United Kingdom

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.

5. Hudson and Sharp, Australian Independence (29 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s independence ought to be dated to 11 December 1931, when the Statute of Westminster took effect, finally devolving legislative power to the country as well as the sister dominions of Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and South Africa. Diplomatic sovereignty had been granted in 1923, followed by the 1926 and 1930 release of executive powers (i.e., disallowance, reservation, annulment of the Colonial Laws Validity Act) and the assignment of governors-general as responsible to national ministries. Notwithstanding continuing anomalies, the substance of facts make 1930 sufficient.

1901’s federation established the potential for independence but not its lawful basis. Though newly united, Australia hadn’t fully separated from the United Kingdom; the states remained bound to the crown; and the governor general remained responsible to the king, in the tradition of English government as the sovereign’s government.

The transition was driven by Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, running contrary to the Australian political will and transpiring with little public appreciation. Four elements fueled interest in imperial continuity: defense, race (culture), economy (loans from London), and status (British hegemony). Neither the Canadians nor the South Africans depended on British security; both the Canadians and the Irish (given the same status in the 1921 agreement) objected to their inability to amend their own constitutions; the Irish rejected personal union under the king. Whereas through the 1920s, Aussie leaders tended to be born in the UK. Only the New Zealanders sided with Australia on defense; but the British had been withdrawing from the ‘far East’ since before World War I, save for the 1923 construction of Singapore’s naval base. There was no practical means of international cooperation within the Commonwealth because there was no prior imperial body, only Whitehall.

At the 1923 imperial conference the UK determined to allow the dominions to make international treaties: paradoxically, external affairs preceded domestic matters. Executive independence emerged from the 1926 conference, as a political bargain between the ‘radical’ dominions which aimed to appease domestic nationalists and the UK’s wish for equivocation on the crown’s role and the continuing projection of imperial unity. The Balfour formulation established that: ‘[The Dominions] are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. (p. 93) The radicals then focused on autonomy, the Australians on common allegiance. (Newfoundland was also a dominion but too small to wield influence.)

By 1929/30, disallowance and reservation of dominion legislation as well as Colonial Laws Validity Act were to be jettisoned; but the Canadians and the Irish technically had to ask the UK to revise their constitutions, so the Westminster statute was promulgated. The Australians insisted on proactively adopting the statute, and delayed doing so: opposition party leader John Latham provoked the states to protest to UK on the spurious grounds of Canberra’s intrusion into their matters. Then James Scullin’s Labor government fell, and though Robert Menzies proposed adopting Westminster in 1935 and 1936, it wasn’t established until 1942 under John Curtin, largely to facilitate the trans-shipment of war material, there being no public pressure nor motivation for politicians. The states didn’t sever from the UK until the 1986 Australia Act.

3. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (17 January 2024)

by kurto

Explores the Anglo-Australian relationship through stylishly recounted stories of upper-end society, culture, and sport (i.e., cricket): Australia’s ties have been fraying and the country must inevitably become a republic. Davie correctly assumes that connections which are not husbanded must decay; wrongly presumes Aboriginal problems means British and Irish heritage must also be; and nowhere considers that the Westminster tradition has been helpful to an effective political system. Less systematic assessment than a series of essays, Davie looks to have been deflated by 1999’s ‘no’ vote: ‘spiritual independence cannot be rushed’.

Menzies and cabinet had been surprised to discover Australia’s politics did not map to Britain’s. The key cultural break of the 20th century was Curtin’s refusing to deploy troops to Burma, prompting Aussie recognition that self-defense should trump imperial concerns. However, Britain’s 1941 decision to prioritize Europe was no betrayal, as in David Day’s telling. Australia and Britain hardly collaborated in postwar immigration: the UK resisted sending skilled people; the Aussie unions didn’t want those trained outside the British system; the ‘whingeing Pom’ had committed only £10 to emigrate and so took things for granted. The 1930’s self-deception (i.e., appeasement) did not persist in the 1960s, when the political class took the measure of Britain’s turn to the EEC and its Commonwealth Immigration Act – no more favored treatment for the dominions – and in turn opened toward Asia. 1964-70 was the most difficult period since the early colonial era, but the author confuses the correlated rise of the Tigers and China with causing England’s turn to Europe.

