'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.

The Anglosphere on Television: Miami Vice

[A television channel available here in South Florida shows the classic 1980s television show Miami Vice in syndication every weeknight. I have been writing some commentary about the episodes I see for another audience, and I thought to provide some of those posts here, with a slightly different emphasis.]

Miami Vice was relatively popular in Britain when it ran there on the BBC. I know several of my friends in London at the time watched it, although I haven't been able to track down actual ratings yet. As I recall, the violence was at first somewhat controversial, and there was even discussion about how the BBC was editing out some footage of shootings. (One bullet would do where Americans got three.) 

Despite the obvious links between Latin American drug traders and the main thread of the show, the Anglosphere was a constant presence from the start. Tubbs, played by Philip Michael Thomas, frequently acted as a West Indian when undercover. And then, starting in Season 3, the relationship appeared to deepen. The first episode shown (although not the one planned) even featured an IRA-based plot and a young Liam Neeson. But I prefer to look start looking at these connections further into the season.  

Season 3, ‘Theresa’

The preceding episode, 'Duty and Honor,' featured a youthful Helena Bonham Carter in a cameo role as Crockett's girlfriend. 'Duty and Honor' itself focused on Lt Castillo's Southeast Asian past, and therefore the American experience in Vietnam. (The Vietnam Vet is another constant underlying presence in the show.) Bonham Carter, however, was given greatly expanded duty in 'Theresa', the title itself being the name of her character. Watching again after all these years, it is clear she was too young for the role. Contrast her efforts here with her much more self-assured performance a decade later in Fight Club, and you can see what I mean. That said, a baseball simile comes to mind: like a young pitcher’s sequencing, her work seemed callow in the earlier one, and she lacked the command that the veteran brought to bear in the later stint. But he talent was undeniable.

Nonetheless, the fact of her Britishness is entirely irrelevant to the role. There is brief mention of it, but the script could easily be re-written to make her character Canadian, Bajan or even a non-Anglosphere country like Argentina. But this is how the Anglosphere works in culture -- the subliminal impact is that we are somehow related in a way an Argentinian is not. This was perhaps more true in 1987 than it is today. It is somewhat ironic that if it is less true, Miami Vice the show probably contributed to that happening. Miami Beach went from the home of a chubby white comedian, to a multi-cultural, open-air, crime-infested gallery of the Art Deco

Fun with Gellner... and TRUMP

At the outset, I have to say I wouldn't urge anyone to take this post too seriously. It's just a bit of scholarly fun that further research might confirm offers some insight -- or mean nothing at all.

In his 1964 book Thought and Change, Ernest Gellner talks about how some nationalism emerges when a linguistic-cultural (or ethnic) minority contained within a larger state that is dominated by a different linguistic-cultural group. What happens is that the minority elite, which participates in the regime, recognises it could do better being big fishes in a small pond, as opposed to swimming around the big pond competing with other big fishes at a disadvantage. They form an intelligentsia which tells the great mass of the ethnic minority the reality of their situation, and motivates them to demand independence.

Some twenty years later, in Nations and Nationalism, Gellner developed one of those sociological typologies that irritate scholars of history, because the categories depicted can result in exceptions that must be hand-waved away somehow but which are meat and drink to historians. I found a useful table of these typologies in an academic article by Brendan O'Leary, 'On the Nature of Nationalism', published in the British Journal of Political Science in 1997.

So how does this apply to the amazing presidential trajectory of Donald Trump? As is well known, college-educated people (the elite) are, with the exception of Republican party regulars, not really on his side. The power-holders class is also somewhat split and those most heavily invested in globalisation appear to be sceptical about Trump. Meanwhile, he does better among the less well-educated. Gellner's typologies have six factors -- power-holders vs powerless, educated vs uneducated and shared culture vs culture not shared. These typologies intersect to produce various outcomes related to what state will emerge when confronted by fundamental economic change.

Your typical educated urban elitist probably watches HBO series, is interested in tennis and drinks craft beer. Meanwhile, smaller-city service worker watches Two Broke Girls, is interested in NASCAR and drinks mass-produced lager. Not much of a shared culture there.

Plug those into Gellner's typologies, and you confront a Type 4 outcome 'Ethnic nationalism'.

Now, actually, based on Gellner's criteria, both groups would count as Educated. I cheated a little bit there. But if the degree of education required to function in what the Marxisants call 'late capitalism' has gone beyond the simple 3 'R's of Type 6 'Classical liberal Western Nationalism' -- well, then, I might be on to something here!

A Short Note Inspired by Ernest Gellner

Over the last three or four months I have been doing some reading into the historiography of the concepts of 'the nation' and 'nationalism'. Thinking about Ernest Gellner's early essay into this topic, the chapter Nationalism in Thought and Change, I find an interesting intellectual point of departure within a globalising world.

Generally speaking, some historians, like the late Anthony Smith (both of us being originally a Classicists by academic training), perceived that kinship, the actual or imagined blood link between a group of people, was at the heart of what one might call proto-nationalism. We see this in the Latin word 'gens', which is 'a race or clan, embracing several families united together by a common name and by certain religious rites' according to Lewis and Short.

