'Fake News', 1780s Quaker Style

'With respect to abolitionism, then, British newspapers and periodicals published from the summer of 1783 to the spring of 1787 need to be read with caution. Historians will never know how many of the antislavery statements that appear in the British press in this period resulted from Slave Association sponsorship. What sometimes looks like an upsurge of antislavery argument and commentary in the press occasionally represented little more than the initiative of  a clever Quaker propagandist. Friends not only attempted to generate antislavery opinion. They tried to create the emergence of an emerging public consensus on behalf of abolition more than two years before that support materialised in full.' 

From, Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: foundations of British abolitionism, (UNC Press, Chapel Hill, NC: 2006), pp 430-1.

Article 50 Day: Bursting a Balloon

'Prince: I know my duty; you are all undutiful:/Lascivious Edward,--and thou, perjur'd George,--/And thou, misshapen Dick,--I tell ye all/I am your better, traitors as ye are:--/And thou usurp'st my father's right and mine.
King Edward: Take that, the likeness of this railer here [Stabs him]
Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III): Sprawl'st thou? take that, to end thy agony. [Stabs him]
Duke of Clarence: And there's for twitting me with perjury. [Stabs him]
-- King Henry VI, Part 3, Act V, Scene 5

- * - * - * -

Probably for some today's Shakespeare quote will be the one on the eve of Agincourt in Henry V, but I prefer to think of #Brexit as a civil war like the Wars of the Roses. This episodic affair arose out of the ending of a cross-Channel empire in France, and concluded with the victory of Henry Tudor, helped by France, over Richard III. Shakespeare here refers to the death of Henry VI's heir, Prince Edward, Watching the murder in this scene is Henry VI's wife Margaret, daughter of a French king. Edward can stand in today for the young people of Britain, who favoured a European future. I have sympathy for them, but for old codgers like me the cultural links with the Anglosphere were being loosened too much under the reign of the mad kings of Brussels. Kith and kin lay abroad across the oceans, not the Channel, for most of us until relatively recently.

Which brings me to a continent I visit too infrequently in this blog, Australasia. Some time ago, I set aside an alarmist article by a former Australian foreign minister, intending to comment on it. I was reminded of it by the recent appearance of a blog post by Ben Wellings of Monash University on the same theme. Now is a good time to deal with this 'Anglosphere Illusion'.

Let me start with former foreign minister Gareth Evans, who writes:

The basic problem for Anglosphere advocates is that none of the candidates for membership of this new club are likely to have the slightest interest – geostrategic, economic or political – in joining it.... the truth of the matter is that the UK has brought nothing of [geostrategic] significance to the region’s defense since the fall of Singapore in 1942....Anglosphere connections mattered a lot for Australians and others in the days before the UK joined the European Common Market. The severance of those ties was painful for our dairy and other industries, but for Britain hard-headed self-interest understandably prevailed....Probably the hardest truth that Britain’s Anglosphere dreamers must confront is that there is just no mood politically, in any of the candidate countries of which I’m aware, to build some new global association of the linguistically and culturally righteous.

 These are three very valid points: (1) Britain is a geostrategic Lilliput; (2) old economic links are gone, (3) Australians have moved away intellectually (and possibly spiritually) from the Mother Country. Now for a look at an earlier blog post on The Conversation:

The British Commonwealth of Nations achieved some economic coordination, but it was not a free-trade area. Members offered each other tariff “preferences” in which they lowered duties....Without central institutions it was hard to promote uniformity and resolve disputes. Between 1932 and 1936 Britain’s empire and Commonwealth trade did rise from 33% to 37% of imports and from 41% to 47% of exports...[After the war] Dollar shortages and exchange controls in the “Sterling Area” channelled trade towards Commonwealth members. In 1953, they accounted for  49% of UK imports and exports.... By 1972...Britain’s EEC trade had overtaken its Commonwealth trade despite the French president Charles De Gaulle twice vetoing UK applications to join the community....The experience of the 1930s illustrates that there are limits to supranational economic cooperation without some pooling of sovereignty.

 Again, the key points are (1) the Commonwealth does not have an economic role, (2) the broader economic situation trumps any 'cultural' unity. We can interpret these as variants of Mr Evans second point. Finally, we come to the post that was my springboard for writing this blog post of my own:

The disappointing UK trade mission to India, where Indian officials showed scant interest in a free-trade agreement and instead wanted fewer restrictions on the movement of Indians to the UK, showed the hard road ahead....The main risk for Australia is that Brexit comes at a moment when – after many years – Australia will soon start FTA negotiations with the EU. For Australia, Brexit is the diplomatic equivalent of moving into a shared house with a divorcing couple. In signalling with alacrity that “Australia will be there” when it comes to an FTA with the UK, Australia must not seem too keen – lest we become embroiled in a messy divorce between the UK and the EU.

 So here the key point is 'Britain can expect no favours' based on past connections, a variant of Mr Evans' third point. The question is, do all these objections leave any grounds for optimism? The answer seems to me to be a qualified 'yes'. I would focus on two aspects from the quotes I have provided here. Andrew Dilley of the University of Aberdeen, in the second citation, illustrates the problems with the Commonwealth as an economic institution. I would suggest that the first step is simply for a 'coalition of the willing' to start envisioning future arrangements that could solve disputes without imperilling sovereignty in the way the EU did. After all, we have the existing example of the EU, for one thing, to show what works and what doesn't.

Furthermore, though the 'Golden Age' of UK-Commonwealth trade grew out of some specific conditions, so did the British 'pivot to Europe' during 1957-72. To some extent, it was a reversion to a natural pattern. In 1913, UK trade with Continental Western Europe amounted to 38.5 per cent of its imports and 29.6 per cent of its exports. Canada, Australasia, Southern Africa and South Asia amounted to 22.6 per cent of imports and 31.6 per cent of exports. More importantly, in 2015 UK exports to Continental Western Europe excluding Switzerland amounted to 30.6 per cent of the total; imports from the same countries amounted to 41.4 per cent. Going by this historical pattern, leaving the EU may well have little impact on British exports, and something like 3 per cent of imports might shift to Commonwealth sources, or elsewhere. (BTW, this is roughly what those opposed to EU entry in the 1960s said, roughly -- our Commonwealth partners would lose a market for their exports.) Far from being of, as Mr Evans put it, 'the slightest interest', that's a lot of money. Surely the EU's difficulty is indeed Australia's (and the rest of the Commonwealth's) opportunity.  The lesson of China stands out here. Imports from Mainland China in 1913 amounted to a minuscule 0.3 per cent and in 1959 stood at 0.5 per cent. In 2015 they stood at 10.4 per cent. Who saw that coming in 1959, let alone 1913? (My 1913 statistics come from a draft UN report you can access here.)

 The second point is the Indian desire for 'fewer restrictions on the movement of Indians'. Leaving the EU will free the British government's hands somewhat on this, and also with regard to the 'white Commonwealth' countries that include many descendants of emigrants from Britain and Ireland. For India and South Asia more broadly, as well as the Forgotten Anglosphere in the West Indies, we have the reverse -- Britain has received people, and the family ties shared by all these countries potentially could help Britain with the immigration it will continue to need. Another 'coalition of the willing' could start thinking about how people could circulate around these countries, which might help with trade. This would strengthen previously existing links between families and other institutions that do share a common heritage. Mr Evans' sense that the ties will continue to weaken is a self-fulfilling prophecy unless people work to keep them up. The same is true of any family.

 This is not to say that some kind of future arrangement will 'replace' the EU on any level. Thinking that is even more 'pie in the sky' than anything I have written above. Britain has learned some hard lessons about 'the free movement of people' in an era of austerity, as any conversation with a teacher or social worker employed in one of the affected areas might highlight. And the economic dislocation is going to be severe, a self-inflicted recession on par with 1991-2, possibly. Welcome to the Brave Old World of post-war Conservative economic policy.

Nonetheless, the idea of an 'Anglosphere Illusion' is... overblown just as much as its proponents assert that some kind of Commonwealth Free Trade Area would be. The reality is going to lie somewhere between the two positions, and probably to the advantage of the Commonwealth countries.

Four Points on the Brexit Compass

I found I had to write a very different post to the one I expected to write. While I dashed off a few paragraphs almost straightaway, I have also had to revise this post on an almost daily basis. 28 June was the first time in five mornings that there was not some kind of new fact to take into account when I looked at some of the British news web-sites. As the day wore on, however, some of what I had intended to say was overtaken by events, and I have tried to write around this still developing historic happening. I offer five points to help interpret, in an historical context, what is going on in the United Kingdom.

