Morning troll
Sarah Boseley at the Guardian today takes up the story of Mary Beard and the eruption of enraged goons.
She said the tone of the debate left her dispirited. “It feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural, ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war, not debate.”
Beard, a classicist at Cambridge University, who is well known for her robust responses to Twitter trolls, was one of those who pointed to evidence that there was at least some ethnic diversity in Britain under Roman rule.
There followed, she said in her blog in the Times Literary Supplement, days of attacks on Twitter, which she described as “a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender [batty old broad, obese, etc etc].”
It is dispiriting. We’ve probably gotten somewhat hardened to it over time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dispiriting; of course it is. It’s hugely dispiriting that we can’t use social media to talk about things like the demographics of Roman Britain without risking yet another dip into the sewer of abuse.
The abuse got worse, she wrote, when Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk analysis in the US and author of the best-selling book The Black Swan, joined her critics.
Beard told Taleb on Twitter that this kind of family in Roman Britain was unsurprising. He questioned her scholarship and accused her of “talking bullshit”.
And when Simon Singh and Nick Cohen defended Beard he called them names too. He considers himself a scholar but he carries on like any random Twitter troll.
Imbecile, I said is insulted in language for imbeciles. And don't try to fuck with me in Ancient languages.https://t.co/6I23OwMyPk
— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) August 5, 2017
2) I guess from your "scholarship" you are so trained to bullshit your way out of situations.
You're a fraud.— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) August 5, 2017
Excuse me?
A professor of risk analysis is having a go at a historian about a question regarding history?
My eduction is in linguistics and if I were to get on a soap box about how an engineer’s calculations of the structural soundness of a bridge are “bullshit”, I would be shouted down and rightly so. But for some reason, it’s all right for someone in risk analysis to claim he knows history better than a historian. I don’t care if he is a scholar, in fact I wouldn’t care if he managed to win both the Fields metal and the Nobel price, it still wouldn’t qualify him to make pronouncements on fields he’s not educated in.
Not that I haven’t seen this before, language is one of the fields where you get all manner of people poking their fingers in thinking they know it better than those actually in the field. But somehow I had thought that history and archaeology would’ve been spared.
Dearie me, I’d not heard of this Taleb chap, but what a jerk.
As for “ethnic diversity” in Roman Britain – at Hadrian’s Wall there were Syrian auxiliaries. When you visit the place which is chilly, windy & wet, you feel sorry for the poor Mediterranean sods stationed there pining for olive oil and grapes.
Mary Beard is one of my heroes – I love how she is unashamedly herself and her documentaries are a delight to watch. I’ve also read articles she’s written and she had a lovely, clear way of communicating that is a pleasure to read.
I’ve also read Taleb’s book. I thought the ideas in it were interesting, but the language seemed deliberately designed to put off the casual reader. A tendency to wordiness is a common sin in academia (and one I will confess to) but words should never get in the way of the message. And the tone was strident and preachy, which I found rather off-putting.
So I don’t find his behavior all that surprising, and Prof. Beard’s experience is one that is all too familiar. I’ve had many a male scientist who are in fields orthogonal to mine explain to me how wrong I was on some topic or another, despite the rather obvious fact that their grasp of the subject was cursory at best.
It’s why I won’t engage with the current movement to unmask peer reviewers. When I write a review of a paper, my goal is to evaluate it and point out it’s flaws, with a recommendation to the editor whether they should reject, accept or return a paper for revision. Anonymity ensures the paper’s authors have to engage with the review, rather than ad hominem attacks on the reviewer. If they unmask reviewers, I think a lot of women academics will just stop reviewing papers. Reviewing is already a thankless enough task without inviting hoards of butthurt male scientists who can’t accept any criticism of their work by a woman to start campaigns of harassment. And you know some of them will.
She’s one of my heroes too. Her books are terrific.
I did Latin back in the 1980s, with a smattering of Classics mixed in. I remember my teacher explicitly stating there were Syrian and North African auxiliaries stationed in Britannica. I’m not sure what Taleb thinks happened to these people. Every fort had its commercial area where locals traded with the soldiers. Those locals included women, some of whom formed relationships with the men. Unless Teleb thinks human nature has changed significantly in the last 2000-ish years then many of those relationships would have led to what might be politely termed “fraternising”. Contraception being what it was, that fraternising would have led to a fair number of mixed race babies near the camps. And in fact we see gene markers more commonly found in North Africans in a higher proportion than the rest of the country in communities that had a large military presence – like the north of England.