Gellner, in Thought and Change, talks of bureaucracies being 'the kinship of modern man'. It helps to understand 'bureaucracy' very broadly. It is not merely the civil servants and lower-level representatives of a state's administration one finds when applying for benefits or getting a driver's licence. Large corporations, banks, medium-sized businesses, universities, non-profits -- all of these are run by means of bureaucratic structures that persist beyond the actual life of people who work there. Quite a few workers, especially those who do well out of the globalised economy, network their way through these institutions into retirement. When they network across borders, they tend to remain within the cities that are themselves part of the global network in a way a city like Detroit or Liverpool is not -- San Francisco, London, Tokyo and their subaltern educational sites in Cambridge or Stanford.

In order to show this kinship, scholars should approach it through some kind of social-network analysis. If these global places are slowly becoming some kind of 'hypernational' entity, we should be able to see people not merely moving within a bureaucratic institution, like Barclays Bank, but also across it to Mizuho Financial. And it must be more than a handful of individuals, and these networks should persist over time, having heritability as mentors leave them to their proteges to continue across 'generations'.

I am working with these ideas in an historical context, but I present them here in the hope that some younger scholar might exploit them usefully. I am getting on, and I have enough research projects for the rest of my life.

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.

Why I Am for #Brexit

Tomorrow will see the British people being given the same chance as they had in 1975 to vote on membership of the European project that began life as an attempt to co-ordinate economies in order to reduce the risk of yet another European-wide war and has been transformed over two-and-a-half generations into a superstate. The thing that they voted for in 1975 has changed dramatically over the subsequent forty years. It is a very different decision.

The campaign, on both sides, has been a disgusting display of fear-mongering and prejudice, punctuated by the assassination of a member of parliament by a neo-Nazi. We are all the poorer for what has happened.

The choice is whether the people of the UK want to be part of the EU under the terms negotiated by David Cameron, or whether to leave the EU altogether. Do not pretend that these new terms put the UK at the heart of Europe. Cameron has negotiated away much of the ability of the UK to influence the future direction of the European Union. There is no chance that this will change for the foreseeable future unless you believe that the Conservative Party will lose its majority in the next election, and a pro-European alternative emerge.

It gives me no pleasure to say that in my opinion the best choice for future generations of Britons is to vote for #Brexit. I am forced to associate with people whom I frequently regard as wrong. But in this case, whatever their reasons for agreeing with me in this binary choice, theirs is the correct position when the matter is viewed as a whole. I will briefly explain why.

The campaign to vote Leave has been a fearsome display of 'othering' that conceals the fact that the United Kingdom needs immigration. But the reality is that the UK can control that immigration more easily if it does not contend with the free movement of people throughout Europe. Having left, the UK will be in a position to improve access for people from Commonwealth countries.

Let us be realistic -- the people of the UK will tolerate a number of immigrants. But this number is an absolute one. If you want a whiter, more culturally Western population, vote for Remain. A victory for Leave will mean UK immigration will be browner and more likely to include those of non-Christian faiths. But in this the UK will look more like its kin in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

As a part of Europe, the UK government has allowed those connections to diminish, although the people of the UK have done a better job of keeping them going. This is exactly the point that was made at the beginning of the UK's long debate over the EU in the time of Harold Macmillan's government (1957-63). The postman arriving at the homes of Britons brought letters from family in those former settler colonies on a frequent basis, while the emerging economies of newly independent countries in Africa and Asia would suffer from joining a Common Market that would place tarrifs on their agricultural goods. We cannot exactly go back to those days, but these links are not extinct, merely atrophied because of the UK's membership of the EU.They can be reactivated, but it will take time. They will not replace the EU. It is a politico-cultural community, not an economic one.

Meanwhile, the campaign for Remain has created a horror story about the economic future for a UK outside the EU. Much of this is grossly exaggerated, and neglects the fact that the UK, by not being part of the single currency, is already not at the centre of European economic decision-making. Because the UK remains part of the World Trade Organisation, and because the UK is an important market for the EU, trade with the EU will continue under no worse trading conditions that the UK has with any other country that is part of the WTO, but not part of the EU.

The EU will do all in its power to make the UK suffer the worst possible terms of trade, because it is the EU that is afraid of its future should the UK leave. If the UK makes a successful transitions within the WTO but without the EU, then other countries will certainly follow. We only need to look at poor Greece, whose citizens attempted to defy the EU within the single currency, to see how frightened the EU leadership is of members trying to adjust the terms of their relationship with this ugly economic monolith.

We also hear about how workers will lose all their rights, and how the NHS will go unfunded. Well, these are political decisions, and asking a foreign authority to guarantee your rights or the funding of your health service seems to indicate that you don't deserve them. These are things I am in favour of -- the rights of workers to minimums standards and a well-funded national health service free at the point of access -- and I am willing to take the risk that the British people can be convinced these are valuable things in and of themselves, and not just because of a treaty with foreign powers. And, let's not forget, what the EU gives to workers in the social chapter, it can also take away when it adopts measures to protect the interests of big business.

