A definitive biography of the late Victorian solider, whose autocratic successes in Sudan and South Africa inspired adulation in the metropole, but left him unprepared to lead Great Britain during World War I. The scale of strategy and scope of operations were too great for one man; the lessons learned were put to good use in World War II. Written in the tradition of political-diplomatic history, the book relies on primary sources from the highest levels (i.e., autobiographies) to portray this thorough (his motto) and driven but ultimately indecisive figure. Kitchener was unable to rally and guide equals, or defeat evenly matched colleagues / opponents, because he could not persuade or rely on staff to create superior force. Magnus moves briskly through events, while providing insight into Kitchener’s relationship with Asquith, Churchill, and King Edward, as well as the mechanics of British imperial machinery. This 1958 work, though evidencing dated punctuation, has lost very little with the passage of time. No need to read further on the topic.
United Kingdom
13. Millard, Cloud Computing Law (7 July 2023)
Limns core and emerging concepts of legislation, jurisprudence, and policy regarding software, platform, and infrastructure as IT services, focusing on the European Union and United Kingdom circa 2020. To this reader, the most pertinent topics may be divided as operations, commercial matters, and taxation.
Operations:
• Cloud services, for purposes of governance, are fundamentally different from outsourcing in terms of design and control and geographic nexus
• PaaS is indicated by large degree of client control over specification or complexity of usage
• Security
o Security by nature entails risk management, as rules can never encompass all use cases; risk management is well suited to principle-based regulation (common in UK and Australia). For this reason, insurance is commonly part of risk management
o Misconfigurations are the largest internal threat to security
o To establish one’s services as a ‘trusted execution environment’, one should encourage the client to consider whether the vendor’s security setup is better or worse than the client’s own systems
• Data transfers
o across international borders may be governed by any of several mechanism (e.g., Privacy Shield, Standard Contractual Clauses, approved bespoke certifications)
o The acceptability of the SCCs to the EU is premised on the former’s compliance with the recipient country’s standards (e.g., the Australian Privacy Principles)
• Privacy: data sharing (e.g., among companies) is a controller-to-controller sequence; conversely, controller-to-processor is provision and instructed use. See chart p. 311 (which further demonstrates that Jacobi’s control of platform security, etc., make it at least a joint controller)
Commercial matters:
• The most negotiated clauses are liability (12 months’ fees being standard) including carveouts; service levels including availability; security and privacy; lock-in, portability, and exit; and intellectual property rights
• An estimated 1/3d of negotiations fail over the transparency of using subcontractors
• Data residency and indemnification for 3d-party claims are frequently client imperatives, increasingly joined by transition plans. APIs have come to be seen as acceptable means of interoperability or portage
• Pre-commercial procurements (PCP) are a means for public buyers (government) purchasing and then sharing emerging technologies without violating state-aid strictures of GATT
Taxation
• The most fluid question is re-establishing consensus of jurisdiction: where is value created? The residence of a provider’s 3d-party infrastructure does not create nexus (because the provider does not control hardware); however the location of the end user (the client) might. There is dispute among OECD and UN principles,
• Cloud fees (including PaaS) are generally taxed business profits not royalties
• A service that is linked (i.e., not separable) is likely to be singularly taxed, rather than as separate products or business lines
18. Ferguson, Empire (31 Dec 2008)
Portrays the trajectory of Britain’s international role from 1650-1950, concentrating on the empire’s leading territories (Caribbean, America, India, southern Africa). Its primary themes are that England imitated its European rivals in acquiring by piracy; resulting migrations were large and sometimes explosive; missionary zeal set the social tone and liberty the political ideal; and the empire’s resolve to defeat Nazi totalitarianism. Though it can be read as an indictment, the book appears to conclude missteps and excesses do not superceed the many benefits of cultural transfer including land tenure, banking norms, common law, team sports as a principle of community, representative and limited government, and the idea of liberty itself. Ultimately a curious cross between history and political science. Its claims to pertain to 21st-century America aren’t clear. An enlightening introduction and conclusion.
6. Thornton, Imperial Idea and Its Enemies (23 Oct 2008)
Chronicles the trajectory of imperialism in British (English) political thought circa 1850-1950. Relying sometimes on Socratic dialogue and occasionally on Parliamentary speeches, the book skips through India, Egypt and the Sudan, South Africa, and other locales, paying more attention to ideas than chronology. Leading thinkers of the two parties are the stars. The dominions and the two wars play a limited role, as do Victoria and Kitchener. Obviously sympathetic to the left and also contemporary opinion (a Whiggish historian?), the author concludes imperialism belongs to the liberal political tradition and so (as of 1957, the height of scuttle) had yet to run its course.
7. Norman, Edmund Burke (29 Dec)
A short, dual-purpose treatment that competently sketches Burke’s life and career and deficiently maps his applicability to modern conservative politics. The profile’s achievement ironically stems from making the context of his political career accessible to 21st-century (British) readers. In an ahistorical, generalized setting, however, prescription without the counterbalance of opportunity costs and other risks loses rigor. Still, an impressive effort for a practicing politician.
