Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

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FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition AUGUST 2022 ISBN: 978-0-06-302144-0

Version 06062022

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-302142-6

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* For example, I never heard anyone refer to High Street as ‘The High’ when I was at Oxford, but G.V. Cox tells us otherwise.

* In Book IV, Chapter VII of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that the defence of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion. He writes: ‘Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.’ This view was not widely shared at the time.

* I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?

* William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, 1804.

* As Robin’s family had only recently migrated south, he had grown up speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese. But his Cantonese, Professor Lovell informed him, could now be forgotten. Mandarin was the language of the Qing imperial court in Peking, the language of officials and scholars, and therefore the only dialect that mattered.

This view is a side effect of the British Academy’s path dependency on scant previous Western research. Matteo Ricci’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was of the Mandarin dialect he learned at the Ming court; Francisco Varo, Joseph Prémare, and Robert Morrison’s Chinese dictionaries were also of Mandarin. Britain’s Sinologists of that era, then, were far more focused on Mandarin than on other dialects. And so Robin was asked to forget his preferred native tongue.

* ‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’

* Hampstead Heath rhymes with teeth. Example: ‘She’s still got all her baby hampsteads.’

* Dinner, sinner.

* A reasonable error. By rape, Pope meant ‘to snatch, to take by force’, which is an older meaning derived from the Latin rapere.

* Because he owned slaves.

* This was to be the last Marryat title Robin ever read. It was just as well. Frederick Marryat’s novels, though full of the high seas adventuring and valour that endeared them to young English boys, also portrayed Black people as happy, satisfied slaves and American Indians as either noble savages or dissolute drunks. Chinese and Indians he described as ‘races of inferior stature and effeminate in person’.

* As the weekly papers recorded the climbing death counts, Robin asked Mrs Piper why the doctors could not simply go around healing the sick with silver, as Professor Lovell had done to him. ‘Silver is expensive,’ responded Mrs Piper, and that was the last they ever spoke of it.

* Here Mr Hallows forgets that chattel slavery, wherein slaves were treated as property and not persons, is a wholly European invention.