The rest of the Remain argument can be boiled down to 'the EU is not that bad, really, in terms of democracy'. Oh, but it is. The one time the EU project was derailed was when the French and the Dutch voted against the proposed European Constitution in 2005. And all the EU leaders did was to negotiate a treaty at Lisbon to impose much of the constitutional arrangements anyway. The EU is not democratic in any meaningful way, but a conspiracy against the ordinary people of Europe by their own governments in order to facilitate a continental economic policy because it suits big business.

Let us not fool ourselves. There are people working to reform this appalling entity, but there is no mass movement to do so, and there hasn't been since the 'democratic deficit' became an issue a generation ago. Anyone who thinks the EU can be meaningfully reformed from within is ignoring the dynamic of history.

The one strong argument deployed by Remain is the constitutional one. There is a grave risk that a vote for Leave will cause Scotland to go its own way, in the hope of staying part of the European project, and a lesser one that Northern Ireland might follow suit. But the Union is already in doubt, and there is no guarantee that Scotland would vote to continue the Union in five or ten years. I will say this: if a vote for Remain would guarantee the Union would continue for another ten generations, then I would set aside all my doubts and vote Remain. I do not believe this is so.

The world is a very different place than it was in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union and the United States threatened to turn Europe into an atomic battlefield. The EU is having far more trouble with coping with this change than the UK could acting alone.

Voting Leave is to take a tremendous risk. But voting to Remain is to lock the UK away in a cage that will see it continue to lose touch with its historical relations, to risk seeing the economy trapped in the disaster that is the single currency's austerity regime, and to distort the relationship between UK Labour and UK Capital by placing a higher referee over them that is not subject to direct democratic accountability by the people of the UK. This is probably the last chance the UK will have to withdraw in my lifetime. I hope it takes it.

The 1st March of Donald Trump

I have been watching the progress of Donald Trump with interest since August 2015, when polling piqued my curiosity about his chances of success. I have written about it at increasing length in a private corner of the Internet populated by exiles from a web site about baseball. Some of what I write here was originally written there. However, now that the phenomenon which Trump represents has triumphed in a fashion that might have seemed unimaginable six months ago, it seems time to push some of what I have learned into the slightly less private corner that is my blog. (I apologise for the paucity of references, and ask that readers assume I can back at least most of my points up with links.)

The first thing is to understand what Trump isn't. He did not receive much in the way of endorsements at any point in the campaign, and in fact was shunned by the Republican party's elected representatives at both national and state capital levels. (I cannot speak of county or municipal ones.) He was spurned by the bigger donors of the party, even when he took the time to approach them. Trump at first didn't embark on a crusade to challenge the authority of these two pillars of the GOP. He offered to work with them, not against them.

So let us move on to what Trump is. Above all else, Trump is a Republican. He endorsed John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. It is not hard to fit his campaign against the Democrats into the mainstream of Republican political positions of the past eight years. The 'insurgent' qualities of the Trump campaign always have been something of a media invention. Trump was expressly running against Washington, but it was a Washington in which a Republican Congress had raised annual objections to working with a Democratic White House, a Congress that sought to obstruct executive action as much as to legislate. In theory, at least, Trump could praise their efforts, could exclude them from rhetoric that portrayed government as doing nothing for the American people.

The second thing is that Trump speaks about policy options in a way that has, shall we say, a degree of frankness unusual for twenty-first century discourse, yet still leaves plenty of room for manoeuvre. He will end Obamacare, but not at the cost of people dying in the streets. Moslems need to be kept out of the country, but only temporarily. Other countries need to be held to account for their self-interested economic policies, but the treaty framework is fundamentally sound. It is a rare statement by Trump that does not include wiggle room. Examples are a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 15 per cent and that he will make the Mexicans pay for the wall (but all of it?). In this context, there is enough evidence that Trump supporters, unlike his opponents, do not take his statements at face value. In fact, they remember Trump as the author of The Art of the Deal, and regard his approach as that of a negotiator at first asking for everything.

The third thing is to understand the forces that have kept the Trump campaign afloat in spite of the hostility towards it on the part of the Republican party's paymasters and their servants in the government. The first of these is the media. Trump has received a great deal of coverage from Fox News and from MSNBC. The other force that has propelled Trump to front-runner status is his consistent success with a specific set of voters. Analysing his results by county in places like Iowa and New Hampshire showed Trump running strongly in economically depressed areas and in smaller cities lacking large universities or state government bureaucracies. He runs behind Cruz in areas that went for the ideological conservative Rick Santorum in a big way in 2012, but ahead of Cruz in areas where Santorum underperformed and Romney and Newt Gingrich ran better. Trump has picked up a significant portion of the Romney coalition (the non-elite parts) and added a lot of Gingrich's. The Super Tuesday states Trump did well in were very similar to those won by Gingrich and Romney, and not so cloe to those won by Santorum.

