The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions

The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions

Edited by Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

ISBN 978-1-108-42993-1, $155 USD

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

A large compendium of some thirty chapters covering the history of the polar regions, produced by the oldest and one of the most illustrious academic presses in the world and written by experts in their fields, is a mouthwatering prospect for anyone with an interest in the human history of either or both poles. Here, one would hope, is a chance to see a snapshot of the latest scholarship, perhaps the fruits of archival research or archaeological investigation, a chance to gain the most authoritative available overview of Arctic archaeology and history in the grand twelve-millennia sweep of the Holocene, and of the great two-century quest to understand and explore the formidable ice continent of Antarctica. A chance to reflect on the differences and similarities between the history of the two regions, and to gain a sense of their complex interconnection with the history of the temperate latitudes where most of us live.

Such is the prospect. All the greater, then, is the disappointment on finding the opportunity so comprehensively missed. To give credit first where it is due: the production functions performed for CUP by freelancers – the creation of the many excellent maps, the copy-editing, the typesetting and printing – have all been done to an impressively high standard. But the book their work has adorned has not been worth the care and treasure spent on it, despite the virtues of its many excellent individual chapters. With no sense of a central guiding intelligence, each chapter is simply a silo unconnected to, and seemingly unaware of the contents of, any of its neighbours.

The cause of the failure is most clearly seen in the editors’ introduction, tellingly titled “The problems of polar history.” Their primary desire, it seems, is not to tell the history but to problematize it, to explain why a narrative is problematic rather than actually giving us the narrative in the first place so we can judge for ourselves how problematic it might be. Exploration in particular is the activity that dare not speak its name here, and the underlying reason is not hard to find. Howkins and Roberts write:

“One person’s unknown frontier is another person’s cherished homeland. Even if the category of the explorer were to be broadened to encompass more than just the Europeans who build a historical edifice around that label, it would privilege encounter over habitation.” (p. 22)

Quite apart from the fact that a large portion of the land “encountered” (from Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and the New Siberian Islands and the far-northern parts of the Canadian archipelago at one end of the Earth to the entirety of Antarctica at the other) was never anyone’s “cherished homeland” before its discovery by Europeans, the contrast the editors go on to posit is a false one: it is not encounter and habitation that are at odds in a putative history of the polar regions. The only meaningful divide in writing any history is between things that are potentially available to historical investigation and those that are not. Assuming we can allow a generous definition of history that encompasses oral tradition and archaeological data as well as written records – despite the varying granularity of their information – there is no reason at all why the histories of encounter and habitation should not both be told. The archaeologist Robert McGhee masterfully achieved precisely this synthesis in The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (OUP, 2005), an important work the current editors show no sign of being aware of.

But there seems to be a further objection to the inclusion of exploration:

“Our claim is that polar history aggregates and indeed magnifies inherent problems with Arctic history or Antarctic history by per definition privileging explorers and scientists – the categories of practitioner for whom the polar regions have meaningful commonalities. The need to identify that which both polar regions have in common necessarily marginalizes that which is particular or unique. Such an approach can erase Indigenous cultures and undermine local ways of knowing.” (p. 10, my emphasis)

If the adequate treatment of a subject required the editors unavoidably – “per definition”, by their own admission – to cover a central aspect of it, yet they were unwilling to do so, it would perhaps have been more honest of them to have declined the task so that it could be passed on to someone capable of it. Note also the passage’s zero-sum thinking (so characteristic of the identitarianism of which the sacralization of Indigenous peoples is a part): the idea that any space given to an unfavoured perspective is space actively taken away from a perspective you prefer (the weasel word here is “necessarily”, a word that no logic or evidence supports). The fact that space in the realm of ideas is not fixed, and can expand with every new perspective that emerges, seems beyond their grasp. Instead, simply invoking the threat of this supposed marginalization is, ironically, sufficient reason to justify their own actual marginalization of exploration in the history of the Arctic and Antarctic, or at least in this one.

