2. Gilbert Murray: George Gilbert Aimé Murray (1866-1957) was an Australian-born classical Greek scholar and a supporter of the League of Nations and the United Nations. He is most famous for his translations of Greek classics, and he co-authored with Wells and seven others the volume The Idea of a League of Nations (1919).

  3. the Tower of Babel myth: Mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Genesis 11:1 -9, the construction of the Tower was undertaken by the descendants of Noah who wished to build it to Heaven as the centre of a great city. Their attempt angered God, however, who confounded their tongues so that they could not understand one another, preventing them from completing the Tower and scattering them across the land.

  4. Buddha: The title of the Indian Prince Gautama Siddhartha (c. 563-c. 483 bc), the founder of Buddhism, and meaning ‘the enlightened’.

  5. the Cro-Magnards: Cro-Magnon man (named after the area in France where the first skulls were found in 1868) are a variety of Homo sapiens which existed some 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. They were anatomically identical to modern humans, and skilled artists, hunters, artisans and musicians.

  6. Daedalus and Icarus: Figures of Greek mythology who built wings of feather and wax to escape imprisonment by King Minos of Crete. Icarus flew too close to the sun and, the wax of his wings melting, plunged to his death in the sea. Daedalus, his father, managed to fly to Sicily, where he built a temple to Apollo and hung up his wings as an offering to the god.

  7. the Second International: The Socialist Internationals were created as part of the ideology of class struggle and the need for the workers of the world to unite. The First International (the London Working Men’s Association) existed from 1864 to 1876. The Second International was formed in 1889, but collapsed in 1914 following its failure to prevent the outbreak of the Great War. The Third International (or Comintern) was founded in 1919 to promote world communist revolution but was dissolved in 1943. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to oppose Soviet policy, but it broke up in disagreement in 1953.

  8. Marx: Karl Marx (1818-83) was a German social, political and economic theorist and the inspiration behind international communism (Marxism). He was the author of many political tracts.

  9. Darwinism: The theory of evolution by natural selection as propounded by the biologist Charles Darwin (1809-82) in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

  10. communism: An ideology conceived in the nineteenth century which advocated that all property and authority be vested in the community, where all are regarded as equal and work for the common benefit. Communist theory declares the state superfluous, though in practice communist regimes have promoted the state as the collective expression of the community.

  11. the Utopian school of socialism: The socialism advocated by pre-Marxist thinkers, most notably Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Utopian socialism is generally small scale and communitarian and aims to spread through example.

  12. it produced its – Five Year Plan only in 1928 ce: In 1928 the Soviet Union launched the first Five-Year Plan. It was designed to efficiently industrialize the country and, in the process, to expedite the collectivization of farms. The plan aimed at making the Soviet Union self-sufficient and emphasized heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. It covered the period from 1928 to 1933, but was officially considered completed in 1932.

  13. the Georgian, Stalin: Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was the second leader of the Soviet Union, effectively succeeding Lenin, after a power struggle, in 1925. He initiated the economic Five-Year Plans and was a successful war leader during the Second World War, elevating the Soviet Union from an economically backward and isolated state to a superpower from the 1950s onwards.

  14. Trotsky: Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was the chief peace negotiator responsible for withdrawing Russia from the Great War (1918) and he was the founder and leader of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1917-22). Following Lenin’s death in 1923, Trotsky was engaged in a power struggle with Stalin which resulted in his exile in 1927 and his murder by Stalinist agents in Mexico in 1940. He was an internationalist who advocated the notion of perpetual revolution (Trotskyism).

  15. as Rostovtzeff pointed out at the time in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire: Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870-1952) was a Ukrainian-born classical historian and archaeologist who emigrated to the USA during the Russian Revolution. While his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926) is considered his masterpiece, he also published outstanding studies of Greek and Egyptian civilization.

  16. Emperor Diocletian: (245-313), Roman emperor (284-305) and one of the chief architects of the Roman recovery after the Barbarian assaults of the third century. He divided the empire into four divisions and proclaimed Maximilian (?-3io), Con-stantius Chloris (c. 250-306) and Galerius (?-3n) Caesars. This strategy improved the empire’s military efficiency, pushing the Barbarian invaders back in the north, in Britain and in Persia.

  17. the great French revolution: The French Revolution began in 1789 with the symbolic storming of the Bastille. The French Republic was proclaimed in 1792 but, following a Reign of Terror and the creation of Directory government, Napoleon Bonaparte performed a coup d’etat and declared himself First Consul of France in 1799.

  18. Left Wing Communism: V. I. Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920).

  19. the fascist regime in Italy: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) founded the Fasci d’ltaliani di Combattimento (Fascist Party) in Italy in 1919 and by 1922, at the invitation of King Victor Emanuel III (1869-1947), had formed a government. In 1924 all opposition parties and trade unions were banned and the fascist corporate state was established. Under the stresses of the Second World War, the regime collapsed in 1943 and Mussolini was executed in 1945.

