Eyam, Shanghai and Sardinia – Plagues past and present: March 2020

The village of Eyam lies around 12 miles from where I live: I know it well and have often taken visitors there. At a time when I was teaching demography I took groups of students to the village because of its significance as a particular case study.  In the last few weeks many reporters and feature writers have produced newspaper columns and online material about the place – including the Canadian TV channel ctv, the Ouest France newspaper and, in the UK, the Guardian, Mirror, and Express newspapers.  The BBC has recently sent a reporter in the village, and Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, has been inspired to verse by its history.  A handed-down version of the Eyam story is well known.

The normally-accepted story goes as follows.  In September 1665 bubonic plague arrived in Eyam and over the course of the fourteen months from then until November 1666 a total of between 257 and 260 villagers died out of a population of around 700.  For part of the time the village was ‘self-isolating’ (to use a term now familiar in 2020), cutting its residents off from those of all surrounding villages.  They were persuaded to do so to prevent the plague from spreading more widely through the neighbourhood.

Plague Cottages, Eyam, where the first victim died in 1665

There are possible parallels between the action taken in Eyam in the 1660s and what is happening today, in 2020, around the world in the face of the COVID-19 coronavirus.  We cannot, of course, put ourselves back into the world of Derbyshire villagers of the past, and there have been many retellings of the Eyam story.  Historical demographers, epidemiologists and biomedical scientists have pored over the few available facts, and revisionists have questioned a number of aspects of the narrative as they have developed over the years.  A list of scholarly sources for material on Eyam is given at the end of this blog, along with a reference to the account written in the nineteenth century by William Wood, normally seen as the originator of the story as we accept it today.

Two friends and colleagues have joined me in producing this blog entry, adding their experiences of quarantine and self-isolation to my own reading of the 1660s actions in Eyam.  ‘C’ is a university lecturer who lives in an eighteenth floor flat in Shanghai and has a friend and his 9-year-old son staying with her.  ‘L’ is a retired university teacher, a widow with two adult children, who lives alone in a first floor flat with its own garden in a town in Sardinia, Italy. I put a series of questions to both of them, and have then added answers of my own for Eyam as well as some further comments.

Who decided on self-isolation?
In Eyam the villagers were persuaded to self-isolate by the two clergymen present in their community – the Revs William Mompesson and Thomas Stanley.  Neither the county (Derbyshire) nor the national government played any role.  However, the Earl of Devonshire, living nearby at Chatsworth, offered to guarantee a food supply to the village if the population would self-isolate.
In Shanghai self-isolation was a policy handed down from the central government in Beijing. However there was some discretion left to provinces as to the detail of its implementation, and local residential communities have also determined some of their own regulations.
In Sardinia it was the government in Rome that brought the measure forward to apply to the whole country, having first introduced it as a requirement for certain regions only. But, as in China, there has been local discretion for individual municipalities to operate as relevant to their own circumstances.

What is its purpose?
In all three cases the purpose was to halt the spread of contagion and of the disease.  But in Eyam, with no modern medical knowledge of the causes of the plague, self-isolation applied principally at the level of the village and not primarily between households.  In both Shanghai and Sardinia ‘social distancing’ has been intended to isolate individual units such as households from each other.  This is an important difference from the practice in Eyam.  But in Shanghai there was a further purpose to isolation.  With the situation in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, causing huge concern, the Chinese authorities asked medical personnel from other parts of the country to go to support their colleagues there.  This reduced the available medical resources in Shanghai, and it was therefore vital that the population of the city should be as protected as possible from the disease reaching them.  The lockdown in Shanghai was at its strictest during the weeks when the city’s numbers of doctors and nurses were depleted.

When was it imposed?
The handed-down version of the story of Eyam gives the impression that self-isolation was imposed throughout the plague outbreak.  This was not actually the case.  The plague ran through the village from September 1665 to May 1666, bringing 42 deaths up to the end of 1665 and only 20 during the first five months of 1666.  But mortality then started to rise rapidly again, and it was only in June 1666 that the village adopted its self-quarantining, which lasted until November of that year when the outbreak died out.
In Shanghai self-isolation (in effect a total lockdown for most) was required from 27th January onwards.  Shanghai and the nearby Zhejiang province were early adopters of rigorous self-isolation after the COVID-19 outbreak took hold in Wuhan (Hubei province).  A lockdown had been imposed there on 23rd January.  On 20th January one case of COVID-19 had been diagnosed in Shanghai.  The city authorities in Wuhan, and in Hubei province more generally, acted very quickly to impose very strict self-isolation when the possible severity of the situation was realised, but it was later recognised that insufficient attention had been paid to the new disease when it first appeared, with the authorities arguing, against medical opinion, that it was only flu and nothing that needed bureaucratic intervention.
In Sardinia, as in the whole of Italy, containment measures were introduced progressively from 4th March, and then extended on 8th and 9th with a total lockdown in force from 11th onwards. Not only was the disease well-developed in China and Iran by then, but case rates were rapidly expanding in northern Italy where the first deaths had occurred on 23rd February.
Shanghai’s strict self-isolation was therefore introduced 16 days after the first death had occurred in Wuhan (on 11th January).  The lockdown in Sardinia occurred 17 days after the first COVID-19 death elsewhere in Italy, which occurred on 23rd February.  It might have been expected that a lesson from China might have been learned and an earlier lockdown implemented.

What were the reactions among the affected people?
Eyam in the 1660s was relatively isolated from its neighbours anyway, as a lead mining village surrounded by farming communities.  We know little about whether many people fled the village – except that we do know that the Rev Mompesson, who persuaded the villagers to self-isolate, sent his children away. The suspicion is that the squire of the village also left before isolation was imposed.
In China the disease could not have broken out at a worse time – on the eve of the Spring Festival when millions of those who have migrated to the cities leave to return to the countryside.   News of the intended lockdown on 23rd January in Hubei, two days before Spring Festival, was leaked 25 hours before it came into place and possibly 300,000 Wuhanese rushed to leave the city, almost certainly spreading the disease with them.  Elsewhere in China, for example in Shanghai, the lockdowns imposed shortly afterwards were seen as proportionate – and they were imposed without warning.
In Sardinia the lesson from China of the need to impose restrictions instantly was not learned. When the Prime Minister announced stricter controls on 9th March residents of northern cities near the epicentre of the outbreak rushed to trains and planes to ‘escape’ south, including to Sardinia, bringing the virus with them in some cases.

