Other research

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Travels with my keyboard

Looking for a village half a day’s ride from the Marquess of Wellington’s winter headquarters in Portugal, I landed on Almeida. What a find! This medieval fortress village is amazing. I’ve been through it by Youtube clip, read several travel accounts, been awed by its resilience to one siege after another, and noted that it has been taken by assault only once, when a stray shot fortuitously blew up the armaments store in the medieval castle along with the castle itself and part of the village. By the way, in one of the Sharpe book’s, the explosion was caused by Sharpe. I love when an author takes a real historic incident and repurposes it for the story.

In my story, Almeida is mentioned only in passing. My brigade is camped in the fields below the hill that contains the village, though they do have a couple of guard posts up on the outer defenses. But wow!

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Constitutional monarchy and the power of a living symbol

State Opening of British Parliament in 2019

Britain has a constitutional monarchy, as do 14 realms like my own who share its monarch. There are others, including Belgium, Cambodia, Jordan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Thailand.

A constitutional monarch is a system of government in which power is shared according to the country’s constitution. The monarch may be the head of state, have purely a ceremonial role, or have certain limited powers allocated by the constitution. All other powers of government belong to the legislature and judiciary.

Britain has a democratically elected legislature that holds all the political power, an independently appointed judiciary that has the power to decide whether the legislature is breaking the law, and a monarch whose power is almost entirely symbolic.

The path to a politically powerless but socially effective monarch was a long one. Some suggest it started when the barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. There were other steps along the way, as Parliament tried to rein in the monarch, including 1649, when a monarch who thought he should have absolute power was tried by Parliament and executed (for treason). Then came the so-called Glorious Revolution, which led to a compact in 1689 between Parliament and the monarch. The monarchy was maintained and the herditary succession continued, but only on Parliament’s terms.

1708 is the last time that a British monarch denied royal assent to a bill (that is, refused to allow a piece of legislation passed by Parliament). From the time of George 1, kings stopped selecting Cabinet Ministers and getting involved in discussions at Parliament. William IV, in 1831, dissolved Parliament at the request of the prime minister but against the will of the majority of Parliament. Again. Last time.

Monarchs still give assent, approve Cabinet Ministers and the Prime Minister, open and dissolve Parliament. But now, they only do so when asked by Parliament.

Since the Georgian kings, the monarchs of Britain have had three rights and only three:

  • the right to be consulted
  • the right to encourage
  • the right to warn.

The monarch is not so much a ruler as a parent of adult children, acting in an advisory capacity only, and making sure he or she does not embarrass or challenge the government of the day by stating opinions in public. They have no policies, no platform, no axe to grind or wheel to grind it on. To blame them for the decisions of the governments of the past 250 years is to completely misunderstand history.

The monarch also, of course, gives the British a centrepiece for the pomp and pageantry they do so well.

Personally, I hope my own country keeps its link to the monarchy. I don’t want a head of state with political power. I especially don’t want a head of state with political policies and affiliations. They cannot possibly promote unity or represent it, which seems to me to be the vital function of the monarch. I could stand having an elected head of state who was non-political. France and Ireland do that. But why pay the cost of elections when we already have a head of state who is stuck with the job, poor sod, because he was the first born male in the wrong family? (Take a look at the relative costs in various countries of heads of state. It’s enlightening. The British have it cheap.)

Long live the King.

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The Development of Democracy: commerce, power, and oppression

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the term democracy referred to a primitive and failed form of government used in ancient cultures. Popular government, their worldview held, would lead to conflict and turmoil. Every person would desire to be master over others and no one would want to obey.

Modern countries, so the argument went, needed to have an ordered system whereby some ruled and others obeyed, so that they could engage in foreign trade and defend their independence. Democracy was only fit for small communities hiding out in harsh places where they needed to be frugal, disciplined and hard-working to survive. But what worked for a city republic would not work for a country. Self-interest, love of money, and inequality was what allowed modern eighteenth century states to survive and prosper. But unbridled self-interest led to excess, which needed a monarch to contain it.

These philosophers didn’t want to give power to the multitude, but to correct their vices, instead. In this way, commerce could reign supreme, bringing wealth to those nations who succeeded in the marketplace.

One of the great debates of the century was whether commerce would channel aggression, or become another reason for aggression. Some argued that people would reject war in order to trade. Others that competition over trade would lead to war.