Manning Clark thought Australia was a geographic terms and self-contained historical topic. Stuart McIntyre and Davie see parallels to Australia in Canada and New Zealand, notwithstanding differing attitudes toward republican status. British educators and artists in exile are portrayed as exercising outsized influence on elite Aussie culture. In cricket, following a nuanced study of 1937’s bodyline tour, Aussie pragmatism ‘routs’ English romanticism. Less encompassing than Pringle, he dedicates an entire chapter to Windsor gossip and another to the editorial echelon of the chattering class.

‘When an Aussie enters a British room, you can hear the chains clanking’.

18. Roberts, Last King of America (10 September 2022)

by kurto

George III was a custodial not a tyrannical monarch, demonstrating a principled constitutionality and remaining above faction without undermining those in power. Initially unpopular and enduring a series of irresolute or unprepared prime ministers, during the French Revolutionary era he showed himself determined and muchly helpful to Pitt the Younger’s success. The recasting of the British monarchy as constitutional head of state commenced with him, not Victoria.
George’s education was superior to public schooling but reclusive. He learned to value the balanced constitution while developing lifelong hostility to Whig oligopoly. Self-denying for the sake of country, he was the first Hanover to see himself as primarily British. He was kindly and at ease among the populace; many less flattering characteristics aspects of his character are attributable to the salacious Horace Walpole, an entertaining but often misleading diarist.
Just prior to reaching his majority, Parliament entered the Seven Years War having sacked Pitt the Elder, its best strategist, in favor of the corrupt Henry Fox. (George II, though conscious of his rights, did so at the Duke of Cumberland’s urging; he merely agreed with the Old Whigs.) Bute’s tutelage of George was held against his ministry, and the king was at first seen as grasping both by contemporaries and historians, wrongly in Roberts’ view.
At the French war’s denouement, Bute ceded the sugar island Guadeloupe, after having instead considered Canada on grounds that French pressure would have kept the American colonies loyal to Britain. Once safe, economic matters were a pretext for the real issue of self-government. Bute and Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) fashioned George’s opinion that American claims to self-government had no standing in English law. In addition to the strategic error of tethering the Americans to the Atlantic seaboard (the Proclamation of 1763), this conservative view propelled Britain toward losing the colonies.
George tended to appoint prime ministers and leave them to legislate and execute, notwithstanding the unwonted predominance of the Grenvilles (George and his brother Richard Temple) and the Pitts (the elder being married to Temple’s sister). The Stamp Act was Grenville’s responsibility, and having insisted on dismissing Stuart-Mackenzie as Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, forcing George to break a promise, Grenville alienated George to the family for making him subject to factional interests. Lasting but two months, Grenville was replaced by Rockingham, who had never sat in Commons nor anyone else’s cabinet. Contra Conor Cruise O’Brien, on his return Pitt the Elder (now Lord Chatham) was given more scope than Rockingham, one of several occasions on which Roberts disagrees with the Irish historian. Later the sons of Pitt and Grenville would become PMs, indicating George’s essential forbearance.
In the years following the Stamp Act’s repeal, George contended with keeping Grenville out as PM, Wilkes out of the Commons, Parliamentary review of royal finances and appointments, and France out of the West Indies. Historians who contend George tried to gather power ignore the politicians who wished to avoid responsibility – including Lord North, who had otherwise ended the merry go round. Relatedly, contemporary European governments often resorted to genuine tyranny (e.g., mass arrests, execution of civilians without trial) whereas there had been arrests at all following the Boston Tea Party. George behaved with constitutional propriety during the American unrest, going along with hawkish ministries (admittedly to his liking) rather than driving policy. Of the 28 charges laid against George in the Declaration of Independence, only 2, regarding taxation and parliamentary authority to legislate for the colonists, are logical.
In post facto war gaming, the UK wins the war 45 percent of the time. Even as the war deteriorated, George, stepping back from hopes of an outright win, was determined to hold Canada, Nova Scotia, and Florida. The stakes were more patriotic than economic: circa 1776, imports from the British Windies totaled £4.5 million, versus 1.5 million from India, while the Americans were far below.
1779 marked existential danger for Britain. A French fleet of 63 ships and 30,000 regulars gained control of the English Channel. George showed a decisiveness that North lacked, pressing for attack in the Windies, Gibraltar, and Minorca, recognizing that France and Spain’s joining the war converted the conflict from a domestic question of Parliament’s constitutional rights in the colonies to the UK’s survival as a great power. Colonial possessions had to be defended, even at the risk of the homeland’s invasion, because of the sugar islands’ revenue. However, he was less clear sighted about responsibilities for the American war’s military losses. (NB: ‘Hessians’ werer from several small principalities, representing one-third of the soldiery. Not mercenaries, they were paid by the German states. Though effective they made for poor propaganda, especially during the New Jersey winter of 1777-78.)
Though not ignoring the denouement, Roberts’ current thus turns toward domestic matters. Thinking George a moderate, he is generally unsympathetic to Burke, described as a ‘radical Whig’ (e.g., pp. 417, 445, 486, 490). Pitt on Burke: ‘much to admire, nothing to agree with’ (p. 526). Irish repeal of the Declaratory Act demonstrates Westminster had learned from America, rather panic in the Rockingham administration. Whig attempts to arrogate East India Company patronage to Parliament in 1778 seemed an oligarchical revival to George; parallels to the Whigs’ 1766’s repeal of the Stamp Act make them seem hypocritical.
1784’s dismissal of the Fox-North coalition stemmed from the East India Bill, and was quite constitutional of George. The subsequent election, a hotly contested affair which produced ‘Fox’s martyrs’, indicated that the Whig leader had overplayed his hand regarding East India, the loss of America, and near-republican critique of the monarch. Pitt’s rout result in George’s having a genuine ally for the first time, at time when the king could still have his choice of ministers. Had he died in 1783, he might have been lumped together with his Hanoverian predecessors; but instead he and Pitt saw off the French revolutionaries and Bonaparte. By 1792, Pitt as PM was no longer immediately responsible to the king, but to Parliament; he, Dundas, and Grenville were a united front in dealing with the monarch; Addington extended the trend. Pitt’s success was muchly due to George’s support.
As when recovering from illness, so with the initial period of the Revolutionary wars. Evident homeliness, piety, and commitment to national victory established his bona fides. Whereas during the American revolution George’s principled stance was unhelpful, in the French wars it was invaluable. Ironically, he traveled little, never visiting Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; nor Hanover; nor the American colonies or Windies. Indeed, did he travel north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He never went to see the newly industrializing Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.
In Ireland, George supported toleration of the Catholic Church but not equality, for he was head of the Church of England (and of Ireland), and so was unhappy with the Earl of Fitzwilliam’s concessions. His successor, Earl of Camden, confiscated 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes – indicative of 1798. Neoclassical architecture, already underway, reached its apogee during his reign as he frequently paid interest in public projects.
(NB: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.)
(NB: as an insult, a XXX husband, rather than not remarry, should as condign punishment marry the devil’s daughter. The riposte: the law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister – p. 407)