One Iowa county in particular caught my interest. In 1960 and 1968, Carroll county in Iowa was solidly Democratic. In 1976 it went for Jimmy Carter. But in 1980 it swung to Reagan by a pretty substantial percentage, but Reagan only squeaked out a win there in 1984, and it returned to its Democratic ways until George W Bush took it in 2000, and only Senator John McCain in 2008 lost it from the Republican column since. Could it be a marker for the old-time Reagan Democrats? One county is not enough foundation on which to base such a hypothesis, but it is a fact that Trump had a narrow lead over Ted Cruz there, whereas Marco Rubio finished firmly in third place, his elite-sponsorship doing him no good at all. There may be signs that supporters of Cruz are swinging to Trump, as recent polls in Florida show Trump gaining as Cruz' percentage falls. The bedrock of Trump's support rests on what one might call 'rank-and-file' GOPers. The message from the party Establishment has so far fallen on deaf ears.

The other factor here is turnout. Turnout for GOP caucuses and primaries has been way up this year compared to 2008 and 2012. Some of these people are coming out to vote for Trump, and it appears some are coming out to vote against him. So far it is not so clear how many of the new Republicans are voting for Trump. Initially, at least, late deciders voted against him. In national polls his 'negative value' among Republicans has been fairly stable throughout.

The dilemma confronting the GOP leadership hasn't really sunk in, by all appearances. They are acting as if they believe they will lose down the ticket if Trump is at the top of it. They are trusting that if they block Trump's bid for the nomination by any means possible, their supporters will still turn out to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. But what if they don't? What if they are so angered by the shenanigans of a party leadership turning on the voters' choice that they stay home? I did a calculation that suggested, using evidence from Quinnipac University polls, that Trump might cost the Republicans about 15 per cent of their base vote, but it is impossible on the basis of that data to calculate how many of Trump's supporters are voting Trump or nothing.

American political parties are built on a 'strategic triad' of elected politicians, donors and voters. Each has a vital role to play in the electoral process. It has been a long time since we have seen the kind of civil war now going on among Republicans in an American party, and the reality is that these outcomes never end well for the victims. The Democratic party ran against both George McGovern in 1972 and, to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and again in 1980. The result was twelve years of Republican control of the White House, and it could have been longer had it not been for Ross Perot's quixotic tilt in 1992. Unless this civil war is rapidly brought to an end, or some unforeseen event occurs between now and November, it looks like the Republicans will basically be a Congressional and state-house party for some time to come.

Did Americans Invent the Commonwealth of Nations?

Eric Nelson is a professor at Harvard University who has written a book that examines a neglected aspect of the ideologies underlying the American War of Independence. If you want a taster, you can listen to an interview with him that is part of a series of podcasts under the rubric 'Ben Franklin's World'. It is about an hour long.

During the course of the podcast, he reminds us that the political problem the war of independence solved was more than one of the relationship between the colonies and the government in London. In fact, it was as much one of an Anglospheric one in that the Colonists tried to raise questions about the relationship between the British monarch and parliament. Nelson explains the constitutional history of Britain either side of the civil wars that took place in the British Isles in the middle of the seventeenth century. Nelson has reminded us of the fact that some colonists perceived the struggle not to be one between colonial assemblies and King George, but in fact as one between colonial assemblies and parliament. The colonists, in other words, saw the colonial assemblies as equals to the parliament in London.

In this sense at least some of the colonists were enunciating a version of Responsible Government, avant la lettre. Responsible government, of course, was the basis for the granting of dominion status within the empire, and the ideology of the British Commonwealth of Nations holds that present or past loyalty to the Crown unites free and equal polities. While pre-1776 British North American colonial administrations did not assert an authority to conduct an independent foreign policy (except in regard to American Indians, perhaps), the Patriots who blamed parliamentary over-reach for the crisis did assert the authority for their assemblies and governors to conduct an independent domestic fiscal policy.

The answer to my headline question, of course, is a definite 'no'. But the ideological debate during the American crisis does appear to foreshadow subsequent constitutional developments within the British Empire.

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.)

Locating Gay Marriage

This map, courtesy of a tweet by the ever-fascinating @LindaRegber, brought home a point I had never really considered before.

Britain, the core country of the Anglosphere, allows it. It is joined by the settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand and South Africa and, as the caption on the map indicates, parts of the United States. By contrast, the Francophonie has little place for gay marriage outside the metropolitan area. Hispanohablantes are a little bit more enthusiastic. And, of course, in the Scandinavian world it appears to be almost universal.

Gay marriage at the moment is very clearly a marker for Anglospheric culture, which itself has roots drawn from a Scandinavian planting, as Norse and Danish influence on the British Isles was considerable, for a time. This will probably change sooner rather than later, but at the moment, tolerance for gay marriage sets English-speakers apart.

You're welcome, high-school students

My high-school daughter asked me to help her revise for a history test, one question of which will ask her about the causes of the War Between the States. So I reproduce here the brief analysis we constructed.

The immediate cause of the War Between the States was the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in the harbour of Charleston, SC, in April 1861. As a result of this, President Abraham Lincoln of the United States called for volunteers to serve three months in the militia, in order to suppress the insurrection. A military conflict with the seceding states became inevitable at that point.

But why did Fort Sumter have to be bombarded?

Between December 1860 and February 1861, seven states seceded from the United States, as they saw it reclaiming their sovereign rights. However, the federal government controlled things like the naval, military and postal services. The question of to whom these belonged would obviously be controversial. In the case of military installations, the presence of a garrison meant that attempts by local or new authorities could be resisted, at least for a time. This is what happened at Fort Sumter.

