British Empire

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pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

., Our Island Story, Digireads.Com Publishing, 2013 Marshall, P. J. (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Marshall, P. J., ‘The British Empire at the end of the Eighteenth Century’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 16–23 Marshall, P. J., ‘The Diaspora of the Africans and the Asians’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 280–95 Marshall, P. J., East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century, Clarendon Press, 1976 Marshall, P. J., ‘Imperial Britain’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 318–37 Marshall, P.

Elsewhere other historians point variously to 1497, the year that John Cabot sailed from Bristol on the Matthew and ‘discovered’ the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII of England, or to 1708, which saw the publication of John Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America (a year after the Act of Union between England and Scotland officially made Britain a thing), or to 1757, when Indians lost the Battle of Plassey to the East India Company, or to 1858, when the Government of India Act resulted in the abolition of the East India Company and the supremacy of the British Crown. And this is far from the last elastic aspect of British empire. Perhaps the main lesson I imbibe from my reading is that there is very little about British empire that is certain or knowable, the books I consult teaching me, among other things, that: Britain’s relationship with its colonies varied across the globe and over time.

Presumably his people did some market research, and presumably this research brought up a notorious YouGov poll from 2014 in which 59 per cent of respondents deemed the British empire to be ‘something to be proud of’, only 19 per cent claimed to be ‘ashamed’ of its misdeeds, and more than a third claimed ‘they would like it if Britain still had an empire.’ Two years later, in January 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 per cent of Britons thought their country’s ‘history of colonialism’ was something to be proud of, and 43 per cent deemed the British empire to be a ‘good thing’. More recently, in March 2020, a global YouGov poll found that 30 per cent of Britons believe former colonies were better off as part of the British empire. So the number of people who feel nostalgic about empire might be falling but around a third of people in the UK still believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of an empire, a higher proportion, according to the Guardian report of the poll results, ‘than in any of the other major colonial powers’.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Morgan’s career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces. Pirates It used to be thought that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. In reality the expansion of England was far from inadvertent: it was a conscious act of imitation. Economic historians often think of England as the ‘first industrial nation’. But in the European race for empire, the English were late beginners. It was only in 1655, for example, that England acquired Jamaica. At that time, the British Empire amounted to little more than a handful of Caribbean islands, five North American ‘plantations’ and a couple of Indian ports.

Anything, in other words, but take over Mexico – which would have been the British solution. What such attitudes implied for the future of the British Empire was made blatantly clear in an open letter by the editors of Life magazine ‘to the People of England’, published in October 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone.’* The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, agreed.

‘We have made declarations on these matters,’ Churchill assured the House of Commons: the British government was already committed to ‘the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the British colonies’. ‘Hands off the British Empire’ was his pithy slogan in a December 1944 minute: ‘It must not be weakened or smirched to please sob-stuff merchants at home or foreigners of any hue.’ He had egged the Americans on to join the war. Now he bitterly resented the feeling that the Empire was being ‘jockeyed out or edged nearer the abyss’. He simply would not consent to forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life’s existence of the British Empire … After we have done our best to fight this war … I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put into the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to standard.


pages: 637 words: 117,453

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War by Andrew Stewart

British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, Monroe Doctrine, union organizing

Lord Rosebery, speaking to students at Edinburgh on the British Empire, saw its achievements being directed by human hands and minds but was also certain even the 'most heedless and most cynical must see the finger of the Divine' in its long history. Lord Blanesburgh, speaking publicly in January 1933, had argued that it was essential to preserve the Commonwealth of Nations as 'a civilizing force', one which would if needed be 'the final protector of Western civilization'.4 Lionel Curtis, one of the leading Imperial thinkers, thought that the British Empire and Commonwealth would eventually evolve into a federation in which the British government would provide the central authority; once again, he believed that this would bring not only order but spiritual fulfilment.5 In the early days of colonial governments the Parliament at Westminster was the supreme legislative authority for all British possessions.

Lord Blanesburgh, speaking publicly in January 1933, had argued that it was essential to preserve the Commonwealth of Nations as 'a civilizing force', one which would if needed be 'the final protector of Western civilization'.4 Lionel Curtis, one of the leading Imperial thinkers, thought that the British Empire and Commonwealth would eventually evolve into a federation in which the British government would provide the central authority; once again, he believed that this would bring not only order but spiritual fulfilment.5 In the early days of colonial governments the Parliament at Westminster was the supreme legislative authority for all British possessions. It had the authority and jurisdiction to legislate and did so for every part of the British Empire. The refusal of settlers in what became the United States of America to recognize the right of the Westminster body to impose taxation upon them when they had their own legislature which had the power to, and did, tax them ultimately led to the American revolution and the end of the first British Empire. The catalyst for the Dominions' creation was, however, John Lambton, more commonly known as Lord Durham, who was sent to what was then termed as 'the Canadas' in 1838 to investigate two rebellions of the previous year and produced, by way of response the following year, his detailed and celebrated 'Report on the Affairs of British North America'.

As one report written much later—in 1946—by a member of the DO put it, this document was a 'landmark' in the British Empire's constitutional development as it established legally the equality of the Dominions with Britain and 'their complete independence to this country, subject only to the binding link of the Crown'. The Sovereign was still common, Britain's king remained their king, they shared a common allegiance to the Crown and the inhabitants of the Dominions were still deemed to be 'British subjects'.50 Crucially, in Balfour's opinion, it was 'the only constitution possible if the British Empire is to [continue] to exist'.51 The statute would be adopted formally by each of the Dominions but it would take time.


pages: 264 words: 74,688

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The rise and fall of empires has become a narrative that adds epic interest and moral notes to the cyclical patterns beloved by so many writers. This cycle is particularly observed in the treatment of the British Empire and the (“would-be”) treatment of the United States, even if the process can be subliminal (for writer and readers) as much as it can be explicit. Separate to such narratives, the bitter identity politics of empire and even more “ex-empire” lead to claims and assertions about collective memories, amnesia, and forgetfulness.8 These often-angry politics, encourage the deployment of empire, especially the British Empire, as a case study for modern intellectual concerns, notably, but not only, about race and gender; this is a process that is repeated with the United States.

This is readily apparent when considering present hostility to the United States, which, in a highly unsettling fashion, is often greater than that toward Russia, China, Iran, or Turkey. In this context, however, there is no sign that the particularly hostile character of the treatment of Western imperialism, and notably of the British Empire, will cease. This treatment can be reconceptualized by looking at the important distinction between Western empires, notably that of Britain, and those in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Manchu. With all its faults, the British Empire, like, subsequently, the American state, arose in the context of modernity and the Enlightenment as broadly conceived: they came with promises of the rule of law, participatory governance, freedom, autonomy, and individualism, to at least some of their members.

This was particularly true of Britain’s leading role, or rather that of the British Empire, in opposition to the genocidal tyranny of Nazi Germany. In addition, its enemy in World War I, Wilhelmine Germany, earlier in the 1900s, followed policies in East and South West Africa that were far harsher than those of Britain, as were those of the Congo when King Leopold II of Belgium ruled it. Moreover, the brutality used by the Italians in the 1920s and 1930s to suppress resistance in Libya and to conquer Ethiopia, and that of the Japanese in Korea and, even more, in China, were far worse than that seen with the British Empire in the same period, or possibly any period.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

: Anti-Imperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain’, p. 78. 251 ‘the fate of’: Quoted in MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 234. 251 ‘respect the right’: Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 123–4. 251 ‘I have not’: Churchill, ‘The End of the Beginning’ speech, Mansion House, 10 November 1942, quoted in Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, p. 281. 252 ‘sturdy British infantrymen’: The Times, 8 December 1941. 253 ‘the survival of’: Quoted in James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, p. 491. 253 ‘the possibility of’: Churchill, The Second World War, vol. IV: The Hinge of Fate, p. 43. 253 ‘I trust you’ll’: Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, p. 452. 254 ‘Thus’, Churchill proclaimed: Quoted in ibid., p. 451. 254 ‘until after protracted’: Quoted in Gilbert Churchill: A Life, p. 716. 255 ‘the end of’: Quoted in Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, p. 422. 256 ‘The British Empire’: Quoted in Judd, Empire, p. 310. 256 ‘We have always’: Attlee, quoted in the Daily Herald, 16 August 1941. 256 The Labour manifesto: Dale, ed., Labour Party General Election Manifestos, pp. 52, 59, 72. 257 ‘their cookery from Paris’: Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 63. 258 ‘I hate Indians’: John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945, quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 258 ‘if Christ came’: Churchill, ‘Our Duty in India’, speech, 18 March 1931, printed in the Spectator, 6 June 1931, p. 533. 259 ‘the chatterboxes who’: Callahan, Churchill, p. 28. 259 ‘War has been’: Daily Mail, 16 November 1929, quoted in Herman, Gandhi & Churchill, p. 323. 259 ‘a monstrous monument’: Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, p. 267n. 259 a peevish telegram: Wavell, Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, p. 78. 259 ‘on the subject’: Barnes and Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay, pp. 988, 993. 260 ‘territory over which’: Hansard, 5th series, vol. 426, cols. 1256–7, 1 August 1946, quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 260 ‘men of straw’: Quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 260 ‘Britain’s desertion of’: Quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘Churchill and India’, in Blake and Louis, eds., Churchill, pp. 470–71. 261 ‘melancholy event’: Quoted in Herman, Gandhi & Churchill, p. 591. 261 ‘not aware of’: Churchill note of 6 July 1945, quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 171. 262 ‘it surely is’: W.

., Beyond a Boundary (Durham, North Carolina, 1993; orig. pub. 1963) James, Lawrence, Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, 1861–1936 (London, 1993) ____, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1997) ____, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London, 1994) ____, Warrior Race: A History of the British at War (London, 2001) Jasanoff, Maya, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 (London, 2006) ____, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London, 2011) Jeal, Tim, Baden-Powell (London, 1989) ____, Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts (New Haven, 2001) Jeffery, Keith, ed., ‘An Irish Empire?’: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996) Jenkinson, A. J., What Do Boys and Girls Read?

John Vincent (Manchester, 1984) Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857) Lloyd, Trevor, Empire: The History of the British Empire (London, 2001) Longford, Elizabeth, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London, 1979) Looker, Mark, ‘ “God Save the Queen”: Victoria’s Jubilees and the Religious Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review 21 (1988) Louis, Wm. Roger, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’, Crosby Kemper Lecture (29 March 1998) ____, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonisation (London, 2006) ____, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford, 1978) ____, Ultimate Adventures with Britannia (London, 2009) ____, and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994) Lucas, Sir Charles, The Empire at War, 5 vols.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

It openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn from a tiny proportion of the population in Britain. The British Empire was not merely undemocratic; it was anti-democratic. The United States, on the other hand, despite its difficult history, proclaims itself to be democratic, plural and liberal. Its avowed values could not be further removed from those of the British Empire. As I hope to show in many of the examples of imperial history I outline in the following chapters, the anarchic individualism and paternalism which underpinned the British Empire led to messy outcomes. Transitions from British rule to independence were difficult, because the Pax Britannica was itself transient and without any firm foundation.

Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.

GHOSTS OF EMPIRE Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World Kwasi Kwarteng Liber dicatur hic parentibus meis amore grati filii piissimo Contents Map Introduction PART I Iraq: Oil and Power 1 The Spoils of War 2 Rivals 3 Monarchy and Revolution 4 Saddam Hussein and Beyond PART II Kashmir: Maharaja's Choice 5 Land for Sale 6 The World of Sir Hari Singh 7 Deadlock PART III Burma: Lost Kingdom 8 White Elephant 9 The Road from Mandalay 10 Twilight over Burma PART IV Sudan: ‘Black and Blues' 11 Kitchener: An Imperial Hero 12 ‘The Finest Body of Men’ 13 North and South PART V Nigeria: ‘The Centre Cannot Hold' 14 Indirect Rule 15 Yellow Sun PART VI Hong Kong: Money and Democracy 16 Hierarchies 17 Democracy Postponed 18 Red Dawn Conclusion Plate Section Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements A Note on the Author Introduction The British Empire remains one of the most popular themes in history. We all know, or think we know, about its character. We have a hazy image of officers in pith helmets, pukka sahibs and turbaned and bejewelled maharajas; we have a sense of the grandeur and splendour of the empire, but it remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, very remote. The workings of the empire itself are even more obscure, as is the long roll of colonial governors and officials who administered it. In this book, I have tried to show what the British Empire was really like, from the point of view of the rulers, the administrators who made it possible.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

It was, according to James Belich – the historian whose pioneering work has done most to shape our understanding of it – an English-speaking world that, like the Arab or Iberian worlds, was ‘divided and sub-global, yet transnational, inter-continental, and far flung’, comprising ‘a shifting, varied but interconnected mélange of partners and subjects … lubricated by shared language and culture’ in which people, goods and ideas circulated with relative ease.7 As such, the Anglo-world is best thought of as distinct from, but related to, both the wider British Empire and what has been called the ‘British world system’, the global economic and political system created by the growth and consolidation of the British Empire.8 It includes the white settler societies of ‘Greater Britain’ but also the USA, with which the UK had deep economic and ideological ties in the nineteenth century. As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn).

Its origins lie in the late Victorian era, when historians and politicians debated what held the British Empire together, particularly those ‘kith and kin’ colonies where ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had settled, and whether stronger forms of political, economic and military unity were needed to secure the empire against the threats posed by the rise of rival powers, the USA among them. The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC).

Anti-imperialist sentiment and support for the underdog Boers ran high, provoking a public backlash against the British Empire. Three hundred Americans volunteered to fight alongside the Boers, among them a contingent of Irish-Americans who seized the opportunity offered by the war to take up armed struggle against the British state. Here was a conflict that bore the hallmarks of the same liberation war that had given birth to the American Republic itself, and which could not be readily filtered through the categories of race. Yet, as the Boer War wore on, anti-British sentiment receded. The USA backed the British Empire, reciprocating the support Britain had offered in the war with Spain.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

Mackenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6/5 (2008), pp. 1244–63. 24. Andrew Thompson, ‘Empire and the British State’, in Stockwell, ed., British Empire, p. 51. 25. Ibid. 26. See, for example, Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004); David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 495–522; Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire?’ Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996). 27. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 94–118, 140–63. 28.

Richardson, David, ed., Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America, Vol. 3 (Bristol, 1991). Richardson, David, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Richter, Daniel K., ‘Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Riddy, John, ‘Warren Hastings: Scotland’s Benefactor?’, in Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson, eds., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Edinburgh, 1989).

., A Nation of Peoples. A Sourcebook on America’s Multicultural Heritage (Westport, Conn., 1999). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘ “This famous island set in a Virginian sea”: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘Ireland, Empire and Union, 1690–1801’, in Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004). Basu, Paul, ‘Roots tourism as return movement: semantics and the Scottish diaspora’, in Marjory Harper, ed., Emigrant Homecomings (Manchester, 2005). Basu, Paul, Highland Homecomings (Abingdon, 2007).


pages: 370 words: 111,129

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

British interfered with social customs only when it suited them: See, for example, the impassioned appeals by anti-slavery campaigners for the British government to put an end to certain traditional practices of servitude, which were of course completely ignored by Company officialdom: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, A Brief View of Slavery in British India, 1841, Manchester: The University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/60228274. ‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire’: Lawrence James, The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; also published as Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, London: Little, Brown &Co., 1997. For whom was the British empire an open society?: See the essays in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, 2004. Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little: See https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history.

This I have done in each chapter, especially in chapter 2, and in chapters 3 to 7 in which I consider and reject most of the well-worn remaining arguments in favour of the British empire in India. I have supplemented my own years of reading with extensive research both into colonial-era texts and into more recent scholarly work on the British in India, all duly cited in the notes at the end. I hope my arguments have sufficient expert backing, therefore, to be regarded seriously even by those who may disagree with me. Finally, this book makes an argument; it does not tell a story. Readers looking for a chronological narrative account of the rise and fall of the British empire in India will not find it here; the sequence of events is outlined only in the chronology preceding this Preface.

It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power. An intriguing example of the successful colonization of the Indian mind is that of the notorious Anglophile Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British Empire in India: To the memory of the British Empire in India, Which conferred subjecthood on us, but withheld citizenship. To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ Because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 30. 9. See R. S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972). 10. K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1776–1914’, in S. Stockwell, The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), p. 67. 11. PP 1877 (5), Report and Statistical Tables Relating to Emigration and Immigration, 1876, table X. 12. Ibid., table XIII. 13. Fedorowich, ‘British Empire on the Move’, p. 89. 14. E. Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 5. 15. J. M. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960), ch.

Porter, Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial and Commonwealth History since 1600 (Oxford, 2002) which has some 24,000 entries, many running to dozens of volumes. S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008) has an excellent – if somewhat shorter – bibliography. A. Jackson and D. Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism (Oxford, 2011) offers an interesting selection of imperial imagery. B. Porter, The Lion’s Share, first published in 1975 but with several later editions, provides an excellent overview of the British Empire since 1850. W. R. Louis (general ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols., Oxford, 1998–9) is now the most comprehensive account, beginning with N.

When they suffered a string of early defeats, just as the Boxer rebellion and the arrival of foreign armies in Beijing warned that China’s dissolution was at hand, the reaction in London verged on panic. Their dilemma was obvious to Kruger’s closest adviser. The British Empire consisted, wrote Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1899, of ‘great countries inhabited by antagonistic peoples (Cape Colony, India, Egypt &c.) without any adequate military organization in case of disturbance or attack. The dominion that the British Empire exercises … rests more upon prestige and moral intimidation than upon true military strength.’42 Smuts was too optimistic. But the fear of finding themselves in conflict with France and Russia in the Near East and East Asia, while war dragged on in South Africa, galvanized opinion in Britain.


pages: 699 words: 192,704

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

: Character and the growth of power. Part Two THE GROWING CONVICTION: 1850–1870 10. GROOVES OF CHANGE: Technology and the British Empire. 11. THE EPIC OF THE RACE: The Indian Mutiny. 12. PAN AND MR GLADSTONE: An Adriatic interlude, 13. THE IMPERIAL STYLE: Taking a Gothic turn. 14. ILLUSTRIOUS FOR THE NILE: Exploration and the death of Speke. 15. GOVERNOR EYRE: ‘Old ’Angsman’ and the Jamaica Rebellion. 16. ‘AIN’T THE PENTATEUCH QUEER: Religion and the British Empire. 17. THE HUMILIATION OF THE METIS: The subjection of an alien culture. 18. IN THE PACIFIC: Sailing safe in the American ocean, Part Three THE IMPERIAL OBSESSION: 1870–1897 19.

There were fighting patriots, and speculators of exotic preference, and there were even ornamental visionaries, half a century before their time, who conceived a new British Empire framed in symbolism, and endowed with a grand and mystic meaning. One of these was Robert Martin, who standing back from his immense collection of imperial facts, and contemplating his engravings of colonial seals and charters, concluded that the British Empire of 1837, ramshackle and disregarded though it seemed, would prove to be one of the great accomplishments of history, ‘on whose extension and improvement, so far as human judgement can predict, depends the happiness of the world’.1 Another was J.

In particular the issue of an official religion confused both the rulers and the subjects of the British Empire, and even engaged the anxieties of the Queen herself. Nobody was sure whether there was such a thing, whether this was truly a Christian empire, or merely an empire mostly run by Christians. There was certainly a State church at home, but this did not necessarily mean that the Anglican Church was the established religion of the Empire too, and out of the consequent perplexity there swirled a seminal imperial controversy. Not only did the British Empire guarantee religious tolerance, within the limits of humanity, to all its millions of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, animist or pagan subjects: it was also schismatical at the top.


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Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

If it had not been the British, however, it would have been another European state that would have been the centre of the largest empire of the world. It was Britain partly, if not largely, by chance. FIGURE 3.2: A MAP OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE WITH AREA IN PROPORTION TO CURRENT POPULATION The dates when some areas were claimed and rescinded from the British Empire are given in brackets.39 When you looked at what makes up most of the former British Empire today in Figure 3.2 and considered how small Britain is, did you think Britain was more significant, and if so, why? Was it how you were brought up? How you were nurtured? Were you ever shown a map like this at school?

However, when you compare prices around major train stations in these cities, and account for the square metres that are inside dwellings, central London is often found to be the most expensive, at least for now – its prices are falling. 57 Macpherson, W. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Cmnd 4262, London: The Stationery Office. 58 Adams, T. (2013) ‘Doreen Lawrence: “I could have shut myself away, but that is not me”’, The Guardian, 20 April, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/20/doreen-lawrence-stephen-lawrence INDEX Abramovich, Roman 1 abstentions in EU referendum 1, 2, 3 Acheson, Dean 1 Act of Union (1707) 1, 2, 3 Adonis, Andrew 1 age as factor in referendum 1, 2, 3 and views on immigration 1 and support for political parties 1 Al Nahyan, Mansour bin Zayed 1 Aliens Act (1905) 1, 2 Allen, Graham 1 Andrew, Prince 1 Anglo-Saxon myth 1 arms trade 1, 2, 3 Arne, Thomas 1 Arsenal 1 Ashcroft, Lord 1, 2, 3 Attlee, Clement 1, 2 BAE 1 Baker, Herbert 1 Bamford, Lord 1 Bank of England 1, 2 Banks, Arron 1, 2, 3 Barclay, Stephen 1 Barnier, Michel 1 Bartley, Jonathan 1 bell curve 1, 2 Benn, Tony 1 Besant, Annie 1 Bevan, Aneurin 1 Bildt, Carl 1 Blair, Tony 1, 2, 3 Blake, William 1 Bloomberg, Michael 1 Blunkett, David 1 Blunt, Anthony 1 BMG 1 Boer War 1, 2 Bolton, Henry 1 Bonaparte, Napoleon 1 Bone, Peter 1 Booth, Robert 1 Borja, Mario Cortina 1, 2 Bowers, Simon 1 Boyle, Frankie 1 Bradlaugh, Charles 1 Bradley, Karen 1 Bragg, Billy 1 Branson, Richard 1 Bravo, Antonio 1 Bravo, Manuel 1 Brexit Cookbook, The 1 Brexit negotiations Theresa May’s position on 1 free trade deals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 life after Brexit 1, 2, 3 impact on EU 1 and financial services 1 and impact reports 1 and Brexit War Cabinet 1 and ‘no deal’ Brexit 1, 2 and Greenland example 1 ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ Brexits 1 Labour Party position on 1 costs of Brexit 1 Britain definition of 1, 2 misconception of identity 1 role in modern world 1 post-Empire 1, 2, 3 mythology of 1, 2, 3, 4 creation of 1 ‘Great’ in 1 identity of 1, 2, 3 and natural selection 1 international comparisons 1 rise in inequality in 1 pride in 1 industrial revolution in 1 pollution in 1 arms trade in 1, 2, 3 financial services in 1, 2, 3, 4 arms trade in 1 manufacturing industry in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 statistics on trade 1 values of 1 wage levels in 1 life expectancy in 1 possible break-up of 1 Britannia 1 British Brothers’ League 1 British Chamber of Commerce 1 British Empire loss of 1, 2 pride in 1, 2 and immigration 1 creation of 1 and British identity 1 education about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and dependencies 1 as market captive 1, 2, 3, 4 remnants of 1, 2, 3 and public schools 1 racism in 1 fantasy of 1 and Darwinism 1 delusions of grandeur 1 spoils of 1 legacy of 1, 2 Opium Wars 1 and need for food 1 British Empire Union 1 British Medical Journal 1, 2 BRIT(ish): On Race Identity and Belonging (Hirsch) 1 British Union of Fascists 1 Brokenshire, James 1 Brown, Gordon 1, 2, 3 Bullingdon Club 1 Burgess, Guy 1 Buxton, Ronald 1 Cairncross, John 1 Cairns, Alun 1 Cambridge Analytica 1 Cambridge University 1, 2, 3, 4 Cameron, David promises referendum 1, 2 negotiations with EU 1 on ‘Jerusalem’ 1 on trade with the EU 1 at Oxford University 1, 2 family involvement in slavery 1 toughness on immigration 1 at Eton 1 resignation of 1 millionaires in Cabinet 1 wealth of 1 negotiations with EU 1 unauthorised biography of 1 Campbell, Alastair 1 Capital Group 1 Carney, Mark 1 Catholic Herald 1 Cavell, Edith 1 Centre for Social Justice 1 Chagos Islanders 1 Chandler, Christopher 1 Channel Islands 1 Charles, Prince 1, 2, 3, 4 Chelsea football club 1 Child Poverty Action Group 1 Churchill, Winston 1, 2, 3 Clark, Greg 1 Clarke, Kenneth 1, 2 class as factor in referendum 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the British Empire 1 Clegg, Nick 1 Clinton, Bill 1 Cockburn, Patrick 1 Collingham, Lizzie 1, 2 Commonwealth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1968) Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 2 Confederation of British Industry (BFI) 1 Confession of Faith (Rhodes) 1 Conservative Party donations to 1, 2 issue of EU in 1, 2, 3 wins 2015 general election 1 in European Parliament 1 age of supporters 1 Contemporary Review Journal 1 Corbyn, Jeremy 1 personality of 1, 2 election as Labour Party leader 1 and Windrush scandal 1 and 2017 general election 1 honesty of 1 comparisons with Attlee 1, 2 opposition to austerity 1 and second referendum 1 Corera, Gordon 1 corporal punishment 1 Cox, Geoffrey 1 Cox, Jo 1, 2, 3 Crabb, Stephen 1 Cromwell, Oliver 1 Culloden, Battle of 1 Cumberbatch, Benedict 1 Cummings, Dominic and political repercussions of referendum 1 to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch 1 early life and career 1, 2 belief in natural selection 1, 2, 3 in Vote Leave campaign 1, 2, 3 Cyprus 1 Daily Express 1 Daily Mail 1, 2 Daily Mirror 1 Daily Telegraph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Dalla Valle, Luciana 1, 2 Dalrymple, William 1 Daly, Paul 1 Darling, Alistair 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 Darwinism 1 Davis, David and customs union ‘backstop’ 1 and impact reports 1 made Secretary for Exiting the EU 1 Frankie Boyle on 1 bets on referendum result 1 Demetriades, Panicos 1 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 1, 2, 3 Der Spiegel 1 Deripaska, Oleg 1 Duncan Smith, Iain 1 East India Company 1, 2, 3 Economists for Free Trade 1 Edmiston, Lord 1 education as factor in referendum 1 universities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 selective 1 and inequality 1, 2, 3 history of in Britain 1 competition in 1 rise in levels of 1 in OECD countries 1 reforms to 1 Education and Race from Empire to Brexit (Tomlinson) 1 Edward, Prince 1 Edward I, King 1 Edwards, David 1 El-Enany, Nadine 1, 2, 3, 4 Elgot, Jessica 1 Elliott, Larry 1 Elliott, Matthew 1 Empire Marketing Board 1, 2 Empire Windrush 1, 2 England, pride in 1, 2 environmental legislation 1 Eton 1 eugenics 1, 2, 3 European Parliament 1 European Research Group (ERG) 1, 2 Evans, Natalie 1 Evans-Gordon, Major 1 Eyres, Harry 1 Falkland Islands 1 Fallon, Michael 1, 2 Farage, Nigel 1 contemplates Northern Ireland seat 1, 2 foiled leadership ambitions 1 and fantasy of British Empire 1 and immigration 1, 2 and Grassroots Out 1 farming industry 1 Festival of Britain 1 Field, Frank 1 financial services 1, 2, 3, 4 Financial Times 1, 2 Fingleton, Eamonn 1 Finnish Lessons (Sahlberg) 1 Fletcher, C. R. L. 1 Flynn Effect 1 Foot, Michael 1 football clubs 1 Foresight reports 1, 2 Fox, Liam and fantasy of British Empire 1 trade deals 1 and arms trade 1 resignation as Secretary of State for Defence 1 and Grassroots Out 1 Frankie Boyle on 1 free trade and British Empire 1, 2, 3 and Brexit negotiations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 economists on 1 advantages of 1, 2 and immigration 1 post-Brexit 1 Galbraith, John Kenneth 1 Galton, Francis 1, 2 Gangaidzo, Innocent 1 Garnier, Mark 1 Gauke, David 1, 2 gender as factor in referendum 1 general elections 1945 1 2005 1 2015 1, 2, 3 2017 1 genetics 1 Gentleman, Amelia 1 geography as factor in referendum 1, 2 George V, King 1 Gibraltar 1 Gillray, James 1 Global Justice Now 1 Glorious Revolution 1 Goldsmith, James 1 Goldsmith, Zac 1 Goodfellow, May 1 Goodwin, Matthew 1 Gorard, Stephen 1 Gove, Michael foiled leadership ambitions 1, 2 as Secretary of State for Education 1, 2 at Oxford University 1 belief in natural selection 1 and children of immigrants 1 political views of 1 in Vote Leave campaign 1 as Secretary of State for the Environment 1 grammar schools 1 Grant, Charles 1 Grassroots Out (GO) 1 Grayling, Chris 1 Great British Bake Off, The 1, 2 Green, Damian 1, 2 Green Party 1 Greening, Justine 1 Greenland 1 Grenfell Tower 1, 2 Griffiths, Peter 1 Guardian, The 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gugliani, Sam 1 Gummer, Ben 1 Haldane, J.

Index About the authors Copyright LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES Figure 0.1: The most generous political donors from the Rich List of 2018 Figure 1.1: Voting by age group in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 1.2: Voting by region in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 1.3: Voting by local authority area in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 2.1: The Britannia 2017 UK five-ounce gold proof coin Figure 2.2: The ‘British nation’ from 55 BC to 1912 – the making of a myth Figure 2.3: EU overseas territories and outermost regions 2018 Figure 2.4: Chris Patten, his daughters and Prince Charles in Hong Kong, 1997 Figure 2.5: Britain’s Royal Navy message to families and children fleeing Syria Figure 3.1: Darwins, Wedgwoods, Galtons and Barclays family tree, 1573–1914 Figure 3.2: A map of the British Empire with area in proportion to current population Figure 3.3: Home locations of UK students at Oxford University in 2012 Figure 3.4: Once a German, always a German – The British Empire Union Figure 4.1: How proud or embarrassed are you about identifying as English? Figure 4.2: ‘John Bull’ locking the door, Daily Express, first published in 1901 Figure 4.3: A cartoon printed in the wake of the 1905 Aliens Act Figure 4.4: William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte dissect the plum pudding Figure 4.5: Imports to the UK in billions of US dollars (2017) Figure 4.6: Exports from the UK in billions of US dollars (2017) Figure 5.1: Productivity growth in the UK, 1999–2023, actual and forecasts Figure 5.2: The share of manufacturing in eleven major economies, 1990–2010 Figure 5.3: What do the British manufacture in 2015?


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The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

But internally the British Empire could not escape the force of the point. As Lloyd George put it in July 1921 to the Imperial Conference: ‘We are trying to build up a democratic empire on the basis of the consent of all the races that are inside it . . . It really transfigures . . . the human story. The British Empire will be a Mount of Transfiguration if it succeeds.’59 The Commonwealth was to fall well short of such high aspirations, but it did vote over the furious protests of South Africa to affirm that there was an ‘incongruity between the position of India as an equal member of the British Empire and the existence of disabilities upon British Indians’ domiciled elsewhere in the empire.60 In the event, in 1923 Kenya introduced new exclusions on Indian settlement, but in so doing, along with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, and for that matter Britain itself, it put itself at odds with the very principle of equal treatment that was now acknowledged as a requirement of any consistent liberal vision of global empire.

No other power had ever wielded such global economic dominance. If we turn to modern-day statistics to plot the development of the world economy since the nineteenth century, the two-part storyline is clear enough (Fig. 1).26 Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the British Empire had been the largest economic unit in the world. Sometime in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, the combined output of the British Empire was overtaken by that of the United States of America. Henceforth, down to the beginning of the twenty-first century, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order. There has always been a temptation, particularly on the part of British authors, to narrate nineteenth- and twentieth-century history as a story of succession, in which the United States inherited the mantle of British hegemony.27 This is flattering to Britain, but it is misleading in suggesting a continuity in the problems of global order and the means for addressing them.

Faced with the rise of major national competitors, some imperial pundits, advocates of a ‘greater Britain’, began to lobby for this heterogeneous conglomerate to be forged into a single, self-enclosed economic bloc.29 But thanks to Britain’s entrenched culture of free trade, a preferential imperial tariff would only be adopted amid the disaster of the Great Depression. The United States was everything that the champions of imperial preference longed for, but the British Empire was not. The United States began as a heterogeneous collection of colonial settlements that in the early nineteenth century had developed into an expansive and highly integrative empire. Unlike the British Empire, the American Republic sought to incorporate its new territories in the West and the South fully into its federal constitution. Given the cleavage in the original founding of the eighteenth-century constitution, between the free-labour North and the slave-labour South, this integrative project was fraught with risks.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire c.1851–1939: An Exploration’, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds.), The British World, pp. 57–81. 165. See D. MacKay, The Square Mile: Merchant Princes of Montreal (Vancouver, 1987). 166. K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1760–1914’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), p. 85. 167. See B. S. Elliott, ‘Emigration from South Leinster to Eastern Upper Canada’, in D. H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. VIII (Gananoque, Ontario, 1992), pp. 277–306. 168. Fedorowich, ‘British Empire on the Move’, p. 83. 169.

One of the key themes of this book has been the neglected significance of the settlement colonies/‘white dominions’ for British world power, and the close identification of their ‘British’ populations with the fate of the British Empire. The revival of interest in the socio-cultural connections across this ‘British World’ can be followed in C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (2003), and P. Buckner and R. D. Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005). Two recent volumes in the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, namely, P. Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford, 2008) and D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds.), Australia's Empire (Oxford, 2008), reflect this new orientation.

The Empire Project The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, ‘has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire’ and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the ‘white dominions’; the commercial empire of the City of London; and ‘Greater India’ which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

In 1924–5 there was a British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, which included a new Empire Stadium. This stadium was known as such at least into the 1960s, though it is now remembered as the old Wembley Stadium.38 But just as for the British there could never be any such thing as British imperialism (as opposed to the British empire), so there could be no such notion as British nationalism (as opposed to the nation). Nationalism was in British understanding an ideology which threatened the empire, and indeed the nation. IRELAND Ireland was the first nation to emerge out of the British empire in the twentieth century.

While the implications of the fall of France were immense for the British Empire, it should not in itself be taken as being the consequence of British failure or weakness. It resulted from a highly contingent defeat of the French Army. The Anglo-French alliance had, with very good reason, been confident of their overall superiority in military force in 1939 and early 1940. Even after the fall of France, the British empire fought on, and not without a well-founded confidence in eventual victory. Neither ‘Britain’ nor the British empire, was ever alone. It was allied with many governments in exile, which brought with them small armed forces, sometimes large merchant marines and rich imperial territories, such as the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies.

Winston Churchill wrote a semi-official history of the war in its entirety, not just the role of the United Kingdom, or even that of the British empire. If anything, its focus was on the Anglo-American alliance. Historians of the right have followed him in telling stories of the Second World War as a whole rather than specifically writing about the British experience. Histories of the fighting British empire did not appear until the twenty-first century.21 It is indeed worth noting the absence of imperialist (rather than imperial) histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom, and the few that are supportive of the British empire write from a liberal point of view portraying the empire as diffuser of trade and enlightenment, rather than as a trading bloc or the basis of military power.22 The reason is perhaps obvious – there were bigger fish to fry in the Cold War – and the US alliance was central.


Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 17 (3.4.19. P.M.); House, Intimate Papers, vol. 4, p. 285; Mayer, pp. 378–80. 30. D. Lloyd George, Truth About the Peace Treaties, vol. 1, p. 656. 31. FRUS, vol. 3, pp. 210–15; PWW, vol. 55, pp. 160. 32. Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 27 (21.4.19); Tillman, pp. 280–83. 33. Tillman, pp. 287–94; Hunter Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, pp. 337–38; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 27 (21.4.19). 34. Hunter Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, pp. 442–50; Walworth, Woodrow Wilson, vol. 2, pp. 302–3. 35.

Thompson, p. 236; Yale University Library, House diary, 21.2.19. 12. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 31–32; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 13 (13.3.19). 13. Baruch, pp. 5–7. 14. Burnett, vol. 1, p. 34; Hardach, pp. 156–60; Schuker, American “Reparations,” p. 20. 15. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 33, 514; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 33 (1.6.19, A.M.). 16. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 4–8, 21; B. Kent, p. 69. 17. Bunselmeyer, p. 174, n. 9; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 33 (1.6.19, A.M.). 18. Silverman, p. 39; Burnett, vol. 1, p. 61; House of Lords Record Office, Lloyd George Papers, F/45/9/25, Smuts to Lloyd George, 4.12.18; F45/9/29, Smuts to Lloyd George, 26.3.19; F 45/9/33, Smuts to Lloyd George, 5.5.19; Hancock, pp. 539–41. 19.

House took an even longer-term view: separate representation for the dominions and India in the Peace Conference, and in new international bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, could only hurry along “the eventual disintegration of the British Empire.” Britain would end up back where it started, with only its own islands. 25 It was a British empire delegation (and the name was a victory in itself for the fractious dominions) that Lloyd George led to Paris. With well over four hundred officials, special advisers, clerks and typists, it occupied five hotels near the Arc de Triomphe. The largest, and the social center, was the Hôtel Majestic, in prewar days a favorite with rich Brazilian women on clothes-buying trips.


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Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

Even the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Francis Graham Brown, a fierce critic of military excesses in Palestine, thought that the worst incidents were not officially sanctioned by the army authorities, and were privately regretted – though not, he noted, officially condemned.12 All the same, the reality of keeping order in a global empire, even an ‘empire of liberty’ such as Britain’s, meant sometimes doing very ugly things. It is easy to sentimentalise the British Empire’s twilight years – to dwell on the quaint absurdities of late-period imperialism, the sola topees and pukka memsahibs and cold baths and gin-and-tonics on the veranda. But there is no getting away from the fact that the British Empire’s survival, like that of all empires, ultimately rested on the willingness of hard-faced men to commit violence in its name. Someone had to be prepared to do things such as beat a teenage detainee with a tent mallet and a pick-axe handle so viciously that one of his eyes was knocked out of its socket and left hanging by a thin thread of gristle.13 Or smash out the brains of an uncooperative protestor with a rifle butt.14 All the Empire’s liberal intentions and genteel appurtenances could not alter that.

Someone had to be prepared to do things such as beat a teenage detainee with a tent mallet and a pick-axe handle so viciously that one of his eyes was knocked out of its socket and left hanging by a thin thread of gristle.13 Or smash out the brains of an uncooperative protestor with a rifle butt.14 All the Empire’s liberal intentions and genteel appurtenances could not alter that. The British Empire in the 1930s was admired, even by its critics, for its progressive achievements. There were lots of things to admire. But, on the brink of world war, its existence greatly complicated Britain’s claim to special moral authority. And to win that war, the imperial motherland would have to make some ruthless compromises with its own values. * It is difficult, now, to remember just what a permanent fixture the British Empire once seemed. It was still one of the great facts of the world in the 1930s: impossible to miss, older than anyone could remember and apparently indestructible.

He believed in the essential goodness of the British Empire. He also believed that the Empire was not strong enough to withstand the stresses of another conflict against a power like Germany. ‘I must in any given situation,’ he once said, ‘be sure in my own mind that the cost of war is not greater than the price of peace.’75 In 1938 Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, wrote a memorandum to his superiors in Berlin arguing that Chamberlain would never declare war on the Third Reich, no matter what the provocation, because he knew that ‘the social structures of Britain, even the conception of the British Empire, would not survive the chaos of even a victorious war’.76 Dirksen was, as the events of September 1939 proved, wrong.


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Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

The British history of religious dissent and nonconformity provided a cogent pre-configuration of these myths, which perhaps accounts for why the architects of Empire could take them over so readily and transpose them into a secular context. The vehemence of the belief in the absolute individuality, superiority and charm of the Empire is so totally irrational and disproven by history that it can only be of primitive religious origin. To be sure, before the history of the British Empire there was a history of the British Empire of religious ideas that is not often considered in the context of questions of Empire. John Wyclif ’s bible, which appeared in the fourteenth century, was a precursor of Protestant Reformation and emblazoned English style and individualism as thorny issues for Rome and Europe.

It brought effective systems of sanitation, health and education to countries in which these public benefits had been curtailed by despotism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that it waged many small wars, Ferguson credits the British Empire with administering a level of global peace that has been unmatched since its demise. In short, there is good reason for British nationalists to be proud of their history of Empire. The diametrically opposite view associates guilt and recrimination with the Empire ‘adventure’. For example, in After Empire (2004) Paul Gilroy argues that the British Empire was founded upon organized racism and maintains that its history was thoroughly ‘bloodstained’ and 178 BRIT-MYTH ‘xenophobic’ (p. 164).

It exposes British hypocrisy in continuously dissolving the reality of Empire into misleading, vainglorious illusions that ennoble the imperial nation. 179 EMPIRE AND PHOENIX The achievement and validity of the British Empire then, is a deeply contested issue in British culture. Nearly 60 years after Indian independence, it is clear that Empire still casts a long shadow over British culture and identity. It signifies the enormous loss of British power and prestige, and also the carnal nature of British ambition and hypocrisy. One sees all of this in the pathetic existence of the British National Party (bnp). This marginal influence in British political life wallows in nostalgia for the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. Its current leader, Nick Griffin, believes immigrants should be sent home, capital punishment should be restored for premeditated murder, sex murder, terrorism and child murder and that the English language in British schools is being swamped by ‘dozens’ of alien, migrant tongues.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

Edmund Burke spoke of a ‘Commonwealth of Europe’ long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of. The British empire was conquered largely for European reasons. Colonies gave Britain the demographic and financial weight she lacked on the continent; denying them to rival powers was equally important. At the same time, the overseas empire was acquired and maintained through the management of the European balance of power. This was a virtuous cycle, to be sure, but one which began and ended in Europe. When the empire became an embarrassment in Europe and the world after the Second World War, it was mostly wound down. In short: no Europe, no England, no United Kingdom, no British empire and no decolonization.

Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Baton Rouge, 1773), pp. 3–51. 25. Federalist no. 5, 10.11.1787, in Pole (ed.), Federalist Papers, pp. 17–18. 26. Cited in Hamish Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 1. 27. See V. T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 2 vols (London, 1952–64) and Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989). On the loyalists as a demographic reserve for empire see: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles. American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011). 28. Quoted in Jeremy Black, ‘Recovering Lost Years.

See Diane Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chapel Hill and London, 1991), especially pp. 113–14, 192–3. 45. Thus Ashley Jackson, ‘Empire and Beyond: The Pursuit of Overseas National Interest in the Late Twentieth Century’, in English Historical Review, CXXII (2007), p. 1361, and W. R. Louis, ‘Public Enemy Number One: The British Empire in the Dock at the United Nations, 1957–1971’, in Martin Lynn (ed.), The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (Basingstoke, 2006). 46. On this see Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘Suez Revisited’, International Affairs, 69, 3 (1988), pp. 449–64, p. 454. 47. Quoted in Morgan, The People’s Peace, p. 158. 48. Quoted in Morgan, The People’s Peace, pp. 173–4. 49.


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Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Pitt’s policy would encourage Britain’s European allies to engage the enemy on the Continent while using sea power to defeat the French everywhere else. This strategy was the making of the second British empire and the promotion of the global brand known to cartoonists as ‘Britannia’, the vindication of every nationalist’s hopes. The surge in Britain’s fortunes was palpable. In 1792 there were just 23 British colonies; in 1816 there were 43. Similarly, in 1750 the first British empire amounted to some 12.5 million inhabitants, but by 1820 that figure had soared to 200 million. The scale of the fighting involved is important, too. The Napoleonic Wars bore much the same relation to the Seven Years War as the Second World War bears to the First, and they had the same kind of democratizing effect.

Even such a passionate conservative as Edmund Burke could only justify the conduct of empire if it was based on ancient values. ‘The British Empire’, he wrote, ‘must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other’. This strange clash of English tradition with Victorian ambition resulted in a highly eccentric liberal empire that would be celebrated by its apologists at the old queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 as the work of ‘the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the British empire is now long gone, but its power and influence linger in the national imagination. A surprising number of British families will have at least one distant relative who served as a colonial civil servant, or died serving the Union Jack under a tropical sun.

By the late eighteenth century seeds of English and Englishness have become planted successfully across the known world, from Botany Bay to Boston. Finally, a millennium after annihilation by the French, English life, laws and literature become a universal phenomenon dominating the world’s attention for about 150 years. In the past the traditional view was that the waning of the British empire was followed by the rise of American power into the present day. In the words of the Oxford Guide to World English, ‘American English has a global role at the beginning of the twenty-first century comparable to that of British English at the start of the twentieth – but on a scale larger than any previous language or variety of a language in recorded history.’


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As regards the self-governing colonies we no longer talk of them as dependencies. The sense of possession has given place to the sense of kinship. We think and speak of them as part of ourselves, as part of the British Empire, united to us, although they may be dispersed throughout the world, by ties of kindred, of religion, of history, and of language, and joined to us by the seas that formerly seemed to divide us. But the British Empire is not confined to the self-governing colonies and the United Kingdom. It includes a much greater area, a much more numerous population in tropical climes, where no considerable European settlement is possible, and where the native population must always outnumber the white inhabitants … Here also the sense of possession has given way to a different sentiment – the sense of obligation.

For the most part, nations act in their self-interest – enlightened or otherwise – in an uncertain and sometimes chaotic world, creating temporary alliances that may last weeks, months, years or decades, but which are always in danger of eventually crumbling. Each country’s self-interest, meanwhile, is determined by its own mythology and history – and how that mythology and history is reinterpreted over time. For someone born in the UK at the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire was a source of wonder and pride. For someone born in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the British Empire is more likely to be regarded as a source of considerable embarrassment.2 Mythology and history go a long way to explain why the European and US views of the ‘international community’ are not fully aligned, even though the two sides of the North Atlantic are ostensibly close allies.

If technology was the only thing that mattered, the Western Roman Empire – among other things, an incredibly sophisticated technological and logistical infrastructure – would never have come to an ignominious end in ad 476; the Chinese, with their superior naval technologies, would have been busily colonizing the Americas in the early sixteenth century, preventing Spain and, by implication, the rest of Western Europe from gaining a foothold; the British Empire would today still be thriving, thanks to the huge advantages it gained from the Industrial Revolution; the Cold War – which ultimately offered two competing versions of globalization associated with an uneasy nuclear stand-off – would never have happened; and today’s ‘failed states’ – suffering from disconnections both internally and with the rest of the world – would be a contradiction in terms.


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This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

This trading principle did not always run smoothly but by the death of Victoria and the reign of her son, Edward VII, the British Empire was at its strongest and most profitable. Without the breadth of colonial trading Britain would have been financially embarrassed. Nation-states tumble from historical peaks yet the early years of the twentieth century did not obviously suggest it was right to talk of the Empire sliding away; in fact, there is evidence to suggest that the British Empire was even expanding certainly in terms of its influence in the conduct of the Great War. The 1914–18 conflict was a world war because it was a battle of empires: the British Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Japanese and to a lesser extent, the Italian colonies.

The years between the start of the Stuarts in 1603 and the Hanoverians in 1714 was the founding century of the counting house that was the British Empire. For example, twelve of the thirteen American colonies28 were established in that period. In the West Indies, the British-held islands produced enormous wealth, mainly through sugar plantations. Lancaster’s East India Company overwhelmed anything that the Dutch, and before them the Portuguese, had managed in Asia. By the time the Hanoverians arrived the first British Empire was established and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–14) that followed the Duke of Marlborough’s victories in Europe would simply consolidate that imperial holding.

The Dutch Reform Church would be paramount, the courts and schools and councils would use Dutch as their first language. True, the Boers were very much part of the British Empire, but the way in which they were administered was to be left to a constitutional commission and even the original British objection to the Boers’ treatment of blacks was to be left for further discussion. Little wonder that after the ruthlessness of the conflict there was an impression that it had come to its various conclusions by gentleman’s agreement. This was the final of the wars of the British Empire. There would be further skirmishes, battles, even campaigns that were the result of Britain having had an empire – for example, the war against Mau Mau in Kenya, Communist confrontation in Malaya, indirectly anti-terrorist campaigns in Palestine and Aden and against the separatists in Cyprus.


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Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq by Ashley Jackson

Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, out of africa, power law, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment

This was a particularly important line of communication in the imperial defence system because it offered an invaluable alternative should the Suez Canal sea route ever be closed. In addition, Iraq’s RAF bases and flying-boat facilities at Basra, Habbaniya and Shaibah were key staging posts on the British Empire’s civil and military air routes.4 During the war, Shaibah served as one of four transit routes feeding the Desert Air Force and also the Soviet Union.5 Iran, meanwhile, was the British Empire’s main source of oil, and its transport network was to gain significance as a junction connecting Anglo-American military supplies to Soviet forces fighting the Germans following the launch of Adolf Hitler’s Barbarossa offensive.

Continuing its global panorama, the document noted that Malaya was ‘by no means secure’, and that Iraq and Palestine were threatened and required reinforcement as soon as possible. It was here that the British Empire’s grand strategy began to hit the buffers: The necessity for making provision for our security overseas thus postpones the time when we can hope to undertake major offensive operations . . . While it is obviously desirable to secure every part of the British Empire against enemy aggression, it is clear that, with the forces at our disposal, the allocation of defence resources to different areas must be directly related to the extent that each will contribute to the defeat of Germany.3 This was the real-life game of Risk played by policymakers, planners and regional commanders as they wrestled with the complexity created by the coincidence of global war and global empire.

The human traffic in the region remained immense, between April and September 1943, for instance, 700,000 British Empire troops passed through the transit camp at Baghdad. In mid-1944, there were still about 100,000 Indian Army servicemen in the PAIC theatre, along with the 30,000 Americans of Persian Gulf Command (PGC).103 The removal of the German threat meant that PAIC and PGC could focus unhindered on the delivery of millions of tons of military aid to the Soviet Union. It also meant that the oil upon which the British Empire depended would remain secure for the duration of the war. While allied fortunes were improving throughout 1943, the war was very far from being won, and threats to Iran and Iraq remained.


pages: 812 words: 205,147

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent final surrender of British forces in America in October the following year. There was a growing sensation that everywhere the British Empire was in the process of falling apart. In Parliament, a year later, one MP noted that ‘in Europe we have lost Minorca, in America 13 provinces, and the two Pensacolas; in the West Indies, Tobago; and some settlements in Africa’.134 ‘The British Empire,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ‘is tottering to its foundation.’135 Soon Parliament was publishing a six-volume report into these failures. ‘The British purchase on India,’ one senior Company military officer told Parliament, ‘is more imaginary than real, to hold that vast territory in subjection with such a disparity of numbers.

XIV, 1912, pp. 25–7; Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword: The Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies 1599–1874, 2 vols, London, 1903, vol. 1, pp. 19–23. 7Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, pp. 5–6; P. J. Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, in Nicholas Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, Oxford, 1998, pp. 267–9. 8A pauper in comparison to Mughal prosperity, England was not however impoverished by north European Standards, and conducted a large and growing textile trade, largely through the Netherlands. 9Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1430–1630, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 12, 33, 256. 10Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, pp. 6, 7, 9; G.

., 45r. 57Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja ud-Daula, vol. 1, p. 232. 58Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 111. 59Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 258–9. 60Ibid. 61Madec, Mémoire, p. 74. 62Fakir Khairud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 45v. 63Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 530. 64Ibid. 65The Late Reverend John Entick et al.,The Present State of the British Empire, 4 vols, London, 1774, vol. IV, p. 533. 66Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Cambridge, 2011, p. 3. 67Thomas Twining, Travels in India One Hundred Years Ago, London, 1983, pp. 144–5. 68For the domestic political background at this time, see James Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, Princeton, 2009. 69Keay, Farzana, pp. 53, 89. 70Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, pp. 583–4. 71Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 259. 72Sadasukh Dihlavi, Munkatab ut-Tawarikh, trans.


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Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

Iffley, Oxford August, 1986 Further Reading For anyone fortunate enough to be able to contemplate a journey to these last specks of the British Empire there are, sad to say, rather few relevant books that are worth taking. I have ploughed through scores of works that linger over the stately decline of the Empire and any number of papers that suggest fates for those islands that, for one reason or another, escaped the great retreat. But most are a little dull; I would be loath to advise any friend bound for Montserrat or Tristan; for instance, to lug along The Cambridge History of the British Empire, or Mr D. J. Morgan’s Guidance Towards Self-Government in British Colonies 1941–1971, invaluable though they were for me.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree, John Murray, 1950 John Brooks, The South American Handbook, Trade and Travel Publications, updated annually THE FALKLAND ISLANDS Michael Mainwaring, From the Falklands to Patagonia, Allison and Busby, 1983 Ian Strange, The Falkland Islands, David and Charles, 1972 Natalie Goodall, Tierra del Fuego, Ushuaia, 1979 John Brooks, The South American Handbook, Trade and Travel Publications, updated annually THE FALKLAND ISLANDS DEPENDENCIES AND BRITISH ANTARCTIC TERRITORY Robert Fox, Antarctica and the South Atlantic, BBC, 1985 THE PITCAIRN ISLANDS Robert Nicolson, The Pitcaimers, Angus and Robertson, 1966 AND IN GENERAL George Woodcock, Who Killed the British Empire? Jonathan Cape, 1974 Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire, Hodder and Stoughton, 1968 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, Faber, 1978 If there is room for just a single volume, pack the last. About the Author SIMON WINCHESTER was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting correspondent and writer.

Outposts Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire Simon Winchester For Elaine Contents Map Introduction 1 The Plan 2 British Indian Ocean Territory and Diego Garcia 3 Tristan 4 Gibraltar 5 Ascension Island 6 St Helena 7 Hong Kong 8 Bermuda 9 The British West Indies 10 The Falkland Islands 11 Pitcairn and Other Territories 12 Some Reflections and Conclusions Acknowledgements Further Reading About the Author Praise Other Books by Simon Winchester Copyright About the Publisher Map Introduction The world has changed a very great deal since 1984, the year during which I wrote the following affectionate, in many ways rather poignant, and on occasion sentimental account of my wanderings to and around the British-run relics of the greatest of all modern Empires.


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Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

‘Africa is still lying ready for us [and] it is our duty to take it . . . more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.’ To accomplish this feat of empire-building, Rhodes proposed the formation of a secret society, similar to the Jesuit order, a society with ‘members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea’; in effect, a ‘Church for the extension of the British Empire’. He described the kind of men who would make suitable recruits and outlined how they would work to ‘advocate the closer union of England and her colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire’. He also proposed that the society should purchase newspapers, ‘for the press rules the mind of the people’.

On a visit to Kimberley in 1877, Joseph Orpen, an Irish-born surveyor, magistrate and politician, recorded remarks Rhodes made at a dinner party he gave at his two-roomed corrugated iron cottage. Sitting at the head of the table, Rhodes began: ‘Gentlemen, I have asked you to dine . . . because I want to tell you what I want to do with the remainder of my life.’ He intended, he said, to devote it to the defence and extension of the British Empire. ‘I think that object a worthy one because the British Empire stands for the protection of all the inhabitants of a country in life, liberty, property, fair play and happiness . . . Everything is now going on happily around us. The Transvaal is much happier [since annexation] and much better off than it was and is quietly settled under government.

In his review of the history of British policy at the Cape published in 1853, a former colonial secretary, Earl Grey, concluded that the government’s commitment to British settlement made in 1819 on the grounds of being an economy measure proved to be among the most expensive in the annals of the British empire. What British officials found especially aggravating was that Britain had no vital interest in the Cape other than its naval facilities on the peninsula. ‘Few persons would probably dissent from the opinion that it would be far better for this country if the British territory in South Africa were confined to Cape Town and Simon’s Bay,’ observed Earl Grey.


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Two Georges by Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Turtledove

British Empire, citizen journalism, clean water

Meteor Crater did not remind Thomas Bushell of a golfer’s divot. To him, it looked like a gunshot wound on the face of the world. Murders by gunfire, thankfully, were rare in the civilian world, but he’d seen more gunshot wounds than he cared to remember in his days in the Royal North American Army. The British Empire and the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance were officially at peace, so skirmishes between the North American Union and Nueva España seldom made the newspapers or the wireless, but if you got shot in one, you died just as dead as if it had happened in the full glare of publicity. The waiter returned and went through the lounge with a silver tray.

And it would be a pity to waste this lovely wine on my trousers. They haven’t the palate to appreciate it.” He chuckled wheezily. Bushell raised his goblet in salute. “His Majesty, the King-Emperor!” he said. He and his companion both sipped their wine to the traditional toast heard round the world in the British Empire. “I drink to headwinds,” the fat man said, lifting his glass in turn. “If they make us late getting into New Liverpool, we shall be able to enjoy another supper in this splendid establishment.” “I shouldn’t drink to that one,” Bushell said. “I have enough work ahead of me to want to get to it as soon as I can.

Bushell got out of his civilian clothes, hung them up, and put on the red-striped black trousers and the red tunic he took out of the closet. The tunic had two rows of seven gilt buttons down the breast, and a high stand collar that was damnably uncomfortable. The shoulderboards showed Bushell’s rank with the crown of the British Empire (differenced from that of the military by the letters RAMP beneath) and two pips each. He belted on his ceremonial sword, pulled his service cap from the shelf above the coat rail, and set it on his desk. The visor had a row of scrambled eggs along the edge, but not by the crown. That and the band of red around the cap also signified his colonelcy.


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A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, trade route

With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific. The Prime Minister, of course, saw it the same way. As he wrote later, "For the British Empire, the fight with Turkey had a special importance of its own . .. The Turkish Empire lay right across the track by land or water to our great possessions in the East—India, Burma, Malaya, Borneo, Hong Kong, and the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand."12 Amery, who was about to advise the Cabinet that continued Ottoman (and thus German) control of Palestine was a future danger to the British Empire, believed, with the Prime Minister, that Palestine ought to be invaded immediately—and that Smuts was the general to do it.

Just as Britain's Middle Eastern policy had led France to re-evaluate and eventually to repudiate her alliance with Britain, so now France's policy caused the leaders of the British Empire to look at France through new and apprehensive eyes. A short time later the Prime Minister of South Africa wrote to the then Prime Minister of Britain that "France is once more the leader of the Continent with all the bad old instincts fully alive in her . . . The French are out for world power; they have played the most dangerous anti-ally game with Kemal; and inevitably in the course of their ambitions they must come to realise that the British Empire is the only remaining enemy."33 Another unnerving aspect of the crisis was the apparently reckless conduct of the inner group in the Cabinet: Lloyd George, Birkenhead, Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Robert Home, and the Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain.

In 1913, for example, the United States produced 140 times more oil than did Persia.5 From the beginning of the Great Game until far into the twentieth century, the most deeply felt concern of British leaders was for the safety of the road to the East. When Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India in 1877 formal recognition was given to the evolution of Britain into a species of dual monarchy—the British Empire and the Empire of India. The line between them was thus a lifeline, but over it, and casting a long shadow, hung the sword of the czars. British leaders seemed not to take into account the possibility that, in expanding southwards and eastwards, the Russians were impelled by internal historical imperatives of their own which had nothing to do with India or Britain.


Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

But while these anti-­imperialists formulated the connections between war and empire by drawing attention to the global scramble for colonies fueled by finance capital and led by the British, Smuts refashioned the argument to absolve the British Empire of the aggression and rapaciousness that led to war. In Smuts’s account it was the Ottoman and German Empires, the “old Empires” constituted on the basis of “inequality and the bondage and oppression of the smaller national units” and grounded in theories of centralized sovereignty, that had contributed to the war.75 The British Empire, based on the “principles of national freedom and political decentralization,” was exempt from this destructive imperialism and as a result could be the model for the new League of Nations.

Despite the hierarchies between the metropole, the dominions, and dependencies, Smuts argued that the British Empire realized the principles of freedom and equality. He defended this view by transposing equity for equality.76 Equity moderated the absolute and universal claim of equality by indicating that the aim of political institutions was not to secure equal rights and full membership but instead to achieve an appropriate equilibrium attentive to differing capacities and levels of development.77 Like the British Empire, the league would secure development for colonized peoples according to their specific capacities and cultures.

From Asia to Africa, European imperial policy sought to “dominate native labor, pay it low wages, give it little political control and small chance for education or even industrial training; in short, to seek to get the largest possible profit out of the laboring class.”163 Writing from London, James experienced a similar conversion toward a more radical critique of imperialism during the Italian invasion and occupation. In a 1933 essay marking the centenary of emancipation in the West Indies, James urged the British Empire to once again take the lead in the international struggle against slavery. While he mentioned that forced labor and slavery were practiced throughout the colonized world including within the British Empire, he named China, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Liberia as places where slavery remained deeply entrenched.164 Despite being in the midst of researching the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the path toward emancipation for the five million slaves lay in appealing to the conscience of the British public and government in order to force the League of Nations to act.165 By 1936, James, now embracing Trotskyism, abandoned his faith in the British Empire and the league.


pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

Just as the row was hotting up, Churchill wrote to a constituent: It would seem to me a fantastic policy to endeavour to shut the British Empire in a ringed fence. It is very large, and there are a good many things which can be produced in it, but the world is larger & produces some better things than can be found in the British Empire. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers . . . Our planet is not a very big one compared with the other celestial bodies, and I see no particular reason why we should endeavour to make inside our planet a smaller planet called the British Empire, cut off by impassable space from everything else.

Index abdication crisis (1936) ref1, ref2 Abyssinia ref1 Addison Act (1919) ref1 Addison, Christopher ref1 adultery ref1 advertising ref1 air races ref1 air travel ref1 arguments over airspace ref1, ref2 early passenger services ref1 establishment of Imperial Airways and routes ref1 and flying boats ref1 air-raid protection (ARP) wardens ref1 aircraft production ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Aitken, Sir Max see Beaverbrook, Lord Alexander, Sir Harold ref1, ref2 Alexandra, Queen ref1, ref2 Allenby, General ref1, ref2 Amritsar massacre (1919) ref1 Anglo-Persian Oil Company ref1 anti-communist organizations ref1 anti-Semitism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Anti-Slavery Society ref1 appeasement ref1, ref2 arguments for ref1 Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler ref1 and Halifax’s visit to Germany ref1 and Munich ref1 public support for ref1, ref2 Arab revolt (1917) ref1, ref2 architecture ref1, ref2, ref3 aristocracy ref1, ref2 defending of position against House of Lords reform ref1 in economic retreat ref1 and far-right politics ref1 Lloyd George’s attacks on ref1, ref2 post-war ref1 selling of estates ref1, ref2 Armistice Day ref1 Armour, G.D. ref1 Arnim, Elizabeth von ref1 art: Edwardian ref1 inter-war ref1, ref2 Artists’ Rifles ref1 Asquith, Helen (first wife) ref1 Asquith, Herbert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 downfall ref1, ref2 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Home Rule ref1 and House of Lords reform ref1, ref2 loses seat in 1918 election ref1 and loss of son ref1 marriages ref1, ref2 and press ref1 relationship with Venetia Stanley ref1 succession as prime minister ref1 and tariff reform ref1, ref2 and women’s suffrage ref1, ref2 Asquith, Margot (second wife) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Asquith, Raymond (son) ref1 Asquith, Violet (daughter) ref1 Ataturk, Kemal ref1 Atlantic Charter ref1 Attlee, Clement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Auchinleck, General Claude ref1, ref2 Audemars, Edmond ref1 Australia and First World War ref1 Automobile Association ref1 Automobile Club ref1 Aveling, Edward ref1 back-to-nature movement ref1 Baden-Powell, Sir Robert ref1, ref2 Balcon, Michael ref1 Baldwin, Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and abdication crisis ref1, ref2, ref3 and broadcasting ref1 characteristics ref1 and Churchill ref1 conflict with Rothermere and Beaverbrook ref1, ref2 and General Strike ref1, ref2 and India ref1 and Lloyd George ref1 and protectionism ref1 resignation ref1 succession as prime minister ref1 Balfour, A.J. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Balfour, Betty ref1 Balfour Declaration (1917) ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3 banks ref1 Barnes, Fred ref1 Barry, Sir John Wolfe ref1 Basset Hound Club Rules and Studbook ref1, ref2 Battle of the Atlantic ref1, ref2 Battle of Britain ref1 Battle of the Somme (film) ref1 battleships ref1 see also Dreadnoughts Bauhaus movement ref1 Bax, Arnold ref1 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 creation ref1 development under Reith ref1, ref2 early announcers and tone of voice ref1 and General Strike (1926) ref1 receives first Royal Charter (1927) ref1 and Second World War ref1 ‘BBC English’ ref1 beach holidays ref1 Beamish, Henry Hamilton ref1 Beatty, Admiral David ref1, ref2, ref3 Beaufort, Duke of ref1 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Beck, Harry ref1 Beckwith-Smith, Brigadier ref1 BEF (British Expeditionary Force) and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3 Belgian Congo ref1 Bell, Bishop ref1 Belloc, Hilaire ref1 Benn, Tony ref1 Bennett, Arnold ref1 Whom God Hath Joined ref1 Benz, Karl ref1 Beresford, Lord Charles ref1 Besant, Annie ref1 Bethmann-Hollweg, Chancellor ref1, ref2 Bevan, Nye ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Beveridge, William ref1, ref2 Bevin, Ernie ref1, ref2 Billings, Pemberton ref1 ‘bird flu’ ref1 birth control see contraception Bismarck ref1 black Americans arrival in Britain during Second World War ref1 Black and Tans ref1 Blackshirts ref1, ref2, ref3 Blake, Robert ref1 Bland, Hubert ref1, ref2 Bland, Rosamund ref1 Blast (magazine) ref1 Blatchford, Robert ref1, ref2 Bletchley Park ref1 Bluebird Garage ref1 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen ref1, ref2 ‘Bob’s your uncle’ phrase ref1 Boer War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Boggart Hole riot (Manchester) (1906) ref1, ref2 Bolsheviks ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Bomber Command ref1, ref2 ‘Bomber Harris’ see Harris, Sir Arthur Bonar Law, Andrew ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Booth, Charles ref1, ref2 Boothby, Bob ref1 Bottomley, Horatio ref1 Bowser, Charlie ref1 Boy Scouts see scouting movement Boys Brigade ref1 Bradlaugh, Charles ref1 Braithwaite, W.J. ref1 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) ref1 Bristol Hippodrome ref1 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC British Empire ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 British Empire Exhibition (1924) ref1 British Empire Union ref1 British Eugenics Education Society ref1 British Expeditionary Force see BEF British Gazette ref1, ref1 British Grand Prix ref1 British Legion ref1 British Union of Fascists see BUF Britons, The ref1 Brittain, Vera ref1 Britten, Benjamin ref1 broadcasting ref1 see also BBC Brooke, Sir Alan ref1, ref2, ref3 Brooke, Raymond ref1 Brooke, Rupert ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1 Brownshirts ref1 Buchan, John Prestor John ref1 BUF (British Union of Fascists) ref1, ref2, ref3 Burma ref1 Butler, R.A. ref1, ref2 Cable Street, Battle of (1936) ref1, ref2 Cadogan, Sir Alexander ref1 Cambrai, Battle of (1917) ref1 Campbell, Donald ref1 Campbell, Malcolm ref1 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry ref1, ref2 camping and caravanning ref1 Camping Club of Great Britain and Ireland ref1 Canterbury, Archbishop of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Carnarvon, Lord ref1 cars ref1, ref2, ref3 benefits of ref1 developments in ref1, ref2 first accident involving a pedestrian and ref1 Fordist mass-production ref1 motorists’ clothing ref1 rise in number of during Edwardian era ref1 Carson, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Casement, Sir Roger ref1, ref2 Cat and Mouse Act ref1 cavity magnetron ref1 Cecil, Hugh ref1 CEMA ref1 censorship Second World War ref1, ref2 Chamberlain, Arthur ref1 Chamberlain, Joe ref1 background and early political career ref1 and Boer War ref1 breaks away from Liberals ref1 characteristics ref1 fame of ref1 sets up Liberal Unionist organization ref1 stroke ref1, ref2 and tariff reform debate ref1, ref2, ref3 Chamberlain, Neville ref1, ref2, ref3 and appeasement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 as Chancellor ref1 and Churchill ref1 downfall and resignation ref1, ref2 failure of diplomacy towards Hitler ref1 and Munich ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2 Channel Islands ref1 Channon, Sir Henry (‘Chips’) ref1 Chaplin, Charlie ref1, ref2 Chatsworth ref1 Chequers ref1 Cherwell, Lord (Frederick Lindemann) ref1 Cheshire, Leonard ref1 Chesterton, G.K. ref1, ref2 Childers, Erskine execution of by IRA ref1 The Riddle of the Sands ref1 Chindits ref1 Christie, Agatha ref1, ref2 Churchill, Clementine ref1 Churchill, Randolph ref1, ref2 Churchill, Winston ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 as air minister ref1 anti-aristocracy rhetoric ref1 at Board of Trade ref1 and Boer War ref1 and Bolsheviks ref1 and bombing of German cities during Second World War ref1 and Chamberlain ref1 as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Baldwin ref1 and Empire theatre protest ref1 and eugenics ref1, ref2 as First Lord of the Admiralty and build-up of navy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Gallipoli campaign ref1 and General Strike ref1, ref2 and George V ref1 and German invasion threat prior to First World War ref1 and Hitler ref1, ref2 and Home Rule ref1, ref2, ref3 and India ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Lloyd George ref1, ref2, ref3 loses seat in 1922 election ref1 political views and belief in social reform ref1 public calls for return to government ref1 rejoins Tory Party ref1 relationship with Fisher ref1 relationship with United States during Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 resignation over India (1931) ref1 and return to gold standard ref1, ref2 and Rowntree’s book on poverty ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 and Sidney Street siege ref1 speeches during Second World War ref1, ref2 steps to becoming Prime Minister ref1 suffragette attack on ref1 and tariff reform ref1, ref2 threatening of European peace by Hitler warning and calls for rearmament ref1, ref2, ref3 and Tonypandy miners’ strike (1910) ref1 cinema ref1 Citizens’ Army ref1 City of London Imperial Volunteers ref1 civil service ref1 Clark, Alan The Donkeys ref1 Clark, Sir Kenneth ref1, ref2 Clarke, Tom ref1 class distinctions in Edwardian Britain ref1 divisions within army during First World War ref1 impact of Second World War on ref1, ref2 and politics in twenties ref1 clothing motorists’ ref1 and Second World War ref1 and status in Edwardian Britain ref1 in twenties ref1 Clydebank, bombing of ref1 Clydeside ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 coal miners strike (1912) ref1 Coliseum (London) ref1 Collins, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3 Colville, Jock ref1, ref2, ref3 Common Wealth ref1, ref2 Communist Party of Great Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 communist revolution, fear of ref1 communists ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Conan Doyle, Arthur ref1, ref2 The Hound of the Baskervilles ref1 Concorde ref1, ref2, ref3 Congo Reform Association ref1 Connolly, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Connor, William (‘Cassandra’) ref1 Conrad, Joseph ref1, ref2 Heart of Darkness ref1 The Secret Agent ref1 conscientious objectors First World War ref1 Second World War ref1 Conservatives ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 contraception ref1, ref2, ref3 Coolidge, President Calvin ref1, ref2 Cooper, Duff ref1, ref2, ref3 Corrigan, Gordon ref1 Coventry, bombing of ref1, ref2 Coward, Nöel ref1 crash (1929) ref1, ref2 Cripps, Sir Stafford ref1, ref2 Crookes, Sir William ref1 Crooks, Will ref1 Crystal Palace fire (1936) ref1 Curzon, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Czechoslovakia ref1, ref2 Dacre, Harry ref1 Daily Express ref1, ref2, ref3 Daily Mail ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Ideal Home Exhibition ref1 Northcliffe’s article on shells crisis during war ref1 Daily Mirror ref1, ref2 Daimler, Gottfried ref1 ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do’ ref1, ref2 Darwin, Charles ref1 Darwin, Erasmus ref1 Darwin, Major Leonard ref1 Davidson, J.C.C. ref1, ref2 Davison, Emily Wilding ref1 Davos Ski Club ref1 De Havilland ref1 De La Warr Seaside Pavilion (Bexhill) ref1 de Nyevelt, Baron de Zuylen ref1 de Valera, Eamon ref1, ref2, ref3 Debrett’s Peerage ref1 Defence of the Realm Act see DORA Dickens, Charles ref1 Dimond, Phyllis ref1 distributism ref1 Distributist League ref1 ditchers ref1, ref2 divorce ref1 Divorce Law Reform Association ref1 Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union ref1 dockers’ strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Doenitz, Admiral ref1 DORA (Defence of the Realm Act) ref1, ref2, ref3 Douglas, Clifford ref1 Dowding, Sir Hugh ‘Stuffy’ ref1, ref2 Dreadnoughts ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Dresden, bombing of (1945) ref1 drug taking, in twenties ref1 Dunkirk ref1, ref2, ref3 Dunlop, John Boyd ref1 Dyer, General ref1 Easter Rising (1916) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Eckersley, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3 economy and gold standard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 impact of crash (1929) ref1 post-First World War ref1, ref2 Eden, Anthony ref1, ref2, ref3 Edinburgh Castle pub (London) ref1 Edmunds, Henry ref1 education Edwardian era ref1 inter-war years ref1, ref2 Education Act (1902) ref1 Edward VII, King ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Edward VIII, King ref1 abdication ref1, ref2 affair with Mrs Dudley Ward ref1 enthusiasm for Nazi Germany ref1 love for Wallis Simpson ref1, ref2 and social reform ref1 Egypt ref1, ref2, ref3 Eighth Army ref1, ref2 Eisenhower, General ref1 El-Alamein, Battle of ref1, ref2 elections (1906) ref1 (1910) ref1, ref2 (1918) ref1 (1922) ref1, ref2 (1923) ref1 (1924) ref1 (1931) ref1 (1935) ref1 Elgar, Sir Edward ref1 Eliot, T.S. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Burnt Norton’ ref1 The Wasteland ref1 Ellis, Havelock ref1 emigration Edwardian era ref1 inter-war years ref1 Empire Day ref1 Empire theatre (London) ref1 Enigma ref1, ref2 ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) ref1 eugenics ref1 evolution ref1 explorers ref1 Fabian Society ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairey Battle bombers ref1, ref2 fascism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 see also BUF Fawcett, Millicent Garrett ref1, ref2 Feisal, Emir ref1, ref2 Fenians ref1 film industry see cinema Film Society ref1 finger prints ref1 Finland ref1 First World War (1914) ref1, ref2 aftermath ref1 and alcohol ref1 Balkans campaign ref1 Baltic plan ref1 and Battle of Jutland ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and BEF ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 British blockade of Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 and burial of the Unknown Soldier ref1 class divisions in army ref1 collapse of German army ref1 comparison with Second World War ref1 conscription ref1; criticism of by UDC ref2 Dardanelles campaign ref1, ref2, ref3 death toll and casualties ref1, ref2, ref3 early military failures ref1 and film industry ref1 and Fisher ref1 food shortages and rationing ref1 formation of coalition government ref1, ref2 French campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gallipoli campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 German raids ref1 and Haig ref1 impact of on British people ref1 and Middle East ref1 munitions factories ref1 Orpen’s paintings of ref1 and Passchendaele ref1 post-war attack on military chiefs ref1 post-war impact of ref1 preparations for ref1 and press/journalists ref1 public support for ref1 recruitment ref1, ref2 revisionists and ref1 Sassoon’s protest at ref1 scenario if Germany had won ref1 at sea ref1 seeking alternative strategies to Flanders campaign ref1 shells crisis and Daily Mail article ref1 sinking of German battleships by Germany at end of ref1 sinking of Lusitania ref1 slaughter in ref1 steps leading to and reasons for Britain’s declaration of war on Germany ref1 struggle to comprehend meaning of ref1 surrender of Germany ref1; trench warfare ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 U-boat campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and United States ref1, ref2, ref3 use of convoys ref1 use of horses ref1 and women ref1, ref2 Fisher, First Sea Lord ‘Jackie’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Fleming, Sir Alexander ref1 Fleury ref1 flying boats ref1 flying circuses ref1 folk dancing ref1 food imports ref1 Foot, Michael ref1 Ford, Ford Madox ref1 Ford, Henry ref1, ref2 Forde, Florrie ref1 Formby, George ref1 ref2 43 (nightclub) ref1, ref2 France and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3 franchise ref1 and women ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 free trade ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 French, Sir John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Fyfe, Hamilton ref1, ref2 gaiety, in twenties ref1 Gallacher, William ref1 Gallipoli crisis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Galsworthy, John ref1 Galton, Francis ref1, ref2 gambling ref1 Gandhi, Mohandas ref1, ref2 garages ref1 garden cities ref1, ref2 Gardiner, Rolf ref1 Garnett, Theresa ref1 Garsington Manor ref1 Gaumont Palaces ref1 Gawthorpe, Nellie ref1 General Strike (1926) ref1, ref2, ref3 and BBC ref1 gentlemen’s clubs ref1 George III, King ref1 George IV, King ref1, ref2 George V, King ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 George VI, King ref1 German Naval Law (1912) ref1 Germany ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 of (1914) ref1 building of battleships ref1 early state-welfare system ref1 and eugenics ref1 fear of invasion by in Edwardian Britain ref1 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 national welfare system ref1 navy ref1 and planned Irish uprising ref1 and Versailles Treaty ref1 Wandervogel youth groups ref1 see also Second World War ‘GI brides’ ref1 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic ref1, ref2 Gibbs, Philip ref1, ref2, ref3 Gibson, Guy ref1 Gifford, Grace ref1 Gill, Eric ref1 GIs ref1 Gladstone, William ref1, ref2 Glasgow ‘forty hours strike’ (1919) ref1 Goering, Hermann Wilhelm ref1, ref2 gold standard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gort, Field Marshal ref1 Gough, General Hubert ref1, ref2 Graf Spee ref1 Graves, Robert ref1 Goodbye to All That ref1 Grayson, Victor ref1, ref2 Great Depression ref1, ref2 Great War see First World War Greece and Second World War ref1 Greenshirts (Social Credit) ref1, ref2, ref3 Gregory, Maundy ref1, ref2, ref3 Gresley, Sir Nigel ref1 Grey, Sir Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Grieve, Christopher Murray see McDiarmid, Hugh Grigg, John ref1 Guest, Freddy ref1, ref2 Guilty Men ref1 Gunn, Neil ref1 guns and Edwardian Britain ref1 Haggard, Sir Rider ref1 Haig, Sir Douglas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Halifax, Lord (Irwin) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Handley Page, Frederick ref1, ref2 Hanfstaengel, Ernst ‘Putzi’ ref1 Hankey, Maurice ref1 Hannington, Wal ref1 Hardie, Keir ref1, ref2, ref3 Hardy, Thomas ref1 Hargrave, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Harmsworth, Alfred see Northcliffe, Lord Harmsworth, Harold see Rothermere, Lord Harris, Sir Arthur (‘Bomber Harris’) ref1, ref2 Harrisson, Tom ref1 Hart, Basil Liddell ref1 Hastings, Max ref1 headwear ref1 hedgers ref1, ref2 Henderson, Arthur ref1 Henderson, Sir Nevile ref1 Hepworth, Cecil ref1 Hindenburg, General ref1 Hipper, Admiral ref1, ref2 Hippodrome (London) ref1 Hitchcock, Alfred ref1 Hitler, Adolf ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 appeasement towards ref1 and Churchill ref1, ref2 and Edward VIII ref1 and Halifax visit ref1 and Lloyd George ref1 and Munich meeting ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 suicide of ref1 support of by ‘Cliveden set’ ref1 and Unity Mitford ref1, ref2 Ho Chi Minh ref1 Hobhouse, Emily ref1 Hoesch, Leopold von ref1 Holden, Charles ref1 Hollywood ref1 Holtzendorff, Admiral Henning von ref1 Home Guard ref1, ref2, ref3 Home Rule (Ireland) ref1, ref2 honours selling for cash by Lloyd George ref1 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act (1925) ref1 Hood (battleship) ref1 Hoover Building ref1 Hore-Belisha, Leslie ref1 Houdini, Harry ref1 House of Lords ref1 reform of by Liberals ref1, ref2 housing ref1, ref2, ref3 Housing Manual (1919) ref1 Howard, Ebenezer ref1 Howard, Peter ref1 Hughes, Billy ref1 hunger marches ref1 Hurricanes ref1, ref2 ‘Hymn of Hate’ ref1 Hyndman, Henry ref1 Ibn Saud ref1 illegitimacy ref1 Illustrated London News ref1, ref2, ref3 immigration Edwardian Britain ref1 inter-war years ref1 Immigration Act (1924) (US) ref1 Imperial Airways ref1 income tax ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Independent Labour Party (ILP) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 India ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Indian National Congress ref1 industry Second World War ref1 Victorian Britain ref1 Inskip, Sir Thomas ref1 Instone ref1 International Brigade ref1 International Congress of Eugenics ref1 International Fascist League ref1 ‘ Invasion of 1910, The’ ref1 invasion fear of in Edwardian Britain ref1 IRA (Irish Republican Army) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Iraq ref1, ref2, ref3 Ireland ref1 civil war (1922) ref1 a nd Easter Rising (1916) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and First World War ref1 formation of independent Da´il in southern ref1 and Home Rule ref1, ref2 and Second World War ref1 war against British and negotiation of peace treaty (1921) ref1 Irish nationalists ref1, ref2, ref3 Irish Republican Army see IRA Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Irish Volunteers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Ironside, Lord ref1 Irwin, Lord see Halifax, Lord Islam ref1 Ismay, General ref1 Italian futurists ref1 Italians interment of during Second World War ref1 ‘ It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ ref1 Jackson, Derek ref1 James, Henry ref1, ref2 Japanese and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Jarrow Crusade (1936) ref1 jazz ref1 Jellicoe, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Jerusalem ref1 Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism ref1 Jews ref1, ref2 see also anti-Semitism ‘ jingo’ ref1 Johnston, Edward ref1 Johnston, Tom ref1 journalism ref1 see also press Joyce, James ref1 Joynson-Hicks, Sir William ref1, ref2 Jutland, Battle of ref1, ref2, ref3 Kandahar Ski Club ref1 Karno, Fred ref1 Keating, Sean ref1 Kemal, Mustapha ref1 Kendall, Mary ref1 Kennedy, Joseph ref1 Kenney, Annie ref1 Kent, Duke of ref1 Keppel, Alice ref1 Key, Edith ref1 Keynes, John Maynard ref1, ref2, ref3 Kibbo Kift ref1, ref2, ref3 Kinship in Husbandry ref1 Kipling, Rudyard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Kitchener, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Knight, John ref1 Krupskaya, Nadezhda ref1 Labour Party ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1 Labour Representation Committee ref1, ref2 Lancastria, bombing of ref1 Land Army girls ref1 land speed records ref1 Landsdowne House ref1 Landsdowne, Lord ref1, ref2 Lane, Allen ref1 Lansbury, George ref1 Larkin, James ref1 Laszlo, Philip de ref1 Lauder, Harry ref1, ref2, ref3 Lawrence, D.H. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Lawrence, Katie ref1 Lawrence, T.E. ref1, ref2, ref3 Le Queux, William ref1 League of Isis ref1 League of Nations ref1, ref2 Lebanon ref1 Lee, Arthur ref1 Leeper, Reginald ref1 Leese, Arnold ref1 Left Book Club ref1 Leigh-Mallory, Air Vice Marshal ref1 Lenin, Vladimir ref1, ref2, ref3 Lenton, Lilian ref1 Leopold, King of Belgium ref1 Letchworth ref1, ref2 Lewis, Rosa ref1 Liberal Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Liberal Unionist organization ref1 Liddell-Hart, Basil ref1 Lissauer, Ernst ref1 literature ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Little Tich ref1 Liverpool strikes ref1 Liverpool Mersey Tunnel ref1 Llanfrothen Burial Case ref1 Lloyd George, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 anti-landlord rhetoric ref1, ref2 and Boer War ref1, ref2 as Chancellor of the Exchequer ref1 in charge of munitions ref1, ref2 and Churchill ref1, ref2, ref3 downfall ref1, ref2 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Hitler ref1 hostility towards Haig ref1 and Ireland ref1 Orange Book ref1 and People’s Budget ref1, ref2 personal life ref1 political career ref1 as prime minister and wartime regime under ref1, ref2, ref3 rise to power ref1, ref2 and Second World War ref1 selling of honours for cash ref1 share dealing ref1 and tariff reform debate ref1 vision of welfare system ref1 visit to Germany ref1 wins 1918 election ref1, ref2 and women’s vote ref1 Lloyd, Marie ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lockyer, Sir Norman ref1 London ref1 fog in Edwardian era ref1 music halls ref1 as refuge for revolutionaries abroad in Edwardian era ref1 London Blitz ref1 London Pavilion theatre ref1 London Transport ref1 London Underground map ref1 Loos, Battle of ref1 Lubetkin, Berthold ref1 Ludendorff ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Luftwaffe ref1, ref2, ref3 Lunn, Arnold ref1, ref2 Lunn, Sir Henry ref1 Lusitania ref1 Lynn, Vera ref1 MacColl, Ewan ref1 MacCormick, John ref1, ref2 McDiarmid, Hugh (Grieve) ref1 MacDonagh, Michael ref1 MacDonald, Ramsay ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 background ref1 and formation of National Government ref1, ref2 and Mosley ref1 vilification of ref1, ref2 MacInnes, Colin ref1 McKenna, Reginald ref1 Mackenzie, Compton ref1, ref2 Maclean, John ref1, ref2 Macmillan, Harold ref1 McNabb, Father Vincent ref1 McShane, Harry ref1 Madoff, Bernard ref1 ‘mafficking’ ref1 Major, John ref1 Malins, Geoffrey ref1 Mallard locomotive ref1 ‘Manchester Rambler, The’ ref1 Manners, Lady Diana ref1, ref2 marching ref1 Marconi, Guglielmo ref1 Marconi scandal (1911) ref1 Markiewicz, Countess ref1, ref2 Marlborough, Duke of ref1 Martin, Captain D.L. ref1 Marx, Eleanor ref1 Marx, Karl ref1 Mass Observation system ref1, ref2 Matcham, Frank ref1 Maude, Aylmer ref1 Maurice, Sir Frederick ref1 Maxse, Leo ref1, ref2 Maxton, Jimmy ref1, ref2 May, Phil ref1 medical science ref1 Melba, Dame Nellie ref1 Melbourne, Lord ref1 memorials ref1 Mendelsohn, Erich ref1 metro-land ref1 Meyrick, Kate ref1, ref2, ref3 Middle Classes Union ref1 Middle East ref1, ref2 Mill, John Stuart ref1 Millais, Sir John Everett ref1 Milner, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3 miners dispute (1926) ref1, ref2 Mitchell, Hannah ref1 The Hard Way Up ref1 Mitchell, Reginald ref1, ref2, ref3 Mitford, Deborah ref1 Mitford, Diana see Mosley, Diana Mitford girls ref1 Mitford, Jessica ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mitford, Nancy ref1, ref2 Wigs on the Green ref1 Mitford, Pamela ref1 Mitford, Tom ref1 Mitford, Unity ref1, ref2, ref3 modernism ref1, ref2, ref3 Montacute House (Somerset) ref1 Montagu, Edwin ref1, ref2, ref3 Montgomery, General Bernard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Morel, Edmund ref1, ref2 Morrel, Ottoline ref1, ref2 Morris, William (car maker) ref1, ref2 Morris, William (craftsman) ref1 Morrison, Herbert ref1, ref2 Morton, Desmond ref1 Morton, E.V. ref1 Mosley, Cimmie (first wife) ref1, ref2 Mosley, Diana (née Mitford) (second wife) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mosley, Oswald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and anti-Semitism ref1 background and early life ref1 and Battle of Cable Street ref1 and fascism ref1 funding from Mussolini ref1 imprisonment ref1 launching of British Union of Fascists ref1 and MacDonald ref1 marriage to Diana Mitford ref1 and New Party ref1 and Olympia riot (1934) ref1 plans and ideas ref1 resignation from Labour ref1 and Rothermere ref1 Muir, Edwin ref1, ref2 Munich ref1 Munnings, Alfred ref1 Murdoch, Rupert ref1 Murray, Lord ref1 music ref1, ref2 music hall ref1 Mussolini, Benito ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 national debt, post-war ref1 National Government ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 National Insurance Bill (1911) ref1 National Party of Scotland ref1 National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) ref1 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) ref1 navy see Royal Navy Navy League ref1 Nazi Germany ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 see also Hitler, Adolf Nehru, Jawaharlal ref1 Nesbit, Edith (Daisy) ref1, ref2, ref3 The Amulet ref1 Five Children and It ref1 The Railway Children ref1 Nevill, Captain ref1 New Party ref1, ref2 newspapers see press Nicholson, William ref1, ref2 nightclubs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 1922 committee ref1 Nivelle, General ref1, ref2 No-Conscription Fellowship ref1 Nordics ref1 Norman, Sir Montagu ref1, ref2, ref3 Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 background ref1 and Daily Mail ref1 Daily Mail article on shells shortage ref1 and downfall of Asquith ref1 last days and death ref1 Motor Cars and Driving ref1 northern industrial cities, decline of ref1 Northern Ireland ref1 see also Ireland Norway and Second World War ref1, ref2 nostalgia ref1 nuclear bomb ref1, ref2 nudism ref1 O’Connor, General ref1, ref2 Ogilvie-Grant, Mark ref1 Olympia Garage ref1 organic food movement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Orpen, William ref1, ref2 Orwell, George ref1, ref2, ref3 Homage to Catalonia ref1 The Road to Wigan Pier ref1 Ottoman Empire ref1, ref2, ref3 outdoors ref1 Owen, Frank ref1 Owen, Wilfred ref1, ref2, ref3 Oxford Automobile Company ref1 Oxford Union debate (1933) ref1, ref2 Paget, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur ref1, ref2 Palace Theatre (London) ref1 Palestine ref1 Panahards ref1, ref2 Pankhurst, Adela ref1 Pankhurst, Christabel ref1, ref2, ref3 Pankhurst, Emmeline ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Pankhurst, Sylvia ref1 paperbacks ref1 Paris peace conference ref1, ref2 Park, Keith ref1 Parliament during Second World War ref1 Passchendaele ref1 Patton, General ref1, ref2 Peace Pledge Union ref1, ref2 Pearl Harbor ref1, ref2, ref3 Pearse, Padraig ref1, ref2 Pearson, George ref1 peerages ref1 selling for cash ref1 peers ref1 Penguin Books ref1 pensions ref1 People’s Budget (1909) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Pétain, Marshal ref1 pianos ref1 Pick, Frank ref1 Piper, John ref1 Pistols Act (1903) ref1 Plunkett, Joseph ref1, ref2 Plymouth, bombing of ref1 political extremism ref1 Ponzi, Charles ref1 Poor Law Guardians ref1, ref2 poor/poverty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Rowntree’s investigation and book on conditions in York ref1 Pound, Ezra ref1, ref2, ref3 Cantos ref1 Powell, Enoch ref1 Powys, John Cowper ref1, ref2 Preece, Sir W.H. ref1 press ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 and Daily Mail ref1 destruction of Liberal government by ref1 and First World War ref1 see also Beaverbrook, Lord; Northcliffe, Lord; Rothermere, Lord Price, G.

But shrewd observers knew that once a tax on imported corn was announced in spring 1902 to help pay for the Boer War, the argument for a much larger wall around the British Empire was bound to return. Chamberlain had spent much of the past decade worriedly observing Germany, whose industry, prosperity and social welfare had been built up behind high tariff walls; the same was true of France and Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; America’s tariffs were even higher, and her growth was even faster. So perhaps it was now time to accept that the world was one of rival trade blocks, and build a barrier round the British Empire too? Real wages were stagnating and British industry was growing too slowly.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Let’s consider the size of the combined Anglo-American economy as a share of the world (figure 7.6), adding together the British Empire and the United States. For this purpose, I define the British Empire to mean Britain and sixteen colonial possessions for which Maddison provides estimates of GDP during the nineteenth century. The largest of the colonial possessions were Ireland until 1922, Canada and Australia until 1931, and India until 1947. As of 1820, the British Empire accounted for around 6 percent of the world’s output. By 1870, by dint of Britain’s own industrialization and its expanded imperial holdings, the British Empire accounted for around 23 percent of the world economy, of which the United Kingdom itself was around 9 percent.

Global populations soared too, as the result of massive increases in food production. While the Ocean Age gave rise to transoceanic empires, the Industrial Age gave rise to the first global hegemon, Great Britain, and later, the United States. These two powers bestrode the entire globe with unprecedented military, technological, and financial power. But, as the end of the British Empire demonstrated, even hegemons can quickly lose their place at the apex of the global competition. We have now entered the Digital Age, from 2000 to the present, the result of the astounding capacities of digital technologies: computers, Internet, mobile telephony, and artificial intelligence, to name a few.

The Industrial Age decisively intensified global interconnections—by rail, ocean steamer, automobile, aviation, telegraph, telephone, satellite, and eventually the Internet and the global population soared. For the first time in human history, there were truly hegemonic political powers with sway over much of the globe: first the British Empire and then, after World War II, the United States. With the transition to the Digital Age, global power is shifting again, and the intensity of global interactions continues to rise, this time with pervasive, real-time flows of data across the planet. In this sense, the ages of globalization both explain and are explained by the rising scale of global interactions.


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

At this point the British gave up and admitted defeat. The main factor here was that, seriously weakened financially and economically by the global conflict, a struggling British Empire undertook a review of its strategic needs that was free of romance and wishful thinking. The British were about to withdraw from India, their most treasured possession. Independence for India (and Pakistan) in the summer of 1947 was a huge, substantial and symbolic, statement that the days of the British Empire were numbered. In such a context it made no sense at all for the British to be keeping up to 100,000 troops in an ungovernable Palestine, the strategic significance of which (in relation to the Suez Canal), always questionable, was at last discounted.

The British Labour Party has struggled to distinguish anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. On the shelves of booksellers there is no shortage of works on this subject. But much ignorance remains: of the origins of the modern state of Israel, and of the inter-communal antagonism that marked its birth. There is little knowledge of modern political Zionism, little awareness of the British Empire’s historic responsibility for Palestine, and little appreciation of the legacy for Israel. The modern state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War. Many assume a direct link between the two events, and of course there was one. Jewish survivors of the horror of Nazi-occupied Europe wanted to start new lives ‘in the only place likely to welcome them’, and Palestine presented itself as just that.2 Tens of thousands of Jews made their way there.

Meanwhile, in London in 1905, Zangwill and some Anglo-Jewish friends had founded the Jewish Territorial Organisation (JTO). Denying the by-now official Zionist line – that the vital interests of the Jewish people lay in Palestine – they continued to look at possibilities elsewhere. It was thought sensible to search, once more, for land within the British Empire. So, regions of Australia and Canada were considered (as well as locations as diverse as Cyrenaica, Mesopotamia and even Angola). But nothing came of any of these enquiries. Foreshadowing a commonplace of later times, no country was disposed to offer any of its own territory for a Jewish homeland.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

But it meant far more than that. As the British Empire was rapidly falling apart, Rugby was built as part of a government public-relations campaign to boost Britain’s sense of imperial pride, and it was impossible to miss the GPO in the 1930s. Its film unit made distinctive and innovative programming for cinemas around the country. It developed promotional services like a telephone talking clock. It invited newsreel cameras to the opening of every switchboard, exchange and radio station. But what it was really doing was trying to prop up the very idea of a united British Empire—or, rather, of Britishness itself.

FIVE CENTURIES AFTER the government of Chioggia installed a tower clock on their city hall in 1386, overlooking the scene of brutal massacres recently carried out by occupying forces, a new series of violent occupations had reshaped the global map and forcibly changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. By the 1880s, the British Empire included India, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the so-called scramble for Africa was seeing Britain take land and people up and down the African continent—“from Cape Town to Cairo,” as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes described it in 1892.9 And clock towers accompanied them on their march.

Three years after the gold rush began, Melbourne had become home to some thirty-four clockmakers, whereas in the early 1840s there had been just four, and the air of this colonial trading port was filled with the compulsive sound of European time. By the late 1880s, more than thirty public buildings across New South Wales had been fitted with large tower clocks by the Sydney clockmaker Angelo Tornaghi. For invading settlers and indigenous people alike, the time of the British Empire in Australia was rarely far from view or earshot. As the historian Giordano Nanni has said, “If the clock was an avatar of Western time, the bell was its amplifier.”10 But it was in India that the British clock tower project reached its greatest and most zealous heights. Britain’s grip on India tightened hard in the late 1850s following a bloody uprising in 1857 against its rule.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

In July 1917 the League of Londoners came into existence after a meeting at the Canon Street Hotel with a key aim of interning more alien enemies, and it organized a series of meetings in the capital during the summer of 1918.10 The most significant Germanophobic body consisted of the British Empire Union, which may have counted 10,000 members by 1918 and aimed at ‘the Extirpation – Root and Branch and Seed – of German Control and Influence from the British Empire’. It came into existence in April 1915 as the Anti-German Union and received a boost from the Germanophobic peak following the sinking of the Lusitania. Its first large meeting occurred in the Aeolian Hall in London in June 1915 and by the end of 1916 it had published the monthly British Empire Union Monthly Record, having changed its name in the spring of 1916.

., (i) Blind, Carl, (i) Bloomsbury, (i) Blyton, Enid, (i) Boateng, Paul, (i) Bolam, Marc, (i) Bolívar, Simón, (i) Bolivia, (i) Bolivians in London, (i), (ii) see also Latin Americans in London Bombay, (i), (ii), (iii) Bombay Emporium, (i) Bonds, Billy, (i) Bookman, Louis, (i) Booth, Charles, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Life and Labour of the People in London, (i) Bootle, (i) Bordeaux, (i) Bosingwa, José, (i) Boudicca, (i) Bournemouth, (i) Bow, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also East End of London; Tower Hamlets boxing, (i) Bozinsky, Reuben, (i) Bradford, (i), (ii), (iii) Bradford Council of Mosques, (i) Brady, Liam, (i) Brady Street Boys Club, (i) Brazilians in London, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also Latin Americans in London Bremen, (i), (ii), (iii) Brent, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Brentford, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Brentwood, (i) Bridgetown, George Augustus Polgreen, (i) Brieg, (i) Bright, Mark, (i) Bristol, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) British Brothers’ League, (i), (ii) British Council of Churches, (i) British Empire, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii), (xix), (xx), (xxi), (xxii), (xxiii), (xxiv), (xxv), (xxvi), (xxvii), (xxviii), (xxix), (xxx), (xxxi), (xxxii), (xxxiii), (xxxiv), (xxxv), (xxxvi), (xxxvii), (xxxviii), (xxxix), (xl), (xli) British Empire Union, (i) British Empire Union Monthly Record, (i) British Museum, (i), (ii) British National Party, (i), (ii) British Rail, (i), (ii), (iii) British Union of Fascists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Britons, (i) Brixton, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi) riots (1980s), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Brockley, (i) Brodetsky, Selig, (i), (ii), (iii) Bromley-by-Bow, (i) see also East End of London; Tower Hamlets Brown, Roy, (i) Brown, W.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GLOBAL CITY Any understanding of the importance of London as a magnet for migration needs to appreciate its international importance since its development as a city within the Roman Empire and, more importantly, since the rise of the concept of globalization which, in the modern era, became inextricably linked with the expansion of the British Empire. London did not assume its international position as a result of the ‘liberation’ of markets at the end of the twentieth century, because this status had emerged over centuries. Before the arrival of the Romans the area now covered by London ‘was occupied . . . by only a scattered rural population in units no larger than a small village, gaining its living mainly by mixed farming, supplemented to some extent by fishing’.16 Londinium emerged as a Roman city in the first century AD.


pages: 434 words: 127,608

The Myth of the Blitz by Angus Calder

anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, collective bargaining, Etonian, first-past-the-post, full employment, Monroe Doctrine, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside

England would live, Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live … Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end … All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists.28 Churchill, in his war memoirs, patriotically listed the British Empire first among the members of the Grand Alliance in the extract just quoted. Yet until more than halfway through the war, the Empire could boast of no great triumph of aggressive arms.

It arrives without precedent (Australian forces had never been so committed in large-scale warfare before) and at once attracts to itself the ‘mateship’ mythology evolved over a bare century and a quarter since the arrival of the first convict settlers in New South Wales. It renders war ‘innocent’, and ‘naturalises’ as quintessentially Australian qualities seen at their sharpest (supposedly) in wartime adversity. The Dardanelles defeat was not Australia’s – it was suffered by the British Empire, as a result of a strategy decided by the British government. Britons, not Australians, bungled. Hence the Gallipoli myth also crystallises Australian resentment against British condescension towards colonials, and Australians’ sense of difference from Britons. It is also intrinsically expansionist: the Gallipoli heroes far from home show the world what Australians are made of, and represent, as Bean put it, ‘the kind of force to move the world’.

During the war, when officers started to resign, General Robert Howe reminded them that they were ‘actors upon that glorious stage where every incident is to become an historical fact’.23 Compare Churchill in June 1940: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’24 But the ‘if’ was significant. The Thirteen Colonies belonged with a ‘riseing world’. Britain in 1940 was an Old Country. The ‘subjective surplus’ expanded during war went into defending an imperial power which was already in irreversible decline, and national institutions which had tottered into anachronism.


The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder

anti-communist, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, deglobalization, European colonialism, falling living standards, false flag, foreign exchange controls, global pandemic, guns versus butter model, Monroe Doctrine, power law, reserve currency, rising living standards, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

Merchant firms and banks that wanted to keep trading had to disclose all their extant business dealings and were recruited into the intelligence-gathering network operated by the TCH.37 Under the British Trading with the Enemy Act of August 1914, the WTD also acquired the power to confiscate enemy property and investments across the British Empire.38 By January 1917, it could seize any foreign security—enemy or neutral—held in the City of London.39 The Treasury thereby gained substantial control over a sector of the British economy that before the war had been largely self-regulating and unsupervised except by the Bank of England. The activities of the WTD and the TCH produced a stream of information and recommendations that ended up in front of the Restricting of Enemy Supplies Committee.

As early as October 1914, manganese had been added to the British and French lists of goods considered “absolute contraband”—that is, goods that always served a military purpose and were thus readily seizable.71 Prewar commercial statistics clearly conveyed Germany’s dependence on manganese imports from Russia, India, Spain, and Brazil.72 French economic intelligence composed a more detailed, though still imperfect, understanding of German production since the start of the war.73 Tannery’s analysts estimated that the total needs of the Central Powers amounted to roughly one million tons per year by late 1916; deducting their small estimated reserves, they expected the Germans to face a mounting shortfall.74 The war rearranged available routes of access to manganese suppliers. Since India was part of the British Empire and the Central Powers were fighting Russia on the Eastern front, Germany lost access to the two largest suppliers of the mineral ore. It was now wholly dependent on small amounts from neutral Spain and from the Jakobeny mine in Austrian-controlled Bukovina.75 By the end of 1916, 90 percent of global production was controlled by the Reich’s opponents.

For some the Brest-Litovsk Treaty changed the entire outcome that could reasonably be expected from the war.32 Winston Churchill wrote that “no one at this time saw any prospect of a speedy end to the war, and there seemed no reason to doubt that the Germans and Austrians would have the time—as they certainly had the power—to draw new life almost indefinitely from the giant Empire prostrated before them.”33 Robertson likewise thought the best outcome that Britain could now secure would be to “gain terms of peace which would render the future position of the British Empire reasonably secure.”34 When the treaty was signed in March, the WTID’s chief German expert, William G. Max-Muller, noted that the enemy was emboldened by “the knowledge that he has burst the barrier that we had built round him, and is no longer dependent on his own resources. . . . It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the effect on Germany’s economic position of her achievements in the East.”


Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim Wagner

British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, sparse data, trade route, Wall-E

What happened at Jallianwala Bagh, Churchill proclaimed: is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.3 The real point, however, is to be found elsewhere in Churchill’s speech: Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid.

The crimes of one vicious intelligence officer in Kenya obliterate all the patient and benevolent labour of hundreds of district commissioners throughout Africa.’6 Niall Ferguson, whose name has become virtually synonymous with chest-thumping neo-imperialism, similarly describes British brutality in Kenya as ‘exceptional’.7 This approach is not limited to popular writers pandering to conservative sentiments. When British historian John Darwin was criticised in 2015 for not sufficiently highlighting the role of racialised violence within the British Empire, his response was tellingly dismissive: Exactly how to discuss violence in relation to the British Empire is an interesting question. Plainly there were many brutal episodes in its history. Plainly, its authority depended ultimately (and sometimes immediately) upon the use of violence. But then so has that of almost every state in history, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (and things are not getting better).

For the first time, Dyer seems uncertain of himself. This was how director Richard Attenborough reimagined the Amritsar Massacre and the subsequent Hunter Committee inquiry in the Oscar-winning movie Gandhi from 1982.1 This is also how many people today think of what was arguably the bloodiest massacre in the history of the British Empire. While there is an abundance of visual material informing our understanding of key aspects of the history of British India – the viscerally bleak photographs from both 1857 or 1947, for instance – there are no contemporary images of the violence at Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The photographs taken of the Jallianwala Bagh shortly after the massacre show only an empty space.2 It has thus been left largely for Attenborough’s movie to fill in the canvas of the popular imagination and provide the visual repertoire through which today we approach the events of 13 April 1919.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

The Political Divisions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century 3. Charles V’s Inheritance, 15194 4. The Collapse of Spanish Power in Europe 5. Europe in 1721 6. European Colonial Empires, c. 1750 7. Europe at the Height of Napoleon’s Power, 1810 8. The Chief Possessions, Naval Bases, and Submarine Cables of the British Empire, c. 1900 9. The European Powers and Their War Plans in 1914 10. Europe After the First World War 11. Europe at the Height of Hitler’s Power, 1942 12. Worldwide U.S. Force Deployments, 1987 Tables & Charts TABLES 1. Increase in Military Manpower, 1470–1660 2.

In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically—by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars—it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all—a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline. The history of the rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power system since the advance of western Europe in the sixteenth century—that is, of nations such as Spain, the Netherlands, France, the British Empire, and currently the United States—shows a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other. The story of “the rise and fall of the Great Powers” which is presented in these chapters may be briefly summarized here.

A strategic equilibrium existed, supported by all of the leading Powers in the Concert of Europe, so that no single nation was either able or willing to make a bid for dominance. The prime concerns of government in these post-1815 decades were with domestic instability and (in the case of Russia and the United States) with further expansion across their continental land-masses. This relatively stable international scene allowed the British Empire to rise to its zenith as a global power, in naval and colonial and commercial terms, and also interacted favorably with its virtual monopoly of steam-driven industrial production. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, industrialization was spreading to certain other regions, and was beginning to tilt the international power balances away from the older leading nations and toward those countries with both the resources and organization to exploit the newer means of production and technology.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

There was widespread support for the view that a return to gold at pre-war levels would stabilise business conditions after the turmoil of the First World War and its aftermath. This would help to boost international trade and investment, and hence the British economy.1 More importantly, there was an imperial rationale for the policy on sterling. Churchill made this point clearly: ‘If we had not taken this action, the whole of the rest of the British Empire would have taken it without us, and it would have come to a gold standard, not on the basis of the pound sterling, but a gold standard of the dollar.’2 Britain’s problem was that the First World War was largely a European war. The US had emerged largely unscathed and in a stronger international position.

The two greatest manufacturing countries in the world on either side of us, the United States and Germany, are in different ways either on or related to an international gold exchange. Sweden is on the gold exchange. Austria and Hungary are already based on gold, or on sterling, which is now the equivalent of gold. I have reason to know that Holland and the Dutch East Indies – very important factors in world finance – will act simultaneously with us today. As far as the British Empire is concerned – the self-governing Dominions – there will be complete unity of action. The Dominion of Canada is already on the gold standard. The Dominion of South Africa has given notice of her intention to revert to the old standard as from 1st July. I am authorised to inform the Committee that the Commonwealth of Australia, synchronising its action with ours, proposes from today to abolish the existing restrictions on the free export of gold, and that the Dominion of New Zealand will from today adopt the same course as ourselves in freely licensing the export of gold

I am authorised to inform the Committee that the Commonwealth of Australia, synchronising its action with ours, proposes from today to abolish the existing restrictions on the free export of gold, and that the Dominion of New Zealand will from today adopt the same course as ourselves in freely licensing the export of gold. … Thus over the wide area of the British Empire and over a very wide and important area of the world there has been established at once one uniform standard of value to which all international transactions are related and can be referred. That standard may, of course, vary in itself from time to time, but the position of all the countries related to it will vary together, like ships in a harbour whose gangways are joined and who rise and fall together with the tide.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Of course, it came at a cost. In return for its loans to London, the United States took over dozens of British bases in the Caribbean, Canada, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. “The British empire is handed over to the American pawnbroker—our only hope,” said one member of Parliament. The economist John Maynard Keynes was more enraged, describing the Lend-Lease Act as an attempt to “pick out the eyes of the British empire.” Less emotional observers saw that it was inevitable. Arnold Toynbee, by then a distinguished historian, consoled Britons that America’s “hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia’s, Germany’s, or Japan’s, and I suppose these are the alternatives.”

Quoted in Karl Meyer, “An Edwardian Warning: The Unraveling of a Colossus,” World Policy Journal 17, no. 4 (Winter 2000/2001): 47–57. 3. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 268. 4. Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 212. 5. Paul Kennedy, “Why Did the British Empire Last So Long?,” in Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight Studies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 197–218. 6. The facts on Britain’s economic situation come largely from Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 151–200.

European institutions, practices, and ideas were introduced and imposed, though always maintaining racial preferences—the British court system was brought to India, for example, but Indian magistrates could not try whites. Over time, the European impact on its colonies was huge. And it then spread well beyond the colonies. Niall Ferguson has argued that the British empire is responsible for the worldwide spread of the English language, banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative government, and the idea of liberty.11 Such an argument might gloss over the hypocrisy and brutality of imperial control—economic looting, mass executions, imprisonments, torture.


A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

Churchill concluded that none of the British oil companies working within the British Empire would be capable, any time soon at least, of reliable, long-term fuel-oil production on a scale that would meet a significant proportion of the navy’s projected requirements. As Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey expressed the predicament to Parliament a few weeks later, I would very much rather, I fully admit, that the Admiralty had been able to make the arrangements inside the British Dominions, but they could not do it. The British Empire was never planned, and the importance of oil was never foreseen; so, even if it had been planned, I doubt whether this omission to secure a first-rate supply of oil in the British Empire would have been remedied.292 By contrast, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. – operating in the southwest of Persia’s ‘neutral’ zone as defined by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention (see Fig. 25) – appeared to have much greater potential.

Thomas Earle complained in a pamphlet, ‘It is aristocracy and despotism, to have a body of officers, whose decisions are, for a longtime, beyond the control of the people’, while Massachusetts senator David Henshaw declared, ‘Sure I am that, if the American people acquiesce in the principles laid down in this case, the Supreme Court will have effected what the whole power of the British Empire, after eight years of bloody conflict, failed to achieve against our fathers.’75 These protesters would have been disheartened to read Judge Thomas Cooley’s assessment of the significance of this case fifty years later: ‘It is under the protection of the decision of the Dartmouth College case that the most enormous and threatening powers in our country have been created; some of the great and wealthy corporations actually having greater influence in the country at large and upon the legislation of the country than the States to which they owe their corporate existence.’76 The new possibilities for mass trading created by canals and the ever expanding railways were exploited particularly by those businesses that – like the large railroad corporations themselves – strove for aggressive expansion, a process that was facilitated by the large-scale sale of stocks and bonds conducted by the growing and concentrating banking sector.77 Faced with these economic developments, what was to become of the traditional republican values of political egalitarianism, economic individualism, autonomy and self-reliance?

As the object of charters is to give to members of companies power which they would not possess in their individual capacity, the very existence of monied corporations is incompatible with equality of rights.’83 To these prevalent concerns were added widespread accusations that corporate charters for private businesses were routinely being awarded on the strength of the applicant’s political connections. Gone were the trade monopolies and other arbitrary regulations that came with the British Empire’s mercantile control and that were designed for the benefit of London’s banking houses. Yet by the midnineteenth century there were signs of newly concentrating economic and political power as the granting of corporate charters once more became the currency of political patronage; indeed, similar developments were generating unease back in Britain itself.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

He takes issue with U.S. economist Bradford DeLong’s accusation that he has fallen under the influence of “a strange and sinister sect of British imperial conservatives.”1 Skidelsky’s work argues that for Britain the Second World War was in fact two wars, one pitting Britain under Winston Churchill against Nazi Germany, the other lying behind the facade of the Western alliance and pitting the British empire, led by Keynes, against the United States. America’s main war aim after the defeat of the Axis powers, he argued, was to destroy the British empire. “Churchill fought to preserve Britain and its empire against Nazi Germany; Keynes fought to preserve Britain as a Great Power against the United States. The war against Germany was won; but in its effort to win it, Britain spent its resources so heavily that it was destined to lose both its Empire and its Great Power status.”2 Keynes himself outlined one of his central aims as he negotiated in Washington: “America must not be allowed to pick out the eyes of the British Empire.”3 The arguments are complex, not least because Keynes’s main negotiating partner in Washington, Harry Dexter White, was almost certainly passing information to the Soviet Union.

Many Americans, he soon realized, were rather more hostile to Britain than he had supposed. Roosevelt, for example, despised the British empire, mistrusted England’s aristocracy, and, Skidelsky notes, “suspected the Foreign Office of pro-fascist tendencies.”8 Americans had fairly effectively chained and muzzled Wall Street after the Great Depression, and policymakers in Washington saw the far more lightly regulated City of London—the financial heart of the hated British empire—with deep suspicion. Britain was discriminating against American goods in international trade, and Roosevelt’s Republican opponents were horrified at the prospect of entanglement in another foreign war.

A couple of other small European micro-state havens are worth noting, including Monaco and Andorra, with occasional cameo roles from odd places like the Portuguese Islands of Madeira, which was central to a major Nigerian bribery scandal involving the U.S. oil service company Halliburton17 that resulted in the second largest fine ever paid in a prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The second offshore group, accounting for about half the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, is the biggest. This is a layered hub-and-spoke array of tax havens, centered on the City of London, which mostly emerged from the ashes of the British empire.18 As I will show, it is no coincidence that the City of London, once the capital of the greatest empire the world has known, is the center of the most important part of the global offshore system. The City’s offshore network has three main layers. Its inner ring consists of Britain’s three Crown Dependencies: the nearby islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.


pages: 891 words: 220,950

Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy

anti-communist, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, oil shock, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment

For the article’s impact see John Darwin, ‘John Andrew Gallagher, 1919–1980’, Proceedings of the British Academy: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows VI (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 57–78, and Ronald Hyam, ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Imperial History Professoriate, 1919–1981: Robinson and Gallagher and Their Predecessors’, in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 520. 17. Evans, Downing Street Diary, p. 150, diary entry for 16 July 1961. 18. Ibid., p. 111. 19. Ibid., p. 112. 20. Roy Welensky, 4000 Days (Collins, 1964), p. 361. 21. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, p. 521. 22. Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, esp. chapters 1 and 15. 23. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, pp. 73–4, 94–9, 149–53. 24. Hyam, ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Imperial History Professoriate’. 25.

I am, I think, quoting him accurately as it is the most memorable opening stanza to a lecture I have ever heard in person: It is very difficult for people of your age to appreciate the British Empire at its zenith. There is no shortage of clichés – a quarter of the earth’s surface on which the sun never set – but they are as banal as they are misleading because they only give you a sense of the territorial expression of British power. A better test is this. If you were a chap almost anywhere in the world around 1904 and you went for a pee, you would point your cock at a piece of porcelain on which was written ‘Shanks of Greenock’. [Pause] Not for nothing was Greenock called ‘the arsehole of the British Empire’. What better way could there be of illustrating the distinction between the ‘formal’ British Empire based on territory and the ‘informal’ empire of free trade?

What better way could there be of illustrating the distinction between the ‘formal’ British Empire based on territory and the ‘informal’ empire of free trade? The British Empire has been a begetter of historical debates on a suitably imperial scale. The ‘Cambridge School’, which shaped both Ronald Hyam and later myself, tended to disdain mega, all-embracing theories. As one of its high priests, Jack Gallagher, famously put it in his 1974 Ford Lectures at Oxford: All theories to explain the growth of imperialism have been failures. Here and there on the mountain of truth lie the frozen bodies of theorists, some still clutching their ice-picks, others gripping their hammers and sickles.


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

Allan James Crosby (London: Longman & Co, 1876), #556, 175. 9 “Petition of divers gentlemen of the West parts of England to the Queen,” in CSP-Domestic, 1547–1580, vol. 95, #63, 475. 10 Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 1:102. 11 Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Pelican Books, 1979), 178. 12 Jason Eldred, “The Just Will Pay for the Sinners: English Merchants, the Trade with Spain, and Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1563–1585,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 5–28; 9. 13 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London: John Daye, 1577; Kessinger Legacy Reprint [facsimile], 2003, 10 (“Victorious British Monarchy,” “marvellous Security,” “wonderfully increase”); 28 (“New Foreign Discoveries,” “Ilandish Empire”). 14 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42–43. 15 Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 48. 16 Entry for 28 November 1577 in Halliwell, ed., The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, 4. For the first two reports, see John Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, edited by Ken MacMillan with Jennifer Abeles (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 5, 10–13, 37–41. 17 Joseph H. Peterson, ed., John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic (Boston: Weiserbooks, 2003), 8; Suster, John Dee, 55–6; Glynn Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire in Its European Context,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2006), 643–75. 18 Humphrey Gilbert, “A Discourse how Hir Majestie May Annoy the King of Spayne,” in Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 1:170. 19 “A letter written to M.

Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War, 1585–1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; paperback edition, 2011. . Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; repr. 1991. Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ash, Eric H. Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Aughton, Peter. Bristol: A People’s History. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2000.

A Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge while still a teenager, he was hired to help Richard Chancellor and Martin Frobisher prepare for their voyages across uncharted waters to Cathay. As Elizabeth I’s favorite astrologer, he approved the date for her coronation. Also, he made the case for her title to lands in the New World, coining the phrase “British Empire.” Humphrey Gilbert gave him the right to all the land north of today’s US-Canada border. He never sought to claim these lands, however. Francis Drake (1540–1596) was an explorer. The first English captain to complete a circumnavigation, he struck a trade deal with the king of Ternate in the Spice Islands; laid claim to the northwest coast of America, which he named Nova Albion; and captured a hoard of Spanish treasure that transformed him into one of the richest men in England.


pages: 415 words: 103,801

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

From the moment he and his family arrived in Bombay, David allied himself with the British and the expansion of the British Empire. Though dark skinned and an immigrant, he chose to support imperialism. That wasn’t surprising. David saw himself as part of the elite; the Sassoons in Baghdad had risen in part by advising and serving their Turkish rulers. The defining issue of his life—his flight from Baghdad—had been triggered by his misreading the politics of Baghdad and believing the sultan would side with him against Baghdad’s rulers. He was determined that he and his family would never make that mistake again. David arrived in India at a fortunate time. The expanding British Empire wasn’t opening just trade routes, it was opening the British mind.

Reunited with his wife and children, David thought more about the opportunities that lay in Bombay. After a few years, with his wife newly pregnant, David finally decided to make the move, seeking the protection, and opportunity, of British rule. Landing in Bombay, David Sassoon joined the British Empire at the height of its political and economic power. Almost one-third of the world was under British control, including parts of India, Australia, Malaysia, Syria, and Egypt. The British had crushed Napoleon in Europe and commanded the world’s largest navy. Power and money flowed through London, the world’s largest city.

Two decades later, when the North blockaded the South in the American Civil War, cutting off the biggest supplier of cotton to Britain, David was perfectly situated to step into the breach—and to make millions. David became a bridge between the traditional trading practices of the Middle East and the new global system developing under the British Empire. Doing business in Asia meant dealing with a hodgepodge of different weights and measures, different currencies, different languages. David imposed standardization. Inside his company, Sassoon employees conducted business in Judeo-Arabic—Arabic words written with Hebrew letters—the language they brought with them from Baghdad.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

I am not in love with the “Imperial” spirit.’22 Interest in Rhodes dropped during the First World War, but his myth was revived in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a concerted push to drum up enthusiasm for the British Empire. The then Prince of Wales was sent on a series of long publicity tours of the colonies. A much-trumpeted Empire Exhibition was staged in London from 1924–25. The British Empire Film Institute was established in 1926 to counter criticism of the empire by rewarding positive depictions. Rhodes received his first biopic in 1936: Rhodes of Africa, starring Walter Huston. It began with a voiceover: ‘In 1870, South Africa was a largely unexplored territory of a million square miles, peopled by a handful of white men.’

The statue of him that is at the centre of this story, though, was proposed 172 years later by another Bristol businessman and philanthropist: James Arrowsmith. The Bristol of 1893 was very different from the Bristol of Colston’s time. The British Empire had grown into an international behemoth. The Stuart monarchy had been replaced by the House of Orange-Nassau, then the House of Hanover, then the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Victoria had become Queen of Great Britain and later Empress of India. The slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and beyond that by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Indenture had often replaced it. The Industrial Revolution had occurred.

‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’, he wrote. ‘Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.’ Rhodes wanted to form a ‘secret society’ to promote the British Empire. A particular obsession of his was to ‘recover’ the United States of America as a British colony. He contended that the United States had been spoiled by ‘low class Irish and German emigrants’ and that Englishmen would have ‘made a finer country of it’. The will he made the same year bequeathed his wealth to establish this secret society.5 Rhodes was not academically gifted and scraped by at Oxford, where it took him eight years to finish his degree.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Like so many other Western ideas in the nineteenth century, French-style revolution swiftly became a global phenomenon. Across the British Empire there was unrest – in Ceylon, Guiana, Jamaica, New South Wales, the Orange River Sovereignty, the Punjab and Van Diemen’s Land.27 Even more remarkable were the events in French West Africa. There, unlike in British colonies, radical political change had the backing of a revolutionary government in the metropolis. All this serves to illuminate the most distinctive feature of French imperialism: its enduring revolutionary character. The British Empire was by instinct socially conservative; with every passing year its administrators grew fonder of local elites, more comfortable with indirect rule through tribal chiefs and ornamental maharajahs.

Yet while one revolution cemented the democratic rights of property-owners, and brought into being a federal republic that within a hundred years was the world’s wealthiest country, the South American revolutions consigned all of America south of the Rio Grande to two centuries of division, instability and underdevelopment. Why was that? Both the Spanish and the British empires experienced crises in the late eighteenth century. The increased regulation of transatlantic trade by the imperial authorities and the high cost of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) paved the way for colonial revolts. Those that broke out in Britain’s American colonies in the 1770s had their counterparts in Spain’s: Túpac Amaru II’s Andean Rebellion of 1780–83 and the Comunero Revolt in New Granada (present-day Colombia) in 1781.

In the speech with which this chapter began, Churchill – whose own imperial career had started in the Sudan and South Africa – asked a question that was in many ways central to the lives of an entire generation of empire-builders: ‘Why should not the same principles which have shaped the free, ordered, tolerant civilization of the British Isles and British Empire be found serviceable in the organization of this anxious world?’ Civilization as he understood it had successfully taken root in North America – as successfully in those parts that remained under British rule as in the United States. It had flourished in the arid wilderness of Australia. Why not in Africa, too?


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

Attempts to impose Roman-style central control on the diffuse commercially minded British Empire prompted revolts. After 1782 the British avoided antagonising local sensibilities. Britain was a new Carthage, not a new Rome. It lacked the manpower, resources and continuous land mass to be Roman. That identity was seized by the Americans. The British were happy to use the cultural language of Roman imperial might to sustain their self-image, notably with Nelson’s Column and the architecture of Imperial Whitehall, but their deepest concern was to prevent the emergence of a new Roman Empire. Even the exponents of a minimalist British Empire recognised there were some things that had to remain under central control.

Sophonisba was given in marriage to an elderly Numidian king at the final crisis of the Second Punic War. R. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilisation, London: Allen Lane, 2010, p. 309. 37. D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 173. Lord Louis Mountbatten had ‘Rule Britannia’ played when the Japanese surrendered Singapore in 1945. A. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 459. 38. Krammick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 148–9; H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke, London: Constable, 1970, pp. 305–6. 39. P. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 3–61, esp. p. 59.

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Maps The World in the Age of Empire The Mediterranean The Siege of Tyre The Athenian Empire Ancient Athens Rome and Carthage during the Second Punic War Venetian Bases and Caravan Routes The Battle of Lepanto The Dutch Empire Rhodes The Portuguese Empire The British Empire The South China Sea ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As any manuscript heads for publication authors return to the beginning, to reflect on the debt they owe to others, fellow scholars, students, family and friends, delightfully loose categories reflecting the reality that the first and last are often one and the same.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The rest of the world, he wrote ruefully, ‘could not look with much favour or anticipated comfort on the formation of a new power thus motivated and thus clenched – a power whose two fundamental rules of action and raisons d’être would be, to defy its neighbour, and to annex its neighbour’s land.’139 The British Empire If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy.

Its centenary celebration in wartime London was stuffed to bursting with bankers, politicians, economists, diplomats and foreign dignitaries, eating smoked salmon, puffing cigars. ‘Never has so much been read for so long by so few,’ quipped another editor, riffing on Winston Churchill.18 In the second half of the twentieth century, the Economist reached across the Atlantic: the role it once played in the British Empire, it now undertook in the American. A literal bridge between them, star reporters now passed apprenticeships on Wall Street and in Washington, where they enjoyed special access from the start – collared by John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson in the marble corridors of Congress, enjoying personal lines to Ronald Reagan’s White House via George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the foreign-policy establishment.

The diplomat Lord Howden paid a visit before setting sail for Argentina and Brazil to negotiate lower sugar duties, promising news of his progress.87 Wilson carried these intimacies into the countryside, first in Wiltshire, then in Somerset, with hunting, ponies for the girls, gentlemanly pursuits – judging sheep contests – rounding out the days. This change in status was accompanied by a shift in interest from industry, where his father had given him his start, to finance – destined in the framework of the British Empire to benefit from free trade to a greater extent than any other branch of commerce. In 1852, during a brief interlude of Tory rule under Lord Derby, Wilson went to work on a new venture, which he must have partially funded from Economist profits: the following year the Banker’s Gazette section of the paper announced the founding of a Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, initial capital £1 million, prospects ‘unrivalled’, success ‘beyond doubt’.88 Wilson’s pieces for the Economist on the 1847 financial crisis – published as Capital, Currency and Banking the same year – pointed out, in the wake of so many bank failures, a field for profitable investment in the Far East, and lessons on avoiding a similar fate there.


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How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

And without the Scots it might never have existed—let alone reached the status of legend it still holds today. In fact, a Scot created the idea of the British Empire. Charles Pasley came from Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire, not far from where Thomas Telford had grown up. Like Telford, he had prodigious intellectual gifts (he translated the New Testament from Greek at age eight) that found their main outlet in solving technical problems. He served in the Royal Engineers in the Napoleonic Wars, and became Europe’s leading demolitions expert and siege warfare specialist. In 1810 he published An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. It completely changed the way Britons thought about their empire in relation to the rest of the world.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE SUN NEVER SETS— SCOTS AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE I first saw the quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson in Ian MacLeod’s The Scots and have not hesitated to borrow it here. The overseas Scots diaspora is a large and complex subject. The best place to start might be Thomas Devine’s chapter on emigration in The Scottish Nation and the collection of essays in R.A. Cage’s edited volume, The Scots Abroad, 1750–1914 (London, 1985). Also worth reading is Gordon Donaldson’s The Scots Overseas (Westport, CT, 1976). Duncan Bruce’s The Mark of the Scots has a section on Scots and the British Empire; James Morris’s Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1973) is an entertaining survey of the British Empire at its height, even though it says nothing particularly about Scots—except for a wry and witty essay on Charles Napier, which I have quoted in this chapter.

Duncan Bruce’s The Mark of the Scots has a section on Scots and the British Empire; James Morris’s Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1973) is an entertaining survey of the British Empire at its height, even though it says nothing particularly about Scots—except for a wry and witty essay on Charles Napier, which I have quoted in this chapter. Paul Johnson discusses Charles Pasley in The Birth of the Nation; Pasley’s Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire went into successive editions: I used the fourth, published in London toward the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1813. There is an abridged edition of Mill’s History of British India from the University of Chicago Press, edited by William Thomas in 1975, which can be found in some used bookstores.


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The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

., p. 139. 75 Costello and Hughes, The Battle of the Atlantic, p. 215. 76 Ibid., p. 216. 77 Rahn, ‘The war at sea’, p. 341. 78 Hammond, Food and Agriculture, p. 185. 79 Ibid., p. 187. 80 Smith, Conflict over Convoys, p. 177. 81 Ibid., p. 154. 7 Mobilizing the British Empire 1 Stephens, Monsoon Morning, p. 180. 2 Jackson, The British Empire, p. 22. 3 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Europe and the Middle East’, p. 9. 4 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 36, 40. 5 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Asia and the Pacific’, p. 47. 6 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 132–3. 7 Kerslake, Time and the Hour, p. 163. 8 Crowder, ‘The 1939–45 war’, pp. 596, 611. 9 Pearce, ‘The colonial economy’, p. 276. 10 Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance’, p. 195; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 301. 11 Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance’, p. 204. 12 Ibid., pp. 206–7. 13 Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, p. 196. 14 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 138–41. 15 Ibid., pp. 143–4. 16 Sen, Poverty and Famines, pp. 155–6. 17 Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, p. 195. 18 Jackson, Botswana, p. 156. 19 Killingray, ‘African civilians’, p. 141. 20 28 per cent of land in Mauritius was turned over to food crops.

., p. 45. 32 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 89. 33 Cooper, Cairo, p. 162. 34 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 25. 35 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 129. 36 Ibid., p. 88. 37 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 117. 38 Jackson, The British Empire, pp. 120–1; Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 30. 39 Jackson, The British Empire, pp. 166, 198. 40 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. 55, 58, 65. 41 Milward, War, Economy and Society, p. 280. 42 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 81. 43 Ibid., p. 121. 44 Ibid., p. 124. 45 Ibid., p. 106. 46 Ibid., p. 112. 47 Ibid., p. 84. 48 50.8 million to 19.4 million net registered tons.

., p. 73. 90 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Europe and the Middle East’, pp. 17–18; Jackson, The British Empire, p. 2. 91 The papers of G. R. Page, Department of Documents, IWM, p. 30. 92 Crimp, The Diary of a Desert Rat, pp. 20–21. 93 Bierman and Smith, Alamein, p. 151. 94 Crimp, The Diary of a Desert Rat, pp. 38–9. 95 Bierman and Smith, Alamein, pp. 151–2. 96 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 93. 97 Jackson, Botswana, p. 76. 98 The papers of G. R. Page, Department of Documents, IWM, p. 30. 99 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. 273–7; Bayly, ‘Spunyarns’, p. 33. 100 Jackson, The British Empire, p. 105. 101 Collier, ‘The logistics of the North African campaign’, pp. 202–3. 102 The papers of G.


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Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Faced by demands to pay land taxes and to have their properties properly registered, Afrikaaner frustration mounted and finally boiled over in 1833 when slavery was made illegal throughout the British Empire. To escape civilization and find new grazing, they moved north en masse, their long lines of ox-drawn wagons, scrawny sheep and cattle, and sullen slaves forming the central motif in Afrikaaner legends of the Great Trek. In his poem “The Voortrekker,” Rudyard Kipling, the British Empire’s poet laureate, paid tribute to their stubborn refusal to be hemmed in by propertied living: His neighbours’ smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest.

This book was devoted to the magus’s vision of an “incomparable Brytish Impire” that the future would bring. Whatever prompted Dee’s vision, his scrying glass or simply Gilbert’s manic ambition, it was undoubtedly prophetic. According to the Memorials, the empire would be spread across the seas by a mighty navy. Implicitly, as this British Empire expanded, it would carry with it Gilbert’s wild idea that land could be owned as private property around the world. The general, however, was not destined to live long enough to test the accuracy of Dee’s foresight. As night fell, the Squirrel hoisted two lanterns so that the Golden Hind could follow her through the raging seas.

What had been measured out was unmistakably a democracy, and quite clearly a republic, but its foundation was undeniably imperial. And the structure that had made it possible was to be the model for the greatest territorial empire the world had ever seen. Chapter Fourteen The Empire of Land The architect responsible for introducing Jefferson’s blueprint to the British Empire was a jailbird. Edward Gibbon Wakefield began to write about land and empire in 1829 while serving three years in Newgate Prison for abducting a wealthy fifteen-year-old girl from school and marrying her in order to gain her fortune. Born into a prominent Quaker family but with a father who lived by his wits, Wakefield’s character faithfully reflected his genetic inheritance.


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Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

Although some of the worst kinds of torture were curtailed, efforts by the governors to halt daily cruelties were largely thwarted by senior boys and masters. The argument ran that with so few teachers per pupil a regime of strict discipline was essential to avoid the riots of the past. There was also a widely held notion that this tough upbringing was the best preparation for the tough life ahead, imposing rule over the native majorities of the British Empire. But the greatest criticism of all was that the education they sold was out of step with Britain’s dynamic and rising economy. Their reliance on Greek and Latin to the exclusion of sciences put them at odds with the grammar schools and newly established academies. Charles Darwin, perhaps the most enlightened mind of Victorian Britain, made it quite clear that his public school deserved no credit for his scientific achievements.

To achieve this they were more than happy to ensure that their own children benefited from the privilege and advantage that came from a classic public school education. The idea of buying a position among the British aristocracy made absolute business sense. 3 EMPIRE OF THE SONS The Golden Age of the English public school corresponded with the triumph of the British Empire. Generations of diplomats, politicians and civil servants who ruled a quarter of the known world passed through the same school gates. Prime ministers Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston and Winston Churchill attended Harrow, while George Canning, William Gladstone and Arthur Balfour received their education at Eton.

As Britain embarked on its colonial adventures, muscular Christianity was the defining virtue wholly embraced by the British Army and the legions of missionaries who sallied forth across the Empire. Winning wars, crushing cultures and converting pagans was the best way a man could flex his Christian muscles. The Victorian figure who best represents the ideal of muscular Christianity made his name in a number of famous military campaigns in defence and expansion of the British Empire. General Charles Gordon was a courageous commander and explorer whose adventures were avidly followed by the British public as he chased and fought Britain’s enemies to the very margins of the known world. Gordon did not attend one of the great English public schools but instead went to a minor private institution in Taunton, Devon, called Fullands House, before being sent on to the military academy in Woolwich, then as important as Sandhurst in training army officers.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Although he readily acknowledged that it was American weapons and equipment that had finally enabled a fight with the Germans at El Alamein on equal terms, he emphasised that the battle had been ‘fought throughout almost entirely by men of British blood’. For a year the British Empire had provided the only resistance to Hitler, he argued, and he had no plans to acquiesce to its break-up now. Britain was not fighting ‘for profit or expansion’, he insisted, rebutting an accusation that was regularly made – and not just by the enemy – and the time had come to make something else very clear. ‘We mean to hold our own,’ he stated, to cheers. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire . . . I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the earth.

