England

23. Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea (25 Nov 2024)

by kurto

Following 1,000 years of naval development, England was the first European state to achieve the political and administrative sophistication necessary to operate an advanced navy and merchant marine. Precisely because the navy is more costly than a standing army, it required public support, not merely the backing of a consolidated, monarchical government, which explains why Spain in the 16th century, France in the 18th, and Germany and Russia in the 20th failed. Organizing evidence in the categories of policy, strategy and operations, finance, and administration and logistics, Rodger powerfully contradicts the consensus that modern states emerged to support armies; indeed, the new naval powers of England and the Netherlands retained their medieval constitutions.

Prior to circa 1000, English rulers saw the island as confronting three seas – the North, the Narrow (i.e., the English channel), and the Irish – which could not all be mastered, though the public thought they should be. Viking raids had preceded 865, but the Great Army was the first invasion for conquest rather than simple plunder. The invaders were highly mobile, the English based in London. Nonetheless, the resistance of Alfred (r. 871-99) was mainly fought on land: in this era, ships mainly moved troops. To take the helm (steerage) was to take command. Landowners generally provided the military.

The Norman revolution replaced unitary Anglo-Saxon England with an unstable feudal baronage, meaning independent military power. The ship-muster system fell into disuse, and Harold’s fleet withered, creating a vacuum in the Irish Sea filled by Dublin-based Vikings that lasted through the 12th century. Most medieval navigation was English coastal pilotage.

Henry II’s 1171 conquest of Dublin owes less to naval prowess than England’s growing economic/demographic advantage. Its overlordship could easily have been disrupted by
an Irish sea power. Over 1200-40 France drove for the sea, acquiring Normandy on the channel, Poitou on the Atlantic, and a Mediterranean presence, often at the expense of Angevin England whose remnants in Gascony were exposed. The Bordeaux wine trade (‘claret’) accelerated after the 1293 loss of Poitou, coming to serve as the foundation for England’s merchant marine and later naval strength. Viking fleets had receded during the 12th century, absorbed by Scandinavian wars, before returning in the 1180s and persisting as an Irish sea power through the 1260s. England’s defeat by Alexander III of Scotland led to the latter claiming the isles of Man and Hebrides. but the need to be active in western waters threatened Welsh independence, and following a pair of Welsh campaigns, England gained ascendancy in the west. Still, her lack of sea power was evident, and doctrine not yet advanced much past convoys, though ship designs were showing increased scale and other adaptions.

Medieval England was a reputable military power with a modest navy. Only Richard I (a Plantagenet, the Lionheart, 1189-99) and Henry V (a Lancaster, author of Agincourt, 1413-22) understood sea power. Edward I’s loss at Bannockburn in 1314 is normally seen to mark the rise of infantry and archers, but decisive failings were evident at sea. England could not provision Perth or Stirling and was so weak that its troops and shipping both required convoys. In 1340 Edward III defeated the French at Sluys in the Spanish Netherlands: nonetheless the continental balance of power was unchanged. Naval failure – the lack of good government at seas – contributed to popular discontent evident in the 1381 peasants’ revolt and the 1399 murder of Richard II.

All subjects were bound to support the king in wartime; there was no distinction between knights who provided horses and swords, and merchants who offered ships. But the latter rarely received compensation for losses or even usage. By the late 14th century voluntarist service was evidently failing: cash compensation was necessary. This opened the door for the Commons. Already in the prior century, the crown had summoned representatives of seaports, which group was quasi-Parliamentarian.
In the 15th century, single mast ships were replaced by three. Spanish and French ships began to carry larger artillery, an order of difference from heavy-grade crossbows, terrifying to sailors. The English ships of Henry V were smallish and dispersed: it was time-consuming to muster and provision. Though patrol and scouting were common and certain confined spaces could be dominated, the open seas were impossible to interdict. In the 1480s, convoys to Iceland were the first example of open-ocean navigation. ‘Safeguard’ or ‘safekeeping’ of the seas was the state’s protection of commercial interests. Weak kings were obliged to tolerate domestic piracy despite the diplomatic drawbacks. Admirals exercised not only disciplinary matters but disposition of piracy prizes (especially involving foreign claims). Cases were civil suits for damages, and because lucrative, were eventually divided from naval matters proper.