How was self-isolation policed and regulated?
The established narrative of Eyam is of self-policing and noble self-sacrifice.  But there is also evidence of regulation by surrounding areas.  An Eyam woman who turned up at a market in nearby Tideswell was ejected and had mud thrown at her.  And the constabulary in Sheffield was asked to evict anyone found to be from Eyam.
In Sardinia and Shanghai the intended self-isolation is much more rigorous than it was in Eyam – isolation is supposed to apply between household units and not just for the settlement as a whole.  In Sardinia carabinieri and vigili (police forces) are patrolling the streets, with the power to stop cars and pedestrians.  Those stopped must produce a form (printed at home from the internet or delivered by the authorities) to indicate whether their journey is for work, for shopping, or for some other necessity (such as delivering food to older people, or going to tend to animals).  There has been criticism that some people are trying to circumvent the controls by claiming to be making frequent shopping trips. A third police force has been given the responsibility for ensuring that all those who arrive from the North are quarantined for 14 days.
Shanghai has depended on self-regulation and the aim, repeated often within Chinese society, of maintaining harmony, abiding by regulations, and cultivating a sense of mutual responsibility.  However the vast majority of people in Shanghai live in ‘residential communities’ with some sort of physical boundary and with a security presence.  The security guards have policed the operation of self-isolation, but have generally had very little to do in communities inhabited largely by Shanghainese.  There have been more anxieties about communities composed of migrant workers from many different parts of China, with many different cultural ideas and habits: there has been a more overt police presence in these cases, sometimes with police cars stationed outside the entrance to the community compound.
In both Shanghai and Sardinia there have been reports of individuals failing to abide by the regulations, and of other citizens reporting them to the police or other authorities in a spirit of taking responsibility for, and sanctioning, disruptive actions within the community.

What has happened to daily life?
We know little about the answer to this for Eyam. As a mining village, it was clearly dependent on food and other provisions being brought in from elsewhere.  During the quarantine period a series of boundary stones round the village were identified, and food and other goods were left at these points by neighbouring villagers – in return for coins which were left in vinegar in holes drilled in the stones for that express purpose in the belief that vinegar would ‘purify’ the coins.  One issue of significance to the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, and for which we do not know the answer, is what happened to the Eyam economy during the outbreak.  Did lead mining continue?  If so how was the product transported away? If not, what livelihood did the villagers have? Did the Earl of Devonshire (as indicated in an earlier answer) pay for all provisions?  As we know today, there are economic and not just social and epidemiological issues around quarantining.
China is the realm of big data and of the interconnection between databases and all on-line transactions: this has created potential for significant early interventions.  Schools and universities in Shanghai did not reopen after the Spring Festival holiday, and steps were very quickly taken to move teaching on-line. The 9 year-old in C’s flat has for some weeks been doing four lessons on line each day – in Mandarin, Maths, Science and English. And C herself has been in touch every day with her university students via WeChat.  Most impressive of all has been the way in which food supplies have been maintained (without any of the panic buying seen in the UK).  Public announcements strongly recommended that all food orders should be placed on line.  This enabled the government to monitor demands for different key goods, and to move supplies around the country to avoid shortages.  If necessary the government could also have intervened to restrict the number of items purchased, but this wasn’t needed.  To deal with a massive increase in the number of food deliveries being made, the government implemented a rapid training programme for workers made idle by the closure of the restaurants where they normally worked.
C has now been issued with a code, which she can have on her smartphone, so that she can show it wherever she goes so that, in the event of her becoming infected, there is a full trace of her recent contacts and movements available.
In Sardinia there has also been use of on-line services but at a lower level, for instance for education.  But not all pupils, teachers or parents have the necessary equipment or expertise, so although schools and universities are instituting homework, lessons and even exams on line there are problems about inclusivity.
Shopping has been undertaken by younger members of the community for those categorised as more vulnerable (through age or health status). In L’s case, her son uses the remote control to open her garden gate and drive in: he then sanitises his hands and leaves the shopping on the garden table before having a distanced conversation and then driving out.  As in Shanghai, schools, restaurants and all forms of entertainment are closed.

What about public gatherings?
The one thing we know about Eyam in this respect is that church services were moved outdoors to take place in Cucklet Dell where the rector addressed his parishioners.  Even though services were no longer taking place in church, we now understand that these religious gatherings were almost certainly responsible for increasing the incidence of the plague in the village during the worst period for deaths – which exactly coincided with the period of self-isolation.  Whilst 62 residents died between September 1665 and May 1666 while there was no self-isolation, a further 198 died during the period of quarantine between May and November 1666.  We do not know whether the local pub, today the Miners Arms but in those days the Kings Head, stayed open through the plague outbreak.
In both Shanghai and Sardinia all forms of public gathering have been banned.

What sources of information have there been?
It is probable that almost all information available in Eyam would have come via the rector who was most likely to be one of the few literate members of the community.  Shanghai and Sardinia today are very different worlds.  The residents of Eyam did not know what was causing their sickness and death, but medical knowledge today is more advanced.  In particular, it is now believed that plague in Eyam started in its bubonic form, transmitted by fleas.  Had residents fled then, and washed fully, they might have survived.  It later mutated into the pneumonic form of plague, transmitted between humans.  Had self-isolation of family units been operating it might have been contained, but self-isolation of the whole community, as chosen in Eyam, had severe consequences for the population – although it prevented the spread of the disease to other communities.
L says that in Sardinia “there has been an overload  [of information] on television and in the media.  If you watch too much it becomes a source of anxiety.”
In Shanghai C reports that Chinese television at first cancelled all entertainment programmes to focus entirely on the coronavirus outbreak.  But this led to issues of morale, and after a little while entertainment and more general programmes were brought back on internet television.

What have been the numbers of those affected?

At the time of writing (last week of March) the numbers of cases and deaths in Italy now exceeds those in China where the outbreak started.  Across the whole of China the aggregate death rate to date has been around 2.3 per million population and has now stabilised (although the rate might possibly be as high as 250 per million in Wuhan itself).  The current death rate in the whole of Italy is over 110 per million. 

In Shanghai with its tight lockdown over an extended period, the total number of deaths from COVID-19 to date amounts to only 4: a minuscule number in a city with a population of over 24 millions.  Sardinia has so far only experienced 15 deaths (or a rate of 9.1 per million) – very much lower than in Italy as a whole.  But the potential for these figures to rise is considerable in a situation where the lockdown was imposed later than it might have been and where protective equipment for health staff has been in short supply.