After Norway and Dunkirk in 1940, and Greece and Crete in 1941, there was no hiding the fact that 1942 had also been calamitous so far. In February the German pocket battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had steamed through the Straits of Dover unopposed. A few days later Singapore surrendered, and the Japanese marched 85,000 British Empire troops into a captivity many of them would not survive. Churchill had depicted the 33,000-strong garrison of the Libyan port of Tobruk as the linchpin of British resistance to Hitler. But in June, while he was in Washington to confer with Franklin D. Roosevelt, it too had capitulated. He would not forget how the president had wordlessly passed him a pink slip of paper bearing the news before solicitously enquiring if there was anything he could do to help.

Churchill knew that both concepts had ominous implications for Britain and her empire, but he did not dare annoy the man on whom his hopes of victory depended. He and his advisers hurriedly drafted the declaration, which Roosevelt then significantly rewrote, but Churchill managed to dilute it somewhat by deleting the president’s reference to trade ‘discrimination’ – an attack on the tariff system imposed across the British Empire – known as ‘imperial preference’ – that left American companies trying to sell goods in this enormous market at a significant disadvantage. But he had no choice but to agree to what would become known as the ‘Atlantic Charter’ and it was clear the issues that it broached were not going to go away, particularly once the United States started footing the bill for Britain’s war effort, and then – after Pearl Harbor – joined battle herself.


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The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Like Spengler, Toynbee took as his symbol of the modern West the British Empire. Like Spengler’s Decline of the West, Toynbee’s Study of History was shaped by the conviction that Great Britain’s role in that history was coming to an end. On a tour of Crete in 1912 Toynbee had come upon an elaborate Baroque palace built by a Venetian merchant prince shortly before the island was overrun by the Turks. As he stood gazing at its ruined shell, Toynbee wrote later, the thought suddenly struck him: “If the Venetian Empire had perished, the British Empire could not be immortal.” That melancholy insight would remain with him all his life: the fragility of human hopes and expectations, including his own, in the face of the larger forces of history and time.

By the turn of the century the Liberal and Labour parties often accused each other of stealing the other’s programs. Later they would also compete in their lavish praise of the Soviet Union.19 But one issue split them across the bow: the British Empire. The year that Culture and Anarchy appeared, 1869, also witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal and the expansion of British imperial dominion into a new and unprecedented phase. By 1890 it covered nearly one-quarter of the habitable globe. The old liberal attitude toward imperialism had been ambivalent at best: the British Empire, with its exotic trappings of imperial splendor, durbars and jubilees, and “maps painted red,” was largely the creation of Benjamin’s Disraeli’s Conservatives.

* Voltaire summarized the same position more succinctly and prosaically in his Age of Louis XIV (1751): “We may believe that reason and industry will progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those that govern nations.” * Did Rome’s fate await the modern British Empire, as many of his contemporaries predicted? Gibbon himself said no. Material progress, politeness, and refinement—“the system of arts and laws and manners which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies”—made such a repeat performance impossible.


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The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

Slavery itself, though, continued to be ‘legal’ (although it never had been within Britain itself), but in 1833 was made illegal throughout all parts of the world controlled by the UK. It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire. That actually remains true, given that the remnants of it are the fourteen British Overseas Territories. There is always at least one of them in daylight. It might be dark in the Cayman Islands at midnight, but it’s still daytime in the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific. Nevertheless, all good things, and bad things, come to an end. The beginning of the end for the British Empire came as two powers rose to meet it: Germany and the USA. In 1871 the Germanic states finally became tired of fighting each other and unified to become Western Europe’s biggest and most populous country.

However, what Reza Shah Pahlavi did not do was take control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and as long as the British controlled that they still had a huge say in Persian affairs. The British had built the world’s biggest refinery at the port of Abadan, and from it flowed cheap oil for the British Empire. In the Second World War Iran again attempted to be neutral, but once more fell victim to outside powers. On a pretext about the shah’s pro-Nazi sentiments the British and Soviets invaded and, after forcing him to abdicate, achieved their aim of securing the oilfields, constructing a supply line to Russia.

Whereas beforehand the Scottish and English governments each had to fund a standing army to keep watch on their land borders, now the money could be used to secure Britain against invasion from the Continent, and for expansion in the empire. There was a larger population from which to form the military, and the resources, energy and time spent looking inwards could be focused outwards – and by outwards, the British meant the world. The British Empire grew rapidly, and the more it grew, the harder it was to challenge. Sea power was the key, and only a wealthy power could build a navy capable of either controlling the sea lanes, or challenging the navies that did. Britain made use of its oak forests to build ocean-worthy ships. The trees supplied extremely strong wood of the type required when your enemy might be firing cannonballs at you, or when you risked running aground exploring strange new worlds where no big ship had gone before.


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Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 66. [back] 54. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), xvii. [back] 55. Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London: William Heinemann, 2006), 51. [back] 56. James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 58. [back] 57. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 45. [back] 58. James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 66. [back] 59. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 46.

He not only built more warships, but applied superior technology to make them more lethal: better armed, with new fifteen-inch guns; faster, powered by oil instead of coal; and supplemented by a new instrument of war, the airplane.3 In the thousand days between his memorandum and the outbreak of World War I, Churchill led a Herculean effort to maintain British naval supremacy, simultaneously making bold diplomatic strokes to broker détente with Germany and seizing every advantage should war come. His urgency sprang from his conviction that the German surge at sea signaled not a national security challenge but an existential threat to Britain’s survival. Churchill knew that on British warships “floated the might, majesty, dominion, and power of the British Empire.” If its navy were destroyed, he wrote later, the empire “would dissolve like a dream.” All of Europe would pass “into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.” To avoid that catastrophe, he insisted, the Royal Navy was “all we had.”4 Britain thus faced an excruciating dilemma, one that strategists even today struggle to escape in planning exercises.5 On the one hand, naval superiority was non-negotiable.

After a year of research into the king’s question, Crowe delivered a diplomatic gem on New Year’s Day 1907.12 “The healthy activity of a powerful Germany,” Crowe allowed, was good for the world. Instead of fearing Germany’s overseas expansion in principle, he wrote, Britain should applaud German competition for “intellectual and moral leadership” and “join in the race.” But what if Germany’s ultimate goal was “to break up and supplant the British Empire”? Crowe knew that German leaders had indignantly denied “any schemes of so subversive a nature,” and it was possible that Germany did not “consciously cherish” them. At the same time, Britain could ill afford to trust German assurances. Germany might seek “a general political hegemony and maritime ascendancy, threatening the independence of her neighbors and ultimately the existence of England.”


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The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

When in the context of World War Two, a comparable conjuncture again presented itself to the American ruling class, the Roosevelt forces seized the opportunity to reorient the New Deal from its national–corporatist format to a more liberal-internationalist strategy of expansion, in which domestic working-class demands could be in part evaded, in part compromised, while American economic power was brought to bear on both the British Empire and the Soviet Union in order to force them into compliance with US preferences for an open world. The Lend-Lease policy, then, inaugurated an era in which the two elements in combination–the generalization of Fordism and an offensive diplomacy of Wilsonian inspiration–materialized as a process of class formation on the North Atlantic level, guided by successive formulations of Atlantic unity.

From this perspective, the history of Atlanticism, as both ideology and an actual process of class formation, must be related to the three successive strategies of Atlantic unity which corresponded to the different offensive periods of American capitalism. The first was Roosevelt’s concept of Atlantic Universalism, which derived its specific Atlantic dimension from the European focus of World War Two and the key position of the British Empire in the world America wanted to expand into. The second version of Atlantic unity was the Atlantic Union idea which surfaced at the time of the Marshall Plan and combined a status-quo approach to control of the periphery with a high-pitched Cold War unity against the Soviet Union. The third Atlanticist strategy was the Atlantic Partnership scheme promulgated by President Kennedy in an attempt to restore unity of purpose to an Atlantic world in which the establishment of a restrictive EEC demonstrated the degree to which Western European capital had emancipated itself from American tutelage and was intent on carving out a sphere-of-interest of its own.

But Wilson’s universalism, explicitly conceived as a bourgeois-reformist alternative to the call of the October Revolution, soon lost its relevance in the interwar years as US economic foreign policy was shaped, first, by Wall Street rentier interests, then, by the state-monopolist pursuit of an American sphere-of-interest. Even at the beginning of US involvement in World War Two, as Roosevelt began his epic wheeling-dealing to pry the economic assets of the British Empire from Churchill, US geopolitical goals continued to be framed within a basically sphere-of-interest concept that took the division of the world market for granted. Thus the Council on Foreign Relations commissioned research to determine the minimal size of the informal empire necessary for the survival of US private capitalism in terms of raw material supplies, domestic employment and export outlets.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

At the conference in San Francisco, Smuts praised the United Kingdom as the “greatest colonial power” in the world. Smuts saw the United Nations as serving “men and women everywhere, including dependent peoples, still unable to look after themselves.”54 The “international machinery” to promote “advancement” of “dependent peoples” included the British Empire. At the time of the UN’s founding, the United Nations and the British Empire were mutually supportive international organizations. W.E.B. DuBois accused Smuts and the other UN founders of “lying about democracy when we mean imperial control of 750 millions of human beings in colonies.”55 Friedrich Hayek had questioned the moral value of any real power given to an international organization in The Road to Serfdom in 1944.

One of many examples this book gave was that of Lord Hailey, who during World War II stressed material development as a way to avoid a discussion of racism in the British Empire. He emphasized material development to avoid a discussion of the political rights of colonial subjects under the absolute power of the empire. He focused on material development to avoid a discussion of equal rights of whites and nonwhites. We discussed how Hailey was able to strike an implicit deal with the Americans: he would not embarrass them about their denial of equal rights to African Americans at home if the Americans would not embarrass the British Empire about its denial of equal rights to Africans. Both would agree to talk only about improved material well-being and not talk about rights.

Racism and Development The second decision at Versailles—not to endorse racial equality—also had lasting consequences for China and for the formation of development ideas. The Japanese, as the first nonwhite Great Power, wanted respect and proposed a declaration of racial equality at Versailles in 1919. The British and the Americans shot down the equality proposal. The British did not want international attention on racial discrimination within the British Empire. Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist at home who also did not want international interference in white Americans’ treatment of blacks. What is important about this decision is that the idea of development solidified while the West was still unapologetically racist during the interwar period of 1919 to 1939, as we will see with the example of China in this chapter.


pages: 564 words: 178,408

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

Alistair Cooke, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, European colonialism, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, indoor plumbing, jobless men, old-boy network, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

Even before the United States entered the war, the president made his position clear, telling his son Elliott: “We’ve got to make clear to the British from the very outset that we don’t intend to be simply a good-time Charlie who can be used to help the British empire out of a tight spot…. I think I speak as America’s President when I say that America won’t help England in this war simply so that she will be able to continue to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.” During Churchill’s first visit to Washington, Roosevelt raised the issue of self-determination for India, the most precious jewel in the British empire’s crown. Churchill reacted so negatively, he later wrote, that the president never brought up the subject again. That was not exactly the case.

The prime minister and other British officials repeatedly warned the Roosevelt administration that they were running out of dollars, but the U.S. government refused to believe them. The president, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were convinced that the riches of the British empire were virtually limitless. If the British needed more cash, they could simply liquidate some of their investments in North and South America. Morgenthau, in particular, pressed the British to sell to American investors such blue-chip companies as Shell Oil, American Viscose, Lever Brothers, and Dunlop Tires.

Once Churchill assumed the premiership, Kennedy, who detested him, reinforced Roosevelt’s already unfavorable impression with repeated assertions that Churchill was anti-American and anti-FDR. Another of Kennedy’s claims—that the prime minister was trying to lure the United States into the war solely to preserve the British empire—reinforced the president’s long-held suspicions of British imperialism. To Roosevelt, the ambassador characterized Churchill as a man “always sucking on a whisky bottle,” a view also held by undersecretary of state Sumner Welles, who called Churchill “a drunken sot” and a “third or fourth-rate man.”


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Goodrich tire company Bharat, see India Bierce, Ambrose Bikini Atoll Bill of Rights bin Laden, Abdullah bin Laden, Awadh bin Laden, Mohamed bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, Saad bin Laden, Salem bin Laden construction firm birth control pills; see also contraceptives birther conspiracy theory Birth of a Nation, The (movie) Blackboard Jungle (movie) Black Panthers blacks, see African Americans black sites Blackwell, Blanche Blackwell, Chris Bloody Island Massacre Bollywood Bolsheviks Bonin Islands Boone, Daniel Boone and Crockett Club Boonesborough (Kentucky) Boot, Max Booth, John Wilkes Borneo “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen) Boston Boston Globe Boston Tea Party Boustany, Charles Brazil Brereton, Lewis Breslau, University of Brezhnev, Leonid Bridge on the River Kwai, The (movie) Britain; colonies of, see British Empire; in Desert Storm coalition; industrialization in; U.S. military in British Council British Empire; American independence from; end of; governments of colonies in; holiday celebrating; in International Organization for Standardization; measurement system in; North American colonies of; Oregon claims of; in Paris Peace Conference; Peruvian guano industry monopolized by; telegraph cable system of; uprisings against; in World War I; in World War II; worldwide population of British Guiana Brown, Wenzell Brown v.

The 118,933 mainland military service members posted to territories are not listed with each territory’s population, so islands with military outposts but without local residents, such as Wake, are excluded. The Panama Canal Zone was technically Panamanian land leased to the United States, but the census counted it nonetheless. Nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. Was that a lot? Not compared with the world-girdling British Empire, which boasted at the time a population of more than four hundred million (the great bulk of whom lived in India). But the United States’ empire was nonetheless sizable. Measured by population, it was, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the fifth largest in the world. Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population.

The leftist author Howard Zinn, in his immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, wrote of the “global American empire,” and his graphic-novel spin-off is called A People’s History of American Empire. On the far right, the politician Pat Buchanan has warned that the United States is “traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire.” In the vast political distance between Zinn and Buchanan, there are millions who would readily agree that the United States is, in at least some sense, imperial. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Economist William Stanley Jevons made his reputation in 1865 when he was still a young whippersnapper of thirty-three years old with The Coal Question: arguing that Britain at least would within a generation run out of easily accessible coal, and then the factories would just… stop.7 There was nobody who was a bigger believer in the British Empire than Rudyard Kipling. The British Empire was very good to Rudyard Kipling—until September 27, 1915, when, during World War I, it devoured his son John by killing him in the bloody fields outside the French city of Lille. Yet his reaction to the sixtieth anniversary of Queen-Empress Victoria Hanover’s accession to the throne, in 1897, was a poem about London’s destiny being the same as Nineveh’s, closing: “For frantic boast and foolish word—/ Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!”

And as wages in economies that were to become the global periphery diminished, so, too, did the possibility that this periphery would develop a rich enough middle class to provide demand for a strong domestic industrial sector. To understand why, consider the British Empire. Wherever the British went they built a fort, some docks, and a botanical garden—the latter to discover what valuable plants grown elsewhere might flourish under the guns of their fort as well. During the nineteenth century it was the British Empire that brought the rubber plant from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and then to Malaya, and that brought the tea shrub directly from China to Ceylon. Although rubber was not introduced into Malaya, Indonesia, and Indochina until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, by the end of World War I these three regions had become the principal sources of the world’s natural rubber supply.

For the politicians of the French Third Republic, a war with Germany needed to be fought someday in order to recover Alsace and Lorraine, which had been stolen by Germany in 1870. And it was, to politicians and populace alike, self-evidently worth killing a lot of people to make sure that the city of Strasbourg was not called “Strassburg,” and that its mayor spoke French, not German. For the politicians of the British Empire in London, risks of war were worth running to show that the British Empire could not be pushed around. What was more, Germany before World War I had built a battle fleet that Britain saw as an existential threat, and Britain found itself forced to spend a fortune to outmatch it. Recall Winston Churchill’s joke about the pace of pre–World War I British dreadnought battleship construction: the Liberal government was willing to budget for four new battleships a year, the navy admirals demanded six, and the press and public opinion, with their fear of imperial Germany coming to the fore, pushed them to compromise at eight.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

As ever more of the world was partitioned, they acquired fresh sets of potentially troublesome neighbours, newfences to maintain, and a newneed for vigilance. The result was paradoxical. Although the British Empire became larger and larger, the diplomats and strategists charged with protecting it became more and more anxious. Because the British had so much territory scattered round the world, they seemed always at odds with everyone else. The British Empire was like a huge giant, moaned a senior official, ‘with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction’. The minute it was approached by anyone else, the giant would scream with fear at the expected pain.48 It was a poor recipe for diplomatic harmony.

After Tamerlane BY THE SAME AUTHOR Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War 1918–1922 Britain and Decolonization: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate JOHN DARWIN After Tamerlane The Global History of Empire since 1405 ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS ALLEN LANE Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

After 1860, with the spread of railways, India developed much more rapidly as a source of raw materials and the greatest market for Britain’s greatest export, cotton textiles. And if the burden of garrisoning India was heavy, it cost the British taxpayer nothing. Indeed, after 1860 two-thirds of the standing army of the British Empire (a total of some 330,000 British and Indian soldiers) was a charge on Indian not British revenues, and the forces in India could be (and were) used everywhere from Malta to Shanghai. As the partition of Afro-Asia speeded up after 1880, India’s geopolitical, as well as its economic, value became an axiom of British policy.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

FO371/135642, Ramsbotham, ‘Middle East Policy’, 28/8/58, attached: ‘Points for a Middle East Policy’, PUSD, 27/8/58; Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.483; Rawnsley, ‘The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez Crisis’, pp.511–12; Kyle, Suez, p.151. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp.438–9. Hashimoto, The Twilight of the British Empire, pp.128–9 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi not e s321 18. FO1110/1220, Barclay to Wright, 24/10/59. 19. FO1110/1220, Foreign Office minute, 10/12/59. 20. Hashimoto, The Twilight of the British Empire. See also Boyd, ‘Sharq Al-Adna/ The Voice of Britain’, pp.443–55. 21. Bittman, The Deception Game, pp.19–20, 29. 22. CAB301/118, Compton to Lloyd, ‘Secret Vote: Special Operations’, 29/4/57. 23.

.), The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–56 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Braithwaite, R., Afgansty:The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89 (London: Profile, 2014). Brandon, P., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London: Vintage, 2008). Braun, L.F., ‘Suez Reconsidered: Anthony Eden’s Orientalism and the Suez Crisis’, Historian, 65/3 (2003): 535–61. Brendon, P., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Vintage, 2008). Brogi, A., Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 8 Decolonization and Drift The Battle for Influence after Empire From my point of view there is no doctrinal objection to the use of clandestine and covert activities. Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1955 1 B ritain’s colonial rule was built on information management and it is no exaggeration to describe the British Empire as an ‘empire of intelligence.’2 Swathes of information, gathered as part of the process of colonial governance, were vital to allow a few administrators to govern vast territories such as India. Intelligence in the colonies had developed differently from intelligence in Whitehall: it remained more informal, less glamorous, part of the quotidian administration.


pages: 435 words: 134,462

The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by Neal Bascomb, Kingfisher Editors

British Empire, discovery of penicillin, first-past-the-post, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, two and twenty

Less than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremonies in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London’s White City Stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards—instead of simply 26 miles —so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including track and field. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before. In the 4 x 1 mile relays, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead.

“Hello, John”: “Rivals Happy to See Each Other,” Melbourne Age, June 26, 1954; “Mile Stars in Guarded Meeting,” Melbourne Herald, June 27, 1954; Dick Bed-does, “Mile Aces Avoid Talk of Records,” Vancouver Sun, June 26, 1954. 228 On October 30, 1891: “Australia at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, Vancouver, Canada 1954,” British Empire Games Official Program, July 30, 1954; John Blanch and Paul Jenes, Australia’s Complete History at the Commonwealth Games (John Blanch Publishing, 1982). 229 Henry Luce, the famed publisher: Norris McWhirter, personal interview. To televise the event: “TV Mile Thriller Seen by 40,,,” New York Times, August 8, 1954.

He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record. John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one equally telling. Directly after the British Empire versus the United States match, he boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as he strove to make the Olympic team.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking—plus a dash of revolutionary fervor—has a long pedigree. A coffeehouse in late-eighteenth-century Paris TEA and the BRITISH EMPIRE 9 Empires of Tea Better to be deprived of food for three days than of tea for one. —Chinese proverb Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? —Sydney Smith, British writer (1771-1845) The Drink That Conquered the World w WITH FAR-FLUNG TERRITORIES stretched around the world, the British Empire was famously described in 1773 by Sir George Macartney, an imperial administrator, as "this vast empire on which the sun never sets."

A Stone-Age Brew 2. Civilized Beer Wine in Greece and Rome 3. The Delight of Wine 4. The Imperial Vine Spirits in the Colonial Period 5. High Spirits, High Seas 6. The Drinks That Built America Coffee in the Age of Reason 7. The Great Soberer 8. The Coffeehouse Internet Tea and the British Empire 9. Empires of Tea 10. Tea Power Coca-Cola and the Rise of America 11. From Soda to Cola 12. Globalization in a Bottle Epilogue. Back to the Source Acknowledgments Appendix. In Search of Ancient Drinks Notes Sources Introduction Vital Fluids There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

Profits from its trade helped to fund the advance into India of the British East India Company, the commercial organization that became Britain's de facto colonial government in the East. Having started as a luxury drink, tea trickled down to become the beverage of the working man, the fuel for the workers who operated the new machine-powered factories. If the sun never set on the British Empire, it was perpetually teatime, somewhere at least. With its associated drinking rituals of genteel afternoon tea and the worker's tea break, tea perfectly matched Britain's self-image as a civilizing, industrious power. How odd, then, that this quintessentially English drink initially had to be imported at great cost and effort from China, that vast and mysterious dominion on the other side of the world, and that the cultivation and processing of tea were utter mysteries to its European drinkers.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

We’ll see it again with semiconductors and integrated circuits in another couple of hundred years. Transportation Elasticity, Sea and Rail Even in the early 1800’s, the British Empire got off to a slow start. The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, but it wasn’t until another 20 years later that the British would declare the slave trade a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the entire British Empire, after a 5-year trial period, leading to the more commonly known date of abolishment in 1838. The delay didn’t hurt the engine. The plantations in the American South still had slaves, until 1865, and were cranking out cotton for the British textile mills.

This set up the incredible simplification of computers in the 20th century, which only had to deal with 2 digits, 1’s and 0’s, true and false, on and off, instead of 10 numbers. This is a major inflection point in harnessing Logic and Memory for computers. Dealing with two instead of ten states lowered the complexity of computing devices by at least a factor of 10. *** Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution kept cranking. Amazing as it sounds, the British Empire really began with the invention of affordable, comfortable clothing. Silk was comfortable but painfully expensive, since there was no way to push productivity out of worms. Wool was cheaper, and warm, but way too itchy. We all know that. It was the act of substitution that fired the economic engine.

The “protection under law” of ideas prompted individualism, self-interested folks who could work hard knowing they could reap the benefit of their own work. Adam Smith would note this much later, but for now, it set off a wave of invention. A strong and liquid capital market became an important component to enable the British Empire. They almost didn’t have one. Capital Markets and Bubbles Today, money sloshes around the globe quite easily, from Zanzibar to Berkeley Square in milliseconds. But back in the 18th century, money was a local instrument. Almost by necessity, precious metals such as gold and silver were the de facto currency for trade - no one trusted much else.


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Henley, History of Lodge Australian Social Mother no. 1, 1820–1920, Sydney, 1920. R. Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918’, in J. Brown and W.R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire–Volume IV: The Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1999. T. Hunt, Ten Cities that Made an Empire, London, 2014. See the chapter on Bridgetown for its colonial economy and society. B.L. Huskins, Public Celebrations in Victorian Saint John and Halifax, PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, 1991. A. Jackson, The British Empire: A Very Short History, Oxford, 2013. For figures on the extent of the British Empire, p. 5. R. Jaffa, Man and Mason: Rudyard Kipling, Milton Keynes, 2011.

When the opportunity arose, to round out his income, he would republish one or other of the books from his anticlerical days, like The Secret Loves of Pius IX (1900) and The Bible for Laughs (1901). He died in provincial obscurity in March 1907. 10 Allahabad: Mother Lodges of the Empire Imperial Brethren From near to home (Ireland), to the other side of the planet (New Zealand), the British Empire extended over one-quarter of the earth’s land surface at its peak, and included more than a fifth of the global population. Its makers were many and diverse: traders and conquerors, freebooters and missionaries, scholars and capitalists, warriors and settlers, bureaucrats and explorers, monarchs and democrats, doctors and drug traffickers.

Here, where the winter snows overtopped the sill of his study window, Kipling’s whole sensorium reached out to the India of his mind: to the taste of chillies and mangoes; to the whisper of the breeze in the banana leaves; to the smell of turmeric and cheroots; to the feel of the heat–unending, enfeebling–and of the opium he smoked to counter its effects. The Jungle Book, Kipling’s timeless collection of children’s stories set in India, was written in Vermont. Freemasonry’s most loved poem was also written in Vermont, the fruit of an encounter between Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle who, like his friend, was a passionate believer in the British Empire. In the autumn of 1894, having recently killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, Conan Doyle took a break from a speaking tour of the United States to spend a couple of days in Vermont teaching Kipling to play golf–despite the lack of a local course. Conan Doyle and Kipling deepened their friendship as they swished and hacked their way around the open country.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, in the Gujarati city of Surat, just north of Mumbai, the main textile industries shrank, but artisans who made the famous gold thread jari managed to hang on.48 Notables, meanwhile, tried to keep up their former lifestyles as best they could, even as their pensions were being cut back by the British. While undermining old elites, the British empire simultaneously promoted new ones, such as the Parsis. Still, with all these nuances and qualifications, it is clear that, overall, the British empire was bad for luxury consumption in India. This was fully intentional. India was ‘backward’, one English observer argued in 1837, because ‘princes and nobles were engrossing all the wealth of the country,’ while its people were ‘groaning’ under the burden.

E. 238–9 Duala 132–3, 252 dualism, Cartesian 95, 230–31 Dubai 618 Duchamp, Marcel 636 Dufayel (department store) 200, 410 Duhamel, Georges: Scenes de la vie future 283 durable goods see consumer durables dustbins 629–30, 633, 648 dusting 222, 226 dustyards 628 Dutch East Indies 26, 90, 164, 172 Dutch National Bank 563 Dutch people see Netherlands/the Dutch Dutch Republic 4, 10, 54–8 DVDs 387, 533 Dynamo Dresden 526 e-bay 654, 658 e-commerce 481–2, 654, 658 earning power 309 see also spending power earthenware 57, 60, 61, 62, 88, 89, 623 East India Company, Dutch (VOC) 25–6, 57, 69, 70 East India Company, English (EIC) 25–6, 64, 65, 70, 85, 89, 92, 120, 139 Easterlin, Richard 452 eating see also food: in China 357; and class 587–8, 604–5; and control of one’s life 324; family meals 14, 461; with friends 467; gender and eating roles 14; at home 14, 353, 376, 461; Irish 599–600; meat 2, 588, 598–9, 604, 675, 684; in migrant food cultures 596–602, 603–5; and the misery U-index 454; national eating habits 166; out 353, 448, 602, 605, 685 see also restaurants; overeating 106–7, 339; power of eating habits 9; rituals 14; slaves eating English food 170; and sociability 14, 155; time spent on 454 Eaton’s (department store) 203 Eco, Umberto 315 economics 2, 91, 140, 151–2; affluent budgets 338–9; budget studies 147–50, 283; consumption and the German national/historical school of 116, 153, 154; and the discovery of the consumer 147–54; economists’ approach to consumption 119, 147–54; and ethics 151; extension of economic theory into daily life matters 427; GDP see gross domestic product; home economists 256; Keynesianism 427–8; spending power see spending power Economist 611 economy: depression 273, 274, 278–88, 405, 413, 414; of East Germany 335; economic growth 11, 273, 278, 303, 324, 325, 364, 368, 394, 411, 415, 540, 639, 677; emotional 685; European economic expansion 28; foreign luxuries and local economy 41; GDP see gross domestic product; inflation 274, 275, 343, 415, 614, 619; Japan’s economic crisis and ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s 371, 384, 498, 534; moral economy 278, 563, 571, 578, 581; recession 287, 403, 405, 420, 426, 428, 521, 668, 683; scarcity economy 332; shadow economy 330; sharing/leasing economy 687–8; and sustained growth of affluence 301, 302; Total Material Requirement 665, 668 Ecuador 80, 162, 476 Eden, Ashley 143 Eden, Frederic 75 Edo 176, 181, 358, 472 see also Tokyo education 3, 12, 142, 288; and advertising 485, 489; in Asia 372, 407; benefits from fair trade 579; company-based 523; consumer education 393–4; ‘consumer’s view of adult education’ 285; educational films 215; English education in British empire 142; home science 256; learning through play 488; and leisure 448–9, 451, 465–9, 467; schools see schools; Soviet 330, 331–2; spending on 148, 304, 326, 537; and taste 214, 548 efficiency 140, 150, 237, 246, 247, 398, 412, 667, 672–5, 686, 688; campaigns 634; energy efficiency 671–3; and the internet 687; rational 270, 360; and socialism 644–5 Egypt, ancient 68 Egypt, modern 202, 299–300, 593; remittances 590, 593 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 307 El Puente foundation 575 elderly people 429–30, 498–519; abuse/neglect of 516; in Asian societies 508, 509, 516–19; as consumers 429–30, 498–519; day centres for 503; facilitating forces of active ageing 501–4; German 200, 332, 499, 507–9, 512, 513; golden age club movement 503–4, 505; leisure and holidays 450, 498–519; pensions see pensions; post-war 506–7; retirement see retirement; Scandinavian 507, 508, 509, 510, 557; and sport 515 electric cookers 240, 248, 249, 253, 364–5, 554 electric labour-saving devices in the home see domestic appliances and technologies electric lights 192, 208, 367 electric switches 248–9 electricity 4, 175, 181, 248–9, 253, 672; in Asia 367–8, 391–2; in Brazil 527; providers 248, 392 electronic waste 622, 652, 653, 664; recycling 662–4 electroplating 225–6 elevators 192–3 Elias, Norbert 294 elite 29, 52, 84, 92, 169–70, 180, 228, 283–4, 340, 345, 436–7, 605, 680; Asian 52, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 381; British 59, 397; colonial 80; communist 294–5; French 340, 345, 346; women 74 Elizabeth I 39 Elmtown, America 497–8 email 464, 465, 470, 471 embroidery 25, 35, 36, 48, 252, 293 Emin Pasha (born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer) 171 emotions: and comfort 270; emotional economy 685; emotional needs 321; growing interest in 682; mass culture diffusing ready-made emotions 315; separated from reason 274; tied to goods 104–5, 315–16, 320–21, 337, 686 empire/empires: African consumption and empire 124–36; America as a ‘market empire’ 307; Atlantic empire 92; Bat’a empire 525; British empire see British empire; British Raj 137–46, 296–8; and capitalism 160; colonial protection and the tug of war between empires 120; colonialism see colonialism; consumption and the stain of empire 357; costs and benefits of empire debate 91, 160–61; as engines of expansion 90; Hobson’s attack on empire 119, 158, 161; and the housewife 300; impact on taste and ritual 78–93, 119, 170–71; imperialism see imperialism; and the imperium of things 119–73; Indian switch from Mughal to British rule 137–8; interplay of consumption, flow of goods and imperial power 120; liberal empire of free trade 91, 120–21, 122, 140, 141, 146, 161, 163–4, 167, 572 see also British empire; mercantilist empire 91, 92, 161, 163, 164; Mughal empire 137, 138, 142; national identity defined in opposition to empire 379; and popularization of exotic drug foods 78–93; Russian empire 204; schizophrenic 135–6; Spanish empire see Spanish empire; and the value of origin 169–71; writing out the colonial producer 173 empiricism 96 employment see labour and work empowerment: through choice 288, 557, 559, 560, 567; of the consumer 6, 203, 260, 287, 288, 295, 557, 559, 560, 567; through domestic appliances 260; through shopping 6, 203; of women 6, 260 emulation 13, 14, 90, 165, 328, 677 see also conspicuous consumption; imitation; status and social positioning; discomfort with 143; equality and emulative consumption 438; as parent of demand 14, 73; in spending, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ 8, 316, 325, 340, 374, 383, 438 Endrigo, Sergio 352 energy: American sources, demands and consumption 325, 671–3; British domestic consumption 672, 674; cheap energy and high wages 72; companies 367; efficiency 671–3; embedded/embodied 629, 670, 671, 673; EU government expenditure on 538; growth in use 672, 674, 678; and material flow 670; waste-to-energy plants 632 Engel, Ernst 148 Engel’s law 148, 149 Engels, Friedrich 113, 114, 115 England: bankruptcy in 432; Beer Act (1830) 476; and the ‘birth’ of the consumer society 10, 73; Black Death 58; comfort trade-offs 61; Community Health Councils 556; consumer culture 58–63, 61, 62, 65–6, 71–2, 76–7; ‘consumer revolution’ in 17th century 22; debt in 1700 407; early modern 4, 537; elderly people 506, 509–11; Elizabethan 59–60; English as controllers of most ‘good things’ 132; excesses as a drain on wealth 97; farmers’ markets 582; middle classes 117; as missionary nation 126; Parliamentary Committee on Illicit Practices 65; people with holiday homes 655; Poor Law 537; prudence 116; rent 243–4, 555; Shops Act (1911) 476; Stuart England 59; sumptuary laws for clothes 39, 40; Sunday trading 476, 478–9; Sunday Trading Act (1994) 478; trade 26–7, 582; Tudor 60; urban density 93; Victorians see Victorians; wages 58; wealth increase 103 Enlightenment 95–110, 158, 231, 413; and battle against slavery 123–4; and religion 606 Ensslin, Gudrun 322 entertainment see also leisure: affluence and cheap entertainment 455; cinema see cinema; film; colonial planters 161; and conspicuous consumption 228; and the emotional economy 685; equipment 14; and generational bonds 521; growing islands of 281; home entertainment 15 see also DVDs; gramophones; radio; television; and mass culture 315; positive role of play the pursuit of pleasure 218–19; salotto, room for 30; street entertainment 191; Sunday 475, 476–7; as therapy for the elderly 505; urban entertaining spaces 210–21; and wealthy youth 216 environment: climate change 560, 666; ecological footprint 15, 675, 686, 687, 689; environmental justice campaigns 669; Green movement 639, 644; greenhouse gases see greenhouse gas emissions; and material flow 664–75; mining damage 15, 683–4; ‘NIMBY’ 669; outsourcing environmental burden 669–70; past damage to 676; pollution see pollution; recycling and environmental awareness 652 see also recycling of waste; and the shedding of possessions 685–6; sustainability see sustainability; and waste see waste equality and inequality see inequalities; social equality Equipment Installment Plans (EIP) 658 Erhard, Ludwig 308, 309 escapism 305 Esselunga (Italian supermarket) 350 Este, Isabella d’, Marchesa of Mantua 31 Estonia 547 ethics see also morality: and economics 151; ethical consumerism 128, 155–7, 565–80 see also fair trade; fairness see fair trade; fairness; global ethic of care 573, 584; Golden Rule 572; Puritan work ethic 450, 455; and shopping 155, 390, 567, 569 see also fair trade; and wise consumption 289 Euclid Beach Park 218 Europe: annual growth rates in affluence and consumption, 1950s to early 1970s 273; ‘cashing out’ on the home 428; credit 409, 415; domestic appliance adoption 247; early modern 8, 38–43, 53–63, 65–6, 70–77, 398, 678; Eastern 123, 301, 313, 326–37, 427, 461, 463, 535, 598, 600, 607, 644–6 see also Soviet Union; economic expansion 28; EU see European Union; export of plastic waste 652; and the fall of Nazism 300–301; fitness wave 544; GDP 24; and the Iron Curtain 301, 327 see also Cold War; and leisure 449–52, 456, 458–9; merchants 25; and remittances 590; secularization and decline in church-going 479, 606, 607; silver mines 25; smartphones 464; spending on recycling 648; spread of consumer goods from 1950s to 1980s 301; sumptuary laws see sumptuary laws; trade/traders 23, 64, 124, 129; waste and recycling regions 644, 645; waste generation lowering 640–41; and the World Wars see First World War; Second World War; youth spending power 312 European Court of Justice 559, 560 European Social Survey (2004/5) 426–7 European Union 245, 439, 559, 560; European Economic and Social Committee 560; Landfill Directive 640; recycling 640, 652, 653; Single European Act 559; social spending 537, 537, 538, 541; and waste 640, 648, 652 Eurovision Song Contest 352 evangelicalism 128, 608–9 see also Pentecostalism; Calvinist 57, 58, 614; Methodist/Wesleyan 133, 612; Presbyterian 384; prosperity gospel 610–11, 615; Puritan see Puritanism; televangelism 610–11 Everyday Life Reform League (Japan) 250, 256–7 Ewha, Seoul 384 Ewing, Oscar 504 excess, extravagance and opulence 15, 36–7, 49, 55, 97, 100, 103, 106, 294, 302, 382, 405, 407, 434–9, 610; in Asia 48–9, 374, 384–5, 390, 407; and corruption 35–6, 51; and debt 406–7, 428, 431; effects on public 8, 15, 35–6, 302; fears of 41; in funerals 39, 48, 382, 399; imperial spectacle 140–41; sumptuary laws see sumptuary laws; of uncultured nouveau riche (Sombart) 416; wealth as mother of 57; in weddings 8, 37, 39, 41, 48, 596; women’s ‘senseless extravagance’ (Gilman) 228 exotic goods 4, 10, 32, 96, 162, 167–71, 602–3, 678 see also silk; spices; Turkish carpets; beverages 166, 603, 678 see also coffee; tea; foods/drug foods 58, 78–93, 120, 165, 168, 579, 601; and nationalism 168–9 expenditure surveys 319 Exposition Universelle (Paris 1867) 193 extravagance see excess, extravagance and opulence Fabri, Friedrich 134 Facebook 465, 470 factories 89, 153, 293, 525, 528, 638; directors 336; factory homes 457; factory labour/labourers 79, 166, 210, 214, 239, 260, 294, 337; factory production 146; factory textiles 139; owners 177, 195; Soviet 330 Faentino, Andrea 31–2 fair trade 562–71, 564, 681; activism 567, 570–71; advertising 567; branding/labelling 565–6, 570, 577; and choice 563, 566–70; and the co-operative movement 578, 579; education benefits 579; Fairtrade Fortnight 562; global sales of fair trade products 562, 564, 564; health benefits 579; ‘lifestyle’ presentation 567; versus localism 584; origins of 571–80; and responses to globalization 568–9; scale problem of 570; and security 579; shops/world shops 564, 565, 566, 574–5, 576; as a social movement 565, 566, 567, 570–71; and supermarkets 562, 565, 568, 579; towns 562, 568 fairness 343–4, 549, 565–6; fair trade see fair trade; in public services 549, 561; unfairness 276, 335, 336 fairs 203 family: 4–2–1 phenomenon 372; activities 14, 309, 340–41; aristocratic European family networks 84; Asian 363, 364, 365, 367, 382–3, 384, 385, 517–18, 520; choice and rebuilding of post-war family 308; conspicuous consumption as moral threat to 380; extended 145, 260, 382; familycentred happiness 256; family-oriented consumption/consumerism 260, 324, 340–41, 382–3; and generational bonds 520–21; income 147–50, 409, 425, 519; meals 14, 461; planning 365; possessions and family memory 104, 686; privatizing effect of gifted consumer goods on 596; recreational spending 148, 339; time spent with children 461 farmers 44, 47, 54, 55, 73, 75, 203, 634, 649; farmers’ markets 580, 581, 582, 583, 584 fascism 11, 16, 273, 289, 533; and ‘consumerism’ as totalitarian 5, 7; Nazi see Nazism fashion 4, 21, 678 see also clothes; African craze for 135; in Burgundy 69; centres of fashion network 204; children’s 485, 486–7; Chinese 21–2, 44, 46, 47, 49, 69; and the cinema 281–2; codes of dress 40; and the conservative order 41; customization 138; disposable 636; dolls 71; as driver of demand or innovation 22, 67; exotic fashion and antiestablishment politics 323; as heart of Western capitalism 22; and imperialist subjugation 379; magazines 70–71, 200; male 200–201, 315; merchants as ambassadors of 38; as product of East–West exchange 88; radical use of 323; sapping effect on nation 109; shows 528; Soviet cravings for style and 302; and subcultures 6; and sumptuary laws 39–40; teenage 498; women’s 21, 42, 46, 48, 52, 60, 65, 67, 69, 149, 150, 282, 498, 528 Fashion magazine 200 Fazal, Anwar 552 Federal Housing Administration 286, 341, 413 Fedorova, E.

With the rapid growth of China, and material advances in India, Brazil and other so-called emerging nations, it is hard to treat consumption as a uniquely Anglo-American export. Though a billion and a half people continue to live at the edge of starvation, it is clear that the bulk of the world’s population is living with more. They have not, however, simply followed in American footsteps. Of course, the British empire and its twentieth-century successor, the United States, were active in spreading their material civilization across the globe. But other societies were not empty vessels: they had their own cultures of consumption. African kingdoms that succumbed to European colonizers in the nineteenth century brought pre-existing tastes and habits to the imperial encounter.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The vast retail chains which will within a few decades have driven the small tradesmen out of business are there, but if you dropped into the chain of Boots chemists, it might as easily have been to change your books at the library. In the evening, maybe a visit to the cinema. There is a strong case for agreeing with Churchill that the Second World War had been his country’s ‘finest hour’. He was talking about Britain and the British Empire, but the values of that empire were the values which the English liked to think were something which they had invented. Certainly, the war and its immediate aftermath are the last time in living memory when the English had a clear and positive sense of themselves. They saw it reflected back in films like In Which We Serve, Noël Coward’s fictionalized account of the sinking of HMS Kelly.

One political party after another has made promises to restore the integrity and standing of the country, which have turned out to be outrageous lies. It would not matter in Italy, where they don’t believe in the state anyway and where the institutions which do matter to them – family, village, and town – remain demonstrably alive. The English put their faith in institutions, and of these, the British Empire has evaporated, the Church of England has withered away and Parliament is increasingly irrelevant. And it is not merely that the external sureties have gone, so, it seems, have internal certitudes. I once asked the author Simon Raven what he thought being English meant and he replied with a disconsolate caveat, ‘I’d always hoped it meant gentle manners, cricket, civility between the classes, lack of malice towards others, fair dealing with women, and fair dealing with enemies.

Huxley, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, 5 dukes, 10 earls, 26 MPs, 17 admirals, 59 generals, 200 clergymen and 600 other worthies.12 This insularity gave the English a great self-confidence, but it did nothing for their sophistication. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, deep down, the English don’t really care for foreigners. Before it was necessary for foreign visitors to reverence the British Empire, one visitor after another commented on the remarkable vanity of the English. In 1497, a Venetian noticed that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say “he looks like an Englishman” and that “it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman” ’.13 In describing a visit to England by Frederick, Duke of Württemberg in 1592, a German author commented upon the fact that ‘the inhabitants … are extremely proud and overbearing … they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them’.14 Another visitor, the Dutch merchant Emmanuel van Meteren, noticed the same arrogance when he listed the qualities of the English character.


pages: 1,194 words: 371,889

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The first step was to forge individual federations in Australia and South Africa, cast in the mould of the great Canadian federation already set up at Ottawa. In Australia, Canberra would soon take its place as capital of the new federation. But in South Africa everything was confused by the differences of race. For one thing, the region straddled both British Empires – white and black-and-brown. For another, two of the states, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, were Boer republics – outside the British Empire. Already the attempt to annex and federate the Transvaal had stirred up a hornet’s nest among the Boers, as Frere and Carnarvon had discovered to their cost in the 1870s. It would be a brave Colonial Secretary who would wish to re-open that question in a hurry.

The seven British officials breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to return to the small house and garden where they had laagered with their horses. There were no flags, no bunting, not even a solitary Union Jack, or a note of ‘God Save the Queen’. All that would come in a month or so, when the first British battalion arrived from Natal and marched into Pretoria. The Transvaal had been formally, if provisionally, united to the British Empire. And it had proved, the British Treasury would be delighted to hear, a quiet wedding, costing almost nothing. Meanwhile a second ceremony, more like a funeral, took place at the side of Church Square, facing the government offices. A small group of Boers – townspeople and bearded takhars (from the back-veld), some with rifles slung over their shoulders – listened as one of the Executive Council read out a solemn protest signed by Thomas Burgers, the Transvaal’s mercurial state President.

According to the terms of his commission, he must win the agreement of the Volksraad (the Transvaal Parliament) or the majority of the white inhabitants – or at least ‘a sufficient number’. It was vital that no blood was shed. For this was the first step in the British government’s master plan for South Africa to persuade the Transvaal and the other Boer republic, the Orange Free State, to join the British Empire and federate with the two British colonies, the Cape and Natal. With his twenty-five mounted policemen, Shepstone had come and seen and conquered. The political and financial crisis in the Transvaal was real enough. The white minority were split into three factions: Boers favouring the President, Thomas Burgers; Boers favouring the Vice-President, Paul Kruger; and newly arrived British, favouring imperial intervention.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

.… No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Churchill, when informed by the president of the horrendous casualties, responded “What a holocaust!”95 But in private he called the Japanese assault “a blessing.… Greater good fortune has never happened to the British Empire.” He had finally gotten what he had so desperately sought. America was in the war. “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”96 Over in Moscow, sentiments were similar. “We sighed a deep sigh of relief,” recalled the head of the American desk of the NKVD Intelligence Directorate, Vitali Pavlov.97 Yet this was not merely cheerleading from the sidelines.

Churchill did not, and never would, have a sophisticated grasp of monetary issues, but he was ultimately swayed by the widely held view that a renunciation of the prewar parity would have been a “repudiation” of Britain’s solemn obligation to maintain the convertibility of the pound.48 This would, in his mind, have had serious geopolitical ramifications. “If we had not taken this action,” he said in announcing it, “the whole of the rest of the British Empire would have taken it without us, and it would have come to a gold standard, not on the basis of the pound sterling, but a gold standard of the dollar.” As it turned out, a “gold standard of the dollar” would result anyway, but with Britain bearing great economic costs in maintaining what was clearly an overvalued exchange rate from 1925 until 1931, when the country was ignominiously driven off gold again.

Britain could not once again be forced to bear “the dishonour and the reproaches of default” while allowing the United States to sell at its convenience to foreign markets supplied by the British, thereby cutting off British means of repayment. The government had to guard “against the present emergency being used as an opportunity for picking the eyes out of the British Empire.”110 The underlying assumption of the memo was that the United States was an ally in the war, though one that needed to be trained to behave like one. Such an assumption suffered from two key weaknesses: the United States was not yet at war with anyone, and was not about to be lectured as to what it was allowed to do in playing the role Keynes assigned to it.


pages: 549 words: 170,495

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Mayer’s book, which deals with the reproduction of the old order from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, should be supplemented by a work that details the passing on of the old colonial system, and trusteeship, from the British empire to the United States, during World War Two: William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). 3. North-South: A Program for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). For a bleaker, and perhaps truer, version of the same reality, see A. Sivananden, “New Circuits of Imperialism,” Race and Class 30, No. 4 (April–June 1989), 1–19. 4.

But I must say that having studied and indeed lived within the modern empires, I am struck by how constantly expanding, how inexorably integrative they were. Whether in Marx, or in conservative works like those by J. R. Seeley, or in modern analyses like those by D. K. Fieldhouse and C. C. Eldridge (whose England’s Mission is a central work),3 one is made to see that the British empire integrated and fused things within it, and taken together it and other empires made the world one. Yet no individual, and certainly not I, can see or fully grasp this whole imperial world. When we read the debate between contemporary historians Patrick O’Brien4 and Davis and Huttenback (whose important book Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire tries to quantify the actual profitability of imperial activities),5 or when we look at earlier debates such as the Robinson-Gallagher controversy,6 or at the work of the dependency and world-accumulation economists André Gunder Frank and Samir Amin,7 as literary and cultural historians, we are compelled to ask what all this means for interpretations of the Victorian novel, say, or of French historiography, of Italian grand opera, of German metaphysics of the same period.

Novels therefore end either with the death of a hero or heroine (Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Bazarov, Jude the Obscure) who by virtue of overflowing energy does not fit into the orderly scheme of things, or with the protagonists’ accession to stability (usually in the form of marriage or confirmed identity, as is the case with novels of Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot). But, one might ask, why give so much emphasis to novels, and to England? And how can we bridge the distance separating this solitary aesthetic form from large topics and undertakings like “culture” or “imperialism”? For one thing, by the time of World War One the British empire had become unquestionably dominant, the result of a process that had started in the late sixteenth century; so powerful was the process and so definitive its result that, as Seeley and Hobson argued toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was the central fact in British history, and one that included many disparate activities.14 It is not entirely coincidental that Britain also produced and sustained a novelistic institution with no real European competitor or equivalent.


pages: 908 words: 262,808

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Upon becoming prime minister, he did not punish the appeasers such as Chamberlain, Attlee, and to an extent Halifax, but instead, to the degree he could during the war, sought to tap—or to appear to tap—their talents. As prime minister, Churchill focused on the absolute defeat of the Axis powers and the preservation of the British Empire through the ordeal of war. He was aware of the limitations on his own power well apart from the nature of parliamentary government, arising in part from the lasting effects on the British psyche of the prior disasters of fighting in France in World War I, the eroding stature of the British Empire, and the dilemma that Britain had to fight a three-front war against the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, but without the resources of its partner-in-arms, the United States.

Such efforts were also couched in irony, given that Churchill, the colonialist, knew best that his Soviet and American allies would increasingly nose Britain out, as their powers grew and the Axis threat waned. Yet for all his genius, Churchill never quite came to accept that the logic of the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the alliance with Joseph Stalin in various ways would shortly dismantle the British Empire. The war had unleashed enormous pent-up populist passions and transnational ideological movements, and in its aftermath there would be little likelihood of the British Empire making an argument to retain at least some of its colonies on the basis of its supposed prewar civilizing mission.51 Britain’s strategic and operational mistakes, in which Churchill played a leading role, were many.

But the Mediterranean world connected three continents and had remained even more crucial after the completion of the Suez Canal for European transit to Asia and the Pacific. The Axis “spine” was predicated on a north-south corridor of fascist-controlled rail lines connecting ports on the Baltic with those on the Mediterranean. Without the Mediterranean, the British Empire could not easily coordinate its global commerce and communications. It was no wonder, then, that North Africa, Italy, and Greece became early battlegrounds, as did the age-old strategic stepping-stones across the Mediterranean at Crete, Malta, and Sicily that suffered either constant bombing or invasions.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

There were three large scabs on his forehead, as though he had recently recovered from walking into a door. In patrician, New England tones, he was giving a speech on one of his favorite subjects. “The British Empire,” he declared, “is our enemy. It’s the enemy of all decent people on this planet. The British monarchy is an obscene satanic force. And I do not exaggerate when I say satanic. Because Zeus, who is the author of the Roman Empire, and also author of the British Empire, is otherwise known as Satan. Her policy is what? To reduce the population of the planet. Cause mass deaths. Starvation. Killing. Destroy crops. This woman is satanic!”

“Stop Carl Bildt’s war against Putin.” Nobody was paying much attention, so I decided to cheer them up by accepting a free copy of their newspaper. It contained one English-language article, which argued that the financial crisis of 2008 was a manufactured catastrophe. “Call it Tonkin Gulf Syndrome,” it said. “It’s what the British Empire did to suck the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire.” The author of the article was Lyndon LaRouche. Issues that unite all commentators across the political spectrum are rare. But for the past five decades, the European Workers Party has provided one for Sweden. Everybody from SÄPO to the Communists to the Social Democrats to the libertarian Right has a long-held and consistent view on the EAP—it is profoundly, mystifyingly weird.

(“Clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front … oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.”) But he required a more prominent enemy. His pick was both astute and insane. He chose Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, then commissioned a book contending that the British Empire had never fallen but had reinvented itself as a covert body of power and influence. Dope Inc. argued that the queen controlled the world’s illegal drug markets and was fighting a secret opium war against the United States. It had been a long campaign: the British had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War and had also encouraged the development of the student anti-war movement.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In the forty years between 1674 and 1714, Boston alone averaged forty ships a year, producing more than the rest of the North American colonies combined. Indeed, it was, after London, the greatest center of shipbuilding in the British Empire, with fifteen shipyards in operation by 1700. And New Englanders were not just shipbuilders, they were soon major ship owners as well. By 1700 only the ports of London and Bristol within the British Empire outstripped Boston in shipping. The carrying trade that New England developed extended throughout the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and beyond. And it carried far more than just New England products and imports.

Indeed, one has to look to the apogee of the Roman Empire, almost two millennia ago, to find even a remotely comparable situation. Rome conquered the known world by force of arms. Its power arose from its military machine, epitomized by the legions. And every Great Power since has exercised formal political hegemony over alien peoples to advance its own interests. A century ago, the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe’s land area, while a third of the world’s people were subjects of King Edward VII. But only a small minority of those people spoke English or regarded themselves as British. The United States, however, has always been, at most, a reluctant imperialist. In the twentieth century it was the only Great Power that did not add to its sovereign territory as a result of war, although it was also the only one to emerge stronger than ever from each of that century’s three Great Power conflicts.

English has ever increasingly become the world’s unifying language, as Latin was Europe’s for centuries. Sixty percent of the students who are studying foreign languages in the world today are studying English, which is increasingly a required subject in school systems everywhere. Partly this is because, thanks to the British Empire, so many countries use English as a first or second language, but equally it is because the United States dominates the world in communications and entertainment. The Internet, the most powerful means of communication ever devised, is largely an American invention, and English is the language of more than 80 percent of the four billion Web sites now in existence.


pages: 522 words: 144,511

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

Also ye Trade Winds and ye several Tracts made by the Galeons and Flota from place to place. From Atlas Minor, London, 1736, by influential Tory cartographer Herman Moll. This map, his masterpiece, portrayed the West Indies as a region with enormous commercial potential at the core of the developing British Empire. The map also assisted British buccaneers who preyed on Spanish shipping. In Barbados, planter William Dickson recalled, the indentured servants were “stinted in their diet, and otherwise ill treated.”49 In a petition to Parliament in 1659, begging for relief, white servants indentured in Barbados described lives spent “grinding at the mills and attending the furnaces, or digging in this scorching island; having nothing to feed on (notwithstanding their hard labour) but potato roots, nor to drink, but water with such roots washed in it … being bought and sold still from one planter to another, or attached as horses and beasts for the debts of their masters, being whipt at the whipping post (as rogues) for their masters’ pleasure, and sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England.”

Chapter 5 Sugar Stirs the Universe THE SUGAR INDUSTRY AT WORK IN EUROPE Across the Atlantic, at the other end of the bridge that carried the Old World to the New, the metropolises were bound up in their colonies’ fortunes. Britain in particular had its sugar colonies and its people’s voracious sweet tooth to thank for its expanding empire. Together with the tea and coffee it sweetened, sugar was one of the most important founding blocks of the British Empire. The eighteenth-century Abbé Raynal went further, exclaiming that the “scorned [sugar] islands … double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”280 The slave-sugar complex was all-pervasive.

In his passionate and groundbreaking Capitalism and Slavery, Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued that the triangular trade contributed so heavily to British industrial development that its profits “fertilized the entire productive system of the country” and “made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development.”282 By the eighteenth century, the West Indies had become the hub of the British Empire. Sugar slaves had a direct connection to English workers; Williams cites one claim that calculates the combined needs of one planter or manager and ten of his black workers, including their foodstuffs, clothing and tools, as providing jobs for four Englishmen. Other sources provide more extravagant ratios: that one white West Indian created £10 net profit for England, 2,000 percent more than an Englishman; that every sugar worker outproduced every English worker in a ratio of 130 to 1; and that the combined worth of the sugar plantations was anywhere from £50 million to £70 million.283 To support his hypothesis, Williams noted Pitt the Younger’s 1798 estimate that the annual income from the West Indian plantations was £4 million, and that all other sources together totaled only £1 million.


pages: 555 words: 163,712

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

Daniel, to my great sorrow, is no longer here to read this. Still I thank him for sending me on the journey. CURTAIN RISING: LAST TRAIN FROM CAIRO Early Summer, 1942. Cairo. THE WORLD AS everyone knew it was coming to an end. In the vast desert west of the Nile, the Eighth Army of the British Empire was in full flight from the German and Italian forces commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. SMOKE ROSE FROM the grand British embassy facing the Nile. Smoke rose a few hundred yards down the river from the mansions of Garden City that war had transformed into British General Headquarters Middle East.

The embassy gave them passports, visas, and tickets, and they boarded yet another train—this time across the southern rim of Europe, through Yugoslavia and Italy to France.38 Poland was doomed, but its secret weapon had escaped with his life. 2 THE SEDUCTIVE CURVES OF THE DUNES September 1939. London–Cairo–Gilf Kebir. THE TROOPSHIP HAD been a luxury liner till war broke out. Ralph Bagnold had been a civilian. Now Bagnold was back in the Royal Engineers uniform he’d worn nearly half his life, with the major’s insignia on his shoulders, heading out yet again for a corner of the British Empire. By the imperturbable unreason of the military, though, his destination was East Africa, rather than Egypt.1 Bagnold knew the empty stretches of Egypt as well as any man alive, with the possible competition of Laszlo Almasy, the ambiguous Hungarian explorer. Bagnold had followed his father into the Royal Engineers.

The real native language of the royal clan was mutual resentment, since all the princes thought that “at one point or the other they or their fathers should have reigned” if the succession had proceeded properly.7 WHILE PRINCES BICKERED, a different succession took place: in 1933 a new high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, moved into the British Residency. Lampson was a career diplomat, fresh from seven years in Peking, and a recent widower. The word “imperious” could have been invented for Lampson, and not just because of his dedication to the British Empire. He stood six feet, five inches and weighed 250 pounds. Two motorcycle outriders, blasting their whistles, escorted his car on Cairo streets. He did not carry money, or his own cigarette case or fly whisk; lesser beings handled those things. He had a secretary whose job was to take down the diary entries that he dictated to record his meetings, dinner guests, and the precise number of birds he and his guests had killed in his frequent excursions to the British Residency’s private hunting grounds.8 In Cairo, Lampson met a high-society visitor, Jacqueline Castellani, daughter of a famous Italian physician and his English wife.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

But British colonies were not administrative outposts, they were British soil, and their residents were British. Until 1948, nationals of British colonies were called ‘British subjects’, meaning they had de facto citizenship of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Until 1949, everyone born or naturalised in the United Kingdom or the British empire, including independent dominions such as Canada and Australia, enjoyed that right. But British history is still confined to the isles, and the lack of acknowledgement of the rights of offshore British subjects became eroded over the years. This culminated in the 2018 Windrush scandal, where Caribbean British subjects with the right to British nationality were treated like illegal migrants, persecuted, harassed and deported.

In the 2011 film, English pensioners who decamp to India for relief from their financially pressured conditions back home end up rescuing the hapless Indian protagonist, his hotel, and sorting out his love life. It is essentially a modern-day story of colonialism, one that is paternalistic and self-deprecating, while at the same time servicing the warm nostalgia for British empire. To this genre was added the 2017 TV series The Good Karma Hospital, which finds a junior doctor beginning a new chapter of her life in southern India following heartbreak in the United Kingdom. Both titles poke fun at the setting as a sort of passive lower life form location in which the protagonist can go through their journey.

In 2017, Oxford moral and pastoral theology professor Nigel Biggar created a useful illustration of how this tool works. He said that the British should have ‘pride’ in their past and, that if they were taught to believe what the ‘strident anticolonialists’ said, that could lead to a feeling of guilt which makes the public ‘vulnerable to wilful manipulation’. The British empire, according to Biggar, was ‘morally mixed’; he asserted that ‘just like that of any nation state, pride can temper shame’. He continued: ‘Pride at the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, will not be entirely obscured by shame at the slaughter of innocents at Amritsar in 1919.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Back in the eighteenth century there were not a billion people on the face of the earth. Today there are more than 7 billion. Just as the politics, the economics and the sociology of societies today are radically different from those of the past, so is the demography. This process, which started in the British Isles and among sister peoples in the United States and the British Empire around the year 1800, spread first across Europe and then to the whole world. Much of Africa has not yet completed the transition, but most of it is well on its way. Outside sub-Saharan Africa there are barely half a dozen countries today where women have on average more than four children, the global norm as recently as the 1970s.

Although England had led the way in population growth, Scotland was in close step. Wales was often included in the English data, but Ireland was different. Whilst aware of these differences and similarities, it is possible to talk of a population explosion which was not just English but which encompassed Britain as a whole. This was important in terms of the British Empire, because both Scotland and Ireland played a disproportionate role in providing immigrants for the lands beyond Europe. Britain’s rise to global pre-eminence was based not just on the population explosion at home but also on its people coming to dominate vast continental spaces abroad. If, as historian Timothy Snyder has argued, speaking of late 1940 and early 1941, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had remade Europe ‘but Great Britain had made the world’, they did so by exporting people.28 It is worth distinguishing between three different areas in which the British had an impact.

Equally, without mass settlement these lands could not have become the great granaries and providers of meat and other essentials to a global trading system of which a newly industrialised Britain was the heart. Just as Ireland was the exception within an exception in the British Isles, so South Africa was the exception that proved the rule within the British Empire. Whereas most of Africa was judged unsuitable for European settlement, its climate unhealthy, malaria rampant and transport to its interior untenable, South Africa was seen by the British as a land of emigration thanks to its more amenable climate. People were also drawn by the lure of diamonds and gold.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Vehicles lay strewn in mangled heaps. One of the smashed cars bore a windshield sticker that said, “Unite to Fight Terrorism.” The Sri Lankan government promoted Wijeratne posthumously to the rank of general and put on a state funeral at Independence Square, a Colombo memorial to the end of the British Empire in South Asia. Army officers drew the minister’s body through the streets on a gun carriage. Sri Lankan honor guards surrounded the square. Buddhist priests eulogized Wijeratne’s accomplishments in service to the state. Soldiers fired a twenty-one-gun salute. One day after the funeral, the weekly security briefing went on as usual in the appointed Colombo conference room.

In Mahmudabad a series of bejeweled Muslim rajas administered great tracts of land from a gold and silver throne. They financed idealistic politicians such as the Mahatma Gandhi and Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. They doled out gifts to their subjects, paid stipends to renowned poets and intellectuals, plotted against the British Empire, and finally witnessed the birth of independent India and Pakistan in a bloody spasm of post-Partition riots. Abedi and nearly all of BCCI’s senior executives migrated as young adults from what is now India to newly independent Islamic Pakistan in 1947 and 1948, when the kingdoms that the British had employed to rule South Asia fell.

In 1922, when Abedi was born, Mahmudabad was the second or third largest princely state in northern India, encompassing 530 villages and thousands of hamlets and generating half a million pounds sterling in annual income. Its line of Shia Muslim rajas dated to the seventeenth century and commanded respect from the British colonial officers they served, as well as from Indians struggling for liberation from the British Empire. The Mahmudabad rajas lived in exorbitant luxury and owned several palaces in the countryside and the city of Lucknow. But they were also deeply involved in anticolonial politics and Shiite religious movements. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Abedi’s family served the rajas as revenue officers, administrators, and private secretaries.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

There are supposed to be now upwards of one million English souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea), and yet there is perhaps not the one fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! That the future of America, and with it of the British empire, depended on the availability of land was what made the contest with France so important. The defeat incurred by George Washington in 1754 inspired the British government to action; early the following year it dispatched an expedition of regular army officers and men to America to smite the French intruders and regain Britain’s rightful hold on the Ohio.

The mask concealed not mortification but anger. Who did these people—this bought solicitor, these smug lords, the corrupt ministers that made the proceeding possible—who did they think they were? Who did they think he was? It was the question of the hour; generalized, it was the question on which hung the fate of the British empire. Who were these Americans? To the British they were Britons, albeit of a turbulent sort. The Americans might live across the ocean, but the colonies they inhabited had been planted by Britain and were defended by Britain; therefore to the government of Britain—preeminently, to the British Parliament—the Americans must submit, like any other Britons.

In doing so he did not deny his American birth, for he conceived Americans to be as fully Britons as the English, Scots, and Welsh. He delineated for all who would listen the glorious future of Britain in North America, a future joining American energy to the English tradition of self-government. As a measure of his faith in the future of America within the British empire, he employed his influence to help his son William win appointment as royal governor of New Jersey. But then things began to go wrong. A foolish ministry ignored that tradition of self-government and started treating the Americans as subjects—not subjects simply of King George but of Parliament.


The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, plutocrats, traveling salesman, union organizing, Works Progress Administration

Congress had previously codified this antipathy with the passage, starting in 1935, of a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, that closely regulated the export of weapons and munitions and barred their transport on American ships to any nation at war. Americans were sympathetic toward England, but now came questions as to just how stable the British Empire was, having thrown out its government on the same day that Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. On Saturday morning, May 11, President Roosevelt convened a cabinet meeting at the White House at which England’s new prime minister became a topic of discussion. The central question was whether he could possibly prevail in this newly expanded war.

He reminded his audience that Britain had a navy. “Some people seem to forget that,” he said. He made no attempt, however, to skirt the true meaning of the French collapse. The “Battle of France” was over, he said, adding, “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”

On one occasion, crews from the nearby base at Watton “gave us the most superb aerial beating up that anyone could possibly conceive,” Mary wrote in her diary. “A flight of Blenheims appeared & one after another swooped down to within 25 or 30 feet of the ground. We all nearly passed out with excitement.” Every day these same pilots took part in life-or-death sorties that, as far as Churchill was concerned, would determine the fate of the British Empire. Civilians watched air battles unfold from the safety of their gardens or while strolling village streets and picnicking in bucolic meadows, as circular contrails filled the sky above. At dusk these caught the last of the day’s sunlight and turned a luminescent amber; at dawn, they became mother-of-pearl spirals.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

That’s how the empire became so very large. At its height, the British empire controlled almost a quarter of the world’s land mass, and a similar proportion of its people. The ‘white dominions’ of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with their substantial settler populations, were self-governing but deeply loyal to the mother country and ready to help out when needed. India, ruled dictatorially, was the single most significant colony because it provided an army and a huge market for British goods. Smaller colonies were spread across every continent: Kenya, Guyana, Malaya, Cyprus. Somewhere in the British empire it was always teatime. And even this understates the extent of Britain’s dominance of the globe.

From the start, the soldiers in the canal zone were under no illusions that anyone at home much cared about them. The newsletters contain very little discussion of politics – whether the British should have been in Egypt in the first place – but the constant misery of the low-level insurgency is sign enough that the situation was unsatisfactory. The British empire in its pomp would not have tolerated such indignities as his articles describe – constant theft from the stores, Egyptian civilians throwing bricks at patrols as they passed by, collapsing infrastructure. The end of the empire was coming, and the soldiers’ job was to try and make that end as dignified as possible.

The merchant banks, the overseas banks, the specialised finance houses and the larger stockbrokers are so swamped with business that a bright newcomer may well get his hand onto real decision-making at a very early age,’ Fry wrote. ‘Enterprise and inventiveness flourish.’ What happened between the Suez Crisis and the end of the 1960s was a rebirth: the City of London was back in the game. If Westminster was the head of the British empire, and the Royal Navy its muscles, the City was its heart, pumping money out into financial arteries that stretched to every continent and every city on earth. This blood supply – the sterling system – was, more than anything, what held the empire together. Pounds carried the oxygen of capital to any business that needed it.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

housing policies 251-3 inflation 108 institutional investors and 196-8 and insurance 4 mortgage interest relief 252 national debt 80 pensions see welfare state below poverty in 13 savings glut 293 Spanish Empire and 26 stock market 125 and sub-prime mortgages 8 voting rights 234 welfare state 199 and First World War 101-2 see also British Empire; English-speaking countries; Scotland British Empire: and bond market 101 control of colonies 294-6 corporate finance as foundation of 3 and investment 98-9 as narco-state 290 nationalist and independence movements 295 see also Britain broad money 62 brokers 153-4 Bronowski, Jacob 2 bronze 24 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 70 Bruges 47 Bubble Act 156 bubbles: asset-price 163 five stages of 8; displacement 143-4 history of 121-2 international pressures and 167 Kaffir (gold mine) 297 Mississippi 126-7 monetary policy and 166-7 property price 233 reflexivity of 316 South Sea 154 super 342 technology (dot.com) 6 see also financial crises Büchi, Hernán 216 Buckingham, Dukes of 236-40 Buenos Aires 98 Buffett, Warren 228 building societies 247. see also mutual associations Bulgaria 101 bulls (stock market) 121 Bunn, Matthew 223 bureaucracy 275 burial societies 184 Bush, President George W. 117-18.

The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong. Banks and the bond market provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance. Corporate finance was the indispensable foundation of both the Dutch and British empires, just as the triumph of the United States in the twentieth century was inseparable from advances in insurance, mortgage finance and consumer credit. Perhaps, too, it will be a financial crisis that signals the twilight of American global primacy. Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these.

This was not an especially well-timed investment. April that year saw the first victory at Montenotte of a French army led by a young Corsican commander named Napoleon Bonaparte. He won again at Lodi in May. For the next two decades, this man would pose a greater threat to the security and financial stability of the British Empire, not to mention the peace of Europe, than all the Habsburgs and Bourbons put together. Defeating him would lead to the rise of yet another mountain of debt. And as the mountain rose, so the price of individual consols declined - by as much as 30 per cent at the lowest point in Britain’s fortunes.


pages: 257 words: 56,811

The Rough Guide to Toronto by Helen Lovekin, Phil Lee

airport security, British Empire, car-free, glass ceiling, global village, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, place-making, urban renewal, urban sprawl

By the 1860s the distillery was producing two and a half million gallons of whisky from a quarter of a million bushels of grain. In 1869, a fire destroyed most of the original works, but its replacement – a series of tidy brown–brick buildings – survives to this day, on Mill Street, just east of the foot of Parliament Street. The distillery, which at one time was the largest in the British Empire, closed in 1990, but the old works remains the best-preserved Victorian industrial complex in Canada. The complex has recently been revamped as the Distillery District (see p.61), which now holds, amongst much else, art galleries, independent designers, bakeries, shops, a microbrewery and no less than three performance venues – all without a multinational chain in sight, for which blessing the developers are due (at least) three hearty cheers

Hour-long tours of the Air Canada Centre ($12) are available, and include a visit to a dressing room and the Maple Leafs Memories and Dreams Suite, which looks at the team’s history. The Royal York hotel Directly opposite the west end of the railway station, the Royal York hotel, 100 Front St W, was the largest and tallest building in the British Empire when it opened in 1929. The architects, Montreal’s Ross and Macdonald, opted for the Beaux Arts style, so as to match the hotel with Union Station, but in lieu of the formal symmetries of its neighbour, the Royal York has a cascading, irregular facade with stylistic flourishes reminiscent of a French chateau.

Moving on, Building No.6 started out as a magazine but ended up as a storehouse. Its ground floor now holds a modest display on the role of black soldiers and settlers in the early history of Ontario. The Upper Canada legislature actually banned the importation of slaves in 1793, forty years before it was abolished right across the British Empire. Up above, an archeological section displays the various bits and pieces unearthed at the fort – buckles, brooches, plates, clay pipes, tunic buttons and so forth. The most interesting piece is a “Sacred to Love” stick pin, an example of the mourning jewellery that was popular amongst Victorians.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

This falling-out between erstwhile allies (to help them fight the Palestinians in the late 1930s, Britain had armed and trained the Jewish settlers it allowed to enter the country) encouraged the outlandish idea that the Zionist movement was itself anticolonial. There was no escaping the fact that Zionism initially had clung tightly to the British Empire for support, and had only successfully implanted itself in Palestine thanks to the unceasing efforts of British imperialism. It could not be otherwise, for as Jabotinsky stressed, only the British had the means to wage the colonial war that was necessary to suppress Palestinian resistance to the takeover of their country.

The British government’s intentions and objectives at the time have been amply analyzed over the past century.22 Among its many motivations were both a romantic, religiously derived philo-Semitic desire to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic wish to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain, linked to a conviction that “world Jewry” had the power to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting in the war and bring the United States into it. Beyond those impulses, Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons that antedated World War I and that had only been reinforced by wartime events.23 However important the other motivations may have been, this was the central one: the British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project, just as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (enshrined in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France—the Sykes-Picot Agreement—in which the two powers agreed to a colonial partition of the eastern Arab countries.24 More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement—sovereignty and complete control of Palestine.

Nor did it.25 For Zionists, their enterprise was now backed by an indispensable “iron wall” of British military might, in the words of Ze’ev Jabotinksy. For the inhabitants of Palestine, whose future it ultimately decided, Balfour’s careful, calibrated prose was in effect a gun pointed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population. The majority now faced the prospect of being outnumbered by unlimited Jewish immigration to a country then almost completely Arab in its population and culture. Whether intended this way or not, the declaration launched a full-blown colonial conflict, a century-long assault on the Palestinian people, aimed at fostering an exclusivist “national home” at their expense


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

New York was merely a bargaining chip for these great powers, and the account of the treaty signing that ran in the London Gazette did not mention the restoration of New York City.33 New York continued to benefit by way of its “Dutch connection” with places in the West Indies like Curaçao, where the Dutch trade remained important, but England was a rising power that was beginning to exercise economic and political authority abroad and to organize an empire, and the city prospered as part of the British Empire. Its merchants thus became avid participants in a cultural and economic system called “gentlemanly capitalism.”34 British historians such as P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins attribute the origins of the British Empire to the effects of this gentlemanly capitalism, which they identify as a set of cultural, political, and economic forces that was propelled by a group of merchants and financiers who used overseas trade as a means to acquire the wealth, prestige, and connections they needed to reach a higher social level.

I follow Bourdieu in viewing cultural tastes and social measures as tools that people wield in their efforts to possess these goods, with the definition and boundary marking of high-status categories (such as “upper class”) among the most precious stakes up for grabs.9 We start in the 1750s, when New York City was a lesser seaport and provincial capital in the British Empire and when its upper class consisted of royal officials, merchants, planters, and leading professionals. 1 “THE BEST MART ON THE CONTINENT” The 1750s and 1760s AN APPRAISAL OF NEW YORK CITY IN 1753 In 1753 William Livingston wrote a pamphlet entitled A Brief Consideration of New York that proclaimed the superiority of his native province and its major city over other colonies.

The incompatibility of gentility with overly aggressive moneymaking and the privileged status of royal administrators relegated merchants to a secondary position in that upper class. In the end, what did not change in the 1750s and 1760s proved more important than what did change. Despite New York’s newfound centrality in the British Empire, the Seven Years’ War represents a false dawn in the history of the city. The war did not expand New York’s economy or its population, alter the social composition or the status hierarchy of the upper class, or stimulate new ways of acting and thinking on the part of its merchants. Those transformations would begin later, during the nation-building efforts of the 1780s and 1790s, and would accelerate with the economic growth of the nineteenth century.


pages: 750 words: 169,026

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East by James Barr

bank run, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Khartoum Gordon, operational security, Scramble for Africa, short selling, éminence grise

After the sultan’s government went bankrupt in 1876 the British government abandoned a fifty-year-old policy of supporting the Ottomans’ integrity and independence as a bulwark against other powers’ ambitions. In 1878 Britain seized Cyprus and, four years later, Egypt and the Suez Canal in order to secure the route to India. As the canal turned into the major artery for Britain’s growing eastern commerce, Egypt became the fulcrum of the British Empire. While British investors took what was left of their money and ran, following the Ottoman default, the French moved in to replace them. The French already enjoyed significant prestige within the Ottoman Empire through their religious institutions, which ran dozens of schools that were better and more popular than their Ottoman equivalents.

Kitchener, the minister for war, whose face and finger were now emblazoned on recruiting posters on streets across the land, had previously run Egypt. Lloyd George, the quicksilver minister for munitions, was violently anti-Turkish and liked the idea of further imperial expansion at the Ottomans’ expense. Balfour, the former Conservative prime minister, now at the Admiralty, felt the British Empire had reached its limits, and did not. ‘I feel we ought to settle with France as soon as possible, and get a definite understanding about Syria,’ Sykes proposed.¹⁷ ‘What sort of an arrangement would you like to have with the French?’ asked Balfour. ‘I should like to retain for ourselves such country south of Haifa,’ replied Sykes, gesturing to his map.

He began to argue that, by supporting the creation of a Jewish colony immediately east of Suez, Britain could deny that territory to rival foreign powers who might then threaten its control of the Suez Canal. ‘We cannot proceed on the supposition that our present happy relations with France will continue always,’ he warned his colleagues. ‘A common frontier with a European neighbour in the Lebanon is a far smaller risk to the vital interests of the British Empire than a common frontier at El Arish.’ Samuel also argued that such a move would generate goodwill for Britain within the Jewish diaspora. Large numbers of Jews, who faced repression in Eastern Europe and especially in Russia, had migrated westwards in the years before the war. Yet, although the Jewish population in Britain quadrupled in the thirty years before the war, many Jews regarded their new home as tainted by its alliance with the oppressive Tsarist regime from which many of them had fled.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Roxburgh ensured that the Indian artists carefully separated out the sexual organs of the plants, as well as the seeds, as these were crucial for identifying different species under the Linnaean system.34 In the Calcutta Botanical Garden we can ultimately see Enlightenment science in microcosm. It was an institution, established by the expanding British Empire, for the purpose of economic gain. And it was built on land that the British had seized, by military force, from local Indian rulers. At the same time, the Calcutta Botanical Garden was also a place in which a diversity of cultures and scientific traditions came together, from Scottish surgeons to Indian artists.

By 1900, Calcutta had been transformed into an industrial metropolis, with steamships going up and down the Hooghly River and jute mills supplying the world market for cloth and cordage. As elsewhere, electricity was widely considered a marker of industrial modernity. Telegraph lines criss-crossed the country, connecting India to the wider British Empire, whilst various private companies began manufacturing and installing electric lights in Indian cities. In fact, Bose himself advised on the introduction of the first electric streetlights in Calcutta in 1891.63 Despite the growth of science and industry under colonial rule, opportunities for Indians to conduct original research were still relatively rare.

Born into a poor Hindu family in Bengal, Saha had only recently been admitted to the prestigious Government Collegiate School in Dacca, in modern-day Bangladesh. He was getting on well, studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry. But in the summer of 1905, Saha took part in a protest which would define the rest of his life. At the time, Bengal was still under colonial rule, part of the British Empire in India. Since the late nineteenth century, many Indians had campaigned against the injustices of empire. However, the fight against colonialism was about to enter a new stage. In July 1905, the Viceroy of India announced his intention to divide Bengal into two new provinces: Hindu-majority West Bengal, and Muslim-majority East Bengal.


Racing With Death by Beau Riffenburgh

British Empire, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, scientific management

They did buck up temporarily on the morning of 17 October when they reached Cape Bernacchi, a low, rocky promontory dominated by pure white crystalline marble. Here, with a flag that motor-car driver Bernard Day had made out of a jumble of fabrics, they took possession of Victoria Land for the British Empire. Almost a week later, they were still crawling at a snail’s pace over slowly decaying sea ice while the Sound gradually broke up to their one side and the mountains loomed over them on their other. Frustrated, Mawson proposed that they forsake the Magnetic Pole altogether and concentrate on ‘what I had understood was to be the work of the expedition provided the Mag Pole were not reasonably obtainable … the coast geographic and magnetic survey with detailed geological reconnaissances at picked spots, the whole allowing us to return to Dry Valley.’

Mawson determined that if they waited where they were for twenty-four hours, the Pole would likely come to them, but rather than do this, they decided to push on thirteen miles to where he calculated the mean position to lie. The next day, they continued until lunch, after which, leaving behind all gear other than a flag and a camera, they trudged the final five miles to Mawson’s ‘mean position’ at 72°15'S, 155°16'E. There, at a height of 7,260 feet, they hoisted the flag made by Day, claimed the area for the British Empire, and gave three cheers. David pulled a string attached to the camera to snap a picture of them. This done, there was no reason to linger, so they did an immediate about-turn. Their major task now was to reach the coast in time for the ship to collect them. Only a week before, 1,114 statute miles farther south, Shackleton, Wild, Marshall, and Adams had held a similar ceremony.

Speaking to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he explained how multiple bases spread along the Antarctic coast would engage in meteorological, magnetic, geological, and geographical work to open up the mysteries of what he called ‘the Australian Quadrant’ of the Antarctic. In addition, he claimed other benefits would accrue: a ship-based oceanographic programme, the expansion of Australian whaling and sealing, the establishment of meteorological stations for weather forecasting, and the verification of Australia as a key component of the British Empire. Within days, with the backing of David Orme Masson, professor of chemistry at the University of Melbourne and president of the AAAS, Mawson was voted £1,000, one-third of the Association’s liquid assets. In addition, a special committee for the expedition was organised to arrange the details of the scientific work and officially to appoint expedition members.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

That this is a strong prefiguration of the mentality of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four will be obvious; that it is no exaggeration is confirmed by the memoir of Orwell’s friend and contemporary Christopher Hollis, who visited him in Burma in 1925 and discovered him mouthing the platitudes of law-and-order: ‘He was at pains to be the imperial policeman, explaining that these theories of punishment and no beating were all very well at public schools, but that they did not work with the Burmese... ’ Four years later, in the pages of Le Progrès Civique in Paris, a certain ‘E. A. Blair’ contributed an essay in French entitled ‘Comment on exploite un peuple: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’ (‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burm’). The article could justly be described as workman-like; it commences with a careful account of the country’s topography and demography and proceeds to a meticulous examination of the way the colonial power fleeces the Burmese of their natural resources and the fruits of their labour.

., it is worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this:Mr. Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organisation which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare — sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables.

I know people who automatically switch off the radio as soon as any American news comes on, and the most banal English film will always get middle-class support because ‘it’s such a relief to get away from those American voices.’ Americans are supposed to be boastful, bad-mannered and worshippers of money, and are also suspected of plotting to inherit the British Empire. (Orwell forgot that last bit when he muttered, shortly after the war, about the new American empire that was ‘advancing behind a smoke-screen of novelists’.) In other words, he could reprobate simplistic anti-Americanism in others even when not completely eliminating it in himself. This ambiguity, as I’ve already tried to point out, occurs in almost all his discussions of prejudice.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

14 There is a sense that the glorious deserve their renown, and that glory bears a badge of honor. And of all the different kinds of glory—celluloid, mathematical, culinary—none shines brighter than military glory. Even the humblest citizens sense that they share in it. The East Ender in Kipling’s day might think that, poor as he was, at least he partook of membership in the British Empire. It is the same for Americans today who bask in the glory of their country. Nietzsche thought it natural that we should seek power and that the weak should serve the strong.15 Realist students of international relations, such as Hans J. Morgenthau, agreed and identified a Nietzschean desire for dominance as the principal cause of rivalry and conflict between nations.16 Once a country finds itself able to become top dog, it will have difficulty resisting the temptation to do so.

The establishment of a Northern Ireland parliament for the six majoritarian Protestant counties failed to pacify the country, and the law was superseded by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State. The treaty’s first article stated that “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada,” which by then was an independent country. The treaty’s “Canada clause” further provided that the relation of Great Britain to Ireland would be as that of Britain to Canada, “and the law, practice and constitutional usage” of Canada would govern Britain’s relation to the Irish Free State.6 By 1921, what the Canadian model offered was full independence.

Finland will defend its borders but has no wish to extend them. It’s only larger countries that to seek to dominate their region, or the world, and having done so they find it very painful to retreat into smallness. Churchill said he did not become prime minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, and he didn’t. That task he passed on to his successors, who presided over Indian independence in 1947 and the Suez debacle in 1956. After Britain gave up its empire, America became the world’s policeman. In a widely praised address at the American Enterprise Institute in 2004, Charles Krauthammer explained what this entailed: “If someone invades your house, you call the cops.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

He urged robust military action to defend British oil interests and the empire, so as to restore confidence in sterling and return it to its glorious place at the forefront of world affairs. ‘This is the choice,’ Macmillan wrote: ‘to slide into a shoddy and slushy socialism, or the march to the third British Empire.’5 Macmillan didn’t seem to grasp that Britain’s imperial magnificence had already, inexorably, begun to crumble. India had gained its independence in 1947, and others would soon follow. The trigger for the near-total collapse of the British empire was the decision by Egypt’s feisty president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to take over the Suez Canal in 1956. Britain and France joined Israel in an invasion of the canal zone, but the United States, which had lost patience with European imperialism and fretted that the escapade would inflame pro-Soviet passions in the Arab world, forced the invaders to withdraw.

This contrast between apparently clean officials and dirty money is no coincidence; it is the heart of the offshore model. With the collapse of the British empire in the second half of the twentieth century, the City temporarily lost its ability to use gunboats and government officials to extract riches from foreign countries, but the overseas territories tax havens, plugged into the Euromarkets, enabled the City to regain its wealth-extracting mojo. Professor Ronen Palan of City University, one of the first academics to take tax havens seriously, describes this spider’s web as ‘a second British empire which is at the very core of global financial markets today’. This second financial empire, with London at the centre of a globe-spanning web of loose money, has many characteristics in common with Britain’s lost territorial empire.

The results include lower economic growth, steeper inequality, inefficient markets, damage to public services, worse corruption, the hollowing-out of alternative economic sectors, and widespread damage to democracy and to society. To unpack the idea of the finance curse we’ll go on a century-long journey that spans the globe; from the era of American robber barons in the early twentieth century, through the 1950s to explore the rebirth of the City of London as a global financial centre after the fall of the British empire, to the birth of modern British tax havens in the Caribbean in the 1960s, then to explore the early roots of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy in the 1970s and 80s, and then on to uncover some surprising truths about London’s outsized role in generating the global financial crisis. After the crisis, we enter the peculiar world of wealth managers, examine the billionaire-friendly subterfuges and immense powers of the accounting giants, and follow the twisting corporate trails leading from care workers in northern England up to the glittering offices of private equity moguls in Mayfair.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

These ships were, in the words of one naval historian, ‘symbols of the men and nation that had dominated the sea lanes of the Pacific since the days of Anson and Cook’.22 The fall of Singapore, the psychological death-blow to the British Empire and the single worst defeat in the war for British forces, followed swiftly. But Lt Iki’s gallant action was not simply a tribute to the sunken ships, the Royal Navy generally, or even to that expiring British Empire the Japanese had long admired. It was also a tribute to an Aberdeenshire aristocrat, William Francis Forbes, the Master of Semphill. Semphill is one of those Britons forgotten here, remembered over there.

This was the moment when Britain was on the edge and her modern story begins. From that decision on that day, everything follows. First, there was the war, from the Battle of Britain, through Pearl Harbor to the final defeat of Germany and Japan. So, second, the world was differently shaped. The end of the British Empire, once the world’s greatest, and the rise of the United States as ruler of the free world occurred for complicated reasons. But they can be plausibly traced back to what Winston, Clem and Arthur agreed was the right thing to do on that difficult day in May. That decision made contemporary Britain, with her weaknesses and strengths, which are the subject of this book.

Deference and respect for the Royal Family, belief in the superiority of the white man, a complacent assumption that British manufacturing was still best . . . all that survived seemingly unaltered through the years of danger. Britain still believed herself to be in her imperial heyday, mistress of the seas. Though we think of it as essentially Victorian, the British Empire, declaring itself the first ‘world state’ had continued to grow right up until the mid-thirties. At the beginning of the Second World War there were some 200 colonies, dominions and possessions connected to London, covering more than 11 million square miles. The Empire embraced Pacific tribesmen and Eskimos, ancient African kingdoms and the rubble of the great Mughal empire, Australian farmers and the gold-miners of South Africa.


pages: 424 words: 140,262

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

Although this had been rather unsuccessful, the company established itself as a pioneering manufacturer and Beyer spent nearly twenty years there before founding his own firm, Beyer Peacock & Company, which would later build locomotives for the early London Underground lines and ultimately construct 8,000 locomotives, many for the British Empire, till the firm’s demise in 1966. As with the early railways in Britain and France, the train service on the completed stub of a line between Leipzig and Althen was an immediate success. Within a couple of months, there were six daily trains each capable of carrying 150 people in each direction every Sunday, more than on any other day, suggesting not only that the tourist market was dominant, but also that, unlike in the UK, there were no concerns about religious objections to Sunday running.

Consequently, as Michael Robbins puts it, ‘Until about 1870… Britain was the heart and centre of railway activity throughout the world’, 1 and while Britain’s own network suffered from unnecessary duplication and a proliferation of lines that could never be viable because the government deliberately eschewed planning or any attempts to control the private companies building the network, its lead was such that its technology, expertise and finance were exported to many countries, including very unlikely ones such as several in Latin America and Asia with little previous connection with the British Empire. British technology, therefore, was widely imitated and its finance in the last quarter of the century became vitally important for many systems, but the British style of laissez-faire planning for the railways, characterized by lack of interest from the state, was rarely imitated. Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, was the most obvious country to be influenced by British technology, but oddly this did not extend to the choice of gauge.

Both these railways were clearly intended to be the start of a network, linking Bombay with Pune and eventually Madras, and Calcutta with Delhi and later through the newly conquered Punjab right through to Lahore in what is now Pakistan. Dalhousie had been pressing for the creation of a strategic rail network since his appointment as Governor General. He was the sort of dynamic modernizer which the British Empire occasionally threw up and he later claimed he had unleashed in India the ‘great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations – I mean railways, uniform postage and the electric telegraph’. 11 Indeed, he had a past interest in the railways, having chaired a Parliamentary Committee in 1844–5 which attempted to put some order into the chaotic situation when at the height of the railway mania Parliament had been literally inundated with bills petitioning to build lines.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Most biographical mentions of him minimize mention of his work in the subcontinent, even though it remains the Radcliffe Line—This Bloody Line, he called it—for which he is best known. It may be easy to blame the outrage over the drawing of the Radcliffe Line on the plain fact that it was British inspired, its twists and turns drawn with a British fountain pen by one of the British empire’s architects. But that would be too simplistic. Over at the Khyber Pass the Durand Line, also a relic of the empire, drawn half a century before, confirms a natural division between empires and civilizations that is in most places marked organically, by ranges of mountains. It is notable that the Durand line had been formally surveyed and marked by a succession of joint Afghan-British teams, working under the superintendence of the British civil servant after which the line is named, Sir Mortimer Durand.

“It was during the Enlightenment that maps acquired their associations with political liberty and egalitarianism, and it was during the Romantic period that this was supplemented by a deeply felt love for nature and solitary wandering. Proponents of both movements projected these ideas onto the great ‘national undertaking’, the Ordnance Survey.” It is these days, and surely rightly so, deeply unfashionable to speak sympathetically or with anything other than contempt and scorn about the British empire. The reasons are obvious, and legion, and millions around the world have good reason for remembering the British with disfavor. “When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land.

So, what would eventually happen in Oklahoma, and which was centered most profoundly around the distribution of land, was now firmly on the horizon. What would be particularly egregious examples of land grabbing now simply required the passage of time—a century and a half of further colonial rule, then the creation of the United States out of the divided remains of the gigantic American fiefdom of the British empire, and a century more of Washington’s independent governance, briefly fractured though it was during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. During all of these periods of North American history, native lands were being thinned and culled and native people were being slain and pinioned into remote reservations, tracts that were often waterless or infertile or both, impenetrable laagers that no white man would ever wish for.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide had expanded from obscure British outposts to brash commercial centers through mining. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the six Anglo-Australian colonies had federated into an independent dominion within the British Empire. With new mineral discoveries slowing, Australians were beginning to look offshore for further growth. Antarctica might provide that opportunity, Shackleton offered. Surely, it promised the prestige of discovery and the possibility of adventure. These arguments had been made before in Australia, most notably by the Australian Antarctic Exploring Committee, a group of Melbourne-based scientists interested in establishing research stations on the southern continent, but few Australians had listened.

“We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass,” Ross declared.20 The magnetic pole, he determined, lay to the west, behind Victoria Land’s so-called Western Mountains; the geographic pole lay south beyond the ice barrier. Ross could not reach either by ship. Indeed, sailing in wind-powered ships, he could only effect one brief landing, and it was on a rocky islet off the Victoria Land coast, which he presumptuously named Possession Island because on it he claimed possession of the entire region for the British Empire. After cruising twice along the barrier, Ross returned home to report on what he had seen. He could not gauge the ice shelf’s southern extent or say if Victoria Land was part of a continent or merely a large island. No one went back for nearly six decades to settle these points. By then, popular interest in polar exploration had increased, and the Australians were positioned to play a role.

“Twed would eat ship biscuit if I were not here, and would eat that standing over his drill,” his adventuresome wife, Cara, noted in her travel diary, using an acronym for David made from his four initials.47 By jury-rigging the equipment as he went, David managed to drill down over 500 feet by the time he had to depart, with the core still showing coral. While this did not strictly prove Darwin’s subsidence theory, it disproved every alternative hypothesis and won David election to the British Empire’s premier scientific association, the Royal Society. After returning from Funafuti, David resumed his work in glacial geology, leading to a breakthrough that cinched his place on the Nimrod Expedition. Building on the work of University of Adelaide geologist Walter Howchin, he developed and publicized evidence from South Australia of a third global ice age that had occurred eons before the two previously known ones.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

How else can we hope to understand the re-emergence of China and India, the growing influence of Russia and the closer integration into the world economy of nations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe? Through much of the twentieth century, political systems prevented economies from becoming more integrated: indeed, they pushed economies further apart. The collapse of the British Empire, the destruction associated with the First World War, the rise of nationalism, fascism and communism, the horrors of the Second World War and the stalemate of the Cold War all contributed to the destruction of economic relationships. These relationships are now rapidly being rebuilt. Changing patterns of trade and investment opportunities around the world provide compelling evidence of this shift.

As its ventures in India became more complex, so it built up a large private army to protect its interests (matching the earlier behaviour of the Dutch East India Company). It wasn’t long before a commercial operation turned into political ambition, thereby providing an early example of today’s state capitalism, a theme I explore in greater detail in Chapter 7. The mercenaries of the private army became regular soldiers, and India was absorbed into the British Empire. The Opium Wars of the nineteenth century provide a similar example. Again, the East India Company was involved, increasingly exporting opium to a lucrative Chinese market. Again, the British government supported Britain’s commercial interests. The rising demand in Britain for Chinese luxuries such as porcelain and silk had to be paid for somehow.

This was a world of empires and imperfect suffrage. Under the influence of self-determination, sponsored by an increasingly powerful US hostile to colonial influence, the empires of the nineteenth century collapsed in the wars and economic crises that followed. The biggest casualty, most obviously, was the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire went the same way and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, so did the Soviet Union’s twentieth-century empire. The result was a huge proliferation of nation states. According to Freedom House, there were only fifty-five sovereign countries in 1900, alongside thirteen empires.


pages: 414 words: 128,962

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, connected car, Etonian, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Khyber Pass, land reform, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, rewilding, Silicon Valley

Today, at this point, the wall no longer even marked the edge of the farmer’s field, let alone a nation. On the ridge line, I could see an old farmer calling his dog, the straight line of his crook extended beneath his still hands. A dozen sheep broke loose, and jumped the wall again. * At lunch on the third day, I asked my father, ‘Do you think that you felt proud of the British Empire in the way in which Romans felt proud of the Roman Empire?’ ‘Well, it is very difficult to answer that kind of question,’ he said. ‘We were imperialists, no doubt. I was very proud of the Empire. Even my aunties in Kirriemuir liked the idea of “the Empire on which the sun never sets”.’ ‘And was it a Scottish empire?’

Our heroes were Scots connected to Empire: that chieftain, for example, not Lord Lovat – the other one – Maclean. Fitzroy Maclean. We Scots dominated almost half the Diplomatic List – and we were the best soldiers in the army. And so on. But we didn’t want to be a separate Scotland – we’d have thought it was boring – we wanted to be part of a British Empire.’ He talked about humming bagpipe tunes to keep his spirits up under bombardment in Hanoi. (His windows were blown out and his neighbours were killed.) He had poured whisky into the soup at every lunch in Vietnam to keep other ambassadors onside. And everywhere he was the Scot. ‘Ah yes,’ a Malay said once, ‘you were the Scottish Chinese Affairs officer.’

It was not much, but enough perhaps to question whether the Romans were really as unsentimental about their children as the stern, unbending marble statues of imperial heroes might suggest. * Although I was born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia, I did not feel I had been brought up as a child of the British Empire. My father’s time in the Malayan Colonial Service was over before I was born. The pictures of him in his white uniform, with his pith helmet and ceremonial sword, seemed to resemble to the last detail the Sargent portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham in 1904, which was also on the dust jacket of a book in our house.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

The inept, unjust, impersonal bureaucracy and lack of care that resulted in the Windrush scandal do not. The lessons of what happened should be learned by the machinery of government. THE BRITISH EMPIRE Britain’s view about its colonial past is being revised. We have not always taught the Empire in classrooms, leading some to accuse us of historical amnesia. But the truth is many of us did not know anything to forget. We haven’t been informed and therefore we haven’t had time to think or evaluate the bad and the good of our country’s past. At its height in 1922, the British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen, covering a quarter of the world’s total land area and one fifth of humanity.

The panel spoke about both the good and the bad: ‘In Britain, we’re ashamed of our colonial past, but when I work with highly educated people from around the world, they often say the British system is why they are where they are today.’ A YouGov poll published on 19 January 2019 found that 43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 32 per cent were proud of Britain’s colonial history.95,96 In the same poll, 19 per cent said it was bad. Although the proponents of the Empire say it brought various economic developments to the parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines, the use of concentration camps.

When refusing an MBE for services to the arts, writer and spoken-word artist Jonzi D said, ‘Man, I’m a Star Wars fan – Empire is bad.’99 Fellow spoken-word artist and podcaster George the Poet, aka George Mpanga, expressed similar sentiments when he rejected an honour in 2019, saying he had done so because of the ‘pure evil’ perpetrated by the British Empire. ‘It’s not fair that in order to accept this accolade, in order to accept this recognition, I have to submit to that interpretation of empire,’ he said.100 We don’t want to offend its existing recipients. We don’t want to make a fuss; it is, after all, only 2 per cent who refuse. Yet, the fact that one in fifty do, for the reason George explained, should make us pause.


pages: 1,000 words: 247,974

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Penzer, Federation of British Industries, Intelligence Department, Cotton in British West Africa (London: Federation of British Industries, 1920); John Harris, Parliamentary Secretary of the Society, to E. Sedgwick, Boston, November 10, 1924, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, MSS. British Empire S22, G143, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth & African Studies, University of Oxford; John Harris to Maxwell Garnett, January 20, 1925, MSS. British Empire 522, G446, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; D. Edwards-Radclyffe, “Ramie, The Textile of the Future,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, Third Series, 20 (July–October 1905): 47. 18.

England’s domination of these global networks, as we will see, was essential to recast production and become the unlikely source of the cotton-fueled Industrial Revolution. While certainly still revolutionary, industrial capitalism was the offspring of war capitalism, the previous centuries’ great innovation.3 Samuel Greg and his fellow innovators knew that the global reach and power of the British Empire gave them a tremendous advantage over their fellow merchants and artisans in Frankfurt, Calcutta, or Rio de Janeiro. Having started out as a merchant in the employ of his uncles, he had already organized a large putting-out network of cotton spinners and weavers in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside before investing in his new machines.

But while the cotton plant found a favorable environment in large stretches of the world’s arable lands, Lancashire, or anywhere else in the British Isles for that matter, was not among them. Outside of the greenhouses at the Royal Gardens at Kew (which to this day showcase the core commodities on which the British Empire rested), Britain and much of Europe was too cold and wet for cotton. Among European leaders, only French revolutionaries, with their fervent belief in inventing the world anew, seriously tried to outwit the local climate and grow cotton—and even they failed.5 Indeed, British cotton manufacturing—and later, manufacturing across Europe—seemed a poor bet, for it was the first major industry in human history that lacked locally procured raw materials.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

The truth which, as Sebald says, ‘lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered’. * But, to return to Günter Grass’s implicit challenge, how should we begin trying to teach our children about the crimes and genocides committed in the name of the British Empire? Where would you start? There is an immediate challenge here – whereas the particular savagery of Nazism occured within a twelve-year span (or perhaps two generations, going back to its causation), the violence unleashed by the British Empire took place over almost 500 years – more than twenty generations. The contrast with Germany could not be greater. And this is not only a matter of the time frame. The Holocaust took place in a recognisably modern world – we can see television images of Hitler and Himmler chatting, of the senior perpetrators on trial at Nuremberg, we even have images and photographs of the extermination camps.

No one points out that during Hitler’s childhood, a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction that ‘inferior races’ were by nature condemned to extinction: the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way. All German historians participating in this debate seem to look in the same direction. None looks to the west. But Hitler did. What Hitler wished to create when he sought Lebensraum in the east was a continental equivalent of the British Empire. It was in the British and other western European peoples that he found the models, of which the extermination of the Jews is … ‘a distorted copy’. We are part of a European culture, for which the extinction of peoples is not a recent phenomenon, but a pattern repeated over centuries. The first documented European genocide began in 1478 – that of the advanced Berber-speaking inhabitants of the Canary Islands (then ironically called ‘the Fortunate Isles’) – the Guanches.

When I began researching in the late 1990s, very little had been published on the subject; it seemed to be one of the least known, one of the least understood of all genocides. I wondered whether one of the reasons for this cultural invisibility in the West, aside from our historic racism, was that imperial Germany, quite explicitly, had copied the brutal methodologies already established by the British Empire in its colonies and by the United States in its treatment of American indigenous peoples. So maybe there was a deep-rooted, and unacknowledged, shame in our cultures that did not want to see the linkage between our extermination of indigenous peoples and what Germany did to the people of South-West Africa, and later to its own Jewish population.


pages: 535 words: 144,827

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war . . . . . . However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.4 It did not quite amount to a volte-face – any more than did Hitler’s temporary change of tactic – but it came close. The bizarre assertion that the crisis was taking place ‘in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’ seemed especially egregious.

The animal duly dived into it and Read shut the door. Shortly after, the local stag hunt rode up. On Chamberlain’s instructions, the chauffeur professed to have no idea of their quarry’s whereabouts. The hunt galloped off, and the animal was saved. All this time, Chamberlain – the most powerful elected official in the British Empire – remained in the highest branches of the tree, saw in hand, silent and unobserved.7 Neville Chamberlain was also a martyr to gout, and Read became expert, he recalled, at easing the Prime Minister’s swollen feet into his boots. The chauffeur even says that, when Chamberlain had occasion to fly to Germany for the first crisis meeting with Hitler, there were discussions as to whether he might be included in the party, in case a gout attack occurred during the crucial negotiations.

A plan to allow these persecuted Jews into Britain. What good purpose will it serve? Is it proposed to admit more refugees into Britain? That is a dangerous proposition. We have already accepted our full quota of foreign Jews. We cannot assimilate any more.50 It might be possible to allow Jews to settle in ‘undeveloped parts’ of the British Empire, of course. Except Palestine, which ‘cannot take in any more of them’. Otherwise the problem was a ‘purely administrative one which should be dealt with by Mr Chamberlain and his colleagues’. Under the rubric ‘Least said—’ the leader column concluded with matchless banality: The Daily Express has the greatest sympathy with the Jews.


pages: 239 words: 64,987

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, European colonialism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Ironically, when France retained Guadeloupe but lost Canada—held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries—the demand this created for West India cure in the French Caribbean led New Englanders on a direct collision course with the British Crown. The conflict went back to the Acts of Trade and Navigation, one of the foundations of the British Empire, according to which colonists were to sell their goods to England and buy their goods from England. Legally, New Englanders should not have traded directly with Spain and the Caribbean but were supposed to have sold their cod to England and then to have purchased Spanish wine and iron from England.

Felton & Company, a Boston rum maker founded in the early nineteenth century, described the trade with remarkable candor in its 1936 drink guide. “Ship owners developed a cycle of trade involving cargoes of slaves to the West Indies—a cargo of Blackstrap Molasses from those islands to Boston and other New England ports—and finally the shipment of rum to Africa.” Soon the British Empire was not only too small a market for New England’s cod catch but too small a molasses producer for New England’s distilleries. Total British West Indies molasses production was less than two-thirds of what Rhode Island alone imported. The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses.

The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses. Then the British Crown, after letting New Englanders taste free trade for more than a century, decided in 1733 to regulate molasses as a key step toward reasserting its control over commerce. Instead the measure turned out to be one of the first inadvertent steps toward dismantling the British Empire. WEST INDIA IN THE WEST INDIES TIME SO HARD YOU CANNOT DENY THAT EVEN SALTFISH AND RICE WE CAN HARDLY BUY. —1940s calypso by “the Tiger” (Neville Marcano) In Puerto Rico there was a piropia, a catcall to attractive women, that went Tanto carne, y yo comiendo bacalao (so much meat, and I’m just eating salt cod).


pages: 165 words: 47,405

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Think of Mexico, large parts of which we took over in the 1840s, or Hawaii, which was stolen by force and guile in 1898. In both cases the native population was pretty much replaced, they weren’t colonized. Again, not totally replaced. The indigenous people are still there, but they’ve essentially been taken over. Also, if you look at the traditional empires, say, the British empire, it’s not so clear that the population of Britain gained from it. It’s a very difficult topic to study, but there have been a couple of attempts. And for what it’s worth, the general conclusion is that the costs and the benefits pretty much balanced out. Empires are costly. Running Iraq is not cheap.

The Marshall Plan aid to France just about covered the costs of the French effort to reconquer Indochina. So the U.S. taxpayer wasn’t rebuilding France. They were paying the French to buy American weapons to crush the Indo-Chinese. And they were paying Holland to crush the independence movement in Indonesia. Returning to the British empire, the costs to the British people may have been about on a par with the benefits that the British people received from it, but for the guys who were running the East India Company the empire led to fantastic wealth. For the British troops who were dying out in the wilderness somewhere, the costs were serious.

. … The twenty-first-century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. “14 Of course, the apologists for every imperial power have said the same thing. So you can go back to John Stuart Mill, one of the most outstanding Western intellectuals. He defended the British empire in very much those words. Mill wrote the classic essay on humanitarian intervention.15 Everyone studies it in law schools. He argued that Britain is unique in the world. It’s unlike any country in history. Other countries have crass motives and seek gain and so on, but the British act only for the benefit of others.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution. While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company.

At least some of the praise usually heaped on Mahatma Gandhi for his non-violent creed is actually owed to the British Empire. Despite many years of bitter and often violent struggle, when the end of the Raj came, the Indians did not have to fight the British in the streets of Delhi and Calcutta. The empire’s place was taken by a slew of independent states, most of which have since enjoyed stable borders and have for the most part lived peacefully alongside their neighbours. True, tens of thousands of people perished at the hands of the threatened British Empire, and in several hot spots its retreat led to the eruption of ethnic conflicts that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (particularly in India).

They can swallow and digest more and more nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity. The British state of today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any place on earth could have become part of the British Empire. Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique character, but also their central role in history. It’s thanks to these two characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby fusing together larger and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

After an initial flurry of productive activity at new frontiers, Giovanni Arrighi argues, “decreasing returns set in; competitive pressures on the system’s governmental and business agencies intensify; and the stage is set for the change of phase from material to financial expansion.”88 After a roughly century-long cycle of accumulation has generated profits and more liquid capital, the balance of power shifts in a moment of crisis away from the capitalists who organized the accumulation and into the hands of bankers. This happened in the Genoese, Dutch, and British Empires, and it’s now playing out in the United States. But there’s something very different about the era of financialization that began in the 1980s. Previous great financial expansions could all count on imperialism to extend profit-making opportunities into significant new frontiers of cheap nature.

Index Aboriginal Australians, 99, 200 accumulation: as capitalism’s driving force, 38, 87–88; and cheap food, 144; financial engineering and, 88–89; and remaking of nature, 26; wars and, 69 Afonso de Albuquerque, 17 Africa: cultural interventions in, 231n97; Europe, Supported by Africa and America (Blake), 112 fig. 1; extinction in, 213n7; Green Revolution, 150, 157–58 Africans: in domain of Nature, 109; expulsions of, 39; New World production system and, 46; social death for, 30; transatlantic enslavement of women, 129–130. See also slaves/slavery Agricola, Georgius, 73 agricultural revolutions: climate change and, 159–160; in Europe, 232n12; Green Revolution, 149–152; inorganic fertilizer, 147, 172–74 agricultural sector: agricultural revolutions, 103; of Brazil, 143; of British empire, 141–43; communal ownership, 220n51; of Europe, 142–43; of France, 142–43; of Mexico, 142; of Poland, 142; and productivity, 48; swidden agriculture, 231n8; work and, 103. See also Cheap Food Alfonso V, King of Portugal, 92 Anderson, Benedict, 195, 196 Andes: mining in, 52–53, 101; mita labor system, 100 animal food industry, 153, 154 fig. 5, 155–56; food price changes of, 154 fig. 5 Anthropocene era, 1–2, 213n2 appropriation: of extrahuman natures, 63, 95; of human reproductive labor, 110; of Natures, 109; of unpaid work, 95 Araghi, Farshad, 158 Arrighi, Giovanni, 87 Asia: capitalism and, 220n50; global power shift and, 46; global production shift and, 46; global silver trade and, 85; Medieval Warm Period, 48.

See also Cheap Money; financial sector; Genoese banking Bhopal disaster, 209 Biidewe’anikwetok, 211 Black Death, 11–13, 70, 183–85, 238n9 blood ranking, 185–86 Bohemia, 70 Bois, Guy, 10 Bolivia, 179, 200–201 Borlaug, Norman, 149–150 Bosch, Carl, 148, 172, 172–74 Braudel, Fernand, 68, 86, 139, 144, 160, 231n8 Brazil, xiv map 1; deforestation, 174; food price changes, 154 fig. 5; industrialization in, 100, 101; Muslim slave uprising, 106; planetary ecological revolution in, 52–53; slave trading, 31; as sugar frontier, 16, 32–33 British empire: agricultural imports, 103–4; agriculture of, 141–43, 145; botanical imperialism, 147; cotton industry and, 103, 106; Ireland and, 51–52, 190–92, 239n26; labor organizing, 175; labor organizing in, 106; Nigeria and, 128–29, 175; Reclaim the Streets movement, 206. See also England; United Kingdom Brotton, Jerry, 58 Burawoy, Michael, 109 Cadamosto, Alvise da, 14 Canary Islands, 13, 16, 29 Cantino Planisphere, 55, 56–57map3 capitalism: as an ecology, 26, 38; emergence of, 13, 25–26; foundations of, 228–29n22 capitalist ecology: capitalist frontiers, 18–20; cheap money system and, 68; Descartes and, 52–53; domestication and, 230–31n79; effects on planet’s ecology, 28; finance and, 28; global story, 81–85; knowledge, policing of, 225n6; laws of, 52–54; microfinance and, 224n92; Schumpeter on, 215n62; shifts in, 220n50 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 148 care work: austerity programs and, 136; extrahuman natures and, 110, 117; growth of, 134; nationalism and, 136; unequal by gender, 31, 116–17; United States, 134, 135–36; value of, 137; wageworkers and, 116–17.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

This page intentionally left blank A Concise History of Modern India In this second edition of their successful A Concise History of India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India’s modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover by Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India’s huge advances in technology, and the country’s new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into independence, the country has been sustained and transformed by its institutional structures. As the authors argue, it is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural, and economic changes that have taken place over the last half-century and paved the way for the modern success story.

It will then ask how and why the British went on to conquer the entire Indian subcontinent in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it will conclude by assessing the relationships that grew up between what was known as the ‘Company Bahadur’, as though it were a Mughal grandee, and its Indian subjects in the years up to 1850. 56 The East India Company Raj, 1772–1850 57 f o u n dat i o n o f c o l o n i a l ru l e When Hastings took office, the East India Company’s agents knew nothing about India apart from the requirements of trade, and they almost never ventured outside their coastal enclaves. With rare exceptions, among them Hastings himself, they knew no Indian languages. Within the existing British Empire, furthermore, rule over a vast indigenous population such as that of India was unprecedented. With the partial exception of Ireland, Britain’s previous imperial expansion, in the West Indies and North America, had involved the dispossession of the native peoples in favour of settlers from Europe and Africa.

Bayly has written, ‘set it apart even in its early days from all the regimes which had preceded it’. conquest and settlement The arrival of Lord Wellesley as governor-general in 1798 ended a quarter-century during which the British had existed as one among several Indian ‘country powers’. Spurred on by a new vision that saw the British Empire encompassing the entire subcontinent, Wellesley inaugurated twenty years of military activity that made the Company by 1818 master of India. Complementing Wellesley’s conquests-at-arms was the elaboration of an aggressive imperial enthusiasm. Much of this was the product of events in Europe. Thoughout these years an embattled Britain confronted Napoleon, whose armies triumphed not only in Europe but in 1798 in Egypt, the gateway to India; and the patriotism stirred up by this desperate struggle easily spilled over into a conviction of Britain’s right to rule whatever territories its armies might conquer.


pages: 387 words: 120,092

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Amud Ha’Esh, a TV documentary series directed by Yigal Lusin for the first, and that time the only, Israeli TV channel in 1981, gives the viewer a good sense of why the Israelis call the 1948 war the War of Independence. That year is described as the culmination of an anti-colonialist struggle against the evil British Empire. The British were defeated and so, according to this narration, left Palestine because they could not withstand the Jewish resistance against them. Meanwhile, the professional historiography indicated that the British decision to withdraw from Palestine arose from the overall and inevitable global collapse of the British Empire. This wider context informed the financial and regional strategic decisions that led to the end of British rule in Palestine.22 The lengthiest feature film on 1948 during those years was He Walked Through the Fields, based on a novel by Moshe Shamir.

In Israel, this revolt usually appeared as a chapter in the history of Palestinian terrorism.28 In both Palestinian and less biased historiography, it appeared as the first, and in many ways, one of the few, successful popular revolts of the Palestinians that achieved some significant political gains, notably the British White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration and land purchase. This new British policy, together with the emergence of Nazism in Europe, led to a Jewish Zionist revolt against the British Empire. It was a heroic deed against all odds in Israeli historiography, amounting to terrorism in the eyes of not only the Mandatory government of the day but subsequently, leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were regarded as personae non gratae in the United Kingdom because of their terrorist past in Palestine.

Cohen revealed a far more pragmatic and sensible Bevin than was depicted in the myth.13 Nevertheless, the narrative became an intricate sequence of interdependent elements. Thus, while the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) faced annihilation from a barbaric Arab world, as a hostile British Empire and an indifferent international community looked on, it had no time to bother with the indigenous population. According to this narrative, these native people became refugees because their own leaders, and those of the Arab League, told them to leave, paving the way for an all-Arab invasion.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The building was designed by Sir Frank Baines and shows the influence of the Imperial Neoclassical style of Edwin Lutyens, the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall. By 1929, Thames House had risen over what had once been a slum quarter of the city, a massive structure in Portland stone hailed as “the finest office building in the British Empire.” Stella Rimington, the first woman to be appointed MI5’s director-general, saw Thames House as “a great pale ghost.” Others who worked there said the exhaust fumes from traffic and the smell of the river penetrated the inner recesses of Thames House. For outsiders who had business with MI5, there was a ritual to be observed: First, hand in their passport to one of the guards in the entrance hall and then be walked through the security barriers to take an elevator to the appropriate floor.

The one question she repeatedly asked was: Could it happen to London? Could the carnage be repeated in the capital, striking at the principal symbols of Britain’s hegemony, its global commercial and financial power, and call into question the certainties and beliefs that had continued to survive long after the British Empire had become a fading memory? “It was catchup time,” recalled Annie Machon, a former MI5 counterterrorism officer, to the author. Although the Security Service also found itself confronting civil liberties groups opposed to some of those “catchup” methods. In August 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett had issued an unprecedented public apology to British Muslims about “information sweeps conducted by MI5 in Muslim communities.”

Then came the terrible winter of 1946–47 when Eliza’s parents, like millions of others, found themselves living in temperatures below zero from one month to the next as blizzards piled layer upon layer of record-breaking snowfalls across the country. England was gripped in frozen paralysis: Industry closed down; electricity was limited to five hours a day; unemployment rose to six million. Few people realized that was also the time when world leadership began to move from the dying British Empire to the muscular power of the United States. It started when President Harry Truman, in July 1946, signed a congressional bill authorizing a fifty-year loan of $3.75 billion to His Majesty’s government to liquidate America’s obligation to rebuilding the United Kingdom after the war (the loan, with accrued interest, was finally paid off in 2007).


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Hence, the Chinese dismissal of the first British attempts to open trade under Lord Macartney’s diplomatic mission of 1792–1794 was entirely rational because China didn’t need to trade (much less finance) outside its borders. The British Empire by contrast was a merchant-state, where trade, finance, and diplomatic influence vastly outweighed territory or military power. The United States was originally part of that empire and essentially remains a merchantstate, but an inward-looking one, given its vast internal market. Modern China is, whether it likes it or not, a merchant-state built on globalization, just as the British Empire was during the first great age of globalization it led from 1815 to 1914.This global merchant-state role is totally new to China as first a self-contained empire and then a victim of predatory merchant-states such as Britain and Japan.

Of course, today we call integration of markets for goods, services, and money “globalization,” and for much of the last decade we have debated whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Actually, to the Victorians, including Marx, global markets were a fact of life, and barriers to moving capital were almost nonexistent. Between 1815 and 1914, especially in the second half of the period, the combination of a British Empire committed to free trade, the pound sterling backed by gold as anchor currency for the world, and London as the world’s money market allowed capital to go anywhere it could make a good return. Contemporaries called this system of free markets and the limited constitutional government that went with it liberalism, almost the opposite of how the word is used in America today.

Subsidized green energy is but an extreme example, since the Eisenhower national highway system, subsidies for home ownership, and student loans are all examples of using the financial system for essentially nonmarket, noneconomic ends. This kind of thing goes back to the day when royal monopolies Broken Markets were given to joint stock companies to build out the British Empire for broke British monarchs, and it is not going away any time soon. It is all a matter of degree and balance. In the Victorian Era, the markets became free and global for several generations, but that was an anomaly backed by British wealth and sea power along with an almost mystical British belief in free trade.


pages: 299 words: 79,739

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

The historian Philip Stern has argued, persuasively, that this strategy—first dreamed up by Samuel Annesley under house arrest in the Surat factory—would prove to be a critical turning point in the relationship between India and England, one that is inevitably neglected in the traditional version of the rise of the British empire in the subcontinent. The standard account, according to Stern, imagines the East India Company as “a commercial body that only ‘turned’ sovereign—accidentally, haphazardly, and unwillingly—with the Company’s great territorial acquisitions in Bengal following Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the assumption eight years later of revenue and governance responsibilities in the Mughal office of diwan.”

The admiralty had planned to use the case against the Every gang as a show trial, a statement to the world that would announce the British government’s new zero-tolerance policy for piracy. They had even hired a publisher named John Everingham to release the transcripts of the trial allowing interested readers throughout the British empire who couldn’t make it to Sessions House Yard to follow along. Needless to say, Everingham never published the transcripts. One London periodical apologized for its lack of coverage: “We had prepared a more ample account of the Tryal of the Pyrates,” the editors noted, “but in compliance with the prohibition of Authority have omitted it.”

They had at last established a compelling ending for the dominant narrative. John Everingham’s contract was renewed, and the printer released the court transcripts—with only a brief allusion to the unsuccessful first trial—as a twenty-eight-page bound volume within a matter of weeks. The publication went through multiple printings, and was read throughout the British empire. Its final lines left no doubt where the Crown stood regarding the crimes of piracy: According to this sentence, Edward Foreseth and the rest were executed, on Wednesday, November the 25th, 1696; at Execution-Dock, that being the usual Place for the Execution of Pirates. FINIS. EPILOGUE: LIBERTALIA A few days before his stolen coins were found quilted into his jacket—starting the whole chain of events that would lead to five of his shipmates hanging at Execution Dock—John Dann stumbled across Henry Adams’s new bride in the London suburb of St.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

British prime minister Winston Churchill shared these fears, particularly as regards Poland—a country he saw as a barrier to Soviet westward expansion, much as Stalin saw it as a barrier to Western encroachment.4 But FDR never bought into Churchill’s vision of Britain and America marching forward shoulder to shoulder into the postwar era. “The President shared a widespread American suspicion of the British Empire as it had once been,” noted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. And he had “no fear that other powers,” besides the United States, “might fill that role” after the war.5 Yet by 1947, such fear would concentrate minds in the State Department and Pentagon. The Big Three wartime conference at Yalta in February 1945 was Roosevelt’s last face-to-face meeting with Stalin, a final chance to reconcile clashing interests over the shape of postwar Europe before the advancement of Soviet, American, and British troops settled matters on the ground.

In response to the rising threat of a new security vacuum in Europe, Truman’s State Department effectively mothballed the newly born IMF, dismissing disdainfully the assumptions Morgenthau and White had made to justify their faith in it—that Soviet cooperation would continue into the postwar period; that Germany’s economic collapse could be safely, and indeed profitably, managed; that the British empire could be peaceably dismantled; and that modest balance-of-payments credit support was sufficient to reestablish global trade. These had been based on “misconceptions of the state of the world around us,” future secretary of state Dean Acheson reflected, “both in anticipating postwar conditions and in recognizing what they actually were when we came face to face with them. . . .

Clement Attlee’s Labour Party swept to power on a platform of creating full employment, a National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. “Let us face the future” was the theme of the victorious campaign. Yet the belief remained, even within the Labour leadership, that the country’s strength lay in its past—in (a reformed) empire. “I know that if the British Empire fell,” Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin told the House of Commons in February 1946, “it would be a disaster. I know, further, it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”22 But what a difference a year would make. BRITAIN’S NATIONAL DEBT HAVING QUADRUPLED during the war, the strain of policing occupied Europe and restless far-flung colonies had, by 1947, become an intolerable financial burden.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

He was, noted the diarist Henry “Chips” Channon, “a fanatical Francophil [sic].”49 When he spoke in April 1939 of “a solid identity of interest between the Western democracies,” he meant Britain and France.50 “The French,” he said a month later, “have the finest, though not the largest, army in existence at the present time.”51 Only when that army was so shockingly defeated in June 1940, only when his last, extraordinary offer of a complete political union between France and Britain failed to forestall Pétain’s capitulation to Hitler, did he turn all his efforts to the United States. The way he then conjured the British Empire’s tenuous, tense prewar relationship with America into an enduring Special Relationship (with, for the British if not for Americans, a capital “S” and “R”) was to prove the most enduring Churchillism. If you want a glimpse of the great conjuror at work, read the eyewitness account by H. V. Morton of Churchill’s August 1941 meeting with Roosevelt on Canada’s Placentia Bay.

Churchill walked about inspecting every detail, often taking a hand by moving a chair an inch one way or another and by pulling out the folds of the Union Jack.”52 Then, in a radio broadcast, he interpreted his own theatrical production to the world, evoking “that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals, and now to a large extent of the same interests, and certainly in different degrees facing the same dangers.” They represented “two major groupings of the human family, the British Empire and the United States, who, fortunately for the progress of mankind, happen to speak the same language and very largely think the same thoughts, or anyhow think a lot of the same thoughts.”53 Notice how the essential qualifications, “very largely,” “a lot of,” “certainly in different degrees,” are scattered like foam in the wake of a battleship advancing at full speed.

He was a founding father of the Council of Europe, the original pan-European organization of democracies, and spent weeks actively involved in its debates. During its meeting at Strasbourg in 1949, he addressed—“Prenez garde! Je vais parler en français”—the largest, most enthusiastic outdoor rally that city had ever seen in the cause of European union.59 He was, however, grandly ambiguous and inconsistent about Britain’s role. Would the British Empire be a benign external “friend and sponsor,” like the United States, as he explained at Zurich, or was it for “France and Britain to take the lead,” as he declared in the Albert Hall in 1947?60 Generally, he stuck with the less committed stance, frustrating practical enthusiasts of European integration such as Jean Monnet.


The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

air gap, British Empire, clean water, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, period drama, trade route, upwardly mobile

It can be done of course – if you have the time, wood supplies and relevant skill – but it is neither convenient nor easy. That which had been a simple, basic dish back home, well within the skills of any cook or housewife accustomed to coal, frequently went disastrously wrong when attempted over wood in some distant corner of the British Empire. The mistress had scant experience of cooking over wood, and her local servants had no experience of the dishes and methods she was asking them to re-create. Indeed, they were being asked to do something technically awkward, and their chances of success were slim. Many people, in search of the taste of home-cooking halfway around the world, went to the enormous expense of hauling familiar cooking equipment to their new homes.

Wood burnt within them has to be well seasoned and chopped into quite small sections, and the fire needs frequent feeding. Because wood burns at a lower temperature, bringing that whole big mass of iron up to temperature for cooking a meal is a very slow process, much slower than when the same range is fired by coal. The exported foods of the British Empire – beef stew and dumplings, spotted dick, toad in the hole, rice pudding, boiled beef and carrots, apple crumble or a festive dinner of roast turkey and Christmas pudding – all relied on the long, rolling boil of a pot on top of a cast-iron range, or the red-hot iron oven at its side. The range had to be really hot to provide this sort of cooking, and it needed to stay hot for a long period.

In 1600 white Castile soap, you may remember, retailed at 6d a pound; in 1833, it was still selling at 6d a pound – even after taxes and two centuries’ of general price inflation. In 1600 you could have bought six loaves of bread for the price of a pound of soap; in 1833 you would have got not much more than half a loaf. When Robert Montgomery Martin published his political and economic discussion Taxation of the British Empire in 1833–4, he argued that soap was a commodity ‘of essential importance to the cleanliness and comfort of the people’. He may well have been entirely unaware that there were effective alternatives for cleaning available and still in daily use in those remote pockets where the waterways and railways were not yet delivering cheap coal.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Clarkson in turn convinced the parliamentarian William Wilberforce to become the political leader of the British abolitionist movement.44 Working together with formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, who formed the Sons of Africa—Britain’s first Black political organization45—the abolitionists’ campaign in Britain was enormously successful. Britain’s parliament was persuaded to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and to make owning people illegal across most of the British Empire in 1833.46 After 1807 the British government resolved to stamp out slave trading worldwide. They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas.47 This made it harder for slave ships to travel between West Africa, the United States, and the American and Caribbean colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland.

They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas.47 This made it harder for slave ships to travel between West Africa, the United States, and the American and Caribbean colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland. The campaign ultimately captured more than two thousand slave ships and freed over two hundred thousand enslaved people, although those freed were often exploited in other ways and sent to work across the British Empire.48 The abolition of slavery was an example of a values change, by which I mean a change in the moral attitudes of a society, or in how those attitudes are implemented and enforced. In my view, the abolition of slavery was one of the most important values changes in all of history. Over the course of this chapter and the next, I’ll argue that changing society’s values is particularly important from a longtermist perspective.

In the years leading up to abolition, British colonies produced more sugar than the rest of the world combined, and Britain consumed the most sugar of any country.85 When slavery was abolished, the shelf price of sugar increased by about 50 percent, costing the British public £21 million over seven years—about 5 percent of British expenditure at the time.86 Indeed, the slave trade was booming rather than declining: even though Britain had abolished its slave trade in 1807, more Africans were taken in the transatlantic slave trade between 1821 and 1830 than in any other decade except the 1780s.87 The British government paid off British slave owners in order to pass the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which gradually freed the enslaved across most of the British Empire.88 This cost the British government £20 million, amounting to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual expenditure at the time.89 To finance the payments, the British government took out a £15 million loan, which was not fully paid back until 2015. The economic interpretation of abolition also struggles to explain the activist approach that Britain took to the slave trade after 1807.


pages: 811 words: 160,872

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

It was faced, too, by the no less ‘provincial’ society of eighteenth-century Catalonia as it struggled to find its place in a Spain dominated by Castile. The Scots had the advantage over the Catalans of being actively involved in the construction of a global empire, and one that defined itself not as English but as British. It was as the Scottish members of a British Empire rapidly outpacing that of Spain – an empire that could take pride in its unique blend of freedom, religious tolerance and commercial enterprise – that they would be able to make their mark in the world. 116 They were British, but not English, while still remaining patriotic Scots. The options available to eighteenth-century Catalans were less immediately attractive.

Forward-looking Catalans like Capmany rejected ‘provincialism’, or anything that smacked of federalism, as threatening the unity of the Spanish nation. 49 The two national communities of Scotland and Catalonia, however, would take very different paths over the course of the century as they grappled with the consequences of industrialization and sought to affirm their distinctive identities in a political and economic environment much less favourable to consensus in Spain than in Britain. Industrialization and Its Consequences Massive Scottish participation in the construction of the British Empire from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards did much to reconcile Scots at many levels of society to the fact of Union. It also strengthened their dual patriotism as loyal members of the new British state that had been created in 1707 and also as loyal Scots who could take a justifiable pride in a national contribution to Britain’s international power and overseas expansion out of all proportion to the size of their population.

One was to demand a reorganization of the state along the federal lines advocated by Pi i Margall, and a second was to seek a form of home rule within a more or less centralized state. While Pi was himself a doctrinaire liberal, an important practical precedent for this second option had been set by the British North America Act of 1867, which made Canada a self-governing entity within the British Empire. 7 The war in Cuba, breaking out in 1868 and brought to a temporary close ten years later by a proposal from the Spanish authorities for a form of autonomy that came to nothing, showed that home rule, as a possible solution to the problems of Spain and its overseas possessions, was at least an option deserving of serious consideration.


pages: 267 words: 81,108

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya by Nicholas Best

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Etonian, lateral thinking, out of africa, Scramble for Africa

Although Thomson had been prepared to wander through Masai Land simply for the hell of it, the hard-nosed businessmen of the Royal Geographical Society who had put up the cash for his expedition were far more interested in what might come of it in the way of trade. Trade, and ensuing profit for the motherland, was the only reason for the existence of the British Empire. The great powers of Europe were beginning to look towards Africa as a massive counter in the absorbing game of politics. Thomson’s journey raised the question of just how much profit could be squeezed from this vast new territory, at present under no country’s sphere of influence. Thomson himself, a romantic pure and simple, vigorously opposed the idea of opening up the area to commerce.

If he could divert stores and badly needed troops from the Western Front and bog them down in the malarial and disease-ridden bush of East Africa, he would be doing more than his bit for his country. He acted swiftly. Immediately after the shelling of Dar-es-Salaam by the Astraea and Pegasus, a small force of commandos crossed into Kenya, the only part of the British Empire to be invaded by Germans during the entire war. They had orders to blow up railway bridges, cut telegraph wire and confuse the enemy. The men were led by Tom von Prince, a Scotsman with a German mother, who had taken service with the Germans after being turned down for a commission by the British army.

Von Lettow’s men obeyed the order with alacrity. Whenever the invading British moved forward in strength, the Germans would linger just long enough to inflict heavy casualties before slipping away into the bush, leaving their enemies to pick up the pieces and plod on with the advance as best they could. By January 1916 the number of British Empire troops on active service in East Africa had swelled from a few thousand to two divisions, totalling more than thirty thousand men. A large percentage of these lost their lives during the campaign, not from enemy action, but from disease. If malaria did not claim them, then bacillary or amoebic dysentery did.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The botnet that Amanda exposed could be very destructive if it is ever used, and some might even see her as a threat because she was fooling around with the world’s device networks. Still, in exposing these dark secrets, Amanda revealed a lot about what our internet is becoming. What’s in a Pax? The Pax Britannica was a period of history, between Napoleon’s defeat and World War I, during which the British Empire managed global affairs. London was the center of power, the British navy controlled the most important sea-trading routes, and relatively efficient bureaucracies put the world’s resources and people into the Empire’s service. Several aspects of the Pax Britannica may actually describe our future as much as that moment of our past.

The British were strong because their network infrastructure gave them unparalleled levels of political, economic, and cultural control. The Pax Britannica was hardly a period of universal peace—it was a period of stability more than peace. There were nasty, violent brushfire wars throughout the British Empire as poor communities resisted the oppression of colonial masters. Rival kings, separatist movements, nationalist causes, and radical socialists (and anarchists, for that matter) constantly challenged the authority of the British crown. When the Pax Britannica finally waned in the middle of the twentieth century, these conflicts between allies and challengers had lasted more than a century and cost millions of lives.

It was an extensive network, but good roads and public works projects ended where the Visigoths began. Rome was not and could not be everywhere. Having power during the Pax Romana meant having some control over the nodes in the Empire’s networks, and as a city, Rome was the confluence of these networks of power. Similarly, in the British Empire, London served as the node, and the big corporate players all managed their affairs from the capital. The fashions, designs, and innovations of London radiated outward to the colonial seats of British power. Cultural exports from the United States were an important part of the Pax Americana: Hollywood movies, television programs, music, and advertising techniques had a significant impact on the values of viewers, listeners, and consumers around the world.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Alternatively known as moss mites or beetle mites, they can also pull something 530 times their own weight up a vertical surface, using only two of their eight legs. To test this, researchers from the University of Tübingen fixed the mites to a pin with superglue and measured how much force it took to pull them off. Isn’t science fun! STEPHEN What would you say if I said to you that the British Empire was built on diarrhoea? RICH HALL I’d say you were full of shit. Any word that ends in ‘rhoea’ is just bad news, isn’t it? Diarrhoea, pyorrhoea, gonorrhoea. North Korea. What’s the worst thing a swan can do to you? A number of alarming things, but it can’t break your arm. Swans may make threatening noises but your arms are safe with them.

You could have corrugated iron stables, gymnasia, hunting lodges, billiard rooms and laundries. In 1890 the catalogue of David Rowell & Co. was offering a cricket pavilion for £63.50 (£6,000 today), a two-storey cottage for £166 (£16,000 today) or a theatre for £695 (£67,000 today). Corrugated iron churches (or ‘tin tabernacles’) sprang up all over the British Empire: several are still in use as listed buildings today. The craze reached its height in 1851, when Prince Albert ordered a corrugated iron ballroom for Balmoral Castle. It’s still there, now used as a carpenter’s workshop. It wasn’t universally popular. William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, wrote that it was spreading ‘like pestilence over the country’, and some bishops were reluctant to consecrate iron churches.

