Readers may have noticed that we have added Liberty Belles to our blog roll. This site is an up and comer and is maintained by five students who believe in"free minds, free markets, free...Well, let’s say we don’t mind you holding the door for us, we just don’t want the government doing it." Welcome to the L and P blog roll!

Another addition is Positive Liberty, a new group blog managed by L and P's own Jason Kuznicki. The members include Liberty Magazine writer Timothy Sandefur. Good luck to Jason and the rest of the Postive Liberty crew.

Well first of all I must thank everyone who has given me such a warm welcome to this blog. I would have responded sooner except that (like much of England) I was completely absorbed by one of the most exciting cricket Test matches ever. It even finished with England beating Australia and that hasn't happened too frequently in recent years, sad to say!

I was actually invited to contribute to this blog over a year ago but I wasn't able to do so due to various demands, notably writing a book. However over the last few months I have taken to diving in and out of the blogosphere. What I have found has led me to two conclusions. The first is that blogs are proving to be hugely subversive of the kind of calcified orthodoxy found at many conventional media outlets of both left and right - a well worn point by now but made well again by Jeff Jarvis at http://www.buzzmachine.com/ .

A second point is that the world of blogs reveals subterranean movements and realignments in the world of politics and ideology. I have been arguing for some time now that we are seeing is a major realignment of ideologies and political positions. This is particularly true of the 'left', but it is increasingly happening on the 'right' as well. Two questions in particular are helping to bring this about. The first is the whole question of how to respond to 'globalisation', which is increasingly dividing the left between those who accept or welcome globalisation (often including former Marxists who remain loyal to much of Marx's vision of history) and those who in rejecting it are now articulating views that are pretty near indistinguishable from those of nineteenth century reactionaries. Essentially the question intelligent socialists and social democrats have to face is "Given that the traditional notion of socialism has been shown to be incompatible with modernity, how do you feel about the modern, interconnected world?". Many have effectively decided to give up on modernity, and are becoming ever closer in their arguments and analysis to modernity's traitional enemies on the right. Others are starting to reaffirm the traditional 'left' support for the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and progress, along of course with ideas such as egalitarianism and an active role for government.

The second issue is of course the war in Iraq and, more generally, the question of what, if anything, should be the Western response to the ideas and movements of radical Islamism. Here there is an increasingly vocal movement on the left in favour of the war and of an aggresive response to Islamism. The people who take this view tend to also belong to the part of the left that is more comfortable with globalisation and the course that the modern world is clearly taking. Meanwhile opponents of the war are starting to move closer to the kind of critical position articulated by many on the right. My own position, which I'll no doubt elaborate, is that radical Islamism is indeed a threat that requires a robust response, but also that the policy followed by the US and Britain is not only mistaken but positively counterproductive.

The last time we saw a major ideological realignment was in the period between roughly 1880 and 1900, which saw the move from a division between classical liberals and traditional conservatives to one between socialists of various varieties and an alliance between modern conservatives and the remaining classical liberals. I think that in just a few years we will look back and realise that there has been another, equally sweeping reshuffling of the ideological pack.

Yesterday’s Financial Times contains a review, by James Harkin, of a remarkable new book:

Hugh Barnes, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg (2005).

"By what criteria should recherche historical figures be plucked from obscurity and granted a fresh lick of paint for a modern audience? Insofar as the reputation of Gannibal endures, it is chiefly because he is known for being the greatgrandfather of Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. Hugh Barnes, journalist and Russian scholar, wants to make amends for that, and succeeds brilliantly in his task.

The boy Abram Petrovich Gannibal, from humble origins in Ethiopia, became a godson to the Russian tsar Peter the Great via the unusual route of being bought as a child slave in Constantinople. He was initially regarded as nothing more than a curiosity; he was brought to Russia at a time, as Barnes records, when black people were routinely depicted as alien bogeyman figures. Very soon, however, Gannibal became much more important than that. By the age of 12, he was a soldier in the Russian army and was winning garlands for his courage in fighting in the war against Sweden. Very soon, he became Peter’s adviser and house-intellectual, as well as one of his most educated officers.

Peter hoped to introduce Russia to the outside world to create a more cosmopolitan kind of Russian, and his exotic godson became the perfect ambassador for his reformist ambitions. Gannibal became, says Barnes, “a polymath in the Enlightenment mould, a man of eclectic skills: a linguist, a diplomat, a cryptographer, a spy, and also on occasion an able military commander”.

The philosopher-soldier Gannibal was soon talking differential calculus with Leibniz and philosophy with Voltaire. His intellectual and practical career, Peter wrote proudly, “furnished the most striking proof of the injustice of that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority. He has immense spirit, a prodigious facility for study... [and] was blessed with a mobile and elevated character and an incorruptible probity”.

Gannibal’s chief talent, however, was for military strategy and intrigue. In a brilliant career he fought as a commissioned officer for the French against the Spanish, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-engineer.

He became the tsar’s spy in Paris, and even used his engineering genius to build a wall of fortifications around Russia from the Arctic Circle to China.

That a black slave should have shot up so high in the Russian elite is in itself a marvel. But Barnes wants to use the breadth of Gannibal’s experience as a foil for a much larger story, one which takes on everything from Russian literature to the geopolitics of Muslim slave-trading in Africa. For an essentially military man, Gannibal’s fate was supremely intertwined with Russia’s literary culture. Following his death, he seems to have pricked the conscience as well as the muse of Russian writers - his greatgrandson Pushkin, for example, wrote an unfinished and rather sentimental account of his ancestor, titled The Negro of Peter the Great. In the 20th century, Nabokov was moved to write an essay about Gannibal’s life. Even the man who first bought him from a slave market in Constantinople, the Russian ambassador Pyotr Tolstoy, was an ancestor of the novelist and author of War and Peace, Barnes points out. In an attempt to further enhance his mercurial hero, Barnes wants to make a case for him as the “Russian Othello” - a literary allusion too far, possibly. But then Gannibal’s personality, at least in Barnes’ telling, does resemble that of a Shakespearean hero - he was an insomniac who worried ceaselessly about his ancestry and his place in posterity.