Even so, a number of influential thinkers were committed to the idea of a republic. They proposed that people could only be free if they were actively committed to and participated in public affairs. A monarch, even one that did not abuse his or her power, make the people unfree by definition. However, a republic would not work unless everyone was committed to the wellbeing of the community. Self-government required moral behaviour.

English and European philosophy are midwives to a new republic

The thinking of these philosophers influenced the American founding fathers.

The right to representation, political independence, separation of church and state, nationalism, slavery, the closure of the Western frontier, increased taxation, commercial restrictions, use of the military in civil unrest, individual freedoms, and judicial review were some of the salient issues that boiled up in the revolutionary cauldron of Britain’s American colonies. [https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html]

They argued, it is true, about whether what they were creating was a democracy. It all depended on how you defined democracy. But there’s no doubt that the Declaration of Independence had many democratic features. It called for no taxation without representation. It denounced unearned titles. It demanded that all institutions were subjected the test of reason. And the final version of the Constitution isclearly envisaged what most of us would call a democracy.

“The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815

The French seek liberty, equality, and fraternity

In the eighteenth century, France was rapidly changing from a fundamentally agricultural society to a commercial empire with many overseas outposts. The population was increasing, and industrial production was rising. And the French Enlightenment was focused on transforming cultural, scientific and political thinking. Thinkers such as Helveetius, Dietrich, d’Holback, de Condillac, de la Metrie, and Rousseau explored different fields, but agreed that tradition was a bad guide to the future, that government and justice needed radical improvement, and that free-market economics was the way of the future.

Montesquieu, who admired the way in which the English king shared power with Parliament, wrote The Spirit of the Laws, a survey of political insititutions throughout the world. Rousseau’s seminal work was The Social Contract, speaks of empowerment through united with other public minded citizens. He argued that men are by nature free, and so should all have equal rights and should be able to participate in deciding the laws under which they live.

Scholars argue about whether the monarchs of the ancien regime chould have reformed enough to prevent the revolution. They agree, though, that tens of thousands of people formed by the writings of the Enlightenment weren’t prepared to tolerate being disempowered any longer. War, taxes, the widening gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of the various French Parlements, all contributed. In the end, the revolution came and swept away the ancien regime.

For a brief few years, before its own excesses, political infighting and outside threats made an Emperor look enhancing, France was a representative democracy. Perhaps only a third of all eligible men voted in the first election, but that was still more than any other country in the world at the time. Even after the monarchy was restored, the fight for liberty, equality and fraternity continued to fire the hearts of the French people, as it still does today.

Paine reintroduces democracy as a positive

Thomas Paine was first man in modern times to present democracy as a positive term. To do so, he redefined democracy. He suggested that, while direct democracy (where everyone voted on everything) was inconvenient, representative democracy (where everyone voted on the people who would decide everything) avoided the problems of both direct democracy and oligarchy or autocracy. His writing caught the attention of American intellectuals, and the modern view of democracy was born.

 

Sources:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241861074_The_Idea_of_Democracy_and_the_Eighteenth_Century

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/essays/before-1800/was-the-american-revolution-a-revolution/a-democratic-revolution.php

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/french-political-thought-from-montesquieu-to-tocqueville/political-thought-in-eighteenthcentury-france-the-invention-of-aristocratic-liberalism/A5DFA7F70E6C0AF2333CA9888448947E

https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-causes-of-the-French-Revolution

Book post

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The Development of Democracy: Part 1—the Ancient World

The Regency era I write about was on the cusp of major changes in democracy, as it was for industrialisation, criminal justice and law enforcement, the class system, global politics, scientific discovery, medicine, transportation, and many other aspects of how people lived. They had not yet achieved anything like a representative democracy in the modern sense of the term—that is, that government comprises people who have been elected by citizens to represent them. Indeed, apart from a lot of talking during the early years of the French revolution (universal male suffrage was proclaimed in France in 1789, but cancelled after one election), few countries adopted the idea till the second half of the nineteenth century. Extending the vote to women took even longer.

I’ve been giving my characters forward-thinking views on political reform, because I can’t quite bear to make a hero or a heroine out of someone who admires the system they had back then. That, in turn, has led me to look at just what that system was and how and why it changed.

At the same time, the British Commonwealth, of which New Zealand is part, has been celebrating the 70th Jubilee of one of the longest reigning monarchs the world has ever had. Some are using the opportunity to ask whether monarchy as an institution has met its use by date. It seems to me the difference between monarchy and republic is not nearly as significant as the question about who makes the decision about who makes and enforces the rules by which a society was governed.