As well as Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern times on the US mainland, it has Alaska time, Hawaii time and zones that cover its possessions in the Pacific: American Samoa, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. Canada stretches over six time zones and Russia 11, but it’s on the French empire that the sun nowadays never sets. It’s still true that the sun never sets on the British Empire – but only just. The UK currently covers nine time zones. The most easterly is the British Indian Ocean Territory, a collection of atolls midway between Indonesia and Tanzania and home to the Diego Garcia military base. It is six hours ahead of the UK. The most westerly is the Pitcairn Islands, and it’s thanks to these four tiny volcanic islands in the Pacific, inhabited by descendants of the mutineers from the Bounty, that the British can still make this claim.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Part I of this book follows the dialectic relationship between the water landscape and human society from the neolithic to classical antiquity, showing how it contributed to shaping statehood. Part II then shows how—over a thousand years—antiquity was metabolized by European nations into the modern state. The legal legacy of Rome, classical republicanism, political liberalism, the sirens of utopianism, all mixed to inspire institutions, from the American Republic to the British Empire, which set the stage for the twentieth century. Part III describes how the power of the modern state and the force of industrial capitalism led to the most radical transformation of landscape in history. Its success was so complete as to make society’s relationship with water invisible, hidden under the fabric of modern life, and sowing the seeds of the dangerous illusion that governs the present.

It was also to plan the works required to ensure the river continued to be navigable, and it even had recourse to the military vessels of the participating powers in case of need and could enter into loan agreements to finance its works. Nineteenth-century globalization was going to travel on the rivers of the great continent. A Water Legacy The legacy of the British Empire was not just economic or political. The reason rivers are considered central to the historical development of civilization has its roots in British attempts at justifying their own imperial project. Britain’s state religion provided some moral justification for the imperial project. The Church of England adopted Augustinian ideas of a Christian Commonwealth, which nicely fit with the empire’s aspirations of universality.

The United States government appointed him to a commission called upon to rule on how to apportion water between Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Egypt had become independent in 1922. At that point, the likelihood of an engineered integration of the Nile along the lines of what British engineers had imagined was practically zero. But because Egypt was so central to the security of the British Empire—the Suez Canal was the maritime gateway to India—the British were reluctant to relinquish control. The issue of who had authority over Sudan had been left unresolved at independence, so the British used its upstream position to control the river, creating a powerful point of leverage over the downstream, newly independent nation.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Brands, Inside the Cold War: hoy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918-1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 18 (fainting spells); Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 219 ("Old Mossy"); Painter, Oil and the American Century, p. 173 ("colonial exploiter"); Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 651 ("great actor"); Interviews with George McGhee and Peter Ramsbotham ("Moslem"); Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 262; C. M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured (London: Granada, 1982), pp. 113-14; Louis, British Empire, pp. 651-53 ("lunatic" and "cunning"); Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pp. 130-37. [7] Interviews; Louis, British Empire, pp. 667-74 ("Suez Canal"); Notes, June 27, 1951, EP 1531/ 870, FO 371/ 91555, PRO (Churchill); Alistair Home, Harold Macmillan, vol. 1, 1894-1956, (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 310; H. W. Brands, "The Cairo-Tehran Connection in Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East, 1951-1953," International History Review, 11 (1989), pp. 438-40 ("scuttle and surrender")

On Levy's proposals, see Logan memo, July 31,1951, with Minute, July 29,1951, EP 1531/1290, FO 371/ 91575 ("camouflage"); Shepherd to Foreign Office, October 10, 1951, EP 1531/1837, FO 371/91599 (John Kennedy); Cabinet Minutes, July 30, 1951, CM (51), CAB 128/20, PRO. Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 655; Louis, British Empire, p. 677, n. 5 ("mongrelization" and "dilute"); Walters, Silent Missions, pp. 247-56 ("crafty," "Where else?," "certain principles" and Kashani); FRUS: Iran, 1951-1954, pp. 145 ("dream world"). [9] Louis, British Empire, p. 678 ("jolly good"); Fergusson to Stokes, October 3,1951, with Fergusson to Makins, October 4, 1951, EP 1531/1839, FO 371/91599; Ramsbotham to Logan, August 20, 1951, EP 1531/1391, FO 371/91580, PRO.

In his own memoirs, Arnold Wilson offered an epitaph for Reynolds's service: "He was able to endure heat and cold, disappointment and success, and to get the best out of every Persian, Indian, and European with whom he came in contact, except his Scottish employers, whose short-sighted parsimony had so nearly wrecked a great enterprise. ... The service rendered by G. B. Reynolds to the British empire and to British industry and to Persia was never recognized. The men whom he saved from the consequences of their own blindness became very rich, and were honoured in their generation." In firing Reynolds, the directors of Burmah Oil did manage some grudging praise for him, and they gave him a thousand pounds as a token for his troubles.[11] The "Big Company": Anglo-Persian On April 19, 1909, the Glasgow branch of the Bank of Scotland was mobbed by fevered investors.


Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

British Empire, centralized clearinghouse, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Islamic Golden Age, operational security, Potemkin village, Scramble for Africa, zero-sum game

To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain’s wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. Somewhat ironically, one of the first entities to come in for this treatment was the British Empire’s own “jewel in the crown,” British India. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire had devolved into a unique kind of colonial solar system, a galaxy in which its principal satellites operated with increasing autonomy from the central “star” of Britain. Nowhere was this truer than in India, where the British administration in Simla (as the British government of India was commonly referred to, even though Simla was only its summer capital) pursued its own domestic agenda and, to a remarkable degree, even its own foreign policy.

As a student of British history, Colonel Lawrence knew precisely what was about to occur. The pedestal was an investiture stool, upon which he was to kneel as the king performed the elaborate, centuries-old ceremony—the conferring of a sash and the medals on the pillow, the tapping with a sword and the intoning of an oath—that would make him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. It was a moment T. E. Lawrence had long dreamed of. As a boy, he was obsessed with medieval history and the tales of King Arthur’s court, and his greatest ambition, he once wrote, was to be knighted by the age of thirty. On that morning, his youthful aspiration was about to be fulfilled. A couple of details added to the honor.

If stultifying, this stratification also meant that everyone knew his place, the station in life to which he might reasonably aspire. To the degree possible, social and economic advancement was obtained through the “godly virtues” of modesty, self-reliance, diligence, and thrift. Perhaps the least questioned tenet of the time was the notion that the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three—to the world’s less fortunate cultures and races. While this conviction extended to all segments of British society, it had special resonance for the middle class, since it was from precisely this social stratum that the chief custodians of empire—its midlevel military field officers and colonial administrators—were drawn.


The Linguist: A Personal Guide to Language Learning by Steve Kaufmann

borderless world, British Empire, discovery of DNA, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, language acquisition, South China Sea, trade liberalization, urban sprawl

In Eastern Canada, small permanent settlements of English and French speaking people from Europe eventually expanded across the North American continent, driven by the search for furs and by the desire to find farmland. Canada became a colony of the British Empire in 1763. Soon after, as a result of the American Revolution, Canada received a major influx of Americans who wished to remain loyal to the British Crown: the United Empire Loyalists. This group determined how Canadians speak English today. The majority of immigrants to Canada for the first half of the 19th century were British Protestants who reinforced strong feelings of loyalty to the British Empire, opposition to the United States, and a sense of rivalry with the entrenched French speaking Catholic society of Quebec.

Canadian English is a very useful version of English for non-native speakers. It is easily understood and not out of place anywhere in the world. The Immigrant Experience English speaking Canada does not have a powerful distinctiveness. The ever-increasing variety of people who make up English Canada has meant the decline in importance of British Protestantism, the British Empire and British A Personal Guide to Language Learning 141 institutions. There is no longer a typical Canadian name, nor ethnic origin, nor religion. This lack of clear markers is what makes Canadian culture so accessible. Even the relative neutrality of the Canadian accent and the lack of regional accents make it easier for newcomers to blend into Canadian society.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

What has perturbed the even flow of English as it has spread along with the interests of its speaker communities, making it seem to have a life of its own, or rather a life constrained and defined by interests and activities expressed in other languages? Looking round the world for places where English is notable for its rarity, our gaze First lights on three countries that had once hosted massive use of the language, since they were colonies within the British Empire, but have since moved to promote other languages in its place. They are distributed round the Indian Ocean: Malaysia in the east, ri Lanka centrally, and Tanzania in the west. Each of these countries had multiple language communities when the British took over, and so in each of them English might have been considered able to go on playing a convenient, almost natural, role as a neutral lingua-franca for the whole country.

In the area that became Tanzania, however, this Swahili language (named from Arabic saw hil ‘coasts’, and referring to itself as kiSwahili) had spread particularly widely as a lingua-franca, originally from the coastal region round Zanzibar. It had been picked up and reinforced by European (mainly German) missionaries’ schools in the nineteenth century and carried on under British administration after 1918. Essentially, it was the de facto lingua-franca in the country that had preceded the British Empire’s widespread introduction of English. Ever since the country became an independent and united state (over the period 1961– 64), its First president, Julius Nyerere, had been keen to promote it as the national language, and an effective lingua-franca for all Tanzanians, bridging the gaps among the more than a hundred languages they spoke with a distinctively African medium that avoided any recourse to the colonial language English.* Luckily for Swahili, in Tanzania there was no tribe or tribes much larger or more dominant than the others, as the Luo or Kikuyu were and are in Kenya, or the Baganda in Uganda.

Outside India and China, these developments that favored English-speaking powers had not required them to solicit the cooperation of foreigners who did not speak their language.* By contrast, third parties who wanted to join in had to make themselves understood. Just as Indians and other British colonial citizens who wanted to get a piece of the action in the British Empire had to strive to learn English, so other foreigners too had to take an interest in the language to make contact. Official(and Semi-official) Languages by Size—EU and Global (Credit: Nicholas Ostler, based on Eurobarometer data) Western Powers’ Shares of World Manufacturing, 1750–1900.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

The republican Fenian movement of the nineteenth century, dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Ireland when circumstances would permit, was undergoing a process of rejuvenation, and the Irish Parliamentary Party reunited in 1900, after experiencing division and faction in the 1890s. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 provided advanced Irish nationalists with an opportunity to galvanise anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment, and to suggest there were lessons to be learned regarding how to take on the might of the British Empire. But it was also the case that thousands of Irish men were loyal servants of the army of that empire, whether out of conviction or economic necessity. The aged Queen Victoria visited Ireland in 1900, for the first time in thirty-seven years, and although advanced nationalists protested loudly, she was well received by most.

The most recent research suggests that the Irish ‘cultural revival’ of this period was a relatively coherent mass movement, despite differences in religion, class, gender and political conviction. But far from political pessimism, there was also, among the educated Catholic elite, a dynamism and confident outlook, with a vision of a Home Rule Ireland taking a central place in the British Empire.1 Alongside this, a nationalist tradition stretching back two centuries was being communicated to a newly literate mass audience, and sometimes reinterpreted. One aspect of that tradition was a belief in the use of violence to achieve Irish independence from Britain. Adherents of the various philosophies of Irish nationalism were exceptionally active in the opening decade of the twentieth century, and often borrowed freely from each other’s discourse.2 A year after the death of Parnell, in 1892, a small pamphlet was published in Dublin entitled Ireland in the Twentieth Century, in which the writer T.

Regarding his duties in the early days, he remembered a quiet time, occasionally punctuated by drink-induced disorder: ‘whiskey was popular, cheap and deadly … a man with a shilling in his pocket could quickly get fighting drunk … so the police had their hands full at every public gathering.’84 There were 27,000 soldiers stationed in Ireland in 1900 in addition to 12,000 armed RIC men, making Ireland the most densely militarised area of the British Empire in peacetime. The mobilisation caused by the Boer War undoubtedly hardened moderate opinion against the Empire, and helped the radicals in Irish politics to reach a wider audience, but it also obliged many Irish soldiers to fight against the Boers. David Fitzpatrick makes the point that in the early twentieth century ‘the common rhetoric of militarism transcended political divisions in Ireland throughout the turmoil of the period between the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902 and the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921–2.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

A frenzy of cable-laying followed, and by 1871 punters in Calcutta could learn the result of the Derby no more than five minutes after the famous horse race was over. The scale of the British Empire and the dominance of British industry ensured that in 1890 nearly two-thirds of the telegraph lines in the world were owned by British companies, which controlled 97,000 miles of cables. But the influence of the system extended far beyond the British Empire. The growth of the new global communication networks meant, as the Hungarian writer Max Nordau (1849–1923) noted in 1892, that the simplest villager now had a wider geographical horizon than a head of government a century before.

Some 60,000 South Asians were sent to Fiji to work between 1879 and 1920, 25,000 to Mauritius, and 30,000 to build Kenya’s railways in the 1890s, more than a third of them suffering death or serious injury during the construction. The total number of South Asians, almost all of them Indian, working across the British Empire by 1900 totalled more than a million. Sometimes they were sent across vast distances to replace the slave labour that had now become illegal: nearly 75,000 Indians arrived in Trinidad between 1874 and 1915 in this way. The spread of Indian labour across the British Empire indicated its global nature, but it also caused disruption to Indian communities on the subcontinent, and led to racial tensions in some colonies, notably Fiji.

By 1912, FIAT, now a public company in which Agnelli owned most of the shares, was making a new cheap car, the Model Zero, production of which accelerated from 150 vehicles in 1903 to 4,500 in 1914. Britain could not keep up. In 1890, Frederick Simms (1863–1944), a businessman and engineer who invented the word ‘petrol’ and the term ‘motor car’ and founded the Royal Automobile Club, acquired the United Kingdom and British Empire rights for a high-speed petrol engine devised by the German inventor Gottlieb Daimler (1834–1900), although he used it at first to make motor launches. In 1896, Simms opened a factory producing Daimler cars. He also invented and built the first armoured car in 1899. Others followed suit, most notably Herbert Austin (1866–1941), who is generally credited with building the first all-British car.


pages: 225 words: 64,595

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, European colonialism, mass immigration, one-state solution, public intellectual, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Zionism lacks some of the most basic characteristics of a classical colonial movement. First and foremost, the Zionists had no motherland sending them to a foreign land to exploit its resources. The British Empire did indeed support Zionism at the close of World War I, but Britain eventually surrendered to Arab pressure and turned its back on Zionism on the eve of World War II, almost totally halting Jewish immigration to Israel. At the end of the day, the Jewish state was created not through the benevolence of the British Empire but through a violent struggle against it. Many Israelis think of themselves as refugees from Europe, or even orphans of Europe, but certainly not emissaries of Europe. 5.

This is of course a generalization that does not always hold true, but in Israel today an almost direct correlation exists between being right-wing and being religious. Things were not always this way. None of the founding fathers of Religious Zionism treated sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel as sacrosanct. Rabbi Yaakov Reines, who founded Religious Zionism in its political form, supported the Uganda Plan—the proposal by the British Empire in the early twentieth century to create a national home for the Jews in eastern Africa. The founder of the movement that would vigorously reject relinquishing parts of the Land of Israel was himself willing to concede the entire land.1 Later, the minister representing the National Religious Party, Haim-Moshe Shapira, strongly objected to Israel’s launching the Six-Day War.

Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress.2 This perception finds a certain justification in the statements of some of the early Zionists, who initially conceived of a Jewish state as a force for extending the borders of Europe into Asia.3 The Zionists, in this narrative, were the emissaries of the British Empire, and when the imperial hegemon began to falter, they struck an alliance with the American empire instead. For many Palestinians, the confrontation with Israel is a confrontation with a world power that is greater than Israel.4 At the same time, many Israelis feel that their confrontation with the Palestinians is a confrontation with a historic force that is greater than the Palestinians.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Yet so many glorious beginnings were inevitably followed by as many inglorious endings—with the result that all these various powers have retreated from the ocean, leaving the Pacific now almost entirely to its own devices, to be run by its own people. The graceful Cunarder RMS Queen Elizabeth, shown in her glamorous heyday and at her sad sabotaged demise in Hong Kong, had a thirty-three-year life, which marked the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.* [Associated Press; Louis Gardella.] The foreigners’ first withdrawals from the ocean began, effectively, in the mid-1950s, when France came to accept the reality that its once great Southeast Asian peninsular landholding “Indochine” was no more, and had to be returned. For the next forty years, farewell ceremonies seemed to be held almost monthly, with alien flags lowered and swansdown plumes, helmets, and swords being loaded into cabin trunks and sent home to London, Lisbon, Paris, The Hague, and Washington, from islands and outposts dotted in and around the gigantic blue space of sea.

Then, at once, they began to notice that all along the ranks of portholes, from the ship’s stem to her very stern, and on three of her decks, black, oily smoke started streaming out into the clear winter air. This joined into a cloud, which the morning breeze blew in their direction. Within minutes, the lunching hundreds could smell an acrid, chemical, greasy industrial smoke, heavy and sinister. The greatest old ship of the British Empire was on fire. But no fireboats came, not right away. A local accountant was giving his English fiancée’s parents a Sunday boat ride around the harbor, and the four of them stayed, entranced, for three hours. For the first hour no rescue craft came, and they watched with amazement as the blazes consolidated, as explosions began to rock the ship, and as curtains of fire began to race uncontrollably along the vast superstructure.

The British forces who then took part in the flag lowering, moments before midnight, looked by contrast worn, weary, and unkempt, their uniforms still damp from the rainstorm, their performance to be seen as either shabbily charming or unhappily threadbare. The June 1997 night of Hong Kong’s long-awaited “retrocession” from the British Empire was cold and rainswept, drenching the ceremonial and those who attended, and making for an unseemly end to Britain’s presence in the North Pacific.* [FormAsia.] Once the flag was down, Hong Kong was no longer a British colony; and the governor’s formal telegram was transmitted to the queen, a relinquishment done, the retrocession achieved, the ills of the Opium Wars overturned and finished with.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

On the one hand, they condemned the kind of empire that conflated the administration of an overseas territory with preferred access to its resources as itself being an insidious variety of economic nationalism. On the other hand, they looked wistfully back at the Habsburg Empire for supposedly balancing the demands of multiple nationalities while maintaining an internally ­free economic territory. They also praised the British Empire of the nineteenth ­century for preserving ­f ree trade in its colonial markets for all comers. The laudable model of free-­trade empire was promoted at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when the gathered Eu­ro­pean powers vowed to cooperate to preserve f­ ree commerce in the African continent and maintain what Mises praised in 1919 as “the open door for economic activity of all nations” in the Congo basin.11 The spirit of Open Door empire lived on in the League of Nations mandate system, which proposed a gradual movement of colonies ­toward self-­determination ­under the watchful eye of supranational authorities.12 The director (1920–1924) and l­ater member of the Mandates Commission (1924–1939) was the impresario of early neoliberalism, William Rappard, director of the Gradu­ate Institute of International Studies, who brought both Mises and Röpke to Geneva in the 1930s and hosted key lecture series by Hayek and Lionel Robbins in the same de­cade.

In their own variations on this theme, neoliberals ­imagined the end of empire managed by a supranational state that could override national sovereignty to protect global f­ree trade and ­f ree capital flows. The realization of the 1930s for neoliberals was that the self-­ regulating market was a myth. The foundations of world economic order—­t he gold standard, commercial treaties, and the Open Door policies of the British Empire—­were glaring in their absence. The world economy would not reproduce itself without concerted po­liti­cal effort. Instead of envisioning a return to empire, however, neoliberals acknowledged that the era of the nation was irreversible. The secret was how to keep the nation but defang it. How could nations be sapped of their power to disrupt the world economy?

On that day they parted com­pany.”28 The imagination from which Bonn spoke on that day in London in 1933 was shared by the neoliberals, including his colleagues Robbins and Hayek at the LSE and Röpke, who praised Bonn and likely was inspired to title his 1942 book International Economic Disintegration partially by the subtitle of Bonn’s 1938 monograph The Crumbling of Empire: The Disintegration of World Economy.29 Like Bonn, the neoliberals had a differentiated attitude t­oward empire. They saw a chasm between, on the one hand, the many bad empires that protected their colonial trade and saw the world economy as a zero-­sum container of finite resources, and, on the other hand, the single good empire of the British that promoted ­free trade and sound money. They saw the British Empire as the polestar of the first age of globalization from 1870 to 1914. The belief that the British had betrayed economic universalism since 1931 ­under the class pressures of or­ga­nized ­labor and the intellectual seductions of Keynesianism led them to think hard about what a new organ­izing princi­ple and an organ­izing force could be in a world ­after free-­trade empire ­under the indirect rule of the City of London.


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When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

says the German Chancellor. ‘A scrap of paper.’ Have you any five-pound notes about you? I am not calling for them. Have you any of those neat little Treasury pound notes? If you have, burn them; they are only ‘scraps of paper’. What are they made of ? Rags. What are they worth? The whole credit of the British Empire. ‘Scraps of paper’ … Treaties are the currency of international statesmanship … This doctrine of the scrap of paper … that treaties only bind a nation as long as it is to its interest, goes to the root of public law. It is the straight road to barbarism and the whole machinery of civilisation will break down if this doctrine wins in this war.

The implication is that the same will happen again. We do not yet know what will happen in France or whether the French resistance will be prolonged, both in France and in the French Empire overseas … However matters may go in France or with the French Government, or other French Governments, we in this Island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ For the first time Churchill stops reporting and raises himself to his full rhetorical height. Note, though, that a grand message does not demand grandiose language. Three-quarters of the words in this section are monosyllables.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

The same day, at a Gaelic football match in Dublin’s Croke Park, British soldiers, ostensibly preparing to search men leaving the ground, opened fire on the crowd, killing fourteen people including two boys aged ten and eleven. The events of 21 November 1920 became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. (Again, Irish history repeats itself and there would be another, even more infamous, Bloody Sunday to come.) In 1922, a treaty was negotiated that would see an Irish Free State established, under the British Empire, while six counties of the historic province of Ulster would split off to form Northern Ireland. The treaty was narrowly supported in the Dáil, although it couldn’t stop civil war breaking out in Ireland between those for and against it. Eventually Irish Free State forces prevailed. The treaty was implemented and Northern Ireland went its own way.

So it split the difference, granting independence over most of the country to a Republican insurgency it could not supress, while creating a protectorate for loyalists it didn’t love but felt it owed. For a state whose empire then covered two-thirds of the globe, it was a large, humiliating concession. The Easter Rising of 1916, a week-long insurrection by armed Republicans against British rule, began a process of events which, in time, would signify the beginning of the end of the British Empire, with countless other national liberation movements taking their lead from Ireland’s example. So it’s hardly surprising that a succession of governments paid little attention to the vestigial statelet of Northern Ireland, a painful reminder of a national humiliation. In return, members of Northern Ireland’s idiosyncratic political class were given carte blanche to run their affairs as they saw fit.

RESETTING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BRITAIN AND A UNITED IRELAND T he Easter Rising, the week-long insurrection by Irish Republicans in Dublin in April 1916, triggered a sequence of events that eventually led to the creation of the Irish Free State and the establishment of Northern Ireland. It is something of a secret history to most people on the other side of the Irish Sea. This is remiss, given it also effectively symbolised the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The total loss of control in Dublin, even for just a week, was a wounding humiliation for Britain. If uppity Nationalists could bring the second city of the empire to its knees, nothing would ever be the same again. And, indeed, it never was. The event inspired countless other national liberation movements throughout the twentieth century.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

The United States is likely to continue to pursue the promise of Western Hemispheric partnerships. Second, America’s trading, transnational, and technological relations have defined the country’s political and even security ties—as well as its economic links—with the rest of the world. The United States arose out of protest against the British Empire’s infringement of liberties, including taxes on trade. From America’s founding, the country drew a connection between economic and political freedoms and embraced the idea that private parties should be the agents of commerce. America’s merchants became practitioners of a new type of transnational internationalism.

The territories would enjoy self-government at each phase, based on universal white, male suffrage; there would be little interference by the national government. At the time, only Pennsylvania’s constitution recognized such a democratic electorate. The territories would share obligations for the Confederation’s debt and for the common defense.4 Jefferson did not want the expansion of the United States to repeat the mistakes of the British Empire by creating second-class colonies. Jefferson’s suggested names for the new territorial-states were a mixture of Native American, classical, and honorific; most, including Cheronesus, Assenispia, and Polypotamia, fortunately fell into history’s wastebasket. But Illinois, Michigan, and Washington received their launch from Jefferson’s report.

He wrote to a friend that the United States opposed China’s dismemberment and that American public opinion would not support a grab for “spoliation,” “but for the present we think our best policy is one of vigilant protection of our commercial interests without formal alliances.” Neither recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, nor foreign policy traditionalists, would like the idea of an alliance with London on behalf of the British Empire.29 During the summer of 1899, Alfred Hippisley, a Briton on leave from his post as inspector of maritime customs in China, visited his old friend Rockhill and Hay. Hippisley followed up with a letter to Rockhill that offered a practical step. The foreign powers controlled the collection of Chinese tariffs within their spheres of influence.


Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, clean water, operation paperclip, post-war consensus, V2 rocket, wikimedia commons, éminence grise

Just two years earlier, at Yalta, Churchill had striven to preserve the integrity of the British Empire. Now, the sun was rapidly setting on the country’s imperial dominions. On 20 February, the prime minister announced to the House of Commons that Britain would be leaving India ‘by a date not later than June 1948’. Ceylon and Burma would follow soon after. Nor was the situation any easier closer to home. Ernest Bevin announced that Britain could no longer provide essential financial aid to Greece and Turkey, while the problem of Palestine was referred to the United Nations after two decades of British rule. The British Empire seemed to be on the brink of collapse, with the mother country so destitute that it was unable to halt the decline.

‘I have noticed a tendency to regard Communists with suspicion almost automatically,’ he said, before informing them that the Soviets had ‘many sincere and able men among them, who have a valuable contribution to make’. His team were to be flag-bearers for Britain’s role in the post-war world, something that concerned Hinde as much as it did Churchill: ‘The example we set is a matter of the greatest importance. The prestige of the British Empire has never been higher than it is today, and it is up to us to see that in no case are we instrumental in lowering it.’10 As he eyed up his full-blooded young recruits, he could only hope they would be able to resist the temptations that would surely be on offer in Berlin. One of Brigadier Hinde’s first appointees was a snappy young lieutenant colonel named Harold ‘Tim’ Hays, a whirlwind of a man with gaunt features, a smart peaked cap and a devotion to work that was ‘far beyond the normal line of duty’.11 Amidst his many duties, Hays set himself the unofficial task of recording the adventures of the newly formed Berlin team, noting the highs and lows of everything that was to come.

If the western Allies could inflict a rapid and crushing defeat on the Red Army, then Stalin would have to rethink his planned domination of Eastern Europe. Operation Unthinkable was conceived as a military thrust deep into the heart of Soviet-occupied Europe, with the aim of imposing upon Russia ‘the will of the United States and British Empire’.42 The strategic architect of this land offensive was Brigadier Geoffrey Thompson, an ex-commander of the Royal Artillery with professional expertise in the terrain of Eastern Europe. His battle-plan envisaged a massive drive eastwards towards Berlin and beyond, with forty-seven British and American divisions driving the Red Army back to the Oder and Neisse rivers, some fifty-five miles to the east of Berlin.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, was alarmed by this turn of events. ‘Russia and Persia are playing tricks in Affghanistan,’ he wrote in the spring of 1838 – although he remained optimistic that things would soon be satisfactorily resolved.30 Within a few weeks, however, he had become genuinely concerned. The jewel in the British Empire’s crown suddenly looked vulnerable. Russia’s actions had brought it ‘a little too near to our door in India’, he wrote to one confidant. A month later, he was warning others that the barrier between Europe and India had been taken away, ‘laying the road open for invasion up to our very gate’.31 The situation looked bleak indeed.

The problem was that this was not the message that sank in from Burnes’s work; what really hit home back in Britain was his alarmist report that ‘the court of St Petersburg have long cherished designs in this quarter of Asia’.40 This dovetailed with growing British anxiety in other quarters. The consul-general in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, lobbied tirelessly, warning all who would listen that unless Russia’s rise was checked the British Empire would be gravely threatened in India. There were two options: Britain should either extend the empire into Mesopotamia to build a proper buffer protecting the approach from the west; or a major force should be sent from India to attack the Russians in the Caucasus.41 Rawlinson took it upon himself to support local anti-Russian insurgencies wherever he could find them: he funnelled arms and money to Imam Shamil, whose power base in Chechnya was a constant thorn in Russia’s side in the mid-nineteenth century.42 The support he provided helped establish a long tradition of Chechen terrorism against Russia.

In 1880, construction started on the Trans-Caspian Railway, with a line soon connecting through to Samarkand and Tashkent, and by 1899 a spur connected Merv to Kushk, within striking distance of Herat.33 These railway lines were not just symbolic: they were arteries that would allow provisions, weapons and soldiers to be delivered to the British Empire’s back door. As Field Marshal Lord Roberts emphasised to the officers of the Eastern Command not long afterwards, it was regrettable that the railways had been extended so far. Now, however, a line had been established ‘over which Russia could not be allowed to cross’. If it did, he stated, it would be ‘considered a casus belli’ – that is, grounds for war.34 The railway lines also represented an economic threat.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Britain alone produced more than 40 percent of the major inventions, discoveries and innovations in the world, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth century.4 Its technological preeminence was matched by its preeminence as a conquering nation. A twentieth century Italian scholar asked, “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?”5 At its peak, the British Empire included one-fourth of the land area of the world and one-fourth of all the people on earth. Such historic changes in the roles of particular peoples and nations have occurred in other places and other times. The Chinese were for centuries more advanced than any of the Europeans, including among their discoveries and inventions the compass, printing, paper, rudders and the porcelain plates that the West called “chinaware” or simply “china.”

The English legacy is not the reason for the success of North America.26 While it is true that all these countries are former colonies of England, and thus might be described as having been influenced by the culture of England, it is also true that the people who founded Canada and the United States were Englishmen, descendants of people steeped in the culture of England as it unfolded over the centuries— while people in Sierra Leone and Nigeria were descendants of people steeped in the very different cultures of a region of sub-Saharan Africa for many centuries, and exposed superficially to the culture of England for less than one century, during which their own indigenous cultures were by no means extinguished in the historically brief period when they were part of the British Empire. French historian Fernand Braudel referred to “the late and ephemeral colonization of Black Africa by the European powers in the nineteenth century.”27 This was hardly enough to culturally turn Africans into Europeans. Many former English colonies populated by non-English peoples continued to observe some aspect of the culture of England after becoming independent— lawyers wearing wigs in court, for example— but these outward observances of English traditions did not prevent these former colonies from having a fundamentally very different cultural legacy from that of England, and correspondingly very different economic and political experiences going forward after independence.

Some of the counterproductive attitudes that Latin America inherited from Spain have been said to have begun to change in Spain itself, more so than in Latin America.112 It is hard to escape the fact that former British colonies proper— that is, countries founded by a transplanted British population— have generally done better economically than former Spanish or Portuguese colonies. Nor can this be due to the British Empire’s having made better initial choices as to places to settle, because the Spanish Empire was established first, giving Spain the first choices. Spaniards conquered lands and peoples in both North America and South America in the 16th century, before the first permanent British settlement in America was established, tenuously, at Jamestown in the 17th century.


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The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

From this wider angle of vision, nineteenth-century Britain appears to have followed in the footsteps not of Venice or the United Provinces, but of Imperial Spain. As Paul Kennedy (1987: 48) has observed, like the Habsburg bloc three centuries earlier, the nineteenth-century British empire “was a conglomeration of widely scattered territories, a political-dynastic tour de force which required enormous sustained resources of material and ingenuity to keep going.” As we shall detail in chapter 3, this similarity between the spatial configurations of the nineteenth-century British empire and the sixteenth-century Spanish empire was matched by a striking similarity between the strategies and structures of the cosmopolitan networks of THE THREE HEGEMONIES OF HISTORICAL CAPITALISM 59 long-distance trade and high finance which assisted the power pursuits of the ruling groups of the two imperial formations.

The system so instituted was still a system of mutually legitimating, exclusive territorial sovereignties, like the original Westphalia System. But it was a system subject to British governance — a governance which Britain was able to exercise by virtue of its control over the European balance of power, over an extensive and dense world market centered on Britain itself, and over a global British empire. Although this governance was widely perceived as being exercised in the general interest of the member states of the system, it involved a lesser exclusiveness of sovereignty rights than was actually enjoyed in the original Westphalia System. This evolutionary process of simultaneous expansion and supersession of the modern interstate system was taken one step further by its enlarged reconstitution under US hegemony.

By the time the great mid-century expansion of British and world trade took off, Britain had already conquered a territorial empire of unprecedented and unparalleled scale and scope: [Contrary] to the views equally of Lenin and of Gallagher, Robinson and Fieldhouse, now repeated by Ingham and Anderson, most of the British Empire had already been established by 1850 — not only in Canada, and the Caribbean, Madras, Bombay and the Cape Coast from the seventeenth century, but in Gibraltar, Bengal, Ceylon, the Cape, Botany Bay, Penang, Guiana and Trinidad by the end of the eighteenth; and to these were added by 1850 virtually the whole of India, plus Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Natal.


pages: 324 words: 101,552

The Pineapple: King of Fruits by Francesca Beauman

British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, Fellow of the Royal Society, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, language of flowers, Maui Hawaii, refrigerator car, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

Comments on the cost of stone pineapples for his garden. 3 June 1739’ in the Public Record Office ADM 106/906/147. 46 For trade with the empire, see James Walvin, Fruits of Empire (1997). For the empire in this period, see Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (1994); H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire 1688–1755 (1996); and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: the British Empire and the World 1780–1830. 47 James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: a poem (1766) 30. 48 Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (1998) 1. 49 For responses to the empire in this period, see G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (1989), as well as Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire of Virtue: the Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c.1720–1785’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War (1994) 128–56. 50 Quoted in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992) 59. 51 Quoted in Consumer Society 15. 52 Britons. 53 A.

Perhaps the pineapples on his gateposts were a way for Blundell to pay private tribute to this close-to-home casualty of the New World.44 The decision by Admiral Thomas Mathews, Commissioner of the Navy, to install stone pineapples in his garden in Chatham in 1736 may have been influenced by similar motives: he had spent years on the high seas in command of a squadron against pirates in the East Indies.45 The ‘long’ eighteenth century (the period between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815) saw imperialism evolve into a central tenet of British identity. At the same time, Britain established its dominant position within the many trading empires of Europe. As a result, as the century progressed the pineapple’s role as a symbol of status became increasingly intertwined with its role as a compelling and high-profile expression of the emerging British empire.46 A poem of 1766 by James Grainger recounts how on the island of St Christopher’s, ‘the Sun’s child, the mail’d anana, yields / His regal apple to the ravish’d taste . . .’, a metaphor for the way that the ‘mail’d’ native Americans had been forced to ‘yield’ themselves to those who ‘ravish’d’, that is the British.47 The exotic is a construct: any entity only becomes exotic when it is different to what we know already.

With its position as a ‘perfect’ fruit thus undermined, it inevitably lost much of the kudos it gained from its arresting appearance. This was just the beginning of an encroaching disrespect for its finery. For the lower and middle classes, imported pineapple was a way of comprehending the emerging British empire for those participating in it imaginatively, as consumers, rather than physically, through travel or government. The nineteenth century was one of almost continual imperial warfare by British troops, with all the associated financial demands. The pineapple was a tangible affirmation of the benefits of this – bringing the wonders of the empire to the doorsteps of the many.


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

On the contrary, attracting the custom of high-net-worth individuals can turn an “economic backwater”—as the British Virgin Islands were described up until the mid-1970s—into a financial center.58 The BVI, which eliminated most taxes and created an innovative law to help international businesses avoid tax in their home jurisdictions, now hosts 40 percent of the world’s offshore business, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate and private wealth.59 However, as will be explained below, this economic surge has been a mixed blessing for the local people of the BVI, who have seen their tax burden increased and their democratic process compromised. Wealth management, globalization, and postcolonial development If global financialization is “a decidedly Anglo-American phenomenon,” that is due in large measure to the impact of trusts and the fiduciary role, which spread with the expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.60 As a direct result of colonialism, the trust and the concept of trusteeship—core tools of the wealth management profession—diffused into the legal systems of every imperial territory. The remnants of that framework can still be observed in today’s leading offshore financial centers, most of which are current or former British territories, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands.

See also dynastic wealth; inheritance family foundations, 151 family offices, 72–73 Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family (Hughes), 250–51 fiduciary responsibility: as absent in bankers, 63; duty of care, 45–46, 87; fiduciary capitalism, 272; gendering of fiduciary role, 64–65; ideology of moral leadership supplied by fiduciary role, 249–50; laws governing, 44–46, 315n38, 315n39; patriarchal authority of fiduciaries, 86; private fiduciaries, 252; spreads with expansion of British Empire, 253–54; structural expansion of fiduciary role, 250; in trusts, 173; of wealth managers, 23, 63, 67–68, 76, 79, 82–84 finance: complexity of international financial markets, 272; continuing crises in, 298; defined, 6; deregulation of, 126; dirty work of, 132–33; divorce financial analysis, 162, 331n101; each jurisdiction creates its own legal system for, 237; fiduciary responsibility absent in, 82; as global, 56–57, 60, 128, 253–59; lack of organization at international level, 235; little infrastructure needed for, 255; long-term relationships with clients in financial services, 320n1; payment and privilege in, 59–67; professional innovation in, 279; wealth management as at core of, 6.

See also inheritance taxes; tax avoidance; tax evasion; tax havens; tax shelters tax evasion: British Virgin Islands refuses to respond to evasions of, 264; European Union’s Savings Tax Directive for combating, 299; Israel co-opts wealth managers in crack down on, 270; tax avoidance distinguished from, 150; wealth managers associated with, 12, 23 tax havens: African and Russian wealth held in, 203; British Virgin Islands as, 262; client-facing jobs in, 265–66; economic effects on former colonies, 258–59; in former British empire, 264; Jersey as, 24; OECD opposition to, 55, 256, 257, 261; sovereignty in, 256–57, 259–62; the wealthy move to, 137. See also offshore finance tax shelters: colonies as, 254; complexity of, 53; corporate, 151; offshore financial centers as, 47; trust-corporation configuration as, 188; in United Kingdom, 241–42 TEP (Trust and Estate Planning) certification, 26; in advertisement for wealth manager, 60; as industry standard, 30, 55–56; on offshore financial centers, 129, 130; on the state, 236–37; on taxes, 226 testamentary freedom, 166 Thyssen-Bornemisza, Baroness Carmen, 160 tiered entities, 189–92 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 204, 209 trade: free, 239, 254, 293; sanctions, 295; trade-restriction avoidance, 159–60; wealth from global, 5, 51 training programs, 97–98, 103 transaction costs: continuity of wealth reduces, 214; for corporations, 181, 182; for foundations, 180; increased cost of borrowing, 221; minimizing, 209, 212; for private investment opportunities, 212; succession planning reduces, 215 treaties, 133, 256, 264 Treaty of Westphalia (1684), 133, 234, 235, 290, 293–97 Trevor (Panama-based wealth manager), 83, 229, 255 Trudeau, Kevin, 157–58 trust: in client relations, 20, 81–105, 120–21, 287; culture and, 108–16; in institutions, 75; pricing related to, 107, 108; rule of law as basis of, 109; similarity as basis for, 95; social identity and, 119–20 trust and estate planning: American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, 30; bar association special-interest groups for, 29; becomes an industry, 126; Chartered Trust and Estate Planner certification, 30; disparate professions in, 55; professionalization of, 4, 5–6; transformation of capitalism and emergence of, 51; university degrees in, 56.


pages: 736 words: 210,277

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

About 20 percent of the IDF Medical Corps at the end of 1948 were foreign volunteers.37 The Yishuv entered the civil war with one large militia and two very small paramilitary or terrorist organizations: the Haganah, the military arm of the mainstream Zionist parties, especially the socialist Mapai and Mapam, with thirty-five thousand members; and the IZL, the military arm of the Revisionist movement and its youth movement, Betar, and the LHI, which was composed, somewhat unnaturally, of breakaways from the IZL and left-wing revolutionaries who regarded the British Empire as their chief enemy. The IZL had between two and three thousand members and the LHI some three to five hundred. During the civil war, the three organizations occasionally coordinated their operations and did not clash with one another. The Haganah, which as of 1 June 1948 was renamed the Israel Defense Forces, was the organization that counted.

The withdrawal-promoting Security Council resolution of 4 No vember was buttressed by a memorandum by Bunche defining and endorsing the truce lines of 14 October.6 Israel initially demanded that Egypt withdraw from the areas its troops still occupied in Palestine-that is, the Gaza Strip and the Bethlehem area-and that the future armistice boundary between the two countries be based on the old international Egypt-Palestine frontier, agreed between the British Empire (effectively governing Egypt) and the Ottomans (ruling Palestine) in 19o6. The Egyptians initially sought what amounted to sovereignty over the central and southern Negev-partly in order to restore the historic territorial contiguity of the Arab and Islamic worlds-and demanded that Israel withdraw from the areas of Beersheba, Bir Asluj, and Auja.

Bandman, When Will Britain Withdraw from Jerusalem? 12. 3. Cohen, Palestine and Great Powers, 223. 4. Freundlich, From Destruction to Resurrection, 62. 5. Hurewitz, Struggle for Palestine, 281-282. 6. Niv, Battles of the IZL, 5:161-163, 274-280. 7. Cohen, Palestine and Great Powers, 245. 8. Louis, British Empire in the Middle East, 475. 9. Cohen, Palestine and Great Powers, z45. 10. Sela, "Question of Palestine," 317-322; Ben-Dror, "UNSCOP," 20-21. 11. Unsigned, "Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugees May 1947," undated, CZA S25-5353- 12. Text of Andrei Gromyko's speech, Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations, 19411953, 1:189-196. 13.


pages: 208 words: 74,328

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

anti-work, antiwork, bread and circuses, British Empire, Etonian, place-making, Upton Sinclair

I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Half an hour’s cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was ‘safe’; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire – damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple. So far as my observation goes nearly all Anglo-Indian officials have moments when their conscience troubles them.

He claims to be outside the empire-racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the class-racket. Even the right-wing ‘intellectual’, who is not definitely in revolt against British imperialism, pretends to regard it with a sort of amused detachment. It is so easy to be witty about the British Empire. The White Man’s Burden and ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Kipling’s novels and Anglo-Indian bores – who could even mention such things without a snigger? And is there any cultured person who has not at least once in his life made a joke about that old Indian havildar who said that if the British left India there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Peshawar and Delhi (or wherever it was)?

And is there any cultured person who has not at least once in his life made a joke about that old Indian havildar who said that if the British left India there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Peshawar and Delhi (or wherever it was)? That is the attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa.


pages: 249 words: 79,740

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going by George Friedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, It's morning again in America, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

Those that endure grow organically, and their imperial status often goes unnoticed until it has become overwhelming. This was the case both for Rome and for Britain, yet they succeeded because once they achieved imperial status, they not only owned up to it, they learned to manage it. Unlike the Roman or British Empire, the American structure of dominance is informal, but that makes it no less real. The United States controls the oceans, and its economy accounts for more than a quarter of everything produced in the world. If Americans adopt the iPod or a new food fad, factories and farms in China and Latin America reorganize to serve the new mandate.

To create alliances in which the United States maneuvers other countries into bearing the major burden of confrontation or conflict, supporting these countries with economic benefits, military technology, and promises of military intervention if required. To use military intervention only as a last resort, when the balance of power breaks down and allies can no longer cope with the problem. At the height of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston said, “It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

CHAPTER 2 REPUBLIC, EMPIRE, AND THE MACHIAVELLIAN PRESIDENT The greatest challenge to managing an empire over the next decade will be the same challenge that Rome faced: having become an empire, how can the republic be preserved? The founders of the United States were anti-imperialists by moral conviction. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defeat the British Empire and found a republic based on the principles of national self-determination and natural rights. An imperial relationship with other countries, whether intended or not, poses a challenge to those foundational principles. If you believe that universal principles have meaning, it follows that an anti-imperial republic can’t be an empire and retain its moral character.


pages: 240 words: 75,304

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Dava Sobel, digital divide, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Silicon Valley, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair

They were “emigrants,” not immigrants. They had known poverty in their homeland, but overnight, it seemed, had been transformed into hardy transplants in Canada, the United States, or in England itself. Fleming’s life is one long demonstration of competing loyalties to Canada, to Scotland, and to the idea of the British Empire. As a prime example of the successful emigrant, he nevertheless lamented on return visits to Scotland the loss of his distinctive accent, and even his ear for the purer strains of the “north of Tweed” dialect. Only in Kirkcaldy was he taken for a native. The Fleming brothers nearly died on that forty-four-day passage in 1845.

The moment had come, now that the rails were in sight of the ocean, to continue the cables under the Pacific, just as they had already crossed the Atlantic. Vancouver would be connected to Fiji and Australia, Australia with India and South Africa. A glance at any map confirmed the fact that the red patches on the earth, the British Empire, fairly begged for connection. Without abandoning standard time, he would now take up the final great scheme of his life, the laying of the trans-Pacific and worldwide, all-British cable. His vision had always been one of one-world and instantaneous communication. The time zones were but a rough sketch of what he next planned to do.

Ever since my visit to Blacksod Bay I have had visions of the extension of the use of the electric telegraph and have regarded it as a heaven sent means of communication. I have asked myself the question can we bring the Dominion telegraphically as near England as Ireland and Scotland are today? Can we bring the whole worldwide British Empire telegraphically into one neighborhood? Miraculous as it must have seemed at the time, it is about as far as the marriage between steam and electricity can be pushed. The coordinated efforts involved, brought into focus that day, are also indicative of the mechanical disadvantage of steam technology, then entering its unacknowledged decline.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

(Also referred to as economic colonization) It is tempting to assume that empire-building was really only a distant part of human history or a relic of an almost forgotten time, but the reality is that most people have been living through the gradual destruction of the largest Empire history has ever known, the British Empire, as well as the massive expansion of the American Empire. Some people will be able to say that during their lifetime they were witness to the end of both… Empires, governments, and countries rise and fall for the same reason: The thirst for power. If the love of power is the root of all evil, then greed is the seed.

Their primary need was amusement, and they were entirely satisfied to blindly follow whoever gave them a sense of protection and safety and played into their pleasure and wants regardless of the consequences. Sound familiar? Modern scholars like to proclaim that the Roman Empire did not “fall”, but instead refer to it as a “transformation”. Call it whatever people want, but the modern Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian and British empires all have many of the same things in common: They all collapsed over a period of time. They all had scapegoats for their kingdoms’ collapse, from natural disasters to disease epidemics, peasant revolt against a corrupt ruling class, constant warfare among states and nations, economic troubles, or some combination thereof.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end.” – Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass A ROTTING FOUNDATION America, Land of Opportunity Built On Lies Most people have heard the story of the founding of America by those looking to escape the overbearing nature and criminal behavior of the British Empire. Oh, the irony. When people feel that their personal liberties are being infringed upon, sometimes they pack up and move to a different place that sees the relationship between the State and the citizens in a better and more healthy way. Despite what kids these days might think, Christopher Columbus did not discover the “New World”, and for the record, he was not from England.


pages: 1,243 words: 167,097

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Soon, numerous numbered ‘huts’ began to spring up around the grounds; these nondescript plywood barracks housed the offices of the naval, air, military and diplomatic sections, which toiled not only to break into, or decrypt, enemy messages intercepted by the many radio intercept stations located around the British Empire, but then to turn what they intercepted and decrypted into sensible and accurate intelligence to be used by the decision-makers to help win the war. By the end of the Second World War, Sir Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence, who as a 23-year-old undergraduate in history played an influential role in Bletchley’s Naval Section, concluded that Ultra may not have been the ‘war winner,’ but it was undoubtedly a ‘war shortener.’

Godfrey’s mentor, Admiral Sir William ‘Blinker’ Hall, the legendary spymaster from the First World War, had suggested he should hire someone to help him with his overwhelming pressures and responsibilities in a world verging on war, particularly in the now long-neglected Intelligence Division.2 John Godfrey immediately reached out for suggestions for a worthwhile candidate.3 As with most things in the shadowy world of British intelligence and espionage in those days, Fleming’s name reached him through the time-honoured old boys’ network – specifically Sir Montagu Norman, the longest-serving governor of the Bank of England.4 Fleming, like Norman, had been tempered at Eton, the prestigious boys’ school that had crafted the character of generations of the privileged class, preordained for positions of power within the British Empire. The brief resumé Godfrey received seemed impressive enough: the young journalist had achieved a modicum of notoriety dabbling as an ‘occasional informant’ for the Secret Intelligence Service while covering the Russian beat for Reuters in the 1930s.5 And he was made of the right stuff: he was the grandson of Robert Fleming, the founder of Robert Fleming & Company in Dundee, which produced jute-based products during the American Civil War years before moving on to investments in the lucrative American railroad industry.

Almost directly across sat Number 10 Downing Street, the unassuming official residence of the prime minister, and nearby Richmond Terrace, the eventual home of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters. In the distance he could just see Big Ben and the great clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, forever a symbol of London and the British Empire now fighting for its survival. In the long shadow of Big Ben, beneath Whitehall, lay the underground bunkers built to house, among other things, the Cabinet War Rooms, where the prime minister and the chiefs of staff (COS) gathered regularly to confer once Luftwaffe bombs began to fall in the summer of 1940.


Lonely Planet Jamaica by Lonely Planet

British Empire, buttonwood tree, carbon footprint, estate planning, European colonialism, fixed-gear, food miles, jitney, Kickstarter, talking drums, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning

Red Stripe Reggae Sumfest | SHELBY SOBLICK / GETTY IMAGES © August It’s as hot as Jamaica gets, and about as humid too. In fact, the rains may be coalescing into ominous storm clouds. Yet the celebrations on the island aren’t slowing down. zIndependence Day August 6 marks Jamaica’s independence from the British Empire, and occurs with no small fanfare and delivery of dramatic speeches, especially in the Kingston area. Celebrations mark the event island-wide. October Now the rains are coming in hard, and there may be hurricanes gathering off the coast. On the plus side, accommodations run dirt cheap.

East of the airport and closer to Montego Bay are two of the popular Sandals hotels: Sandals Montego Bay ( GOOGLE MAP ; %952-5510; www.sandals.com/main/montego; N Kent Ave; all-inclusive r from US$479; paWs), one of the great-grand-daddies of all-inclusive resorts, and Sandals Royal Caribbean ( GOOGLE MAP ; %953-2231; www.sandals.com/main/royal/rj-home; Hwy A1; 3 nights all-inclusive r from US$1700, ste from US$2700; paWs), a couples-only outpost of the Sandals empire that lays on nostalgia for the British Empire. Sandals Inn ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %952-4140; www.sandals.com/main/inn/in-home; Kent Ave; all-inclusive r from US$690; paWs) is just to the west of the airport. Slightly closer to MoBay’s city center on the Freeport Peninsula near the cruise ship terminal are two more all-inclusive resorts: the high-rise Sunset Splash Montego Bay ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %in the USA 888-774-0040; www.sunsetmontegobay.com; Sunset Dr; all-inclusive r from $US360; paWs) and the closely guarded, couples-only Secrets St James ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %953-6600; www.secretsresorts.com; Freeport; r from US$768, ste from US$1531; paWs).

Heading east, High St ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ), lined with colonnaded Georgian merchant houses, leads to the 1913 Hendricks Building ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; 2 High St) with a stop sign protruding from a small cannon next to it. Just beyond is the Imperial bridge ( GOOGLE MAP ; High St), constructed with materials from all corners of the British Empire. It overlooks the river, with its remaining sugarcane warehouses; the slave market was held on the east bank. On the corner of Market St and Main St, an upturned cannon sprouting a stop sign harks back to Black River's days as a British military garrison. North along Market St is the Zong Massacre memorial ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Market St), commemorating the 1781 event in which 133 African slaves were thrown overboard by the crew of the Zong slave ship, with the subsequent legal case contributing to the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

As a rule, advocates of the imperial state do not see themselves as having set out only to exploit the other nations of the world. There are, of course, exceptions, and Niall Ferguson describes the rise of the British Empire in just these terms. Niall Ferguson, Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For a more balanced account, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 38. Genesis 6.5–8.14, 11.1–9. 39. The three-way distinction between city-states, national states, and empires is treated in Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, 29–39, 121–122; Yoram Hazony, “Empire and Anarchy,” Azure 12 (Winter 2002), 27–70; Azar Gat, Nations, 3, 83. 40.

And second, as you can immediately see from the literature produced by the individuals and institutions supporting these endeavors, they are consciously part of an imperialist political tradition, drawing their historical inspiration from the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the British Empire. For example, Charles Krauthammer’s argument for American “Universal Dominion,” written at the dawn of the post–Cold War period, calls for America to create a “super-sovereign,” which will preside over the permanent “depreciation… of the notion of sovereignty” for all nations on earth. Krauthammer adopts the Latin term pax Americana to describe this vision, invoking the image of the United States as the new Rome: Just as the Roman Empire supposedly established a pax Romana (or “Roman peace”) that obtained security and quiet for all of Europe, so America would now provide security and quiet for the entire world.4 This flowering of imperialist political ideals and projects in the last generation should have sparked a rigorous debate between nationalists and imperialists over how the political world should be organized.

This policy dramatically strengthened Germany’s eastward position, paving the way for Hitler’s devastation, twenty years later, of each of these countries in turn.111 Similarly, Eisenhower’s support for Arab nationalism and self-determination in the Middle East helped to demolish the remains of the British Empire, thereby destroying one of America’s most faithful and reliable allies in the struggle against Soviet Communism. At the same time, this support for Arab national self-determination in Egypt gave rise to the aggressive dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser—who repaid America’s kindness by taking Egypt into the Soviet imperial orbit.112 These examples are not intended as arguments against Czech or Egyptian independence.


The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

In the seventeenth century, harried by agents of James VI, Dùn Èistean fell from use, and Lewis ceased to be a seat of power. A century later, the triumph of Hanoverian kings over the Scottish Stuart line moved power still further south and increased the determination of Lowlanders to break the clans conclusively. By the start of the nineteenth century the Macleod lords were gone, replaced by mainland agents of the British Empire (Mackenzies and Mathesons) who subjected Lewis to the profiteering with which they ravaged the globe. Communities were economic assets to be moved between sites like cash between investments. The gravitational centre of island life moved east, away from the Atlantic: traditional seats of coastal power – such as Ness and Ùig – gave way to the growth of Stornoway.

Just 289 spoke no Gaelic, but three of that tiny Anglo band were the schoolmaster and his family, shipped in by the school board from Birmingham.10 The Education Act was followed by a bombardment of anti-Gaelic propaganda. Simon Laurie, professor of education at the University of Edinburgh, insisted that a child taught Gaelic had been ‘miseducated – in fact, cut off from being a member of the British Empire altogether’. In 1878, the leading Edinburgh publisher and politician, William Chambers, published two caustic articles on ‘The Gaelic Nuisance’. Because Gaelic-speakers didn’t have English books and newspapers, he insisted, they must ‘vegetate between vague legends and superstition’.11 To learn Gaelic, he stated, was to remain ignorant: to wipe out this abomination required ‘moral courage in the face of popular prejudice’ but he saw this crusade gaining momentum around him.

Aberdaron, 299–300, 303, 310–11 Abersoch, 293 Aberystwyth, 293 Abrams, Lynn, 218 Acair (Stornoway press), 109 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, 250 Achill, island of, 253–4 Adam, Seumas, 191–7, 345 Adomnan, 206 Aikerness Holm, 68–9 Aith (town of Shetland), 38 Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, 128, 138, 171, 172, 173–4, 344 Alexandrine desert, 283, 285 Amargin (ancient Irish poet), 286 AMEC (energy consortium), 113 An Garbh-eilean, island of, 134 An Teallach (‘the Forge’, mountain), 3, 153, 155 An Tiaracht (mini-skellig), 277 Anderson, Andrew and Danny, 29–30 Anderson, Iain, 74 anemones, 279, 333 angler fish, 236 Anglican communion, 342 Apollo moon missions, 69 Applecross Peninsula, 165, 167, 168 Araidh na Suiridh (Skye), 94 Aran Islands (Oileáin Árann), 210, 254–7, 258, 261, 340; bounty from shipwrecks, 263; cliff-face place names, 263–4; Dún Aonghasa (clifftop fort), 261–2, 263; An Sunda Caoch (‘the Blind Sound’), 262–3; threat to fishing community, 264, 265 archaeological heritage, xi; absence of inscriptions on gneiss, 92; Barra Isles, 116–17; Erskine Beveridge, 111; Broch of Mousa on Havera, 44–5, 47; Callanish stone circle, 92; on early Admiralty maps, 239–40; early wooden tools as rare in Scotland, 168; and female scientists of the coast, 282; Gokstad ship, 26; Inner Sound and Skye, 167–71; intermingling of eras, 8–9, 45–6, 60, 79, 80; Jarlshof on Shetland, 50; microliths, 168; mysteries of Papay, 65; ‘papa’ sites, 63–6, 117–20; and role of sea in Mesolithic world, 168–70; Rousay coast, 77, 78–81; runic inscriptions at Maes Howe, 86; South Welsh history, 294; west coast of Ireland, 206, 211–12, 214; see also human history, traces/hints of Arctic terns, 32, 38 Ardmore, 195–6 Argentina, 8 Argyll coastline, 198–204, 208 Arkle (mountain), 125–6, 134 Arnold, Matthew, ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), 298 Arran, Isle of, 295 Arranmore, island of, 210 Arthurian legend, 334 Asleifson, Sweyn, 66 Assynt, 124, 254, 317 Atlantic (film, 2016), 264–5 auks, 7, 17, 62–3, 98, 315 Avenius, Rufus (Roman poet), 209 Azoulay, Ariella, 226–7 Baleshare (Uist township), 111 Balfours (Orcadian laird family), 73 Balnakiel (near Cape Wrath), 123, 128–9, 172 Balor (Irish god of darkness), 213, 214, 225 Bardsey, island of (Ynys Enlli), 291, 294, 295–304; current island community, 304–10 Barker, George, 319 barley, 47, 219–20 Barmouth (Wales), 292, 293 barnacle geese, 174 Barra, 91–2, 109, 116, 209; lighthouse keeping on, 204 Barra Head (Beàrnaraigh), 116 Barrett, Josie, 244 Bateman, Meg, 345 BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, 83 HMS Beagle, 239 bearberry, 160 Beaufort, Francis, 207 Beinn Dearg Mòr (mountain), 155 Beinn Eighe nature reserve, 159–60 Belize, xi, 86, 87, 88 Belmullet (County Mayo), 245 Below, Will Ernst von, 244–5 Ben Loyal (mountain), 125 Ben Stac (mountain), 125, 137 Berger, John, 224, 329–30 Bernard van Leer Foundation, 105 Beveridge, Erskine, 111 biodiversity, 237 birlinns (boats), 171–2, 173–4, 244 Birmingham, University of, 10–12, 339 bladderwrack, 23 Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí), 271, 276–9, 340 bluethroats, 201 boatbuilding and boats: birlinns, 171–2, 173–4, 244; currachs, 208–9, 221, 255; Galway hooker sailboats, 254; Irish, 207, 208–9, 221; Irish small boat tradition, 210, 245–6, 247, 287–8; Norse design, 26, 27, 28, 134, 171–2; Sgoth Niseach (traditional Ness boat), 98, 108; on Shetland, 23, 26–8, 29–31; sixareens, 28, 29–31; symbolic ships, 172; transport of cattle, 150, 151, 152; in Wales, 292; on Western Isles, 98, 108; Zulu-class sailing boats, 221–2 Bonar, Patrick, The Story of the Cope (2009), 229 Brae of Moan (Rousay), 78 Brathwaite, Kamau, 87 Brazil, 191 Breen, Colin, 206 Brent Spar scandal, 248 Breton culture, 10, 295, 324, 334 British Empire: agents of in Western Isles, 100; anti-Gaelic propaganda, 103–4; boys’ adventure periodicals, 191–2; clearances, 8, 78, 80–1, 95, 96, 100–1, 102, 127, 136, 187, 188, 195–6; and elites of Victorian Scotland, 88; mapping of, 239–40, 241–2; and Skye, 178–9; and slavery, 88, 190 British Museum, 280–1 Britishness, 341–2 Broadford (Skye), 150 Bronze Age culture, 60, 78, 80, 262 Broo (deserted village on Shetland), 49, 92–3 Brook, Julie, 117 Brough Holm (Shetland skerry), 23 Brown, Peter, 294 the Bull and the Cow rocks, 198, 277, 287 Bullock, William, 62 Bunting, Basil, Briggflatts (1966), 321 Burma, 179 Burra Firth, 18–20 the Burren, 254–6 Bury, J.B., 146, 149 buttercups, 42, 93 butterworts, 37 Cairngorm range, 145 calcareous shell-sand, 93, 94, 95 Caldey (Pembrokeshire island), 291 Callanish stone circle, 92 Calve, island of (Tobermory Bay), 196–7 Calvin and Hobbes (cartoon strip), 189 Calvinism, 128, 304 Campbell, Anne, 113–14 Canna, isle of, 172, 189 Cannon, Moya, 259–60, 268 Cape Clear Island, 277, 287 Cape Wrath, 2, 123, 127, 134 Cara, isle of, 189 Carbost, Old Inn at, 181 Cardigan Bay (Bae Ceredigion), 291–2, 311 Caribbean, 86, 87, 88, 190 Carlyle, Thomas, 148 Carrigskeewaun (County Mayo), 254 Carrowteige, Connolly’s pub at, 245–7 Carson, Rachel, 18, 345 Cartesian philosophy, 343 Carthusian monks, 174–5 Carthy, Hugh, 169 cartography see maps cathedral architecture, 32–3 Catholicism: and Act of Union (1801), 239; and Barra, 91, 204; and Cromwell, 211, 255, 287; and lighthouse keeping, 204; and Scottish conversion to Calvinism, 128; transnational alliances in Iberian heyday, 283; and Uist, 204; unique Irish theology, 285–6; see also Celtic Christianity cattle, 43, 66, 72, 117, 316; droving routes, 149, 150–2 Ceilidh Place (Ullapool venue), 124, 141–2 Celtic Christianity: ancient chapels on Ness, 98, 99; asceticism of, 175, 285–6; early Irish saints and holy men, 98, 118–19, 175, 206, 207, 260, 325; early saints and holy men, 325; Enlli as sacred place, 296, 297–9, 301–4, 305; era of the scholar saints, 284–7; expansion by sea routes, 118, 284–5; Irish monks on Westray, 61; logic of in ninth century Ireland, 257; and ‘papa’ sites, 118–19; sea as place of transcendence, 272–4, 286; Skellig Michael, 283–7; St Columba (Colmcille), 118, 206, 214, 215, 225, 272–3, 284; St Ronan on Lewis, 98–9; travels of the first Irish monks, 91; unique Irish theology, 285–6 Celtic civilisations, x; Irish Celts and Norse world, 94, 118; Lyonesse myth, 333–5; mythology, 213, 255, 261–2, 273–4; and ‘papa’ sites, 118, 119–20; as romanticised, 12; whales in Irish culture and myth, 272–5; see also Gaelic culture; Gaelic language Celtic revival, 94–5 centaury, 94 Chamberlain, Brenda, 291, 302–3 Chambers, William, 103–4 charcoal, 157, 158, 168 Charles Stuart, Prince (’Bonnie Prince Charlie’), 128, 129, 166, 171, 182 Chlèirich (Eilean a’ Chlèirich), 1–3, 8–9, 335, 336 choughs, 228, 315 chromite, 39–40 Church of Scotland, 204 cillín (burial ground for unbaptised children), 252–3 Clanranald, 139, 171, 244 Clare, John, 130 The Claymore (Dunnett and Adam periodical), 191–2 climbing, 117, 125–6, 145, 156, 179–82 Coigach Peninsula, 1, 124 Coille na Glas Leitir at Loch Maree, 159–60 Coire Lagan (Skye), 179–80 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 148 Collins ‘New Naturalist’ series, 159 communication technologies, 5–6, 129; e-commerce, 343; new geographies of mass communication, 9–10, 109, 197, 343, 344–5; ocean cable, 207 Connacht: ‘ABC of earth wonders’, 255–7; coast south of Erris, 255; ‘deep mapping’ projects in, 242, 254–5, 256–8, 261; human traces/ruins, 256; mapping of coast, 240–1; marginal history of ABC zone, 255, 257; see also Galway, County (province of Connacht); Mayo, County (province of Connacht) Connemara (County Galway), 85, 210, 211–12, 223, 254–5, 256–61, 266–8 Coptic Christians, 285 Corbett, Michael, 108 Cork, County, 210, 279 cormorants, 71 Cornish language, 10, 295, 316, 322, 324 Cornish Studies Centre (Redruth), 322, 333 Cornwall: chough as symbol of, 315; Cornish nationalism, 332; Cornish Revival culture, 324, 333, 334; English feeling of, 315–16; Gorsedh Kernow, 324, 332; great Atlanticist writers and artists, 316–25, 326–32; historic links with Atlantic edge, 325; human traces/ruins, 334; and Lyonesse myth, 333–5; painters in St Ives, 326–32; pilchard industry, 323, 324; post-war painters, poets and thinkers, 317–25, 326–32; sea abstracted from the land, 316; smuggling and wrecking, 323–4; tin and copper mines, 323; tourism in, 312, 315–16, 325, 326; vanished culture of, 315–16, 321–4; wildlife and flora, 315, 333 corporate and multinational interests, 247–50, 251–3 Corrib, Lough, 255 Corrib gas field, 248–9, 251–3 Coruisk, Loch (Coire Uisg) (Skye), 182 Costie, Alex, 69–70 Covenanter rising (1679), 219 Crawford, O.G.S., 333–4 creeling, 71–2, 98, 117, 209, 230 Cregan family of Erris, 246 Crichton Smith, Iain, 93, 103, 104, 321 Crieff, 151 Cromwell, Oliver, 211, 255, 287 Cronin, Nessa, 279, 282 Cross, Dorothy, 281–2 crossbills, 160 Culloden, battle of (1746), 129, 171 Cumberland, Duke of (‘Butcher’), 129 Cumming, John, 30–1 Cunliffe, Barry, Facing the Ocean (2001), ix, 169–70, 342–3 curlews, 70, 86 Curwen, E.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

This sought to make life so unpleasant for people presumed not to have a right to live in the UK that they would leave, and more broadly sought to ‘deport first and hear appeals later’.20 The predictable upshot was that people who couldn’t prove their immigration status were wrongly accused of being in the country illegally; some were even deported. Many were migrants from the ‘Windrush generation’, who were invited to come and work in Britain from the Caribbean after the Second World War at a time when citizens of the British Empire and the Commonwealth had the right to move freely to the UK, as Chapter 3 discusses. When the scandal broke in 2018, the ensuing uproar forced anti-immigrant campaigners on to the back foot, led to the resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd and persuaded her successor to water down the policy introduced by Theresa May, who had since become prime minister.

German migrants like him were the Mexicans of their time: the largest category of immigrants to the US whose language, culture and, yes, ‘complexion’ were often seen as inferior and threatening by the established Anglophone majority.11 Before 1820 the ‘New World’ had relied primarily on forced migrants for labour – African slaves in the Americas and British convicts in Australia, as well as poor European indentured servants. But the transport of slaves on British ships was banned in 1807 and slavery became illegal in the British Empire in 1833. Primarily Indian and Chinese indentured labourers – workers in debt bondage to their employers – often replaced slaves, until Britain finally abolished the practice in 1916. Most went home again, but some stayed, as the presence of long-standing Indian and Chinese communities in the Caribbean and many other former British colonies attests.

Among them was twenty-two-year-old Sam King.1 King had served as an engineer in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. While he had returned to Jamaica when he was demobilised the previous year, he had failed to settle back in. So his family had sold three cows to buy his passage on the Windrush. As subjects of the British Empire, Jamaicans had the right to travel freely to Britain and live there. Even so, as the ship approached land, many were anxious that the authorities would turn them back. So King persuaded two former RAF radio operators to play dominoes outside the ship’s radio room to listen in on incoming transmissions.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In addition to migration being a consequence of empire, capitalism, climate catastrophe, and oppressive hierarchies, contemporary migration is itself a mode of global governance, capital accumulation, and gendered racial class formation. Radhika Mongia writes, “The very development of the nation-state occurred, in part, to control mobility along the axis of the nation/race,” which we see in the early organization of passports to regulate movement within the British empire, foreshadowing the modern state.10 Contrary to common analysis, borders being simultaneously monetized and militarized—open to capital but closed to people—are not contradictory juxtapositions. The free flow of capital requires precarious labor, which is shaped by borders through immobility. International talk of “managed migration” and a concerted shift toward “temporary labor migration” in high-income countries unambiguously proves this requirement.

British administrators wielded brutal violence and adopted the doctrine of terra nullius to expropriate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands.15 Named after a South Australian politician, the Torrens system of land registration was first enacted in the colony of South Australia.16 Later exported across the British empire, this system of land registration combined the colonial doctrines of discovery and racist discourses of uninhabited and uncultivated land with capitalist models of private property ownership and land commodification.17 Renisa Mawani explains that the Torrens system borrowed directly from imperial slave ship manifests and, through it, land was seized from Indigenous social and legal organization and transferred as private property to settlers.18 Based on colonial dispossession and capitalist private ownership working together to uphold white settler property, this land registration system sanctioned colonizers’ claims of ownership to the entire continent.

These programs can be traced back to the indentureship of more than 1.3 million people from the South Asian subcontinent, facilitated by the interests of empire and emerging colonial states.32 The British East India Company and then the British raj regulated the emigration of indentured workers to sugar, cotton, rubber, and tea plantations and for railroad construction across the British empire, including to Guyana, Fiji, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad, and Uganda, for nearly one century. Approximately a quarter million of those indentured were women, many of whom were sex workers, widowed, or escaping domestic violence.33 Even though indentureship was deemed voluntary contract labor, the movement of mostly class- and caste-oppressed South Asian indentured labor throughout the British colonies, and later other European colonies, created some of the first state interventions in migration and facilitated the conditions of unfree labor migration.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

Whereas the majority in the Southern Rhodesian legislature had once been unelected company men, they were now overtaken by elected white settlers, making the territory effectively self-governing. As a result, the British Crown decided to revoke the BSAC’s charter. Both Northern and Southern Rhodesia were transferred into the hands of the British Empire. Soon, the indigenous black population, numbering 2 million, was restricted to specially demarcated ‘Native Reserves’, that quickly became overcrowded. Many of them were simply evicted from their land, and forcibly moved into the communal areas. Before Robert Mugabe was of school age, the 44,000 white settlers had awarded themselves four times more territory than the black population, including all that was most fertile, accessible and mineral-rich

The discovery rate simply couldn’t keep up with the runaway demand for cars. An historic shift was under way. The search for oil needed to move beyond Texas and beyond the shores of the US, to geologically uncharted lands. America had only one competitor in the international search for oil, and that was the British Empire. * Hanging on the wall of Edgar Lloyd’s study in South Wales is a photograph showing him and a dozen African officials looking out over a tropical river. A gleaming American stretch car is waiting on the mud road beside them. There are other shots of Lloyd in white shorts and knee-high socks exploring a mangrove swamp, and slashing through forests with a cutlass.

Relying on a single supplier so far from home, however, was still a strategic risk; no one was sure how long Persia could be kept inside Britain’s imperial orbit, and so the search needed to move on, just like it had in the United States. And when it came to combing the world for resources Britain enjoyed a head start over all its rivals. The British Empire, at its peak, held sway over one-fifth of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its land. Britain was able to call upon its territories for exclusive and generous exploration rights. In Africa, the early favourites for an oil discovery of commercial value were Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Sudan.


pages: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

As I looked through the Galton records in the Birmingham City Archive, I discovered a point of view that seemed to me to upend received wisdom about the industrial revolution, and so, partly by accident and partly by will, I hunkered down for a long spell in the eighteenth century and communion with the troubles of another extended family—every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy tells us. But I have also written this book in a time of mass shootings in the United States. My daughter was in first grade when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, in December 2012. My heart broke like everyone else’s, five years into my study of guns in the eighteenth-century British Empire. My investigation into the place of guns in that world showed me that their uses are not fixed, but change with time and place. There were no casual shootings in Britain until suddenly, because of cultural shifts inaugurated by the Napoleonic Wars, there were. Likewise, the shooting in my family was not unrelated to the violence that tore up Punjab in the 1980s, and the mass shootings of our time are not unrelated to the war on terror.

Finance capital and industrial capital were coeval and related. The increasingly dulcet tones of Galton’s gentlemanly life deafened the family to the cacophony of gunmaking in the alleys around their home in Steelhouse Lane; in the same manner, we have become amnesiac about the wars that made the British Empire and the world’s first industrial capitalist economy. Insofar as Francis Galton’s theories of eugenics emerged from his study of his own family history, it behooves us to understand that family well. We forget the place of war manufacturing in industrial capitalism like we forget the blood in our veins.

In explaining the delay, he gave Freame & Barclay an insider view of the gun trade, emphasizing the many big merchants who owed them money, including Richard Oswald and the Hanburys. Through the bonds of debt and credit, Farmer and Galton were drawn into the orbit of such men, whose merchant empires were pillars of the expanding British Empire. When Oswald later needed to borrow from a bank, four times between 1769 and 1778, he, too, turned to the Barclays. In May 1755, Farmer had hopeful news from Lisbon, and his bankruptcy committee examined guns that had been made for Oswald and Earl Daniel and were stored in the firm’s London warehouse.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

The Parthian, Sassanid, Qin, and Han empires were Rome’s contemporaries (and the first two its enemies), and among many empires that followed, Byzantium became a byword for its bureaucratic opacity and durability, the Muslim and Mongol empires for their rapid ascent, the Ottoman Empire for its long decline, the Russian Empire for its eastward expansion, the British Empire for its thalassocratic might, and the Soviet empire for its relentless suppression of dissent. Barfield (2001) introduced a useful hierarchy into the classification of empires. Primary empires, exemplified by Rome or China’s dynasties, are established by conquest of large (subcontinental or continental-size) territories and encompass large (at least millions) and diverse populations.

These analyses were done within the framework of the world-system—an international system, a network of polities making war and allying with one another (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1994; Wallerstein 2004)—and concentrated on four world-regional political/military networks, Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, and East Asia, and the expanding Central System which includes the Persian, Roman, Islamic, Mongol, and British empires (Inoue et al. 2012). After comparing the frequencies of cycles and sweeps across these five interpolity networks, they found, surprisingly, more similarities than differences and identified a total of 22 upsweeps and 19 downsweeps. But they found only three instances of sustained system-wide collapses: the post-Islamic Caliphate collapse in the Central System, the post-Eastern Han collapse in East Asia, and the post-Guptan collapse in the South Asian system.

Empires become large centrally controlled entities by growing from their limited core areas to encompass distant territories inhabited by populations speaking different languages and belonging to different cultures. This definition encompasses a wide range of political entities, ranging from such explicitly established imperial structures as the imperium Romanum or the British Empire to a de facto empire reassembled by the Soviet Union after the Russian Empire’s dissolution during WWI and expanded after the Soviet victory in WWII by both direct and indirect control of half a dozen eastern and central European countries. Central control could be exercised in different ways.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

His government commissioned official reports to find the economic potential of design in its industries and found that design-centered companies “saw a turnover rise by fourteen percent and profits by nine percent.”22 No doubt Jony’s father, Mike, had made a huge contribution to the rise of design in his native land and he was honored thusly. In 1999, in recognition of his contributions to British design education, Mike Ive was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In 2003, Jony was appointed a member of Royal Designers for Industry; in 2004, he was awarded the RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal; and in 2005, he won what was to be the first in a string of prestigious awards from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD). In 2006, he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (a higher award than his father’s OBE). Jony didn’t make a public comment about the award at the time, but in a statement, Apple said: “We are as proud as could be that Jony is receiving such a prestigious commendation.”23 • • • Although his designs were drawing much notice, bigger work (quite literally) was still ahead.

Apple was riding high, having surpassed ExxonMobil as the most valuable publicly held company in the world. Sir Jony Ive The year 2012 began auspiciously for Jony Ive, as it had for Apple, despite Jobs’s passing. Jony was named a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year Honours List, for services to design and enterprise. It was the second time he had been recognized in the honors list, having been made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005. The second highest order of chivalry, the KBE entitled its new bearer to style himself Sir Jonathan Ive. Jony described the honor as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful.”


pages: 224 words: 12,941

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg

bread and circuses, British Empire, computer age, disinformation, double helix, HyperCard, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, means of production, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Saturday Night Live, Socratic dialogue

One must turn to The Modern Library from Random House, the Everyman’s Library, and Penguin or Oxford Classics in the twentieth century for endeavors of a comparable scale. In his day, the Baron had no enduring competitors. The inception and growth of his series parallels the development of the British Empire – a relevant context in at least two respects. The first is that the British Empire spanned the globe in ways that created a global market-demand for the English language and for British literature. Englishmen were invading the four corners of earth in what now is generally viewed, usually with disapproval, as moral, economic, military, 7 8 Robert Patten, Charles Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978); Peter Shillingsburg, Pegusus in Harness (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); June Steffensen Hagen, Tennyson and his Publishers (London: Macmillan, 1979); Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) and R.

He purchased advanced proof sheets and in some cases manuscripts in order that his books would appear in the bookstores before any of his Continental competitors – such as Jugel in Frankfurt, Galigniani or Baudry in Paris, or Robertson and Schroder in Brussels – could even obtain a printed copy to reprint from. By the time competitors could print their so-called pirated (though not in fact illegal) editions, Tauchnitz already had his cheap paperback versions in the stores of Germany, France, Italy, and the approaches to and egresses from the British empire. The first publisher gets the most sales. This part of the story is recounted, deliberately, in disapproving terms to show that the initial praiseful remarks could easily be turned against 9 Simon Nowell-Smith, International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) provides a classic account.

Index abridgment 32 access to texts 85 open source 106, 108 adaptation 20, 85 aesthetic object 5, 169, 174–6, 178, 182, 186 author’s 174 editor’s 184 intended 174 aesthetics 22, 23, 188 agnosia, tonal 48 Altick, Richard 128 aphasia 47–8 archives 4, 34, 82, 85 CD-based 121 archivists 4, 12 Aristotle 29 artifacts 13, 24, 26, 169, 174–5, 178, 182, 186–7 assumptions 191 Austin, J.L. 46 Australian Colonial Texts Series 36 authenticity 23 author 6, 53, 174 commentary 158 European 186 function 53 German 176 literary 63 putative 34–6, 45 authoring 50 authority 6, 32, 174, 177 author’s 52 in script acts 56 mixed 182–4 unmixed 184 authorship 130 economics of 130 Barthes, Roland 60 Barwell, Graham 10, 141 Beardsley, Monroe 60 Beckett, Samuel Samuel Beckett project 108 Beowulf project 4, 108 Bernays, M. 170 Berrie, Phill 10, 91, 118, 124, 142 bibliographic codes 16–18, 72 Bickerton, Derek 42–3 Binder, Henry 84 biography 60 Birney, Earle 187 Blake, William 4, 142 book 12–14 ‘‘bookness’’ of’ 139 buyers 6, 135 electronic 1–2, 28–9, 65; complexity of 28; as distinguished from print books 29; quality of 29–30 physical condition of 129 as physical object 12, 49, 127, 135 print book 1, 65; advantages 29; as copytext 168; as distinguished from electronic books 29; survival rate 27 production 6, 64 virtual 141 book collecting 151 book historians 136 book history 158 goal of 135 Boorstin, Daniel 193 Bordalejo, Barbara 10 Bornstein, George 8, 16 Bowden, Ann 133–4 Bowers, Fredson 9, 25, 153, 185 Bradbury and Evans 36 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 147 Bradford, Robin 153 Bree, Linda 10 British Empire 131 Brown, Charles Brockden 164 Brown-Rau, Alexandra 108 Bryant, John 8–9 209 210 Index Burton, Anthony 123 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 16, 72, 185 Caldwell, Price 10, 75, 77 Calvin, William H. 43, 46 Cambridge, Ada 36 Carlyle, Thomas 161, 170 Carey, Peter 64 Caxton, William 179 censorship 33 Center for Editions of American Authors (see Modern Language Association) Cervantes 29 Chaucer, Geoffrey 4, 87, 179–84 Chaucer project 142, 144 The General Prologue on CD-ROM 87 Chesnutt, David 142 Chopin, Kate 36 Clark, Marcus 120 Cockran, Patti 142 codex 29, 85 Cohen, Morton 131 Colby, Robert 122 Cole, Gavin 10 collation Hinman Collator 110 historical 164 Lindstrand Comparator 110 sight 22, 110 software 107 Committee on Scholarly Editions (see Modern Language Association) communication 7, 41–2, 45 event 67 of determinate effects 63 theory 140 Communist Manifesto, the 16–18 compositors 181 computer files legacy research materials 109, 112, 115, 122; quality control 116 computer technology 26–8, 139 (see also software and markup) Contemporary German Editorial Theory 9, 169 context 31, 54, 66, 78, 146, 191 functional 67 generative 54 generic 55 historical 59, 130 matter 54 place 54 relevant 74 sense-making 73 thematic 55 time 54 contextualization 55 conventionality 41 conventions 50–1 copyright 139 copyright law 132 costing 2 Crane, Stephen 84 criticism, literary 12, 63, 83, 151 junk 75 Marxist 130 New 60, 75 Practical 60 psychological 60 reader response 45 textual (see textual criticism) critics literary (see criticism) textual (see textual critics) Cross, Nigel 127, 128 cultural engineering 163 deconstruction 51–3 Descartes, René 198 Dedner, Burghard 26 Deppman, Jed 10 Derrida, Jacques 43, 51, 60 de Saussure, Ferdinand 60 de Smedt, Marcel 91, 108 Dewey, John 196 Dickens, Charles Clarendon Dickens editions 134 Dickinson, Emily 4, 65, 75 Emily Dickinson project 142 Dijksterhuis, E.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

The US went one better: its population enjoyed average per capita incomes by the beginning of the twenty-first century fully 50 per cent higher than those in Germany and three times higher than those in Argentina. What accounts for Argentina's spectacular fall from grace? Argentina was a major outperformer between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, thanks largely to the free-trade instincts of the late nineteenth-century British Empire, new scientific advances and the mass migration of people in the late nineteenth century. It may have been a long way away from Europe and the US but Argentina was able to take full advantage of the Royal Navy's commitment to keep international sea lanes open. New refrigerator technologies – and faster ships – meant its beef could be exported to destinations many thousands of miles away.

In an attempt to reduce Argentina's high dependency on developments – both good and bad – elsewhere in the world economy, Argentine politicians in the 1930s moved rapidly to push through their version of economic autarky. Rejecting international linkages – which were increasingly blamed for Argentina's woes – Buenos Aires tried to develop its own manufacturing capacity behind closed doors, an approach ruled out by both the Canadians and Australians thanks to their privileged access to the markets of the British Empire and, indeed, to Britain's own influence on their behaviour.4 To do this, a labyrinthine arrangement of tariffs and capital controls was developed, leading in turn to huge distortions in the allocation of resources. With domestic activity aimed primarily at satisfying immediate demands for higher consumption, Argentina increasingly became a ‘hand to mouth’ economy.

Given these political upheavals, it's hardly surprising that, over the last century or so, Argentina went from one financial crisis to the next: from 1890 through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, Argentina had to cope with five debt defaults or restructurings6 and six stock-market crashes that led, in turn, to sustained periods of economic contraction.7 Argentina ended the twentieth century with one of the worst financial records in history. Claims on future Argentine economic output have often ended up totally worthless. In hindsight, it is easy to see why, in the interwar period, Argentina went down an ultimately doomed road to autarky: international financiers had seemingly let Argentina down, the crumbling British Empire no longer offered the certainties of old, the Americans preferred to invest at home rather than abroad and the slow march towards another war in Europe persuaded Argentina that self-sufficiency was best. The argument was seductive. It was also, sadly, wrong. Self-sufficiency beckoned only because Argentina's engagement with other nations in the interwar period – nations that, themselves, were increasingly heading towards a more protectionist model – had been so damaging.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

He is a big fish in the British Bangladeshi community, and a hero among restaurant owners. I went to see him at his headquarters in Droylsden, right by Manchester City football stadium. In the boardroom, surrounded by photographs of him shaking hands with royals and political leaders, and collecting his Order of the British Empire from Prince Charles, he fed me plates of breaded prawns and the story of his success. Iqbal is the son of Bangladeshi parents who fell on hard times and moved to Britain. ‘Our family were landlords, but we lost our land,’ he said. In Britain, his father ran a small grocery shop in nearby Oldham, ‘open all hours’.

Though the involvement of Mr Tate and Mr Lyle started after slavery ended, their company is the inheritor of that trade, and still gets most of its sugar from the Caribbean and other former British colonies such as Swaziland, Mauritius and Fiji. Tate & Lyle sold off its plantations in the 1960s and 1970s, as the British Empire itself dissolved. And we have other sources of sugar now, such as home-grown European sugar beet, sold under the brand name Silver Spoon by a subsidiary of the food giant Associated British Foods. But Tate & Lyle is still the dominant buyer from a string of countries that remain hugely dependent on growing sugar cane.

Sloane, who later gave his name to a famous square in London and created a treasure trove of foreign delights that formed the basis for the British Museum collection, also brought opium and cannabis and Chinese rhubarb to Britain. But none took so well to the British palate as milk chocolate. From Sir Hans Sloane’s milk chocolate, it was a small step to Mr Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and Mr Fry’s Chocolate Cream. And the British Empire did the rest. The cocoa bean from the forests of Central America became one of the world’s most profitable and addictive commodities, loved by hundreds of millions of chocoholics round the world. The human race consumes around 3 million tonnes of cocoa beans a year – half a kilo for everyone on the planet.


pages: 1,169 words: 342,959

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, illegal immigration, margin call, millennium bug, out of africa, place-making, plutocrats, rent control, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, the market place, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban renewal, white picket fence, Y2K, young professional

But Miss Clara just said, very quiet, “No, it is never right.” And with her character, I knew she wouldn’t be changing her mind about that. Indeed, I heard her say to her husband once that she wouldn’t be sorry if the whole business of slavery came to an end. But he answered that as things stood, he reckoned a good part of the wealth of the British Empire depended on the slaves in the sugar plantations, so it wouldn’t be ended any time soon. I stayed with Miss Clara and her husband through that year. During that time there was an outbreak of yellow fever in the city, but fortunately it didn’t touch our house. And I remained with them most of the next.

The new jury was not rigged. The trial would be honest. British fair play. New York might be a long way from London, but it was English, after all. The whole colony was waiting with baited breath. Not that it mattered. The defendant hadn’t a hope. The third day of August, the year of Our Lord 1735. The British Empire was enjoying the Georgian age. For after Queen Anne, her equally Protestant kinsman, George of Hanover, had been asked to take the throne; and soon been followed by his son, a second George, who was ruler of the empire now. It was an age of confidence, and elegance, and reason. The third day of August 1735: New York, on a hot and humid afternoon.

A mischievous twinkle came into the merchant’s eye. “But at the same time, cousin,” he continued, “you may acknowledge that we British are also guilty of a mighty hypocrisy in this matter. For we say that slavery is monstrous, yet only if it takes place on the island of Britain. Everywhere else in the British Empire, it’s allowed. The sugar trade, so valuable to England, entirely depends upon slaves; and British vessels carry thousands every year.” “It cannot be denied,” Eliot politely acknowledged. “Does it concern you, sir,” Kate now ventured, “that New York is so dependent upon a single trade?” The merchant’s blue eyes rested upon her, approvingly.


pages: 950 words: 297,713

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

and give the whole conspiracy away’. Vladimir storms down to the local police station, assuring the Zurich authorities that he is going to leave Switzerland very soon, and demands they return the one-hundred-franc administrative deposit he gave them when he arrived. HALIFAX, DOMINION OF CANADA, BRITISH EMPIRE: Scurrying back from the United States to Russia to take part in the greatest event in the history of the world, the principled non-tipper runs into a problem: a telegram from British naval intelligence. ‘FOLLOWING ON BOARD KRISTIANIAFJORD AND SHOULD BE TAKEN OFF AND RETAINED PENDING INSTRUCTION’, it reads.

Its structure of infinitely replicable local chapters is designed to work for a city, a country or a continent. All the divisions must maintain a band or orchestra. UNIA has its own newspaper, the Negro World. It is a flamboyant enterprise. Its organisational chart overflows with magnificent titles borrowed from the traditions of black Freemasonry and the British Empire of which Garvey is a subject: High Chancellor, Chaplain-General, President-General. (In this, it is perhaps not very different from a recently refounded white supremacist organisation known as the Ku Klux Klan, with its knights and wizards.) Grandest of all, the supreme leader is known as the Potentate.

For the rest of the world, it limps on. SPA: On the first day of autumn, Ludendorff calls his staff officers together to a meeting. The Western Front could break at any moment, he tells them. Germany’s allies have already folded, or will soon be forced to surrender. A combination of Arab and British Empire forces captures Damascus the same day; Istanbul is wide open after the collapse of Bulgaria; Austria–Hungary is a spent force militarily. The German army, ‘poisoned with Spartacist and socialist ideas’, cannot be relied upon. The real enemy now is revolution. In consequence of this, the general tells his staff, the German high command has recommended to the Kaiser that Germany sue for peace immediately.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

After the king left for London, the German kaiser arranged the rest.’ In the end it was Kaiser Wilhelm, along with his uncle, King George, who lifted his grandmother Victoria into her coffin. That was how things went among the eternal kin, within the European family. And there was yet another bedrock certainty: the British Empire. In Southwark, on Walworth Road, one finds the Cuming Museum. This ‘British Museum in miniature’, as it is sometimes called, is in fact more like an incredible collection of curiosities, piled high in the upper room of a library. Over the span of 120 years, father and son Richard (1777–1870) and Henry Cuming (1807–1902) dragged everything they could lay their hands on back to this plush lair; they were true nineteenth-century gentlemen.

As the current curator has rightly noted, it is a collection that flies in the face of all known international agreements. The Cumings could never have hauled in their Indian masks, Roman toy sheep, Egyptian falcon mummies, Pacific scalps and Chinese inkpots so easily had their country not grown during that same period into the mightiest power on earth. Around 1900, the British Empire stretched from North to South Pole: Canada, Egypt, the Cape colonies, India, Burma, Malacca, Singapore, Australia and so on. The British Navy was strong enough to fight two wars at the same time, its fleet could – theoretically, at least – take on the combined navies of Germany, Russia and the United States.

Along the Russian-German border, the first hostilities are reported. The first strange rumours start flowing in as well. ‘A French airplane has dropped a bomb on Nuremberg. This is behaviour unworthy of a cultured nation. Even in war, there are limits to the decent use of force.’ Two days later, in the evening edition: the British Empire declares war on the German Empire. Diplomatic relations end. Within a few days, all the switches have been thrown. Everything is ready for the Great European War, 1914–45. Let us take one good, close look. On the right side of the uniform's collar, beside the general's star, we see a hole several millimetres in diameter.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

The plan was to send Genêt to the United States where he would persuade France’s fellow republic to join its noble cause.7 The Girondins understood that the United States might refuse to enter the war.8 In that case, they expected assistance just short of war.9 The French Foreign Ministry instructed Genêt to ask the United States to expedite the repayment of the debt owed to France that was incurred during the Revolutionary War. He would then use the funds to buy American supplies for the war effort back home.10 Next, the ministry instructed Genêt to undermine the Spanish and British Empires by assembling teams of American adventurers to infiltrate Spanish-held Florida and Louisiana and the British colony of Canada, where they would foment rebellion.11 Finally, Genêt came armed with a thick stack of three hundred blank letters of marque (special letters authorizing private sailors to attack and capture foreign vessels) that he would use to assemble a fleet of “privateers”—a veritable private navy of American sailors—to prey on British shipping.12 On February 7, 1793, Genêt set out in the forty-four-gun frigate Embuscade for Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States.

In correspondence with the United States, Great Britain stated that it would join the new Pact only on the “understanding” that it would not limit Britain’s “freedom of action” relating to “certain regions of which the welfare and integrity constitute a special and vital interest for our peace and safety”—namely, the vast territory that constituted the British Empire.2 France also required public assurances that it could defend territory within its own imperial orbit.3 In testimony before the U.S. Senate, Kellogg explained that the treaty would not interfere with the right of self-defense. He even said it would not disturb the Monroe Doctrine—which prohibited European intervention in the Western Hemisphere.4 These assurances persuaded the Japanese Foreign Ministry that the concept of self-defense in the Pact was, as an internal memo put it, “elastic enough to rationalize future Japanese actions in China.”5 That, it would turn out, was a terrible miscalculation—one that Japan would realize too late.

Japan had failed to appreciate the critical difference between the past and the future. Past conquests would be protected, but future conquests would not. Indeed, the Pact appealed to the West because it promised to secure and protect previous conquests, thus securing Western nations’ place at the head of the international legal order indefinitely. The British Empire of 1928 encircled the globe, covering nearly 31 million square kilometers. The French Empire was smaller but still immense, stretching over 12.5 million square kilometers.6 Together, the United Kingdom and the United States controlled three quarters of all the mineral resources in the world.7 The Peace Pact would protect this territory from reconquest, securing the vast empires at the moment they had begun to weaken—and competitors had begun to emerge.


pages: 200 words: 64,329

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

To make matters much worse, the former Axis powers of Japan, Germany and Italy were booming, as were France and the Benelux countries, all of whom had been rescued from the Nazis in part by the British. Who could avoid a sense of disappointed expectations? We must acknowledge, too, the sheer exhilaration of being English for a young, white, privileged man during and after the war. The great journalist and historian of the British Empire James (later Jan) Morris, recalled in 1962, when Britain was making its first abortive bid to join the Common Market: Almost the instant I grew up a memorable thing happened to me: for scarcely had I passed my nineteenth birthday when I was commissioned into a superb cavalry regiment in one of the most triumphant armies of British history.

Morris, in his reflections on the great change of mood, could still console himself with the obvious truth that England was morally and culturally superior: ‘More than most Powers, we can still presume to precedence in teaching nations how to live’.8 Even in making the argument in 1971 that Britain should stay out of Europe and forget all its pretensions to be a world power, Joan Robinson, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, appealed to a notion of innate moral superiority that could be nurtured in splendid isolation: ‘I think that, as empires go, the British Empire was not discreditable and that to give it up (in the main) without a fight was a very unusual example of common sense. Let us now have enough sense to accept the position of a small country and try to show the world how to preserve some elements of civilisation and decency that the large ones are rapidly stamping out.’9 Nancy Mitford, contemplating the prospect of Britain helping to build a new European empire asked (half-facetiously) ‘What about Prince Charles as Emperor?

The use of Independence Day as a way of framing Brexit was intended to appeal primarily to Americans, who are familiar with 4th July as their own Independence Day holiday, marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. There are, however, two big problems with this neo-imperial project. One is that even the most deluded Brexiteer would concede that even if it were ever to come about, its centre would not be in London but in Washington. It would be an American, not a British empire. George Orwell had long ago anticipated it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it essentially exists as Oceania. It is not good news for England, which is now called Airstrip One. Even as pure fantasy, which it is, the Anglo-Saxon Union does not set the pulses racing – liberation from a marginal position in one empire to a marginal position in another is not much of a thrill.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

The American Ambassador to Britain, John Winant, cabled back to Under Secretary of State in Washington, William Clayton, after the loan terms were finalised: ‘The British are hanging on by their fingernails. . . in the hope that somehow or other, with our help, they will be able to preserve the British empire and their leadership of it.’12 * In Britain, the end of the war was not Zero Hour, but the general election of 1945 had seemed like a clear break from the past. The overwhelming scale of the Labour victory might have shocked Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, but few people in Britain were all that surprised.

He would point out that when the US and the UK had signed the Atlantic Charter, earlier in the war, which contained a sweeping statement about the freedom of people to choose the form of government they wished, Churchill had insisted on an assurance that the Charter would not apply to any of the colonies in the British Empire, including India, where a popular independence movement had long been campaigning for freedom. The Monroe Doctrine gave the US a self-appointed right to stop others interfering anywhere in the Americas – and the Americans permitted nobody else any say in the future of Japan. From Stalin’s point of view the other Allies had limited rights to interfere in Poland, a country so clearly important to the USSR.

Of course he knew which sound-bite would receive the most attention, but only a small part of the speech referred directly to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Most of it was about the ‘fraternal association’ between the English-speaking peoples, the ‘special relationship’ he mentioned several times in the text, and the need for ‘the British Empire’ and the US to unite more closely to create a lasting peace. He did not specifically mention the American loan to Britain, which was then being debated in Congress, though it was clearly a factor in what he was saying. He spoke about sharing military bases, manufacturing interchangeable weapons, building institutions together – eventually sharing a common citizenship.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

Recall how the East India Company was superseded by the British Raj when the former proved unable to handle local insurgency, or how the Hudson’s Bay Company’s police powers were handed over to the Dominion of Canada. The British Empire brought law and order to societies that lacked them, argues the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson: “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labor,” he writes, “than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”13 One does not need to buy into Ferguson’s glowing take on the British Empire to agree with his assertion that imperialism was a tremendously powerful force for economic globalization. A recent statistical study found that two countries that were members of the same empire had twice the volume of trade between them compared to trade with others outside the empire, holding as many things constant as is feasible in this kind of quantitative work.

So Britain signed a treaty with Ottoman Turkey in 1838 that forced the country to restrict import duties to a maximum of 5 percent and abolish import prohibitions and monopolies. The British also fought the so-called “Opium War” with China in 1839–42 to open up the country to imports of opium and other goods exported from the British Empire. Commodore Matthew C. Perry signed a treaty with Japan on behalf of the United States in 1854 to open the country to foreign shipping and trade. These and other similar treaties would impose ceilings on import duties (one-sided, of course), restrict the ability of the less powerful countries to conduct their trade policies independently, grant foreign traders legal privileges, and enforce foreigners’ access to ports.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Only through having been caught so blatantly with their noses in the troughs (e.g. the 2011 Academy Award–winning documentary Inside Job) has the American Economic Association finally been forced to adopt an ethical code, and that code is weak and incomplete compared with other disciplines. Increasingly, and especially during the past ten years, there is evidence that the US is beginning to doctor the numbers for measures such as productivity and GDP to make itself look stronger and more powerful than it actually is. In this it is copying its forebear, the British Empire, which increasingly began to tell itself lies as it failed to arrest its relative economic decline after the recession of 1873–79, until the Second World War bankrupted and broke up its global hegemony. Economics is supposed to be about revealing truth such that society learns to become better than it was before.

The great British founder of neoclassicism, Alfred Marshall, was the undisputed leader in economics from the death of Jevons in 1882 until his own death in 1924, and was famous for his evenhandedness and avoidance of controversy. But even he got involved in media campaigning against imperial initiatives, such as the 1903 tariff reform movement that aimed to turn the British Empire into a single free trade zone in order to inhibit the rise of the United States and Germany. The big change, however, was that Bernays was merely having distinguished economists put in appearances at media events completely unconnected with economics. This, over time, caused the American public to begin to see distinguished economists as a type of THE ECONOMICS OF THE POWERFUL 17 celebrity, especially as Bernays found that the typically male experts of that time were particularly likely to put in appearances at events where famous actresses would be present.

After all, financial sector salaries have risen to twice the average in the economy, whereas three decades ago they were equal to this average (Johnson 2009). The only time that finance has been known to have been as profitable for as long as they have been during the past 30 years was in the UK during the period leading up to 1913, as the British Empire stagnated MONEY IS POWER 101 (Imlah 1952; Dimson et al. 2002). Are sustained abnormal banking profits a sign of hidden local economic stagnation as capital is redirected to more profitable locations in the world? Perhaps with the long British experience of finance in mind, the British Warwick Commission noted that a bloated financial sector is a disaster waiting to happen as well as a continuous drag on the economy.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

Attempting to declare English the official language risks looking insensitive. The Vatican is the only country in the world that has Latin as an official language. When did Parliament make slavery illegal in England? 6 April 2010. With a few minor exceptions, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, but it wasn’t thought necessary to outlaw it at home. In 1067, according to the Domesday Book, more than 10 per cent of the population of England were slaves. The Normans, perhaps surprisingly, were opposed to slavery on religious grounds and within fifty years it had virtually disappeared.

This unseemly habit was made illegal by the courts in 1772 when the judge, Lord Mansfield, reportedly declared: ‘The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe’, with the result that thousands of slaves in England gained their freedom. From that moment, slavery was arguably illegal in England (though not in the British Empire) under Common Law, but this was not confirmed by Parliament until the Coroners and Justice Act. Previous acts of Parliament dealt with kidnap, false imprisonment, trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour, but never specifically covered slavery. Now, Section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act (which came into force on 6 April 2010) makes it an offence in the UK, punishable by up to fourteen years’ imprisonment, to hold a person in ‘slavery or servitude’.

Which nationality invented the ‘stiff upper lip’? It wasn’t the British. Unlikely as it may sound, it was the Americans. To keep a stiff upper lip is to remain steadfast and unemotional in the face of the worst that life can throw at you. Though long associated with Britain – and especially the British Empire – the oldest-known uses of the term are all from the USA, beginning in 1815. Americans were going around with ‘stiff upper lips’ in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and in the letters of Mark Twain (1835–1910) and it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the expression first appeared in print in Britain.


pages: 241 words: 90,538

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

In the twentieth century between World Wars 1 and 2, a substantial population of African and Asian seamen, recruited from the Empire to the merchant navy during World War I, settled in Britain, especially in port cities such as Liverpool and Cardiff. They experienced discrimination in the labour market and the benefits system when they sought to exercise their rights as British citizens.1 Historically, anyone born within the vast British Empire was a British subject of the British monarch and entitled to the same rights as those who were born in Britain.2 However, registration of births was not complete throughout the Empire, and immigrants from poorer backgrounds often could not provide evidence of their place of birth, which could disqualify them from claiming their rights.

It existed to promote the cause of Indian independence, and to fight for the rights of Indian workers in Britain and against all forms of discrimination. POST-WAR IMMIGRATION The British Nationality Act 1948 confirmed the right of 800 million colonial citizens to enter the United Kingdom. It was designed to reinforce the long-established principle that everyone born within the British Empire had equal rights of citizenship throughout Britain and the colonies. However, few expected that non-White colonial citizens would take up their rights in large numbers, since they had not done so in the past. Even the relatively small number of immigrants who arrived from the Caribbean on the SS Windrush in 1948 provoked some panic.7 West Indians began to migrate to Britain in large numbers in the 1950s.

However, prosecutions were concentrated in a few police districts,41 and the increase was partly due to Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyffe’s drive for greater uniformity in prosecutions and the use by the police of entrapment techniques and conspiracy charges to ensnare homosexual men.42 The press sensationalized and disseminated the details of a series of successful prosecutions of prominent men, often on flimsy evidence. In 1952, the mathematician Alan Turing, who received an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work on cracking the Enigma code during the war, was arrested for homosexual offences. He accepted hormone treatment instead of a prison sentence, but committed suicide in 1954.43 In 1953, the novelist and playwright Rupert Croft-Cooke was sentenced to nine months in prison on the testimony of two sailors.


pages: 352 words: 98,424

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City by Christian Wolmar

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

These innovations were the start of a strategy that saw Marylebone switch its focus from express trains to commuter services. The station’s best and busiest days were when football matches were being played at Wembley stadium, which opened in 1923. A special station on a diverted section of line was built in anticipation of the British Empire Exhibition held over the two subsequent years but the crowds on these days were not enough to make up for the lack of passengers the rest of the time. Although the suburban ridership built up steadily, the station was always underused and, as we will see in Chapter 12, not only lost its main-line services when the Great Central closed on the recommendation of Beeching but also narrowly escaped being shut altogether in the 1980s and its lines turned over to the use of motor coaches.

Just before the Second World War, Imperial Airways, the predecessor of British Airways, inaugurated its London terminal in Buckingham Palace Road next to Victoria; Southern Railways ran connecting trains to the airline’s boat planes, which operated from Southampton Harbour to the Far East, Australia and other parts of the British Empire. These Continental services were the prestige services of the South Eastern & Chatham and the canopies on either side of the cab arch read ‘Shortest and quickest route to Paris and the Continent’ and ‘Sea passage one hour’. The rivalry remained, however, as the Brighton, next door, boasted about its Newhaven–Dieppe service, proclaiming it also – and misleadingly – to be the shortest service.

Its best feature, oddly, was the Gill Sans lettering of the signs that had been introduced as part of the London & North Eastern’s design makeover in the early 1930s. Euston, too, remained largely unchanged between the wars as the London, Midland & Scottish, which boasted of being the largest company in the British Empire, showed little interest in improving its poor facilities. The Great Hall was scrubbed up in 1927 but behind the scenes there were moves afoot to demolish what was a fundamentally inconvenient station. The Second World War intervened, but the station became the biggest casualty of the postwar period when Modernism and its concomitant disdain for Victorian architecture ruled unchallenged.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Even more than providing a means for expanding Chinese military activities, the BRI provides a motive by placing Chinese workers and investments in dangerous environments. In the absence of adequate security, China could assume a greater role in protecting its workers and investments, if partner countries allow it. China’s first official military base on foreign soil, in Djibouti, will not be its last. From ancient Rome to the Mongol Empire to the British Empire, trade has never traveled far, for long, without the flag. “Imperialism” is so loaded, so heavy a term, that it can be distracting. It may be easier to think objectively about China’s BRI purely in terms of power without the historical baggage. There have been different forms of imperialism, of course, and there is a rich debate about defining it.25 The Oxford English Dictionary, which appropriately was created during imperial Britain’s reign, offers one definition of “imperialism” that feels timeless: “the extension and maintenance of a country’s power or influence through trade, diplomacy, military or cultural dominance, etc.”26 That “etc.” demands more attention from scholars, particularly how new technologies provide avenues of influence, but China is, quite obviously, extending its power and influence through these means.

See also China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Britain/United Kingdom: Baghdad Pact and, (i); China Railway Express routes to, (i); China’s railway development (1873) and, (i); fears and criticism of China and Russia, (i); “Golden Era” of UK-Chinese relations, (i); railway development in, (i); telegraph domination of, (i), (ii), (iii) British Empire: protection of workers and investments, (i); railway development in Africa, (i); railway development in Asia, (i), (ii); Sri Lanka as part of, (i); telegraph aiding decolonization movements in, (i), (ii). See also Suez Canal Brown, Jerry, (i) Brzezinski, Zbigniew, (i) Buffet, Warren, (i) Camp Lemonnier (Djibouti), (i), (ii) Camp Simba (Kenya), (i) Caspian Sea, (i) Caspian Shipping Company, (i) Cave, Danielle, (i)n74 CCCC.

-Pakistan relationship as backdrop to, (i) China Railway Company, (i) China Road and Bridge Corporation, (i) Christie, Agatha: Murder on the Orient Express, (i), (ii) Churchill, Winston, (i) CIDCA (China International Development Cooperation Agency), (i) Clark, James, (i), (ii)n53 Clinton, Hillary, (i), (ii) Cody, William “Buffalo Bill,” (i) Colombo Port (Sri Lanka), (i), (ii), (iii); author’s experiences at, (i); Chinese military vessels using, (i); Lotus Tower, (i); Port City development, (i) colonial powers: African railways and enterprises, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); Chinese power and influence compared to, (i); infrastructure projects as analogy to BRI, (i), (ii), (iii). See also British Empire; countries Commission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), (i) Congress of Berlin (1878), (i) connectivity: BRI’s benefits of, (i); CPEC’s weakest area in, (i), (ii); imperial importance of, (i). See also technology and digital infrastructure Conte, Giuseppe, (i) Cooley, Alexander, (i) corruption: in Afghanistan, (i); in Central Asia, (i); China’s anticorruption efforts, (i), (ii); Chinese contractors insulated from scandals of, (i); construction projects, factors allowing for, (i); as cost of doing business, (i), (ii), (iii); in Ethiopia, (i); highway police, bribe to, (i); in Japan, (i), (ii); Kazakhstan world’s fair (2017) and, (i); in Kenya, with Chinese siphoning of railway revenue, (i); Kyrgyz experience with Chinese-financed projects, (i); in Malaysia, (i), (ii); middlemen benefiting from choke points, (i); in Pakistan, (i); pervasiveness in BRI initiatives, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); in Philippines, (i), (ii); in Sri Lanka, (i); Tajik highway construction and, (i); U.S. transcontinental railway and, (i) Corruption Perceptions Index (Transparency International), (i) COSCO shipping company, (i), (ii) CPEC.


pages: 253 words: 69,529

Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations by Simon Jenkins

Beeching cuts, British Empire, Crossrail, gentrification, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, market bubble, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, starchitect, the market place, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

To Karl Marx in Das Kapital, the Mania was ‘the first great railway swindle’. The fire did not go out. As after 1836, enough capital had been committed to instigate a renewed round of construction, more vigorous than the first. Railways were voracious for money, materials and talent. Not since the rise of the British Empire in the 18th century had opportunity so beckoned to all classes. The nation hurled itself at the challenge of conquering distance. Victory needed iron, coal, timber, bricks, quarries, factories and forges. It needed cartographers, geologists, surveyors, engineers and men who could understand and handle money.

The builders were playful, escapist, even mischievous, as they spread centuries of Europe’s stylistic history across their façades. Some saw the diversity and eclecticism of Victorian architecture as a political virtue. Writing in the 1860s, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alexander Beresford Hope, was overtly political. He championed eclecticism as emblematic of the British Empire. It would draw inspiration from ‘Benares and Labrador, Newfoundland and Cathay … We must assimilate and fuse everything that we eclect [sic]’ into what he called ‘a progressive eclecticism’. After the early-Victorian battle of the styles, architecture should become a peace treaty, a resolution.

It was briefly a goods area in the 20th century, but this closed in 1965. British Rail then barred its future use as a station by building a signalling centre across its entrance. The old shed was used variously for storage, as an exhibition hall, an ‘interactive science centre’ and even an abortive museum of the British Empire. Its inconvenient location told against it. The building is now a venue for weddings, exhibitions and conferences, but there are plans to bring it back into some form of railway use, involving the welcome removal of the signalling centre. No sooner had Brunel’s work been completed than a different company, the Bristol and Exeter Railway (B&ER), arrived from the south-west with a terminus at right angles to Brunel’s shed.


pages: 265 words: 71,143

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by Jason Sharman

British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, death of newspapers, European colonialism, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land tenure, offshore financial centre, passive investing, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, profit maximization, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs

The fact that the new wave of chartered companies formed to reap the benefits of these new overseas opportunities (while sparing the metropole the costs of imperial governance) almost always lost money, and often went broke, or only survived at the expense of the taxpayer, indicates the scanty commercial benefits of the new colonies.22 One calculation suggests that “The British Empire … generated no profits, at least in the years 1880–1912. In fact it required a subsidy.”23 Even where colonies did bring profits, typically to small sections of the elite, it is unclear whether these same or greater profits could have been gained through arm’s-length trade or investment, minus conquest and formal subordination.24 Though the imperial powers did recruit troops in the colonies, the main duties of these forces was to garrison and extend imperial borders, rather than improving the defense of the metropole itself.25 Perhaps more importantly, if scholars are still arguing about the economic and security benefits of empire (if any), it is highly unlikely that contemporary leaders were able to make accurate calculations.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howard, Michael. 1976. War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hui, Victoria Tin-bor. 2005. War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyam, Ronald. 2010. Understanding the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isaacman, Allen. 1972. Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: Zambezi Prazos, 1750–1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Jackson, Robert H. 1993. “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations.”

William and Mary Quarterly 63 (4): 693–712. Stern, Philip J. 2009. “History and Historiography of the English East India Company: Past, Present and Future!” History Compass 7 (4): 1146–1180. Stern, Philip J. 2011. The CompanyState: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevens, Carol B. 2007. Russia’s Wars of Emergence 1460–1730. Harlow: Pearson. Strang, David. 1991. “Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Institutionalist Accounts.” International Organization 45 (2): 143–162. Streusand, Douglas E. 1989.


pages: 221 words: 71,449

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming

British Empire, colonial rule, Downton Abbey, financial independence, friendly fire, Skype

But then something else was revealed that connected with me even more. The Military Medal Tommy Darling had been awarded was such a high honor that he had been invited to Buckingham Palace in 1941 to receive it. Sixty-eight years later, I, his grandson, had also been to Buckingham Place to pick up a medal. I was awarded the OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Honors List of 2009 for “services to film, theatre and the arts and to activism for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community,” a tad less heroic and gallant than my grandfather’s, but an honor nonetheless. My mum, my brother, and my husband all came to the palace that day with me.

The Japanese had entered the war in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and very quickly developed a reputation for total lack of fear, and of fighting to the death. Edgar now pulled out a map and showed me that by March 1944 the Japanese forces had advanced through Burma and had their sights set firmly on neighboring India, the jewel in the British Empire’s crown. They crossed over the northeastern border and amassed their troops around the mountain town of Kohima with the aim of pushing west to take Delhi. I had a feeling this was not going to end well. The Cameron Highlanders were on the front lines of the battle at Kohima, made to push through Japanese forces that had taken positions on a hillside.

But whatever the reasoning, he was about to walk into the middle of the most brutal of colonial wars. {Courtesy of iStock, ©studiocasper.} Malaya, or Malaysia as it is now known, was bordered to the north by Thailand and in turn is just a bridge’s distance north of the island of Singapore. It had been part of the British Empire since the early nineteenth century, and its huge rubber and tin resources made it a hugely valuable asset to the UK. But after the Second World War, Malaya saw growing unrest as its economy suffered, and soon the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, began a campaign to disrupt British trade in an attempt to overthrow its colonial rule.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

Who could avoid a sense of disappointed expectations? We must acknowledge, too, the sheer exhilaration of being English for a young, white, privileged man during and after the war. In 1962, when Britain was making its first abortive bid to join the Common Market, the journalist and historian of the British Empire James (later Jan) Morris recalled the euphoria of those years. When he turned nineteen, he was given a commission in a “superb” cavalry regiment in ‘one of the most triumphant armies of British history.’ His comrades were ‘men of remarkable character, cultivation, and assurance’ in a division that had fought its way triumphantly across North Africa and up through Italy: ‘Our enemies were humbled, our allies seemed dullards beside us, and it never occurred to me to doubt that this intensely English organism, this amalgam of bravado and tradition . . . was the very best thing of its kind that any country in the world could offer.’5 When the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community met at Messina on 7 November 1955 – a meeting that would lead to the signing of the Treaty of Rome and the foundation of what would become the European Union – Britain was invited to join them.

Morris, in his reflections on the great change of mood, could still console himself with the obvious truth that England was morally and culturally superior: ‘More than most Powers, we can still presume to precedence in teaching nations how to live’.8 Even in making the argument in 1971 that Britain should stay out of Europe and forget all its pretensions to be a world power, Joan Robinson, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, appealed to a notion of innate moral superiority that could be nurtured in splendid isolation: ‘I think that, as empires go, the British Empire was not discreditable and that to give it up (in the main) without a fight was a very unusual example of common sense. Let us now have enough sense to accept the position of a small country and try to show the world how to preserve some elements of civilisation and decency that the large ones are rapidly stamping out.’9 Nancy Mitford, contemplating the prospect of Britain helping to build a new European empire asked (half-facetiously) ‘What about Prince Charles as Emperor?

The use of Independence Day as a way of framing Brexit was intended to appeal primarily to Americans, who are familiar with 4th July as their own Independence Day holiday, marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. There are, however, two big problems with this neo-imperial project. One is that even the most deluded Brexiteer would concede that even if it were ever to come about, its centre would not be in London but in Washington. It would be an American, not a British empire. George Orwell had long ago anticipated it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it essentially exists as Oceania. It is not good news for England, which is now called Airstrip One. Even as pure fantasy, which it is, the Anglo-Saxon Union does not set the pulses racing – liberation from a marginal position in one empire to a marginal position in another is not much of a thrill.


pages: 243 words: 70,257

In Patagonia: by Bruce Chatwin

British Empire, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong

The Onas’ sheep rustling threatened the companies’ dividends (in Buenos Aires the explorer Julius Popper spoke of their ‘alarming Communist tendencies’) and the accepted solution was to round them up and civilize them in the Mission—where they died of infected clothing and the despair of captivity. But Alexander MacLennan despised slow torture: it offended his sporting instincts. As a boy he had exchanged the wet slates of Scotland for the boundless horizons of the British Empire. He had grown into a strong man, with a flat face reddened by whisky and the tropics, pale red hair and eyes that flashed both blue and green. He was one of Kitchener’s sergeants at Omdurman. He saw two Niles, a domed tomb, patched jibbahs and the ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’, desert men who anointed their hair with goat grease and lay under cavalry charges, ripping the horses’ guts with short hooked knives.

He tried to liven up the second with cannibalistic details of his married life with Yamba, but the same day saw the eclipse of his reputation. The Daily Chronicle, sensing a scoop, carried a leader calling de Rougemont a fraud. More denunciations followed and a chorus of academics joined in. Throughout the autumn, as the British Empire rose to its zenith, the de Rougemont fraud held the headlines with the Battle of Omdurman, the Fashoda Incident, and the reopening of the Dreyfus Case. The Daily Chronicle found his old mother at Grasset, and on October 21sta Mrs Henri Grien of Newtown, Sydney, identified de Rougemont as the man who owed her maintenance of twenty shillings and five pence a week.

The first impressions are of an energetic pioneer, confident in his new handlebar moustache; hunting elephant seals in South Georgia; salvaging for Lloyd’s; helping a German gold-panner dynamite the Mylodon Cave; or striding round the foundry with his German partner, Herr Lion, inspecting the water turbines or the lathes they imported from Dortmund and Goppingen. Lion was a methodical man, who ran the place while Charley chatted up clients. Panama was not yet cut through and the business was good. The second set of images are of the British Empire’s southernmost Consul, a senior citizen of Punta Arenas and director of its bank. He was making money all right (but never quite enough), stiffening with lumbago and ‘wearying for news’ of home. Old members of the British Club still remember him. And I sat in the tall rooms, painted an under-sea green and hung with sporting prints and lithographs of Edward VII.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

.* But economists and historians have attempted to reconstruct GDP data for the past by using what information is available, and they’ve generally concluded that aggregate income and output in the United States had already exceeded that of the British Empire by the eve of World War I.* At this point, the United States also exceeded England in terms of income per person, and obviously far exceeded the larger British Empire, which at the time included deeply impoverished places like India and a large chunk of Africa. That enormous economic might allowed us to intervene decisively in both the First and Second World Wars, in both cases first through our power as a source of agricultural commodities and industrial products and then secondarily as an actual fighting force of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Of course we won the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in no small part thanks to the valor of our troops at war. But on another level, the Axis scarcely had a chance. Back in 1938, the gross domestic product of the United States alone was larger than that of Germany, Japan, and Italy combined.* In practice, of course, the Axis also had to take on the large Soviet Union and the British Empire. But America alone had enough economic mass to take down its rivals. That manifested itself in the United States bringing superior matériel to bear on the battlefield; in American civilians enjoying higher wartime living standards than what was seen on foreign home fronts; and in America’s ability to serve as the “arsenal of democracy” (and of Soviet communism), supplying vast quantities of useful material resources to our allies through the Lend-Lease Act.


pages: 97 words: 31,550

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution. While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company.


Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

They devised the concept of what they called the Grand Area, which the US must dominate. And within the Grand Area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US plans—explicit, almost those words. What’s the Grand Area? Well, at a minimum, it was to include the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, and the whole British Empire—former British Empire—which, of course, includes the Middle East energy resources. As one high-level advisor later put it: “If we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world.”59 Well, that’s the Grand Area. As the Russians began to grind down the German armies after Stalingrad, they recognized that Germany was weakened—at first, they thought that Germany would emerge from the war as a major power.


pages: 96 words: 33,963

Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell

British Empire, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois

I have seen a young coal miner, for instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading the Gem. Recently I offered a batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out the Gem and Magnet first. Both papers are much read by girls,* and the Pen Pals’ department of the Gem shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching-powder, the Phine Phun Ring which runs a needle into your friend’s hand, etc. etc.) indicate roughly the same age; there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for youths between seventeen and twenty-two.

Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is unintentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the Thriller and Detective Weekly) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers.


pages: 605 words: 110,673

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

British Empire, double helix, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, offshore financial centre, precautionary principle, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), War on Poverty

Of course, the British government did encounter widespread use of the drug as the British Empire expanded into Asia. Here it was viewed as a commodity, which, because it was seen as an essential daily item by many Indians, could be used as a means of social control. Just as the East India company cornered the market in salt, they shut down the local production of cannabis, forcing people to buy their “bhang” from the British. (When you factor-in the opium trade in China, and the vast profits made from trading tea, coffee and alcohol, the British Empire was easily the largest drug dealer in the history of the world!)

Iverson, Oxford University Press, 2000 17 THC levels were at one point as high as 21%, they soon dropped back down to 15%• Cannabis: classification and public health, ACMD, April 2008 18 overshadowed by the more potent painkilling properties of opium• Indian Hemp and the Dope Fiends of Old England: A sociopolitical history of cannabis and the British Empire 1840–1928, Sean Blanchard and Matthew J Atha, URL-28, 1994 19 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report in 1894• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report in 1894, Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, available online on the Medical History of British India website, URL-29, accessed December 7th 2011 20 In 1945 there were a total of 4 prosecutions for cannabis offences, and it wasn’t until 1950 that the number of prosecutions for cannabis (86) outnumbered those for opium and other manufactured drugs (83).• Indian Hemp and the Dope Fiends of Old England: A sociopolitical history of cannabis and the British Empire 1840–1928, Sean Blanchard and Matthew J Atha, URL-28, 1994 21 The situation was very different in the USA• Illegal drugs: a complete guide to their history, chemistry, use and abuse, Paul M Ghalinger, Plume, 2003 22 diverting prescriptions from their doctors• Necessity or nastiness?

Iverson, Oxford University Press, 2000 17 THC levels were at one point as high as 21%, they soon dropped back down to 15%• Cannabis: classification and public health, ACMD, April 2008 18 overshadowed by the more potent painkilling properties of opium• Indian Hemp and the Dope Fiends of Old England: A sociopolitical history of cannabis and the British Empire 1840–1928, Sean Blanchard and Matthew J Atha, URL-28, 1994 19 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report in 1894• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report in 1894, Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, available online on the Medical History of British India website, URL-29, accessed December 7th 2011 20 In 1945 there were a total of 4 prosecutions for cannabis offences, and it wasn’t until 1950 that the number of prosecutions for cannabis (86) outnumbered those for opium and other manufactured drugs (83).• Indian Hemp and the Dope Fiends of Old England: A sociopolitical history of cannabis and the British Empire 1840–1928, Sean Blanchard and Matthew J Atha, URL-28, 1994 21 The situation was very different in the USA• Illegal drugs: a complete guide to their history, chemistry, use and abuse, Paul M Ghalinger, Plume, 2003 22 diverting prescriptions from their doctors• Necessity or nastiness? The hidden law denying cannabis for medicinal use, David Nutt, URL-30, December 13th 2010 23 not to renew the medical licence on cannabis• Science and Technology - Ninth Report, House of Lords Select Committee, URL-26, November 4th 1998 24 the House of Lords Select Committee produced a report• As above. 25 the legal situation has become even more draconian in recent years• Necessity or nastiness?


pages: 375 words: 109,675

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

Along the track, every vantage point on rooftops and hillocks was taken and some of the locals, according to the Overland Telegraph and Courier, reported that ‘the natives salaamed [bowed to] the omnipotence of the steam engine as it passed’.20 Others saw the engine as a god and applied the tilak, the red mark of the Hindus, to the smoke stacks of the locomotives, left food and money on the footplate, and laid flowers on the tracks. It was not only locals who turned out to watch. The Illustrated London News, which reported on what it saw correctly as an event that ‘would be remembered far longer than the recent battles which had brought India into the British Empire’,21 found there were visitors from as far afield as East Africa, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. It was, in other words, recognized as a world-changing event. Even with a stop halfway for the engines to fill their water tanks, it took less than an hour for the pioneering train to cover the route, despite the fact that sightseers slowed its progress by spilling on to the tracks, a phenomenon that survives to this day (and, shockingly, currently causes ten deaths per day in the Bombay area alone).

There were, too, permanent bottlenecks in the system, notably the routes to and from the ports of Bombay and Calcutta, which, despite expansion such as quadrupling of sections of track, were unable to cater to the growing demand from both freight and local commuters. The war only made matters worse. As part of the British Empire, India was immediately placed on a war footing as soon as Germany opened hostilities in August 1914. Inevitably, the railways were crucial to the war effort, but their long-term viability was sacrificed for the short-term benefit of helping the cause. Routine spending on maintenance was cut back and work on major capital projects ground to a halt.

As Sahni reported, ‘according to witnesses who appeared before the Committee, except in the case of America, where even railways set up originally by the State were transferred to the control of private ownership, the experience of virtually every other country had shown that State ownership and State management was by far the best method of running and developing the railway system’.19 At the time, in Germany, Japan and Russia, railways had come fully under government control, while France was considering legislation for nationalization (and soon afterwards created the government-owned Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français). Similarly, in other parts of the British Empire, such as Australia and Canada, railways were run by the state. Acworth, a former Tory councillor on the London County Council, was no radical but his report certainly was. He was firmly of the view that the Indian railways should be run by the state as it was simply impossible to justify the involvement of the British companies.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Oriani made it seem that all roads leading to the Third Rome had to be bloody: War is an inevitable form of the struggle for existence, and blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas … The future of Italy lies entirely in a war which, while giving it its natural boundaries, will cement internally, through the anguish of mortal perils, the unity of the national spirit. The Italians weren’t alone in working themselves up into a militarist lather during the nineteenth century. The British Empire may have been originally acquired in a state of absent-mindedness. But, by the 1870s, the relentless expansion of capital, the endless dynamism of competition and acquisition, and international rivalry made empire seem indispensable to the pursuit of economic interests and national glory. France, fulfilling Tocqueville’s deepest desires, expanded its colonies dramatically after 1870.

In 1906 they met at a lodging house for Indian students and aspiring revolutionaries in Highgate. In one account of their encounter, Savarkar, who was frying prawns, offered them to Gandhi. When Gandhi, a vegetarian, refused, Savarkar allegedly said that only a fool would attempt to fight the British Empire without being fortified by animal protein. Gandhi seems to have taken due note of Savarkar’s political as well as culinary choices. The Hindu activist had friends among a range of expatriate Indian revolutionaries, who partook of the general trend of assassination in Europe and America, believing in Mazzini’s notion that ‘ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs’.

America First (right-wing think tank) American Revolution anarchism fin de siècle fin de siècle terrorism fin de siècle terrorism in literary fiction see also Bakunin, Mikhail ancien régimes Anglo-American liberalism see democracy, liberal; liberalism, classical; neo-liberalism D’Annunzio, Gabriele anti-Semitism in Austria-Hungary in France in Germany in late nineteenth century of Wagner Appiah, Kwame Anthony Arab world ‘Arab Spring’ see also individual countries Arendt, Hannah negative solidarity concept The Origins of Totalitarianism Argentina Arminius Arndt, Ernst Moritz Aron, Raymond Arts and Crafts movement Asia financial crisis (1997) impact of Western materialism and modernity pan-Asianism rise of nation state in spiralling wars in traditional beliefs in Western colonialism in see also individual countries Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Hitler’s reverence for Atta, Mohammed Austria Austria-Hungary al-Awlaki, Anwar Baader-Meinhof group Bagehot, Walter Bajrangi, Babu Bakunin, Mikhail and idea of individual freedom influence in Italy and Nechaev affair and Wagner Balkan conflict (1990s) Balzac, The Country Doctor (1833) Banerjea, Surendranath Bangladesh Barcelona Barres, Maurice Baudelaire, Charles Bayly, Christopher, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2004) Beethoven, Ludwig van Belinsky, Vissarion Ben-Gurion, David Benjamin, Walter Benn, Gottfried Bentham, Jeremy Berdyaev, Nikolai Bergson, Henri Berlin, Isaiah Besant, Annie Beyoncé Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali bin Laden, Osama Bismarck, Otto von Blavatsky, Madame Bloom, Allan Boer War (1899–1902) Bolívar, Simón Bollywood films de Bonald, Vicomte Boo, Katherine, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) Borneo Boulanger, Georges bourgeois society 1848 victory of loathing of in nineteenth century see also commercial society Braun, Lily Brazil Breivik, Anders Behring Britain Brexit (2016) commercial class in English nationalism Gandhi and Savarkar in Glorious Revolution Great Exhibition (1851); see also Crystal Palace industrial revolution in jingoism in and neo-liberal revolution Rousseau on England and Second World War Voltaire in England British Empire conquest of Palestine (1917) Hindu supremacist terrorism (1909) nineteenth-century revolts against Bruce-Gardyne, Jock Brussels attack (March 2016) Buber, Martin Buddhism Buffon, Comte de, Natural History (1749) Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Bush, George W.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

As we’ve seen, many who work in or travel to these cities may live on their periphery or even in entirely different parts of the world but, as Gottmann notes, must journey there for certain interactions and expertise that do not exist anywhere else.47 London’s origin as the first true global city, with tentacles that reached virtually everywhere on the planet, grew from its status as the capital of the British Empire. This gave it power, not only in its historic island core but also in its English-speaking colonies and vast territories.48 Today, that legacy, even in the face of Britain’s retreat from political and military power, lives on in its role as not only a global financial capital but also a critical hub for the cultural, legal, and business practices that define global capitalism.49 A half century after the fall of the British Empire, London remains, along with New York, the world’s dominant global financial center—the Global Financial Centres Index ranked it first in the world in 201450 and second in 2015.51 Although New York is part of a far larger economy, London retains many advantages as a financial hub, including a regulatory environment considered superior to those imposed by governments elsewhere, including the United States and the eurozone.

The colonial rulers of Mexico City, itself placed on the site of a great Aztec metropolis, made a conscious attempt to separate Spaniards—who were considered racially superior—from the indigenous population.56 This legacy from the colonial period helped create cities that, as they achieved independence, lacked many of the necessary structures to be successful on their own. British officials did not want to see their network of colonial cities compete with Manchester or London; Japanese colonialists in Korea certainly did not envision Seoul as a rival for Tokyo, whose rulers saw it as the capital of “a new British empire,” a London or New York on the Pacific.57 This even occurred, notes historian André Raymond, in those cities such as Cairo that were nominally independent and had a long glorious history behind them but found themselves subordinated within the European-dominated world economy. When it came to most business sectors, Europeans presided over what was essentially “a colonized nation.”58 This legacy of colonial domination applied to India, even in cities such as Bombay and Calcutta that had significant industry.

In contrast to the high percentages of immigrants seen in Western global cities, as well as Singapore, cities such as Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing are predominantly made up of nationals, although, as in the case of virtually all large developing world cities, many originated from the countryside or smaller cities.41 THE POWER OF INERTIA Inertia, noted Braudel, “is one of the great artisans of history.”42 Global cities, particularly the leading ones, owe much to their early origins—and the culture, ideas, and infrastructure rooted in their evolution over time. Three of the leading global cities in Asia—Mumbai, Singapore, and Hong Kong—started as outposts of the British Empire. Shanghai emerged largely as a European-dominated business center with extraterritorial rights,43 while Tokyo emerged largely as the center of the Tokugawa regime44 and then as the capital of an empire, which, at its height in the early 1940s, extended from Manchuria to Indonesia. Even today, with the clear rise of eastern Asia as the potentially dominant center of the world economy, the leading global cities remain those that emerged from the first melding of the worldwide economy.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

Whether or not this is the case, it is quite obvious from looking at the cable-laying industry that the Victorian practice of sending British people all over the planet is now paying them back handsomely. The current position of AT&T versus Cable & Wireless reflects the shape of America versus the shape of the British Empire. America is a big, contiguous mass, easy to defend, immensely wealthy, and basically insular. No one comes close to it in developing new technologies, and AT&T has always been one of America’s technological leaders. By contrast, the British Empire was spread out all over the place, and though it controlled a few big areas (such as India and Australia), it was basically an archipelago of outposts, let us say a network, completely dependent on shipping and communications to stay alive.

The strings of fireworks kept blowing themselves out, so as I backed slowly toward the Oil Tiger I was treated to the sight of excited Chinese software engineers lunging into the firestorm holding their cigarettes out like fencing foils, trying to reboot the strings without sacrificing eyes, fingers, or eardrums. BACK IN SHENZHEN, WHEN I’D HAD ABOUT ALL I COULD TAKE OF THE SPECIAL Economic Zone, I walked over a bridge across the Shen Zhen and found myself back in the British Empire again, filling out forms in a clean well-lit room with the Union Jack flying overhead. A twenty-minute trip in one of Hong Kong’s quiet, fast commuter trains took me through the New Territories, mostly open green land with the occasional grove of palm trees or burst of high-rise development, and into Kowloon, where I hopped into a taxi.

Cable & Wireless has an institutional memory stretching all the way back to 1870, when it laid the first cable from Porthcurno to Australia, and the British maritime industry as a whole possesses a vast fund of practical experience that is the legacy of the Empire. One can argue that, in the end, the British Empire did Britain surprisingly little good. Other European countries that had pathetic or nonexistent empires, such as Italy, have recently surpassed England in standard of living and other measures of economic well-being. Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

It has helped leaders craft their policies and measure their power. However, when practiced poorly or neglected, accounting has contributed to cycles of destruction, as we saw all too clearly in the 2008 financial crisis. From Renaissance Italy, the Spanish Empire, and Louis XIV’s France to the Dutch Republic, the British Empire, and the early United States, effective accounting and political accountability have made the difference between a society’s rise and fall. Over and over again, good accounting practices have produced the levels of trust necessary to found stable governments and vital capitalist societies, and poor accounting and its attendant lack of accountability have led to financial chaos, economic crimes, civil unrest, and worse.

Over and over again, good accounting practices have produced the levels of trust necessary to found stable governments and vital capitalist societies, and poor accounting and its attendant lack of accountability have led to financial chaos, economic crimes, civil unrest, and worse. All this is every bit as true in our own day of multitrillion-dollar debts and massive financial scandals as it was in the Florence of the Medici, Holland’s Golden Age, the heyday of the British Empire, and, of course, 1929 on Wall Street. Capitalism and government, it seems, have flourished without massive crises only during distinct and even limited periods of time when financial accountability functions. People have known how to do good accounting for nearly a millennium, but many financial institutions and regimes have just chosen not to do it.

