Ignorance: A Global History

Peter Burke
(Yale, £20)

IN 1947, with a view to solving a national peanut shortage, and doubtless buoyed by the success of many a hare-brained wartime scheme, the British government spent the equivalent of £1.2 billion trying to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania). The area chosen had the wrong type of soil and insufficient rainfall, on top of which there was a paucity of suitable workers. The scheme, conceived and managed in Whitehall —reminding one of Eisenhower’s comment that ‘farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pencil and you’re 1,000 miles from a corn field’—is only one of hundreds of fascinating instances of monumental ignorance cited in this riveting book.

‘Ignorance,’ Peter Burke suggests in the preface, ‘defined by an absence of knowledge, may not sound like a topic at all.’ A friend of his imagined that a book on