Economic development

17. Jenkins, Short History of London (3 September 2025)

by kurto

The City predominated medieval and early modern London, at Westminster’s expense. Thereafter the British capital has passed through phases of growth and decline without settling on effective local governance or planning. She’s been profligate with land, unable to strike a balance between the market and the needs of poorer residents or transportation. Consequently London’s physical development, i.e., geography in contradistinction to architecture or socioeconomic character, has sacrificed neighborhood continuity and civic historicity.

The medieval decision to situate London’s power outside the district of St. Paul’s shaped the capital’s early history. Following the 1348’s plague of the Black Death, the City regularized government in 25 aldermen from 12 guilds, bolstered by 100 representatives from 25 wards. Most of the former were lifetime positions, though because of the guild’s basis in trade, especially maritimes, the oligarchy was regularly, naturally renewed by changing fortunes. Well-to-do medievals could escape the city’s walls for the countryside: commercial power was not co-resident with political heft.

In seizing the monasteries Henry III added to his hunting estates and consequently such parks as St. James, Hyde, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s. Richard Gresham and his son Thomas, Henry’s bankers, saw to the City’s admitting Flemish refugees from Spanish Netherlands, contributing to London’s surpassing Antwerp as the commercial hub of northern Europe. By 1600, half of the wealthiest were ‘suburban’, contributing to a rising gentry, and as such Elizbeth’s government restricted building beyond three miles – creating a proto-greenbelt.

During the Civil War, the City favored the Puritans before taking a compromise position at decade’s end. It had financed Cromwell and overawed Westminster, reaching the apex of its power. London’s classes began intermixing during the Restoration, as the building of aristocratic squares (e.g., St James, Grosvenor) required servant quarters nearby. Later these became slums, then gentrified townhouses. Outside the City, late 17th-century London was inadequately governed by parish vestries (Middlesex, Essex), lacking the guilds’ organization and self-policing. Thus Sacheverell’s 1709 attacks on Irish Catholics and other Dissenters provoked discord, leading to the passing of the Riot Act in 1714.

By the Hanover era, Westminster was no longer a suburb but truly a second city, built around St James and Mayfair mansions. Johnson, of Fleet St, personified London, observing he who tires of it ‘is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford. You will find no man that is at all intellectual who is willing to leave’. Campaigns by Henry Fielding and William Gogarth against cheap gin led to heavy taxes, for alcoholism and infant mortality soared over 1720-50, hitherto the only time the population had stagnated; and thereafter the populace switched to beer.

(In 1709, Cheyne Row was built in then-distant Chelsea, which shortly became one of the few estates to change hands, sold to Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum. In 1753 it was divided between his daughters, one of whom married the Welsh Lord Cardogan, who developed in Knightsbridge and in the 1880s was responsible for heavily rebuilding the north section in the redbrick, neo-Dutch style. His estate remains active; fortunately, the white-stuccoed terraces toward the Army hospital survived.)

The regulation of construction, which began after the Great Fire of 1666, accelerated with 1774’s Building Act, banning exposed woodwork and prescribing uniform streets. The century’s latter half also saw renewed estate building. The Napoleonic wars stimulated development, but the broad trend over 1720-1800 had been imperial trade moving to Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow as London’s docks were outmoded. Hence construction commenced in the Isle of Dogs and Wapping: the East End became England’s greatest working-class city – almost unknown to the rest of the town.
Victorian reform (sanitation) and improvement – rapid, ‘brutal’ railway construction – came hand in hand, both being piecemeal. The Metropolitan Board of Works originated in 1855 after poor water was identified as the cause of ill health; it would be replaced by the more expansive London County Council (LCC) in 1888. Other British town councils were already in place in the 1830s. Yet Salisbury’s Tories opposed a unitary capital government as too big and powerful, favoring the unreformed City, Poor Law administrators, and vestries as bulwarks. Fabian capture of the bureaucracy would soon prove his point. Notwithstanding serious problems in 1832, ‘48, ‘67, and ’88, threats to public order were minimal because tradesmen were separated into ‘little islands’, making citywide agitation too difficult, There remained land for expansion, to accommodate the growing residency, Jenkins cites of historian Roy Porter.

Shipbuilding virtually disappeared in the 1860s. Services now predominated, accounting for 60 percent of jobs, notably in finance, law, and public administration. One-third of these were filled by women. By 1900 individual buildings had surpassed the street or square as the cityscape’s best-known features. Urban sprawl accelerated with the coming of cars, ownership rising to 1 million after World War I. Separately, London’s deep clay would prove ideal for the tube (whose iconic map was modeled on an electrical circuit board).

Planning came into vogue in interwar era. The Blitz damaged London much less than Allied bombs rent Germany, those killed numbering 30,000 versus 500,000, but postwar Labour efforts were more political than practical, density remaining fairly low. Clearance of traditional communities led to unwonted gentrification, and its evident failure to alleviate housing shortage led laissez-faire development in the 1950s and early ‘60s. (South Kensington remains one of the town’s densest districts.) Patrick Abercrombie, author of 1944’s Greater London Plan, builder of the Barbican, and all-round promoter of brutalism, is the villain. In the 1970s, arts and education bodies too destroyed heritage sites in the spirit of progress. Jenkins chides politicians for ‘taking orders’ from architects, planners, and quangos lacking in civic spirit. From 1950-70 the population fell by 9 percent, 17 in the inner city districts. However, the smog of 1952 (the successor of the Great Stink of 1858), was addressed in a private bill of ’56, resulting in the banning of coal heating by 1968.