It would seem natural to place double-entry accounting—a true Western invention—at the center of European and American economic history. The study of accounting and accountability allows us to understand how institutions and societies succeed and fail at their most basic levels. We recognize that the Medici Bank, the Dutch dominance of commerce, and the British Empire were successes, yet, of course, they no longer exist. So if each one of these institutions knew massive success, it also knew great decline and fall, and accounting was central to each of these stories. Seen through the lens of the history of financial accountability, then, the history of capitalism is neither simply a history of ascent nor a cycle of booms and busts.


Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis

British Empire, Columbine, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

On one memorable day he extracted no fewer than 149 teeth. Dedicated to God and king, impervious to physical suffering, possessed of medical skills that seemed wizardly to the scores of people he saved, Wakefield became one of those stalwart colonial figures that loomed over the wild frontiers of the British Empire. A photograph from the Wakefield family album shows him perched on an iceberg in his skivvies, about to leap into the dark ocean for his morning constitutional. The war came to Newfoundland in the summer, as the entire country was at sea fishing for cod. When word of the hostilities reached Labrador, Wakefield left immediately for St.

Riding a favorite horse with his polished staff at his side, not a button or buckle amiss, allowed him to maintain the illusion that the world was still a place of gentlemen and order, and that war as an exercise had not lost its luster or glory. In four years at the head of the largest army the British Empire had ever placed in the field, a force that would suffer 2,568,834 casualties in France and Belgium alone, Haig never once saw the front; nor did he visit the wounded. Long after the war Haig’s son attempted an explanation: “The suffering of his men during the Great War caused him great anguish.

Finally a mounted herald approached the dais and throne and, with appropriate flourishes, proclaimed the coronation of the new king. The imperial salute of 101 guns still resounded as Curzon moved front and center to summon the multitudes in their loyalty to the unchallenged supremacy of the British Crown. “There has never been anything,” he would later write, “so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity.” THE BRITISH had indeed transformed the face of India, building thousands of miles of canals and railroads, bringing into being entire cities. But at a deeper level, the British presence was but an ephemeral veil over the body of a land that was more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that had endured for four thousand years as an empire of ideas rather than territorial boundaries.


pages: 557 words: 159,434

Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham by Mary S. Lovell

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, land bank, out of africa

Sometimes she flew an accident victim or critically sick patient from distant outposts to hospital in Nairobi.58 In addition she provided an air taxi service to up-country farms, undercutting Wilson Airways’ rates of one shilling and threepence per mile.59 Often she worked as a relief pilot for East African Airways and a colleague, G.D. ‘Flip’ Fleming, stated: She was a fine pilot with great courage and endurance, and with the exception of Jean Batten I think Beryl was the finest woman pilot in the British Empire… I never saw her tired or ‘the worse for wear’ even after a ten-hour flight or a party the night before. She always looked fresh and cheerful…her navigation was uncanny, and she could find her way to any spot in the vast open country of East Africa…I never saw her make a poor landing, even in really filthy weather, on bad aerodromes or at night.60 When the Furness safari ended in January, Tom made preparations to fly to the Furness mansion near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.

‘Not until I’ve been to South Africa to visit my father.’ ‘Are you going to South Africa immediately?’ ‘First I want to see my little boy Gervase – I’ve brought back a picture of my aeroplane which was painted in New York as a souvenir for him. Then I will probably fly on to South Africa as I want to see the British Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, but I’ll do it in easy stages.’ ‘Is the cut on your face still giving you trouble?’ ‘Oh, but it’s disappearing. It is disappearing, isn’t it? There’s only a little bump now.’ Endless questions, questions, questions. Inevitably when the articles appeared she was misquoted.

Miss Sophie Tucker and Mr Jack Hylton were also present.’5 ‘Isn’t it strange,’ Dessie said to a friend in the wings, ‘that all that could happen in one week – that Tom could die and be buried and I be back here doing the same things that I was doing last Saturday.’ And to a reporter: ‘I am just going on with my job as Tom would have wished me to do.’6 Beryl was at Portsmouth aerodrome at dawn on Tuesday 29 September to watch the start of the big race. In connection with the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition, South African mining millionaire and industrialist I. W. Schlesinger had offered prizes totalling £10,000 for places in the long-distance race. His intention was to stimulate interest in aviation in South Africa and to publicize the exhibition. It was planned on much the same lines as the London to Melbourne Race, won by Tom and Charles Scott two years previously.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

During the remaining age of sail, there would be many Atlantic battles that would quite deservedly pass into the history books, either because of their textbook elegance as naval engagements or because of their profound significance in signaling or triggering some great shift in the placement of the world’s political chess pieces. The defeat of the Spanish Armada by Queen Elizabeth’s navy in 1588 was an action that led essentially to the creation of the British Empire and the reduction to mere decadence of its Spanish predecessor. The defeat of Napoléon’s navy (along with more Spaniards) at the classic battle of Trafalgar in 1805 is best remembered for the death of Nelson—a man still regarded with great reverence by all in Britain, and by all sailors everywhere.

Moreover, Nelson’s grand and unorthodox tactic, that of sending his two parallel but well-separated lines of battle directly into the sidewall of the enemy fleet, piercing both the enemy’s heart and his lower limbs rather than sailing alongside and hoping to cannonade him into submission—is still taught as an example of bravery and naval chutzpah; and the tragedy of the day, with the admiral lying bleeding to death on the deck, wounded by a sniper’s luck, cradled in the arms of his doctors and his trusted captains, all the while warning his fleet to take shelter from a coming storm and with his last words, allowing how humbled he was to have been able to do his duty, remains etched with acid on the British public mind. The Pax Britannica was in essence conceived at Trafalgar: and since the British Empire was au fond an oceanic empire—dependent on the navy to secure it, on islands to coal and sustain it, and on fertile oceanside countries to victual it and bring it fortune—and as one might argue further that it was an Atlantic Empire, too, so the siting of its inaugural battle in the heaving gray seas forty miles off the coast of Spain could hardly have been more apposite.

SOUTH And yet in the far south Atlantic, matters appear to be in rather better shape. The fishery created in 1993 in a huge area of British-administered sea around the island groups of South Georgia and South Sandwich—its 850,000 square miles making it the largest remaining part of what was once the formidably grand British Empire—is currently one of the most policed and efficient in the world. Most of the Chilean sea bass to be found on northern restaurant menus comes from there, most of it certified approvingly by the world’s fish protection organizations. In truth, like most people I had long been unaware of the simple existence of this body of British-run sea.


pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

In Burma and other tropical areas, the Japanese soldier–who was supposed to be night-blind and afraid of supernatural creatures in the jungle–suddenly became transformed in Allied eyes to what Yank, the Army weekly, referred to as “a ‘born’ jungle and night fighter.” In General Slim’s words, they became the “superbogeymen of the jungle,” while the British forces fell into a massive “inferiority complex”—an experience unprecedented in the history of the British Empire. Indeed, the marvels that occurred in this imaginary world beggared belief, as is implicit in a newspaper headline during the months when sentiment against the Japanese-Americans was being pumped up. “Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base” trumpeted the Los Angeles Times in an article purporting to uncover local farmers plotting to guide Japanese attack planes to their targets.

The Chinese Nationalists had fought long. They had suffered grievously. They had seen the United States and England supply military goods to Japan until almost the eve of Pearl Harbor and pursue a “Europe first” policy thereafter. They had listened to Churchill proclaim his intention to restore the British Empire, and listened in vain for a clear American disavowal of support for this plan to reconstruct the status quo ante of the white man’s imperium. Lawmakers such as Walter Judd of Minnesota and Mike Mansfield of Montana, who were respected by their colleagues for their special expertise on Asia, spelled this out carefully, and the implications were well understood.

Fu Manchu (1916), 34, 87, 162; The Drums of Fu Manchu (1939), 46. The Island of Fu Manchu (1941) was the tenth in the series. In the fourth novel, The Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), one of Rohmer’s characters observed that “a great federation of Eastern States affiliated with Russia–a new Russia–is destined to take the place once held by the British Empire.” In the eighth novel, President Fu Manchu (1936), the evil genius was plotting to seize the presidency of the United States through a front organization. In The Drums of Fu Manchu, the ninth in the series, the extraordinary plot hinged on saving a thinly disguised Hitler from assassination by Fu Manchu and his legions of colored henchmen.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The smells were “excrementitious.”6 Exhaust from the mills displaced the air and reduced the sun to “a disc without rays.”7 In 1872, a worried scientist who had been studying Manchester’s “chemical climatology” coined the term “acid rain” to describe the sulfuric dilute falling from the sky.8 The clangor, the stench, the poverty, the gloom, and the acid rain were by-products of the accumulation of an immense fortune. Factories in and around Manchester generated around half of the value of the trade of Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire was growing to encompass a quarter of the planet’s population and land, and when British factories were taking almost a third of the world’s raw materials and producing almost 40 percent of the world’s manufactured exports each year.9 Sometimes the capitalists get the credit for this dynamism, seeking profit, shaping policy, setting armies into motion, ruling their global empire of cotton from well-appointed merchant houses and banquet halls.10 Sometimes the machines do: steam engines, mechanical looms and frames, locomotives, steamships, telegraphs.11 Yet all the powerful new forms of governance and technology that combined to remake Manchester into Cottonopolis, the center of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, were at bottom tools for the extraction of unprecedented quantities of hard labor.

The popularity of Máximo and Bertola reflected a Victorian enthusiasm for the foreign: the unusual, the freakish, the distant and ancient, whatever made the familiar domestic world look like the high ground. Decline and fall—first ancient, then Spanish—was the frame in which the Victorians viewed Latin America, clearing the way for the superior British Empire to rule over the territories and peoples lesser empires could not hold. “Nothing but Anglo-Saxon energy will ever stir this sluggish pool into life,” Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words wrote of Central America in 1851. “The present inhabitants of Central America—Spanish, mixed, or coloured—know no more of the use which they might make of their unlimited resources, than a baby knows what it can buy with half-a-crown. . . .

* * * — WHEN JAMES HILL went in for coffee on the Santa Ana Volcano, he read everything he could get his hands on about coffee planting in Central America and Brazil and everywhere else.3 And if certain books from his childhood had predisposed Hill to make an adventure of life in Central America, there were other books to help him make it profitable. Some of these books grew out of the Victorian fad for memoirs of self-invention: stories of the property-less poor boy or the luckless second son, who, lacking prospects at home, seeks his birthright in the wider world. Such young men staffed the remote frontiers of the British Empire, turning what had been forest and jungle into plantations. Once they had remade themselves as Planters—usually capital P—they wrote the stories of their lives and adventures to the specifications of the boys’ fiction of the time, only—in contrast to Treasure Island—holding back no point of useful detail.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Empires that insist on administration in the language of the imperial masters can be immensely long-lived, like that of the Chinese, or can have a healthy afterlife, like that of the British; empires that make do with the languages of their subject-peoples have a tendency, like that of the Mongols, to break up and melt away. The longevity of the Arabic world – of the Arabic word – is astonishing. No other comparable diasporic groups – Scythians, Turks, Mongols – have had such a strong and long-lasting sociolinguistic ‘glue’. The Greek of the Hellenic world and the Latin of the Roman (and the Roman Catholic) dissolved in time. The standard English of the British empire is dissolving now. A present-day inhabitant of Kingston, Jamaica, would probably have little in common, linguistically or otherwise, with a seventh-century tribesman from Anglo-Saxon Northumbria; in contrast, despite the similarity of distance in time and space, a literate member of the black Moroccan Gnaoua in Tangier could hold a conversation with a seventh-century Meccan.

That German reunification of 1990, itself part of a contrary process that fragmented the Soviet Union, was a return to a unity that was then a mere two lifetimes old. During those lifetimes, Europe had been the epicentre of wars that blasted apart the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and led to the gentler meltdown of the British empire – but out of which came the United Nations and the European Union (those well-known bastions of unanimity). All the world’s a crucible in which once-stable compounds are continually breaking down and new ones forming. If there were no such change, there would be no history. Union and division are part of the same process.

Like Britons too, it might be true to say that Arabs have often taken a little of their psychological insularity abroad with them. But there is a major difference: other than as a place of pilgrimage, Arabia itself was swiftly sidelined after that greatest exodus, the Islamic one. It was as if, as the British empire grew, Britain itself had become a backwater. ARABIAN LANDSCAPES Part of the reason for this net export of people is the brown on the rainfall map: the Fertile Crescent may be irrigable, but the rest of the subcontinent is not at first sight a land of milk and honey, let alone of petroleum and gas.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

It should have been madness for a mere naval captain to put a prime minister on the spot like this, but Elliot knew he could rely on the business community to lobby Parliament to recover the money. And so it was that personal, political, and financial interests thickened around Melbourne until he had no choice but to pay up and then send an expedition to make the Chinese government reimburse Britain for the confiscated opium (Figure I.2). This was not the British Empire’s finest hour. Contemporary analogies are never precise, but it was rather as if in response to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency making a major bust, the Tijuana cartel prevailed on the Mexican government to shoot its way into San Diego, demanding that the White House reimburse the drug lords for the street value of the confiscated cocaine (plus interest and carriage charges) as well as paying the costs of the military expedition.

It promptly plucked Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler off the beach at Salerno, where an Anglo-American force had just invaded Italy, and dropped him into New Delhi to administer a million and a half square miles of territory that was almost as archaeologically rich as Egypt. Wheeler was a larger-than-life character. He fought in both world wars, left a trail of broken hearts across three continents, and revolutionized British archaeology with his meticulous excavations of Roman sites. All the same, eyebrows were raised at this appointment. The British Empire was clearly on its last legs, so why, Indian nationalists asked, inflict on us some pensioned-off Colonel Blimp, more at home on muddy Roman sites in Britain than in the land of the Buddha? Wheeler had a lot to prove, and as soon as he landed in Mumbai (known to the British as Bombay) he set off on a whirlwind archaeological tour.

“Our bells are threadbare with ringing of victories,” one well-placed Briton bragged in 1759, and in 1763 the exhausted French had no option but to sign away most of their overseas empire (Figure 9.8). Figure 9.8. All the world’s a stage: the global setting of the War of the West, fought by Britain and its allies against France between 1689 and 1815. Crossed swords mark some of the major battles; the British Empire as it was in 1815 is marked by dots. The War of the West, though, was barely half done. Even Britain was feeling the financial strain, and when a poorly thought-out scheme to get the American colonists to pick up part of the check for the war set off a revolt in 1776, France was there with the cash and ships that made all the difference for the rebels.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

GREAT CONTINENTAL RAILWAY JOURNEYS Destinations 1 LONDON TO MONTE CARLO HUNGARY TO AUSTRIA BERLIN TO THE RHINE BASEL TO JUNGFRAUJOCH AMSTERDAM TO NORTHERN FRANCE 2 MADRID TO GIBRALTAR TURIN TO VENICE DRESDEN TO KIEL COPENHAGEN TO OSLO PRAGUE TO MUNICH BORDEAUX TO BILBAO 3 TULA TO ST PETERSBURG ROME TO TAORMINA WARSAW TO KRAKÓW LA CORUÑA TO LISBON HAIFA TO THE NEGEV DESERT LYON TO MARSEILLE 4 VIENNA TO TRIESTE BARCELONA TO MALLORCA PISA TO LAKE GARDA SOFIA TO ISTANBUL FREIBURG TO HANNOVER ATHENS TO THESSALONIKI INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL PORTILLO BRADSHAW’S GUIDEBOOKS PROVIDE A DEEP INSIGHT into Britain’s state of mind in the year of their publication. The guide to the United Kingdom from the 1860s (which I use in the BBC television series Great British Railway Journeys) reveals a nation at the peak of self-confidence. The British empire is the largest that has ever existed and, at its heart, London is the world’s first metropolis. The country leads the world in innovation, invention, science, engineering and manufacture. But by 1913, the mood has changed markedly. The Bradshaw’s Continental Guide of that year reveals a loss of self-assurance.

After passing through half a dozen of these tanks the water was sufficiently clear for use but not for drinking purposes. That had to be fetched from a distance.’ Livesey’s first son, Fernando Harry Whitehead Livesey, was born in Santander in 1860. Harry, as he was known, went on to be made an OBE in 1918 and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1920. But the best remembered of the English engineers in the region was John Trulock (1856–1919), who became managing director of the West Galician Railway for some 40 years. Details of the early life of London-born Trulock are sketchy, although at the age of 14 he was apparently a warehouseman in an umbrella factory in Holborn.

INDEX (page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations) A AB Svenska Kullagerfabriken, ref1 Abdul Hamid II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 deposed, ref1 Abe, Shinzo, ref1 advertisements, ref1, ref2, ref3 Albula railway, ref1 Alexander II of Russia, ref1, ref2 Alexander III of Russia, ref1 Alexander the Great, ref1 Alexandra, Queen, ref1 Alexandria–Cairo line, ref1 Alfonso XII of Spain, ref1 Alfonso XIII of Spain, ref1, ref2 plot to assassinate, ref1, ref2 Algeciras, Conference of, ref1 Algeciras (Gibraltar) Railway Company, ref1 Aligeri, ref1 Allenby, Lord, ref1 American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, ref1 (see also Armenian Christians) Amsterdam–Northern France journey, ref1 Anasthatos, ref1 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), ref1 Ansaldo, Giovanni, ref1 anti-Semitism, ref1, ref2 Aparicio, Juan Pedro, ref1 Apennine mountains, ref1, ref2 Aranjuez line, ref1, ref2 Arcachon, ref1 arches, two-storey, ref1, ref2 Armenian Christians, genocide of, ref1 Art Deco, ref1 Asquith, Herbert, ref1 Association of German Engineers, ref1 Astapovo station, ref1, ref2 Atatürk, Kemal, ref1 Athens–Thessaloniki journey, ref1 Atocha station, ref1, ref2 Auschwitz, ref1, ref2 ‘Austrian bridge’, ref1, ref2 Austrian empire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Austrian State Railways, ref1 Austro-Hungarian empire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 map of, ref1 Auto, ref1 B Baden State Railway, ref1 Baedeker, Karl, ref1, ref2 Baghdad Railway, ref1 Bake, William Archibald, ref1 Balfour, Arthur, ref1 Balkan War, First, ref1 ball bearings, ref1, ref2 Barcelona–Mallorca journey, ref1 Barcelona–Mataró line, Spain’s first domestic train on, ref1 Barcelona metro, ref1, ref2 Barcelona, as regional railway hub, ref1 barges, ref1, ref2 Barraclough, John, ref1 Bartali, Gino, ref1 Basel–Jungfraujoch journey, ref1 Battle of Langensalza, ref1 Battle of the Somme, ref1 Bavarian Ludwig Railway, ref1, ref2 Bayard, ref1 BBC, ref1, ref2 Beer, Hanna, ref1 Belgian chocolate, ref1 Belgian Resistance, ref1 belle époque, ref1, ref2 Belpaire, Alfred, ref1 Bergen line, conversion of, ref1 Berlin, Congress of, ref1 Berlin–Rhine journey, ref1 Berlin, trams in, ref1, ref2 Berlin Wall, ref1 Betjeman, Sir John, ref1 Bianchi, Riccardo, ref1, ref2 bicycles, ref1 Bilbao station, ref1 Bing, Stefan, ref1 Bismarck, Otto von, ref1 Black Forest, ref1 Blériot, Louis, ref1 Blowitz, Adolphe Opper de, ref1 Bon Marché, ref1 Bonaparte, Napoleon, ref1, ref2 Booth, Alfred, ref1 Bordeaux–Bilbao journey, ref1 Bordeaux station, ref1 Bordeaux wines, ref1 Boris III of Bulgaria, ref1 Bradshaw, George, ref1, ref2, ref3 cholera suffered by, ref1 grave, ref1 railway shares bought by, ref1 Bradshaw’s Continental Guide (1913), ref1, ref2 (see also Bradshaw’s guidebooks) journeys (Destinations 1): Amsterdam to Northern France, ref1 Basel to Jungfraujoch, ref1 Berlin to the Rhine, ref1 Hungary to Austria, ref1 London to Monte Carlo, ref1 journeys (Destinations 2): Bordeaux to Bilbao, ref1 Copenhagen to Oslo, ref1 Dresden to Kiel, ref1 Madrid to Gibraltar, ref1 Prague to Munich, ref1 Turin to Venice, ref1 journeys (Destinations 3): Haifa to Negev Desert, ref1 La Coruña to Lisbon, ref1 Lyon to Marseille, ref1 Rome to Taormina, ref1 Tula to St Petersburg, ref1 Warsaw to Kraków, ref1 journeys (Destinations 4): Athens to Thessaloniki, ref1 Barcelona to Mallorca, ref1 Freiburg to Hannover, ref1 Pisa to Lake Garda, ref1 Sofia to Istanbul, ref1 Vienna to Trieste, ref1 legacy of, ref1 published, ref1, ref2 Bradshaw’s guidebooks, ref1, ref2, ref3 (see also Bradshaw’s Continental Guide (1913)) Belgium praised by, ref1 on Circumvesuviana, ref1 Dresden praised by, ref1 Dutch praised by, ref1 on Greece, ref1 on Heidelberg Castle, ref1 on Jerusalem, ref1 on Leipzig, ref1 on Pyrenees, ref1 on Santiago Cathedral, ref1 warnings in, ref1, ref2 Brandt, Alfred, ref1 Braque, Georges, ref1 bread train, ref1 Breda, Ernesto, ref1 locomotive built by, ref1 Brenner Pass, ref1, ref2 British empire, ref1, ref2 broad gauge tracks, ref1, ref2, ref3 (see also narrow gauge tracks) Broders, Roger, ref1 Brooke, Rupert, ref1 Brothers Grimm, ref1, ref2 Brown, Charles, ref1 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, ref1, ref2 Budapest: Chain Bridge, ref1, ref2 Europe’s first underground system in, ref1 Budweis line, ref1, ref2 Bunyol, Miquel Biada, ref1, ref2 Burschenschaften, ref1 Busse, Otto, locomotive designed by, ref1 Byron, Lord, ref1 Byzantine empire, ref1, ref2 C Café Central, Vienna, ref1, ref2 Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Canadian Pacific Company, ref1 Cannes, ref1 Carlos I of Portugal, ref1, ref2, ref3 Carnegie, Andrew, ref1 Carnot, Sadi, ref1 Carpathian Mountains, ref1 Carrel, Alexis, ref1 Carriage 2419, ref1, ref2 Caserio, Sante Geronimo, ref1 Central Station, Amsterdam, ref1, ref2 Chain Bridge, Budapest, ref1, ref2 Channel Tunnel, ref1, ref2 Charing Cross station, ref1 Charles Albert of Piedmont, ref1 Cherepanov, Miron, ref1 Cherepanov, Yefim, ref1 chocolate manufacture, ref1 Chopin, Frederick, ref1 Christie, Agatha, ref1 Chrzanów factory, ref1 ‘Cinderella’, ref1 Cinématographe, ref1 Circumvesuviana, ref1, ref2 CIWL (Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits), ref1 Clark, Adam, ref1 Clark, William Tierney, ref1 clocks and time, ref1, ref2, ref3 CO (Société Générale pour l’Exploitation des Chemins de Fer Orientaux), ref1 Colaço, Jorge, ref1 Committee of Union and Progress (‘Young Turks’), ref1 Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM), ref1, ref2 Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL), ref1 Compañía Vapores del Sur de España, ref1 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, ref1 concentration camps, ref1, ref2 (see also anti-Semitism; Nazi Germany) Conference of Algeciras, ref1 Congress of Berlin, ref1 Cook, Thomas, ref1 Copenhagen–Oslo journey, ref1 Corinth Canal, ref1 corkscrew tracks, ref1, ref2 Credit Mobilier, ref1 Credit Suisse, ref1 Cresta Run, ref1, ref2 Crimean War, ref1 Cuypers, Petrus J.


A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, NP-complete, phenotype, placebo effect, wikimedia commons

This development paved the way for the large-scale production of the lighter-colored malts that were the basis for a burgeoning new category of pale ales—and, as we have seen, for Josef Groll’s pilsner lager. One highly significant variation on the pale ale theme was the India pale ale (IPA) that was produced specifically for the fledgling British Empire. The hot Indian climate made it impractical to brew beer on the spot, yet the sweltering British merchants and sundry adventurers wanted more than the pungent and often downright dangerous arak palm wine that was all Indian tradition had to offer. The market they offered was potentially hugely lucrative, but transporting English ales to India involved a long and arduous sea journey that traditional beers rarely survived in ideal condition.

New York: W. W. Norton. Brown, P. 2003. Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer. London: Pan. ———. 2006. Three Sheets to the Wind. 300 Bars in 13 Countries: One Man’s Quest for the Meaning of Beer. London: Pan. ———. 2010. Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer that Built the British Empire. London: Pan. ———. 2012. Shakespeare’s Pub: A Barstool History of London as Seen through the Windows of Its Oldest Pub—The George Inn. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Chapter 4. Beer-Drinking Cultures Brown (2006) is as engaging a general account as you will find of beer-drinking cultures around the world.

Samuel (1996a, b) describes the analysis of the Amarna brewery evidence. Calagione (2011) outlines the role of the Dogfish Head Brewery in replicating ancient beers, while Brown (2012) describes his adventures re-creating an authentic IPA. Brown, P. 2012. Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer That Built the British Empire. London: Pan. Calagione, S. 2011. Brewing up a Business. Revised and updated edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Civil, M. 1991. “Modern Breweries Recreate Ancient Beer.” Oriental Institute News and Notes 132: 1–2, 4. Katz, S., and F. Maytag. 1991. “Brewing an Ancient Beer.” Expedition 44: 24–33.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

More important, he and his colleagues are aware that they are being scrutinized, and that a single incident of abuse can awaken a national shaming campaign in a matter of hours. The punching-up protesters have demonstrated their power. * * * Mahatma Gandhi, the twentieth century’s master of punching up, demonstrated the strategy and discipline required to win the long game. His Salt March in 1930 set the standard. At that time, the British Empire was drawing profits out of India while hundreds of millions of Indians lived in misery, many threatened by famine. For years, Gandhi had been leading protests. They were growing bigger, and by 1930, many expected the nonviolent leader to focus his movement on the pillars of British colonial power, perhaps the stock exchange in Bombay or the viceroy’s mansion in Delhi.

Gandhi’s choice of salt was genius. It made it abundantly clear that the Indians were not motivated by greed or status. They were asking only for a basic element of life. Who could deny it to them? The Salt March was a perfectly designed scenario for punching up. Gandhi vowed that it would “shake the British Empire at its very foundation.” His strategy hinged on the diffusion of information. If news of the march didn’t reach Britain and the rest of the Western world, the campaign would accomplish nothing. Like a falling tree in a deserted forest, shame makes no impact if its message misses its audience.

We have no other motive than to serve Nigeria with our hearts and might, and build a nation which we and generations to come can be proud of,” pic.twitter.com/​E0O5To78mL, Twitter, https://mobile.twitter.com/​mbuhari/​status/​1100797066391867392?lang=bg. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “shake the British Empire”: “Gandhi’s Salt March, the Tax Protest That Changed Indian History,” https://www.history.co.uk/​article/​gandhis-salt-march-the-tax-protest-that-changed-indian-history. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “They went down like ten-pins”: Whitney Sanford, “What Gandhi Can Teach Today’s Protesters,” ed.


pages: 168 words: 35,753

Ye Olde Britain: Best Historical Experiences by Lonely Planet Publications

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Winter of Discontent

A 1792 Act of Parliament allowed the Bow Street model to spread across England. 1776–83 The American War of Independence is the British Empire’s first major reverse. 1799–1815 The Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon threatens invasion of Britain, but his ambitions are curtailed by Nelson and Wellington at the famous battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815). 1858 & 1860 The first modern national eisteddfods are held in Llangollen and Denbigh – although earlier ones had been organised from the end of the 18th century as part of a Welsh cultural revival. 1837–1901 The reign of Queen Victoria. The British Empire – ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’ – expands from Canada through Africa and India to Australia and New Zealand. 1847 Publication of a government report, dubbed the ‘Treason of the Blue Books’, suggesting the Welsh language is detrimental to education in Wales, and fuelling the Welsh-language struggle. 1900 James Keir Hardie (usually known as just Keir Hardie) becomes the first Labour MP, winning a seat in the Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfyl. 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated in the Balkan city of Sarajevo – the final spark in a decade-long crisis that starts the Great War, now called WWI. 1916 The Welsh Liberal MP David Lloyd George becomes the British prime minister in an alliance with the Conservative Party, having built a reputation for championing the poor and needy. 1925 Plaid (Cenedlaethol) Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, is formed, initiating the struggle for Welsh self-governance and laying the foundations for the modern-day party. 1926 Increasing mistrust of the government, fuelled by soaring unemployment, leads to the General Strike.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

GC&CS worked on the cyphers of many countries in the interwar period, including those of France, the United States and Japan, since they all shed light on international affairs; but the most important were those of Russia.8 Both MI5 and SIS, together with intelligence officers from the three armed services, were obsessed with the threat from Bolshevik Russia in the interwar period. GC&CS followed suit. There were good reasons for making Moscow the pre-eminent target. Bolshevik agents were actively seeking to subvert the British Empire, and sigint produced operational intelligence that could be used to thwart these plots. Alastair Denniston enjoyed a major advantage, having recruited Ernst Fetterlein, the Tsar’s leading code-breaker, when he fled Russia after the Revolution of 1917, and in the 1920s GC&CS was successfully reading Soviet diplomatic cyphers.

This allowed the British government to learn of the secret subsidies paid by Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain and its newspaper, the Daily Worker. It also contributed to important successes against major Comintern agents in imperial outposts and international centres such as Singapore and Shanghai.12 Faced with the real threat of active subversion throughout the British Empire by the Comintern, GC&CS paid limited attention to military matters or the rise of the Axis until the mid-1930s. Germany, Italy and Japan were a remarkably low priority. Admittedly, a small naval section of GC&CS had been set up in 1925, and its most important work was done overseas by naval officers like Eric Nave, based in Hong Kong.

Remarkably, it was not yet working on German traffic.3 Moreover, in January 1942, and again in early 1943, the British and the Americans were discussing the mutual exchange of intercepted material from ‘Slavic nations’.4 Soviet cyphers had been the core business for Britain’s interwar code-breakers, and work on this material never stopped completely during the Second World War. To understand why, we must cast our minds back to the approach of the war. During the 1930s, GC&CS continued to follow the traffic of the Comintern even after other Soviet systems were lost. This revealed persistent efforts to subvert the British Empire in locations such as India, Malaya and Hong Kong. Indeed, the Soviet Union appeared to be in league with Germany after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939. It is often forgotten that Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union together. For a nightmare period between August 1939 and June 1941, many suspected that Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union would act in uneasy concert, dividing the spoils of the world between them.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Colonial Echoes This is where the long history of colonialism’s entanglement with capitalism helps us move beyond the sound and fury of contemporary scandals and grasp the longer pattern of resource appropriation that gives shape to today’s developments. Long before Karl Marx identified it as a force in the world, capital was already expanding in the sixteenth century, in the period most commonly identified with historical colonialism and the emergence of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires. Capital was acquiring new territories from which to extract resources and new bodies from which to extract labor. Those close relations between colonialism and capitalism (indeed, between colonialism and modernity in general)20 are important to our story; they help us grasp what is distinctive about the current expansionary phase of capitalism.

That is probably why in 2016, civil society in India organized to force the government to prevent Free Basics from being offered in that country,44 a move that drove Marc Andreessen (cofounder of Netscape and a Facebook investor) to lecture Indian civil society via Twitter on the economic futility of anticolonialism.45 Expand Indians have plenty of reason to be suspicious of foreign corporations. Founded in 1600, the East India Company by the year 1833 controlled five hundred thousand square miles of territory in South Asia, encompassing 93.7 million subjects paying 22,718,794 pounds a year to the British empire in taxation. At its height, the Company controlled about half of the world’s trade, specializing in basic commodities such as tea, textiles, and spices. The power of the East India Company was secured by its own military and paramilitary armies, which served not only to protect its interests and enforce compliance with its decrees but also to collect revenue and perform police duties.46 Along with military force, the East India Company relied on technological innovation to expand and manage its empire.

An important reason for undertaking all of this urgently is that data colonialism is a period of transition. It is not here to stay; its patterns simply announce an emerging order that is yet to come. As discussed in chapter 1, historical colonialism served as a prelude to modern industrial capitalism. The eighteenth-century abolition of colonial slavery solidified the British empire’s transition in the nineteenth century to a new form of imperialism based on liberal values such as free trade. This in turn allowed the empire to reimagine itself at the center of a global network of commerce in manufactured goods—the beginning of what we would recognize today as modern capitalism.97 In short, historical colonialism was not just about systematic and global extraction and appropriation but about reimagining those things as progress and enforcing a new world order in which colonizers could continue to rule with decreased (yet still prevalent) levels of violence but also with increased legitimacy.


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The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

During the period from 1870 to 1914, for example, when great powers spent their defense dollars on either their army or their navy, the United Kingdom earmarked a significantly larger share of its military budget to its navy than did either France or Germany.73 These different patterns of defense spending made good strategic sense, since the United Kingdom was an insular state that needed a large and powerful navy to protect its seaborne commerce and to transport its army across the large bodies of water that separated it from the European continent as well as the vast British empire. France and Germany, on the other hand, were continental powers with much smaller empires, so they were less dependent on their navies than was the United Kingdom. They were also more dependent on their armies than the United Kingdom, however, because they had to worry constantly about an invasion by a neighboring state.

Between 1864 and 1870, for example, the United Kingdom and Russia stood by and allowed Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia to conquer territory in the heart of Europe and create a unified German Reich that was considerably more powerful than its Prussian predecessor. The United Kingdom reasoned that a united Germany would not only deter French and Russian expansion into the heart of Europe, but it would also divert their attention away from Africa and Asia, where they might threaten the British empire. The Russians, on the other hand, hoped that a united Germany would keep Austria and France in check, and that it would also stifle Polish national aspirations. The Allure of Buck-Passing Buck-passing and putting together a balancing coalition obviously represent contrasting ways of dealing with an aggressor.

Specifically, Nazi Germany’s stunning military successes in the early years of the war “gave Italy unprecedented leverage and freedom of action.”106 Mussolini’s first major step was to declare war against France on June 10, 1940, one month after Germany invaded France, and at a point when it was clear that France was doomed to defeat. Italy entered the war at this opportune moment to acquire French territory and colonies. Nice, Savoy, Corsica, Tunisia, and Djibouti were the main targets, although Italy was also interested in acquiring other French-controlled areas such as Algeria, as well as parts of the British empire, such as Aden and Malta. Mussolini also demanded that the French navy and air force be turned over to Italy. Germany met hardly any of Italy’s demands, however, because Hitler did not want to give France any incentive to resist the Nazi occupation. Despite this setback, Mussolini continued looking for opportunities to conquer territory.


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The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

Writing in 1923, the British professor of agriculture Thomas Hudson Middleton observed that his compatriots were “chiefly fed upon imported food, and are interested in the quality and price of their foodstuffs rather than in its origins, the ordinary consumer takes little interest in the well-being of agriculture.”46 (Most of his compatriots did not even care whether or not foodstuffs were produced in the British Empire, thus prompting the creation of an “Empire Marketing Board” in 1926.) Despite the fact that they have been conditioned to provide SOLE answers when formally quizzed on their shopping habits, today’s British consumers are apparently still behaving like previous generations. 47 This, we will argue, is the right path for all consumers to pursue.

Every time you buy Canadian salmon, Australian fruit, New Zealand lamb, South African wine, Indian tea, you are dealing with the very people who go out of the way to spend money on the goods made in your own country, and so to create em- ployment, pay wages and increase prosperity here. Buy Empire Goods. Ask—Is it British? —EMPIRE MARKETING BOARD, proposed advertisement for British newspapers, 19261 Perhaps the most appealing claim of locavores is that diverting consumer dollars once spent on “distant” food items towards others produced nearby will boost local employment. But as with all protectionist schemes that keep more affordable foreign products out of a local economy and undermine the production of things in the locations where they make the most economic sense, locavorism can only deliver poorly paid jobs and massive wealth destruction.

Food CPI, Prices and Expenditures: Expenditures on Food, by Selected Countries (various tables) http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/. Chapter 3 1 Quoted in Kaori O’Connor. 2009. “The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes and the Commodities of Empire.” Journal of Global History 4 (1): 127–155, p. 143. The [British] Empire Marketing Board’s (1926–1933) mission was to encourage “local” Empire shopping campaigns. A collection of posters produced by this organization is available on the website of the Manchester Art Gallery at http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/revealing-histories/propaganda-pride-and-prejudice-posters-from-the-empire-marketing-board/. 2 Interview with Michael Pollan. 2008.


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The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

• • • WHEN WE SHIFT our focus to London, the third of the great European cities of the early twentieth century, we are looking at an altogether different sort of place from Paris or Vienna. There were no great boulevards for the affluent to use as promenades; there was no Haussmann or Emperor Franz Josef to impose any plan for urban greatness. “If the British empire was the most powerful the world had ever known,” the historian Jonathan Schneer wrote, “it yet lacked an emperor whose every vision of London could become an architect’s command.” London, like Vienna and Paris, was an enormous magnet. It brought millions of people together for reasons of economics, government, and culture.

One writer described it as a place “where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.” The journalist Will Crooks is said to have remarked that the sun that never sets on the British Empire never rises on the dark alleys of east London. This was no welfare population; to all intents and purposes, there was no welfare. Most of these people worked. The main employers were sweatshop clothing makers, but many East End residents worked on the London docks, loading and unloading ships at the world’s greatest port, twenty-six square miles of territory along the Thames, lined with huge warehouses, some of them six stories tall and an acre across.

., p. 227. 15 “the great ordering system”: James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Meditations on the Urban Condition (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 3. 16 “Second Empire Paris became”: Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century, p. 232. 17 “For hours I could stand”: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 46. 18 “the Minister-President or the richest magnate”: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 15. 19 “The first glance”: Ibid., p. 14. 20 “It is a sort of democratic club”: Ibid., p. 39. 21 “dismal tenement landscape”: Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 58. 22 “If the British empire was the most powerful”: Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p.19. 23 “a true Londoner”: Ford Madox Ford, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2000), p. 569. 24 “The Strand of those days”: H.


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Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

As Giovanni Arrighi pointed out, an analogous corporate model was emerging at the same time in Germany, and the two countries—the United States and Germany—ended up spending most of the first half of the next century battling over which would take over from the declining British empire and establish its own vision for a global economic and political order. We all know who won. Arrighi makes another interesting point here. Unlike the British Empire, which had taken its free market rhetoric seriously, eliminating its own protective tariffs with the famous Anti–Corn Law Bill of 1846, neither the German or American regimes had ever been especially interested in free trade.

The very first thing the United States did, on officially taking over the reins from Great Britain after World War II, was to set up the world’s first genuinely planetary bureaucratic institutions in the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and GATT, later to become the WTO. The British Empire had never attempted anything like this. They either conquered other nations, or traded with them. The Americans attempted to administer everything and everyone. British people, I’ve observed, are quite proud that they are not especially skilled at bureaucracy; Americans, in contrast, seem embarrassed by the fact that on the whole, they’re really quite good at it.14 It doesn’t fit the American self-image.


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The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

People speak of Scotland as the land of the Protestant Kirk (the Church of Scotland), but Catholics outnumber adherents of the Kirk in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. And, like most of Europe, Scotland has a long-established Jewish presence and a growing Muslim population. Nor does Scottishness belong just to the territory of Scotland. The Scots played a huge role in creating and managing the British Empire. If you travel north and west from Glasgow and take the boat from Oban to the tiny isle of Colonsay, with its landscape of rock and peat, and a miraculous rhododendron garden made possible by the warm waters of the northern Gulf Stream, you will find the home of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal.

The school at Dartington was suggested by his father’s sister, Florence, who later married the principal of an illustrious West African school. (It was Prince of Wales College, Achimota, which had to defend its title as the best school in the Gold Coast against Mfantsipim, the school my father went to.) The boy’s family connected him, then, to the wide world of the British Empire in the early twentieth century. Dartington gave Michael both the habitus and the social capital (crudely, the connections) with which to proceed. He flourished at the new school, and the Elmhirsts took him into their family, encouraging and supporting him for the rest of their lives. Since she already had a son called Michael, Dorothy called him Michael Youngster.

., 182 Baghdad, Iraq, 196 Balkans, the, 195, 201 “Ballad of Walter White, The” (Hughes), 130 Baltic States, 77, 79 Bangladesh, 58 Bannockburn, Scotland, 102 Baruch, Book of, 50 Basho, Matsuo, 208 Bayreuth, Germany, 126 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 82 Belgium, xi, 84 Bengal, 78, 137 Berlin, Germany, 77, 125 Berlin, Isaiah, 165 Bethnal Green (London, England), 153, 154, 168, 175 Betjeman, Sir John, 61 Bevin, Ernest, 174 Bible, 43, 50–52, 54, 57, 112 Bieber, Justin, 205 Blyden, Edward W., 122, 123 Bodrum, Turkey, 192 Bohemia, 72 Bonwire, Ghana, 101, 208 Book of Snobs (Thackeray), 23 Boston, Massachusetts, 152, 168 Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 23, 24 Brandenburg, Germany, 108 Brazil, 72 Bristol, England, 139, 174 British Empire, 87, 93, 139 British India, 78 Brittany, 5, 77 Brontë, Charlotte, 144, 158 Brown, Michael, 132 Bruck, Karl Ludwig von, 83 Buddha, 60, 208 Bulgaria, 77, 195 Burney, Fanny, 155, 157 Burns, Robert, 82–84, 86, 87, 103, 104, 205 Burr, Aaron, 150 Burton, Isabel, 83 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 82 Byzantine Empire, 194 Byzantium, 193, 194, 197 Cadmus (king of Thebes), 175 Caledonia, 82, 103 Cambodia, 127 Camus, Albert, 182 Canada, 45, 87 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 145 Cape Town, South Africa, xi Caribbean, 123, 132, 150 Carthage, 110 Catalonia, 90, 103 Caucasus, 79 Cavafy, C.


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The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon

British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, discovery of penicillin, housing crisis, index card, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

On Barrington Street in Richmond, just above the busy piers and the Acadia Sugar Refinery, young wives with young children from across Canada moved into newly built low-rent row houses, waiting for their husbands to return. Halifax was not only Canada’s war base but also one of the busiest ports in the world. It served as the conduit for meat and grain from the prairies, lumber from the mountains, and men from the West Indies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, eventually, the United States. Halifax was the British Empire’s lifeline for virtually all the supplies it needed to win, and that included explosives, which arrived from plants across New England in unmarked ships and trains. Haligonians could watch all these resources run through their railyards to the ports and out to sea from Fort Needham, which had been converted to a park atop the slope of Richmond; from the Richmond’s neighborhood homes, which often featured bay windows overlooking the Narrows; or from Citadel Hill, which lorded over the entire harbor.

Principal Huggins urged them to join the Junior Cadet Corps, where they were trained in drill, physical fitness, and rifle exercises. Noble Driscoll also tried to join the Cadet Corp, where his older brother Al was one of the team’s best shooters, but he was too small for someone his age and couldn’t handle the guns, so his cadet career ended before it started. In 1915, 625 teams of cadets from across the British Empire took part in the National Rifle Association competition, with Richmond’s cadets winning two prizes. Like their friends and neighbors Ian Orr and Noble Driscoll, the Pattison boys were obsessed with warships. Because the Pattisons’ house was so close to the dry docks, when James was walking to or from Richmond School, North Street Station, or his friends’ houses, he liked to make a detour toward the docks to see what ship they were working on.

If you had a requisition from your pastor or a committee chairman, anything you wanted was free. Although no one calculated just how much Eaton gave away, conservative estimates put the total in the six figures—millions today. He gave it all away on one condition: that there be no publicity. Every corner of the vast British Empire gave generously. Local newspapers reported financial gifts from Newfoundland—still a separate British colony—the West Indies, South America, China, and New Zealand, as well as other parts of North America and the U.K. The Australian government gave $250,000, and the British government voted to send £1 million, then worth $4,815,000, and now almost $100 million—confirmation of the close connection between the Crown and her most loyal Canadian city.


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Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, invention of movable type, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

Salt makers brought in livestock: donkeys to haul carts of salt to the wharves, and cattle to feed themselves as they made salt. All that these small, salt-making islands had was their location in shipping lanes, sunshine, and marshes that trapped seawater. Yet for a time they prospered because the British Empire needed salt. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Salt and Independence THE ENGLISH, THE Dutch, and the French hunted for salt, the magic elixir that could turn their new American seas of limitless fish into limitless wealth. The Dutch gave incentives to colonists and, in 1660, granted a colonist the right to build saltworks on a small island near New Amsterdam, known as Coney Island.

In a less corporate age, oil men used to take glee in pointing out that the three most important discoveries in the history of American oil—Titusville, Spindletop, and the East Texas Field—were all drilled against the advice of geologists. As Brownrigg had predicted in the mid–eighteenth century, “Old arts are improved and new ones daily invented.” The quest for salt had turned unexpected corners and created dozens of industries. CHAPTER TWENTY The Soil Never Sets On . . . WHEN THE BRITISH Empire was at its height, “Liverpool salt” was the salt of the empire, a prestigious product known all over the world. As in Cardona, Hallein, and Wieliczka, a visit to the Cheshire salt mines was a special treat for visiting aristocrats. These elite guests were lowered into the mines in enormous brine buckets.

Lord Winterlon, the undersecretary of state for India, assured the British government that there was no reason for concern about the salt issue. Not everyone in England agreed. In British Parliament, Sir Henry Craik argued that the salt tax was causing serious hardship in India and that this hardship was leading to civil unrest. Some suggested that the revenue from the salt tax was not worth the threat that unrest posed to the British Empire. Labour members warned that the salt tax could be leading them into another Irish situation in India. In 1930, Orissa seemed near open rebellion. And so, contrary to popular belief today, it was not an entirely original idea to focus rebellion on salt, when that idea was seized upon by an entirely original man named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.


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Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

It has a very long history (one has only to read Shakespeare) and indeed England can be seen as one of the first movers in the formation of the modern nation state. The English have as much right to a collective political identity as the Irish or the Scots (and indeed as the Germans or the French) have. But for centuries, English nationalism has been buried in two larger constructs: the United Kingdom and the British empire. These interments were entirely voluntary. The gradual construction of the UK, with the inclusion first of Scotland and then of Ireland, gave England stability and control in its own part of the world and allowed it to dominate much of the rest of the world through the empire. Britishness didn’t threaten Englishness; it amplified it.

The very poor outcome of the Brexit negotiations for Britain reflects the realpolitik: there was a relatively small and isolated country up against a huge multinational bloc. This is the accustomed way of such things. But this time there has been a staggering variation: the places have changed. Britain, not Ireland, is the relatively small and isolated country. Ireland, not the British empire, has on its side the power of a huge multinational bloc. This in itself is deeply disorienting. It is a new thing: the first time in 800 years of Anglo-Irish relations that Ireland has had more clout. No wonder the Brexiteers and the British government found it impossible for so long even to recognise this new reality.

In itself, this withdrawal may be of minimal significance – certainly when compared with the prospect of a much larger British withdrawal from Europe. But it reminds us of the very long afterlife of the catastrophic wars of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1919, Europe, the United States and the British empire imagined they were entering a post-war world. In 2019, we could all say the same, but not with any great joy. It is not just that we know from a century ago that ‘post-war’ can turn into ‘inter-war’. It is that we actually need the memory of those wars to stay alive. They are still the best warnings we have about our collective capacity to manufacture catastrophe.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

Described by the German kaiser as the most important naval battle since Trafalgar a century earlier, and by President Theodore Roosevelt as ‘the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen’, the Battle of Tsushima effectively terminated a war that had been rumbling on since February 1904, fought mainly to decide whether Russia or Japan would control Korea and Manchuria. For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war; and the news careened around a world that Western imperialists – and the invention of the telegraph – had closely knit together. In Calcutta, safeguarding the British Empire’s most cherished possession, the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, feared that ‘the reverberations of that victory have gone like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East’.1 For once the aloof and frequently blundering Curzon had his finger on the pulse of native opinion, which was best articulated by a then unknown lawyer in South Africa called Mohandas Gandhi (1869 – 1948), who predicted ‘so far and wide have the roots of Japanese victory spread that we cannot now visualize all the fruit it will put forth’.2 In Damascus, Mustafa Kemal, a young Ottoman soldier later known as Atatürk (1881 – 1938), was ecstatic.

He was clearly emboldened by the Mahdi’s successes in Sudan. In his long letter to the Ottoman sultan in 1879, written shortly before he arrived in India, al-Afghani had proposed himself as a roving revolutionary who could arouse and unify Muslims across Central Asia and India and provoke a clash between the Russian and British Empires, fulfilling the sultan’s pan-Islamic programme. It was full of lines such as these: ‘I wish after the completion of the Indian affair to go to Afghanistan and invite the people of that land, who like a wild lion have no fear of bloodshed and do not admit hesitation in war, especially holy war, to a religious struggle and a national endeavor.’93 Abdulhamid’s response to him is not known.

There was no question now of Japan remaining subordinate to Western powers on its own territories. The treaties were revoked, and in 1902, nearly half a century after the Ottoman Empire first tried to climb on to the international stage on the back of the greatest European power, the Japanese concluded an alliance with the British Empire. Tokutomi Soh, already Japan’s most respected journalist, was on a ship en route to the Japanese military base at Port Arthur when he learnt of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Soh had long been convinced that Japan, a small country with few resources of its own for modernization, had to expand its territories, a ‘matter of the greatest urgency’, and for that she had to ‘develop a policy to motivate our people to embark upon great adventures abroad’ and ‘solve the problem of national expansion without delay’.


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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Parliament ruled on a number of occasions against spinners, combers, and shearers who petitioned against cotton-spinning machinery, wool-combing machines, and gig mills. As mentioned above, the shift in the British government’s stance on mechanization was due in part to the merchant manufacturers’ becoming a more politically powerful force. Their fortunes depended on the success of the British Empire’s trade, which in turn depended on mechanization to remain competitive internationally. And more broadly, Britain’s dependence on trade made economic conservativism harder to align with the political status quo. The external threat of political replacement due to foreign invasion gradually became greater than the threat from below, as competition between nation-states intensified.

Lilley, 1966, Men, Machines and History: The Story of Tools and Machines in Relation to Social Progress (Paris: International Publishers). 6. In Czech, robota means forced labor of the kind that serfs had to perform on their master’s lands and is derived from rab, meaning slave. 7. A. Young, 1772, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London: printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell). 8. On cheap labor and mechanization, see R. Hornbeck and S. Naidu, 2014, “When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South,” American Economic Review 104 (3): 963–90. 9. R. C. Allen, 2009a, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 10.

Crafts, 2004, “Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective,” Economic Journal 114 (495): 338–51. 87. Quoted in J. L. Simon, 2000, The Great Breakthrough and Its Cause (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 108. 88. P. Colquhoun, 1815, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, Johnson Reprint Corporation), 68–69. See also J. Mokyr, 2011, The Enlightened Economy; Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850 (London: Penguin), chapter 5, Kindle. I am indebted to Joel Mokyr for pointing me to this reference. 89. Malthus, [1798] 2013, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 179. 90.


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The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

That had in effect allowed dollars to be spent - even on the import of timber for ‘social’ (‘Council’) housing - but it had come with the condition that the pound could be changed into dollars, free of wartime restrictions. The historian Kenneth Morgan even claims that it made the Labour programme possible. There was an implication, too, that the Americans would be able to trade freely with the British Empire, which, in places, had vital raw materials still priced in pounds. In 1947 convertibility was introduced, and foreigners, in droves, changed their pounds into dollars. Almost £200m was being lost every week. The Labour government was in effect broken by this: there was never the same drive in it again; its huge majority collapsed at the next election, in 1950, and in 1951 it lost.

However, the worst position for a Cabinet minister to be in was probably the Foreign Office. The country may have been badly weakened internally but there was no end to its responsibilities, and these were turning very sour. The problems went back to the first post-war period, in 1919, when men had joyously assumed that Empire made them rich, and the British Empire, already enormous, received a considerable extension in the Middle East. In 1929, the world slump in the end particularly affected agricultural prices, such that lambs were simply slaughtered rather than eaten, because the profit margins were lost in transport costs. India, ‘the jewel in the Crown’, became instead a liability and the nationalist leader there, Gandhi, rightly said that the Empire consisted of millions of acres of bankrupt real estate.

The Americans faced problems of the same sort in the Philippines, to which they gave an independence with certain limits. The nightmare of nightmares was Palestine. Whatever the British did would be wrong. As with India, it is obvious that a few more years of Empire would have been desirable for an orderly transfer of power to occur. But to whom? Here again, as with other parts of the British Empire, there was much strength in the argument that the Empire kept order, tried to assure legal rights, and sent out honest people. But there was an original sin at the centre of the Palestinian question, and it lay in the context of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had offered the Jews a national home in what was then Arab (or Ottoman) territory: the aim being essentially to keep the French away from the Suez Canal.


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The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

“But if, both for your love and skill, your name / You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame, / Stella behold, and then begin to INDITE.” – Sir Philip Sidney, English courtier, soldier, and poet ineffable (in-EF-uh-bull), adjective Something so fantastic, incredible, or difficult-to-grasp it cannot be described in words. Poet Ezra Pound wrote of “the infinite and INEFFABLE quality of the British empire.” ineluctable (In-el-LUCK-tah-bull), adjective Unavoidable, inevitable, with a sense of being unfortunate, sad, or even tragic. Our inability to procure Pratesi linens for our Colorado ski lodge created an INELUCTABLE sadness among the members of our family. inexorable (in-eks-ZOR-ah-bull), adjective Inevitable; unavoidable; relentless; persistent; unstoppable.

titillate (TIT-l-ate), verb To excite in an agreeable way. With its stirring performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the full orchestra TITILLATED us at the Van Gelder’s gala. titular (TITCH-uh-luhr), adjective A person who is a leader by title only, but lacks any real power. The Queen is the TITULAR head of the British empire. tombolo (TOM-bo-low), noun A split that joins an offshore island to the mainland. Until they decide to build a bridge, the single-lane road on the TOMBOLO is the only way on to and off of the island. tome (TOAM), noun A large or scholarly book. “She carries a book but it is not / the TOME of the ancient wisdom, / the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new.” – Hilda Doolittle, American poet and memoirist toothsome (TOOTH-suhm), adjective Voluptuous and sexually alluring.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

The unknown was exhausted, the known triumphant, and the world felt jaded as much as gilded; fin de siècle had arrived. The frontier that defined America’s challenge and potential, the demographer and historian Frederick Turner told his compatriots, had closed. The scramble for Africa, Europe’s last great theft, was almost over. The British Empire on which the sun never set lacked for that very reason a sunset beyond which to sail. Riches continued to accumulate, quarries to be quarried, mines to be mined. But the age was now one of intensification not extension, one constrained by unaccustomed limits. It was thus in keeping with the times for Sir William Crookes, perhaps Britain’s leading chemist, to draw attention to a limit of planetwide importance.

In the 1890s he had become one of the first to identify helium in samples of Earthly material – the element had only previously been known to be present in the sun and stars. But the admonitory and inspiring presidential address he gave to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898 began with a subject much more mundane: the British Empire’s insufficient supply of manure. Crookes was worried about the world’s supply of wheat. The number of people wanting to eat it was increasing, as was the amount of it many of them wanted to eat. The amount of land on which it grew was not increasing, at least not by much; the world had been mapped and its fertile lands more or less all expropriated by the mappers.

The numbing effect of the unprecedented slaughter of the Second World War might perhaps make such a laissez-faire attitude to mass mortality easier to embrace – even if, for Vogt, that slaughter had been insufficient. (‘Unfortunately,’ he wrote, ‘in spite of the war, the German massacres, and localised malnutrition, the population of Europe, excluding Russia, increased by 11,000,000 between 1936 and 1946.’) The world beyond America looked both broken and out of control. The British Empire was ready to collapse. China was in turmoil. And the war-ending atom bombs seemed to have burst the very bounds of nature. Whole cities – perhaps whole countries – were now susceptible to annihilation. In late 1945 opinion polls found that a quarter of Americans said they expected nuclear science to destroy the world.


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Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants by Jane Goodall

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Google Earth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, language of flowers, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, precautionary principle, transatlantic slave trade

Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 40. “captured to work in the tobacco fields” Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18–21. 41. “death rate among them was high” Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the British Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 42. “many of the tribes of the southeastern United States” Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W.

For those plant hunters were, without doubt, among the most fearless—and the most crazy—of all the explorers. I did not know much about them until I read The Plant Hunters by Michael Tyler-Whittle and became utterly fascinated by the tales of those extraordinary men of a bygone era, when the mania for collecting plants spread across Europe. Their travels took place during the years when the British empire was being built, when France and Holland, Spain and Portugal, were also sending out expeditions to discover and lay claim to the various islands, territories, and whole countries that would become their colonies overseas. Those expeditions gave many of the early plant hunters their opportunity to collect (or “hunt”) plants abroad when they were appointed as botanist to some of the great sailing vessels.

Hall, The Products and Resources of Tasmania as Illustrated in the International Exhibition (London: Hobart, 1862). Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “The Tentacles of Empire: The New Imperialism and New Nationalism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas,” in In the Balance: Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998). James Beattie, “Recent Themes in the Environmental History of the British Empire,” History Compass 10 (February 2012): 129–39. 4. “Britain, France, Holland” David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Robert Tigner et al., “Reordering the World, 1750–1850,” in Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (New York: W.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

If the French had won in North America, there might have been no American revolutionary war, and perhaps no emergence of the continental United States at all. If the French had held the British in India, there would have been no Raj, and the English language might never have achieved its present global reach. If the French had achieved mastery of the seas, British trading ambitions and the later growth of the British Empire might have been stifled altogether. Much of the significance of the Seven Years War was appreciated at the time. Horace Walpole—Prime Minister’s son, a diarist of insight and wit, and a colossal snob—wrote to Sir Horace Mann in 1761, ‘You would not know your country again. You left it a private little island, living upon its means.

After all, such markets are supposedly secured by private property rights and, the argument goes, if people have private property rights those must include rights over their bodies and the product of their future labour. Yet this view of Smith is a direct inversion of the truth: Adam Smith despised slavery and the slave trade, and he argued with enormous force that, far from resulting from natural liberty, both were abetted by mercantilism and monopoly. Britain banned the slave trade across the British Empire by Act of Parliament in 1807, and abolished slavery itself in 1833. But already when The Wealth of Nations was published, slavery and the slave trade were—at last—becoming a highly emotive and contentious issue. British involvement had dated back at least 200 years to the 1560s, when Sir John Hawkins had plied the notorious triangle trade in sugar, goods and slaves between Britain, West Africa and the Caribbean.

Overseas, British policy was far more imperial than free trade in character. The Cobden–Chevalier Treaty of 1860 between Britain and France picked up the threads of Pitt’s pioneering efforts of the 1780s and reduced tariffs on British manufactures and French wines and spirits; it can claim to be the first true free-trade agreement. But, as the British Empire expanded, military power increasingly trumped diplomacy and negotiation. Notoriously, Britain had forced open five major Chinese ports to trade—much to its own advantage—and seized control of Hong Kong, in the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, which concluded the first Opium War. The growth of the East India Company, supported by dozens of former company men and shareholders in Parliament, was followed by great-power conflict across central and southern Asia, the Company’s collapse after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, direct British control of India and a series of British thrusts into inland Africa in pursuit of trading opportunities and mineral wealth.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The governor-general of India from 1828 to 1835 spoke of the “improvement” of India, “founding British greatness on Indian happiness.26 A British commentator on India concurred in 1854: “when the contrast between the influence of a Christian and a Heathen government is considered; when the knowledge of the wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect on the unspeakable blessings to millions that would follow the extension of British rule, it is not ambition but benevolence that dictates the desire for the whole country.27 The nineteenth-century economist John Stuart Mill saw the British empire as furnishing what sounds like a colonial combination of the Big Push and structural adjustment: “a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent…tenure of land…the introduction of foreign arts…and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves.28 Refuting criticism that Manchester capitalists dictated imperial policy, Lord Palmerston said in 1863, “India was governed for India and…not for the Manchester people.29 In India, the British doubled the area under irrigation from 1891 to 1938, introduced a postal and telegraph system, and built forty thousand miles of railroad track.30 Railways had been part of India’s “development plan” since the 1820s, the key to “opening up” the country to commerce.31 The Indian civil servant Charles Trevelyan in 1853 had told a Commons committee that railways would be “the greatest missionary of all.32 The development efforts were not any more successful than today’s foreign aid or nation-building, however: Indian income per capita failed to rise from 1820 to 1870, grew at only 0.5 percent per annum from 1870 to 1913, then failed to grow again from 1913 to independence in 1947.33 In the American empire in the Philippines, American teachers and their Filipino successors imparted at least a rough education, raising literacy and making English the lingua franca in the ethnically fragmented islands.

The French built the first railway in Senegal in 1883. Later railways in French West Africa connected plantations in the interior to ports on the coast. The copper mines of the Belgian Congo shipped ore south after 1910, putting out a spur to meet the railways emanating from South Africa. The British empire planner Cecil Rhodes called railways and the telegraph “the keys to the continent.34 Railways reduced Africa’s ancient curse of high transport costs by as much as 90 percent.35 The advent of roads in the twentieth century reduced the transport cost from farms to railheads by a similar amount.36 Among other benevolent actions, the French colonial minister Albert Sarraut launched a program in 1923 to improve general hygiene and medical care in the African colonies, including clinics, training centers, maternity homes, and ambulances.

.: World Bank, January 2002, p. 21. 27.Deepa Narayan and Patti Petesch, Voices of the Poor: From Many Lands (vol. 3), Washington, D.C.: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 383. 28.Ibid., p. 86. 29.Ibid., p. 63. 30.Quoted in Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London: Zed Books, 1997, pp. 38–39. 31.Quoted in Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994, p. 186. 32.Quoted in Klaus Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850, London: Frank Cass, 1968, p. 380. 33.Quoted in William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 1600–1858:A Study in the History of Development Economics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 138. 34.Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons from Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 236. 35.


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Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

“There is no way this would have happened,” a short, balding, British investor screamed in my ear. “Why not?” I didn’t like anyone bursting my childhood pirate fantasies. “Because we Brits had Wilkinson cannons.” “You mean Wilkinson swords.” “You Americans watch too much TV. Wilkinson, the Iron Master. The Board of Ordnance loved Wilkinson. He was the great hero of the British Empire.” I was about to ask why, but my right ear was temporarily deaf from the big finale. It didn’t take me long to figure out that John Wilkinson was the Iron Master of Shropshire, which sounds like a walk-on part in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But in 1774, it turns out, Wilkinson had a serious problem and the Industrial Revolution almost didn’t happen.

You may ask, “Uh, someone said something about my needing to drive a Beemer?” OK, OK. It takes lots of dollars to buy chips and software and Viagra and McNuggets and Jerry Lewis movies. No problem, we just have to buy something from other countries, to put dollars in their hands. In the early 19th century, the British Empire was almost stillborn. In 1815, the long inflationary Napoleonic Wars ended, and sure enough, wheat prices collapsed. Farmers began turning in their pitchforks and moving to 271 272 Running Money the cities in droves to work in manufactories. Steam engines were driving textile mills to allow the British to sell cheap and comfortable clothing to the world.

Workers started starving because they were not making enough in the factory to pay for now expensive bread. But factory owners couldn’t raise wages because they were having trouble selling their manufactured goods overseas. Why? Because the French and Germans were paying for these goods with their wheat and corn, and the British taxed them out of affordability. How stupid—this almost killed the British Empire in its infancy. With any foresight, the landowners should have dumped their unprofitable farms and invested the proceeds in highly profitable joint stock companies making pottery, shirts and potbelly stoves. England should have gladly bought French wheat and Dutch flowers and German barley and hops so that consumers in these countries could have turned around with the money they received and bought British manufactured goods.


pages: 395 words: 94,764

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

JOHN NEWTON ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS BY THE RICH MERCY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE HAD LONG LABOURED TO DESTROY John Newton was Rector here for 28 years and wrote the hymns ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘Amazing Grace’. He died in 1807, the year his dream was realised, with the introduction of the Slave Trade Act that abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. William Wilberforce declared his inspiration to be the sermons John Newton gave from the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth. Edward Lloyd, whose coffee-house in Lombard Street was the origin of Lloyd’s of London insurance market, was buried here in 1713. In the west gallery is a 17th-century Father Smith organ, THE ONLY UNRESTORED EXAMPLE OF ITS KIND LEFT IN LONDON.

In 1869 the HURLINGHAM CLUB was founded to hold pigeon shooting competitions in the grounds, and this explains the pigeon on the club’s crest. In 1874 the club managed to acquire the freehold of the estate and now had enough space to indulge in the new sport of polo, which was introduced at Hurlingham in that year. The Hurlingham Club then became the HEADQUARTERS OF POLO for the whole British Empire until the 1940s. Polo ceased to be played at Hurlingham at the end of the Second World War, when the polo ground was compulsorily purchased by the London County Council for housing, but the HURLINGHAM POLO ASSOCIATION has remained the governing body of the sport in the UK, Ireland and many other countries.

An Olympic stadium was added for the Olympic Games of 1908, which were transferred to London after Rome, the chosen host city, experienced financial difficulties. The marathon started at Windsor Castle so that the royal family could get a good view, and the distance from there to the finishing line at White City, 26 miles, 385 yards (42.195 km), became the standard distance for the modern marathon. In 1914 the site was used for the British Empire Exhibition, an event commemorated with road names such as South Africa Road, India Way and Australia Road. White City eventually became a venue for greyhound racing and the centre of British athletics until 1971, when the athletics moved to Crystal Palace. The stadium was demolished in 1984 and replaced by BBC offices.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

In this version, the war in Asia begins not with Pearl Harbor, but with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 (or, in the official version as of 2017, with the Manchurian crisis of 1931). China fought without formal allies for four and a half years until 1941, when the United States and the British Empire entered the Asian war. In the last years of the war, and in the immediate postwar, China was given many assurances of future international assistance, an elevated global status, and a role in shaping postwar order in Asia. Yet China was isolated after the 1949 communist revolution, which allowed the United States to dominate the region and shape its structures with little interference from the Soviet Union.

In spring 1944, the Japanese launched Operation Ichigō, their last major thrust into central China, which destroyed large parts of the already enfeebled Nationalist military capacity. Nonetheless, under Allied pressure, Chiang authorized troops to take part in the campaign in Burma in 1944, in which American, British Empire, and Chinese troops operated together to force the Japanese to retreat from that occupied British colony. Meanwhile, American military officials made their first visit to the Communist-controlled areas (the “Dixie Mission”), where they met Mao Zedong and other top Communist leaders. In 1944, relations between Chiang and Stilwell reached a breaking point, and Stilwell was recalled from China.

The end of European communism did not mark a fundamental shift in China’s understanding of its wartime past comparable to the change in historical perspective in Eastern Europe, where memory of the war changed profoundly with the end of Soviet domination of the region.47 A Global Divide on Postwar History? One notable feature of the division of Eurasia at the start of the Cold War was the establishment of distinct circuits of memory. One narrative, centered on the role of the United States and the British Empire, dominated in the liberal states of North America and Western Europe, with Western-oriented nonliberal states such as Spain and Greece deploying rather different versions of this narrative. Another variant of this narrative developed in Japan. A different narrative, centered on the USSR’s role, dominated in Eastern Europe.


pages: 178 words: 52,374

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, open borders, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

A war of independence between crown forces and the Irish Republican Army (which had evolved from the Irish Volunteer organisation) followed, while the Irish civil war raged from 1922 to 1923 as the Irish republican movement was ripped apart by the fallout from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty between Irish republicans and the British government in December 1921 that created a free state in southern Ireland, a dominion of the British empire. Crucially, the British government did not negotiate with Irish republicans until it had first addressed the Ulster question. Partition had been suggested as a solution to the home rule problem by Liberal MP Thomas Agar-Robartes in June 1912, the idea being centred on the exclusion from home rule of four Ulster counties: Antrim, Down, Armagh and Derry.

This was matched by an often-duplicitous republicanism, capable of sending different and contradictory messages about whether this was a final settlement or a bridge to advance the quest for a united Ireland, which was perhaps why Blair felt they needed to be ‘brought to the precipice and asked to look over it’.18 This is why so much of the politics of Northern Ireland was still for some a ‘zero-sum’ quarrel. But there was also the added complication of the standing of Ulster unionism, given the waning of Britain’s international status. The identity of Ulster loyalism had for so long been interwoven with British empire that the decline of ‘Britishness’ inevitably made the Protestants of Ulster feel cast adrift – or, as Tom Bartlett put it in 1998: ‘If Ulster is British what is British?’ Was unionism as a political creed, given the momentum behind devolution in Scotland and Wales, and especially growing Scottish nationalism, on a road to nowhere?


Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, European colonialism, TED Talk, trade route, women in the workforce

A German, Werner von Siemens (his family firm became today’s Siemens company), working in London, invented a way to coat copper wires seamlessly with gutta-percha. Entrepreneurs and capitalists spotted the opportunity and the great cable race was on. After much trial and error and 144 derring-do on the high seas, the production and laying of reliable cables eventually became routine. In 1876 the British Empire was linked from London to New Zealand, and by the end of the nineteenth century more than 400,000 kilometres (¼ million miles) of telegraph cable girdled the Earth, alive with the hubbub of commerce, diplomacy and journalism. That wasn’t so good for the gutta-percha trees themselves, however.

British colonists quickly saw the value in the rich red jarrah wood, which was immensely strong and resistant to rot, insects, wind and water. It was eagerly taken up for shipbuilding and harbour pilings. When convicts arrived en masse from 1850, the flood of cheap labour meant that jarrah could be exported across the British Empire to feed its insatiable appetite for railway sleepers and other durable infrastructure such as telegraph poles, wharves and even tea sheds. A network of steam-powered sawmills and railways sprang up to extract the timber. On the other side of the world, Londoners were trying to work out what to use to pave their roads, which by the 1880s were hectic with horsedrawn traffic.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

(It also tips us off to this: As a general rule, no credible grand strategy starts with the word “don’t.”) 7. So we should say it coldly: America has, as of yet, no strategy. The country has no shared picture of the world as it might be. And the experience of other empires that quickly collapsed should offer an urgent lesson. “The struggle to survive,” the historian John Darwin has written of the British Empire, “was waged in an age of revolution: a Eurasian revolution that cumulatively (but very quickly) destroyed almost all the global preconditions on which the British system had depended since the 1830s.” So it is in our age. Many of the essential determinants of American power are being revolutionized by new, connected forces.

Napoleon’s greatest victories were enabled as much by the industrial strength of French artillery factories as they were by the liberated masses of the French Revolution. The very name of France’s levée en masse hinted at the size of what might be assembled when citizens and not merely mercenaries or aristocrats took to the lines. When France was unseated by the British Empire, it was manufacturing scale and naval depth that tipped the balance. Germany’s blood-and-iron commercial engines challenged London’s clubby mastery of the globe. Size and scale and safety became linked, a lesson finally confirmed by America’s global mastery. The undeniable power of American industry was Winston Churchill’s only real comfort for two nervous years after 1939.

‘Mesopotamia… yes… oil… irrigation… we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine… yes… the Holy Land… Zionism… we must have Palestine; Syria… h’m… what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.’” This sort of charmless arrogance—The Holy Land… we must have that—doesn’t much suit our age. Gatekeepers, after all, depend on the good will of the gatekept. But Lloyd George’s comprehensive view should be a model. What oil and irrigation and Suez were to the British Empire, finance and data flows and gates are to our age. 4. Hard Gatekeeping echoes the postures of some of the most enduring orders in human history—the “defense in depth” of the Roman Empire, for instance, or the protective isolation of Tokugawa Japan or the walls of Han China. The aim of these systems was to survive through defense.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Rayward has noted the problematic aspects of Wells’s World Brain. For one thing, he seems to proceed from the assumption that the truth is ultimately fixed and knowable—a distinctly Aristotelian supposition that would doubtless strike many contemporary readers as quaint and outdated as a Victorian settee. For Wells, writing during the ascendancy of the British Empire, the notion that learned people might obtain something approaching universal truth may have seemed like a perfectly reasonable supposition. To that end, he 215 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D imagined that a vast team of thousands of professional encyclopedists would ultimately do the work of sorting fact from fiction, uniting the world’s published output into an authoritative body of knowledge.

The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 335 INDEX Illustrations are indicated by italic page numbers. The Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 26 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 248, 251 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), 251, 252 Africa. See also Congo British Empire in, 51 European powers allocating, 50–51 Otlet’s view on (1917), 155 Pan-African Congress (1921), 167–172, 168 repatriation of American slaves in, 55–56 African Progress Union, 168 Albert I (Belgian king), 143, 154, 164 Alexandria Library, 6, 185, 186, 226 Amazon, 298 American Library Association, 95 American Society for Information Science and Technology, 217 Amherst College, 37 “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (Borges essay), 220 Andersen, Anders, 124–125 Andersen, Andreas, 124–125, 126, 129 Andersen, Hendrik Christian, 124–143.

See also Printing technology benefits of, 25–26, 240 destruction and burning of, 4–6 Eco’s categorization of, 80 encyclopedic and reference books, 23–24, 24–25, 27, 50, 80, 214, 217 Geddes and Otlet sharing disdain for, 120–121 information liberated from, 250 mass production of, 34 Otlet’s expanded definition of, 229 popular literature, 34 production of, 23 religious origins of, 22–23 secular writing, proliferation of, 22–23, 25 substitutes for, 228, 232–233 Boolean searches, 209 Borges, Jorge Luis, 13, 220–221, 286, 321n17 Bourgeouis, Léon, 98 Bradford, S. C., 218 Brain of humanity, 206. See also Mechanical collective brain; “World brain” concept of Wells Brand, Stewart, 258, 260, 261 Branford, Victor, 113 The Bridge (Die Brücke), 205–208 Brin, Sergey, 298 British Empire in Africa, 51 British Museum, 186 Brockman, John, 276 Brook, Daniel, 303 Bryce, James W., 209, 217 Buckland, Michael, 35, 217 Bührer, Karl Wilhelm, 205 Bush, Vannevar, 15, 209, 217–218, 248, 254–258, 262, 285, 290 Cailliau, Robert, 15, 252–253 Calvin, John, 25–26 Camera Obscura, 108–110, 302 Capart, Jean, 203–204 Carlier, Alfred, 194 Carnegie, Andrew, 40, 116, 118, 119, 133, 135, 306–307 Carnegie Foundation, 118, 178, 199 Carrier pigeons, 100 338 INDEX Casement, Richard, 146 The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (fictional Chinese encyclopedia), 220 Central Office of International Institutions, 98–99, 135 Cerf, Vinton G., 15, 252 CERN particle physics research center (Switzerland), 252–253, 268–271, 269 Chabard, Pierre, 121 Chambers, Ephraim, 29 Channeling, 227 Charlemagne, 6 Chirac, Jacques, 299 Chronicles of England (Holinshed), 27 Cinema, possibilities of, 228–229 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 110 Citizendium, 284 Classification schemes.


pages: 354 words: 99,690

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

I wonder what thoughts teachers turn to for comfort in such moments? This section discusses many of the crazy educational theories that the majority of us who delight in never having to set foot in a classroom again are free to enjoy. 7 A Sorry State is Nothing to Apologise For An update on the condition of the British Empire. I fear it may have peaked. 8 Some Things Change and Some Things Stay the Same – and That’s One of the Things That Stays the Same Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edmund Blackadder, Michael Gove, the snake, the apostrophe, the wheelie bin, the Christmas card, the mango, the off-side rule, the Queen.

After centuries of dysfunctional relationships with their leaders, they’ve given up resisting: the fact is they’re attracted to a strong man, even when he slaps them about a bit. The British are fussier. Of late, the closest we’ve come to electing a genocidal maniac was probably Tony Blair. And, as psychopaths go, he was pretty low-key – he kept all the killing abroad, the sound principle on which the British empire was founded. Very much your iron-hand-in-a-velvet-glove type, rather than the kind of guy who likes to be photographed swimming amid bear carcasses. I like to think of him slipping silently into hotel rooms by night, dressed in black, seeing by the light of his teeth, to leave poisoned boxes of chocolates by opinion-formers’ bedsides.

This isn’t just sour grapes about losing to reds in 1966, and indeed at Stalingrad, but the result of a study made by sports psychologists at the University of Munster. It found that competitors wearing red scored about 10% more than those dressed in other colours. It seems that the crimson look like they’re winning, which means, more often than not, that they are. This explains much: the size and success of the British empire, and its steady decline after the adoption of khaki; the preeminence of Butlins over Pontins; the one-sidedness of so many episodes of Bargain Hunt; why it’s taking so long for communism to give up the ghost. What it doesn’t explain is why a team would ever wear any colour other than red. Maybe now they won’t.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

And chief among these were scores of young men who turned up now and again in the city’s security videos, often wearing distinctive khaki uniforms. They were Pakistan Boy Scouts, including Sunni Muslims, Hindus, even Christians. The Scouts were a familiar presence in Karachi. They had been for generations. A British general had begun the worldwide Scouting movement in 1908, and it spread across much of the British Empire at the same time it was spreading to America. In the 1920s, a Hindu businessman paid for the Karachi Boy Scouts’ handsome stone headquarters. In 1947, the founder of the nation, Jinnah himself, accepted the designation of Pakistan’s chief Scout, a title that passed to his successors. The current chief Scout was President Asif Ali Zardari, whose mustached image graced the inside of the Karachi headquarters right next to Jinnah’s portrait, and who would, early in the following year, issue a statement urging young Scouts to help battle terrorism.

The main street that we know as Jinnah Road was called Bandar Road then, bandar being the word for “port” in the language of the ethnic Sindhis who had lived in this province for generations. Then as now, the city hall was a stone pile topped with onion-shaped domes. British officers commanded the Army of India, whose Karachi-based soldiers rested at Napier Barracks, named for the Victorian general who conquered Sindh and added it to the British Empire. Bandar Road, the future Jinnah Road, mid-twentieth century. [imagesofasia.com] Karachi was the closest Indian port to the sea lanes leading toward England. And so for the British it was a gateway to the greatest and most outrageous of all the prizes seized in the age of colonialism: an entire subcontinent ruled from afar.

They established courts under British law, and extracted taxes from the Indians themselves to pay for the whole enterprise. Indian soldiers fought in British armies around the world, while great figures in British history spent years in India: the Duke of Wellington, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill. Indians traveled the other way to London, among them a student named Gandhi, who was a devoted subject of the British Empire before his life moved in unexpected directions. Now the grand hallucination of British India was about to disappear—that mixture of tradition, firepower, and sheer bluff that the British called prestige, which allowed handfuls of men to rule hundreds of millions. In a few days the king’s final viceroy was planning to surrender the subcontinent, bowing to decades of Indian demands for freedom.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

The Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1912, established a separate bureaucracy called the Lifan Yuan, or Court of Colonial Affairs, to manage the minorities who populated the far-flung regions it conquered. It functioned much like the former Colonial Office in the UK, which administered the British empire. Shaking off the perspective that equates China solely with the Han Chinese is difficult. The Han-dominated CCP assiduously encourages a view of the country that relegates the other ethnic groups to the fringes. Just as they exist at the geographical edges of China, so they occupy an uneasy space at the margins of society.

He led his invasion force of British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers through the pass in late 1903. From the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Qing’s hold on power grew progressively weaker, the British were able to sidle into Tibet, motivated by its proximity to India and fears that the Russians might use it as a backdoor route to undermine the British empire. They mapped the country secretly and in 1903 sent Younghusband and his soldiers to force the Dalai Lama to agree to a trade treaty. In March 1904, outside Gyantse, they ran into a 3,000-strong Tibetan force armed with ancient matchlock muskets, weapons over 200 years out of date. The British carried machine guns, and in a matter of minutes they left around 700 Tibetans dead.

By the eighteenth century, Chinese merchants were trading in Pu’er tea from Simao, just north of Banna. That, though, was as far as they went. The Qing officials nominally in charge of Banna were based in Simao and ventured south just once a year. Only in 1899 was Sipsongpanna formally annexed by Beijing, although by then the French and British empires had already absorbed its southern and western fringes into Laos and what was then Burma. Banna was granted autonomous status within the Chinese realm and its Dai king continued to rule until 1953. But if the kingdom of Sipsongpanna disappeared when he was forced to abdicate by the CCP, the Dai still remember the state they had for at least eight centuries and how far it spread.


pages: 353 words: 148,895

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton

asset allocation, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, European colonialism, fixed income, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, purchasing power parity, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, yield curve

The markets in Ljubljana, Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw were thus just modest regional exchanges. Table 2-3 shows that, mostly, the exchanges founded during the nineteenth century were set up either in Europe, or by Europeans abroad. Of the non-European exchanges that pre-date 1900, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Sri Lanka were all part of the British Empire, while Egypt was effectively a British protectorate. The exceptions to the European/colonial rule are the United States, Japan, Turkey, and the five Latin American markets, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela. The important issue that Table 2-3 raises is the extent to which the sixteen countries covered in this book and shown in bold typeface were representative of the world’s stock markets at the start of our research period in 1900.

Its equity and bond markets were the world’s largest, and its equity market capitalization exceeded that of the NYSE by 50 percent. Yet for much of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom was in comparative decline. Despite “winning,” the United Kingdom was weakened financially by the world wars. Decolonization led to the dissolution of the British Empire. Yet the United Kingdom was slow to come to terms with its diminished role, and continued to overstretch itself, for example, in defense. It also suffered serious economic, labor, productivity, and investment problems, which were not fully addressed until the late 1970s. These were deeply rooted in its past as a mature industrialized nation, and the United Kingdom’s early start in industrialization had become an unfortunate legacy.

France’s highest correlations were with Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland; Italy’s were with France and Switzerland; The Netherlands was most highly correlated with Belgium, followed by France, Denmark, and Switzerland; and Sweden was highly correlated with Denmark, Canada (natural resources), and Switzerland (neutral countries). Australia’s highest correlations were with the United Kingdom and Ireland (historical and trade links), and Canada and South Africa (gold, mining, and the British Empire). 115 Chapter 8: International investment Table 8-3: Correlation coefficients between world equity markets* Wld Wld US UK .93 Swi Swe Spa SAf Neth Jap Ita Ire Ger Fra Den Can Bel Aus .77 .59 .62 .67 .54 .73 .68 .52 .69 .69 .73 .57 .82 .54 .69 .67 .44 .46 .53 .46 .57 .49 .40 .66 .56 .56 .46 .78 .45 .57 US .85 UK .70 .55 Swi .68 .50 .62 Swe .62 .44 .42 .54 Spa .41 .25 .25 .36 .37 SAf .55 .43 .49 .39 .34 .26 Neth .57 .39 .42 .51 .43 .28 .58 .44 .63 .31 .71 .42 .39 .73 .58 .59 .57 .57 .59 .56 .39 .60 .19 .72 .36 .45 .57 .53 .64 .58 .35 .63 .37 .63 .38 .63 .34 .49 .27 .76 .76 .44 .61 .29 .44 .35 .63 .32 .64 .50 .64 .75 .56 .51 .55 .54 .30 .29 .44 .24 .31 .42 .37 .25 .62 .10 .66 .39 .59 .63 .74 .77 .64 .55 .70 .46 Jap .45 .21 .33 .29 .39 .40 .31 .25 Ita .54 .37 .43 .52 .39 .41 .41 .32 Ire .58 .38 .73 .70 .42 .35 .42 .46 .29 .43 Ger .30 .12 -.01 .22 .09 -.03 .05 .27 .06 .16 .18 .34 .33 .25 .36 .24 .50 .17 .59 .33 .55 .71 .50 .40 .51 .38 .42 .03 .45 .49 .54 .57 .50 .83 .61 .57 .59 .46 Fra .62 .36 .45 .54 .44 .47 .38 .48 .25 .52 .53 .19 Den .57 .38 .40 .51 .56 .34 .31 .50 .46 .38 .55 .22 .45 Can .80 .80 .55 .48 .53 .27 .54 .34 .30 .37 .41 .13 .35 .46 Bel .58 .38 .40 .57 .43 .40 .29 .60 .25 .47 .49 .26 .68 .42 .35 Aus .66 .47 .66 .51 .50 .28 .56 .41 .28 .43 .62 .04 .47 .42 .62 .63 .60 .66 .48 .55 .54 .30 .30 .65 .30 .35 * Correlations in bold (lower left-hand triangle) are based on 101 years of real dollar returns, 1900–2000.


pages: 498 words: 153,927

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

PENGUIN BOOKS THE RIVER AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and China, and now lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and makes regular broadcasts for the BBC. Simon Winchester's other books include Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire; Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles; The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare, a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over; Prison Diary, Argentina, the story of three months spent in a Patagonian jail on spying charges during the Falklands war; The River at the Centre of the World – A Journey up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time; the number-one international bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne; and The Map that Changed the World, which tells the extraordinary story of William Smith, pioneering geologist of the British Isles.

You were forced to leave a part of your precious ship behind, here in Zhenjiang. You destroyed a passenger ship on your way out. Killed many people. Yes, I had forgotten. We will find the piece you left behind here as proof. The anchor – you're right! It was a great humiliation for your precious British Empire.’ I reeled slightly from this unexpected onslaught. Not that Lily was entirely correct. Nor entirely wrong, for that matter. The facts – or at least, the facts as presented to us as schoolchildren – had cast the whole affair in a very different light. His Majesty's Ship Amethyst was a sloop-cum-frigate of 1500 tons, and in 1949 – an exceptionally dangerous year, considering the vicious civil war going on between the Kuomintang and the Communists – she was assigned to a task on the Yangtze.

And while I felt reasonably comfortable in paying only slight attention here to the Nanking Incident of 1927, and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1860s, it was impossible to ignore either the Japanese assault of 1937 or, as in this last excursion, the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. I told Lily this is what I wanted to see. ‘Oh my God,’ she wailed. ‘Your bloody British Empire again!’ The memorial was tucked away off a side street, not far from the old British Embassy (which is now a seedy two-star hotel and from where a local businessman was trying to sell debentures in a new golf club, at $20,000 apiece). It is in a tiny temple known as the Jing Hui Shi, which was made famous five centuries before when Cheng Ho, the country's most famous explorer, stayed there before he took off on his famous sailing trip to Mogadishu.* It is now called simply the Nanjing Treaty Museum, and it is looked after by an elderly lady named Mrs Chen.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

But even these states are not clear exceptions, as much of their success depends on the industrial processing of their agricultural output. 10. The British Empire’s treasury understood the logic of offshore centres and consistently argued the case for them in preference to larger colonies, which were favoured by aggrandising politicians and entrepreneurs who wanted government to subsidise their activities by paying for infrastructure and the like. Today’s offshore financial industry is rooted in the string of little islands that were beloved of the accountants of an economically predatory empire. (Not all the small islands of the British Empire have remained as offshore financial centres. Bombay and Lagos were originally settled by the British because they were islands.

The Prussians sought military security by drawing other German-speaking states into their orbit, and dreamed of avenging past defeats and territorial losses to Napoleon Bonaparte.17 Similarly, the samurai warrior class launched its coup against the Tokugawa shogunate with the aim of stitching together all of Japan’s han – its large, semi-feudal domains – in a unitary nation that would be able to fight back against colonial encroachment. The means to military security in both places was economic development. Nineteenth-century Germany was the first state to articulate clearly a set of conclusions about development that had been reached by the Americans when they had split from the British Empire. The German view was put forward by the so-called Historical School, an informal affiliation of intellectuals that was the dominant force in the political economy and jurisprudence departments of German universities in the mid nineteenth century. The group held that the history of Britain showed that a successful developing state had to deploy protectionist industrial policies in order to nurture its manufacturers.

None the less, some important businessmen like Soichiro Honda were from farm families while the leading auto-maker, Toyota, was very much a rural-based business. 126. James Rorty, ‘The Dossier of Wolf Ladejinsky’, Commentary, April 1955, pp. 326–34. 127. The New York Times, 23 December 1954. 128. ‘Indentured’ labour, subject to long-term contracts, was the ‘liberal’ nineteenth-century replacement for slavery in the British Empire. 129. Michael Lipton, ‘Towards a Theory of Land Reform’, in David Lehmann (ed.), Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Reformism (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 288, observes: ‘There is now abundant evidence that ‘output per unit of land is inversely related to farm size.’ He provides a long list of academic studies to support this assertion, covering east and south Asia and Africa.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Created by University of Wisconsin–Madison Cartography Laboratory. Natural Earth; SourceMap; thegatewayonline.​com. pai1.27 Which Role Model for China? Created by University of Wisconsin–Madison Cartography Laboratory. Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580; Natural Earth; The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire; The Twentieth Century, The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume IV; Wikipedia. pai1.28 A Map of Minerals. Map created by Jeff Blossom. BP Statistical Review; CIA World Factbook; Mineral Map of the World; PRIO Diamond Resources; U.S. Geological Survey. pai1.29 World Food Supplies. Map created by Jeff Blossom. USDA; FAOSTAT; CropMapper.

The former sought an unrealistic exclusivity, while the latter suggested a progressive and inclusive civic pluralism. Societies built on immigrant assimilation strive toward common identity despite racial differences. Singapore became a cosmopolitan hub through historical migrations from China and Indians circulating across the British Empire and then by design as Lee Kuan Yew insisted on multiethnic public housing to prevent any ghettos from forming. Today Singapore ranks as one of the world’s most religiously diverse cities, with a surfeit of monuments for each religion. Only half of Singapore’s population is citizens, and more than 20 percent of marriages are mixed race, mostly Chinese-Indian—creating a growing number of “Chindians” each generation.

In the coming decade, even more automated check-in, security, and border control systems are planned such that passengers around the world are cleared for exit on arrival before they even take off.*4 Could digital technology and economic necessity bring us back to the bygone era of free mobility? For centuries before World War I, people traveled the world without passports. The fluidity of imperial zones such as the British Empire nurtured generations of cultural intelligibility among millions of people moving across colonies from East Africa to Southeast Asia. At the same time, European settlers arrived in North America as pilgrims fleeing monarchy or migrants fleeing famine. Passports were actually seen as feudal relics meant to tie people to the land they tilled.


The Revolt by Menachem Begin

British Empire, Defenestration of Prague, illegal immigration, Internet Archive

At a meeting with Haganah and F.F.I, representatives we were told by all of them that if we did not release the prisoners, the fate of our men was sealed. The British Empire, they claimed, would not sacrifice its prestige for the lives of a few officers. The Haganah consequently felt that we should release them and, then there would be hope of saving Ashbel and Simchon. The F.F.I, thought we should hold them to the bitter end and execute them after our two soldiers had been hanged. We rejected both these views. We admitted that the question of prestige must be a powerful one. One radio station had wildly declared that the kidnapping had shaken the British Empire. But, we felt, there were two threats to prestige between which the British Government would be compelled to choose.

On May the 6th, the Haaretz special correspondent at the U.N. Assembly's special session reported: "The events at Acre have caused a tremendous sensation here." Political circles in London were confused. In the House of Commons one Member stormed: "There has never been anything like it in the history of the British Empire," and on May the 13th, Major Rayner drew the Government's attention to the Irgun's threats against British soldiers. (He was referring to our statement that any British soldier falling into our hands would be tried by a field court-martial). A spokesman of the War Ministry replied that the Palestine authorities had informed the War Ministry of these threats, and at once he had appealed to the Jews for help.

They would try "by all the means at their disposal"—as the Daily Telegraph put it—to crush the illegal activities. But they were bitterly disappointed. What they saw as their anchor of hope became a deadly trap. They sowed nooses and reaped hangings. On the 30th of July, with the implementation of our warnings of counter-hangings, a tremor went through the whole British Empire. Amidst curses and abuse for the "vile terrorists" a great cry broke forth in Britain. "Out! We must get out of Palestine! Take our soldiers out of Palestine!" A few British hooligans indulged in scattered violence from Tel-Aviv to Glasgow, but this only added to the difficulties of the "civilised Power!"


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

To many Jews, they were clear evidence that the Balfour Declaration, or any other form of international recognition of Jewish statehood, would not be enough. Each side told its own narrative. As far as the Jews were concerned, they were finally returning home, with the blessing of the civilized nations of the world. The Arabs saw themselves as a native community being usurped by European colonists backed by the British Empire. Very few Jews had fully realized how their growing presence impacted the local Arabs. August 1929 drove home the reality that two nations were competing for the same piece of land. Before then, the Arabs living there had not factored into Zionist thinking. The main question had been how to convince the great powers carving up the Middle East to grant the Jews sovereignty.

The Hebrew University, one of the flagships of the Zionist enterprise, had opened in 1925, only four years before Benzion arrived there. It represented the political view furthest from Netanyahu’s thinking. The chairman of its board of trustees was Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, who steadfastly believed in working under the auspices of the British Empire. The chancellor was Professor Judah Leon Magnes, a Reform rabbi who had emigrated from the United States; Magnes was also a founder of the short-lived Brit Shalom movement, which called for the establishment of binational Jewish-Arab autonomy under British rule. Many among the faculty were active in Brit Shalom.

He was probably too minor a figure to draw attention, and he wasn’t directly involved in the IZL’s American operations. In any case, the Roosevelt administration wasn’t inclined to get involved in the internal wars of the Jews. By the end of World War II, the mainstream Zionist movement had established itself as the administration’s main interlocutors, just as it had at the end of World War I with the British Empire. The United States was to prove Zionism’s true ally, although the one central lesson the Jews had taken from three decades of dealing with the British was that they could never fully trust any ally. 4 The End of the Great Zionist Dream The Allied victory in Europe brought an end to the slaughter but little joy for the Jews as the enormity of the Holocaust began to sink in.


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

The British high commissioner's monthly telegram to the secretary of state for the colonies reported "no genuine political developments" among the Jews and "on the surface no political activity on the Arab side." The commissioner expressed concern over possible Arab recruiting efforts for a postwar conflict. He mused over the exile of Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The now ex-mufti had resumed his nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists by taking up with the archenemy of the British Empire: Nazi Germany. The ex-mufti was now in Berlin. In his February report on the state of Palestine, the high commissioner worried about a Jewish "pseudo-political terrorist gang known as the Stern group," which had begun carrying out assassinations. But mostly the commissioner advised London, "Public interest, both Arab and Jewish, has tended once again to concentrate more on the cost of living and the supply situation": food rationing, the price of yarn, the supply of shoes, and the number of meatless days per week.

In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement. The earlier cooperation between the British Empire and the Zionists had all but vanished, and like the leaders of the Arab Rebellion of the 1930s, Jewish leaders in Palestine wanted the British out. The Jewish Agency had been authorized by the British to create a "national home for the Jewish people." Now, nearly three decades later, the Jewish community in Palestine had grown into a potent economic and political force in the midst of its Arab neighbors and British overseer.

The ministry's job was to regulate the limited supply of food so that no one went hungry. Israel's rapid growth required it to import 85 percent of its food. Although before 1948 the Jewish Agency had direct (if unofficial) trade relations with other states, Israel's sudden entry into the world economy proved jarring. The state had reduced its trade with the markets of the British Empire, and the Arab countries had imposed economic and political boycotts. Egypt was blockading cargo to and from Israel through the Suez Canal, despite a UN resolution calling for free passage through the vital waterway. Israel had to depend on wheat and processed flour, and imported meats, seasonally discounted fish, and even olive oil, from the United States, Canada, and Australia.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Exclude Europe and the fairly independent dominions in Australasia and Canada and colonial investments were less than a third of the total. The returns from the more developed countries in Europe, Australasia and North America were 1% a year higher than those in the developing world.25 Rapid growth was not confined to current, or former, parts of the British empire. Mexico managed a growth rate of 8% a year between 1876 and 1910 while the population grew by a half. The country benefited from demand for commodities, particularly metals, and was ruled for 35 years by Porfirio Diaz, a general who seized power in a coup.26 For a while the British were particular enthusiasts for investing in Argentina, which received almost half of all the country’s overseas lending in the 1880s.

In the 17th century, Europeans actually sold 40,000 to 80,000 slaves to African traders in modern Ghana.27 When the British cracked down in the 19th century, King Gezo of Dahomey complained that “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth.”28 Whether you view the British conversion to abolitionism as deeply cynical or morally commendable may depend on your nationality. It is worth noting that the institution of slavery was not abolished in the British empire until 1833. Compensation was paid to the owners and not to the slaves themselves. By 1840, as the trade was winding down, more than three times as many Africans had arrived in the Americas as had Europeans.29 Slavery continued in the Americas, with Brazil the last to abolish the practice in 1888.

The Chinese had already developed a breast-collar harness, which was far superior to European versions but did not arrive in Europe until the eighth century CE. 31. Jerome Blum, “The rise of serfdom in Eastern Europe”, The American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. 4, July 1957 32. The folk rock group led by Ian Anderson was named after him. 33. See Professor Mark Overton, “Agricultural revolution in England 1500–1850” http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/agricultural_revolution_01.shtml 34. Ibid. 35. Michael Turner, “Agricultural productivity in England in the eighteenth century: evidence from crop yields”, The Economic History Review, vol. 35, no. 4, November 1982 36. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy 1000–1700, third edition 37.


A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

In January 1818, the Quarterly Review, looking forward to the statue’s impending arrival, described it as ‘without doubt the finest specimen of ancient Egyptian sculpture which has yet been discovered’.61 Eventually, in March that year, the Weymouth anchored in the Thames and the Foreign Office and Admiralty were able, finally, to notify the British Museum that their prize acquisition had arrived. At a stroke, the Museum became ‘the first repository in the world of Egyptian art and antiquity’.62 The scope and ambition of its collections both reflected and proclaimed the scale and reach of the growing British Empire. The torso, now its star attraction, went on permanent display towards the end of 1818. One of its early admirers was the poet John Keats. His great friend and fellow poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley – a man who ‘perused with more than ordinary eagerness the relations of travellers in the East’63 – was inspired to write his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’.64 The poem – the most famous meditation in the English language on the fragility of human power – was published on 11 January 1818, just as the torso was making its way up the English Channel.

It was the French who dominated the sugar industry and controlled the Suez Canal. They also ran most of the best schools in the country. All Cairo’s main hotels (Shepheard’s, the Gezira Palace and the Savoy) were under European management, and the area around Shepheard’s was a European enclave. Expatriate life in Cairo, as in other cities of the British Empire, revolved around clubs. The Gezira Sporting Club had been founded immediately after the British invasion of 1882, on land ‘gifted’ by the khedive. Modelled on the Hurlingham Club in London, it was frequented by British administrators, Cairo’s other foreign residents, and a few members of the Egyptian ruling class.

Martial law, military raids, widespread imprisonment, a network of informants, and the systematic use of torture were Cromer’s instruments of government.32 His secret intelligence service was extensive and highly effective: ‘He was kept informed of everything that went on, and often staggered people by his knowledge of their most intimate affairs.’33 Against this background, nationalism started to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, in Cairo’s cafes and newspapers, as prolonged exposure to Europeans and European ideas started to transform Egyptian politics. The British had never intended to colonize Egypt. Successive governments steadfastly resisted annexing it to the British Empire, ruling instead through the ‘veiled protectorate’. This made it even harder for Egyptian patriots to challenge the status quo, since it had no legal standing or structure. Cromer was a strong advocate of the veiled protectorate, fearing that formal annexation might provoke a war with France. Those particular concerns were largely put to rest after the signing of the entente cordiale in 1904, but there were indigenous threats to British rule.


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Henry Home – later Lord Kames, one of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment – took up the cudgels too from the bench. Home announced that Millar wanted to “crush this Manufacture in the Bud” before it could develop an export market in the colonies. He proceeded to use the case to question the political economy of the British Empire itself. If the Londoners won their case for literary property, Home insinuated, then Scotland’s book trade would be relegated to a colonial status. The real English plan was to “inslave” Scottish booksellers by restricting them to mere printing and retailing – the fate of the majority of London’s bookmen.

Reprinting took its identity from the politics of the Irish capital. These were politics of fragile prosperity, religious tension, and growing nationalism. On the one hand, the city was a cultural hub. It was the home of the Irish parliament and the location of Trinity College, and the second largest city in the British Empire. Its parliament building, built to the latest neoclassical style, projected confidence in the stability and prosperity of the order it represented – that alliance of parliament, established church, and imperialism known as the “Protestant ascendancy.” But on the other hand, that confidence was more fragile than it looked.

It is therefore slightly ironic that what gave the initial spur to the antipatent campaign was a move by the British government to do just that in one instance. Specifically, the immediate cause of tension was a new relation that the 1852 law defined between Britain and its colonies. The 1852 law expressly excluded the colonies of the British Empire from having to honor patents filed in the home country. Colonial manufacturers could now adopt the latest technologies from Britain without paying royalties. This decision derived in large part from earlier struggles over slavery, especially in the West Indies. The West Indian colonies had been slaveplantation economies until emancipation in 1834.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The American state’s own “founding myth” determined that its empire would be an informal one, not only leaving it free to appear as a champion of “national liberation” against colonialism, but also ensuring that the annexation of Hawaii and the establishment of colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines were seen to be, as in fact they eventually proved to be, “a deviation . . . from the typical economic, political and ideological forms of domination already characteristic of American imperialism.”59 Of course, the main business was that of establishing the political conditions for capital accumulation in what was now defined as the American sphere of influence. In this it was following what the British had sometimes done with their own informal empire, but whereas in the British Empire this still was more the exception than the rule, for the American empire it was taken as the modular form—including, as Emily Rosenberg says, by the new professionals, business managers and government officials, all of whom championed the global spread of market exchange [as] part of an expansive vision of an American civilizing mission and the inevitability of market-driven progress.

Whereas in 1812 Jefferson had seen conquering Canada as the only way of preventing “difficulties with our neighbors,” exactly a century later President Taft could celebrate the “greater economic ties” that were making Canada “only an adjunct of the USA.”69 US economic penetration of Canada had the added advantage of “providing access to unfettered trade within the British Empire which could look like part of the scaffolding of a new world order, all the more as American capital had a growing stake in it.”70 Yet the latitude that even Canada could claim within the American informal empire was demonstrated in 1911 when Canadian voters (spurred by fears of annexation) rejected a free trade agreement with the US, and when Canada immediately entered into World War I in support of Britain, while the US initially stayed out.71 It was nevertheless a mark of the status of Canada as a “rich dependency” within the American empire that Canadian banks were virtually unique internationally in utilizing the dollar as a reserve currency, and maintained large external balances in New York as a source of liquidity and to cover the massive flow of goods and capital across the border.

Moreover, as early as April 1940, Alvin Hansen (who had led the shift to Keynesianism in the Treasury) had proposed to the Council on Foreign Relations’ economic planning group the establishment of an international monetary fund to anchor the free convertibility of currencies in a system of international payments based on the American dollar.26 Harry Dexter White, who became head of the Treasury’s newly created Division of Monetary Research in the mid 1930s, could draw on all this experience when he was charged, only a week after Pearl Harbor, with developing the Treasury’s plan for what Morgenthau called a “New Deal in international economics.”27 The Path to Bretton Woods The British Empire may have been acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, but the American empire that emerged after World War II was the product of considerable planning. The blueprints for the postwar international order drawn up by US wartime policymakers sought to graft “the philosophy, substance, and form of the New Deal regulatory state onto the world,” recapitulating many of its legal and administrative forms in “virtually every issue area, ranging from the Food and Agricultural Organization to the projected International Trade Organization.”28 But above all, these blueprints were infused with a liberal conception of the rule of law, and also reflected the projection abroad of the New Deal’s “grand truce with capital.”


pages: 708 words: 196,859

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

Though Lord Esher had been offered numerous high positions in government, he preferred to remain merely deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle while exerting his considerable influence behind the scenes. Most important, he was a founding member of the Committee of Imperial Defense, an informal but powerful organization formed after the debacles of the Boer War to reflect and advise on the military strategy of the British Empire. In February 1912, the committee conducted hearings on issues related to trade in time of war. Much of the German merchant marine was then insured through Lloyds of London, and the committee was dumbfounded to hear the chairman of Lloyds testify that in the event of war, were German ships to be sunk by the Royal Navy, Lloyds would be both honor-bound and, according to its lawyers, legally obliged to cover the losses.

When the war ended, Keynes was appointed the principal Treasury representative at the Paris Peace Conference. Though his official titles included deputy to the chancellor of the exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council, chairman of the Inter-Allied Financial Delegates in the Armistice negotiations, and representative of the British Empire on the Financial Committee, he soon found himself completely excluded from the most important economic negotiations at Paris, those on reparations. He had to watch impotently from the sidelines as the “nightmare” of the Peace Conference was played out. As he later wrote, “a sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene.”

Meanwhile, prices in the United States and the UK, even after the postwar deflation, were still 50 percent higher than before the war, which meant that in effect the real purchasing power of gold reserves had contracted by almost 25 percent. FIGURE 2 In 1922, Norman worked with officials at the British Treasury to develop a plan whereby some of the European central banks would, as did many countries in the British Empire, hold pounds rather than gold as their reserve asset—in much the same way that many central banks hold dollars nowadays. He argued that substituting pounds for gold would allow the world to economize on the precious metal and thus reduce the risk of worldwide shortage. Few people failed to notice that by creating a captive source of demand for sterling, the plan would add to its privileged position in the constellation of currencies and greatly ease his job of returning the pound to gold.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.12 For Emerson, as for his contemporaries and writers throughout the nineteenth century, it was typical to rattle off a futuristic cosmopolitan pronouncement then affirm the country’s Anglo-Protestant ethnic character, a mental feat Emerson called ‘double consciousness’. Assimilation played a key part in squaring the circle. In his English Traits (1856), Emerson wrote that: forty of these millions [in the British Empire] are of British stock. Add the United States of America, which reckon (in the same year), exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 people … and in which the foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and language of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000 souls.13 Emerson reflected the prevailing view among Anglo-American liberals that newcomers could be not only integrated but ethnically assimilated into the W-AS-P cultural markers and traditions.

That is what we are endeavouring to do, and that is the reason so much stress is laid upon the British settler …19 After the Second World War, Canada had difficulty attracting the same number of British immigrants, and its desire to develop the country led it to slowly open up to other European groups. The British loyalism of English Canadians began to wane in favour of Canadian nationhood as the sun started to set on the British Empire. Sentiment in favour of retaining the Union Flag (‘Union Jack’) as the national flag, for example, declined from 42 per cent in 1943 to 25 per cent in 1963, and the new Maple Leaf flag was adopted in 1965.20 In the 1950s, economic liberalism gained the upper hand over ethno-traditionalism in immigration policy, as it had in the Sifton period and during the 1920s.

On closer inspection, we see it is English Canada which is exceptional: Quebec, despite experiencing lower immigration levels than English Canada, has a populist-right party and a climate of opinion closer to Europe. No group invested quite as heavily in British loyalism as the Anglo-Canadians, and when the British empire broke up, this identity disappeared along with it. The collapse of loyalism removed the country’s traditional counterweight to liberalism. The somewhat abstract notion of British Canada, fusing genealogical and political origins but not focused on any particular group of Canadian settlers (the United Empire Loyalist myth was entwined with Empire), meant that no ethnic founding myth or sense of peoplehood survived the fall of Britannic nationalism.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

In the sphere of secular culture, the ethos of Mitteleuropa owed much to the influx of a strong Jewish element, which had turned its back on the East and whose assimilation into German life and language coincided with the peak of Germany’s imperial ambitions.68 [WIENER WELT] The WASP* variant of Western civilization came to fruition through the common interests of the USA and the British Empire as revealed during the First World War. It was predicated on the anglophile tendencies of America’s then élite, on the shared traditions of Protestantism, parliamentary government, and the common law; on opposition to German hegemony in Europe; on the prospect of a special strategic partnership; and on the primacy of the English language, which was now set to become the principal means of international communication.

Its strategic implications were formulated, among others, by the ‘father of geopolitics’, Sir Halford Mackinder,69 and found early expression in the Washington Conference of 1922. It was revived at full strength after the USA’s return to Europe in 1941 and the sealing of the Grand Alliance. It was global in scope and ‘mid-Atlantic’ in focus. It inevitably faded after the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of American interests in the Pacific; but it left Britain with a ‘special relationship’, that helped NATO and hindered European unification; and it inspired a characteristic ‘Allied Scheme of History’ which has held sway for the rest of the twentieth century (see below). The second German variant, as conceived by the Nazis, revived many features of the first but added some of its own.

Great Britain, for example, built its overseas empire in an era when naval power could provide effective insulation from continental affairs. But the same degree of separation is no longer possible. Naval power has been superseded by aeroplanes, and aeroplanes by ICBMs, that render surface features such as the English Channel almost irrelevant. The British Empire has disappeared, and Britain’s dependence on her continental neighbours has correspondingly increased. The opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 was an event of more than symbolic importance. It marked the end of Britain’s island history. Given the principal divisions of the Peninsula, three sub-regions have gained functions of particular importance: the Midi, the Danube Basin, and the Volga corridor.


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

In his view, the task of leading India into the next phase is analogous to the last seven minutes of a match that his team is losing. In a letter to his cousin, the King of Great Britain — “My dear Bertie” — he summarizes the situation thus: “The last Chukka in India — twelve goals down.” In actual fact, he is preoccupied by something other than winding up the British Empire. He is keen to reestablish the family’s honor after his father, the German Prince Louis von Battenberg, was ignominiously forced out of the Navy under the anti-German rules in place during the First World War. The appointment as Viceroy has come at an awkward time. Cousin Bertie understands his dilemma.

Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 1958. Wilcox, Claire, ed. The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957. London: V&A Publications, 2007. Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: admiral of the cyber sea. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2004. Wolpert, Stanley. The Shameful Flight: the last years of the British Empire in India. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES Biberman, Herbert, excerpt from HUAC testimony, 1947, YouTube. Fenyö, György, “Imperfekt om mitt liv,” 2014. Ferencz, Benjamin, interviewed by the author in May 2015. Frischmann, Nina Ellis, and Christopher Hill, “Silence Revealed: women’s experiences during the partition of India,” www.academic.edu, 2010.


pages: 209 words: 58,466

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Albert Einstein, British Empire, dematerialisation, Maui Hawaii, search costs, traveling salesman

But the black people wouldn’t call that school by its proper name, either. On the day it opened, there were already young black people wearing jackets which looked like this from the back: • • • I have to explain, too, see, why so many black people in Midland City were able to imitate birds from various parts of what used to be the British Empire. The thing was, see, that Fred T. Barry and his mother and father were almost the only people in Midland City who could afford to hire Niggers to do the Nigger work during the Great Depression. They took over the old Keedsler Mansion, where Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, had been born. They had as many as twenty servants working there, all at one time.

Through Fred’s father, those gangsters bought almost every desirable property in Midland City for anything from a tenth to a hundredth of what it was really worth. And before Fred’s mother and father came to the United States after the First World War, they were music hall entertainers in England. Fred’s father played the musical saw. His mother imitated birds from various parts of what was still the British Empire. She went on imitating them for her own amusement, well into the Great Depression. “The Bulbul of Malaysia,” she would say, for instance, and then she would imitate that bird. “The Morepark Owl of New Zealand,” she would say, and then she would imitate that bird. And all the black people who worked for her thought her act was the funniest thing they had ever seen, though they never laughed out loud when she did it.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

A tension developed in Pennsylvania between eastern establishment and western frontiersmen that was a microcosm for what would be seen in the country as a whole after independence. The Quakers ran their colony of Pennsylvania as though it were an independent state, adopting a foreign policy completely out of line with the British Empire. Not only did Pennsylvania refuse to conscript militias to fight the French, they would not fight Indians and independently negotiated peaceful and friendly relations with them. Had Quakers controlled all of the colonial legislatures and not just that of Pennsylvania, the history of North America—and perhaps, by example, all of the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia— might have been different.

When seven thousand army troops were ordered to force-march the Cherokee, all 17,000, to what is now Oklahoma, the commanding officer, John Wool, resigned in protest and was replaced by General Winfield Scott, whose march, known in history as “the Trail of Tears,” nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language, was so brutal that 4,000 Cherokees died. The Cherokee had lost their faith in nonviolence and put to death the leaders of the small contingent that had signed the removal treaty. But in a remote corner of the far-flung British Empire, there was a people who took on the British with classic nonviolent activism. The far South Pacific seems to have been one of the last places settled by humans. The few islands beyond Australia are not near anyone else nor on the way to anywhere. The first people to go there were Polynesians.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Any pride in this history is regarded as evidence of an innate bigotry combined with a lack of enlightened education. Trevor Phillips has argued that the new approach represents ‘a gross caricature that distorts our rich and complex history’.8 It ignores the complexity that should be at the heart of history, substitutes propaganda and ideology for proper academic analysis (see the nonsense view that the British Empire was ‘worse than Nazis’, propagated by attention-seeking professors at Churchill College, Cambridge), seeks to diminish achievements like the abolition of the slave trade and flies in the face of the majority of public opinion, which sees British history as something to be proud of.9 Many of the proponents of the new, decolonised history are ideologues and propagandists and should be treated as such.

She is also part of a ‘Decolonising Working Group’ at the library, which has discussed declaring a ‘racial state of emergency’; replacing ‘Eurocentric maps’, which are ‘tools of power’; reviewing Western classical music because it represents the ‘outdated notion of Western civilisation’; and has lamented the battleship design of the library as glorifying racism, as battleships are ‘by far the greatest symbol of British imperialism’.29 In the spirit of the activist scholars, the working group has said that their goal is ‘developing and delivering major cultural change’. Institutions such as the British Museum followed suit, removing the bust of their founder Sir Hans Sloane and adding him to a series of exhibits about the ‘exploitative context of the British Empire’. The Arts Council have made clear that they see art as very much a vehicle for political and social change – delivering ‘a country transformed by its culture’. The head of the National Gallery has said that it is no longer possible for cultural organisations to ‘remain neutral’, meaning they now have a role to play in political issues.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

This was the beginning of massive gold accumulation by the newly formed Federal Reserve and its private bank owners. Sterling’s role from 1914 to 1944 was a façade. The fact that London remained a financial center, and sterling remained a reserve currency, had more to do with Britain’s captive market in the British Empire, and the sufferance of anglophile bankers at J. P. Morgan, than with intrinsic strength. Scholar Barry Eichengreen brilliantly laid out this transition and the seesaw struggle between the dollar and sterling for the global reserve currency crown in the interwar years in his book Golden Fetters.

Decline of the Ottoman Empire, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and the 1912 Balkan Crisis were of a piece, leading to the destruction of Europe and the collapse of empires from 1914 to 1945. The First and Second World Wars are best viewed, and will be viewed by future historians, as a single, large-scale systemic collapse of Europe, Japan, China, and the British Empire. Complexity kills. Where are we now? Financial crises have supplanted kinetic warfare at the center of complex system dynamics. Financial crises in 1998 and 2008 are the analogues to the Russian, Franco-German, and Balkan wars of 1870 to 1912. They are warnings—tremors ahead of a misfortune beyond imagining.

Another $4 trillion of money on top of $4 trillion already printed since 2008 could push confidence past the breaking point. Emergency liquidity would come from the IMF in the form of SDRs. An IMF rescue would entail greater control of the international monetary system by China, Russia, and Germany. This dollar hegemony denouement would illuminate American decline as decisively as Bretton Woods ended the British Empire. When I mentioned SDRs, someone in the live audience laughed aloud. Whether this was ridicule, nerves, or the shock of recognition is impossible to say. Having taken the audience through complexity, scale, and the consequences of collapse, I concluded my case for America in decline. I trusted the audience to realize this has all happened before, and would happen again.


pages: 461 words: 109,656

On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

British Empire, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, invisible hand, joint-stock company, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway

Spain wouldn’t give up the Netherlands until half a century after Philip’s death, and Portugal with its overseas possessions would remain Spanish for six decades. Spain’s own “new world” dominions, extending eventually from mid–North America to Tierra del Fuego, survived into the early nineteenth century and in fragments until 1898, a longevity rivaling that of the British empire.33 Even Philip’s debts, about which he complained constantly and on which he defaulted repeatedly, may have been, by modern standards, sustainable.34 Philip judged himself, though, on a loftier scale. He sought to serve God, and the empire only to the extent that it advanced God’s interests.

So they settled for governments grounded in the interests of each state, linked loosely by Articles of Confederation. These established a league but not a nation: there was no chief executive, no judicial review of legislation, and most significant, no authority to tax.43 It was as if the Americans had made “salutary neglect” their first constitution, but whether the lightness they’d liked in the old British empire could extract them from the new one remained to be seen. For even on continents, armies could get trapped and forced to surrender. That’s what happened to the British at Saratoga in 1777 and at Yorktown in 1781. They carried on after their first defeat but gave up after the second: would the Americans, in such circumstances, have fought on?

The 1907 “triple entente” with France and Russia carried no clear obligation, when the fighting began in July 1914, to enter a war against Germany.30 And yet, the Germans’ invasion of Belgium on August 4—their plan for war against France having ignored long-standing international guarantees of Belgian neutrality—caused the British not only to declare war, but to abandon a centuries-old aversion to combat on the continent. Where Britain would lose, over the next four years, more men killed than the Union and the Confederacy together in 1861–65.31 This “continental commitment” seems almost to have been made, as was once said of the British empire, “in a fit of absence of mind.”32 But if one links the concerns of Crowe, Mackinder, and Salisbury, then a larger logic emerges. Crowe’s claim of a connection between sea power and self-determination on the one hand, and between land power and authoritarianism on the other, would mean that the continental consolidation of which Mackinder had warned could endanger more than just control of the sea: the future of freedom itself might be at stake.33 Which gets to what Salisbury may have meant when he said that Britain couldn’t alone “remedy an inland tyranny.”


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Although Darwin’s theory was not originally about human social evolution, it came from that context, and based on the work of Spencer and others, a set of ideologies termed social Darwinism emerged in the late 1800s. These ideas used Darwin’s theory of natural selection to justify a whole range of political, social and economic views that were popular in the rapidly expanding Victorian British Empire. They included a laissez-faire attitude to free-market economics, a staunch antipathy towards any welfare assistance for the ‘unfit’ poor, a justification for imperialism, sexism and racism, and, ultimately, a growing enthusiasm for eugenics. The mathematization of the theory, through the introduction of statistics and probability, lent these social and racial prejudices the stamp of scientific respectability.

His experiments yielded test results that were so varied he couldn’t make sense of the data, so he asked that a statistician be assigned to help him. None were available, so Box bought some statistics books and taught himself to analyse the data, and did work that provided some insights into the effects of gas on soldiers and how they might best be treated. After the war, Box was awarded the British Empire Medal for his contribution, and returned to school to formally study statistics, later earning his PhD from UCL under the supervision of Egon Pearson, the son of Karl Pearson, the founding father of statistics. Over the decades, Box made an enormous contribution to the field of statistics and yet, despite being a specialist in modelling strategies, he is most famously remembered for the cautionary quote that all models are wrong, and some are useful.

She was still working on the Almanac when she died in 1815, by which time she had trained one of her daughters to take over the work. Thus, the Edwards ladies provided a substantial part of the computation that ensured Britain’s supremacy at sea during the country’s most powerful period in history, enabled the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars and paved the way for the British Empire’s domination of nearly half the world in what is considered the largest empire in history. All this, despite the prevailing separate spheres model that said Mary should have been focused on childcare, housework and religious education, and should have been incapable of attaining the intellectual heights of her male contemporaries.


pages: 404 words: 110,290

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

Named the Shah Jahan Mosque, after the Mughal emperor who constructed the Taj Mahal, this mosque was an institution of learning and awarded degrees from the University of Punjab. In short, Liverpool and Woking were outposts of the Islamic empires of the Mughals and Ottomans in England. Along with the British Empire’s rise and fall, its Muslim populations ebbed and flowed. Disraeli liked to remind Queen Victoria that she was the queen-empress of more Muslims in her domain than the Turkish sultan in his. British Muslims are the grandchildren of the British Empire. Today, there are almost 2,000 mosques in Britain’s towns and cities. On some roads, we have multiple mosques to cater for sectarian, ethnic and tribal differences. The Turks, Arabs, Pakistanis and Indians all want their own mosques in parts of north London, for example.

Patriotism requires pride and confidence in the memory of a nation’s past, but also hope and optimism in a country’s future. It is time to stop unreservedly apologising for Britain’s past. This country has done nothing that China, Turkey, Russia and Austria have not done in multiple forms. I am a product of the British Empire. Millions of Brits have a love for India or Egypt because of their family ties to those lands, both as administrators and administered. My father left India to come to Britain in 1953 willingly, freely. My mother’s ancestors left Arabia. Diversity in Britain today is a consequence of the millions who made that decision: they did not come here because they hated Britain, but because they loved this country and its freedoms and opportunities.


The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Etonian, gentleman farmer, land reform, off-the-grid, plutocrats, spinning jenny, upwardly mobile

NANCY MITFORD, THE PURSUIT OF LOVE (1945) CONTENTS Foreword CHAPTER 1The House Party CHAPTER 2Everyone Sang CHAPTER 3It Is Ours CHAPTER 4The King’s Houses CHAPTER 5Reinstatement CHAPTER 6A New Culture CHAPTER 7Lutyens CHAPTER 8Making Plans CHAPTER 9Home Decorating CHAPTER 10 The New Georgians CHAPTER 11 The Princess Bride and Her Brothers CHAPTER 12 My New-Found-Land, My Kingdom CHAPTER 13 A Queer Streak CHAPTER 14 Field Sports CHAPTER 15 In Which We Serve CHAPTER 16 The Political House CHAPTER 17 The Old Order Doomed Acknowledgments Notes Index FOREWORD THERE IS NOTHING QUITE AS beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes across the nation. At least, that is the conventional view of a period that has always been seen as witnessing the end of the country house. One by one, so the story goes, the stately homes of England were deserted and dismantled and demolished, their estates broken up, their oaks felled, and their parks given over to suburban sprawl.

He insisted to Webb that space was needed “from time to time on occasions when the King and other members of the Royal Family wish to show themselves to the people.”7 When the news of the Armistice began to spread on the morning of November 11, 1918, five thousand people gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, “the central point of the British Empire.”8 It was on that balcony that the king appeared to them shortly after eleven o’clock, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, with Queen Mary beside him, bareheaded and wearing a fur coat. The band in the courtyard played “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” and everybody sang. As the Prince and Princess of Wales, George V and Queen Mary had lived round the corner at Sir Christopher Wren’s Marlborough House during Edward VII’s reign.

His most acclaimed domestic building of the postwar period boasted a marble staircase and a suite of state apartments, hot and cold running water, a garden by Gertrude Jekyll, and portraits by leading artists of the day, including Sir John Lavery and Glyn Philpot, Alfred Munnings and William Nicholson, but no one ever mounted that staircase or strolled through the state rooms. Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a one-twelfth-scale piece of Wrenaissance designed by Lutyens in 1921–1924, was praised to the skies when it went on show at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. More than 1.6 million visitors viewed the “miracle in miniature,” as the Times called it; “a model for the ages of the best the twentieth century can do in domestic architecture, decoration and furnishing.”1 Other postwar Lutyens works were iconic in the true sense of the word: the Cenotaph, Britain’s official national war memorial; the Great War Stone, which was placed in all the larger military cemeteries in France; India Gate, the seventy-five-foot-high All India War Memorial Arch, which stands, as big as the Arc de Triomphe, at the heart of New Delhi; and the moving and magnificent Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, unveiled in 1932 and the largest British war memorial in the world, inscribed with 72,099 names.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

In 1812, after trying various strategies to push Britain into allowing American trade more freedom on the high seas, President James Madison had caved to pressure exerted by Republican congressmen and asked for a declaration of war. The most vehement congressmen were the so-called War Hawks, mostly young representatives from western states. They believed that now, while Britain’s fleets and armies were tied up in the struggle with Napoleon, was the time to finish dismembering the British Empire in North America by annexing Canada. (As it turned out, Canadians did not want that.) Southern congressmen also imagined that war with Britain would permit them to seize additional territories from Spain. They had just annexed “West Florida,” the strip of land from Mobile to the “Florida Parishes” of Louisiana.

We don’t know whether Jefferson thought his morals depraved when he fathered his first child with an enslaved teenager named Sally Hemings. And we can imagine reasons for his desire. Perhaps she looked something like his dead wife, who was, after all, Sally’s half-sister. Jefferson left no words about his transactions with Hemings. But a document from another white man raised in the slave colonies of the eighteenth-century British Empire reveals more openly the intimate connections between white men’s sexual and financial desires.43 In the 1790s, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican planter who wrote a four-volume history of the West Indies, published something that seemingly didn’t fit with his usual fare of trade laws and sugar statistics.

North American shipbuilding firms sold 64 ships in Rio between 1841 and 1845, most of them for the slave trade.73 In 1842, Britain sent Lord Ashburton, a.k.a. Alexander Baring, one of the directors of Baring Brothers, as an ambassador to the United States. His mission was to secure US submission to the terms of the Convention of London. Cynics pointed out that the British Empire’s sugar producers, comparatively disadvantaged by the parliamentary abolition, would benefit from removing Cuban and Brazilian competition. On first glance, small revenue gains in sugar would hardly seem to balance out the losses that Britain—whose economy depended on an endless supply of cheap, high-quality cotton—might suffer by blocking the further expansion of US slavery.


Frommer's London 2009 by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Edmond Halley, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, young professional

Paul’s and the spires in the East End. 05_285596-ch01.qxp 7/22/08 5:29 PM Page 5 T H E M O S T U N F O R G E T TA B L E T R A V E L E X P E R I E N C E S • Enjoying a Traditional Afternoon Tea: At The Ritz Hotel, 150 Piccadilly, W1 (& 020/7493-8181; p. 113), the tea ritual carries on as it did in Britain’s heyday. You could invite the Queen of England herself here for a “cuppa.” The pomp and circumstance of the British Empire live on at The Ritz—only the Empire is missing. See p. 199. • Cruising London’s Waterways: In addition to the Thames, London has an antique canal system, with towpath walks, bridges, and wharves. Replaced by the railroad as the prime means of transportation, the canal system was all but forgotten until it was rediscovered by a new generation.

In room: TV, coffeemaker, hair dryer. 6 Hotels from Marylebone to Holland Park MARLEBONE VERY EXPENSIVE After it was bombed in World War II, this well-located hotel The Langham languished as dusty office space for the BBC until the early 1990s, when it was painstakingly restored. The Langham’s public rooms reflect the power and majesty of the British Empire at its apex. Guest rooms are somewhat less opulent but are still attractively furnished and comfortable, featuring French Provincial furniture and red oak trim. The hotel is within easy reach of Mayfair and Soho restaurants and theaters, and Oxford and Regent streets shopping. Plus, Regent’s Park is just blocks away. 1C Portland Place, London W1B 1JA. & 800/223-6800 or 020/7636-1000.

Note that for the most popular hotels (especially The Ritz), you should make reservations as far in advance as possible. If you go to a place that doesn’t take reservations, show up at least half an hour early, especially between April and October. Jacket and tie are often required for gentlemen, and jeans and sneakers are usually frowned upon. The British Empire no longer comes to a grinding halt at 4pm with all of England rushing for their cuppa. The English still like a cup of tea in the afternoon, but in workaday London it’s often consumed at desks piled high with papers. A proper sitdown tea is reserved mainly for those ladies-who-lunch who like to indulge in fattening but delectable pastries in the late afternoon.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

He joined his radical political platform to an enthusiasm for economic progress. His targets were the vestigial injustices of an aristocratic society, not the new abuses of an industrial society. His writings influenced the history of capitalism not just because he helped push the American colonies out of the British Empire but also because he made the attack on tradition a popular cause. Men like Paine admired the entrepreneurial economy because it was open to talents rather than reserved for those of inherited status. This remains true today, even if it is harder to get access to capital. The threat from old enemies faded slowly—at least in the imagination.

London became the glittering world capital of finance, trade, and fashion with a civil society enlivened by association meetings, demonstrations, the theater, and popular magazines, big and small. Even shorn of its continental American colonies, Great Britain retained its preeminence as a seaborne power with colonies in the Caribbean, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and India. Contemporaries captured its global reach when they observed that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” Industrialization was creating a new incentive for controlling raw materials that could be brought home to be worked up into finished goods. Its continental American colonies lost to an independent United States, Britain turned its attention to India, which enhanced the importance of its naval station in South Africa.

First Britain’s challengers had to figure out how to get their hands on their marvelous machines, leaving them with little choice but to engage in industrial espionage. Societies that enjoyed sufficient isolation from the Western European center of wealth and war making could ignore British gains, and they did, unless they were drawn into the British Empire. Those closer could not. Once Britain’s spectacular new machines could be seen, it was possible to imagine replicating them. Such an appropriation had haunted private investors as well as British officials, but theirs was too open a society to be very successful at keeping secrets. The steam engines that revolutionized old ways of making tools and spinning cotton attracted spies from France, Germany, even Britain’s quondam colonies in America.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The Industrial Revolution and the technologies it unleashed didn’t spread to Egypt, as that country was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which treated Egypt in rather the same way as the Mubarak family later did. Ottoman rule in Egypt was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798, but the country then fell under the control of British colonialism, which had as little interest as the Ottomans in promoting Egypt’s prosperity. Though the Egyptians shook off the Ottoman and British empires and, in 1952, overthrew their monarchy, these were not revolutions like that of 1688 in England, and rather than fundamentally transforming politics in Egypt, they brought to power another elite as disinterested in achieving prosperity for ordinary Egyptians as the Ottoman and British had been.

We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of Taqali, situated to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a man called Isma’il, and it stayed independent until amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The Taqali kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was not used—except by the kings, for external communication with other polities and diplomatic correspondence. At first this situation seems very puzzling. The traditional account of the origin of writing in Mesopotamia is that it was developed by states in order to record information, control people, and levy taxes.

The British government went further, though: it actively sought to implement this measure by stationing naval squadrons in the Atlantic to try to stamp out the slave trade. Though it took some time for these measures to be truly effective, and it was not until 1834 that slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire, the days of the Atlantic slave trade, by far the largest part of the trade, were numbered. Though the end of the slave trade after 1807 did reduce the external demand for slaves from Africa, this did not mean that slavery’s impact on African societies and institutions would magically melt away.


pages: 595 words: 162,258

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

He spent some of his subsequent time writing and in 1810 he published his Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. By November 1812 it had already gone into a fourth edition. In January 1813, a copy of Pasley’s Essay was lying on the table of an Lshaped red-brick house, once a farm and inn, in Chawton village, on a busy crossroads in Hampshire. One of the occupants of this house wrote to her sister: ‘we are quite run over with books’. ‘I,’ she emphasised proudly, ‘am reading a Society-Octavo, an Essay on the Military Police [sic] & Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers.’ This was ‘a book which I protested against at first,’ this correspondent explained, ‘but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining’.

., ‘Changing Needs in Great Britain’, pp. 109–18, in Seymour (ed.), 1980. Parsons, E.J.S., ‘The Superintendency of Lewis Alexander Hall’, pp. 119–28 in Seymour (ed.), 1980. Parsons, E.J.S, ‘The Scales Dispute – Henry James 1854–1863’, pp. 129 in Seymour (ed.), 1980. Pasley, Charles W., Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, 2nd edn, London: A.J. Valpy, 1811. Paterson, Daniel, A New and Accurate Description of the Roads in England and Wales, and Part of the Roads of Scotland, London: Longman, Rees, Faden, 1803. Patten, Eve, ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival’, Irish University Review, 33, pp. 1–13, 2003.