Given this opening credo, one might assume that Indigenous history would feature heavily in the book. In fact, as we shall see, the glaring lacunae in coverage extend to this area as much as to exploration. Perhaps apart from subject emphasis and selection, what has gone awry is the simple ability to manage a large project:

“Our aim has been to assemble a set of chapters that make arguments about an aspect of polar history rather than attempting the futile task of comprehensive coverage.” (p. 24)

It’s not often that the editors of a collection throw up their hands and frankly proclaim at the outset the futility of the task that their book’s title seems to promise. It is easy to miss how insulting this is to the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic (the half of their purview that actually has Indigenous inhabitants): the notion that there is no point in even attempting to write about their history in any systematic, thorough, joined-up way – in other words, with the application of an intellectual cohesion that the editors dismiss, ludicrously, as a “Eurocentric ‘God’ perspective” (p. 22), as if non-Europeans were incapable of, or had some natural hostility towards, a synthetic and synoptic approach to history. Can anyone imagine the editors of a multi-contributor History of Africa, or South America, or any part of Asia, getting away with such a shameless Gallic shrug of lackadaisical indifference?

The publisher is equally to blame for this state of affairs: if the editors abdicated their responsibility to brief their authors adequately, CUP’s commissioning editor seems also to have failed to brief Howkins and Roberts – or if she did, to have monitored what was happening and pulled them into line when it became clear they had so thoroughly lost their way. What results, sadly, has not earned the right to be called a “Cambridge History of” anything at all. A “Companion,” perhaps, or a “Handbook” – a disjointed set of individual chapters all conceived without reference to each other – but not a history. To be worthwhile, a regional history must be more than just three or four journal issues’-worth of random articles. It must have meaningfully sustained connecting threads – chronological, thematic, methodological – as well as cross-references that show each author has had a chance to read related contributions, that together provide an overall telos to the sequence of individual chapters.

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Of course none of this is the fault of the actual authors of those individual chapters, all of whom have seriously addressed their given (or perhaps chosen) subjects, and most of whom have achieved a creditable survey of their field, even if they seem to have been left to rely on guesswork to define the chronological and thematic boundaries of their contribution.

Emblematically placed first is a chapter by Inuit hunter George Angohiatok, describing the social and particularly environmental changes he has seen during his lifetime based around Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, but given a longer perspective by also drawing on the cultural memory of his parents and their ancestors preserved in oral tradition. The equivalent starting point (by Martin Siegert and Andrew Fountain) for Antarctica, a continent lacking Indigenous inhabitants, accesses deep time instead through the disciplines of geology and glaciology to describe the slow evolution of the continent’s ice sheet. Bjarne Grønnow then takes us into the archaeological evidence that describes “The initial peopling of the circumpolar north” – a fine summary but one that, as we shall see, has been left to do too much heavy lifting on its own – followed by “The Norse settlement of Greenland” (Jette Arneborg). Archaeology then merges with documentation in “Russia, the first Arctic empire, 1000–1917” (Ryan Tucker Jones, Alexei Kraikovski and Julia Lajus). The latter two chapters of course contain aspects that are usually described as “exploration”, but since in these territories the end-point is settlement, this seems to pass the Howkins and Roberts sniff test. After a chapter on the slow emergence of Antarctica in the mapping efforts of the nineteenth century (Erki Tammiksaar and Cornelia Lüdeke), Russell Potter, writing about “Sir John Franklin and the Northwest Passage in myth and memory,” not only describes something of the cultural history of Euro-American thinking on the passage and Franklin’s last expedition but manages to sneak in a potted history of some of its earlier exploration by sea and land. Stephanie Barczewski’s following chapter on “The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, 1890 to the present” seems to present the most obvious challenge to the editors’ distaste for the subject, though her focus is more on how views of the age’s image of patriotic masculinity have evolved, been critiqued and reinterpreted by subsequent generations.