But why did these states secede?

In November 1860, a split in the Democratic party between northern and southern wings assisted in the election of the Republican party's candidate for president, the aforementioned Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's party had a plank in its platform stating 'we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States'. The question of whether slavery could be permitted in the parts of the United States that had not yet acquired statehood, much of which had been organised into territories, had been extremely controversial before the election/ In the case of Kansas, a mini-civil-war had raged for some years. All the parties took a position on this. The Democrats split over the question of slavery in the territories, with the Northern faction wanting to limit it on the basis of 'popular sovereignty': if the representatives elected to a territorial convention voted to abolish slavery in its territory, slaveholders would have to abide by that. By contrast, the Southern Democrats wanted the right of slaveholders to their human property to be respected in all territories, regardless of local sentiment. Lincoln's election, and even more significantly the election of Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, gave slaveholders little hope that in future their right to human property would be respected in the territories. Inevitably, as 'free soil' territories became states, Slaveholding power within the legislature as represented by members of Congress would dwindle. This would open the way for abolitionists to end slavery altogether in the United States.

Thus, the fundamental cause of the civil war was slavery. However, one can argue a secondary cause of state's rights, on the basis that the outcome of the civil war established, by main force, that states have no right to secede from the Union unilaterally. They can only secede if the federal government assents to their departure. But, in the absence of the controversy over slavery, it is hard to see why that right of state sovereignty would have been asserted. Given an opportunity to claim it over tariffs in 1832-3, no state considered that issue significant enough.

Talk About the Past

(I don't normally blog such extensive commentary about a book, but I wrote it up somewhere else and decided that an edited version could continue the current Canadian theme on this blog.)

The Strange Demise of British Canada describes itself as a response to Igartura's The Other 'Quiet Revolution', a book I have not read, but which I have known about for many years. The issue both books grapple with, the loss of a 'British Canadian' identity during the 1950s and 1960s, applies as much to the United States, where the WASP Ascendancy began to crumble at about the same time. (Although it might also be said to have crumbled in the US in the aftermath of the Great Depression.) Where Igartura apparently sees a transition from 'British Canada' to Anglophonie, in Champion's analysis, the British Canadian identity persists, much less visibly, because it remains the default ideology of Canada.

Champion's interest is in a particular group of British Canadians who gathered around Lester Pearson, the Liberal party politician who is popularly credited with inventing peacekeeping, and who brought to an end the old red ensign flag, with the Union flag in the quarter. The red ensign was replaced by the wildly successful Maple Leaf Flag, one of the best flags currently flying for standing as a representative icon of a country. (It was not, significantly, Pearson's own choice of design.) Champion has come in for some criticism in focusing on an elite group, but I think such a complaint is unwarranted. The whole process he is describing is one of political leadership, and it was decisions at the top that did much to undermine the link between Britain and Canada's Britons.

Champion points out that many of these men had experience of Britain either through war service in the world wars or through study at Oxford or Cambridge university during the interwar period. Many of them were small-town Ontarians, who had grown up in a province dominated by Methodists and Presbyterians. Small towns and low churches possess a kind of basic democracy, despite the presence of a petit-bourgeois paternalism. In Oxford, or in the service, they encountered the British caste system in all its pomp. As rustic colonials, they would already have provided some amusement to the immature representatives of the Ruling Class. The discomfort rural Ontario felt in addition with the presence of deferential servants who expected to fetch and carry was fatal to encouraging close ties with the political elite of the Mother Country. (I focus on Ontario here because Champion points out that Atlantic Canadians seem to make the transition from middle-class dominion to caste-ridden Britain more comfortably.) The drunken academic sport familiarly depicted in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited must have seemed exceptionally alien to boot. Champion makes the point that these attitudes were not exclusively Canadian, but were shared by many Britons, about their own country. Indeed, the difference between modern British attitudes and modern Canadian attitudes concerning the legacy relationships of Crown, Altar and Lords are not very far apart.

But, Champion could have taken his analysis a little bit further. Consider: in 1957, John Diefenbaker led the Progressive Conservatives to a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, pledged to reduce Canada's dependence on the US economy and to foster closer ties with Britain. However, Britain was already beginning to look to a future as part of the Common Market, which took formal shape with an application for membership in 1961. Diefenbaker was outraged. But did it not prove that Canada needed to accommodate a future without formerly close political relationships with Britain? Tied into the restrictive trade arrangements of the Common Market, Canada's previous alternative to the US for exports and investment would no longer be effective. New relationships would have to be forged. A new flag becomes a symbolic gesture that costs little and, done in a particular way, conveys a lot about self-image.

Champion's saddest chapter is his last case study, about the unification of the Canadian Forces. Pearson and his government come across as no better than a bunch of Stalinists (or, to make an allusion more of their time, Maoists). They did away with the 'Royal' prefixes of the navy and air force, despite the fact that the country remained a monarchy. They imposed a new uniform common to all services, and Americanised the ranks of an air force that historically did not share the same institutional history as the US Army Air Force. The Royal Air Force ripped away its army roots, in very 'Pearsonian' fashion, and its rank structure, with Flying Officers, Squadron Leaders and Group Captains, among others, was very descriptive and modern compared to 'colonels' and 'majors'. It really was too sad for many words.