Today, I want to lay a foundation to the discussion by looking back to the ancient world.

Democracy came first

Studies of hunter-gatherer societies today show them to be hierarchical but egalitarian. Despite differences in climate, culture and history, their government structures are similar across the globe. They operate in kinship groups, with wider connections according to exchange information, goods, and non-related mates.

Those with the most skill and experience become the informal leaders of the group, so who was in charge would depend on the task being performed. Every adult member of the band involved in a task has right to express an opinion, so there might be a split across gender lines, with women discussing women’s activities, and men discussing men’s activities.

Co-operation was key for human societies before settled agriculture, and every member of the band mattered to its survival.

Priest-kings and citizens assemblies

With the development of wide-spread agriculture, two forms of government emerged. One was autocratic. The other was at least proto-democratic.

Priest-kings with ultimate authority very likely came with wide-spread agriculture. A central authority needed to organise the large-scale activities that agriculture bought. Secure places to store grain and soldiers to protect it from inside larceny or outside invasion. Irrigation works to take water to the fields and road works to bring the grain to storage. Someone had to be in charge. Religion, military power, and political power combined to concentrate the power in the hands of a single elite.

Such a system ran the risk that an incompetent leader and his cronies might believe their own public relations rather than their advisors. History is cluttered with societal-collapses because of poor decision-making from the top. At best, the priest-king would lose his place through assassination, coup, or revolution. I am still tickled by the pragmatic approach of ancient Chinese political philosophy. The Emperor ruled by the mandate of Heaven. That mandate could be removed. How did the Emperor know the mandate had been removed? Someone succeeded in deposing him.

On the other hand, not all such kings ruled with absolute power. We have evidence of citizens’ assemblies as early as four and a half thousand years ago. In Syria-Mesopotamia at the time, many towns and cities–and even countrysides–had citizens’ assemblies who might rule alone on local issues. On wider state issues, similar groups advised the ruler or even had the right to ratify major decisions taken by the ruler.

We know this because documents include the titles ‘Chief of the Assembly’ and ‘Herald of the Assembly’. The myth of Gilgamesh says that the hero was unable to go to war without the approval of the people.

“… having failed to obtain the approval of the council elders, he then went to the council of young men.”

We have no idea who decided the membership of the citizens assemblies, or how much influence they had. (Certainly, Gilgamesh just moved on to ask someone else in order to get his way.) But it was, at least, a starting point.

Greece and Rome

The city states of Greece borrowed their popular assemblies from Syria-Mesopotamia. In Athens, between 508 and 260 before the common era, male citizens met every 10 days to debate and decide laws. Athenian women, slaves, and resident aliens did not get to vote.

The Greeks called this demokratia—a form rule by the people. Apparently, women were not people, a view shared by the entire Western world until suprisingly recently.

That aside, the Greeks also introduced trial before elected juries, public vetting of officials, freedom to speak in public, voting by lot, and the ability to expel people from the assembly by popular vote. All important elements of later democracies.

The Greek political systems ended as other have, throughout history. By invasion. Repeated invasions made Greece part of the Roman Empire,

Rome followed the same principle of assemblies from 509 BCE until the Roman Republic ended in 27 BCE with the appointment of the first Roman Emperor.

In the Roman Republic, the patricians—the wealthy aristocracy—were initially the only people who could vote and hold offices. The assembly they elected was called the Senate, and it was an advisory body to those assemblies that actually made the rules. However, over 200 years, the plebians gained the right to elect their own kind to the Concilium Plebis, which regulated the plebians.

Several other assemblies made the laws for specific parts of Roman society. All of them were strongly influenced by the Senate.

Under the emperors, power shifted from representative democracy to imperial authority. Even so, the assemblies continued their governing roles, though the Emperor became the final authority.

Throughout that time, to be elected or appointed to one of the assemblies, a person needed to be male, free, and a citizen of Rome.

