uh heavily inflected by the Marxist view of history. Um, your work shows that's not the case and that it goes much longer than that. And I wondered whether we could perhaps look at sex relations in a similar way, which was how would you describe the the relationship between men and women on these aisles over the long span of history which you've been studying? And where do you think the common misconceptions are uh with the stories we tell ourselves now?

SPEAKER_02

So um are you mainly interested in the sex relations, in other words, the physiological relation between men and women or gender relations? In other words, the social status of um relative social status of men and women or both.

SPEAKER_00

In incisive question, uh let's go with let's go with the the gender relations, and then if there's any time to be able to weave in courtly love, that kind of thing, let's do that.

SPEAKER_02

The gender relations of England are are largely misunderstood for various reasons. Um I suppose the general picture is that of a long-term improvement from a very low base. In other words, the further back you go, the worse the position of women was in relation to men. So it was pretty bad before women got the vote, and um Emily Pankhurst and the rest, the Victorians were pretty horrible to their women. Uh when you went back to the 18th century and 17th, 16th, got worse and worse and worse until one hardly imagines how women survived at all by the time you get back to the early medieval period and the Anglo-Saxons. Um, so there's a kind of uh secular view. Um it's not clear what this is based on. Um I think it's just uh it is a little bit Marxist in that um Marx and Engels wrote quite a bit about the history of the family, and they absorbed this certainly Engels in its work, absorbed this idea that it was the, to a certain extent, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath that freed women from some of the um inequalities that they'd suffered from before. Um as far as I can see, it's more or less total rubbish. Um if you start at the other end, you start with the Anglo-Saxons. If you look at Anglo-Saxon law, if you look at Anglo-Saxon poetry, if you look at Anglo-Saxon lady saints and writings about Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons who came over to England had a very egalitarian attitude towards women. Women were um not at the disposal of their husbands, they had individual rights, they had a pretty free life as far as one can see. Um you get to the early medieval power period and you look at the laws of England, you find in the great treatises of, say, Bracton at the beginning of the 14th century, you find that women are treated as equal to men in law, except in one case. So women can own property, they can sue men, um, they can sue a man if he uh damages them in any way, including physical physically, including their husband, um they are equal to men, except in one obviously crucial respect, which is that when faced with a problem of a husband and a wife taking a decision, you have two people, and so um if you're taking a decision and one says yes, the other says no, what are you going to do? So the husband has the casting vote. Ideally he should persuade his wife that this is the thing to do. But basically, and also in marriage, if a woman has serious property, then it is put in trust to be held by her husband. He mustn't um abuse the property, and if he dies, then it's still hers, and it goes back to her and her children. But basically, he has the use of his wife's property to a considerable extent. So under medieval law, there is, should we say, uh a widow is free, an unmarried woman is just equal to a man, but during marriage there is a marginal inequality. And then if you've been fortunate uh enough, as I was to study Chaucer's poetry in the 14th century in England, and you look at what is portrayed in Portra Chaucer's work, the women are dominant, the wife of Bath most famously, but there are other women there, and they are treated as exactly equal. There's no hierarchy at all in Chaucer, and he was a great poet. You then move on to 16th, 17th century literature, and you see Shakespeare. Now, some of Shakespeare's women are a bit subservient, but some of Shakespeare's women are clearly bosses. Um it's a pretty egalitarian picture you get from Shakespeare, I think, more or less in line with the law, which is that there's a slight edge to being a man, there are certain things you come to as a woman and so on. Um and then if you go up to the period of novels, if you get to uh Afro Ben, the first woman novelist, and then um you look at the 18th century novels up to Jane Austen, Jane Austen's heroines are hardly downtrodden. Um and uh the same with the great uh English women novelists of the 19th century, the Bronte's and so on. You know, you can see some power inequality, um, but it's not very serious. Um and some of them women are clearly um equal. If you look at portraits as I was doing the other day of 18th century schools, they're filled with girls as well as boys. There were many girls' schools as well as boys' schools throughout the 18th and 19th century. Women were educated. So um the better, probably the better picture, instead of a sort of starting at a very low base and gradually getting better, you start at a high base, and then there are fluctuations. There is a period um in the 19th century when they changed the marriage laws and the property laws, and women's status seems to decline somewhat in the early to middle of the 19th century, and was only restored by the um Married Women's Property Act of about 1870, and they go back to having their own property. And obviously, it's improved by changes in the voting systems in the early 20th century. Um, so women have got back to their 18th century. But if you look at the blue stockings, as Sarah, my wife, has done, and the power of some of these women in 18th century families, it's very, very extensive. Now the Duchess of Devonshire, as my wife reminds me. Um what is very um what what sets it uh in context is everywhere else. Basically, it's on, you know, women could complain they're only 70, 80 percent as powerful as men at certain periods and so on. But you just have to look at um for women's position in very many um pre-modern pre-industrial societies, and you see women are 10%. They're nothing. They don't have souls, they have no control over their bodies or their property or anything else. And to a certain extent, this is true of China as well. Um they're married off, they arrange marriages, they're subservient to their mothers-in-law, their um their feet are bound, and so on and so on. So um I I mean it's some uh summarized by an aphorism that was current in the 16th, 17th century, comparing Italy and England. England was um a hell for horses, a purgatory for servants, and a paradise for women. Italy was the opposite. Hell for women, purgatory for servants, and uh a paradise for horses, or I can't remember. So basically, England was a paradise for women, not a paradise, but as things went then pretty pretty good.

