IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 291

The city of St Petersburg was founded on 27 May 1703, not on the mainland but on a small island in the delta where the River Neva flows into the Gulf of Finland. The date was not marked by any formal ceremony; it was a decision taken in the middle of a war. Russia had been fighting Sweden since 1700 in what became known as the Great Northern War, and in 1703 Peter the Great's forces took the Swedish fortress of Nyenschantz, which stood near the mouth of the Neva. On the island, known as Hare Island, work began at once on a new fortress named after Saints Peter and Paul. A city intended to guard the river mouth and to give Russia a naval base on the Baltic grew up around it.

The site could hardly have been less hospitable. The delta was a flat expanse of marsh and waterlogged ground, cut by channels and subject to regular flooding, and for several months of the year the river was frozen. Building required enormous numbers of workers. Each year the state conscripted peasants and artisans, sometimes tens of thousands at a time, and sent them to the delta for months of heavy labour: digging foundations, driving piles and hauling stone. Many fell ill with fever and dysentery. Historians agree that the death toll was very high but disagree about its size, because no reliable records were kept; later accounts that put it in the hundreds of thousands are guesses rather than figures derived from documents.

Building on soft, wet ground required a technique familiar from Venice and the Low Countries: wooden piles were driven into the mud in great numbers to carry the weight of masonry above. Stone was the harder problem. Russia had little suitable building stone in the region, and in 1714 Peter issued a decree forbidding the construction of stone buildings anywhere in the country except the new city, so that masons and materials would be concentrated there. Foreign ships arriving at the port were also required to bring a quantity of stone as part of their cargo. Most early buildings were nevertheless of timber, and only gradually did brick and stone replace them, after fires had repeatedly destroyed whole streets.

Peter wanted a planned city rather than a haphazard one, and he looked abroad for architects and engineers, chiefly to Italy, Switzerland and France. Domenico Trezzini, from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, arrived in 1703 and spent the rest of his life in Russian service, designing public buildings and drawing up the first plans for the city. In 1716 the French architect Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond was appointed to produce a general plan, which imposed a grid of straight streets and a network of canals on the delta. The result was a city unlike any earlier Russian town: regular, geometric and oriented towards the sea.

The centrepiece of the fortress was the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, built by Trezzini between 1712 and 1733. Its most striking feature was a slender, gilded spire which, for many years, made it the tallest building in Russia. Peter was buried there after his death in 1725, and the cathedral became the burial place of the Romanov dynasty. The city's main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospect, was laid out at about the same time, cutting a long straight line through the marshy ground eastward from the Admiralty shipyard.

In 1712 Peter moved his court and the principal organs of government from Moscow to the new city, which, apart from a brief interval around 1730, remained the capital of Russia until 1918. The move was a deliberate statement that Russia's future lay on the Baltic and in Europe rather than in the old Muscovite interior.

Military success made the site secure. Peter's victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 ended any serious threat to the new city, and the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 formally ended the war, with Russia acquiring the Baltic provinces. Nobles and merchants were then ordered to build houses in the capital of a specified size, and those who failed to do so could have their property confiscated. Peter also insisted that his court adopt European dress and manners, and the city was intended to embody that change. For contemporaries it was a deliberate break with the Russian past.

When Peter died in 1725 the city was still far from complete, and some observers doubted that it could survive. In the following decades, however, it expanded rapidly under his successors. The most spectacular buildings date from the reign of his daughter Elizabeth, when the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli designed the Winter Palace and other palaces with ornate facades in bright colours. Catherine the Great added to the city's monuments: in 1782 a bronze equestrian statue of Peter, commissioned from the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, was unveiled and became known as the Bronze Horseman.

St Petersburg has been flooded many times, most disastrously in 1824, when the river rose far above its normal level and caused extensive damage. That a great city exists there at all remains an extraordinary feat of engineering, organisation and political will. It was, as much as any battle, an assertion of Russia's place in Europe.