Next week, the long gestation of Western democracy

Sources

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hunter-Gatherers_and_Play

https://www.google.co.nz/books/edition/Sumer_and_the_Sumerians/eX8y3yW04n4C? pg 30

https://doi.org/10.2307/595104

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/romes-transition-republic-empire

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Touring historic England during lockdown

My personal romantic hero and I are being careful during this current outbreak of the global pandemic. We’re sticking close to home, and not going out into large groups. But we are touring the world. Every evening, another dinnertime cruise. Every day, a city or a building or both. And this is one of the series that is helping us to enjoy virtual travel. George Clarek’s National Trust Unlocked. The English architect visited National Trust sites throughout Britain during the UK lockdown, and the results are amazing. Read more here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/our-places-on-screen-with-george-clarkes-national-trust-unlocked

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British Newspapers Archive online

In among painting door frames and resorting cupboards so we can organise the garage, I’ve been doing a job I’ve had in mind for a while: writing a list of the types of article to be found in Regency newspapers, which I access through British newsletter archive. It’s an initiative between the British Library and Find My Past to digitise the British Library’s vast collection of newspapers, and I can spend hours reading news items, classified advertising, theatre reviews, market reports, Court news, and Society gossip. It’s a time suck, but it is also fascinating.

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

I’m currently reading newspapers from the week beginning 15 November 1815, when they report the news from Paris: Marshall Ney successfully argued that the Council of War had no status to try him for treason, and his case was referred to the Council of Peers. Also, the fashion leaders of Paris prescribed turbans for evening wear. White or Black, with perhaps a feather.

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Before the assembly line

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the numbers of horses that post inns in the Regency needed to have to provide the fresh horses needed by travellers. Another point that seemed startling to me the first time I heard it pointed out, and that is nonetheless blinding obvious is that carriages were mostly made to order, and each was individually crafted. No assembly line back in those days. No ordering a Kia Nero or a Toyota Hi Ace, and having nothing to pick but the colour.

Just think about the implications of that. Your furniture would probably be made by the local carpenter (unless you were handy, in which case you might do it yourself, or wealthy, so could afford to buy from one of the elite furniture makers). Perhaps the man in the next village had a name for his chairs, and you might save up and take a trip there next time your brother-in-law could loan you his cart. Which, by the way, would itself have been probably been purchased from the maker.

I find it somewhat mind boggling. In New Zealand, and I am assuming in other parts of the world, if we buy a house that hasn’t been built yet, we assume we’ll be able to move a door here or there, upgrade the tapware, change the size of the kitchen island, shell out a bit more for a conservatory instead of a deck.

As I noted several years back in a post about carriages.

Carriages, even more than custom-made cars today, varied according to the needs and tastes of the owner around certain defined features. Number of wheels. Number of passengers. Seat for a driver-groom or not. Type of axle, wheel, and spring. Height from the ground. Open or closed. Rain cover or no cover. One horse, two, or up to six. And lots more.

Imagine that being the case with your carriage, your saddle, your furnishings, your clothing, even. Very little ready to walk out the door of the shop with the purchaser; most of it custom made, though increasingly factory production was being used to turn out cheaper and more uniform goods for what was called at the time ‘the middle sort’ — those who occupied the economic territory between the poor, who made do with second hand or cast offs or went without, and the gentlefolk, who at least tried to maintain the appearance of wealth, even if the substance wasn’t there.

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Research in the background

River Alde near Aldeburgh Suffolk, one of the sources for Storm & Shelter’s fictional village of Fenwick on Sea

Research helps me to keep my fictional world contract with my readers. All fiction requires readers to suspend disbelief—to accept the reality of the story while they are reading. The writer’s part of the contract is not to jar the reader out of that disbelief.

Since I write historical fiction, that means creating historical worlds that are a recognisable simulacrum of the setting I’ve used and people of the type I’ve use in that particular place and time. And that means research.

In my Children of the Mountain King series, research took me to Iran in the (European) eighteenth century. The fall of one dynasty and the rise of another became part of the plot. So did the Kopet Dag Mountains north of Iran, and the Silk Road, some arms of which pass through those mountains.

I watched movies, documentaries and YouTube clips to get the feel for those places, and read contempary and more recent books about them.

For the first novel, I also read up on Akhal Teke horses, the modern day descendants of the Turkmen horses that were famous for their endurance, faithfulness, and intelligence. The second took me into medical training in the Middle East and Central Asia, and required a close examination of smallpox symptoms, historical treatment and likely progress.

That second novel comes out in less than a fortnight.

Storm & Shelter, the anthology that comes out next month represented a different kind of challenge. Because all eight of us were writing stories set in the same village, using common characters and settings and the same storm, we needed a common body of research.

The story resource we came up with included:

  • a list of historical events in the time period of the stories
  • accounts of historical floods in the area chosen for our fictional village
  • images and descriptions of buildings typical of the area at the time of our setting
  • maps and floor plans adapted from real world originals
  • and more.