London’s rebirth commenced in 1980 with Thatcherite policy and the City’s Big Bang, Nigel Lawson’s disbanding of monopoly practices, later extended by Blair. The working class moved rightward as enrichment spread. London would become an international city – by 2001 nearly 40 percent were foreign born, and 55 percent considered themselves ‘non-white British’. The populace, which had fallen to 6.6 million in 1985, rebounded to 9 million in 2019; however, the West End became the province of empty second homes (especially along Chelsea’s King’s Road or in Kensington’s Phillimore estate, the combined borough’s residency falling at the 2011 census.) Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are responsible for permitting London’s unruly towers.

Surprisingly, Jenkins makes no comparisons with other great, imperial cities. He writes not in the interests of policy; his efforts in that direction, such as recalling his native Camden, are incomplete or unconvincing; yet he is a kindly and fond narrator. His view that cities belong to residents as much as developers is resonant.

19. Blainey, Tyranny of Distance (15 November 2025)

by kurto

Australian remoteness from mother England shaped its colonies’ economic and hence national development through World War I, if not the 1960s. All their primary activities depended on transoceanic connections and technologies.

Aside from transportation, Botany Bay afforded England opportunity to participate in Asian piracy and smuggling, while Norfolk Island’s supply of flax was promising for sail and cord sought by the British navy. For settlers, navigable waterways surpassed arable land in value: Flinders’ locating a way through the Torres Straights unlocked a better route to India and the Cape of Good Hope. Bengali goods often went to Sydney; supply ships later went to China for tea. In 1814 Britain exported £100,000 of cotton to Indian Ocean sites plus Canton; the trade then grew eleven-fold in 7 years. Asian exchange hastened New South Wales’ transition to free settlement. Trade routes also led to military outposts, notably Hobart and Launceston in soon-to-be Van Diemen’s Land (i.e., Tasmania) and Victoria, forming the basis of Britain’s claiming the continent. Interior settlement was secondary.

By the 1830s Australia was more shipping terminus than a self-sufficient settlement, links to Europe surpassing those to Asia, the exports comprising wool and whale oil (during its ascendancy in the 1840s). The latter was a free man’s calling, but the trade was cut short by the gold rushes, which as in San Francisco lured away men on arrival in Hobart and Melbourne. (NB: Boston and Salem whalers had no tradition of grog.)

The lack of inland waterways explains the hub-and-spoke tradition later seen also in railway expansion. Wool and wheat were expensive to ship amongst the colonies, for which reason mining was initially ignored. Wool was 10 times more valuable than wheat, immediately worth sending to the UK while fostering centralization in the coastal cities. Sheep runs, stretching from Brisbane to Melbourne, a span equal to Boston to New Orleans, were often a half- or full day’s ride apart, such that few regional towns grew up. Immigrants therefore tended to look for work in the seaports because the inland cost of living was high, due to transport and lack of services for women and children. The towns also manufactured cheap goods.

Gold was the main export of the 1850s-60s, supplanting and replaced in turn by wool. The ‘circle route’, west around Antarctica, was more important in the 1850s than the Suez Canal in the 1870s (map p.180). Its debut coincided with fast American clippers, suited for the ‘high latitudes’ notwithstanding the risks of icebergs and uncharted islands. Ideal trips extended from Australia to China to collect tea for return to England. The trade fueled emigration, as Chinese ships were incapable of ocean journeys. [NB: Most Chinese immigrants to America came from the southern tea ports.] Nonetheless, Suez came to replace the circle route as gold and wool warranted the shortcut’s high charges and emerging steamships. By the 1880s steamers dominated coastal Australian shipping but not yet the European routes; mails and gold predominated as the London-Melbourne run halved to 45 days, helped by European trains.

In the 1830s Australian colonies began selling land to immigrants and by extension consolidating squatters, creating funds to subsidize immigration. Queensland was most assiduous, wishing to shun tropical (Chanak) labor. By the late 1840s freemen surpassed convicts. The undertaking was necessary to compete with cheaper migration to North America.

The first Geelong railway ran to Melbourne not the northwest goldfields, unprofitably and ultimately selling to the Victorian government. By 1860 most railways (save Melbourne’s city lines) were publicly owned. Unlike the US and Europe, Australia relied on public subsidy to build her rails, the colonies looking to unlock their interiors (but not those of rival colonies). There were three separate gauges, the narrowest being nimblest in the hills. Cargo featured imports sent inland and primary goods for export. Farming came to rely on rails: South Australia’s pair of peninsulas shortened transport of wheat, making it the Aussie granary over the 1850s-70s; the other states of the ‘southeast boomerang’ followed suit; as cost fell, Australia came to supply Europe.