Calculation of the death rate in Eyam is highly dependent on an estimate of the population of the village at the start of the outbreak.  The number of deaths is accurately put at between 257 and 260.  Nineteenth century accounts suggested that the village population was only about 350, but more recent demographic research has suggested a much higher figure – around 700.  On a comparative basis that would produce a rate of around 350,000 deaths per million, or 35% of the original population.  Effective medical interventions in Eyam were non-existent. In advanced modern economies, and given scientific understanding, treatment has been much more efficacious today in Shanghai and in Sardinia.  But in both places medical staff have been at risk and on the front line, and some have been lost to the disease.  Predominantly, however, those succumbing have had prior medical conditions such as diabetes or coronary heart disease.  Very few children have been affected, unlike the situation in Eyam where deaths of infants were numerous and whole families were almost wiped out.

What next?

There are four theoretical ways that an epidemic or pandemic can die out:

1. There is total containment so that no one else is infected.

2. Community immunity is gained once a significant proportion of people have had the disease, survived, and have developed antibodies.

3. Vaccination or immunisation against the disease.

4. A mutation in the bacterium or virus so that it ceases to pose a threat.

Policy dependence on the fourth of these would clearly be unwise – although it may be what happened in Eyam according to some of the epidemiological evidence.

Scientists all round the world are putting great efforts into the possible third solution – of a vaccination.  But that will take time.

The experience of China and of Shanghai on the first possibility is not encouraging.  China made rigorous efforts to contain the virus and to limit it to Wuhan, and then to Hubei.  Total isolation was operationalized in Shanghai, with the acquiescence of the population, for two months – no mean feat in one of the world’s biggest cities.  With China now undoing a lot of its restrictions, it can see that this has been a (partial) success, at least domestically.  Equally, the self-isolation imposed in Eyam may be an explanation for the fact that plague did not spread outside the village.  But in today’s highly connected world the likelihood of successful containment is much reduced – it only needs one carrier to ‘escape’ self-isolation to create a new wave of disease transmission elsewhere.  That is now China’s anxiety. As C puts it “China’s problem is now the problem of the rest of the world.  COVID-19 won’t be properly finished in China until it is finished in the rest of the world.  China’s danger now is people bringing the disease back from elsewhere.  If the disease is not eradicated in the rest of the world China has wasted its time.”

A final set of related points:

In Eyam plague struck in a period of very closed societies, low flows of information, and in the context of respect for authority in the shape of the clergy (even though we know that Mompesson was actually less trusted than his predecessor, Stanley, who had remained in the village).

In Sardinia – and in Western Europe more generally – COVID-19 has struck in societies that have less trust in authority, and which are very much more open to the rest of the world.  In particular, politics is played out in these countries as contests between personalities, with significant proportions of the population unwilling to admit that anything put forward by those they do not agree with can be of any use or significance.  And politicians are constantly balancing what it is right to do in the wider interest and what will be acceptable to the electorate.  In addition, sociologists have claimed for many years that European societies and mentalities have become much more individualistic and less community-focused. There is a strong tradition of questioning opinions and directives, and particularly of contesting government policies.  Further, there are multiple sources of information available – unlike the situation in Mompesson’s Eyam, and that information is often contradictory, populist in nature (telling people what they want to hear), or downright wrong.

In Shanghai – and throughout China – there is greater acceptance by ordinary people of statements and policies put forward by ‘authority’, with a less personalised perspective on individual politicians.  Authority is therefore less contested and more trusted to be operating in the interests of the country as a whole.  There is less of a tradition of contest and questioning: people are more willing to do what they are asked to or told to do.

There are also reflections in relation to self-isolation and its effects.

In Eyam self-isolation was imposed on the village as a whole and not on individual households who were free to continue to mix.  Almost certainly this enhanced the spread of the plague within the community at a time when it had mutated from being driven by infected fleas to being passed on through human contact. Self-isolation, in the words of one recent scientist, can be seen as either a heroic sacrifice or a tragic mistake.

In Shanghai self-isolation was introduced early enough, and in a strict enough form, to protect the city from the level of infections of COVID-19 that are being experienced in many other parts of the world.

In Sardinia self-isolation has now been imposed rigorously but could perhaps have been brought in earlier, following the Chinese example.  It will almost certainly need to be maintained for longer than in Shanghai, and that will create issues about stress levels and the mental health of the populations kept under lockdown.

But if self-isolation does not fully contain COVID-19 then, as China now recognises, it may not be a sustainable solution to the current worldwide health crisis.  But I should end this on a more optimistic note. Descendants of those in Eyam who survived the 1665-6 plague outbreak carry a genetic mutation named CCR5-delta 32 which provides them with strong resistance to the HIV-AIDS virus.  We don't yet know whether it also resists COVID-19.

Sources on Eyam

Didelot. X. 2016. Heroic sacrifice or tragic mistake? Revisiting the Eyam plague, 350 years on, Significance, Vol 13, No 5, pp. 20-25

Massad, E. et al. 2004. The Eyam plague revisited: did the village isolation change transmission from fleas to pulmonary? Medical Hypotheses, Vol 63, No 5

Race, P. 1995. Some further consideration of the plague in Eyam, 1665/6, Local Population Studies, No 55

Wallis, P. 2005. A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666-2000, Working Papers on the Nature of Evidence: How Well do ‘Facts’ Travel? No. 02/05. Department of Economic History, London School of Economics

Whittles, L.K. and Didelot, X. 2016. Epidemiological analysis of the Eyamplage outbreak of 1665-1666, Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences, Vol 283, No 1830

Wood, W. 1865. The History and Antiquities of Eyam, London

Hangzhou, China, November 2019 - More than just West Lake (XiHu)

I imagine it would come as a surprise to most people, certainly in the Western world, to learn that during the thirteenth century Hangzhou was almost certainly the largest city in the world, with a population of around 2 millions. Marco Polo, visiting towards the end of that century, called it 'the most beautiful and magnificent city in the world', and a few years later the Moroccan scholar and traveller Ibn Battuta was equally impressed.

I first visited Hangzhou in 2007 and I have just been back for my third visit.  Each time I have become more fascinated with its history and geography.  And I have realised how deficient my Western education has been about one of the great cities of the world - as about so much of the realities of China, past, present and future.  Hangzhou's got a lot of each of those (although expressing them in Mandarin might be complicated in a language without verb tenses).

