4 ms·
> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked. It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view. My d
by gopalv 8y ago
> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.
It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view.
My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945.
The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books.
The "Great war" had just passed ("between cousins"), there was wistful memories of the Russian empire, of china being conquered by the japanese.
Oil empires in Burma (Burmah-Shell), political deals with the Kings of Siam, health of Austro-Hungarian royal inbreeding.
The shades of gray in which Belgian kings and Cecil Rhodes got painted as conquerors ,liberators and genocidal maniacs in one go.
All the important intellectuals are German (Kant, Hegel ...) or French. The world "lingua franca" was used to describe what English stands for today.
America was busted and fallen down, the economy under Hoover (who was called an "engineer, digging deeper into pockets"). They had poor quality cotton (remember, Indian British books - the Deccan plateau had Cotton too & the empire had Daka muslin) and a "department of war".
Is from such an amazing period of time, after fax machines, aero planes and Einstein, but before anti-biotics and nukes.
But other than as a curiosity, the whole collection has been obsoleted by the 2nd half of the century.
- brennebeck 8y agoDo you happen to remember some of the titles?
- rexpop 8y agoI don't see how they could be obsoleted. What we know of Rome is very often through late-Roman scholars. We'll need these texts to disprove modern anti-historians, who make claims about our origins to drive reactionary politics. A Roman example--as described in Mary Beard's "SPQR"--is how imperialists claimed Rome was always ruled by kings, attempting to erase its Republican history. Contemporary populations accepted that viewpoint because they didn't have access to history. They're still relevant. Frankly, I am grateful for even your cursory summaries.
- lazyasciiart 8y agoWhat's wrong with the books being about a vanished place? Most classic literature falls into exactly that category - think about Tom Sawyer, or The Great Gatsby. People don't get rid of them.