Biographical Excursions
Cocker has travelled to over 40 countries spanning 5 continents in pursuit of wildlife. Between 1982 and 1984 he spent a total of 10 months in India and Nepal. This proved to be the background to two illuminating biographical studies:
A Himalayan Ornithologist: The Life and Work of Brian Houghton Hodgson and
Richard Meinertzhagen: Soldier Scientist and Spy. These examined two remarkable figures from the age of Empire, radically different in personality, but united by the polymathic range of their interests.
Hodgson was the Honourable East India Company’s resident (proto Ambassador) in Nepal, where he was a scholar of almost every branch of zoology, from fish and amphibians, to birds and mammals. He was also a scholar of Himalayan languages and of Mahayana Buddhism. Six weeks spent in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery led to Cocker's involvement in this book.
Meinertzhagen, on the other hand, was a big-game hunter, a soldier, naturalist, minor political figure, writer, intelligence officer, explorer and diarist. Cocker's biography on this neglected demon and giant, received widespread critical acclaim and was judged, with Mark Hudson‘s
Our Grandmothers‘ Drums and Bill Bryson‘s
The Lost Continent, one of the highlights for Secker and Warburg in 1989. . The novelist William Boyd , who had drawn on some of Meinertzhagen’s writings in his novel
An Ice-Cream War, said of Cocker's biographical study of Meinertzhagen:
’Mark Cocker lucidly and honestly tries to pin the man down and succeeds admirably insofar as such an attempt is possible. The problem with Meinertzhagen, is that the chief witness and key source is the man himself. Cocker has unearthed in his diaries patent elaborations, exaggerations and falsehoods and there is evidence too that in his scientific career Meinertzhagen indulged in practices that would be considered highly fraudulent. But with that reservation it is a compelling story and Meinertzhagen, however bizarre or preposterous or sinister or admirable we may think him, is one of the genuinely fascinating mavericks in 20th-century history’.
Cocker's next two books reflected his darkening perception of Britain’s wider imperial impact upon the lands and peoples that they explored and occupied.
Conquest and Power
In the 1990s Cocker shifted his focus from the orthodox biography of colonial figures, to a moral reflection upon the real impact of European Empire, this resulted in his next two books:
Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century and
Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal People .
Loneliness and Time is an attempt to provide both a generic understanding of the importance of travel and foreign lands to the British psyche; and an investigation of the intellectual value and literary canons of the travel book. It received mixed reviews. It was followed by the exhaustively researched, and highly acclaimed indictment of European exploitation and destruction of indiginenous people's,
Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, which Cocker considers his most important book. The work focuses on four collisions between Europeans and indigenous cultures: the conquest of Mexico, the British onslaught on the Tasmanian Aborigines, the uprooting of the Apaches, and the German campaign against the tribes of Southwest Africa.
The book was praised and criticised on both side of the Atlantic for similar reasons. Ronald Wright , noted its "shaky existential dichotomy between Europeans and “tribal peoples”", while fellow historian Alfred Crosby suggested that "Cocker has written the kind of book we needed a generation ago, when our concept of history was profoundly Eurocentric, but surely now all of us given to reading history books are doubtful about the immaculate gloriousness of white civilization." However it also received praise:
"Cocker succeeds in finding a tone appropriate to the matter: he has a journalistic sense of impact and a powerful command of historical narrative. This is a powerful book, communicating its fierce indignation without recourse to polemic."
The most powerful theme of Mark Cocker’s books is his vivid map of hell into which people can so easily descend when they have ideology, means and opportunity.’