Hollar), 1 Home, John, 1 Hooke, Robert, 1 Hopetoun House, 1 hot-air ballooning, 1 Hounslow Heath: as basis for Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2; as basis for Paris–Greenwich triangulation, 1 Howse, Thomas, 1 Hughes, John, 1 Hume, David, 1 Hundred Acres, 1 Hunter, Joseph, 1 Hurd, Thomas Hannaford, 1 Hutton, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Hutton, James, 1 Hydrographic Office, 1 Imber, 1 Imperial System of measurement, 1 India, 1, 2; mapping of, 1, 2; and George Everest, 1; Great Indian Arc of the Meridian, 1; Trigonometrical Survey, 1 Industrial Revolution, 1, 2 Ingleborough, 1 Institution of Civil Engineers, 1, 2 instruments see names of specific instruments e.g. theodolite interior surveying, general, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Interior Survey, division of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Inverness, 1 Inversnaid Barracks, 1 Ireland: early maps, 1; first Ordnance Survey maps published, 1; idea of mapping proposed, 1; place names, 1; survey and mapping of, 1, 2; individual locations are listed by place-name Ireland, William Henry, 1; Henry II: An Historical Drama, 1 Irish Society, 1 Isle of Man, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Isle of Wight, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 isopleths, 1 Jacobins, 1 Jacobite Rebellion (1745–46), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 James II, xiii, 1 James, Henry: appointed superintendent of Ordnance Survey, 1; and map scales, 1, 2; and First Series, 1; and letter to The Times, 1; and Jerusalem survey, 1; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (with Wilson), 1 Jefferys, Thomas, 1 Jerusalem, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Johnson, Samuel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Kant, Imannuel, 1 Kent, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Kéroualle, Louise de, Duchess of Portsmouth, 1 Kettlewell, 1 King’s Arbour, 1, 2 King’s Sedgemoor, 1, 2, 3 King’s Topographical Collection at the British Library, 1 Kinloch Rannoch, 1 Knox, Vicesimus, 1 Kuhn, Thomas, 1 Lake District: and Coleridge, 1; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1; and Wordsworth, 1 Lamb, Charles, 1 lamps, as used to illuminate surveying staffs, 1 Land’s End, 1 landscape, Ordnance Survey’s representation of, 1, 2, 3, 4; and relationship to inhabitants’ behaviour, 1; and roads, 1; qualities and appearance of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; and painting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; militarisation of, 1, 2; sight of through instruments’ sights, 1; and literature, 1, 2, 3; and enclosure, 1; and emotions, 1, 2; and industrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4; and traces of Ordnance Survey’s presence, 1; and gardening, 1; views of from above, 1, 2; and the sublime, 1; aesthetic theories of, 1; and the picturesque, 1, 2; and imagination, 1, 2, 3, 4; and the prospect, 1; and pedestrianism/hiking, 1, 2, 3; and the Bible, 1; individual locations are listed by place-name; for mapping of, see mapping; for measurement of, see measurement; for naming of, see toponymy Langdon Hill, 1 Larcom, Thomas Aiskew, 1; and mapping of Ireland, 1, 2, 3, 4; learns Gaelic, 1, 2; and memoir project (of Ireland), 1, 2, 3, 4; and Irish toponymy, 1; Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry (with Colby), 1 latitude, calculation of, 1, 2, 3 Laurent d’Arlandes, François, 1 Leiden, University of, 1 Leith Hill, 1, 2 Lennox, Charles, 1rd Duke of Richmond, 2; with Roy at Dunkirk, 1, 2; sculpture gallery at Goodwood, 1; on need for maps of British Isles, 1; education, 1; and James Sampson, 1; interest in military defence, 1, 2, 3, 4; enmity of George III, 1, 2; and Reform, 1, 2; as Master-General of the Board of Ordnance, 1; and Fortifications Bill, 1, 2; and Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3; and foundation of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; and remeasurement of Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and Great Theodolite, 1; leaves Board of Ordnance, 1; on map-making, 1 Lennox, Sarah, 1, 2 lenses, xxii, 1, 2, 3, 4 Les Estables (French village), 1 levelling, 1; see also primary levelling of Great Britain Liddle Moat, 1 limelight, 1 Lincolnshire, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Lind, James, 1 Lindley, Joseph, 1 Lisburn, 1 Liskeard, 1 literature, and maps, 1, 2, 3 Llanelian, 1 Llangeinor, 1 Lloyd, Humphrey, 1 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 1 Llyn Cau, 1 Loch a’Mhuillidh, 1 Loch Leven, 1 Loch Morar, 1, 2 Loch Rannoch, 1 Lockhart, John Gibson, 1 London, cartographic depictions of, 1, 2, 3; and roads, 1; and societies and sociability, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and nature of urban environment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; William Roy’s mapping of, 1, Ordnance Survey’s maps and mapping of, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; Ordnance Survey’s move away from, 1; for Ordnance Survey’s London headquarters, see Board of Ordnance, and Tower of London London Review, 1 Longford, 1, 2 Longham Common, 1 longitude, calculation of, 1, 2; see also Board of Longitude Lorraine, Claude, 1, 2; see also Claude Glass Lough Foyle baseline, 1, 2 Louis XIV, 1 Louis XVI, 1, 2, 3, 4 Lovat, Simon Fraser, 1th Lord, 2, 3, 4, 5 Lunar Society, 1 Lunardi, Vincenzo, 1 Lundy Island, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3 Lyell, Charles, 1 McAdam, John Loudon, 1 McCulloch, John, 1 MacGowan, John, 1 MacGregor, Robert (Rob Roy), 1 Mackenzie Sr, Murdoch, 1; Nautical Survey of the Orkney Islands and Hebrides, 1 Maclaurin, Colin, 1 MacPherson, James, 1 Malkin, Benjamin Heath, 1; Father’s Memoirs of his Child, 1 Malkin, Thomas Williams, 1 Malvern, 1 Mangan, James Clarence, 1, 2, 3 Manson, John, 1 map-makers: as antiquarians, 1; enjoying positive experiences, 1, 2, 3; as spies, 1; trials and tribulations of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unpopularity among general populace, 1; unpopularity in Ireland, 1; individual mapmakers are listed by surname mapping: with alidade and plane-table, 1, 2, 3, 4; and availability of data, 1, 2; metaphorical,1, 2; and National Grid, 1; and perspective, 1; and picturesque, 1; training and instruction in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; see also cartography; interior surveying, general; triangulation maps: appearance of, 1, 2, 3, 4; and art, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; and digital technology, 1, 2, 3; early British, 1, 2; and Enlightenment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; errors in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and literature, 1; publication process, 1, 2, 3; recognition of military need for, 1, 2; scales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also mapping; maps; individual maps are listed under their titles and the surnames of their principal creators Marie Antoinette, 1, 2 Mark, George, 1, 2 Martello towers, 1 Martin, Ellis, 1 Maskelyne, Nevil, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; ‘An Account of Observations Made on the Mountain Schehallion for Finding its Attraction’, 1; Nautical Almanac, 1 Mason, Charles, 1, 2 Maton, William George, 1; ObservationsRelative Chiefly to the Natural History, Picturesque Scenery and Antiquities of the Western Counties of England, 1 Maupertius, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 1 May Hill, Gloucestershire, 1 Mealy, Ann Elizabeth, 1 measurement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13; see also mapping; meridian arcs; metre unit of measurement; plane-tabling; triangulation measuring chain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; see also Gunter’s chain Méchain, Pierre François André, 1, 2, 3 Menzies, William, 1 meridian arcs, measurement of, 1, 2, 3 metre unit of measurement, 1 Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, 1, 2 militarisation of landscape, 1, 2 military see Artillery, Royal Regiment of; Board of Ordnance; Engineers, Corps of; Tower of London; uniform; individual battles are listed by name Military Academy, High Wycombe see High Wycombe Military Academy Military Academy, Woolwich see Woolwich, Royal Military Academy Military Survey of Scotland (1747–55), 1 militia, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4 Militia Act (1757), 1 Milton, 1, 2 Minden, Battle of, 1 Misterton Carr, 1, 2 Moelfre, 1 Montgolfier, Joseph and Jacques, 1 Montlambert, 1 Morning Chronicle, 1, 2 Morris, Lewis, 1 Mortella Point, Corsica, 1 Mostyn, John Armstrong, 1; Scotch Atlas, 1 Mount Pleasant House, Thanet, 1 mountains: classification, 1.n2; gravitational attraction, 1; volume, 1; Munros, 1; individual mountains are listed by name Mountjoy House, Phoenix Park, 1 Mudge, Jane (sister of William), 1 Mudge, Jane (wife of John), 1 Mudge, Jenny (daughter of William), 1 Mudge, John (father of William), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Mudge, Margaret Jane (née Williamson) (wife of William), 1, 2 Mudge, Richard Zachariah (son of William), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Mudge, Thomas (uncle of William), 1, 2, 3 Mudge Jr, Thomas (cousin of William), 1, 2 Mudge, William, 1; appointed director of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; background and character, 1, 2; joins Board of Ordnance, 1, 2; remeasures Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; searches for second baseline, 1; chooses Salisbury Plain as second baseline, 1, 2; assumes full control of Ordnance Survey, 1; makes maps available to general public, 1, 2, 3; and toponymy, 1; presents first map to George III, 1; surveys West Country, 1; measures London baseline, 1; reservations about Interior Survey, 1; family pressures, 1; and Colby, 1, 2; sits for portrait, 1; pressures of work, 1; fears French invasion, 1; surveys Wales, 1, 2, 3; surveys northern England, 1; appears before Commission of Military Enquiry, 1; depression, 1, 2; on Phipps’s decision to withhold maps from public, 1; measures meridian arc through Britain, 1, 2, 3; and Shetland Islands extension, 1; illness and death, 1; legacy, 1 Mudge, William: publications: ‘An Account of the Measurement of an Arc of the Meridian’, 1; An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales … from … 1797, to … 1799 (vol 1), 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1797 [to] 1799’, 1; with Colby: An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … in the Years 1800 [to] 1809 (vol 3), 1, 2, 3, 4; with Dalby: An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; with Williams and Dalby: ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1791, 1792, 1793, and 1794’, 1; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1795 and 1796’, 1, 2 Mudge, Zachariah (grandfather of William), 1, 2, 3, 4 Muirhouse, 1 Mulgrave, 1st Earl of see Phipps, Henry Muller, John, 1 Munro classification of mountains, 1 Munster, siege of, 1 Murray, Lord George, 1 Museum of Practical Geology, 1 Mynydd Maen, 1 naming see toponymy Napoleon Bonaparte, 1, 2, 3 Napoleonic Wars, 1, 2, 3 National Grid Reference System, 1 nationalism, xx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 national triangulation see triangulation Nautical Almanac, 1; see also Maskelyne, Nevil Neal, John, 1 neoclassicism, 1 New Annual Register, 1 Newlyn, 1 Newton, Isaac, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Nidd, River, 1 Ninebarrow Down, Dorset, 1 Norden, John, 1 Northcote, James, 1, 2 Northern Echo, 1 Norwood, 1 Observer, 1 O’Connell, Daniel, 1 O’Curry, Eugene, 1, 2 O’Daly, Aengus, 1 O’Donovan, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 O’Donovan, Patrick, 1 Office of Works, 1 Ogilby, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Britannia Depicta, 1, 2, 3, 4 Ogmore, 1 O’Keeffe, Patrick, 1 Old Sarum, 1 Ordnance Survey: database, 1; establishment (1791), 1, 2, 3; in Ireland, 1, 2; move to Southampton, 1; origins, 1, 2; possible birth dates, 1; primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3; reference works, 1; safe passage of Ordnance Survey – continued surveyors, 1; secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; individual personnel are listed under surnames; for general issues see mapping, maps, cartography, map-makers Ordnance Survey: maps and other publications: Cornish maps, 1; early, 1, 2, 3, 4; Essex maps, 1; expense, 1; Explorer series, 1, 2; faults in, 1; first map published (1801), 1; First Series, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; Glamorgan maps, 1; Gower maps, 1; Irish maps, 1, 2, 3; Isle of Man sheet, 1; Isle of Wight map, 1; Jerusalem maps, 1; Kent maps, 1, 2, 3; key to symbols, 1, 2; Landranger series, 1, 2; Lincolnshire sheets, 1; Lundy Island map, 1, 2, 3; New Series, 1; Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, 1; OS Master-Map, 1; Pembrokeshire maps, 1; publication process, 1; scales, 1, 2; Sinai peninsula maps, 1; Somerset maps, 1; street atlases, 1; Suffolk maps, 1; Surrey maps, 1; toponymy, 1, 2; towns, 1; Welsh maps, 1, 2; Wiltshire maps, 1; for general issues see maps Ordnance Survey Bench Marks (OSBM), 1 O’Reilly, Andreas, 1 O’Reilly, Edward, 1 Otway, Caesar, 1; Sketches in Ireland, 1 ‘pacification’ of the Highlands see Highland reform painting, and cartography see art, and cartography panopticism, 1 Paris, Treaty of, 1 Paris Exhibition, 1 Paris–Greenwich triangulation, 1, 2, 3 Pasley, Charles, 1, 2; Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, 1 Paterson, Daniel, 1, 2; New and Accurate Description of the Roads in England and Wales, and Part of the Roads of Scotland, 1 patriotism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 pedestrianism, 1, 2, 3; see also hiking Pembrokeshire, Ordnance Survey maps of, 1 Penicuik, 1 Penn Beacon, 1 Penygadair, 1 perambulators, 1, 2; see also waywisers; surveyors’ wheels perspective, in art, 1 Perth, 1 Peru, French expedition to (1735), 1 Petrie, George, 1, 2, 3, 4 Petty, William, 1, 2; ‘Down Survey’, 1 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Phipps, Henry, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, 1, 2 Picard, Jean, 1 picturesque, 1 Pilâtre de Rozier, Jean-François, 1 Pilsden Hill, 1 Pink, George, 1 Pitt the Younger, William, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 place-names see toponymy; specific locations are listed by place-name plane tables, 1 plans see maps, surveys plantation (of Ireland), 1 Playfair, John, 1 Plymouth, 1 Plympton St Maurice, 1 Poor Law Commission, 1, 2, 3, 4 Portland, 1 Post Office, 1 Poussin, Nicolas, 1 Preseli Mountains, 1 Prestonpans, Battle of, 1 Price, Richard, 1, 2 primary levelling of Great Britain, 1; see also levelling primary triangulation see triangulation Pringle, Sir John, 1 ‘prospect’ poetry and painting, 1 see also landscape Quiberon Bay, 1 Raglan, Lord, 1 railways, mapping of, 1 rambling, 1; see also pedestrianism Ramsay, Allan, 1 Ramsden, Jesse: and deal rods, 1; and glass rods, 1; and dividing engine, 1; and lateness, 1; and theodolites, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; accused of negligence, 1; and measurement of Hounslow Heath baseline, 1; and zenith sector, 1 Rawthmell’s coffee-house, London, 1 Reagh, Stephen, 1 Reform, 1, 2; see also Highland reform; Lennox, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond Regiment of Artillery see Artillery, Royal Regiment of Reid, William, 1 relief, cartographical representation of, 1, 2, 3 Rennell, James, 1 repeating circle, 1, 2, 3 Repton, Humphry, 1 Revolutionary Tribunal, 1 Reynolds, Joshua, 1, 2, 3, 4; Discourses on Art, 1 Reynolds, Samuel, 1 Reynolds, Theophila, 1 Reynolds, Thomas Vincent, 1; ‘Military Map of Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Part of Hampshire’, 1 Rhoades, James, 1 Rhuddlan Marsh, 1 Richmond, 1rd Duke of see Lennox, Charles, 2rd Duke of Richmond Ringswold Steeple, 1 road-books, 1 roads, state of in eighteenth century, 1 Rob Roy see MacGregor, Robert (Rob Roy) Robertson, Duncan, 1 Robertson, William, 1 Robespierre, Maximilien, 1 Robinson, Thomas Romney, 1, 2 Rochefort, 1 Rodriguez, Don Joseph, 1, 2, 3 Romanticism, 1, 2 Rombalds Moor, 1 Romney Marsh, 1, 2, 3 Rook’s Hill, 1 Rosa, Salvator, 1 Roscommon, 1 Rosdew, Richard, 1, 2, 3 route surveying, 1, 2, 3, 4; see also traverse surveying Roy, James, 1 Roy, John, 1, 2 Roy, William: birth and early life, 1, 2; and Watson, 1, 2, 3; and Military Survey of Scotland, 1, 2, 3; study of antiquities, 1; survey of England’s south coast, 1; and Seven Years War, 1; map of Minden, 1; anecdote of Warley Common, 1; as Surveyor-General of Coasts, 1; at Dunkirk, 1; proposes military map of whole country, 1, 2, 3, 4; house in Argyll Street, London, 1; and Royal Society, 1; barometric observations, 1; and Schiehallion, 1; and Greenwich–Paris triangulation, 1, 2; criticisms of Ramsden, 1; illness and death, 1 Roy, William: publications and principal texts: ‘An Account of the Measurement of a Base on Hounslow-Heath’, 1, 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Mode Proposed to … Determin[e] the Relative Situation of … Greenwich and Paris’, 1, 2; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Operation … between … Greenwich and Paris’, 1, 2, 3; ‘Considerations on the Propriety of making a General Military Map of England’, 1; ‘Experiments and Observations … with the Barometer’, 1; Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis, 1, 2; Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘Military Description of the South-East of England’, 1; ‘Plan Shewing the Situation of the Base Measured on Hounslow Heath in Summer 1784’, 1 Royal Academy, 1 Royal Geographical Society, 1 Royal Irish Academy, 1, 2, 3 Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Royal Philosophers’ Club, 1, 2 Royal Regiment of Artillery see Artillery, Royal Regiment of Royal School of Artillery, 1 Royal Society, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Royal Society Club, 1, 2 Russell, John, 1 Sage, Mrs, 1 St Ann’s Hill, Chertsey, 1, 2 St George’s Channel, 1 St James’s Chronicle, 1, 2, 3 St Paul’s Cathedral, 1, 2, 3 Salisbury, Lord, 1 Salisbury Plain, 1 Sampson, James, 1 Sinai Peninsula, maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Sandby, Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Party of Six Surveyors, Highlands in Distance, 1; View Near Loch Rannoch, 1 satnav systems, 1, 2 Satterthwaite, James, 1 Saxton, Christopher, 1, 2 Scafell, 1 scales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Scales Dispute, 1, 2 Scar House Reservoir, 1 Schiehallion, 1, 2, 3, 4 Scilly Isles, 1 Scotland, Colby’s experience of mapping, 1; Lowland gentry and aristocracy, 1; 2; Highlanders, 1, 2, 3, 4; landscape, 1, 2; language, 1; midges, 1; outlaws, 1; place-names, 1; poor state of maps of Highlands before and during Jacobite rebellion, 1, 2; surveyors’ experiences of Lowlands, 1; see also annexed estates; Highland reform; Military Survey of Scotland; specific locations are listed by place-name Scott, Frederick, 1 Scott, Walter, 1, 2; Old Mortality, 1 Scurry, James, 1 secondary triangulation see triangulation Sedgwick, Adam, 1 Seven Years War, 1, 2, 3 Severndroog Castle, 1, 2, 3 Sgurr Dearg, 1 Shelburne, 1nd Earl of, 2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 Shetland Islands meridian arc extension, 1 Shooter’s Hill, 1, 2, 3 Short, James, 1, 2 Shrapnel, Henry, 1, 2 Simcoe, General John Graves, 1, 2 Sinai Peninsula, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Skiddaw, 1 Skinner, William, 1 Skye, Isle of, 1 Slieve Donard, 1, 2, 3 Slieve Snaght, 1 Smeaton, John, 1 Smith, Adam, 1 Smith, Charlotte, 1, 2, 3; The Young Philosopher, 1 Smollett, Tobias, 1 Smyth, James Carmichael, 1 Snowdon, Mount, 1 Snowdonia, Robert Dawson’s map of, 1 Society for Constitutional Information, 1 Society for the Commemoration of the Revolution in Great Britain, 1 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later Royal Society of Arts), 1, 2, 3, 4 Society of Antiquaries, 1, 2 Soldi, Andrea, 1 Somerset, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 South Sea Bubble, 1 Southampton, 1 Spaniard’s Inn, Hampstead, 1 Speed, John, 1; Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, 1 Spilsbury, John, 1 Spring Rice, Thomas, 1, 2 stagecoaches, 1 Stamp Office, 1 Stanford, Edward, 1 Stanford’s (map retailer), 1, 2 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 1 Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), 1 Steel, James, 1 Sterne, Laurence, 1 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1 Stewart, Dugald, 1; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1 Stonehenge, 1, 2 strip maps see traverse surveying Stuart, Charles Edward (‘Young Pretender’), 1, 2 sublimity, notion of, 1 Suez Canal, 1 Suffolk, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Sun, 1 Surrey, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 surveying, xxvi, 1; see also mapping; planetabling; triangulation surveyors see map-makers surveyors’ wheels see waywisers, perambulators surveys see maps, Ordnance Survey, Military Survey of Scotland Survey Act (1841), 1 Sussex, maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3 Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 1 Swift, Edward, 1 symbols, used in early Ordnance Survey maps, 1, 2 telescopes, as used in map-making, 1; see also theodolites Templemore, 1, 2 terrestrial refraction, 1 Test, William, 1 Thames, River, 1 Thelwall, John, 1 theodolites, 1, 2, 3, 4; Jesse Ramsden’s ‘Great Theodolite’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Interior Survey’s eighteen-inch theodolite, 1 Thomas, Alfred, 1 Thomson, James, 1; Liberty, 1 Thomson, Thomas, 1; Annals of Philosophy, 1 Tickell, Thomas, 1; An Epistle, 1 The Times, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Tintern Abbey, 1, 2 Tiptree Heath, 1 Tipu Sultan, 1 Tithe Commission, 1 Tithe Communication Act (1836), 1 Topographical Branch (Ordnance Survey of Ireland), 1, 2, 3 topographical surveying, general see interior surveying Topographical Survey, division of Ordnance Survey see Interior Survey topography, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also landscape; relief toponymy, 1, 2, 3 Torbay House, Paignton, 1 tourism, 1, 2 Tower of London: fire at (1841), 1; map-making at, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; see also Artillery, Royal Regiment of; Board of Ordnance; Engineers, Corps of townlands (Ireland), 1, 2 towns, mapping of, 1 traverse surveying, 1, 2, 3, 4 Trellech Beacon, 1, 2, 3, 4 Trembley, Abraham, 1 triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; benefits over positional astronomy, 1, 2, 3; Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21; Ordnance Survey’s secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; importance of in Enlightenment, 1, 2; and relation to perspective, 1; see also Paris–Greenwich triangulation triangulation stations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24; trig points at specific locations are listed by place-name Trigonometrical Survey, division of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 trigonometrical surveying, general see triangulation trigonometry, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; for trigonometry used in triangulation see triangulation trig points see triangulation stations Tucker, James Walker, 1; Hiking, 1 Tummel, River, 1 Tummock, 1 turnpikes, 1, 2 Twiss, Brigadier-General, 1 Ultima Thule, 1 uniform, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Union, Anglo-Scottish (1707), 1, 2, 3 Union, Anglo-Irish (1800), 1 Unst, 1 Upper Hardes, 1 Upper Nidderdale, 1 Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, 1, 2, 3, 4 Usher, Henry, 1 Vallancey, Charles, 1 Victoria Dock, Liverpool, 1 Wade, George, 1, 2, 3, 4 Wakeman, William, 1 Wales: Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3; place names, 1; specific locations are listed by place-name Walpole, Horace, 1, 2 War Office, 1, 2, 3 Warley Common, Essex, 1 Wast Water, 1 Water Crag, 1 Waterloo, Battle of, 1, 2, 3, 4 Watson, David, 1; birth and early life, 1, 2, 3; and Robert Dundas, 1, 2, 3; joins Army, 1; joins Corps of Engineers, 1, 2; in Flanders, 1; and Jacobite Rebellion, 1, 2; proposes survey of Scottish Highlands, 1; and William Roy, 1, 2, 3; work in Scottish Highlands, 1, 2; and Military Survey of Scotland, 1, 2, 3, 4; illness and death, 1; last will and testament, 1 Watson, Robert, 1 waywisers, 1 Wedderburn, Alexander, 1 Wellesley, Richard, 1st Marquess, 1, 2 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 1, 2, 3 Wemyss, 1th Earl of, 2 Wickham, William, 1 Wilkie, William, 1 William IV, 1 Williams, Edward: appointed deputy director of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; life and character, 1; remeasures Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and national triangulation, 1, 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1791, 1792, 1793, and 1794’ (with Mudge and Dalby), 1; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1795 and 1796’ (with Mudge and Dalby), 1, 2; death, 1 Williams, John, 1 Wilson, Charles, 1; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (with James), 1 Wilson, Sophia, 1 Wiltshire, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Winchelsea, 1 Windham, William, 1, 2, 3 Windsor Castle, 1, 2 Wingham, 1 Wollaston, Francis, 1, 2 Woolcot, Simon, 1, 2, 3 Woolwich, Royal Military Academy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Wordsworth, Christopher, 1 Wordsworth, John, 1 Wordsworth, Mary, 1 Wordsworth, William: on Salisbury Plain, 1; on ‘Engineer agents’, 1; suspected of being a spy, 1; on City of London, 1; on the landscape, 1; interest in Ordnance Survey of England and Wales, 1, 2; in Lake District, 1, 2, 3; on maps, 1, 2, 3, 4; and William Rowan Hamilton, 1; interest in Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1; in Ireland, 1; buys Templemore memoir, 1 Wordsworth, William: publications: TheExcursion, 1, 2; ‘Guilt and Sorrow, or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain’, 1; ‘Inscription: Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Combe’, 1, 2; The Prelude, 1, 2; ‘View from the Top of Black Combe’, 1 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 1 Wrotham Hill, 1 Wye Valley, 1, 2 Wyld, James, 1 Yeakell, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; ‘Actual Topographical Survey of Sussex’ (with Gardner), 1 Yolland, William, 1, 2 Yorkshire, maps and surveys of, 1 Young, Arthur, 1 Zach, Francis Xavier Baron de, 1 zenith sector, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (A) David Watson by Andrea Soldi, finished after Watson’s death in 1762, showing him pointing to his crowning glory: a military survey of Scotland.


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

Sugar was an ideal target of taxation: production was localized to tropical colonies, so its import could be controlled, and it was in universal demand but not (yet) considered a necessity of life. (The same was true of tea; the sweetening of tea and the burgeoning tea industry in India also drove sugar consumption through the British Empire in this era.) The British government began taxing sugar imports from the Caribbean, along with tobacco, in the late seventeenth century. The Americans followed a century later, after the Revolution, and after realizing how much money could be raised from sugar to help get a fledgling country on its feet.

These diseases have tended to increase in prevalence through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and many of them are closely associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. We can think of Burkitt and Trowell’s provisional 1981 list as a product of the collective medical consciousness of the British Empire. One of the advantages of having colonies, protectorates, dominions, and territories scattered over much of the planet is that it allows for the physicians working in these far-flung locales—“where the conditions of life differ so widely,” Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary (and father of Neville), would phrase it in 1903 with the founding of the British Cancer Research Fund—to compare and contrast their clinical experiences and inpatient records with those of their colleagues working in the home country.

The implicit message was that cancer appeared to be an increasingly common disease, and that action had to be taken to understand what was happening and why. A committee of investigators would now carefully examine the records of malignant disease in hospitals throughout the U.K., Europe, and Asia, and in missionary and colonial hospitals throughout the British Empire. A series of dispatches were circulated to the governors and commissioners of all the British colonies and protectorates worldwide, directing missionary and colonial physicians to report back on the prevalence of cancer in their patient populations and, if possible, ship specimens of any cancers that might be newly diagnosed and surgically removed (“placed in formalin immediately after removal from the body”) back to London for careful microscopic investigation.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Over the next century, British traders in over 11,000 ships transported more than two and a half million slaves.50 The profits generated from the slave trade and the plantations brought new wealth to Britain, generating a new class of wealthy traders, as well as a range of new products, which as production increased became entrenched in the British diet, such as sugar, potatoes, tea, coffee, and tobacco.51 Only a small fraction of the African slaves were brought to Britain—an estimated 40,000 by the 1770s—and although they were legally free in Britain, they were barred from engaging in work and therefore dependent on the bonded contracts with their employers. The British Slave Trade Act of 1807 made the transportation of slaves on British ships illegal, but it was the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 that banned slavery within the British Empire. The Abolition Act was the product of decades of political campaigning, which started in earnest with the formation in 1787 of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade—primarily involving humanitarian-minded British Quakers and Anglicans. The Society used public meetings, newspaper articles, popular boycotts, and political lobbying to press their humanitarian message, best incarnated in their logo of a chained kneeling slave asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Britain took special measures to actively discourage emigration from “New Commonwealth” countries (in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean) without openly changing its immigration policy. 28 During World War I, millions of colonial subjects were recruited for the war effort. Over 1.4 million Indians and other South Asian soldiers fought for the Allies in World War I. Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire sent an additional million or more men to fight for the Allies. Following the war, however, the Indian and Caribbean soldiers who had fought for Britain found they were “shooed off home with undisguised alacrity” after being officially purged from representation in the grand London victory parade.29 Population Separation While certain states sought to limit migration on the basis of race, others promoted migration in order to “unmix” their populations.

As Jewish displacement from Europe became increasingly severe in the mid-1930s, the number of refugees arriving in Palestine rose to 200,000 between 1933 and 1936.43 The systematic murder, persecution, and displacement associated with Hitler's Third Reich in Germany would increasingly propel Europe's Jews toward Palestine—despite restrictions by the British Mandate government—and ultimately pave the way for the creation of the state of Israel, accompanied by the forced displacement of the Palestinian people. THE INTERWAR PERIOD: ECONOMIC DECLINE AND REGULATED MIGRATION Following World War I, the Treaty conference at Versailles involved negotiation over the creeping exclusions that signaled the end of open borders. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the British Empire all insisted on their right to limit migration (often on the basis of race). Despite Japanese, Chinese, and Indian demands for the free movement of labor, the new League of Nations did not include any institutional support for international migration.44 Efforts advanced through the League to liberalize or abolish the new passport system were ultimately unsuccessful.45 Government opposition meant that the International Labour Organization stayed away from the issue of migration, and the efforts of the International Federation of Trade Unions to create an International Office on Migration failed.46 Instead, within a climate of nationalism and economic stagnation, states reserved their right to increasingly regulate migration and impose restrictions on the rights of foreigners within their borders.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

Whatever your own ideas, prepare to have them shattered by this endlessly fascinating, amorphous city. Don’t believe anyone who claims to know London; the only thing that’s constant here is change. You can spend a lifetime exploring the streets and parks, the famous buildings and the many attractions in the surrounding area, but there’s always something new to discover. And while the British Empire may be long gone, the engines of global capital continue to be stoked here, all adding to London’s vibrant persona. It also makes it the third-most expensive city on the planet. Yet with endless reserves of cool, London rises above the fray and remains one of the world’s great cities. View of the London Eye (Click here) from the River Thames PHOTOGRAPHER: RICHARD I'ANSON / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © London & its Day Trips Tower of London British Museum Tate Modern Shakespeare’s Globe London Eye Greenwich Cambridge Top of chapter London & its Day Trips Highlights Tower of London & Beefeaters London’s famous Tower ( Click here ) has variously been a castle, palace and prison over almost 1000 years of history.

Age of Empire In 1707, during Queen Anne’s reign, the Act of Union was passed, bringing an end to the independent Scottish Parliament, and finally linking the countries of England, Wales and Scotland under one parliament (based in London) for the first time in history. Stronger control over the British Isles was mirrored by even greater expansion abroad. The British Empire – which, despite its official title, was predominantly an English entity – continued to grow in America, Canada and India. The first claims were made to Australia after Captain James Cook’s epic voyage in 1768. The empire’s first major reverse came when the American colonies won the War of Independence (1776–83).

AD 43 Emperor Claudius orders the Roman invasion of province of Britannia. 5th–7th centuries Anglo-Saxons migrate to England and expand across the country. 850 Vikings from today’s Denmark invade northern England. 1066 Norman French armies defeat the English at the Battle of Hastings. 1272 Edward I invades Wales and makes his own son Prince of Wales. 1314 English army defeated by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn. 1400 Owain Glyndŵr leads Welsh rebels against the English army. 1415 The English army under Henry V defeats the French at the Battle of Agincourt. 1459–87 The Wars of the Roses between the Houses of Lancaster and York. 1536 & 1543 Henry VIII signs the Acts of Union, formally uniting England and Wales. 1642–49 English Civil War results in the execution of Charles I, and exile of Charles II. 1666 Great Fire of London burns much of the city to the ground. 1707 The Act of Union links England, Wales and Scotland under one parliament. 1799–1815 Napoleon threatens invasion but is defeated at Trafalgar and Waterloo. 1837–1901 Under the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Empire expands its influence across the globe. 1914 The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria leads to the outbreak of WWI. 1926 Millions of workers down tools during the General Strike. 1939–45 WWII: Britain, with allies from America and the Commonwealth, defeats Germany. 1953 The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II takes place in Westminster Abbey. 1960s Many former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean declare independence from Britain. 1979 Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party wins the general election. 1997 The Labour Party wins the general election with a record-breaking majority. 1999 Devolution leads to the formation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. 2003–04 Britain joins the US-led invasion of Iraq. 2005 Labour is re-elected for a third term with Tony Blair still at the helm. 2007 Tony Blair resigns, and Gordon Brown takes over as Britain’s prime minister. 2010 A coalition between Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats wins the election.


pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Little did I suspect that from this squad, Mike Boyce would rise to become First Sea Lord and then Chief of the Defence Staff before taking his seat in the House of Lords as Lord Boyce of Pimlico and becoming a Knight of the Garter. Jeremy Blackham would become Vice Chief of the Defence Staff and a Knight of the British Empire. Garth Morrison would take voluntary early retirement and go on to become Chief Scout and a Knight of the Thistle, the top honour in Scotland. Rodney Pattisson MBE would go on to win two Olympic Gold Medals and one Silver for sailing, plus three World Championship Golds in the Flying Dutchman Class.

I was now up with the likes of Hornblower. Four days later, a pop group called The Beatles played their first gig on Merseyside. They were about to go stratospheric; I was about to go to Singapore. They were at the cutting edge of a new British pop culture that would conquer the world; I was at the tail end of a disappearing British Empire. During my first term at Dartmouth, the Soviet Union had detonated a fifty-eight megaton hydrogen bomb over Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic, the largest ever man-made explosion, fifty-eight thousand times larger than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And, horror of horrors for the Americans, the new Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, had announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba would be embracing International Communism.

(Left to Right: Lt Cdr Paul Thomas (later Admiral); Mechanician McCrum (Reactor Panel operator); Mechanician McDonagh; Captain Andrew Thomson, Captain of the Tenth (Polaris) Squadron; Mechanician Murdoch; the author. Source credit: Crown copyright Leading Mechanic James McWilliams (‘Bungy Mack’) and me outside Buckingham Palace. He had just been awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and I had just received my MBE (Membership of the British Empire). Source credit: Crown copyright A personal triumph: a Sub Harpoon missile is loaded into the torpedo compartment of HMS Odin, much to the annoyance of the Ministry of Defence who had no plans for her to have this weapon. Odin deployed with it to the Falklands war zone. She remains the Royal Navy’s only missile-firing diesel boat.


pages: 369 words: 120,636

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London by David Wragg

Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Crossrail, financial independence, gentrification, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Louis Blériot, low interest rates, North Sea oil, railway mania, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Winter of Discontent, yield management

And the horse-drawn bus, we should remember, was no humble convenience as it was very much the mode of transport of the middle classes, who could afford the fares, while the working classes walked. The one obvious relief to all of this pressure on the streets was the River Thames. This was the main source of many of the supplies needed by London. True, London grew as a great international trading port, and its growth matched that of the British Empire, but much of the cargo handled in London came from elsewhere in England and was intended for the consumption of Londoners and London business. Coal came from Newcastle by sea, and salted fish from ports much closer in East Anglia and Kent. It was not just cargo that came and went using the Thames.

Having a railway land on its doorstep was as big a godsend to a hard-pressed local authority in the nineteenth century as having a major airport would be today, but in the case of the railways, central government also saw its opportunity to raise revenue, and took it just as surely as in recent years it has begun to tax travellers by air. Given that London was the capital of a major empire, and that business did not feel itself constrained to remain within the bounds of that empire, the impact of London as a financial centre on railways was not confined to the British Isles or to the British Empire, but to countries that were independent of it and had no ties of language or culture. British companies were active in Latin America and Asia, developing railways and tramways. The first trunk lines arrive It was not just the fact that London was already heavily built-up that was a problem for the new railways as they attempted to get as close as possible to the centres of the City and of the West End, some of the railways had to approach through the better class of area where important property owners held sway.

The population of the London Passenger Transport area actually fell by 2.7 million to 7,147,000 between 1939 and 1944, largely due to evacuation, and the reduced travel caused by the blackout and German bombing, reduced traffic substantially at first. On the other hand, heavy movement of forces personnel brought heavy and sometimes unpredictable traffic peaks, while for service personnel from the British Empire and, later, the United States, even without the bright lights London continued to be the prime destination when on leave. This service leave traffic was encouraged with the offer of a ticket, costing a shilling, which gave visiting service personnel the use of most of London Transport’s bus, tram, trolleybus and underground services for a day, starting at 10.30 am.


pages: 428 words: 117,419

Cyclopedia by William Fotheringham

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed-gear, flag carrier, gentleman farmer, intermodal, Kickstarter, Northern Rock, safety bicycle, éminence grise

Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric Newby Pretty eccentric tale, as the travel-writing great sets off in the depths of winter with wife Wanda to contend with Irish weather, Irish signposts, and their shared lack of cycling experience. Round the World on a Wheel, John Foster-Fraser Kipling or Baden Powell should have written this account of one of the first around-the-world trips. If you want to get an idea of the mindset that made the British Empire what it was—in the best and worst senses—it’s all there in this book, reissued in 1982. An excellent Boys’ Own-style caper at the time, now a period piece. Into the Remote Places, Ian Hibell One of the original and best “ridden there” books. Hibell cannot match Moore for humor, or Newby for observation, but no holds are barred, from bust-ups with his (male) companions, to his love affair with a (female) companion, not to mention the extreme experience of crossing the Darien Gap, slashing the jungle, bike on his back, with a septic leg oozing pus.

Roberto, a fine cyclist, watched Coppi and Koblet on their racing trip to Colombia and ended up making bikes and running teams. His brother, meanwhile, had a velodrome built in his hometown of Medellin so he could bet on the races held there. COMMONWEALTH GAMES There was no cycling in the inaugural British Empire Games of 1930; bike races appeared four years later. The Games take place on a four-year cycle which alternates with the Olympics. It was not until 1974, after various name changes, that the name Commonwealth Games was settled upon. Women’s cycling did not appear until 1990, while the 1998 Games in Kuala Lumpur saw the introduction of team events, and in 2002, in Manchester, events for athletes with disability were introduced.

With two hugely successful models, the Chopper, an iconic kids’ bike, and the Twenty, a small-wheel shopping bike, the 1970s saw the company boom again. Raleigh profited from a massive increase in the market in the UNITED STATES and had other overseas operations including the Gazelle company in Holland and large sales of classic old roadsters across the former British empire. By 1975 its site in Nottingham covered 75 acres. In Europe, Raleigh sponsored the most successful professional team of the late 1970s and early 1980s, managed by the Dutchman Peter Post but barely ever including more than one British cyclist in its lineup. Post brought the company world titles in 1978 and 1979 and the Tour de France title with Joop Zoetemelk in 1980, with 77 stage wins in the Tour between 1976 and 1983.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

“Hybridity, Race, and Science: The Voyage of the Zaca, 1934–1935.” Isis 103, no. 2 (2012): 229–53. ________. “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States.” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (April 2012): S95–S107. Anker, Peder. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Bashford, Alison. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Bendyshe, T. “The History of Anthropology: On the Anthropology of Linnaeus—1735–1776.” In Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London (London: Trübner and Co., 1865).

“Take a bird or a lizard or a flower …” Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 19; Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Knopf, 2009), 49. Luminaries and royal patrons Smethurst, Travel Writing and Natural World; Blunt, Linnaeus, 153–58. Linnaeus discounted even the most obvious Nancy J. Jacobs, “Africa, Europe, and the Birds Between Them,” in James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman, Eco-cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). In the sixteenth century See, e.g., Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). the alternative idea that birds annually traveled thousands of miles Dingle, Migration; Ron Cherry, “Insects and Divine Intervention,” American Entomologist 61, no. 2 (2015): 81–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/tmv001.

Chew, “Indigene Versus Alien in the Arab Spring: A View Through the Lens of Invasion Biology,” in Uzi Rabi and Abdelilah Bouasria, eds., Lost in Translation: New Paradigms for the Arab Spring (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2017). Elton delivered his warnings about invasive species Matthew K. Chew, “A Picture Worth Forty-One Words: Charles Elton, Introduced Species and the 1936 Admiralty Map of British Empire Shipping,” Journal of Transport History 35, no. 2 (2014): 225–35. “one of the central scientific books of our century” David Quammen, back cover blurb to Elton, Ecology of Invasions. Produced by Walt Disney studios Jack Jungmeyer, “Filming a ‘Wilderness,’ ” New York Times, August 3, 1958; Cruel Camera: Animals in Movies, documentary film, Fifth Estate program, CBC Television, May 5, 1982.


pages: 224 words: 69,494

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

Politically an argument in favour of reducing mobility has a lot in common with an argument in late 18th century Liverpool, Bristol and Lancaster for abolishing the slave trade. Why would any right-minded person want to abolish something that played such a large part in national life, in the ideology of the British Empire and in the economic viability of several cities? Those that argued for abolition of the slave trade and then slavery itself had a tough time but they succeeded (Hague, 2008). History is littered with dramatic examples of paradigm shift and there is no reason to suppose that the mobility paradigm will not follow slavery, children working down coal mines, the denial of voting rights to women and other ridiculous examples of 19th and early 20th century norms and be consigned to the dustbin.

Like all major examples of social change, inevitability goes with the requirement for constant repetition, persuasion, reinforcement and engagement. Britain did not abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself because it woke up one morning and decided it was the right thing to. Abolition followed serious, sustained effort to bring about that change. The British Empire did not wake up one morning and suddenly agree with the “Quit India” campaign. The decision to abandon “the jewel in the crown” was the result of sustained effort and by major political changes that made it inevitable. A similar story can be told about the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany.


pages: 277 words: 72,603

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal

3D printing, air gap, Anthropocene, British Empire, clean water, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elisha Otis, Guggenheim Bilbao, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method

Throughout its history, whether under British rule or as an independent nation, supplying its inhabitants with enough water has been a constant challenge. The earliest sources of water in Singapore were streams and wells, which served the country adequately when the population was a mere 1,000. But after 1819, when Sir Stamford Raffles made the country part of the British Empire, the numbers greatly increased. By the 1860s, 80,000 people were on the island, and the rulers began building reservoirs to store water. In 1927, an agreement was reached with neighbouring country Malaysia, enabling the Singaporeans to rent land in Johor, from where they could pipe untreated water from the Johor River.

Romano; here courtesy of wikipedia; here © exaklaus-photos; here © Heritage Images; here © Heritage Images; here © Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo; here © Fotosearch / Stinger; here © Stock Montage; here © Washington Imaging / Alamy Stock Photo; here © Popperfoto; here © North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo; here © Empato INDEX Page numbers in italic refer to the illustrations 3D printing here, here, here 9/11 here Abbey Mills Sewage Treatment Works, London here, here acanthus leaves here acceleration, of sway here Acropolis, Athens here Acton, London here, here Admiralty here adobe here aeroplanes here, here aggregates here, here air gaps, fire prevention here akasha here Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, Japan here Alexander the Great here Anatolia here, here Andronicus of Cyrrhus here Angel of Independence victory column, Mexico City here aqueducts here, here, here, here, here, here aquifers here, here Arabian Sea here arches aqueducts here, here, here Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence here construction here, here corbelled arches here, here Derinkuyu here forces acting on here, here, here, here, here insulae here pointed arches here quadripartite arches here, here Roman here, here, here, here, here Archimedes here, here, here, here, here, here, here Arciniega, Claudio de here, here Aristotle here Armageddon (film) here Armstrong, Lord here Arnolfo di Cambio here Arthur, Chester here ash, volcanic here, here, here Assyria here Athens here Acropolis here Parthenon here Propylaea here ‘Tower of the Winds’ here, here atoms here Atrush, River here Attenborough, David here attenuation tanks, sewage here Augustus, Emperor here Avignon here Azerbaijan here Aztecs here, here, here, here, here, here Babylon here, here, here bacteria recycling waste water here, here ‘self-healing’ concrete here sewage treatment here baking here balance, cable-stayed bridges here balconies here Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong here Baroque architecture here basements, skyscrapers here, here Basilica Cistern, Istanbul here, here Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence here Batman Begins (film) here Battersea, London here Bazalgette, Joseph here, here, here, here, here beams here, here, here, here in ancient architecture here exoskeletons here flexing here, here, here, here shape here bearings cable-stayed bridges here earthquake protection here, here Beckton sewage treatment works, London here, here beehives here, here Beijing here Belgium here ‘the bends’ here Bénézet, Saint here Berbers here Bessemer, Anthony here Bessemer, Henry here, here Bessemer Process here, here, here Bilbao here biomimicry here, here, here birds here, here ‘Bird’s Nest’ National Stadium, Beijing here Black Sea here boats Falkirk Wheel here, here The Pontoon here, here, here sailing here Boeing aeroplanes here bolts, tie-systems here Bombay Stock Exchange here, here bombs here, here Bond, James here bonds, metals here bone, biomimicry here Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City here bouncy bridges here braces here bricks here, here arches here, here Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence here, here concrete here Indus Valley Civilisation here Jericho here load-bearing structures here manufacture here mortar here, here Roman here, here, here tunnels here, here, here Victorian architecture here bridges here Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, Japan here Brooklyn Bridge, New York here, here, here, here, here cable-stayed bridges here, here, here, here construction here Falkirk Wheel here, here forces here Forth Bridge here foundations here, here, here, here Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco here graphene here Ishibune Bridge here, here London Bridge here, here Millau Viaduct here, here movement joints here Northumbria University Footbridge, Newcastle here, here, here, here, here, here, here Old London Bridge here, here piers here, here Pont d’Avignon here The Pontoon here, here, here Quebec Bridge here, here, here reinforced concrete here resonance here, here, here Roman here rope bridges here silk bridge here, here span here steel here stress-ribbon bridges here, here suspension bridges here, here, here, here Sydney Harbour Bridge here, here, here and temperature here 3D printing here trusses here tuned mass dampers here, here Britain Beneath Your Feet (documentary) here British Association here British Empire here Bronze Age here Brooklyn Bridge, New York here, here, here, here, here Brooklyn Engineers’ Club here Brunel, Isambard here, here, here, here Brunel, Marc here, here, here, here Brunel, Mary here Brunel, Sophia here, here Brunelleschi, Filippo here, here, here, here, here, here burdock here Burj Khalifa, Dubai here, here, here Byzantine Empire here, here cables cable-stayed bridges here, here, here, here The Pontoon here stress-ribbon bridges here, here suspension bridges here, here, here caisson disease here, here caissons here, here, here, here calcite here calcium, in concrete here, here California here Caligula, Emperor here Callimachus here Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction here Canada here canals aqueducts here Falkirk Wheel here, here Nineveh here locks here, here Singapore here cantilevers here carbon adding to iron here in steel here, here, here carbon dioxide, concrete-making here carbon fibres, elevators here cast iron here Castle of the Teutonic Order, Malbork here catenary curves here, here, here Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence here, here, here, here causeways here caves, Derinkuyu here Celtic axes here, here cement here, here, here, here, here see also concrete centering here, here, here, here Centre Pompidou, Paris here, here, here, here ceramics here cesspits here Chatham Dockyard here, here Chicago here DeWitt-Chestnut apartment building here John Hancock Center here, here China here, here, here, here, here, here cholera epidemics here, here, here chuna mortar here Church here cisterns here, here clay in cement here clay mines here reinforcing tunnels with here tunnelling into here see also bricks cofferdams here, here, here collapses here, here columns here, here dis-proportionate collapse here after explosions here Old London Bridge here pontoon bridges here Quebec Bridge here, here resonance and here Ronan Point here, here, here, here, here, here Tacoma Narrows Bridge here Tay Bridge here World Trade Center New York here Colosseum, Rome here, here, here columns here, here, here, here Basilica Cistern, Istanbul here, here Corinthian columns here, here exoskeletons here failure here, here insulae here Pantheon, Rome here safety calculations here World Trade Center collapse here Commission of Sewers here compression here, here arches here, here, here, here beams here cable-stayed bridges here columns and here concrete here, here domes here, here load-bearing systems here skyscraper cores here suspension bridges here computer-aided design here concrete here aggregates here, here aqueducts here arches here beams here, here carbon dioxide emissions here columns here compression here, here cracking here, here, here curved shapes here domes here in fires here floors here, here, here making here moulds here Pantheon, Rome here, here, here, here piles here, here prefabrication here, here reinforced concrete here, here Roman here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘self-healing’ concrete here in skyscrapers here, here, here, here, here, here, here sound proofing here steel reinforcement bars here strength here and tension here, here versatility here conduits, kariz (water system) here, here Constantine, Emperor here cooking here Cooper, Theodore here corbelled arches here, here core, skyscrapers here, here, here, here, here Corinth here Corinthian columns here, here Cornwall here Cow Court, Rotherhithe here cranes here, here, here, here, here, here Crassus, Marcus Licinius here Crimean War (1853–56) here Crossness Sewage Treatment Works, Erith, London here, here Crossrail, London here crows here Crystal Palace station, London here crystals, in metals here, here culverts here, here, here curved shapes here Czech Republic here dampers earthquake protection here, here tuned mass dampers here, here, here, here, here ultra-thin skyscrapers here Dardanelles here Darius I, King of Persia here Dark Ages here Darlington here Darwin’s bark spider here, here Delhi, Iron Pillar here, here, here, here Democritus here Derinkuyu here desalination plants here deserts, water systems here DeWitt-Chestnut apartment building, Chicago here Dhaka University here diagrids here, here disease here, here, here, here dis-proportionate collapse here diving bells here, here diving boards here, here domes Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence here, here, here construction here forces acting on here, here Pantheon, Rome here, here, here, here, here Doric columns here drawbridges here Driver, Charles Henry here drones here Dubai, Burj Khalifa here, here, here ductility here, here earth four elements here see also soil earthquakes here, here, here, here East India Company here East London Railway Company here East River, New York here Eastgate Centre, Zimbabwe here Edge Moor Iron Company here Edinburgh here eggs here, here, here, here Egypt here, here, here, here, here Eiffel Tower, Paris here, here, here elasticity metals here spider silk here electricity cables here, here elements here elevators here, here, here, here, here, here embankments, rivers here Empire State Building, New York here, here end-bearing piles here, here energy earthquakes here making concrete here pulleys here Epicurus here epidemics here, here Erciyes here escalators here escape routes, skyscrapers here, here exoskeletons here, here, here, here, here, here, here exothermic reactions here explosions here, here, here, here external braced frames see exoskeletons Fa Hsien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms here fairy chimneys here, here Falkirk here Falkirk Wheel here, here Ferris Wheels here fertilisers here, here fibre optic cables here filters, waste water here, here fires here, here concrete and here Great Fire of London here Great Fire of Rome here Old London Bridge here World Trade Center, New York here First World War here Fisac, Miguel here flexible membrane moulds here floating bridges here, here floods here, here, here floors here, here, here, here Florence Basilica di Santa Croce here Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore here, here, here, here, here Palazzo Vecchio here Ponte Vecchio here forces in arches here, here and collapses here designing bridges here in domes here, here earthquakes here frame structures here, here gravity here, here load-bearing structures here, here piles here pulleys here wind here see also compression; tension formwork, concrete here Forth and Clyde Canal here Forth Bridge, Scotland here Forum, Rome here, here fossils here foundations here bridges here, here, here, here, here building on soft ground here, here insulae here on piles here Roman here, here tunnels here four elements here Four National Taps (Singapore) here frame structures here, here exoskeletons here, here, here, here, here, here, here parts of here tie-systems here France here, here, here Franchini, Gianfranco here Fratres Pontifices here frequency here, here fresh water here friction arches here, here piles here, here weight and here From Russia with Love (film) here furnaces here, here, here Gardon, River here, here Garuda here gas explosions here geometry, irregular here Georgetown Visitation Convent here, here Germany here, here, here ‘The Gherkin’, London here, here, here, here Giotto here, here Giza, Great Pyramid here, here Glasgow here glass here, here, here, here Goh Chok Tong here Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco here Gonabad here Gothic architecture here grape skins here graphene here, here gravity here, here, here Great Fire of London (1666) here Great Fire of Rome (AD 64) here Great North Run here, here Great Pyramid of Giza here, here ‘Great Stink’, London (1858) here Great Wall of China here, here Greece here, here, here, here ‘ground granulated blast furnace slag’ (GGBS) here Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao here guns, Crimean War here Gupta dynasty here Gyllius, Petrus here gypsum here, here, here Hadrian, Emperor here Harappa here, here Harris, Andres here Hasan here Haughwout, E.V. & Co. here, here healing here Hearst Tower, Manhattan here, here Heartlands Project, Cornwall here Hellespont here, here Heraclitus of Ephesus here Herodotus, The Histories here herringbone pattern, brick-laying here, here Hewitt, Abram here Heydar Aliyev Center, Azerbaijan here Hiero II, King here Hinduism here, here Hittites here Hoare, Edward here Hodge, Ivy here, here Hong Kong here, here Hood Canal Bridge here Horologion of Andronikos Kyrrhestes, Athens here, here horse hair, reinforcing plaster here hot-working metal here, here House of Commons, London here houses frame structures here, here insulae (apartment buildings) here, here load-bearing structures here, here on Old London Bridge here Huitzilopochtli here huts, mud here, here, here hydration here, here hydraulics, earthquake protection here Iltutmish, tomb of, Delhi here Imperial College London here India here, here, here, here, here, here Indus Valley Civilisation here, here Industrial Revolution here Institute of Making here Institution of Structural Engineers here insulae (apartment buildings) here, here intumescent paint here Iran (Persia) here, here Iraq here, here iron here cast iron here frame structures here furnaces here Iron Pillar, Delhi here, here, here, here reinforced concrete here Roman here rust here strengthening here suspension bridges here wrought iron here see also steel Iron Age here iron oxide here irregular geometry here Ishibune Bridge, Japan here, here Islamic architecture here, here Israel here Istanbul, Basilica Cistern here, here Italy here, here, here jacks, tightening cables here Japan here, here, here, here Jeddah Tower here Jenga here Jericho here Jerwan here jibs, cranes here John Hancock Center, Chicago here, here Johor River here Jordan here Jordan, River here Justinian, Emperor here kariz (water system) here, here keystones, arches here, here Khan, Fazlur here, here, here kilns, brick here, here, here Kodumanal here Kuala Lumpur here, here, here Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall, Stuttgart here lasers here lava, volcanic here, here Leaning Tower of Pisa here, here Lebanon here Lee Kuan Yew here Leeds University here LEGO here Leonardo da Vinci here, here Levant here lime here lime mortar here limestone here, here, here Lincoln Cathedral here Lincoln’s Inn, London here loads on arches here building on soft ground here load-bearing structures here, here patterned loading here piles here preventing collapses here World Trade Center collapse here, here, here locks, canals here, here Loki here London here, here Crossrail here Crystal Palace station here Great Fire here London Overground here New London Bridge here, here Old London Bridge here, here Ronan Point, Canning Town here, here, here, here, here, here 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) here, here, here, here St Pancras Renaissance Hotel here sewers here, here, here, here The Shard here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Tower of London here Tube here, here, here, here tunnels here, here, here Los Angeles here McLean, Thomas here McLure, Norman here Madagascar here Madrid here, here Malaysia here, here, here, here, here Malbork here Maltesers here Manhattan here, here, here, here maps, wind here Marathon, Battle of (490 BC) here Marmara here master builders here materials choice of here science of here see also concrete, steel etc mega-skyscrapers here, here Melendiz Daglari here membrane engineering here Menander here Mendeleev, Dmitri here Merdeka Tower, Kuala Lumpur here Mesopotamia here, here metal here bonds here ductility here elasticity here molecular structure here see also iron; steel Metropolitan Board of Works, London here Metropolitan Cathedral, Mexico City here, here, here Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, London here Mexico City here, here Angel of Independence victory column here Metropolitan Cathedral here, here, here Torre Latinoamericana here Torre Mayor skyscraper here, here mica here microfiltration here Middle Ages here Middle East here Millau Viaduct here, here Miller, Abraham here Milton Keynes here Milwaukee Art Museum here minarets here mines, clay here Miodownik, Mark here Mohenjo-daro here, here molecular structure, metal here Monier, Joseph here Moon here Morocco here mortars here, here, here, here moulds, for concrete here movement joints, bridges here mud mud huts here, here, here reinforcing with straw here multi-use buildings here Mumbai here, here, here MUPAG Rehabilitation Center, Madrid here muqanni here Murphy, Senator Henry here Murrow Memorial Bridge here mythology here, here Namazu here Napoleon Bonaparte here National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City here National Taps, Singapore here Native Americans here Nature, biomimicry here, here, here navvies here Neolithic man here Nero, Emperor here, here New York here, here, here Brooklyn Bridge here, here, here, here, here Empire State Building here, here Hearst Tower here, here 432 Park Avenue here World Trade Center here, here New York Bridge Company here New York Herald here New York Star here New York World’s Fair (1853) here NEWater here Newcastle, Northumbria University Footbridge here, here, here, here, here, here, here Newton, Isaac here, here third law of motion here, here, here newtons here Niederfinow Boat Lift here night soil trade here Nightingale, Florence here Nineveh here Norse mythology here Northumbria University Footbridge, Newcastle here, here, here, here, here, here, here octopuses here oculus (opening) here, here, here, here Old London Bridge here, here opus caementicium here Osaka here osmosis here, here, here Otis, Elisha here, here, here, here, here, here Ottoman Empire here Ovando-Shelley Dr Efraín here, here Oxford University here oxidation here oxygen, Bessemer Process here paint, intumescent here Pakistan here Palazzo Vecchio, Florence here Palm Jumeirah, Dubai here Pantheon, Rome here, here, here, here, here parabolic cables here Paris here Centre Pompidou here, here, here, here Eiffel Tower here, here, here Paris Exposition (1867) here 432 Park Avenue, Manhattan here Parker, John here, here Parthenon, Athens here patterned loading here pendulums earthquake protection here, here, here, here Metropolitan Cathedral, Mexico City here, here penthouses here Percival, Lt-General Arthur here periodic table here Persia here, here Peter of Colechurch here Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur here, here Philadelphia here Phoenicians here phosphorus here, here Piano, Renzo here piers, bridges here, here piledrivers here, here piles here, here, here, here, here, here Pillar, Iron (Delhi) here, here, here, here pipes, robots checking here Pisa, Leaning Tower of here, here plaster here, here plaster of Paris here Plataea here, here Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis here Plutarch’s Lives here pneumatic caissons here polyethylene (PE) formwork here polypropylene (PP) formwork here polystyrene blocks, formwork here polyvinylidene fluoride here Pompeii here, here Pompidou Centre, Paris here, here, here, here Pont d’Avignon here Pont du Gard aqueduct here, here Ponte Vecchio, Florence here The Pontoon here, here, here potholes here pozzolana here, here Pratt trusses here prefabrication here, here prehistoric buildings here Propylaea, Athens here Public Utilities Board, Singapore here pulleys here, here, here, here, here pumping stations, sewers here, here Purnell, Phil here pyramids here, here, here, here, here, here qanat (water system) here Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum here quadripartite arches here, here quartz here Quebec Bridge here, here, here Quebec City here Qutb complex, Delhi here, here Rael, Ronald here Raffles, Sir Stamford here raft foundations here, here railways here, here, here, here rainwater here, here, here, here recycling waste water here Regent’s Canal, London here reinforced concrete here, here Renaissance here, here Rennie, John here repairs, future possibilities here reservoirs here, here resonance here, here, here, here, here reverse osmosis here, here, here rice here Richard the Raker here rivers untreated sewage in here, here, here, here see also bridges road repairs here robots here, here, here rocks, formation of clay here Roebling, Emily Warren here, here, here, here, here, here, here Roebling, John Augustus here, here, here, here Roebling, Washington here, here, here Rogers, Richard here Romans here aqueducts here, here, here arches here, here, here, here, here Basilica Cistern, Istanbul here, here bricks here, here, here bridges here, here columns here concrete here, here, here, here, here, here, here cranes here, here, here fires here foundations here, here insulae (apartment buildings) here, here iron here on materials here mortars here ‘Tower of the Winds’, Athens here, here Rome here, here Colosseum here, here, here Forum here, here Pantheon here, here, here, here, here Ronan Point, Canning Town, London here, here, here, here, here, here rope bridges here, here ropes, pulleys here rotating bridges here, here Rotherhithe, London here rubber bands here, here rubber bearings here, here rust here, here safety, skyscrapers here, here sailing here Saint Lawrence River here, here 30 St Mary Axe, London (The Gherkin) here, here, here, here St Mary’s Church, Rotherhithe, London here St Mary’s Church, Stralsund here St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London here Salamis, Battle of (480 BC) here salty water desalination plants here reverse osmosis here, here, here San Francisco here sand, tunnelling into here sanitation here, here, here, here Saudi Arabia here Scotland Falkirk Wheel here, here Forth Bridge here Tay Bridge collapse here Scott, George Gilbert here sea urchins here Second World War here, here, here, here sedimentary rocks here ‘self-healing’ concrete here Sennacherib, King here sewers here, here, here, here Shanghai here The Shard, London here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sheffield here Sherlock Holmes (film) here The Shield (tunnel-boring machine) here, here, here Shinto here ships see boats shipworms here, here, here shock absorbers, earthquake protection here silicates, in concrete here silicon here, here silk bridge here, here Singapore here skulls, birds here skyscrapers basements here, here Burj Khalifa, Dubai here, here, here concrete in here, here, here, here, here, here, here core here, here, here, here, here elevators here, here escape routes here, here exoskeletons here, here, here, here, here, here, here explosions in here, here fires here first skyscrapers here height here, here, here mega-skyscrapers here, here piles here prefabrication here, here The Shard, London here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here slenderness ratios here stability systems here, here steel in here, here substructure here sway here, here, here, here and winds here slenderness ratios, skyscrapers here Snow, Dr John here Soho, London here soils piles in here subsidence here under London here water table here Spain here Spanish Pavilion, World Expo (2010) here Sparta here Spartacus here spiders, silk bridge here, here springs, wagon here, here stability systems, skyscrapers here, here stairs here, here starlings (artificial islands) here, here steel here beams here, here, here, here Bessemer Process here, here bridges here columns here core of skyscraper here, here, here, here ductility here exoskeletons here, here in fires here, here, here frame structures here hot-working here, here piles here reinforcing concrete with here, here, here rust here thermal expansion here trusses here waste materials here Stewart, James here stone bridge-building here constructing arches here load-bearing structures here Stralsund here Strasbourg Cathedral here straw, reinforcing mud with here Strépy-Thieu boat lift here stress-ribbon bridges here, here struts here Stuttgart here subsidence here, here substructure piles here, here skyscrapers here suspension bridges here, here, here, here sway, skyscrapers here, here, here, here Sydney Harbour Bridge here, here, here Syria here, here Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Washington here Taipei 101 tower here, here, here, here Taiwan here Taj Mahal, Agra here Tamil Nadu here Tarn valley here Tay Bridge here Tebitu, River here temperature bridges and here reinforced concrete and here Tenochtitlan here, here tension here, here beams here brick structures here cable-stayed bridges here, here, here concrete and here, here domes here, here metals here reinforced concrete here, here skyscraper cores here stress-ribbon bridges here suspension bridges here Teotihuacan here Teredo navalis (shipworm) here termite mounds here, here Texcoco, Lake here, here Thales here Thames, River Bazalgette’s sewers here, here New London Bridge here, here Old London Bridge here, here sewage in here Thames Tideway Tunnel here, here, here Thames Tunnel Company here, here, here thermal coefficients, reinforced concrete here Thrace here, here Three Gorges Dam here tie-systems here timber see wood toilets here, here, here Tokugawa shogunate here Tokyo here, here top-down construction method here, here, here Tornado Tower, Doha here Torre Latinoamericana, Mexico City here Torre Mayor skyscraper, Mexico City here, here toughness, spider silk here Tower Hamlets, London here Tower of London here towers cable-stayed bridges here, here suspension bridges here, here ‘Tower of the Winds’, Athens here, here and winds here see also skyscrapers treadwheels here Treasury (UK) here trees here, here, here, here Trevithick, Richard here triangles, trusses here, here, here Triton here trusses here, here, here Tuas here Tube, London here, here, here, here tubular system, exoskeletons here tuff here tuned mass dampers here, here, here, here, here tuning forks here tunnels kariz (water system) here, here Thames Tideway Tunnel here, here, here Thames Tunnel here, here, here, here tunnel boring machines (TBMs) here, here Turkey here, here, here, here turtles here, here typhoons here UN-Habitat here underground railways here, here, here, here underground structures here underwater structures here, here Union Canal, Scotland here United States Supreme Court Building, Washington here University of California, Berkeley here Urban VIII, Pope here Utica here vaults, quadripartite here, here Vauxhall Bridge, London here, here Velcro here ventilation systems here, here, here, here Vertigo (film) here Vesuvius, Mount here, here vibrations bridges here earthquakes here frequency here Victorian architecture here Vierendeel trusses here Vishnu, Lord here Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus here, here De Architectura here, here, here, here, here volcanoes here wagon springs here, here walls, wattle and daub here Wapping, London here War Office (British) here Warren, Gouverneur K. here Warren trusses here waste disposal here, here, here, here water here aqueducts here, here, here aquifers here, here bridge foundations here, here, here canals here, here cisterns here, here cofferdams here, here concrete-making here, here desalination plants here floods here inJapan here kariz here, here in London here, here osmosis here, here, here rainwater here, here, here, here recycling here reservoirs here, here in Singapore here waste water here, here, here, here water pipes here, here water table here wattle and daub here Wayss, Gustav Adolf here webs, spiders’ here, here weight and friction here gravity and here pulleys here weirs here wells here, here Westminster, London here Wheel, Falkirk here, here Wikipedia here Willis, Bruce here wind here, here wind maps here wind tunnels here, here windlasses here, here, here windows, insulae here, here women engineers here, here, here wood bridges here centering here, here, here early houses here, here formwork here piles here, here, here shipworms here wattle and daub here Woolwich Dockyard here World Expo (2010) here World Health Organization here World Trade Center, New York here, here World’s Fair, New York (1853) here wrought iron here Wuhan Greenland Centre here Xerxes, King of Persia here, here Zimbabwe here A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Roma Agrawal is a structural engineer who builds big.


pages: 261 words: 65,534

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau

British Empire, Ford Model T, Lewis Mumford, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War

The person who now dines at 7:30, for instance—which is perhaps the average dining hour of the Londoner—will then be dining at 6:10, which is preposterously early, and will be altogether unfashionable. Moreover, there is one aspect which would fill London with horror. If, for instance, a man were going to a seven o’clock dinner, under the new arrangement of daylight he would appear on the streets of London in evening dress at 5:40, which would shake the British Empire to its foundations.” DST IN PARLIAMENT After meeting thirteen times and hearing testimony from forty-two witnesses, the Select Committee reported favorably to Parliament on the Daylight Saving Bill. In its Special Report issued June 30, 1908, it defined the bill’s objective as “promoting the earlier and more extended use and enjoyment of daylight” April through September.

Having observed the success of Port Arthur, the citizens of nearby Fort William followed in their neighbors’ footsteps and made the change in 1910. Now the two principal communities of Ontario’s Lakehead Region were permanently on Eastern Time. That, however, was as far as Hewitson’s proposal spread. Canada, a dominion of the British Empire, followed the daylight saving controversy in Britain as Parliament debated Willett’s proposals. In 1909, a national DST bill was introduced in the Canadian Parliament, but it met a similar fate as Willett’s many attempts. With no national law, it would be up to cities themselves to experiment with daylight saving time.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

He was by nature a solitary person, but proved to be a great patriot when he helped England and its allies crack German codes 17 CHAPTER 2 during World War II. Turing was, in fact, a perfect example of how both sides in the conflict harnessed the greatest minds of their generation to do both basic and applied research for the war effort. For his brilliant code breaking, Turing won the Order of the British Empire in 1945. Written just before the war, Turing’s master’s thesis, “On Computable Numbers,” was his greatest contribution to computer science. In it, he proposed the questions that still remain central to the discipline decades later. Turing suggested that it should be possible to make a “Universal Machine,” a computer that could simulate the performance of any other device.

Intergalactic Computer Network and, 108, 152, 168 Machine Histories, 64 Macintosh computer, 165–167 Macrotelevision, 56–60 Madonna, 63 Madrid, 100, 130 Mahabharata, 28 MAKE magazine, 68–69 MAKER Faires, 68–69 Manchester Mark I computer, 18 “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (Licklider), 151 Mandela, Nelson, 113 Mandiberg, Michael, 41–42 Manhattan Project, 150 Manual labor, 3 Many Eyes, 126, 193n37 Mao Zedong, 86 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 44 Markets bespoke futures and, 97–104, 118, 207 INDEX Markets (continued) 120, 127, 131–132, 137–138 capitalism and, 13, 66, 75, 97–100, 104–105 (see also Commercial culture) culture machine and, 156, 161–167, 173 empowerment and, 8 entrepreneurs and, 99, 109, 156–157, 174 FIRE, 99–100 Global Business Network (GBN) and, 113, 115, 191n18 Great Depression and, 107 Greed and, 100 Internet television and, 9 mass culture and, 184n16 NASDAQ, 99 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 prosumers and, 120–121 retail, 103–105 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 September 11, 2001 and, 99–101, 130 Slow Food and, 5–6 social campaigns and, 190n8 stickiness and, 13, 16, 24, 30–33, 37 technofabulism and, 99–100 textile, 11 unimodernism and, 45, 48, 58–59, 71, 75 Web n.0 and, 81, 83, 86, 90 Martha Stewart Living magazine, 69 MaSAI (Massively Public Applications of the Imagination), xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 Masai tribe, 193n32 Mashing, 25, 54–55, 57, 74 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 71, 117, 144, 148, 151 Matrix, The (film series), 39 Mau, Bruce, 55–56, 102, 190n8 Mauchly, John, 148 McDonald’s, 5 McLuhan, Marshall, 2, 14, 116 Meaningfulness, xvi, 173 bespoke futures and, 119, 123, 128– 129, 133 categorization of, 29–30 defining, 27–29 disrupting flow and, 23–24 Enlightenment and, 129–139 play and, 32–34 power and, 32–34 stickiness and, 14, 17, 20 (see also Stickiness) toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unimodernism and, 42, 67, 77 uploading and, xvi, 29 Web n.0 and, 79 Mechanical calculator, 149 Mechanization, 44–45 Medium specificity, 56–57 Meliorism, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 Melodium label, 27 Memex, 108, 149–151 Memory, 46–47, 60, 67, 71, 109, 149, 194nn1,6 Metcalfe, Bob, 86–87 Metro Pictures gallery, 41 Michnik, Adam, 104 Mickey Mouse, 65, 88–90 Mickey Mouse Protection Act, 90 Microcinema, 56–60 Microfilm, 149–150 Microsoft, 144–145, 163–166, 172–173, 175, 196n21 Middle-class, 44 Mindfulness, 77, 79, 183n6 bespoke futures and, 123, 129 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 103–105 208 INDEX Mindfulness (continued) disrupting flow and, 23–24 info-triage and, xvi, 20–23, 121, 132, 143 stickiness and, 14, 17, 20–24, 27–29, 42 Mobility, 81–82, 128 Modders, 69–70 “Model B32” (Breuer), 45 Modernism, 36–37, 105–108 Modern Times (film), 45 Moore, Gordon, 156 Moore’s law, 156, 195n13 Morpheus, 92 Moses, Robert, 84 Motorola, 116 Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann), 60–63 Mouse, 158–159 MP3s, 2, 27 MS-DOS, 165–166 MTV, 31, 63 Murakami, Takashi, 49 Murger, Henri, 61 Musée du quai Branly, 66 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 42, 117 Music bebop, 25–27 calypso, 35–37 hip-hop, 53–54, 61 jazz, 25–27, 160 Napster and, 54, 92 remixing and, 53–55 (see also Remixing) Mutually assured destruction, xi MySpace, 81 Napoleonic Wars, 21 Napster, 54, 92 Narrative, 2, 8 bespoke futures and, 108, 110, 129–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 209 development of computer and, 143– 145, 174, 178 Enlightenment Electrified and, 129–139 gaming and, 188n25 isotypes and, 44, 125, 193n34 negative dialectics and, 29–30 Oprah and, xv, 180nn3,4 samizdat and, 59 storyline and, 59 unimodernism and, 58–59, 67, 71, 76 NASA, 51, 123 NASDAQ, 99 National Center for Biotechnology Information, 81 “Nature Boy” (Cole), 62 Nelson, Ted, 145, 168 Net.art, 52 Netscape, 169 Networks bespoke futures and, 98–101, 108, 112–113, 116, 119–126, 133, 137 commercial, 4–5 (see also Commercial culture) culture machine and, 143–144, 152, 167–168, 172–175, 178 development of computer, 8–9 flexibility of digital, 10 Global Business Network (GBN) and, 113, 115, 191n18 Intergalactic Computer Network and, 108, 152, 168 Metcalfe’s corollary and, 86–87 patio potato and, 10, 13 peer-to-peer, 15, 54, 92, 116, 126 stickiness and, 16–17, 22, 24, 29–36 unimodernism and, 39, 47–48, 54–57, 60, 64–65, 68–69, 73–74 Web n.0 and, 79–95 Neurath, Otto, 44, 125 New Economy, 190n3 bespoke futures and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138 INDEX New Economy (continued) dot-com bubble and, 145 fantasies of, 104 Hustlers and, 144 Newtonian physics, 118 New York City, 25–26, 84–86, 100, 130 New Yorker, 135 New York Museum of Modern Art, 42 New York Times, 61, 103 NeXT Cube, 167–168 Nirvana, 62 NLS (oN-Line System), 160 Nobel Prize, 156 Norman, Don, 16 Nouvel, Jean, 66 Noyce, Philip, 156 “Nude on a Red Background” (Léger), 45 Obama, Barack, 31 Odyssey (Homer), 28, 94–95 Offenbach, Jacques, 62 Ogilvy, Jay, 113–114 Open source, 36, 189n12 Creative Commons and, 90–93, 123, 173 development of computer and, 144, 170–173, 177 GNU and, 171, 173 Linux and, 75, 169–173, 197n27 Raymond and, 172 Stallman and, 170–171 Torvalds and, 144, 167–173 unimodernism and, 61, 69, 74–75 Web n.0 and, 116, 121–126 Opera, 40, 45, 60–63, 187n18 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 150 Oracle, 172–173 Order of the British Empire, 18 Otivion, 101 Ourobors, 175 Oxford Internet Institute, 83 Packard, Dave, 145, 157 Pac-Man game, 71 Page, Larry, 144, 174–176 Paris, 66 Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 25 Participation affordances and, 16–17 bespoke futures and, 98–99, 120–121, 129 culture machine and, 143–147, 151, 156–165, 170, 175–178 fan-based production and, 28–32 Licklider and, 151–152 MP3s and, 27 simulation and, 15–17 stickiness and, 15–17, 27–35 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unimodernism and, 54, 66–67, 74–80 Web n.0 and, 79–95 Patio potatoes, 9–10, 13 Patriarchs Bush and, 52, 108, 144, 147–152, 157 description of term, xv development of computer and, 143–144, 147–158, 162–163, 166–168 Licklider and, 108, 144, 147–148, 151–152, 158, 163, 168 Paul, Frank R., 109, 109–110 PBS, 68 PDP minicomputer, 71 Peer-to-peer networks, 15, 54, 92, 116, 126 Perot, Ross, 145 Perpetual beta, 36 Personal digital assistants (PDAs), 17 Petrini, Carlo, 5–6 Photography, 15, 40–42, 46–47, 64, 109, 150, 176 Photoshop, 131 Picasso, Pablo, 93 210 INDEX Pico Swap Mart, 105 Pirate Bay, 92 Pixar, 167 Pizza Hut, 5 Plagiarism, 41 Play, 188n25 bespoke futures and, 110–111, 130–131 culture machine and, 143, 153, 160–163 gaming and, 15, 23, 33–34, 57, 67, 70–74, 72, 188n25 meaningfulness and, 32–34 modders and, 69–70 power and, 32–34 rejuveniles and, 67 running room and, 74–77 stickiness and, 13, 15, 32–34, 70–74 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185n22, 185n23 unimodernism and, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77 video games and, 15, 23, 33–34, 57, 67, 72, 188n25 Web n.0 and, 85, 88 Play space, 74–77 Plug-in Drug, The (Winn), xii Plutocrats culture machine and, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 description of term, xv Hewlett and, 145, 157 Moore and, 156 Noyce and, 156 Packard and, 145, 157 profit and, xv Watsons and, 144, 153–157, 165–166 Plutopian meliorism, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 Poetry, 14, 18–19, 136, 145 Politics African National Congress and, 113 211 Berlin Wall and, xvi, 85, 97, 99, 104 Communism and, 97–98, 103 copyright and, 88–93 Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi fantasies of, 104 New Economy and, 104 propaganda and, 31, 103, 124 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 Slow Food and, 5–7 Soviet Union and, xi, 31, 49–52, 59, 73, 85, 88, 97, 102–107, 146 Tiananmen Square and, 104 Velvet Revolution and, 104 Pong, 71 Popper, Karl, 107 Popular Mechanics magazine, 69 Pop-up ads, 23 Positivism, 10, 125 Postmodernism, 29–30, 39–41, 74, 79, 130, 135 PostScript World, 55–56, 102 Poststructuralism, 29–30 Power, 8 bespoke futures and, 98–103, 112– 116, 119–126, 129–130, 136–137 culture machine and, 143, 147, 150– 151, 155–156, 163, 166, 169, 175 meaningfulness and, 32–34 play and, 32–34 stickiness and, 13, 17, 22, 30–34 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unimodernism and, 39, 49–50, 62, 71–75 Web n.0 and, 81–87, 90–95 PowerBook, 39 Pro bono work, 111 Production appropriation and, 28, 31, 35, 41 balance and, 13 collaborative, 30 INDEX Production (continued) continuous partial, 34 DIY movements and, 67–70 fan culture and, 28–32, 48 mashing and, 25, 54–55, 57, 74 mechanization and, 44–45 modders and, 69–70 open source, 36, 61, 69, 74–75, 91–92, 116, 121–126, 144, 170– 173, 177, 189n12 plagiarism and, 41 remixing and, 27, 35, 39, 53–54, 62–63, 70, 92–94, 129, 189n12 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unfinish and, xvi, 34–37, 51, 67, 70, 76–79, 92, 127–129, 136 WYMIWYM (What You Model Is What You Manufacture) and, 64–67, 74, 131 Propaganda, 31, 103, 124 Prosumers, 120–121 Psychology culture machine and, 151, 161 Gestalt, 42–43 Licklider and, 151 propaganda and, 31, 103, 124 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 stickiness and, 16, 21–22 unimodernism and, 42–44, 56 Public domain, 91 Publishing, 31, 190n8 bespoke future and, 109–110, 112 culture machine and, 146, 148–149, 168 DIY movement and, 67–69 Gutenberg press and, 11, 137–138 unimodernism and, 55–65, 68 Puccini, Giacomo, 61 Punk aesthetic, 46, 67–68, 87, 110 Quantum theory, 148 Radio, 8 Radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs), 65 Radiohead, 39 Ramayana, 28 Rand, Paul, 43 Raymond, Eric, 172 Raytheon, 149 Rear Window (film), 44 Relativity, 49–50, 186n4 Religion, xi, 1, 13, 76, 130–135, 138 Remixing, 27, 94, 129, 189n12 appropriation and, 28, 31, 35, 41 Creative Commons and, 92 Moulin Rouge and, 60–63 unimodernism and, 39, 53–54, 53–55, 62–63, 70 Renaissance, 60 Rent (Larson), 61 Reperceiving, 112–113 Reuters Spectracolor Board, 9 Revivalism, 60 Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (BBC documentary), 10 Rheingold, Howard, 145 Rick’s Café, 90 Roberts, Alwyn “Lord Kitchener,” 25–27 Robot butlers, xiv Rockefeller, John D., 166 Rolling Stone magazine, 67 Romanticism, 103 Romeo and Juliet (hip-hop version), 61 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 148 Rope (film), 44 Roux, A., 11 Royal Dutch Shell, 112, 112–113 Royal Library of Alexandria, 89 R-PR (Really Public Relations), xvi, 123–127 RSS feeds, xvii Rumsfeld, Donald, 99 Running room, 74–77 Run time, 57 212 INDEX environmental perception and, 16 memes and, 19, 53–54, 76, 87, 91, 98, 113, 143–144, 149–150, 156–162, 165–170, 178, 194n1 mimicry and, xvii MP3s and, 27 participation and, 15–17 stickiness and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 unimodernism and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 Sinatra, Frank, 63 Skype, 15 Skyscrapers, xiv Slow movements, 5–7, 181n7 Slurpees, 4 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), 62 Smith & Hawken, 113 Snakes on a Plane (film), 30 Snow White (Disney film), 20 Social issues advertisement and, 23, 52, 57, 59, 107, 175–177, 184nn12,15 Aquarians and, xv, 144, 152, 157, 159–169 atomic age and, xi (see also Atomic age) Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 bespoke futures and, xvi, 97–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 97–100, 103–105 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 cell phones and, xiii, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Communism and, 97–98, 103 computers and, xvi, 5, 15–19 (see also Computers) Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi dangers of overabundance and, 7–10 desk jobs and, 3 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 Sacred texts, 28 Saint Laurent, Yves, 60 Saks Fifth Avenue, 31 Samizdat, 59 Scenario planning bespoke futures and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 chaos theory and, 117–119 crafting of, 113–116 Ogilvy and, 113–114 Schwartz and, 113–114 Scènes de la vie Bohème (Murger), 61 Schindler, Rudolph, 45 Schrödinger, Erwin, 49 Schwartz, Peter, 113–115, 119 Scott, Ridley, 107 Scratching, 53 Searchers, 167, 177–178 Brin and, 144, 174–176 description of term, xv–xvi Page and, 144, 174–176 Sears, 103–105 September 11, 2001, xvi–xvii, 99–101, 130 SETI@home, 122 Sex, 7, 19, 88, 129–130, 167 Shakespeare, William, 28, 44 Shannon, Claude, 148 Shockley, William, 156 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 156 Silicon Valley, 149, 161, 164 Silly Symphonies (Disney film), 88 Simon, John, Jr., 39 Simulation, xvi, 2, 11 affordances and, 16–17 bespoke futures and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 buttons/knobs and, 16 communication devices and, 15–16 culture machine and, 143–144, 147– 152, 156–160, 166–168, 175–178 downloading and, 143, 168 emulation and, 183n3 213 INDEX Social issues (continued) figure/ground and, xvi, 42–43, 46, 102 folksonomies and, 80–81 hackers and, 22–23, 54, 67, 69, 162, 170–173 Holocaust and, 107 Hosts and, xv, 144, 167, 175 hypercontexts and, xvi, 7, 48, 76–77 information overload and, 22, 149 MaSAI and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 meaningfulness and, xvi, 14, 17, 20, 23–29, 42, 67, 77, 79, 119, 123, 128–129, 133, 173 narrative and, xv, 2, 7–8, 58–59, 67, 71, 76, 108, 110, 130–132, 143– 145, 174, 178, 180n4, 188n25, 193n34 personal grounding and, xiv–xv play and, xvi, 13, 15, 32–34, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77, 85, 88, 110–111, 130–131, 143, 153, 160–163, 185n22, 188n25 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 power and, xvi, 8, 13, 17, 22 (see also Power) relationship with data and, 32 religion and, xi, 1, 13, 76, 130–135, 138 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, xvi, 123–127 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 suburbs and, 3, 8 television and, xii (see also Television) terrorism and, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 unfinish and, xvi, 34–37, 51, 67, 70, 76–79, 92, 127–129, 136 urban planning and, 84–86 utopia and, 36, 73, 97, 101, 104, 108, 110, 120, 127–129, 138 wants vs. needs and, 13, 37, 57 wicked problems and, 158 World War I era and, 21, 107, 123, 146, 190n1 World War II era and, xi, 18, 25, 32, 47, 73, 107–108, 144–150, 157, 170 Socialists, 102–105 Software platforms, 15, 164, 170 Sontag, Susan, 135 Sopranos, The (TV show), 7 Soundscapes, 53–55 Soviet Union, 31, 85, 88, 146 Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 fall of, 104 gulags of, 107 samizdat and, 59 unimodernism and, 49–52, 73 Space Invaders, 71 Spacewar!


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

Belcher’s grand Baroque design—one of the first neo-Baroque buildings in London—borrowed from the buildings of more established professions such as medicine and the law, giving the fledgling profession an aura of gravitas and permanence, while its site near banks, gentlemen’s clubs and the buildings of Sir Christopher Wren lent it dignity by association. Similar accounting societies soon spread throughout the British Empire, the first being established in Canada in 1880. The Antipodes took to the new profession with astonishing enthusiasm. By 1899 six institutes of accountants had been established in Australia. In 1905 in Australia and New Zealand there was one chartered accountant for every 4000 people, a striking figure when compared to Scotland’s one accountant for 6500 people, Italy’s one for 13,000, and England and Wales’ one for 10,500.

As Skidelsky says, for Keynes the ‘real “heart of the matter”—in global as well as in domestic policy—was to prevent unemployment by reducing the attractions of holding money’. Keynes’s idea was taken up in Washington, but remodelled in favour of the United States (just as Keynes’s original concept had favoured the British Empire) and transformed into two international bodies: the Bank for Reconstruction and Development (which became the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was the creation of these and other international organisations after the Second World War that made the gathering of national income statistics an essential task for every nation involved and prompted an era of national income accounting.


Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

Constructed in 1833 to transport slate from the quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog to waiting ships on the Irish Sea, downhill trains were powered by gravity, with horses deployed to heave empty trucks back uphill. The horses were doubtless relieved when steam locomotives took over duties in the mid-19th century, capable of carrying greater loads of slate to be shipped to rooftops across the British Empire. Ffestiniog’s northerly neighbour, the Welsh Highland Railway, opened for business in the 1920s, also hoping to plunder the mineral riches of the region – though both swiftly fell victim to declining demand for slate and the growing popularity of the motorcar. They had both closed completely to freight and passengers by the mid-1940s.

Even if you’re not a railway enthusiast, it’s worth learning a little about the engines, a few of which have been pressed into service as far afield as South Africa and Australia. Look out for examples of the Double Fairlie engine: the curious double-ended locomotives that are the icon of the Ffestiniog Railway. The powerful Garratt design is commonly used on the Welsh Highland Railway, having been employed widely across the British Empire. ❸ MAKE IT HAPPEN Trains on both lines have seasonal timetables: the Ffestiniog has up to eight daily departures in high summer (July and August), while the Welsh Highland has three daily departures during peak times. Both are closed for extended periods in the winter (November– February).


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Recognizing their own weakness and realizing the futility of trying to sustain colonial rule, the Belgians conceded independence to the Congo within a year, though they left behind a fragile state wracked by internal divisions that would soon descend into civil war. The size and geographical spread of the British empire meant that decolonization was bound to be a more complex process than it was for the Netherlands or Belgium. As they had done when building their empire, British representatives usually tried to co-opt nationalist leaders and local power-brokers into the process of dissolving imperial rule. It was far from an invariable success, though it often helped to smooth the process of transition and avoid the descent into colonial war.

The Rhodesian government declared independence in November 1965 in the teeth of British opposition to such a move, aiming to retain the dominance of the white minority despite condemnation by the rest of the Commonwealth. This led Rhodesia into a brutal fifteen-year civil war but merely delayed the inevitable. Rhodesia eventually would be given independence as the new state of Zimbabwe in April 1980. By then the British empire was – other than lingering, unimportant remnants – long gone, its obsequies effectively pronounced in the government’s withdrawal in 1968 of British forces from bases ‘East of Suez’. Britain could no longer afford expensive and unnecessary global commitments. And already by the early 1960s trade with the Commonwealth was shrinking fast.

It took de Gaulle’s statesmanship and realism to end the largely nominal integration into France of what, despite the official denials, had in reality all along been a colony resting on discrimination against the nine million indigenous inhabitants by a million settlers. By the mid-1960s only fragments of the once-mighty French and British empires were left. The age of empire was over. * * * The state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill – the last survivor of the ‘big three’ wartime leaders – on 30 January 1965 symbolized the passing of a generation wedded to the certainties of the nation state, imperialist domination and European great-power politics.


pages: 415 words: 127,092

Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

British Empire, classic study, European colonialism, food desert, gentleman farmer, gentrification, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, profit motive, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight

It is so famous an event that in addition to the numerous books that have been written about it, pageants have been performed around it, and places (Pontiac, Michigan) as well as things (the Pontiac car and Pontiac Silverdome Stadium) named for its intrepid leader.22 Pontiac, the son of an Ottawa man and Ojibwe woman, was a skilled orator and warrior who sought to inspire an all-out war against the British Empire, which had spread its reach into his Great Lakes homeland. A French collaborator who had sided with that country in the French and Indian War, Pontiac aimed to gather Ottawa, Ojibwe, Huron, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, and French combatants—some of whom had had group rivalries in the past—to wage war against the British and undercut their newly won military and hence commercial victory in the region.

The treaty called for Native relinquishment of massive swaths of land in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, including “the post of Detroit, and all the land to the north, the west and the south of it.” This left little else in the way of Indian land in Detroit, and those portions remaining would be taken by 1807. As indigenous people had suspected throughout the long years of war, the Americans fully intended to dispossess them, as the “revolutionaries who fought for freedom from the British Empire in the East also fought to create an empire of their own in the West.”51 Although the indigenous western resistance seemed to have been quelled after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, one final barrier stood in the way of American expansion into the inland West: the British occupation of Great Lakes forts.

Michelle Cassidy, Emily Macgillivray, and Tiya Miles, “Placing Indigenous Peoples in Early Detroit,” in Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safranksy, and Timothy Stallmann, eds., Detroit: A People’s Atlas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). Ottawa presence: Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 28. Location of Huron villages: Andrew Keith Sturtevant, “Jealous Neighbors: Rivalry and Alliance Among the Native Communities of Detroit, 1701–1766” (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary, 2011), 24. Detroit as native hunting ground: Karen L. Marrero, “Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages in Eighteenth Century Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 2011), 134–37.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It was exactly the kind of academic berth John needed at this juncture, offering him accommodation, a work space and – crucially – the time in which to gather his thoughts. One of his first acts there was highly symbolic. Just as his government experience had been at its sourest, he had been named Chief of the Burning Spear, Kenya's equivalent of the Order of the British Empire. Coming when it did, the award had felt part consolation prize, part bribe. Now he arranged for it to be sent to an old Kenyan friend, Harris Mule. Mule, a former permanent secretary at the finance ministry, had been a loyal civil servant who had refused to play the political game. When he had fallen into disfavour, he had quietly accepted his fate.

Opening up the hinterland would not only allow its riches to be tapped, it would also, Mackinnon maintained, mean the eradication of the vile Arab slave trade, saving the region for Christian missionaries. The magnate and his politician friends applied a broad brush when it came to geopolitics, their rough imaginary strokes stretching across half the globe. The recently opened Suez Canal, they argued, held the key to the British Empire's all-important trade with India. If that waterway were to be guaranteed, then the headwaters of the Nile must be secured, and that meant establishing a link between Lake Victoria – source of the Nile – and the coast, controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar. Above all, a railroad would shore up Britain's position in its long race for regional supremacy with Germany, whose agents lusted after the promised ‘new India’ just as ardently as Mackinnon.

And as the new arrivals marked up their farms, everything began to change for the more than forty local tribes. Back in Britain, the citizen's right not to have his taxes raised or property confiscated on the whim of a greedy ruler had been recognised since the Magna Carta. But these fundamental principles did not apply to the British Empire's African subjects. A series of regulations passed at the turn of the century decreed that any ‘waste and unoccupied land’ belonged to the Crown, which could then dispose of it as it wished, usually in the form of 99-and 999-year leases to settlers. In order to force Africans to take paid work on white-owned farms, which were desperately short of labour, the colonial authorities levied first a hut tax and then a poll tax.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

The theory of false consciousness assumes their rival media owners unite in a political pact to brainwash the masses and keep the elite in power. George Orwell subscribed to it. In his essay on boys’ comics he said that their tales of upper-class boarding schools and ripping adventures in the service of the British Empire were part of a plot ‘by capitalist newspaper proprietors’ to indoctrinate the young ‘in the interest [of maintaining] the class structure of society’. An amused Evelyn Waugh replied that ‘a study of those noblemen’s more important papers reveals a reckless disregard of any such obligation’. The same applies today.

There was much more to hate in the Britain of 1940 with its poverty and imperial conquests than the Britain of today, and a good deal of what the supporters of the convention said was true. Many from the old gang of the Thirties were still in power in 1940 and 1941. In Churchill’s mind the Second World War was as much a war to defend the British Empire as defeat Nazi Germany. Londoners didn’t always show grim determination during the Blitz and they had no guarantee that they wouldn’t face mass unemployment again when the war was over. What the vicars, trade unionists and celebrities couldn’t understand was that the democratic system offered the chance of rectifying these evils.

Scott 98–9 Armstrong, Sir William 56 Ash, Lucy 121 al-Askari, Abdel-Qadir 51 Astor, Lord and Lady 217 asylum seekers 7 Atta, Mohamed 83, 255–7, 260, 269, 273 Auden, W.H. 122, 219, 220, 223, 224–5, 238, 335, 358–9 Australia 258 Axelrod, Pavel 103 al-Ayyeri, Yussuf 270 Aziz, Hind 34 Aziz, Tariq 292 Baath Party (Iraq) 24, 25, 33–4, 352, 365 alliance with Islamists after war to form ‘insurgency’ 8, 32, 286–7 and conspiracy theory 35–6 ideology 33, 35 and indoctrination 33–5, 41 and Iraqi communists 37–8 killings by 4–5, 31–2, 37 program against Iraqi Jews 36–7 purges of by Saddam 35, 42–4 seizure of power 22 and Soviet Union 37–8, 40 tyrannizing of Iraqis and forces of oppression 7, 33, 37, 41–2 Baath Party (Syria) 31 backlash politics 196–7 Bad Writing Contest 99–100 Bagehot, Walter English Constitution 189–90 al-Bakr, Ahmad Hasan 36 Baldwin, Stanley 220 Bali bar bombings (2002) 258 al-Banna, Hassan 265–6 al-Barak, Fadhil 35, 36 Barruel, L’Abbé Augustin 340, 341, 343, 345, 346 Memoirs to Serve for a History of Jacobinism 340 Battle of Britain 225 Baudrillard, Jean 110 Bazoft, Farzad 5, 53 BBC 159, 244, 304, 367, 368, 369, 379 Beard, Mary 274–5 Bell, Clive 228, 235 Bellow, Saul Ravelstein 80 Benaissa, Mohamed 352 Benenson, Peter 322 Benn, Hilary 367 Benson, Ophelia 101 Berman, Paul 249, 250, 312 Beslan school hostage crisis (2004) 259–60 Betjeman, John 221 Bevin, Ernie 231, 232, 233, 246 bin Laden, Osama 257, 258, 261, 267–8, 276, 365, 367 Birthler, Marianne 331 Blair, Cherie 205 Blair, Tony 54, 114, 185, 201, 277, 290, 297, 359, 364, 379 and Amnesty 322–3 and Iraq war 8, 202, 203, 280, 284, 285, 297, 300 and Kosovo war 151 and 9/11 257 Blakeney, Kate 63, 66 Bleasdale, Alan 184 blogosphere 270–1 Bloomsbury Group 192, 227, 228, 229, 235 Blum, Leon 249, 251 Blythe, Ronald The Age of Illusion 230 Boggan, Steve 40–1 Bosnian war 10, 127–51, 153–4, 168, 172, 370 atrocities committed 128, 129, 130, 131–2, 134 denial of crimes committed 171–8 ending of 151 lack of international help 135 Omarska prison camp 129, 130–1, 174 photograph of ‘emaciated men behind barbed wire’ 134, 174–5 pressure on Major government from Americans to intervene 145–9 prevention of action in by Major government 139–43, 144–5, 153–5, 168 siege of Sarajevo 153–4 Srebrenica massacre (1995) 130–1, 149–50, 171, 177–8 Trnopolje camp 131–4, 171, 174, 175–6 Bridget Jones’s Diary 313 Britain 138–9 and Euroscepticism 139 possibility of Bolshevik revolution in 1970s 55–7 prevention of action in Bosnian War by Major government 139–41, 144–5, 153–5, 168 radicalism in 58 trade unions 298–9 British Empire 162 British Muslims 369–72, 378 British National Party (BNP) 294, 310–11 British People’s Party 235–6 Brittain, Vera 248–9 Brown, Gordon 201, 297 Buchan, James High Latitudes 95 Burchill, Julie 207 Buruma, Ian and Margalit, Avishai Occidentalism 268 Bush, George (senior) 169 Bush, George W. 8, 9, 83, 85, 201, 209, 274, 284, 320, 321, 358, 359, 365, 373 Butler inquiry 285 Butler, Judith 100, 111 Butt, Hassan 371–2 Caldwell, Christopher 336–7 Cambodia 93, 166–7 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 230–1 Campbell, Professor David 176 Campbell, Sir Menzies 74 Camus, Albert 29 capitalism 22, 119–20, 195 Carey, Professor John 189 Castro, Fidel 93, 293 ‘Cato’ 225 Celebrity Big Brother 288–90 centralized regulation 194–5 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 227, 266–7 Chamberlain, Neville 144, 217–18, 220, 227, 233 Chamcha, Saladin 184 Chechnya 259–60 Chemical Ali see al-Majid, Ali Hassan China 93, 94, 117 Chirac, Jacques 150 Chomsky, Noam 14, 155–62, 164–8, 170, 179–80, 258, 376 American Power and the New Mandarins 156–7 anti-Americanism 156–7 background 155–6 and Bosnian War atrocities denial 178–9 condemning of Kosovo War 170–1 and Hiroshima 156, 157 and Holocaust denial theory 164–6 and Khmer rouge killings in Cambodia 167–8 and media propaganda 157–8, 160–1 support of Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade 178, 179 Christian Democrats 14 Churchill, Caryl 184 Churchill, Winston 2, 33, 218, 219, 245, 246 Clearances (Scottish Highlands) 118 Cliff, Tony 54 Clinton, Bill 83, 87, 145, 150, 201, 211, 273 Clwyd, Ann Saddam’s Iraq 40 Cockburn, Alexander 73 Coe, Jonathan 184 Cohn, Norman 345 Cohn, Professor Werner 174 Cold War 4, 88, 97, 143 Collard, Dudley 242 Collins, Michael 205–6 Columbia Journalism Review 159–60 communalism 309 communism 3–4, 89, 373–4 collapse of 87–8 and fascism 89, 237 killing of by communists 248 Communist Party (Britain) 238 attempt to rally support for Hitler after Soviet-Germany pact 239–46 People’s Convention 239, 242–6, 247 support of war effort after invasion of Soviet Union by Germany 246 Communist Party (Iraq) 37–8 Conquest, Robert 29, 103 Conservatives 2–3, 10, 53, 113 conspiracy theory 339–40 and Freemasons 35, 340–2, 345–6 and Jews 35–6, 65, 77, 343–6, 350–1 consumer leftism 373–6 consumerism 12, 221 Cook, Robin 285, 313 Cooper, Robert 136 council house waiting lists 200, 201 Critical Terms for Literary Study 100 Croatia 127 Crusaders 340 cults, political 60–3 Daily Mail 197 Daily Worker 240–1 Dalrymple, Theodore 229 Darfur 50, 117, 381 Dawkins, Richard 318 Dawson, Geoffrey 217 de Beauvoir, Simone 103 de Pauw, Cornelius 262–3 Declaration of Independence 317, 343 Deichmann, Thomas 174–5, 176, 177 democracy 193–4, 268, 342, 362, 365, 379, 380 fascism’s case against 268–70 Democrats 14, 211 Dench, Geoff 199 denial 162–3 and Bosnian war 171–8 and fascists 163–4 Holocaust 163–5, 179 Denmark 212 al-Din, Salah 33 Disneyland 110 Dole, Bob 145, 147, 150 Domvile, Admiral Sir Barry 235, 236 Dorfman, Ariel 283 Dostoevsky 67 dowry-murders 101, 102, 121–3 Drabble, Margaret 263 Dutton, Denis 99–100 Dzandarova, Zalina 259 East End/East Enders 198–201 East Timor 161, 170, 258, 275, 283 economists 114 education 204–5 Egypt 349, 350 Eliot, George 333 Eliot, T.S. 219 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 109–10 Engels, Friedrich 158 ‘Englishness’ 206 Enlightenment 35, 106, 109, 343, 355, 357 environment movement 356–7 epistemic relativism 105–6 Equity 57–8 Estikhbarat 40 ethnic cleansing 128, 365 ethnic minorities 11 eugenics 198 European Court of Human Rights 136, 212 European Exchange Rate Mechanism 3, 139 European Social Forum (2003) 115, 119–20, 301 European Union 10, 127, 135–8, 212, 214, 365, 379 Euroscepticism 139 Euston Manifesto 361–3 Fabians 190, 192, 193, 198 Fahrenheit 9/11 321–2 Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed 78–9 false consciousness, theory of 158–9, 374–5 Falwell, Jerry 261 family attempt to weaken influence of by political cults 61 fascism/fascists 3–4, 10, 268 case against democracy 268–70 and communism 89, 237 and denial 163–4 Faurisson, Robert 163–5 feminism/feminists 12, 90–1, 111, 112 in India 120 Ferguson, Euan 282–3 First World War 220 Fischer, Joschka 332 Fisk, Robert 271–2 ‘fisking’ 271 Foot, Michael 225, 232–3 Forster, E.M. 244 Foucault, Michel 107–8, 109, 377, 379 Fox, Dr Myron L. 97–8 Fox, John 146–7 France 47, 206, 212, 218, 281 Franco, General Francisco 1, 35, 50, 346 Frank, Thomas 209, 210–11, 212 Franks, General Tommy 72 Frayn, Michael 182–3 Freemasons 35, 38, 269, 340–2, 345–6, 350, 351 French left 249, 327 French Revolution 42, 355 French socialists and Hitler 249–52 Gaddafi, Colonel 68 Galbraith, Peter 50, 52 Galloway, George 74, 290–3, 300–1, 302, 310 game theory 97 Gaullists 14 Gavron, Kate 199 genocide against Iraqi Kurds 5, 7, 24, 48–9, 50–2, 127 defined by United Nations 129 Geras, Norman 325 Germany anti-war demonstrations 281 and Iraq war 329 see also Nazi Germany Globalise Resistance 296 globalization 141, 374, 376 see also anti-globalization movement Gold Standard 219 Gollancz, Victor 240–1 Goodlad, Alistair 153 Gorazde (Bosnia) 154 Gore, Al 273 Gorst, Irene 59–60 Gourlay, Walter 215 grammar schools 205 Grant, Ted 54 Great Depression 195, 218, 220–1, 356 Great Leap Forward 49 Greece anti-war demonstrations 281 Green movement 119, 356 Griffiths, James 234 Griffiths, Richard 236 Griffiths, Trevor 55 The Party 55–6, 57 Guantanamo Bay 324 Guardian 117, 179–80, 294, 304, 337–8 Guevara, Che 93 Guilty Men 225–7, 240 Gulf War (1991) 71, 89 Halabja 50–2, 292 Hamas 259 constitution 348–9 Hamza, Abu 351 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio Empire 109–10 Hare, Sir David 184, 206 Harrington, Michael 82 Hawley, Caroline 46 Hayek, Friedrich 294 The Road to Serfdom 194–5 Healy, Gerry 53–5, 57–9, 61, 63–4, 66–8, 301 hegemonic 110–12 Heidegger, Martin 263–4 heroes/heroines 19–20 Herman, Edward S. 166, 168, 170, 176 Hezbollah 293–4, 366 Hiroshima 156, 157 Hitchens, Christopher 247, 253 Hitler, Adolf 4, 35, 49, 50, 246, 248, 250 appeasement of by Chamberlain 217–18, 220, 227, 233, 233–4, 276 and France 251 and Jews 30, 346 meeting with Lansbury 234 Mein Kampf 345, 346 pact with Stalin 358 rise of 231 seen as a bulwark against communism 217 Hizb-ut-Tahir 370 Ho Chi Minh 93 Hoare, Marko Attila 169–70, 171 Hobsbawm, Eric 103, 185, 241–2 Hoggart, Simon 299–300 Hollinghurst, Alan The Line of Beauty 184 Holocaust 336 denial of 163–5, 179 homosexuality 11, 105, 111 ‘honour killings’ 378 Horta, Hose Ramos 283–4 Houellebecq, Michel 213 Howard, Peter 225 human rights 39–40, 88, 106, 143, 312, 313, 316, 324–5, 362 Human Rights Watch 52, 312, 325–6 Hume, Mick 176 Hurd, Douglas 140–1, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 169, 370 Husain, Ed The Islamist 369–70 Hussain, Azfar 101–2, 104 Hussein, Saddam see Saddam Hussein el-Husseini, Haj Amin 347–8 Huxley, Aldous 235 identity politics 376–7 Independence Party 294 Independent 304, 320, 335, 366 Index on Censorship 335 India 75, 120–1, 162 dowry-murders and persecution of women 101, 102, 121–3 feminist movement 120 partition of 143 Indict 292 individualism 356 Indochina 166 Indonesia 81 Information Research Bureau 246 Institute for Public Policy Research 207 international criminal states 313 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 130 International Monetary Fund 117 Internet 270–1 Iran 22, 25–6, 81, 82, 374, 377, 379 revolution (1979) 26–7, 107–8, 380 war against Iraq 28, 32, 44, 47–8 women in 357–8 Iraq 4–6, 7, 20–6, 40, 72–3 alliance between Baathists and Islamists after war to form ‘insurgency’ 8, 32, 286–7 American assistance in war with Iran 46–8 Baath Party regime see Baath Party genocide of Kurds 5, 7, 24, 48–9, 50–2, 127 invasion of Kuwait 6, 70, 72–3 ‘oil-for-food’ programme 72 pull back by America in (1991) 71, 72, 80, 81, 87 sanctions issue 74–5 seen as only country to take on Israel 76–7 shift in attitude towards by left 30, 74–5, 89–91 and Soviet Union 37–8 terrorizing of Shia majority by Sunni Islamists 287 trade union movement 297–8, 301, 302–3 war against Iran 28, 32, 44, 47–8 weapons sales to 47 and Workers’ Revolutionary Party 65–6, 67, 68 see also Saddam Hussein Iraq Memory Foundation 330 Iraq war (2003) 4, 7–9, 84, 299–300, 357, 364–5, 381 aftermath 285–6, 381 anti-war movement/ demonstrations 169–70, 280–311, 313–14, 357 and Blair 8, 202, 203, 280, 284, 285, 297, 300 liberal opposition to 46, 202, 312–32 Iraqi Communist Party 334 Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions 298, 302 Ireland 212 anti-war demonstrations 281 Irvin, Jeremy 129, 133 Isherwood, Christopher 219, 224, 233 Islam 9, 107, 367 Islamic Combatant Group 258–9 Islamism/Islamists 260, 261–2, 264–6, 267, 269–70, 273, 343–4, 347, 352, 360, 365–6, 368, 371–2, 374, 381 Israel 21, 76, 77, 170, 335, 336, 338–9, 346, 347, 351–2, 353 Italy anti-war demonstration 280 Izetbegovic, Alija 154 jahilyya 265, 267 Jamaat-i-Islaami party 266, 351, 369, 371, 377 Jarman, Derek 184 Jarrow hunger marches 218 Jehovah Witnesses 296 Jelacic, Nerma 172–3 Jewish Chronicle 65 Jews 10, 35, 36, 269 attack on by Iraq’s Baath Party 36–7 conspiracy theory involving 35–6, 65, 77, 343–6, 350–1 and Hitler 30, 346 and Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion 36, 344, 345, 346, 349 and tsarist Russia 344–5 see also antisemitism Johnson, Hewlett 243 Johnstone, Diana Fools’ Crusade 176–7, 178 Jong-Il, Kim 39 journalists 159–60 July bombings (London) 10, 257–8 Kagan, Robert 136, 315–16, 317 Kanaan, Jean-Sélim 326 Kansas 209, 209–10 Karadzic, Radovan 128, 129, 131, 169 Kelikian, Dr Hampar 148 Kenneth, John 50 Keynes, John Maynard 114, 228, 377 Economic Consequences of the Peace 228 Khan, Irene 324 Khan, Mohammad Sidique 258 Khmer Rouge 167, 167–8 Khomeini, Ayatollah 27, 28, 70, 107, 108, 184 Kianouri, Noureddin 27 Kirwan, Celia 246 Kissinger, Henry 47 Klein, Naomi No Logo109 Knights Templars 340–1, 342 Kosovo war 10, 151, 168, 170–1 Kouchner, Bernard 326 Kumari, Ranjana 121 Kurds 36 attempts to rally international support for 50 genocide against by Saddam Hussein 5, 7, 24, 48–9, 50–2, 127 use of poison gas against at Halabja 50–2, 292 Kuwait invasion of by Iraq (1990) 6, 70 Labour Party 93, 182, 220, 231–3 see also Blair, Tony; New Labour Labour Party conference (2004) 297, 299–300 Lader, Philip 367 Lansbury, George 199, 229–32, 233–4 Laski, Harold 21, 240 Lawrence, D.H. 219 League of Nations 231 Left Book Club 219, 240, 243 Leigh, Mike 184 Lenin, Vladimir 50, 54 Leslie, Ann 333 Lewis, C.


pages: 410 words: 122,537

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

The Khalifa was conquered on the railway.’16 At the other end of the putative but never completed Cape to Cairo,17 the railways were also about to play a major, if very different, part in a war. The Boer War18 was another eminently preventable clash which started off with patriotic cheers, and ended with much soul searching about the state of the British Empire. At the turn of the century, the current Republic of South Africa was divided into four territories: Natal and the Cape Colony, which were British colonies, and two Boer republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State.19 To the north, Rhodes had created the British South Africa Company, which became Rhodesia.

The Boers eventually surrendered in May 1902, ground down by the gradual progress of the British through their territory, and with little room to manoeuvre as the soldiers in the ever lengthening strings of blockhouses provided increasingly detailed intelligence on the whereabouts of the enemy. The Boers were harried and, unable to fight, forced into finally accepting peace terms which the British had offered several times previously. After lengthy negotiations, the Boer republics were incorporated into the British Empire a few years later, but the cost of dragooning the Boers into Britain’s fold had been high. Far from being the short conflict which the politicians expected, it turned out to be the bloodiest and most costly of Britain’s wars between 1815 and 1914. In railway terms the Boer War was a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming world war, even though the nature of the conflict was quite different, but in the intervening period another war was fought alongside a single long stretch of track in which the railway played an even more central part.

A standard-gauge railway struck north to Parbatipur on the foothills of the Himalayas, and then a metre-gauge line continued across Eastern Bengal to the banks of the Brahmaputra river, where there was only a ferry to connect with another narrow-gauge railway, which wound up the valley to Dimapur, the supply base in the north-eastern corner of Assam. The Allied forces in China were supplied by an airlift over the Himalayas from airfields close to the north-east end of the railway. According to the historian of the line, John Thomas, ‘the fate of India and to a degree the British Empire depended on this slender line of communication’,28 which was inevitably slow given that goods had to be manhandled three times between the various modes of transportation. To speed the flow of goods on the line, 400 British railway troops were brought over in early 1943, followed at the start of 1944 by ten times that number of Americans.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

There were periods of dictatorship, a first empire under Napoleon, restoration of a monarchy combined with a parliament, a second empire and dictatorship under Louis Napoleon, then a series of republics interrupted in the twentieth century by the Vichy dictatorship (1940–44) sponsored by and beholden to the Nazis. Nor is American experience an exception. The thirteen colonies were originally part of the British Empire; the colonial system was overthrown by a confederation of the former colonies; it was succeeded by a new federal system and national government that would be challenged in the next century by a secessionist movement that culminated in a civil war and two systems of government. Throughout the nineteenth century the structure, even the form, of the American system, including its politics, was continually changing as new states from the Midwest, Southwest, and West, some with cultures strikingly different from that of the eastern states, were admitted—and all this against the background of Indian “wars,” the first chapter in the national commitment to eradicating terrorists while extending the reach of its government.

Recall as well, however, that the Founders favored a republic over a democracy because the latter could not be accommodated to an “enlarged sphere,” to a huge geographical expanse. And recall that the American citizenry has a long history of being complicit in the country’s imperial ventures. The imperial impulse is not a tic afflicting only the few. The difference may be that, unlike, say, the Roman and British empires, the American empire is repressed in the national ideology. Virtually from the beginnings of the nation the making of the American citizen was influenced, even shaped by, the making of an American imperium. The nineteenth-century expansion of the country to the west and southwest was achieved by military victories over various Indian nations and Mexico.

The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South. x Today this failed assumption, that free politics could be reconciled peaceably with an ever-increasing scale, has been demonstrated again by the imperial ambitions of Superpower and its distinctive nonterritorial conception of empire. It used to be said of the late British Empire that it was not the consequence of a premeditated plan but casually established in “a fit of absent-mindedness.” There were, of course, “imperialists” who dreamed of empire, and some of them, such as Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill, who consciously fought for its realization. But there is a larger truth in the notion of an empire that begins without much forethought or conscious intention at work: empire building is likely to have contributing causes other than, or in addition to, the conscious intentions of imperialists.


pages: 561 words: 120,899

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Early in the twentieth century, as they created new ways to study biology and heredity, theoreticians would change their attitudes toward Bayes’ rule from tepid toleration to outright hostility. Karl Pearson (I repeat his first name because his son Egon figures in Bayes’ story too) was a zealous atheist, socialist, feminist, Darwinist, Germanophile, and eugenicist. To save the British Empire, he believed the government should encourage the upper middle class to procreate and the poor to abstain. Karl Pearson ruled Britain’s 30-odd statistical theorists for years. In the process he introduced two generations of applied mathematicians to the kind of feuding and professional bullying generally seen only on middleschool playgrounds.

But in straightening out inconsistencies in Karl Pearson’s work, Fisher pioneered the first comprehensive and rigorous theory of statistics and set it on its mathematical and anti-Bayesian course. The enmity between these two volatile men is striking because both were fervent eugenicists who believed that the careful breeding of British supermen and superwomen would improve the human population and the British Empire. To help support his wife and eight children on a subsistence farm, Fisher accepted funds from a controversial source, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, who, as honorary president of the Eugenics Education Society, advocated the detention of “inferior types, . . . the sexes being kept apart” to prevent them from bearing children.26 In return for his financial help, Fisher published more than 200 reviews in Darwin’s magazine between 1914 and 1934.

The secrecy had tragic consequences. Family and friends of Bletchley Park employees went to their graves without ever knowing the contributions their loved ones had made during the war. Those connected with Colossus, the epitome of the British decryption effort, received little or no credit. Turing was given an Order of the British Empire (OBE), a routine award given to high civil servants. Newman was so angry at the government’s “derisory” lack of gratitude to Turing that he refused his own OBE. Britain’s science, technology, and economy were losers, too. The Colossi were built and operational years before the ENIAC in Pennsylvania and before John von Neumann’s computer at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, but for the next half century the world assumed that U.S. computers had come first.


pages: 447 words: 126,219

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Most visitors to the site were more interested by the cycle track and the sports ground laid out around the tower or were content simply to view from the ground what soon became known as Watkin’s folly. By the time the park opened, Watkin, weakened by his stroke, was too ill to push the project forward and the tower was never completed, but its first stage survived for a decade before being demolished. The site was used after the First World War for the British Empire Exhibition and the internationally famous football stadium, which would have pleased Watkin as they both attracted considerable railway traffic. Another boost to Underground use was the growing entertainment market. Theatres were booming and, more significantly in terms of numbers, music halls were springing up everywhere in London: by the early 1890s there were thirty-five, with total audiences of 45,000 nightly.

In the centre were two banks of escalators leading to and from the lines, all lit by the characteristic uplighters which created the welcoming glow that became a feature of the Underground system and its publicity material. Although there was a commercial element, with shop displays around the outer perimeter of what Holden called his ‘ambulatory’, the main theme was London as the centre of the world, an appropriate sentiment given that the British Empire was still at its height. On the wall above the top of the escalators were oil paintings featuring a map of the world, with side panels showing the objectives of Underground travelling: business and commerce, outdoor pleasure, shopping, and amusements of the town. Later, a world clock map was installed, showing the time at various places around the world.

., ref1 Boer War, ref1 boiler explosions, ref1 Bonar Law, Andrew, ref1 Bond Street, ref1, ref2 booking clerks, ref1 Borough, ref1 Bounds Green, ref1 Bow, ref1, ref2 Bramwell, Frederick, ref1 Brandon-Thomas, Jevan, ref1 Brent, ref1 Brent Valley viaduct, ref1 Brighton, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 British Empire Exhibition, ref1 British Freehold Land Company, ref1 British Museum, ref1, ref2 British Transport Commission (BTC), ref1, ref2, ref3 Brixton, ref1, ref2 Broad Street, ref1, ref2 Bromley, ref1, ref2 Brompton & Piccadilly Circus Railway, ref1, ref2 see also Piccadilly Line Brompton Road, ref1 Brown, Gordon, ref1, ref2 Brunel, Isambard and Marc, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Buckingham Palace, ref1 Budapest, ref1 building societies, ref1 Burnt Oak, ref1 bus conductors, ref1 bus fares, ref1, ref2 bus stops, ref1 buses (motor), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and London Regional Transport, ref1 and London Transport, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and network integration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 pirate operators, ref1 see also omnibuses Bushey, ref1 Bushey Heath, ref1 Byers, Stephen, ref1 cable railways, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ‘call boys’, ref1 Camden Town, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Campden Hill, ref1 Canada Water, ref1 Canary Wharf, ref1 Cannon Street, ref1, ref2, ref3 Canons Park, ref1 Carr, Jonathan, ref1 Cassel, Ernest, ref1 Catford, ref1 Cave, Sir George, ref1 Cecil Park, ref1 Central Line competition with Metropolitan Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 construction and opening, ref1, ref2 extensions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 fares, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 finances, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 gradients, ref1 hand signals, ref1 improvements, ref1 interchanges, ref1 locomotives, ref1, ref2, ref3 parcels service, ref1 passenger numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 safety, ref1 stations, ref1, ref2, ref3 travelling conditions, ref1, ref2 Twopenny Tube nickname, ref1 UERL takeover, ref1, ref2, ref3 and wartime, ref1, ref2 working hours, ref1 workmen’s trains, ref1 Central London Railway, see Central Line Chalk Hill, ref1, ref2 Chamberlain, Neville, ref1 Chancery Lane, ref1 Channel Tunnel, ref1, ref2, ref3 Chaplin, Charlie, ref1 Chapman, James, ref1 Charing Cross, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 flood barriers, ref1 interchanges, ref1, ref2, ref3 and Jubilee Line, ref1 station collapse, ref1 terrorist attacks, ref1 Charing Cross & Waterloo Electric Railway, ref1 Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway alternate trains, ref1 construction and opening, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 express trains, ref1 extensions, ref1, ref2, ref3 integration into Northern Line, ref1 interchanges, ref1 passenger numbers, ref1 see also Northern Line Cheam, ref1 Chelsea, ref1, ref2, ref3 Chesham, ref1 Chicago, ref1, ref2, ref3 Chingford, ref1 Chiswick Park, ref1 choke damp, ref1 Chorley Estate, ref1 Churchill, Winston, ref1 Circle Line, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 completion, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 costs per mile, ref1 electrification, ref1 open-air sections, ref1 opening, ref1 passenger numbers, ref1 siding dispute, ref1 terrorist attacks, ref1 travelling conditions, ref1, ref2 and wartime, ref1, ref2 circuses, ref1 City & South London Railway compared with Central, ref1 construction, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and electric power, ref1, ref2 fares, ref1, ref2 finances, ref1, ref2 integration into Northern Line, ref1, ref2, ref3 passenger numbers, ref1 stations, ref1, ref2 travelling conditions, ref1, ref2 UERL takeover, ref1, ref2, ref3 and wartime, ref1, ref2 see also Northern Line City Imperial Volunteers, ref1 City Road, ref1 Clan na Gael, ref1 Clapham, ref1 Clapham Junction, ref1, ref2, ref3 Clark, Charles, ref1, ref2 Clerkenwell Vestry, ref1 Cockfosters, ref1 Combine, the, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 see also Underground Electric Railways Company Communist Party, ref1 commuting, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Continental Passenger Railway Company, ref1 Cornhill, ref1 Cornwall Sir Edwin, ref1 cost-benefit analysis, ref1 costs per mile, ref1, ref2 costermongers, ref1 council housing, ref1 Courtenay, Irving, ref1 Covent Garden, ref1 Cromwell curve, ref1, ref2 Cross, George, ref1 Crossrail, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Croxley, ref1 Croydon, ref1, ref2, ref3 Crystal Palace, ref1 crystal railways, ref1 Cunningham, Granville, ref1, ref2 Cunningham, James, ref1 Daily Mail, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Daily Mirror, ref1 Daily News, ref1 Daily Telegraph, ref1, ref2 Daily Worker, ref1 Dalston, ref1 Dawkins, Sir Clinton, ref1 deep tube lines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Dell, Robert, ref1 Denham, ref1 Denton, Rev.


Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by David Roberts

British Empire, en.wikipedia.org

An “exact” magnetic pole could not be determined. It was good enough for the played-out trio. At 4:15 p.m., they hoisted a Union Jack they had fabricated in the hut over the winter. David uttered an official proclamation: “I hereby take possession of this area now containing the Magnetic Pole for the British Empire.” Mawson set up the expedition camera with a string attached to the shutter for a group portrait. With the Union Jack on a pole planted in the snow, all three men took off their helmets and stared into the camera. David, in the middle, pulled the string. The photograph remains one of the most famous images ever exposed in Antarctica.

The British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, or BANZARE, would produce its own slew of scientific reports, and would make further discoveries on the southern continent, but a principal motivation for the journeys was to forestall an aggressive thrust by the Norwegians to claim territory that the Australians felt belonged to them, or at least to the British Empire. Captain John King Davis was once again the pilot for the expedition ship on the 1929 voyage, during which he and Mawson fell out so angrily that they stopped speaking to each other, trading notes instead. The quarrel wrote a doleful finis to what ought to have been a lifelong friendship cemented by the two men’s loyalty to each other on the AAE.

., 86 bridge, 166 British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE), 301–2 British Antarctic Expedition (BAE; Nimrod expedition; 1907–09), 40, 43–45, 47–86, 94, 109, 118, 289, 307 area claimed in, 71 base camp in, 49, 55–57, 60, 75 book manufactured by, 263 cairns built in, 63, 67, 74 failure of, 80, 82 first exploratory deed of, 49–56 funding of, 40, 47, 87 impetus for, 47 landfall problems of, 48–49 McMurdo Sound base denied to, 45, 47–48, 87 motorcar in, 57–58, 96, 183 Nimrod rescues in, 76–78, 81, 93 relief party in, 81–82 Shackleton’s confusing instructions in, 59–60, 69, 75 supply depot problem in, 49 trek to South Magnetic Pole in, 57–72, 82–84, 111 trek toward South Pole in, 57–58, 60, 79–80 Wild in, 57–58, 79–82, 94, 118, 163, 164 wintering-over pattern in, 56–57 British Commonwealth, 92, 175 British Empire, 199, 301 Brocklehurst, Philip, 53–56 Broken Hill, 43, 85, 86, 90 Bunger, David, 198–99 Bunger Hills, 198–99 bunks, bunkmates, 125, 127–28, 163, 248, 306 burberry, 37, 146, 306 burberry trousers, loss of, 210, 216–17, 218, 226 burial services, 36, 37, 224 Butter Point, 62, 75 Byrd, Richard E., 199 “cags,” 56–57 cairns, 191, 206, 239–40, 242 of BAE, 63, 67, 74 “calcutta sweep,” 141 cannibalism, 41 Cape Adare, 88–89, 96, 108 Cape Denison (Winter Quarters), 15, 16, 18, 23, 111–21, 124–62, 202–8, 252–85 bunkmates at, 127–28, 248 cargo unloaded at, 114–17, 189 deadline for return to, 26, 171, 177, 181, 208, 222, 229 delayed departures from, 171, 182 distance from, 15, 32, 33, 36, 208, 215, 216, 222 egalitarianism at, 128, 139 entertainment at, 127, 129–30, 144–45, 267–68 guarding of hut in, 161, 170 hut erected at, 124–27, 126, 131, 248, 254 hut temperature at, 132 interpersonal tensions at, 151–60 location of, 96, 111–13 Mawson’s return to, 244–49 naming of, 113 newspaper published at, 262–68 other structures erected at, 131 parting between the men at, 207–8 quasi-military regimen at, 139–40 Western Base compared with, 163, 164, 169 Western Party’s return to, 187–88, 208 wind at, 132–39, 141, 145, 146, 148–49, 152, 159, 160, 164, 259, 260, 268, 283 Cape Evans, 203 Cape Freshfield, 32, 180, 295 Cape Royds, 49, 55–58, 63, 75, 76, 78, 79, 118 deadline for, 60, 68, 80 Nimrod’s departure from, 82 wintering over at, 56–57, 125, 133 Cape Washington, 60, 76 Caroline Cove, 99–100, 103, 105 Aurora’s return to, 107–8 cars, 57–58, 96, 183 Caruso (dog), 131 Cathedral Grotto, 182, 183, 186 celebrations, 172, 288 birthday, 56, 144, 152, 269–70 Christmas, 175, 185, 192, 198, 199, 215–16 Challenger expedition (1872–74), 117 champagne, 289, 290 “championship,” 145, 265 China, 57, 58 chocolate, 141, 173, 217, 237, 238 Christmas celebrations, 175, 185, 192, 198, 199, 215–16 chronometers, 64, 185 Churchill, Winston, 299 cigarettes, 141 Cleland, John, 224–25 climate, 55, 138–39 climbing equipment, 50–51 Close, John “Hollow-leg”; “Terror,” 130, 142, 149, 158–61, 170 Mawson’s view of, 154, 158, 161 in Near Eastern Party, 161, 177 clothing, 16, 37, 38, 67, 78 in Aladdin’s Cave, 179 of David, 62, 63, 73 of Hurley, 137 of Mawson, 227, 231, 289–90 of Mertz, 210, 216–17, 218, 226, 305 of search party, 205–6 Clyde (ship), shipwreck of, 102–3 coal, 76, 78, 97, 201 discovery of, 180 fear of shortage of, 110, 111, 119, 120, 252 for stove, 132, 140, 254 “Commercial Resources of Antarctica, The” (Mawson), 265 Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement, 298 Commonwealth Bay, 113–16, 138, 161, 181, 186, 189, 249, 277, 281, 284–85 Aurora’s returns to, 202, 203, 207, 242, 247, 284 Davis’s departure deadline from, 205 walks on, 267–68 compass, 58, 59, 81, 175, 238, 239 conjunctivitis, 211 continental drift, 307 Cook, Frederick A., 156 cooking, cooks, 98, 139, 141–42, 157, 158, 196, 216, 256 in Aladdin’s Cave, 179 of Jeffryes, 256, 270, 280 of Mawson, 128, 221, 223, 229, 270 coral atolls, 39 cornea, 22 Correll, Percy, 149, 203, 298, 306 in Eastern Coastal Party, 179–82 cotton: burberry, 37, 146 japara, 173, 210 crampons, 50–51, 73, 134, 138 improvised, 240–43, 305 Mawson’s throwing away of, 236, 240 “Cremation of Sam McGee, The” (Service), 129 crevasses, 24–30, 32–36, 137, 178, 282 BAE and, 54, 66, 67, 75, 78, 79–80 Far Eastern Party return and, 211, 230–33, 235–36, 241, 309 Madigan’s Eastern Coastal Party and, 180 Mawson’s close calls with, 230–33, 305, 311–12 Ninnis’s close call with, 25, 27 Ninnis’s death in, 35–36, 208–9, 211, 215, 216, 230, 231, 248, 296, 308, 309 open vs. hidden, 24 sledge accidents in, 27–29, 34–36, 208–9, 309 Southern Party and, 174–75 Western Coastal Party and, 190 Western Party and, 166, 167 Wild’s Eastern Coastal Party and, 194, 195, 196, 199, 209 “crook cooks,” 128 cyanide, 232 Dante, 196 David, T.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

German chancellor Konrad Adenauer described the land east of the Elbe River as the beginning of the “Asiatic steppe,” a comment about inner German divisions as much as it was about “Europe” and “Asia” or civilization and barbarism. Whether Asia or Europe, the Europe East of the Elbe was under Stalin’s thumb.9 Stalin was eager to see communism advance outside Europe after the war. Before World War II, the Soviet Union had been hemmed in in Asia by a noncommunist China, by the French and British empires, by imperial Japan and by the American navy. To improve the Soviet position, Stalin briefly went to war against Japan in August 1945. This whole setup changed completely after the war. Japan was lost to the Americans, but much else was in play—from an independent nonaligned India, which had its grievances against Britain and the West; to Indochina, where the French position had been shattered in the war; to Korea, which had a border with China and could not escape Chinese influence; to Latin America, where revolutionary movements of the Left and the Right were strong; to the Middle East, where antipathy to the West coalesced with Israel’s founding in 1948.

The Korean War had stalemated in 1954, but in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, the Cold War was costly and turbulent in the 1960s and 1970s. American advisors, American troops, American intelligence, American arms and American aid were flowing in every direction. What separated the United States of 1965 or 1975 from the French and British empires? These empires had been staffed by legions of ideologues, colonial administrators, experts and artists (Kipling, most memorably) who sang the beauties of empire, while the American Cold War university blended the study of the West with the celebration of the West and the celebration of the West with the advising of presidents and government institutions.

Tracking this notion, Fukuyama regarded much human history until the Renaissance as deformed by a master-slave dynamic. A few masters robbed the many slaves of recognition. Then came the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century, from which grew the tree of liberal democracy. The pioneer was the British Empire, which furnished “the Anglo-Saxon version of liberal theory on which the United States was founded.” An “Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition” granted political and economic recognition to those who fueled its success, expanding upon “the objective historical relationship that existed between Christian doctrine and the emergence of liberal-democratic societies in Western Europe.”


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

In most cases and many ways, the cost of general progress in the eighteenth century remains unquantifiable. But we can know the cost of specific projects intended to progress society – the first voyage of Captain James Cook, for instance, undertaken four years after Winckelmann published his great work – just as we can know the significant role it played in the expansion of the British Empire and the decline of nomad influence. ‘At 2 pm got under sail,’ the forty-year-old Royal Navy officer wrote in his log as he steered his ship away from England in August 1768, ‘and put to sea having on board 94 persons.’ His instructions were to sail to the Pacific Ocean and locate the island of Tahiti, first seen by a European the previous year.

In an eloquent expression of the inhumanity inherent in the new forces and machines that were reshaping society, he wrote how: ‘The living and the dead shall be ground in our rumbling Mills For bread of the Sons of Albion.’41 The sons of Albion were in the process of creating an empire that would circle the world and on which the sun would never set. Made possible by compass, print and gunpowder, and powered by what Blake called ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ and other inventions of the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and its European rivals eclipsed the old nomadic and post-nomadic empires. Even though nomads had played a major part in shaping the world since before history, from domesticating the horse and inventing the wagon to inspiring ideas of nobility, valour and the bonds that bound a band of brothers, when imperial historians wrote the story of humankind, they either omitted nomads completely or else they did as Roman historians had done and presented them as barbarians.

In Australia, where as many as 90 per cent of the 750,000 indigenous people had died within ten years of the arrival of Joseph Banks’s First Fleet settlers, those who remained continued to go walkabout and to dream up their country, as they have done into our own time. In a world encircled by the British Empire, tens of millions of nomads roamed, hunted and gathered. But Macaulay’s conviction would prove to be true and European arts, morals, literature and law would triumph over the ‘barbarous hordes’, nowhere more so than in North America where, a dozen years after Macaulay’s speech to Parliament, a citizen of a former British colony coined a two-word phrase that continues to resonate today.


pages: 563 words: 179,626

A Life in Secrets by Sarah Helm

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, clockwatching, haute couture, large denomination, old-boy network

Across the chaos of bombed-out Germany she followed the agents' trails to the concentration camps and helped track down many of the Germans who had captured and killed them. She gave evidence at Nazi war crimes trials, and the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and the Légion d'Honneur in 1995. The British, by contrast, waited until 1997 to honour Vera Atkins, finally making her a Commander of the British Empire. As I listened to her, however, I realised just how sparse the known facts about Vera Atkins were. Who was this woman? How could it be that she had reached the age of ninety without anyone knowing more than this about her? I looked around, but the room contained no clues. It seemed unremarkable, quite comfortable but colourless, with a pale-green carpet.

By early March nothing had been heard from Lionel Lee, Antelme s radio operator, but strange messages had come over from Nora's radio saying that, on landing, Antelme had fractured his skull. Subsequent messages gave bizarre medical reports on his worsening condition. London sent messages back giving Antelme s medical history for the French doctors and cheering him with the news that he had won an Order of the British Empire (OBE). Antelme was “very pleased and touched by the award,” said one reply from the field. Then a week later he had “deteriorated,” and on May 2 it was announced that he “died after an attack of meningitis.” He was “buried by moonlight,” and “deepest sympathy” was sent to his family. Penelope Torr produced an analysis of these messages and even sought the opinion of a doctor, who said the position of the head fracture as described in one message was “very unusual for a landing accident.”

She was determined to put Nora up for a George Cross. Three years after the end of the war it was not easy to persuade the powers that be that Nora's recommendation for a gallantry award should be rewritten for a fourth time. First she was proposed for a George Medal, then for a member of the Order of the British Empire, and then for a Mention in Dispatches; now that the truth about her courage appeared to have emerged, she was to be put forward for the highest award for bravery anyone could receive. The correspondence between Vera and Eileen Lancey of the Honours and Awards Office showed Vera endlessly battling to prove that this time she had got the facts for the citation for Nora right.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

A court of heraldry was added to this strange brew: in overseeing marriages and maintaining pedigree, it provided further evidence of the intention to fix (and police) class identity. Pretentious institutions such as these hardly suited the swampy backwater of Carolina, but in the desire to impose order on an unsettled land, every detail mattered—down to assigning overblown names to ambitious men in the most rustic outpost of the British Empire.6 Yet even the faux nobility was not as strange as another feature of the Locke-endorsed Constitutions. That dubious honor belongs to the nobility and manor lord’s unique servant class, ranked above slaves but below freemen. These were the “Leet-men,” who were encouraged to marry and have children but were tied to the land and to their lord.

His farming families were not poor or self-sufficient, but engaged in some form of commercial farming, producing enough to support their families and purchase British goods.14 The most startling feature of his theory was that the class contentment he described could be achieved through natural means, or, to put it more bluntly, by letting nature take its course. The British Empire, with its well-trained ground forces and powerful navy, secured the territory. From that moment forward, the unoccupied land was the lure for settlers much like the molasses pot for the ants. In a land of opportunity, procreating came more naturally, as families felt happy and secure. Rigid class distinctions and the hoarding of resources were less likely to take place.

Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 3, 6–8, 25, 31, 38, 40, 102. 2. Ibid., 8, 63, 76–77; D. B. Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 1:102; Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 30–31, 200–201, 218, 294–99. 3. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 3–4, 92–100, 158, 184–94, 218, 221–31; E. G. R. Taylor, “Richard Hakluyt,” Geographical Journal 109, no. 4–6 (April–June 1947): 165–71, esp. 165–66; Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 3–4, 267.


pages: 69 words: 15,637

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Danilo Kiš, disinformation, fake news, Milgram experiment, post-truth, Rosa Parks

Their preferred reference point is the era when democratic republics seemed vanquished and their Nazi and Soviet rivals unstoppable: the 1930s. Those who advocated Brexit, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, imagined a British nation-state, though such a thing never existed. There was a British Empire, and then there was Britain as a member of the European Union. The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown. Eerily, when judges said that a parliamentary vote was required for Brexit, a British tabloid called them “enemies of the people”—a Stalinist term from the show trials of the 1930s.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

For several months, however, they were based in the same room, struggling, with minimal resources, ‘to deal both with espionage in this country and with our foreign agents abroad’.3 The Secret Service Bureau owed its foundation to the recommendations of a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, the chief defence planning council of the realm, which had been instructed in March 1909 by the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith to consider ‘the nature and extent of foreign espionage that is at present taking place within this country and the danger to which it may expose us’.4 It reported on 24 July: ‘The evidence which was produced left no doubt in the minds of the subcommittee that an extensive system of German espionage exists in this country and that we have no organisation for keeping in touch with that espionage and for accurately determining its extent or objectives.’5 Most continental high commands would have been surprised to discover that British intelligence was in such an enfeebled state. There was a widespread myth that, ever since the days when a secret service run by Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, had successfully uncovered a number of Catholic plots, British intelligence, like the British Empire, had grown steadily in size and influence, spreading its tentacles across the globe. The myth was encouraged by Edwardian spy novelists. The most prolific and successful of them, William Le Queux, allegedly Queen Alexandra’s favourite novelist, assured his readers: ‘The British Secret Service, although never so prominently before the public as those unscrupulous agents provocateurs of France and Russia, is nevertheless equally active.