The first point is that the political map of England has ventured on new historical territory. Traditionally, London and the Southeast offer a solid bedrock of support for a ‘Court’ party, rooted in Westminster, to which supporters in other parts of England then attach themselves. By contrast, look for a map of the votes from 23 June, and you will see that London and its educational and ideological colonies in Oxford and Cambridge -- the ‘Court’ party -- stand out quite dramatically from the rest of England. The ‘Country’ party -- in the past the King’s party in the Civil War, the Tories in the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath, the Labour party from 1918 -- has won what is possibly its first lasting victory in English history.

The second, and crucial, point is that the United Kingdom's political class has blundered on a massive scale, calling into question the legitimacy of their right to rule. The whole process was structured in such a way as to make the transition to the consequences of a Leave victory as awkward as possible. This was not a general election, in which an alternative government stands ready. Thus, complaints by people that ‘there is no plan’ are somewhat unwarranted. Blame the people responsible for the way the referendum was posed, not the winners. One could single out David Cameron, but that would be unfair. The referendum was held under a parliamentary act that MPs debated and could have amended. As a consequence of that it is going to take several years for the new dispensation to emerge from the grind of daily politics, foreign and domestic. Leave’s victory constitutes a revolutionary moment. Both the French and Russian revolutions demonstrate that this opens up several possibly pathways for the UK state, and no-one knows with any certainty where they will lead. What is being fought over now is control of the opening gambit in this process. There is no guarantee that by the time the process ends, the same people will be in charge.

The third point is that Europe is a fault-line that has run through both Britain’s major parties since the 1960s. Labour suffered the most from it at first, leading to the split that created the Social Democratic Party. The Conservative split may have cost them a majority in February 1974, but they closed ranks and it was not until the Maastricht treaty in 1992 that they split again. Meanwhile, Labour retreated from its anti-EU position very rapidly, and gradually the anti-EU wing was reduced to a tiny group in the parliamentary party, assisted by a somewhat larger one outside. But now the original split is appearing again. The problem for the UK is that the organisational structures underpinning its political system largely try very hard to avoid accommodating this divide. This is the fundamental cause of the current instability in both political parties, and result in the abdication of the political elite from government.

The fourth point is that what we see on display in the result of the referendum is the fundamental trend governing world politics today -- the emergence of the city-state network. Certain cities have reached a stage where they can transcend national borders and exist as part of a network of communities that is almost, but not quite, self-sufficient. Imagine a global polity that consisted of London, New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Hong Kong and other places. Might these cities have more in common with each other in the pursuit of economic and social policies than with their hinterland? I suspect so. That leaves Boston in Lincolnshire, Sunderland and other similar places in the awkward position of being ruled by this polity but having no effective political representation within it.

The life of the late Jo Cox is itself worth of a Greek tragedy on the theme of what is happening. She grew up in a community that has converted its old textile mills into shopping complexes. She educated herself, being the first in her family to go to university, and left to find more opportunities in London. There she did good work on behalf of an international charity. There, her connections to the Westminster ‘bubble’ enabled her to return home and win selection as a Labour candidate and, in due course, election as a member of parliament. Her assassination by a neo-Nazi who was left behind by the Global Polity illustrated how their share community experience a very real problem. The Global Polity draws away many of the best and brightest from places that desperately need leadership and investment to find some sort of peaceful accommodation with the future. If this is not done, the United Kingdom -- and the world -- may get a lot messier than they are today.

The Spectre of Nativism

Few things get my historical scholar's goat more than a post like this one, about Trump the Nativist.

Nativism was a complex phenomenon throughout American history, and a very mutable one. In this case, I would like to look at what might be considered a Janus-faced component of the old-time Nativist like George Bourne, whose Abolitionist views were inseperable from those attitudes he shared with Trump. Let's take a closer look at Robin Dale Jacobson's commentary.

While many pundits have looked to former regimes in Germany or Italy to explain the dangers they perceive Trump to embody, we need to understand him and his following as an American phenomenon. . . . John Higham, in the canonical book Strangers in the Land, wrote that nativism is “an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. ‘un-American’) connections.” This opposition can have a wide range of targets in “response to the changing character of the minority irritants and the shifting conditions of the day; but through each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism.”

Certainly American Nativism is rooted in the idea of nationality. The problem is that nationality is another of those mutable ideas that in a political discourse conceals much more than it reveals. What is the basis for a nation? The first naturalisation act, passed in 1790, defined a potential new American as a 'free white person'. It then asked them to live in the country for two years. It is this residency period that is of interest here, and is a commonplace in naturalisation legislation around the world even today. The final step in the process was to swear an oath of allegiance to support the Constitution. Today's historians focus on the whiteness requirement, but at the time that was barely discussed. In fact, it certainly seems that the residency requirement was seen as crucial.

Mr Hartley said...he thought some security for their fidelity and allegiance was requisite besides the bare oath that is, he thought an actual residence of such a length of time as would give a man an opportunity of esteeming the Government from knowing its intrinsic value, was essentially necessary to assure us of a man's becoming a good citizen.

from the House Journal, 1st Congress, pp 1147-8

Thus, from the very first piece of federal legislation concerning immigrants, we see that there are important political considerations involved in the question of nationality. The key element turns out to have been the residency requirement, as opposed to the 'bare oath' This is further illustrated by later debates on the 1798 act that sought to extend the residency period to fourteen years.

Mr Bayard said...Every principle of policy, in his opinion, required this regulation to be made general; for he believed there was many Jacobins and vagabonds come into the United States during the last two years, as may come for ten years hence; so that these very persons against whom this law was intended to operate, will become citizens, and may be chosen into the government.

from the House Journal, 5th Congress, p 1780

Again, here we see a political issue. At the time of the French Revolution, Jacobins were seen as having the potential to subvert the Constitution, given their unhealthy enthusiasm for the will of the people, as opposed to the kind of solid bourgeois republicanism that defined the American. But it was also the moment of the Quasi-War, which could easily have turned into a proper one.

Mr Varnum said...there was no necessity for any measures being taken with respect to foreigners, except such as belong to the nation with whom we expect to be at war.

from the House Journal, 5th Congress, p1782

I can easily imagine how a Trump supporter might see the United States as a nation at war with Islam, or at least those of its Radicals who have in practical terms declared war on it. The fact that a significant majority of Americans polled are opposed to a ban on Moslem visitors should give us some comfort. Let me return to Jacobson's text.

The durable American nativist tradition has an additional common feature: a racial religious othering. Throughout history we see religious differences being blended with racial differences; groups of people perceived to be sharing a religion are characterized as having innate immutable differences that threaten the native citizens or the nation as a whole. ... Nativist responses to new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the early twentieth century were also centered at the intersection of race and religion. Advocates who opposed immigration argued that these newcomers from sending areas in Europe, including Italian and Irish Catholics as well as eastern European Jews, threatened to overwhelm the U.S., and to damage the racial and religious character (read: white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) of the country.

Here Jacobson is guilty of condensing two distinct moments in Nativism. In the 1830s through the 1850s, hostility towards immigrants was mostly rooted in their Catholicism. The hostility that emerged in the 1890s and carried on into the quotas of the 1924 immigration legislation did identify nationality or, if one prefers, ethnicity in relation to religious hostility. Tellingly, this covers the period that Higham does. He gives only a few pages over to the earlier manifestations of Nativism, and does not reflect at length on the process by which ethnicity became attached. But I would like to focus on the earlier response. Why did Roman Catholicism seem to present a threat?

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it.

Para 14 of the Papal Encyclical Mirari Vos, issued in August 1832

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice.

Para 15 of the Papal Encyclical Mirari Vos, issued in August 1832

These two paragraphs suggest that 1830s Americans had cause to be suspicious about the threat posed by the Roman church to proverbially American values enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Nor were Americans shy about taking these comments aimed at liberty of conscience and freedom of speech and expanding them to encompass much more.

Romanism, in its merely secular attributes and political and social effects, ever and immutably is opposed to civil and religious freedom; and is destructive of all those rights of man with which our Declaration of Independence proclaims to be inalienable.

p6, The Text-Book of American Popery, George Bourne's Nativist book

And, of course, as immigration from Catholic countries grew, it was associated with this political threat to the American political order.

