by Tom Phillips
On the plus side, I guess, they probably help keep the insect population down?
5 MORE SPECIES WE PUT IN PLACES THEY SHOULDN’T BE
Cats
Everybody loves cats. Except in New Zealand, which didn’t have any predatory mammals until we brought them with us—which was bad news for the local species, particularly the plump, flightless parrot the kakapo.
Cane Toads
Like the rabbits, cane toads (natives of South America) were introduced into Australia with good intentions—in this case, to eat a pest, cane beetles. They didn’t eat the cane beetles. They ate almost everything else, though.
Gray Squirrels
When the American gray squirrel was introduced to Britain and Ireland, it immediately started throwing its weight around and bullying the native red squirrel close to extinction.
Asian Tiger Mosquito
A particularly annoying and potentially disease-spreading mosquito (it feeds at all hours, unlike many other species), it’s notable for how it hopped continents—it traveled from Japan to America in 1985 in a shipment of used tires.
Northern Snakehead
Look, if you’re going to introduce an Asian species into America, maybe don’t make it a ravenous carnivorous fish that can walk across land and survive for days out of water? That’s just asking for trouble.
4
Follow the Leader
As human societies grew more complex, with villages becoming towns becoming cities, we were forced to confront a problem that’s common to any large group faced with a complicated task—whether that’s founding a civilization or working out where to go for dinner. Ultimately, you need someone to make a decision.
We don’t know much about how the earliest human societies organized themselves. Human nature being what it is, it’s a good bet that there have always been people who liked bossing other people around, but it’s not entirely clear when this became an actual job rather than just a hobby.
What we do know is that (as already mentioned) not long after the origin of agriculture, humanity invented inequality. Well done, humans. Archaeologists can tell this by looking at the sizes of houses in early settlements. To begin with, there’s not much difference between them. The societies seem to be fairly egalitarian. But over the first few thousand years after humans began planting crops, an elite starts to emerge who have much larger and fancier houses than everybody else. In the Americas, this rising inequality seems to hit a plateau after about 2,500 years of agriculture; but in the Old World, it just keeps on going up and up. Why? One possible explanation is that the Old World had draft animals like horses and cattle, which could be used for transport and to plow fields, which better enabled the creation of personal wealth that could be passed on down the generations. And thus the 1 percent were born.
At some point, these elites stop just being a bit richer than everybody else, and start actually ruling over them. Spiritual or religious leaders were probably the closest thing the earliest city-states had to rulers, but then something changes around 5,000 years ago in both Egypt and Sumer (modern-day Iraq), and we get the first examples of everybody’s favorite mode of government—absolute dynastic monarchy! There’s a Sumerian stone tablet that very helpfully lists all the kings (and a single solitary queen) in order, which means that it’s possibly a record of the first kings in human history. Unhelpfully, however, a lot of it is clearly bollocks. The first king mentioned on it, Alulim, is recorded as having ruled for 28,800 years, which frankly seems unlikely given that it’d mean he’d still have over 22,000 years of his reign left today.
Why, exactly, does humanity opt again and again for the “put one dude in charge of everything” approach to decision-making? Obviously, they may not have had much choice: the first rulers might have seized power by force, or some other form of coercion. But it also seems likely to be linked to war—the pharaonic dynasty in Egypt begins when Egypt is unified by conquest, and the kings of Sumer emerge during a period of growing intercity conflict. A little while later, in 2334 BCE, after a few hundred years of Sumerian kings, they were conquered by neighboring king Sargon of Akkad, who was busy establishing the world’s first empire. In Mexico, in the valley of Oaxaca, archaeologists can see this all play out in one location. The settlement of San José Mogote starts out as a small, egalitarian, nonhierarchical village shortly after the adoption of agriculture around 3,600 years ago. Over the next millennium or so, minor conflicts with neighboring villages escalate, and wealth and inequality increase, until by 2,400 years ago it’s being ruled as a chiefdom, the valley is falling into a state of war and the population of San José Mogote has moved up a mountain and started building a defensive wall.
“Which came first, the leaders or the wars?” is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, but the two certainly seem to go hand in hand—and unfortunately for everybody else, it’s not something you can really opt out of if you’d rather stay as a small, egalitarian village. In good news for fans of war, we’ll have more on war in a couple of chapters, but for now let’s focus on the leaders.
I know it’s hard to believe in our fortunate, enlightened times, but occasionally the people who become the leaders of countries aren’t actually terribly well suited to the job. In fact, it’s actually not that surprising: you probably have to be at least a bit weird to start with to even want to run a country. Some of us have enough trouble choosing what socks to wear in the morning—imagine actually wanting to choose what socks a whole nation should wear?
Of course, there are lots of different types of leaders, and plenty of ways that countries can end up stuck with them. You’ve got your different flavors of autocrat: the hereditary dynasties, the ruling by divine right, the seizing of power by force and various types of dictator. Oh, and you’ve also got democratic elections. We’ll take a quick spin through the screw-ups of democracy in the next chapter; in this chapter, we’ll take a look at some of history’s most incompetent, awful and just plain weird autocrats.