Gannibal died in 1781, at the plum age of 85, in relative obscurity after having fallen foul of shifting court loyalties. His tombstone pays tribute to “a Russian mathematician, a builder of fortresses and canals”, but makes little mention of his military career.

In Barnes’ story, Gannibal appears as a self-shaper nimble enough to make a myth out of his own circumstances. It was only during his time in France, for example, that he began signing his name Gannibal, a Russian variant of Hannibal. Like other former enslaved Africans who made their way to the top of western societies, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho, Gannibal was something of a canny operator - he seems to have played his colonial hosts at their own game, alternately revelling in his exoticism and suggesting the nobility of his African origins, a claim which he never managed to corroborate.

That this former slave eventually became the owner of slaves is a delicious irony for a biographer. But Barnes makes it clear that even Gannibal’s formidable presence could do little to overturn intellectual racism. Even Montesquieu, he records, who tended towards the view that Africans were lazy and immoral, was impressed by Gannibal. Among friends such as Voltaire and Richelieu, says Barnes, “it was as if Gannibal’s wit bleached the pigment of his skin”.

Barnes has dug himself up a most engaging subject. He carries his story along in an unpretentious fashion, wearing his research lightly and never failing to intrigue. Only when it descends into travelogue - when Barnes walks around the places associated with Gannibal trying to sound reflective - does the pace begin to falter. The story is so rich that it has no need of being dressed up in this way.

Gannibal’s life made for an almost unique encounter between Europe and Africa. His story is all the more relevant, Barnes argues, because of the recent resurgence of racism in post-Soviet Russia. Nowadays, he says drily, many ordinary Russians take a rather dim view of the dark-skinned Muslim peoples of Chechnya and other republics. They are known disparagingly as the chorniye, or the blacks, of Russia. Among some Russian scholars, too, it remains controversial to point out their national poet should have had a negro ancestor.

While this may sound a little worthy, what Barnes has written is an intelligent Boy’s Own story, an adventure stuffed full of encounters with history - a ripping good yarn which has the merit of being entirely true."

From today's Detroit Free Press comes an interesting story about University Bank in Ann Arbor offering"Islamic Mortgages." Traditional interpretations of the Koran prohibit the charging of interest, making traditional mortgages not in Sharia (compliance with Islamic law). University Bank, like a small number of other banks around the country, offers a lease-to-own arrangement that has the same practical effect as a mortgage but without the explicit charging of interest. Because the overhead costs are higher than traditional mortgages (mainly because there's no secondary market, thus banks have to manage them in-house), they are slightly more expensive, but apparently devout Muslims are willing to pay that premium.

These mortgages have also posed some complications for regulators and insurance companies, who have to be persuaded to treat them like standard mortgages (the key difference being that the bank really does own the property not the residents). However, these seem to be getting resolved.

I'd argue that this sort of thing is an excellent example of how market capitalism is not a destroyer of unique cultures creating one"McWorld," but rather a flexible, dynamic set of institutions that can adapt to changes in the culture. It is only within the dynamism of the market that one can adapt ways of doing business that are"traditional" to one culture to the needs of another culture when those needs arise. So not only do we have US banks altering their practices to accommodate a distinct minority demand (something defenders of markets have long argued as one of their strengths), we also have a potential blueprint of how market institutions and practices can emerge in Muslim societies with very different ethical principles.

The best part to me is that these sorts of changes can happen in the market in small pockets and spread through imitation. They don't require extensive discussion and debate. They don't require a political voting process where the majority has to be persuaded to agree with the change. Can you imagine what it would take to make such a change in a world where banks were run by the state? The ecosystem of the market makes it much easier for a thousand flowers to bloom, and to accommodate the needs of a religous group whose numbers remain pretty small within the US.

Oh yeah, it's also another example to combat the belief that Muslims are being systematically discriminated against post 9/11.

I don't know whether it's the HNN server or my dial-up access that's preventing me from using the comments function, but something is, so I'll just have to add my hearty welcome to Steve Davies as a regular entry. I'm delighted to share blogspace with Steve, who, as David notes, is amazingly knowledgable (and is quite the raconteur I might add). Welcome aboard Steve!

I always enjoy reading the British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft even when I disagree with him. He is exceptionally well read and is consistently one of the most thoughtful and interesting commentators in Britain today. His new essay The Birth of ‘Mere Terror’ is no exception.

“Hiroshima wasn't uniquely wicked. It was part of a policy for the mass killing of civilians.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Let's all type in a round of applause to the newest member of the L and P fraternity: Stephen Davies, a professor of history at Manchester University.

It has been my pleasure to work alongside Steve in several venues, most notably seminars sponsored by the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies. As a scholar, he is a renaissance man of the first rank. He is one of the knowledgable people I know, whether the question at hand concerns the Sung dynasty or the history of Middle Eastern religions. He has written extensively on the private provision of services in Britain such as police, fire protection, and welfare, British individualist feminism, and the development of markets in urban history.

His books include A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (with Nigel Ashford) and Empiricism and History (Theory and History)

My article by that title is posted at The Future of Freedom Foundation site here.