English ambitions on the continent effectively ended in October 1523 when Suffolk’s army abandoned its march on Paris: Henry VIII was the last to pursue the Hundred Years War. Henceforth her military goals would be naval. Henry is sometimes seen as architect of the modern navy, but in fact he was conventional, using ships for convoy escort, local patrols, and coastal raids. Strategy amounted to invading France (in conjunction with the Low Countries). Operations were limited to the East coast to the Firth of Forth, the Channel to Brest, and the southern Irish seas. Administration and provisioning was haphazard, and there was no agency for foreign trade.
By midcentury, Henry VIII’s new foreign policy became evident in naval matters: England was forced to follow Scotland in assuming it was a weak power whose enemies could only come by sea. Breaking with Rome had weakened England; he had to sell monastic lands to fund the navy, and also to encourage piracy. During Lady Jane Grey’s interregnum, Northumberland’s policies established the link between Protestantism, piracy, naval service, and foreign trade amid the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies, which position Elizabeth inherited. But her navy was premised on defending England by dominating the Channel and North Sea. In the 1540s, shipbuilding scaled to match the Spanish galleon, and accommodate forward firing, thereby merging seaworthiness and armament. Whereas turn-of-the-century Spanish warships were really armed merchantmen, English galleons were closer to pure men of war, lacking storage for long distance, were thus defensive. The country came late to carrying heavy guns, naval warfare, and oceanic voyaging, following in the wake of Scotland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Genoa, the Dutch, and France. Rodger asserts they were not laying the basis of empire or even Nelson’s navy (e.g., establishing lines of battle), for the immediate challenge was ship design and tactics to defeat peninsular galleys. Henry VIII’s reforms commenced lasting administrative and logistical structures, unique to England (save Portugal), providing an institutional memory across reigns that proved both resilient and adaptive. the most important factor in 18th-century open-water gains stem from 16th-century advances in provisioning of foodstuffs and water.

The duel with Spain commenced prior to 1588 and extended beyond. Phillip II’s inflexible orders to make no independent landing of the Armada but to first link with the Duka of Parma in Flanders for conveyance to the Downs condemned the mission to fail. Spain hadn’t shallow-draft ships to fend off Dutch raiders. Medinia Sidonia was forced to anchor at Calais for nearly a week, with the English to windward, waiting for Parma. England attacked, eventually driving Spain into the North sea and dissolution. In 1594 Spain sought to build a fort near Brest, Brittany, which would command approaches to the channel. England and France (the latter content to ally as the converted Henry IV was enthroned) attacked and defeated Spain in a battle equally important as 1588. The Spanish war produced seasoned navigators using math and charts.

By end of century, English ministers had decided the best defense was offensive operations against the Spanish coastline or shipping. Ireland had been pacified (i.e., was not a potential enemy base), Dutch strength was growing, France unified under Henry IV, and privateering established as reliable for the crown in the east Atlantic as well as the Caribbean. The latter transformed the merchant marine and its London owners into political players. Elizabeth consciously sought to employ sea power to stave off European powers, and consequently depended on a small number of merchants, shipowners, investors, and naval officers whose interests had congealed since her father’s era, and whose privateering was difficult to separate from the crown. Men of rank (aristocrats) were now seeking to men their name at seas, somewhat at the expense of ‘professionals’.

It takes much longer to build a squadron than raise an army, though shipbuilding itself is rapid as against routinizing operations and training. The dockyards are the most complex part of administration, but the real premium is on planning. (16th century armies expend to lose one-third of strength every campaign year.) From 1577 John Hawkins dominated the Navy Board, making it relatively free of corruption. (Rodger several times says historians overuse or conflate corruption with weakness of complex, premodern systems.)