Auxilliaries who served their full service term and retired from the army were awarded a land grant. Many would take it in their home province – perhaps taking their native women and children home with them. Others, who had perhaps served in Britannica for most of their career, may have come to see it as home, and would have taken their land grant here, and assimilated into the local communities as relatively wealthy land owners. They would have had local wives and had mixed race children who further mixed with the community. This is just what humans do. We go out, travel, explore, mate with the locals, sometimes settle, and sometimes bring locals home with us. We’ve done this since the stone age when we busily interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and probably other sub species of human that we haven’t found the fossils for yet. Let’s face it, if we can’t find other humans, there’s a reason for jokes about sheep in rural areas!
But then Beard is a woman. What does she know? Taleb has the magical power of dudely dudeness that means he knows everything better than a woman. Even a woman who is expert in a field he is not. Dunning-Kruger, anyone?
Steamshovelmama, to add some anecdata to your post…
My family is broadly speaking of British decent. In know of no ancestors who were not English, Scots, or possibly English from the Channel Islands. Of the four siblings in my family one was born with a birthmark the doctor characterised as signifying Mediterranean heritage. We both share dark brown hair (well, once upon a time we did) and brown eyes although the other has noticeably swarthy skin, whereas I just go red. Whether that is from something as old as your Syrians, or comparatively recent such as the Armada who knows.
Even if my anecdote is in fact irrelevant, there’s more than enough actual vidence around to demonstrate that Taleb is an ignorant poopyhead speaking waaay outside his expertise.
About legionnaires retiring home with land grants – you could also get that mixing when British legionnaires came home from Syria, Egypt, etc. with dark, southern brides. A generation later, kids with two far-southern grandparents may grow up together and carry on keeping those genes in the British gene pool.
It would be startling if there WASN’T considerable movement inside an empire as large as the Roman. Indeed, enough movement that a ‘Roman’ born in North Africa might be ‘pure’ Italian. And, despite the lazy claims, Scipio Africanus was nicknamed for conquering Africa, not being born or descended from there.
Didn’t I see a recent archaeological report on a ‘Roman’ buried in England who turned out to be Chinese?
Also, there are Australians who’ve assumed their families had Aboriginal ‘blood,’ only to find via DNA testing that their ancestors were American loyalist ex-slaves who’d fallen afoul of the law in England. So yeah. People get around inside of empires.
Yes, absolutely – the gene flow isn’t only one way. Also, later in the Roman period the tendency towards ethnic homogeneity of the earlier auxiliary cohorts began to break down – they were recruited from here, there and everywhere, leading to a real mixed bag of origins meaning all bets are off about what ethnicity served where and added to the local gene pool.
Of course, it’s not just marriage and settling either. Every vicus would have had at least one soldier’s brothel, plus a couple of independent women open to offers. It’s safe to assume the area around the vicus was pretty mixed by the next generation.
The thing is we can’t project our model of the world into the past. The Romans didn’t seem too fussed about skin colour – they were deeply suspicious of Greeks and Carthaginians equally (I see no reason to assume Carthaginians were any different “racially” to the people who inhabit that area now). They weren’t keen on northern Europeans either, the very epitome of what we now consider “white”. They were uncivilised barbarians – and that’s the key to the Romans. You could be a Roman Citizen as long as you were born in the Empire (a Citizen of Rome was different – that meant being born in Rome itself, and that was considered a superior thing) and you came under the “civilised” canopy, regardless of your skin colour. If you were outside the Empire, you were strange, foreign and probably bad, regardless of what your face looked like. They still drew harmful divisions, most societies seem to, but they weren’t our harmful divisions. And that worries the contemporary white supremacists because much of their rhetoric is based on a “natural” order they think has been broken. If people in the past did things very differently then that undermines the very concept of the natural divisions of “races”.