1. Brauer, Education of a Gentleman (4 January 2024)

by kurto

Studies Restoration and Georgian views of upper-class education, finding the debate between advocates of private tutoring and nascent public schooling encapsulated its main goals: individual virtue, public service, scholarly and worldly knowledge, and sociability (good breeding). Of these, virtue was most valued. The Middle Ages had looked to nobles and gentry for military service; in the Renaissance (i.e., the Tudor era), statesmanship came to the fore. Though the Puritans had unsuccessfully attempted to introduce vocational training and the Reformation retreated toward the old tradition of indifference – pedantry was to be feared – upper-class men in the 18th century nonetheless relied on education to buttress their forming the social elite. Patriotic content was expected: history, government, law, political thought running along English lines. Much of the monograph is given to contemporary exposition, notably from Locke and 4th Earl of Chesterfield as well as clergy and schoolmasters. Contemporaries address the nature and extent of English ignorance, comparison with the continent, the value of the grand tour, and so on. Tutors remained most fashionable though the advantage of schools competition with peers was beginning to surface.

2. Jenkins, Churchill (24 Jan 2023)

by kurto

Churchill was the greatest of Britain’s prime ministers, surmounting Gladstone and Lloyd George, despite substantial personal foibles.
More concerned with policy and (often social) legislation, government machinations (especially Parliamentary doings), and society doings and gossip than Roberts, Jenkins more fully portrays why you would dislike the aristocratic thruster. In seeking to show Churchill was out of step, however, he too often falls back on ‘the sense of the house’. He contends, against Roberts and unconvincingly, Churchill was a proto-Europeanist. Often he is more the reproving politician than a historian.
Churchill had the gift of insolence – memorably amusing, performing without fear. His many talents first evident as a junior officer in India, though Jenkins seems unduly critical of the autodidact making up for lost school time.
Upon crossing to the Liberal Party, Churchill was naturally inclined to imperialists Asquith, Grey, and Haldane but personally closer to the Little Englanders. Curiously, he trumpeted his father’s unionism though himself soon to oppose the Curragh mutiny and favor updated Home Rule. He accepted a role junior to Lloyd George, the pair of whom cast aside the Gladstonian tradition of embracing libertarian political issues (and ignoring social matters) in favor of ‘constructive radicalism. ‘[Lloyd George and Churchill] were the two British politicians of genius, using the word in the sense of exceptional and original powers transcending purely rational measurement, in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result they were the two outstanding prime ministers, although in terms of solid (peacetime) achievement Asquith runs at least equal, rather as Peel did with Gladstone and Disraeli in the Victorian age. Churchill was substantially the greater man both because of the wider range outside politics of his interests and accomplishments and because his central achievement in 1940 and 1941 was of a higher order than Lloyd George’s in 117 and 1918, brought off against heavier odds, and still more vital to the future of the world. Furthermore, on issues and people, he had more fixity of purpose and coherence of belief than did Lloyd George: ore principle and less opportunism would be another way of putting it. Yet Lloyd George was undoubtedly strung in a number of significant qualifies than was Churchill, and one, and perhaps the most remarkable of his strengths was the could long exercise and almost effortless authority Churchill.’ (p. 144)
Though in 1911 he had left the Board of Trade, passed through the Home Office, and already spent two months as First Lord of the Admiralty, National Insurance was very much Churchill’s, the details being fully worked out while there. Labour Exchange Boards and enforcement of sweated labor provisions were also to his credit. Unlike most ministers, Churchill drafted his own minutes – and sent them before queries could be lodged.
