Political development

25. Talbot, Season of the Witch (28 Dec 2025)

by kurto

Valorizes libertine, gay San Francisco circa 1965-85 as a Nietzschean escapade-cum-morality tale, flattening socioeconomic context and ignoring externalities. Whether or no these were the city’s animating spirits, Talbot reads as though the late 20th century’s progressive paradigm was inevitable rather than contingent on events that also included neighborhood reshuffling after 1989’s earthquake and the Internet boom of the next decade. Equally, why and at what cost should counterculture be not merely accepted but endorsed?

Narrating via sympathetic character sketch of local celebrities and leftist politicians, Talbot moves from Haight-Ashbury bohemians to Filmore’s music scene to city hall. The Sixties amounted to a cultural dialogue between metropolitan London, falling fast, and a depopulating northern California city of approximately 725,000, supported by Motown Detroit. Music, fashion, drugs, and sex surpassed the civil rights movement, welfare-state expansion, declining industrial and Keynesian economics, or the Cold War (save Vietnam).

Like other US cities, San Francisco’s wartime and postwar industrial heights were passing, families migrating to the suburbs (their commute aided by the unmentioned 1972 debut of BART), and violent crime rising. Talbot alludes to working-class neighborhoods, portrays the police as a corrupt, closed ‘Gaelic and garlic’ shop, and paints felonies in the colors of moral equivalence. Municipal administration improves with the election of George Moscone, trailed by the beatified Harvey Milk – both complicit in Jim Jones’ degradation of electoral politics. Amid the Dan White’s notorious assassinations, one learns the Board of Supervisors somehow remained a 6-5 majority of ‘moderates’. Who were these benighted voters? Why is Dianne Feinstein, quarterback to 1981’s $25 million bailout by California and praised for prompting a conference of American mayors to establish an AIDS task force, a ‘good government moderate’?

The 1950s are ‘dark days’ for labor activists. Reagan is seen to put a ‘genial face on callous policies’ as governor in the 1960s and president in the 1980s, when the city heroically responded to AIDs (originally GRID). The underdog 49ers are most laudable for being gay-friendly, unlike the hegemonic Dallas Cowboys, whose Hall of Fame but Christian coach exhibits an equally regional trait. And so on.

Talbot questionably reports Vincent Hallinan, an early hero, has an Olympic-size swim pool in his Marin backyard – most unlikely. Later one reads 15 percent of returning Vietnam veterans were addicted to heroin, without citation. Oral history without reference to other evidence, however readable, seems to sacrifice accuracy and balance.

Cities are ‘social enterprises built on the tacit compact that one racial or religious group or neighborhood won’t start warring on another’, Talbot writes. On what basis do they function well? He ventures:
By taking care of suffering men [during the AIDS crisis], San Francisco finally became a unified city. …The plague burned down to the city’s core, where one simple truth was revealed: we must take care of each other. No matter how sick or helpless or untouchable people are.

The contemporary left transforms Hobbesian individuals into Marxist/postmodern classes, whose claims are borne not of natural right but Rousseau’s compassion, demanding not only toleration but approbation. How to meet the costs of such as regime? The burdens of California’s Proposition 13, its latter-day capital-gains tax, and other scarcities endemic to the peninsular city disproportionately fall not on patricians like Feinstein or nouveau riches but working classes and families, the citizens who seemingly comprise Talbot’s ‘conservatives’.

Even as a cultural synthesis of how it felt to contemporaries, Season assumes that which is to be explained: that which might have been grounded in San Francisco’s up-and-down 150 years since the 1840s, or contrasted with contemporary American cities, is lionized in isolation. Season may serve as a standard treatment not as a treatment of any standard.

23. Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (13 Dec 2025)

