| On a clear night we can look up and be stunned by the stars, some of them galaxies as big as ours. When we are told their size and distance and age, the big numbers make us want to rush back indoors to the finite, familiar world of human beings. But have we not got things the wrong way round? In the few seconds it has taken to read this page so far, the number of electronic impulses passing through the reader's brain and nervous system is to be reckoned in billions, if not already trillions (1012). Many are quite unpredictable, if only because some of my billions help affect some of your billions and vice versa. That is for two people, over a few seconds. But there are many of us, our lifetimes strung together over centuries. For numerical complexity, can the galaxies match that? |
| The result, anyway, we call history. Early Hindu arithmeticians are said to have created the sign for zero, '0', on the model of the great 'space of heaven', resolving its infinities into a tiny circle.1 In the same way we speak of history as a school 'subject', when 'subject' is the one thing it is not. It is far above our heads. But because the reality would be unbearable, we conspire to forget that the real human past cannot be comprehended, still less traced or written about, except in simplifications so crude as always to distort and often to falsify; the falsehoods of each generation, agreed by convention, being exultantly exposed in the next by 'research', itself over-thrown in its turn. That battle of the generations no doubt lurches towards a quantum of truth. But behind the quantum is the unquantified, the living galaxies, one on another, of ricocheting trillions of impulses, further beyond reckoning than the stars are above anyone's head, and all of which, comprehended or not, happened with as much actuality as your reading of these words now. |
| These reflections could well preface any history book as a 'start-of-day' exercise, to be undertaken before picking it up. There is a special reason why they should preface this one. Unconventionally long, the book remains, to the author's certain knowledge, 'a mere introduction'. That has been said by authors of bigger books on bigger subjects. This one is about a single, recondite theme in a single period of history, a theme which has attracted academic attention so far mainly in articles, if at all. But the result is still a |
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