Political development

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.

5. Johnson, Modern Times (2006)

by kurto

A tour of the principal socioeconomic, intellectual, and political events and trends of the 20th century through the 1980s. Key observations: political violence is infectious and degenerative in nature; it is highly important for leaders to be seen as moral and ethical. In the last century, the left was responsible for the bulk of the disastrous experiments with social engineering in Russia, China, and various socialist outposts, but the right also participated as in Germany, Italy, and Spain. The author convincingly points to the enduring role of individual agency as well as the law of unintended effects. Because he is not a professional academic and is conservative, he is considered idiosyncratic but his conclusions have never been refuted.

16. Judt, Postwar (25 Nov 2006)

by kurto

A work of great erudition and bien pensant orthodoxy that treats the sociopolitical history of Europe from 1945 to 2005, from the Cold War to the near-term aftermath. The author’s best work is in describing the damage wrought by World War II, the brutality of the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe, and the cultural consequences of Western Europe’s economic growth. Micro studies of nation states like Spain also are valuable. But Judt does not grasp the central conflict between democracy and totalitarianism and so presents the Soviet collapse as compelled by economics and driven by Gorbachev, rather than fueled by the thirst for liberty. So too is the dynamic of Thatcherism dismissed as ‘little more than state selloffs’. (Still more remarkable is the omission of Reagan’s ‘Tear down this wall’ speech.) Judt concludes not with the European leadership’s failure to prevent Balkan war and genocide but yet another review of Nazism’s Final Solution and its historical uniqueness; the Soviets get a pass. Ultimately an unoriginal book.

5. Friedman, Next 100 Years (27 Apr 2010)

by kurto

Projects the major historical events of the 21st century using a determinist geopolitical framework. The US will benefit from centrifugal forces in China and the Russian-dominated Caucasus, and then see off a wartime alliance of Turkey and Japan, which along with US ally Poland will have emerged as major players. (The Islamist challenge will dissipate because it lacks geopolitical mass.) Key trends include population decline (which will vitiate global warming), the American-led militarization of space and its attendant civilian benefits (particularly in energy), new forms of warfare that pull back from the social mobilization of total war, and the impact of America’s 50-year cycles — due in 2030 and 2080. The rupture of 2030 will lead the US to encourage immigration; its space edge (and continued control of the seas) will carry the States through the midcentury war; but the cultural weakness of the Hispanic fifth column in the southwest ‘borderlands’ will prove a liability as the century ends. Strongly informed by a sharp reading of history, but at times almost Marxist in its faith in the inevitability of events. There is little here in the way of political thought.