by kurto

The 19th-century Habsburg monarchy took as its raison d’etre acting to stabilize Mitteleuropa but failed to keep pace with either liberalism or nationalism. After the tumult of 1848, the dynasty’s repeated pursuit its own interests – the army and financial administration (i.e., taxation) – led to constitutional muddle which could not reconcile emergent peoples to German-flavored federalization. Surrendering the possibility of greater Germany after 1866, the empire turned away from liberalism following the crash of 1873, thereafter stumbling into the train of Magyar Hungary and Prussian Germany. The empire fell not because it was unworkable but since the national elites envied sovereignty without exercising responsibility. Her successors also struggled to convert the peasantry to liberalism, instead becoming agrarian democracies ill-equipped to manage power, as Metternich predicted.
The empire’s ‘missions’ had included defending Europe from Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, promoting the Counterrevolution in the 17th, and promoting Enlightenment in the 18th, as a means to the permanent, paramount cause of the dynasty’s honor and glory. In the 19th, it unsuccessfully sought to block Greater Germany, too late in seeking to enter the Zollverein and then the Confederation.
1620’s Battle of White Mountain determined the empire’s character: the Czech nation and Protestant religion was submerged, Germanic Austria extended to Bohemia. Hungary, reconquered after a final Turkish assault in 1683, sidestepped the same outcome in 1707 and 1711, latterly by the Peace of Szatmar in which the Magyars gained recognition for the county gentry’s managing judicial and fiscal matters (the comitat) in exchange for recognizing Charles VI as sovereign. The bargain was reinforced by 1740’s Pragmatic Sanction, intended to secure Maria Theresa’s succession, which swapped the indivisibility of Habsburg lands in illogical exchange for Magyar privileges. The pact foreshadowed 19th-century efforts to position the master-nation peoples (Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland) against one another.
Habsburg lands were entailed estates, not a nation, a collection of ‘Irelands’ whose nobility were loyal to Vienna (save those in Galicia and Italy). Imperial bureaucrats were town dwellers in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Brno, promoting the Enlightenment.
Joseph II (reigned 1765 as co-regent to 1780, then as monarch to 1790) saw the empire as Germanic, breaking with the Hungarian settlement and also the Catholic Church in the interest of a centralized state. Land reforms were intended to increase property subject to tax, but restricted sales among social classes, meaning the social (i.e., formative national) character of peasant communities was strengthened and not subsumed in German ways. Simultaneously, magnates amalgamated the lands of petty nobles, creating incipient capital. (Freeing Jews from restrictions typical of Russia created a class grateful to the dynasty.)
Following the Congress of Vienna, Francis II (Holy Roman Emperor from 1792-1806, then Emperor of Austria 1804-36) upheld Metternich’s system borne of 1819’s Carlsbad Decrees (imposing censorship and control of national university groups) as well as the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Russia, these the two pillars of the empire’s contribution to the Concert of Europe.
Metternich sought to arrange regional diets in support of the dynasty; but regional bodies in 1825 and 1830 had demanded the use of popular languages. He wrongly supposed the Magyars would be content with the post-Napoleonic settlement, but winning the Hungarian gentry to federalism would have meant ending comitat privileges and otherwise making liberal concessions. His rival, Kolovrat, standing as an independently wealthy Bohemian to a Rhinelander in need of dynastic employ, won control of domestic policy after balancing the crown’s accounts in 1831; Metternich regained sole control on Ferdinand’s 1835 succession. Louis Kossuth’s Magyar nationalism both made the running of awakening Diets and, like the Habsburgs, pursued pseudo-liberal policies, for instance in replacing Latin with Magyar but not Romanian (in Transylvania), Croatian, etc. Before 1848, this was mainly the handiwork of intellectuals in towns of more than 100,000 – Milan and Venice, Prague, Budapest – where a Rights of Man worldview was contending to supersede Germanic bourgeois liberalism. Italian nationalists sought not Magyar privilege but outright independence for Lombardy and Venetia, and so threatened Metternich’s entire domestic system as well as the policy of deterring French aggression.
***
1848 commenced with February riots in Paris, then followed Budapest, where Kossuth perceived that unless the gentry acted radical intellectuals would capture the peasantry. The March laws, established in Bratislava’s diet (subsequently removed to the Hungarian capital), converted the constitution to recognizing solely Francis Joseph’s personal rule; abolished the Hungarian chancellery and set up a viceroy without reference to Vienna; incorporated Transylvania and Croatia; abolished the robot, established the Magyar language and enlarged suffrage; and established a separate army, budget, and foreign policy. Ferdinand acceded.
Bohemia simultaneously overreached, demanding unification of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia despite lack of historical precedent; Silesia was predominantly German, as were Moravian elites. In the Slav congress of June, Palacky launched Austroslavism, neither Russian nor German, as an alternate to Slav nationalism. The Prague meeting produced both a revolutionary manifesto, for instance seeking the reunion of Poland, and an address to the emperor calling for improved treatment of subject peoples. The bifurcation identified the substance of the empire’s final mission, its ‘decisive question’. Street fighting broke out, to be crushed by the imperial army; but the empire was not uniformly strong-willed.
In Lombardy, also in March, locals called for aid from the King of Sardinia, which invasion Radetzky was initially ordered not to resist, leading to claims on all Habsburg Italian lands; however, Germanic students in the Tyrol and Trieste remained loyal and so checked the momentum. The army in Lombardy-Venetia, having withdrawn to the Quadrilateral (Verona, Peschiera del Garda, Mantua, and Legnago between the Mincio and Adige rivers), recovered with Lombard victories in July and, following siege, Venetian surrender in August 1849.
In Vienna, Archduchess Sophia led the engineering of Metternich’s resignation; but Viennese middle and working classes went further – in April Windischgratz’s army narrowly kept order. The dynastic court fled to Innsbruck; ministers remaining in Vienna promulgated an imperial constitution styled on Belgium’s, and the following month, conceded a constituent assembly.
September’s Act of Emancipation was the most consequential legislation of Ferdinand’s reign, abolishing without compensation the hereditary (comitat) rights of landlords and the robot, while establishing peasant security of tenure. Subsequently, landowners were no longer interested to retain peasants, some of whom sold and moved to the towns, providing labor for industrialists and support for the swamping of German elites. Soon they wished for schooling in the vernacular, especially in Bohemia and Slovenia, and switched from opposing aristocrats to contending among one another as subject (i.e., incipient) nationalities. The abolition of hereditary jurisdiction ceded power to imperial officials, but only in Hungary did the decline of petty gentry matter – elsewhere it was too small – and remaining peasants lost their revolutionary fervor.
Broadly, the court and revolutionaries each came to accepted remodeling along the lines of the master nations; the dynasty preserved but was never serious about working the subject peoples. Habsburg policy acknowledged Croatia but not Transylvania, which was left to the Magyars. Bohemia exposed its dilemma, for the regional elite’s Germanic character had given way. The bourgeois retreated from these views as the revolutionary tide receded, but had indicated a fundamental preference for German confederation.
Insurrection had not ended: in October, Viennese radicals rose, but were unsupported by peasants in lower or upper Austria and suppressed by Windischgratz. At the same time the restored Croat leader Jellacic invaded Hungary, effectively rescinding Habsburg acceptance of the March Laws while also indicating the Magyars would not be free of popular discontent. Jellacic, after helping suppress Vienna, was defeated. Ferdinand abdicated in December; in March 1849 Francis Joseph issued the centralizing March constitution. Kossuth declared independence, which went unrecognized and prompted Russia’s May invasion, restoring matters to status quo ante. Hence both greater Germany and national Austria failed in 1848, and national Hungary in 1849.
***
Afterward, the already dwindling German elites hoped for revived imperialism, while fissiparous peoples such as the Bohemian Czechs wished for federalism. The dynasty thus reasserted itself as ruling subject peoples – the ‘empire of 70 millions’ – whom Francis Joseph trusted no more than liberalism. The Bach system launched with 1850’s abolishment of Hungarian tariffs, persisting until 1859. The decade saw great capital investment especially in railroads, but 1857’s crisis shook liberal faith. Foreign affairs predominated: as in Metternich’s time policy sought to deter French interest in Italy and check Russia’s pursuit of Danubian principalities as a route to Turkey. The Crimean war’s outcome blocked the latter, yet the empire lost. Russia blamed her for threatening to join the allies, while the allies thought the war could have been prevented had she done so earlier. Worse, the allies had stopped Russia alone, and the Peace of Paris stopped Austria herself advancing to the mouth of the Danube. The empire’s Mitteleuropa mission was compromised.
