Alan Macfarlane

Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye.In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution.Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.

This entertaining and endlessly surprising book takes us on an exploration into every aspect of Japanese society from the most public to the most intimate. A series of meticulous investigations gradually uncovers the multi-faceted nature of a country and people who are even more extraordinary than they seem. Our journey encompasses religion, ritual, martial arts, manners, eating, drinking, hot baths, geishas, family, home, singing, wrestling, dancing, performing, clans, education, aspiration, sexes, generations, race, crime, gangs, terror, war, kindness, cruelty, money, art, imperialism, emperor, countryside, city, politics, government, law and a language that varies according to whom you are speaking. Clear-sighted, persistent, affectionate, unsentimental and honest - Alan Macfarlane shows us Japan as it has never been seen before.

The author traces the fascinating history of this remarkable plant, from its initial uses as an aid to Buddhist meditation in China during the fourth century B.C. through its remarkable explosion of popularity all around the world, becoming a valued commodity that would change world history. 17,500 first printing.

In a frank and unpretentious series of letters addressed to a teenage granddaughter, this highly original book teaches us to know and understand the world we live in and its rules, and how to behave in it. In these thirty letters, Alan Macfarlane answers his granddaughter's questions about how the world works, how it got to be as it is, what it could be, and where she fits in. Lily's enquiries range from the intimate, personal and moral to the political, social and philosophical. What is the nature of good and evil? What is religion? How can I be truly me? Is right and wrong the same wherever you are? What is beauty? Does there have to be torture? Does money matter? Is knowledge always good? What is progress? What is truth? What is sex? Is democracy a good idea? These are just a few of the questions. In responding to Lily's challenging problems, Alan Macfarlane, from a lifetime's experience as a historian, anthropologist and teacher, ranges through history and across the world's cultures. Her questions are timeless. His answers add up to a classic.

The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and the crucial differences between England and other European nations. Drawing upon detailed studies of English parishes and a growing number of other intensive local studies, as well as diaries, legal treatises and contemporary foreign sources, the author examines the framework of change in England. He suggests that there has been a basic misrepresentation of English history and that this has considerable implications both for our understanding of modern British and American society, and for current theories concerning the preconditions of industrialization.

Witchcraft in 16th- and 17th-century England! Witchcraft beliefs and accusations flourished as never before in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This study of some of the least-explored regions of post-Reformation society investigates the categories of persons that were believed to be witches and considers the motives of their accusers. The author, a highly regarded anthropologist-historian, examines the extent to which witchcraft accusations reflected basic tensions in the structure of pre- industrial thought and society, and directs light on such issues as contemporary attitudes to misfortune and pain, to methods of resolving interpersonal conflicts, to the treatment of social deviants.

The story of the development of glass and the effects it had on every aspect of culture from astronomy and navigation to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

From the preface: 'This is a book which synthesizes a lifetime of reflection on the origins of the modern world. Through forty years of travel in Europe, Australia, India, Nepal, Japan and China I have observed the similarities and differences of cultures. I have read as widely as possible in both contemporary and classical works in history, anthropology and philosophy.'Prof Macfarlane is also the author of The Culture of Capitalism, The Savage Wars of Peace, The Riddle of the Modern World and The Making of the Modern World, among many others.This is the third book published by Odd Volumes, the imprint of The Fortnightly Review.

This book aims to solve the problem of how parts of mankind escaped from an apparently inevitable trap of war, famine and disease in the last three hundred years. Through a detailed comparative analysis of English and Japanese history it explores such matters as the destruction of war, decline of famine, importance of certain drinks (especially tea), the use of human excrement and the effects of housing, clothing and bathing on human health. It also shows how the English and Japanese controlled fertility through marriage and sexual patterns, biological and contraceptive factors, abortion and infanticide.

“The great merit of Macfarlane’s book is that it poses questions; it teaches historians to look very much more closely, and in new ways, at familiar evidence; it brings familiar relationships into the centre of scrutiny; and it offers, in a significant way, the unit of one man’s life, and of one man’s economic fortunes, as a focus of study.” ―E. P. Thompson, Midland History Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex from 1641 to his death in 1683, kept for almost forty years a remarkably detailed account of his life―his mental and emotional world as well as his activities. Few diaries from this period afford such a rounded picture of a family from so many aspects. Alan Macfarlane, a historian and lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge University, explores through the diary Josselin’s life as a farmer, businessman, Puritan clergyman, neighbor, husband, and father, providing a unique view of seventeenth-century life from the inside.

Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) is arguably the greatest Japanese social thinker of the last three centuries, yet he is little known outside his native country, except to experts on Japan. Contemporaries, on the other hand, recognized his eminence and influence. The dialogue with Fukuzawa has a somewhat different purpose from that with earlier thinkers of the western Enlightenment treated in my previous work. The work of Montesquieu, Smith and Tocqueville, when combined, set out a set of conjectures as to how mankind could and perhaps did ‘escape’ from the normal tendencies of agrarian civilization. Since Fukuzawa (1835-1901) was writing later, and at a great distance from the original ‘escape’, it is unlikely that he will be able to contribute much that is original to the analysis of this problem. For that we have already considered Maitland’s impressive solution. On the other hand, Fukuzawa provides an interesting test case for the utility of their theories. If their model is plausible and seems to have explanatory power, it should be attractive to a thinker whose aim, as we shall see, is to grasp the essence of the first transition from agrarian to industrial civilization so that he can help his own Japanese civilization achieve a similar break-through. If he selects and approves the same central essence as Montesquieu, Smith, Tocqueville and Maitland, their insights would appear to have cross-cultural validity. An even more stringent test is the degree of success in the material world. In other words, did the recipe work? If an outsider to Europe not only repeated the central theories of those who addressed the riddle of the origins of the modern world, but then applied these to a distant civilization and helped to effect a similar ‘escape’ in entirely different circumstances, this would be as good a confirmation of the validity of the theory as one could hope for. The task is made more worthwhile because, despite his eminence and interest, there has only been one book about him in English, and that was also about other thinkers in the Japanese Enlightenment. There have been one or two articles also, but there is no recent intellectual biography of a man who had an enormous impact on Japanese civilization and whose ideas are such a wonderful mirror of western thought and colonial expansion.

'Marriage and Love in England' has been awarded the American Sociological Association, Family Section, William J. Goode Award for 1987.

Concerned with the origins of capitalism & the conditions that accompanied its birth, this work argues that capitalism is more than an economic system: it's a culture that affects not just the material but also the social, familial & even spiritual bases of existence. The author considers the nature of evil, attitudes towards love & the family, the phenomenon of violence, population change & revolution & how we have come both to dominate & to revere the natural world.

The traditions and creativity of Cambridge University have survived 800 years. In celebration, this first-ever combined historical and anthropological analysis explores the culture, the customs, the colleges and the politics of this famous institution. A professor there for nearly forty years, the author sets forth on a personal but also dispassionate attempt to understand how this ancient university developed and changed and how it continues to influence all people who pass through it. This book delves into the history and architecture as well as the charm and the ghosts of Cambridge, presenting a must-read for anyone who studies, teaches, visits, or is intrigued by this great intellectual centre.Alan Macfarlane is Professor of Anthropological Science, University of Cambridge, and Life Fellow, King’s College Cambridge. In 1986 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He was born in Assam, India, and his work covers Britain, India, China and Japan. Throughout his distinguished career, Alan Macfarlane has published widely in history and anthropology. His publications include Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England ((1970) 1999) Routledge, London, Resources and Population(1976) CUP, The Origins of English Individualism (1978) Blackwell, Oxford, A Guide to English Historical Records (1983) CUP, The Culture of Capitalism (1987) Blackwell, Oxford, The Savage Wars of Peace (1997) Blackwell, Oxford, Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (2003) (with Iris Macfarlane) Ebury Press.

It was in the 1870s that, in his attempt to win a Trinity College Fellowship at Cambridge, a young scholar called Frederic William (F.W.) Maitland submitted a dissertation entitled ‘A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge’. He published it at his own expense when he was twenty-five. In this long and brilliant work Maitland summarized and analyzed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the two hundred years before his own work, including the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, Mill and others. The central theme is the way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings. Having sketched out the philosophical problems in this early work, I believe that his later life’s work on English historical records allowed him to re-examine how the modern liberty had emerged. Maitland tried to show that from very early on there had been a peculiar liberty of the individual in England, particularly in relation to property and power. In opposition to most of his contemporaries, including Sir Henry Maine, he disliked the idea of the movement of all societies from Community (Status) to Association (Contract). He saw a basic liberty and individualism in England from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. Thus freedom and liberty of action, he argued, are indeed key features of the curious English structure which, in his day, was spreading all over the world. Yet if the individual is not embedded in the wider group in the usual ways, what about the second great unifying force, hierarchy? Basically Maitland takes up Tocqueville’s central theme, namely the nature and implications of equality and inequality. What he shows is that the nature of English law and social structure is such, and has always been such, that there are few, if any, inherited differences based on birth. All differences, whether of social rank, of parental power or of gender are the result of contract, or as modern sociologists might say, of achievement rather than ascription. Thus he presents a picture of a competitive and fluid social structure as far back as the records take us. All this, he is aware, is very unusual and very important.