All of that needed research. Here, from our story resource, is the fictional setting that resulted.

The village of Fenwick on Sea lies scattered along a road that sprawls along the peninsula between a coastal beach and the river that was once its reason for being. An inlet still remains where the river was, a harbour for the fishing fleet and the occasional ship, blown of course by the irascable North Sea winds. The river itself is long gone, moving like a disgruntled lover to a more favoured town much further north.

The village sprawls across the boundaries that once could barely contain a bustling town, dreaming of past glories. The network of causeways that once criss-crossed the salt marshes has dwindled to a single road from more inland regions. The coastal road turns where once a bridge crossed the faithless river, to skirt the inlet and continue north until it eventually reaches Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

Many of the public buildings recall more populous times, not least the Norman church and the Tudor inn, The Queen’s Barque. Most of the cottages of the former town have tumbled to ruin, many now obliterated by the thrift of the surviving villagers, past and present, who have pressed their materials into use. The nucleus of the town comprises the church and its vicarage, the inn and two rows of cottages, one half-timbered with a slate/tile roof and one plastered with a thatched roof. One of the cottages has a general store on the ground floor.

A mere twenty families still eke out an existence fishing, farming, providing goods and services to one another, or all three. Most of the young men have gone to war in the navy or the army. Of those who remain, more than a couple support the local smuggling enterprises alongside their parents and grandparents.  The inn also serves as a brewery and a bakery. The village has a farrier and a general store.

The village also serves an even more scattered population of farms that combine crops and livestock, grazing cattle in the marshes and sheep on the sandy heaths. They grow grain, and particularly barley and wheat, but even the high demand for grain caused by the war has not helped to make them prosperous, as the landholdings are small, and distances to market across rough roads make selling their produce hard.

There is a local manor; a minor house of a peer who has many. Neither he nor his family have visited in many years. The house is half a mile from the village, on a knoll between the vanished river and the coast, and is kept in order by a staff comprising a housekeeper and half a dozen servants. The housekeeper regards herself as the highest ranked lady in the district, and the keeper of public morals, and has a cadre of supporters. The innkeeper’s wife forms the nucleus of those who oppose her pretensions. If the vicar had a wife, she would outrank them both, but even so, both ladies are more than willing to help him find one.

See more about:

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Ring vaccination and the eradication of smallpox

Lines snaked around New York streets when a 1947 outbreak of smallpox led to vaccination of 6 million people in less than a month.

The eradication of smallpox is the one undisputed success story in the long history of humankind’s fight against disease.

Undisputed, did I say? That smallpox is gone is beyond a doubt. No-one has seen it outside of a laboratory since 1977,  which makes the last case almost old enough to be historical, if one of us were to write a book about it. (Fifty years or more before the present day is usually suggested as the timespan for ‘Historical’, though we might want to review that in the light of how different the ’70s and ’80s are from the present.)

Yet some argue that vaccination was not the reason for the disappearance of the disease; that it was getting milder as the population grew healthier; that even at its height, the vaccination campaign only reached 10% of the populations of the countries were vigorous vaccination campaigns took place.

Some smallpox was always milder

Point 1: as I discovered when I researched smallpox for To Mend the Broken-Hearted, smallpox always came in two varieties. Variola minor had a death rate of 1%; variola major, on the other hand, killed 30% on average. It’s true that, by the mid-20th century, variola minor was the predominant strain in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, variola major continued to scythe its way through communities in the rest of the world, killing 300 million people and occasionally making a visit to the supposedly safer countries, courtesy of international travel. Here are just two examples. An overseas visitor to New York started a massive vaccination campaign in 1947, after he infected 12 people. Two, including the visitor, died.  In 1962, a traveller from Pakistan started a smallpox outbreak in Wales.

Twenty-five people contracted smallpox, and six of them died, including a nine-month-old baby. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml]

In the late 1950s, the World Health Organisation decided the only way to protect the world from such events was to eradicate the disease. Smallpox was ideal for the attempt. [https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/disease-eradication]

  1. It was easy to recognise. Patients develop a distinctive rash. Time from exposure to rash is short, so the disease usually can’t spread very far before someone notices it.
  2. Only humans can transmit and catch smallpox. Many illnesses have an animal species they can also infect, so the disease can hide there and jump back to humans under the right conditions.
  3. After surviving smallpox or being immunised, people are protected for a lifetime.