Martial law was lifted form Lombardy-Venetia in 1857; the following year Napoleon III agreed to help Cavour expel the Austrians. Sardinia was given an ultimatum to disarm, but the Habsburg army mobilized more slowly than the French. Radetzky lost at Magenta and then Solferino. Peace, struck directly between France and the empire, surrendered Lombardy but not Venetia or the Quadrilateral, and demonstrated the dynasty must share power with the master nations. The prestige of the army, vital to survival in 1848, suffered.
The October Diploma of 1860 was intended as a federalist document, with legislation to derive from the diets and a Reichsrat. The countervailing February Patent of 1861 made the Vienna parliament imperial, the diets reduced to acting as regional electoral colleges. Voting was weighted for urban Germans and landlords. Neither addressed the erstwhile Hungarian concessions of 1848. Francis Joseph insisted the Reichsrat must never interfere with foreign policy or the army, never to relent.
Then followed constitutional absolutism under Schmerling. In 1863 the minister persuaded Francis Joseph to bid for leadership of the German confederation; Prussia declined to attend a Frankfurt convention, and subsequently thwarted the empire’s application to the Zollverein. Austrian bourgeois and intellectuals, mistakenly thinking the Habsburgs to be turning to German rationalism, wholly went over to the Habsburgs (as German liberals would the Hohenzollerns in 1866).
Francis Deak, repudiating the scope of Kossuth’s ambitions, thought the Magyars could not oppose both the Habsburgs and Hungary’s own subject peoples, and so chose to ally with the empire, to reassert as a historic Habsburg nation. Publishing Magyar demands in the summer of 1865, he drew Francis Joseph to Budapest to recognize the grants of 1848. Schmerling fell. Hungary’s gains came at the expense of the Reichsrat: Deak demanded a ministry responsible to the emperor, Belcredi – appointed to resolve Hungarian matters so as to prepare for Prussian war – countered with a comitat and ‘national’ diet. Andrassy, returned from exile with Kossuth, suggested a compromise of delegations of Hungarians and Austrians that would be responsible for internal matters and work together on imperial matters (i.e., the nationalities), essentially the basis of 1867’s dualism.
After 1863, war with Prussia was inevitable: Italy allied with the Hohenzollerns, refusing the empire’s belated offer to cede Venetia (which was then offered to France). Routing Austria at Sadowa in July 1866, Bismarck opened negotiations promptly, to block French or Russian participation, which resulted in Austria’s final exclusion from unified Germany.
Beust, a Saxon, succeeded to the mission of pacifying subject peoples, so as to restore the anti-Prussian possibility of empire. And again Hungary was to be mollified. He revived the February Patent, narrowing the Reichsrat to ‘constitutional Austria’, the emperor retaining sole control of foreign policy and the military. Under the Dualist settlement, each delegation had 60 members, the Austrian side imperial in scope, the Hungarian strictly national. Economic policy was shared between the two delegations, tariffs among the empire were to be settled very 10 years, generally creating leverage for the Hungarian magnates’ agrarian demands at the expense of imperial industrial interests in cheap food. The empire’s declining aristocracy acceded because of its unwillingness to rule; the liberals did not understand they had no real role; the dynasty was content with maneuvering to retain power; Dualism was a return to Bach.
Francis Joseph resented the liberals’ interference with Dualism over 1867-79, and so doubled down on the Magyars. Hungary after 1867 had seen the disappearance of 100,000 landowners, resulting in one-third of the country being owned by magnates, one-fifth by some 300 families. Agrarian protection turned the magnates into nationalists, much as the Junkers became German patriots. Land reform having killed Austria’s regional nobles, capitalist successors concentrated in Vienna, weakening any would-be federalism. But the economic crisis of 1873 shook industrialist and bourgeois faith in liberalism: they turned for protection to the Habsburg state, simultaneously making way for nationalism. In the succeeding era of 1879-93, Taafe balanced the subject peoples. The Czechs, able to compete for jobs, turned loyal to constitutional Austria; but this produced Germanic backlash. Proposals to extend the franchise raised more fears. He was dismissed in favor of a nationalities coalition of ministers, another Habsburg reverse of course, again government disrupted while administration persisted.
Austria in her final years was a vast body of state servants, amid three competing constitutional frameworks – the October Diploma, the February Patent, and Dualism. Every year the provinces gained responsibility, yet could not contain nationalist discontent, but only relay it to the Reichsrat. There being very little power in the private sector, every small matter of railway, schools, or postal appointment was politically fraught. In the 1890s the price of defeating liberalism emerged as the diversion of emergent middle-class aspirations to national autonomy, which redounded to claims that eventually reached further than parliamentary purview of foreign policy and the army. Loyalty to the emperor no longer sufficed for intellectuals or urban classes, as it had for the military and bureaucracy. Indeed, Christian socialism (more populist than Germany’s Center) and Social democracy presented more alternatives; while these acted to deny nationalist claims, they sought for the same distributive socioeconomic functions.
The dynasty achieved liberty to manage constitutional Austria by following a foreign policy sympathetic to Germany. When the latter abandoned Bismarck’s pacificism for Weltpolitik, the empire and its peoples became beholden to Germany’s bid for mastery of Europe – no liberty after all. Austria-Hungary was neutral in the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war but consequently gained responsibility for Bosnia-Herzegovina, adding Slavs to the empire, which reinforced the Bismarckian intention of Germanic predominance in the Balkans. But the chancellor’s dismissal led to Wilhem II committing Germany to follow Austrian lead in the Balkans in 1889. 1905’s Moroccan crisis, Germany’s first attempt to subdue France and Russia, was the dynasty’s last independent effort.
The Austro-Russian entente of 1897, which swapped Russian non-interference in the Balkans for recognition of her interests in the Straits, was intended to promote domestic stability. Instead it enabled subject peoples to make claims of the dynasty, e.g., fuller use of the Czech language in Bohemia. These prompted German demonstrations in Austria, unprecedented since 1848, and thence Badeni’s dismissal. The same year, Hungarian tariff negotiations, eventually postponed to 1903, opened new attacks on Dualism (e.g., against the common army), prompting further protest from the German ‘people of state’.
The final dynasty’s insurmountable challenge would come from the South Slav idea. Strosmajer (not Tito) was the real creator of the South Slav idea, but his conception didn’t reconcile the Serbs (who’d fought Turks) and Croats (who’s opposed Magyars and sometimes Habsburgs); the Serbs took their culture from Paris, the Croats from Germany; Slovenia, isolated from both by the Hungarian frontier, naturally allied with the Czechs. All the missteps of 1907-14 sprang from mistaking Serbia, totem of the South Slavs, for Piedmont. The Magyar proposal to make Hungarian the sole language of local rails, even in Croatia, aggravated Serbo-Croat intellectuals. More significant, Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed in 1908, in exchange for Austria’s supporting Russian warships passing through the Dardanelles. Supervision was justified, annexation was not. In the late days of the empire, military spending lagged behind the other Great Powers.
Magyar support for Germany in World War I was Hungary’s foremost concession to greater Germany. Kossuth had expected that for Mitteleuropa’s nationalities to emerge, the empire must fall. Tisza supposed Hungary could remain independent of Germany too because the Prussians were reliably anti-Slav. He checked Germany attempts to win over Romania via Transylvanian concession. Most nationalities had 2-3 natural opponents, the Czechs only the Germans, fearing victory as fatal to an independent Bohemia. Francis Joseph passed in 1916, succeeded by Charles, who sought Magyar mollification and independent negotiation with the allies. Tisza threatened to withhold food. The Czechs demanded to add Hungarian Slovakia. The Poles finally broke with the empire over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s recognizing a Ukraine which included parts of historic Poland. In 1848 the threat of social revolution rallied the upper classes to the dynasty. In the war’s dying stages, they sought strength in nationalism. Masaryk won Wilson away from the ‘Austrian mission’ of federalism to self-determination, aided by American Slovaks willing to support to the new Czech state.
The empire’s successors faced problems in establishing domestic authority and security against revanchist Germany. They were little better than the Habsburgs. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, borne of nationalist expression, became new versions of the Austrian idea.
***
Rather than narrate events and draw conclusions, Taylor deduces ineluctable logic, a technique dependent on construction or interpretation. Further, his is often discursive, constantly renewed with addition, subtraction, refinement.

7. Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed (26 April 2025)

by kurto

The long Stuart century resolved the central problems of James I’s era – religion, finance, and Scotland – albeit unexpectedly. The Anglican settlement held, though Dissent proliferated. Royal finance became the people’s responsibility to fund government. Scotland was unified if not integrated with England. Ultimately monarchy became the king-in-parliament.

Towns increasingly crossed transitioned from agricultural centers to exchange economies, most home to approximately 1,000 residents. Norwich, Bristol, York, and Exter ranged from 10,000 – 30,000. London was a world of its own. Despite decline of the traditional cloth trade, by century’s end, England had passed Holland in transshipping from the Atlantic colonies and East Indies to the European continent; cloth fell to below half, while re-export went from 0 to 33 percent.
The constitution was not only unwritten but could not be reduced to writing. The best decisions were seen to result from unanimity; Commons generally deferred to the Lords, local officers (e.g., JPs) to the lords lieutenants. Polls for the Commons were a last resort. Thus were Catholics and Puritans (ideally) excluded from politics.

The king was a singulas major universalis major, according to developing ideas of resisting the (Catholic) sovereign. Among the 20-30 privy counselors, the 3 most important offices were the lord treasurer (of the Exchequer), the chancellor (legal officer), and secretary of state. Charles I sought to reform the lord lieutenancy but the position became a life tenancy of appointed peers; peerage grew from 55 to 170 by the time of William III, James I having dispensed tithes for cash, Charles for loyalty.

In 1610 the Lord Treasurer Earl of Salisbury proposed Parliament should adopt the Great Contract, a one-time subsidy to pay off the royal debt and to commute some prerogative rights to an annual land tax. The Commons balked, wanting the specifics of transforming wardship, purveyance, and trade impositions. The failure led to retailing of titles, royal land, and an increase in royal rents. Salisbury won a legal case (the Bates case) re import tax but squandered the mystique of the king’s wisdom (i.e., the rationale of the prerogative).

