I start from an episode in history that seems interesting to me. With each of my books, I started from a political, social or economic story that fascinated me. I couldn’t find anything notable from the late 17th century. For now, anyway. That’s the only reason for the 200 year jump.
That 7-year-old boys can work 14 hours a day, from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. My grandfather started in coal mining at 13 years old. But 7 years is cruel.
Steam automated jobs that people had been doing in their homes for centuries. There is a loom in a museum in Manchester that replaced 560 women. But industrialization eventually raised wages because people worked in a factory rather than in a village often terrorized by a tyrannical nobleman (squire). With AI, there will be winners and losers. Car drivers will certainly lose out. But this morning I asked an AI tool to write a Ken Follett chapter. It was incredibly bad. Full of clichés, green meadows, hills, the wind of war. That relieved me.
European nations responded with repression to the French Revolution, especially. Because of the threat of the guillotine. Two laws in particular reduced personal rights in Britain to a level not seen since the Middle Ages.
Unions in the 1970s overreached and became unpopular. The coal strike in the early 1980s was called by Arhtur Cargill, who was far left. They destroyed the industry. Thatcher took advantage of it. It is because of far-left union leaders that today’s low-income earners are paid below the minimum wage.
In A Pillar of Fire people were tortured because of their faith. In the 18th century there were still tensions, but Methodist churches were not burned. I describe the first steps of religious freedom. Today, we don’t even know who is Catholic, Protestant or atheist.
I admire Napoleon a lot, even though he was a dictator who killed a lot of people. In Waterloo he had a corps of ambulance men, while British soldiers depended on the women who accompanied them. His soldiers were well fed, unlike the enemy soldiers. But if I had wanted to have a French perspective, I would have needed two or three other characters, to follow them to Italy, to Russia, and I already had six.
We do not have to ask them for permission to write that they do not think like us, that they do not have the same respect for freedom. We don’t tell them how to behave. Simply, you must know that the rights for which our ancestors fought do not exist in these countries.
This is an excellent book, even if Hague has a conservative point of view. I told him about Pitt’s attempts to strip people of the few human rights they had. He agrees that it was not a good thing.