The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was a leading member of the French Enlightenment and laid the foundations for thought in many of the social sciences. His greatest book, 'The Spirit of the Laws', was the first detailed survey of the customs and cultures of the world and their deeper structures. It build on other important work in his 'Persian Letters', 'Considerations on the Decline of the Romans'. His wide learning and analytic brilliance does not always make his work easily accessible. But if we consider all the work together, and combine the life with the writing, it is possible to see deep insider the mind of one of the most profound thinkers of modern times and someone who shaped our modern world.

The Justice and the Mare's Law and Disorder in Seventeenth Century England

I have spent the last sixty years trying to understand the world. I have studied for two doctorates at Oxford and London, travelled through Nepal, Japan and China, published more than twenty books. My explorations have taught me a little about how we might approach a deeper knowledge of the world around us. Here I will tell you of what I have found about asking questions, guessing, testing, assembling evidence, creative writing and the conditions of creativity. I hope it helps.

We often tend to believe that we can understand the world around us by just applying our eyes and ears to what is happening. In fact, our knowledge is filtered through many cultural and intellectual forces which shape our understanding. This short book looks at changing world views and paradigms over the last ten thousand years, from oral hunter gatherers to twenty-first century social media. It shows some of the effects of the Axial Age, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Evolutionism. This is done through a broad comparison of the East and the West.

This book examines the cosmologies or world views of western civilization over the last five hundred years. Applying an approach from anthropology, it examines the way in which shifts in relative power between the West and the Rest have shaped concepts of time, space and causation. It expands the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault and outlines eight shifts in mental and moral systems, from circular and closed worlds, to a global and multi-cultural world view.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766 and died in 1834. He was the son of a clergyman and one of eight children. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge and later became Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India Company’s College at Haileybury in Hertfordshire. His most famous work, the Essay on the Principles of Population, was published in 1798 when he was 32. It has been seen partly as a reaction to the Utopian thought of William Godwin and others, as well as that of Malthus’ own father. It is as an extension and formalization of the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smith and others who had laid down some of the basic ideas concerning the tendency of population to outstrip resources. Malthus’ theory in brief was that humankind is permanently trapped by the intersection of two ‘laws’. The first concerned the rate at which populations can grow. He took the ‘passion between the sexes’ to be constant and investigations showed that under conditions of ‘natural’ fertility (with early marriage and no contraception, abortion or infanticide), this would lead to an average of about fifteen livebirths per woman. This figure is confirmed by modern demography. Given normal mortality at the time, and taking a less than maximum fertility, this will lead to what Malthus called geometrical growth, namely 1,2,4,8,16. It only needs 32 doublings like this to lead from an original couple to the present world population of over six billion persons. The second premise was that food and other resource production will grow much more slowly. It might double for a generation or two, but could not keep on doubling within an agrarian economy. Thus there could, in the long run, only be an arithmetic or linear growth of the order of 1,2,3,4. Incorporated in this later theory was the law of diminishing marginal returns on the further input of resources, especially labour. Underpinning the scheme was the assumption that there was a finite amount of energy available for humans through the conversion of the sun’s energy by living plants and animals. The conclusion was that humankind was trapped, a particular application in the field of demography of the more general pessimism of Adam Smith. Populations would grow rapidly for a few generations, and then be savagely cut back. A crisis would occur, manifesting itself in one (or a combination) of what he called the three ‘positive’ checks acting on the death rate, war, famine and disease.

What conditions the chances of liberty, wealth and equality at the start of the third Christian millennium? Why did human civilizations develop so slowly for thousands of years, and then transform themselves during the last three hundred? This study of four great thinkers who lived between 1689 and 1995, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville, and Ernest Gellner, weaves their lives and works together and through their own words shows how they approached the question of the nature of man, his past and his future.

We live in a confused and confusing world. This is partlycaused by the massive growth of inter-civilisational contactsdriven by economic, cultural and communication changes. Itis urgent that we understand each other if we are to surviveand thrive, yet most of us know very little about the worldoutside our own civilisation.This book describes the central features of four greatcivilisations, their history and China, Japan, Europeand the Anglosphere. Through a comparison of their deeper cultural logic and through investigating their dreams and nightmares, their religious, economic, political and social similarities and differences, we may come to a deeper appreciation of their worlds and our own.Drawing on fifty years of travel through these different civilisations and teaching about them at the University of Cambridge, Alan Macfarlane explores how we can remain different and yet live in some sort of harmony through mutual appreciation and understanding.