The book assumes more knowledge of twentieth-century Canadian history and politics than I imagine a typical non-Canadian would possess, and in particular the lack of information about the 1945-64 period might prove a handicap. I don't entirely agree with Champion's subtle perceptions, but he does make a broad point that the more dominant narrative, that of Igartura by all accounts, doesn't neglect so much as actively ignores. Champion raises some interesting questions about the kind of 'mythic history' that provides the basis to school curricula, the environment in which most people make their limited acquaintance with history. However, the 'one size to fit as many as possible' presentation to impressionable minors neglects the reality that history is a constant battleground of competing visions. The losers in the flag debate simply had a different view of Canada, one in which the British -- or more specifically English -- Canadians did not have to retreat into a hapless anonymity, while still underpinning so much of what passes for 'Canadian'.

False Facts

I may have never before seen a statement quite so misleading in a quasi-official publication subsidised by a national government as the following from thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Although officially neutral, Britain had supported the Confederate states in the American Civil War

The context of the statement is the cancellation in 1866 of a trade treaty between Britain and the United States signed in 1854 governing trade between British North America and the USA.

I wonder what Abraham Lincoln might have had to say about the efforts of Britons to oppose the Confederacy?

Mr Lincoln, in a letter dated 19 January 1863...replied with the words that are inscribed on his statue: 'I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. 'It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom...Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.'

Lincoln in this passage refers to the workers in Lancashire cotton mills support for the war against slavery, despite the fact that they were undergoing terrible hardship because there was no work. The mills' cotton normally came from the states that had seceded, those states (and the Union blockade) had restricted the export of the cotton, so the mill workers had no work. You can read more about the affair in this BBC.com News post. You can also listen to an In Our Time episode about the Lancashire cotton famine. The Union was without doubt the favoured side of the British people in the war, although opinion among those whose job it is to worry about Britain's national security saw some advantage in a United States divided into two.

What thecanadianencylopedia.ca must refer to are the Alabama Claims. The basis for these claims were the raids of five ships that were built in British yards but sold to the Confederate States' Navy. These raids sank over 150 'Northern ships' in the course of their commerce raiding during the War Between the States. Given that Britain remained officially neutral throughout the war, the question of whether ships built by private British interests for foreign buyers that put to sea in an unarmed state raised technical legal questions far removed from the blatant Union abuse of British neutrality in the Trent affair. That the British government did not want to get mixed-up in a private transaction cpncerning the Alabama following such a presumption on the part of the American navy can at worst be regarded as a bit of tit-for-tat diplomacy. In the end, the British prime minister and foreign secretary both accepted that they should have stopped the Alabama putting to sea, in the same way that the President Lincoln disavowed the actions of the US naval officer in the Trent affair.

In fact, the Alabama claims led to an attempt by the United States to dismember Canada, suggesting that British Columbia, parts of western Canada between the Rockies and Manitoba and a portion of Nova Scotia might be appropriate return for the losses to the US merchant fleet. Of course, one won't find American territorial ambitions in Canada mentioned. Having lived there for several years there are moments when to my mind there seems to be an ideological war in Canada against Britain, which I neither understand the necessity for, nor believe all of its practitioners fully understand the potential consequences of it.

Of course, having worked in publishing for many decades I know what happened here. There was a word limit and a more nuanced description of the fraught state of Anglo-American relationships during 1861-72 was compressed to the point that it became wrong. Still, one would expect it to have been corrected in the last listed revision of the original article, last July.

In hoc vexillo vinces

New Zealand has begun a process to decide whether to keep the old 'blue ensign' or to substitute another design. The voting will be a two-step exercise, first to select from a set of alternative designs, and then to have a run-off between the winner and the current flag. There has been some controversy over a consultation exercise about alternative designs that received many submissions opposed to the process generally, and specifically to the need for a different flag. The first round will conclude on 11 December.

Of the four Commonwealth settler colonies, two have already changed their flags. South Africa's current flag dates to 1994, after the old apartheid regime had been brought to an end. However, South Africa had more traditional British Empire flags in the shape of a red ensign, then a blue one, until in 1928 a flag that was less obviously related to the British one was adopted. The flag debate was tinged with controversy, as the change was seen as an attempt by descendants of the original Dutch settlers of the Cape, the Afrikaners, to reduce the visible significance of the Imperial tie, while raising that of the old Boer republics. The annoyance of the British-descended settlers was tempered by placing a smaller-sized Union flag in the central white stripe.