After this sequence of broad-sweep chapters, roughly chronological though with large lacunae within and between them, any semblance of systematic linkage between the chapters breaks down. In the remaining two-thirds of the book some historical surveys are still to be found, such as Janice Cavell’s “Canada and the high Arctic islands, 1880–1950” and Andy Bruno and Ekaterina Kalameneva’s “Creating the Soviet Arctic, 1917–1991.” A welcome southern-hemisphere perspective comes from Pablo Fontana’s chapter on “The Antarctic extension of Latin America,” about the competing sectoral claims of Chile, Argentina and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, though it is telling how minor is the adjustment of language needed for the traditional anti-British resentment lurking close to its surface to be re-cast into the politically more stylish jargon of anti-colonialism. (For an example of proud Argentine nationalism, written at the very time about which Fontana is so exercised yet unclouded by such xenophobia, one need only look to José Manuel Moneta’s memoir Four Antarctic Years in the South Orkney Islands.)

Alongside these chapters the remainder of the book intersperses thematically defined essays such as “Industrial whaling in the Arctic and Antarctic” (Bjørn Basberg and Louwrens Hacquebord) and “The first century of US militarization in Alaska, 1867–1967” (Matthew Farish). Mark Nuttall’s chapter on “The rise of circumpolar political movements” successfully combines both approaches and brings us up to date with the most important new force – Indigenous self-determination – to emerge in the Arctic regions in the last half-century. The thematic chapters are fascinating in their own right, and one of them, Dolly Jørgenson’s “Moving muskoxen as an Arctic resource in the twentieth century,” I found the most purely enjoyable in the whole book, describing the varied success with which attempts have been made to establish commercially viable colonies of muskoxen around the circumpolar world as a new string to the Arctic economy’s bow.

But such chapters also most forcefully show the baleful results of the editors’ laissez-faire approach. Given what has been left out of the book, whether deliberately or inadvertently, it is hard to imagine how a chapter on such an arcane and small-scale topic as a few mostly failed attempts at muskoxen farming could justify its place in any responsibly and knowledgeably conceived one-volume history of the polar regions, though it would make a fine standalone journal article. So too with Elizabeth Leane’s “Representing the polar regions through historical fiction” or Carl-Jösta Ojala’s “Archaeology, politics, and Sámi heritage”, which is solely concerned with the present-day political struggle between governments, NGOs and institutions to control the interpretation of Sámi culture. One is literary criticism, the other is contemporary sociological reportage, and despite their real merits, neither are history, and they have no place in the present volume.

So what has been left out? Among other things, and in no particular order:

·       The entire history of Iceland, which is a member of the Arctic Council and, despite lying just south of the Arctic circle, is nevertheless further north than most of the population of Greenland. More importantly, its climate is subpolar, shaping its history and culture, shared with Scandinavia and the former Norse settlements of Greenland, making them indelibly Arctic in character.

·       The long migration and settlement of the Thule Inuit from the western to the eastern North American Arctic and the Greenlandic seaboard, supplanting the Tuniit as they spread. The Tuniit (Dorset culture) are admirably treated in Grønnow’s chapter but he stops before the Thule migration, perhaps assuming it would be covered in another author’s chapter that then never materialized (or perhaps was never commissioned). 

·    Any serious treatment of the Sámi as historical actors (rather than as cultural pawns in a current-day power game).

·    Any detailed discussion of the migrations and settlements of most Indigenous Siberian peoples: again it is Grønnow who provides the pre- and early-Holocene foundation, but how the Chukchi, Evenki, Nenets, Dolgan and their many subdivisions emerged and established themselves before their fleeting appearance in Jones et al.’s chapter on Russian expansion is a tale left unattempted.

·    The entire effort of European maritime exploration of the far north in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries – many dozens of expeditions from several nations – with its accompanying cartography, geographical theorizing, and commodification of Arctic resources. Anyone who has looked at a map and wondered how such names as Baffin, Davis and Hudson became attached to such large geographical features in the Arctic will search in vain for any enlightenment here.

With proper planning by the publisher, and an appropriate degree of real work by the editors, all of these areas could have been covered, and through careful briefing of authors could have been properly integrated with their chronologically, geographically, and thematically abutting chapters to make a collection that was also a coherent whole. But the Cambridge History of the Polar Regions we actually got is sadly not made of such whole cloth; instead we have a threadbare garment patched together from different materials – yet still full of gaping holes.