1. Scruton, Meaning of Conservatism (2 Jan 2015)
Sketches core concepts of British paleoconservatism, concluding the virtuous individual – not individual freedom or the social contract – is the objective of community, government, and politics. There is no universal politics of conservatism: it varies depending on the social order, and each society exists through its unique structure. Community and tradition store (institutionalize) social wisdom. Therefore it’s up to progressive philosophies to demonstrate why their wisdom is superior, not to the conservative to show his should persist. The progressive threat to society is authority which does not map to social order or historical identity. Law, which is the will of the state, should also be the will of society: individual freedom and the absence of harm are insufficient objectives. Thus, if the state is the protector, it must support property rights. Institutions, however, must be self-directed with the state playing the role of guardian. ‘Establishment’ is how the state embeds these social institutions within the overall order. Originally written in the late 1970s, the book is concerned not only to address socialism but also liberalism including a free-market worldview the author sees as represented by Hayek, Friedman, and even Thatcher. As ever, Scruton is broadly provocative, draws attention to paradox, and makes frequent reference to Kant. Worth rereading.
15. [Mcintyre], Work of History (7 August 2022)
A festschrift narrating the career of Australian Marxisant Stuart Macintyre, evincing the effects of ‘commitment’ on professional study – however learned, surely limited and tendentious. An early historian of the British and Australian Communist parties, which pursuit was seen as groundbreaking because (modestly) critical, Macintyre moved on to Australian labor and government, and in as much as Marxist theories failed in history and they did in sociopolitics, then a Weberian sociology of the contemporary. He lamented the Hawke-Keating era didn’t go far enough in addressing utopian goals, criticizing ‘normative neoliberalism’, rejecting the search for ‘timelessness’. Effectively he and his student lodged the usual complaints of ‘winners and losers’, that unequal outcomes fall short of the general will. Macintyre was a ‘black armbander’ who controversially sought to put himself above the fray, a position which might have been more credible had he acknowledged the errors and outcomes of 20th-century communism.
5. Sandoz (ed.), Roots of Liberty (26 March 2022)
A series of essays exploring shifting interpretation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and Magna Carta, sweeping from Fortescue to Augustan England and colonial America, addressing the charter as emblematic of Saxon culture, original intent, rule of law and government by consent, and the source of executive power. Effectively premised on JGA Pocock’s
- Ancient Constitution and Feudal Laws
, the contributors agree one’s views on such topics as the rights of subjects (e.g., trial by jury of peers) and limits of authority are relevant not only to jurisprudence but also the political conditions of liberty. Pocock had observed (among other things) that it was judicial process, rather than black-letter law, which was immemorial. Sandoz writes Fortescue and the common law grounded Coke’s opposition to the monarch. Holt observes Magna Charta was both a grant of liberties and a legislative act. Brooks writes, somewhat against the grain, that 16th-century lawyers were little concerned with constitutional theory and more interested in humanist (neoclassical) law. Christianson, sketching the skirmishing between early Stuarts (i.e., James I’s absolutism) and the Parliamentary opposition (Selden’s mixed monarchy, Hedley’s constitutional monarchy grounded in common law) which came to blows in the Five Knights case and provision of supply, essentially pitted rival views of the ancient constitution rather than absolutism vs constitutional government. Reid: 17th- and 18th-century lawyers thought the ancient constitution gave Parliament and common-law courts standing against arbitrary monarchy (which resonated with American revolutionaries). The common laws which had survived were the best evidence of English liberty. (Later, Burke held prescription the most solid of the titles to property, custom being the proof point of time time.) The merit of ancient constitution was security against government caprice – in an unwritten charter, no element was more essential to thwarting slavery to government. Reid adds: in this era, forensic historical work deployed the ancient constitution for proof of authority, establishment of consent, and bulwark against new government claims; in the latter century, the British chose government by consent (i.e., king in parliament) whereas the Americans settled on rule by law (following Coke, not a sovereign granting rights but a people delimiting executive power). The Saxon constitution represented liberty; the Norman charter arbitrary power; the Americans converted the dynamic to the notion of original intent. He asks why English lawyers, alone in Europe, sought to formalize understanding of rule of law – a matter now relevant to American originalists (vs progressivism) and Brexiteers (vs European Unionism).
13. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (18 Aug 2016)
Studies mid-Victorian society and politics, contending that education and culture (‘sweetness and light’) is a surer path toward human perfection than religion or government. Culture promotes considering social issues from many angles, whereas religion (especially Dissent, preoccupied as it is with disestablishment) trends toward a single, inflexible approach. Hebraism is obedience to authority, Hellenism is independence of thought. Arnold also treats of class (aristocrats, bourgeois, and working) views of political order and governance, which are inevitably self-interested and so again want the leavening of culture. Libertine individualism is the greatest of all ills.
16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)
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’.