For most people in medieval Europe the basis of every meal was grain. Wheat, rye, barley and oats were grown wherever climate and soil allowed, and in the colder north oats and barley flourished while wheat did better in the warmer south. Grain was eaten chiefly as bread, but also as pottage, a thick stew of crushed grain or pulses boiled in water or stock, and as ale, which was drunk in large quantities at every level of society. Vegetables such as peas, beans, cabbages, leeks and onions filled out the diet and were grown in gardens and in open fields. What was available varied sharply from one region to another: olive oil was the normal cooking fat around the Mediterranean, while in northern Europe butter and animal fat took its place.

Diet also marked social rank. The finest wheat bread, risen and light in texture, was a status symbol in towns and great houses, while the poor ate coarse loaves of rye, barley or mixed grains, often baked hard and eaten with ale or pottage. Meat was more widely available than older accounts suggested, particularly pork, which could be preserved by salting and smoking. But the quantity and variety of meat, and the spices used to flavour it, depended on wealth. Pepper, cinnamon, ginger and saffron reached Europe through long-distance trade and cost far more than most households could afford, so a heavily spiced dish announced the means of its host.

The Christian calendar imposed its own pattern on the year. Meat was forbidden on Fridays and during Lent and Advent, and the total number of fasting days has been estimated at around one hundred and fifty. This made fish essential, and fish was preserved by salting, smoking or drying. Dried cod, known as stockfish, was traded in vast quantities from Norway and Iceland to the towns of northern Europe, and herring fisheries supported whole coastal economies. The rules were not always observed and enforcement varied, but for centuries the Church's calendar shaped both agriculture and trade.

Historians draw on three broad kinds of evidence. The first is written: household accounts that record purchases, manorial records that list dues paid in grain and livestock, and cookery books, of which a number survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These sources are informative but narrow. Cookery books, for instance, were compiled for aristocratic or wealthy urban households, and their recipes say nothing about what most people ate. Accounts, similarly, survive only for institutions and families rich enough to keep them. The written record is therefore, to a large extent, a record of the tables of the minority.

The second kind of evidence comes from excavation. Medieval cesspits and rubbish dumps preserve the remains of meals, and specialists can now identify the seeds, pollen and insect remains that survive in them. Animal bones, recovered in large numbers, show which species were eaten and which cuts of meat were preferred. At some sites the bones of fish, birds and wild animals appear in quantities that no written source mentions. The rubbish from a peasant holding and from a nobleman's kitchen look very different, and excavation has the advantage of reaching people who left no documents of their own.

The third approach uses chemistry. The ratios of different isotopes of nitrogen and carbon in human bone and tooth collagen reflect what a person ate over many years, because marine foods and land foods leave different signatures. Applied to medieval cemeteries, this method has shown that marine fish formed a larger part of the diet than some historians expected, especially in coastal and monastic communities. It can also distinguish between populations that ate a great deal of animal protein and those that lived mainly on plants. The technique cannot identify individual meals or particular species, but it can reveal broad patterns across a whole community.

Each of these sources is limited in its own way. Bone survives poorly in acid soils, and the fragile bones of small fish are often lost altogether, which may exaggerate the importance of larger species. Material from a single rubbish pit may reflect one household or one season rather than a whole community. Written records may be unrepresentative, and isotopes give an average over years rather than a picture of daily life, while the excavation of a particular site is itself a matter of chance. Historians have learned to combine all three kinds of evidence, but the combination is not straightforward, because they often point in different directions.

The most heated disagreement concerns how well ordinary people ate. Some scholars have argued that English peasants in the century after the Black Death of 1348–1350 enjoyed diets rich in meat and ale, and that their standard of living was in some respects higher than that of factory workers in the early nineteenth century. Others regard such claims as exaggerated, pointing out that the evidence comes from a small number of unusually well-documented estates, and that years of harvest failure, such as the great famine of 1315–1317, could reduce whole regions to starvation. The debate is hard to settle because it turns on what is meant by an adequate diet as much as on how representative the surviving evidence is.