Ring vaccination

Which brings us to point 2. Carefully managed, 10% was enough.

The WHO strategy was to track down every contact of every smallpox case they found, and vaccinate them, thus putting a ring of immune people around the live disease. It’s as simple as that. With a disease that meets the three criteria above, you don’t need herd immunity across the entire population. You simply need to get rid of any case you find by ring-fencing it with people who can’t get smallpox, and therefore can’t pass it on.

Quarantine is essentially the same strategy: you take away any chance smallpox has to jump to a new human host, and the disease dies (at least in that vicinity) when those being treated either recover or die. Except that quarantine tends to  be expensive, time consuming, and leaky. Vaccines work better.

In 1977, the last patient in the world to catch smallpox outside of the lab was diagnosed in Somalia.

Ali Maow Maalin, a 23-year-old hospital cook in Merca, had never been successfully vaccinated. After his diagnosis, an intensive tracing and vaccination campaign led to 54,777 people being vaccinated in the next two weeks. The disease was cornered, with no vulnerable hosts nearby to spread to.

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Write what you know (and if you don’t know, find out)

 

Beginning writers soon hear the advice ‘write what you know’. Often, teachers of writing classes interpret this to mean ‘write about the places and activities, and base your characters on the people, in your own life’.

Which sucks for writers of historical fiction, fantasy, or sf.

Even leaving aside questions of time and space, a literal interpretation limits people to writing within their own race, class, age, gender, religion, and physical or mental condition. I totally agree with those who want fiction to be more representative of the glorious and diverse range of human kind. Tribalism is the scourge of civilisation, and those who tell stories have an obligation to show that the differences between people make them interesting, not scary; that difference does not mean wrong.

Know what you write

On the other hand, there’s a non-literal interpretation. Every writer I know mines their own life and their own feelings for the emotional energy that goes into a story. They study the people around them to give dimension to their own characters. They research so that the facts they portray are accurate.

I write historical romance, mostly set in places I’ve never been to and involving societies I’ve never lived in. I read historical research and primary sources. I watch documentaries and other videos set in the places my characters travel. (A bike tour gives almost a horse rider’s view of the countryside.) I talk to other people who are studying the same topics. I take classes. I read some more. I stop mid-sentence to check facts, such as the time from the onset of fever to the first appearance of the rash in smallpox.

And I check things out with experts. A battlefield medic and an emergency room nurse read my operation scene in A Raging Madness. I sent the draft of Paradise Regained to the Iranian wife of my cousin’s son. A kura (woman elder) of the people descended from the tribe at Te Wharoa agreed to look at Forged in Fire for me.  I’m not going to stop writing about diverse characters, but I’m also going to be careful that my unthinking assumptions don’t trap me into being offensive.

Life is rich, but we human beings have a habit of simplifying it to our own detriment. For example, there are thousands of edibles plant species in the world, and each of them comes in multiple types. We cultivate around 120 today. Three of those crops account for half of all food eaten on the planet.

We storytellers can (and some do) create a Regency society devoid of people of colour, LGBTQ characters, people with disabilities, poor people, people of different faiths. It sure isn’t true to history, and it’s also boring. Those who do write characters that represent such diversity often come from a community that has been marginalised, and they protest at being further marginalised by being blocked from publication and being shoved off into a corner if they are published. The assumption is that people want to read what they know.

I think — I hope — the assumption is wrong.

So let’s be brave

If you’re a reader, choose to read a novel that challenges your assumptions about your favourite historical era. And please, put your suggestions for novels to read into the comments so we all have a chance to try something new.

If you’re a writer, include diverse characters. Go out and learn so you know what you write. Present humankind in all its wonderful variety. Here’s a resource list, courtesy of Louisa Cornell, who says she got some of the list from Vanessa Riley (who writes great novels with black heroes and heroines).

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano; or Gustavu Vassa, the African written by Himself

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by David Livesay

Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina

Britain’s Black Past by Gretchen Gerzina  (3/31/20)

A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi. London: Greenwood Press, May 2007.

The Chinese in Britain – A History of Visitors and Settlers by Barclay Price (2019).

The Chinese in Britain, 1800 – present, Economy, Transnationalism by Benton Gomez and Gregor Edmund

Chinese Liverpudlians: A history of the Chinese Community in Liverpool, by Maria Lin Wong. Liver Press, 1989.

Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. by Christopher J. Hawes

The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present. by  Humayun Ansari

(And here’s what 31 authors said about Write What You Know.)