1919-20 was the least impressive phase of Churchill’s career. He himself considered the Conservative abandonment of unionist Ireland as the most dramatic u-turn in modern history, though it was Lloyd George’s decision and treaty. Churchill and Bonar Law had the least natural rapport of any two major UK politicians to 1950. Baldwin’s failed bid for a protectionist mandate catalyzed Labour’s rise; on Macdonald’s 1924 accession, Churchill had to go back to the Tories as the Liberals were clearly finished.
Churchill was right to return to the gold standard: the establishment’s ‘superior wisdom;’ bested rational argument and instinct. Save that the move turned out poorly!
Marlborough evinces Churchill’s dispute with Macaulay: he won but not without the Victorian’s scoring points. The principal reason Churchill wanted to retain India was economic, as rivals were catching up the UK. Opposing independence is presented in terms of Parliamentary machinations, not political thought: he was on the losing side so he must have been wrong. Too bad – a Labour historian in the 2000s could have taken an honest look at imperialism; no one could now do so.
Churchill’s vindicated wilderness years are qualified in ‘yes but’ chapter 25. Again he falls back on sense-of-the-house explications, without treating Churchill’s stated position. Only war could have brought him back, the author says. His opposition to Soviet communism, commencing in the 1930s and continuing during wartime, is shortchanged. Eden is given credit for wartime diplomatic successes.
The Norway inquest of May 1940 was the most dramatic, far-reaching Parliamentary debate of the 20th century. Almost everyone of note participated. Its rivals are the Don Pacifico affair of 1850, which proved of little consequence; 1831’s first Reform Bill, when the doomed rotten boroughs were named; and 1886’s first Home Rule bill. In this passage, the author’s deep personal experience shines through – elsewhere he is too eager to display his bona fides, as when Atlee received a telegram at Jenkins’ wedding (p. 776) – but the author says there is no doubt Halifax would not take the job, contra Roberts. Churchill was the right man for the nadir of 1940-41 by dint of his courage and self-confidence. His connection with Montgomery reflects both being ‘light casualty’ tacticians; his rapport with Roosevelt was never so deep as often considered. In nearing war’s end, Churchill felt sidelined. (NB: of all the Europeans, Poland least reveres Churchill for acceding to Stalin’s demands for Moscow-based Polish exiles.)
Churchill’s partisanship in opposition bears little relations to an ‘essentially moderate’ term in office over 1951-55. Accepting that Labour legislation was a ‘considerable success’, he played a ‘constructive role’, for the clock could not go back to the 1930s. He missed his chance to bring the UK into Europe because Eden was cool on the matter, Eden acting as a kind of junior PM. Jenkins essentially holds the UK should have abandoned its residual imperial interests to join the Steel and Coal pact. It would have been better had Churchill retired in 1953, that Eden’s didn’t move because of illness and Butler lacked ruthlessness.
For Churchill, duty’s most powerful ally was the desire to be at the center of events. He drew energy from constant change of scene and pattern. He returns again and again to alleged chronic depression, again contra Roberts.
Quotes:
‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. (P. 132)
‘Oligarchies were seldom destroyed and more frequently committed suicide’ (p. 165)
Clementine: ‘To be great one’s actions must be understood by simple people’ (p. 302)
Jenkins on democratic centralism: ‘All successful political meetings give both audience and the speaker a simultaneous sense of influencing events, with a residue of inspiration but not actually challenging the currents of politics. Whereas constituency militants are ‘almost inevitably a force against sense and statesmanship … The difficulty of sustaining enthusiasm without giving militants excessive power has been one of the perennial problems of democratic government’ (p. 531)