It was in the 1870s that, in his attempt to win a Trinity College Fellowship at Cambridge, a young scholar called Frederic William (F.W.) Maitland submitted a dissertation entitled ‘A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge’. He published it at his own expense when he was twenty-five. In this long and brilliant work Maitland summarized and analyzed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the two hundred years before his own work, including the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, Mill and others. The central theme is the way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings. Having sketched out the philosophical problems in this early work, I believe that his later life’s work on English historical records allowed him to re-examine how the modern liberty had emerged. Maitland tried to show that from very early on there had been a peculiar liberty of the individual in England, particularly in relation to property and power. In opposition to most of his contemporaries, including Sir Henry Maine, he disliked the idea of the movement of all societies from Community (Status) to Association (Contract). He saw a basic liberty and individualism in England from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. Thus freedom and liberty of action, he argued, are indeed key features of the curious English structure which, in his day, was spreading all over the world. Yet if the individual is not embedded in the wider group in the usual ways, what about the second great unifying force, hierarchy? Basically Maitland takes up Tocqueville’s central theme, namely the nature and implications of equality and inequality. What he shows is that the nature of English law and social structure is such, and has always been such, that there are few, if any, inherited differences based on birth. All differences, whether of social rank, of parental power or of gender are the result of contract, or as modern sociologists might say, of achievement rather than ascription. Thus he presents a picture of a competitive and fluid social structure as far back as the records take us. All this, he is aware, is very unusual and very important.

Very few people in the West know much about China. What they think they know is largely based on outdated stereotypes from the mind-twentieth century or earlier. Yet, as China emerges once again as a world super-power and influences lives around the globe, it is important to understand this most ancient and largest of all civilizations. This book is based on seventeen visits to China since 1997 by Alan Macfarlane and his wife Sarah Harrison, travelling and filming through many remote regions and the great emerging cities. It is also informed by teaching in numerous Chinese universities and many friendships with Chinese students and colleagues.

Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political scientists of all times. His 'Democracy in America' and 'Ancien Regime' are classics. Yet his work is not always easy to understand, since it needs to be seen as a work which combines his essays, letters, travels and other materials. Through an examination of these we can see that Tocqueville, more than almost any other writer, understood the deep roots of individualism, equality and fraternity, and in doing so the origins of the modern world. His three way comparison of France, England and America is unique and suggestive.

I was born and have lived between worlds. My infancy was in Assam on the borders of India and Burma. When I returned to England at the age of five, and subsequently attended ten years of English single sex boarding schools, I learnt how to be ‘modern’ and British. I learnt to be an individual, self-reliant and separated from my family and to transact in the capitalist and industrial world around me. The shock of contrast between my roots and my experience was kept alive by frequent periods of anthropological fieldwork in Asia. I spent fifteen months on doctoral research in 1968-70 and then more than two years on sixteen subsequent visits to a remote hill village in the Annapurna mountains of central Nepal. I also visited many parts of Japan and China on fifteen expeditions from 1990 onwards. My central question has long concerned the conditions and consequences of the emergence of the unusual, unexpected and strange bundle of features which we term ‘modernity’, including individualism, capitalism and industrialism. I explored this first in The Origins of English Individualism (1978). I rejected much of what I had accepted in my earlier education, including the model partially derived from Marx, Weber and Durkheim. From then onwards I have explored what has happened and its consequences through a series of books, including 'The Culture of Capitalism' (1987), 'The Savage Wars of Peace' (1997), 'The Riddle of the Modern World' (2000) and 'The Making of the Modern World' (2002). A synthesis of my views on how we arrived where we are now is in my book 'The Invention of the Modern World', the Wang Gouwei lectures at Tsinghua University, published in Chinese and English in 2013. While working on these books and exploring different cultures, I wrote a number of shorter lectures, talks and essays on various aspects of the great transition to modernity. These are often rough and informal, showing in an unpolished way how my thought was developing. I have decided to collect them together in a single volume, though they are also available on my www.alanmacfarlane.com

Alan MacFarlane has studied the parishes of Earls Colne in Essex and Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria, as well as other parishes, and has undertaken anthropological fieldwork in a contemporary community in Nepal. In collaboration with Sarah Harrison and Charles Jardine he has devised a method of collecting, breaking down and then reintegrating historical records in a way which makes it possible to answer some of the sociological, demographic, anthropological, geographical and other questions which interest many people. For the amateur historian or genealogist who wants to know about a village or family, the method makes it possible to find out almost everything that survives in historical documents concerning each person who lived in a village, each plot of land and house.

How, why and what are the likely consequences of the development of modern computers and Artificial Intelligence.