There was nothing in 1914 to suggest that it would emerge from the war as a mass movement which would become the focus of resistance to the British Raj. The man who brought about this transformation was M. K. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, an English-educated barrister of the Inner Temple who, more than any other man, set in motion the process which, a generation later, began the downfall of the British Empire. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915 from South Africa, where he developed the technique of satyagraha, or passive resistance, which he was later to use against the Raj, the DCI assessed him as ‘neither an anarchist nor a revolutionary’ but ‘a troublesome agitator whose enthusiasm has led him frequently to overstep the limits of the South African laws relating to Asiatics’.51 In the course of the war MI5 extended its involvement in imperial intelligence from India to the Empire and Commonwealth as a whole.

On 24 April, a week before he became head of the new Directorate of Intelligence, a flattering article in the right-wing Morning Post reported that his new ‘Special Branch’ would operate ‘on the lines of Continental Secret Services and will ultimately have agents throughout the United Kingdom, in the colonies, and in many parts of the world outside the British Empire’. Wildly exaggerated though the claim turned out to be, it probably accurately reflected Thomson’s immense ambitions. The Daily Mail next day was equally flattering: After 50 years as a sub-department of Scotland Yard the ‘Special Branch’ which looks after Kings and visiting potentates, Cabinet Ministers, and suffragettes, spies and anarchists, has been given a home of its own and is placed under the special charge of an assistant commissioner of police, Mr Basil Thomson, who has an unrivalled knowledge of all these.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

A 1792 Act of Parliament allowed the Bow Street model to spread across England. 1776–83 The American War of Independence is the British Empire’s first major reverse, forcing England to withdraw – for a while, at least – from the world stage, a fact not missed by French ruler Napoleon. 1799–1815 The Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon threatens invasion on a weakened Britain, but his ambitions are curtailed by Nelson and Wellington at the famous battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815) respectively. 1837–1901 The reign of Queen Victoria. The British Empire – ‘the Empire where the sun never sets’– expands from Canada through Africa and India to Australia and New Zealand. 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated in the Balkan city of Sarajevo – the final spark in a decade-long crisis that starts the Great War, now called WWI. 1926 Increasing mistrust of the government, fuelled by soaring unemployment, leads to the General Strike.

Charles II (the exiled son of Charles I) came to the throne, and his rule – known as ‘the Restoration’ – saw scientific and cultural activity bursting forth after the straight-laced ethics of Cromwell’s time. Exploration and expansion were also on the agenda. Backed by the army and navy (which had been modernised by Cromwell), colonies stretched down the American coast, while the East India Company set up headquarters in Bombay, laying foundations for what was to become the British Empire. * * * ‘in 1707, the Act of the Union was passed, linking the countries of England, Wales and Scotland under one Parliament’ * * * The next king, James II, had a harder time. Attempts to ease restrictive laws on Catholics ended with his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne by William III, the Protestant king of Holland, aka William of Orange.

During her reign, in 1707, the Act of Union was passed, linking the countries of England, Wales and Scotland under one Parliament – based in London – for the first time. Anne died without an heir in 1714, marking the end of the Stuart line. The throne passed to distant (but still safely Protestant) German relatives – the House of Hanover. Meanwhile, the British Empire – which, despite its title, was predominantly an English entity – continued to grow in the Americas, as well as in Asia, while claims were made to Australia after James Cook’s epic voyage in 1768. Return to beginning of chapter THE INDUSTRIAL AGE While the Empire expanded abroad, at home Britain had become the crucible of the Industrial Revolution.


pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

If he had opened a newspaper, he would have been taken aback by the complacent assumptions of abundance – the classified offers of second-hand cars and old appliances, the endless promises of bargain-bonanza sales, the features on gardening, motoring and DIY, the glossy advertisements for cigars, liqueurs and foreign holidays. But if he had looked at a map, he would have been stunned to see so many new countries, and probably horrified by the apparent extinction of the British Empire. And if he had plucked up the courage to go into a pub, to buy a drink – perhaps lager or keg beer, not the bitter or mild he usually drank – he would have recognized some of his neighbours’ conversation, but not all of it. He might remember the name of Harold Wilson, a youthful President of the Board of Trade back in Mr Attlee’s day, but the names of Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, Jeremy Thorpe and Jim Callaghan, would be entirely unfamiliar to him.

What was more, elements within the Irish government – notably Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, but possibly even the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, himself – arranged for Irish Army intelligence to buy and ship guns to the Provisionals in the spring of 1970, an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous decision, given what was to follow. Finally, any group claiming the mantle of the IRA could expect considerable moral and financial support from across the Atlantic, where Irish families still toasted the Easter Rising and damned the British Empire. In particular, it was American money that paid for the massive shipments of Armalite rifles to the Provos in the early 1970s, with most of the cash coming from the Provo front organization NORAID. Smugglers even used the cruise liner QE2 as cover, bringing over half a dozen Armalites with every voyage, sometimes tucked down the legs of their trousers.

He hated spades – wished they’d wash more often or get the hell back where they came from. This was his London – not somewhere for London Transport’s African troops to live. – Richard Allen, Skinhead (1970) AGGRO BRITAIN: ‘Mindless Violence’ of the Bully Boys Worries Top Policeman – Daily Mirror, 14 June 1973 By the beginning of the 1970s, the British Empire had been consigned to history. As one colonial possession after another had declared independence during the 1950s and 1960s, so the swathes of imperial pink that had once covered maps in classrooms across the country had vanished. When Edward Heath flew to Singapore for the first Commonwealth Conference in January 1971, it was as the chief executive of a rusting industrial conglomerate, once a market leader but left now with just a handful of tiny, scattered subsidiaries: Hong Kong, the Seychelles, St Vincent, the Falkland Islands.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

AD 1000 15 The imperial Kingdom of Arles from 1032 16 The modern linguistic region Arpitania 17 The disintegration of imperial Burgundy 18 The Duchy and County of Burgundy in the fourteenth century 19 The States of Burgundy, fourteenth–fifteenth centuries 20 The Imperial Circles of the Holy Roman Empire 21 Pyrenees 22 Marches of Charlemagne’s Empire, ninth century 23 The cradle of the Kingdom of Aragon, 1035–1137 24 The Iberian peninsula in 1137 25 The heartlands of the Crown of Aragon 26 Aragonese Empire 27 The two medieval Sicilies 28 The Kingdom of Mallorca 29 The union of Castile and Aragon, 1479 30 Belarus 31 The ‘Land of the Headwaters’ 32 The Principalities of Polatsk, c. twelfth century 33 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Mindaugus (mid-thirteenth century) 34 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the other Jagiellonian lands, c. 1500 35 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1572 36 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1572–1795 37 The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, 1772–1795 38 Western gubernias of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century 39 Istanbul and the Bosporus 40 Contraction of the Byzantine Empire 41 Kaliningrad oblast 42 Borussia – land of the Moravia 43 The Teutonic State, 1410 44 Royal and Ducal Prussia after 1466 45 Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648 46 The growth of the Hohenzollern Kingdom, 1701–1795 47 The Kingdom of Prussia, 1807–1918 48 The Eastern frontline, 1944–1945 49 Rome 50 Savoy and Piedmont 51 The Kingdom of Sardinia, c. 1750 52 Italy, 1859–1861 53 Northern Italy, spring 1860 54 West Ukraine 55 The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, c. 1900 56 Galicia in Austria-Hungary, c. 1914 57 Florence 58 The Kingdom of Etruria, 1801–1807 59 Napoleonic Italy, 1810 60 Free State of Thüringia and Northern Bavaria 61 Saxon mini-states, c. 1900 62 Montenegro, 2011 63 The tribes of Montenegro, c. 1900 64 Montenegro and neighbours, 1911 65 Yugoslavia after 1945 66 Modern Zakarpattia (Carpatho-Ukraine) 67 Czechoslovak Republic, 1920–1938 68 The Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, 1939 69 Ireland, 2011 70 Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century 71 Estonia 72 The Baltic States between the wars 73 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1945–1991 74 Russia’s western ‘near abroad’ after 1991 Introduction All my life, I have been intrigued by the gap between appearances and reality. Things are never quite as they seem. I was born a subject of the British Empire, and as a child, read in my Children’s Encyclopaedia that ‘our empire’ was one ‘on which the sun never set’. I saw that there was more red on the map than any other colour, and was delighted. Before long, I was watching in disbelief as the imperial sunset blazed across the post-war skies amidst seas of blood and mayhem.

In late Roman times, they would have warned of the approach of the Hibernian pirates, whom the Romans called Scotti.* In the ninth century they would have gasped in awe at the fearsome fleets of Viking longships. In more recent times, they would have seen the troopships and merchantmen that formed the sinews of the British Empire, and the stately Cunard liners steaming out to the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, the town under the shadow of the Rock lived for much of its career from ship-building. The shipyard at Dumbarton was itself too small to accommodate the great ocean liners that were built at nearby Clydebank; instead, it specialized in the smaller steamships and paddleboats that have plied their trade on the Clyde for the last 200 years.

Yet historians face a very real problem in categorizing Aragon’s far-flung lands. In recent times, they have frequently talked of the ‘Aragonese Empire’ or the ‘Aragon-Catalonian Empire’. Scholastic arguments which crankily complain that the Aragonese example did not resemble the ancient Roman Empire or the modern British Empire are not helpful. These unhistorical terms do serve a purpose. For, though the Crown of Aragon was dynastic in origin and decentralized in nature, it formed more than a mere ragbag of accidental possessions. It constituted a long-lasting political community with a common allegiance, common traditions, common cultural proclivities and strong economic ties.34 How one classifies it is of secondary importance.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

A supplementary document from the State Department underlined the American position, to the extent of declaring that a timetable to independence should be drawn up: ‘It is accordingly, the duty and purpose of each nation having political ties with colonial peoples… to fix at the earliest practicable moment, dates upon which the colonial peoples shall be accorded the status of full independence…’ American public opinion echoed the sentiment, with the press to the fore. In an open letter to the English people the editors of Life magazine declared in 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British empire together…’10 Whatever Churchill may have told the House of Commons, his government was fully aware that American enthusiasm for independence probably entailed the end of the British Empire.11 But for all its fine sentiment, a clause in the Atlantic Charter calling for ‘access on equal terms to the trade and to the raw material of the world’ indicates that Roosevelt's noble demands were not wholly without self-interest.

The Afrikaners lacked the means of enforcing these decrees, but their apparent determination to persist with slavery in Natal aroused British concern. Gunships were dispatched to Port Natal and the republic was annexed by Britain in 1843. The document of submission which brought the Afrikaner Natal Republic into the British Empire included the stipulation ‘that there shall not be in the eye of the law any distinction of colour, origin, race, or creed; but that the protection of the law, in letter and in substance, shall be extended impartially to all alike’.25 After the British annexation of Natal, nearly all the Afrikaners trekked back to the high veld and distributed themselves throughout the interior – down to the Orange River and across the Vaal – creating an extensive but thinly populated frontier zone where they could sustain themselves but neither they, nor the indigenous communities, nor, for that matter, the British colonial authorities, could establish undisputed political control.

For £9,000 and 10,000 shares in his British South Africa Company.34 In writing of the deal Rhodes remarked that he did think the price excessive; which gives some clue to the scale of his ambitions in Africa in 1889. Rhodes was already immensely rich; he had gained overall control of the Kimberley diamond mines, and had major interests in the development of the gold-mining industry in the Transvaal. Wealth and ruthless business acumen had brought political influence and fuelled grandiose plans for a British Empire in Africa, stretching from the Cape to Cairo, as magnificent as the Indian Raj, ruled by Rhodes and his men. But first he had to have exclusive rights to the land. And at a time when the European powers were scrambling for spheres of influence around the world, that meant keeping others out. The granting of Protectorate status had kept the Germans out of Bechuanaland; an agreement with Lobengula forestalled Boer and Portuguese ambitions in Matabeleland; but what of Barotseland?


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

AD 1000 15 The imperial Kingdom of Arles from 1032 16 The modern linguistic region Arpitania 17 The disintegration of imperial Burgundy 18 The Duchy and County of Burgundy in the fourteenth century 19 The States of Burgundy, fourteenth–fifteenth centuries 20 The Imperial Circles of the Holy Roman Empire 21 Pyrenees 22 Marches of Charlemagne’s Empire, ninth century 23 The cradle of the Kingdom of Aragon, 1035–1137 24 The Iberian peninsula in 1137 25 The heartlands of the Crown of Aragon 26 Aragonese Empire 27 The two medieval Sicilies 28 The Kingdom of Mallorca 29 The union of Castile and Aragon, 1479 30 Belarus 31 The ‘Land of the Headwaters’ 32 The Principalities of Polatsk, c. twelfth century 33 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Mindaugus (mid-thirteenth century) 34 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the other Jagiellonian lands, c. 1500 35 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1572 36 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1572–1795 37 The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, 1772–1795 38 Western gubernias of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century 39 Istanbul and the Bosporus 40 Contraction of the Byzantine Empire 41 Kaliningrad oblast 42 Borussia – land of the Moravia 43 The Teutonic State, 1410 44 Royal and Ducal Prussia after 1466 45 Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648 46 The growth of the Hohenzollern Kingdom, 1701–1795 47 The Kingdom of Prussia, 1807–1918 48 The Eastern frontline, 1944–1945 49 Rome 50 Savoy and Piedmont 51 The Kingdom of Sardinia, c. 1750 52 Italy, 1859–1861 53 Northern Italy, spring 1860 54 West Ukraine 55 The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, c. 1900 56 Galicia in Austria-Hungary, c. 1914 57 Florence 58 The Kingdom of Etruria, 1801–1807 59 Napoleonic Italy, 1810 60 Free State of Thüringia and Northern Bavaria 61 Saxon mini-states, c. 1900 62 Montenegro, 2011 63 The tribes of Montenegro, c. 1900 64 Montenegro and neighbours, 1911 65 Yugoslavia after 1945 66 Modern Zakarpattia (Carpatho-Ukraine) 67 Czechoslovak Republic, 1920–1938 68 The Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, 1939 69 Ireland, 2011 70 Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century 71 Estonia 72 The Baltic States between the wars 73 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1945–1991 74 Russia’s western ‘near abroad’ after 1991 Introduction All my life, I have been intrigued by the gap between appearances and reality. Things are never quite as they seem. I was born a subject of the British Empire, and as a child, read in my Children’s Encyclopaedia that ‘our empire’ was one ‘on which the sun never set’. I saw that there was more red on the map than any other colour, and was delighted. Before long, I was watching in disbelief as the imperial sunset blazed across the post-war skies amidst seas of blood and mayhem.

In late Roman times, they would have warned of the approach of the Hibernian pirates, whom the Romans called Scotti.* In the ninth century they would have gasped in awe at the fearsome fleets of Viking longships. In more recent times, they would have seen the troopships and merchantmen that formed the sinews of the British Empire, and the stately Cunard liners steaming out to the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, the town under the shadow of the Rock lived for much of its career from ship-building. The shipyard at Dumbarton was itself too small to accommodate the great ocean liners that were built at nearby Clydebank; instead, it specialized in the smaller steamships and paddleboats that have plied their trade on the Clyde for the last 200 years.

Yet historians face a very real problem in categorizing Aragon’s far-flung lands. In recent times, they have frequently talked of the ‘Aragonese Empire’ or the ‘Aragon-Catalonian Empire’. Scholastic arguments which crankily complain that the Aragonese example did not resemble the ancient Roman Empire or the modern British Empire are not helpful. These unhistorical terms do serve a purpose. For, though the Crown of Aragon was dynastic in origin and decentralized in nature, it formed more than a mere ragbag of accidental possessions. It constituted a long-lasting political community with a common allegiance, common traditions, common cultural proclivities and strong economic ties.34 How one classifies it is of secondary importance.


pages: 56 words: 17,340

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

A more reasonable answer was given by a number of sources, including the Vatican, and was spelled out by the preeminent Anglo-American military historian, Michael Howard, last October. Actually, it's published in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (January-February 2002); that's the leading establishment journal. Now Howard has all the appropriate credentials, a lot of prestige; he's a great admirer of the British Empire, even more extravagantly of its successor in global rule, so he can't be accused of moral relativism or other such crimes. Referring to September 11, he recommended a police operation against a criminal conspiracy whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they could receive a fair trial, and if found guilty be awarded an appropriate sentence.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Previously, those areas conE V E R Y O N E A L I V E T O D AY 155 156 The New Elite sisted of very small states or territories, often ruled by monarchies, and had no defining language because they shared the culture and language of neighboring principalities (some of these ‘‘micro-states’’ survive to the present day, such as French-speaking Monaco and German-speaking Liechtenstein). Much of the world outside Europe was colonized as part of large multiethnic empires such as the British Empire, leaving local residents with little self-determination. The nation-state arrived in these parts of the world much later, and often only after considerable conflict. Today the nation-state is ensconced throughout the world, and in our minds. But change is coming. The nation-state is slowly, silently fading.

But she was guillotined nevertheless, and massive disparities of wealth were certainly key factors in the French 202 The New Elite Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. But as Kevin Phillips points out in Wealth and Democracy, massive inequality has been a harbinger of significant but more gradual declines among each of the world’s most dominant powers since the Renaissance: Spain in the early 1500s, Holland in the early 1600s, and the British Empire of the 1800s. The future of any plutonomy, along with its social and political implications, depends on a number of factors. First, while the rich have gotten richer, has everybody else gotten richer as well? At the extremes, two scenarios suggest themselves. First, if the economy approximates a zero-sum game, in which the gains of the elite come at the expense of the vast majority, then resentment and class warfare would be more likely.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Through his skirmishes he carved out a separate space for economics – downplaying the importance of history, even economic history, in the economics curriculum. He created an Economics Tripos degree at Cambridge, the first of its kind, which gave students the opportunity to specialize in economics. This model was copied across many English-speaking universities within the British Empire and in the US as well. Marshall built up the basic corpus of economics as it came to be taught. He had the clever idea of using mathematics in his arguments but hiding it in the footnotes and appendices. He translated his mathematical results in lugubrious prose and pretended that he was writing for the practical businessman.

Marshall taught the growth of firms and the expansion of whole industries in the same gentle prose he used to explain how the price of tea was determined. Economics was to be a useful subject dealing with the daily business of life. And yet behind this easy facade was the certainty that whatever the economic problem, the answer could be readily found. English-speaking economists stopped reading German or French books. It was the heyday of the British Empire and it seemed easy to say “It is all in Marshall.” Marshall made the ideas of marginal and average costs familiar to economists. He established that the most efficient outcome for a firm was where the marginal cost of producing a good equaled its price. Competition between many small firms producing an identical product (farmers of wheat, for example) would result in an identical price for every producer/seller and in the end profits would be minimal thanks to competition.


pages: 253 words: 79,441

Better Than Fiction by Lonely Planet

airport security, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, transcontinental railway

After graduating from Oxford, she spent ten years as a foreign correspondent, first for The London Times, then the Guardian, and was the only reporter with the expedition that first climbed Mt Everest in 1953. Since then she has written some forty books of travel, history, memoir, biography and imagination. The Pax Britannica trilogy evokes the climax and decline of the late British Empire. The memoir Conundrum concerns the author’s change of sexual role in the 1970s, and Hav is a fictional account of an entirely imaginary European city. Morris has also written literary studies of Wales, Spain, the USA, Canada, Venice, Oxford, Sydney and Hong Kong, and unorthodox biographies of Abraham Lincoln and the British admiral Lord Fisher, who died in 1926 and with whom she proposes to have an affair in the afterlife.

Did I not draw him, all unwitting, from my memories of the trial of Adolf Eichmann at Jerusalem, when the ultimate mass murderer in his glass cage suggested to me ‘an elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore’, priggish and petulant in his self-justification? Much of my own life’s pilgrimage has taken me through the shadow of the lost British Empire, and I felt its presence also in Hav, which was British for a time itself. The ambiguous grandeur of that once-majestic dominion has always haunted me, not least in the crumbling memorial slabs I have stumbled across from Tasmania to Alberta. It is not surprising that I discovered a moving specimen down by the waterfront at Hav, commemorating an officer of the Royal Engineers who had ‘Left this Station to Report to the Commander of a yet Greater Corps’.


pages: 235 words: 73,873

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

But the dangers have not stopped. If we are to form a United States of Europe, or whatever name or form it may take, we must begin now.’ For Churchill, steeped in realpolitik, there was another imperative driving the formation of the USE, beyond strengthening the Atlantic Alliance and Western Europe’s democracies. The British Empire was disintegrating fast, and there was nothing Churchill could do about it. In February 1947, he appointed Lord Mountbatten as Viceroy of India, hoping to stabilise British rule on a more democratic basis. But it proved impossible. Significantly, the treaty to establish a European union was signed three months after India became independent in August 1947.

Haileybury, his Hertfordshire public school, had been the East India Company’s training school and morphed into a public school with a mission for imperial service, and the young, idealistic ‘Clem’ went from Haileybury to Oxford in its imperial heyday. Bew argues that Attlee was motivated ‘more than anyone else in his government’ by the conviction that the old British Empire, that of Queen Victoria and the Diamond Jubilee, had come to an end, and should not be supported beyond its natural lifespan. Nonetheless, he saw the new Commonwealth as a real and vital political and economic bloc, not just a fig leaf for imperial decline. For many on the left, a British-led Commonwealth was appealing as an alternative bloc to the United States and to the totalitarian Soviet Union.


pages: 457 words: 128,640

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times by Lucy Lethbridge

Ada Lovelace, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, country house hotel, decarbonisation, garden city movement, high net worth, invisible hand, Louis Pasteur, new economy, period drama, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social web, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

‘Gas was despised, I forget why – vulgar I think,’ was how Lady Diana Cooper remembered it.16 Gordon Grimmett, who in 1915 went to work as a lamp boy for the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, where there was no electricity, put this distaste for technological innovation down to the ruling classes’ immunity to discomfort: ‘The English public school system had instilled in them the virtues of a spartan life, and early principles, it seemed, died hard. It was all right for the foreign aristocracy, they were a soft lot, that was why the British Empire was there and would always remain there. It was also why every day I had to collect, clean, trim and fill four hundred lamps.’17 In 1900 domestic service was the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain: of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants, a majority of them as single-handed maids in small households.

There was a general air of discretion about Lord Haldane not unfitting for one in charge of the cellar keys and other confidential business.’2 Accounts of butlers by themselves and others tend to show him as his master’s lieutenant, bestowing his beneficent order not only on the household, but on nature, on his country and, like ripples spreading outwards, on the subject peoples of the British Empire. ‘I walked right up to the front door, great big thing – bang, bang, bang – and the butler arrives; I thought it was the lord himself,’ said a young maid describing the interview for her first job.3 The celebrated Edwin Lee, for years the Astors’ butler at Cliveden, was a figure whose discipline and efficiency was legendary in servant circles and beyond.

XXXI, 1892 ‘A Four-inch-Driver’, The Chauffeur’s Handbook, London, 1909 Dean, Charles, in Geoffrey Tyack, ‘Service on the Cliveden Estate Between the Wars’, Oral History, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1977 Caunce, Stephen, ‘East Riding Hiring Fairs’, Oral History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 1975 Franklin, Jill, ‘Troops of Servants: Labour and Planning in the Country House 1840–1914’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (December 1975), pp. 211–39 Gerrard, Jessica, ‘Lady Bountiful: Women of the Landed Classes and Rural Philanthropy’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 1987), pp. 183–210 Higgs, Edward, ‘Domestic Servants and Households in Victorian England’, Social History, Vol. 8, No. 8 (May 1983), pp. 201–10 Hinton, James, ‘Militant Housewives: The British Housewives’ League and the Attlee Government’, History Workshop Journal, 38:1 (1994), pp. 129–56 Horn, Pamela, ‘Ministry of Labour Female Training Programmes Between the Wars, 1919–39’, History of Education, 31:1 (2002), pp. 71–82 Kent, Susan Kingsley, ‘The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War One and the Demise of British Feminism’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (July 1988), pp. 232–53 Lees-Maffei, Grace, ‘Accommodating “Mrs Three-in-One”: Homemaking, Home Entertaining and Domestic Advice Literature in Post-War Britain’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 16, Issue 5 (November 2007), pp. 723–54 ———‘From Service to Self-Service: Advice Literature as Design Discourse, 1920–1970’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2001), pp. 187–206 Todd, Selina, ‘Domestic and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950’, Past and Present, 203 (1) (2009), pp. 81–204 Published Sources Adam, Ruth, A Woman’s Place 1910–1975, London, 1975 Adams, Samuel and Adams, Sarah, The Complete Servant, London, 1825 Adburgham, Alison, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914: Where and in What Manner the Well-Dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes, London, 1989 ———A Punch History of Manners and Modes 1841–1940, London, 1961 Addison, Paul, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945–51, London, 1985 Ager, Stanley and St Aubyn, Fiona, The Butler’s Guide to Running the Home and Other Graces, London, 1980 Akhtar, Miriam and Humphries, Steve, The Fifties and Sixties: A Lifestyle Revolution, London, 2001 Allen, Charles, Plain Tales from the British Empire: Images of the British in India, Africa and South-East Asia, London, 2008 Allingham, Margery, The Oaken Heart, London, 1941 Angell, Norman and Buxton, Dorothy, You and the Refugee: The Morals and Economics of the Problem, London, 1939 ‘An Old Servant’, Domestic Service, London, 1917 Anon., The Ideal Servant-Saving House by an Engineer and his Wife, London, 1918 ———Mistresses and Maids: A Handbook of Domestic Peace, London, 1904 ———Commonsense for Housemaids, London, 1853 ———The Manners and Rules of Good Society, London, 1910 Askwith, Eveline, Tweeny: Domestic Service in Edwardian Harrogate, Bridgwater, 2003 Baily, Leslie, Scrapbook for the Twenties, London, 1959 Balderson, Eileen, Backstairs Life in a Country House, Newton Abbot, 1982 Balsan, Consuelo, The Glitter and the Gold, London, 1953 Banks, Elizabeth, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London, London, 1894 Bankes, Viola, A Kingston Lacy Childhood, Wimbourne, 1986 Barker, Paul, The Freedoms of Suburbia, London, 2009 Barrie, J.


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

Thus normal interstate relations with capitalist governments were not paramount; instead, subverting the West through covert action was seen as essential to the survival of the new Soviet régime. This myth seemed all the more plausible because world war had dislocated relations between the great powers and undermined social and economic stability across the face of Europe. The second myth, held by the leading Great Powers, most notably France, the British Empire, and, momentarily, the United States, was that the agreements negotiated to end the First World War—most notably the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919)—would forge a stable peace. This would be done by subjugating Germany for the indefinite future; an international outcast, it would be stripped of its ability to wage war and economically crippled through the payment of reparations.

Reilly was executed on November 3.62 His corpse lies to this day under a courtyard within the Lubyanka.63 Moscow and London reached an uneasy truce after mutual diplomatic recognition was achieved in March 1921, and ambassadors were even exchanged in 1924, during Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived Labour government. But relations rapidly deteriorated under the strain of accelerated Comintern activity within the British Empire, including, importantly, in the treaty ports of China. China mattered greatly. It was Britain’s second-largest trading partner and the second-largest recipient of British investment. Stanley Baldwin’s die-hard Conservative government (1924–1929) swept to power on the back of the Zinoviev Letter, which purported to be an instruction from Comintern to instigate mutiny in the armed forces.

No doubt to Liza’s silent horror, Blyumkin was condemned to death on November 3, 1929: the first victim within the Party to lose his life as a result of Stalin’s very personal vendetta against Trotsky.23 Operation Tarantella Artuzov may not himself have invented the Trust, but he did turn it into a legend, though its demise ultimately proved impossible to avert. Operations on a similar scale were now contemplated to neutralise Moscow’s main foreign adversary, the British Empire, through disinformation on a grand scale. This led to the birth of Operation Tarantella in the summer of 1930. Artuzov’s Italian roots no doubt made this an amusing choice of title: the tarantella is by legend a Neapolitan dance designed to drive men mad.24 The operation’s broad aim was to convince London that the industrialisation of the Soviet Union was a huge success.


Ada BlackJack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic by Jennifer Niven

British Empire, Golden Gate Park, plutocrats, traveling salesman

—JOHN MUIR, 1881 Chapter Five IMMEDIATELY AFTER PUTTING ashore on September 16, 1921, the four men raised the British flag in the name of King George, Monarch of the British Empire, and claimed Wrangel Island for Great Britain. From the deck of the Silver Wave, Captain Hammer watched with suspicion as the Union Jack was planted and the men appeared to read from a document. He couldn’t hear their words from where he stood, but the message of the flag was clear. The Silver Wave was an American ship with a largely American crew, and Hammer had the sneaking feeling that he and the rest of his countrymen had just been duped into aiding a bold political maneuver on behalf of the British Empire. But on Wrangel Island, standing atop a hillside in the shadow of the British flag, Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight, Fred Maurer, and Milton Galle signed their names to an official proclamation, and celebrated the first victory of their expedition.

I, Allan Rudyard Crawford, a native of Canada and a British subject and those men whose names appear below...on the advice and council of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a British subject, have this day, in the consideration of lapses of foreign claims and the occupancy from March 12th 1914 to September 7 1914 of this island by the survivors of the brigantine Karluk . . . raised the British flag and declared this land known as Wrangel Island to be the just possession of His Majesty George, King of Great Britain...and a part of the British Empire. While the four men sealed the proclamation with tallow, enclosed it in a bottle placed inside a slender box, and buried it in the earth, Ada Blackjack walked down the beach, her eyes on the ship. She watched as the Silver Wave pulled away from the island and pointed its nose toward Alaska. She knew she was going to cry and she didn’t want the men to see her.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

An agent provocateur pasted the cartoon to the door of the city’s main mosque, the Jama Masjid, during Friday prayers. When the congregants emerged, they grew enraged and attacked Parsis indiscriminately. Moreover, Muslims influenced by the austere Wahhabi movement, the brainchild of a conservative theologian on the Arabian Peninsula named Mohammed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, had been restive throughout the British Empire in the nineteenth century. The British worried Bombay’s Islamic community merited what they termed their “Wahhabi phobia”—imperial fear of radicalized anti-Western Muslims—especially now that rumors ran rampant that the British had forced Indian Muslims to unwittingly consume pork. Yet the Eid al-Adha holiday commemorating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son passed without incident in the summer of 1857.

No matter how large Shanghai grew, China’s greatest city would always be dwarfed by the countryside’s hundreds of millions of peasants, many of whom were now armed under Mao Zedong with China’s capitalist heart in their crosshairs. 6 THE CITY UNDER PROGRESS’S FEET Bombay, 1896–1947 Eros Cinema On June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubillee, the sixtieth anniversary of her ascension to the throne. The British Empire was at its peak, encompassing fully one-quarter of the world’s population. As the new day dawned in each British holding from New Zealand in the east to Canada in the west, carefully coordinated celebrations erupted. In India, the fulsome festivities befit its status as the jewel of the empire.

Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 33. 103 “The classes most advanced in English education”: Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49. 103 “the admission to the legislative body”: Basil Worsfold, Sir Bartle Frere: A Footnote to the History of the British Empire (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 29. 104 before him there was no British architecture: Christopher London, Bombay Gothic (Mumbai: India Book House, 2002), 129. 105 “a trust from God”: Worsfold, Sir Bartle Frere, 40. 105 “meet the most pressing wants”: London, Bombay Gothic, 28. 105 “As our administration”: Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 1. 106 “grown up in sunshiny regions”: ibid., 98. 107 “one long line of array”: Norma Evenson, “An Architectural Hybrid,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

That was true of the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, more recently, the Soviet Union.8 When the latter broke up in 1991, the IMF recommended that the successor states continue to use the rouble. But within a short time, they had all adopted new currencies. Less spectacularly, but no less completely, when the British Empire metamorphosed into the British Commonwealth during the post-war period, the sterling area faded away. When Czechoslovakia was divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, the two new states soon moved to distinguish their currencies, and in 2009 Slovakia joined the euro area. That was a relatively amicable divorce.

It came to an end in 1914 when Sweden decided to abandon the gold standard. The case of Ireland is also telling. After the Easter Rising of 1916, and the subsequent political and military struggle, Irish independence became a reality. The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty recognised the Irish Free State but implied that it would remain part of the British Empire. That interpretation was not accepted in Dublin, although the new Free State continued to use sterling as its currency. It made no attempt to design or issue banknotes because those printed by the Bank of England, at that time a private company, did not depict the UK sovereign.11 When distinctive Irish coins were introduced in 1928, with inscriptions entirely in the Irish language and depictions of animals instead of British heraldry and the King’s head, they ‘were intended to be unambiguous in declaring a distinct Irish identity and in announcing the arrival of a new sovereign state to the community of nations’.12 Following independence, the Irish Republic maintained an informal monetary union with the United Kingdom but left in 1979, first to cohabit with and then formalise its relationship with the euro area.

Abe, Shinzo, 363 ABN Amro, 118 Acheson, Dean, 368 Ahmed, Liaquat, The Lords of Finance, 158 AIG, 142, 162 alchemy, financial, 5, 8, 10, 40, 50, 91, 191–2, 257, 261, 263–5, 367, 369; illusion of liquidity, 149–55, 253–5; maturity and risk transformation, 104–15, 117–19, 250–1, 254–5; pawnbroker for all seasons (PFAS) approach, 270–81, 288, 368 Ardant, Henri, 219 Arrow, Kenneth, 79–80, 295 Asian financial crisis (1990s), 28, 349, 350 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 349–50 Australia, 74, 259, 275, 348 Austria, 340, 341 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 216 Bagehot, Walter, 212, 218, 335; Lombard Street (1873), 94–5, 114–15, 188, 189, 190, 191–2, 202, 208, 251, 269 Bank for International Settlements, 31, 255, 276, 324 Bank of America, 103–4, 257 Bank of England, 169, 217, 275, 280, 320–1; Bank Charter Act (1844), 160, 198; during crisis, 36, 37–8, 64, 65, 76, 118, 181–3, 184, 205, 206; Financial Policy Committee, 173; garden at, 73–4; gold reserves, 74, 75, 77, 198; governors of, 6, 12–13, 52–3, 175–6, 178; granting of independence to (1997), 7, 166, 186; history of, 92, 94, 156–7, 159, 160, 180–1, 186, 188–201, 206, 335; inflation targeting policy, 7, 167, 170, 322; Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), 173, 329–31; as Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, 75; weather vane on roof, 181 bank runs, 37–8, 93, 105–8, 187–92, 253–4, 262 Bankia (Spanish bank), 257–8 banking sector: balance sheets, 31, 103–4; capital requirements, 137–9, 255–6, 258, 280; commercial and investment separation, 23, 98, 256, 257; creation of money by, 8, 59–63, 86–7, 91, 161, 253, 263; as dangerous and fragile, 8, 23, 33, 34, 36–7, 91–2, 105, 111, 119, 323–4; deposit insurance, 62, 107–8, 137, 254–5, 328; European universal banks, 23–4; and ‘good collateral’, 188, 190, 202–3, 207, 269; history of, 4–5, 18–19, 59–60, 94–5, 187–202, 206–7; implicit taxpayer subsidy for, 96–7, 107, 116–17, 191–2, 207, 254–5, 263–4, 265–6, 267–8, 269–71, 277; interconnected functions of, 95–6, 111–12, 114–15; levels of equity finance, 103, 105, 109, 112, 137–9, 173, 202, 254–9, 263, 268, 280, 368 see also leverage ratios (total assets to equity capital); liquidity support stigma, 205–7; misconduct scandals, 91, 100, 118, 151, 256; narrow and wide banks, 263–5, 266–7, 279; political influence of, 3, 6, 288–9; recapitalisation of (October 2008), 37–8, 201; taxpayer bailouts during crisis, 4, 38, 41, 43, 93, 94, 106, 118, 162, 243, 247, 261, 267–8; ‘too important to fail’ (TITF), 96–7, 99, 116–17, 118, 254–5, 263–4, 279–80; vast expansion of, 23–4, 31–3, 92–4, 95, 96–9, 115–18; visibility of, 92–3, 94; see also alchemy, financial; central banks; liquidity; regulation Banque de France, 159 Barclays, 95 Barings Bank, 137, 193 ‘behavioural economics’, 132–4, 308, 310 Belgium, 201, 216, 340 Benes, Jaromir, 262 Bergsten, Fred, 234 Berlusconi, Silvio, 225 Bernanke, Ben, 28, 44, 91, 158, 175–6, 183, 188, 287 bills of exchange, 197–8, 199 bitcoins, 282–3 Black, Joseph, 56 Blackett, Basil, 195–6 Blair, Tony, 186 Blakey, Robert, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress (1839), 251–3 Blinder, Alan, 164 BNP Paribas, 35 Brazil, 38 Brecht, Bertolt, The Threepenny Opera (1928), 88, 93 Bremer, Paul, 241 Bretton Woods system, 20–1, 350, 352 British Empire, 216, 217 Bryan, William Jennings, 76, 86–7 Buffett, Warren, 102, 143 building societies, 98 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), 251 Cabaret (film, 1972), 52, 83 Cambodia, 246 Cambridge University, 12, 83, 292–3, 302 Campbell, Mrs Patrick, 220 Campbell-Geddes, Sir Eric, 346 Canada, 116, 167, 170 capitalism, 2, 5, 8, 16–21, 42, 155, 366; as best way to create wealth, 17, 365–6, 369; and end of Cold War, 26–7, 365; money and banking as Achilles heel, 5, 16–17, 23–6, 32–9, 40–1, 50, 369–70; Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’, 152; see also market economy Carlyle, Thomas, 16 Carney, Mark, 176 Caruana, Jaime, 324 central banks, 156–9; accountability and transparency, 158, 168, 169–70, 175–6, 178–80, 186, 208; and ‘constrained discretion’, 169–70, 186; creation of ‘emergency money’, 48, 65–6, 71, 86, 172, 182–3, 189, 196–7, 201–7, 247, 275; during crisis, 36–9, 64, 65, 76, 113, 118, 158, 159, 162, 181–4, 205, 206, 335; and disequilibrium, 46–7, 171–2, 175, 208, 329–32; exclusive right to issue paper money, 160, 165, 283; and expectations, 28, 176–8, 304; forecasting by, 179–80, 304–5; future of, 207–10; gold reserves, 74–5, 77, 198; history of, 159–60, 161–2, 180–1; independence of, 5–6, 7, 22, 71, 165–7, 169–70, 185–6, 209–10, 357; industry of private sector watchers, 178; integrated policy framework, 187, 208–9, 288; as ‘lenders of last resort’ (LOLR), 94–5, 109–10, 163, 187–97, 202–7, 208, 259, 268, 269–70, 274–5, 288; and ‘macro-prudential policies’, 173–5, 187; monetary policy rules, 168–9; and money supply, 63, 65–6, 76, 86–7, 162, 163, 180–4, 192, 196–201; pawnbroker for all seasons (PFAS) approach, 270–81, 288, 368; in post-crisis period, 43–4, 63, 76, 162–3, 168–9, 173, 175, 179–80, 183–6; printing of electronic money by, 43, 52, 359; proper role of, 163, 172, 174–5, 287; and swap agreements, 353; see also Bank of England; European Central Bank (ECB); Federal Reserve central planning, 20, 27, 141 Chiang Mai Initiative, 349 ‘Chicago Plan’ (1933), 261–4, 268, 273, 274, 277–8 China, 2–3, 22, 34, 77, 306, 322, 338, 357, 362–3, 364; banking sector, 92, 93; export-led growth strategy, 27–8, 319, 321, 323–4, 356; falling growth rates, 43–4, 324, 363; medieval, 57, 68, 74; one child policy in, 28; problems in financial system, 43–4, 337, 362–3; savings levels in, 27–8, 29, 34; trade surpluses in, 27–8, 46, 49, 319, 321, 329, 364 Chou Enlai, 2 Churchill, Winston, 211, 366 Citigroup, 90, 99, 257 Clark, Kenneth, 193 Clinton, President Bill, 157 Cobbett, William, 71–2 Cochrane, John, 262 Coinage Act, US (1792), 215 Cold War, 26–7, 68, 81–2, 350, 365 Colley, Linda, 213–14 communism, 19, 20, 27 Confucius, 10 Cunliffe, Lord, 178, 193 currencies: break-up of sterling area, 216; dollarisation, 70, 246, 287; ‘fiat’, 57, 283; during government crises, 68–9; monetary unions, 212–18, 238–49 see also European Monetary Union (EMU, euro area); optimal currency areas, 212–13, 215, 217, 248; ‘sterlingisation’ and Scotland, 244–7, 248; US dollar-gold link abandoned (1971), 73; virtual/digital, 282–3; see also exchange rates cybercrime, 282 Cyprus, 363–4 Czech Republic, 216 Debreu, Gerard, 79–80, 295 debt, 140; bailouts as not only response, 343–4; as consequence not cause of crisis, 324–5; forgiveness, 339–40, 346–7; haircut on pledged collateral, 203, 204, 266, 269, 271–2, 275, 277–8, 280; household, 23, 31, 33–4, 35; importance of for real economy, 265–6; as likely trigger for future crisis, 337–8; and low interest rates, 337; quantitative controls on credit, 173, 174–5; rise in external imbalances, 22–3, 24–5, 27–31, 33–4, 45–7, 48–9, 236, 306–7, 319–24, 329–30, 338, 364; and rising asset prices, 23, 24, 31–2; role of collateral, 266–7, 269–81; see also sovereign debt decolonisation process, 215 deflation, 66, 76, 159, 164, 165 demand, aggregate: ‘asymmetric shocks’ to, 213; disequilibrium, 45–9, 316, 319–24, 325–7, 329–32, 335, 358–9; in EMU, 221, 222–3, 229, 230, 236; during Great Stability, 319–24; and Keynesianism, 5, 20, 41, 293, 294–302, 315–16, 325–6, 327, 356; and monetary policy, 30, 41–9, 167, 184–5, 212–13, 221, 229–31, 291–2, 294–302, 319–24, 329–32, 335, 358; nature of, 45, 325; pessimism over future levels, 356, 357–60; price and wage rigidities, 167; and radical uncertainty, 316; rebalancing of, 357, 362–3, 364; saving as source of future demand, 11, 46, 84–5, 185, 325–6, 356; as weak post-crisis, 38–9, 41–2, 44–5, 184–5, 291–2, 337, 350, 356–60 democracy, 26–7, 168, 174, 210, 222, 318, 348, 351; and euro area crisis, 224–5, 231, 234–5, 237–8, 344; and paper money, 68, 77; rise of non-mainstream parties in Europe, 234–5, 238, 344, 352 demographic factors, 354, 355, 362 Denmark, 216–17, 335 derivative instruments, 32–3, 35–6, 90, 93–4, 97–8, 100, 101, 117, 141–5; desert island parable, 145–8 Dickens, Charles, 1, 13–14, 233 disequilibrium: and aggregate demand, 45–9, 316, 319–24, 325–7, 329–32, 335, 358–9; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–33; and central banks, 11–12, 46–7, 171–2, 175, 208, 329–32; continuing, 42, 45–8, 49, 171–2, 291, 334–5, 347, 353, 356–70; coordinated move to new equilibrium, 347, 357, 359–65; definition of, 8–9; euro area at heart of, 248, 337; and exchange rates, 319, 322–3, 329, 331, 364; high- and low-saving countries (external imbalances), 22–3, 24–5, 27–31, 33–4, 45–7, 48–9, 236, 307, 319–24, 329–30, 338, 364; in internal saving and spending, 45–8, 49, 313–16, 319–21, 324, 325–6, 329–30, 356; and ‘New Keynesian’ models, 306; the next crisis, 334–5, 336–8, 353, 370; and paradox of policy, 48, 326, 328, 333, 357, 358; and stability heuristic, 312–14, 319–21, 323, 331, 332; suggested reform programme, 359–65 division of labour (specialisation), 18, 54–5 Doha Round, 361 Domesday Book, 54, 85 dotcom crash, 35 ‘double coincidence of wants’, 55, 80, 82 Douglas, Paul, 262 Draghi, Mario, 225, 227, 228 Dyson, Ben, 262 econometric modelling, 90, 125, 305–6 economic growth: conventional analysis, 44–5, 47; as low since crisis, 11, 43–4, 290–2, 293, 324, 348, 353–7; origins of, 17–21; pessimism over future levels, 353–7; in pre-crisis period, 329, 330–1, 351–2; slowing of in China, 43–4, 324, 362; stability in post-war period, 317–18 economic history, 4–5, 15–21, 54–62, 67–77, 107–9, 158–62, 180–1, 206–7, 215–17, 317–18; 1797 crisis in UK, 75; 1907 crisis in US, 159, 161, 196, 197, 198, 201; 1914 crisis, 192–201, 206, 307, 368; 1920-1 depression, 326–7; 1931 crisis, 41; ‘Black Monday’ (19 October 1987), 149; Finnish and Swedish crises (early 1990s), 279; German hyperinflation (early 1920s), 52, 68, 69, 86, 158–9, 190; Latin American debt crisis (1980s), 339; London banking crises (1825-66), 92, 188–90, 191–2, 198, 201; panic of 1792 in US, 188; see also Great Depression (early 1930s) The Economist magazine, 108–9 economists, 78–80, 128–31, 132–4, 212, 311; 1960s evolution of macroeconomics, 12, 16; forecasting models, 3–4, 7, 122–3, 179–80, 208, 305–6; Keynes on, 158, 289; see also Keynesian economics; neoclassical economics Ecuador, 246, 287 Egypt, ancient, 56, 72 Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets, 120, 290 emerging economies, 39, 43, 337, 338, 361; export-led growth strategy, 27–8, 30, 34, 319, 321, 324, 349, 356; new institutions in Asia, 349–50; savings levels in, 22–3, 27–8, 29, 30; ‘uphill’ flows of capital from, 30–1, 40, 319; US dollar reserves, 28, 34, 349 ‘emotional finance’ theory, 133–4 Engels, Friedrich, 19 Enron, 117 equity finance, 36, 102, 103, 140, 141, 143, 266, 280; and ‘bail-inable’ bonds, 112; in banking sector, 103, 105, 109, 112, 137–9, 173, 202, 254–9, 263, 268, 280, 368 see also leverage ratios (total assets to equity capital); and limited liability, 107, 108, 109 European Central Bank (ECB), 137, 162, 166, 232, 339; and euro area crisis, 203–4, 218, 224–5, 227–8, 229, 231, 322; and political decisions, 218, 224–5, 227–8, 231–2, 235, 344; sovereign debt purchases, 162, 190, 227–8, 231 European Monetary Union (EMU, euro area), 62, 217–38, 337–40, 342–9, 363–4; creditor and debtor split, 49, 222–3, 230–1, 232–7, 338, 339–40, 342–4, 363–4; crisis in (from 2009), 138, 203–4, 218, 223–31, 237–8, 276, 338, 339–40, 3512, 368; disillusionment with, 234–5, 236, 238, 3444; divergences in competitiveness, 221–3, 228, 231, 232–3, 234; fiscal union proposals (2015), 344; at heart of world disequilibrium, 248, 337; inflation, 70, 221–2, 232, 237; interest rate, 221–2, 232, 237, 335; launch of (1999), 22, 24–5, 218, 221, 306; main lessons from, 237; and political union issues, 218, 220, 235, 237–8, 248–9, 344, 348–9; ‘progress through crisis’ doctrine, 234; prospects for, 232–3, 345–6; sovereign debt in, 162, 190, 224, 226–8, 229–31, 258, 338, 339–40, 342–4; transfer union proposal, 224, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237, 344; unemployment in, 45, 226, 228, 229–30, 232, 234, 345; value of euro, 43, 228–9, 231, 232, 322 European Stability Mechanism (ESM), 228 European Union, 40, 235–6, 237–8, 247, 248–9, 348–9; no-bailout clause in Treaty (Article 125), 228, 235–6; Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), 235, 236 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 219, 220 exchange rates: and disequilibrium, 319, 322–3, 329, 331, 364; and EMU, 222, 228–9, 338–9, 363–4; exchange controls, 21, 339; fixed, 20–1, 22–3, 24–5, 72–3, 75–6, 339, 352, 353, 361; floating, 21, 338, 353, 361–2; and ‘gold standard’, 72–3, 75–6; risk of ‘currency wars’, 348; and wage/price changes, 213 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 62, 137, 328 Federal Open Market Committee, 179 Federal Reserve, 45, 65, 74, 137, 157–8, 162, 168–70, 175, 178–9, 320; in 1920s/30s, 192, 326–7, 328, 349; during crisis, 39, 76, 107, 113, 183, 184; discount window, 206; dual mandate of, 167–8; opening of (1914), 60, 62, 159–60, 194–5, 196, 197 Ferrer, Gaspar, 193 Field, Alexander, 355 Financial Conduct Authority, UK, 260 financial crises, 11–12, 34; and demand for liquidity, 65–6, 76–7, 86, 106, 110, 119, 148, 182, 187–92, 194, 201–7, 253–4, 367; differing causes of, 307, 316–17, 327–8; frequency of, 2, 4, 20, 92, 111, 316–17; and ‘gold standard’, 75, 165, 195; and Minsky’s theory, 307–8, 323; narrative revision downturns, 328, 332–3, 356, 357, 58–9, 364; the next crisis, 334–5, 336–8, 353, 370; as test beds for new ideas, 49–50; see also economic history financial crisis (from 2007): articles and books, 1–2, 6; central banks during, 36–9, 64, 65, 76, 113, 118, 158, 159, 162, 181–4, 205, 206, 335; desire to blame individuals, 3, 89–90; effects on ordinary citizens, 6, 13, 41; the Great Panic, 37–8; interest rates during, 150–1, 181, 335; LIBOR during, 150–1; liquidity crisis (2007-8), 35–8, 64–5, 76, 110; money supply during, 181–3; parallels with earlier events, 90–2, 193; post-crisis output gap, 42, 291, 337; short-term Keynesian response, 39, 41, 48, 118–19, 326, 328, 356; ‘small’ event precipitating, 34–5, 323; unanswered questions, 39–43; underlying causes, 16–17, 24–5, 26–39, 40, 307, 319–26, 328; weak recovery from, 43–4, 48, 291–2, 293, 324, 337, 355, 364, 366 financial markets, 64–5, 113, 117–18, 141–5, 149, 184, 199–200, 314–15; basic financial contracts, 140–1; desert island parable, 145–8; and radical uncertainty, 140, 143, 144–5, 149–55; ‘real-time’ trading, 153–4, 284; see also derivative instruments; financial products and instruments; trading, financial financial products and instruments, 24, 35–6, 64, 99–100, 114, 117, 136–7, 258, 278, 288; see also derivative instruments Finland, 159, 279 First World War, 88–9, 153, 164, 178, 200–2, 307; financial crisis on outbreak of, 192–201; reparations after, 340–2, 343, 345–6 fiscal policy, 45, 184, 347–8, 352, 358; and Keynesianism, 78, 181, 292, 300, 356; in monetary unions, 222–3, 235; short-term stimulus during crisis, 39, 118–19, 356 Fisher, Irving, 163, 261 fractional reserve banking, 261 France, 93, 201, 216, 219, 221, 236, 248, 348, 364; and euro area crisis, 228–9, 231, 236, 322; occupation of Ruhr (1923), 340; overseas territories during WW2, 242; revolutionary period, 68, 75, 159 Franklin, Benjamin, 58, 127 Friedman, Milton, 78, 130, 163, 182, 192, 262, 328 Fuld, Dick, 89 futures contracts, 142, 240–1, 295–6 G20 group, 39, 255, 256, 351 G7 group, 37–8, 351 Garrett, Scott, 168–9 Geithner, Timothy, 267 George, Eddie, 176, 330 Germany, 93, 161, 162, 184, 219, 322, 341, 357; Bundesbank, 166, 219, 228, 232; and EMU, 219–22, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231–2, 234–6, 248, 338, 340, 342–3, 345; export-led growth strategy, 222, 319, 363–4; hyperinflation (early 1920s), 52, 68, 69, 86, 158–9, 190; Notgeld in, 201–2, 287; reunification, 219, 342; trade surpluses in, 46, 49, 222, 236, 319, 321, 356, 363–4; WW1 reparations, 340–2, 343, 346 Gibbon, Edward, 63, 164 Gigerenzer, Professor Gerd, 123, 135 Gillray, James, 75 global economy, 349–54, 361; capital flows, 20–1, 22, 28, 29, 30–1, 40, 319, 323; rise in external imbalances, 22–3, 24–5, 27–31, 33–4, 45–7, 48–9, 236, 307, 319–24, 329–30, 338, 364; see also currencies; exchange rates; trade surpluses and deficits Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 85–6 ‘gold standard’, 72–3, 75–6, 86, 165, 195, 200–1, 216–17, 348, 352 Goldman Sachs, 98, 109, 123, 257 Goodwin, Fred, 37, 89 Grant, James, 327 Great Depression (early 1930s), 5, 16, 20, 158, 160, 226, 348, 355; dramatic effect on politics and economics, 41; Friedman and Schwartz on, 78, 192, 328; and ‘gold standard’, 73, 76; US banking crisis during, 90–1, 108, 116, 201 Great Recession (from 2008), 6, 38–9, 163, 290–2, 326 Great Stability (or Great Moderation), 6, 22, 45–7, 71, 162, 208, 305, 313–14, 318–24, 325–6; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–33; monetary policies during, 22, 25, 46–7, 315 Greece, 216, 221, 222, 225–31, 338–40, 364; agreement with creditors (13 July 2015), 230–1, 346; crisis in euro area, 223–4, 225–7, 229, 230–1, 236, 258, 338–40; debt restructured (2012), 226–7, 229, 236, 339, 343–4, 346; national referendum (July 2015), 230; sovereign debt, 224, 226–7, 339–40, 342–4, 346–7; Syriza led government, 229, 235 Greenspan, Alan, 157–8, 164, 175, 317 Gulf War, First (1991), 238 Hahn, Frank, 79 Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS), 37, 118, 206, 243 Halley, Edmund, 122 Hamilton, Alexander, 188, 202, 215 Hankey, Thomas, 191–2 Hansen, Alvin, Full Recovery or Stagnation?


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Although occasionally a few, such as Paul above, have thought a little more carefully than others. If you look carefully at figure 21, you’ll see that all but the most recent 170 years of human demographic history squeezes into the bottom eleventh of the graph. Since that point, we have always had growth. The growth took off from around 1850, when the British Empire was beginning to approach its zenith. By this point Britain had already invaded some 171 of the present 193 members of the United Nations, although most were not yet actual countries.8 The effects of these invasions were devastating. The British were not alone in this kind of endeavor, or the first to undertake these practices, but they were certainly the most effective.

A baby boom followed the end of the war in 1945, but as there were too few young adults in the 1960s due to too few births before 1945, migration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent was positively encouraged by the U.K. government. But Britons (encouraged by self-serving politicians and newspapers) complained about the arrival of (former British Empire) immigrants from the former colonies, and an immigration control act was passed in 1965, to be followed by many more. Paradoxically, the 1965 act served to increase the immigrant population, as those already in the country dared not leave and many endeavored to bring over their elderly relatives while they still could.

See also fertility Black Death, 147, 174 Blade Runner, 214 Blaiklock, Katherine, 281 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 32 books, 72–85; European explosion in book publishing, 72–74; importance of, 80–81; increasing literacy and production of, 77; Netherlands production and consumption, 73, 74–77, 75, 81–85, 83; and obsolescence, 77–80, 81; oldest, 65 Booth, Charles, 186 boredom, 17–18, 322–23 Brazil: car production, 115, 118; fertility rates, 225, 228; slavery, 8 Bread, 287 Brexit, 279–80 Brexit Party, 281 Bricker, Darrell, 140, 141, 296 British Empire, 145, 279–80 British Isles: emigration from, 162; population, 161–65, 164. See also England; United Kingdom Brunner, John, 314, 324 Buchanan, Emily, 163 Bush, George W., 61, 278, 279, 356n18 Canada, 177–79, 178 capital controls, 256 capitalism: Haque on, 319; as transitional/temporary, 10–11, 188, 230–32, 235–37, 283, 284, 317–18; trickle-down effect, 259, 358n44 carbon emissions, 90–119; acceleration of (1884–World War I), 94–96, 100; automobiles and, 101–2, 112–16, 118; China and, 98, 98–99; and global warming, 110, 112, 119 (see also temperature rise); Industrial Revolution and, 90–94, 100; population growth and, 102–3, 106–9, 107; postwar consumption and, 104–5; recessions and depressions and, 93–94, 99, 101, 101, 104; reduction of, 116–19, 136–37; timelines, 100, 108, 111; war and, 102–4 carbon taxes, 304 Caribbean Islands, 177–79, 178 cars.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

But none of them laid out their reasoning for socialism, or agitated for it, quite as strenuously as the five Collegians. Like Haldane, the other Collegians had come to think that science was best nourished by socialism and that their own country was interested in research only for the aims of profit and war. We have, Haldane said in a speech, “in the entire British Empire only two professors of genetics,” whereas the Soviet Union “is crawling with them.” He didn’t cite a source for this statistic, but Bernal explained the dismal state of British science at greater length in his book The Social Function of Science. Only 0.1 percent of Britain’s gross national product was dedicated to research and development—an amount that Bernal called “ludicrously small,” before pointing out that “the greater proportion of what is spent is wasted on account of internal inefficiency and lack of co-ordination.”

The Communist party is not illegal in Britain or France, but Communists are beheaded in Germany.” Why then, Haldane’s hypothetical reader asked, should Stalin not stand with the democracies of the West? Bereft of any real response, Haldane feebly volleyed an accusation back upon the Allies: The answer is simple. What do you mean by we? Do you mean Britain or the British Empire, France or the French Empire? I would sooner be a Jew in Berlin than a Kaffir in Johannesburg or a negro in French Equatorial Africa. If the Czechs are treated as an inferior race, do Indians or Annamites enjoy complete equality? Until the British and French Empires become Commonwealths, they can only expect Soviet friendship if their foreign policy is a hundred per cent peace policy.

Haldane, Truth Will Out, 83. 169 “except . . . the spiritual luxury of open quarrelling”: Mitchison, You May Well Ask, 191. 169 “In its endeavour, science is Communism”: Bernal, The Social Function of Science, 415. 169 “seemed almost to dominate”: Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 121. 170 “My old life was broken to bits”: Bernal, diary, part of the Bernal papers at Cambridge University Library, document numbered O.23.1. 170 “in the entire British Empire only two”: From “The Place of Science in Western Civilization,” in The Inequality of Man, 127. 171 Trawling through Marx and Engels: Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938). 171 “I have only one possible serious criticism”: Haldane to L. Kislova, August 1944, HALDANE/4/4/22, University College of London archive. 173 “Classical Mendelian genetics was damned undialectical”: John Maynard Smith, 2004, interviewed for Web of Stories, https://www.webofstories.com/play/john.maynard.smith/33;jsessionid=366C7B8A225B1FE31E223AC57FB85528. 174 “Like anyone on his first acquaintance”: Andrew Rothstein, “Vindicating Marxism,” Modern Quarterly 3 (1939), 290. 175 “I began to realize”: Quoted in Clark, J.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 greatly enhanced America’s pre-eminent position, eliminating its main adversary and resulting in the territories and countries of the former Soviet bloc opening their markets and turning in many cases to the US for aid and support. Never before, not even in the heyday of the British Empire, had a nation’s power enjoyed such a wide reach. The dollar became the world’s preferred currency, with most trade being conducted in it and most reserves held in it. The US dominated all the key global institutions bar the UN, and enjoyed a military presence in every part of the world. Its global position seemed unassailable, and at the turn of the millennium terms like ‘hyperpower’ and ‘unipolarity’ were coined to describe what appeared to be a new and unique form of power.

In the longer run, however, it seems likely that South Korea will continue to move closer to China and further away from the United States, perhaps to the point where eventually the US-Korean alliance will be dissolved - but that is unlikely to happen within less than a decade, probably rather longer.79 In the meantime, it is possible that the United States will eventually withdraw its troops from the Korean Peninsula if and when a solution is found to the present crisis.80 The rapprochement between China and South Korea is a powerful echo of earlier times when Korea was a close and important tributary state of China, a situation that lasted many centuries until China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.81 Australia cannot be counted as part of East Asia, but belongs more properly to Asia-Pacific, which embraces that region together with the Pacific countries. One of the great geo-cultural anomalies is that a country that lies just to the south of Indonesia has an overwhelmingly white majority and has long been considered a Western country. Though historically part of the British Empire, ever since 1942 it has enjoyed an extremely close relationship with the United States, for most of that period being its closest and most loyal ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Over the last decade, however, China’s growing economic power has exercised a mesmerizing effect on the island continent.

It is important, however, to place these points in a broader context. China’s rise will be accompanied by that of other major developing countries, such as India and Brazil, and these are likely to act in some degree as a constraint on China’s power and behaviour. WEIGHT OF NUMBERS At the height of the British Empire in 1913, Britain accounted for only 2.5 per cent of the world’s population, while Western Europe represented 14.6 per cent. By 2001 Western Europe’s share had fallen to 6.4 per cent. In 2001, when the United States was the world’s sole superpower, it comprised a mere 4.6 per cent of the world’s population.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

While Meluhha's whereabouts have not been verified, most scholars are convinced it refers to an extensive civilization that grew up in the Indus Valley and prospered during the third and second millennia BCE.42 For more than a century, archaeologists busily excavated the ruins of Mesopotamia and Egypt without having the slightest idea that a contemporaneous Indus Valley civilization had even existed. Then, in 1924, archaeologists announced the discovery of two great cities—Mohenjo-daro and Harappa—located six hundred kilometers away from each other in an area that was then part of the British Empire and is now spread over Pakistan and India.43 Following the excitement of discovering an unknown civilization, the general reaction to the archaeological sites of the Indus Valley cities became one of disappointment. There were no pyramids, no great amphitheaters, palaces, or sculptures. Over the decades, it emerged that what became known as Harappan civilization was fundamentally different from its contemporaries.

This began on a small scale in the sixteenth century, reaching its height in the eighteenth century with the transport of more than six million slaves in that century alone. It's estimated that, in total, about twelve million people were shipped to the Americas as slaves. The conditions in the boats were so terrible that about one-fifth of those who were transported died on board.57 The abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807 marked the beginning of the end of this particularly egregious form of exploitation. However, the European powers simply looked elsewhere for their continued exploitation of other races. They instituted systems of indentured labor, transporting millions of workers from India, China, and the Pacific Islands to territories where they were needed.

Lippincott, 1941), 19; A. Supan, Die territoriale Entwicklung der Europaischen Kolonien (Gotha, 1906), 254, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/colonies.htm (accessed July 10, 2013). 57. Ponting, New Green History, 175–76. 58. Ibid., 175–76, 197–98. See also C. Erickson, “Review: Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834–1920. By Kay Saunders,” Population Studies 39, no. 1 (1985): 1184–85. 59. Cited in Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), xxi, xxiv. 60. David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 156–59. 61.


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Docklands Development You’d probably never guess it while gazing up at the ultramodern skyscrapers that dominate the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf, but from the 16th century until the mid-20th century this area was the centre of the world’s greatest port, the hub of the British Empire and its enormous global trade. At the docks here, cargo from global trade was landed, bringing jobs to a tight-knit working-class community. Even up to the start of WWII this community still thrived, but that all changed when the docks were badly firebombed during the Blitz. After the war the docks were in no condition to cope with the postwar technological and political changes as the British Empire evaporated. At the same time enormous new bulk carriers and container ships demanded deep-water ports and new loading and unloading techniques.

Other highlights include a fascinating painting of Queen Elizabeth I displaying her might by standing over a map of England, and a touching sketch of novelist Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra. The 1st floor is a captivating journey through the Victorian era and the 20th century, with portraits illustrating the rise and fall of the British Empire. The ground floor is dedicated to modern figures, using a variety of media (sculpture, photography, video etc). Among the most popular displays are the iconic Blur portraits by Julian Opie and Sam Taylor-Wood’s David, a video-portrait of David Beckham asleep after football training. The gallery hosts brilliant temporary exhibitions and the excellent audioguides (£3) highlight 200 portraits and allow you to hear the voices of some of the people portrayed.

By the enormous Great West Door (opened only on special occasions), seek out a glass panel, known as the ‘dirty panel’, which has preserved a section of the wall to demonstrate just how black and gloomy St Paul’s had become. Crypt On the eastern side of both the north and south transepts are stairs leading down to the crypt and OBE Chapel , where services are held for members of the Order of the British Empire. The crypt has memorials to some 300 military demigods, including Florence Nightingale and Lord Kitchener, while both the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson are actually buried here, Nelson having been placed in a black sarcophagus that is directly under the centre of the dome. On the surrounding walls are plaques in memory of those from the Commonwealth who died in various conflicts during the 20th century.


The Tube: Station to Station on the London Underground by Oliver Green

British Empire, cashless society, Crossrail

A large new station building designed in Holden style by Reginald Uren was completed in 1938, by which time the branch was served by extended Piccadilly line services over the former District South Harrow branch as well as fast Metropolitan line trains from Baker Street. Rayners Lane station as rebuilt by the LPTB in 1938, to the designs of Reginald Uren in the Holden house style. Take a Metropolitan train to Wembley Park, a station successively rebuilt and enlarged since the Empire Stadium and British Empire Exhibition put Wembley on the map in the early 1920s. The iconic concrete sports stadium, home of English football, was finally demolished and rebuilt by the FA as a larger venue in 2003, prompting another station reconstruction to handle the bigger football crowds that now attend matches. The large new entrance building on the stadium side was completed in 2006.


pages: 1,364 words: 272,257

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, California gold rush, Etonian, facts on the ground, haute couture, Khartoum Gordon, Mount Scopus, place-making, plutocrats, sexual politics, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War

As he left, this reborn Jew and dedicated imperialist celebrated a similar though of course different messianic fervour as Shaftesbury: 'O Jerusalem,' he wrote in his diary, 'may the city soon be rebuilt in our days. Amen.' Shaftesbury and Montefiore both believed in the divine providence of the British empire and the Jewish return to Zion. The righteousness of evangelical zeal and the reborn passion of Jewish dreams of Jerusalem dovetailed neatly to become one of the Victorian obsessions, and it happened that the painter David Roberts returned from Palestine in 1840 just in time to show the public his hugely popular romantic images of a flamboyantly Oriental Jerusalem ripe for British civilization and Jewish restoration.

Their passionate Protestantism was American in character - gritty, exuberant and swashbuckling. At its heart was the belief that a person could save himself and accelerate the Second Coming by righteous action and heartfelt joy. America was itself a mission disguised as a nation, blessed by God, not unlike the way Shaftesbury and the English evangelicals saw the British empire. In little wooden churches in one-horse mining towns, farmsteads on boundless prairies and gleaming new industrial cities, the preachers in the New Promised Land of America cited the literal biblical revelations of the Old. 'In no country,' wrote Dr Edward Robinson, an evangelical academic who became the founder of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem, 'are the Scriptures better known.'

He had already risked his life on three visits to Jerusalem and his doctors had advised him not to go again - 'his heart was feeble and there was poison in his blood' - but he and Judith came anyway, accompanied by an entourage of retainers, servants and even his own kosher butcher. To the Jews of Jerusalem and across the Diaspora, Montefiore was already a legend who combined the proconsular prestige of a rich Victorian baronet at the height of the British empire with the dignity of a Jew who always rushed to the aid of his brethren and had never compromised his Judaism. It was his unique position in Britain that gave him his power: he straddled the old and new societies, as much at home with royal dukes, prime ministers and bishops as he was with rabbis and financiers.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

International Review of Red Cross, 31 (333), 109–116. 9 United Kingdom Immigration to the United Kingdom Will Somerville and Betsy Cooper The United Kingdom (UK), in contrast to immigrant-settled countries like the United States, has had a more ambiguous experience with immigration (Somerville, 2007). Not only did the UK historically consider itself a country of refuge for the persecuted, but for generations immigration from the British Empire was unimpeded and emigration to the British Empire encouraged. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that serious controls were put into place (Hansen, 2000). Subsequently, however, the UK has carefully controlled migration to the island, and fostered a policy of ‘‘race relations’’ to incorporate newcomers. Since 1990, sustained immigration flows have diversified the ethnic, linguistic, and religious composition of the British population.

There was a considerable exodus of European migrants from countries such as Britain, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, to America to gain from the New World’s growing economy. The majority of migrants went to the Americas, but others went to Australia and New Zealand also. Limited Migration (1930–1960) World War I, the Great Depression and the break-up of the British Empire were some of the factors leading to this period of limited migration. Postindustrial Migration (1960s to 1990s) This period saw the expansion of human migration to a global phenomenon. Emigration from Asia, Africa, and South America increased at this time, and as the century progressed, patterns of migration became more complex, with traditionally sending countries becoming receiving countries also.

United Kingdom Immigration Policies In this context of rising numbers and anxieties UK policy makers since 1997 have drafted radical policy responses in an attempt to manage migration. To understand these changes, it is first necessary to highlight the previous ‘‘model’’ for the sake of comparison. The Postwar Policy Model. The postwar policy model, created at a time when the British Empire was dismembering itself, was based on two pillars, each entrenched by three laws (Somerville, 2007). The first pillar, limitation, comprised three laws—enacted in 1962, 1968, and 1971—that together had the goal of ‘‘zero net immigration.’’ The 1971 Immigration Act—the single most important immigration Act of the last 50 years—made a strong statement that Britain was a country of ‘‘zero net immigration.’’


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The UK has also been deeply implicated in tax haven activity worldwide through its close connection with well-known tax haven jurisdictions. Britain’s Crown Dependencies, the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey and the Isle of Man, are well-known secrecy jurisdictions. Many of its Overseas Territories, remnants of the British Empire, such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, are notorious tax havens. Two UK-based independent organizations, Christian Aid and the Tax Justice Network, have published a Financial Secrecy Index that ranks countries on the basis of their accommodation of tax evaders through secrecy provisions.

In the most recent ranking, the UK itself was in thirteenth position among seventy-three countries, but the authors note that if the entire British network were considered, it would easily be ranked as the world’s number one secrecy jurisdiction. In his book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the ‌Men Who Stole the World,32 Nicholas Shaxson tells the story of how the UK became the centre of a web of tax havens in the 1950s in a deliberate attempt to funnel illicit funds from the crumbling British Empire to the City of London. While it’s impossible to estimate accurately the revenue loss from granting non-domicile status to the super-rich living in London, it probably amounts to ‌billions of pounds a year33 – an unconscionable loss at a time when ordinary UK citizens are being subjected to austerity measures to reduce the deficit.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The migrated archive also contained evidence that it was only a small part of a much larger, and largely destroyed, hidden history. Accompanying the remaining files – most of which have still not been released – are thousands of ‘destruction certificates’: records of absences that attest to a comprehensive programme of obfuscation and erasure. In the dying years of the British Empire, colonial administrators were instructed to gather up and secure all the records they could, and either burn them or ship them to London. This was known as Operation Legacy, and was intended to ensure the whitewashing of colonial history. Government offices, assisted by MI5 and Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, either built pyres or, when the smoke became too obvious, packed them into weighted crates and sunk them offshore, in order to protect their secrets from the governments of newly independent nations – or from future historians.

The brutality in Kenya was ‘distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or communist Russia’, wrote the colony’s own attorney general to its British governor in 1957.17 Nevertheless, he agreed to write new legislation permitting it, as long as it was kept secret. ‘If we must sin, we must sin quietly’, he affirmed. Operation Legacy was a deliberate and knowing effort to obscure the violence and coercion that enabled imperialism, and its manipulation of history prevents us from reckoning with the British Empire’s legacy of racism, covert power, and inequality today. Moreover, the habit of secrecy it engendered permits its abuses to continue into the present day. The torture techniques developed in colonial Kenya were refined into the ‘five techniques’ deployed by the British Army in Northern Ireland, and then into the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ guidelines.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

As an unhealthy cocktail of anxiety and belligerence brewed, a mental, as well as a physical, chasm between Jaffa and Tel Aviv developed; relations between the two cities from 1917–1938 were so fractious, the author Chaim Lazar branded this period the ‘Thirty Years’ War’.113 Tel Aviv’s final, and somewhat inevitable, separation from Jaffa was facilitated by the incoming British authorities, who not only made a handful of concessions to Jewish institutions but decisively annulled the Ottoman limitations put on Jews purchasing land. While many of the Jews in Palestine shared a European heritage with their new masters, the affinity which developed between the two essentially derived from the similarities and common interests which tied their respective colonial projects; the push to shore up the British Empire on the one hand, and the Zionist drive for a Jewish state on the other. Paradoxically, at least for the first few decades, these two designs dovetailed nicely. While the British made full use of their special status in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate as a smokescreen for adding this strategic outpost to their colonial network, the Jewish population saw the benefits of assisting their new governors.

., ref1 Bigger, Gideon, ref1 Black Night, ref1 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, ref1 Blodgett, Geoffrey, ref1n224 Book of Tel Aviv, The, ref1, ref2 borders ease of creation anywhere, ref1 of Israel, ref1 (see also United Nations Division Plan) of Jaffa under UN Plan, ref1 of Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n70 Boshi, Roi, ref1 Boullée, Étienne-Louis, ref1n56 Bouyssy, Maïté, ref1n152 branding of Antique Jaffa, ref1 Bauhaus and, ref1 Jaffa/JAFFA oranges and, ref1, ref2nnref3 and rebranding of Israel in 1990s, ref1 of Tel Aviv as a Bauhaus city, ref1 of Tel Aviv as city on the dunes, ref1 and trademarks, ref1n187 of the ‘white city’, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Brauner, Teddy, ref1, ref2 Brenner, Yosef Haim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n117, ref5n126 Brewald, Alexander, ref1 British Empire, ref1, ref2n60 Mandate in Palestine, ref1, ref2, ref3 military operations in Jaffa, ref1, ref2 Brod, Max, ref1, ref2n44 Buber, Martin, ref1 Bugeaud, Maréchal Thomas-Robert, ref1, ref2n152, ref3n229 Bulthaup, ref1 Bureau of Architects and Engineers in Israel Burnham, Daniel, ref1 Bypass Roads, ref1n111 Caesarea, ref1 Carmiel, Batya, ref1 Casdan, Haim, ref1 Chelouche, Yosef Eliyahu, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n143, ref7n248 China, ref1 Chirico, Giorgio de, ref1n219 Christian German colony, ref1 minority in Jaffa, ref1, ref2 sites in ‘Antique Jaffa’, ref1 cities constructed by victors, ref1 relation between history and geography, ref1 role of storytelling in shaping, ref1 see also urban planning, individual cities by name City with Concept, ref1 Clausiewitz, Carl von, ref1, ref2n240 Clore, Sir Charles, ref1 Cohen, Jean-Louis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n221 colonial exhibitions, ref1 colonialism, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8nn212, ref9, ref10n247 Conquest of Jaffa, The (Kibush Yaffo), ref1, ref2 conservation of buildings, ref1, ref2 failures of, ref1 Neighbourhood Rehabilitation programme, ref1, ref2 construction workers, ref1n61 constructors/construction companies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and evacuation and construction schemes, ref1n193 crime, associated with Jaffa area, ref1, ref2, ref3 Critical Modernists: Homage to Tel Aviv, World Heritage City (conference), ref1, ref2 culture cultural hegemony, ref1, ref2 Israeli in 1980s, ref1 Israeli official and counter-culture, ref1 Israeli rooted in 1930s, ref1 Israeli, and Zionist propaganda, ref1 of the Jewish Diaspora, ref1 multiculturalism in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 second-generation Israeli, ref1 of Tel Aviv, ref1 white, ref1 (see also under white) Dakar, ref1, ref2 Dan the Guard, ref1n44 Danin (Socholovsky), Yehezkel, ref1n80 Darwish, Mahmoud, ref1 Dayan, Assi, ref1, ref2n49 Dayan, Moshe, ref1, ref2, ref3n49 Dayan, Shmuel, ref1, ref2n49 De Maria, Walter, ref1 deaths in the Altalena affair, ref1n183 in the Arab Revolt, ref1 in and around Jaffa in 1921, ref1, 2056n126 in and around Jaffa in 1948, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n147 in ‘Operation Rainbow’, ref1 of Turkish prisoners in 1799, ref1 Decorative Art Today, ref1 Deedes, Wyndham Henry, ref1, ref2n128 Degania, ref1 Deir Yassin, ref1, ref2 deportation of foreign workers ref1 Dessau, ref1, ref2 Diary of a Palestinian Wound, ref1 Dionysus in the Centre, ref1 Dizengoff, Meir, ref1, ref2 Dor, Daniel, ref1 Dotan, Dani and Uri, ref1 Drive Slowly, ref1 Droyanov, Alter, ref1, ref2 Dubek, ref1 dunes removal of, ref1, ref2n65 significance to Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3 see also sand Dwelling on the Dunes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 education, ref1, ref2 ‘Land of Israel Studies’, ref1 Efrat, Zvi, ref1n135 Egged Israel Transport Cooperative, ref1 Egypt, ref1, ref2n144 border fence, ref1 Eilon, Amos, ref1n24 Ein Gedi, ref1 Ein Hakore, ref1 Ein Harod, ref1, ref2 Ein Hod, ref1, ref2 Ein Kerem, ref1 Einstein, Arik, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n39, ref5n41, ref6n43 Eisenberg, Shaul, ref1 Eisenman, Peter, ref1n224 Elhanani, Aba, ref1 Elhayani, Zvi, ref1 Engelman, Paul, ref1 Engels, Friedrich, ref1n154 Etinger, Amos, ref1 Etzel (Irgun Tzvai Leumi), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n133, ref5n147, ref6n148, ref7n183 museum to, ref1 Eurocentrism, ref1, ref2n23 Europe influence of Central vs Eastern, ref1 national identities in, ref1n247 ‘evacuation and construction’, ref1, ref2n193 Ever-Hadani, Aharon, ref1 exhibitions see fairs and exhibitions Fabian, Roy, ref1n164 Faglin, Amichai ‘Gidi’, ref1, ref2, ref3 fairs and exhibitions annual celebrations of Tel Aviv White City, ref1, ref2n205 International Style (New York), ref1, ref2, ref3 Jubilee Fair (1929), ref1 Orient Fairs, ref1, (1932), ref2 Tel Aviv in the Tracks of the Bauhaus, ref1 White City, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fanon, Frantz, ref1, ref2, ref3n232 Feingold, Shlomo, ref1, ref2, ref3n80 Fellah and his Land, The, ref1 First Intifada, ref1 First street lamp, The,74 fishing, ref1n177 Flaubert, Gustave, ref1, ref2 fonts, ref1 Förg, Günther, ref1 Foucault, Michel, ref1, ref2n240 Fragile, ref1 France and its colonies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n221 cultural influence of, ref1, ref2 foreign policy, ref1 new towns, ref1n56 Paris, ref1, ref2n56, ref3n152, ref4n156, ref5n229 Frankel, Eliezer, ref1, ref2 Frenkel, Chanan, ref1n17 Frey, Albert, ref1 Fuller, Buckminster, ref1 Galey Tzahal, ref1 Gamzu, Yossi, ref1 Gaon, Yehoram, ref1 Gavish, Dov, ref1 Gaza Strip, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n251 Geddes, Sir Patrick, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n205 Gefen, Aviv, ref1, ref2n49 Gefen, Yehonatan, ref1, ref2n49 Germany Askhenaz, ref1, ref2n22 Berlin, ref1n156 Chemnitz, ref1 commentary on Tel Aviv/Israel, ref1 migrants from, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n183 Nazis, victims of, ref1 Stuttgart, ref1 Weisenhof, Stuttgart, ref1 Gershuni, Moshe, ref1n21 Getter, Tamara, ref1n21 Golan, Menachem, ref1 Golan Heights Law, ref1 Goldman, Peera, ref1 Goree, ref1 Graham Foundation, ref1 graphic art, ref1 Grazovsky, Yehuda, ref1n80 Great Arab Revolt see Arab Revolt Gropius, Walter, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n14 Grossman, David, ref1 Guerre des rues et des maisons, La, ref1 Gugig, Zvi, ref1 Gur(-Gerzovsky), Shlomo, ref1, ref2n76, ref3n137 Gutman, Nachum, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n4, ref6n107 Museum, ref1n108 Haaretz, ref1, ref2 Haganah, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n138, ref6n144 Haifa, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n143 Haim, Haham David, ref1n80 Ha’Ir, ref1, ref2 Hankin, Yehoshua, ref1n143 Harel, Nadav, ref1 Hashimshoni, Aviah, ref1 Haussmann, Baron, ref1, ref2n152, ref3n229 Hebrew becomes language of Jaffa, ref1 Hebraization of Arab cities, ref1, ref2n169 poorly spoken by refugees, ref1 speaking architects and a change of style, ref1, ref2n34 Zionist revival of, ref1n3 Hebrew University, ref1n137 Hecht, Edgar, ref1n17 Hefer, Haim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n46 Heizer, Michael, ref1 Herzl, Theodor, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n24, ref10n97, ref11n225 visit to Palestine (1898), ref1, ref2n79 Histadrut, ref1 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, ref1, ref2 Hitler, Adolf, ref1, ref2, ref3n185 Hodžić, Aida Abadžić Holocaust, survivors of, ref1 see also under Germany Horowitz, Aaron, ref1 hospitals, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 House of the Lone Settler in the Sahara, ref1 Houses from the Sand, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, housing Bauhaus conceptions of, ref1 Bayara homes, ref1n119 ‘Build Your Own House’ projects, ref1, ref2, ref3 contemporary costs in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2 crisis for Jews in Palestine from 1920s, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n115 destroyed in Jaffa, ref1 destroyed in ‘Operation Rainbow’, ref1 and ‘evacuation and construction’ schemes, ref1, ref2n193 impact of land management policies on, ref1 modern styles of, ref1 projects in Jaffa in 1950s and 1960s, ref1 scheme rehabilitation under Begin, ref1 in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hugo, Victor, ref1n152 Huldai, Ron, ref1, ref2n42, ref3n205 Huma Umigdal see Wall and Tower immigration see migration implicate relations, ref1 infrastructure built during British Mandate, ref1, ref2n143 Tel Aviv’s, ref1, ref2 Instructions pour une prise d’armes, ref1 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, ref1 International Style architecture, ref1, ref2 French/North African, ref1, ref2 in Jaffa, ref1 in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 International Style (exhibition/catalogue), ref1, ref2, ref3 Iron Dome, ref1 Israel 1930s plan for structure and borders, ref1 army and militarism, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n183 debt to infrastructure and institutions of British Palestine, ref1 emblem of, ref1n198 foreign policy, ref1, ref2, ref3 founding of, ref1, ref2 ‘Good Old Eretz’ conception of, ref1, ref2, ref3 Herzl’s conception of, ref1 infrastructure for ref1 Land of Israel Studies, ref1, ref2 loss of value in, ref1 middle class in, ref1n242 Jewish migration from, ref1, ref2n27, ref3n205 official history of, ref1 the ‘Other Israel’, ref1 perceived legitimacy of settlements in, ref1 planning and settlements in 1980s, ref1 ‘second generation’ culture in, ref1 War of Independence, ref1, ref2, ref3 (see also under Jaffa) Zionist attitudes to land, ref1n97 Israel Antiquities Authority, ref1 Israel Lands Administration, ref1, ref2n168 Israel Ministry of Housing, ref1n193 Israeli Architects Association, ref1 Israeli Council of Citrus Fruit, ref1, ref2 Israeli Defense Force (IDF), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n47, ref7n64, ref8n138 museum, ref1 see also individual military operations by name Israeli Project, The, ref1n206 Jaffa, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 agriculture around see agriculture Andromeda’s Rock, ref1, ref2 annexation to Tel Aviv, ref1 ‘Antique Jaffa’ project, ref1, ref2 Arab history ignored and obliterated, ref1, ref2, ref3 attack and destruction (1947–8), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8n144, ref9n148, ref10nn159, ref11 beach, ref1 Ben-Gurion’s description of, ref1 ‘Big Zone’, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 as ‘black city’, see under Tel Aviv borders in UN Partition plan, ref1 Clock Tower (Square), ref1 contemporary gentrification in, ref1 decanting of residents to suburbs, ref1, ref2 encirclement and cutting off, ref1, ref2 ‘forbidden’ to Jews, ref3 former importance as hub, ref1 Greater Jaffa, ref1 Hebraization of, ref1, ref2 Herzl’s visit to (1898), ref1 history of, ref1, ref2 ‘Jaffa Mound’, ref1 Jewish migrants in, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 modern neighbourhoods of see under Tel Aviv need to end Jewish occupation, ref1 New Saraya building, ref1, ref2 Old City, demolition and remodelling, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n171 photos of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 plans and maps, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 population and demographics, ref1, ref2n159 port, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n143, ref10n144 railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 riots in see under riots siege and fall (1799), ref1 sociopolitical significance, ref1 (see also crime) songs about, ref1 St Peter’s church, ref1, ref2 state today, ref1 war with Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2 ‘Jaffa’ (song), ref1 Jaffa in the Mirror of Days, ref1 ‘Jaffa’ oranges, ref1 Janko, Marcel, ref1 Jerusalem, ref1 attack in 1967, ref1 building projects for, ref1 Herzl’s visit to (1898), ref1 Law, ref1 Old City, ref1, ref2 Shrine of the Book, ref1n210 Jewish Architects in Germany, ref1 Jewish National Fund see Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jews anti-Jewish riots, ref1 apostate, ref1 Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, ref1n23 coexistence with Arabs and Christians, ref1, ref2 collaboration between factions, ref1 emancipated in France, ref1, ref2n90 exiled by Ottoman Empire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 migration of see under migration Napoleon’s emancipation of, ref1 possible pact with Arabs, ref1 social/ethnic categorizations of, ref1, ref2n23 tensions with Arabs in 1920s, ref1 Johnson, Philip, ref1, ref2, ref3n224 Josephus Flavius, ref1 Jubilee Fair (1929), ref1 Judenstaat, Der, ref1 Kabak, Aharon, ref1, ref2 Kanafani, Ghassan, ref1n150 Kanoun, Youcef, ref1, ref2 Karavan, Dani, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7n56 White Square installation, ref1 Karavan, Noa, ref1, ref2n66, ref3n69 Kardom, ref1, ref2, Kark, Ruth, ref1 Karmi, Dov, ref1, ref2, ref3 Karmi, Ram, ref1, ref2, ref3n202 Katsav, Moshe, ref1 Katznelson, Berl, ref1n122 Kauffmann, Richard, ref1, ref2 Kav (journal), ref1, ref2 Kazablan (film), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n172 Kazablan (play), ref1, ref2n172 Kendall, Henry, ref1, ref2 Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (Jewish National Fund), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n139 Kfar Yehoshua, ref1 Khalidi, Walid, ref1n159 kibbutz movement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Kibbutz + Bauhaus, ref1, ref2, ref3 Kiesler, Frederick, ref1n210 Kikar Levinsky (Levinsky Square) Corporation, ref1 Kineret, ref1n38 Kleinberg, Aviad, ref1 Klemmer, Klemens, ref1 Kluger, Zoltan, ref1 Knesset building, ref1n137 mural for, ref1 Kobler, Franz, ref1n90 Kochavi, Aviv, ref1, ref2n156 Kollhoff, Hans, ref1n68 Koolhaas, Rem, ref1, ref2n156 Korkidi, Nessim, ref1n80 Kraus, Frantz, ref1 Kushnir, Mordechai, ref1, ref2n126 Labour Party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n243 land and the Absentees’ Property Law, see Absentees’ Property Law agricultural, appropriated in building Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3 Ahuzat Bayit plots lottery, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 confiscated for settlement, ref1, ref2 devalued by war, ref1, ref2, ref3 individual grabs in 1948, ref1n132 and the Jewish National Fund, ref1n139 management/policy, ref1 for Neve Sha’anan, ref1, ref2 obliteration of Arab boundaries, ref1 possible compensation for expropriation, ref1n168 potential division between Jews and Arabs, ref1 purchase restrictions for Jews under Ottoman rule, ref1 purchased by Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, ref1 purchased for settlement, ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘without a people for a people without a land’, ref1 Last Ships, ref1, ref2 Lavry, Mark, ref1n44 Lazar, Chaim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n147 Le Corbusier, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11n29, 1216nn219, ref12, ref13 Lebanon, ref1, ref2 Second War, ref1n251 Lefebvre, Henri, ref1 Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel), ref1, ref2, ref3n134, ref4n148 Lerman, Sergio, ref1n119 Levin, Michael, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 LeVine, Mark, ref1n24 LeWitt, Jan (Yacov Chaim), ref1, ref2n20 Liebskind, Daniel, ref1n156 Like a Besieged City, ref1 Likud, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n243 Line of Fire, ref1n156 Little Tel Aviv (musical), ref1 Lod, ref1 Loos, Adolf, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6nn225, ref7 Luidor, Yosef, ref1, ref2n126 Lul ensemble, ref1, ref2n43 Lydia, ref1 Maariv, ref1 Maccabiah Games, First, ref1 Makom (exhibition/catalogue), ref1 Mann, Thomas, ref1 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ref1 Matta-Clark, Gordon, ref1 ‘May It Be’ (song), ref1 Memorial for Mansieh, ref1 Mendel, Sa’adia, ref1, ref2 Mendelsohn, Erich, ref1, ref2, ref3 Menorah symbolism, ref1, ref2n198 Merkaz Hanegev (Centre of the Negev) project, ref1 ‘Merkaz Hayekum’ (Centre of the Universe) project, ref1 Mestechkin, Shmuel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n68 ‘Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern Movement in Architecture’, ref1 migration Bedouin, ref1 from Germany pre World War II, ref1 immigration police, deportations by, ref1 Jewish from Palestine/Israel, ref1, ref2n27, ref3n205 Jewish to Israel after World War II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n183 Jewish, Palestine too small for, ref1n116 Jewish to Palestine after World War I, ref1, ref2, ref3 North African to Jaffa, ref1 Palestinian from Jaffa, see Jaffa, attack and destruction to Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 in ‘Third Aliya’, ref1 see also Jaffa, refugees military and guerrilla tactics, ref1, ref2n152, ref3n154 Milo, Yosef, ref1, ref2n96 minorities in Israel, ref1, ref2, ref3 in nineteenth-century Jaffa, ref1 see also Arabs, Christians, refugees Mistechkin, Shmuel, ref1n118 Mitterrand, Francois, ref1n56 Mizrahi, Abraham, ref1 modern movement, ref1 in architecture, see under architecture as benchmark of the past in Israel, ref1 myths of modernity, ref1 see also International Style Morocco Casablanca, ref1, ref2n172, ref3n212 Morris, Benny, ref1, ref2, ref3n144, ref4n159 Morrison, Toni, ref1, ref2 Mosenzon, Yigal, ref1, ref2 Moshav settlement type, ref1 Moshe, Haham Yosef, ref1n80 ‘mouse hole’ military tactics, ref1, ref2 Muki, ref1 My White City, ref1 Nablus, attack on refugee camp, ref1 Nachal Sorek [Sorek River] nuclear plant, ref1n224 Nahal (Noar Halutzi Lohem), ref1, ref2n48 Nahal company, ref1 Nahalal (settlement), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n49 ‘Nama Yafo’, ref1, ref2n96 Namir, Mordechai, ref1 Napoleon Bonaparte, ref1, ref2, ref3n90 National Corporation of Tourism, ref1 Nazar, Salah, ref1 Nazareth, ref1 Negev Brigade, monument for, ref1 Nemours Project, ref1 Nerdinger, Winifried, ref1n68 Nes Ziona, ref1 Neutra, Richard, ref1 Neve Sha’anan Corporation/association, ref1, ref2, ref3n115 New York, International Style (exhibition), ref1, ref2, ref3 Newspapers Under Influence, ref1 Niv, Amnon, ref1 ‘Nothing like Jaffa at Night’, ref1 Nouvel, Jean, ref1, ref2, ref3n10 Occupied Territories, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also Palestine Old Jaffa Development Company, ref1, ref2 Omer, Hillel, ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘Operation Anchor’ see Project Anchor ‘Operation Cast Lead’, ref1n251 ‘Operation Chametz’, ref1 ‘Operation Defense Shield’, ref1n251 ‘Operation Pillar of Defense’, ref1n251 ‘Operation Protective Edge’, ref1, ref2n251 ‘Operation Rainbow’, ref1, ref2n251 orchards see agriculture Order of Tel Aviv Township, ref1 Orientalism, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Orloff, Hannah, ref1n28 Ornament and Crime, ref1 Oslo Accords, ref1 Ottoman Empire see Turkey Oulebsir, Nabila, ref1, ref2 Pain Song, ref1 Palestine 21st century Israeli military operations, ref1 Arab residents before founding of Israel, ref1 Arab residents replaced in old cities, ref1 (see also under Jaffa) British Mandate, ref1, ref2, ref3 bypass roads in, ref1n111 Highway Six, ref1n243 Jewish settlement in, see Israel national identity, ref1 Occupied Territories see Occupied Territories refugees from and to, see under refugees significance of Jaffa to, ref1, ref2, ref3 UN Division Plan (1947), ref1, ref2, ref3 Zionist counters to Palestinian claims of entitlement, ref1 see also Gaza Strip, Israel, Separation Wall Parent, Claude, ref1 Peace Now, ref1 Peeping Toms (film), ref1 Penn, Alexander, ref1 people as focus of architecture, ref1 Perec, Georges, ref1, ref2n86 Peres, Shimon, ref1n224 Peretz, Isaac Leib, ref1n177 Perlstein, Yitzhak, ref1 Petah-Tikvah, ref1 Pichmann, Yaacov, ref1, ref2 Piltz, Arieh, ref1 piracy, ref1 plague (in Jaffa), ref1 ‘Plan Obus’, ref1, ref2 ‘Plan Voisin’, ref1 Plumbers, The, ref1, ref2n225 Poelzig, Hans, ref1n68 politics and changes of national administration, ref1 and the city, ref1 democracy and isonomy, ref1 and discourse on architecture, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 right-wing in Tel Aviv, ref1 socialist/radical left, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n122 and unrest, ref1 see also Labour Party, Likud, Zionism Pommer, Richard, ref1 Poraz, Avraham, ref1 Portugali, Yuval, ref1 postcolonialism, ref1 postmodernism in Israeli architecture, ref1 Zionist use of, ref1 power and architecture, ref1, ref2 and a city’s shape and history, ref1 relative of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, ref1 privatization, ref1, ref2, ref3n193 of war, ref1n246 ‘Project Anchor’, ref1, ref2 Prouvé, Jean, ref1 Rabin, Yitzhak, ref1, ref2, ref3n183 Rafah, ref1 Rahim, Ahmed Abdul, ref1 Ramla, ref1, ref2, ref3 Ratner, Yohanan, ref1, ref2n76, ref3n138 Reading power station, ref1 Rechter, Yoni, ref1n96 Rechter, Zeev, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5n28 Red House, the, ref1, ref2n118, ref3n126 Reifer, Rafi, ref1 refugees African in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2 attacked in Nablus, ref1 Jewish in Jaffa/Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Palestinian, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 (from Jaffa, ref5, ref6, ref7n150, ref8n159; see also Jaffa, attack and destruction) see also migration Rehovot, ref1 Reuveni, Aaron, ref1, ref2 Riddle of the Land, The, ref1, ref2 riots in 1921 Jaffa, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 anti-African in 2012, ref1 Rokah, Israel, ref1, ref2n165 Rokah, Shimon and Eliezer, ref1 Rotbard, Sharon, ref1, ref2 Rothschild, Baron Edmond Benjamin James de, ref1, ref2n51, ref3n79 Rubin, Karl, ref1, ref2 ruins city in, see under Jaffa restored as part of museum, ref1 ruin value theory, ref1, ref2, ref3n185 Runkle, Benjamin, ref1 Russia, Jewish migrants from, ref1, ref2 Sadeh, Yitzhak, ref1, ref2n47 Safed, ref1 Said, Edward, ref1 Salameh, Shukri, ref1n148 Samuel, Sir Herbert Louis, ref1, ref2, ref3n116 sand building material in Tel Aviv, ref1, ref2n68 significance of, ref1, ref2n69 see also dunes Sandel, Theodor, ref1 Sarona (German colony), ref1 Sauvage, Henri, ref1n210 Scheps, Marc, ref1 Schocken family, ref1 Department Store (Chemnitz), ref1 Schultz, Bruno, ref1 Schulze, Franz, ref1n224 Schwartz, Amnon, ref1 Schwartz, Dani, ref1 ‘Seashores are sometimes longing for a river’, ref1n53 Second Intifada, ref1 See Under: Love, ref1 Segev, Eyal, ref1n167 Segev, Tom, ref1n160 Seltzer, Dov, ref1 Separation Wall, ref1, ref2n97, ref3n243 Settlement Offensive, ref1n76 see also ‘Wall and Tower’ settler movement, ref1 in Tel Aviv, ref1 Shabtai, Yaakov, ref1n21 Shaked, Ayelet, ref1 Shalit, Tomer, ref1n205 Shamir, Gabriel and Maxim, ref1n198 Shamir, Yitzhak, ref1n134 Shapira, Meir Getzel, ref1 Shapira, Moshe, ref1 Sharet, Yaakov, ref1, ref2n96 Sharett, Moshe, ref1 Sharon, Ariel, ref1, ref2, ref3n97, ref4n243 Sharon, Aryeh, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n135 buildings by, ref1, ref2 publications, ref1 workers’ housing project, ref1 Shatz, Zvi, ref1 Shavit, Yaacov, ref1 Shemer, Naomi, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6n38 Shenhav, Yehouda, ref1n168 Shimonovitz, David, ref1 Shitrit, B.


pages: 270 words: 81,311

In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen

anti-communist, British Empire, clean water, Day of the Dead, East Village, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, trade route

They killed innocent children and shot rebelling soldiers out of cannons. Taking up the culinary motif, they sewed some Hindu soldiers into cow carcasses and left them to suffocate. Their behavior was so louche that the British government decided to take India away from the East India Company and make it a member of the British Empire. In fact, this early revolution probably failed only because the Indian soldiers, who outnumbered the English twenty-five to one, refused to use the hated Enfield rifles during the fight. Revolutions over cow fat, riots over roast beef—it strikes Westerners as preposterous until you realize that we, too, have massacred and tortured thousands over the exact same issue.

Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism and Gender in European Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. McCance, Robert. Breads, White and Brown: Their Place in Thought and Social History. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1956. McCulloch, J. R. A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847. McIlwaine, Shields. The Southern Poor White Trash: From Lubberland to Tobacco Road. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma, 1939. Melchert, Christopher, Director of Regulatory and Technical Affairs for Snack Food. Personal interview. Mennell, Stephen.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Fears of a mixed race population helped drive the restrictions introduced in 1925: British subjects of colour who landed in ports across the country had to register themselves and clock in with officials if they were going to move; all the while the possibility of deportation loomed over them.27 This signalled what was to come in the following decades; the racial categories created during colonialism underpinned the debate and they would continue to do so for years to come. Desperate to retain global status as the British Empire was crumbling in front of them and determined to continue an economically exploitative relationship with colonies and former colonies where possible, politicians embraced the idea of the Commonwealth. Through this organisational vehicle they claimed that the Empire was naturally evolving into a multiracial collection of countries.28 In this telling of history, colonial independence could be cast not as a radical change driven by anti-colonial movements but as a planned transformation that signalled the UK’s benevolence and adaptability.

In one well-known case, the British Hotels and Restaurants Association had an active drive to recruit staff from the colonies. 39. Quotes taken from Black Nurses: The Women Who Saved the NHS, BBC, 2016, 1:40–1:52; 19:32–19:52; 15:58–16:08. Bruce Paice, head of immigration for the Home Office between 1955 and 1966, said: ‘the population of this country, in general, were all in favour of the British empire as long as it stayed where it was. They didn’t want it here.’ ‘Looking back at race relations’, BBC News, 23 October 1999. 40. Denise Noble, ‘Decolonizing Britain and Domesticating Women: Race, Gender, and Women’s Work in Post-1945 British Decolonial and Metropolitan Liberal Reform Discourses’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 13, issue 1, 2015, pp. 53–77. 41.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

The theory was that these traditional welfare systems made people ‘lazy’, accustomed to easy food and leisure; by removing them, you could discipline people with the threat of hunger, and get them to compete with one another to extract ever higher yields from the land. From the perspective of agricultural productivity, it worked; but the destruction of subsistence agriculture and communal support systems left peasants vulnerable to market fluctuations and droughts. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, 30 million Indians perished needlessly of famine in what the historian Mike Davis has called the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’. Needlessly, because even at the peak of the famine there was a net surplus of food. In fact, Indian grain exports more than tripled during this period, from 3 million tons in 1875 to 10 million tons in 1900.

The minimum wage is calculated at the 1993 rate, interest through 1993, and the results are expressed in 1993 dollars; an updated figure would be much higher than this. 21 Utsa Patnaik, Agrarian and Other Histories (Tulik Books, 2018); Jason Hickel, ‘How Britai stole $45 trillion from India,’ Al Jazeera, 2018. 22 B.R. Tomlinson, ‘Economics: The Periphery,’ In The Oxford History of the British Empire (1990), p. 69. 23 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2003). 24 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 25 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, 1689. 26 For more on this history of scarcity, see Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 2017). 27 I derive these quotes from Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press, 2000). 28 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso Books, 2002). 29 Maitland explored this paradox in a book titled Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

In view of Britain's economic leadership in foreign trade, other countries began to give serious consideration to shifting to a pure gold standard like Britain'sbut the difficulty of disposing of their stocks of silver in an oversupplied market was a major deterrent. Germany was especially eager to make the changeover to gold, for the Germans wanted to be perceived by the world as a great power. Germany also wanted to be on the same standard as Britain in order to meet the growing need for sterling to pay for raw material imports from the outposts of the British Empire. Ludwig Bamberger, a politician who played a major role in putting Germany on the gold standard, admitted as much when he declared, "We chose gold, not because gold is gold, but because Britain is Britain.""' Germany seized on the opportunity provided by its victory over France in 1871. The indemnity paid by the French relieved the Germans of the necessity of liquidating silver in order to finance its purchases of gold.

He emphasized that the decision was essential "for the revival of international trade and inter-Imperial trade [and] for the financial center of the world." And then, in a fine Churchillian flourish, he finished with these ringing words: "If the English pound is not to be the standard which everyone knows and can trust ... the business not only of the British Empire but of Europe as well might have to be transacted in dollars instead of pounds sterling. I think that would be a great mis- fortune."18 The Gold Standard Act of 1925 did not completely restore the old arrangements. Bank notes remained legal tender but were no longer convertible into gold coin at the Bank.

From a lecture delivered at Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pa., on March 13, 1997. Andrews, Kenneth, 1978. The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530-1630. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Andrews, Kenneth, 1984. Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnon, Arie, 1991. Thomas Tooke: Pioneer of Monetary Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Attman, Artur, 1962. American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600-1800. Goteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhallet. (I drew on the information in this book as provided in Kindleberger, 1989.)


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

As for Britain, while its resources were ‘quite adequate to meet the liability for the war debt which was assumed in 1923 . . . the amount of lease-lend aid was far greater, and the country’s resources far more heavily depleted’, wrote Ralph Hawtrey, the retired British Treasury official, in 1946.21 The prostrate position of Great Britain after the war, in economic terms, has often been seen by historians as a perfect opportunity for America to extend its dominance over the world. Keynes’s most significant biographer goes so far as to suggest that ‘America’s main war aim, after the defeat of Germany and Japan, was the liquidation of the British Empire.’22 Regardless of the motivations of the Americans, the relative strength of the two countries’ position was obvious. The Bretton Woods Agreement reflected White’s scheme rather than Keynes’s ‘not because it was technically superior, but because the Americans had the power’.23 Behind the scenes, the British were undoubtedly frustrated by their subordinate position.

His public career had been entirely shaped by the two world wars. Despite his immense prestige and charisma, Keynes had not managed to stem the tide of American dominance in world affairs. Rather like Winston Churchill, he had been brought up in the high confidence of the upper classes of the British empire. Like Churchill’s, his life had been conducted almost exclusively in the elite institutions of British public life. Eton, Cambridge, the Treasury and, latterly, the House of Lords had been the scenes of his life’s work. Churchill’s life was almost entirely spent at Harrow, in the British army and in the House of Commons.

These countries treated ‘London not merely as the place where they keep their currency reserves but also as their banking centre’.8 It would mean that those countries would resort ‘to any means at their disposal to push their exports’. This would threaten the interests of the United States or, in Martin’s more diplomatic language, ‘set up numerous points of friction in the trade relations between this country and the British Empire at a most inopportune time’.9 The British loan itself was controversial and split opinion across many levels of American politics. John Wesley Snyder, Fred Vinson’s successor as US Secretary of the Treasury, and a close personal friend of President Truman, later recalled that Anglophiles like George Kennan, an official in the US State Department, believed that the ‘resources of the United States were inexhaustible and that they should be employed to the greatest extent to relieving some of the economic and financial problems of Great Britain’.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

He has talked often to friends and acquaintances about his father's loss to Bill Clinton eight years ago, when the elder Bush focused on foreign affairs and the Arkansas neophyte emphasized the economy."30 An unwillingness on the part of the masses to make serious sacrifices for empire is not new. Until World War I the British empire was conquered and run very much on the cheap (largely by local native auxiliaries—not unlike the situation for the United States in Afghanistan after 2001), and this was true of the other colonial empires as well. The Royal Navy was of course expensive, but then it doubled as the absolutely necessary defense of the British Isles themselves against invasion or blockade. 25 AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG Then as now, given the overwhelming superiority of Western firepower and military organization, enormous territories could be conquered at very low cost and risk.

A great many nations throughout history—perhaps even the great majority—have had a sense of themselves as especially "chosen" by God, or destiny, for great and special "tasks," and often have used remarkably similar language to describe this sense of mission.62 Indeed, some of the most articulate proponents of America's universal mission have been British subjects, repeating very much the same lines that their fathers and grandfathers used to employ about the British empire.63 In the words of Herman Melville (1819-1891): "We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear.

Since then it has become a fixed and recurring feature of American political theater.31 Such moves can be used either by the opposition to discredit the government in power or by the government to whip up patriotic support and discredit the opposition. Lord Salisbury, several times British premier at the height of the British empire, once remarked sourly that if British generals and their political allies had their way, he would have to pay to "fortify the Moon against an attack from Mars."32 Indeed, in 1897 a British magazine published a story with a title which could have been written by Charles Krauthammer—"How Britain Fought the World in 1899"—in which France and Russia invade Britain.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

He then proceeded to lay out a detailed assessment of America’s military challenges in fighting the British. But after the fighting was over, America faced the task of creating a new, independent state separate from British trade and especially independent from the banks of the City of London. The story of money and debt in America is the chronicle of how a fragment of the British empire broke off in the late 1700s and supplanted and surpassed Great Britain in economic terms by the end of WWI. Though Britain for centuries was the dominant economic system in the world, America would come to lead the global economy by the early twentieth century. The English pound was not the first great global currency, nor will the dollar likely be the last.

In the early 1900s, for example, when American companies purchased goods from overseas, they often paid for the imports using a letter of credit drawn on a London bank. Because the credit of U.S. banks was considered to be so inferior and because British banks were set up to do business throughout the British empire, London held a tight grip over the financing of American commerce more than a century after the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, while there were many reasons for the Anglo-centric view of the House of Morgan and its strong ties to the London banking market, sheer necessity was one of the most important.

The Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods would create a structure for global trade and finance that was measured in and supported by the dollar, a construct that supposed the existence of an international currency based upon the economy of just one large, politically dominant nation. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 also marked the end of Great Britain as a significant global power in financial and strategic terms. With the financial collapse of the United Kingdom after the war, the United States assumed responsibility for much of the colonial possessions of the British Empire and, once again, bailed out London financially. The mechanism for the bailout was a regime of fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar, with the U.S. currency retaining some residual link to gold. The guns in Europe had barely fallen silent before the United Kingdom was seeking accommodation with respect to its obligations under the Lend Lease Act of WWII.


pages: 522 words: 144,605

Spitfire: A Very British Love Story by John Nichol

belly landing, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, friendly fire, Suez canal 1869

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ’25 Hitler was riled. Churchill would feel the wrath of blitzkrieg. War Directive No. 16 was drafted. German High Command was ordered to prepare for invasion. ‘The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English motherland as a base from which war can be continued and, if necessary, to occupy completely.’

Four centuries later a similar campaign was being waged in the same place for the same reasons. Strategically important, Malta was located in the perfect spot in the Mediterranean where Axis shipping crossed from Italy to supply Rommel’s campaign in North Africa. Hitler’s grand strategy of sweeping through Egypt, cutting off the eastern half of the British Empire and seizing Arabian oil fields was being held up by an island of 290,000 people and an assortment of RAF aircraft. By the end of 1941, air and naval attacks from Malta had sunk 64 per cent of ships carrying fuel, tanks and personnel destined for Rommel’s Afrika Korps.2 Malta was a menace and a sore and had to be eliminated.

Russia’s southern underbelly? It was clear – Malta had to be saved whatever the cost. And yet again, the Spitfire would be called to the forefront of the action. * * * The islanders’ allegiance to Britain had endured since Admiral Lord Nelson ousted Napoleon’s haughty French troops and made Malta part of the British Empire. That loyalty was about to be tested as Kesselring ordered his men to smash Malta’s air defences as the prelude to invasion. The Germans stuck to their well-used script, flattening homes and damaging Malta’s three airfields in a wave of bombings. The ageing Hurricanes were simply no match for the agile Me109Fs.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The slaughter at Gallipoli symbolized the national pride of Australians, now fighting for their British motherland as Australians, not as Victorians or Tasmanians or South Australians—and the emotional dedication with which Australians publicly identified themselves as loyal British subjects. That self-identification was re-emphasized in 1923, when a conference of British Empire member countries agreed that British dominions could henceforth appoint their own ambassadors or diplomatic representatives to foreign countries, instead of being represented by the British ambassador. Canada, South Africa, and Ireland promptly did appoint their own diplomatic representatives.

The British government recognized those cruel realities before the Australian government did, but the acknowledgment was intensely painful on both sides. The changes in Britain were at their peak while I was living there between 1958 and 1962. Australians had traditionally viewed their identity as being British citizens within the British Empire, based on the twin realities of population ancestry and of British trade and military protection, all of which were changing. At the same time, the British had traditionally viewed their identity as being based on ownership of the largest empire in world history (“the empire on which the sun never sets”), then on leadership of the British Commonwealth.

Or, is Australia instead an independent nation on the immediate periphery of Asia, with its own national interests and foreign policy and ambassadors, more involved with Asia than with Europe, and with its British cultural heritage declining with time? That debate did not begin seriously until after World War Two, and it is continuing today. Even as Australia was debating its identity as a proud outpost of the British Empire, Britain was debating its own identity as the proud center of that empire (in decline), and struggling to assume a new identity as a non-imperial power heavily involved with continental Europe. The theme of honest self-appraisal (factor #7) has increasingly characterized Australia since World War Two, as Australians have come to recognize Australia’s changed situation in the modern world.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

For Britain, the significance of the Middle East lay in its strategic position on the routes to India, including the Suez Canal. Moreover, the Ottoman sultan in his role as caliph, the spiritual leader of Muslims and protector of Islam, had called for a jihad—a holy war—against the British, who in turn were alarmed by the potential impact on the Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India and the protectorate of Egypt. French ambitions were more commercial, but were also wrapped up in a collage of religion, history, “mission historique,” and the determination to “reap the harvest of seven centuries of French endeavors” going back to the Crusades (although one English official did note, “The Crusaders had been defeated, and the Crusades had failed.”).3 * * * — In December 1915, Sykes was summoned to a meeting in Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s office to discuss Britain’s plans for the future of the Middle East.

World War I was proving the criticality of oil, not only to fuel the battleships, but also for the recent inventions that had become vehicles for war—trucks and motorcycles and tanks and airplanes. Oil and the internal combustion engine had quickly redefined mobility and warfare. All this would make oil the most important strategic commodity in the world. In the final months of the war, a secret report on “The Petroleum Situation in the British Empire” noted that Britain depended upon the United States for most of its oil. If Britain were to remain the dominant naval power, it could not rely upon a United States whose president, Woodrow Wilson, was so inalterably opposed to the very concept of empire. Thus, Britain needed “to obtain the undisputed control of the greatest amount of Petroleum that we can.”

See oil and natural gas prices and Russian geopolitical ambitions, 71 and South China Sea tensions, 138 terminals for, 34–36, 86, 241 and Trump administration, 39–40 and U.S. exports to Mexico, 41–44 and U.S. manufacturing boom, 26–28 and varied approaches to climate change, 418 “Natural Resources and the Commodity Supercycle” (panel), 56 nature-based climate solutions, 405–6 naval power and China’s Belt and Road initiative, 189 and China’s Malacca Dilemma, 182 and Chinese history, 152–54 and freedom of navigation, 145, 150, 165, 167 and “Petroleum Situation in the British Empire” (1918), 200 and the Thucydides Trap, 131 and U.S.–China rivalry, 134 See also South China Sea Nayef bin Saud, 221 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 122–23 Nazarbayev University, 177–78 Nebraska Department of Roads, 348 Nenet people, 111 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 255–56 Netherlands, xix, 33, 86, 87, 232, 344 New China Construction Atlas (Bai Meichu), 140 Newcomen, Thomas, 378 New York Times, 208, 231–32, 348, 364, 387 Nguyen Phu Trong, 159 Nichols, Larry, 8, 10 Nigeria, 272, 278, 280 9-Dash Line, 141, 144–46, 149, 150, 157 Nissan, 42, 332, 340 nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, 335–36 Nixon, Richard, 53 Nobel Prizes, 379–80, 395 Noble Energy, 254, 256 Nord Stream pipelines, 84–85, 89, 102, 104–8, 106, 113, 126, 314 North Africa, 22, 87 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 70, 80, 82, 88, 105–7, 135, 239 North Dakota, 18–20, 49–51, 50, 282–83 Northern Sea Route, 112–13 North Field, 34 North Korea, 39, 135 North Sea, 87, 398 Norway, 88, 99, 232, 281, 320, 339, 400 Novak, Alexander, 275, 280, 313 Novatek, 111–12 nuclear power, 63, 87, 155, 401, 403 Nuland, Victoria, 93 Obama, Barack and Arab Spring protests, 237, 238 and China Belt and Road Initiative, 181, 183 and electric car development, 340 and energy transition challenges, 381–82 and Iranian nuclear ambitions, 226 and pipeline battles, 47 (Keystone), 51 (Dakota Access) and Russia-Ukraine tensions, 91–92, 94 and Russian annexation of Crimea, 96 and shale gas policies, 12 and Snowden intelligence breach, 91–92 and Syrian civil war, 245–47 and U.S.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Classical Liberalism “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” proclaimed the American revolutionaries when they gathered in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, to sign the document proclaiming the independence of thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain. The revolutionaries went on to detail their grievances against their king, George III: He had trampled on their rights, stolen their liberty, and put the entire British Empire on the road to tyranny. This oppression had become intolerable, justifying the drastic act of separation that the American colonists were undertaking. Liberty was a critical word in revolutionary discourse, invoked repeatedly, urgently, and in a wide array of contexts. What did it mean?6 Politically, liberty signified a determination to limit government and thereby to maximize individual freedom.

Phillips Payson O’Brien has recently argued that the Germans were also hobbled in their attack on the Soviet Union by the need to divert airplanes and other resources to the western front to defend their homeland against the Allied air assault that began in 1943. See his How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 37.Westad, The Cold War, 74. 38.Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 39.Roosevelt, Wallace, and several other advisors did not regard a possible Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe as the first step toward the domination of all of Europe and then of the world. They were more inclined to view Soviet designs on Eastern Europe as a defensive maneuver to protect the Russian homeland from yet another German invasion.

Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 2.Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), chapters 4–5. 3.Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Penny M. von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Merve Fejzula, “Negritude and Black Cultural Citizenship Across Senegal, Nigeria, and the United States, 1945–66” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2019); Sarah C.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

* * * Charles II (the exiled son of Charles I) came to the throne, and his rule – known as ‘the Restoration’ – saw scientific and cultural activity bursting forth after the straight-laced ethics of Cromwell’s time. Exploration and expansion were also on the agenda. Backed by the army and navy (which had been modernised by Cromwell), colonies stretched down the American coast, while the East India Company set up headquarters in Bombay (now Mumbai), laying foundations for what was to become the British Empire. The next king, James II, had a harder time. Attempts to ease restrictive laws on Catholics ended with his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne by William III, the Protestant ruler of Holland, better known as William of Orange. Ironically, William was married to James’ own daughter Mary, but it didn’t stop him doing the dirty on his father-in-law

As part of the process, from 1721 to 1742 a senior parliamentarian called Sir Robert Walpole effectively became Britain’s first prime minister. Return to beginning of chapter THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT Stronger control over the British Isles was mirrored by even greater expansion abroad. The British Empire – which, despite its official title, was predominantly an English entity – continued to grow in America, Canada and India. The first claims were made to Australia after Captain James Cook’s epic voyage in 1768. The Empire’s first major reverse came when the American colonies won the War of Independence (1776–83).

Although many of the dispossessed left for the New World, others came from the glens to the burgeoning factories of the Lowlands. The tobacco trade with America boomed and then gave way to textile and engineering industries, as the cotton mills of Lanarkshire and the Clyde shipyards around Glasgow expanded rapidly. * * * At its height the British Empire covered 20% of the land area of the Earth and contained a quarter of the world’s population. * * * The same happened in Wales. By the early 19th century copper, iron and slate were being extracted in the Merthyr Tydfil and Monmouth areas. The 1860s saw the Rhondda valleys opened up for coal mining, and Wales soon became a major exporter of coal, as well as the world’s leading producer of tin plate.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

• • • IN THE YEAR before the landing of the Mayflower, another group made a consequential, if less than voluntary, landing on Virginia’s shores. In August 1619 Rolfe recorded that a “Dutch man of war . . . sold us twenty negars.” The first slaves had landed in what would become the American colonies. But for another few decades, there was a far more cost-effective source of labor. The eventual rise of the British Empire tends to create the impression of an all-powerful England dating back to an even earlier era. But in 1620, the year of the Mayflower’s departure, significant elements of English society suffered from abject economic misery. One particularly chilling letter from the Virginia Company to the Lord Mayor of the City of London sheds some light on these circumstances.

In 1763, when the war concluded, Great Britain emerged as a substantial victor and the world’s leading power. In America it had managed to push its border substantially westward. But victory had a price: The British Treasury, despite the tax revenues collected during the war, had accumulated additional debts of over £60 million over the seven-year period. Understandably, the British Empire now sought to pay down the sizable cost of its past war through every means available to it, including imposing a part of the financial burden on its colonial holdings. At the same time, it now needed to maintain a standing army of ten thousand troops in America to protect its hard-won gains from the war.

• • • IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the political ramifications of the events in Boston to be felt in Virginia. Its most privileged sons began debating, studying, and analyzing this potential call of history. While only fifteen years earlier the only common bond between Massachusetts and Virginia had been the thread that connected all parts of the British Empire, the colonies were discovering a unified identity apart from being English. The realization that unfolded through the 1760s and early 1770s was that they needed one another. In the interior of Virginia, over one hundred miles from the colony’s capital in Williamsburg, was one of the many rolling hills of Albemarle County.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

Look, the general population here does not gain very much from holding on to our imperial system—in fact, it may gain nothing from it. If you take a look at imperial systems over history, it’s not at all clear that they are profitable enterprises in the final analysis. This has been studied in the case of the British Empire, and while you only get kind of qualitative answers, it looks as if the British Empire may have cost as much to maintain as the profits that came from it. And probably something like that is true for the U.S.-dominated system too. So take Central America: there are profits from our controlling Central America, but it’s very doubtful that they come anywhere near the probably ten billion dollars a year in tax money that’s required to maintain U.S. domination there. 58 WOMAN: Those costs are paid by the people, though, while the profits are made by the rich.

For instance, the United States has always been a much more advanced capitalist country, by far—corporations in the modern sense were an American invention, and ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, corporate America has always been much more powerful than its Canadian counterpart. This was a much richer country; we kept trying to invade Canada; Canada’s much more sparsely settled and much less populous than the United States; it was part of the British Empire; they have the French-English split, with Quebec there; and so on. So there are a lot of historical and other differences between the two of them, and I think it’s a good question to look into in more detail. But the fact is, there are advantages and disadvantages to the two countries. A lot of things have been won in the United States that are good, and are a model for other places—and as far as organizing is concerned, it’s the kind of thing you can do relatively freely here, free of the fear of very much direct state repression.

Israeli doves wrote articles about that, and of course the Israeli government knew it. 89 Well, okay, that whole phenomenon led to the Oslo Agreements—and now where the P.L.O. leadership fits in is just as part of the standard Third World model: they are the ruling Third World elite. So take a classic case, look at the history of India for a couple hundred years under the British Empire: the country was run by Indians, not by British—the bureaucrats who actually ran things were Indians, the soldiers who beat people up and smashed their heads were Indians. There was an Indian leadership which became very rich and privileged by being the agents of the British imperial system—and it’s the same thing everywhere else.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

• • • IN THE YEAR before the landing of the Mayflower, another group made a consequential, if less than voluntary, landing on Virginia’s shores. In August 1619 Rolfe recorded that a “Dutch man of war . . . sold us twenty negars.” The first slaves had landed in what would become the American colonies. But for another few decades, there was a far more cost-effective source of labor. The eventual rise of the British Empire tends to create the impression of an all-powerful England dating back to an even earlier era. But in 1620, the year of the Mayflower’s departure, significant elements of English society suffered from abject economic misery. One particularly chilling letter from the Virginia Company to the Lord Mayor of the City of London sheds some light on these circumstances.

In 1763, when the war concluded, Great Britain emerged as a substantial victor and the world’s leading power. In America it had managed to push its border substantially westward. But victory had a price: The British Treasury, despite the tax revenues collected during the war, had accumulated additional debts of over £60 million over the seven-year period. Understandably, the British Empire now sought to pay down the sizable cost of its past war through every means available to it, including imposing a part of the financial burden on its colonial holdings. At the same time, it now needed to maintain a standing army of ten thousand troops in America to protect its hard-won gains from the war.

• • • IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the political ramifications of the events in Boston to be felt in Virginia. Its most privileged sons began debating, studying, and analyzing this potential call of history. While only fifteen years earlier the only common bond between Massachusetts and Virginia had been the thread that connected all parts of the British Empire, the colonies were discovering a unified identity apart from being English. The realization that unfolded through the 1760s and early 1770s was that they needed one another. In the interior of Virginia, over one hundred miles from the colony’s capital in Williamsburg, was one of the many rolling hills of Albemarle County.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

In the early 1770s, citizens throughout the colonies that would become the United States became increasingly aware of the activities of peddlers—and they didn’t like what they saw. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the peddlers or thought that peddling was immoral. Rather, the colonists were engaged in an economic war with Britain and didn’t want roving street merchants to break the embargo they had imposed on goods from anywhere in the British Empire. In 1774, a year after the Boston Tea Party, the Connecticut Courant reported approvingly that people from several towns in the Boston area had found “those Gentry, called Pedlars” selling tea, and had seized the offensive merchandise and burned it. And in 1775, just a month before the hostilities that would become the Revolutionary War commenced, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts (the renegade body that, prior to the Declaration of Independence, declared itself free from British control), in a decree signed by John Hancock, ordained that local officials had the authority to search the packs of all peddlers, in order to prevent the strolling merchants from “selling East-India goods and teas.”

And in 1775, just a month before the hostilities that would become the Revolutionary War commenced, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts (the renegade body that, prior to the Declaration of Independence, declared itself free from British control), in a decree signed by John Hancock, ordained that local officials had the authority to search the packs of all peddlers, in order to prevent the strolling merchants from “selling East-India goods and teas.” As India was part of the British Empire, the Provincial Congress declared, selling Indian spices and teas served to “interrupt and defeat” the effort to “secure the rights and liberties of the inhabitants of these colonies.” In selling British goods, the peddlers were seen as providing aid and comfort (and money) to the enemy and, in the process, jeopardizing the revolution.


pages: 311 words: 89,785

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith

Beryl Markham, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Pepto Bismol, Scramble for Africa, trade route

British East Africa, a territory three times the size of the British Isles, encompassed what would become Kenya and Uganda. King Leopold II of Belgium personally controlled almost a million square miles of the Congo basin to the west. Before leaving London, Grogan had visited the Foreign Office and the War Office to see how his journey could help the British Empire directly. He left with requests for information on the activities of Portuguese, German, Belgian, and French forces, especially when it related to colonial boundaries. He also promised to bring back the first accurate map of the region around Lake Kivu and Lake Edward. “From end to end every tribe seemed at war with its neighboring tribes or with the white man,” Grogan wrote about their route.

Every time he turnedaround, it seemed, he was being wined and dined, interviewed, or asked to give a lecture or write an article about his experiences. On April 30, at age twenty-five, he became the youngest person ever to address the Royal Geographical Society. Even Grogan was nervous speaking in front of such an eminent crowd, which included the king of Sweden and some of the British Empire’s smartest and most accomplished men. “Anything more ridiculous than the possibility of my return to Africa never occurred to me as I wearily munched my ration of everlasting bully beef and rice during the Matabele war of ‘96,” he began, and proceeded to captivate his audience with his eloquence and dry wit.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

George Grote, another radical historian, argued that the ancient Greeks were philosophical radicals avant la lettre, exhibiting the virtues of a world of small states and liberal individualism. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was universally interpreted as a demonstration of the wonder-working power of free trade. So was the British Empire. The liberal movements that flowered across Europe in the mid­nineteenth century embraced both small government and the Westminster model. The 1848 revolutions represented a howl of protest against aristocratic rule and its wasteful extravagance. For continental modernizers, the message was simple: If the world’s most powerful country was run by people fixated on keeping government small, why should they put up with anything else?

All this was delivered with real passion. Friedman loathed the liberal conceit that government was the embodiment of reason and benevolence; he saw only muddle and selfishness. He believed that there was a direct correlation between government intervention and national decline: Just look at the history of the Greek and Roman and British empires. And he also loathed the idea that politicians and bureaucrats were somehow more enlightened and selfless than businesspeople: They simply chose to advance their personal interests in a different way. He even had doubts about whether there was any point in making government better, given that its main job was robbing the public: “Efficiency is a vice if it is devoted to doing the wrong thing.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Box 4.1: What they said about London’s economy two decades ago “Three facts dominate London’s economic history since 1960: first, the loss of 800,000 manufacturing jobs in a city that was once an important center for light manufacturing; second, a rather stagnant economy for about twenty years, with steady losses in employment and population; and third, a new phase of rapid growth based on finance and producer services, beginning in 1984, with employment in these industries overtaking that in manufacturing in 1985. That was the year when net employment gains replaced net losses in London, after twenty-five years of losses.” (Sassen, 1991: 205) “This city’s standing as a major financial center has survived the end of the British Empire, the rise in economic power of New York and Tokyo and the rapid changes that have swept banking, insurance and the securities business. Now London is being challenged again, this time by the fitful movement toward European unification, the expansion of stock markets on the Continent and the growing dominance of Germany over Europe’s economic affairs.”

Founded by the Romans as a trading post on the banks of the River Thames, offering excellent sea access from the northerly reaches of the Roman Empire, trade is part of London’s DNA. From the Middle Ages and throughout the centuries which followed, this trading spirit resurfaced in London’s age of maritime adventure, which brought with it boat building, navigation technologies and financial innovation in shipping, insurance and banking. The trading spirit fostered the British Empire, with its growth of docks and exchanges, and led to a deep pragmatism and openness. Openness to trade also meant openness to other people: merchants, labourers, and investors. Of course its status as an imperial metropolis also enabled London to become a centre of arts, artifacts, culture, publishing and a seat of learning.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

As for Singapore, it was in many respects an even more extraordinary historical laboratory. The administrative and economic capital of the British Empire in South-East Asia, its population was a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia. This deracinated population of colonists and migrants has always made the most of cultural exchange and experimentation. After independence in 1965, the country suddenly found itself in the desperate position of a trade hub without a hinterland. The British Empire was gone and neither Malaysia nor Indonesia, with which Singapore had difficult relations, could replace it.


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

At least as late as 1917–18 ‘not a single clerk, station master or machinist was a non-European’.66 Motor vehicles were much more open to natives.67 In 1935 the number of native car owners was just below the number of European owners, and just over the number of ‘foreign oriental’ owners; however, there were twice as many licensed native drivers as Europeans, who presumably were chauffeurs and taxi drivers.68 17. India’s tryst with its modern destiny shown on a postage stamp commemorating India’s independence from the British Empire on 15 August 1947. India later designed and built jet fighters rather than the civil transports shown on the stamp. There was a particular racial order in the vast British merchant marine that served in India and elsewhere. It depended to an extraordinary degree on ‘lascars’, seamen recruited from the Indian subcontinent.