The fastest steamers to Australia in the 1890s were German, a sign of her rising power or of British decline. Ships remained the primary means of alleviating Australia’s isolation as late as the 1960s, when air travel – already domestically important – and telecoms came to the fore. Shipping costs continued declining because of the Suez shortcut (hence Menzies’ interest) and the shift to oil. Cars were domestically important – holidays no longer depended on the rail terminus – and Australia surrendered self-sufficiency in transport fuel in the 1950s. Governments sought to prop up their interests in rail shipping through the 1960s via subsidized rail charges, neglecting to build or repair roads, rationing fuel, and tax; such policies were found unconstitutional in 1954.

World War I and the interwar years are treated lightly; World War II, though threatening to isolate Australia, stimulated her economy, which gained in the postwar even as British trade halved. Thus Blainey’s thesis seems to lose steam as the 20th century wears on. The final chapter detours into sociocultural discussion of immigrant waves, seemingly to point out eastern European and then Asian migration was bound to surpass British arrivals. Notwithstanding, a well-sketched view of pre-Federation Australia.

Aussie mateship, a collectivist ideal, held that men should be loyal to the others with whom they lived and worked, rooted in the idea of the country as a man’s land. The tradition ran strongest in the interior, and was taken up by the Labor Party after 1900. Education was seen as spurning mateship, as snobbery not self-improvement.

18. Biggar, Colonialism (23 August 2024)

by kurto

The British empire evidenced both good and evil, defying the simplistic judgements of leftist critics. Imperialism, so far from being an ideological ‘project’, was more a race to catch up with trading and settlement. After the American Revolution, British society converted to antislavery: the Colonial Office’s intentions were Christian and humanitarian, above all dedicated to eradicating slavery and instilling such characteristic institutions as parliamentary accountability, a free press, and independent courts. Though detractors frequently compare the empire with Nazism, the ultimate proof of British aims are evident in its spending the last of its resources to oppose Germany in the world wars.

Social hierarchy is not itself immoral. Any large society will arrange a division of labor; the challenge is preventing functional hierarchy. There are countless examples of colonial administrators insisting on British rule of law applied in harmony with local customer, such Governor of Madras Thomas Muro writing in the 1820s to the East India Company directors: ‘You are not here to turn India into England or Scotland. Work through, not in spite of, native systems and native ways, with a prejudice in the favour rather than against them; and when in the fullness of time your subject can frame and maintain a worthy government for themselves, get out and take the glory of the achievement and the sense of having done your duty as the chief reward for your exertions’.

Because slavery had not existed in England for many centuries, the common law was silent. Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies in 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, subverting its economy. In 1819 the Foreign Office established an (anti) Slave Trade Department, its largest precinct during the 1820s and 30s. In contrast, Muslim slavery persisted to 1920. An estimated 17 million Africans were sold east over second millennium (?) versus 11 million across the Atlantic.
Colonial governments, especially in the dominions, unilaterally bound themselves to respecting native property law, as an extension of (western) natural law. Modern claims that treaties were made by uncomprehending natives do not falsify the intention, but do indicate partisanship. Further, the oral histories often cited as evidence are often framed, anthropology has shown, to make sense of the present rather than to demonstrate the past. Those in the 21st century who believe the West should cease ‘oppressing the global south’ largely align with 19th-century Christian missionaries, whom they pejoratively label imperialist. Whereas Nigerian national Chinua Achebe exemplifies those who recognize imperialism both harmed and helped: no culture has a right to isolation.

In Australasia and Africa, policies for detaining aboriginals were limited measures to preclude violent resistance to settlement, not ipso facto racism. Other times segregation was meant to protect natives. In North America as well, British government was borne of Christian, Enlightenment views of human equality and cultural advancement not the competition of social Darwinism. Economic exploitation is hardly unique to colonialism, see Stalinist or Maoist industrialization. Famines are not attributable to policy: they persisted in the postwar era. The novelty of welfare policies, as well as penurious colonial governmental, makes their absence an anachronism. There is no evidence of racism in India’s partition, but perhaps overcaution after failing to prevent Irish civil war. Comparisons with Nazism (but never Soviet communism) are polemical.

That India’s economic output, measured in a global framework, collapsed over the 19th century does not prove imperial exploitation, since independent China fell equally dramatically; the neo-Marxist theory of appropriating surplus does not account for the Industrial Revolution. To the contrary, free trade opened the English market to the UK’s disadvantage. In west Africa, the worst excesses of agricultural boards (commissariats) came from the hands of postcolonials exploiting dated systems. Between 1870-1945, three quarters of foreign capital invested into sub-Saharan Africa was British.

Contemporary historians fairly point to examples of racism, economic exploitation, cultural repression, and wanton violence. But these are not essential only wrongful. They overlook British suppression of slavery, efforts to moderate the impacts on traditional societies, the seeding of modern agriculture, the opportunity of free trade, and the provision of civil services and judiciary to pre-democratic societies. The dominions as well as Israel and the United States are some of the world’s most advanced countries.

