Simon Winchester: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the james madison council and the institute of museum and library services and the national endowment for the humanities hello and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i'm wasita nava a contributing editor at the new republic and i'm here with simon winchester to talk about his book land how the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world to learn more about our authors check out loc.gov bookfest now before we get begin i want to let you know that we'll save the last 10 minutes of this 30 minute live event to respond to audience questions you can actually start submitting your questions right now simon thank you for joining us thank you it's lovely to be here cj so you chose a very large and broad topic for this book in some ways one of the largest possible topics uh but at the end of the book you mentioned that you came to it from a discussion with your wife about a fairly specific thing american immigration policy can you talk about that conversation how it led you to think about land and its history i think the what we were thinking of was when people came here particularly in the 19th century from europe um what did they have in their mind um when they arrived here [Music] until the 17th century um people didn't land in britain 1604 and they were people were in large numbers uh i'm just thinking that my internet connection may have failed um i'm just going to reconnect and see if it has um so just hold your horses for a second i can actually hear you sign him i don't know if anybody else can but i can hear you pay can you hear me well all right in that case if you can hear me i just all of my seizure still photographing myself which is particularly disagreeable but all right um it's a great photo too actually previously villagers in england had well thank you so much people um living in england in the 17th century 16th century didn't own land they were the land was commonly held then came what were called the the enclosures acts and all of a sudden land became privately owned and people were um who had previously used the what was called common land were booted off it and um they came to london or birmingham or manchester or wherever and became sort of disgruntled former landowners who had been booted off their land because of this new principle of enclosure and a number of them those that didn't necessarily go to london or liverpool or birmingham crossed the atlantic or the indian and pacific oceans to go to these newly found by westerners countries the americas or australasia and started settling in those places but imbued with the idea that we've been dispossessed if we find any people here we're jolly well going to dispossess them and that's exactly what happened the whole mantra of land ownership which had made them disgruntled because they had their land taken away suddenly became applied in particularly north america particularly in massachusetts and virginia the early places to be settled by white colonists and if they found any people there they then dispossessed them so the infection began in europe was immediately transported to the new world right and you know one of the things that i liked about the book too is that uh you talk about that broad historical perspective but you also begin by talking about your own personal experience with land ownership as a jumping off point for everything you you delve into both the history of native disobsession and everything else um it begins with your purchase of attract in upstate new york which is small in the grand scheme of things but in talking about what that landed once been you lead the reader to consider larger things so can you talk a little bit about how you came to learn about your own land and how learning about it changed your own experience of it it did indeed so i bought from when i used to live in hong kong and when i left hong kong at the end of the 1990s i came to america and um settled here and bought a little house in the um essentially in the hudson valley and um fell in love with the house and a local hunter said he didn't want to own the land that surrounded my house because he had to pay taxes on it why didn't i buy it from him he named a price it wasn't very good land and it was very low price so i bought it and um didn't really think too much about it until 2011 and 2011 was when i became a citizen of this country knowing that i owned with ownership it's the big thing to say i my situation that i owned a piece of the united states that i was quite literally invested in this kitchen of my situation and i became very interested in the land and i wanted to know particularly who had um owned it before me so i went to the the records office in poughkeepsie in dutchess county and found that the i bought it in the early 2000s when someone that was belong to a chap called luria who he bought it from in the 1940s 30s then as i went back back back the deeds became handwritten rather than type written and then became less and less legible and the pieces of paper were sort of pretty pretty martha easton and so forth but then interestingly enough they ceased being in english they were they were in dutch because that part of the united states was colonized of course before the united states by the dutch rather than the english and the people who they bought it from the words the people on the other side of the deeds um didn't sign it with names in the way that i had but put little x here or a little drawing of a deer or some antlers or something like that and these of course i realized were the original inhabitants these were the the mohican people the stockbridge muncie people the lenape people and further north the iroquois people and that continuity of these documents fascinated me because what was the difference in the attitude of the mohicans their land and my attitude i considered that i owned it did they well it turned out no they did not they regarded themselves millions stewards of the land that famous remark by chief seals who his name was memorialized in seattle today said no more can we own the land then we can own the ocean or the own the breeze no we can only look after it and hope that the land will look after us so that difference in attitude ownership or non-ownership really triggered the writing of this book and i found it a fascinating question absolutely so as you just mentioned i mean native dispossession is one of the major through lines uh throughout the entire book um and you talk about not just native dispossession here in the united states but you know you also talked about african colonization a good deal you talk a lot about australia and these are all different places with different histories but what are some of the commonalities that you see between them in the