  20. the tumult of the Nazi party in Germany: The National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) rose to power during the early 1930s behind the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler. In 1932 they became the largest party in the Reichstag and the following year Hitler was appointed Chancellor. In 1934 he merged that position with President to become the German Führer (leader) and, following the Reichstag Fire, was voted emergency powers with which he banned all opposition, eliminated his party rivals in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and declared the establishment of the Third Reich. The Nazis pursued expansionist policies seeking to unite all Germans under one regime and seeking to eliminate all non-Germans from the Reich. These policies culminated in the Second World War (1939-45) and the Holocaust, during which several million people, particularly Jews, were exterminated.

  21. the financial storm of the years 1928 and 192.9 CE: During 1928 financial speculation sent the New York stock market spiralling to new heights only to see it collapse spectacularly the following year with the ‘Wall Street Crash’. The crash resulted in a worldwide Great Depression (or ‘World Slump’) between 1929 and 1933, though the USA did not recovery economically until its involvement in the Second World War from 1941.

  22. the parting speech to America… French Prime Minister, Laval: In 1931 French premier Pierre Laval (1883-1945) visited President Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) in Washington to discuss war-loan repayments. Hoover advocated a moratorium on payments between all parties (this amounted to the USA sacrificing 257 million dollars owed to it), but Laval refused to write-off the 97 million dollars owed to France, primarily from Germany. Laval won wide respect for his tough stand against the American President, being named the Time magazine ‘Person of the Year’ for 1931.

  23. President Hoover of America: President of the USA from 1929 to 1933. He became unpopular with the electorate as a result of his opposition to direct governmental assistance for the unemployed during the Great Depression, or ‘Hoover Slump’ as it was sometime called.

  24. Mr Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937) was the first Labour Prime Minister of Britain (1924) who became notorious, during his second premiership (1929-35), for abandoning the Labour government (1931) in favour of a National Government dominated by Conservatives.

  25. the legendary Tantalus: Tantalus, in Greek myth, attempted to trick the gods into eating human flesh by preparing them a meal out of the meat of his son, Pelops. The gods discovered his trick and condemned Tantalus to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Each time he reached up to pick the fruit, or bent down to drink the water, they receded from his hand and he thus went hungry and thirsty. It is from this legend that we get the English word ‘tantalize’.

  26. a primitive form of entertainment in Western Europe and America called ‘Dissolving Views’… ‘Magic Lantern’: A magic lantern is an apparatus, popular in the nineteenth century, for projecting pictures on slides upon a screen. ‘Dissolving views’ are achieved by directing images from two or more lanterns (or a single lantern with multiple lenses) upon one spot on the screen and adjusting the light to make images fade in place of other images and then reappear.

  §3 THE ACCUMULATING DISPROPORTIONS OF THE OLD ORDER

  1. the gold sovereign: A British coin in use between 1817 and 1932 with a face value of one pound. Since 1932 gold sovereigns have been issued occasionally, often as commemorative pieces.

  2. The International Institute of Agriculture in Rome: Founded by David Lubin, a Polish-born American internationalist (1849-1919), in 1905, the IIA was an international agency supported by forty member-states throughout the world. It measured and forecast agricultural production, disseminated useful information to food producers and generally attempted to systematize agricultural production for the benefit of producers and consumers alike. In 1945 it was reorganized as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

  3. the Postal Union: The Universal Postal Union was founded in Berne, Switzerland, in 1874. With 189 member countries in 2004, the UPU is the primary forum for cooperation between postal services and helps to ensure a universal network of up-to-date products and services.

  4. International Government: Written in 1915 by Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880-1969), a writer and publisher who, with his wife Virginia (1882-1941), founded the Hogarth Press. He also wrote a five-volume autobiography (1960-69).

  5. the little old Fabian Society: The Fabian Society was founded in 1887 as a middle-class alternative to the Marxist and labourite socialist organizations then in existence. Having assisted in the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee (subsequently the Labour Party) in 1900, it became a constituent socialist society within the Labour Party from 1918. Wells was a member of the Society between 1903 and 1908.

  6. Lord Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (published in 1842): Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) was the English Poet Laureate between 1850 and 1892. His fame was established with his 1842 collection of Poems, in which he published ‘Locksley Hall’. His most famous work is In Memoriam (1850), a long poem twenty years in the making.

  7. Bolshevist reconstruction of communism: With the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, communist theory met political reality. In place of a self-organized community of workers and peasants as advocated by Marx, a strong central state was developed which controlled the means of production, distribution and exchange in the name of the working class. In place of democratic control, a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ emerged with all power vested in the Communist Party and its leader.

  8. Herbert Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), British philosopher who introduced sociology and positivism to Britain. He advocated social Darwinism in which societies evolve through competition and are engaged in the ‘survival of the fittest’. His works include Principles of Psychology (1855) and The Man Versus the State (1884).

  9. The Nurmi ratios in the blood: Although ‘Nurmi ratios’ appear to be Wells’s creation, the source for the reference was Paavo Nurmi (1897-1973), the Finnish distance runner who set forty world records and won nine gold and three silver medals at the Olympic Games between 1920 and 1928. He was renowned for sticking to a very strict fitness regime, and when, later in life, he contracted atherosclerosis (the hardening of the arteries) he used his vast wealth to establish the Paavo Nurmi Foundation in Helsinki to research its causes and seek a cure.