Canada, by contrast, replaced its old red ensign with a design that eliminated the symbolic representation of the British connection altogether. The Maple Leaf Flag was not the first choice of the prime minister who pushed for this change, but the parliamentary flag committee offered it as a compromise. The new flag was the product of a particular generation of Liberal party politicians who came to maturity between the world wars. It is important to remember that this period was marked by Canada moving from an autonomous domininion to a fully-fledged independent member of the international community following the Balfour Declaration of 1926. Besides this political transformation, Canada was also undergoing a significant economic change. Between 1922 and 1930 the US supplanted Britain as the largest holder of Canadian foreign debt. Yet the symbols of the old Imperial connection remained, despite being emptied of any practical authority. The challenge to the symbols began after 1945, with Britain burdened by the debt of the war against Nazi Germany and in retreat from the most prestigious parts of its empire in South Asia.* C P Champion's book on British Canada during the middle 1960s suggests that they symbolic recognition of the end of British authority over Canada allowed Liberal Canada to assemble a nationalistic narrative of a rise from mere colony to vibrant post-dominion. However, at the same time this narrative's climax coincided also with serious political questions about Britain's long-term commitment to any of the settler dominions. The crumbling facade of Imperial leadership was being torn down by the US assertion that Britain was strictly a European power, and one that should be in the Common Market, itself committed to 'an ever closer union'.

Despite the tremendous success of the Maple Leaf Flag as a national symbol, the retirement of the old red ensign in Canada does raise some questions about whether the accompanying narrative was genuinely appropriate to Canada. It is hard to divorce it from the Liberal party's older political agenda of trying to make Canada more like the United States than like Britain. As the power of the United States grew during the nineteenth century, Britain became wary of antagonising the country and arguably neglected Canadian interests in treaty negotiations with the administration in Washington. A commitment to ensuring the independence of Canada through military action grew inconvenient as the European balance of power was threatened by a Germany frightened of an encircling alliance, thus suggesting that the American analysis of Britain's true place in the world was far from unsound. The victory over Germany in 1918 can above all be presented as a victory of the Britain, its empire and the dominions. However, during the decade after that victorythe empire had unravelled, with the dominions asserting more independence and India achieving a national cohesion it perhaps did not possess in 1757. Canada did not need a national liberation struggle. Britain quite willingly handed over increased autonomy whenever asked by the Canadians, culminating in the repatriation of the constitution, when the Thatcher government ignored the link between provinces and the British Crown in order to privilege the demands of the federal government. What has been described as 'the other Quiet Revolution' was as much about creating an imagined community as any myth about Founding Fathers or the Norman Yoke. Reviewing Canadian history it can seem that the Past, in J H Plumb's formulation, is as much a tool of liberation as it is of oppression. In this Liberal narrative, throwing aside the maternalistic symbols of the Mother Country allowed Canada to be 'itself', and led to decades of fretting over Canada's national character, which has still not stopped.

Flags are vital national symbols, and it is not my place to comment on the New Zealand referendum more than to place it in context of comparable moments within the Anglosphere. However, I would say that changing the flags in South Africa and Canada raised very real issues that in the former case were only resolved in time for the current banner, and in the latter have not been solved in any practical way still, although the problem is gradually going away. And all that is a blog post for another day.

PS-In researching this post I was surprised to find out who the current largest foreign direct investor in New Zealand is Canada has almost as much as Australia and the US combined. Britain, by contrast, has less invested than Hong Kong.

_______

* We should be wary of interpreting Indian independence as a sign that Britain was beginning a general retreat from empire. At this point some British politicians believed that the empire could persist in some form in other parts of the world, especially Africa.

The (British) Face of God

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favourite comedy films. It conveys some sense of mediæval life. ('He's not covered in [muck] like the rest of us.' '...married to a girl whose father owns the biggest tracts of open land in Britain'.) And it also has the kind of surreal humour that I love. ('You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.')

However, my interest today is in some of the work by Terry Gilliam, the genius of Monty Python's animation. Gilliam was born in Minnesota and grew up in California. Gilliam, however, had been living in Britain for about a decade by then. In one scene, God appears to King Arthur in the form of a Gilliam animation. What is interesting is the choice of face to represent God the Father.

Some of my readers might recognise that face, which is that of a major celebrity of his own day.

It is, of course, the great cricket W.G. Grace. Grace might be recognised by quite a few in the Anglosphere, but he would pass largely unrecognised to the audiences of Canada and the United States. I doubt very much that Gilliam had much interest in who the face of God would be. The face itself was what counted. But, honestly, if there was a God of Cricket, he might be W.G. Grace. But I did wonder what North American might have filled the role best. I might give it to the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, although I couldn't find a photograph that really matched the head-on angle that Grace offers.

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.]

Araby Calling

Ian Bremmer, a professor at New York University, posted a link to a graphic using Brookings Institution data, and graphically credited to The Independent (a British newspaper) and Statista, showing the top locations claimed byTwitter users supporting ISIL.

I thought it was interesting that the two leading Anglosphere countries stand out on a list of Near Eastern ones. I haven't done the exact maths, but as a proportion of population the United Kingdom Tweeters are about twice as many as a proportion of the population as the US ones. You can find the full report here. I'd hoped to find more data for other Anglosphere countries, but there was no table beyond the countries in the graphic. I do wonder how Canada, Australia and New Zealand fared in this ranking. Of course, this is self-reported data, so there are questions about how trustworthy it is.

Is this another small example of how Britain has more in common with its settler colonies than with its European neighbours? Six per cent of the Tweets were in French, the third-highest ranked language behind Arabic and English. So why doesn't France appear somewhere? Or maybe the rankings mean nothing at all. Just something to think about.

