England

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.

19. Butterfield, George III and the Historians (24 September 2022)

by kurto

George III’s intentions at accession have been revealing of the historian’s partisanship and methodological preferences. Primarily narrating the historiographical turns of the succeeding two centuries, Butterfield points up the novelty of party in 18th-century England: the great minds of Bolingbroke, Hume, and Burke were innovating. Therefore to claim the king broke rules of constitutional monarchy which were not so well established in 1760 as in 1860 indicates anachronism. Further, both Whigs (Rockinghams) and court parties were necessary to conflict and resolution; one should not write history as if conflict should not have occurred. The role of independent MPs, not to mention the Wilkes saga, brings politics back into relief. Where Whiggish historians have seen partisan views (e.g., in parliamentary debates) as automatically leading to voting outcomes, Namierites have seen socioeconomic classification as determinative. (As an analogue, see historical treatment of assembly debates early in the early French Revolution.) Yet individuals acted on particular influences or preferences. No amount of scholarship can remedy insufficient imagination in interrogating and reconstructing the past. Equally, the historian who recovers structure and process is not obliged to defend it. The professional is to be diligent in search of evidence, responsible to it, and fair-minded in judgement and presentation. Narrative encompasses both analysis and structure most fully. Put more colloquially, the reader should not be able to guess the outcome.

24. Prest, William Blackstone (27 Dec 2015)

by kurto

A narrative life of 18th-century jurist William Blackstone, renowned for distilling dense English common law into a more readily understood framework. The fatherless son of minor gentry, Blackstone rose through diligent classical studies to a place at Oxford’s All Souls, where postgraduate and administrative energies led to intra-university political activity. His initial foray as a London barrister was unsuccessful; his lectures on the common law made him a name; but his taking most of the income of newly endowed chair earned Blackstone a whiff of odium. Or was it more simply undignified ambition in Hanoverian and Georgian England? The future George III was a fan, Jeremy Bentham was not. The author’s counterbalances his own opinion. Later an MP, Blackstone was only modestly effective because of his back-bench independence and also a diffident speaking style: he failed notably during the rough-and-tumble of the Wilkes affair. But his practice grew, and some years after leaving Oxford for good, he won the judgeship he sought. Again opinions were divided, between churlish, high-church Tory and diligent national treasure. In fact he was something of a rationalist modernizer. Like Everitt’s

    Cicero

, the book could spend a bit more time elucidating the kernel of Blackstone’s thinking itself.

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.