SPEAKER_00

I think there's many more legs in in this one, but I I I will put a pin in it because I could keep you all day. What I will do though, Alan, because these have been three remarkable discussions, you've had an unbelievable career, and if anyone even goes and looks at all of the works that you've produced, they will see that it is prolific, and you're still you're still writing books. Uh I I suspect there are quite a few people who, when they're getting sucked into the uh the soul-wearying um habits of scrolling on social media or feeling like they've wasted their time on the internet and they wish they'd been producing something of worth, or that they'd followed something like a line of inquiry, as you have in many different areas, they would want to know what does what does a professor emeritus do to structure his day? So when when you're when you're researching, what's what's your what's your approach to research and and writing and the habits that you've formed over the years?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I I think I formed this. What is curious is that I have done quite a lot of things, but I formed more or less the same habits of everyone in my social class, which is that we were sent away to boarding schools at the age of eight, and from then on we learnt to uh several skills. One was to concentrate uh very much on the task in hand, and that was because um the school, the first preparatory school I went to, which was the most um interesting school in maybe the world, certainly in England, the Dragon School. Um there's a book by the poet who went there, John Betchman, called Summoned by Bells. And that's what you were it describes it. We were summoned by bells, in other words, 45 minutes of Latin, 45 minutes of English poetry, 45 minutes of maths, and so on. So you did that. You didn't do too much of it because you then did all the other things, plays and music and so on and so on. So I learned to concentrate, to um achieve something, and then the bells came and you did something else. Um my great advantage over all the other people who went through this and maybe didn't do as much sometimes, was that I wasn't particularly gifted. Having too much gift, too many gifts as a child is uh can be a great disadvantage. I was not gifted in two ways. One was physically, I was very small, I was very light, I couldn't run fast. Um as a result, when I quickly appreciated that the the way to success in a school like that was through games, I didn't have any of the properties which would make me any good at any games. So I realized the only way I'd be good at games was to Think very hard, to plan very hard, and to throw myself into it with uh utmost vigor. And the result was that I was the only boy in my year in a school of 400 who was uh on all four top teams. And from that I learned A, that usually if you really try and believe in yourself, you can achieve something against all the odds. And that was a very useful lesson from the world of games and so on. Later I realized that games that you can't play however hard you try, but up to that bitter. And it was the same intellectually. I was uh he tries hard, kind of master's report. You know, Alan is very willing, he tries very hard, he shows promise, he might do something one day. Um, but he's what I joke with my wife, he's a two-beer. Um the school had number one cast, they all went to Eton and uh all souls fellowships. Then there was two A, and they all went to a good better public school, and they all end up as middle to top civil servants. And then there was two B, which I was in, and they were, you know, you wouldn't bother to put them in for a scholarship to a good public school, but they might get into a good public school. And so they were okay, they would stumble along. Uh, and I was a two-bia. Now, I realized I was a two beer, and so what was I gonna do about it? And what I did about it was to pay enormous attention to planning, to time management, to organization, to memory tools, to the tools of thought. And that increased from about O level onwards. And so um I at each hurdle, I just through hard work and so on, I just leapt in. So I just got into uh Oxford, second or third try. Um I just got a two, uh top two one, but not a first in I just got into and so on. So basically, um the the secret is uh to believe in yourself, to know that anybody can do anything really if they apply it. Um I mean Einstein is who is one of my heroes, um says the same thing. He has uh he says, I was not particularly gifted, I'm not particularly a good mathematician. Um and I what I've done with my life is through self-confidence and passion or and imagination, combining those three, then I've achieved what I achieved. Um so I subscribe to that view, and um it's never too late. I mean, basically, if you haven't found this about yourself and the way to work at 30, there's no reason why in this long life we lead, you can't do it at 40, 50, 60, or in my case, 80.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I'll certainly be taking some of that on board. There are there are far too many projects that have stopped in their tracks for whatever reason. I'm sure there are lots of people listening, watching that will appreciate that advice, and thanks for thanks for sharing that very, very humbly as well. Uh and it unbelievable to think you are a two beer uh that reached the top of your game. Alan, I'm gonna let you go. I've kept you long enough, and hopefully we'll speak again in the future, though I do know you are even more into mans than you ever were before. And uh long may that continue. Thank you very much. To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.

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John Gillam

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