history of how land has been taken uh and the impact that this possession can have on both this possessed and the natural landscape well i mean a completely fascinating topic and it would make for a very long book in and of itself the brutality of colonization particularly in africa and i commend obviously the book about about king leopold's ghosts about what went on in in the congo in the 19th century but what we the british did in australia and new zealand is appallingly bad it's interesting though isn't it and i mentioned it in the book that when captain cook arrived in botany bay and was in 1787 i think it was he and joseph banks who was the extremely clever botanist who was collecting honor and flora from this vast expedition that cook led um he noticed from the bow of the ship as they nosed their way into essentially what is now just south of sydney that the landscape there were trees yes but it looked like an english gentleman's estate as he put it because there were allays of trees there were plots of what looked like vegetable gardens and flower gardens and whoever inhabited this countryside had nurtured it had taken care of it and clearly these people who we now of course know to be the indigenous or the aboriginal people of australia were as sophisticated in their attitude to their land as we thought ourselves to be now as it happened the encounter in sydney didn't go well but further north about 800 miles north in what is now queensland the two sides got on much more amicably and both banks and cook came away with the view that we are dealing with people who ought not to be brutally colonized rather our relationship with them should have been one of engagement that however was not the view taken back in london when crooked banks got home and these people were regarded as primitive at best or not human beings i mean i dedicate the book to a ponca a native american who was owned as late as the late 19th century was only then by the u.s supreme court declared to be a human being it is extraordinary is it not that aboriginal peoples indigenous people were by the british particularly not regarded as humans and if they weren't and if the lands that quote we discovered unquote were not thought to be inhabited by people than they were in law in our law anyway terra nullius empty land and we could colonize it willy-nilly willy-nilly so our attitude of colonizing opened up a whole slew of unfair and atrocious behavior which i hope this book illustrates i think it does that pretty well um you know another portion of the book uh isn't really about lens itself so much as it is about maps how we draw out define and categorize places and what happens when we do and there are two parts of this section that i hope you you can talk about a little bit the one the first one is you know a smaller thing like the culture of maps in britain before reading this i didn't really know that there was such a widespread love and reference for maps in the uk so maybe you could talk a little bit about the ordnance survey maps you know what they are and why they mean so much to people and the second thing i was hoping you could talk about is the international map of the world that 19th century project to create a common standardized map uh that ultimately failed why did it fail and what should that suggest to us about the politics of land that's a lovely question and i seldom get asked it so i'm thank you very much for indulging my particular passion for maps um well the ordnance survey the os maps as they're called in britain they go back and the ordinance it's where you cite your cannons so these were originally military maps made in britain originally at the scale of one inch to the mile that's one two six three three six oh which every school child in england knows those numbers there are about 250 of them i think when you would go to almost any shop in britain that sold you know candice and tobacco and things like that and there would be the local os maps um folded um such that if you unfold them you can either buy them such that you can use them in the rain they're waterproof or less expensively ones that will not stand up to hard weather but if you ever go walking and of course the british are great walkers um there would be a map for you and i was in scotland well before the pandemic and wanted a map of the island of rose in western scotland and there was map number 42 or something and pay about two pounds for it they're wonderful wonderful maps all down to the same scale the same colors the same what are called conventional signs you know this is a church with a steeple this is a church with a spire this is a post office this is a telephone box and you have as a school child to learn these things and you'll be on the chalkboard the instructor will draw a symbol and you'll have to say oh that's a b-class road or that's a 500-foot contour line or that's a wetland well this whole idea of a unified series of maps was then expanded onto the global scale in the late 1880s i think it was had the geographical congress held i think in switzerland and it was championed by a man called albrecht pink who said well the british have done very well with the one per inch to the mild maps of the british islands let's do it for the whole world and we'll do it at one to the scale of a million and the whole world if it's mapped and the projection of the maps are such that if you stuck them all together with tape you would produce a sphere one millionth the size of the sphere or the spheroid that it's our planet a millionth smaller and everyone thought what a capital idea and he said very wisely you can't have the british mapping their own country and france mapping theirs and america mapping those let's get you know the british to map bolivia and the argentinians to map russia so that there's a sort of cartographic neutrality about it well that worked pretty well by 1914 the outbreak of the first world war there were about 120 of the projected 850 sheets completed all the same colors all the same contour lines everything in english but using metrical measurements and they're beautiful things to behold and then the um they uh the festival war happened they picked it up again in the 1920s and by the time the second world war there were maybe 400 completed same thing began it again in 1948 headquarters in southampton in southern england but slowly the impetus for doing it began to fade no one's quite sure why except that the growth of commercial aviation meant that similarly scaled maps showing the highest point so that your aircraft wouldn't crash into it they became an imperative whereas these maps that i'm talking about were a luxury really whereas aeroplanes really do have to know where they are in the world so they don't go crashing into mount everest or the grand teton or something so