What do I remember of my 2007 visit?  The guidebook I had bought beforehand put most of its emphasis for Hangzhou on the West Lake, describing it as one of the major sights of China.  I was visiting Zhejiang University (where earlier this year I gave a lecture - at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning!) and the hotel had a magnificent view over the lake.  At night the pagodas around the lake were lit up - a magical sight.  But when I went for a walk along one of the causeways that intersect the lake I was an object of interest - a rare Westerner (although it may also have been because in the high humidity my shirt showed that I was not used to the climatic conditions, unlike all the local people).  I recall walking by the lake to an excellent Italian restaurant one evening (my European colleagues wanted a change from Chinese food) but I also have an image of a taxi I was in being caught up in a swirl of bicycles in rush hour traffic and hardly moving for an hour.

On my more recent visits I have come to understand that Hangzhou is much more than the lake.  As long ago as the seventh century AD it became the southern end of the Grand Canal leading all the way to Beijing, and a few days ago I watched laden barges ploughing their way along what must be one of the oldest artificial waterways in the world.  Other side canals were later added and Marco Polo commented on the way the city resembled Venice.  I have walked by these waterways at night, through beautiful linear parks, with bridges that invite those with time on their hands to linger and chat, leaning on the wooden balustrades that line the bridge parapets.

People lingering to sit and talk on a canal bridge

The Emperors of the Song dynasty made the city their capital between 1132 and 1276 when the dynasty fell, and during this period Hangzhou became one of the most cultured and civilised places in the world, during a period when Chinese creativity and inventiveness was at its peak.  But unlike many Western cities, there are virtually no surviving relics of this period - wood was the predominant building material and fires were frequent: only some of the major pagodas on the city's edge date from that period.

So the old buildings actually only go back two or three hundred years.  But they give character to several of the city's districts.  Not far from the lake I have visited a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy in the Wushan shopping area and nearby my companion and I have quenched our thirst with a drink made from stripped and pressed sugar cane and lime juice.  On the way back we passed the Phoenix Mosque, one of the four great mosques of China and dating back over 1000 years (although several times rebuilt).  Near the Grand Canal I have wandered along traffic-free lanes backing on to a small canal where the terraces of tiny cafés overlook the water, and where the main product in the shop on the bank opposite our café was its own home-made soy sauce.  I have inspected the personal seals made to commission by a group of craftsmen who occupy an old property on one of the islands in the lake.

Pharmacy for traditional medicine

Pedestrian lane near the Grand Canal

But Hangzhou also has its bustling modern face.  Since I first visited in 2007, part of the lake promenade has been pedestrianised, with the road diving into tunnels that carry it under the water.  There are immensely long new road tunnels running east-west to the north of the lake.  Hangzhou has been awarded the 2022 Asian Games, and 11 new metro lines are simultaneously being constructed to add to the existing 2: and no doubt they will be finished on time.   The new metro lines may assist with the one downside (to me) of the city - the fact that the station for China's high speed trains (HangzhouDong station) is so far out east from the city centre: trying to get there from Zhejiang University a few months ago road traffic congestion forced my companion and me to abandon the vehicle we were in and run for our train, despite the fact that an hour had been allowed for the journey to the station.  Once the metro is completed there are also plans to ban the scooters that have replaced the bikes I remember from 2007.  The 2016 G20 summit was held in Hangzhou, the first in China, in the International Expo Centre on the opposite side of the Qiantang River - a building that has echoes of the 'Birds Nest' stadium built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  I do not know whether Hangzhou has been particularly favoured in recent years because Xi Jinping was formerly a party leader in Zhejiang province (a political appointment since he was actually born in Fu Ping in Shaanxi).  But one thing he did was to insist on the development of a dense network of clean public toilets throughout Zhejiang's major city -  I've never been anywhere that matches Hangzhou in the availability of such facilities.

The International Expo Centre on the Qiantang River, site of the 2016 G20 summit

One day we drove past the headquarters of Alibaba,  one of the top ten companies in the world, founded in 1999 by Jack Ma in his apartment in Hangzhou.  The city was in right at the start of the e-commerce boom and has remained so ever since.

But let me return to the lake.  Any map of Hangzhou is distinctive in showing a missing segment in the  urbanised area.  The lake is just to the west of the city centre, and the opposite shore could easily have been built up to surround the water with housing and offices.  But good sense has prevailed over the centuries - perhaps aided by the presence of a major Buddhist complex, the Lingyin Temple just beyond the western shore.  So the view of West Lake from the city is not blotted by inappropriate constructions on the opposite bank.  Given the vicissitudes of China's history over the last few centuries that is indeed a blessing.  On a Saturday evening, after dark, my colleague and I set out from our lakeshore hotel to walk along one of the lake causeways.  All the trees on the islands were illuminated (although only until 9.30), the moon was almost full and was reflected in the water, and the lights and sounds of the city were some way off.  My 2007 guidebook was right - the West Lake is a jewel in the territory of Hangzhou, and one of China's greatest sights.  But there is much more to Hangzhou than that.

West Lake (XiHu) illuminated and moonlit

Gordes, Vaucluse, France, October 2019 - Tourist growth and change

I have just been in the village of Gordes, in Provence, for the fourth time.  My first visit was in 2007, so I have seen it over a number of years.  Gordes is one of the places that almost all guidebooks provide strong encouragement to visit, but in truth there isn't a great deal to do in the village itself - the main attraction is really the site itself, particularly if one is driving in along the main road from the valley below.

There is more to occupy one's time in nearby Roussillon, where the ochre quarries are of considerable interest.  The Abbey of Sénanque, which must be one of the most familiar images of Provence from calendars, all pictures being taken during the few days when the lavender in front of the abbey is at its best, is a couple of kilometres away (and actually lies within the commune of Gordes although not the village itself).  There is an ancient village of circular stone-built huts in the opposite direction.  Gordes has a small castle, and a number of viewpoints over the valley below, but not a great deal more - apart from restaurants and bars.

Nevertheless, I have been back four times in the last few years, and I certainly find it an atmospheric and attractive location.  But something I have noticed, particularly on my most recent visit, has been that Gordes is changing - and doing so quite rapidly.

Where in 2007, when I first came, one could get an evening meal in the hotels or in two other restaurants at opposite ends of the quality scale, today, in 2019, there are upwards of 10 restaurants operating, and even in late September and early October booking is essential for a table for dinner - and prices are substantial.  The two original places - l'Artégal and l'Estaminet - have been joined by the Bastide de Pierres (owned by the biggest hotel a little down the road), La Trinquette, the Crêperie de Fanny, Le Jardin, the Restaurant l'Outsider and more.  The friendly (and cheap)  boulangerie  near the church is still open from the crack of dawn onwards, but another on the other side of the square has closed.  Some of the bars have become either restaurants or fast food places.  The Cercle Républicain remains a traditional bar welcoming all comers, local and visitors alike, for 365 days a year but makes few concessions to visitors - its plate of croissants and pains chocolats is quickly depleted in the morning and not afterwards recharged. I hope the Cercle can last as it is.