  10. From 1812 ce, when public gas-lighting was first organized: Gas lighting was first used in London in 1812 when the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company won the contract to supply 140 gaslights in Westminster.

  11. a chair of ‘Social Biology’ was set up in the London School of Economics – a chair of Social Psychology in the same college: In 1930 Lancelot Hogben (1895-1975) became the first Professor of Social Biology at the London School of Economics (LSE), University of London, but with his departure for the University of Aberdeen in 1937, no new appointment was made. From 1926 the LSE also considered establishing a Chair in Social Psychology, though the creation of professorships in this field only occurred from 1964 with the establishment of the Social Psychology Department.

  12.. the Second Fire of London: The ‘first’ Great Fire of London occurred in September 1666. Lasting five days, it destroyed virtually all of the medieval city.

  13. British Museum: Founded in London in 1753 to promote universal understanding through the arts, natural history and science in a public museum. It holds in trust for the nation and the world a collection of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures.

  14. Roman Empire: The Roman Empire dominated much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. As a united empire, it spanned 27 bc-ad 395. The empire was subsequently divided into east and west and spanned the period 395-476.

  §4 EARLY ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND AND DEAL

  WITH THESE DISPROPORTIONS: THE CRITICISMS

  OF KARL MARX AND HENRY GEORGE

  1. Henry George: Henry George (1839-97), American journalist and economic reformer who advocated a single tax on land as a remedy to poverty. He published Our Land and Land Policy (1870), Progress and Poverty (1877-79) and masses of journalism.

  2. the Tzarist collapse: In February 1917, as a result of Russian losses in the Great War and social unrest at home, revolution broke out, resulting in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. In July 1918 he and his family were executed at Yekaterinburg.

  3. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895): A German socialist who managed successful textile mills in Manchester. He supported Marx financially for many years, and was the author of The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845).

  4. the English socialist movement of Robert Owen: Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism. He organized the early cooperative movement and founded the first general trade union as well as establishing model communities at New Lanark, Scotland, and New Harmony, Indiana. His ideas are most clearly expressed in his book A New View of Society (1813).

  5. Das Kapital: Published in three volumes (1867-94), tne first was written by Karl Marx alone, while volumes two and three were completed after Marx’s death by Friedrich Engels.

  6. Communist Manifesto (1848): Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a programme for the socialist revolutionaries across Europe in 1848.

  7. Saturn, the Conservative head-god – how Jove bound Prometheus in his turn every lover of Shelley can tell: According to Greek mythology, Saturn was destined to be overthrown by his own son, so as each of his children was born, he devoured them. However, when Jove (or Jupiter) was born, his mother, Magna Mater, hid him from Saturn and instead gave Saturn a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he devoured. Eventually, Jove overthrew Saturn, and exiled him to Tartarus. Jove also chained Prometheus to a rock as a punishment for Prometheus offering the gods burnt sacrifices of unwholesome meat. Each day a vulture would eat Prometheus’s liver, which would grow back again only to be devoured the following day by the vulture. Although Prometheus was ultimately freed by Hercules, Jove made him wear a ring of metal and carry a stone as symbols of his earlier enchained state. Shelley told aspects of this story in his lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound (1820).

  8. the recorded struggles in the histories of Republican Rome and ]udaea – the year of Jubilee of the latter: In 63 bc Judaea became a client kingdom of Rome. There were three Judaean rebellions against Rome, in 66-70, 115-17 and 132-35. The second of these rebellions was caused by excessive taxation of the Judaean people. Plebeian secessions occurred in 494 bc, 450 BCand c. 287 bc, when the plebs would remove themselves in a body to a site outside Rome, and refuse to act in their normal roles unless their wishes were granted. The plebs’ actions eventually won them political rights within the Roman Republic. The Judaean year of Jubilee was celebrated every ninety-nine years as the year of liberty when the fields were left fallow, servants were freed and debts were annulled. The reference to the year of Jubilee in the text is probably to 7 bc, the supposed birth of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (c. 7 bc-c. ad 30).

  9. the legend of Joseph in Egypt: According to Genesis 37-50 Joseph was the eleventh of twelve sons of Jacob, born in Canaan. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him because he was his father’s favourite and received a multicoloured coat as a gift from him. The brothers therefore sold Joseph into slavery and rubbed goat’s blood on his coat to convince their father that Joseph was dead. Taken to Egypt, Joseph became renowned for interpreting dreams and when he correctly warned the Egyptian Pharaoh that his dreams foretold seven years of plenty and seven years of drought for Egypt, Joseph was made chief minister, and reunited with his family.

  10. Breasted Commemoration Fund: This fictitious fund gets its name from James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), the American archaeologist and historian who founded American Egyptology and created Chicago University’s Oriental Institute. He published Ancient Records of Egypt (1906) in which was transcribed every hieroglyphic transcription then known.