This danger from uneducated mind is augmenting daily by the rapid influx of foreign emigrants, the greater part unacquainted with our institutions, unaccustomed to self-government, inaccessible to education and easily accessible to prepossession, and inveterate credulity, and intrigue, and easily embodied and wielded by sinister design. In the beginning this eruption of revolutionary Europe was not anticipated, and we opened our doors wide to the influx and naturalisation of foreigners. But it is becoming a terrific inundation...what if this emigration, self-moved and slow in the beginning, is now rolling its broad tide at the bidding of the powers of Europe hostile to free institutions, and associated in holy alliance to arrest and put them down?...Are not the continental powers alarmed at the march of liberal opinions, and associated to put them down?

pp 51-2, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, by Samuel Morse (unlike Bourne, a defender of slavery).

Morse chooses his words with care there, as the 'holy alliance' was indeed a real thing, lasting from about 1815 to 1820. And the Papacy was seen as in league with the Austrian Empire, itself in the care of Prince Klemens von Metternich, a particular bogeyman of those 1830s Nativists, as can be demonstrated by a citation from this 1836 article.

Austria is now the only temporal support of the Papal power in Europe. Under the ministry of the most tyrannical Prince Metternich, she continues her support to the Court of Rome. This Prince Metternich is one of the greatest enemies of mankind now living; a man who has done more for the support of despotic principle, and to enslave the masses of Europe, than any other man.

p178, Methodist Magazine, April 1837, from an article on the Papacy's prospects by a New England divine named S W Coggeshall who was possibly the author of this letter to Lincoln supporting a more radical approach to war against the Confederacy.

Those masses fleeing Metternich's slavery, however, showed little sign of embracing Protestant religion, despite spending several years breathing liberty's air in the United States. Instead, they were building up a Catholic presence in the United States, which people like Bourne, Morse and Coggeshall thought clearly alien to American political values. While Coggeshall mentions Irish immigration, it is only a reference to its scale (see p 180). His invective says nothing about race but everything of his fears of Catholic institutions being founded in the United States, and the conspiratorial efforts of a mysterious St Leopold Foundation, directed from Vienna and in receipt of papal approbation.

Whatever changes might arise for historians to argue over in its later manifestations, history shows us that the man concern Americans initially had about immigrants related to their politics. In this case, the internal minority was a religious one and, further to remove race from the equation, one that drew its membership from multiple states, and thus possessed loyalty (or antipathy, in the case of the Irish) towards different regimes that might, in fact, find themselves at war with one another.

It is without question that American Nativism was from the first about protecting more than the political character of the United States, and that initially race was a less significant factor since not many sought to emigrate here willingly from Africa or Asia. Slavery was, however, seen as a blot on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence by many Americans. It was Lincoln himself who put forth that the civil war was 'testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived [in Liberty] and so dedicated, can long endure'. For Americans of his time and the few decades earlier, American liberty seemed a precariously planted tree in a world where monarchs ruled China, India, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Brazil, Turkey, Persia, Morocco, Zululand and Madagascar. Those ideas of liberty were rooted in an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant outlook that was a smaller set than the word 'white' might imply in naturalisation acts passed by Congress. It was this day-to-day 'Anglo' culture that was seen as defining Americans. To reduce these fears to race alone does a disservice to that generation of abolitionists, unsympathetic toward 'papist' religion, who fought more successfully to end race-based slavery.

(P.S. -- By the way, if you didn't follow the Wikipedia link, George Bourne, abolitionist and nativist, was himself an immigrant from England.)

Framing History

Kevin Gannon, who blogs under the pen-name 'The Tattooed Professor', recently wrote a post suggesting that, at least as far as the teaching of US history went, we should think about framing it in a 'continental approach'. He contrasted this with the traditional narrative describing the advance of the frontier from the east coast, which disregards such useful facts as the settlement of St Augustine in Florida by the Spaniards before the Pilgrims arrived, or even the apparently radical notion that the American Indians got here first, and went from northwest to south and east.

While it is an intriguing as opposed to a silly idea, I'm going to need more convincing that it is a good one.

Gannon's agenda becomes apparent when he characterises the traditional narrative teaching of the history of the United States in a rather negative light:

...it imprisons us in a nationalist framework of analysis without our even realizing it. If we approach US history as “the history of the United States as a distinct national entity,” we adopt all sorts of implicit assumptions about what is significant, what is historical–indeed, even what is human.... We may not see it, but we work from the same agenda that the most militant slaveholders, Indian-hunters, and xenophobes pursued. If we norm the “nation,” all else becomes abnormal.

The problem here is that Gannon is starting from the point of rejecting the traditional foundation of all historical study, not merely that of slaveholders and xenophobes. The Western tradition of historical scholarship is rooted in exactly the adoption of implicit assumptions about significance that will exclude people from the narrative, even if they had some relevance to it. I could go back to Herodotus or Thucydides to illustrate this point, but instead I'll stick with the English-speaking world and look to Bede.

Bede's preface to his his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, addressed to King Ceowulf (ruler of Northumbria, Bede's home in the northeast of England), refers to the monarch's 'eager desire to know of the doings and sayings of men of the past, and of famous men of your own nation in particular' [my italics]. Bede's understanding of 'nation', however, is rather different to ours. Bede's nation encompassed all those who spoke English, including people who lived in Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Mercia, distinct kingdoms each. Despite that quite explicit assumption that he is writing about his nation, Bede manages to race through about seven hundred years of history of his 'continent', in this case the island of Britain, in a few pages.

But it is only a few pages. Because he writes an ecclesiastical history, Bede is not much concerned with a pagan pre-literate history he cannot access, nor with the interaction of the Roman province of Britannia with the rest of the empire. He devotes more space to St Alban than to the emperors Claudius, Severus or Constantine, who in different ways all had claims on great significance in the history of Britain. Yet St Alban and St Germanus, important to a history of British Christianity, remain minor figures in Bede's narrative. He is writing about the English, and so his ecclesiastical history really begins with the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury, who sought to convert the pagan Angles and Saxons. Would Bede's account of the English people and their church been improved by integrating a longer narrative about British Christianity? Probably not, because Bede's interest was in how things came to be, not how they ought to be. He includes those interactions between the two he thinks are important to the history of English Christianity.

Gannon's proposal would be an excellent one for a course about the United States in North American history, but it defeats the objective of teaching US history. Indeed, I don't quite understand Gannon's resentment of a nationalist framework. It was exactly this pursuit of a nationalist framework that did much to advance the causes of African-American and American Indian history. In those cases, though, the nationalism was of those peoples and, at least in the case of the former, stopped short of embracing separatism. Gannon's course would undermine the very concept of the United States as a polity capable of addressing external forces because it reduces the polity to a hateful elite. Indeed, it would assist those forces that are creating our future world of networked global nodes overseen by a corporatised transnational elite. Polities like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica and Guiana are the vehicles by which ordinary working people have some hope of influencing this global elite on their behalf. Besides slave-holders and Indian-hunters, that US history includes other aspects that should provide food for thought to progressives like Gannon. The United States is also a history of oppressed white workers, in the indentured servants from the British Isles who laboured in the fields beside Africans in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia. It is a history of religious liberty, whether of the Pennsylvania Dutch who found sanctuary outside of Europe but within the dominion of a Hanoverian monarchy or Mormons moving teleologically westwards. It is a history of resistance to a racist political structure. These people are just as much part of a nationalist framework as the villains listed by Gannon. History courses are the major means of constructing a coherent political identity from people who might care to look beyond red, white, black and brown.

Indeed, if we are going to pin labels on people, why can't we accuse the American Indians of being eco-terrorists for contributing to extinctions, of being anti-immigrant and being slave masters themselves. It just becomes an absurd game influenced by politics rather than scholarship. It is systems, not people, for historians to hold to account in this context. What we need to do is acknowledge our assumptions and understand why they are necessary, rather than throw out old assumptions for new ones.

Back to Bede, to whom I will give the last word. He goes on, after the quote I cited earlier, to give some good advice to all practitioners of history, although let us excuse this faithful religious his eighth-century assumptions about morality -- 'For if history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good: or if it records evil of wicked men, the devout, religious listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse and to follow what he knows is good and pleasing to God.'

[Quotes from the Penguin Classics edition of Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price.]

