Social development

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.

7. Sen, The Argumentative Indian (6 Mar 2015)

by kurto

Essays by the noted political economist collectively arguing for the importance of Indian heterogeneity, particularly as regards history and religion. The author considers Indian views of themselves and others, ways of reasoning, and such ‘real world’ issues as poverty, class and sex, nuclear weaponry, etc. The title refers to the subcontinent’s pluralistic sociocultural traditions. However, the book fails to grapple with the violence of partition: why should it be ascribed to the British? Rabindranath Tagore figures prominently, and appears worthy of future exploration. At times self-referential and repetitive, the book is nonetheless a useful introduction to Indian sociopolitical thought.

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

by kurto

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

16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)

by kurto

British thinkers following in the footsteps of Locke and Hume — Berkeley, Hutcheson, Gibbon, Smith joined by Burke and Wesley — were the Enlightenment’s first and foremost cohort, seeking to elaborate social compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. Where the French philosophes concentrated on the ‘ideology of reason’, born of universally applying the systems of Newton and Descartes to society’s structure and pursuits, and the American Founding Fathers on equitable political liberty, the British sought new precepts for a gentler, more virtuous society. These moral philosophers ‘posited a moral sentiment in man as the basis of the social virtues’. Himmelfarb places a major emphasis on Methodism (as an offshoot of the Anglican Church) and Dissent. Burke’s role was to take the British approach further, ‘by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” of men the basis of society itself, and, ultimately, of the polity as well’.