Breakfast in the Cercle Républicain

On this visit I missed the extensive Provençal market held on a Tuesday on both sides of the castle, but I suspect little will have changed at that, other than more stalls aimed at tourists (selling Marseille soap, Provençal herbs, lavender bags and so on) than in the past.

But at all times of the day Gordes is thronged with visitors - among them many from Asia or from Eastern Europe - who are asked to park outside the village and walk in.  Those who don't stay to eat or drink will, I expect, stay an hour but not much longer. They will visit the souvenir shops (where a high proportion of the merchandise on sale, pleasingly, is from the local region).  But they will stay in the top part of the village rather than descending the cobbled paths to the valley bottom where some of the oldest and most interesting properties lie.  One afternoon I spent an hour sketching down there and during that time only two couples passed me, whilst the square up above was busy with visitors.

Gordes is typical of many tourist villages in France, and more widely across Europe - a stop on a day's touring by car, a 'must see' in the guidebook, a few photographs, a coffee or soft drink, possibly a small purchase, and then on to the next place.  But I have watched the main road into the village in the evening, the one that comes past the viewpoint, and seen that it is almost devoid of traffic.  The rhythm of visits lasts from around 10 until 6.  So do the new restaurants make enough of a living from lunch visitors alone?  But as I've already commented, a booking is needed for dinner.  Where do the diners come from?  And what is happening to the village and its inhabitants more generally?

I have been delving into the available statistics from the French national statistical office, and they make very interesting reading (and, again, are, I suspect, typical of many other places).

There are actually only 164 hotel rooms in Gordes, 45% of them in 5 star establishments and with nothing below 2 star.  This is high class (and expensive) hotel tourism.  The 'best' hotel has recently joined the 'Grand Luxury Hotels of the World' marketing group: after a recent refurbishment it now dresses its staff in mock eighteenth century outfits, presumably aimed at impressing an American clientele.  There is only one camp site (at 3 star), with 100 pitches.  But added to these are 615 bed spaces in rented properties, air bnb, bed-and-breakfast offerings and so on.  Most of these are in the rural areas surrounding the village, and many of them are extensively advertised through English- or Dutch- language web sites.  They are, in the main, up-market properties with a range of amenities including, sometimes, pools, and they are almost all stone-built providing the fantasy, for urban residents from elsewhere in France or Europe more generally, of living for a week or so in an authentic rural setting.  

People have been visiting Gordes for decades, since those parts that were destroyed by Nazi bombardment during the war were rebuilt - among those who came were Marc Chagall and François Mitterrand.  But some who come decide to stay, or at least to purchase a stake in the village.  (There are more estate agents now than there were in 2007.)  In 2011 just over 40% of properties in Gordes were second homes; by 2016 that had risen to 46%.  During the same period the resident population had fallen, by 9%, from 2056 to 1873.  The scope for further growth in second homes is considerable - in 2016 there were over 150 vacant properties in Gordes, although most would require significant investment to make them habitable for prosperous buyers expecting certain standards of accommodation.

And what about the residents of today's Gordes?  They are elderly.  In 2011 41% were over 60: by 2016 that had risen to 49.4%.  By now (2019) over half the population must be in that age category.  And the education level of residents is high - over one third have a degree level or professional qualification.  It seems as if the retirees are of high status.

 Second homes in the lower part of the village

Gordes is undergoing a dual process of growth in the tourist industry, and of a move upmarket in terms of who is attracted to it and the surrounding area.  But tourism is growing not through new hotel capacity - instead it is day visits and self-catering activity that lead development.  What use are day visits to tourist villages?  They create traffic congestion and the amount spent by visitors may be low.  Self-catering may provide an income for landlords, but I have the suspicion that many of these are not local residents and may even be property companies based abroad.  But their tenants do create a demand for restaurants - even if they drive to a supermarket on the edge of a nearby town such as Apt or Cavaillon for their shopping.  The permanent residents are ageing, and the hotels increasingly depend on migrant staff.  The employee that came to check my room one evening was from Moldova and spoke virtually no French or English - and my Romanian runs only to buna seara (good evening) and multumesc (thank you).

Gordes is still very well worth a visit.  But what is going on under the surface of tourist villages such as this poses interesting questions about what the future will hold.   

Alberobello, Puglia (Apulia), Italy, June 2019 - Making the most of historic poverty

It is five years since I was last in Puglia, and the intervening period has witnessed significant change. Puglia now seems to be high on the list of 'must-visit' places for tourists from many parts of the world.  In the UK we see numerous holiday advertisements for tour groups that will take in Alberobello, Otranto, Vieste and Matera as part of a coach excursion.  (Matera is actually in Basilicata rather than Puglia and has risen to fame this year as one of the European Capitals of Culture - more of that below).  Over the last few days I have heard groups speaking English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Eastern European languages that I can't decipher.  When I was last here there were certainly English and German tourists around, but the whole world now seems to come to Puglia.

Looking back to the days when I studied the geography of Italy as part of my degree, this transformation in the image of the region seems astonishing.  This was one of the poorest parts of Italy at the time when the great investment bank for the south - the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno - was set up in 1950.  That investment didn't actually do much of substance other than improve the roads, because a lot of money went into capital-intensive developments such as steel works and oil refineries that did little to alleviate local rural unemployment and poverty.  Just over the border of Basilicata the writer and intellectual Carlo Levi had been outlawed to the desperately poor and backward village of Aliano by the Mussolini regime in the 1930s, resulting in his wonderful book 'Christ stopped at Eboli' in which he argued that these southern parts of Italy had never been visited by anybody except as an enemy or an outsider seeking to extract what little value they could from the region.  Many years ago I was impressed by the Goncourt-Prize-winning novel 'La Loi' ('The Law') by Roger Vailland (1957) describing the scarcely functioning rural society of a part of Puglia near Bari.  And in 1983 Francesco Rosi set his Oscar-nominated film 'I Tre Fratelli' ('The Three Brothers') in the same area.  Characteristically, the three brothers had all left for careers elsewhere, in Rome, Naples and Turin,  returning home only on the death of their mother but then leaving once again. Emigration was the way out of poverty in the region.