Detractors cannot distinguish between just war and Fanon’s and Satre’s cathartic violence. Biggar, an ethicist rather than a historian, declares himself a Burkean conservative. Moral (Christian) understanding of human frailties should promote tolerance of past and even present shortcomings. He points out it’s banal to say Milner wanted power; of course he did, pressing the Cabinet into the second Boer for the purpose of securing English institutions including equal treatment of blacks, whereas Kruger sought legal subordination. In this and other instance, historians have got culpability wrong. Discussing the possibility of reparations, he notes what is just smaller or earlier societies may not be in larger or later countries. Compensation requires demonstration of current harm caused by past wrongs, not merely current disadvantage.

15. Devine, Scotland (21 July 2024)

by kurto

1707’s Act of Union catalyzed Scotland’s transformation from one of Europe’s poorest, most backward regions to the workshop of the world, before the postwar decline of the heavy industry undermined paternalism and consequently British sentiment. Allowing the Presbyterian church (the kirk) to continue its predominant role, in contradistinction to threat of economic sanctions and alien status in England, cleared the path for Highlander Jacobitism to be absorbed into national mythology, as the elite of American and French revolutionary wars. Post-union Scotland, a center of the Enlightenment and gateway for the world’s newly integrated primary producers to Europe, never extended into consumer products – indeed, shipping supplanted textiles: the Clyde’s deterioration could not be ameliorated. Labour lost out to resurgent nationalism, and Thatcher’s policies catalyzed abandonment (which incongruously implies England broke the statist compact).

Poor harvests over 1695-99 had induced as much as 15 percent of the population to leave for Ulster or North America, as well as producing unrest which threatened the Glorious Revolution, the island’s regimes no longer unified by monarchy. Accommodating the kirk vitally eliminated religion as a source of resistance, leaving only personal loyalty to Jacobitism – never a solid basis in a country characterized by clans. Notwithstanding uprisings in 1725 and 1746, most residents would have had more to do with the Presbyterian church than London’s House of Parliament, so education and poor relief in Presbyterian hands, as well as continuity of law, enshrined a high degree of autonomy and continuity. For the aristocratic class, there was further the prospect of free trade with the colonies as well as exemption from debt. Landowners (mainly in the Lowlands) were coming to see their holdings as assets for revenue and wealth, rather than sources of military power and authority. Union-era Calvinism was stern but stimulated interest into morality, philosophy, and science. The end of 17th century had been misleading.

Rural social structure circa 1760 was more like Europe than commercializing England. From then, however, socioeconomic change proceeded faster than the continent: by 1850, one-third lived in towns greater than 5,000, the migrants including Ulstermen, though only 5 percent of Glaswegians were Highlander. Newcomers were lured by textiles (i.e., mechanized spinning) of cotton, linen, and woold. Living standards rose over 1780-1800, but thereafter stagnated. In two generations, Gaeldom went from tribal to market-oriented society. Single-tenant farming increased, meaning shared holdings declined, as produce was more for sale at market than community sustenance. Cottars had long since declined in England, the structure of landowner, less-farmer, and landless laborers effectively in place by 1700, driven by the gentry. By 1800, rising Scottish grain yields catalyzed Scotland’s transition, bringing in year-round demand for labor and aristocratic landowners using the right to eject lessees at end of term, the rise of sheep farms also promoting displacement. However, rural landowners were forced to offer high wages to compete with urban opportunities. Highland elites, often educated in southern schools and by travel, were absorbing extra-Gael culture before Culloden. The effects of Smith and the Enlightenment were to undermine the currency of the ‘social economy’, in which wages were to be sufficient to the cost of living. Measures to pacify Scotland (e.g., military roads, confiscation of lands) played their role were complemented by changing views of indigenous lifestyles.

Indebted Highlander landowners were then replaced by well-to-do gentry. By the 1840s Scotland’s per capita income passed Ireland. Scotland’s central advantage in early 19th century was engineering on the Clyde, especially in steam engines, allied to railroad integration of Ayr, Lanarkshire, and West Lothian counties. Highland labor seasonally migrated to the south, which helped (along with subsidized emigration) to check crop failures late in the decade. Presbyterian leader Thomas Chalmers was arguably the most influential Scotsman of the century, but the church broke in 1843, ending its hold on civic matters (but also prompting internal evangelization and charity). Literacy neared 90 percent even before compulsory education and local boards arrived in 1871 (which innovation was easily adopted, there being no class connotations as with English public schools). Liberalism reigned: Conservatives won but 7 seats over 1832-68. Nationalism was subsumed though culture persisted. The fetish of Highlandism was promoted by Romanticism, taking in identity without threatening the state. Home Rule, which split liberalism, the party being too far to the left for landed interests, threatening to commercial interests, and disquieting for Ulster migrants in the west. The Crofters war of 1880 (rent strikes, ‘raiding’ aka squatting) was notable less for agrarian violence than its purchase among urban southerners as well as similarities with Ireland. Following Gladstone’s Irish Land Act of 1881, Scotland too prohibited eviction at the end of rental tenure (blocking clearance), established boards for setting rents and payment for rental improvements, and otherwise set up the state as the primary force in the Highlands and the islands. (Public policy in the west Highlands and west Ireland were often similar.) In 1897 ‘congested districts’ boards came in to promote improved agricultural practices, financing of infrastructure, land redistribution, education, and assistance for fishing and weaving. The trend culminated in 1919’s Land Settlement Act (eminent domain for returned WWI soldiers, funds to convert squatters to landowners). Such measures were effective for the symptoms but not depopulation in the face of declining fishing and stock prices.