From 1600 Barbary Coast (Algerian) pirates pushed into the Atlantic: with more than 100 warships, most with 25-plus guns, they stood as Europe’s largest fleet, taking more than 400 English ships over 1609-16 alone. The business amounting to capturing men for slavery, the West country and Newfoundland fisheries suffered most.

One fragility of Charles I’s reign can be found in the competing needs to deter European rivals and to protect fishermen, traders, and coastal residents: there was no agreement of the navy’s strategic purpose, yet it was very expensive, requiring public input. Thus the weighty matters of ship money. During the Civil War, the ‘new merchants’ were independent traders and privateers, not the great chartered firms like the East India Company; were Presbyterian; and were dominant in naval administration such that the army and the navy were on opposite sides. The latter lost out during the Interregnum, and country’s naval tradition looked to be faltering.
The trajectory of the British Isles to 1650 was very much shaped by sea power or lack thereof. England, via her navy, had been ascendant until 1066, then fell back as military (land) power grew in importance. The sea is a highway as much as a barrier. English governments were overthrown by naval invasion nine times to 1688, not counting unsuccessful attempts.

19. Kenyon, History Men (5 October 2024)

by kurto

Surveys the development of English historiography to the 1980s, focusing on the distinction between literary (i.e., politically minded, aristocratic, and/or ‘amateur’) and professional (postwar, specialized university) work. New social history, inspired by Namierite prosopography, sociology, and so on is prematurely seen to have failed: Kenyon didn’t account for ideology. As the Marxists and the Annalistes never much figured in the literary specialists’ treatment of the ancient constitution or the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, so their long march through the schools was not yet evident.

Raleigh was the first to discern political uses of antiquarian writing. Whiggish history commenced with Hume, whom Macaulay sought to eclipse. The contemporaneous opposition was not Voltaire’s philosophical reflections of universal relevance, but Ranke’s emphasis on re-creation of events and ideas. William Stubbs initiated premodern academic study at Oxford over 1866-84, unusually for his time working back into the medieval era to discern the origins of the modern British nation. English professionals (i.e., Oxbridge) trailed Paris, Göttingen, and Vienna. Early 20th-century practitioners were infatuated with scientific history, lacked degrees to rival the continental schools, and were already becoming overspecialized even as new institutions such as Manchester sprung up. Albert Pollard of University College Lond was the era’s driving force.

Trevelyan was perhaps the last of the aristocratic literary men. Elton, co-star with Namier of the postwar era, was England’s most Germanic practitioners; curiously both were immigrants. The former opposed conceptual history; history is the only truly empirical discipline, in which the author starts not with a thesis or paradigm to test but criticizes evidence, asks questions, examines authoritative claims – especially when the subject moves from narrow intellectual concerns (sexuality) to political matters that concern all. Plumb contended the point of undergraduate history is to prepare for public service and statesmanship, to embrace ideas and policies, the better see through forthcoming events. The quality of an age is not the work of the common man, though they must labor namelessly to support it.

7. Scruton, England: An Elegy (2 March 2024)

by kurto

England’s 20th-century decline owes to abandoning the wisdom of culture and custom derived from the countryside, common law, and the softening of power into authority. Classical Albion was a society of people desiring of privacy who could nonetheless be relied upon to act benevolently – strangers but never foes. Governed not from above (i.e., by class) but within (self-regulating order but around shared experience and compromise), it collapsed after World II not through antiquated education and honor but because English politics and law work only in English society, through reason not rationality and compromise. Urban development, homogeneity, and Continental rationality (e.g., Roman law and EU promulgations) broke the spell of enchantment.