I have been staying in exactly the area where these images most strongly applied - the Murge.  It is a  plateau  around 1000 feet high, made up of karst limestone and with a steep drop to the coastal plain to the north-east.  The soil is a distinctive red-brown colour, field boundaries are dry stone walls, and the dominant crop is olives.  Luckily, in this area the disease that is decimating Puglia's olives further north - xylella fastidiosa - has not (yet) developed.  If and when it does it will transform the landscape into a wilderness.  But at the moment, with the exception of the olives, parts of the countryside look remarkably English.

So what has brought about the transformation from the impoverished image of the past to the tourist presences of today?  My last blog was about two UNESCO-listed villages in China, and here once again UNESCO is in part the cause.  Parts of the town of Alberobello are listed, just like the villages of HongSun and XiDi in Anhui, China.  And the general area around is under a number of protective measures.  The reason is the local vernacular house-type - stone-built single-storey buildings with conical roofs also made of stone, with most houses made up of several interlocking circular rooms.

'Trullo' houses

The town containing the greatest number of these 'trulli' houses is Alberobello where whole districts are comprised of this distinctive architecture.  The history of this local house-type is unclear - there appear to be few references to it before the seventeenth century (but then no writer was interested in such an impoverished area before then).  They may date back earlier (on some houses there are plaques claiming a history back to around 1400, but proof is slight).  What is certain is that these were the dwellings of the poor.  

Part of Alberobello

So the historic poverty of many parts of Puglia has now become a factor in the attraction of tourists to the region.  The trulli with their lack of running water, animals and people sharing one property, and poor living conditions (children often slept on wooden platforms under the conical roofs, accessed by wooden ladder) have become tourist attractions.  Most in Alberobello itself are now either souvenir shops or have been upgraded to become Air bnb properties, whilst many of those out in isolated spots in the countryside have been spruced up with the addition of swimming pools to be let as holiday villas.

Trullo converted into a holiday villa

But doing up a trullo  is now an expensive business.  Planning and conservation laws, even outside the UNESCO zone, mean that the cost of repairing a roof has risen ten fold in the last few years, and detailed regulations have to be followed in any renovation scheme.  (Or should I say, there are detailed regulations in existence - although I suspect they are often got round in some way, such is the custom in Italy.)  There are many hundreds, possibly even thousands, of trulli in the area between Alberobello, Locorotondo and Martina Franca that have collapsed or are in total disrepair - a sign of the way in which, during the post-war period, their inhabitants moved out of them as soon as they could.  Many of the older residents of the area must be amazed by the way in which the properties that they fled from out in the olive groves have become the preserve of wealthy northern Europeans, either as holiday homes or holiday rentals, once many thousands of euros have been spent on them (including, of course, the digging out of swimming pools and the removal of huge limestone boulders that lie beneath the thin soil of the area).

I don't see this as voyeuristic tourism because the holidaymakers are not here to see or experience poverty.  Something a little different is perhaps present in Matera, referred to earlier, where the big tourist draw is to see the 'sassi', the houses carved out of rock faces (effectively caves) where people lived until they were (often forcibly) relocated to social housing in other parts of the city from the 1950s onwards.  I visited Matera in 2014, and there was a frisson in seeing the amazing conditions in which whole families once lived.  But the area of the sassi has now become chic and hotels have since been created in the old caves. It still baffles me, however, as to why the city was chosen (along with Plovdiv in Bulgaria) as one of the two European Cities of Culture for 2019.

Tourist developments in inland Puglia and Basilicata have probably created more employment than the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno ever did, and spread across a wider area (at least in the trulli zone of the Murge plateau). But there is another way in which the past poverty of the region has become a selling point - through its cuisine.  I notice, though, that what was advertised in 2014 as cucina povera ('the cooking of poverty') has now been reimagined as 'authentic Puglia products' - but the ingredients are the same: the use of rough wholemeal flour, brown pasta, dried beans, biscuits (taralli) made with a little white wine and olive oil.  Today's food fashions make such simple products sellable.  Last night in a restaurant I ate lampascioni  - grape hyacinth bulbs treated with oil and vinegar and tasting a little like shallots.  Puglian cooking, traditionally some of the most basic in Italy, is now all the rage.  I'm not always impressed with it.  Five years ago, at a time when it was still being sold as 'cucina povera', I chose the menu bearing that name in a side street restaurant in Lecce (a city that has always bucked the trend of regional poverty, with some of the most stunning baroque churches one could find anywhere in Europe): it was one of the most boring meals I have ever had to pay for.

So the economy of Puglia has traded on its history of poverty and is now creating new images for the region and attracting new activities to its inland areas to supplement the coastal tourism that has been present for many decades (principally driven by the demands of Italian families).  Data for 2017 show that gross domestic product per capita in Puglia is now ahead of that in Campania (around Naples), Sicily, and Calabria - although it is still at only 65% of the average for Italy as a whole.  There is some way to go, but Puglia is doing better than much of the rest of the Italian South.

My previous blog was also about UNESCO-recognised villages - but in China.  Both in Italy and in China I saw distinctive house types - as well as witnessing a history of poverty.  But there is also one great similarity between the various villages I have visited.  Sitting in a pizzeria near the start of the main street in Alberobello, three groups with 30 or so people in each make their way past me, each group led by a guide holding a flag on a stick; they are clearly making the ten minute trek up from the coach park on the edge of the village.  In HongSun I waited several minutes to cross the bridge over the South Lake into the village while a number of tour groups, each led by a person carrying a flag on a stick, hustled past me: I didn't see their tour buses but they must have been somewhere near.  Recognition brings tourism, and tourism so often means groups.  What do such groups get out of visiting historic villages?  There were large numbers of school parties in Alberobello, just as in HongSun and XiDi, each group distinguished by a common cap colour or some other uniform.  Most children were more keen on talking to their friends or, for older children, taking selfies and group photos than in listening to their teacher or guides explain what they might see.  What do school parties actually learn from a visit to a historic site?  Souvenir shopping was also a dominant activity in all cases: at least that would have an economic benefit.  But mass group tourism brings its own problems.  Could Alberobello ultimately become a less attractive destination because it is too crowded with groups?  In China, might visitors to HongSun turn instead to LuSun?  If I come back to Puglia again in five years time what further changes will I see?

Anhui villages, China, April 2019 – A glimpse of rural life and history

I first visited China in 2007 but until now heavenly seen the life of some of the big cities - Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai and so on.  I have just returned from a few days spent in and around some of the villages of Anhui province, which remains economically backward compared to the other provinces of the coastal south-eastern region of China (despite the fact that it is only three hours by high-speed train from Shanghai).  Over three days I have been in Lucun, HongCun, GuanLu, NanPing, PingShan, and XiDi villages, all of them probably over 1000 years old.  Two of them, HongCun and XiDi, are UNESCO World Heritage sites and very much on the tourist map.  But the others, although certainly visited by a few outsiders, are much quieter and still dominated by the traditional activities of the residents.