@John#8
Several papers ran with the story of Chinese settlers from the Roman period found in London. It may or may not be so – the method used to assess origin is new, the skeletons weren’t in great condition. They are congruent with a Chinese origin, but more data is needed to be certain. That said, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be. An adventurous trading family who travelled the full length of the Silk Road, then carried on the the end of the world?
That’s a thing about Empires. They build roads, promote trade between different provinces and provide an infrastructure that makes travel within the Empire easier than it was before – certainly much easier for adventurous young people to join the army and be carried all over the Empire, to crew boats and ships, to join merchants on caravan routes, to be post riders travelling the length and breadth of the Empire. Curiosity and a taste for adventure are not new traits; they’ve kept people exploring, travelling and wandering further and further afield since we were born in East Africa. That trait alone ensures that we have never been reproductively isolated in the way racists like to believe.
These are a few links to burials and DNA evidence that the UK’s population has never been lily white. And for every piece of evidence we have, there’s a hundred pieces lost to history. If we find evidence of one black family in Roman Britain, it’s safe to say there were several, perhaps many, others.
The “Upper Class” African Lady with the Ivory Bangle
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/evidence-of-upper-class-africans-living-in-roman-york-1914553.html
Possible Chinese people in London
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/two-ancient-chinese-skeletons-found-in.html
African Roman soldier from Stratford
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-12280213
West African rare haplogroup A1 in Yorkshire men (may or may not originate in the Roman period)
http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/sub-saharan-african-y-chromosome.html
87% of Attenboroughs from Nottinghamshire possess African haplogroup E1b1b1 (again, uncertain origin, but Roman is not impossible)
https://haplogroupi2b1ismine.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/africans-in-britain/
There is some reason – the Muslim conquests spread some Arab genes across North Africa, moreso than the Roman Empire already had. But that doesn’t impact any of your points significantly – it’s not as though there’s some racist theory that really puts ancient Berbers/Carthaginians and Arabs on a different footing, and it’s another reminder that Islam and Christendom as empires make for still more of that genetic shuffling.
Yes, the definition of black is at least partially socially determined. People do sometimes claim the Carthaginians must have been “whiter” than current north Africans – this means they can claim Hannibal was white. Which such a great general must have been, of course. And it explains, to their satisfaction, how a north African coastal empire was able to be the only force to seriously challenge the Romans on their own ground – people like Varus and the “German” tribes, and the Parthians only really scuffled on Rome’s borders. And, as you say, I doubt the people who want to believe this would be any happier with a Moorish light brown skinned culture, rather than an semitic light brown skinned culture. There’s this image of Carthage as a white enclave ruling a largely indigenous north African brown skinned population.
One of my real bugbears about history and ethnicity is the assumption that folk in the past didn’t know or have experience of other cultures. There is artwork depicting black British Victorian people – and not just maids and soldiers because they didn’t get their pictures painted. These are smartly and fashionably dressed people, moving in the upper strata of society. Queen Victoria had a God Daughter who was of Indian origin, and who was active in the suffragette movement (Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh – and you don’t get more multicultural than a name like that). You can find people like this in every era.
People recently have complained about things like adaptations of the Arthurian stories being made “PC” by including non-white characters. To which I take great pleasure in pointing out that the writers on the 11th and 12th Centuries were more open to diversity than some people are today. Did you know that the central narratives of the Arthurian mythos – the Morte and the Tristan – include five Knights of the Round Table who aren’t white? (I’m ignoring the Green Knight…) There’s Sir Morien who is often descirbed as “Moorish” but is, without question, intended to be a Subsaharan African. He was the son of Aglovale (Lancelot’s father) and a beautiful African Princess.
Then there was Sir Palomedes the Saracen, a main character who makes it into TH White’s “The Sword in the Stone” and his two brothers Sir Safir and Sir Sagwarides (minor background characters). Palomedes was a great and noble Knight who fell for Iseult and lost out to Tristan.
Then there’s Sir Feirefiz who is described as having “checked” or “plaid” skin. He’s another mixed race Knight so it’s possible this is just a symbolic way of showing his mixed ancestry. However, it’s also quite possible that what is being described in what we would now call vitiligo (and it’s also possible the writer thought vitilgo was what all mixed race people had by virtue of their parentage).
So, when someone says these things aren’t possible, all they’re doing is revealing their sheer ignorance of history.