By 1901 2 of 4.5 million lived in towns, where lifestyles were segregating into bourgeois vs working class. Council boards were tasked with fitness and welfare following revelations of poor health of Boer War soldiers. Nascent Labour was reformist not revolutionary, prior to the Red Clyde’s World War I emergence. Lloyd George’s Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 (and follow-on acts for ‘slum clearance’, etc.) shaped Scotland’s 20th-century cities: the free market was replaced by subsidized building and activist council management, which bodies received £9 per capita per annum for maintenance. Reformed universities started down the path to Hegelian curricula, social exclusion (e.g., sons of pastors), and Oxford-trained administrators. In the rural Lowlands, 1/5 of all lands to changed hands, aristocratic landowners too selling to tenants (though Scotland in the 1970s was still highly concentrated, 1/3 of holdings being greater than 20,000 acres, land taxation having declined since 1945). Lowlands laborers often ‘flitted’ around the region, encouraged by one-year employment contracts which came with (spartan) housing for the married; in the interwar era, men commonly went out Friday nights so women could share a hot bath. Voting rights for women were seen to favor out-of-power Conservatives (!).

The Beveridge report raised postwar social expectations. The Marshall Plan and Labour’s policy of export promotion sustained Glasgow: 15 percent of the world’s tonnage was made on the Clyde over 1948-51. WWII’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, a former Red Clyde man, was charged to head off wartime unrest and became the century’s best Scottish leader. The Scottish TUC dropped Home Rule during the 1950s. Decolonization never really made an impression on Scotland inasmuch as decoupling had already taken place with devolution to the dominions. The Scottish National Party won its first seat in 1967 in Glasgow. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act triggered growing unrest. The first Home Rule vote in 1979 narrowly missed: though only 1/3 had voted, the populace was divided. Thatcher paradoxically increased working-class dependency on the state while alienating popular sentiment: she is midwife to 1997’s successful referendum, which granted authority over all but foreign and (macro) economic policy, social security, and television broadcasting.

Later chapters read less like history than sociology. Devine never offers a solution to the question of Scottish selfishness, why the country which benefit so greatly from English ascendancy should have so readily abandoned its neighbor. Perfidious Albion indeed.

21. Sinclair, History of New Zealand (4 Nov 2024)

by kurto

The main themes of 19th- and 20th-century history are the themes of encouraging an egalitarian society dependent on foreign trade (and primary products at that) and reconciliation among Maori and pakeha.

As much as three-fourths of NZ’s flora is unique, so long had the islands been separated. The first Europeans were traders and settlers from Australia, exporting timber from Kororakea (Bay of Islands). The Colonial Office did not wish to assume responsibility for governance; the Maori were to treated fairly – contra contemporary theories of imperialism.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield led those who saw NZ as a proto ‘dominion’, that is a tabula rasa colony, later joined by South Island pastoralists; Gordon Coates personified the philanthropic / missionary types, intending to help Maori cultural progress. Politics was pluralist, the government mainly confronting lawlessness and semi-open settler-Maori warfare. Wakefield’s New Zealand company didn’t force the Colonial Office’s hand but to the contrary, established beachheads knowing of London’s intent. The first governor-general was instructed to moderate Australian settlers and protect Maori largely by guaranteeing land rights: all European title was to come via crown grants, since the crown assigned itself a monopoly on buying from Maori. This view that the land belonged to the locals was different from commerce with the American Indian, Australian aborigine, or South African bantu, the author notes. The Maori tribes began a loose amalgamation.

1840’s Treaty of Waitangi sought to codify bicultural relations. Thereafter governor George Grey established order among competing interests, shaping the balance of the 19th century. The constitution of 1852 was highly democratic; lands were purchased for settlers; and Maori subdued along the road from Auckland to Hamilton and in the Waitara. Thus the country’s socioeconomic character was formed in its infancy: paternalist government, concern for Maori, and focus on primary production. Of the six provinces given in the constitution, five were NZC (Wakefieldian) settlements; most settlers were from London or the Home counties not Australia, though the 1861 gold rush in Otago brought in 65,000, mostly Aussie. (In the 1960s, it was still possible to hear the Kiwi accent in Essex.) Most were working class concerned to surmount poverty or some social predicament. A New Zealand-born mentality was already forming, the North Island characterized race relations and commerce with the UK, the south, more exclusively pakeha, concerned with sheep grazing as well as outgrowths of the gold rush. There was predictable struggle between the central government (as a proxy for the poorer provinces) and the well-to-do (South) provinces. Wellington was made capital in 1865, after it seemed Maori warfare had peaked.