A Last Call for a Bit of Old Soho

You have about a week left to catch a radio dramatisation of Keith Waterhouse's famous play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. It has an amusing moment or two, but more in the nature of tragi-comedy than side-splitting slapstick. I strongly recommend giving it a listen if you want gain an idea of an eccentric corner of London Life during the postwar era. It could be considered a sort of parody of the Algonquin Round Table, a place where civilly vicious quips were replaced by out-and-out drunken insults and so will pass largely unmemorialised.

Bernard is the sort of person who disproves my fundamental notion that the English-speaking world has a culture that transcends the national boundaries that divide it. He drifted from job to job within journalism, eventually fetching up in Alexander Chancellor's version of The Spectator, a magazine long associated with the Conservative Party in Britain. Bernard wrote a weekly column under the characterisation, 'Low Life'. In this, he described a life largely empty of middle-class achievement, but one full of the kind of incident that could amuse, such as the story of the racing cats featured in the play.

My recent hiatus was due in part to the necessity to leave Canada, and during the journey to my new location (Boca Raton, FL), I bumped into the Waterhouse play while lying in bed one morning in Lexington, SC. Wherever I had wifi and time, I would listen to it. I have heard parts of it multiple times during the past month, and it has sent my memory (and my internet searches) back in time to 1980s London. for some of that time I was working for a publishing company just off St Martin's Lane. I had also been, for some years already, a loyal Spectator reader, and would read Bernard's column on occasion. Of the men I met who knew Jeffrey Bernard, apart from his brother Bruce, they seemed an insecure lot ready to intimidate with shouts and words in order to establish some kind of pecking order. Bernard does not come across like that here, but I have to believe he could give as good as he got from the likes of Graham Mason.

So, I encourage you to have a listen to this play (or you can look for a filmed version on YouTube; there used to be a few) before its iPlayer time is up. Many people see Bernard as something of 'a man's man', for those of you interested in issues of gender. His Anglospheric connection is made through the Canadian author Elizabeth Smart (here presented with a cringe-worthy accent), who wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and worked for Queen magazine. That bohemian Soho of which Bernard was a part will surely, before long, become a popular subject for academic research (if it hasn't become so already). Because, apart from the drunkeness, metropolitan intellectuals kind of all live like that now.

Maggie's Draws

In one small corner of the Internet, I am notorious for my opinion of 'the dreadful Mrs Thatcher'. Thanks to the magic of retweets, I find there is a Twitter account commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the election of Lady Thatcher to the leadership of the Conservative party. Several of the tweets reproduce excerpts from the newspapers of the time. I have copied two of these below.

The first is from the Sunday Times, and the second is by the Sunday Telegraph's Peregrine Worsthorne, a particular favourite of mine.*

What is striking from both these excerpts is how Mrs Thatcher is seen as something different, someone who represents a break with the past. Events would prove both of these comments prescient, but I think Worsthorne does a better job of capturing that difference than the Sunday Times' writer. One wants to fall off one's chair reading that prior to Mrs Thatcher the Tories were not 'a class party'. Throughout their history, the Conservatives have been the very definition of a 'class party' — the class being the people who own the country. But the clue there as to Thatcher's real significance is in that comment 'to rebuild the...position of the middle classes'. The fact is, the mischievous 1970s in Britain had much to do with different sectors of British society demanding to maintain, in TradeUnionSpeak, 'differentials'. The skilled workers believed they deserved more than the unskilled. The accountants and sales directors believed they were entitled to more than the skilled workers. The idea that your 'value' in wages depended on the colour of your collar was at the root of Mrs Thatcher's appeal.

And that leads naturally on to Worsthorne's comment. He refers to Sir Keith Joseph, who was the first well-known politician to present the monetarist ideas of Milton Friedman to the British voters. Worsthorne uses those words that should have been fatal to any person running for the leadership of the Conservative party, that the party leader would be a 'liberal' in the old-fashioned sense of that word. The Conservative party was rooted in the idea of being the natural leader of the country as a whole, balancing the interests of the other classes while preserving an institutional structure that dated back at least as far as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its accompanying ideology of 'English liberty'. For Lady Thatcher, and her éminence grise, the equally dreadful Rupert Murdoch, the old establishment had lost the will to confront the enemies of those who own the country. People needed to be judged by their individual achievements in mobilising the resources of a market economy to become a good earner, not by their location in a social order that sought to control change. If the establishment's institutions got in the way of this battle between the market and its enemies, they must be put down from their seats. The previously humble, at least those who showed the gumption to get on in life under a free-market economy, would be exalted now.

For people like me, who admired that institutional structure that had seen Britain to victory in two world wars and had both started and accommodated a welfare state that indeed had reduced 'differentials', Lady Thatcher's years in government were to be a profound disappointment. But, even for those who hoped the unleashing of enterprise would lead to revitalised British economy and a classless meritocracy, Britain forty years on must seem to have failed the liberalising spirit that Lady Thatcher promised in 1975. I do hope @thatchersrise will continue the story at least up to 1979, so people can compare ambition with results, and join me in seeing in hindsight that Lady Thatcher's legacy of failure was present at her creation.

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* I saw him in 1996 with some of his acquaintances at the Renoir cinema near Russell Square in London. For the second time in my life I found myself a few feet from a writer who had given me great pleasure over the years, and declined to go over and offer my compliments. I feel bad about these missed opportunities.

A Note Prompted By the Passing of Gough Whitlam

[NB — The extended hiatus from last autumn was a result of my wife's cancer returning. It is a long story, and I prefer to keep it short. We finally got a firm diagnosis of the extent of her problem just before Christmas. We are hopeful that she will be with us for a few more years, but it was still disturbing news and only now is my life beginning to return to what could be called 'normal'.]

The death of Gough Whitlam three months ago reminded the world of Australia's 1975 political crisis. The crisis became fodder for those who see the secret hand of the CIA or the United States at work in so many curious incidents around the world. However, it also brought into question the relationship of the Commonwealth Realms to the British royal house. It is fair to say that the the question of the continued presence of the monarchy in Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada is going to become a significant over the coming decade. The Queen may yet reach 100, and defy such a prediction, but the probabilities suggest we will be hailing King Charles III before too long. Whether the 'white dominions' of Canada, Australia and New Zealand will be willing to continue with the link to the House of Windsor is a matter certain to be raised. Each of these will, I suspect, return answers that suit their own particular circumstances at that moment. So in this post I am going to consider two political crises that raise important questions about a change from dominion status to one of a republic.

Australasia is certainly where my knowledge and familiarity of Anglosphere history is weakest. Nonetheless, I am going to risk floating a comment because Whitlam was a very interesting political figure not just in his own country, but within the broader context of Anglospheric political trends. Whitlam in one sense was a 'Blairite avant la letter (or, better, Tony Blair was simply a Whitlam clone, part of Rupert Murdoch's Australianisation of Britain). Eric Hobsbawm famously in 1978 proposed that the historic role of the industrial proletariat as the decisive force in the revolution against the capitalists' power was coming to an end. While neither the British nor Australian labour party was in any way Marxist, it is fair to say that they both were organisations rooted in that industrial proletariat. This constituency had repeatedly failed to deliver parliamentary majorities for twenty-three years, and Whitlam looked to other sources of electoral power for the party. He found them in a variety of socially liberal causes, such as race, unfair pay for women and the urban and suburban constituencies poorly served by the welfare measures of the Australian state. While Labour parties were not "sound" on these issues, tending to put the interests of a largely male skilled and semi-skilled workers above all others.

Thus, when Whitlam came to power in the 1972 election, he put just as much weight on a policy agenda that appealed to middle-class liberals who wanted to ameliorate the hardships of disadvantaged groups at home and abroad. Whitlam's basic outlook was to promote welfare clientelism — a dole handed out to the unfortunate. Rather than focus on the hard task of attacking the foundations of international capitalists' power, Whitlam preferred the easier task of attacking the 'colonial' remnants in the Australian state, at a time when Britain's Establishment for over a decade had been eagerly shedding as much of these legacy responsibilities as it could without causing offense.

During 1974 and 1975, Whitlam found himself in an economic and political crisis of some severity. Confronted with an apparent political deadlock, the Governor-General appointed by Whitlam, Sir John Kerr, made use of reserve powers completely on his own initiative. These sorts of reserve powers are inherent in all constitutional arrangements where the head of state is intended to be a figurehead somewhat above politics.