So what have I learned through these visits? Apart from the obvious contrasts with Shanghai, where I was based on this particular visit to China, I reflect that spending time in these villages has demonstrated something about both the tangible and the intangible legacies of China's history and the ways that both are present in the contemporary rural scene.

                  

Interior courtyard in wood - Lucun

         Inside Lucun village - stone-built properties

The two most immediately obvious tangible elements of the villages are, firstly, the fact that the houses are constructed of stone with no windows at ground level – all the light coming via courtyards hidden behind the high and fortress-like walls of the properties. And the second element is that the interiors of the properties make considerable use of intricately-carved wood from the local hills. The solidity of the exteriors is therefore dramatically contrasted with the intimacy of the detailing inside the houses.

These are elements of a local architectural style, reflecting wider aspects of local culture in the district known as Huizhou (and extending as far as language – at one point when two local young people were talking together my colleague from Shanghai turned to me and said “I can’t understand a word they are saying”.)  The roof beams of the houses are finished off in a flamboyant gesture locally known as a ‘horse’s tail’. 

                                               

Alleyway, NanPing

Water supply was clearly crucial in the establishment of these villages, and each has streams running through, or close by, or has created artificial ponds to supply the needs of the residents.  In HongCun (one of the UNESCO sites) the village is centred around the ‘Moon Pond’, reputedly planned by the wife of the village leader during the later Ming period in the early seventeenth century, with a second lake providing a possible defensive barrier immediately to the south of the village.

Moon Pond, HongCun

  South Lake, Hongcun

 Lake and gateway to the village, XiDi

LuCun village surrounded by fields of oil-seed rape

To a European, there is one tangible element of village-scape that is missing.  Whilst the church (or churches) dominate(s) the external view of almost all European village centres, such a focal point is missing in the Chinese case.  Viewed from afar, these villages all appear low-slung and relatively formless (although certain of them have central squares of some kind).

There are many other noteworthy features of these villages, but they are too many for a blog such as this. One element worthy of comment, however, is the narrowness of the lanes within the villages – generally too narrow for even a cart and thus producing a dense and intimate feel to the settlement suggesting that all space is seen as privatised in some way.

But the intangible elements from these villages are as important as their physical characteristics.  The UNESCO listing of HongCun and XiDi is doubtless part of the reason for the presence of large numbers of school parties and organised tours, but these are also there not just to look but also to learn about the ways of rural life in an era of extended families and clans, of Confucianism (and Taoist influences), of earlier village educational expectations, and respect for ancestors: in short to learn about traditional ways of social organisation, expected behaviours and ‘living the good life’.  Past norms of behaviour are constantly being referenced by the guides in these villages, and by the artefacts and furnishings to be found in the buildings – many of which are open to the general public who are encouraged and licensed to enter private houses to explore their features while the residents quietly sit and watch the visitors. 

Alleyway in NanPing

                                                                   Alleyway in HongCun

Several of the villages remain dominated by the extended clan of an individual family.  In GuanLu, for example, a much-visited feature consists of the eight interlinked houses built by brothers of a merchant family – the Wangs – during the early Qing period (late seventeenth century): the Wang family can actually be traced back to the Song dynasty (around the first millennium) and is still dominant in the village today.  Most residents of NanPing are members of the Ye family who built ancestral halls here in the Ming period (1368-1644): in these clan power over family is exercised by elders in the presence of the spirits of their ancestors. Some of the finest of these family ‘temples’ were used by Ang Lee as the setting for scenes in his Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which also took location shots in HongCun).  XiDi is still dominated by the Hu family (from a branch of which President Hu Jingtao, with ancestors in Anhui province, came).  LuCun takes its name from the Lu family who still make up the majority of its inhabitants (Cun means ‘village’ and is pronounced with a soft 'c', like an 's').  

The interlocking houses of the eight brothers in GuanLu

Ancestors hall of the Ye family, NanPing

Particular spaces within the buildings were reserved for particular groups – for instance for women, for male elders, for servants, or for children’s education. Schoolrooms existed for whole families. Places of honour were located either side of the table in the principal room.  And on that table a particular arrangement of a mirror and water jar with a Buddha (or more recently a clock) in the centre was deemed to bring good luck. I was instructed on these matters in a house in LuCun originally built by the merchant Lu Bangxie but more recently refurbished by a member of the Wang family from nearby HongCun.  And in several buildings the importance of feng shui in the design of spaces was emphasised.

The inner place of honour in Lu Bangxie’s mansion in LuCun

The retired village schoolmaster and the author of this blog in the seats of honour in a HongCun house

Tourist visitors pretending to attend the old village school, HongCun

And everywhere within the houses and in the public spaces there are black and white paintings as well as a plethora of texts and writings – poetry, sayings from the old writers, rules dating from pre-Communist times admonishing residents in how to be virtuous, door surrounds in red to bring good luck.

Posters around the door of a tea house and Airbnb in XiDi

But to end this long blog, with its many images, I will turn back to the overall meaning of a visit to villages like these.  To the urban population of today’s China such a visit tells of a past way of life, of traditional historic patterns of existence, of continuity, of value systems that date back millennia, of the meaning of family in a world where the domestic unit, in an era after the one-child-policy, has shrunk significantly from the sizes that once dominated in these country places.   A trip from contemporary Shanghai to these Anhui villages also demonstrates something about inequalities in contemporary China. Residents in old houses here sit under the eaves of their courtyards, receiving a bare income for allowing visitors to enter, while the rain drizzles down into the open space in front of them with no sheltering wall separating them from the elements.  I see people washing their pots and pans in the stream. Chickens run in and out of houses. Turning a corner in one village we come across an old woman almost bent double with age, putting fodder out for a cow and calf tethered in a corner of an alleyway.  These are some of the realities of rural China, inequalities that President Xi has vowed to combat.

This doesn’t necessarily mean sweeping away the old.  The past can be remodelled for present and future use.  HongCun and XiDi villages have become tourist meccas, with much of what that entails all round the world in terms of souvenirs, local (and some non-local) crafts, and eating opportunities.  I spent some time with a research student from HongCun who is intent on creating sustainable and planned tourist growth for her village.   I was impressed by the local entrepreneur who has invested vast amounts of time and money in restoring the Lu Bangxie mansion in LuCun.  But one of my lasting memories will be of the hotel bar in PingShan where four of us sat drinking Swiss-style hot chocolate and eating Belgian waffles in a long discussion about conservation policies in China and the UK – a bar and hotel in a building re-assembled from the wall of a derelict ancestral hall and the addition of a reconstructed family temple in wood, brought together by a film director, Zhang Zhenyan.  Here lay a homage to the cultural past of the region sensitively adapted to create a facility for rural employment and revival for the future.  I would like to go back in a few years to see how it’s doing.