The decisive moment had been the fall of ‘King country’ strongholds in 1863. Though Maori tribes controlled large sections of the North Island all the way to Napier, they never opted for a broad guerrilla was but only tradition defensive fortification (pa), and of course weaponry was no match; however, the British regulars thought the Maori their toughest colonial foe. After the final battle in Orakau, just south of Hamilton, some 3 million acres was confiscated in Waikato, the East coast, and Taranaki – prime lands rather than punitive confiscation – unfairly and the worst example of colonial mismanagement, the author suggests. But if the conflict was actually a civil war (as now characterized), then would not the losing side expect to suffer losses? Among the Maori, the Hau Hau religion sprang up.

In the 1870s-80s, Julius Vogel promoted growth via borrowing from London investors. The population doubled, railways and telegraphs were built, and pakeha landownership quadrupled. Government spending per capita was 13 times the rate of Canada, surpassing Victoria and New South Wales on a gross basis. In something like the American election of 1828, the Liberals came to power in 1890, marking the decline of southern pastoralists, the colonial gentry. The party taxed land rents, and toyed with the idea of owning all the land. Dick Seddon ruled over 1893 to 1906, which era brought in the women’s vote, mandatory arbitration for labor unions, and easy loans to buy land amid continuing dispute over freehold versus leasehold. The radicality of 1890 settled into paternalism. Labor came to be dissatisfied with arbitration, and the country grew weary of Seddon’s rule, leading conservatives to establish the Reform Party while the leftists became Labour (the ‘Red Feds’). As in Britain, the centrists eventually died off.

At the turn of the century, NZ decided not to join federal Australia as being too far awas and for lack of a common sensibility, though the Kiwis sought to retain an option to later join. Reform came to power in 1912, simultaneous with the political ascendancy of Northern small farming and diary interests (the ‘cow cockies’). As in Australia, Gallipoli and World War I marked the turning point of British colonists into Pacific islanders. Postwar soldiers were encouraged to buy farms: veterans and speculators roamed the countryside, resulting in nearly half the land changing hands. The three-party balance was unstable, Reform first among relative equals. Exports led by meat, wool, butter, and cheese (which in 1980 still comprised 50 percent of trade) were the highest per capita in the world. Foreign debt grew: in 1933, nearly 40 percent of government expenditure was on interest. New Zealanders understood themselves to have a high standard of living.

In the downturn, labor radicalism was easier to effect than in the US or Australia – which is seen as influencing Labour’s 1935 electoral win. The left wished to ‘insulate’ the country from the world economy, questionable for a trading nation. World War II again propelled centralization. By 1949 social services reached one-third of spending, up from 20 percent in 1928, growth mainly coming from eliminating means testing of family benefits, which increasing the welfare roster to 230,000 from 45,000. Government policies sought for equality of outcomes.

The postwar economic grew apace with the west; communist-inspired labor strife dominated the cities; the countryside and South Island remains pastoral and agricultural. The government sought to implement autarchic industrial growth in steel and liquid natural gas, with limited success. In the late 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands emigrated: the population actually fell in 1978. From 1984, the country like Australia veered from excessive statism, Rogernomics lowered income rates and introduced a value-added tax.

Though the government took radical steps in the slumps of 1891-98 and 1936-38 and otherwise centralized, the people are temperamentally conservative. Wealth carries no prerogative of leadership, and politics mostly centers on economic development to pay for education, health, and pensions, such beneficence stemming from missionary humanitarianism as well as 19th-century utilitarianism. Sinclair writes redistribution is the more possible because of the country’s small size. The matters of biracial society are important but subsumed under equality of outcomes, achieved through government mandate.

New Zealand belongs to a ‘pacific triangle’ formed by Auckland, Sydney, and San Francisco: Kiwis are not a ‘better British’ but a bicultural, Pacific Ocean people – albeit more British than the Aussies (against whom they define themselves) or Americans (never quite forgotten as colonial brethren). Questions of identify are more pronounced in the South Island, the northerners having the stronger Maori influence and balance of population.

16. Lüthy, From Calvin to Rousseau (28 July 2024)

by kurto

Sketches the 17th- and 18th-century Geneva’s contribution to Western political economy, commencing with Calvinist government and concluding with subjection to French Louisianan oligarchy and Rousseau’s utopianism.

To Weber as to Marx, the Reformation was the first bourgeois revolution, foreshadowing capitalism. Lüthy dismisses Weber’s thesis of Calvinist Protestantism promoting capitalism, showing predestination is not pivotal to Calvin and simplistic definitions obscure more than they clarify: it’s survives only because succeeding scholars couldn’t agree definitions either. The Reformation was evidently a milestone in the progression from the medieval to the modern world, and Calvinist views indeed underpinned northwestern Europe; but this was just one of many conditions, also to include money (specie) from the new world, emigration (especially Huguenot) within Europe prompted by the Counterreformation, the rise of banking, and the maturation of medieval republican city-states. Is it not also evident that the Counterreformation stifled what would have happened in Catholic countries, especially as Spain and Italy were the more advanced economies?