Canada has in its history a similar confrontation between a prime minister and the reserve powers held by a head of state who represents a monarch resident overseas. The "King-Byng" affair is, I imagine, largely forgotten outside of Canada, and based on my own experience living there for six years seems largely forgotten within Canada, too. (Canadians are a people who prefer to forget their past, even to discard it altogether.) We see something similar happen here, except with a key difference. After the general election of October 1925, Governor-General the Viscount Byng of Vimy allowed the incumbent prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to have the first attempt at finding support in the House of Commons. Arguably Byng should have given the Conservative party, which had won the most seats, a go before King. However, Byng could be seen as accepting his prime minister's advice, which is how constitutional monarchies should work. After King had clearly lost his support in the Commons in June 1926, Byng declined to follow his prime minister's advice for a dissolution. The question that Byng had to answer was 'who spoke for the electorate?'. King's government was threatened with censure by the same house that had supported him nine months earlier, which saw King's party not even possessing the most seats. The October mandate had been inconclusive, and the largest party had not been given a chance to find a majority in the House of Commons. Whichever course of action Byng chose to adopt, he would have alienated a large number of Canadian voters. In fact, Byng handed the Conservative leader a poisoned chalice. The Conservatives could not secure a majority either, and a dissolution took place in a matter of days. King's party won a slim majority in the 1926 election.

In both cases, replacing the office of a vicegerent governor-general representing a monarch resident overseas would not have changed the dynamic of the crisis. In both cases the essential problem was between the government and the parliament. The head of state was required to arbitrate, and in both cases chose not to follow the advice of the prime minister. However, in both cases there were perfectly sound political reasons to take the course of action that was followed. Kerr needed to find a government that was capable of getting a budget sorted out in the midst of an economic crisis of the incumbent government's creation. I don't see how an elected Kerr could have failed to reach the same decision, nor is there any evidence that the relationship between Australia's monarchy and Britain's came into play here. Likewise, an elected Byng would have faced the same problem that an appointed Byng did.

In neither of these two crises did the 'colonial' position of the dominions come into play. Nor would a 'republican' polity have changed the crises in any way. Both are examples of how people in pursuit of power are prepared to kick at the foundations of their constitutional order, without really thinking about the long-term risk to the political system. In other words, image trumps reality when the stakes are highest.

Scots Should Vote 'No' and Remain Independent!

Tomorrow's referendum in Scotland on whether to vote to end... well, what exactly? This is a problem that has been nagging me these past few weeks — what is it that the Scots are being asked to vote for? Because as soon as one thinks about the process by which the United Kingdom came to be, it raises a qualm about voting 'Yes' to the question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?'. A 'Yes' undermines the foundation of a Scottish state's constitutional order. A Yes' potentially creates something that has never existed before.

Scotland in 1602 was an independent kingdom. The Scottish people, via the Church of Scotland, had imposed restrictions on what their monarch could do. The future James VI had been baptised in the Catholic faith, but when the Protestant nobility in Scotland forced his mother (Mary, the queen of Scots who was executed by England's Queen Elizabeth in 1587) to abdicate, James was raised in the Church of Scotland, and came under the influence of his preceptor, George Buchanan, who certainly believed in trammelling the power of the Scottish monarch.

All this changed in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, on the death of Queen Elizabeth. James traced his ancestry back to Henry VII of England, who was Elizabeth's grandfather. This is known as the Union of the Crowns. Scotland theoretically remained an independent monarchy, with a parliament and justice system distinct from the English one. However, what it did not have was an independent foreign policy. Ambassadors addressed the same person, whether they went to London or to Edinburgh. A 'British' foreign policy emerged straightaway, with the ending of the Anglo-Spanish War that had been going on for some twenty years, and which previously the Scots had stood apart from. He also secured the end of the Nine Years' War in Ireland which, however, had petered out without his direct involvement. He simply swept up the pieces. Given the nature of seventeenth-century monarchies (and even earlier ones) it could not be any other way. (Although, interestingly, colonisation in the Americas remained two distinct projects.) The monarch pursued the best advantage for all the realms under his or her rule. And this is at the root of the basic problem with a 'union of crowns'. Those Crowns can eventually fall onto separate heads, as would happen when Queen Victoria ascended the British throne, but that of Hanover was occupied by a man. The Hanoverians followed Salic Law, which did not permit a woman to be monarch.

And it was this that lay at the root of the next development. James had been quite keen to see the merger of England and Scotland, but some English and many Scots preferred otherwise. The two parliaments, the two churches and the two legal systems continued to go along their separate ways, which contributed to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, itself preceded by the Bishops' Wars, in which the King of Scotland, James VI's son Charles I, used his English realm to try and enforce his opinions on Scotland. However, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a salient moment in English constitutional history, the Union of Crowns problem emerged. In theory, James VII could have remained king of Scotland and king of Ireland*. He didn't because he lost wars fought there on his behalf. In 1692, the daughter of James VI and I, Sophia of Hanover, was made the heir of Anne, the Protestant daughter of James VII and II as queen of England and Ireland. Scotland would have to make its own decision.

And, it did. In 1704 the Act of Security proposed a separate, Scottish monarchy that would remain Protestant, but could not be identical with that of the English line of succession, now vested in Sophia. This dispute in turn led to the Acts of Union of 1707, which united the Scottish and English parliaments and the two kingdoms. The Kingdom of Great Britain would now be governed by means of a parliament at Westminster. Scotland retained a separate church and a separate legal system. Foreign policy would go on as before, but economic policy would now be combined. Scotland remained an independent country, in one sense, in that it continued to exercise that independence through the Kingdom of Great Britain.

At its root, it is this which the referendum question is about. 'Should we undo the Act of Union of 1707?'. But I'm afraid it goes farther than that, based on what we have heard. Salmond has asserted that the Queen will remain head of state of an independent Scotland. But, in that case, she has to decide which realm will be her home, and which will require the appointment of a governor-general. Why? Because, fundamentally, the monarch no longer conducts a united foreign policy for all realms. In order to remain above politics, the monarch has to receive advice (which is basically a courtesy memo) from governments. In the case of, say, participation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Queen of Canada, in the person of the governor-general, received different advice from the Queen of the United Kingdom. For Scotland, if the monarch should choose to reside in England, this would be something completely new. Scotland would have the same status as one of the Commonwealth Realms. So? Well, all those were formerly colonies of Scotland, through the Kingdom of Great Britain. In other words, Scotland would be in danger of demoting itself to ex-colonial status, in danger of asserting that in its previous existence it was not an independent country. This is constitutional nonsense. If Scotland is not an independent country now, than neither is England.

It seems to me that if Scotland wants to undo the 1707 Acts of Union, a 'No' vote is in order, to recognise that Scotland is already an independent country, through the United Kingdom. However, this must be followed by a demand from the Scottish Assembly to repeal or annul the acts. This, of course, could be the same process as after a 'Yes' vote, except that the 'Yes' vote as it stands inherently proposes that Scotland is a subjugated country, something that never happened. Subsequently, a new Act of Security could be passed, and Scotland could go its separate way without having undermined its previous status. It would, of course, remain a part of the Anglosphere.

Whatever the case, I'm clearly too historical to be an effective politician!

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* I'm not going into Ireland's relationship to all this, which is an interesting story in itself.

A Hanoverian Succession?

One hundred years ago today, half of the Anglosphere went to war with the German Empire. It probably bears repeating that there was neither debate in Parliament, nor consultation with the Dominions. A few men in London had a few meetings, and issued an ultimatum to the government in Berlin during the morning of 4 August 1914. The other half of the Anglosphere had no immediate intention of joining this conflict, even though the occupant of the White House, Woodrow Wilson, was one of the most Anglophile presidents in American history. One could argue that the First World War was the inception of the Anglosphere, the moment when the idea of an English-Speaking People really became something with practical effect, despite the long debate that took place before the United States went to war. The Dominions, through their armed forces, acquired identities that were no longer mere creations of distance, prone to fragmentation by the scale of their countries, but focused on a continuing national project that required social mobilisation to an unparalleled degree. Not only could they claim to be separate, but they could now point to an effort that deserved equality. Britain began to accept that it was no longer the centre of the Anglospheric universe, but simply had a claim to be primus inter pares.