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.

20. O’Brien, Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt (7 October 2023)

by kurto

A Namierite survey of Protestant Ascendancy politics in the Irish Parliament during the 1780s-90s, well sourced of contemporary correspondence but sometimes forced and lacking fluid narrative. The Act of Union came because English hopes of rowing back political rights in exchange for economic concessions foundered on Anglo-Irish sense interdependence.

1691’s Treaty of Limerick established the basis of unstable 17th-centry politics. William of Orange had come to Ireland to defeat Jacobites not Catholics, but the Irish missed the distinction. Almost immediately Protestants saw London (i.e., Westminster) as working at contrary purposes. But the locals were willing to accept venality, and both the Irish and (less often) English privy councils altered or pocketed Parliamentary legislation sent for formal assent. In Anne’s reign the English Commons rescinded all Parliament land grants. Further grievances rose in limiting wool exports, coinage, Poynings Law (permitting legislative alterations), and 1719’s Declaratory Act (direct legislative authority, less often used than Poynings).

In 1770 Townshend sidelined Ireland’s ‘undertakers’ to concentrate power in the Castle, converting Anglo-Irish to opposition, thereby entrenching personal rivalries in the political process and also opening the route to 1782. This change surpassed the influence of the contemporary American rebellion, the author asserts; Irish protest literature was present out of doors but never played much role in Parliament (contra Bailyn’s Origins). Constitutional revisions commenced in 1779 with economic issues: more complete legislative freedom was seen to safeguard free trade. Charles Francis Sheridan was the ideological paladin, echoing Locke, essentially arguing the Anglo-Irish were a separate nation. Henry Grattan assumed Parliamentary leadership from Barry Yelverton, besting Henry Flood. There was no coordination among Irish and English Whigs. The opposition sought repeal of the Test Act, of Poynings, restoration of habeus corpus, independent judges (in the House of Lords), control of the exchequer, and domestic use of hereditary revenue (essentially land tax of absentee owners, tantamount to taxation without representation). These demands were supported by the paramilitary Volunteers.

(In correspondence, Burke described Grattan as a madman to be stopped?)