The Future Is Nodal

A while ago I made a post at the end of which I suggested:

London is already a key member of a network of global cities which are the organisational centres of the global economy. These metropolitan areas include New York, the Bay Area in California, Tokyo and Toronto. What would be interesting would be to establish whether, like London, these all are developing a politics that to a greater or lesser degree diverge from those of the country in which they are situated. More importantly, are they resembling one another's politics more than they do those of the rest of their country's.

This fell in line with an opinion I have expressed on other occasions that we should recognise that borders are going to be irrelevant in the globalised world. In keeping with the scheme of Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Theory, the core is no longer going to be demarcated by national boundaries, but rather a network of Global Cities, better represented by a point-to-point map in which the lines can be seen as communication links or airline routes.

In keeping with this, we are increasingly confronted in historical scholarship with works that bypass old national boundaries. Kevin P. McDonald's recent book on the position of New York within an Indo-Atlantic network is a good example of this. As the reviewer puts it,

By studying the trade connections that ran via Madagascar between New York and the Indian Ocean, McDonald opens a world that defies modern categorization. It is a world that is not “Atlantic,” but can best be described as Indo-Atlantic. And although he does not make it explicit, the ventures he describes are not just British, but might well be described as Anglo-Dutch....an informal trading empire was created that directly connected colonies across imperial boundaries without passing through the metropolitan “core.” Goods and people, as McDonald shows, moved directly from the production centers in the Indian Ocean to the Anglo-American colonies.

I would reject the idea that this world defies modern characterisation at all. We have New York as a "node" in a network of commerce. We have a hybridised political identity that struggles to conform with nineteenth-century notions of Romantic naitonalism, but works perfectly well under a quaintly named "transnational" monarchy. We have a core that is located not within a nation, but in the tie between two trading and financial nodes on the Thames and the Hudson. I don't think the twenty-first-century graduate student would find those kinds of categorisations at all challenging.

I am going to wager that more and more we shall see historical and literary studies that supplant our traditional 'national' histories with these newfangled 'networked' histories until eventually they dominate future scholarship. Looking at the history of a now-peripheral node like Detroit or Sheffield in a national context will seem hopelessly backward, and not where the grant money is to be found.

Before the Teds

The other day I caught Simon Heffer's televised essay on British war films of the 1950s. Although originally from 2013, it had been rebroadcast in August and showed up on the BBC's iPlayer for about a month. In the way of these televised essays about culture, it was a bit superficial in that Heffer would show us a clip from a film, followed by an interview with a personage associated with it, and then would lead us to his conclusion. There was no attempt to explore alternative interpretations. This is fair enough given an hour to play with, and a requirement to cover the whole of an era running from about 1951 until 1961. (I did think he could have made a bit more of Jack Hawkins and The League of Gentlemen.)

I would like to pick on one point Heffer made. He introduces the idea that from 1951 (perhaps not so coincidentally the year the Conservatives returned to power) to about 1955, the British war film reigned supreme over a country that was 'at ease with itself', as Sir John Major put it. Then came the scourge of American rock 'n' roll, which unleashed the barbarous Teds, who liked nothing better than to rip up cinema seats to a rock 'n' roll soundtrack of films like Blackboard Jungle The British war film reinvented itself somewhat in the face of this threat, but the great dams of British culture had been breached, and the hedonistic Sixties spoiled much that was good. (For some reason, partisan columnists like Heffer always overlook the hedonistic Eighties, made possible by their beloved Mrs Thatcher.)

The problem for this aspect of Heffer's thesis is that the pass may have already been sold to American culture before Bill Haley rocked around the blackboard jungle. When reading a book like Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good, one is regularly reminded that the guardians of British culture stood constant watch against the threat posed by America. (Another interesting book on this topic is Adrian Horn's Juke Box Britain, which starts the story of the American threat during the years of the Attlee government.)

The history of the influence of American pop before 1953 is the absence of 'pop chart' information. But have a listen to The Stargazer's 1953 #1 'Broken Wings'. I would suggest it isn't so far removed in character from American hits like Jo Stafford's 'You Belong to Me' or Les Paul's and Mary Ford's 'Vaya Con Dios'. One of the two founders of The Stargazers was Dick James, whose short American obituaries did not go far enough in explaining how he was a key figure in British music, with a performance lineage going back to Henry Hall. The Stargazers were founded in 1949 (or maybe 1950), a half-decade before Heffer's arrival of Americanisation.

And let's leave the trad jazz fad of the postwar period with just a mention, or this post will get far too long.

The sort of popular 'historiography' on display in Heffer's programme is simplistic, and arguably reflects more of a focus on a kind of 'living memory'. Heffer's parents will certainly have remembered the 1950s scaremongering about the Teds. He and I were born a matter of weeks apart, and Teds were still a bit of a 'thing' in the 1970s and 1980s. It might be more interesting to think about the fears of Americanism in 1950s Britain in the context of the American presence from 1942 until 1944. Are we seeing a fear of allies turning into occupiers? Or are people like Heffer and myself projecting into the past concerns about the way globalisation is destroying the local, at least how it is viewed through the kind of mass culture distributed by major corporations?