Calvinism was important for manifesting reformist Christianity most clearly independent of politics and statecraft. The connection to economics is less fear of predestinarian uncertainty and more release of fears of other men, of social stricture. The Reformation destroyed social hierarchy more than it shaped individual values. Calvin broke the hold of usury by common sense: wealthy lenders have richer men as clients, demonstrating the borrower is not always and evidently prey. The rule of equity (i.e., the golden rule) guides proper lending, Calvin observed in overturning Aristotelian view that money (interest) does not engender money. Protestant lenders were no different from Catholics for example in maritime credit, bills of currency exchange. Ironically classical Greece alone among the ancients employed a productive credit system, to support the agricultural regions near the poleis.

Neither the French monarchy nor the country’s national church fits comfortably into the common dynastic vs national schema. France’s centralizing tendencies were most evident in the Academy Francaise (i.e., control of language), which produced clarity over fuller participation in the Enlightenment. Louis XV’s reign completed his predecessor’s making aristocratic and heritable bourgeois office completely dependent on the throne. The constitution of society was economic and social, not only political – a regime in the full sense of the word. The French economy amounted to starveling producers and consumers exempt from tax; there were regional exceptions in Brittany, Normandy, and Languedoc that proved the rule. Quesnay’s primary concern was distribution of ‘net product’ of agriculture (i.e., primary produce) among the royalist entourage: Louis XV’s era was an age of unbounded, reckless enthusiasm not the edge of the abyss. The rise of the Atlantic trade from 1760 undermined the specifics of physiocratic economics, and Quesnay lacked the tooling of the modern discipline, but he was not wrong in his assessment of the country’s dynamics. By contrast, Turgot changed men’s minds in their understanding of the state’s role in the economy.

Rousseau sought to understand the act by which a people is a people, but compromised by proposing the tyrannical general will. Having posited society corrupts natural man, he could not allow for civic order which protects individual rights. In fairness, he saw the Greek city-state as a model; his eloquence raised its applicability to large, modern nations – and led directly to 20th-century tyrannies. In his own time, Genevan democrats (‘populists’) brought the general will to Louis XV’s France, foreshadowing Mirabeau and Robespierre.

In France, finance was the preserve of Catholic royalist administrators, banking was open to all, that is to Protestants. The former traded with Spain, the latter with faster-growing England. Absolute monarchy and public credit were discovered by Necker to be incompatible, and in the late 18th century the latter won. The Protestants retained the anti-dogmatic attitudes of 17th-century emigres to Geneva, mixed with the Enlightenment’s freethinking, critical reasoning, and sovereignty of conscience. But in the storm of the Revolution, the Catholic Church proved a shelter against the radicals, whereas the Protestant churches lacked institutional bulwark: liberalism was first to succumb.

NB: the example of Genevan oligarchies sacrificing Calvinist self-governance to Catholic Paris is relevant to 21st-century USARFU (p. 260)

13. McLauchlan, Short History of New Zealand (23 May 2024)

by kurto

Sketches pre-European anthropology and sociopolitics over 1840-2015, touting the country’s egalitarian mores without connecting them to economic dirigisme. Following imperial Britain’s 1835 recognition of Maori sovereignty, the Treaty of Waitangi was hurriedly oversold and then broadly ignored, precipitating struggle for farmland as well as cultural clashes. Frontier fighting in the 1850s and 60s, by which time whites were in the majority, culminated in British confiscation of land – rather in the Maori tradition of warfare. Following a gold rush, Dunedin was the economic capital; however, by 1900 the balance of residents were on the north island (with most Maori in rural areas). The urban-rural political divide emerged in the 1880s; the economic template, spanning 1890-1960, turned on pastoral exports (wool, meat, dairy), mostly to England. Like Australia, the universal franchise and the welfare state arrived early, cemented by Michael Savage’s 1938 Social Security Act. Postwar unionism, highlighted by dockworker and neo-communist strikes in 1951, brought the National Party back into contention. Parliament became unicameral in 1949, making legislation easy to pass. Social strife resurfaced in the 1960s, often around rugby competition with apartheid South Africa. Labor-led reform came in the 1980s, though discussion of ‘Rogernomics’ is slender. By late 20th century, three-quarters of Maori had moved to the towns, mostly in the north island. To a degree, contemporary economic stability owed not only to diversification of exports but also Australian-owned banking. Why did New Zealand decline federation with Australia? Aside from wartime alliance, what were New Zealand’s views of sovereignty prior to the shock of England’s joining the EEC? The author rushes to demonstrate anti-racist sensibilities but then spends more time of conservative Pakeha culture (e.g., prohibition and liquor laws), not even treating the phenomenon of the Maori Party.