Interior of the hotel bar in PingShan

                                               

Madeira, Portugal, March 2019 - Virgin land, settlement and slavery

I have just returned from a first visit to the island of Madeira.  Politically it is a constituent part of Portugal but geologically, as I was told by Ronaldo, the driver  I hired (not to be confused with his more famous namesake, the footballer, who also comes from the island) it is part of Africa.  In various places I saw signs marking the 600^th anniversary of the discovery of the island in 1418 by two Portuguese mariners, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vex Teixeira.  (The first landing happened the following year.)  Dates of ‘discovery’ can, of course, be disputed, and it now seems likely that Vikings visited the island (and its small surrounding archipelago), and it is possible that Pliny knew of it even earlier.

It dawned on me after a few days that there was something very distinctive about the history of Madeira. This was the very first place I had visited anywhere in the world where there had been no inhabitants prior to the arrival of European settlers – which happened within a year or two of Zarco and Teixeira’s report back to Henry the Navigator in Lisbon.  Madeira was genuinely a terra nullius – or unoccupied land, unlike other parts of the world (particularly Australia) where that epithet was inaccurately accorded in order to eliminate any native people’s claims.

I have visited every continent except Antarctica, and everywhere I have learned of histories of contact between Europeans and already-resident populations.  I have been to certain West Indian islands (for example St Lucia and Barbados in the Lesser Antilles) where European settlement was preceded by Caribs and Arawaks.  The Smithsonian Institution has an ongoing project showing how there are continuing legacies of these people in the islands today.

There were Algonquin peoples in what is now New York a thousand years before the Dutch settled the site, and the curious line of Broadway, cutting across the grid pattern of streets of today’s Manhattan, is a legacy of the native hunters’ Wickquasgeck  Trail. (The name ‘Manhattan’ is itself of native American origin).  In San Francisco I have heard about how thousands of native Americans were killed in an apparent policy of genocide or ethnic cleansing in the mid nineteenth century to make way for the new settlers of the state of California.  Throughout Canada I have been impressed by the way in which the ‘first nations’ of that country are now celebrated and their history commemorated, providing some form of atonement for previous persecution of these groups.

In Australia I have participated in conferences where, at the start of proceedings, there is formal recognition of the so-called ‘aboriginal’ group from whom the land for the conference building was taken.  And in New Zealand I have seen, and commented on in earlier blogs, the ways in which the whites (pakeha) and Maori came into contact, generally to the disadvantage of the latter. And no one with the slightest knowledge of South Africa can be in ignorance about the issues of contact between European settlers and original populations.

These examples are all drawn from places I have visited outside Europe.  (I might add that within Europe I have also heard of the effects of contact for the Sami peoples of northern Scandinavia, told to me while sitting in the house of a Sami man in northern Finnmark.)  I am excepting China and Japan here, both of which I have also spent time in: in both of those cases European travellers were faced with societies of similar levels of development as themselves. 

In every one of the other cases the arrival of Europeans brought upheaval, disease, the expropriation of land (or the disavowal of the rights of earlier peoples to use it), and sometimes genocide.  The role of Christian churches and their insistence on a ‘civilising’ mission of conversion was particularly profound, dismantling existing societies and belief patterns and often prohibiting practices that had tied peoples to their land for generations.  Through almost every other country I have visited there have been long-term effects that have hugely damaged not just the ways of life of ‘first nations’ peoples (to use the Canadian term, which I rather like) but in most cases have also drastically reduced the viability of their societies and decimated their numbers. (Again, I except Japan and China from this generalisation, although contact in 19^thcentury China and the Opium Wars were not exactly beneficial episodes in China’s history).

So was Madeira a paradise where European settlers found virgin territory and were able to establish an economy and a society without destroying something that pre-existed it?

Ronaldo, the driver, took us on a tour of the Eastern part of the island.  And for an hour or so we walked alongside one of the levadas or irrigation channels (from the Portuguese ‘levar’ – to carry) that run along the contours of the mountains to bring fresh water from the heights, particularly in the north, down to the fields below and to the lower-lying towns. There are no underground water sources on volcanic Madeira, so the use of surface water was essential.  There are between 1400 and 2000 km of levadas in total, although some are in disrepair. They are one of the great joys of Madeira, providing easy walking with stupendous views surrounded by plentiful wild flowers.  We were accompanied on our walk by local Madeiran chaffinches.  

 

A levada walk

A Madeiran chaffinch

Most written and web materials on Madeira and the levadas use the passive tense in describing their construction: ‘they were built’, ‘they were constructed’, ‘a network of levadas was created’ and so on.  But by whom?  Some sources are more explicit – they were built by Arab and African slaves who were brought to the island in the later fifteenth century to work on the sugar plantations set up by the Portuguese and to construct the all-important water channels that supplied the irrigation water.  Constructing the levadas along the precipitous mountainsides was dangerous work, and slaves were suspended from above to cut the channels with hand-tools.  The first slaves on the island were recorded in 1452, from both North Africa and from the Canary Islands (the Guanches – indigenous peoples: unlike Madeira, the Canaries were already inhabited by non-Europeans).  In 1614 the population of Madeira was enumerated as just over 28,000, of whom 3,000 (11%) were slaves.  But the sugar plantation economy collapsed later that century in the face of Caribbean competition.  And Portugal abolished slavery in 1775.

So although Madeira is unique in my travels as a territory where the first European settlers faced no indigenous populations whatsoever, subsequent history reflects so many patterns elsewhere – of the exploitation of an ethnically and culturally different population – in this case through the operation of the slave trade.   The South African media company IOL describes Madeira as ‘The Portuguese island with slave roots’.  And it is true that some of the most distinctive tourist attractions of the island – and therefore the basis of one of the three pillars of the island’s contemporary economy of tourism, Madeira wine, and bananas – are the product of slave labour.

Every place has its elements of uniqueness, but beneath these there are always general patterns of historical, sociological and economic evolution that respond to wider forces.  Despite its unique origins in terms of European settlement Madeira shares its history of the exploitation of ‘non-European’ populations with other European powers’ colonies around the world.