Law and government:
Common law developed along the lines of Kant’s view that the moral law known to all rational beings, even if not all could explain it. The point was to do justice in the individual case, regardless of interests of power or cohesive rationality. Legal proceedings were primarily discovery, not invention: what was to be discovered is the solution to the case, not the law of the land. The object was not to exercise power over people but to give people relief from abusive power.
Rights were ancient prerogatives of the people, effected by custom not granted by government. Individuals possessed rights only because they were also burdened by duties, in contrast with European positive rights granted by government. Trusteeship in law (Burke’s partnership), along with trial by jury (of peers) and the common law itself, were characteristic features enabling disinterested husbandry of shared assets particularly over time.

The English cared less for the origins of the monarch than monarch’s commitment to upholding the law of the country; Protestantism was merely an exponent of lawfulness and custom. Whereas the Local Government act of 1888 eroded local interests and identity, while centralizing and corrupting authority.

When confronting power, the English questioned whatever and whenever no authority was evident, for possessing power does not entitle or recommend its exercise. England had never suffered Weber’s transition from traditional to legal-rational forms of authority. The attitude toward officialdom was: it it’s needs doing, you yourself should. So long as government service is an honor, it will attract the best minds; but it is merely a well-paid lifestyle, it degrades to power.
Imperialism’s worst crimes were committed against the Irish, during the Interregnum when politics was self-righteous, not compromising. But though the English emerged from World War II morally exhausted, no longer willing to cultivate its inheritance – to bear duties as well as rights – and to stave off its enervating critics, it didn’t think to compare its record with its Continental peers or previous empires. As Tocqueville observed, revolutionary sentiment is not borne of oppression but weakness of the old order.

The harmonization of law discovered not promulgated, the monarch as a corporation sole representing the people, and a religion tenuous but uniting was a settlement, an enchantment – Burke’s making the country lovely to its inhabitants. The key to government is not democracy but representation of the people’s interests, which requires compromise as well as solutions across generations; the political system must intend to amplify authority while restricting power.

Society and culture:
Hume thought the mind comprised of sensations, and the soul an illusion. If so, then a propos of Thatcher, so too must society be a collection of individuals.
English honor could be extended throughout society because the trust of behaving rightly did not require intimacy – it worked among strangers – and the test of virtue was in moments of real difficulty or danger, or when no one was looking. England did not turn on Mediterranean honor and kinship but honesty, fair play, and rule of law. The primary objective in morality is to act rightly in the circumstance, not to expound the principles which color one’s view of right, even / especially when principles are elusive or obscure. This was Austen’s genius to show. The gentleman was defined by manners, culture, virtue, aloofness but independent of lineage and wealth; and could be trusted to behave rightly without reducing the distance between him and you. Class worked to advance the body politic’s social objectives and aspirations. Amongst the working class, society was not a prison but a maze potentially leading to the way out. Disquiet over immigration is not ipso facto racism but the loss of a sense of home, disrupted to what end? When your primary loyalty is locality, EU or global sovereignty acts to create a crisis of identity.
Shakespeare presented England as enchanted by ethics, justice, law, authority; and always the ideal was presented as the possibility of restoration. England simultaneously believed the sacred to be a human construct, and that some things really are sacred.

The Anglican Church was a settlement, an attempt at peace, molding Christian belief to English idiosyncrasies, thereby enabling the binding of strangers. Once synthesis was achieved, doctrine became a social benefit, a transmitter of shared ethics. The people became a corporate person. Religion was a close ally of law, government, and social institutions. Contra Linda Colley, the English understood Protestantism in terms of nationality, not nationality in terms of Protestantism.
English art and literature were premised on place, demonstrating internalization of mystified (sacralized) topography. Burke in Sublime: nature is mysterious, is internalized by imagination (not rationally deducted). (Hedges were not total enclosures but permitted continuance of footpaths.) Where the French were more concerned with rural privations than fulfillments and contentments, the English gentlemen sought not to spend their money in London but in their country seats. The countryside’s decline reduced his stature, as did the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

English money was not rational and meant to be added, but traditional and meant to be divided, shared. Imperial and metric diction is evidence of reasonable versus rational; the English system was the product of what works in life.

