A Short, Fun History of Policing London from American Gaming Channel "Extra Credits"

... in five chapters. While the Government attempts to ban protests that make noise and historians who teach history, here's fifty minutes of stuff I wish I'd been taught:

 

 

 Episode 1 takes us to the beginning of the eighteenth century, a huge boom in personal property, new laws, no prisons, a subsequent boom in death sentences (proving no deterrent), citizen's arrests, bounty hunters, and teflon-coated gang-lord and "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild.

 

 

 Episode 2 sees Wild and his growing Gangland Empire brought down by the popularity of renegade street rat and escape artist Jack "He went that-a-way" Sheppard, who plugged his own biography on the scaffold.
 

 

 Episode 3 sees novelist and banned-playwright-turned-lawyer Henry Fielding rustle up both the country's first state-funded court, open to the public, and the city's first police force, assembled surreptitiously from parish constables bearing batons stuffed with arrest warrants.

 

 

 Episode 4 sees Fielding's Bow Street model of law enforcement become acknowledged – if not adopted – nationwide, Henry's brother John starts to tackle the causes of crime, Elizabeth Fry attempts prison reform, and, facing an age of revolution, Home Secretary Robert Peele considers instituting a force trained to arrest people without killing them.

 

 Finally, despite a strong popular distaste for the very foreign idea of a salaried police force, Episode 5 sees Peele gets his wish in 1829... 

"Parliament was even ready to fund the police force directly through taxes, which was the single largest thing that had held the establishment of a force back. They were also starting to get an inkling that some things could simply not be outsourced or made to pay for themselves – an ethos that had ceated Jonathan Wild. It was that same ethos, by the way, that had led to the colonial taxes that lost Britain the American Colonies, allowed the East India Company to run amok in India, and would later hobble efforts to combat the 'Irish Potato Famine'. A lot of problems in this era arose from British Parliament just flat out not wanting to pay for stuff while still reaping whatever benefits it gave them."

 Imagine being taught that.

 And how is it that, despite an A Level in History, I only heard about the South Sea Bubble from Not The Nine O'Clock News, "The Great Hunger" from The Pogues and the East India Company from a joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, ?

 I mean, I know why.

Who's Better Though, Greeks or Persians? There's Only One Way To Find Out... WATCH VIDEOS!

 I spotted this board game in the window of a charity shop in Clapham back in - let me check... September. Wait, September? That is... That's only two months ago! But it feels like... - 2020 has seemed so long, yet the days have seemed so short. Anyway... I had often wondered where the concept of "Western Civilization" came from, given it seemed to refer to influences from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and what I'll call the Bible Lands, all of which as shown in the map above lie to the North, South and East of the Mediterranean. My confusion however was lifted by the following short, computer-game-sponsored video from "Extra Credits" (and its sequel). I've a lot of time for "Extra Credits". Apparently it's the Greek historian Herodotus who first spun the idea of a pan-Greek identity in his account of the battle of Thermopylae against Persia, the battle depicted in the film 300, the battle the Greeks actually lost. In fact, as the video goes on to explain, the Hellenic alliance would be incredibly short-lived, and Sparta would turn on a rebuilt Athens before the century was over...

 

 In this short window between invasions however, the city-state of Athens would produce the Parthenon, the plays of Aeschylus (the Oresteia), Euripides (Medea) and Sophocles (Oedipus!), the philosophy of Socrates, the sculpture of Phidias, and a culture war between the rule of law and contrarian personality cults whose models bring us pretty much bang up to date.

 

Thanks again, Larry Gonick. 

 

 The influence of the team on the left hand side of the map, in other words, has not been overstated. But it's worth remembering that this fight against "Oriental despotism" (as the Persian Empire is described below in a Sunday Times publication from 1960 enigmatically titled Mainly For Children) fought for at Thermopylae and more successfully a few months later at Salamis, masterminded by Greeks who would later seek comfortable retirement themselves in that same Persian Empire, was a fight for freedom only inasmuch as it was a fight for self-determination, the freedom to, among other things, keep slaves, a model that again brings us pretty much bang up to date.

 On other pages: "Why Bother About Space?" by Colin Ronan, "The Chronicle Of The Great Carp" by Clifford Parker, and "Australian Animals I Have Met" by Axel Poignant.

Ships, Sea and the Snark

  
A whatsapp map created for refugees,
presented by Professor Marie Gillespie,

in which distances are measured in money.

 This week's episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich might be the the ships-sea-and-the-starriest one yet, because it deals with navigation. Not just the treasures of cartography, but the Pacific star maps being recommitted to memory by modern Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson - an account of which you can hear me reading at 5:25 - and the Global Positioning System, or GPS, originally reserved for the American military until it was unscrambled for general use in January 2000. Other systems are now available of course, just not the EU's, because we're leaving it. On a completely unrelated-to-Brexit note, I also get to rattle through some Hunting of the Snark at 34:30. 

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"  (Source.)

 Marie Gillespie also brings a bag refashioned by a refugee solidarity network on Lesbos from one of a million lifejackets now left on the beaches of Greece, and if you fancy further clicks Extra Credits just produced a nice series on Austronesian navigation which you can watch here, and you can give to the Refugee Council here.