11. McMillan, Modern France 1880 – 2002 (28 April 2024)

by kurto

A disappointing collection of thematic overviews that fails to get at France’s approach to the great sociopolitical questions. The authors neither ground core problems nor suggest departures, but frequently trend toward sociology as well as left-liberal consensus circa 2000; the essays ignore Maastricht, fairly enough for a history but illogical in light of attacks on right-wing ‘identitarianism’.
• The long-term goal of the Third Republic was to build the state for plutocrats as well as bourgeois, never mind the Dreyfus affair’s ruptures. But radical democrats and emergent socialists found no common ground: democratic (i.e., liberal) socialism was ‘impossible’
• Fin-de-siecle governmental persecution of Catholics, led by Rousseau-Waldeck over 1899-1902, parallels Bismarck’s earlier efforts: the separation of 1904, undoing Napoleonic concordat, exposed the church’s dependency on the state. Despite the hostility, many clergy fought for France in World War I, earning some respite; in the early Fifth Republic, de Gaulle and other ministers again brought Catholics to the fore; there is no discussion of Muslim immigration
• France’s descent over 1815-1945 stems from demographic decline – there is no linkage to the Catholic plight – especially after Germany’s 1870 unification. By 1910, France was the world’s leading immigrant country, attracting Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and French colonials to work at large, industrial firms. Traditionally rural France, which contacted the outside world via the bicycle (presaging the Tour de France), finally succumbed in the postwar era to economic modernization – though small farms persisted, protected by the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the state remains the country’s largest employer
• Only after 1936 did France subordinate her foreign policy to Britain, and in the postwar era much her impulse has been to restore independence and grandeur
• In addressing the French Communist party as well as ‘committed’ intellectuals (said to ‘think in German’), the authors allude to obvious dead-ends but adduce no evidence of remorse. However, the Fourth Republic collapsed because it was designed to counter the extinct Communist threat; Algeria mattered mainly to the political classes; the Fifth Republic minimized the influence of the Fourth’s ‘notables’, for example by referenda. Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, succeeding the SFIO (Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvriere), wisely limit doctrinaire politics, mimicking the more flexible right, and so succeeding in 1981
NB: Barres: intellectuals are those who believe society is founded on logic

27. Corfield, Georgians (28 December 2023)

by kurto

Is sociocultural history pone to sloppy practice, Whiggish prefiguration, or even ideological capture? Corfield’s Georgians, though hugely learned of the ‘long 18th century’ from Restoration to 1850, suggests all three. The author is evidently fond of the period’s life and detail but seems impelled to judge that slave trading compromised the whole. In conclusion the left-liberal syllabus of 21st-century errors (e.g., climate change, international tax evasion, uncivilized social media, and other sprawling ills) may be traced to the Georgians because 250 years is after all a small span of humanity.

Literacy and numeracy rose, aided by new cultural influences from trade and colonization. First canals then railroads (somewhat out of period) transformed commercial environment. Birmingham, a canal junction, became the first substantial European city not located on a major river. The scientific and industrial revolutions, though they weren’t points in time but transformations, fueled progress.

As Britain urbanized (i.e., as subsistence farming declined), classes blended, and political participation rose. Social violence declined: from 1689 there were no anti-immigrant riots for more than 200 years. As middle-class professions such as law, business, and the like grew, the clerisy lost authority. Household work increasingly became a female preserve. Public schoolboys were often middle class, which category rose to ~ 15% by 1850, from less than 5 in 1700. Titled aristocracy remained stabled at 1-2%, or some 500 families, much less than the estimated 17,000-25,000 noble families prior to the French Revolution.

The extreme of politics was no longer civil war. Of some 5,000 MPs over 1734-1832, more than 50% evidenced commercial or professional interests. A Protestant ethos of public service, neo-republican sense of civic duty, and general national resolve (if not jingoism avant la lettre) fueled respect for government – presumably in lieu of declining class deference – and willingness to pay tax. There was a contest between laissez-faire advocacy (oddly called ‘free trade’) and clamor for professional regulation of medicine and suchlike.

Women were excluded from politics by custom not law; the chancery court was the ‘woman’s friend’. Georgians were newly public of their sexuality (almost predictably leading the book), which trend the Victorians consciously rowed back. By 1850, Methodism had reached 10% of non-conformism, topping the 8% of old-line non-Anglicans. A ‘semisecret’ state grant called regium donum was annually made to Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist churches over 1722-1851.

Corliss assiduously identifies harbingers but rarely explores the consequence of abandoned tradition or custom. She contends 2.7 Africans millions reached America, whereas Henry Louis Gates says less than 400,000; both, confusingly, cite Emory University (https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/06/slave-voyages/index.htm). Britain is presented as hegemonic when in fact she contended with continental powers for the whole of the period. Smith is persistently, anachronistically described as a free trader, and Burke in Reflections primarily decries lost social customs (though elsewhere he is treated more considerately, perhaps typical of the left-liberal reluctance to concede him to conservatism). Hill is better: at minimum, history from below leads to simplification and the smuggling in of one’s contemporary prejudice.

9. DeSoto, The Mystery of Capital (2005)

by kurto

Identifies why market economies do not function in post communist and Third World countries as they do in the developed world. Most have more than enough capital. But it is dead because it cannot be transformed into liquidity; assets cannot be measured as standardized units; and laws do not work to protect assets, but instead to force owners into the underground economy. The leading example of successful transition to from informal to formal economy is the 19th-century United States. Present-day failures threaten the credibility of capitalism. A bit repetitious toward the middle, yet through and penetrating.