English empiricism rejected the need to rationalize everything – reason can never explain morality, politics, religion, and so on a priori. Negotiation, compromise, deference to tradition are valid, helpful contributors, the latter often likely to contain the essence of things. Empiricist philosophy, allied to common law reasoning (discovery of the ancient and the essential) and parliamentary government, were expressed in the ‘concrete vocabulary and compromising syntax’ of the language.
(Relevance in education is chimerical: who can guess the student’s interests in 10, 20, 40 years? So the standard is excellent and extent of current knowledge.)

What was the apex of Scruton’s England? Were its core elements synchronized or did they separately peak? Probably he would have chosen somewhere between the Georgian and early mid Victorian eras; although Brexit would likely have been welcome. Corelli Barnett emerges as Scruton’s principal opponent for misdiagnosing the cause of England’s decline.

The Premiership’s 3pm blackout

by kurto

The gross value of Premiership broadcast rights has continued rising, but includes more contests, raising the possibility that additional games might be shown in the 1500h window when lower-division clubs play. As these clubs depend on match-day revenues, violating the window may put lower division sides out of business.

Meanwhile, having cracked the US market, the Premiership’s overseas rights dwarf the continental leagues. The lowest English club makes more from TV’s league rights, approximately £150 million per annum – than Bayern Munich, AC Milan or Paris St Germain – all but Barcelona and Real Madrid.

The overall sense one gets is that the revenue squeeze is replacing three decades of a rising tide that lifted all footballing boats with a winner-takes-all environment in which the highly competitive and expertly marketed Premier League is the clear winner. At home that may endanger smaller English clubs. Abroad it jeopardises viable competition in continental tournaments, and will only put a tighter squeeze on other European clubs and leagues as international broadcasting revenues become the scarce resource.

In a market economy, runaway success creates its own problems.

https://www.ft.com/content/a0430c7a-c8b8-4ca4-b86f-803b369a3f46?segmentId=114a04fe-353d-37db-f705-204c9a0a157b

8. Spencer, Battle for Europe (17 May 2006)

by kurto

A well-constructed analysis of 1704’s Battle of Blenheim, in which John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, defeated (and captured!) armies of Louis XIV for the first time in nearly 50 years. The book nimbly progresses from Europe’s turn-of-the-century political environment (and Britains’s since the Glorious Revolution), to the War of Spanish Succession, and finally on to campaigning and the famous battlefield. Churchill and Prince Eugene of Savoy are the protagonists. Though it would be another five years before the conflict’s denouement, the battle ended French ambitions of annexing the Holy Roman Empire (or its remnants), and led to repulse from Italy. In Britain, Blenheim reshaped the country’s military stature on the Continent, and when aligned with sea power, set the stage of the first great imperial age of the 18th century. Primarily a synthesis of leading works; needs more theater maps; highly readable.

10. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (25 July 2006)

by kurto

The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.

24. Skidmore, Bosworth (27 Nov 2022)

by kurto

Narrates the civil war between the Plantagenet houses of York and Lancaster over the second half of the 15th century, culminating in the battle of Bosworth, in which Henry VII bested incumbent Richard III with the aid of the turncoat Stanleys, and the Tudor dynasty’s establishment through victorious Henry’s marrying Edward VI’s daughter Elizabeth to unite the lines. Using a popular style to point up contemporary sociopolitical perceptions as well as military and political calculation, the author is well balanced and generally steers clear of omniscience. Still, it is antiquarian in that no ideas or values seem to be at stake, only allegiances and place in an aristocratic society.

7. Trevelyan, English Revolution (30 Jul 2014)

by kurto

Crisply narrates the events of the Stuart restoration and Hanoverian succession, focusing on the prudential resolution of unprecedented constitutional questions. Though open to charges of Whiggish history, Trevelyan usefully shows the subsequent sociopolitical consequences of the Glorious Revolution through the long 18th century (i.e., to the Victorian era). But the work exceeds such prescriptive intent: it is masterfully synthesized, the chapter on the settlement’s consequences in Scotland and Ireland also serving to negate the charge of triumphalism. While it is what I had come to understand from derivative works, it remains very good, standing the test of time in argument and writing.