Let’s start with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, a man who shaped our modern world to a quite staggering degree through his combination of a farsighted vision and a brutal but effective approach to getting things done. Unfortunately for him, he also blew it with a classic bit of delusional supervillain-style overreach.
Qin united the seven warring kingdoms of China into a single country through the cunning diplomatic tactic of conquering all of them. Nobody had ever managed this before: in 222 BCE, at a time when Rome was only just beginning to ponder properly expanding beyond Italy and getting itself an empire, Qin was founding a vast political entity that would outlast them all.
Not only did he manage that, but he did so while instituting a series of reforms that would set standards for how a modern country should be organized: reducing the influence of feudal lords and establishing a centralized bureaucracy, standardizing writing, money and measurement systems and building key communications infrastructures such as a huge network of roads and an early mail service. Oh, and he started work constructing the first sections of what would become the Great Wall.
So...what’s so wrong with Qin, then? Well, unfortunately, he did all this by suppressing all opposition, banning opposing philosophies, executing people who disagreed with him and violently forcing peasants into slavery for his construction projects. That probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given how things in history tend to play out.
What is a bit more surprising is what he used all his unprecedented centralized power and widespread communication networks for: in short, to make his subjects hunt for the elixir of life.
Qin, being an ambitious sort, was obsessed with immortality, and was convinced that by unleashing the power of his new state he could brute-force his way to finding the secret of everlasting life. He sent out demands across the nation, roping in everybody from doctors to soldiers to tradesmen in the most remote parts of the country to contrib
ute to his search. He ran his personal quest like a major government initiative, with his central court receiving regular progress reports from various outposts, and samples of herbs and potions being sent for his consideration. As part of it, all doctors had to register with the state. In some ways, it was an early form of centralized health system. In other ways, it really wasn’t.
Sadly for Qin, it didn’t work out as a great health system from his point of view. In true supervillain form, his search for immortality was his downfall: it’s believed that many of the would-be elixirs of life he sampled contained mercury. Which, naturally, killed him. (And quite probably drove him mad from mercury poisoning before he died, which obviously is exactly what you want in a power-hungry absolutist ruler whose every word is law.)
By the time he died, everybody was so pissed off with Qin that they revolted almost immediately after he left the stage, overthrowing his heir a few years after his death. Qin’s dynasty didn’t last, even if the country he founded is a superpower to this day. They never did find the secret of everlasting life, though.
Sticking with China, but fast-forwarding about 17 centuries to 1505, if you want a helpful guide on why it’s best not to put someone with the temperament of a spoiled child in charge of a country, then the Zhengde Emperor (born Zhu Houzhao) is probably a pretty good place to start.
His distaste for actually doing any of the work of ruling, when he’d much rather be off hunting tigers or sleeping with absurd numbers of women, was one thing. Not ideal, but, eh, you work with what you’ve got.
What was weirder was when he invented an alter ego for himself—a dashing military leader called General Zhu Shou—and started giving this imaginary general orders to go and fight battles in the north, which, in character as Zhu Shou, he would of course dutifully follow. And which, by a remarkable coincidence, just happened to take him away from his work for many months.
That was definitely weird.
But probably not quite as weird as the fact that he had a full-size replica of a city market built inside the palace grounds, and would force all his most senior officials and military leaders to dress up as shopkeepers and play-act at being tradesmen so that he could dress like a commoner and walk around the market pretending to buy things. And if he caught any of them looking even a bit grumpy about this profoundly humiliating waste of time, they’d be fired, or worse.
Yep, that bit was probably the weirdest.
Oh, and there was also that time he decided it was a good idea to store all his gunpowder inside the palace just before a lantern festival. Which ended pretty much exactly how you would expect it to: explosively. (He survived the fire, but then died at the age of 29 from a disease he caught falling out of a boat. Twat.)
One problem with hereditary systems is that they do quite often end up with someone being in charge who clearly would rather be doing anything else but ruling. It was the case with the Zhengde Emperor, and it was also the case with poor Ludwig II of Bavaria. Unlike most of the other rulers on this list, “Mad King Ludwig” was mostly harmless; he just wasn’t remotely into any of the things that were expected of the King of Bavaria. Instead, he preferred to devote his life to making things extremely fabulous.
When you look at the history of supposed madness in rulers, it’s hard not to spot that many cases that feature on lists of “maddest monarchs” have something in common. Namely, the people in charge of writing history seem to be using “insanity” or “eccentricity” as a code for “insufficiently heterosexual.” (Shout-out in particular to Queen Christina of Sweden, who refused to marry, preferred wearing masculine clothing and having uncombed hair and had what today would probably be referred to as a “gal pal.” When put under pressure to find a husband, she instead renounced the throne, left Sweden dressed as a man and moved to Rome, where she entered the city on horseback dressed as an Amazon.)
We can only ever tentatively guess at the actual sexual orientation of historical figures (and we need to remember that the idea of “gay” as a specific, distinct identity only became solidified in Western societies within the last 150 years or so). That said, it still seems a pretty safe call to state that Ludwig II was super-super-gay.