they took the energy away from the international cartographic community such that by the 1980s when the united nations was looking after this project with something like 800 of the 850 sheets completed there was a meeting in bangkok in which they said let's abandon it and the last collection i spent a long time searching for it where was the definitive collection i didn't say the library of congress has got one but there was supposed to be a connection in new york with the american geographical society not the national but the american much smaller organization and they moved from a very swanky headquarters with lots of room for map cabinets in the 1990s to a rather smaller place in brooklyn and they i lost them or gave them more away and then i tramped all over the country to various map libraries looking until one day i was on a book tour in all places milwaukee and i was introduced to my talk on a completely different subject was on the fourth floor of a library at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee campus and i walked in and there was every imaginable globe and thousands upon thousands of map cabinets and this wonderful lady called marcy bidney and i stepped forward and i said you haven't got and she said i have got i know what you're looking for she walked over to a cabinet and opened a drawer and in it were sheet after sheet after sheet of these beautiful maps of the most obscure corners of the world done in what i still think of as a great piece of cartographic visionary behavior um which was abandoned in the 1980s so a very long answer to your question but if anyone wants to go and see them go to milwaukee a long uh but wonderful answer and honestly it would be impossible to cover everything that you encompass in this book in in just 20 minutes time um but i think you've done a good job of giving people a taste and they can look to the book for the rest before we turn on to the uh the audience questions i did want to get a chance to ask you the theme uh question for the festival this year uh the festival's theme is open a book open the world you're the author of many many many books i think over 20 books i'm not mistaken uh so this is a question really suited to you how have books opened your world it's funny i had no warning of this question until i said what is this question and you told me about 20 minutes ago and um so by coincidence i've just reviewed a book um by uh chuckle colin thubron in britain on um the amur river which is a river that divides russia from china and um is one of the great sort of unsung big rivers of the world so there's a classic example if i open a book and my vision of the world is enhanced i've just done a review i think it was in the last week's new york times chap tom standage his short history of motion which takes us from the invention of the wheel which wasn't invented in most places we think but in what is modern day poland and um to the invention of the motor car and uh the future of the motorcycle i wasn't very interested in the future but the past and did you know the first ever journey taken by car was when mrs benz borrowed inadvertently her newly invented husband's car which had never traveled on the road at all in the middle of the night and filled it out with petrol a petrol it wasn't called petrol it was called ligroin strange name for a fuel gasoline had been invented but it was regarded as a waste project and thrown away in swamps so she filled it up at four o'clock in the morning with ligroid and drove 36 miles from one germantown to another to visit her mother the first ever automobile journey in the world and that's given us everything that we know either love or hate freeways parking meter maids you know speeding signs congestion pollution and so forth so my world has been hugely opened by books yes a wonderful wonderful answer so we'll go to audience questions now obviously we're not going to be able to get to all the great questions people have submitted but we'll be able to get to a few so guy asks is the concept of land ownership as old as history itself do we know how the concept originated you do actually spend a good bit of time in the book talking about this the agricultural origins of land demarcation uh could you can you give a condensed summary of what we know about that yes very quickly i went to boarding school in dorchester in dorset in england the village that we used to do our cross-country runs too was called radipo pretty little village about six miles away not a very long cross-country run but that as it happens was the first place to enjoy or suffer what was called enclosure the idea previously was that villages in specifically in england much the same occurred in many places in western europe too but let's stick to england for a moment all that land was commonly owned by everyone in the village and so if you had a farmer with cows your cows would be there someone else that grew turnips his turnips would be there his pigs would be there and so forth but the problem with that the so-called the tragedy of the commons is that the cows would eat the turnips and the pigs would eat the cabbages and the food production of this land was very much compromised and so with the population of england beginning to grow people started to say how do we make land produce food more efficiently and the way they decided was to segment the common land enclose it putting up fences or hedges or ditches what are called hearts in the old days and this field can belong to farmer a where he can keep his cows and this field can belong to farmer b who can grow his turnips and it'll be much more efficient but that meant that the people that previously were on that land and superintended it or took benefit from it were thrown off quite literally they were dispossessed of being part of the communal ownership so they as i mentioned earlier disgruntled um either they remained in poverty in the countryside or went in search of fortune in the newly growing big cities which once the industrial revolution began in 1776 with james watts invention the steam engine started to expand mightily or if they didn't go to the cities they came to this part of the world and they took with them the idea of ownership and dispossession and started visiting this on the native americans who they met through them of their land and the rest of american history the rest is history uh anna nit asks how did you decide how to pace a book with such a large scope and what specific things you wanted to focus on it's not a book that's chronologically ordered but you've chosen certain themes that you thought were important to hit upon and you tie different threads together from different parts of the world and thematically how did you come upon the right organizational scheme uh for the subject well it's a wonderful question