In 1621 James couldn’t find a diplomatic solution to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, in which the Spanish Habsburgs claimed the Lower Palatinate, erstwhile ruled by his nephew Frederick V (the ‘Winter King’), and could not prevent the Commons petitioning for war and a Protestant marriage for Charles. In 1627 came the Five Knights Case, followed by the Petition of Right (including habeus corpus, prohibition on supra-Parliamentary taxation, the billeting of troops in peacetime, martial law). Oddly, the 1630s were remember as peaceful, in contrast to the continent, despite the slide toward civil war including religious ferment: 10,000 Catholic priests were active in the country. Meanwhile, Laud, backed by the Duke of Buckingham, was enforcing high church policy – alienating moderates and Catholics, and prompting the first wave of Puritans to leave for New England.

The Civil War effectively commenced in 1637 with enforcement of the Anglican prayer book in Scotland and consequent formation of the Covenanters; the second Bishops’ War was the formal start, leading to Scottish occupation of Newcastle. In 1641, Parliamentary attacks on Charles’ ministers were tantamount to impeaching the king. The Grand Remonstrance polarized the Commons, calling for rights to approve the King’s ministers as well as the Anglican hierarchy, thereby exacerbating Anglican-Presbyterian tensions. As events quickened, the political class faced stark choices among otherwise shared values (e.g., private property, royal prerogative). Generally, the north and west were royalist, the south and east Parliamentarian. When war was actually declared, each side enlisted 20,000. Following the failure of 1645’s Uxbridge Proposition, Parliament’s military leaders sketched plans the ‘new model’ army, combining three field forces into one, while stripping peers (lords lieutenant) of automatic command. So long as Charles was represented by Laud, Parliament focused on reforming the episcopacy, though Presbyterians were willing to sacrifice liberty to license, and the Independents to tolerate license for liberty of conscience.

The second phase of the war, commencing winter 1648, saw Charles’ English supporters join the Scots in opposing the New Model Army’s intervention in politics. Though the army was broadly disliked, Parliament retained better resources and organization. Having debated amongst itself at Putney, the army then purged Parliament and imprisoned Charles.

The king’s execution made England an outlaw nation, its people sullenly accepting the Commonwealth – prompting Hobbes to write Leviathan asserting state authority was preferable to universal civil war. The gentry withdrew from local government, leaving novices in their stead; the Commons was dependent on the army. The revolution was internally inconsistent: Puritan enthusiasm catalyzed events in the interest of conscience, the gentry’s fundamental constitutionalism acted as a check. Ireland, whose religious revolt had fairly united all sides of England, took three years to subdue, the revolutionary theorist Henry Ireton passing in the fighting. Nonetheless, the Commonwealth’s greatest successes were militaristic, notably the comprehensive union of the three Stuart realms and defeat of the Dutch navy in 1652 by result of a better (if politicized) military. The country fell further into debt. The Rump was expelled in 1653 because the populace would have voted royalist. The Instrument of Government (1653) established Cromwell as protector, contained elements on the New Model Army as well as Leveler proposals but looked like monarchy to its opponents. Cromwell ruled for the people’s good – not what pleased them but what he thought they needed. The regime was held together in his person, displaying a contradictory longing for stable constitution and hope of a millenarian vision.

The Protectorate had retained three armies, one led by Monck, who catalyzed the Commonwealth’s fall after Cromwell’s passing. Amid the Restoration, the Convention was careful to pay for disbanding soldiers, though prejudice against a standing army would last more than 100 years. Tasked with indemnity, land holdings, religious settlement, it finished its business in a rapid 5 months. The Restoration converted monarchy to a popular form of government, with the Church of England positioned as a compromise between Catholics and Puritans (later Dissenters), and the Commons as a recognized branch of government. But the Irish settlement chose Parliamentary owner-occupiers (in order not to reopen English debts) and the Scottish resolution was status quo ante bellum (i.e., control of a subordinated Parliament, control by royal privy council, and restoration of disliked episcopacy).

The Earl of Clarendon’s 1667 fall marked a return to personal rule. Fiscal problems prompted 1670’s secret Treaty of Dover: a personal subsidy and a share of the Dutch empire in exchange for a naval attack on the Netherlands and suspension of anti-Catholic laws. Anglicans and Dissenters were united by 1672. Titus Oates’ conspiratorial Popish Plot transpired over 1678-81, ironically against Charles in order to replace him with the Catholic James II, the subject of the Exclusion Crisis. Based on his past record, Charles was widely expected to relent to 1680’s Exclusion Bill but stiffened, dissolving Commons, purging judges and local officials, arresting the Earl of Shaftesbury, and persecuting Dissenters.

In issuing 1687’s Declaration of Indulgence, James set aside penalties for Catholics and Dissenters. The Anglican hierarchy refused to read it in church, protesting this was to suspend the common law, and went into opposition; six bishops went to the Tower. But Catholics and Dissenters didn’t amount to necessary support. Meanwhile, William of Orange, actively trying to prevent England from siding with France, accepted an invitation to visit England, panicking James into the fleeing the country. Parliament resolved the crisis of William and Mary’s claim in a brisk two weeks, determining the throne had been abdicated, a deliberately ambiguous view. The opposing camps then agreed the Declaration of Right, formalizing the Commons’ role, again prohibiting standing armies, requiring free elections as well as Commons’ consent if the public were to be taxed. It established the appearance of a constitutional monarchy.

An assassination attempt promoted the Oath of Association, declaring William the lawful, rightful king, driving a wedge into the Tories, who left local office. In power, William’s warfare created the need for efficient fiscal administration, leading to the creation of national (not royal) debt, and reorienting London around finance instead of commerce. In war, the security of funded debt was preferable to the risks to overseas trade. The Act of Settlement (1701) pre-established the transition from Anne Stuart to the Hanovers, also restricting government to English citizens and severing judges from royal appointment and other country prejudices. Country opposition cut across Whig and Tory: the country favored constitutional checks on monarchy and the standing army as well as fiscal restraint. William stumbled badly in Scotland, where the ‘Club’ made itself a loyal opposition and the Highlands were essentially ungoverned. James’ passing helped prompt the War of Spanish Succession, driving William away from a tilt toward Robert Harley and back to the Whigs; but soon the Dutchman passed from a riding accident.