All of these developments relate to what one might call the 'lost cousin' of the Anglosphere, Germany. Given any opportunity, I vigorously promote the idea of thinking about an alternative to the Anglosphere that I call 'the Hanoverian Complex'. The United States was founded, not out of Britain, but out of the realms of King George of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover. German-speakers were a major stream of immigration into the United States, and the era of 'Liberty Cabbage' (a re-christening of sauerkraut) during the First World War threw something of a cloak over just how prominent German was in the United States was before 1917. In this, parts of the United States fitted into what might be called a German-sphere. Even up to 1914, Germany remained something of a geographical expression. There was a king in Bavaria until 1918, and it is better to write of the German armies going to war in 1914. Bavarian, Saxon and Wuerttemburger forces all had distinct identities from the 'Prussian' force that overwhelmingly predominated. Just as the war divided the Dominions from London, the conflict united German states to Berlin more thoroughly than had been accomplished by the Franco-Prussian war. The German-Speaking people came together as the English-Speaking one drew apart.

Germany, Britain and the United States have had an odd triangular relationship during the past two hundred or so years. Germans were important emigrants both to the United States and to the British dominions, while Queen Victoria was a determined Germanophile. (Her daughter-in-law, Alexandra of Denmark, was quite hostile towards Germany, and arguably played an important role in changing British attitudes.) Changes in this triangular relationship, initially broadly friendly, at first glance coincide with the accession of Wilhelm II as German emperor. Wilhelm, whose mother was the daughter of the German-descended Victoria and her German husband, literally possessed a 'love-hate' relationship towards Britain, and his pursuit of extra-European expressions of German political power clashed with the United States' own taking up of 'the White Man's Burden'. In the five years before August 1914, the most important episode of this from the perspective of Washington, DC, came in German attempts to influence the course of the Mexican revolution, which had started in 1910 and turned into an ongoing civil war after a coup in 1913. Tension between the two also arose in China, another site of a revolution that offered an opportunity for Germany and the United States to expand their influence. For the British, German economic competition and Wilhelm's bellicose rhetoric, as well as plans for a much bigger German navy, made for an uncomfortable neighbour. On 4 August 1874, relations between the three countries were certainly cordial, if not friendly. Forty years later, Germany was perceived with grave suspicion by the English-Speakers. What remains constant is that the English-Speakers shared an opinion at both moments.

So, thus, we come to the article that stimulated this post, Simon Jenkins' request for Britons to set aside their fascination with wars against Germany. Jenkins wants Britons to face the future, which requires remembering the friendly Germany, and not the one that was responsible for the massacre at Dinant, the sack of Louvain and other German attacks on civilians in 1914, let alone the worse business of 1939-45. The problem is that Germany appears to have been run in 1914 by a group who perceived themselves to be victims of a plot to keep their Empire from its proper role as primus inter pares in Europe, a view complicated by the fact that they believed that Russia's power could only get stronger. It is not unreasonable to connect the conduct of German soldiers in Belgium and elsewhere with this same paranoid outlook. This paranoia has turned into something of a self-perpetuating phenomenon, as the ”Stab-in-the-Back Myth” or the controversy over the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt and the 1960s' student protest movement which spawned the terrorist Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Cells can all be seen as symptoms of attitudes that were shaped around the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, it doesn't help halt the self-perpetuation when foreigners readily turn to reminders of a guilty past when angered by German policy.

Jenkins was profoundly wrong to apologise to the Germans for English-Speakers' worship of the First World War. Not only was the war was possibly the single most important event in shaping the Anglosphere, but “the problem with Germany” is really a German problem. German leaders needed to recognise that history moves slowly, and their fears in 1900 were a long way from being realised. It is the Germans who need to break out of that self-perpetuating persecution complex, and they need a certain resilience in the face of crass equations of German assertiveness with Nazi aggression. Who is to say, at this point, that they aren't already on a path to becoming more like the Germany of Bismarck, which recognised how to maintain the dignity of and knew the limits to great power status?

In another way, though, Jenkins was right that Britain may need to move on from its victories over Germany. Arguably, to adopt the mood of Berlin 1914, the Anglosphere as we know it is falling apart. The United States could already be inescapably headed out of it and into Latin America. Many Canadians seem embarrassed about their Anglospheric roots, see more in common with the United States than the 'Mother Country', and seem likely to opt for a globalised identity. Only Australia, New Zealand and Britain still value a shared cultural identity, although I am too far from Australia to judge that with any accuracy. One notes that one day Prince George of Cambridge is due to ascend the British throne, and by that time perhaps Britain will be wiser to embrace the 'Hanoverian Complex' rather than the 'Special Relationship'.

The Living Dead

This post departs somewhat from the cultural history theme on which this blog is supposed to focus. Towards the end I introduce some themes that are not particular to Anglo-American Culture, but which Anglo-American culture played an important role. So if you read the posts on this blog for their historical content, I recommend you skip this and wait for tomorrow's contribution.

In recent years, I have become more acquainted with cancer than one might find comfortable. Cancer was responsible for the most formative event in my life, the death of my sister when she was twenty-five, just as my childhood was ending. The rest of my life has taken place in the context of this event, in ways almost none of my family nor my closest friends had or have any real appreciation. Six years ago my wife was diagnosed with cancer. Although she survived, in mutilated fashion, one has had to live through treatment and through almost annual scares in the years since. This year, my mother died as a result of a cancer. As I get older, and the probability of me developing cancer increases, I feel like a member of a herd of animals, a herd attacked by predators who pick off individuals. The survivors are relieved, but fearful. I do not claim any special status in writing this. I expect that at least a million individuals in the world can share a story similar to mine, if not millions.

That's why I recommend this podcast, in which a literary critic, D G Myers, mortally ill with cancer, talks about how he copes with a death sentence, and what it tells him about life. His advice is sound, speaking as a witness to cancer, and I recommend those who have need of such advice to pay heed. However, I'm more interested here in discussing other things that the podcast raises.

Myers and his interlocutor, a Stanford University economics professor named Russ Roberts, both raise a point about what one might call a history of perception. Roberts mentions how in the nineteenth century children might be taken on visits to cemeteries as a kind of exercise in memento mori, a concept I haven't observed used by a living person in a non-monumental environment since 1983 and even then in a proto-hipsterish ironic way. Death, of course, was a much more familiar rite of passage to people a hundred and fifty years ago because of infant mortality, shorter lifespans and a poorer understanding of the causes of disease, as well as a general lack of safety measures on trains, ferries or even the street. Mourning was expected in a more religious society, as was a cult of the dead, who were seen to have a role still in life. We were expected to pray for them both on their behalf, and to intercede on ours. Nowadays, however, we tend to obey the Gospel injunction of the Lord of Life in Matthew VIII:22. Except on officially sanctioned occasions that serve to commemorate service to the state, such as Armistice Day, we are encouraged to put mourning behind us quickly. This was most significantly observed by Geoffrey Gorer, a friend to George Orwell, an anthropologist, and a decidedly Anglo-American figure. Gorer held that mourning, by the 1960s, had become like sexual urges during the Victorian era. To be too open about it was something shameful, a burden to those around one. This attitude still persists today. Yet, as Myers points out, death and the accompanying grief are important reminders to us that our time has value, We are only allowed so much of it, and we should consider carefully what matters, before the doctor's diagnosis forces us to consider what matters.

As Roberts negotiates his way past the mortality of Myers, asking about lists of good novels or forgotten writers (which, to digress, tragically includes Graham Greene, according to them) he comes to discuss the environment that both work in, the Groves of Academe. Myers throughout makes some telling points about the difference between 'creative writing' and 'literature', and the problem of having practitioners of the one teach the other. They conclude with a discussion of the transformation of the Groves, into corporate bureaucracies that have reached the conclusion that an English Literature degree does not require the study of Shakespeare, let alone Milton or Chaucer. As a Classicist, I could have told Myers that this was inevitable once the study of Latin and Classical Greek had been marginalised, instead of being the bedrock of a humanistic tradition in education that reached back to the fifteenth century in Europe. 'First they came for the Classicists, &c'. What students get, more or less, is an offering of lecturers' hobbies, and the student can pick and choose amongst them, and thereby reach a personal connection to English Literature that in its essence divides him or her from fellow students. Whereas in the past the completion of the degree was to share in a tradition, now the object is to satisfy appetites of both teacher and taught.