Ludwig was a shy, creative daydreamer who was profoundly uninterested in the business of politics or leading an army. Instead, when he became king in 1864 at the relatively tender age of 19, he withdrew from public life and dedicated his reign to becoming a patron of the arts. What’s more, he was pretty good at it.
He poured resources into the theater, hiring top talent and turning Munich into a cultural capital of Europe. He was a devoted fan of Wagner and became his personal patron, funding and supporting the composer to produce his late-career masterpieces after everybody else tried to run him out of town for being a knob. And above all, there were the castles.
Ludwig wanted Bavaria to be filled with fairy-tale castles. Getting theatrical stage designers rather than architects to plan them, he spent extravagantly on a series of increasingly ornate and flamboyant palaces—Schloss Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee and particularly the dramatic Schloss Neuschwanstein, perched on a rocky Alpine outcrop near his childhood home.
Schloss Neuschwanstein
All of this was very troubling to the great and the good of Bavaria. It wasn’t exactly that Ludwig was inattentive to his duties—he would speed through his paperwork so he could get back to his true passions—but he was piling up debt to fund his artistic endeavors, hated appearing at public functions and his main interest in military matters seems to have been that the cavalry was full of hot guys.
And then there was the issue of an heir. As kings usually were, Ludwig was under constant pressure to marry and have children. He got engaged to a duchess who shared his love of Wagner, but as the wedding date came closer, he postponed it over and over again, before finally calling it off. He never even came close to marrying again.
Eventually, as Ludwig’s debts increased and his plans for future castles got more and more elaborate, his enemies at court decided to act, and followed the time-honored route of having him declared insane. Now, the idea that some mental health issues might have run in Ludwig’s family isn’t out of the question (his aunt Alexandra thought she had a glass piano inside her body, although that didn’t stop her going on to have a literary career). But of the four eminent doctors that the conspirators persuaded to sign off on Ludwig’s diagnosis, none had ever examined him, and only one of them had ever even met him (12 years earlier). Among their evidence of his clear unfitness to rule was the damning fact that he forbade a servant to put milk in his coffee.
But the ruse worked, and despite the best efforts of a friendly baroness who temporarily fought off the government commissioners with her umbrella, Ludwig was deposed, and taken to be imprisoned (sorry, “treated for his health”) in a castle south of Munich. The suspicion that not everything was entirely aboveboard about all this is only increased by the fact that three days later, Ludwig and his doctor were both found dead in a shallow lake, in what can only be described as “mysterious circumstances.”
But in some ways, Ludwig had the last laugh. All those castles that he spent so lavishly on? They’re now globally famous—Schloss Neuschwanstein is the iconic representation of Bavaria around the world—and attract millions of visitors a year, all of which is pretty good news for the Bavarian economy. If the plotters hadn’t stopped Ludwig’s future plans by deposing him, who knows how much more the Bavarians might have now. The person who fucked up here wasn’t poor daydreaming Ludwig. It was them.
Even if you’ve never heard of Schloss Neuschwanstein, you’ve still seen it a hundred times. Its romantic turrets and spires were the direct inspiration for the castles in Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, which themselves became synonymous with the world’s biggest entertainment company. Any time you see that shooting star sprinkling its fairy dust over the castle in Disney’s logo, you’re watching Ludwig’s
dream living on.
Ludwig was far from the only leader whose dreams and talents lay in a different direction to the business of ruling. His love of building castles was at least a vocation that sits in vaguely the right ballpark for a monarch. A less suitable career would be one, say, as an enthusiastic and indefatigable pickpocket.
Now, if the only notable thing that Farouk I of Egypt had done in his life was to pickpocket Winston Churchill’s watch while taking part in a crucial meeting during World War II, then he might be remembered a bit differently. He would have gone down in history at worst as a mild eccentric; at best, as an absolute legend who was basically the King of Banter.
But Farouk did not stop there.
Despite being richer than any of us could ever dream, Farouk—the second and final adult King of Egypt—just bloody loved stealing things. He would steal things from the great and the good, and he would steal things from commoners. He had one of the most notorious pickpockets in Egypt released from prison just so that he could teach him how to steal things better. When the body of the recently deceased Shah of Iran was resting in Egypt on its way to Tehran, Farouk literally stole a jeweled sword and other valuables from out of the coffin. (Unsurprisingly, this caused something of a diplomatic incident.)
It wasn’t just stealing that marked Farouk out as perhaps not great king material. He was renowned for his appetite, partying and lavish lifestyle. Once described as “a stomach with a head,” after becoming king as a handsome teenager he rapidly ballooned in size to over 280 pounds. He was so fond of his official car, a red Bentley, that he decreed that nobody else in Egypt could own a red car. He built up a vast collection of low-grade pornography. An inveterate and profligate gambler, he surrounded himself with a coterie of chancers, con artists and corrupt officials. Once, after having a nightmare in which he was being attacked by lions, he awoke and demanded to be taken to the Cairo zoo, where he promptly shot their lions.