The Renunciation Act of 1783 shifted power to Ireland, but not through Parliamentary success or incipient rebellion. In making concessions, the Castle disregarded settled policy and the Cabinet, and Shelburne mismanaged the dysfunction. Upon taking office, Pitt sought to barter improved economic terms for reduced sovereignty. More broadly, he first sought to link national debts – the Irish were to pay for their administrative costs – and saw Irish trade demands as claims to sell colonial produce to the mother country: he did not see the claim to autonomy within the empire. His cabinet colleague Jenkinson saw Ireland as more equivalent to English towns, and helped re-turn Pitt from Adam Smith to mercantilism. These commercial propositions as well as the Regency affair were inconclusive.
Grattan refused the Castle in April 1782, as the nexus of power was then between the Irish parliament and British cabinet, the Castle being an executive agency. Yet there was no cohesion among the opposition. Country independents were regularly bought, the pensions list growing and growing in the 1780s. The Patriots were doomed to permanent opposition. Losing Corry to the Castle in 1788 handed the Parliamentary reigns to Grattan but he failed to capitalize on the febrile environment of February-March 1789; he too would later cross over.

In the 1790s the Lord Lieutenants transformed what had been ‘elitist insurrection’ into violent peasant uprisings by the Volunteers and Whiteboys. Pitt continued to see that commercial concessions would alleviate conditions. But his Irish reform policy was really an effort to reform the English legislature(?). Thus 1782 had not only separated the combatants but also increased the cost of patronage, and some in the cabinet immediately saw the failure to redress Irish concessions meant the Act of Union must follow: it was the product of exhaustion not evolution. 1800 having sidelined the Anglo-Irish, 1829’s Catholic Emancipation then removed the final barrier – the conflict became Catholics versus the Cabinet.

O’Brien’s choppy narrative itself undermines efforts to show political outcomes were pre-determined by class, as demonstrated by counting votes. Though he frequently (and admirably) cites correspondence, his Namierite approach seems likely to be masking problem and nuance.

8. Gordon, Dominion Partnership in Imperial Defense, 1870-1914 (25 May 2023)

by kurto

Traces efforts to establish an imperial defense strategy encompassing Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Cape Colony in the years leading to World War I. The burden fell on Britain’s naval leaders, as the sea is not divisible, and while Churchill and Haldane made late efforts to establish political consensus, the matter was never solved: the British ultimately withdrew so as to defend the North Sea against Germany.
From 1850, Lord Grey championed relieving the British taxpayer, who shouldered 90 percent of defense costs. The Mills committee of 1862 commenced a decade-long withdrawal of military (army) postings to the dominions, paradoxically making imperialism a safe political cause. Britain thought the maturing colonies should progress from self-sufficiency to enlightened interest in the empire but the colonials wrangled over autonomy and the size of naval-subsidy payments to London. 1878’s Russian war scare carried the debate to more comprehensive review of imperial defense; in the following decade, the colonies were asked to participate in London’s councils.
Whether the empire ought to be a zollverein or kriegsverein remained unanswered: imperial federation were dead by the turn of the century, and as political imperialism waned, the Colonial Office’s Colonial Defense Committee (which morphed into the Committee for Imperial Defense) made the running. Yet the dominions were ‘patriotically’ responsive to the Boer War demands. Though the 1902 Colonial Conference produced no real advances in defense doctrine. Fisher’s appointment to the Admiralty and the initiation of two parliamentary committees in fact brought technical matters to a new phase. In this decade, the Canadians were pleased to acquire and staff two bases; the Aussies basked in the visit of America’s White Fleet, proof of a second partner against Japan.
The dreadnought crisis of 1909 opened the way to Canadian- and Australian-controlled navies, since Britain needed to husband cash to stave off the German buildup. Aussies welcomed Deakin’s efforts, while the Canadians contested Laurier’s for it cut across Anglo-French rivalries. (The New Zealanders, neither worried about the United States nor evidencing latent distrust of Irish immigrants, were typically content to sit close by the UK.) Thought the navy’s ‘blue water’ doctrine masked the degree to which the UK was retreating, the metropole knew the fight would be in Europe.