I don't think I'm wrong to connect the reduction of a societal emphasis on marginalising a continuing connection to the dead with the reduction of personal emphasis in education from shared experience to individual development. Both are a consequence of Modernity, that condition that marks our own time from that of the now-dead. The themes of Modernity are The New, The Young, Fashion, Consumption (or as I prefer to designate it, Appetite), Celebration and The Individual. Before was about The Tradition, The Mature, Ritual, Preservation, Duty and The Group. To connect to the past is dangerous, because it delays The New, reminds The Young that they will be old, shows us that Fashion will fade, that Appetite will impoverish, that Celebration must end and that The Individual to dust shalt return. Paradoxically, the more that the centres of power shift from the individual to the corporate, the more that this individualist collection of themes comes to dominate cultural discourse. The family-owned shop or diner is replaced by the chain or franchise. The Anglosphere led the way in supplanting individual investors with shareholding capital organised through 'unit trusts' or 'mutual funds'. Even in sports, the local team becomes secondary to the Major-League one.

The corporate entities that dominate Modernity are themselves in principle eternal. They have the potential to outlast their personnel, to stand as paper assemblages of capital as long as the Sphinx or the Pyramids. The monarch may die, but the Crown endures. In this way, and in this only, Modernity has a capacity to resist change. Modernity's desire for change is only motivated by its need to control, and by continuous rupturing of the social environment its to disorienting changes transform us from people with a past and with traditions into goldfish living in a perpetual now. Looking out of our bowls we are frightened into a false obliviousness of our inescapable end. Traditions and rituals connect us to a death that renders all that Fashion, all that Appetite, meaningless. Modernity ignores the final change of all, Death.

Yet when confronted with death-change we identify what is important and we focus on that. These important things, if Myers is to be believed, are tied to friends and family (a group), habitual pleasures (rituals) and a request to be treated with honesty as the same person as one was before the diagnosis (preservation). Tradition connects us not only to the past, but also to the future. Those cultural traditions that we share with those who came before are ones we can also share with those who shall come after. I don't think it is any accident that that Dante Alighieri was led from the Inferno to Paradise by a poet who had been dead for 1300 years at the time he found himself in a dark wood wandering.

Baroness Thatcher's Party?

In the 1997 British general election, after five years of heated argument largely within the Conservative Party over Britain's relationship to the European Community, the promise to hold a referendum on the topic attracted 2.6 per cent of the votes. This was the sole issue on which the Referendum Party fought the election. It did not campaign to leave the Community, only to offer a vote on the topic. Up to that time, the party was one of the most successful minor parties in British electoral history, and received a much higher percentage than a rival Eurosceptic party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

A previous referendum on the subject in 1975 had endorsed membership, and one might have thought that the question was settled. The 'Yes' votes in 1975 secured a margin of about two-to-one over the 'Noes'. Here is an excerpt of one speech in support of the 'Yes' cause.

It is not surprising that I, as Leader of the Conservative Party, should wish to give my wholehearted support to this campaign, for the Conservative Party has been pursuing the European vision almost as long as we have existed as a Party....

We can play a role in developing Europe, or we can turn our backs on the Community.

By turning our backs we would forfeit our right to influence what happens in the Community.

But what happens in the Community will inevitably affect us.

The speaker was the future Baroness Thatcher, on 16 April 1975, exactly forty years before 2015's anticipated British general election. Mrs (as she then was) Thatcher was in her first year as leader of the Conservative Party, the party that had taken Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, and the party which had first applied for the United Kingdom to join the Common Market, in 1961.It is absolutely key to understanding my topic in this post to recall that

(a) the Conservative Party was, prior to 1997, the more Europhile of Britain's two main parties; and,

(b)Margaret Thatcher, given an opportunity to vote against Britain's membership in the European Community/European Union, rejected it.

It is clear, therefore, that something dramatic changed. Baroness Thatcher became the ringleader of Euroscepticism until she retired from public life, while the Conservatives became increasingly sceptical in outlook towards the European project, at least until David Cameron was elected leader. To what can we attribute this change?

Thatcher on several occasions was quite explicit about her reasoning, even before her resignation.

There are some things for which there was majority voting within the Community when we went in, and we accepted that, and for the specific objective of achieving the Single European Act only, there have been more matters. Now there is an attempt to get far more things passed by majority voting. That means that we would have more laws imposed upon us, even if the House was flatly against them. We expect our people to obey the law, mainly because it has gone through all the legislative processes in this House, and we should be very slow to add to any majority competence on the part of the Community.

Mrs Thatcher's statement to the House of Commons, 30 October 1990, the occasion of the famous 'No, no, no' line which precipitated the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe.

The point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single Parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which take all political power away from us. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Lawson ) said in his first speech after the proposal for a single currency was made, a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a federal Europe by the back door.

Mrs Thatcher's speech to the House of Commons, 22 November 1990

[The Maastricht Treaty] takes us over the top to a new political entity, a European union, which we have never had before. Before that, we had never gone that way but had kept quite a bit of sovereignty, and it is the last lot that we are in danger of losing.

Baroness Thatcher's speech to the House of Lords, 7 June 1993

For the European Union not only wishes to take away our powers; it wishes to increase its own. It wants to regulate our industries and labour markets, pontificate over our tastes, in short to determine our lives. The Maastrict Treaty, which established a common European citizenship and greatly expanded the remit of the European Commission, shows the outlines of the bureaucratic superstate which is envisaged. And Maastrict is the beginning, not the end of that process....

Indeed, we are increasingly seeing the emergence of a whole new international political class. Some of them are politicians who have failed in their own countries, and so have tried their luck overseas. Some are officials who understand nothing of our British distinction between the legitimate powers of the elected and those of the unelected.

the inaugural Keith Joseph lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies in 1996

These selections from Thatcher's speeches are consistent in their theme. According to them, the Maastricht Treaty fundamentally altered the EEC, symbolised by the change of name to European Union. The Referendum Party specifically addressed this, by arguing that such a fundamental change required a renewal of the promise made by the British people in 1975. The problem was, however, that the bulk of Conservative MPs during the government of John Major believed that Britain could achieve some kind of accommodation with the European Union. In this they continued the Conservative Party's postwar traditions. Thatcher, meanwhile, played a duplicitous game of at times seeming to support rebels against the Major government, and at others declaring her loyalty. The result was the creation of a cadre of Conservative MPs opposed to further changes in the nature of the European Union. The defeat of the Major government in 1997 (which in no way can be attributed to the Referendum Party) thus marked a turning point in the history of not just Britain, but the European Union. It is conceivable that a Conservative government elected in 1997 would have been much less enthusiastic about the arrangements in the Nice Treaty, and thereby slowed the rate of European political integration during the time of the Blair government (1997-2007). We shall, of course, never know.

That Nice treaty included some articles governing EU citizens' freedom of movement within the Union. Today's British politics sees immigration as an important issue, and concerns about asylum-seekers (who would have been non-European) featured strongly in the Conservative election manifestos in 2001 and 2005. From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, immigration had also been a significant political issue, although the nature of that immigration was very different. In January 1978, over a year before the 1979 election, Mrs Thatcher addressed the topic in a television interview:

...there was a committee which looked at it and said that if we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples' fears on numbers. Now, the key to this was not what Keith Speed said just a couple of weeks ago. It really was what Willie Whitelaw said at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where he said we must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration because at the moment it is about between 45,000 and 50,000 people coming in a year. Now, I was brought up in a small town, 25,000. That would be two new towns a year and that is quite a lot. So, we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration except, of course, for compassionate cases.

Mrs Thatcher further addressed the matter in her memoirs, when she wrote:

Ever since Enoch Powell's Birmingham speech in April 1968 it had been the mark of civilised high-mindedness among right-of-centre politicians to avoid speaking about immigration and race at all, and if that did not prove possible, then to do so in terms borrowed from the left of the political spectrumm, relishing the 'multicultural', 'multi-racial' nature of modern British society. This whole approach glossed over the real problems that immigration sometimes caused and dismissed the anxieties of those who were directly affected as 'racist'. I had never been prepared to go along with it. It seemed both dishonest and snobbish.

The Path to Power, pp 405-6, my italics.

Mrs Thatcher's gift for populism is much in evidence here. It is curious to see a Conservative politician use the word 'snobbish' as snobbery is at the root of the Conservative party. It historically has been very much what the Marxists would call 'a class party'. It exists to defend the interests of the propertied (which for much of its history meant those who owned the land), but at the same time it has been rooted in the defence of key institutions of the British state — the monarchy, the Church established, the armed forces. By contrast, its nineteenth-century rival, the Liberal Party, was more of an alliance of groups who needed to protect their own interests against the core represented by the Conservatives. The stresses of modernity broke up the Liberal coalition during the first three decades of the twentieth century, while leaving the Conservatives largely intact. However, many traditional Liberal voters drifted over to the Conservatives during the 1920s, among them an Alfred Roberts, a grocer in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and the father of Margaret Roberts, later Baroness Thatcher. (Mrs Thatcher's official biographer, Charles Moore, is quite explicit about this, p.15 of the first volume.)