Anne, who had acted to channel Puritan sympathies into a national reform of manners, saw her reign dominated by European war, and mostly continued William’s policies. Her administration was led by Godolphin’s treasury and Churchill’s army; Tory policy favored the Anglican church, the blue water navy, and fiscal prudence. Franco-Spanish alliance threatened trade and hence finance. The Failure of the Scottish colony at Darien – which had absorbed an estimated ¼ of Scotland’s liquid capital – drove home the country’s exposure to English trade. The Act of Settlement had not been adopted in Scotland; it approved an Act of Security for an independent choice of monarch, raising Jacobite possibilities. The English Alien Act of 1705 then established that unless the succession of the Hanovers were accepted, Scotland would be treated a foreign nation and trade with France interdicted, thereby catalyzing the 1707 Act of Union.

The Whiggish Junto, which had predominated William’s ministry, fell during Anne’s, in part by prosecuting the high Anglican Sacheverell, though Harley supplanting Godolphin, and by the Marlboroughs’ fall from favor. Harley’s courtier-like behavior supplement a ‘government above’ party message. He sought peace in the Spanish Succession war (contra Marlborough), which meant ending the peninsular war and seeking English diplomatic prizes (repudiating the Junto’s aims). The UK thus acquired Newfoundland, retained Gibraltar, and St Kitts in the Peach of Utrecht (1711), taking pole position among naval powers plus a 30-year monopoly on the Asiento.
Kishlansky overstates the formation of political parties and Whiggishly elides events into harbingers: the foreshadowing chapter’s contents is questionable. No footnotes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

23. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (23 November 2023)

by kurto

Sectarian and socioeconomic matters have forced compromises in the aspirations of Irish nationalism: ‘Irishness’, heavily influenced by its neighbors, is a scaled rather than a territorial or residential characteristic.

At the period’s outset, there were Old Irish (Gaels), old English (Elizabethan but Catholic colonists), and New English (Protestants). Newcomers, who saw the country as already loyal (i.e., not conquered), contended with a society premised on tuath, an extended practice of family and foster family, of temporary clan alignment. Neither common nor Roman law prevailed, social organization was parallel to but not congruent with English feudalism. Towns exhibited a more Viking / Norman / English character than the Gaelic countryside. The Catholic Church was split between Francophile Jesuits and residents of Old English towns, and pro-Spanish clerisy in the country. The Old English might have turned but Protestant but for the Counterreformation’s success combined with heavy-handed Westminster policy (as represented by Thomas Wentworth). Was the 1609-10 English settlement to be gradual Anglicization or sharply anti-Gael colonization? 1613’s parliament favored the newly settled provinces of Ulster (then the poorest region) and Connaught. For the new English, Anti-Catholicism was a civilizing mission; settlers were not to reside among Catholics. But the skilled artisans needed for settlement didn’t leave England, save those in the West country who went to Munster, and the important demographic trend was Scottish Presbyterian migration to Ulster, later accelerating in the 1640s. Hugh O’Neill was not the source of 19th- and 20th-century Ulster separatism, nor a nationalist, but only an icon of tuath era.

During the English Civil War, the Old English took the Old Irish (i.e., Catholic) view of education, land, and law; but split over foreign Catholic presence. Parliament raised £1 million on security of 2.5 million acres of Irish lands. Cromwell cowed surrender to the Cavalier army. Appropriate displaced Catholic landowners but not all residents. Because lands were quickly re-sold, settlement was hard to disentangle. Meanwhile spoken Gaelic began receding more quickly than in Scotland, Wales, or Breton France.

William invaded England for European not English purposes: James’ 1689 stand on the Boyne was Louis XIV’s aim not the Stuart goal. Nonetheless, the militarily inconclusive outcome shaped almost three centuries of Irish government and politics. The Treaty of Limerick settled military matters by facilitating the flight of Jacobite wild geese, but altered or ignored guarantees of security for Catholic landowners and to a lesser degree Catholic religious freedom. ‘Patriot’ politics originated herein, not the later 18th century, its aims crystallizing as the repeal of Poynings Law, the establishment of habeus corpus, and public policy made domestically. (Though the Woolen Act of 1699 was not so much Westminster’s doing as economic interests refracted through MPs.) The Declaratory Act of 1719 abolished the Irish House of Lords’ right to appellancy, making Ireland finally dependent. Consequently, nationalism in the context of the Protestant Ascendancy couldn’t rely on natural law, since that would include Catholics. Though the settlers asserted primacy in Irish territory, that they represented the true Irish nation, they were indeed colonizers, for their authority was divorced from the real power in London. Foster describes this as the decisive milestone in Ireland to 1972.

In the 18th century, agriculture drove increasing Anglo-Irish trade, counterbalanced by the incipient English Industrial Revolution. Wool went to Liverpool and Bristol. Beef and butter were traded for sugar, tea, and coal. Middle-class, town Catholics began trading with English co-religionists, and began prospering from the1750s. Supply of specie grew in the 1770s. Thus complaints of restricted trade were more political than real. Irish rents were low in relation to the capital value of land, especially during the Ascendancy, so little capital was invested on improvement. But absenteeism was also explained by such pursuits as military or diplomatic assignment. The Ascendants patronized (Georgian) memorials for land, family, and residencies rather than (Anglican) churches or sculpture. Penal laws were little used, though an effective barrier to Ascendancy politics (Burke: ‘connivance in relaxation of slavery is not the definition of liberty’.) Ulster was already distinctive because of its unique linen trade, dominated by Protestant families. Adding cotton, it became a manufacturing center. Yet 40% of contemporary Irish emigration of 250,000 was Ulster ‘Scotch Irish’. Economic growth then faltered, extending in the next century: the population came to outrun the land, and secretive rural violence (‘the boys’) took root.