3. Downing, Military Revolution and Political Change (18 Jan 2015)

by kurto

The endurance of medieval forms of constitutional government and the revolution of early modern warfare, which required state centralization of resources, accounted for the democratic trajectory of western and central European countries. After reviewing forms of late medieval government and warfare, the author uses a comparative framework to evaluate Prussia and France as absolutist cases and England, Sweden, and the Netherlands as republican exemplars. The work is a useful riposte to class and economic determinism, but lacks truly original expression, the text being heavily footnoted with citations of generally accepted historiography. It is also written as if for a graduate seminar: impossible not to learn, but better off with Fukuyama.

23. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (18 Nov 2022)

by kurto

Politics shaped England’s socioeconomic development over 1530-1780, as the island nation alone in Europe progressed from monarchy-and-aristocracy toward the proto-bourgeois, from agricultural toward commercial and early industrial.
In the Tudor era, the Commons gained influence; in the Reformation, absolutism was undermined by conscience and education of the gentry. London’s economic power acted to unify England (if not the soon-to-be United Kingdom). Domestic policy aimed at controlling the peasantry via justices of the peace. Foreign policy, which began in medieval thrall to Rome and Spain, grew to be independent (though the country remained a 2d-line power).
1640’s destruction of the Stuart bureaucracy was the most decisive event in British history. The dynasty’s unsustainable economics – spending more than it received – led to the Civil War (see also 18th-century France). But predictable causes do not guarantee predictable outcomes: nonconforming religion (e.g., Lollards) as well as the new urban culture evinced popular opposition. When the conflict came, richer peasants aligned not with the lumpen but the gentry, which had learned to lead in the schools.
During the Interregnum and Restoration, the abolition of northern and Welsh councils unified the legal system and the economic dominance of London gathered pace, acting to radiate Puritanism. But the Restoration’s key feature was anti-democratic. Aristocrats and bishops returned; nonconformists were excluded by the Clarendon Code; enclosure accelerated, promoting agricultural productivity. In this respect, Jacobitism was an outcome not a cause: unimproving, gentry and freeholders were liquidated; the ‘new men’ were ascendant before 1745. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 marked the transition to national monopoly (i.e., to colonial mercantilism from chartered companies) and the Dutch wars. Then joint stock companies deployed capital where previously it had been in limited supply. (Ireland, after African slaves, was the principal victim of this trend.) The Restoration did not halt labor migration but favored employers. Excise and land taxes acted to shift resources from peasants to landowners and the City. Following the Toleration Act, Quakers and others saw to it that favorable legislation was enforced across England, again promoting more uniform administration and tempering the influence of JPs. Intellectually, the Newtonian revolution as well as dispersion of ‘natural hierarchy’ undermined views of social organization: men no longer were united to each other.
After the Glorious Revolution and over the 18th century the colonies supplanted Europe as England’s biggest market; 1763’s Peace of Paris converted these markets from suppliers to buyers, until the American revolution and Irish revolt shook the system. Thus there were five periods of export trade: old draperies to 1600; new draperies to 1650; colonial monopoly – entrepot – re-export to 1700; manufactures to the colonies to 1780; and afterward the industrial revolution, enabled by modernized banks and credit, facilitated worldwide export. Bacon’s aspirations for society advanced by scientific approaches advanced dissent. Freeborn men thought to enter the factor was to surrender their birthright; laborers now sought protection for Elizabethan regulations (e.g., prices, standards, apprenticeships, etc.). By 1780, rural distress was evident, though grand landowners had regained ground.
Heavily focused on structural analysis, there is no discussion of even the Whig Ascendancy or George III’s new system. Event are Whiggishly inevitable. The neo-Marxist approach also surrenders credibility in such observations as Soviet collectivization costs ‘thousands’ of lives.