During the nineteenth century, it was the Liberal party that in Britain supported a programme of cheap, small government, that regarded the 'Establishment' with suspicion and supported free trade over protectionist economic management. These are all approaches that we have come to associate with the late twentieth century's archetypal British Conservative, Baroness Thatcher. But they weren't the attitudes of the Conservative tradition. And in the twenty-first century, it is UKIP, not the Conservatives, who are loudest on themes of Euroscepticism, controlling immigration, suspecting the Establishment and wanting to reduce government intervention in the economy and society. In many ways, UKIP represents the real descendant of Mrs Thatcher, and are part of the continuous reinvention of the British political system that has been going on since the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and the 'New Liberalism' of the 1906-15 Liberal government.

During the nineteenth century, it was the Liberal party that in Britain supported a programme of cheap, small government, that regarded the 'Establishment' with suspicion and supported free trade over protectionist economic management. These are all approaches that we have come to associate with the late twentieth century's archetypal British Conservative, Baroness Thatcher. But they weren't the attitudes of the Conservative tradition. And in the twenty-first century, it is UKIP, not the Conservatives, who are loudest on themes of Euroscepticism, controlling immigration, suspecting the Establishment and wanting to reduce government intervention in the economy and society. In many ways, UKIP represents the real descendant of Mrs Thatcher, and is part of the continuous reinvention of the British political system that has been going on since the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and the 'New Liberalism' of the 1906-15 Liberal government. European integration exposed the fault lines in the Conservative movement that had been hidden by a common opposition to Labourism on the part of traditional Conservatives and what might be called Gladstone Liberals. We could well have entered a period in British political history like that of a hundred years ago, when the main parties remade themselves, leaving the rump of one to be pushed to the margins. And at the end of the process, where will Baroness Thatcher's party be?

A G.I. Bride

My mother was a GI Bride. It probably is the act that most defined her life, a life which illustrates the effects of historical processes on 'little people', those whose absence from archives makes comprehending the past so difficult for historians. The briefest summary of her life shows how none of us can live free of the past, no matter how much we might think it is possible.

She was born in Portsmouth, on England's south coast, in 1927. The year and place establish that she would be exposed to two of the most critical events of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and the Second World War. But being born in England meant that she would be among the relatively privileged of the world, even if her parents were not among the elite of English society. She had the opportunities of a better education, better health care and access to the earning potential of work in one of the world's most advanced economies. The reasons why Britain could make all this available to her rested on the course of events over some three hundred years of history, from the reign of Charles I until my mother's own time. During this, Britain had risen from a Western European power into the greatest of Great Powers, with an empire that encompassed all of South Asia, much of Africa and included a degree of economic dominance of the South American economy. This power and wealth provided a job to her father, who made a career serving in the Royal Navy, that insulated the family to some extent from the effects of the Great Depression.

Her life would be changed utterly by the Second World War, like so many. She was very bitter about this, although would rarely talk about it. Once she commented that the Germans had robbed her of her adolescence, which itself was a concept that really only took shape for people of her social situation in the aftermath of the First World War. By the time of the war she was living in Fareham, a town along the Solent coast between Portsmouth and Southampton. There was some bombing of Fareham, although it was not 'blitzed' as heavily as Portsmouth. It seems she was bright enough to attend some kind of tertiary education, but the patriarchal mentality of that time meant that she left school at sixteen and went to work as a kind of office dogsbody in a Southampton hotel. It was in Southampton that she met he future husband, a G.I. who worked at the hospital at Netley. The war itself made possible this meeting.

After the war, she crossed the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary to live with her husband in Detroit, Michigan. We rarely think of the Second World War as a time of great migrations, but displaced persons and G.I. or wartime Brides were part of a notable transference of people from one part of the world to another. The United States made special legislation, the War Brides Act, to cope with this situation. In Detroit, she found an industrial city that had continued its tremendous twentieth-century expansion during the war. Younger people today may have difficulty in understanding just how well-off one could be living in Detroit after the Second World War. Union jobs in factories associated with the car industry made the workers of Detroit enviable — if they had seniority. They could afford houses, cars and appliances that their parents could only have dreamt of during the straitened days of the Depression. Layoffs and long-term strikes, however, created difficult times, and contributed to my mother's tremendous sense of thrift. By the 1960s, however, my father had built up sufficient seniority that we were eventually able to afford a trip to England, during which my mother met her parents again for the first time since 1945, almost twenty-five years.

My mother was disturbed by the notorious racial tension in Detroit. She always expressed antipathy towards the very notion of 'white flight'. She also had a few telling observations about how jobs at J.L Hudson's downtown department store were segregated. There was little that an individual could do in the face of institutional prejudice except to treat the people one met on their merits. She did, however, believe strongly in education as the means by which people should equip themselves to overcome any disadvantages, and that meant a degree of assimilation to the dominant social mores. The 1950s and 1960s were the final years of the WASP Ascendancy, that time from the Gilded Age until 'The Sixties' during which the American elite was a caste rooted in the northeast who lived somewhat as 'offshore Europeans', aping either the luxuries of the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy or the lifestyle of a British landed gentry. She raised her children to use this caste as a yardstick.

Her children all succeeded in the tertiary education that she missed out on. They benefited from the expansion of higher education that resulted in part from the G.I. Bill, but also from other Federal government initiatives that ensured students from humble backgrounds could acquire higher education without putting themselves into severe debt. I would think that this was the achievement of which she was most proud, because it would not have been possible without her help in making us self-disciplined, literary and mathematical. Nonetheless, it would not have been possible without a social policy that sought to ensure that capable students could benefit from inexpensive higher education. Currently, the Anglosphere drifts towards a system of higher education that burdens young people with debts while being stingy in the supply of good-paying jobs to equip the students to pay off those debts.

During the early 1980s, my mother returned to England for a time and lived in London. However, the birth of her eldest grandchild in 1983 transformed a temporary visit into a permanent one. In this she finally experienced the suburbanisation of America, as her Detroit home that she finally left in 1980 was within the city limits of Detroit. Subsequent to 1983 she lived in low-density neighbourhoods in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, in the city of Davenport, Iowa, and in the area of Kalamazoo, Michigan. This urban sprawl produced unprepossesing strip malls and big-box stores, while housing tended to be inaccessible by public transport (although not in the case of Davenport, where she lived by a bus stop). She never learned to drive, so in the absence of buses she was reliant on my brother to travel .

At the end, medical and pharmaceutical technology ensured my mother outlived her own mother by about four years. She suffered from colon cancer a few years ago, which was successfully treated, but a mystifying incident in the autumn of 2012, when she had a faint, took a heavier toll on her health. She wasn't quite housebound after that, but her mobility was sharply restricted as she became too weak to walk for too long. Tumours began to squeeze her œsophagus shut in the winter of this year, although a cough that seems to have been associated with lung cancer suggests trouble there, too. In May she decided she only wished to undergo palliative care, and lived out her life in a hospice until she died in the early hours of 20 June, last Friday. Despite having lived in the United States for almost her entire adult life, she remained British in her official citizenship, never having taken out American nationality. However, having been offered the chance to have her remains transported home, she declined. As the wife of a veteran, she was allowed to be interred in a nearby military cemetery. The last act of her life remained literally linked to the title of this post.

The point of this very long blog entry is to illustrate how a single life can be used to structure a history course. Simply by highlighting these broad historical themes, one can see how our lives are not matters of individual choice, but are subject to historical conditions over which we have no control, starting at the very moment of birth. Think of a eleven-week course constructed around this life, including some topics I haven't covered in this little essay:

1) Britain's empire in the twentieth century.

2) The Great Depression

3) The Second World War

4) Migration in Britain and the United States

5) Racism and the Urban Question

6) From urban to suburban in North America

7) The rise and fall of mass tertiary education

8) Women's role in peace and war, 1930 to 2010

9) 'Live Long and Prosper': medicine during the Postwar Era

10) From cinema to downloads, a history of modern entertainments

11) The strange rise and impending decline of the Anglosphere

History at its inception was a narrative art, and largely bounded by large events, just like a human life.