Brazilian aircraft carrier Minas Gerais (Tom Pietrasik) Index Figures in italics refer to captions; those in bold to Tables. 2,4-D herbicide 162–3 17 of October (ship) 94, 124 A A-bomb see atomic bomb abattoirs 173 abortificients 23 abortion 23 Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq 156 academic science, and invention 185–7 acid rain 121 acupuncture 49 Acyclovir 163 advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) 21 AEG 193 aeronautical research 186 aeroplanes ix, xiv, 1, 3, 6, 28, 159, 191 appearance as a new technology 31 civil aircraft 117 and civilianised warfare 139 downplaying of military origins 142 hypersonic 38 killing by 146 and nationalism 116 powered aeroplane innovated in the USA 111 primarily a weapon of war 116, 158 R&D 197 supersonic 38 see also aviation; flight Afghanistan 145, 153 Africa death rate per car 27 guerrilla rebellions 152–3 malaria 27 sub-Saharan income per head 207 African National Congress 122 AGA range 57 Agency for International Development (AID) 157 agent orange 163 Agfa 130, 193 Agfacolor 130 agricultural revolution 64–6 agriculture family farms in the USA and USSR 62–4 horsepower xiii, 33–4 output 53 productivity 65, 74 shift to industry 52 Agrigento, Sicily 78 AIDS 25, 27, 49, 164, 207 Air France 21–2 air transport, cheap 115 air-conditioning 170 aircraft see aeroplanes aircraft industry 116, 158 airships 38, 50, 199 Al-Khahira (Cairo) jet trainer 125 Alang Beach, Gujarat, India 208 Albania 118, 131–2 Aliano, Basilicata, Italy 122–3 alkali 190 Allen & Hanbury 196 Almirante Latorre (battleship) 92 alternating current (AC) electrical systems 8–9, 176 alternatives assumption that there are no alternatives 6–7, 8 comparable alternatives 7–8 using a thing marginally better than alternatives 8 American Civil War 146 American Monarch (ship) 167 Amgen 202 AMO factory, Moscow 126 amodiaquine 26 analytical labs 192 animals husbandry 66 hybrids 190 killing 161, 164, 172, 173–6 anti-aircraft guns 14, 15 anti-malarials 164, 199 anti-missile systems 155–6 anti-virals 163 antibiotics 163, 190 antifungal treatments 164 apartheid 122 Apocalypse Now (film) 152 Arab oil embargo (1973) 122 Arab–Israeli wars 146–7 architecture ‘post-modern’ viii vernacular 41 Argentina builds a jet fighter 124–5 meat exports to Britain 172 national industrial development 118 the picana eléctrica 157 Argentina (liner) 124 Armament and History (Fuller) 141 Armenians 178–9 Armour meat packers 171, 172 Armstrong, Neil viii artillery fire 143, 144, 190 asbestos 42, 43, 211 asbestos-cement 42, 43 Asia: rice production 64–5 astronauts viii AT&T 193, 195 Atebrin (mepacrine) 25 atomic bomb xiv, 15–19, 21, 114–15, 117, 123, 138, 139, 158, 159, 185, 198, 199 atomic power 3, 6 Auschwitz–Birkenau extermination camp, Poland 121, 165, 180–81, 182 Australia maintenance and repair 80 meat trade 172 national industrial development 118 autarky 115, 116, 117–19 Autochrome process 193 autogiro 103 automation 2, 3, 85 Aventis 196 aviation 1, 19, 143 choices in aircraft construction 10 civil 6, 116 and empires 132 engine types 10 maintenance 87–91, 89 power of 141 supersonic stratospheric 3 see also aeroplanes; flight Axis Powers 18 AZT 164 B B-29 bombers 13, 15, 16, 123 B-52 bombers viii, ix, 95, 152, 155 ballistic missiles 154 Bangkok, Thailand long-tailed boats 47 Science Museum 28 Bangladesh motorised country-boats 48, 61 rice production 65 shipbreaking 208 barbed wire 146 Barham, HMS 93–4 BASF 119, 120, 121, 193 battleships x, xiv, 92–4, 93, 97, 141, 142, 143, 148–9, 154 Bayer 193, 194 Bayh–Dole Act (1980) 187 Beechams 196 Beef Trust 171 Belgrano (ARA General Belgrano) 94 Bell Labs 195, 196 Bell telephone 132 Belzec extermination camp, Poland 179 Bergius, Friedrich 120 Berlin–Baghdad railway xi bicycles x, 4, 45, 50–51, 58, 61 bidonvilles 41 Billingham plant, Stockton-on-Tees 119, 121 biological warfare 149 biotechnology 1, 185, 188, 192, 196, 202–3 Biro, Ladislao José 103 biro pen 103 birth control 23 Bishop, Billy 114 Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile ix Blue Star Line 172 boats fishing 49 long-tailed 47–8 motor torpedo 68 motorised country-boats 48–9, 61 bomber aircraft viii, ix, x, xiv, 9, 13, 13–16, 18, 95, 97, 123, 143, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155 Bomber Command 14 bombing atomic 15–19 conventional 12–15 ‘dumb’ bombs 155 ‘smart’ bombs 155 targets 12–13, 14, 15, 16 Borges, Jorge Luis 94 boundaries 117, 131, 132 branding 71 Braun, Werner von 18 Brazil (film) 75 Brezhnev, Leonid 102 Bristol Jupiter engine 88 Britain agricultural yields 64 autarchy 118 aviation 104, 111 car production 69 coal consumption ix cotton industry 36–7, 105, 190 economic growth 206 executions 176 horsepower in First World War 35 maintenance and repair 80 meat imports 172 output per head 109 privatisation of railways 87 R&D 109 railway workshops 98 steam power ix, 105 television 131 truck production 69 two-way movements between Britain/France and Britain/India 111–12 British Airways 21–2 British Electrical Development Association 56 British Empire 135 Brunnental, Soviet Union 62–3 Bumper V-2 rocket 2 Burmese army 145 Burney, Commander Sir Charles Dennistoun 167 buses ix, 96, 98, 191 C cable TV x, 49 Calcutta: rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws 45–6 Cambodia 182 Camden Market, London 33 camels 35 caravans 28, 30 cameras, replica 50 Canada: maintenance statistics 79 cap, the 24 Cape Canaveral, Florida 2 capitalism 76, 128 carbon monoxide 121, 179–80 Carrier, Dr Willis H. 170 Carrier Corporation 170 carrier pigeons 43 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 163 carving 28 CASA company 125 cavalry units 35 CDs 7 cement ix, 45 ceremonial occasions: use of reserve technologies 11 Césaire, Aimé 133 CFC gases 211 Chamoiseau, Patrick: Texaco 42–3 Cheliabinsk, Soviet Union 126 Chelmno extermination camp, Poland 179 chemical warfare 164 chemicals 1, 105, 188, 191, 192 chemistry 2, 130, 185, 186 organic 185 synthetic 4, 185 Chicago meatpackers 129–30, 171–5 chickens 66, 163, 164, 174–5 China agriculture 73 and Albania 131–2 atomic weapons as ‘paper tigers’ 19 autarchy 118 bicycle production 45 collective farming abolished 73 control of the internet 137 cotton textiles 65 Cultural Revolution 45, 72 economic growth 109, 112, 207 economy 73 executions 177 export of containers 74 foreign enterprise 137 ‘four big belongings’ 58–9 Great Leap Forward 44–5, 73 a hydraulic society 76 imitation of foreign technologies 112 industrialisation 73 links with Soviet Union (1949–60) 131 low-tech exports 137 Maoists 152 nationalism 137 old small scale technologies 72–3 pig production 66 produces Soviet technology 44 promotion of small-scale rural industries 72–3 rural industries 73 second Sino–Japanese War 140, 179 steel production 73 ‘technological dualism’ 44 Chinese Communist party 73 Chinese First Automotive Works 126 chlorinated organic compounds 161–2 chloroquine 26, 164 cholera 25 Ciba 196 Ciba-Geigy 26 Cierva, Juan de la 103 cinema ix, 203 cities of the poor world 39–40 clinical trials 11–12, 201 clothes: trade in old clothes 81 coal consumption ix hydrogenation of 120, 121–2, 186, 199 Cold War 123 ‘cold-chains’ 170 collectivisation 63, 64, 127 colonialism 39, 134 Common Market 119, 175 communications technologies xiv, 2 Communist movement 60 Companhia Energética de Sao Paulo 99 computer-numerically-controlled machine tool 158–9 computerisation 2 computers ix–x, 1, 158 analogue 7, 9 cheap PCs 71 digital 3, 6, 7, 9 initial cost as a percentage of lifetime cost 78 Concorde 21–2, 38, 96–7 condoms 1, 22–3, 24, 25, 49, 190 Congo War, second 146 contraception vii, x, 1, 22–5, 49, 190 cooking ranges 57 copper 73 corn, hybrid 64 corporate research laboratories 192 corrugated iron 41–3, 50–51, 78 cost-benefit analysis 11–12, 21, 142 cotton industry ix, 36–7, 65, 105, 136 Cotton Industry Act (1959) 38 credit agreements xv creole technologies xii, 39, 43–5, 46–7 creolisation of technology 85 Cuba 36, 207 Cudahy meat packers 171 cultural lag viii, 141, 212 Cultural Revolution 45, 72 cultural significance, measurement of 1 cycle-rickshaws 46–7, 48–9, 191 D Daktarin 164 Dalén, Nils Gustav 57 Datong Locomotive Works, China 50 DC-3 airliner 88, 197 DC-4 aircraft 197, 198 DC-6 aircraft 88 DC-8 jet 88, 197 DDT 26–7, 38, 162–3, 162 De Niro, Robert 75 de-globalisation 212 dependence 39 depression 37 Derwent jet engine 123 design 71 Detroit automation 86 Deutsches Museum, Munich 104 development labs 192 Dewoitine, Emile 125 diaphragm 24 diesel engine 3 differential analysers 7 diffusion vii Digital Signal Processing chip 195 direct current (DC) electrical systems 8, 9, 176 division of labour 72 Dnieper complex, Soviet Union 127 dockyards 91 domestic equipment 81 domestic production 56 ‘domestic science’ 56 domestic servants 56 domestic technologies xiv, 4, 56 domestic work, scientific organisation of 56 donkey carts 28, 30, 49 Dornier, Claude 125 douches 23 Dreadnought (battleship) 92 dreadnoughts 92, 148 Dufay process 130 Du Pont 20, 158, 193, 194–5 Durex 25 E East Germany: hydrogenation 121 Eastman Kodak 130, 193 economic growth 5, 52, 108, 109, 110, 206–7 economic history 3 economies of scale 71 ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) 38 Edison, Thomas 176 Edwards Air Force Base, California viii Egypt Ancient 76 aviation 126 Einsatzgruppen 179 ELAS resistance movement 60 electricity x, 1, 3, 6, 76–7, 185, 188, 190, 192 increased usage 5 electrification 2, 6, 32 electrocution/electric chair 165, 176, 177, 178 electronic communication: change in price 6–7 electronics 3, 99, 105, 191 Elizalde 31 Elliot, Gil: The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead 145–6 EMI 130, 131 empires 132, 134 employment in agriculture 53 in industry 53 service industries 53, 70 enclaves for European colonisers 134 engineering 19 masculinity of 101 mass production 67 engineers xiii, 100–102, 192–3 state 101 engines jet 10 petrol 10 Erikson, Gustaf 95 Europe car accidents 27 car production 69, 70 uptake of new technologies 32 European Union (EU) 200, 206 Eva Péron (liner) 124 F Fairchild Semiconductor 195, 203 Fairfree (factory stern trawler) 167 Falklands war 94 Far East growth rates 207 Faust, Mrs Mary 54 fertilisers 44, 45, 50, 64, 65, 67, 119–20 fertility control 23 feudalism 76 Fiat 69, 127 fibre-optic cables 7, 49 firing squads 176 First World War 31, 34, 34–5, 130 battleships x, 148, 149 casualty rates 146 chemical warfare 164 a chemist’s war 138 deaths 143 developments in artillery practice 143 H.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

By the mid-1850s a typical American daily newspaper contained at least two columns of AP reports, and the AP came to wield enormous influence, particularly after free newspaper exchanges by post were abolished in 1873. Three other telegraphic news agencies agreed in 1870 to carve up the rest of the world: Reuters covered the British empire, Havas covered France and its colonial possessions in Africa and beyond, and a third agency, Wolff, covered Germany and its sphere of influence. The trio agreed not to compete but to share their reports, and they were later joined by the AP. The telegraph increased the speed with which news could be delivered and made foreign news more widely available than ever before.

“The Press and the French Revolution after Two Hundred Years.” French Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 664–683. ———. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. Potter, S. “Webs, Networks and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire.” Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 630. Powers, W. Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Raymond, J. News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

One of the key insights into what happens next—and within which E=mc 2 is once again crucial—was first made by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a leader in twentieth-century astrophysics, whose career spanned almost sixty years. The discovery came when he was just nineteen, in the hot summer of 1930. The British Empire was in its dying days, but Chandra (the name he usually went by) was still within its dominion, and en route from Bombay to England, where he was taking up graduate studies at Cambridge. There were storms in the Arabian Sea that August, keeping everyone in their cabins, but when Chandra recovered, he had weeks of quiet cruising before him, several sheaves of paper, and a family habit of always using spare time productively.

Nor was it just the “tradi- What Else Einstein Did tional” mass of the sun that would be doing this. The 1905 equation entered in also. All the heat and radiation blasting out of the sun—all that “energy”—was acting as an additional form of “mass.” It added to the bulk of the sun as well. (This was at the heart of what Chandra would build on, in his later sea voyage of 1930.) Luckily, the British Empire had its traditions, and one of the prime ones was that something always went wrong. Explorers, conquerors, younger sons and even metal-eyeglassed Quaker astronomers had learned that lesson: picking it up from a lifetime of hearing about one imperial expedition after another. And that’s why Eddington had sent out a second team—an entire duplicate crew—to be sure he proved Einstein’s prediction.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

You might think that chucking out the racist allegories left over from Vitruvian thinking might be an improvement, but Semper’s abstracting vision also brackets the circumstances that made pos­­sible his encounter with a West Indian hovel in the middle of the world’s biggest, most industrial city in 1851. The hut got there because the British empire had transformed the Caribbean into a money factory worked by slaves. The hut was not some abstract space but the former home of a displaced indigenous person (the Caribs resisted slavery and were quickly eradicated from their island homes). Like Vitruvius’ imaginary first hut, the first hut of nineteenth-century science was also the home of a colonial subject, brought to the awareness of the theorist by expansionary warfare and, though preserved in his writing, very likely burned, smashed and eradicated in reality.

For most British officials, Mesopotamia’s significance lay solely in its proximity to India; however, a small yet powerful group centred on the Admiralty, including Winston Churchill, who became first lord in 1911, had a different prize in mind – oil. The only problem was, they weren’t the only ones to have spotted it. Since the end of the nineteenth century a new force had been threatening the supremacy of the British empire, as a sustained boom pushed the German Reich’s industrialists, bankers and administrators in search of new markets and raw materials. There was very little on offer in terms of colonial possessions, the British long having snapped up most of the world’s weaker nations, so instead the Reich struck an alliance with the debt-ridden Ottoman empire on Europe’s doorstep.


pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

They argue that the “enclosure” movement of the 13th–19th centuries, where common lands were brought under private ownership, is one example of capitalism’s insatiable appetite to take over non-capitalist institutions. Others have pointed to the Spanish moving into the Americas. Others still argue that the British empire is an example of the sort of imperialism that is unavoidable under capitalism. This sort of reading of history is probably wrong. Many of these events (such as enclosure) happened when capitalism had barely taken off. There were many other explanations for imperialism. That is not the only problem with Luxemburg’s theory, either.

“The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves,” he said. All observation is unavoidably theory-laden. Marshall’s Principles is an exemplary combination of principles and data. In it he expounds on theories at great length, but there is also data on everything from the population of different cities to an estimate of the “wealth of the British empire in 1903”. What is it good for? Marshall did not become an economist merely in order to be a successful academic, though he was that. He had a very practical objective in mind. He saw himself as someone who would help governments devise good policy. As Jacob Viner puts it, Marshall was “a Victorian ‘liberal’ in his general orientation toward social problems”.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

In 1804, for example, Cambridge University introduced an annual award that invited undergraduates to compete for prizes for essays on topics such as ‘The Probable Design of the Divine Providence in Subjecting So Large a Portion of Asia to the British Dominion.’20 This tendency didn’t die with the 20th century as is sometimes presumed. The Conservative MP Enoch Powell referred to the divine righteousness of British Empire in a speech in 1961, suggesting ‘there was this deep, this providential difference between our empire and those others.’21 Over the 20th century, British imperialists reluctantly relinquished the baton of godly exceptionalism to the United States, where conservative Christians like Ronald Reagan peppered their speeches with chest-thumping praise for America’s manifest destiny.

‘In history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds,’ he writes in his influential essay The Subjection of Women, somewhat ironically, for in the same essay he praises England at length for stewarding a new modern era of free enterprise based on ‘moral law’ rather than ‘force’ – a debatable assertion made at the height of British empire, when a succession of ‘heaven-born’ generals imposed ‘peace’ through violent force.20 But I’m not making this point to attack Mill. My aim is the exact opposite. I’m trying to stress that Mill is right – we do tend to see what we want in history, and given that someone with Mill’s brilliance and compassion was not spared this problem, his example serves as a warning today, when other smart people also make debatable assertions about the pervasiveness of peace in our day.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The United Kingdom had a solution, however: its extensive portfolio of overseas colonies. In addition to the so-called white dominions of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Britain had control over parts of southern Africa, all of the Indian subcontinent, Hong Kong, Malaya, and bits of the Western Hemisphere. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the British Empire would dramatically expand to include much of Africa, the Middle East, and substantial spheres of influence in Asia. These territories would not be allowed to develop using List’s “National System.” Tariffs would be minimal, at least for British goods. The empire would serve as a sink for British exports and provide it with a secure supply of raw material imports.

By the nineteenth century, this process had transformed the obligations of certain central banks, especially the Bank of England, into reserve assets almost as good as gold. Similarly, claims on the most dependable British banks were also considered roughly equivalent to gold—even when held outside the British Empire. The gold standard had effectively become a paper standard. On the eve of World War I, the Bank of England held only 3.4 percent of the world’s gold reserves, and fewer than 5 percent of its notes were backed by gold. Yet many of the world’s governments felt comfortable holding British pounds as reserve assets to cover imports and foreign debts.


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The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

The 40-60 hour work week, one-track careers, growing wealth inequality and the shape of modern capitalism and society have all come to be seen as the inevitable, inescapable, and natural order of things. The same was once said of the divine rule of kings, the flatness of the Earth, the reach of the British Empire, the inferiority of small-screen drama to the silver screen, blind men climbing Everest and the infallible genius of well-heeled bankers. This is what the figure at the door is warning you: Nothing lasts forever and the Nice Age is over. A bright future truly awaits and getting there is what this book is about, but it will not be reached by doing more of the same because “the same” will not exist.


Richard Tregaskis Rouben Mamoulian Collection (Library of Congress)-Guadalcanal diary-New York, Random house (1943) by Unknown

British Empire

On 27 August, the ist Battalion, 5th Ma- September and the Ridge Admiral McCain visited Guadal- cruisers and destroyers. General Van- degrift noted that McCain had gotten a dose of the "normal ration of Sergeant Major Sir Jacob Charles Vouza exceptional devotion to duty. He later received the Police Long Service Medal and, in 1957, was made a Member of the British Empire for long and faithful government service. After the war, Vouza continued to serve his fellow islanders. In 1949, he was appointed district headman, and president of the Guadalcanal Council, from 1952-1958. He served as a member of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Advisory Council from 1950 to 1960.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Chief beneficiary of the blaze was Christopher Wren, who was commissioned to redesign the city and rose to the challenge with such masterpieces as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich. Much of the public architecture of London was built in the Georgian and Victorian periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when grand structures were raised to reflect the city’s status as the financial and administrative hub of the British Empire. And though postwar development peppered the city with some undistinguished Modernist buildings, more recent experiments in high-tech architecture, such as the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater and the Shard, have given the city a new gloss. < Back to London Westminster Political, religious and regal power has emanated from Westminster for almost a millennium.

Throughout the Middle Ages, this was one of central England’s most important towns, a flourishing commercial hub whose now demolished castle was a popular stopping-off point for travelling royalty. A fire in 1675 burnt most of the medieval city to a cinder, and the Georgian town that grew up in its stead was itself swamped by the Industrial Revolution, when Northampton swarmed with boot- and shoemakers, whose products shod almost everyone in the British Empire. Errol Flynn kitted himself out with several pairs of Northampton shoes and boots when he was in repertory here in 1933, but he annoyed his suppliers no end by hightailing it out of town after a year, leaving a whopping debt behind him – justifying David Niven’s cryptic comment, “You can count on Errol Flynn, he will always let you down”.

< Back to The Northeast Contexts History Architecture Books and literature Sixty years of English pop Film History England’s history is long and densely woven. From obscure beginnings, England came to play a leading role in European affairs and more latterly, with the expansion of the British Empire, the world. What follows is therefore a necessarily brief introduction: we have offered some more detailed reference materials in our “Books” section. The Stone Age England has been inhabited for the best part of half a million years, though the earliest archeological evidence, dating from around 250,000 BC, is scant, comprising the meagre remains of bones and flint tools from the Stone Age (Palaeolithic).


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

But whenever any theory was propounded that considered a given value system a prerequisite of development, it could usually be effectively contradicted on empirical grounds: development had actually taken place somewhere without the benefit of the “prerequisite.”2 Yes. Historians or economists focused on one locale, such as Britain, are liable to miss similar conditions elsewhere that belie their celebration of, say, the English common law (but oddly not the Scottish civil law, considering that Scotland, too, had an Industrial Revolution) or the British empire (but oddly not also the French empire, whose trade with France grew faster in the eighteenth century than Britain’s imperial trade with Britain). A wide angle of view disciplines speculation. The North, Wallis, and Weingast book I have mentioned from time to time is modestly subtitled A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History.

Mother Teresa, like some on the left and right, in other words, didn’t believe that economic growth mattered. What mattered to her—and here we do not need to rely on hostile accounts—and what still matters to many on the left and the right, are only transcendents, such as eternal life or secular utopia or the environment or the British Empire. Eric Hobsbawm, the historian and British communist, was asked on a television show by the liberal Michael Ignatieff in 1994 whether “the murder of 15, 20 million people [in the USSR under Stalin] might have been justified” in light of its contribution to founding a communist society (one might ask the same about Mao’s famine, 1958–1962, with forty-five million deaths).20 Hobsbawm promptly answered, as Mother Teresa, in another key, would have too, “Yes.”

It’s too bad that the Indonesian economy has been so badly run in the past that such a job looks to the very poor Indonesians to be a satisfactory deal (solution: let trade-tested betterment work for a generation or two, as in Singapore or in Hong Kong, which were in 1950 Indonesian-poor but now have average real incomes a little below and far above that of the United States).5 Both Marx from the left and Carlyle from the right, among many others suspicious of the Great Enrichment before it was so obviously great, called paid work “slavery.” It was part of Carlyle’s argument, echoed in the American South under slavery, that compared with the horrors of northern American and northern British “free” wage labor the actual slavery in the British Empire, beginning to be terminated in 1833, had been in fact a good thing, not bad—darkies playing banjos in happy subservience. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels argues, Harriet Beecher Stowe regarded the susceptibility of slaves to commercial forces outside the control of even a loving master (as when the master goes bankrupt or dies) as the worst of the institution.


pages: 556 words: 46,885

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain by Mark Casson

banking crisis, barriers to entry, Beeching cuts, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, combinatorial explosion, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intermodal, iterative process, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, linear programming, low interest rates, megaproject, Network effects, New Urbanism, performance metric, price elasticity of demand, railway mania, rent-seeking, strikebreaker, the market place, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration

If labour had been cheap then factory owners could simply have ignored the wishes of their workers, but their workers had alternatives to factory employment; not only emigration, but employment in service industries such as transport, retailing, and banking. Factory production became steadily less economic as a result. Infrastructure, on the other hand, prospered. The British Empire was growing fast, and everywhere there were new opportunities for development. Ports, railways, telegraphs, and urban investments were the key. It was not so much the factory as the engineering workshop that became the hub of British manufacturing. While the factory remained dominant in the textile trades, engineering workshops, and ‘yards’ were responsible for producing most of the sophisticated machinery that was exported overseas; in particular, ships and steam locomotives, and the pre-fabricated bridges and pipework that were exported for use in overseas projects.

Birkenhead was a rival port to Liverpool on the opposite side of the Mersey estuary. It developed into a major shipbuilding and engineering centre, and handled a large amount of Irish cattle destined for abattoirs in major English cities. It also exported coal to bunkering stations around the British Empire. In the 1830s, however, it was still in the early stages of development. Initially the Birkenhead company fed most of its traYc into the Chester and Crewe Railway, which in turn fed its traYc into the Grand Junction Railway at Crewe. The Grand Junction was a Liverpool-based company and to begin with did its best to divert traYc away from Birkenhead in favour of Liverpool, by making connections at Chester deliberately poor.

There was also a great deal of metallic ore in the area, which led to the development of metal reWning industries that provided a local use for the coal. But when these mineral ores were depleted the emphasis changed to the export of coal. Some of the valleys produced top-grade steam coal, particularly suited for steamships, and much of this coal was exported to bunkering stations around the British Empire. Horse-drawn tramways were well-established in South Wales by 1800, and were progressively converted into railways from 1830. Many of the railways up the valleys were independent concerns, and most remained independent until incorporated into the GWR at the Grouping of 1922–3. When the main trunk railways arrived in South Wales they naturally wished to tap into the coal traYc, and this led to tensions with the established local companies, such as the TaV Vale Railway (TVR) and the Rhymney Railway (RR).


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

In Europe, peaceful trade was the province of rich and powerful nations such as Spain and the Netherlands, who had a vested interest in keeping the seas free from piracy. Like many poor, weak, backward states, Britain in the late sixteenth century could not afford the luxury of permitting foreign merchantmen to sail undisturbed; there was simply too much profit in plunder. The majestic, liberal, and free-trading British Empire was more than two centuries in the future; Tudor England was a nation of bankrupt monarchs, crown monopolies distributed to court favorites, and royal letters of marque granting freebooters a piece of the action. The most valuable cargo landed that day at Plymouth was neither spices nor silver, but rather intellectual capital.

At that early stage, no one could imagine that the trade in these textiles would eventually ignite the Industrial Revolution, destroy Indian textile manufacturing, spark a controversy over free trade in Britain as contentious as any seen in today's globalized economy, and, last but not least, give birth to the British Empire. Within several decades of the Company's chartering by Elizabeth I on the last day of the sixteenth century, England was gazing at a kaleidoscope of fabrics, colors, and patterns the like of which had never been seen before in Europe. England's traditional heavy, monochrome woolens could not compete with clothes, drapery, and upholstery made of the light, gaily colored printed Indian fabric.

In 1661, England's Charles II had acquired it as a dowry from his Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza, and the port soon overshadowed nearby Surat.35) In 1690, under Child's leadership, a third presidency was established in Calcutta. Eventually, these trading posts, whose main purpose was the purchase of textiles, would become the cornerstone of the British Empire. An unabashed admirer of the Dutch system of fortified trading posts, Child rapidly built up the EIC's military presence at the three presidencies. This policy paid off during the conflict between the Mughals and Hindu Marathas that raged between 1681 and 1707. He also solidified the complex "trading rules" required by the two-year "feedback loop" between the initial departure of cargoes of silver and trade goods from England and the arrival back home of calicoes.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

—and then suddenly snorted (for weeks she had been ribbing me about the British empire) with mock annoyance. “I know the ship. Of course!” she said. “We call it the ‘Imperial Make-Trouble Vessel.’ What is the name? Purple Stone Hero, yes, that's it! We defeated it. All Chinese know the story. You came as pirates, and we made you run! You were forced to leave a part of your precious ship behind, here in Zhenjiang. You destroyed a junk with passengers on your way out. Killed many people. We will find the piece you left behind. The anchor. It was a great humiliation for your precious British empire.” I reeled slightly from this unexpected onslaught.

For the West, and Great Britain especially, the Amethyst's dash for freedom was the stuff of legend—and, inevitably, a movie. Was it indeed one of the rare epics of the burgeoning Cold War? But as Simon Winchester learned when he visited the site, the Chinese regard the escape of “The Imperial Make-Trouble Vessel” as a tale of bloodied bullies slinking away, a humiliation for the British Empire in particular and white prestige in general. For over a century, the Royal Navy had roamed the major rivers of China unchallenged. Suddenly, it seemed a little less invincible. The psychological impact of the Amethyst incident (as Chassin writes) “did more for a Communist victory than any strategic maneuver could possibly have done.”


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

The U.S. government now produces more classified information than unclassified information—and, since even the amount of classified information is classified, we may never know how much dark matter there is. Von Neumann’s monument, however, has turned out not to be as coldly legible as it first appeared. There will always be truth beyond the reach of proof. Alan Turing received the Order of the British Empire in 1946, yet, under the Official Secrets Act, he could never talk openly about his wartime work. After leaving the National Physical Laboratory in 1948, he thrived under Max Newman’s auspices at the University of Manchester, where the core of the computing group from Bletchley Park were continuing from where their work on Colossus had left off.

A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governour of Pennsylvania in America, to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province, residing in London, 16 August 1683 (London, 1683), p. 3. 2. Chief Tenoughan (Schuylkill River) as noted by William Penn, winter of 1683–1684, in John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America: Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and present State of all the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America, vol. 1 (London, 1708), p. 162. 3. Samuel Smith, The History of the Colony of Nova-Caesaria, or New Jersey: containing, an account of its first settlement, progressive improvements, the original and present constitution, and other events, to the year 1721.

., 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 Tucker, Albert, 3.1, 3.2 Tukey, John W. (1915–2000), 1.1, 5.1 Turing, Alan (1912–1954) childhood and education arrives at Princeton (1936) builds relay computer (1937) cryptography and cryptanalysis in World War II (1940–1945) visit to USA (1942–1943) assigned to study ENIAC and EDVAC, (1945) visits ECP (1947) receives Order of the British Empire (1946) sentenced to hormone “therapy” (1952) death, in Manchester (1954) apology to, from UK government (2009) and Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), 8.1, 13.1 on “being digital” and computability on evolution and Gödel and David Hilbert, 13.1, 13.2 on “His power of creating souls” on intelligence as search on intuition and ingenuity, 6.1, 13.1 on mechanical intelligence, 1.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 17.1, 17.2 and nondeterministic machines on “oracle machines” on unorganized machines and von Neumann, 5.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 see also Universal Turing Machine Turing, Ethel Sara Turing, Julius Mathison Turing, Sara, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Turing’s cathedral, Google as turtles Ujelang (Marshall Islands) Ulam, Adam Ulam, Claire, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 18.1 Ulam, Françoise Aron (1918–2011), 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 18.1 on hydrogen bomb, 11.1, 11.2 and Los Alamos on Stan Ulam, 11.1, 11.2 on von Neumann, 4.1, 11.1, 11.2 Ulam, Joseph, 11.1, 11.2 Ulam, Stan (1909–1984), 4.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1, 15.2, 16.1, 16.2 on cellular automata, 11.1, 11.2 childhood and education and digital universe, 11.1, 11.2, 16.1 on Gödel and Leibniz on Hungarians and hydrogen bomb, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and intuition vs. logic on logic vs. thought on mathematics as a game, 10.1, 18.1 and Maxwellian demons and Monte Carlo and nuclear space propulsion and von Neumann, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 14.1 on von Neumann and Gödel on Klári von Neumann on winning at evolution ultraintelligent machine (I.


Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country by Simon Winder

British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia

The British argued endlessly about their Continental commitment, which became more closely integrated with their sharing a ruler – generally called George – with the Electorate of Hanover: a worthwhile but awkward-to-reach territory well to the east of the Dutch Republic. An extreme though plausible argument could be made for the British Empire itself being largely a displacement activity for the frustrations of fighting in Flanders. Generally the French were held back during these wars by different combinations of allies in the Austrian Netherlands, but there was never any question of mortal damage being done to France itself, which remained impregnable behind its Vauban fortresses.

After Britain had pigged out on its winnings from the Seven Years War, dumped its friends and become Europe’s first super-power, it was too good to be true that after so short a period of lording it, it might lose its biggest colony. The French poured everything they could into messing the British about, and around 1780 it looked as though their empire might crack up completely. For the Dutch, the great temptation emerged: should they, as the French proposed, join forces in the Indian Ocean and carve up the British Empire there, just as the French and the Americans were doing in the western Atlantic? William V remained neutral and pro-British, but as the American War unfolded and the British became both ferocious and despairing in its prosecution, the Dutch were awkwardly placed. Not least, the almost unbelievably tiny but enterprising Dutch West Indian island of St Eustatius became the key entrepôt supplying weapons to the American rebels.

William Rees (London, 1995) Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1992) Russell Shorto, Amsterdam (London, 2013) Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008) Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe (London, 2016) Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (Basingstoke, 1998) Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (London, 2007) Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London, 2004) Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History, 500–1000 (Oxford, 2005) Peter C. Smith, Hold the Narrow Sea: Naval Warfare in the English Channel, 1939–1945 (Annapolis, 1984) Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy (Oxford, 1981) The Song of Roland, trans.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In the United States, migration within the country as well as immigration from outside have tended to be constants throughout the country’s history—unlike in the United Kingdom, whose modern demographic diversification only truly began with the Second World War and the postwar dissolution of the British empire. The embrace of mass immigration from the European Union produced further rapid change in both the composition and the size of the population in the 2000s. In America, however, demographic change did take on a new character beginning in the 1960s. Specifically, it began to go hand in hand with generational change.

Discrimination exists in many pernicious forms of bias and prejudice in the United Kingdom, but Britons from all racial and ethnic backgrounds were likely to find themselves living and working directly alongside each other in towns and cities across the country once immigration from the former British empire increased after World War II. Black working-class students from across the UK at my alma mater, St. Andrews University, for example, in interviews with me in 2020, had the same concerns about accessibility and affordability in higher education and limited future job opportunities as white working-class students.

dominated by men: “Women in Academia: Quick Take,” Catalyst, January 23, 2020, https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia/. inside and outside Congress: Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson:The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). dissolution of the British empire: Fintan O’Toole, The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). baby boomers: Kim Parker and Ruth Igielnik, “On the Cusp of Adulthood and Facing an Uncertain Future: What We Know About Gen Z So Far,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/14/on-the-cusp-of-adulthood-and-facing-an-uncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far-2/.


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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Indeed, throughout the rest of the world this continues to be the age of the liberal democratic nation state and of liberal (or in some cases illiberal) democratic nationalism—European integration is a global exception. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s saw another burst of nation creation, just as there had been earlier in the twentieth century with the disappearance of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and later the French and British empires. More of the world’s problems arise because nation states are too weak rather than too strong: why, for example, was rapid economic development possible in the East Asian Tigers but not in Africa? It was partly because national solidarity has been too weak in parts of post-colonial Africa to prevent the state being hijacked by sectional interests.

.: product lines of, 86 Appiah, Kwame Anthony: 117 assortative mating: 188 Aston University: 164 austerity: 98, 200 Australia: 4, 160 Austria: 56, 69–70 authoritarianism: 8, 12, 30, 33, 44, 57; concept of, 57; hard, 45 Baggini, Julian: observations of British class system, 59 Bangladesh: 130 Bank of England: personnel of, 86 Bartels, Larry: Democracy for Realists, 61 Bartlett, Jamie: Radicals, 64 Basel Accords: 85 BASF: 176 Bayer: 176 Belgium: 73, 75, 101; Brussels, 53, 89, 93, 95, 98 Berlusconi, Silvio: 65 birther movement: 68 Bischof, Bob: head of German-British Forum, 174 Blair, Tony: 10, 76, 159, 189; administration of, 218; foreign policy of, 96; speeches of, 3, 7, 49; support for Bulgarian and Romanian EU accession, 26; unravelling of legacy, 221 Bloomsbury Group: 34 Bogdanor, Vernon: concept of ‘exam-passing classes’, 3 Boyle, Danny: Summer Olympics opening ceremony (2012), 111, 222 Branson, Richard: 11 Brexit (EU Referendum)(2016): 1–2, 19, 27, 81, 89, 93, 99–100, 125, 233; negotiations, 103; polling prior to voting, 30, 64; Remainers, 2, 19–20, 52–3, 132; sociological implications of, 4–7, 13, 53–4, 118, 126, 167–8, 225; Stronger In campaign, 61; Vote Leave campaign, 42, 53, 72, 91, 132; voting pattern in, 7–9, 19–20, 23, 26, 36, 52, 55–6, 60, 71, 74, 215, 218 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): 112, 145; Newsnight, 60; personnel of, 15; Radio 4, 31, 227; Today, 60 British Empire: 107 British National Party: European election performance of (2009), 119; supporters of, 38 British Future: 19 British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association: personnel of, 135 British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys: 153; authoritarian-libertarian scale, 44–5; findings of, 38–9, 44, 106–7, 120, 202, 206–7, 218; immigration survey (2013), 44; personnel of, 218–19 British Values Survey: establishment of (1973), 43; groups in, 43 Brooks, Greg: Sheffield report, 155 Brown, Belinda: 205, 207–8 Brown, Gordon: 106; abolition of Married Couples Allowance, 204; budget of (2006), 147–8; political rhetoric of, 16–17 Brummer, Alex: Britain for Sale, 173 Bulgaria: 26; accession to EU, 225 (2007); migrants from, 126; population levels of, 102 Burgess, Simon: 131 Burggraf, Shirley: Feminine Economy and Economic Man, The, 194 Cahn, Andrew: 98 Callaghan, Jim: Ruskin College speech (1976), 154 Callan, Eamonn: 191 Callan, Samantha: 202, 212 Cambridge University: 35, 179, 186; faculty of, 37; students of, 158–9 Cameron, David: 71, 103, 179, 183, 189; administration of, 226; cabinet of, 187 Canada: 160; mass immigration in, 119 capital: 9, 100; cultural, 190; human, 34; liberalisation of controls, 97; social, 110 capitalism: 7, 11; organised, 159 Care (Christian Action Research & Education): 203 Carswell, Douglas: 13 Case, Anne: 67 Casey, Louise: review of opportunity and integration, 129 Catholicism: 15, 213; original sin, 57 Cautres, Bruno: 72 Center for Humans and Nature: 30 Centre for Social Justice: 206; personnel of, 202 chauvinism: 33; decline in prevalence of, 39; violent, 106 China, People’s Republic of: 10, 95, 104, 160; accession to WTO (2001), 88; manufacturing sector of, 86; steel industry of, 87 Chirac, Jacques: electoral victory of (2002), 49 Christianity: 33, 69, 83, 156 citizenship: 68, 121–2; democratic, 7; global, 114; legislation, 103; national, 5; relationship with migration, 126; shared, 113; temporary, 126 Clarke, Charles: British Home Secretary, 84 Clarke, Ken: education reforms of, 158–9 Clegg, Nick: 11, 13, 189 Cliffe, Jeremy: 10–11; ‘Britain’s Cosmopolitan Future’ 216; observations of social conservatism, 217 Clinton, Bill: 29, 76; administration of, 218 Clinton, Hillary: electoral defeat of (2016), 67–8 Coalition Government (UK) (2010–16): 13, 54, 226; cabinet members of, 16; immigration policies of, 124–5 Cold War: end of, 83, 92, 95, 98 Collier, Paul: 110; view of potential reform of UNHCR, 84 colonialism: 87; European, 105 communism: 58 Communist Party of France: 72 Confederation of British Industry (CBI): 164 confirmation bias: concept of, 30 Conservative Party (Tories)(UK): 19, 207; dismantling of apprenticeship system by, 157; ideology of, 76, 196; members of, 31, 164, 187; Party Conference (2016), 226; Red Toryism, 63; supporters of, 24, 35, 77, 143, 216–17 conservatism: 4, 9; cultural, 58; social, 217; Somewhere, 7–8; working-class, 8 Corbyn, Jeremy: elected as leader of Labour Party, 20, 53, 59, 75, 78 Cowley, Philip: 35 Crosland, Tony: Secretary of Education, 36; two-tier higher education system proposed by, 158 Crossrail 2: 228; spending on, 143 Czech Republic: 69, 73 D66: supporters of, 76 Dade, Pat: 43–4, 219; role in establishment of British Values Survey, 43, 218–19 Daily Mail: 227; reader base of, 4 Danish Peoples’ Party: 55, 69–70, 73; ideology of, 73 Darwin, Charles: 28 death penalty: 44; support for, 39, 216–17 Deaton, Angus: 67 deference, end of: 63 Delors, Jacques: 96, 103–4; President of European Commission, 94 Democratic Party: ideology of, 62, 65; shortcomings of engagement strategies of, 66–7 Demos: 137 Dench, Geoff: 207; concept of ‘quality with pluralism’, 214; Transforming Men, 209 Denmark: 69, 71, 99; education levels in, 156 Diana, Princess of Wales: death of (1997), 107 double liberalism: 1, 11, 63 Duffy, Gillian: 124 Dyson: 173; Dyson effect, 173 Economist: 10, 210, 216 Eden, Anthony: administration of, 187 Eichengreen, Barry: 91 Elias, Norbert: 119 Employer Skills Survey: 163 Engineering Employers Federation: 166 Englishness: 111 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip: 218 Essex Man/Woman: 186 Estonia: population levels of, 102 Eton College: 179, 187 Euro (currency): 100–1; accession of countries to, 98–9 European Commission: 26, 97 European Convention on Human Rights: 83–4 European Court of Justice (ECJ): 103 European Economic Community (EEC): 92; British accession to (1973), 93; Treaty of Rome (1957), 101 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): 97–8 European Parliament: elections (2009), 71–2; elections (2014), 72 European Union (EU): 10, 25, 53, 76, 89, 92–4, 99–100, 120, 124, 160, 215, 221–2, 229, 233; Amsterdam Treaty (1997), 94; Common Agricultural Policy, 92, 96; establishment of (1957), 91–2; freedom of movement principles, 100–1, 163–4; Humanitarian Protection Directive (2004), 83; integration, 50, 98–9, 173; Lisbon Treaty (2009), 94; Maastricht Treaty (1992), 94, 96, 103; members states of, 16, 31, 55, 71, 216; personnel of, 128; Schengen Agreement (1985), 94–5, 99, 117; Single European Act (1986), 94; Treaty of Nice (2000), 94 Euroscepticism: 69 Eurozone Crisis (2008–): 92, 99 Evening Standard: 143–5 Facebook: 86 family culture: 196–7; childcare, 202–3; cohabitation, 196, 211; divorce figures, 196–7; gender roles, 206–13; legislation impacting, 195–6; lone parents, 196; married couples tax allowance, 225; relationship with state intrusion, 200–2; tax burdens, 203–4; tax credit systems, 202, 204–5, 225 Farage, Nigel: 11; leader of UKIP, 72; political rhetoric of, 20 Fawcett Society: surveys conducted by, 195–6 federalism: 69 feminism: 185, 199, 205; gender pay gap, 198–9; orthodox, 194 Fidesz: 69, 71, 73 Fillon, François: 73 Financial Times: 91, 108, 115, 138, 145, 147 Finkelstein, Daniel: 34 Five Star Movement: 53, 55, 64, 70, 73 Florida, Richard: concept of ‘Creative Class’, 136 Foges, Clare: 183 food sector: 17, 102, 125, 126 Ford, Robert: 35, 150 foreign ownership: 172–74, 230 Fortuyn, Pim: assassination of (2002), 50, 69 France: 69, 75, 94–6, 101, 173; agricultural sector of, 96; compulsory insurance system of, 222; Paris, 104, 143; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; Revolution (1789–99), 106 Frank, Thomas: concept of ‘liberalism of the rich’, 62 Franzen, Jonathan: 110 free trade agreements: opposition to, 62 Freedom Party: 69; electoral defeat of (2016), 70; ideology of, 73; supporters of, 70 French Colonial Empire (1534–1980): 107 Friedman, Sam: ‘Introducing the Class Ceiling: Social Mobility and Britain’s Elite Occupations’, 187 Friedman, Thomas: World is Flat, The, 85 Front National (FN): 53, 69, 72–3; European electoral performance of (2014), 72; founding of (1973), 72; supporters of, 72 Gallup: polls conducted by, 65 Ganesh, Janan: 115, 145 gay marriage: 5, 76; opposition to, 46–7; support for, 26, 220 General Electric Company (GEC) plc: 172, 175 German-British Forum: members of, 174 Germany: 70, 73, 86, 94, 96, 100–1, 173–4, 209; automobile industry of, 96; chemical industry of, 176; compulsory insurance system of, 222; education sector of, 166; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; labour market of, 147; Leipzig, 58; Ludwigshafen, 176; Reunification (1990), 96, 147, 176; Ruhr, 176–7 Ghemawat, Prof Pankaj: 85–6 Gilens, Martin: study of American public policy and public preferences, 61–2 Glasman, Maurice: 227 Global Financial Crisis (2007–9): 56, 169–70, 177; Credit Crunch (2007–8), 98, 177 Global Villagers: 31–2, 44–5, 160, 226; characteristics of, 46; political representation of, 75; political views of, 109, 112 globalisation: 9–10, 50–2, 81–2, 85, 87–8, 90–1, 105–6, 148; economic, 9; global trade development, 86–7; growth of, 85–6; hyperglobalisation, 88–9; relationship with nation states, 85–6; sane, 90 Golden Dawn: 74; growth of, 105 Goldman Sachs: personnel of, 31 Goldthorpe, John: 184–5, 189–90 Goodhart, David: 12 Goodwin, Fred: 168 Goodwin, Matthew: 150 Gordon, Ian: 137–8, 140 Gould, Philip: 220 Gove, Michael: 64, 91 great liberalisation: 39–40, 47; effect of, 40 Greater London Authority (GLA): 143 Greece: 53, 56, 69, 74, 99, 105; Athens, 143; government of, 98 Green, Francis: 163 Green Party (UK): supporters of, 38 Group of Twenty (G20): 89 Guardian: 14, 210 Habsburg Empire (Austro-Hungarian Empire): collapse of (1918), 107 Haidt, Jonathan: 11, 30, 33, 133; Righteous Mind, The, 28–9 Hakim, Catharine: 205 Hall, Stuart: 14–15 Hames, Tim: 135–6 Hampstead/Hartlepool alliance: 75 Hanson Trust: subsidiaries of, 175 Hard Authoritarian: 43–7, 51, 119, 220; characteristics of, 24–5; political views of, 109 Harris, Gareth: 137; ‘Changing Places’, 137 Harvard University: faculty of, 57 Heath, Edward: foreign policy of, 96 Higgins, Les: role in establishment of British Values Survey, 43 High Speed 2 (HS2): 228 High Speed 3 (HS3): aims of, 151, 228 Hitler, Adolf: 94 Hoescht: 176 Hofstadter, Richard: ‘Everyone is Talking About Populism, But No One Can Define It’ (1967), 54 Holmes, Chris: 151 homophobia: observations in BSA surveys, 39; societal views of, 39–40, 216 Honig, Bonnie: concept of ‘objects of public love’, 111 Huguenots: 121 Huhne, Chris: 16, 32 human rights: 5, 10, 55, 113; courts, 113; legislation, 5, 83–4, 109, 112; rhetoric, 112–13 Hungary: 53, 64, 69, 71, 73–4, 99, 218; Budapest, 218 Ignatieff, Michael: leader of Liberal Party (Canada), 13 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI): 172, 174–5; personnel of, 169; subsidiaries of, 175 Inbetweeners: 4, 25, 46, 109; political views of, 109 India: 104 Inglehart, Ronald: theories of value change, 27 Insider Nation: concept of, 61, 64; evidence of, 61–2 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS): 201; findings of, 211–12 International Monetary Fund (IMF): 86–7, 102 interracial marriage: societal views of, 40 India: 10, 160 Ipsos MORI: polls conducted by, 42, 122 Iraq: 84; Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11), 82 Islam: 50; Ahmadiyya, 84; conservative, 131; Halal, 68; hostility to, 73; Qur’an, 50 Islamism: 130 Islamophobia: 130 Italy: 55, 64, 69–70, 73, 96; migrants from, 125 Jamaica: 14 Japan: 86; request for League of Nations racial equality protocol (1919), 109 Jews/Judaism: 121, 259; orthodox, 131; persecution of, 17 jingoism: 8 Jobbik: 53, 64, 74 Johnson, Boris: 145 Jones, Sir John Harvey: death of (2008), 169 Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of: government of, 84 Jospin, Lionel: defeat in final round of French presidential elections (2002), 49 Judah, Ben: This is London: Life and Death in the World City, 145 Kaufmann, Eric: 8–9, 131, 219, 227; ‘Changing Places’, 137 Kellner, Peter: 78 King, Mervyn: Governor of Bank of England, 86 Kinnock, Neil: 98 knowledge economy: 147, 149, 154, 166, 221 Kohl, Helmut: 94 Kotleba: 74 Krastev, Ivan: 55, 65, 82–3 labour: 9, 89–90, 149; eastern European, 125–6; gender division of, 197; hourglass labour market, 150, 191; living wage, 26, 152; market, 95, 101–2, 124, 140, 147–8, 150–2, 156–7, 181, 225 Labour Party (Denmark): 77 Labour Party (Netherlands): 50; supporters of, 76 Labour Party (UK): 2, 23, 53, 57, 72, 123, 157, 159, 207; Blue Labour, 63; electoral performance of (2015), 75; European election performance (2014), 72; expansion of welfare state under, 199–200; members of, 14, 20, 36, 59, 61, 77–8, 84; Momentum, 53; New Labour, 33, 75, 107, 123, 155, 159, 167, 196, 207, 220, 226, 232; Party Conference (2005), 7; social media presence of, 79; supporters of, 17, 35, 75, 77, 143, 221; voting patterns in Brexit vote, 19 Lakner, Christoph: concept of elephant curve, 87 Lamy, Pascal: 97 Latvia: adoption of Euro, 98–9; migrants from, 25–6 Laurison, Daniel: ‘Introducing the Class Ceiling: Social Mobility and Britain’s Elite Occupations’, 187 Law and Justice Party: 69, 71, 73 Lawson, Nigel: 205 Le Pen, Jean-Marie: victory in final round of French presidential elections (2002), 49, 69 Le Pen, Marine: 53; electoral strategies of, 73 Leadbeater, Charles: 53 League of Nations: protocols of, 109 left-behinders: 20 Lega Nord: 69 Levin, Yuval: Fractured Republic, The, 232 liberal democracy: 2, 31, 55 Liberal Democrats: 23, 53–4; members of, 16; supporters of, 38, 78 Liberal Party (Canada): members of, 13 liberalism: 4–5, 12–13, 29–31, 55, 76, 119, 127–8, 199, 233; Anywhere, 27–8; baby boomer, 6; double, 1, 63; economic, 11; graduate, 216–17; meritocratic, 34; metropolitan, 216; orthodox, 13–14; Pioneer, 44; social, 4, 11 libertarianism: 8, 11, 22, 39, 44 Libya: 84; Civil War (2011), 225 Lilla, Mark: 35 Lind, Michael: 105, 135 Livingstone, Ken: 136 Lloyd, John: 56 London School of Economics (LSE): 54, 137–8, 140, 183 Low Pay Commission: findings of, 170 Lucas Industries plc: 172 male breadwinner: 149, 194, 195, 198, 206, 207 Manchester University: faculty of, 131 Mandelson, Peter: British Home Secretary, 61; family of, 61 Mandler, Peter: 135 Marr, Andrew: 53, 181 Marshall Plan (1948): 92 mass immigration: 14, 55, 104–5, 118–19, 121–4, 126–7, 140, 228–9; accompanied infrastructure development, 137–9; brain-drain issue, 102; debate of issue, 81–2; freedom of movement debates, 100–3; housing levels issue, 138–9; impact on wages, 152; integration, 129–32, 140–2; non-EU, 124–5; opposition to, 16–17, 120, 220 May, Theresa: 63, 179, 183, 198–9; administration of, 173, 176, 187, 191, 230; British Home Secretary, 124–5; ‘Citizens of Nowhere’ speech (2016), 31; political rhetoric of, 15, 31, 226 McCain, John: electoral defeat of (2008), 68 meritocracy: 152, 179–80, 190; critiques of, 180–1; perceptions of, 182–3 Merkel, Angela: reaction to refugee crisis (2015), 71 Mexico: borders of, 21 migration flows: global rates, 82, 87; non-refugee, 82 Milanovic, Branko: 126; concept of elephant curve, 87 Miliband, Ed: 78, 189 Mill, John Stuart: ‘harm principle’ of, 11–12 Millennium Cohort Study: 159 Miller, David: concept of ‘weak cosmopolitanism’, 109 Mills, Colin: 185 Mitterand, François: 94, 97 mobility: 8, 11, 20, 23, 36, 37, 38, 153, 167, 219; capital: 86, 88; geographical, 4, 6; social, 6, 33, 58, 152, 168, 179, 180, 182, 183–191, 213, 215, 220, 226, 231 Moderate Party: members of, 70 Monnet, Jean: 94–5, 97, 103–4 Morgan Stanley: 171 Mudde, Cas: observations of populism, 57 multiculturalism: 14, 50, 141–2; conceptualisation of, 106; laissez-faire, 132 narodniki: 54 national identity: 14, 38, 41, 111–12; conceptualisations of, 45; indifference to, 41, 46, 106, 114; polling on, 41 nationalism: 38, 46–7, 105; chauvinistic, 107, 120; civic, 23, 53; extreme, 104; moderate, 228; modern, 112; post-, 8, 105–6, 112; Scottish, 221 nativism: 57 Neave, Guy: 36 net migration: 126; White British, 136 Netherlands: 13–14, 50, 69, 73, 75, 99–100; Amsterdam, 49, 51; immigrant/minority population of, 50–1; Moroccan population of, 50–1 Netmums: surveys conducted by, 205–6 New Culture Forum: members of, 144 New Jerusalem: 105 New Society/Opinion Research Centre: polling conducted by, 33 New Zealand: 160 Nextdoor: 114 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): 21; refugee, 82 Norris, Pippa: 57 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): 91; opposition to, 62 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): 85, 92; personnel of, 84 Norway: 69 Nuttall, Paul: leader of UKIP, 72; Obama, Barack: 67; approval ratings of, 60; electoral victory of (2012), 68; healthcare policies of, 22–3; target of birther movement, 68 O’Donnell, Gus: background of, 15–16; British Cabinet Secretary, 15 O’Leary, Duncan: 232 Open University: Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), 172–3 Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11): political impact of, 56 Orbán, Victor: 69, 218 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): 201, 204; report on education levels (2016), 155–6; start-ups ranking, 173 Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 108–9 Osborne, George: 189; economic policies of, 4, 226 Oswald, Andrew: 171 Ottoman Empire: collapse of (1923), 107 outsider nation: concept of, 61, 64 Owen, David: 99 Oxford University: 15, 35, 179, 186; Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance, 151; faculty of, 31, 151; Nuffield College, 32 Pakistan: persecution of Ahmadiyya Muslims in, 84 Parris, Matthew: 115 Parsons, Talcott: concept of ‘achieved’ identities, 115 Party of Freedom (PVV): 69; ideology of, 73; supporters of, 50, 76 Paxman, Jeremy: 42 Pearson: ownership of Higher National Certificates (HNCs)/Higher National Diplomas (HNDs), 157 Pegida: ideology of, 73 Pessoa, Joao Paulo: 88 Phalange: 74 Phillips, Trevor: 133 Pioneers: characteristics of, 43–4 Plaid Cymru: supporters of, 38 Podemos: 53, 64 Poland: 56, 69, 73; migrants from, 25–6, 121 Policy Exchange: ‘Bittersweet Success’, 188 political elites: media representation of, 63–4 populism: 1, 5, 13–14, 49–52, 55–6, 60, 64, 67, 69–74, 81; American, 54, 65; British, 63; decent, 6, 55, 71, 73, 219–20, 222, 227, 233; definitions of, 54; European, 49, 53, 65, 68–9, 74; left-wing, 54, 56; opposition to, 74; right-wing, 33, 51, 54 Populists: 54 Portillo, Michael: 31 Portugal: migrants from, 121, 125 post-industrialism: 6 post-nationalism: 105 poverty: 83, 168; child, 183–4, 200, 204; extreme, 87; reduction of, 78, 200; wages, 231 Powell, Enoch: ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (1968), 127 Professionalisation of politics: 59 Progress Party: 69 progressive individualism: 5 Progressive Party: founding of (1912), 54 proportional representation: support for, 228 Prospect: 14, 91, 136 Prospectors: characteristics of, 43 Protestantism: 8, 213 Putin, Vladimir: 218 Putnam, Robert: 22; theory of social capital, 110 racism: 32, 73–4, 134; observations in BSA surveys, 39; societal views of, 39; violent, 127 Rashid, Sammy: Sheffield report, 155 Reagan, Ronald: 58, 63; approval ratings of, 60 Recchi, Ettore: 104 Refugee Crisis (2015–): 83–4; charitable efforts targeting, 21–2; government funds provided to aid, 83; political reactions to, 71 Relationships Foundation: 202 Republic of Ireland: 99; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; property bubble in, 98 Republican Party: ideology of, 62, 65; members of, 68 Resolution Foundation: 87–8; concept of ‘squeezed middle’, 168–9; reports of, 171 Ricardo, David: trade theory of, 101 Robinson, Eric: 36 Rodrik, Dani: 82, 89; concept of ‘hyperglobalisation’, 88; theory of ‘sane globalisation’, 90 Romania: 26; accession to EU, 225 (2007); migrants from, 102, 126 Romney, Mitt: electoral defeat of (2012), 68 Roosevelt, Theodore: leader of Progressive Party, 54 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 156 Rowthorn, Bob: 149 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS): personnel of, 168 Royal College of Nursing: 140 Rudd, Amber: foreign worker list conflict (2016), 17 Ruhs, Martin: 126 Russell Group: 55; culture of, 37; student demographics of, 130–1, 191 Russian Federation: 2, 92; Moscow, 218; St Petersburg, 218 Rwanda: Genocide (1994), 82 Saffy factor: concept of, 199, 221–2 Scheffer, Paul: 85; ‘Multicultural Tragedy, The’ (2000), 49–50 Schumann, Robert: 94 Sciences Po: personnel of, 104 Scottish National Party (SNP): 1, 23, 54, 112; electoral performance of (2015), 75; ideology of, 53 Second World War (1939–45): 105, 194; Holocaust, 109 Security and identity issues: 41, 78, 81 Settlers: characteristics of, 43 Sikhism: 131 Singapore: 101, 128; education levels in, 156 Slovakia: 69, 73–4 Slovenia: adoption of Euro, 98–9 Smer: 69, 73 Smith, Zadie: 141–2 Social Democratic Party: supporters of, 75–6 social mobility: 6, 33, 58, 179–80, 183, 187, 189–91, 220; absolute mobility, 184, 188; relative mobility, 184; slow, 168; upward, 152 Social Mobility Commission: 161, 179–80 socialism: 49, 72, 183, 190 Somewheres: 3–5, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 41–3, 45, 115, 177, 180, 191, 214, 223, 228; characteristics of, 5–6, 2, 32; conflict with Anywheres, 23, 79, 81, 193, 215; conservatism, 7–8; employment of, 11; European, 103; immigration of, 106; moral institutions, 223–4; political representation/voting patterns of, 13–14, 24–6, 36, 53–5, 77–9, 124, 227; political views of, 71, 76, 109, 112, 119, 199, 218, 224–6, 232; potential coalition with Anywheres, 220, 222, 225–6, 233; view of migrant integration, 134 Sorrell, Martin: 31 Soskice, David: 159 South Korea: 86 Soviet Union (USSR): 92, 188; collapse of (1991), 82, 107 Sowell, Thomas: 30; A Conflict of Visions, 29 Spain: 53, 56, 64, 74; government of, 98; migrants from, 125; property bubble in, 98 Steinem, Gloria: 198 Stenner, Karen: 30, 44, 122, 133, 227; Authoritarian Dynamic, The, 30–1 Stephens, Philip: 108 Sun, The: 227 Sutherland, Peter: 31–2 Sutton Trust: end of mobility thesis, 183–5 Swaziland: 135 Sweden: 56, 70, 100; general elections (2014), 70; Stockholm, 143; taxation system of, 222 Sweden Democrats: 70; electoral performance of (2014), 70; ideology of, 73 Switzerland: 37 Syria: Civil War (2009–), 82, 84 Syriza: 53, 69 Taiwan: 86 Teeside University: 164 terrorism: jihadi, 71, 74, 129 Thatcher, Margaret: 58, 63, 95, 189, 205; administration of, 169; economic policies of, 176 Third Reich (1933–45): 104; persecution of Jews in, 17 Times Education Supplement: 37 Timmermans, Frans: EU Commissioner, 128 Thompson, Mark: Director-General of BBC, 15 trade theory: principles of, 101 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP): 89; support for, 225 Trump, Donald: 50, 62, 74, 85; electoral victory of (2016), 1–3, 5–7, 13, 27, 30, 64–8, 81, 232; political rhetoric of, 14, 22–3, 51, 54, 66–7; supporters of, 56, 67 Tube Investments (TI): 172 Turkey: 218 Twitter: use for political activism, 79 Uber: 140 UK Independence Party (UKIP): 53, 55, 63–4, 69, 71–3, 228; electoral performance of (2015), 75; European election performance (2009), 71–2; members of, 13; origins of, 72; supporters of, 24, 35, 38, 72, 75, 143, 168, 216, 222 ultimatum game: 52 Understanding Society: surveys conducted by, 37–8, 202 unemployment: 101–2; gender divide of, 208–9; not in employment, education or training (Neets), 151–2, 190; youth, 139, 151–2, 166 Unilever: 175 United Kingdom (UK): 1–3, 8, 11–12, 21, 27–8, 31, 33, 41, 44, 59–60, 69, 73, 75, 81, 83, 91, 111–12, 147, 165, 173, 180, 193–5, 199, 204, 217, 227; Aberdeen, 136; accession to EEC (1973), 93; Adult Skills budget of, 161, 225; apprenticeship system of, 154, 157, 162–3, 166; Birmingham, 7, 123, 166; Boston, 121; Bradford, 133, 136; Bristol, 136; British Indian population of, 77; Burnley, 151; Cambridge, 136; City of London, 95, 106, 174; class system in, 58–9, 75, 123, 135–6, 149–52, 172, 182–3, 186, 195; Dagenham, 136; Department for Education, 206; Department for International Development (DfID), 224; Divorce Law Reform Act (1969), 196; economy of, 152, 170; Edinburgh, 54, 136; education sector of, 35, 147, 154–8; ethnic Chinese population of, 77; EU citizens in, 101; Finance Act (2014), 211; Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 224; Glasgow, 136; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 150–1; higher education sector of, 35–7, 47, 159–62, 164–7, 179, 208, 230–1; Home Office, 17; House of Commons, 162; general election in (2015), 60; House of Lords, 31; Human Rights Act, 123, 225; income inequality levels in, 169–70, 172, 177, 184–5; labour market of, 16, 26, 124, 140–1, 148, 150–1, 152, 225; Leicester, 133; Leeds, 161; London, 3–4, 7, 10–11, 18–19, 24, 26, 34, 37, 59, 79, 101, 114–15, 119, 123, 131, 133–45, 151, 168, 216, 218, 226, 228, 232–3; Manchester, 123, 136, 151, 161, 228; manufacturing sector of, 17, 88; mass immigration in, 122–4, 126–7, 228–9; Muslim immigration in, 41–2, 44; Muslim population of, 127, 130; National Health Service (NHS), 72, 91, 111, 120, 140, 144, 200–1, 229; National Insurance system of, 204; Newcastle, 131, 136, 161; Northern Ireland, 38; Office for Fair Access, 180; Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), 155; Office of National Statistics (ONS), 138, 144–5; Oldham, 133; Olympic Games (2012), 111, 143, 222; Oxford, 136; Parliamentary expenses scandal (2009), 56, 168; Plymouth, 131; public sector employment in, 171, 208–9, 229–30; regional identities in, 3–4, 186; Rochdale, 124; Scotland, 110, 138; Scottish independence referendum (2014), 53, 110; self-employment levels in, 171; Sheffield, 161; Slough, 131, 133; social mobility rate in, 58, 184–5, 187; start-ups in, 173–4; Stoke, 121; Sunderland, 52, 172; Supreme Court, 66; taxation system of, 222; Treasury, 16; UK Border Agency, 108; vocational education in, 163; voting patterns for Brexit vote, 7–9, 19–20, 23, 26, 36, 52; wage levels in, 168; Wales, 138; welfare state in, 199–203, 223–4, 231–2; Westminster, 54, 58, 60; youth unemployment in, 151–2 United Nations (UN): 102, 198; Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 10; Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 109; Geneva Convention (1951), 82–4; High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 82, 84; Security Council, 99 United States of America (USA): 1–2, 6–7, 22–3, 36–7, 51, 57, 60, 74, 86, 89, 94, 128, 168, 193, 208, 227; 9/11 Attacks, 130; Agency for International Development (USAID), 224; Asian population of, 68; borders of, 21; Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 54; class identity in, 65–6; Congress, 67; Constitution of, 57; education system of, 166; higher education sector of, 167; Hispanic population of, 67–8, 85; House of Representatives, 67; immigration debate in, 67–8; Ivy League, 36, 61; New York, 135; political divisions in, 65; Senate, 67 University College London (UCL): Imagining the Future City: London 2061, 137, 139 University of California: 165 University of Kent: 36 University of Sussex: 36 University of Warwick: 36; faculty of, 171 Vietnam War (1955–75): 29 Visegrad Group: 69, 73, 99 Vlaams Belang: ideology of, 73 wages for housework: 194 Walzer, Michael: 117–18 War on Drugs: 62 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic): 27 Welzel, Christian: Freedom Rising, 27 Westminster University: 165 white flight: 129, 134, 136 white identity politics: 9, 67 white supremacy: 8, 68, 73–4 Whittle, Peter: 144 Wilders, Geert: 50, 76 Willetts, David: 164, 185 Wilson, Harold: electoral victory of (1964), 150 Wolf, Prof Alison: 162, 164–5; XX Factor, The, 189, 198 working class: 2–4, 6, 51–2, 59, 61, 65; conservatism, 8 political representation/views of, 8, 52, 58, 63, 70, 72; progressives, 78–9; voting patterns of, 15, 52, 75–6; white, 19, 68 World Bank: 84 World Trade Organisation (WTO): 10, 85, 89–90, 97; accession of China to (2001), 88 World Values Survey: 27 xenophobia: 2, 14, 50–1, 57, 71, 119, 121, 141, 144, 225 York, Peter: 138 York University: 36 YouGov: personnel of, 78; polls conducted by, 16–17, 42, 66, 79, 114, 132, 141 Young, Hugo: 93 Young, Michael: 119, 190; Rise of the Meritocracy, The, 180–1 Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001): 97 Yugoslavia: 97 Zeman, Milos: President of Czech Republic, 73


pages: 319 words: 95,854

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In a series of clashes culminating in the turn-of-the-century Boer War (in which the young Winston Churchill served as a journalist), the British defeated the Afrikaners. The Boers, or “farmers,” as the Afrikaners were then frequently known, entered a half century of political submission to the British. The Afrikaners’ political self-awareness grew over that time. Most wanted little to do with the British Empire, of which they were now a part. They opposed South Africa’s entry into the Second World War, quietly supporting the Axis. But three years after the war’s end, in 1948, an assertive Afrikaner party, the National Party, won South Africa’s elections for the first time. With this victory began the period of legally enforced “apartness” or, in Afrikaans, apartheid.

Instead of modernization, these purifying reforms are really addressing identity and insecurity: the fear that if a language becomes impure by borrowing, the nation itself will become corrupted. These mixed, sometimes conflicting motives of modernizing, Westernizing, and “nationalizing” of a language are shown vividly in the language reforms in Turkey beginning in the 1920s. Ottoman Turkey was one of history’s greatest empires, the equal of the Roman, Chinese, or British empires at its height. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople, a Greek-speaking center of Orthodox Christianity, in 1453. They renamed it Istanbul, turned the great Hagia Sophia church into a mosque, and proceeded from there to march farther into Europe, even reaching Vienna. The Ottoman state also expanded into the Middle East, extending nominal or real suzerainty over the Arab lands as far as Morocco and including the Levant, Syria, Iraq, and most of the populated parts of the Arabian Peninsula.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

From the outset of the war, in 1939, Washington anticipated that it would end with the United States in a position of overwhelming power. High-level State Department officials and foreign policy specialists met through the wartime years to lay out plans for the postwar world. They delineated a “Grand Area” that the United States was to dominate, including the western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, with its Middle East energy resources. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, the Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible—at least its economic core, in Western Europe. Within the Grand Area, the United States would maintain “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy,” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.3 These careful wartime plans were soon implemented.

It was well understood, however, that the “idealistic slogans” were to be displayed prominently when addressing others, including the intellectual classes, who were expected to promulgate them. The plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted that the United States would control the western hemisphere, the Far East, the former British Empire (including the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its commercial and industrial centers. These were not unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of power at that moment. But decline set in at once. In 1949, China declared independence—resulting, in the United States, in bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that “loss.”


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or ‘unequal treaties’ (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3–5%) on them.8 Despite their key role in promoting ‘free’ trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonialism and unequal treaties hardly get any mention in the hordes of pro-globalisation books.9 Even when they are explicitly discussed, their role is seen as positive on the whole. For example, in his acclaimed book, Empire, the British historian Niall Ferguson honestly notes many of the misdeeds of the British empire, including the Opium War, but contends that the British empire was a good thing overall – it was arguably the cheapest way to guarantee free trade, which benefits everyone.10 However, the countries under colonial rule and unequal treaties did very poorly. Between 1870 and 1913, per capita income in Asia (excluding Japan) grew at 0.4% per year, while that in Africa grew at 0.6% per year.11 The corresponding figures were 1.3% for Western Europe and 1.8% per year for the USA.12 It is particularly interesting to note that the Latin American countries, which by that time had regained tariff autonomy and were boasting some of the highest tariffs in the world, grew as fast as the US did during this period.13 While they were imposing free trade on weaker nations through colonialism and unequal treaties, rich countries maintained rather high tariffs, especially industrial tariffs, for themselves, as we will see in greater detail in the next chapter.To begin with, Britain, the supposed home of free trade, was one of the most protectionist countries until it converted to free trade in the mid-19th century.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

When the Chinese authorities tried to clamp down on the foreign traffickers, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston sent in the gunboats. Royal Navy cannons ensured a swift victory for the British smugglers and dealers. The consequence of the Opium Wars was that the drug became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and the British Empire took full advantage. By the 1880s, the Indian opium fields produced enough to satisfy the daily needs of around 14 million consumers in China and South East Asia, and the British Raj was reliant on feeding the addiction it had helped create. Quantities of the drug arrived back in Britain. Mrs Beeton recommended readers of her Book of Household Management to keep their cupboards stocked with ‘opium, powdered, and laudanum [opium mixed with alcohol]’; ‘Vivat opium!’

., ref1 Battersea Home for Lost and Starving Dogs, ref1, ref2 battles: Lyndanisse, ref1 Poitiers, ref1 Rawmarsh School, ref1 BBC: bad language broadcast by, ref1 blogs, ref1 consumer programming, ref1, ref2 family-life survey by, ref1 ‘God Save The Queen’ banned by, ref1 on immigrants, maternity units and translation services, ref1 marital-life lectures on, ref1 murder dominates 1980s news bulletins of, ref1 Reith lectures, ref1 BBC-3, ref1 ‘beacon of relief’, ref1 Beatles, ref1, ref2 Becket, St Thomas à, ref1, ref2 Beeton, Mrs, ref1 Belgium, ref1, ref2 The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (Lerner), ref1 Bell, ref1 Bentham, Jeremy, ref1, ref2 Beresford, Pamela, ref1 Berger, Peter, ref1 Berners-Lee, Tim, ref1 bhat-ghum, ref1 see also sleep Bichard, Sir Michael, ref1 Billingsgate fish market, ref1 Birkenhead Park, ref1 Birt, John, ref1 Birth of a Flower, The, ref1 Black Death, ref1 Black Prince, ref1 Blackadder, ref1 blackout, ref1 Blair, Tony, ref1, ref2, ref3 apologies from, ref1 ASBOs introduced by, ref1 child-poverty promise of, ref1 ‘drugs tsar’ appointed by, ref1 and Internet, ref1, ref2, ref3 and Iraq invasion, refusal to apologise for, ref1 and licensing hours, ref1 on ‘electronic service delivery’, ref1 and power-napping, ref1 and social capital, ref1 ‘third way’ philosophy of, ref1 Blake, William, ref1 blasphemy, ref1, ref2 see also bad language Blobby, Mr, ref1 blogging, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bloom, Dr Benjamin, ref1 blue air, ref1 see also bad language Bluewater shopping centre, ref1 Blunkett, David, ref1, ref2, ref3 Board of Agriculture, ref1 ‘bodged job’ ref1 bodily functions, ref1, ref2 and bowel cancer, ref1 and constipation, ref1 embarrassment over, ref1 and paruresis, ref1 Boer War, ref1 Bolivia, Camba people of, drinking culture among, ref1 Book of Household Management (Beeton), ref1 Bourdieu, Pierre, ref1 bourgeoisie, ref1 and hunting, ref1 resentment towards power of, ref1, ref2, ref3 and social hierarchy, ref1 and verbal propriety, ref1 see also class; elitism bowel cancer, ref1 Bowlby, John, ref1 Bowling Alone (Putnam), ref1 boxing, ref1 Brain, Lord, ref1 Brake, Tom, ref1 Breadline Britain, ref1 ‘Breakthrough Britain’ (Conservative Party), ref1 Brie, ref1, ref2 British Academy, ref1 British Brothers League, ref1 British bulldog, ref1 British Cheese Board, ref1 British Empire, collapse of, ref1 British Medical Journal (BMJ), ref1, ref2 British National Corpus, ref1 British National Party, ref1 British Spirit, ref1 Britishness, ref1 and anachronism, ref1 ‘broken’ Britain, ref1, ref2, ref3 brolly, see umbrella Brontë, Charlotte, ref1 Brontë, Emily, ref1 Brookman, Dr Fiona, ref1 Brown, Gordon, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 on civic patriotism, ref1 and official statistics, ref1 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, ref1 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, ref1 Bryson, Bill, ref1 Buchanan, James, ref1 Buddha, ref1 Bulger, James, ref1, ref2, ref3 Burke, Edmund, ref1 Burnham, Andy, ref1 Bush, George H.


pages: 279 words: 96,180

Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer by Jon Frost

airport security, blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, IFF: identification friend or foe, Louis Blériot

At the start of the war, the drink issued on British naval ships was brandy (a French-produced spirit). The British government identified the potential supply problems and so replaced the ‘brandy tot’ with rum, which became the sailors’ tipple. It was unpopular to start with but tastes soon changed. Another advantage of switching to rum was that it was produced within the growing British Empire. Kipling, the author and not the cake maker, penned a whole poem on the subject called ‘A Smuggler’s Song’: ‘Five and twenty ponies/Trotting through the dark –/Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk/Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –/Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!’

I’d even once heard a senior judge state that he would write to the ‘slovenly’ country himself because, in his words, ‘That will get the buggers moving!’ Which was typical of the detached and sometimes delusional thinking of many judges who seemed to still think most of the world was within the British Empire. In the case of this particular judge, his letter worked so well that ‘the buggers’ managed to lose all of our overseas evidence, never to be seen again. In Mr Shah’s case, I was lucky. All my overseas evidence was in Pakistan and the Pakistan Narcotics Agency was on the ball. I received everything I wanted within weeks, plus more.


pages: 356 words: 97,794

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, low skilled workers, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

They would be ‘converted’ to civilian uniforms once again when military rule was replaced in the 1980s by the Civil Administration, one of the many indications that the transition from ‘military rule’ to ‘civil administration’ – hailed by Israel as a move intended to make life easier under occupation – did not cause any dramatic change in the life of the Occupied Territories. Each cabinet minister was asked to recruit local Palestinians to work with them. In the days of the British Empire, in countries such as India and Egypt, a very similar structure was employed whereby the governor had a local advisor shadowing him. The colonial nature and face of the occupation became more and more visible by the day. The committee produced, as we shall see, two models for the manner in which life would be managed in the territories.

Abdel-Shafi, Haidar 199 Abdullah I of Jordan, King 13 Absentee Property Law 143 Abu Labada, Hassan Abd al-Sayidi 183 Abu Mazen 222, 223 Abu Nidal 166 Agha, Hussein 205 Ahdut Ha’avoda 24, 50 AIPAC, see American Israel Public Affairs Committee Alon, Yigal 23–4, 36–7, 43, 48, 89–93 and colonization 95, 96–7, 98, 101–2, 103 and Gaza Strip 136 and punishment 107 and refugees 67 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 18, 43, 61 Amir, Yigal 155 Angleton, James 34 annexation 50–3, 56–9, 60–1, 62–6, 100–2 anti-Semitism 10 Arab Higher Committee 197 Arab League 12, 25, 197 Arab states 10, 18, 26, 28, 30–1 and radicalization 20, 21, 23, 24 see also pan-Arabism Arab Summit 25 Arafat, Yasser 194, 195, 196, 204–6, 207, 208 Aran, Zalman 52, 68, 126 Argov, Shlomo 166 Arnon, Ya’acov 137 assassinations 211–12 al-Astal, Muhammad Ahmad 182–3 autonomy xxviii, 50, 101–2, 157 Avnery, Uri 38–9, 73 Ba’ath party 18, 23, 26, 29 Bachi, Roberto 80 Baker, James 195 Barak, Ehud 196, 200, 206, 213 Barbour, Walworth 61 Bavli, Dan 150–1 Begin, Menachem xx, 49, 124, 154, 159 and Palestinians 51–2, 54, 55 Beilin, Yossi 125, 200 Ben-Amos, Dan 73 Ben-Eliezer, Fuad 161 Ben-Gurion, David xxii, 12, 13, 14, 17–20 and Egypt 15, 16–17 and Jerusalem 59 and settlers 131 and Six-Day War 39, 43 and West Bank 21–2 Bentham, Jeremy xxvii Bentov, Mordechai 53, 54, 120, 121, 123, 125–6 Benvenisti, Meron 170, 203 Bethlehem 62, 92 Black September 134–5 ‘Blueprint for Physical and Regional Planning, A’ 152–3 Bor 38, 39 Breaking the Silence 213–14 Britain, see Great Britain British Empire 138 British Mandate xxii, 9 B’Tselem 179, 183–4, 220 Buber, Martin 18–19 bureaucracy xxix–xxx, 4, 79–80; see also Committee of Directors General Burg, Yosef 69 Bush, George H. W. 195 Bush, George W. 208, 217, 224 Camp David Summit xxi, 154, 196, 202–3, 204–6, 207 Carmel, Moshe 37, 53, 54 Carter, Jimmy 69, 152 cemeteries 87 censorship xv Challe, Gen Maurice 19 Chamber of Planning 165 checkpoints 184–5 children 176–7, 188, 220 Chomsky, Noam 30 Christians 57, 66 CIA 33–4, 35–6 citizenship xxvi, 102 civil administration 138 Civil Administration for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip 160–1, 162, 179–81 Clinton, Bill 191, 194, 196, 205 Cold War 43, 62 collaborators 190–1 colonization xxiii–xxiv, 79–80, 93–5, 161–5 and Alon 90–3, 101–2 and Gaza Strip 98–100, 135–6 and Jerusalem 82–8 and wedges 95–7 Committee of Directors General (CDG) 105, 137–40, 143, 144 Communism 14 compensation 81–2, 142 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord 55 curfews 182–4 currency 105, 106 Dayan, Moshe 15–16, 29, 35, 36, 49–50, 89 and autonomy plan 157 and economics 105, 146, 147–8, 149, 150 and expulsions 116–18, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–6 and the media 71–2 and Palestinians 52, 107–8 and refugees 66–8, 114 and Six-Day War 39, 41, 42, 43 and West Bank 97 De-Shalit, Memi xvi Dead Sea 95, 97, 153 demonstrations xviii–xix deportations 170–1 Dinstein, Zvi 128 Directors General xxix–xxx Drucker, Raviv 207–8 Druckman, Rabbi Haim 132 Dudin, Mustafa 160 Dulles, John Foster 17 dummy city 213–14, 225 dunams 79, 81, 82, 84–5, 86, 244 n. 1 East Jerusalem 81–2, 164 Eban, Abba 12, 31–2, 33, 37, 47, 48 and expulsions 122 and marketing 68 and Six-Day War 39, 41 and USA 60, 61, 62, 65 economics 7, 104–6, 146–50, 168–9, 187, 209 education xvi, 22, 148 Egypt xiii, 13–15, 110, 134, 197, 228 and Gaza Strip 12, 218 and peace process 62 and refugees 115 and Sinai Peninsula 24, 25, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 36 and Six-Day War 40 and Suez campaign 16–17 and Zionists 55 Eilat 29 Eilat (warship) 72 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 61 Eisenstadt, Shmeul Noah 80 Eizenkot, Gadi 225 El-Arish plan 55 Elazar, David 38 Elon, Amos 73 emergency regulations, see 1945 Mandatory regulations encystation 122, 165 Eshkol, Levy 28–9, 33, 35, 38, 129 and colonization 93–4, 96 and downsizing 118–19 and dual language 49 and Jerusalem 45, 98 and marketing 69 and Palestinians 50–1, 54–5, 55 and refugees 67 and security border 48 and Six-Day War 41 and USA 63, 64 and Yemenite Jews 114 ethnic cleansing xii, xiii, 89 and 1948 xxiii–xxiv, 4, 9, 10 and 1967 xxiv–xxv, 112–28 Europe xxiii, xxviii European Union (EU) 97, 105, 180, 211 Evron, Boaz 171–2 executions xv, xxviii Fafo 195 Fatah 27, 28, 35, 109, 177–8, 198, 222 financial aid 7, 19, 26, 43, 105 Findley, Paul 185–6 fishing rights 226 Foucault, Michel xxvii France xiii, 16, 17, 19, 26, 70 Free Officers 13 Freij, Elias 150 Fulbright, J.


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

The flickering lights of swamp gas—what we call will-o’-the-wisps—were said to be the ghosts of dead mapmakers wandering the marsh by night. Better finish your cabbage, kids, or the surveyor will come and get you! A nice thick border and a carefully chosen color scheme can serve to unify a nation, as on those Victorian maps in which every far-flung corner of the British Empire was always the same uniform pink, to impress on generations of schoolchildren the constancy and reach of the Crown—the “pink bits,” students called the empire.* Map boundaries also define, with a simple stroke of the pen, who isn’t on our side: an enemy to guard against or even territory we might take back someday.

., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 156. The only completely blank USGS map in the Great Salt Lake is, I believe, 41112C6, known as “Rozel Point SW,” but there are several others that show only a single train trestle or boundary line. 63 the ghosts of dead mapmakers: Ibid., p. 137. 64 the “pink bits”: This was the “British Empire Map of the World,” the brainchild of the Canadian schoolteacher George Parkin. Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections, p. 79. 64 localized versions: You can view a comparison at “Disputed Territory? Google Maps Localizes Borders Based on Local Laws,” Search Engine Roundtable, Dec. 1, 2009, www.seroundtable.com/archives/021249.html. 64 God would strike her down: Nadav Shragai et al., “Olmert Backs Tamir’s Proposal to Include Green Line in Textbook Maps,” Ha’aretz, June 12, 2006. 65 1,807 feet east: Elizabeth White, “Four Corners Marker Is Off Target,” Denver Post, Apr. 23, 2009. 65 Mike Parker has noted: In his very entertaining Map Addict (London: Collins, 2009), p. 131.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or ‘unequal treaties’ (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3–5%) on them.8 Despite their key role in promoting ‘free’ trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonialism and unequal treaties hardly get any mention in the hordes of pro-globalisation books.9 Even when they are explicitly discussed, their role is seen as positive on the whole. For example, in his acclaimed book, Empire, the British historian Niall Ferguson honestly notes many of the misdeeds of the British empire, including the Opium War, but contends that the British empire was a good thing overall – it was arguably the cheapest way to guarantee free trade, which benefits everyone.10 However, the countries under colonial rule and unequal treaties did very poorly. Between 1870 and 1913, per capita income in Asia (excluding Japan) grew at 0.4% per year, while that in Africa grew at 0.6% per year.11 The corresponding figures were 1.3% for Western Europe and 1.8% per year for the USA.12 It is particularly interesting to note that the Latin American countries, which by that time had regained tariff autonomy and were boasting some of the highest tariffs in the world, grew as fast as the US did during this period.13 While they were imposing free trade on weaker nations through colonialism and unequal treaties, rich countries maintained rather high tariffs, especially industrial tariffs, for themselves, as we will see in greater detail in the next chapter.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“It’s going to feel like a recession, even when it ends.” Those who looked backward found ample reason to expect decline. From his perch at Harvard, the historian Niall Ferguson, a nostalgist for the faded British Empire, repeated his case that the once mighty American dreadnought was dead in the water. The weight of history suggested that the United States, overextended and debt-ridden, was likely to suffer the same fate in the early twenty-first century that befell the British Empire in the mid-twentieth. “It’s not a thousand years that separates imperial zenith from imperial oblivion,” he said in a May 2010 speech. “It’s really a very, very short ride from the top to the bottom.”1 Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, economists who data-mined history in This Time Is Different, a comprehensive look at financial debacles going back to the 1300s, arrived at a similar conclusion.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

To everyone’s surprise—as he later described it to me—he won a first-class honors degree in physics, despite a lack of early preparation in mathematics. But it was in Egypt that he found his future. As the twentieth century began, the British Empire had finally put down the fundamentalist Mahdi revolt upriver in Sudan. A period of relative peace, growth, and dam construction ensued. For most of its northward course the Nile was undisputed property of the British Empire: from Lake Victoria to Lake Albert, to the joining of the White Nile and the Blue Nile at Khartoum, over the swamps, clay, and cliff-lined basins of Sudan and southern Egypt, and out at last to the broad Delta on the Mediterranean Sea.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Like Bell, Dahl, Lane, Weinberg, and other Americans, Snow was quite optimistic about the prospect of the solution of problems at home and abroad by the application of scientific and in turn social scientific methods. He was a fervent, if unofficial, advocate of “Modernization” theory. This faith in science and technology distinguished Snow from many of his contemporaries, not least in the humanities, who lamented the decline of the British Empire and Great Britain’s increasingly second-class superpower status vis- a-vis the United States.35 As Mayer has argued, however, earlier debates between scientists and humanists in Britain were nowhere near as divisive as those generated by Snow’s works and were based upon a transcendent belief in the value of both.36 But post-war science and technology policy was not just a reaction to the challenge of affluence or to the threat of Communism or to the need for greater scientific and technological literacy. 114 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia In 1956, William H.

Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (Bowden) 191 Bezos, Jeff 220 Bhopal, India 253 Bible 47 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris 254 Big Brother 166 Bigelow, Jacob 52 Bikle, George 20, 21 Billington, David 52, 121 Bimber, Bruce 118 biomass, energy from 157 biotechnology 186 BlackBerry gadgets 220 Blair, Ann 190 Blake, William 83 Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 25 Bloch, Ernst 251, 254 Bohr, Niels 120 Bolıvar, Simon 22 Bonald, Vicomte de 60 Bono (pop star) 163 Book of Revelation and utopianism 25 books, attitudes toward 190 persistence of print 217–222 bookstores, US, closure of 218 Boorstin, Daniel 101, 102 Borders chain stores, closure of 218 Boston Beer Company 3 Bova, Ben 9 Bowden, Mark 191 Bradley, Mary E. 92 Brand, Stewart 154 Brave New World (A. Huxley) 123, 166 Brazil 23 Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (Ehrenreich) 168 Brin, Sergey 158 British Empire 114 Brook Farm 24, 25–26, 27 Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Delano) 254–255 Brooklyn Bridge 139 Brooks, David 124 Bryan, William Jennings 29 Bryant, Howard 191 Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (exhibition) 245 buckminsterfullerene 247 Buddhist eschatological traditions 21 Bundy, McGeorge 104, 106 Bunji, Suzuki 20 Burma (Myanmar) 19 Burns, William 236 Bury, J.


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Finally you would have come to the camp’s northern perimeter, and been impressed, or depressed, by the sight of a dozen hospitals lined up along it. Between them these boasted 23,000 beds, making Étaples one of the largest hospital complexes in the world at the time. On any one day, this sprawling, makeshift city accommodated 100,000 men and women. Reinforcements arrived daily from the four corners of the British Empire, and nearby were camps for German POWs and French troops from Indochina. Fifty kilometres to the south, at Noyelles-sur-Mer, near the Somme estuary, the CLC had its headquarters and a hospital of its own (Number Three Native Labour General Hospital, to give it its correct name). In all, around 2 million human beings were camped out in this small corner of northern France.

Diamond, ‘Origins of major human infectious diseases’, Nature, 17 May 2007; 447(7142):279–83. 2. Epicurus, Vatican Sayings. 3. Book 25, The Fall of Syracuse. 4. W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), p. 2. 5. D. Killingray, ‘A new “Imperial Disease”: the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 and its impact on the British Empire’, paper for the annual conference of the Society for Social History of Medicine, Oxford, 1996. 6. W. F. Ruddiman, Earth Transformed (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2013), ch. 21. 7. C. W. Potter, ‘A history of influenza’, Journal of Applied Microbiology (2001), 91:572–9. 8. Quick Facts: Munch’s The Scream (Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/resource/171. 2.


The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities by Mancur Olson

barriers to entry, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, full employment, income per capita, Kenneth Arrow, market clearing, Norman Macrae, Pareto efficiency, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, search costs, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban decay, working poor

The parts of Western Europe that paced the advance of the West were often areas that had previously been peripheral or unimpressive; the center of growth in the seventeenth century was in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, which had never been important or wealthy before and had only lately escaped subjugation by Spain. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was England, rather than the far larger and more imposing France, that gave us the Industrial Revolution. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was long-quiescent Germany and distant ex-colonies in North America, rather than the British Empire at its apogee, that carried that revolution farthest. There will be no attempt here to account for the rise and fall of the ancient empires or civilizations in the manner of universalist historians like Spengler or Toynbee. If their disappointing experience is any guide, it is perhaps not even very fruitful to identify allegedly common patterns in the rise and decline of ancient civilizations or jurisdictions for which we have only scanty records.

The Austro-Hungarian empire was divided at Versailles into many smaller states. In general these new nations were economically nationalistic and protectionist. The Soviet Union had relatively little trade with the outside world. Protection increased dramatically elsewhere as well; even Britain and the British Empire abandoned free trade policies. On top of this, the world economy was further deranged by extravagant demands by the European allies for reparations from the defeated nations, unrealistic demands by the United States for repayment of the debts its allies had contracted during the war, and beggar-thy-neighbor and other foolish exchangerate policies in many countries.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Three words: the Suez Canal. This shy little waterway might not look like much, but it was the single body of water that directly connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. Meaning it was the single thing that connected the East to the West. Meaning it was the single thing that connected the British Empire to its most important colony—India. This thumbnail of water held the key to the British economy. Which is why Lawrence was recruited to map out all the surrounding land, in case the Ottomans teamed up with Austria-Hungary and Germany and staged a ground attack. Lawrence turned in his brilliant maps, and not a minute too soon.

Yes, it had to do with the fierce and bloody Jewish resistance, but it was also a result of other tectonic shifts. Political and economic pressure from inside and outside the British government pushed them to end many colonial endeavors around the world. One important part of their agreement to leave Palestine had to do with the British Empire giving up its hold on India. As soon as that was done (on August 15, 1947), the Brits no longer needed the region to defend the path to India, so they were thrilled to give up their Mandate over Palestine and just kept control over that oh-so-important route, creating the Suez Canal Zone (militarized, of course, until 1956).


pages: 336 words: 97,204

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson

British Empire, Columbine, Corn Laws, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, George Santayana, Honoré de Balzac, James Watt: steam engine, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus

The Dickenses left the cramped quarters of Furnival’s Inn and moved into 48 Doughty Street, a substantial terraced house near Gray’s Inn. By now he was on to Oliver Twist. The past never stays still. It changes, which is why the task of the historian changes with each generation. Those taught as students that the British Empire was their country’s moral, as well as political, apogee lived to see the absolutely opposite viewpoint become the orthodoxy. In personal narratives, this phenomenon is observable in almost every human life. In the life of one of the greatest creative geniuses, it is inevitable that his narrative of his own marriage should be presented with especial forcefulness; with such a pungent strength that biographers of Dickens have inevitably divided between those who sided with his version of the marriage and those who have subsequently found it dismaying.

, 314 All the Year Round, 99, 126, 145, 153, 158, 212, 214, 215, 219, 229, 285 American Civil War (1861–5), 214, 223 American Notes (Dickens), 164 American Revolution (1765–83), 262 ‘Among School Children’ (Yeats), 206 Ampthill Square, Camden Town, 12, 21, 317 Andersen, Hans Christian, 38, 134 Anderson, Wesley, 197 Angel in the House, The (Patmore), 136 Anglesey, Marquess of, see Paget, Henry Anglo-Saxon Primer (Sweet), 20 animal magnetism, 253, 255, 260–70 Anne of Cleves, 136 Aristotle, 28 Arnold, Thomas, 188 Artists’ Benevolent Fund, 36 Atalanta, 9 Athenaeum, The, 74 atmospherics, 282–4 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 225, 249 Austen, Jane, 6, 272, 307, 308 Austin, Letitia, 26, 70, 78, 297 Australia, 27, 40, 149, 151, 181, 182, 249 autism, 94–5 Autobiographical Fragment (1849), 60, 91, 95, 121, 155 Baltimore, Maryland, 222 de Balzac, Honoré, 43, 81, 87, 140–41, 202, 257 Banbury Road, Oxford, 20 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), 58, 84, 297, 312, 313 Barrow, Charles, 76 Barrow, Mary, 63, 69 Barrow, Thomas Culliford, 63 Battle of Life, The (Dickens), 158 Battle of Trafalgar (1805), 61 Baudelaire, Charles, 141 Bayer Pharmaceuticals, 244, 246 Bayswater, London, 317 Beadnell, George, 106 Beadnell, Maria, see Winter, Maria Beard, Frank, 99, 238, 286, 297 Beard, Thomas, 99 Beatles, The, 300 ‘Begging-Letter Writer, The’ (Dickens), 154 Belfast, Ireland, 210, 310 ‘Bénédiction’ (Baudelaire), 141 Benham, William, 313–14, 315, 316 Bentham, Jeremy, 77, 81, 147, 172, 179, 188 Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 199, 216 Bernard, William Bayle, 207 Bethnal Green, London, 24 Betjeman, John, 227, 309 Bettelheim, Bruno, 94–5 Biggles series (Johns), 302 Birmingham, West Midlands, 203, 204, 209 Blake, William, 118 Bleak House (Dickens), 21, 39, 43, 62, 67, 90, 94, 114, 146, 200, 215, 280, 282 Bleak House, Broadstairs, 46, 125 Bloomsbury, London, 25, 40, 102 Boer War (1899–1902), 300 Boleyn, Anne, 136 Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, 297 Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn (Dickens), 197 Boston, Massachusetts mesmerism in, 266 Parkman–Webster murder case (1849), 250–53, 279 public reading tours, 123, 220–21, 224–6, 229, 250 Boswell, James, 121 Boulton, Matthew, 64 Bowen, Elizabeth, 46–7, 48, 303 Bradford, Yorkshire, 205 Bright, John, 188 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 304 British Empire, 120 British Museum, London, 25, 103, 167, 295 Broadstairs, Kent, 46, 125, 145, 297, 314 Brontë sisters, 6, 204 Brooklyn, New York, 222 Brothers Grimm, 29 Brougham, Henry, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, 154 Browne, Hablot Knight, 118, 119 Browne, John Collis, 246 Browning, Robert, 155 Bruce, Thomas, 7th Earl of Elgin, 295 Bubbles (Millais), 292 Buffalo, New York, 222, 225 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 308 Bulwer-Lytton, Robert, 1st Earl of Lytton, 104, 147 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 122, 131, 146, 147–53, 156 Burdett, Francis, 147 burlesque, 5, 27, 30, 33, 35 Burnett, Frances ‘Fanny’, 62, 70, 78, 93, 101 Buss, Robert William, 45–6, 118 Byron, George Gordon, 234, 319 Camden Town, Middlesex, 70, 77, 228 Ampthill Square, 12, 21 Bayham Street, 96, 228 Drummond Street, 206 Gloucester Crescent, 100, 102–6 School for Girls, 45 Wellington House Academy, 155, 206, 228 Canning, George, 63 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 7 Canterbury, Kent, 7, 247, 272, 274 capital punishment, 175, 176–7 Carey, John, 299, 305 Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 81, 121, 155, 162, 178–81, 183, 234, 293 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen consort of the United Kingdom, 139 Carrow, Goldsmith Day, 215 Catholicism, 23, 164, 166, 311 Chadwick, Edwin, 188 Chalk, Kent, 119–20 Chamberlain, Joseph, 190, 209 Chandler, Raymond, 308 Chaplin, Charlie, 29, 238 Chapman and Hall, 45, 116–18, 120 Chapman, Edward, 116, 120 Chappell of Bond Street, 212, 226 Charing Cross, London, 102, 227, 296 Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (Hartley), 150–51, 155, 156–7 Charles Dickens As I Knew Him (Dolby), 226 Charles Street, London, 62 Chatham, Kent, 35, 55, 64, 69–70, 77, 112, 126, 216, 271, 273, 284 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 7, 135 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, 237 Chester, Cheshire, 238 Chesterton, George Laval, 151 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 298, 311 Childs, George William, 243 Chimes, The (Dickens), 94, 158, 234 China, 220 chlorodyne, 246 cholera, 165 Christ in the House of His Parents (Millais), 159, 291 Christianity, 48, 146, 147, 160, 162, 164–70, 191, 265, 311 Christmas, 24, 146, 157–61, 174, 186–7 games at Gad’s Hill, 53–4, 60, 73, 74, 99, 206 pantomimes, 27, 29, 35 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 59, 104, 156, 157, 158, 161, 173, 174, 180, 187, 191–2 public readings, 182, 204–5, 232, 235 Cinderella, 29 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 293 Cleveland Street, London, 62 Workhouse, 39, 64, 66, 68, 188 Clive, Catherine ‘Kitty’, 268 Cobden, Richard, 188 Cold Bath Fields, Middlesex, 151 Cole, Henry, 161 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 247 Collins, Charles, 101, 105 death (1870), 297 Collins, Katey, see Perugini, Catherine Collins, William Wilkie, 7, 9, 10, 15–16, 38, 70, 145, 250, 280 Frozen Deep, The, 7, 9, 10, 32, 38, 39, 201, 206, 207, 248, 297, 316 Moonstone, The, 253, 283–4 New Magdalen, The, 314 Woman in White, The, 137 Collyer, Robert Hanham, 266 Comédie humaine, La (Balzac), 257 Comte de Gabalis (Villars), 260 Connolly, John, 104 Convent Thoughts (Collins), 101 Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann), 121 Cook, Edward Dutton, 103 Cook, Lynda, 103 Cooper, Anthony, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, 165 Corn Laws, 186 Cornelius, Anne, 130 corporal punishment, 300, 305 Cousine Bette (Balzac), 257 Coutts, Thomas, 147 Covent Garden, London, 25, 68, 102 Cox, Arthur, 273 Cranmer, Thomas, 136 Crewe Hall, Cheshire, 62 Crewe, John, 63 Cricket on the Hearth, The (Dickens), 158, 204, 209, 232 Crimean War (1853–6), 209 Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 317 Cruikshank, George, 37, 61, 119 Cuba, 220, 221 Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree, A (Dickens), 28 Curwen, John, 186 Cuvier, Georges, 262 Daily News, 115, 149 Darwin, Charles, 172 David Copperfield (Dickens), 10, 21, 42, 46, 79, 106, 116, 146, 195 as autobiographical, 27, 29, 39, 42, 71, 79, 195, 248, 277 Doctor Strong’s, 247, 272 Em’ly, 149–50, 151, 257 evangelicalism in, 164 pantomime and, 29–30 parents, influence of, 71, 91–2 Preface (1867), 46 public readings, 235 sex in, 257 Swinburne on, 195 voice in, 200 de la Rue family, 268–70 Dean Street, Soho, 37 Death of Chatterton, The (Wallis), 140 death penalty, 175, 176–7 Derby, Lord, see Smith-Stanley, Edward Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park, 25, 125 Dickens and Christmas (Hawksley), 159 Dickens and Daughter (Storey), 17 Dickens and the Workhouse (Richardson), 39, 64 Dickens in Search of Himself (Watkins), 299–300, 305 Dickens Museum, Doughty Street, 210 Dickens World, The (House), 67 Dickens, Alfred (b. 1814), 62, 78 Dickens, Alfred (b. 1822), 26, 70, 78 Dickens, Augustus, 26, 70, 78, 111, 140 Dickens, Catherine ‘Kate’ (wife, born Hogarth), 10, 92, 95, 99–141, 220, 271 Birmingham Christmas reading (1853), 205 British Museum letters donation (1879), 103 cruelty towards, 129–30 death of Charles (1870), 103, 104, 286 Forster and, 104, 123, 130 Italy trip (1844), 268, 269–70 mental illness accusation, 103–4, 105 Mesmerism and, 260 as mother figure, 31, 130 Naples trip (1845), 128 public reading tours and, 201, 202, 205, 219–20 separation from Charles (1858), 11, 42, 100, 131–41 Violated Letter (1858), 132–3 Warren’s Blacking, knowledge of, 72, 95, 121 wedding to Charles (1836), 119 Dickens, Charles ‘Charley’ (b. 1837), 103, 120, 148, 233, 286, 296 Dickens, Dora, 25, 125 Dickens, Edward, 125 Dickens, Elizabeth, 26, 30–32, 62, 69, 76, 82, 88–96, 101 Dickens, Frances ‘Fanny’, see Burnett, Frances Dickens, Frederick, 70, 78, 112, 121, 140 Dickens, Harriet, 70, 78 Dickens, Henry ‘Harry’, 53, 54, 105, 296, 305, 316 Dickens, John, 24–7, 30, 35, 40, 58, 61–4, 69, 74–7, 92–3, 105, 111 Dickens, Katey, see Perugini, Catherine Dickens, Letitia, see Austin, Letitia Dickens, Mary ‘Mamie’,21–2, 38, 105, 122, 286, 296 Dickens, William (b. 1716), 63 Dickens, William (b. 1783), 62 Dickens’s Dream (Buss), 45–6 Dickensian, The, 273 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 74–6, 78, 79, 84 ‘Dinner at Poplar Walk, A’ (Dickens), 116 Disraeli, Benjamin, 147 divided self, 5, 10, 41–2, 58–9, 155, 232, 252–4, 279, 286, 291 divorce, 135–9 Dixon’s, Hull, 230 Doctors’ Commons, London, 111–12, 119 Dodd, John, 62 Dodd, Ken, 196 Dolby, George, 198, 212–13, 219–22, 224–6, 229, 232, 235–7 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 45, 100, 146, 200–201 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 6, 84, 281 Doughty Street, Holborn, 36, 45, 120, 210, 296 de Douhault, Mme, 137 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 272 Drummond Street, 206 Drury Lane Theatre, Covent Garden, 37, 237 Dublin, Ireland, 23, 310 Dunsterforce (1917–18), 22, 316 Edinburgh, Scotland, 111, 114 Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom, 207 Egg, Augustus, 37 Elgin, Lord, see Bruce, Thomas Eliot, George, 6, 16, 43, 140, 155, 204, 208, 232, 239, 277, 307, 308 Elliot, Frances, 217–18 Elliotson, John, 261, 263–7 Emerson, James, 250 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 220 Enlightenment, 261 epilepsy, 263 Eton College, Berkshire, 148, 296 Euston Station, London, 227–8, 229 Eva Trout (Bowen), 46–7, 303 evangelicalism, 164–5, 166, 167, 168 Evans, Frederick, 129 Evening Chronicle, 114, 167 ‘Evening with Charles Dickens, An’, 317 Every Man in His Humour (Jonson), 37, 206 Eyre, Edward John, 182, 312 Fabian Society, 162 Facts of Mesmerism, The (Townshend), 265 False Self, 95–6, 100 Falstaff Inn, Gad’s Hill, 11, 12 Farewell Tour, 232 Fielding, Henry, 231 Fields, Anne, 229, 243 Fields, James Thomas, 220, 223–4, 229, 243 Firbank, Ronald, 308 First World War (1914–18), 162, 238, 316 Fitzclarences, 139 Fitzherbert, Maria, 139 Flaubert, Gustave, 202 Florence, Italy, 219 Fontane, Theodor, 202 Forster, John, 35, 79 and Autobiographical Fragment (1849), 155–6 death of Charles (1870), 295, 296, 298 and Elizabeth Dickens, 89 and Kate Dickens, 104, 123, 130 Every Man in His Humour performance (1845), 37 Life of Charles Dickens, The, 20, 74, 121, 234 Mystery of Edwin Drood and, 275, 276, 277 and public readings, 201, 207, 209 on Seven Dials, 231 and Warren’s Blacking, 74–5, 78, 79, 82 Will of Charles Dickens, publication of, 20 Fort House, Broadstairs, 46, 125 Fountain Hotel, Canterbury, 247 France, 16–17, 18, 76, 106, 108 Revolution (1789–99), 261, 262, 313 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), 48 Franklin, John, 7 Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 7, 8, 32, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 32 Froude, James Anthony, 121 Frozen Deep, The (Collins), 7, 9, 10, 32, 38, 39, 201, 206, 207, 248, 297, 316 Fry, Elizabeth, 179 Frye, Northrop, 163–4 Furnival’s Inn, London, 111, 120 Gad’s Hill, Kent, 5, 11, 12, 40, 41, 58, 60, 99, 129–30, 132, 195 Christmas games at, 53–4, 60, 73, 74, 99 death of Dickens (1870), 7, 11–16, 40, 48, 49, 73, 101–3, 255, 276, 286 Dickens’s Dream depiction (1875), 45–6 Georgina’s, household management, 11, 105, 125, 134 library, 160–61 Nancy murder enactments, 150, 195, 198, 207, 232–3 Swiss chalet, 102, 256, 276, 282 Garrick Club, London, 132, 237 Garrick, David, 268 Gaslight, 131 General Gordon’s Last Stand (Joy), 300 General Theatrical Fund, 25 Genoa, Italy, 268, 269, 293 George IV, King of the United Kingdom, 78, 80, 139 ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ (Dickens), 94 Gerrard Street, London, 74, 75 Gilbert, William Schwenck, 312 Gladstone, William Ewart, 188, 205, 247 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, 100, 102–6 Glums, The, 304 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 121 gonorrhoea, 145–6, 150, 286 Gordon Riots (1780), 313 Gordon-Lennox, Charles, 5th Duke of Richmond, 156 Grant, Ulysses, 223 Gray’s Inn, London, 36 ‘Great Baby, The’ (Dickens), 166, 167–70 Great Exhibition (1851), 38, 161, 165 Great Expectations (Dickens), 41, 56–7, 141, 191, 195, 248–9, 283 as autobiographical, 195, 248–9, 277 Elizabeth Dickens and, 90–91 Great Expectations (cont.)


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

Greensill had worked for Cameron’s government as an unpaid adviser on trade finance. He’d walked the corridors of Whitehall and around Number 10 Downing Street as if he owned the place. He’d pitched his supply chain finance ideas, some of which even saved the government some money, he said. And in return Lex received a CBE – Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The honour played to Lex’s ego. The certificate hung in the lobby of the Greensill office. A video of the ceremony, Prince Charles bestowing the honour on a beaming Lex, ran on the company website landing page. Many partners and clients of Greensill felt that it all seemed a bit gauche. But the CBE got Lex noticed and bought him some credibility.

The citation also claimed Greensill had ‘a real impact on the UK economy and saved the taxpayer money especially in the Health and Defence areas.’ (Later, a National Audit Office report largely debunked these claims.) Sue Gray, the Cabinet Office’s head of ethics, pushed back, saying Lex should settle for a lesser gong, the Order of the British Empire. In a heated email tug-of-war, Gray wrote that ‘Lex must remain an OBE and while we can put him forward for a CBE it will be outrageous if he gets one’. But the lobbying in Lex’s favour was relentless. Eventually, the honours committee put his name forward in March 2017. A few months later, Lex’s mother flew to the UK.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Although this bleak assessment resembled those made about Germany during and after the Thirty Years War, it formed part of the indictment read out on 20 January 1649 by John Cook, ‘Solicitor-general for the Commonwealth’ of England at the first ‘war crimes’ trial of a sitting Head of State ever held: that of King Charles I. His execution ten days later brought about Britain's only experience thus far of Republican government, its first written Constitution, the first effective political union between all parts of the Atlantic Archipelago, and the foundation of the first British empire. It was, as Christopher Hill observed, ‘the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain’.1 Moreover, in the words of Martyn Bennett, war ‘invaded the fields, the yards and the kitchens of the people. It took the linen off their beds and the mirrors off their walls’. It also killed about 250,000 men and women in England, Scotland and Wales, or 7 per cent of the total population (compared with some 700,000 people, fewer than 2 per cent of the total population, in the First World War and just over 300,000, not quite 1 per cent of the total population, in the Second World War).

The Rump organized a victory parade in London, which included some 4,000 Scots prisoners who promptly went into penal servitude – some to drain the Fens and mine Tyneside coal, the rest to labour in the American colonies – and declared that 3 September should forever be celebrated as a day of thanksgiving. It was just getting started.53 Creating the First British Empire No sooner had Cromwell triumphed at Dunbar than he urged the Rump to seek wider horizons: ‘you shall shine forth to other nations, who shall emulate the glory of such a pattern, and through the power of God turn into the like’. Specifically, Cromwell proposed exporting England's Revolution and the Rump, by now a relatively homogeneous assembly that met almost every weekday to exercise both the executive and legislative functions of government, accepted this new charge with enthusiasm.54 Its first target was North America.

The Rump had thus achieved a great deal in a short time. It had created a Republic; it had defeated the Dutch; it had crafted new administrative and economic structures for its colonies in America; and it had imposed effective English rule on both Scotland and Ireland. In short, it had created the first British empire. Nevertheless, the ‘Commonwealth’ lasted fewer than five years, because the Rump failed to take one final step dear to the New Model Army, whose troops had largely created that empire: it refused to arrange elections for a new Parliament according to a franchise based on personal assets, not just property, with additional representatives for Scotland and Ireland.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

But once a British governor was in place (himself a former privateer) he offered an amnesty to those who were willing to change their ways, and set them against those who were not. Within a few years the pirate plague was at an end.5 II The acquisition of Jamaica by the English is a good example of Sir John Seeley’s dictum that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Yet it was not the first English colony in western Atlantic waters, even if it became one of the most important ones. Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to create a colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina during the 1580s had ended with the mysterious disappearance of its settler population.6 More enduring was the Jacobean colony at Jamestown, founded in 1607 in Virginia, which gave the English their first permanent foothold in North America, over a century after Cabot’s first voyage, but only a year after a legal ban on the right to emigrate was abolished.7 One accidental spin-off from the establishment of Jamestown was the settlement of Bermuda, briefly visited a century earlier by a Portuguese seaman named Bermudez.

Jones, ‘The Matthew of Bristol and the Financiers of John Cabot’s 1497 Voyage to North America’, English Historical Review , vol. 121 (2006), pp. 778–95; Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages , p. 206, nos. 19–20; A. Williams, John Cabot and Newfoundland (St John’s, Nfdl., 1996); J. Butman and S. Targett, New World, Inc.: How England’s Merchants Founded America and Launched the British Empire (London, 2018), pp. 25–7. 46. Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock’, pp. 230–31. 47. Ibid., pp. 224–6, 253–4. 48. N. Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). 49. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages , p. 210, no. 24; Williamson, ibid., p. 41; Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock’, p. 230. 50.

Williams, Arctic Labyrinth , p. 23. 30. Best, True Discourse , in Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest Passage , pp. 23–31; J. McDermott, ed., The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island 1578 (London, 2001); J. Butman and S. Targett, New World, Inc.: How England’s Merchants Founded America and Launched the British Empire (London, 2018), pp. 127–35. 31. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth , pp. 25–9. 32. Documents and narratives in Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents , pp. 303–34; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth , pp. 32–8. 33. Vaughan, Arctic , pp. 65–7; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth , pp. 41–3; Whitfield, New Found Lands , p. 83 (Baffin’s map of Hudson Bay). 34.


pages: 768 words: 252,874

A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

British Empire, classic study, deep learning, liberation theology, mass immigration, place-making, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Unable to take his seat because of the requirement to take a Christian form of oath, Rothschild was finally admitted to the House of Commons in 1858 with permission to take a Jewish form of the oath; in 1885, the year Gaster left Romania, Lionel’s son Nathaniel was the first professing Jew to be raised to the peerage. The rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London, who had been informally recognized as chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi Jews of England since the mid-eighteenth century, was in 1845 officially designated by the state as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire; rabbis appointed by the lay Jewish leadership to this position have retained considerable prestige within the wider English public down to the present. It would be wrong to assume that there was no antisemitism in nineteenth-century England, but there was remarkably little hostility on grounds of his origins to Benjamin Disraeli when he became prime minister despite his open pride in his Jewish background, and the cultural hostility which can be discerned in literary depictions of Jews from Shakespeare onwards, and in such social slights as exclusion from golf clubs or antisemitic jokes, cannot compare to the discrimination being suffered by Jews in much of mainland Europe in this period.8 The most destructive expression of such discrimination was to be suffered by the Jews of Germany in the twentieth century, when resentment at the travails of the nation after war had ended in 1918 and the political chaos of the early 1930s encouraged popular credence of Nazi claims that the Jews were to blame.

All public institutions are required to serve only kosher food, state schools are allotted either to the national secular or the national religious stream, and issues of personal status for Jews, such as marriage and divorce, are subject to the jurisdiction of rabbinic courts recognized by the state. The state recognizes the authority of two chief rabbis, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi, adopting a practice instituted by the British in 1920 during the Mandate period in imitation of the chief rabbinate of the British Empire (although the authority of the Sephardic chief rabbi, known as the Rishon leZion, ‘First in Zion’, went back further into Ottoman times in the nineteenth century). Elected for a term of ten years by a large electoral assembly of rabbis and representatives of the public, the chief rabbis have generally been sympathetic to the essential aims of the state, with some, like Shlomo Goren, who served as chief rabbi from 1972 to 1983, having a decisive impact on religious aspects of state policy.

In Lemberg, in September 1848, an orthodox Jew named Abraham Ber Pilpel killed the Reform rabbi of the town, Abraham Kohn, by slipping into his kitchen and poisoning the family’s soup with arsenic – the first known case since antiquity of religiously motivated murder of one Jew by another. But most opposition – however visceral – took an oral or written form. Some orthodox leaders adopted a more eirenic approach: thus on 27 May 1934 Joseph H. Hertz, chief rabbi of the British Empire, and spokesman for mainstream orthodox Judaism in England, attended the consecration of the new Reform synagogue in London, asserting roundly: ‘I am the last person in the world to minimise the significance of religious difference in Jewry. If I have nevertheless decided to be with you this morning, it is because of my conviction that far more calamitous than religious difference in Jewry is religious indifference in Jewry.’


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Quoted in MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 335. 25. Klassekampen [newspaper], 19 September 1973. CHAPTER 10: BREAKING EMPIRES 1. Quoted in William Roger Louis and Judith Brown, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 331. 2. Quoted in Louis and Brown, Oxford History of the British Empire, 4:350. 3. Quoted in Ebrahim Norouzi, The Mossadegh Project, 11 October 2011, http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/biography/tudeh/. 4. Africa-Asia Speaks from Bandung (Jakarta: Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955), 19–29. 5.

The Eisenhower Administration did not think de Gaulle could afford to break with the West, but worried about the impact its alliance with France had elsewhere. “As long as the Algerian conflict continues,” a National Security Council study concluded in 1959, “France will be a liability in U.S. relations with the Afro-Asian bloc, as well as in the Middle East.”13 The British Conservative government, which had sworn never to abandon the British Empire, ended up giving eight countries independence between 1958 and 1962. In most cases the process was peaceful, even though the new postcolonial governments often found it difficult to sustain their authority. Ghana had been the first African colony to gain independence, in 1957. There, the charismatic nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister, though Nkrumah was keen on getting a more prominent place in the liberation of Africa than just being the head of one small country.

The most important point, though, is that South Korea and Taiwan took the opportunities offered to them and made good use of their unanticipated advantage. The same can be said, to an even higher degree, for Singapore and Hong Kong. Two unloved (and some would say unwashed) cities that had lost their strategic importance with the decline of the British empire saw it revived by the Cold War. Hong Kong became a listening post against China, ruled up to the end of the Cold War by Britain, in part in order to share its information cachet with the Americans. Singapore became, first, an unhappy member of the Malaysian federation, and then, from 1964, when they were thrown out of Malaysia, an independent city-state.


pages: 121 words: 34,193

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Thomas Piketty

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, dematerialisation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, high net worth, income inequality, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, transfer pricing

In 2012 four scholars attempted to create anonymous companies through 3,700 incorporation agents all over the world: in about a quarter of the cases, they were able to do so without providing any identification document whatsoever.8 However, shell corporations are not domiciled in Switzerland, but for the most part in a handful of tax havens where their creation is cheap, rapid, and safe. As for trusts, they are the specialty of the paper-pushers of the British Empire. Today more than 60% of accounts in Switzerland are thus held through the intermediary of shell companies headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, trusts registered in the Cayman Islands, or foundations domiciled in Liechtenstein. An essential point: The Anglo-Saxon trusts do not compete with the opacity services sold by Swiss banks; the two techniques of dissimulation have, on the contrary, become fundamentally intertwined.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

He concluded that the central bank must ultimately create second-layer money in abundance when the system needs it most, underpinning the modus operandi of central banking ever since. The power to create money came with the responsibility, when necessary, to do whatever it took to preserve the currency denomination. The pound sterling spent the nineteenth century as the world reserve currency as other nations procured it as a savings vehicle due to the British Empire’s stature and stability. As the Empire expanded to cover half the Earth’s surface, the Bank of England faced the enormous challenge of maintaining a domestic denomination used by participants around the world. Pound sterling wouldn’t be the last currency to suffer from this conundrum. Across the Atlantic, the next world reserve currency was waiting in the wings.


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

At grass roots level, the common experience of poverty and wretchedness had eroded the strict distinctions between Christians and Muslims. As a result, some Christians adopted, superficially and for practical reasons, Muslim worship. They were referred to as Linobambaki and survive to this day in the North. The British Empire, or the Return of the West In 1878 Britain acquired the lease to Cyprus from Ottoman Turkey. However, its strategic importance as a staging post to India evaporated after the British occupied Egypt with its superior port of Alexandria and the Suez Canal. Plans to improve the piers in Larnaca and Limassol were dropped and private investors found few attractions.


pages: 351 words: 107,966

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There by Sinclair McKay

Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, pneumatic tube, Turing machine

‘So I didn’t need to speak Japanese. It was all figures.’ After the privations of Britain – the constant shortages, the rationing – this exotic new billet proved surprisingly pleasant. The ease with which this girl from Perthshire adapted to her new life tells us something about the last years of the British Empire, when even the remotest corners of the world had a sort of instant familiarity and comfort – as long as one made the correct introductions and got to know the right sort of people. ‘I was there fifteen months,’ says Jean. ‘I left Britain in the middle of the blackout, with all that severe rationing.

These days, some wonder exactly why everything had to remain so hush-hush for so long afterwards. One very simple reason was that the encryption techniques that Bletchley had managed to break into, either via Enigma or ‘Tunny’, were still current in other parts of the world – far-flung corners of the fast-fading British Empire included. Indeed, in its first few years under Communist rule, East Germany was still using the same Enigma; a fact that was exploited not merely by the British, but also by the East Germans’ Russian overlords. The second reason was the Cold War: Churchill’s chilling 1945 speech concerning the Iron Curtain falling across Europe; the understandable paranoia when, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict with Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union went back on all its promises and not only swallowed up Poland but a vast chunk of Germany too, bringing the oppressive forces of Communism jutting into western Europe.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

When New York-based James Marwick met William Peat from London on a liner in 1911, the Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. that emerged could satisfy the accounting needs of corporate clients in a new age of transatlantic communication and trading. Many such companies now had operations elsewhere around the world, too, which also needed auditing. Usually this meant their home auditor teaming up with bean counters who had already made their way to some far-flung part of the British Empire. In India, for example, firms set up by English accountants in the 1870s and 1880s in the capital of the Raj, Calcutta, became business partners of Price Waterhouse and William Peat at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Closer to home, expansion was more direct. The Anglo-American firms were particularly keen to entrench the profession in Germany to serve emerging industrial giants like IG Farben and Daimler-Benz.

., 264 Boston Consulting, 191 Boulton, Matthew, 43 Bower, Marvin, 75 Boy Scouts of America, 149 Bradford & Bingley, 141–2, 149 Brazil, 220, 238, 239, 242–3, 246 Breedon, Richard, 154 Brexit, 195, 203–4, 273 bribery, 211–28, 240 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), 238 Bristol, England, 49 Britannia Building Society, 142 British Academy, 111–12 British Aerospace, 212–14, 219 British Airways, 148 British American Tobacco, 148 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 169, 197, 220 British Empire, 233 British Home Stores (BHS), 260–61 British Virgin Islands, 213, 220, 246 Britnell, Mark, 192–3, 208 Brown, Gordon, 157, 184, 185, 186, 196 Bruges, 31 BT, 149 Bubble Act (1720), 44 Budgetary Control (McKinsey), 74–5 Buffett, Warren, 63, 135 Building Public Trust Awards, 256 Bureau d’Imposition Sociétés VI, 168 Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, US Navy, 77 Burgundy, Duchy of (1032–1477), 31 Bush, George Walker, 98, 114, 145, 253 Bush, Tim, 126, 127, 147 Butler, Stephen, 181 Byrne, Liam, 184 Byzantine Empire (285–1453), 21 Cabinet Office, 200, 201 Cable & Wireless, 215 Caesar, John, 54, 55, 56 Calcutta, India, 233 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 194 Cambridge University, 55, 268 Cameron, David, 192, 195, 203 Campaign Against the Arms Trade, 265 Canada, 246 Canary Wharf, London, 256 Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast, 37 Capita, 201–2 capital, 3 Carell, Steve, 112 Caribbean Football Union, 221, 223, 224, 225 Carnegie, Andrew, 55, 71 Carter, Arthur, 58 Cash Investigation, 168, 171 Caterpillar, 178 Catholic Church, 3, 24–5, 26, 29, 34, 38 Cattles plc., 142 Causey, Rick, 104 Cayman Islands, 104, 164, 214, 239, 246, 247 Celanese, 60 Celler–Kefauver Act (1950), 59, 61 Celluloid Corporation, 60 certified public accountants, 53 CFO, 101, 109 Chaplin, Charlie, 71 Chappell, Dominic, 260 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 31 chartered accountancy, 14, 16, 45, 47–8, 49, 53 Chelsea Flower Show, 200 Chicago School, 84–5, 183 Chicago Sun-Times, 154 Chicago, Illinois, 54, 72–4, 101, 105 child labour, 44 China, 17, 111, 204, 238, 243–5, 251–2, 272, 274 China Integrated Energy, 244 Chirac, Jacques, 127 Christianity, 3, 24–5, 26, 34, 35, 38 Catholicism, 3, 24–5, 26, 29, 34, 38 Protestantism, 3, 42, 43 Christoffels, Jan Ympyn, 36 Churchill, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 41 Circle Health, 194 Citigroup, 149, 258 City of Glasgow Bank, 51, 147 City of London, 46, 49, 156, 249 Civil Rights Movement, 64 Claridges, London, 122 Clarke, Charles, 207 class-action lawsuits, 64–5, 92 Cleese, John, 15 climate change, 18 CloseMore University, 115 Clowes, Peter, 88–90, 91, 136, 209 Co-operative Bank, 142, 149, 150 Cohen, Manuel ‘Manny’, 80 Cold War, 95 Cole, Margaret, 208 Colin, Bernard, 173 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 120–21, 129–30, 133, 136–40, 265 Collier-Keywood, Richard, 182 Collins, Simon, ix, 11, 204, 218, 255–9, 264–7, 276, 277–8, 279 Colombia, 229 colonialism, 37 Comey, James, 161 commercial-mortgage-backed security (CMBS), 121 common accounting standards, 73, 123–5 common law, 39 Companies Act 1862: 51 1900: 52 1929: 58 1948: 66 1989: 93 compulsory rotation, 5 computing, 77–8 Comroad, 240 conflicts of interest, 18, 60, 82, 91, 98, 187, 254–5 Arthur Andersen & Co., 73–4, 78, 105, 277 and Barnier proposals, 254–5 in China, 274 and data, 271 Deloitte, 241 KPMG, 202, 228 Price Waterhouse & Co., 73, 277 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 143 and Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 122 Connolly, John, 89–90, 136, 137, 139, 146, 148, 150, 201 Conservative Party, 95, 185, 186 consultancy, 6, 10–12, 69, 70–83, 97, 114, 183–210, 261–7, 284–5 Continental Baking, 59 Continental Bank, 101 convergence, 123 Cook, Martin, 16 ‘cooking the books’, 36 Cooper, Cynthia, 109 Cooper, William and Arthur, 49 Coopers & Lybrand, 49, 56, 65, 87–8, 95, 185, 216 Coopers Brothers, 87 Copeland, James, 239 Corbyn, Jeremy, 201 Cornwall, England, 43 corruption, 211–32, 240 cost accounting, 42–4, 70–71, 76 cost–profit calculus, 3 Cotswolds, England, 26 Countrywide Financial Corporation, 48, 118, 257 Court of Appeal, 211 credit default swaps (CDSs), 120, 122, 134–5 credit rating agencies, 130, 149 Cruickshank, David, 166 Crystal Park, Luxembourg, 170 Cuba, 239 Cuomo, Andrew, 133 currency swaps, 156–7 cyber-security, 272–3 Daily Mirror, 88 Daniel, Vincent, 112–13 Dante, 33 Dassler, Horst, 220 Datini, Francesco di Marco, 25 Davey, Horace, Baron Davey, 52 Davos, see World Economic Forum Defoe, Daniel, 38 DeLany, Clarence Martin, 72 Delaware, United States, 8, 57, 92, 236, 284 Deloitte, 2, 5, 8, 12–13, 82, 90, 98, 276, 277 and Adelphia, 109 and bankers’ bonuses, 158 and Bankia, 241 in Brazil, 242–3 Brexit memo (2017), 195, 203 charity, 16–17 in China, 244, 251–2 client relationship partners, 12–13 cyber-security, 272 and Deutsche Bank, 158 dot after name, 12 and Duke Energy, 109 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 Global Impact Report, 17 global operations, 236 and Gol, 242–3 government, advice to, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 and GPT, 216 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 and House of Lords committee (2010), 146 integrated reporting, 18 Journey Declaration, 275 and National Health Service (NHS), 193, 194 and Parmalat, 239, 243 and private finance initiative (PFI), 187, 189, 190, 191, 203 and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 145 revolving door, 207, 208 and Royal Ahold, 238–9 and Royal Bank of Scotland, 47, 90, 136–40, 142, 147, 241, 259 and securitization, 121 and Standard Chartered Bank, 230 and tax avoidance, 157, 158, 166, 203 and technology, 271 and thrifts, 87 and World Economic Forum, 18 Deloitte, Haskins & Sells, 89 Deloitte, William Welch, 46–7, 49, 158 Deloitte & Touche, 89, 91, 136–40 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 239 Deltour, Antoine, 166–8, 171, 173–4, 175, 175 Democratic Party, 58, 80, 159 Deng Xiaoping, 243 Department for Business, UK, 201 Department for Exiting the EU, 204 Department of Health, UK, 188, 191, 192 Department of Justice, US, 144, 161, 223 deregulation, 84, 85, 95, 112, 163, 273–4 derivatives, 117, 119–23, 125, 129–31, 133–40, 148, 265 Desmond, Dermot, 163 Deutsche Bank, 158, 166, 258 Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft, 235 Devon, England, 73 Dickinson, Arthur, 55, 62, 73, 82 DiPiazza, Sam, 242 dirty pooling, 63 discrezione, 26, 29 Disney, 171 Dissenters, 43 dividends, 31, 39, 45 Donovan, John, 116–17 Doty, James, 260 ‘Double Irish’ scheme, 164 double-entry bookkeeping, 3–4, 6, 18, 22–41, 42–4, 96 Bank of England, 38 and Catholicism, 24–5, 26, 29, 34 Christoffels, 36 East India Company, 37 Goethe, 235 Japan, 235 Medicis, 26–32, 36 Pacioli, 32–6, 100, 124 and Protestantism, 42 Royal African Company, 37 South Sea Company, 39–41, 42 Washington, 53 Watt, 42–3, 44 Wedgwood, 43, 44 Dow Jones, 5, 95 Drucker, Jesse, 164, 165 drug trafficking, 229, 231 Dublin, Ireland, 163 Duke Energy, 109 Duncan, David, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 108 Duranton International Ltd, 214 EADS, 216 East India Company, 37 Economist, The, 67, 238 EDF (Électricité de France), 205 Edinburgh, Scotland, 54 Edinburgh Society of Accountants, 47 Edison, Thomas, 55 Edward IV, king of England, 30 Edward VII, king of the United Kingdom, 68 Egypt, 21 Einzelunterschrift, 221 Eisenhower, Dwight, 76 Eisman, Steve, 112 Electronic Data Systems, 82 Elizabeth II, queen of the United Kingdom, 111–12 Elkind, Peter, 101 Ellis, Kevin, 256, 258 Enfield rifles, 71 England Bank of England, 38 East India Company, 37 Royal African Company, 37 slave trade, 37 Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), 30 woollen industry, 26, 30 see also United Kingdom Ennis, Jessica, 196 Enron, 16, 40, 99–108, 110, 130, 186, 190, 209, 221, 240, 261, 264 and Arthur Andersen & Co., 4, 7, 11, 74, 102–8, 113, 117 and consultancy arms, sale of, 262 and mark-to-market, 99–102, 113 and regulation, 6, 10, 122, 162, 222, 274, 279 Ernst & Ernst, 63, 71, 87 Ernst & Whinney, 86, 87 Ernst & Young, 2, 56, 91, 97, 132–3, 148–9 alumni system, 17 and Anglo Irish Bank, 144 Arthur Andersen structured finance purchase (2002), 121 ‘Building a Better Working World’, 12 and Civil Service Awards, 200 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 global operations, 236 government, advice to, 180, 187, 199, 202 and HealthSouth, 109 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 integrated reporting, 18 in Japan, 240–41 and Lehman Brothers, 12, 13, 132–3, 145, 148–9 and limited liability partnerships, 94, 95 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 86–7 mark-to-model, 124 Panama Papers scandal (2016), 247 and private finance initiative (PFI), 187 and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144–5 ‘Quality in Everything We Do’, 12 revolving door, 206, 207, 208 and securitization, 121 and Sino-Forest, 244 Tate sponsorship, 16 and tax avoidance, 7, 156–7, 162, 180, 182, 246, 247 tax policy development team, 180, 199 thought leadership, 12 and VAT avoidance, 7 and Warner, 224 Weinberger’s leadership, 17–18 and World Economic Forum, 17 European Central Bank, 10 European Commission, 170, 253–5, 268, 280 European Union (EU), 168, 170, 203, 253–5 eurozone, 273 Evans, Jonathan, 207 Evening Standard, 256 Everson, Mark, 159 executive pay, 76 ‘expectations gap’, 65, 257 ‘Eye of the Tiger’ (Survivor), 103 Facebook, 164 fair value, 123–5, 126 Fairhead, Rona, 230 Faisaliah Tower, Riyadh, 217 Falcon 900 jets, 100–101 Farah, Mohamed ‘Mo’, 196 Farrar, Michael, 208 Fastow, Andrew, 101–3, 104–5, 108, 109 Federal National Mortgage Association (‘Fannie Mae’), 118–19, 145, 257 Federal Reserve, 122, 133 Federal Trade Commission, 79 Fiat, 170 Fibonacci, Leonardo, 21–2, 32 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), 219–28 Fife, Scotland, 48 Financial Conduct Authority, 140, 149, 281 financial crisis (2007–8), x, 4, 7, 10, 13–14, 18, 111–50, 210, 253, 256–9, 265 American International Group bailout, 133–5, 144, 145, 148 Anglo Irish Bank bailout, 144 Bear Stearns bailout, 139, 145 and China, 111 Fannie Mae crisis, 118–19, 145, 257 HBOS bailout, x, 140–41, 142–3, 149, 257 Lehman Brothers collapse, 12, 13, 92, 131–3, 138, 144, 145, 148–9 and IAS39 rules, 123–5, 126, 127, 147 and mark-to-market, 129–31 New Century Financial Corporation collapse, 115–18, 257 Northern Rock collapse, 125–9, 142–3, 148 Royal Bank of Scotland bailout, 47, 136–40, 142, 241 and securitization, 119–23, 129–31, 133–40, 265 and subprime mortgages, x, 10, 36, 48, 111–22, 126, 130, 133, 136, 142, 274 Washington Mutual collapse, 145 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 134, 135, 144, 145 Financial Reporting Council, 138, 142, 144, 149, 182, 209–10, 213–14, 259, 261 Financial Services Authority, 127, 128, 137, 138, 140 Financial Times, 17, 94, 169, 275 Finland, 246 First World War (1914–18), 71 Flint, Douglas, 229 FLIP (Foreign Leveraged Investment Program), 159, 162, 181 Florence, Republic of (1115–1532), 16, 21, 25, 26–32 Flynn, Timothy, 149 Ford, 71, 181 Ford, Henry, 71 Fortune, 62 fossil fuels, 18 Foul!


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Not all countries were on the standard; some mixed gold and silver together. The system developed in a higgledy-piggledy fashion with different countries adopting the metal at different times; it was not set up by some eighteenth-century equivalent of the United Nations. Indeed, you could argue that, like the British Empire, the gold standard was a result of a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’. In Britain, the system came about thanks to a decision by Sir Isaac Newton who, as master of the Royal Mint, was in charge of the nation’s currency. Both gold and silver were in circulation at the time and a conversion rate had to be set between the two.

On top of the economic arguments, Churchill also seems to have been swayed by a mixture of national pride and a need to protect the status of Britain as a global financial centre. In a Parliamentary speech in May 1925, he declared: If the English pound is not to be the standard which everyone knows and can trust, and which everyone in every country understands and can rely on, the business not only of the British Empire, but of Europe as well, might have to be transacted in dollars instead of pounds sterling. I think that would be a great misfortune. What were the arguments against a move? First, a rising currency makes the nation’s goods more expensive for foreigners. Exporters may respond by cutting their costs (employee wages), a process that can easily lead to a deflationary contraction in demand.


pages: 366 words: 107,145

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot. Cross the threshold suddenly and emphatically and they get a lot hot. And the elder gods wake up, smell the buffet, and prepare to tuck in. Our organization was formed as the British Empire's occult countermeasures organization during the struggle against Nazism, but it has continued to this day, serving a similar purpose: to protect the nation from an entire litany of lethal metanatural threats, culminating in the goal of surviving CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The UK's in a good position: a developed country, overwhelmingly urban (meaning its inhabitants are located in compact, defensible cities) with nearly neutral population size (no hot spots), and the world's most sophisticated surveillance systems.

George (honors service overseas or in connection with foreign or Commonwealth affairs) [UK] KGB Committee for State Security (renamed FSB in 1991) [Russia] THE LAUNDRY Formerly SOE Q Department (spun off as a separate organization in 1945) [UK] MI5 National Security Service (also known as DI5) [UK] MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (also known as SIS, DI6) [UK] NEST Nuclear Emergency Support Team [US] NKVD Historical predecessor organization to KGB (renamed in 1947) [USSR/Russia] NSA National Security Agency (equivalent to GCHQ) [US] OBE Order of the British Empire (awarded mainly to civilians and service personnel for public service or other distinctions) [UK] OCCULUS Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations [UK/NATO] ONI Office of Naval Intelligence [US] OSA Official Secrets Act (law governing official secrets) [UK] OSS Office of Strategic Services (disbanded in 1945/remodeled as CIA) [US] Q DIVISION Division within the Laundry associated with R&D [UK] QINETIQ See DERA [UK] RIPA Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (law governing communications interception) [UK] SAS Special Air Service (British Army special forces) [UK] SBS Special Boat Service (Royal Marines special forces) [UK] SIS See MI6 [UK] SOE Special Operations Executive (equivalent to OSS, officially disbanded in 1945; see also the Laundry) [UK] TLA Three Letter Acronym [All]


pages: 376 words: 110,321

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, British Empire, cotton gin, Easter island, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Motors Futurama, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kitchen Debate, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, refrigerator car, scientific management, sexual politics, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E

This worked out as 277.42 cubic inches, which was close to the old “ale gallon.” Once the new gallon had been established, it was easy to readjust the pint, quart, and bushel measures to fit. The adage now went like this:A pint’s a pound the world round. Except in Britain where A pint of water’s a pound and a quarter. For Britain, read the British Empire. These new imperial measures were confidently promulgated wherever the British ruled. A pint of maple syrup in Colonial Canada was the same volume as a pint of whiskey in Colonial India. Did this spell an end to confusion in measuring? Not at all. In 1836, the US Congress finally established American uniform standards and decided to take the opposite route to Britain.

Today, cans are more significant as packaging for drinks (fizzy sodas, beer) than food: world sales of processed food in cans are around 75 billion units a year, as against 320 billion units for canned drinks. In the end, the technology that most improved the diet of American families was not canning but refrigeration, which really did give people access to “a kitchen garden where all good things grow.” In 1833, a surprising consignment arrived in Calcutta, then the center of the British Empire in India. It was forty tons of pure crystalline ice, which had come all the way from Boston on the East Coast of the United States, a journey of 16,000 miles, shipped by Frederick Tudor, an ice entrepreneur. The Boston-to-Calcutta ice trade was a sign of how America was turning ice into profit.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

European powers competed for parts of the African continent in the ‘scramble for Africa’, while many Asian countries were also taken as colonies (Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar by Britain; Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos by France). The British Empire expanded enormously, backed up by its industrial might, leading to the famous saying: ‘The sun never sets on the British Empire.’ Countries like Germany, Belgium, the US and Japan, which had not so far engaged in much colonialism, also joined in.13 Not for nothing is this period also known as the ‘Age of Imperialism’. The domestic front also saw a marked increase, not a decrease, in government intervention in the core capitalist countries.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Because the polar area diagram plots deaths in proportion to the area of a wedge, rather than the height of a bar, it also slightly obscures just how awful January and February 1855 were, instead lumping them together with the grim bulk of “before the sanitary commission.” Nightingale wanted to make the importance of improved sanitation leap off the page, convincing the viewer that the Scutari experience could be repeated in hospitals, barracks, and even private dwellings across the British Empire. She created the powerful “before and after” structure of the diagram to strengthen that argument. Is this dazzle camouflage? Perhaps. I’m inclined to say it isn’t, if only because the data are rock solid and there in plain sight. Unlike Debtris, it doesn’t rely on patchy statistics and unhelpful comparisons; unlike the subway-inequality diagram, it isn’t all sizzle and no steak.