When governments face an unfamiliar crisis, they often turn to historians. Journalists ask what past epidemics, crashes or wars can tell us about the one now beginning, and historians are invited onto committees and into newspapers to supply the answer. The assumption behind these invitations is old. Cicero called history the teacher of life, and the idea that the past offers lessons for the future has been repeated ever since. The question I want to consider is narrower and more awkward: should historians actually try to predict what is going to happen?

There is a serious case for saying they should. History is, after all, the study of change over long periods, and many of the forces that shape the future are already in motion and visible in the record. Institutions, once created, tend to persist and to shape behaviour long after the circumstances that produced them have gone. Demographic structures change slowly and, within limits, predictably. A historian who has traced the expansion and collapse of credit in earlier centuries is better placed than most to describe the vulnerabilities of a financial system. On this view historians are not fortune-tellers but specialists in long-run processes, and it would be strange to exclude them from the discussion.

Historical knowledge has plainly been useful in practical settings. Debates about how to control infectious disease have repeatedly drawn on the experience of earlier epidemics and on the history of sanitation and vaccination. Financial regulators have studied past banking panics, and the design of deposit insurance owes something to that study. Military planners have long employed historians to analyse previous campaigns. Insurance, quarantine and the very idea of a public health authority all have histories that repay study. In each case, however, what was transferred from the past was a knowledge of mechanisms and of what had already been tried, rather than a forecast of what would happen next.

Against this, the record of forecasting in the social sciences is not encouraging. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was foreseen by almost nobody, and the financial crisis of 2008 caught most economists by surprise. Historians have not done noticeably better. Their predictions are usually qualitative and vague, which makes them hard to test and easy to reinterpret afterwards. The temptation to read the present into the past is also powerful: an age preoccupied with pandemics finds plagues everywhere in the record.

More fundamentally, history and prediction are different kinds of enterprise. The historian explains why something happened by reconstructing the particular combination of circumstances that produced it, and those circumstances are, by their nature, unique. To predict, one must assume that the future will resemble the past in the relevant respects, and the historian's own work tends to show how seldom that assumption holds. This does not mean that nothing can be said about the future; it means that confidence in any detailed prediction should fall towards zero as the horizon lengthens.

The lessons of history, moreover, are frequently misused. Political leaders reach for analogies, and the analogy then does the arguing: a policy is justified because it resembles what was done in 1938, or condemned because it resembles something else. Analogies are chosen for their rhetorical force rather than for their fit, and the differences between the cases are quietly ignored. The past is a warehouse of examples, and a warehouse can supply almost any argument one wants. Historians who supply such analogies on demand are not illuminating the future; they are lending the authority of the past to decisions already taken for other reasons.

What historians can legitimately offer is something more modest and more valuable. They can widen the range of possibilities that decision-makers consider, by showing that arrangements now thought natural were once different and could be changed again. They can identify mechanisms — how rumours spread, how institutions lose legitimacy, how shortages turn into unrest — that recur across very different societies. They can point out what has been attempted before and why it failed, and they can ask awkward questions about the assumptions built into a forecast. None of this amounts to prediction, but it improves the quality of the decision that precedes one.

There are also professional risks. A historian who appears on television to say that a situation resembles the 1930s will be asked back; one who explains that the comparison is loose and the evidence ambiguous will not. The pressure to be quotable pushes the discipline towards exactly the confident claims it should distrust. Reputations built on a successful forecast are rarely damaged by the forecasts that failed, because nobody remembers them.

My own view is that historians should decline to predict, and say clearly why. They should refuse the framing that treats them as forecasters, while insisting on the value of what they can do: describing the range of possible futures, identifying the constraints that make some of them unlikely, and explaining what happened on previous occasions when similar pressures arose. The past is not a guide to what will happen, but it is an indispensable guide to what might. That is a less glamorous claim than Cicero's, and a more defensible one.