By the end of England’s Seven Years War with France, Ireland was more troublesome than North America. Ascendants, thinking themselves Irish with English-style civil rights, were elitist but not nationalists, for whom politics was a badge of status. Showing new responsiveness to public opinion, parliamentarians claimed budgetary control and other powers, though somewhat contrary to O’Brien’s Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt, external pressures (renewed French warfare, the formation of Irish Volunteers – the start of Ireland’s paramilitary tradition – and general public discontent) prompted 1779’s trading concessions and 1882’s panicked yielding of legislative right (technically the repeal of portions of Declaratory Act). Clientelism persisted and Grattan was friends with Catholic interests only so far as they didn’t conflict with the Ascendancy. It was more the French Revolution that drove affairs leading to the Act of Union. In Ulster, now-established traditions of Presbyterian, libertarian republicanism predated the Gaelic nationalism now taking root, spurred by French egalitarianism.
The Ascendants, unwilling to ally with Catholics, were subsequently absorbed into the metropole, and Ireland precluded from 19th-century dominion status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Underground loyalties and protest groups began to influence electoral politics. O’Connell rose off the back of low-cost subscriptions. 1828 marked the Ascendancy’s first electoral reverse, 1829’s Roman Catholic Relief Act the acknowledgement of the Lords, Wellington, and Peel that Irish public opinion was not entirely sectarian: Catholic liberation coincided with reduced voting rolls.

Meanwhile, population had been growing unsustainably, such that emigration was on its way to becoming the main feature of 19th-century society, the Catholics joining Protestants. Many went to Liverpool, which became 25% Irish; London; or America. Most were under age 25, and emigration per capita was double England’s rate. In consequence, residual population became more conservative, particularly the countryside. Remittances and fatalism took their place. The Church’s social authority increased, since the clerisy rose in numbers. The lower classes were decimated, the bourgeois already exhibiting latter marriages and childbirths. The decisive precursor to the Famine was economic collapse after the Napoleonic wars, when agricultural demand collapsed. Recovery was slow and weak, the ecosystem turned to the potato monocrop. Would the Famine have happened anyway? Contemporary Irish poverty is not well understood.

Post Repeal, high politics came to be divided between Whiggish Irish liberals and Tory-minded Protestant scions of the Ascendancy. In the 1870s, the instinctive political deference of middle-class farmers lapsed. The Irish Republican Brother (the Fenians) merged with the rural Ribbon societies, making respectable republican separatism (independence). Agrarian violence became political violence as evictions swelled. The Land League introduced women to political activism and more important established nationalism among Catholics; the opposite side of the Land War was pro-English, Protestant, urban exemplified by Ulster and Trinity College. Land purchase rights, working to the favor of tenants, was the crucible of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which Parnell shaped into a disciplined Westminster party. Home Rule then surpassed Irish Whiggery, the Tories becoming unionists. Moderates who saw law depended on force not opinion deserted Gladstone in the 1886 and 1893 failures of Home Rule; the 1912 bill was very close to the latter, but stalled by World War I.

The Boer War crystallized separatism as a Catholic political aim (and kicked off international decolonization), while Protestant Ulster became irrevocably unionist as 250,000 (of 1.6 million) signed a declaration of loyalty (though Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Derry city exhibited doubts). The Gaelic League, Yeats, and others pointed to the literary revival as preeminent, even more important, a trend underpinned by the Gaelic Athletic Association’s rise. At the start of the war, the Irish Volunteers, which had foolishly been pledged to support Britain with concomitant implementation of Home Rule, were infiltrated by the IRB, and many soon joined Sinn Fein, especially after the return of Easter Rising prisoners. Sinn Fein supplanted the Parliamentary party after Lloyd George’s failed effort to boost conscription in exchange for restating Home Rule transition. Irish guerillas were confident English liberals would flinch; shadow Dail courts trimmed the excesses of Sein Fein’s cattle driving and land seizures. Indeed, public and political opinion broke the UK government’s nerve while the IRA was still in the field. As Anglicization and modernization had enabled the spread of 19th-century nationalism, so 19th-century socioeconomic development had created the social classes which fueled the 20th-century guerillas. Meanwhile, the population hit its nadir, falling to 4.4 million in 1911 from 8.2 in 1840.

The Treaty of 1921 did not enable partition; partition in the form of 1920’s Government of Ireland Act, the successor to 1912 Home Rule bill, made the Treaty possible by creating two devolved parliaments linked by a council of Ireland. The UK tried for a 9-county Ulster but unionists insisted on 6 in the interest of heavier Protestant representation. Southern Ireland’s boycott left Lloyd George to govern the 26 as a crown colony under military law, so he countered by offering Dominion status. The Irreconcilables rejected the treaty because it failed to deliver a republic, rather than all 32 counties (which wasn’t on offer since Ulster was loyal), the Oath of Allegiance being entirely unacceptable. Sheer outlawry was also averse to settlement, but most of the countryside favored resolution. Ironically de Valera and Collins took opposite sides of common expectation, the latter being more pragmatic; the IRB split 11-4 in favor. If the result of the Anglo-Irish war was predictable, the civil war’s denouement was not. The 20th century’s main fault line ran through constitutionalism and the IRA, rather than class (labourism) or emigration.

In the Free State era, gaps between the riven IRA and Dail were rife, de Valera having withdrawn until 1932. The government sought to assert cultural identity of the new country through compulsory study of Gaelic in schools and other means. Ulster was uncompromising in opposing Catholic political interests, driven by middle-class Protestant opinion (including ex-WWI soldiers). During the depression, the north saw heavy emigration to the UK.