and who knows whether it's the right or the wrong but when i think when i sit down to plan any sort of big subject book i try to think okay it's a good idea to write about land and it'd be nice if you can write it in a sort of elegant way but really the crucial thing is the organization of it and because you can write beautifully about a fascinating subject but if it's organized in a bad way people will just fall asleep or put the book down or whatever so for this i decided what's it about it's about ownership well in order to own land you need to know where it is you need to know where its borders are so how do you demarcate land how do you map the land and then how do you then acquire it do you buy it do you steal it do you fight for it are you giving it this basic concept of ownership um what does it mean and then um what if you get people land on either side of a border do people fight each other does it lead to militarization and politicization and creation of national boundaries and so forth so you have to corral all this information very carefully i wanted to do a whole big section on stewardship i mean other national parks a good thing is what is the reason that there is no beltway uh around the city of denver for instance and the reason that there is a big pie shaped hole in the in the northwest side of denver is because the american government polluted it with plutonium with a big plutonium processing plant and you can't drive there is no 495 that goes around denver for that very reason the bad stewardship of rocky mountain land around denver so that kind of thing in the future that had to be another chapter so you have to think quite carefully and thus far the reviewers have been kind to me and so that makes me think that the organizational principle of this book uh was sort of spot on but it's a big challenge with every book so john has a question i actually had myself uh reading this he says many animals in animal world seek to maintain their own territory and he wonders if that drive has anything to do with our concept as human beings of land ownership and what land means is that's a topic that you considered thinking through in the book directly is that something you thought about yourself well i i find this whole idea of different peoples and how they what happens when they encountered each other i mean to give an example if you accept that humankind began in multivita gorge in ethiopia and then spread out the south where it didn't go very far because it hit the sea but went north and then there were civilizations grew up there in the nile valley in the tigris and the euphrates mesopotamia in other words the indus valley and the yellow river valley in china so taking the two that were closest let's say the the arab civilization based in the nile valley and the let's call it the persian civilization which began in the um in mesopotamia as those two grew out towards each other unknowing of course of each other's existence um like um penicillin if you like in a petri dish there comes that moment when was it 1400 1500 000 when they hit each other and where did they hit each other and i like to think it's probably in that um delta near basra in what is now iraq where some of the most terrible battles of the iran iraq war were fought 30 years ago but i think that's where the first true international boundary and by that i mean not people that are moderately different from another one another the oldest boundary in europe is between i think andorra and spain but those people are more or less the same on each side but the people on from two very different civilizations that's a real frontier an ethnographical frontier and the consequences of that i find fascinating in the same way that the questioner if i understood the question correctly finds the territorial range of of animals to delineating her territories in the jungle or the savannah or wherever equally fascinating where it deals with human beings since has of course long lived political implications too absolutely so i think this is probably going to be our last question it's a good question to end on uh emily wants to know what your next project is going to be and if there are topics that you haven't explored in your work that you are really really eager to take on in your next lovely question one of the many books i'm sure you're going to write in the future the book i'm doing at the moment is uh as i was mentioning theater at the beginning of this story the topics seem to get smaller and smaller this is on the the history of the diffusion of knowledge um the idea being that with knowledge now literally at the touch of a button thanks to mr mrs google um i wonder i fear as i'm sure many teachers and people fear that knowledge doesn't necessarily lodge in our heads anymore at least to the same extent that it used to before google and like things took off in a big way my fear therefore at least this is the question in the subtitle of the book which i'm sort of thinking of calling knowing what we know the history of the diffusion of knowledge and the threat to the future of wisdom if you accept that wisdom is knowledge multiplied by experience you may end up with people who are very old and consequently have the potential for lots of experience but don't have as much knowledge up here as they once used to because of the presence orbit at the touch of a button and so wisdom may cease to be a component of the human mind and is that worrisome so i look at all manner of how knowledge is defused encyclopedias the internet of course teaching how that's changed what everyone ought to know and i ask everyone i meet i was at a cocktail party last weekend and i said i must be the most boring person to have a cocktail with okay i want to know what every child in the world when at 16 ought to know for instance i say i think it is useful for everyone to know both the concept of and the value of pi and you'd be surprised how many people had no idea what i was talking about people who were 16 17 or 18 or or older i'm not going to embarrass anyone here by saying do you know what pie is but i think everyone ought to know that the ratio between the circumference and the radius of a circle is 3.14159 well i'm glad you're not going to ask because we're out of time uh we've all been saved by the by the bell here uh but simon thank you so much for joining us here at the national book festival book again is land how the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world uh thank you again for for showing up and taking these questions uh keep enjoying the national book festival at loc.gov bookfest thank you so much thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 35

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress

Id: 4fw2yD5hppE

Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021