De Valera’s Fianna Fail came to stand not only for small farmers and shopkeepers of rural Ireland but also the bourgeois. Quashing the neo-fascist blue shirts demonstrated article 2A of 1937’s constitution would apply to the dissident IRA. He had preferred ‘external association’ with the Commonwealth, rather than 32-country republicanism (though the revised constitution claimed to legislate for Ulster and sought to appeal to northerners); but saw the repudiation of the governor-general; disavowal of annuity payments to English landowners, which sparked a trade war; and subsequent recovery of the ‘Treaty ports’ as his crowning nationalist achievement. Unintentionally, the outcome bound Ulster into British shipbuilding and broader economy; Ulster was raided in World War II while southern Ireland enjoyed a ‘pro British’ neutrality.

In the postwar era, Finance department planners were all-powerful in seeking for development, leading (among other things) to the arrival of foreign corporations in the 1960s. In the same decade, Church authority began receding while Fianna Fail retained hegemony and population resumed growing. Though a Peronist, rural ideology pervaded government doings, it was a decade of exposure to the winder world. In Ulster, the crisis within Protestant unionism as much as radical political Catholicism instigated the Troubles. The IRA resurfaced as fighting the UK’s military might in the form of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, rather the Protestant majority.

Foster would say attempts to remake society as if a tabula rasa end badly, and that as with so many revolutions, the decisive factor is suitably defining the enemy (rather than agreeing final objectives). Ireland and India each chose to fight following partition – which is not the UK’s responsibility – and both became one-party states rather than the pluralities of colonial era.
However magisterial, the push for EEC membership only succeeding in 1972, the study has necessarily been surpassed by Ireland’s gains from European Union membership and consequent socioeconomic change.

4. Welsh, Great Southern Land (11 Mar 2023)

by kurto

Australia developed very quickly in comparison with contemporary British dominions, the Federation launching with provisions for a near-complete welfare state. Whereas the high wages, high tariffs and White Australia consensus persisted until the eighth decade of the 20th century, and the new baseline not established until Howard ratified the Hawke-Keating Accord.
The continent’s settlement had opposed the world’s oldest society with its most enterprising: terra nullius was fairly applied (if regretted). By 1800 emancipist and former officers had made New South Wales self-sufficient in food, but marine products remained the principal export until the development of merino wool. 19th-century Aussie colonies were readily granted self-government, as in Canada Colonial NSW busied itself with land policy, immigration, and education. Frontier conflict, largely dormant until midcentury, sharpened with expanding agriculture and livestock and missionary activity (Anglicans being a less temperate influence than elsewhere in the empire). 1846’s revised leaseholding law converted Squatters from agitators to defenders of status quo.
In 1849, colonial legislatures were authorized to modify their own constitutions and unlike 20th century Africa, they quickly grew into the role, the author approving of such Chartist features as no property qualification, equalized voting districts, votes for women, and pay for MPs. Contrary to affinities for Ned Kelly and bushranging (or at least goldmining, sheep shearing, and droving), 35% of the population lived in the main cities (25% in Sydney or Melbourne), generally in crowded, poor conditions. Save for foreign policy and defense, they were largely independent. Governments grew up not by application of logic but common sense: Australia’s conservative bent was due not to British influence but legislative elites’ mistrust of democracy. Victoria was unsurprisingly less prepared for growth than NSW – 15 years after its founding Melbourne’s population of 140,000 was greater than Sydney not to mention Bristol, England, or Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1860, there were 1 million acres under crop, by 1900 7.5 million.
Inter-colonial agreement had been possible since Lord Grey floated the idea of union in 1848 but the first generations of responsible government had been more interested in practical matters. So the tariff was the main issue of the first Federation conference in 1891, along with the nature of the upper house. The Canadian model seemed most relevant, as the Westminster tradition was unwritten, and the US seen compromised by civil war / racism. (Meanwhile, because of current account surplus, Aussie debt per capital was £50 versus £12 in Canada.) The Federation charter was remarkable for anticipating (in section 51) the welfare state: government was given powers to resolve industrial disputes and to provide for old-age and widows’ pensions, maternity allowances, unemployment, medicines, and medical and dental treatment. Organized labor had not been part of its drafting, yet Australia was soon known as a workman’s paradise.
As nascent industries and labor wanted protection, while primary producers and conservative allies sought access to English markets, the matter was resolved by ‘imperial preference’, three-quarters of imports originating in the empire. Support for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was unanimous, led by Labor and Queensland; it was not abandoned until 1966 (under Holt) and renounced in 1991 (by Hawke). Modern wage awards lasted still longer, as employers demanded tariff protection in return. Recessions naturally led to decreased wages and inevitably to labor unrest.
The author’s portrayal of the postwar era is conventional and less obviously triumphant yet more balanced than, for example, Macintyre. Where there was ‘a hint of Northern Ireland’ in prewar Australia – politics refracting religion (Labor = Catholic, Liberal = Protestant, characterizing wide swaths of society and government) – with the influx of Italians, discrimination against working-class Catholics diminished and stereotypes broke down. By 1970, multiculturalism was established in Sydney and Melbourne, the country towns remaining Anglo-Irish. Australia’s role in Vietnam left fewer scars than in the US. Menzies predominated; Whitlam shook Labor from its party centralization; Fraser’s Liberals struggled to articulate a positive program, as so often with statist conservatives. The Hawke-Keating Accord – trade-union wage restraint in exchange for controlling inflation and job creation plus award reform – broke the postwar prototype; Howard honored its resolution while also surmounting the problems of Mabo and Wik, the latter imperiling 70 percent of Australian land title. Republicanism doesn’t address the country’s ongoing racial animosities.
Often usefully comparative; largely celebratory though seeming regretful of racism by book’s end. Excellent maps.