As a schoolboy Keynes was educated at Eton College—just like Britain’s first prime minister, and nineteen others since. Like his father, he became a senior academic: a fellow of King’s College, the most spectacular of all the Cambridge colleges. His job during the First World War was managing both debt and currency on behalf of the British Empire; he’d barely turned thirty. He knew everyone. He whispered in the ear of prime ministers. He had the inside track on whatever was going on in the British economy—the Bank of England would even call him to give him advance notice of interest rate movements. But this child of the British establishment was a very different person from his American counterpart.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

CITY IN ACTION TODAY There are now thirteen jurisdictions across the globe that do not have a general corporate income tax. Eight of them—Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Turks and Caicos—are British territories or Crown dependencies. “They’re all little outposts of the British Empire that have managed to sort of find a way to give wealthy people advantages and wealthy companies advantages in their battle to reduce their tax burden,” said Jonathan Luff, the former top aide to UK prime minister David Cameron. These jurisdictions have their own legislatures, but their chief executive is appointed by the British monarch, and their top court is the Privy Council, a group of British politicians primarily responsible for advising the Crown.

See also artificial intelligence (AI) Bahamas Baidu Baltimore Teachers Union Bank of England Bank Sepah International Banting, Frederick Barclays bank Bargaining for the Common Good base erosion Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project (BEPS 2.0) beer companies Beijing Kunlun Tech Belomorkanal Belt and Road Initiative benefit corporations (“B Corps”) Benioff, Marc Bermuda Best, Charles Bezos, Jeff Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Billboard Artist 100 chart biotechnology BlackRock Blair, Tony Blankfein, Lloyd BMW Boeing Bork, Robert Boyd, Cindy Scherer Boyd, Jesy Brandeis, Louis Bremmer, Ian British East India Company British Empire. See also United Kingdom British Labour Party British Parliament British South Africa Company British Virgin Islands Brown, Gordon BTS Buddhist temples Budweiser Burundi businesses, power of. See also corporate power Business Roundtable Butz, Earl California California State University San Marcos Calvin Klein Cambridge University Cameron, David Cameroon campaign finance laws Canada capital, nonproductive uses of capitalism.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He pioneered key concepts that dominate economic science and policymaking to this day such as national income (a forerunner to GDP) and annual economic growth and became himself one of the world's most prominent economists along the way. The economic development curve of the United States in those years was a turbulent one. In the 1920s, the country was on an economic high; it came out of the First World War swinging. The US emerged as a political and economic power and put its foot next to that of an already enfeebled British Empire. Britain had dominated the world during the First Industrial Revolution, ruling a third of the world until 1914. America instead became a leader of the Second Industrial Revolution, which really took off after World War I. US manufacturers introduced goods such as the car and the radio to the country's huge domestic market, selling them to a public hungry for modern goods.

First Wave of Globalization (19th Century–1914) This started to change with the first wave of globalization, which occurred over the century, roughly ending in 1914. By the end of the 18th century, Great Britain had started to dominate the world both geographically, through the establishment of the British Empire, and technologically, with innovations such as the steam engine, the industrial weaving machine, and more. It was the era of the First Industrial Revolution. Britain in particular positioned itself as a fantastic twin engine of global trade. On the one hand, steamships and trains could transport goods over thousands of miles, both within countries and across countries.


How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie

Albert Einstein, British Empire, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Ida Tarbell, Mahatma Gandhi, scientific management

The twenty-one words that this young medical student read in 1871 helped him to become the most famous physician of his generation. He organized the world famous Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford the highest honor that can be bestowed upon any medical man in the British Empire. He was knighted by the King of England. When he died, two huge volumes containing 1,466 pages were required to tell the story of his life. His name was Sir William Osier. Here are the twenty-one words that he read in the spring of 1871, twenty-one words from Thomas Carlyle that helped him lead a life free from worry: "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day." During World War II, Winston Churchill, in his late sixties and early seventies, was able to work sixteen hours a day, year after year, directing the war efforts of the British Empire. A phenomenal record. His secret? He worked in bed each morning until eleven o'clock, reading papers, dictating orders, making telephone calls, and holding important conferences. After lunch he went to bed once more and slept for an hour. In the evening he went to bed once more and slept for two hours before having dinner at eight.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He pioneered key concepts that dominate economic science and policymaking to this day such as national income (a forerunner to GDP) and annual economic growth and became himself one of the world's most prominent economists along the way. The economic development curve of the United States in those years was a turbulent one. In the 1920s, the country was on an economic high; it came out of the First World War swinging. The US emerged as a political and economic power and put its foot next to that of an already enfeebled British Empire. Britain had dominated the world during the First Industrial Revolution, ruling a third of the world until 1914. America instead became a leader of the Second Industrial Revolution, which really took off after World War I. US manufacturers introduced goods such as the car and the radio to the country's huge domestic market, selling them to a public hungry for modern goods.

First Wave of Globalization (19th Century–1914) This started to change with the first wave of globalization, which occurred over the century, roughly ending in 1914. By the end of the 18th century, Great Britain had started to dominate the world both geographically, through the establishment of the British Empire, and technologically, with innovations such as the steam engine, the industrial weaving machine, and more. It was the era of the First Industrial Revolution. Britain in particular positioned itself as a fantastic twin engine of global trade. On the one hand, steamships and trains could transport goods over thousands of miles, both within countries and across countries.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

In spite of the indifferent deals, Arif made an outsized impact in Dubai with public relations blitzes and a grand annual ball. “It all looked very, very glamorous,” one guest recalled. In the summer of 1998, Arif visited London and met up with Imtiaz, who had by then also left Olayan. Imtiaz told him about an exciting opportunity. He said that Inchcape, a company founded in the days of the British Empire to ship goods between London and India, wanted to sell its Middle Eastern grocery stores and liquor chains to focus on its main business distributing cars. Inchcape’s grocery and liquor business was profitable and had annual sales of more than $600 million but potential bidders including Olayan had ruled out making an offer because of a problem.

When he wasn’t hunting for deals, Khawar helped out at a charity founded by Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne. The charity ran mentoring programs for young people in poor communities like the one Khawar grew up in. Khawar’s charitable work earned him membership of the Order of the British Empire, a coveted award from Queen Elizabeth II. Khawar’s rise to the heights of the British establishment came to a halt with a poor healthcare investment at Apax that lost millions of dollars. He left Apax and headed to Moscow, where he got a job at a private healthcare company owned by a Russian oligarch who later faced money-laundering charges.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

It’s dynamic, it’s changing, and it’s incredible. “Shit runs deep here. Meaning—best scientists can tell—it all started for us in this neighborhood: tribes of hunter-gatherers, the Bantu and Nilotic peoples, Arab and Persian traders, the Portuguese merchants, the Omani, all left their mark. But the British Empire’s hold, from 1895 to 1964, is perhaps most deeply felt. “The British system of education, governance, justice, along with, to a certain extent, its values, were imposed on a native people, and laid, for better and worse, much of the foundation for modern Kenya. It did abolish slavery, for instance.

From Tobago’s airport, official taxis (those whose license plates begin with an H) can take you to your hotel or other destination, for anywhere from TT$34 to $475/US$5–$70, plus a 10 to 15 percent tip, depending on your destination. EATING IN TRINIDAD: THE DOUBLES * * * “A half century after Trinidad became independent of the British Empire, there are surprisingly few architectural remnants. But the face of the country—and its population—were forever changed when slavery ended in 1834, and Great Britain found itself in need of cheap—if not free—labor to work the plantations. They found it in East India. Between the end of outright slavery and the beginning of World War I, 150,000 indentured servants were brought here from India.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

“The Criminal Investigation | MH17 Incident,” Government of the Netherlands, accessed November 28, 2021, www.government.nl/topics/mh17-incident/achieving-justice/the-criminal-investigation. 52. “About—Bellingcat,” Bellingcat, accessed November 28, 2021, www.bellingcat.com/about. 53. Cahal Milmo, “Revealed: How British Empire’s Dirty Secrets Went up in Smoke in the Colonies,” Independent, November 29, 2013, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-how-british-empire-s-dirty-secrets-went-smoke-colnies-8971217.html; Jonathan Levinson, Conrad Wilson, James Doubek, and Suzanne Nuyen, “Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab People in Portland, DHS Confirms,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, July 17, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland. 54.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

We know today that the discovery of this setup owes a great deal to the interception of communications, uncommon at the time, by the British, who were already experts in the field. The organization responsible for wiretapping, the Government Communications and Cypher School (GC&CS), had set up wiretapping stations in every large garrison town across the British Empire from 1920. In China, these stations were located in Hong Kong and Shanghai.12 The humiliation suffered by Moscow only increased when Dai Li, the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s intelligence service, had the documents translated and published as a book of selected extracts from the communications of the Soviet spies.13 A report sent to Paris by the French intelligence service, which also consulted the documents, summarized the wealth of information that had been seized, and the naivety of the Soviet cadres who had neither encrypted nor destroyed the files after they had finished with them: Document numbers 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 deal with Soviet espionage and counterintelligence.

If this surveillance of the masses is surprising to readers, it is important to remember that the British system of administration in Hong Kong bore no relation to the democratic system of government in the United Kingdom itself. Along with Northern Ireland, Hong Kong was one of Britain’s last foreign settlements, and the British Empire had never disseminated civil liberties in these spheres of influence—although it did leave behind a legal and constitutional system that would obstruct Beijing after the handover in 1997. In the 1970s and 1980s, a network for monitoring and spying on the civilian population had been set up called the Local Intelligence Committee.

This small town, where tourists are as likely to encounter spy engineers as Aboriginal people, has a strong tradition of both communication and interception. The topography of the site lends itself to it. In 1870 Charles Todd, who gave his name to the Todd River, founded a telegraphic station that connected Adelaide on the south coast to Darwin on the north coast, and well beyond—to the rest of the British Empire, including Hong Kong and the British settlements in Tianjin and Shanghai.2 In the Victorian era, Chinese gold diggers from Fujian arrived here, as indicated by the name Chinaman’s Creek, located on the road leaving Alice Springs in the direction of the ASD–NSA secret station. Today’s subjects of ASIO surveillance are more recent arrivals: the dynamic Chinese immigrant community assumed to harbour some “deep-water fish”, Guoanbu secret agents on a mission to recruit Chinese-origin engineers and linguists, baiting them with reminders that they are part of the large Chinese diaspora, the Huaqiao.


The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, British Empire, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, the market place, upwardly mobile

But it was enough to free him from economic cares. Life opened up for him. Now, more decisively than before, he left the Kumbakonam of his youth behind and, from early 1911 and for the next three years, stepped into the wider world of South India’s capital, Madras. • • • It was the fifth-largest city in the British Empire and, after Calcutta and Bombay, third-largest on the subcontinent. Some traced its name to the legend of a fisherman named Madarasen; others to a corruption of Mandarajya, meaning realm of the stupid, or even Madre de Dios, Portuguese for mother of God. The city itself, however, was an invention of British colonial policy.

If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers, and artists, helping to build a new India and a new world? R. Viswanathan, a later headmaster of Ramanujan’s alma mater, Town High School in Kumbakonam, would insist that, given the resources, he could turn out many Ramanujans. Taken literally, he was quite wrong; all the wealth of the British Empire, all the rich intellectual tradition of Europe, all the freedom and opportunity of America, have made for but a handful of Ramanujans through the centuries. Still, Viswanathan had expressed a larger truth—that India held vast stores of talent and ability denied the means to develop fully. Ramanujan represented his country’s intellectual and spiritual strengths—but also its untapped potential

Bhargava, Who’s Who in India; Who’s Who in Madras, 1934. Ramachandra Rao meeting. P. K. Srinivasan, 86; Ramachandra Rao; S. R. Ranganathan, 24, 74; Family Record; Seshu Iyer, 83. Neville, “The Late” (Nature 106): 66. he probably didn’t “work it out.” Richard Askey supplied this insight. Fermat’s leisure. Bell, 59. fifth-largest city in the British Empire. After London, Calcutta, Bombay, and Liverpool. Lewandowski, 51. Origins of name. Thurston, 2; Krishnaswami Nayadu, 1. History of Madras. See Slater, Southern India; Urwick; Steevens; Lewandowski; Srinivasachari; Lanchester. more than fifty feet above sea level. Lanchester, 90. “hutments.”


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

In Paris, Japan had pushed for the inclusion of a statement of racial equality in the League covenant, but, as the historian John Cooper notes, “Wilson had bowed to his own country’s and British white supremacist sentiments and vetoed the proposal.”3 Fearing that this decision might prompt Japan to refuse to join the League altogether, Wilson, who was still recovering from the flu, caved to Tokyo’s demand to take possession of Shandong.4 But given his stated opposition to imperialism and his defense of self-determination, the move opened the president up to scathing charges of hypocrisy at home. A second criticism centered on the fact that the League covenant allowed for separate votes for five of Britain’s dominions (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa), which gave the British Empire six votes in the League Assembly (although not in the League’s decision-making body, the Council). The strongest reservation, however, concerned the collective security obligations under Article X of the League covenant. These committed the United States, like all other members, to preserve the territorial independence and political autonomy of other countries, including through the possible use of military force.

For imperial powers, colonial possessions increasingly went from assets to liabilities. In the 1920s and 1930s, France faced rising opposition, unrest, and nationalist movements in Algeria, French Indochina, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia. Great Britain confronted agitation for independence in places as diverse as Egypt, Iraq, Ireland, and India.39 Across the British Empire, the pandemic played an important, albeit often ignored, role in highlighting the fundamental inequalities intrinsic to imperial rule. In Egypt, then a British protectorate, the death rate from influenza was twice as high as it was in Great Britain itself. As many as 170,000 Egyptians (more than 1 percent of the population) may have died, with most of those deaths occurring in the last two months of 1918.

-led international order and the rise of something new. This had already been under way before 2020, he acknowledged, but COVID-19 was a catalyst. “The pandemic is as bad as a world war,” he wrote. He went on to say: The world during and after the pandemic is like the world after WWI. At the time, the British Empire no longer had the means to fulfill its ambitions, and the sun which had once “never set” on the empire was … rapidly disappearing beyond the horizon.… In the current pandemic, Trump’s America not only has not assumed its world leadership responsibility, selfishly hiding its head in the sand, but in addition, because of policy failures, it has become a major disaster center of the world pandemic.… This is a blow to America’s soft and hard power, and America’s international influence has suffered a serious decline.98 From Beijing’s perspective, what started out as a potentially existential challenge to the regime was quickly turning into an opportunity to consolidate and accelerate China’s rise.


pages: 1,335 words: 336,772

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bolshevik threat, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, death from overwork, Dutch auction, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, interest rate swap, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, paper trading, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the payments system, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War, young professional

“It was definitely a hands-off situation,” noted Tim Collins, a later Morgan Grenfell chairman.15 There remained a close, familial feeling between 23 Wall and 23 Great Winchester, and the London Times called it only a “slight technical alteration.”16 Yet for a firm that had always been subordinate to New York, the change represented a new level of British autonomy. It also occurred at a time when the City could no longer float huge foreign loans, as it had before the war, except for the British Empire. Morgan Grenfell and London’s other merchant banks concentrated instead upon securities and merger work for domestic companies. In August 1935, Tom Lamont gathered the J. P. Morgan chieftains at his island farm off the Maine coast. The group included Morgan partners Leffingwell, Whitney, S. Parker Gilbert, and Harold Stanley, and Lansing Reed of Davis, Polk, and Wardwell.

On the eve of World War II, Lamont’s friendship with the Astors took on important political dimensions. Cliveden, the Astor estate on the Thames, had become a gathering place for politicians and intellectuals who favored appeasement of the Nazis. They thought England could coexist with Hitler, feared a war would shatter the British Empire, and supported the appeasement policies of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. In time, the name Cliveden became synonymous with a phobic hatred of Russia, a benign or even admiring view of Fascist intentions, and a rejection of Churchill’s warnings about German rearmament. Like his Cliveden friends, Lamont believed that Europe’s dictators could be held at bay through diplomacy and that war could be avoided.

In a new spirit of forgiveness, Lamont took to citing English, Scottish, and Irish blood in American veins as the country’s real source of strength. Vindictive toward Britain two years before, Russell Leffingwell said warmly, “To my mind the only thing worth fighting for is to save England and the British Empire. For that I would shed every drop of blood in my own veins, and let many millions of Americans shed theirs too.”33 J. P. Morgan and Company resumed its customary role of defending the mother country. When Life magazine published an open letter saying the war shouldn’t be fought so Britain could keep her empire, Lamont sparred with Henry Luce.


I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, dematerialisation, glass ceiling, public intellectual, stem cell, the scientific method, working poor

I mean, Africa's perfect, especially when you think about Cecil Rhodes's idea when he set up the Rhodes scholarships. The idea was to bring bright young American barbarians over to England and make them citizens of the world. He wanted to lift them up to a higher plane and extend the reach of the British Empire with its American cousins in tow. The British Empire is gone, but a Rhodes still lifts you to a higher plane. You're not doomed to being some obscure college teacher. You become a public intellectual. Everybody talks about your ideas." Charlotte said, "There are only thirty-two Rhodes scholarships?" Adam nodded yes. "Well, golly, that's not very many.

There's also the Marshall Fellowships, but they're the last resort. I mean that's bottom-fishing. During the cold war a bad-ass couldn't've accepted a Fulbright or a Marshall, because they're government programs, and that would've made you look like a tool of imperialism. A Rhodes was okay because there was no British Empire left, and you couldn't be accused of being a tool of something that wasn't there anymore. Today the only empire is the American empire, and it's omnipotent, and so if you don't get a Rhodes you have to make use of it, the new empire. It's okay as long as you're using it for the sake of your own goals and not theirs."

It was a time in which modern industry was developing and changing the face of England. Also technology, mechanical invention, modern medicine, and the first widespread distribution of printed materials-books, magazines, newspapers. On top of everything else, and on every Englishman's mind, was the spread all over the world of the British Empire. Darwin, you tell us, was swept up in this general belief in progress, and long before he went to the Galapagos he intended to show that all animals, all species, had progressed from a single cell"-Mr. Starling looked up, smiling-"or those four or five cells in our famous warm pool." He returned to her paper.


pages: 158 words: 35,552

The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich

British Empire, place-making, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live

Sometimes she sleeps for over twelve hours.” A long time passed in silence. I waited patiently for the detective to arrive at what appeared to me to be an obvious conclusion. But it was as if the gears of his deductive wheels were jammed. “Perhaps someone is trying to dodge the fabric tariff by smuggling garments into the British Empire,” he said. “And they are sneaking them into Alyssa’s bag.” “I’m not sure that follows,” I said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve found male apparel in her bag,” he continued. “I’ve found socks, too. Big ones. Like the kind of socks a big man would wear. A big, athletic man.” “Like a trainer?”


pages: 128 words: 38,963

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clockwork universe, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius

Then suddenly, in the wake of Harrison’s success with H-4, legions of watchmakers took up the special calling of marine timekeeping. It became a boom industry in a maritime nation. Indeed, some modern horologists claim that Harrison’s work facilitated England’s mastery over the oceans, and thereby led to the creation of the British Empire—for it was by dint of the chronometer that Britannia ruled the waves. In Paris, the great clockmakers Pierre Le Roy and Ferdinand Berthoud advanced their montres marines and horloges marines to perfection, but neither of these two archrivals ever produced a timekeeper design that could be reproduced quickly and cheaply.


pages: 124 words: 38,034

Journey to Crossrail by Stephen Halliday

active transport: walking or cycling, Ada Lovelace, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, wikimedia commons

Their bone skates were discovered during Crossrail work. (Wellcome Images) According to legend, Boudicca is buried beneath platform 10 of King’s Cross station, close to the Harry Potter exhibit at that London terminus. Boudicca was a favourite of the Victorians who saw her defiance of the mighty Roman Empire as foreshadowing the much greater British Empire over which Victoria reigned. The statue of Boudicca and her daughters was erected on Westminster Bridge in 1902 as a tribute to Victoria, shortly after her death the previous year. The discovery that the skulls were Roman victims of Boudicca’s vengeance would have been, perhaps, a suitable salute to the East Anglian Queen by the heroic engineers of Crossrail.


pages: 124 words: 36,360

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

He organized a youth parliament at Utrecht University and followed up by starting the General Organization of Dutch Soldiers during his mandatory military service. Since then, he has been a creature of the European telecom elite, working with ITT Corporation, Dutch telecom’s PTT, and England’s BT. He is a regular attendee of the Davos World Economic Forum and has been made a Dutch Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau, an honorary Knight of the British Empire (KBE), and a French Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. Verwaayen is, in fact, annoyingly worthy. The two of us fall into a light discussion of politics’ changing tone in the Internet era. Verwaayen’s thinking is precise and aphoristic: “Never have two countries with McDonald’s restaurants ever been at war with each other.


pages: 396 words: 117,897

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

NAHB (National Association of Home Builders) (2010) Smaller homes to remain popular even after recession's end, http://www.nahb.org/news_details.aspx?newsID=11485&fromGSA=1 (accessed 19 June 2013). NAS (National Academy of Sciences) (1969) Resources and Man, W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA. National Archives (2012) British Empire: Living in the British Empire—India, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/empire/pdf/g2cs4s2.pdf (accessed 23 May 2013). NBSC (National Bureau of Statistics of China) (2013) Statistical Data, http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/ (accessed 23 May 2013). Ndoro, W. (1997) The Great Zimbabwe. Scientific American, 277: 94–99.


pages: 419 words: 118,414

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack by Steve Twomey

British Empire, index card, Internet Archive, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, South China Sea

War in the Pacific would not only force the navy to strip ships from the Atlantic and raise the risks to crucial convoys of materials but also probably sever Britain’s other essential lines of supply, those to the Far East. “Dear Joe,” Roosevelt replied in January to Grew’s “Dear Frank” letter of the previous December. So far, the president wrote, the English had avoided Nazi conquest “because as the heart and the nerve center of the British Empire, they have been able to draw upon vast resources for their sustenance.” Those resources would be far, far less vast if Japanese armies invaded and occupied Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and India. But at the White House on Friday before the president’s departure for Georgia, the six men had agreed that the clock was going to run out, no matter how much they wished otherwise.

The visit lasted only a few days. While doing postgraduate work at the Naval War College in 1926, Kimmel had written a paper about Far East issues, dispensing sympathetic bromides about the Japanese. “The United States has more contacts with Japan than any other power in the world save perhaps the British Empire,” his thesis said, “and it behooves us to understand the aims and aspirations of this nation.” If Kimmel had acquired any behooved understanding, it had come mostly long distance, while living and working among Americans too often given to dismissing the capabilities of the Japanese. He had had almost no contact with their contemporary leaders.


pages: 383 words: 118,458

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

Anton Chekhov, British Empire, drop ship, Ford Model T, Khyber Pass, means of production, Occam's razor, South China Sea, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, working poor

The hurrying daytime crowds might have frightened me more if they had been idly prowling, but in their mass there was no sense of aimlessness. The direction of those speeding white shirts gave to these thousands of marchers the aspect of a dignified parade of clerks and their wives and cattle, preparing to riot according to some long-held custom, among the most distinguished architecture the British Empire produced (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul's Cathedral). Bombay fulfils the big-city requirements of age, depth, and frenzy, inspiring a chauvinism in its inhabitants, a threadbare metropolitan hauteur rivalled only by Calcutta.

Mr Bernard brought me to the room, and then got a shovelful of hot coals and started a fire in my fireplace, talking the whole time about Candacraig. The name was Scottish, the place was really a "chummery" for unmarried officers of the Bombay-Burma Trading Company, to keep the lads out of trouble in the hot season after months in remote timber estates: here they could take cold showers and play rugby, cricket, and polo. The British Empire operated on the theory that high altitudes improved morals. Mr Bernard went on talking. The rain hit the windows and I could hear it sweeping across the roof. But the fire was burning bright, and I was in an easy chair, toasting my feet, puffing on my pipe, opening my copy of Browning. 'Would you like a hot bath?'


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The extensive migrations of labour that have occurred both historically and in recent times have frequently been channelled in such a way as to link certain places of origin with specific occupations in the receiving country. The National Health Service in Britain simply could not function without the immigration of different groups from what was once the British Empire. In recent years migrant streams (mainly women) from Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and the like) have been recruited wholesale into various facets of the so-called ‘leisure’ industries throughout much of Europe including Britain (everything from cleaning hotels to waitressing and bartending).

., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

What’s useful about the category of leading world economic power is that it denies a limited primacy based on continental military rather than global economic sweep. Thus, continental military powers like France under Louis XIV or Napoleon, as well as twentieth-century Russia or Germany, lack the breadth to make the list. The limited downside is that most histories discuss the decline of Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic, or the British Empire from a perspective centered on what went wrong economically. Figuring out how and why the politics of those same periods came up short in reform or restoration attempts has been a subordinate or even missing theme. Over the last few years, analogies to Rome have been appearing, a logical enough response to the short-lived U.S. imperial pretense and breast-beating and its subsequent international embarrassment.

Varadarajan, Siddharth Venezuela Vietnam Vietnam War Voice of America News Volcker, Paul Wachovia Wachter, Susan Wall Street Journal Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Rick Washington, George Washington Mutual Washington Post Wasik, John Wasserstein Perella Wealth and Democracy (Phillips) Weary Titan, The (Friedberg) Weber, Axel Weber, Max Weber, Tim Weeden, Charles Weill, Sanford Wells Fargo Whalen, Christopher whaling industry Whitehead, John Wilkinson, Bruce William of Orange Williams, John Wilson, Woodrow Wolf, Martin Wolf, Robert Woman in Charge, A (Bernstein) WorldCom World Economic Forums World Energy Outlook (IEA) worldpublicopinion.org World Trade Organization (WTO) World War I World War II Wu Xiaoling Yemen yen, Japanese Yucaipa Companies Zhuhai Zhenrong Trading FOR MORE FROM BE STS E LLING AUTHOR KEVIN PHILLIPS , LOOK FOR THE American Theocracy The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century From ancient Rome to the British Empire to twenty-first century America, global overreach, militant religion, energy dependency, and ballooning debt have been Achilles’ heels of leading world economic powers. For America today, the new, added danger comes in how these same interests and biases—oil, religion, and money management—have combined to dominate the Republican electoral coalition which in turn now controls American politics and policymaking.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

The “Grand Area” During World War II, study groups of the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations developed plans for the postwar world in terms of what they called the “Grand Area,” which was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy. The Grand Area was to include the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe, the Far East, the former British Empire (which was being dismantled), the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East (which were then passing into American hands as we pushed out our rivals France and Britain), the rest of the Third World and, if possible, the entire globe. These plans were implemented, as opportunities allowed.

Countries like Brazil and Argentina are potentially rich and powerful, but unless they can somehow gain control over their wealthy, they’re always going to be in trouble. Of course, you can’t really talk about these countries as a whole. There are different groups within them, and for some of these groups, the current situation is great—just as there were people in India who thought the British Empire was fine. They were linked to it, enriched themselves through it, and loved it. It’s possible to live in the poorest countries and be in very privileged surroundings all the time. Go to, say, Egypt, take a limousine from the fancy airport to your five-star hotel by the Nile, go to the right restaurants, and you’ll barely be aware that there are poor people in Cairo.


pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

In the long run, he became President of the United States and went gunning for the Robber Barons. Roosevelt is affectionately recalled today as a half-heroic, half-comic figure, a bespectacled barrel of a man choking with teeth and jingoism; for at one time his obsession was to match the glory of the British Empire with an American dominion in the Caribbean and the Pacific. But though for a time Americans got a heroic bang out of the idea of empire, they were temperamentally averse to practicing it. President Taft might call on the country to think of the inhabitants of America’s newly acquired overseas ‘territories’ as ‘the little brown brother,’ but, in a country that had no taste for recruiting the soldiers and the civil servants, the workhorses of empire, the general sentiment was that of a Marine song: ‘He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, But he ain’t no friend of mine.’

It is true that the Allies could not have defeated the Central Powers without the intervention of the United States in the last eighteen months of a war which was to record an atrocious pile of casualties: more than half of Russia’s mobilized twelve million were killed or wounded; five and a half of France’s eight million; more than a third of the nine million recruited by the British Empire and Commonwealth; one and a half million of Italy’s five and a half million. When a whole generation of Europeans was maimed and faint with exhaustion, the United States had sent into the battlefields two million brash and lusty young men. American industry, already geared to a scale of productivity that Europeans could hardly grasp, poured arms and materiel across the Atlantic.


pages: 407 words: 114,478

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Thus, the investor in bills demanded a higher return for the more uncertain payout. Figure 1-4 also shows something far more important: the gradual decline in interest rates as England’s society stabilized and came to dominate the globe. In 1897 the consol yield hit a low of 2.21%, which has not been seen since. This identifies the high-water mark of the British Empire as well as any political or military event. Figure 1-4. English short- and long-term rates, 1800–1900. (Source: Homer and Sylla, A History of Interest Rates.) The tradeoff between the variability of bill payouts and the interest-rate risk of consols reverses during the twentieth century.

Recall that the slope of a semilog plot at any point shows the true rate of growth. Note how relatively smooth and constant the rates of growth are in the two countries. The American plot slopes upward at 3.6% per year, and the British at about 1.9% per year. (Incidentally, this plot places the eclipse of the British empire in 1871, when its GDP was exceeded by that of the U.S.—about a quarter of a century earlier than suggested by the plot of consol interest rates.) About two-thirds of the difference in GDP growth between the two nations can be accounted for by the higher American population growth, and the other third by our increasing edge in labor efficiency.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

But the political mainstream regarded these insights as quirky caveats attached to more general principles about the unique efficacy of running things on individualistic lines. The great inflation of the 1970s had, after all, exposed Foot's old order as bankrupt, and so – like the Cold War before it, and the British Empire before that – the New Right's ‘post-post-war’ settlement had slowly developed an air of permanence by the time the slump arrived. And then, one might have imagined, everything would have changed. After all, the last time the economic gale had hit with such force, the eventual political result was that New Deal agenda (and its delayed British equivalent) of building shared shelters and levelling society a little.

Such economists, who emphasise individuals’ freedom to borrow and save to ‘smooth’ consumption in line with ‘permanent income’, also tend to believe it is more instructive to look at expenditure than income data, and so already mistrust traditional poverty measures. For more on such alternative approaches, see Richard Blundell and Ian Preston, ‘Consumption inequality and income uncertainty’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113:2 (1998), pp. 603–40. During the 1990s, British empirical analysis of expenditure data had suggested that inequality in living standards might not have risen as sharply as the income figures suggested. See Alissa Goodman and Steven Webb, ‘The distribution of UK household expenditure, 1979–92’, Fiscal Studies, 16:3 (1996), pp. 55–80, at: www.ifs.org.uk/fs/articles/fsgoodman.pdf The most sanguine interpretation of this finding was that incomes were not so much becoming more unequal as more volatile, and that households could use financial markets to smooth things over.


Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown

Ascot racecourse, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, sensible shoes, Timothy McVeigh

On this is planted a top bogus town, which would just do as the stage setting for Carmen in Costa Rica.’ It was populated, he complained, by ‘the English rich – Princess Margaret, American queens, lots of Austrians with Australian passports, Roman duchesses complaining about the disappearance of the British Empire. Not again.’ The ‘American queens’ to whom he referred were, it transpires, the caustic novelist and essayist Gore Vidal and his boyfriend Howard Austen, who happened to be staying next door with Diana Phipps. All in all, Vidal didn’t enjoy his time there either, describing it as ‘a terrible place, made worse by the quarrelling Snowdons’.

Lacking that ‘the’, her grandmother was in some sense below the salt. Margaret had been born to the King-Emperor at a time when the map of the world was still largely pink. Her sense of entitlement, never modest, grew bigger and bigger with each passing year, gathering weight and speed as the British Empire grew smaller and smaller, and her role in it smaller still. She remained conscious of her image as the one who wasn’t, and to some extent played on it: the one who wasn’t the Queen; the one who wasn’t taught constitutional history because she wasn’t the one who’d be needing it; the one who wasn’t in the first coach, and wouldn’t ever be first onto the Buckingham Palace balcony; the one who wasn’t given the important duties, but was obliged to make do with the also-rans: the naming of the more out-of-the-way council building, school, hospital or regiment, the state visit to the duller country, the patronage of the more obscure charity, the glad-handing of the smaller fry – the deputies, the vices, the second-in-commands.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

He also increased power output from 105 horsepower to 150, climbing to 260 HP in later iterations over the course of the war. During the Second World War he turned to aircraft engines, with similarly spectacular results. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his wartime accomplishments, he would enter the peerage as Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. I wonder if Sir Harry still smelled of carb cleaner as he kneeled before the queen, to be touched upon the shoulders with the ancient sword. Ricardo’s magisterial work, The High-Speed Internal-Combustion Engine, was first published in 1923 and rewritten in 1953. It opens with an interesting observation about the role of chance in the process by which certain designs beat out others.

See traffic management mass absenteeism, 119 Mayall, Joe, 82 McCabe, Katie, 275 McCabe, Matt, 269–271, 274–275 McEachin, Don, 230 mechanized judgment, 217–218 MegaSquirt, 129 Mercedes-Benz, 117 metallurgy, 145 Meyer, Greg, 201 Microsoft Corporation, 293, 295–297 mobile phones, reckless driving and, 238–240 modern state, 285 Monchaux, Thomas de, 281–282 monopoly capital, 43 monopoly pricing, 44 monopoly(s) behavior, 298 Google as near, 290–291 inventive genius, 135 Microsoft and, 296 radical, 246–247 moral choice, 122 moral injury, 118–119 moral judgments, 23 morality affect of abstraction and, 118 automation and, 117–118 trolley problem, 116–118 utilitarianism and, 119–120 virtues and, 121–122 Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, 134 motivated reasoning, 56 MotoGP motorcycle racing, 173 motor sports, 14–15 Caliente 250, 22–23 demolition derby, 184–187 drifting as, 164–168 fight to the death and, 172–173 Formula D points series, 165 SNORE Knotty Pine 250, 200 soap box derby, 187–191 social element of, 168–169 Virginia International Raceway, 66 motorcycle races.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Substantial elements in parliament and the City were openly supportive of the rebels, including Pitt (now the Earl of Chatham), the radical Charles James Fox and the conservative Edmund Burke. Burke was furious at George using ‘the hireling swords of German vassals… against English flesh and blood’. When eventually the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the new British empire was lost, George III was humiliated. In desperation, in 1783 he asked Chatham’s son, the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt the younger, to head a government. The City’s response to American independence was predictable. Merchants raced to do business with the new United States. London saw its first substantial black immigration as freed slaves who had fought for the crown during the rebellion were given sanctuary.

It housed, employed and fed 6 million people and had doubled in size in just forty years. After the troubles of the 1880s, the metropolis showed few signs of self-doubt and felt it might boast, if only just a little. As Pevsner put it, ‘As the penny-pinching Victorian spirit abated, the desire was commonly voiced that Westminster should become a capital worthy of the British Empire and comparable in splendour to Paris, Vienna or Berlin.’ It was decided that the place for this was the royal enclave of St James’s, still a rather scruffy jumble of townhouses and a square, overlooking Nash’s attempt at a pocket Regent’s Park. The winning proposal came from the architect Sir Aston Webb, for a mall running through St James’s Park from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

After the meal, the women would retire to one room, while the men talked politics in another, which was the style at the time.64 They also liked to get very drunk, just like James Bond. As a matter of fact, they looked up to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, the British agency that had accumulated so much expertise in spycraft while maintaining the British empire for centuries. And some of them loved James Bond himself. Tracy Barnes, one of the Agency’s founding figures, loved the character created by Ian Fleming in 1953, and would pass out copies of the novels to his family at Thanksgiving.65 Paul Nitze, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War, described the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members.

For the Puritans in New England, their ideological commitment to the colonies, extremism in relation to England, and their conclusion that God “providentially cleared the land of its inhabitants to accommodate His people,” see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “New England in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 193–96. 2. Alexander Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quarternary Science Reviews 207 (March 2019), www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261#!.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

* * * — Leaving Venice: no one has described such a departure better than Lawrence Durrell, at the beginning of his travel memoir, Bitter Lemons, the finest book he ever wrote—greater than all the volumes of The Alexandria Quartet. For his obsession with aesthetics does not deter him from political and moral analysis of the waning British Empire in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1950s. Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them….They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well…. These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly.

., 236 Barnacle, Nora, 109 Batrićević, Boban, 236 beauty Brodsky on, 70 as form of truth, 89 Kundera on, 49–50 Venetian model of, 75 Belisarius, 33, 38–39, 86 Bells in Their Silence, The (Gorra), 237 Belt and Road Initiative, 121, 211, 234, 279 Benda, Julien, 169 Benjamin, Walter, 16 Berat, 258–259 Berenson, Bernard on art, 46, 66 Guggenheim and, 90 Pound and, 85 San Vitale and, 49 Stokes and, 17 on Tempio Malatestiano, 8 on tragedy, 128 Venice and, 68, 75 Berisha, Sali, 254–256 Berlin Wall, fall of, 108, 114, 143, 149, 169, 190, 196, 253 Bismarck, Otto von, 103 Bitter Lemons (Durrell), 90–91 Blaise, Saint, 219 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 130, 288 Boetius, 30–31 Bojanić, Sanja, 163, 165–166 borders, 118–119, 159, 163, 164–165, 261 Borges, Jorge Luis, 32–33, 289 Borngasser, Rose-Marie, 100 Bosnia, 157, 169, 233 Bowra, Maurice, 171 Braudel, Fernand, 26, 35, 78, 82–83, 95, 185, 213, 265 Brexit, 166 British Empire, 90 Brodsky, Joseph, 12, 69–70, 86–88, 134 Brown, Peter, 33, 35–36, 45 Bruni family, 145–147 Bruti family, 141, 145–147 Bulaj, Monika, 121 Bulgaria, 52, 108 Bulgarian Empire, 243 Bulgars, 38, 51 Burckhardt, Jacob, 54, 67, 77–78 Burton, Isabel, 126 Burton, Richard Francis, 125–130 Buruma, Ian, 169 “Bust of the Emperor, The” (Roth), 131 “Bust of Tiberius, The” (Brodsky), 87–88 Byzantium.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

The ultimatum none the less had the effect that Curzon had intended. Moscow was determined to preserve the trade agreement and therefore accepted the humiliation of promising ‘not to support with funds or in any other form persons or bodies or agencies or institutions whose aim is to spread discontent or to foment rebellion in any part of the British Empire’. Even more humiliatingly, the Soviet government also recalled its envoy in Kabul, Fedor Raskolnikov, to whose ‘subversive’ activities Curzon’s ultimatum had taken particular exception.28 No British Foreign Secretary has ever reacted so emotionally, at times even hysterically, as Lord Curzon to the contents of decrypted diplomatic telegrams.

Schweppenburg (‘Herr von S’) too had been ‘risking his life’ to pass on a similar message. British policy during the Munich Crisis, MI5 reported, had convinced Hitler of ‘the weakness of England’: ‘There now seems to be no doubt he is convinced that Great Britain is ‘‘decadent’’ and lacks the will and power to defend the British Empire.’ MI5’s aim was to stiffen Chamberlain’s resolve by demonstrating that Appeasement had encouraged, rather than removed, Hitler’s aggressive designs. In order to try to ensure that the Prime Minister paid attention to the report, it was decided, at Curry’s suggestion, to include samples of Hitler’s insulting references to him – the first known occasion of a British intelligence agency using this simple but effective tactic to attract a policymaker’s attention.

Arthur Pearson, 1925) Badian, Ernst, Collected Papers on Alexander the Great (London: Routledge, 2012) Baigent, Michael, and Richard Leigh, The Inquisition (London/New York: Viking, 1999) Bakeless, John, Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes: Espionage in the American Revolution, reprint of 1959 edn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998) Ballantyne, Tony, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Bamford, James, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency (New York: Penguin Books, 1983) —, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008) —, ‘Every Move You Make’, Foreign Policy, 7 Sept. 2016 Bar-Joseph, Uri, ‘Forecasting a Hurricane: Israeli and American Estimations of the Khomeini Revolution’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 36 (2013), no. 5 Barberiato, Federico, The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop: Inquisition, Forbidden Books and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) Barclay, David E., Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy, 1840–1861 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Barker, Elton, ‘Paging the Oracle: Interpretation, Identity and Performance in Herodotus’ History’, Greece & Rome, vol. 53 (2006), no. 1 Barnes, Jonathan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Barnett, Corelli, The Desert Generals, rev. edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) Barrass, Gordon S., The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009) Barry, Jonathan, and Owen Davies (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Barry, Jonathan, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Bass, Streeter, ‘Nathan Hale’s Mission’ (Langley, Va: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996) Batvinnis, Raymond J., The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007) Bayly, C.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought to myself, when Major-General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms.

Before the First World War, Arab intellectuals had argued publicly for a new relationship between the Arab world and Constantinople, seeking a form of “home rule” for the Arab lands inside the Ottoman empire, either through a federal system of government—under which the sultan would be crowned king of the Arabs as well as king of the Turks—or, more mischievously in Turkish eyes, with an autonomy guaranteed by Western powers, especially France. At this time, a similar though not identical crisis afflicted the proponents of Home Rule in Ireland, some advocating a “free” Ireland within the British empire, others complete independence from Britain. Syrian notables met in Paris before the war and discussed what form of autonomy they might be given; among other demands, they asked that Arabic should be taught in schools alongside Turkish and used with Turkish in all government affairs. But although the Turks appeared initially well disposed towards these ideas, the deliberately vague nature of the instructions sent out to Turkish governors in the Arab provinces quickly proved that the Sublime Porte had no intention of dividing power within the Ottoman empire.

Months later, I learned that the Taliban had sought to find me, that I could have travelled to Afghanistan and talked to bin Laden—but that the message never reached me. The Scoop that never was. Unaware of all this, I went on vainly pestering the Taliban’s men for a visa. I settled into a villa in Peshawar, working my contacts in Islamabad for that all-important, hopeless document. I would take tea on the lawn. Perhaps only in the old British empire do they make black tea and milk in the same scalding pot, poured with lashings of sugar into fragile cups. The bougainvillea blasted crimson and purple down the brick wall beside me while big, aggressive black birds pursued one another over the cut grass. At the end of my road lay the British cemetery I had first explored twenty-one years earlier wherein memorials recorded the assassination of the Raj’s good men from Surrey and Yorkshire, murdered by what were called ghazis, the Afghan fundamentalists of their age, who were often accompanied into battle—and I quote Captain Mainwaring who was in the Second Afghan War—“by religious men called talibs.”


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Malik 2009, 184 62. World Intellectual Property Organisation, ‘The Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860 Act No. 45, 6 October 1960, https://perma.cc/L27B-QZ4D?type=source 63. Dean Nelson, ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay: A Giant of the British Empire’, Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8090422/Thomas-Babington-Macaulay-a-giant-of-the-British-Empire.html 64. Masani 2013, 121 65. see Nair 2013. I am grateful to Pratap Bhanu Mehta for drawing my attention to this article. Current text of 295A. World Intellectual Property Organisation, ‘The Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860 Act No. 45, 6 October 1960, https://perma.cc/L27B-QZ4D?

Section 153A, for example, threatens up to three years in prison for anyone who ‘by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities . . .’ (my italics).62 On the face of it, that may look like the ultimate contemporary multiculturalist recipe. In fact, it goes back to the days of the British empire, since a penal code originally drafted by the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay was taken over wholesale by postcolonial, independent India.63 Yet Macaulay was no admirer of native customs and described his goal as ‘firm and impartial despotism’.64 The logic of his section 153A was thus one of colonial oppression: keep the lid on those restless natives, by having the power to lock up anybody for saying anything offensive to anyone else.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

What it had done instead was enter—or, depending on one’s definition, start—World War II, first by trying to establish control over China and then by setting up a colonial empire that reached from Burma in the west to the atolls of Micronesia in the east and from the Aleutians north of the Arctic Circle to the Solomon Islands south of the equator. At the height of its power, it laid claim to roughly as many souls as the British Empire did at the time—close to half a billion people, or a fifth of the world population.2 Figure 4.1Top income shares in Japan, 1910–2010 (in percent) To sustain this extravagant venture, Japan’s military had grown more than twentyfold in size, from a quarter of a million troops in the mid-1930s to more than 5 million by the summer of 1945, or one in seven Japanese males of any age.

Elites in developing countries park an even larger share of their assets overseas—perhaps as much as half of national private wealth, in the case of Russia.23 * The widespread resurgence in income and wealth inequality of the last few decades seamlessly continues the narrative laid out in the opening chapters. Many of the variables reviewed in this section are closely tied to international relations. Globalization of trade and finance, a powerful driver of rising inequality, is predicated on a relatively peaceful and stable international order of the kind that the British Empire had come to ensure when worldwide economic integration first took off in the nineteenth century, was subsequently reestablished under the effective hegemony of the United States, and then was further reinforced by the end of the Cold War. Key mechanisms of equalization such as unionization, public intervention in private-sector wage setting, and highly progressive taxation of income and wealth all first rose to prominence in the context of global war, as did full employment during and after World War II.

., 312n33 Botswana, 371 Bourbon family, 84, 238 bourgeoisie, 96, 216, 220, 226, 232, 234, 291 Bourguignon, Francois, 21, 21n19, 412n7, 414n11, 433–34 Bowles, Samuel, 27n3, 39, 434n12 Brazil, 361, 380, 382, 384–85 Britain, 4, 19, 59, 89–90, 97–98, 100, 104–5, 130, 132–33, 135, 137–43, 145–48, 165–66, 168, 170–71, 200–1, 247–50, 267–69, 292, 296–306, 311, 331, 346, 360, 366, 373, 394, 405–6, 413, 421, 425, 428, 434–35, 437, 447, 450–52 British Empire, 116, 422 British Labour Party Manifesto, 145 Bronze Age, 88, 188; collapse, 188; Greece, 59, 277, 342; Late, 281; Late Mediterranean, 270–79; Mycenaean Late, 87 bubonic plague, 88, 267, 293, 394, 320 Buffett, Warren, 2 Buke, Iikim, 82n32 Bulgaria, 249, 349–50 Bullion, Claude de, 84 bullying, 25, 26n1 Buzhilova, Alexandra P., 31n10 Cairo, 312, 324 Cambodia, 230, 254, 278, 347 Canada, 130–31, 133, 135–37, 142, 145–46, 150, 168, 364, 405–6 Capac, Huayna, 316 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 242 Caribbean, 315, 360 Carnegie, Andrew, 176 Carneiro, Robert, 44 Carolingian expansion, 88–89 Carthage, 186–87 Catal Höyük, 15, 39 causation, 33n13, 166n49, 223, 392 Central Powers, 215 Chao, Huang, 262 Charles III, 355 Charles V, 58 Cheverny, Dufourt de, 236 Chile, 156, 352, 380, 382, 384 China, 2–3, 53, 63–71, 102–3, 155, 168, 182–86, 223–28, 231, 238–40, 243–44, 250, 253, 260–64, 330–31, 357, 377, 410–11, 420, 424 Chronicle of the Priory of Rochester, 298 Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, 252, 253 Chumash, 34 city-states, 45, 97, 270, 274; revolts, 251–52 civil wars, 7, 11, 17, 20, 74, 117, 156, 202–7, 213, 258, 356, 373n7, 440; Argos, 251–52; China, 204; communists, 216–18, 225; developing countries, 283; development, 204n44; Germany, 350; Guatemala, 380; Nepal, 440; Peru, 352; profiteers, 176; Roman empire, 206–9; Russia, 205, 216–18, 225; Rwanda, 203; Spain, 349; Switzerland, 168; see also American Civil War; Spanish Civil War Claessen, Henry J.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

THE RULES ARE DIFFERENT IN A KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY … IT’S A SCARY TIME FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT. Countries, regions, governments, and companies that assume they are … And will remain … Dominant … Soon lose their competitive edge. (Particularly those whose leadership ignores or disparages emerging technologies … Remember those old saws: The sun never sets on the British Empire … Vive La France! … All roads lead to Rome … China, the Middle Kingdom.) Which is one of the reasons bioinformatics is so important … And why you should pay attention. What we are seeing is just the beginning of the digital-genomics convergence. When you think of a DNA molecule and its ability to … Carry our complete life code within each of our cells … Accurately copy the code … Billions of times per day … Read and execute life’s functions … Transmit this information across generations … It becomes clear that … The world’s most powerful and compact coding and information-processing system … is a genome.


pages: 136 words: 42,864

The Cable by Gillian Cookson

British Empire, cable laying ship, financial engineering, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Monroe Doctrine, undersea cable

He went on to found a string of submarine cable companies until he, Gooch and other associates controlled telegraphs stretching from Britain across the Far East and Australasia. Porthcurno, an isolated sandy cove in the west of Cornwall, was for a century the point at which Pender’s network of fourteen telegraph systems converged, the main communications gateway of the British Empire. Pender was angered not to have been knighted in the wake of the success in 1866, nor afterwards for his services to Empire, and wrote confidentially to Gladstone in 1881 to stake his claim to a baronetcy. He argued that he had risked a quarter of a million pounds on the Atlantic scheme, ‘without which the necessary capital for the undertaking could not have been secured’.


pages: 118 words: 42,837

Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson

British Empire, call centre, Martin Parr

He became obsessed with history and would probe us with endless quizzes about the battle of this or the fall of that. We were forever being harried and hustled around castles and churches and stately homes, sitting in countless soggy National Trust car parks drinking stewed tea from Thermos flasks as the rain pounded angrily on the car roof. Having been born within the fading influence of the British Empire, he was a committed royalist and could recite the order of succession and dates of birth and death of every monarch since William the Conqueror, and would regularly stand to attention and salute the national anthem during BBC2’s Closedown. We started collecting the symbols of this autocracy – old British coins and stamps – and would trawl through junk shops and tatty antique fairs searching for the elusive bargain that would turn our fortunes.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

China's economic rise is shadowed by political clout and military might that has the potential to precipitate a new Cold War. Terrorism has intensified and is taking on the character of a global insurgency. Europe's unification is faltering; Russia's democratization is failing. And Africa's prospects, in this era of globalization, have deteriorated, not improved. Not since the days when the sun never set over the British Empire has one superpower had the global influence deployed today by the United States of America. When foreign observers stated in their dispatches that the November 2004 United States presidential election was in effect an election for world leadership as well, they did not exaggerate. The rest of the world did not have a vote, but it had reasons to take an interest in the result.

To get the job done, they constructed an imaginary grid around the planet, using the poles of rotation and the globe-bisecting equator as their starting points. Since a full circle has 360 degrees, the Earth is divided, pole to pole, by meridians (Fig. 2-2). Of course a starting meridian, or prime meridian, was needed, the zero-degree meridian. This decision was made when the British Empire was at its zenith, and so, not surprisingly, the prime meridian was established as the line of longitude running through the Greenwich Observatory near London. That turned out to be a fortunate choice, because the 180-degree line, which would divide the globe into Western and Eastern Hemispheres, lay on the opposite side of the world from London—right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Since 1800, the North Atlantic economies have been the world’s dominant economies and political powers. The cataclysms of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II did not shake the dominance of the North Atlantic economies, though they did shift the balance of geopolitical influence away from Europe, especially the British Empire, to the United States. Now, after many centuries, the unquestioned economic and geopolitical dominance of the North Atlantic will end. The American century will end sometime in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, when Asia becomes the center of gravity of the world economy, in the sense of producing more than half of the world’s income (Figure 2.3).

Northern and southern Darfur have poverty rates between 41 and 60 percent, while western Darfur, on the Chad border, has a poverty rate between 61 and 72 percent. Throughout modern history, Darfur has lacked basic infrastructure (roads, power, safe water, and sanitation) as well as political representation. During the British Empire, Darfur was neglected in favor of the irrigated cotton plantations along the Nile. The only reliable growth in Darfur was its population, from less than one million at the start of the twentieth century to an estimated six to seven million today. But as the population has soared, the carrying capacity of the land has declined because of long-term diminished rainfall, shown in Figure 10.7 for the El Fasher weather station of north Darfur.


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

On the network’s main discussion show, Question Time, he declared, ‘Up to the Suez crisis … most people’s conception of what being British involved was basically going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuff and the fruits of their labours. That was a core part of British identity, was the British Empire. Now various members of the political class have tried to revive that idea quite recently without much success.’9 Leaving aside the claim that any member of the political class has tried to revive the British Empire in recent years, in these comments one can hear the authentic and undisguised voice of revenge. Demonstrating that such an instinct transcends racial or religious boundaries, and can as easily be self-induced as aimed at others, it suggests that on this occasion Britain must be uniquely punished for the deeds of history.


pages: 434 words: 124,153

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

The growing empire held opportunities for every class of Victorian society. Criminals were transported to it, the poor emigrated there, the middle classes were employed in administration or civilizing, and the upper echelon accepted appointments of a regal nature. Following the example of the seventeenth-century Dutch, tobacco growing was encouraged throughout the British Empire, and the weed was cultivated in nearly every territory under the protection of the British flag. India, the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas possessions, was the second largest producer of tobacco in the world by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, although almost all the weed it grew was for domestic use.

Reynolds 212, 223–4, 274–5, 316, 334–5 Highly Leveraged Transaction, target for 335–6 Roberts, Julia 349 Robinson, Edward, G. 250 rock ’n’ roll 270–1, 312 Rogers, Sir Philip 294 Rolfe, John 70–2, 74, 80, 105 Rolling Stones 299 Roman Catholic clergy and snuff 36, 80 Röntgen, Wilhelm 218 Roosevelt, Eleanor 252 Roosevelt, Franklin 257 Roosevelt, Theodore 222 Rosenblatt, Stanley 356 Rosie, George 261–2 Rousseau 132 Rowlands, Samuel 49 Royal College of Physicians 292 Royal Navy 102, 104, 141 tobacco rations 232 Vigo, battle of 120–1 Russia 85, 93, 94–5, 258, 261, 269, 270, 337–8 Napoleon’s blockade, resistance to 145 Napoleon’s defeat 152 Napoleon’s invasion 145–6 Peter’s beard tax 95 smoking habits 146, 337 Russian Orthodox Church 94–5 Ryamin, Valery 337 Saba 84 Saddam Hussein 341 Saigon 91 St Croce, Prospero 40 St Eustatius 84 St Kitts 76–7 St Maarten 84 Saka, Dr 57 Salons, The (Baudelaire) 180 Saluzzo, Bishop of 40 San Agustín 51 San Francisco 44 see also United States of America San Salvador 22 Sands of Iwo Jima, The 268 Sandwich Islands 171 Santa Fe, California 166 Santa Maria, capture of 56 Santo Domingo 51, 79 Sassoon, Siegfried 232, 233 Saturday Night Fever 313 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 281 Sauckel, Gauleiter Fritz 263 Saxony 95 Schairer, Eberhard 255 Schöniger, Eric 255 Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health (SCOTH) 346 Scotland 100–5 colonization attempt 102 Edinburgh 100 England, union with 104 Glasgow 105, 140–1 Highlands 100–2 Lowlands 102 slave trade 105 tobacco growing 141 Scott, Captain Robert Falcon 219 Scott, Sir Walter 159 Scouting for Boys (Baden-Powell) 217 Scuttertnull of Glen Moran (legend) 101–2 Sears, Roebuck & Co. 225 SEITA 180–1 Serbia 231 Serturner, Friedrich Wilhelm 161 Seven Years War 136, 137 Seville 80, 115 Fabrica del Tobacos 115–16, 146–7, 177–9 Sex Pistols 314 Shakespeare, William 50, 78, 83 shamans 6–7, 8, 9–10, 27, 283 Shaw, George Bernard 220 Shelley, Percy 159 Siberia 87 Sirius convict ship 134 slavery and the slave trade 63–4, 77, 106, 110–13, 138, 183–4 abolition of in USA 184 American tobacco plantations, life on 111–12 Dickens offended by 176–7 Dutch 84 names, choosing of 112 Scots 105 tobacco as trigger 73 Small Faces 299 Smith, Adam 126 Smith, Captain John 72 smoke-blowing ritual 7 smoking: age barriers among Victorians 193 apparel 158 arts, represented in 82–3, 220, 280–1 children, warnings to 194 curiosity to craze, change from, in England 46 decline during nineties 345 divans 159 English rituals 47 films, portrayed in 246–51, 267–8, 271, 348–50 product placement 331–4 giving-up-smoking books, courses and counselling 310–11 health issues 274, 283, 321 see also lung cancer health warnings 296–7, 302, 309, 311 ‘It Girls’ 240 Johnson’s observation 123 meditation link 97 no-smoking areas 306–7, 310, 341 London Underground trains 341 opposition 195–6, 215–18, 229–31, 241, 317, 320 propaganda battle 347 passive (Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS)) 329–31, 346–7 cot death 346 punishments: China 86–7 Islamic countries 86 Japan 86 Lüneburg (Lower Saxony) 95 Persia 92 Russia 85 ‘reeking gallants’ 47 ritual blowing 7 scientific research 161–3, 218, 255, 315, 318–19, 321 segregation 158 smoking rooms 193 teenage females, proportion of smokers rises in UK 351 tribal customs, North America 17 versus snuff 123–4 see also cigarettes; cigars; nicotine; pipes; tobacco Smoking and Health (Royal College of Physicians) 292 Smoking and Health Now (Royal College of Physicians) 311 Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service (USA) 292–3 ‘Smoking Kills’ (White Paper) 352, 353 smuggling 98–9, 358–60 snuff 4, 7, 9, 31–2, 42, 63, 80, 117–24 adulteration 122, 124 boxes 101 Brummell 154 English etiquette 121, 152, 154 Fabrica del Tobacos, Seville 115–16 French fashion 119 in Ireland 101 Martinique blend 154 as medicine 124 Morocco blend 154 ‘Nicotian Herb’ 40 in Prussia 117 in Scotland 100–1 ‘snuffy [Queen] Charlotte’ 138, 154 taxes 124 versus smoking 123–4 snuffing machines 9 Sofala 59 Solly, Samual 195 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow) 168 South Africa 361 Spain 43–4, 113–15, 146–8, 357–8 Armada 56 bandoleros 149–50 Bible and fairy-tale morality 23 Bonaparte, Joseph, as king 146 Britain’s 1808 expeditionary force 150 Caribbean islands’ population, extermination of 25 conquistadores 21, 25 Aztec temples, overthrow of 30 contraband under French rule 149 crown’s regulations in colonies 113 decree limiting tobacco growing 79–80 disease, spreaders of 25–6 Ferdinand and Isabella 21, 22 Inca, subduing and extermination of 9, 34–5 infidels, cruel towards 23 Inquisition 115 papelote, punishments for using 148–9 population’s tobacco preferences 147–8 slaughter, Biblical ‘justification’ for 25 Tabacalera (tobacco company) 80 tobacco, growing techniques 71–2 trans-Pacific trade route 58 Venezuela, tobacco production banned in 113–14 Vigo, battle of 120–1 Spanish Inquisition 115 Spenser, Edmund 49 sports sponsorship 207, 298, 313 Formula One 353 Sri Lanka 58, 90 Stalin, Joseph 265 Stallone, Sylvester 332–3 Stanley, Henry 200 Stephen Mitchell & Sons 213 Strychnine 162 Sublime Tobacco (Mackenzie) 283 Sunday, Billy 241 Superman II 331–2 supernatural forces 6 Swanson, Gloria 247 Sweden 81 Switzerland 43, 95 Sydney Opera House 135 syphilis 27 Tabacalera (tobacco company) 80 Tachard, Guy 89 Tahiti 127, 128–9, 131–3, 135–6 as New Scythera 133 Taiwan 337, 359 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de 164 Tatler 121 taxation of tobacco 69, 85, 104, 208, 209, 255, 312, 353–4, 358–60 taxonomy 118 Team Lotus 298 television 276–7 cigarette advertising banned in UK 297 cigarette advertising banned in USA 309 commercial, in UK 278 soap operas 276 sponsorship of shows 277 television ads banned in Japan 357 temperance movement 195, 216, 241, 294, 351 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 78 Teniers, David, the Younger 82 Tennessee 216 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 187 Terry, Luther 292–3 Tess of the D’Urbevilles (Hardy) 192 Tezcatlipoca 13 Thackeray, William 159 Thailand 58, 359 Thevet, André 33 Thirty Years War 81 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud) 228 Thunderball 284 Thurman, Uma 349 To Have and Have Not 267 Tobacco Industry Research Committee (USA) 288 Tobacco Smoking and Cancer of Lung 286 tobacco: addiction 25, 68, 226, 314–15, 317–19, 324, 340–1 additives 211 adulteration by apothecaries 51–2 bandoleros 149–50 Bright 211 British Empire, growing encouraged throughout 199 British excise bill and consequent riots 124 Burley 211 cancer, potential cure for 39–40 see also lung cancer Cartier’s description 31 centre of origin 3 chewing 7–8, 173–6, 339 ingredients 175 Chinese medicine 58 Christians’ spiritual aversion 27 cleansing and fertility 5 clyster 8, 186 companies as targets for Highly Leveraged Transaction (HLT) 335–6 company diversification 335 consumption leaps in industrial world 219–20 cost 42–3, 50–1 as currency 108 Devil, association with 38, 41, 67 domestic production 43 Double Happiness brand 303 as drink 7, 8 duty raised in USA 216 enemas 8, 186, 196 English import statistics 51 essence de tabac 162 Europeans, first to smoke 23 exchange, instrument of 88 first smoking of 4 flavour enhancers 19 as fumigant 5 habit spread by seamen 56–7 as hallucinogen 5 home growing See Appendix 1 as hunger suppressant 10, 24, 245, 351 as insecticide 5 as intoxicant 46 James I’s prohibition 78–9 law suits 289, 294, 355 legends 91 Scottish 101–2 licking 8–9 longevity claim 96 Master Settlement Agreement 355–6 Mayan farms 11 medicinal use 5–6, 16–17, 41 in animals 41 in bubon-c plague 83–4, 96 military rations 231–2 Monardes’ pamphlet 40–1 name, etymological debate about 32–3 Napoleon I’s influence 144 Nicotiana: benthamiana 130 excelsior 130 gossei 130 ingulba 130 Linnaeus’s taxonomy 118 rustica 2, 3, 118 tabacum 2, 3, 70, 118 Orinoco brand 74, 84, 100, 102 oversupply and consequent price drop 106–7 papelote 148–9, 179 becomes ‘cigarette’ 179 ‘picado’ (minced) 147 Piedmont leaf 184 pigtail 186 Prince Albert brand 223 prohibition of sale to young in UK 217–8 prohibition, first ever 36 religious attitudes 65–6 as rite of passage 5 ritual 7, 9, 89 salaries paid in 107–8 Salem brand 303 sex, association with 177–8 shag 186 shamans 6–7, 8, 9–10, 27, 283 Silk Cut 87 Skoal Bandits 339 slave trade, introduction of 73 smuggling 98–9, 358–60 ‘sotweed’ tag 46 Southern States growers’ co-operatives 221 spiritual functions 54 spittoons 174, 175 sports sponsorship 207, 298, 313 Formula One 353 taxation 69, 85, 104, 208, 209, 255, 312, 353–4, 358–60 twist 186 Vatican crop 40 war causes demand 146, 302 ‘yallacure’ 184, 210 youth market targeted by manufacturers 316–17 see also cigarettes; cigars; nicotine; pipes; smoking; snuff Todd, Geoffrey 294 Tolstoy, Leo 145 Tom Jones (Fielding) 122 Tophane 94 Torres Strait 91 Torres, Luis de 23, 24 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 220 Trafalgar, battle of 145 Travis, Dave Lee 339 Travolta, John 349 Tropic of Cancer 90 Twain, Mark 175–6 Tyler, John 175 Under Two Flags (Ouida) 197 United States of America 140–1 Castro, attempt to overthrow 309 child smokers 216 cigarette consumption, fall in 213 cigarette consumption, growth in 205, 209, 212 cigarette habit, nation dismayed by 205 Civil War 184 Declaration of Independence 140 diplomatic relations with Britain’s enemies, establishment of 141 Lewis and Clark 164–5 Louisiana Purchase 164 migration west 165–6 tobacco duty raised 216 tobacco exports 141 War of Independence 140–3 Treaty of Paris 142–3 USA Today 348 Utopia (More) 77 van Gough, Vincent 220 Van Riebeck, Jan 89 Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 156, 159 Vauquelin, Nicolas 162 Venezuela 27, 79 tobacco production banned 113–14 Venice 183 tobacco tariff 80 Venitia 182 Vespucci, Amerigo 32 Vicious, Sid 314 Victoria, Queen 173 Vietnam 91 War 302–3 Vigo 120–1 Vile Bodies (Waugh) 240 Virginia 53–5, 107–8 Britain’s firing of tobacco fields 142 Company 69–70 dissolved by James I 74–5 first tobacco taken to London 72 Orinoco brand 74, 84, 100, 102 population growth 105 slaves 110 thriving tobacco trade 105 tobacco, French preference for 181 Tobacco Inspection Act (Virginia) 108 tobacco, salaries paid in 107–8 see also United States of America Volstead Act (USA) 241 Wagner, Honus 223 Wahlstatt, Field Marshal Prince Blucher 152, 159 Wales 103 Walker, John 202 Wallis, Captain Samuel 127 Walpole, Horace 136 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 145–6 Washington, George 136, 137, 139 Waterloo 156–7 Waugh, Evelyn 240, 251 Wayne, John 268 W.


pages: 476 words: 124,973

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, Columbine, drone strike, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, fixed income, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, South China Sea, UNCLOS

Gerlach had told me one of his earliest memories was the sight of Somali soldiers marching through Galkayo for the Italians. I remembered an excellent book by Gerald Hanley called Warriors, about Somalia during and after World War II. Hanley was an ethnic Irishman, born in England and sent by the British Army to East Africa. He had no passionate loyalty to the British Empire, so his book is an independent-minded snapshot of Somalia during that dramatic span of years when war had weakened Europe’s colonial grip on much of the world and Africa was full of hope. “I can remember sitting by the waterhole,” he wrote, “wondering how it was that the war I had joined because it was against Fascism had landed me in ragged shorts and shirts in a geography like the moon where Fascism had vanished like a thin mist and the war had rolled far away into distant silences.”

In 1700, William Penn was so impressed by the role pirate treasure had played in colonial finance that he wrote to London, with a baroque flair for sentence construction: As for Piracy, I must needs say that if Jamaica had not been the Seminary, where pirates have commenced Masters of Art after having practiced upon the Spaniard, and then launched for the Red & Arabian Sea, and at Madagascar have found a yearly supply of flour, bread, ammunition and arms from some of our neighboring colonies, that perhaps in 10 years’ time got a million by it, and then have returned these fellows upon us and our Coasts, we had never had a spot upon our Garment. Three hundred years before Somali pirates, in other words, the scourges of the Indian Ocean were rebel subjects of the British Empire—American colonial pirates. So I could lie in the dark and curse my kidnappers, but I had done this research and I knew better than to think of myself, or my heritage, as innocent. V My guards took orders from pirate bosses because they had little choice—they’d joined the gang out of poverty, and the bosses ruled by violence—but they still had a weird notion of their own moral agency.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Two-thirds of these houses were bought for investment—also called trading and flipping.54 51 Caroline Baum, Bloomberg, February 16, 2005, p. 32. 52Alan Murray, “Resolving War Issue May Be President’s Best Economic Plan,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2003, p. A4. 53 Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Finance,” speech at the Federal Reserve System’s Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C. April 8, 2005. Alan Greenspan, Knight Commander of the British Empire, awarded the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur (France), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (U.S), the (U.S.) Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, and the Enron Prize for Distinguished Service, entered the Olympic stadium for his final lap, the torch held aloft, the crowd on its feet, cheering, weeping, and swooning.

., 230 Gore, Al, 323 Government agency securities, 309–310 Gramlich, Edward “‘Ned,” 178, 188, 259–260 Gramm, Phil, 163, 217, 245, 322 GrammLeach-Bliley Act (1999), 275–277 Grant, Cary, 47, 57 Grant, James, 118, 125, 195, 314 Gray, Edwin, 91–93 Great Depression: Greenspan’s analysis of, 28–29, 205 and money supply, 352 “The Great Impoverishment,” 358–359 Greenspan, Alan: and 1987 stock market crash, 103–104, 112–114 and 1990s stock market bubble, 160–164, 170–178, 191–210, 219–225, 285–287 and 1990s subprime market, 164–166 and 1995 funds rate cuts, 139–141 and 1998 rate cuts, 187–189 and 2000–2001 economic slowdown, 224–225, 237–249 2007–2008 speaking tour of, 341–344 and analysts, consistent-bias theorem, 197, 199, 201 and analysts, upward bias of forecasts, 202, 203, 209, 232, 284 and (Wall Street) analysts, 29, 175, 177–178, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201 n.35, 203, 204, 209, 218, 231n.16, 232, 233, 235, 239, 243, 244, 284 and asset inflation (vis-à-vis price inflation), 4, 16, 25, 28, 65, 106, 170, 171, 175, 176–177 awarded, American Hero of 2007, 329 awarded, Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, 297 awarded, Enron Prize for Distinguished Service, 248, 284, 297 awarded, Knight Commander of the British Empire, 297 awarded, Order national de la Legion d’honneur, 297 awarded, Presidential Medal of Freedom 297 after retirement, 301–304 Americans’ feelings about, 104, 144, 164, 195, 203, 245, 243, 337–338 on asset inflation, 359 autobiography of, 154, 187, 303, 337–341, and bubbles, states he (and Federal Reserve) has and can pop bubbles, 128–129, 139–140, 161 and bubbles, states Federal Reserve cannot pop bubbles, 192–195, 203–205, 225, 228, 261, 285–286 on bubbles, 192, 203–204, 285, 349–350 campaign for Fed chairmanship, 82–83 debt, refers to as “wealth,” 2, 99, 107, 258, 260, 290 during Carter presidency, 60–67 character and personality of, 3, 14, 15, 27, 193, 211–213 and consumer debt, 254, 258, 261 and corporate management earnings bias, 235 control of FOMC/Federal Reserve by, 137–139 on Council of Economic Advisers, 5, 47, 50, 52–57 on credit default swaps, 315–316 and derivatives, 102–105, 110, 113, 128, 130–131, 182, 189–190, 206, 276, 312, 314, 343, 346 dissolution of Townsend Greenspan, 102 early life of, 2, 9–10 economic forecasts by, 3, 6, 13, 16–17, 25, 43, 54–55, 97–98, 119 education of, 3, 10–13, 59–60 and presidential election of 1980, 67–70 as Fed chairman, 6–7, 104–107 Fed nomination hearing for, 95–102 and financial institution bailouts, 115 “Gold and Economic Freedom,” 28–29, 205, 286, 352, (see additional pages under “Gold and Economic Freedom”) on gold standard, 362–363 and housing market, 254, 259–263 image presented by, 2, 52–53, 60, 61 infamous speeches of, 284–286, 289–299 on inflation, 4, 5, 45–46, 48 on investment, 350–352 legacy of, 365 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 6–7, 85–93 on liquidity boom, 331 and LTCM failure, 181–187, 189 marriages of, 13, 57 and Mexico bailout, 135–136 Greenspan, Alan: (Cont.)


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Similarly, Rowan Williams, Archbishop throughout the later New Labour years and the first years of the coalition government, wrote a searing critique of government policy. That these public interventions are widely commented on demonstrates that the Church retains some influence, even if its power has diminished. The Army, too, declined in importance after the fall of the British Empire. As colonies won their independence in the aftermath of World War II, Britain’s global power was hugely diminished and British foreign policy subordinated itself to US power. Inevitably, the Army lost its central role. In recent years, austerity measures have led to further drastic cuts to military capabilities, including the loss of over 30,000 soldiers and other Navy and Army personnel.

Companies go to considerable lengths and use elaborate means to avoid paying corporation tax – but then, when confronted with these facts, argue that paying this specific tax does not really matter, because they are paying a whole range of other taxes. This doctrine of ‘total tax contribution’ was developed in 2005 by John Whiting,1 a one-time tax partner at PwC. Whiting went on to receive an Order of the British Empire for services to the tax profession. He is now a non-executive director at HMRC. Total tax contribution is, as Richard Murphy puts it, ‘complete Mickey Mouse accounting’. What ‘total tax contribution’ does is add together all of a company’s payments to the government – whether it be television licences, vehicle licences, fuel duty, airport taxes or insurance companies.


pages: 407 words: 123,587

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, clean water, Etonian, full employment, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Masdar, microcredit, public intellectual, trade route, unemployed young men, urban planning

On my way back to camp, I passed the old British war cemetery, which had been converted to a rice paddy. A few headstones lay by the fence, and there was a white cross in the center of the field, a long wall, and a dilapidated Mughal dome that must have marked “the graves of the Hindus and Muhammadans.” On a dark granite wall was carved: 1914–1920. The officers and men of the Forces of the British Empire whose names are here recorded are buried or commemorated in this cemetery which contains also the graves of 925 of their comrades whose names are not known. The wall continued for fifty yards on each side, with scores of cap-badges and thousands of names. My regiment, the Black Watch, had lost more than anyone—there were three hundred names, half a battalion, including a Black Watch brigadier.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR RORY STEWART has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books, and is the author of The Places in Between. A 2004 fellow of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his foreign service. He now lives in Kabul, where he has established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. Footnotes 1Abu Miriam ran an organization called the Movement of the Party of God. Abu Ahmed was the representative of the Supreme Committee for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

The railways, he possessed the vision and the skill to see, had the potential to transform time, distance, and communication, as well as our relationship with and reliance on technology. From his workshop on the Tyne, Stephenson set in motion a commercial, mechanical, and cultural revolution that extended across Britain and then around the world, and that drove the British empire to its highest peaks of wealth and influence. Whereas for decades colonial trade and expansion had revolved around coastal settlements, innovative steam technologies brought vast new tracts of land under British control. Powerful British steamships sailed regardless of the wind or the currents, and they voyaged farther inshore and upriver than ever before, while railways were established across the colonies and soon provided fast and safe access to resource-rich interiors that in the past had been far too hard to reach and exploit.

Powerful British steamships sailed regardless of the wind or the currents, and they voyaged farther inshore and upriver than ever before, while railways were established across the colonies and soon provided fast and safe access to resource-rich interiors that in the past had been far too hard to reach and exploit. Stephenson’s inventions laid the foundation for the sophisticated international transportation network that allowed the British empire to move people, goods, and information more cheaply and dependably than ever before, that brought it previously unimaginable levels of prosperity and coherence, and that enabled it to build on successes in ways that kept it well ahead of its colonial competitors. XII Humphry Davy was the Regency’s leading scientist and was celebrated both nationally and internationally for his groundbreaking research in areas ranging from mineralogy, geology, and agriculture, through the nature of light, heat, and electricity, to the chemistry of tanning hides and the anesthetic potential of nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas.”


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Good-Bye to All That In 1929 the English writer Robert Graves published his book Good-Bye to All That, with which he achieved acclaim and some notoriety. The book deals largely with his experiences as an officer in the First World War (during which he was injured so badly that his family were incorrectly informed of his death). More broadly, the book is a wry reflection on the passing of the British Empire, a very specific way of life and moral framework. Its title keeps coming to mind today, and it seems a good starting point from which to reflect on a period marked by Brexit, policy mishaps over world trade, and the disintegration of the world order. These events are just a few of those leading us to say good-bye to globalization.

In particular, by the nineteenth century America was regarded by Europeans, much as Alexis de Tocqueville did, as the model Europe should follow. Globalization was born out of two Anglo-Saxon empires: the British trade- and land-based empire of the nineteenth century and the American hegemony of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Though the British Empire was undemocratic in its impact on other countries and though it sought to transfer value from the rest of the world to its core, it did at least set up transport routes, the cultural, legal, and linguistic structures that globalization still travels by today. As a result, most of the facets of globalization have a strong Anglo-Saxon flavor, especially if we think of globalization as a legal, political, economic, and perhaps cultural network.


Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

The ruins of its 12th-century abbey and surrounding gothic castles have even, according to legend, been the inspiration for fairytales. The area’s enchanting effect on visitors is well known. It was a favourite haunt of colonial civil servants, who flocked here after retiring from service to the British Empire. Lawrence Durrell, who made his home here, turned the region into a literary starlet when he wrote about it in Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. Kyrenia’s north coast is now fast changing. Vast olive fields, old village houses and natural habitats are making way for new developments and infrastructure such as tourist towns and roadways.

Top of section History Situated at the nautical crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean basin, the island has a rich and varied history much like the intricate 6000-year-old mosaics found on its shores. Over the centuries countless settlers, invaders, and immigrants have landed or attempted to possess the island. It has been a part of the Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, Byzantine, Roman, Lusignan, Genoese, Venetian, Ottoman and British Empires, each one leaving an indelible mark on Cyp­riot history and culture. Remnants can be seen in the great many temples, tombs, ports, churches, basilicas, aqueducts and castles, as well as in the chapels, bastions, fortresses and ancient city walls that cover the island. It is this combination of influences and contrasts that make Cyprus the incredible place it is today.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Once the industry is established, the social controls that already exist in small, isolated communities activate on behalf of the industry. Locals accept a certain degree of corruption in the interest of keeping the money flowing. Those who resist are cowed into silence, ostracized, and—if they persist—sometimes imprisoned or exiled. The BVI forms part of a system of British tax havens. These vestiges of the British Empire include the BVI, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Channel Islands, and Turks and Caicos. Farther afield but part of the same tax haven family are former English possessions like the Bahamas, Belize, Cyprus, Singapore, and the Seychelles. Among these jurisdictions, one of the oldest and most venerable is Jersey, an island off the coast of Normandy in the English Channel, less than an hour’s plane ride from London.

Appleby and its data were different from Mossack Fonseca and the Panama Papers. Whereas the upstart Panamanians were entrepreneurial risk-takers, their files filled with garrulously compromising emails, Appleby was the establishment. The firm had been founded in 1898 by Major Reginald Woodfield Appleby, who later became a commander of the Order of the British Empire. It boasted annual revenues of more than $100 million and membership in the elite trade group the Offshore Magic Circle.25 Appleby’s correspondence was more circumspect than that of Mossack Fonseca, the leaked data incomplete and often in the form of spreadsheets. After the Panama Papers, the offshore industry was willing to cut the Panamanians loose, casting them as outliers, a blemish on an otherwise law-abiding industry.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

I’ve come to visit Biffa Polymers, a gleaming new plastics recycling plant perched on a windswept hilltop overlooking the North Sea. This stretch of England has known heavy industry for centuries: coal mines, foundries, brickworks, bottleworks. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, ships left port at Seaham loaded with the materials to build the British Empire. The scars of that industrial legacy are still written into the cliffs and rocky sands. The recycling plant overlooks Chemical Beach, so named for the nineteenth-century chemical works that operated here, turning out soda crystals and magnesia; its wastes still wash up on the beach as sea glass even now.

Although if you can’t sell it, is it worth that much? PART TWO FOUL 6 THE CURE FOR CHOLERA ‘The sewer is the conscience of the city’ —VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables This might all sound bleak, but we’ve solved a waste crisis before. It’s July 1858, and Victorian London is suffocating in the grip of a relentless heatwave. The British Empire is at its peak. Smoke billows from the factories and workhouses, the docklands thronged with ships arriving from India and the West Indies. Charles Dickens, at the height of his fame, has just set off on a reading tour of the country, while on the Isle of Wight another Charles is putting first pen to paper on a book called On the Origin of Species.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

Irrepressible, unpredictable and inconsistent (‘nothing is so bad as consistency’, he once claimed) and dazzled with his own power, Beaverbrook soon became the major newspaper magnate in Britain, hiring writers of the calibre of Arnold Bennett and Evelyn Waugh who was sacked after two months but later put his experience to use in writing his 1938 Fleet Street novel, Scoop, taking Lord Beaverbrook as his model for Lord Copper. He even formed a political party, the new United Empire Party, in February 1930, to promote what he called his Empire Crusade of protectionist tariffs in favour of goods produced by countries in the British Empire. The Daily Express moved to a new site on Fleet Street in 1933. • Daily Express, Fleet Street, p. 44. Wine Office Court Licences for the sale of wine were formerly issued from this court off Fleet Street. Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court at Fleet Street One of London’s oldest and most popular pubs, the Cheshire Cheese, described by Arthur Ransome in Bohemia in London as ‘the dirty-fronted, low browed tavern with stone flasks in the window’, was where Augustus Sala, the nineteenth-century man of letters, noted how ‘the waiters are always furious… How could it be otherwise when on the waiter’s soul there lies the perpetual sense of injury caused by the savoury odour of steaks; of cheese bubbling in tiny tins; of floury potatoes and fragrant green peas; of cool salads, and cooler tankards of bitter beer without being able to spare the time to consume them in comfort?’

Some of the properties were later taken over by institutions such as the German Embassy (now in Belgrave Square), the Royal Society (at No. 6) and the Mall Galleries, home of the Federation of British Artists and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (at No. 17). south side: Trafalgar Square end to Buckingham Palace end Nos. 12–14 Home during the Cold War of the Information Research Department, a secret branch of the Foreign Office set up to combat nationalism in the British Empire and monitor the Left in Britain. The department’s agents gleaned their information from radio broadcasts, smuggled newspapers, refugees and asylum seekers, and assisted in overseas missions, such as the 1965 overthrow of the Indonesian leader President Sukarno. It was closed down in 1977 by Labour foreign secretary David Owen who claimed it had too many links with Labour’s opponents.

Bell Lane Bell Lane was the ‘worst area in all London’, according to the East End News of July 1888, a time when the surrounding streets were so densely populated there were around 800 people to the acre, compared with a capital-wide average of fifty per acre. Next to the chicken slaughterhouse on the west side of the street from 1821 to 1939 stood the Jewish Free School, at one time the largest school in the British Empire, with 4,300 pupils. Though denominational, the establishment aimed at anglicizing its pupils and ridding them of their guttural European accents, and its alumni included the diamond merchant Barney Barnato; the comic Bud Flanagan; the danceband leader Joe Loss; Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, the only non-Chinaman to become a member of the Kuomintang, China’s nationalist party; and the novelist Israel Zangwill, the leading Jewish writer of the late nineteenth century.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Return to beginning of chapter DOCKLANDS You’d probably never guess it while gazing up at the ultramodern skyscrapers that dominate the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf, but from the 16th century until the mid-20th century this area was the centre of the world’s greatest port, the hub of the British Empire and its enormous global trade. At the docks here cargo from global trade was landed, bringing jobs to a tight-knit working-class community. Even up to the start of WWII this community still thrived, but then the docks were badly firebombed during the Blitz. After WWII the docks were in no condition to cope with the postwar technological and political changes as the British Empire evaporated. At the same time, enormous new bulk carriers and container ships demanded deep-water ports and new loading and unloading techniques.

The one-time dean of St Paul’s, Donne was also a metaphysical poet, most famous for the immortal lines ‘No man is an island’ and ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ (both in the same poem!). On the eastern side of both the north and south transepts are stairs leading down to the crypt, treasury and OBE Chapel, where weddings, funerals and other services are held for members of the Order of the British Empire. The crypt has memorials to some 300 military demigods, including Florence Nightingale and Lord Kitchener, while both the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson are actually buried here, Nelson having been placed in a black sarcophagus that is directly under the centre of the dome. On the surrounding walls are plaques in memory of those from the Commonwealth who died in various conflicts during the 20th century.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

Walking Tour 1: Westminster, Whitehall & Trafalgar Square Start: Finish: Time: Best time: Westminster Tube station Trafalgar Square Allow approximately 60 minutes, not including time spent in attractions Be at the starting line just before noon to hear Big Ben deliver its longest chime of the day Worst time: After working hours, when energy drains out of the area 231 12_308691-ch08.qxp 232 12/23/08 Chapter 8 9:18 PM Page 232 Walkabouts When most people hear the word “London,” this is the area they immediately picture: the Houses of Parliament, the wash of the Thames, the gong of Big Ben, the humble facade of Number 10 Downing Street, and the imperial government buildings of Whitehall. Kings and queens, prime ministers and executioners, scoundrels and assassins—this is where they converged to shape a millennium of world events, at the command center for England and the British Empire. History fans, lace up. 1 Westminster Tube Station The best train to take here is the Jubilee Line, which was added at great expense in 1999. The station’s concrete-grey, 36m-deep (118-ft.) cavern, ascended by escalators from the Jubilee’s platforms, is one of the city’s finest new spaces, providing a modern-day analog to the majestic space of Westminster Abbey nearby.

The imposing building to the left of Clive Steps is the Foreign Office, an important civil office. So who is Robert Clive, the cutlass-wielding subject of this statue on the steps? He was the general who helped the East India Company conquer India and Bengal, partly through a series of underhanded bribes, thus delivering the region into the control of the British Empire for nearly 2 centuries. Don’t be too hard on him; the opium-addicted fellow committed suicide by stabbing himself with a penknife. Walk down King Charles Street and through the arches at the end. You should now be on Parliament Street. Look left, into the center of it. The somber stone column in the traffic island is 9 The Cenotaph The Cenotaph (from the Greek words for “empty” and “tomb”) is a simple but elegiac memorial to those killed in the two World Wars.

The London Compendium, by Ed Gilnert, serves as a street-by-street catalog (maddeningly indexless) of little-known facts. For a witty tour of London oddities by way of the places on its version of the Monopoly board, try Do Not Pass Go, by Tim Moore. The Pax Britannia Trilogy, by Jan Morris, is a three-volume saga of the rise and fall of the British Empire. A Survey of London, Written in the Year 1598, by John Stow offers an eyewitness account of the reign of Elizabeth I. Gillian Tindall’s The House by the Thames spins the story of Southwark’s changes by tracing the history of a town house that survived them all. The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life, by Virginia Woolf, is a quick read in which the writer profiles the city in the early 20th century.


The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

Wallace was asking Darwin to please read his paper and, if he thought it worthy, to please pass it along to Lyell. So it was that Wallace put his discovery of all discoveries—the origin of species by natural selection—into the hands of a group of distinguished British Gentlemen. The year 1858 was on the crest of the high Victorian tide of the British Empire’s dominion over palm and pine. Britain was the most powerful military and economic power on earth. The mighty Royal Navy had seized and then secured colonies on every continent except for the frozen, human-proof South Pole. Britain had given birth to the Industrial Revolution and continued to dominate it now, in 1858, almost a century later.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

Will Hutton wrote in the Observer: ‘If Britain can’t find a way of sticking together, it is the death of the liberal enlightenment before the atavistic forces of nationalism and ethnicity – a dark omen for the twenty-first century. Britain will cease as an idea. We will all be diminished.’ Talk like that actually reminds one of the language bandied about at the peak of the British Empire. The break-up of Britain might well diminish people like Will Hutton and his ilk; others might see it as an opportunity to bring about a few changes here. In contrast, George Monbiot of the Guardian delivered a very fine column two days before the vote. ‘No United Kingdom newspaper’, he wrote, ‘except the Sunday Herald supports Scottish independence.’


pages: 153 words: 45,871

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty. But Disneyland wasn’t built atop an equally peculiar nineteenth-century theme park—something constructed to meet both the romantic longings and purely mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern Singapore was: Bits of the Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis. These few very deliberate fragments of historical texture serve as a reminder of just how deliciously odd an entrepôt Singapore once was—a product of Empire kinkier even than Hong Kong.


pages: 193 words: 46,052

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction by Rana Mitter

banking crisis, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, urban planning

Amyes BARTHES Jonathan Culler THE BEATS David Sterritt BEAUTY Roger Scruton BESTSELLERS John Sutherland THE BIBLE John Riches BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Eric H. Cline BIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee BLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell THE BLUES Elijah Wald THE BODY Chris Shilling THE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens BORDERS Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION Martin Loughlin THE BRITISH EMPIRE Ashley Jackson BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright BUDDHA Michael Carrithers BUDDHISM Damien Keown BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown BYZANTIUM Peter Sarris CANCER Nicholas James CAPITALISM James Fulcher CATHOLICISM Gerald O’Collins CAUSATION Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum THE CELL Terence Allen and Graham Cowling THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe CHAOS Leonard Smith CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Kimberley Reynolds CHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson CHRISTIAN ETHICS D.


pages: 165 words: 46,133

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

British Empire, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, fear of failure, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, reality distortion field, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

Believe it or not, this is the hard way. That’s why it works. Remember, sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. USE OBSTACLES AGAINST THEMSELVES Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enmities. —PLUTARCH Gandhi didn’t fight for independence for India. The British Empire did all of the fighting—and, as it happens, all of the losing. That was deliberate, of course. Gandhi’s extensive satyagraha campaign and civil disobedience show that action has many definitions. It’s not always moving forward or even obliquely. It can also be a matter of positions. It can be a matter of taking a stand.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

On another side of the world, sufferers of unexplained itches confabulated complex stories about nanotechnology and government conspiracy. In a different country still, one highly regarded expert in schizophrenia called another ‘a liar and a charlatan.’ Lord Monckton blamed almost all the dreads that have befallen the West on the nihilistic, jealous, power-crazy left, insisting that the British empire fell because of the welfare state. David Irving, meanwhile, held an intrigue of scheming Jews responsible for the same event. Despite the fact that his version of wartime events has been almost universally rejected, Professor Deborah Lipstadt still worries that it somehow presents ‘a clear and future danger’ to historical knowledge.

Henry 41 behavioural patterns, release of 44 ‘being stared at’, sense of 255, 258, 262, 265, 276 beliefs coherent 218 core 183 and facts 201 faulty 84, 142, 182, 218 forcing onto others 311 of others 50–51 religious 197 simplified nature of 133 Benedetti, Fabrizio 42 Bentall, Richard 145–48, 155–57, 180, 310, 313 Benveniste, Jacques 110–12, 115 Beowulf 302 Berns, Gregory 71–2 Bible 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25 Condemnation of homosexuality 14–15, 18 Dragons of 13 Genesis 3–4, 13 Binary Judgments, 133–34, 309 Blair, Tony 94 Blind spots 79, 82 Blindness 82 Blizzard, Pam 289 Bloom, Paul 304 Blue Mountains 52, 64 Bortolotti, Lisa 182 brain 42, 70–92, 101–103 and confabulation 189–96 development 73 experience expectant’ nature 205 faulty beliefs of 84–91 information processing capacity 79 left/right hemispheres of 190–92 mental models of 76, 85–86, 102, 147–48, 183, 185–86, 316 and the mind 303–304 organic abnormalities of schizophrenia prefrontal cortex 73 size 75 and storytelling 188–89, 191–92, 305–307 tumours in 92–93, 116 breath control (‘Pranayama’) 32–26, 38, 40–41, 45, 56, 134, 196 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 95 British Centre for Science Education 5 British Empire 209–210, 249, 250, 252–53, 309 British False Memory Society 170, 173 British Homeopathic Association 109 British Journal of Psychiatry 145 Browne, Sylvia 290 Bruner, Jerome ix, 303 Buddha 52 Buddhist meditation 52–62, 182 Buddhists 65, 70, 182 Bulger killings 171 Bush, George W. 87 Butler, Rab 232 Cambridge Union 210 Campbell, Joseph 303 cancer 93 ‘cures’ for 33, 35, 38–39, 116, 181, 242, 310 Cancer Act 1939 116 cannibalism 175 Cannon, Dolores 44 Capitalism 213, 217 Capolingua, Rosanna 39–40 carbon-dioxide levels 204 Carroll, Lewis 201 Carson, Rachel 211 Catholics 21 cause and effect 184–187, 189, 196, 206, 302, 304 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 118–119, 124, 135 certainty human need for 132–34, 197, 252 rejection of 268 change 306 Charles E.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

The Daily Mirror crowed about oil seepages in the English Midlands that indicated the British Isles had as much oil in the ground as Pennsylvania, Baku, and the Middle East, the only places on Earth then known to have large oil reserves. Churchill, of course, knew The Mirror was as reliable then as it is now. And so, the young Naval chief knew the British Empire would need its own globe-girding oil supply. He eyed Persia and Iraq. But first, Churchill would have to invent Iraq, which he did, later, in 1919, with a razor blade, when he cut a “nation” out of the three Mesopotamian oil fields of the defeated Ottoman Empire. In the meantime, the rubes and boobs were grabbing for the “Sound Investment” trumpeted on The Mirror’s front page after Sir Winston’s let-them-burn-oil speech.

Churchill’s drinking buddy (all Churchill’s buddies drank), William Knox D’Arcy, picked Persia up for a song from the wastrel Pasha in 1901, then sold what would become British Petroleum, for a “gratifying return,” to Her Majesty’s government in 1914 at Churchill’s insistence. With Persia in its pocket, the British Empire left the Caspian Sea to the Soviets to abuse—and as a lure to successfully tempt the Axis to its doom. (Here’s a photo of Hitler carving up a cake in the shape of the Caspian republics. The word Baku is on his slice. The Führer planned to carve up the Caspian by September 25, 1942, with Panzer divisions.


pages: 582 words: 136,780

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

Dust of all grades and compositions was thrown into the air by the eruption. Much of it, too heavy to be kept on high for long, fell down as drifting veils of grey, and was widely reported as having done so. Ships at sea experienced dust falls for a fortnight after the eruption: the Brani and the British Empire came under a slow rain of a white ash that one master said ‘looked like Portland cement’, when they were sailing in the Indian Ocean within a 2,000-mile range of the volcano; the Scotia experienced falling dust until 8 September, when she was off the Horn of Africa, 3,700 miles away. But the lighter material, the finest particles of all, were thrown up right through the troposphere until, almost defying the pull of gravity, they were caught up for months in the lower reaches of the stratosphere† itself.

Thomas (American brig) 157 Arabia 14, 40, 74, 331, 333, 339 Arabian Sea 190, 191 Arabism 331 Arabs 22, 40, 144, 325, 331, 332 Archer (Australian passenger steamship) 157 Arctic 24, 79, 80, 85 Arctic Circle 80 Aristotle 371 Arles, France 40 art 282–5 arthropods 369 Ascroft, William 284–5, 290, 291 Asia 13n, 21, 42, 68, 74, 112, 116, 271 Asia Plate 317, 320 Asians, Portuguese-speaking (Mardijkers) 44 asthenosphere 109 Athens 34 Atlantic Monthly 220n Atlantic Ocean 14, 19, 59, 67, 87, 97n, 105, 107, 196 Atlantis 73 atmospheric pressure 268 Australia 55, 64, 65, 69, 74, 114, 115, 116, 189, 319 Australian Oceanic Plate 316–17, 320 Avallone, M. 394n Azores 306 Backer, Cornelis Andries 364–7 Bacon, Francis 72n Baird, Major A.W. 276 Baker, Diane 394 Bali, Balinese 17, 44, 55, 66, 69 manuscript style 127 bombings (2002) 343 Balkans 112 ballooning spiders 356–9, 357, 361–2 balloons 72 Baluchistan 190 Banda, sultan of 32 Banda Islands 23, 31, 33 Banda Sea 29 Bandung, Java 153, 376, 377, 379 Bangkok 264 Bangladesh 331 Banjoewangie, Java 189 Banka Island 148 Banks, Sir Joseph 120 Banquey Island, near Borneo 265 Bantam, Java 25, 126, 237 Bantam, king of 121 Bantam, Resident of 167 Banten, Java 201 a pepper port 15, 29, 322 skirmish with the fleet from Goa 18, 19 described 20–21 flood destruction of 1883 127 piety of the people 325 Islam established 332 the haj 333n signs of the Mahdi's imminent arrival 336–7 Banten, Java, sultan of 17, 31, 34, 35, 40 Banten Peasants' Revolt (1888) 331 importance of 323–4 Islamic-inspired and Islamic-led 340 attack on Sanedja 340–41 Dutch repeating rifles finish the rebellion 341 the hajis' victims 341–2 fades in popular memory 342 and Indonesian independence 342 a warning of future events 343 Bantenese 321, 332, 333, 335, 338 Barents Sea 24 Barnum & Bailey 243n barographs 267–70, 274, 275 barometers 267, 270 barometric pressures 293 basalt 84–8, 96, 102, 104, 112, 113, 297, 306, 308, 319 Batavi tribe 37 Batavia (Dutch steamship) 231 Batavia (previously Jayakarta, then Jakarta) 6, 28, 145, 172n so-named by the Dutch 36, 37 concentration of scientists in 36 Dutch proud of 37 Dutch compelled to leave (1949) 38 golden era 38 Dutch building 39–40, 41–2 the VOC 42, 47, 135, 139 employment in 42–3, 45 population 44, 144 Town Hall (Stadthuis; now Jakarta History Museum) 46–7, 142 Dutch life in 135–6 and war with Britain 139, 141 becomes a capital city 141 old Batavia closed down 141–3 new Batavia 141, 142, 143 communications 146–7, 196, 197, 225, 226, 237, 264n gasworks 147, 217–19, 218, 233, 248, 252 iceworks 147 's Jacob appointed governor-general 148–9 the circus visits 199–201, 201, 321 Plant and Animal Garden 201–2 clubs 202–4, 203 receives information from Anjer (August 1883) 215 air waves arrive in 233 four gigantic explosions 233–5 sounds not heard by everyone 266 tide-meter 277–8 change in temperature after the eruption 293 Batavia Standard Time 219, 248 Batavia Castle 51, 135, 142 day-register 49, 50 Batavia Cricket Club 205 Batavia Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory 154, 162, 216 Batavia Port Authority 157 Bates, Henry Walter: ‘On Coleopterous Insects Frequenting Damp Places' 58 bathymetric survey data 105 Batuwara, Mount 125, 126 Bay of Bengal 18n, 191 Bay of Biscay 192, 281 Bay of Naples (Welsh cargo vessel) 231, 299 Beale HMS 60 beetles 58, 60 Behaim, Martin 22 Belfast 220 Belgium, Kingdom of 29n Bengalen 49 bentonite 297 Berbice (German paraffin-carrier) 223 Berdichew, Poland 190 Berkowitz, Rickey 379 Berlin 190 Berouw (paddle-steamer) 230, 231, 251, 255–8, 256, 259 Beyerinck, Mrs 165, 166, 226–9, 251 Beyerinck, Willem, controller of Ketimbang 156, 165, 166–7, 176, 226–30, 245, 246, 247, 251 Billiton Island 148 Billiton Tin Company 148 Bintaing (hopper) 157, 245 biogeography 54, 73 biology 54, 69, 369, 372 biosphere 302 biota 54 birds geographical distribution 54–6, 64 Wallace's collection 60 repopulation of Krakatoa Island 360 sent to Europe 155 on Anak Krakatoa 370–71 Bird's Head, New Guinea 309 Bishop, Reverend Sereno 285n, 290 ‘Bishop's Rings’ 285, 289 Black Sea coast 190 Blaeu, John 25 Blair, Lawrence 395 Blair, Lorne 395 Blavatsky, Helena 53n Blosseville Coast 80 Blundell D.F. 52 Bogor, Java 142n Bogota, Colombia 273 Boing (a guide) 380, 386–9 Bombay 90, 191, 270, 276 Bonaparte, Louis, King of Holland 141 Bonney, Thomas 273n Borjild (Norwegian barque) 230–31 Borneo 22, 23, 66, 69, 132, 137, 188, 272 Borobudur temple, Java 123n, 142n Bo'sun's Rock (Bootsmans Rots) 346, 348, 383, 387 botany 54, 187, 354n, 364, 372 Bothwell Castle (ship) 299 Brani (ship) 285 Brazil 13n, 14, 71, 148, 224 Brazzi, Rossano 394 Brewer, W. 196, 197 Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 199 Bristowe, William Syer 361, 368 Britain, British and Pulau Rann competition with the Dutch 29 official sanctioning of trading cooperatives 30 colonial intentions for Java and Sumatra 34 and the Portuguese 34 abandons siege of Ambon fort 35 Runcorn's rock magnetism studies 92 at war (1780s) 139, 141 presence on Rodriguez 261–2 on the Andamans 265 in India 326 imperialism 334 see also England British Army 35 British Empire (ship) 285 British Ornithologists' Club 53 British-Australian Telegraph Company 189 Brito, Don Lourenzo de 18 Bromo, Mount, Java 48, 155, 303 Brunhes, Jean 96 Brussels 195 Buddhism 123 Buenos Aires 289 Buffon, Comte de 72n Bugis 137, 138 Buijs, Thomas 211n Buitenzorg, Batavia 144, 146, 147, 150, 152, 201, 266 Botanical Gardens 148, 224, 364, 367 Bullard, Teddy (later Sir Edward) 90 Burma 34n, 44 butterflies 58, 60 Button Island 222 Byron, George Gordon, Lord: ‘Darkness’ 295–6 Cabele & Wireless 100 Cabral, Pedro Alvarez 13–14 Cailendra Dynasty 123, 134 Cailendra Seven 123 Cairo 116 Calais 187 Calapa 25 Calcutta 276, 280 Calicut 13 California 13n, 290, 295 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 93 Calmeyer Island 314, 347n Calvinism 33 Cambodia 34n Cambridge University 105, 276 Cameron, Consul Alexander Patrick 152, 235–9, 236, 259, 260n, 272 Canada 290 Canary Islands 289 Cape Colony, southern Africa 34n Cape of Good Hope 14 19 30 Cape Mendocino, California 93 Cape Race 196 Cape Town, South Africa 281 Cape Verde Islands 13n caitalism 30 carbon 302 carbon dioxide 243, 301, 302, 317 carbon-14 isotope 134 Carcavelos, Portugal 191 Cargados Carajos 280 Caribbean Signal Service 287 Carita Java 373, 375, 379–80 Carita Beach Hotel 390 casowaries 116, 137n Caucasus 112 Cavendish, Sir Thomas 34 Cayman Brac 265 Celebes 23, 66, 69 Central America 133 Cerro Hudson volcano 308 Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) 11, 22, 264 Ceylon Observer 279 Chacana volcano, Ecuador 308 Chamberlin, Thomas 76 Champa Kingdom, Vietnam 128 Channel Four 133n, 395 Charles Bal (cargo-carrying barque) 220, 246, 299 Chaumont Bay, Lake Ontario 283–4 Chefoo (later Yantai), China 287 Chelsea, London 284, 290, 291 chemistry 305–6 chemolithoautotrophic hyperthermophilic archaebacteria 367n Cherbourg 282 Chile 13n, 289, 308, 309 China, Chinese 22 and spices 10 rule of Macau 19 mapping 23, 24 coolies 42, 213, 228 merchants 42 Coen and 42–3 Batava population 44, 144, 215 and tectonic plates 111 and possible eruption of AD 535 131 records of sea captains 131–2 anti-Chinese riots (1998) 138 and the 1883 eruption 215, 246–7, 250 China Overseas Shipping Company (COSCO) 381 Christianity, Christians and the 1883 eruption 163 and Muslims 32 Protestant 44 Christie, Mr (in Ceylon) 264 Christmas Island 89, 114 Church, Frederic Edwin 283–4 Niagara 283 Sunset over the Ice on Chaumont Bay, Lake Ontario 284 Twilight in the Wilderness 283 Ciliwung River 34, 38, 39 cinnamon 18, 31, 330 Ciparis (Sylbaris), Louis-Auguste 243n Claw, Iceland 82 Cloos, Hans 75–6 cloves (Syzygium aromaticum) 10, 11, 18, 29, 31, 65, 297n, 330 Cochin 11 cochineal 330 cockatoos 55, 65, 65, 66, 68, 137n cock's tail' jets 352 Cocos (Keeling) Island 114, 190n Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 33, 142 appearance 32 personality 33, 35 founder of the Dutch East Indies 33–4, 36 governor-general of the East Indies 33, 34 decides to eject the British 34 and the Chinese 42–3 coffee 10, 141, 148, 182, 188, 238–9 Cold War 106–7, 266, 275 Coleoptera 58 College of Delft 156n Collocalia 21 Cologne Cathedral 297 Colombia 308, 309 Colombo 288 Columbia University 107 Compagnie van Verre 15 Concordia Military Club, Batavia 147, 153, 172, 202, 203–4, 203 Conrad (Dutch mailboat) 157, 167–8 Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim 12–13 conservative plate boundary 113 Constantinople 10 continental drift 171 Wegener's theory 71–8 in basalts of east Greenland 87 and convection 90, 91, 97–8 and earth's magnetism 92, 97 dating of 97 and plate tectonics 91, 101, 315 reacceptance of 101, 102 Wilson's conclusions 104–5 Jeffreys opposes the concept 304n continental plate collision 112–13, 307 continental shrinking 73 continental tectonic material 112, 113, 114 controllers 156 convection 90, 91, 97–8, 109, 302 Cook, Captain James 119–20, 121, 122, 298, 354 Copenhagen 80, 82, 196 Cotopaxi volcano, Ecuador 308 Cotteau, Edmond 356, 358, 360 ‘ country trading' 31–2 Court Javanese language 124n, 127 Creole language 261 Cressonnier, Louis 208, 209 Cretaceous Quiet Zone 96 Crete 244 Cribb, Robert: The Historical Atlas of Indonesia 28n cricket 153 Crimea 190 Cuba 265 Culemborg bastion, Sunda Kelapa 137 Curie, Pierre 92n Curie point 84, 92n currency 11, 14 cycad 365n da Gama, Vasco 13 Daendels, Herman Willem 141–2, 143 Daily Eagle 291–2 Dalby, R.J. 175 Daly Waters, south of Darwin 264 Damavand, Mount 112 Dammerman, Karel 367, 369 Danan cone, Krakatoa xv, 121, 158n, 318, 347 erupts (August, 1883) 176, 177 disappearance of 313, 346 Danes 196 Dark Ages 133 Darwin, Charles 61, 276 pioneers evolution science 57, 62, 63 natural selection theory 59 Wallace influences 60–61, 62 Wallace's loyalty to 63 On the Origin of Species 58, 62 Darwin, Sir George 276, 305n Darwinism 63 Day, Arthur Louis 304–5 Dayaks 265 de Vries, Mr (a pilot) 214–15 decibel-meters 266 declinometer 162–3 deer 65, 66, 146 Dekker, Eduard Douwes (‘Multatuli’) 328, 330 Max Havelaar 328, 329, 330 Delft Technical University 88 Demak, Java 332 Denmark 290 Denmark Strait 80 Descartes, Rene 305 Deventer, central Holland 337 Devonport 282 Dewey, John 105, 106 Diamond Head, Oahu 102 Dickinson, William 107n Diego Garcia 53, 263–4 Disappearing Island 102 Discovery, HMS 121 Djaman, Umar 324 Dover 187, 282 Dowd, Charles 219n Down House, Downe, Kent 62, 64 Drake, Sir Francis 34 duck-billed platypus 65 Dumas (a clerk in Sanedja) 340 Dumas, Mrs 340, 341 Durant, Will 301 Durban, South Africa 281n dust particles 285–6 Dutch builds Anjer lighthouse 3, 258–9 spice trade 12, 14–16, 23, 141 Portuguese driven out 15, 19, 29 first expedition to Java 15–18 first treaty with Java 16 relations with the local population 16, 17, 32, 323 Dutch fleets start to go East 19–20, 29 cartographers 21, 23, 27 outposts run from the Javanese HQ 34n and Indonesian independence 38, 342, 380n building of Batavia 39–40 and slavery 42 Batavia population 44 Treaty of Paris 139, 141 guerrilla war in Aceh 147 response to impending eruption (1883) 164 dual administrative rule 253n relief operations after the 1883 eruption 321, 323 momentary faltering in the region 327–8 impact of Max Havelaar 328 Kultuurstelsel (Cultivation System) 328–9, 333 Ethical Policy 330 reforms after the Peasants' Revolt 342 Dutch Cemetery, Madaascar 16 Dutch Colonial Police 339 Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia) Coen founds 36 slavery abolished 44 Wallace's fascination with 59 Dutch government takes charge (1799) 141 and submarine telegraph cables 189 Dutch-Javanese relations 212 revolts and restlessness in 326 Kultuurstelsel 328–9 Ethical Policy 330 Dutch East Indies Post and Telegraph Office 186 Dwars-in-den-weg/Thwart-the-Way Island 237–8, 260 earth gravitational field 88–91, 301 magnetism 91, 95 hotspot 103 siting 301 size of 301 heat and thermal decay within 302 earthquakes 112–13, 154, 162, 207, 208, 242n, 243, 246, 268, 318 East Africa: rift valleys 306 East Anglia 190 East India Company 47 East Indies 2, 29, 31, 32, 54, 59, 139, 325, 326 East Pacific Rise 308 Easter Island 308 Eastern Telegraph Company 189, 193, 197 ecological interdependence 271 Ecuador 308 Edinburgh (cable-laying ship) 189 Ega, Brazil 58 Egeron (ship) 170, 171 elephants 116, 307n Elisabeth (German warship) 157–60, 183, 213 Emden (German surface raider) 190n Emden, Germany 190 England 290 spice trade 12, 14 see also Britain English Channel 276, 282 Enkhuizen 20 Equatorial Smoke Stream 290 Eskimos 82 ethogeological prediction 207 Etna, Mount 112, 303, 393 Eugenia caryophyllata 10n Eurasian Plate 112, 116 Eurasians 144 Europe, Europeans 74 invasion by barbarians 133 drowned in the eruption of 1883 238, 252 temperature 295–6 expulsion from the region (1949) 325 Evelina (ship) 280 evolution science 57 62, 63, 64 Ewing, Maurice 90 Faeroes 87 Faircloth, Captain 287–8 Falkland Islands 111 Falmouth weather observatory 270 Far East 24, 26 Ferzenaar, Captain H.J.G. 176–8, 177, 207 Fiado (British steamship) 202 Fielder, Mr (in Ceylon) 264 Fingal's Cave, Staffa 84 First Point, Java 155, 161n, 185, 220, 299 Fiske, Richrd S. 396 Flat Corner, Java 170 Flint, Dr Earl 287 Flores 19, 29 Foley (on Cayman Brac) 265–6 Folkestone Harbour 191 Forbes H.O. 175 Forbes (tea-planter) 168 Formosa 34n Fort Speelwijk, Java 20, 21 Fourth Pacific Science Congress (Batavia, 1928) 350–51 Fourth Point lighthouse, Anjer 221, 234, 238, 258–9, 260, 321 France, French 197 makes peace with Britain 139n sugar plantations 261 imperalism 334 Franklin, Benjamin 294 Freuchen, Peter 79 Friesland 29n, 44 Fujian province 42 Fukoto Kuokanaba 384n fumaroles 176–7 Furneaux, Rupert: Krakatoa 316n, 396 gabbros 297 Galapagos 60 Galeras volcano, Colombia 308 Galileo Galilei 77–8 Galle, Ceylon 31, 279 Galton, Sir Francis 63 gamelan orchestras 124, 227 Gede volcano (Kamula), Java 126 Geikie, Archibald 273n Genesis, Book of 69 geography 54, 187 Geological Society of London 304,315 Geological Survey of Indonesia 375 geology unpredictable nature in the East 36 Wallace and 66–8 and religion 69 Georia 190 Gérard, Max 344 German Imperial Navy 159 Far Eastern Station 157 Germany 197, 295 Giant's Causeway, County Antrim 84 Gibbon, Edward 10 Gibraltar 191, 325 glaciers 244 Gladstone, William Ewart 236 Glasgow weather observatory 270 Global Positioning System 319 global village, birth of 6–7, 184–5, 198 lobal warming 271 Glodok, Jakarta 138 Goa 16, 18, 19, 25, 29 Gogh, Vincent van 40, 329 Gondwanaland 72n, 73–6, 74, 90 Gouverneur-Generaal Loudon (excursion vessel) 172–4, 213–14, 216, 219, 228, 234, 245–6, 251, 256, 257, 299, 337 Graaff-Reinet, South Africa 287 Granville, Earl 236, 236 graptolitic shales 73 gravimeters 89, 101 gravity 88–90 Great Chain of Being 371–2 Great Northern Telegraph Company 196 Great Plague 133 Great White, The 83 Greeks 303, 304 greenhouse gases 271 Greenland 74, 81 Wegener in 72, 76–7 Oxford University expedition 79–86, 91 volcanic 83 basalts 83–8 proof of continental drift 87–8 acid snows 133 ice-cores 308n Greenlandic language 81 Greenwich Mean Time 275 Greenwich Observatory 270, 275, 282 Gresik, east Java 332 Grytviken whaling station 281 Gubbels, Dora 341 Gubbels, Elly 341 Gubbels, Johan Hendrik 341 Guild of Pepperers 12 Gulf of Mexico 289 gutta-percha 187, 189 Haag (Dutch barque) 157 Hades 303 Hadhramaut Yemen 339, 342 haj 332, 333 Halifax, Nova Scotia 196 Hall, R. and Blundell, D.J.: Tectonic Evolution of Southeast Asia 52 Halmahera 61 Hambantota, Ceylon 279 Hamburg, Mr (ship passenger) 174 Hammersley Range, western Australia 264 Handl, Johann 360–61 Handl's Bay, Krakatoa Island 356 Hapsburgs 29n Harmonie club, Batavia 147, 153, 172, 202–3 Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 274 Hatfield, Oscar 152, 234 Haughton, Mr (in Ceylon) 287 Hawaii Island (Big Island) 102, 103, 104 Hawaiian Islands 102–5, 121, 306, 354n Heims, Father 159–60 Helen (a square-rigger) 59 Her Majesty K II submarine 89 Her Majesty K XIII submarine 89 Hermak, Baluchistan 190 Hess, Professor Harry 90, 91, 92, 97–100 ‘ History of Ocean Basins’ 98n Hesse, Elias 49–50, 135 Hevea brasiliensis (Brazilian rubber) 224, 225 Hibernia (converted cargo ship) 189 High Court, London 263n Himalayan Mountains 74, 112 Hinduism 128, 332 Holland 29n, 44 see also Dutch; Netherlands Hollandsche Thuyn (long-rangepacket) 48 Hollmann, Captain 158–9 Hollwood 113, 393, 394 Holtan community 132 Holtum, John (‘Cannonball King’) 205–6 Holy War (perang sabil) 336, 337, 340, 342 Homo erectus 116 Hondius, Henricus 25 Hong Kong 220, 278 Honolulu 289 Hooghly River 276 Hooker, Sir Joseph 62, 63 Hoorn, Zuider Zee 20, 33 Hope (a barque) 175 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 288 Hôtel des Indes, Batavia 206, 207, 208–9 hotspots 103, 104, 347n House of Orange 151 Houtman, Cornelis de 15–18 Houtman, Frederik de 15 Huaynaputina volcano, Peru 308 Hudson, USA 283 Hudson River School 283 Hudson's Bay Company 30 human sacrifice 303 humongous explosion 309, 312 Hurgronje, Snouck 41, 333–4 Hutton, James 69 Huxley, Sir Thomas 63 hydrochloric acid 243 ice cores 129, 131, 133, 296, 308n Iceland 82, 96, 306 Illustrated London News 155n Imperial Beacons & Coastal Lighting Service 170 India 11, 13, 22, 24, 40, 44, 55, 74, 112, 144, 191, 197, 276, 280, 325, 326, 331, 332 India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Company 187–8, 197 Indian Mutiny 326n Indian Ocean 2, 21, 53, 114, 161n, 182, 182, 231, 261, 264, 278, 280, 285 indigo 330 Indo-Australian Plate 111, 115, 116 Indonesia (formerly Dutch East Indies) xiv, 63, 68, 116, 137, 145–6, 308, 309, 325, 331 independence 38, 342 International Date Line 112, 219n International Meridian Conference (Washington, DC, 1884) 219n Io 302 Iran 112, 331 Ireland 188, 196, 264 Irian 55, 61 iron oxide compounds 84, 85 Isla de Pascua 308 Islam Sumatra and Java Islamicized 17 rigid formalisms 32 local form of 40–41, 332–3 orthodox 40, 41 birth of 133 and the 1883 eruption 321 becomes entwined with local political developments 325 power of 325 upsurge in Islamic zealotry in the East Indies 325 stand against colonialism 327 number of Muslims in Indonesia 331 an imperial religion 331 collision with the West 331 first comes to the East Indies 331–2 the haj 332, 333 threatened by Western imperialism 334 fundamentalism 339 Isonandra gutta 187 Istanbul 378 Italy 22, 242 I wo Jima 384n ‘s Jacob, Governor-General Frederik 148–9, 149, 150–53, 169, 172, 201, 215 ‘s Jacob, Leonie 151 Jakarta History Museum, Java 46n Jakarta (previously Jayakarta and Batavia) 2, 21, 38, 126, 137, 373, 379 Jakarta Radio 9 James I, King 12 Jammersley Range, New Guinea 264 Japan 34n, 42, 44, 196, 244, 308, 309 Java 1, 2, 6, 7, 66, 78, 242 coffee 10, 141 spice-trading 10, 11, 31 first treaty with the Dutch 16 colonization 16 Islamicized 17, 40 mapping 22, 24 British colonial intentions 34 described 40–41 and slavery 44 volcanic 83 and the Java Trench 89 volcanically unstable 114–15 splits from Sumatra 126, 155 anti-Chinese riots 91998) 138 earthquakes 154 response to impending eruption (1883) 164 and gutta-percha 188 explosion sounds not heard by all 266 number of active volcanoes 309, 326 attacks by white-robed figure 323–4, 325, 337 First Military Region 324 Islam 325, 342 mysticism 327 Java Bode 162, 255 Java Head 155, 161n, 182, 220, 231, 379n Java Major 25, 25, 26 Java Man 116 Java Minor 22 Java Pars. 27 Java Sea 45, 172 Java Trench 89, 111, 114 Javasche Courant 153 Jayabaya 128 Jayakarta (later Batavia, then Jakarta) 34, 38 Jeffreys, Sir Harold 76, 304 jetstream 290 Jogjakarta, Java 2, 153 joint-stock companies 30 jökulhlaups 244 Judd, John 315–16 Volcanoes 315 Julius II, Pope 13n Jupiter 302 Jurassic period 96 Kaimeni 347 Kamchatka Peninsula 309 Kamula volcano, Java (Gede) 126 kangaroos 65, 65, 116, 137n ‘Kapi, Mount’ (in Ranggawarsita's history) 125, 126, 129 Karachi 190, 280 Karim, Haji Abdul 334–5, 337, 338, 339, 341 Kartodirdjo, Sartono: The Peasants' Revolt of Bantenin 1888 322 Katmai, Mount, Alaska 5 Kauai Island 102–3, 104 Kaula 102 Kavachi 384n Kedirie (ship) 299, 313 Keith, Brian 394 Kennedy, Henry George 235, 272 Kerala 44 Kerm-an, Teheran 190 Kertsch, Crimea 190 Ketimbang, Sumatra 156, 164–5, 167, 226–30, 233, 245, 251, 259 Kew weather observatory, Surrey 270 Keys, David: Catastrophe 132, 133, 134,395–6 Kilauea: Halemaumau Crater, Hawaii 1093 Kinematics, Inc. 376, 378, 386 King of the Netherlands, The (steam-yacht) 323 Kiribati, Republic of 100 kites 72 Kittery Island 102 Knossos, Crete 244 Koeripan River 256, 257, 258 Kokkulai, Ceylon 287 Kosrae Island, Pacific Micronesia 298 Kowalski, Bernard 394 Krakatoa archipelago 379 Krakatoa Committee, Royal Society 272–3, 275, 276, 286–7 Krakatoa, East of Java (film) 2, 394–5 Krakatoa Iron & Steel Works 340n Krakatoa Island present remains of 1–2 van Linschoten describes 25–6 first mentioned by its current name 27 derivation of the name 27–8 cultivation 120–21 lush coastal jungle 122, 354–5 Schuurmann describes 173 Ferzenaar visits (August 1883) 176–8 disappearance of 178, 237, 239, 240, 260, 300, 337, 338 surrounded by small faults and zones of weakness 320 purity after the 1883 eruption 355–6 repopulation of 356–66, 372 Krakatoa Islands xv Krakatoa Problem 364, 366 Krakatoa Time 219, 248, 275 Krakatoa Volcanic Observatory 375, 376, 389 Krakatoa volcano (general refernces) see also Danan cone; Perboewatan cone; Rakata cone and the Wallace Line 57, 64 notoriety 68, 116, 286, 393 number of eruptions 117–18 ruins compared with Anak Krakatoa 353, 354 Krakatoa volcano ( possible eruption of AD 416) 123–9, 133 Krakatoa volcano (the confusions of AD 416 or AD 535) 129–31 Krakatoa volcano (the likely eruption of AD 535) 123, 131–4 Krakatoa volcano (the near-certain eruption of 1680) 123, 134–9 Batavians and seamen unaware of potential danger 45–6 first recorded eruption 46, 47 Vogel's report 48–9 Hesse's report 49–50 Schley's painting 138–9, 140 Krakatoa volcano (before the certain eruption of 1883) 139–49 Krakatoa volcano (eruption of 27 August 1883) 4–5, 28, 123, 134, 209 the event 210–39, 240 the effects 241–61 the experiences 261–321 death statistics 5, 313 telegraphy 5, 7, 28n, 146, 167,184–7, 192–4, 215 undersea cables 5, 6, 184, 187, 189 lack of geological knowledge at the time 5–6 religious fears 6 and birth of global village 6–7 impact on climate 7 a Plinian eruption 12 and subduction zones 111 Banten flood destruction 127 warnings of forthcoming eruption 154–63 Perboewatan erupts 167–9, 175, 176, 180, 184–5, 193–4 excursions to visit 172–4 Danan erupts 176, 177 statistics of deaths and injuries 242 the sound of 262–8 progress of the shock waves 273–5, 313 art and 282–5 and temperature 293–6 floating bodies 296–300 existed above a large chamber of magma 318–19 burial of the dead 321, 322 rebuilding after 321, 323 political and religious consequence 321, 342–3 reluctance to settle near the volcano 379 Kramat 260 Kultuurstelsel (Cultivation System) 328–9, 333 Kurile Islands 309 Kurrachee 276 Kyoto 297 Labuan, Java 337 lahars (volcanic mud and water slurry) 243 Lakagígar (Hekla), Iceland 294 Lamongan 155 Lampong Bay 166, 216, 219, 228, 234, 247, 249, 250, 251 Lancaster, James 34 Lang Island, Krakatoa (previously Panjang, now Rakata Kecil) xv, 118n, 158n, 314, 318, 354 Laos 34n Lascar volcano, Chile 308 Laurasia 73, 74, 75 lava flows 369 Laysan Island 102 Le Havre 282 Leicestershire 57, 58 Lemuria 53n Liciala spinosa 355 Lincoln, President Abraham 196, 219n Lindeman, Captain T.H. 173, 174, 216, 219, 230 Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London 52–3, 54, 62, 64, 65 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 23–6, 26 Itinerario 24, 25 Lippincott Gazetteer 190n Lisbon 14, 15, 191 Lisianski Island 102 lithosphere 109–10, 302 Llaima volcano 308 Lloyd's of London 161, 168, 180–83, 186, 193, 232, 261 Committee 182, 197 Foreign Intelligence Office 193 Lochart, Nanette 208, 209 Locomotive 151 Lodewijcksz, Willem 25, 26 Logan, Captain William 223–4 Lombok Island 61, 66, 69 Lomu, Jonah 384n London 19, 179–80, 189, 190, 191, 196, 197, 270, 284 London Station 193 Londonderry 196 long waves 278, 279–80 Los Angeles 200 Luzon 24 Lyell, Sir Charles 62, 63, 69 Macassar, Celebes, Macasserese 31, 44, 265, 326 Macau 19 McColl, Mr (Lloyd's agent) 181, 259–60 mace (aril) 11, 18 MacKenzie, Captain 157, 161 McLuhan, Marshall 184, 198 Madagascar 16, 53 Madras 190, 191, 280 Madura 17 Magellan, Ferdinand 23 Magellan Strait 19 magma 84, 103, 104, 305, 315, 316,318–20 magnetic airborne detector (MAD) 93n magnetism and basalts 84, 85 moon's surface 100 remanent 91–2, 96, 97, 102 underwater 93–5 magnetite 84–5, 85, 92n magnetometers 93–6, 97, 101, 107 Magpie, HMS 265, 272 Mahdi 322, 335, 336, 337, 342 Malabar Coast 11 Malacca 11, 18, 22, 29, 34, 44 Malaku 61 see also Moluccas Malay Archipelago 59, 60, 190 Australian (eastern) end of 55, 64, 65 Indian (western) end of 55, 64, 65 Wallace's preferred term 59 Malay language 59 Malaya peninsula 22, 24, 29, 31, 40, 53, 190, 326, 331 Maldives 23 Malta 191 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 294 Manchus 157n Manhattan, New York City 295 Manila 196, 264 Manley, Reverend W.R. 288 maps 21–7, 26, 155 Mardijkers 44 Marie (Danish salt-carrying barque) 219–20, 230, 234, 246 Mars 302 Mason, Ron 93–5 Massachusetts Bay Company 30 Mataram sultan of 40 Matuyama, Motonari 96 Maui Island 103 Mauk 260 Maurice of Nassau, Prince 16n Mauritius 16n, 34n, 261, 263n, 270 Maan civilization 133 Mayon, Mount 266 Mecca 332–5, 336, 337, 342 Mecca's Plain of Arafat 333n Medea (British ship) 216, 231 Mediterranean 14, 23, 191 Mediterranean region 133 Mekong 24 Melbourne 270 Merak, Java 160, 222, 225, 238, 246, 249n, 250, 252–3, 259, 260, 337 Merapi, Mount 48, 155 Merbapu, Mount 48, 155 Mercator, Gerardus 71 Merchant Adventurers 30 Merchant Staplers 30 Meteorological Council 270 meteorology 70, 76, 275, 290.


The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

They were trying to gain a monopoly of opium so they could force their way into the Chinese market, which they couldn’t get into because their own goods were not competitive; and the only way that they could do it was try to turn it into a nation of drug addicts, by force. And they had to conquer large parts of India to try to gain that monopoly. This narcotrafficking empire was huge. It was the foundation for a lot of British capitalism and the British Empire. Mill wasn’t unaware of that. He was writing right at the time of the second opium war. Of course he knew; and it was being discussed all over the place in England. Interestingly, there were critics – the old-fashioned conservatives, classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden: he thought it was horrendous.

Index abduction 168, 183, 246, 248 acquisition of language 225, 244adequate explanation of 22, 60, 149, 235, 244, 245, 246 behaviorist view of 222, 224 and biological development 59 and canalization 39 early timing of 55, 56 and the format of language 82 and grammar 24 and linguistic theory 24 and parameters 97 and poverty of the stimulus 23 and semantics 193 study of 84 universal principles of 245 activism 119 adaptation 157, 169evidence for 170, 172 adaptationism 68, 171, 172 adjunction 201, 234, 264 agency 124–128 algorithms 64, 166 altruism 104, 106 animal communication systems 12, 20, 33, 197, 262 animals, and concepts 26, 30, 33, 203 Ariew, André 277 Aristotle 26, 162, 163 articulatory system 69 Austin, John 129, 160 baboons 143, 202 Baker, Mark 39, 55, 83, 241 bees 20, 106 behavior, study of 138–151, 286 behaviorism 66, 89, 186, 285criticism of 285 and evolution 173 and language acquisition 222, 225, 282, 284 and learning 180 belief 138, 140I-beliefs 153–156 irrational 140 religious 141 study of 139 Berkeley 127 Bilgrami, Akeel 113 binding theory 37, 237, 238, 276, 290 biolinguistics 5, 91, 246 biological limits 133–137 biological systems, properties of 22 biology 157autonomy of 175 explanation in 158 folk biology 223 function-for-an-organism 169–174 functions in 174–175 Bloom, Paul 166, 170, 172, 176 Boltzmann, Ludwig 18 Borer, Hagit 166, 194, 229 Boyle, Robert 67 Bracken, Harry 114 Braille 44 brain 60See also cognitive faculties evolution of 49 size of 54 structures of 48 bricolage 24, 243 British Empire 121, 122 Brody, Michael 83 Burge, Tyler 130, 289 Butterworth, Brian 16 Byrd, Robert 123 c-command 79, 232–238, 276 canalization 39–45, 96, 239–242, 278, 279, 286and parameters 45, 276–277 Carey, Sue 72, 97, 128 Carnap, Rudolf 250 Carroll, Sean B. 279 Carruthers, Peter 162 causation 141, 193, 198 chemistry 19, 65, 73, 88, 156 Cherniak, Christopher 60, 277 childrenacquisition of language 56, 244–246 dysarthria 43 language capacities of 70 speech production 281 Williams Syndrome 46 Chomsky, Carol 44–45 Chomsky, Noaminfluence of 2 intellectual contribution of 76–79, 285 on natural science 183–185 and Nelson Goodman 86–92 personal relationship with Goodman 91–92 role of simplicity in his work 80–85 Church, Alonzo 64 Churchland, Patricia 212 cognitive development 70 cognitive faculties 1, 154, 179, 202, 212, 259, 260, 267, 271, 280biological basis of 103, 172 distinctiveness of human 178 evolution of 78 limits of 97, 133, 134, 146, 184, 189, 247, 289, 290 predetermination of 98 and truth 136 cognitive science 127, 247 Collins, John 277 color 247–248 adverbial account of 258, 260 science of 192, 247, 257, 259 common sense 73, 124–128, 180, 189, 209, 211, 259, 280concepts 161, 271, 272, 284 understanding of functions 158–166 communication 11–20, 44, 50, 51, 164, 166, 176animal communication systems 12, 20, 33, 197, 262 evolution of 20, 58 computation 31–32, 65, 161, 174, 195, 213, 281–282 efficiency of 39, 60, 61, 148 linguistic 265 optimal 62 phases of 278 concepts 26, 202, 267acquisition of 200, 230, 268 adverbial account of 260 of animals 203 artifact concepts 162, 284 atomic 34, 275 Chomsky's views on 188 common sense 267 commonsense concepts 126, 161, 267, 271, 284 complexity of 201 compositional character of 190, 194, 268 errors in thinking about 186–196 and externalism 220 I-concepts 153–156 innateness 284 and internalism 198, 255–257 intrinsic content of 199 lexical concepts 190 linguistic expression of 197, 203, 230 location of 260 nature of human 77, 177, 230, 268, 274, 284 origin of 26 properties of 40, 204 and reasoning 180 relational 35 scientific 184, 279 theories of 186–194, 196 under- or overspecification of 193, 195 uniqueness of human concepts 21–30, 33–35, 196–205, 263 conceptual intentional systems 14 conceptualism 130 Condition C 37, 238, 275 conjunctivism 254 connectionism 67, 179, 180, 186, 200, 220, 225, 282 consciousness 98 constructivism 87, 206, 208, 285 conventions 221, 223 cooperative societies 103, 105 corporations, CEOs of 147 Crain, Stephen 254 creative aspect of language use 5, 6, 204, 210, 253, 262impact on the study of language 227, 263 origin of 97 Cudworth, Ralph 40, 163, 267 culture 121, 178 Dalton, John 88 Darwin, Charles 171 Davidson, Donald 35, 112, 139, 140, 141, 166, 198 Dawkins, Richard 105 debating 116 decision 52 Deep Structures 233 democracy 118 denotation 188, 215, 218See also meaning, reference derivation of sentences 193, 238, 281 Descartes, René 74, 246, 286, 289animals 124, 177 linguistics 63, 178 reason 124, 139, 178 description 90, 134 design 50–58, 139, 172, 175, 265connotations of the word 50 desire 138 determinism 141, 280–281, 290 development 46–49, 59, 73, 158, 279constraints on 245 epigenetic factors 242 phenotypical 171 Dewey, John 212 discourse domains 207 displacement 25, 108 dispositional terms 192 dissection 203 dissociation 16 dominance hierarchies 143, 237 dualism, methodological 288 Dummett, Michael 57 dysarthria 43 economics 144 Elman, J.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

Civil War prompted the planting of opium poppies in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina for the first time, and bequeathed the country thousands of morphine-addicted soldiers. Two nineteenth-century wars were over the morphine molecule itself, and whether China could prevent the sale on her own soil of India-grown opium. The drug provided huge revenues essential to the British Empire and was one of their few products for which the self-sufficient Chinese showed an appetite. That it lost two of these Opium Wars to the British explains China’s infamous and widespread opium problem in 1900 where only moderate numbers of addicts existed in 1840. In 1853, meanwhile, an Edinburgh doctor named Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic needle, a delivery system superior to both eating the pills and the then-popular anal suppositories.

The county had a needle exchange program that took in a hundred thousand syringes a year; new hepatitis C cases dropped by half. Addicts saved twenty-three people overdosing by injecting naloxone they were given through a state-funded pilot project in Scioto County. China, having lost two Opium Wars waged on it by the British Empire, cured itself of its opium addiction by relying on former addicts to mentor their dope-sick brothers and sisters. Portsmouth was doing the same. Twelve-step meetings were all over town, sometimes several a day. Addicts saw examples all around them of people getting clean and happy. A newly recovering addict now had mentors to call at three A.M. who knew how hard things could get.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

And by the way, Germany’s overwhelming strength meant that it had already won the war, so that any effort to stop Hitler was all much too late. Johnson’s dispatch from Munich in October 1939, by which time the war had started, is in the archive: ‘Germany talks peace. It only fails of its object in the British Empire and her crown colony, the US of A. English talk affects us deeply, but leaves all other neutrals cold. Italy goes as far as to answer, “what do you mean when you say Europe is at war, you are not fighting our battle Great Britain, we want peace, and so do Spain, Hungary, Jugoslavia, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland”.’

There was in this rupture a clear echo of the self-conscious youthfulness of the no longer derided Labour Party administration of Harold Wilson in 1964 with its embrace of technology and popular culture. Tony Blair wasn’t after all the first prime minister to bask in the reflected glory of rock stars: at Wilson’s behest, the Queen had awarded the Beatles membership of the Order of the British Empire. But Blair was the first to have surreptitiously rechristened his party. Labour had become New Labour when the electorate weren’t looking. Where once the British valued the marks of traditional values above all else, a series of financial disasters, from the Lloyd’s underwriting fiasco that bankrupted scores of middle-class families to the collapse of the stuffy centuries-old Barings Bank, brought down by a single delinquent – and working-class – trader, suddenly created exactly the opposite assumption.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Streetcars or horse-drawn trams, which ran through the street on iron rails, were introduced to Britain by an American, George Francis Train, who some say was the inspiration for Jules Verne’s character Phileas Fogg. They appeared in London in 1870 and became the main form of mass transport here until the end of the century. London was the centre of the British Empire and, like imperial Rome, its streets were chaotic. By the middle of the century, London’s veins were clogged with traffic. Nearly 250,000 people came into the City each day to work. As well as omnibuses, hansom cabs and hackney carriages (uncomfortable and expensive, at eightpence per mile), there were horse-drawn wagons, advertising vans pulled by horses, costermongers with carts, and animals being driven to market through the streets.

Paul Theroux describes it as ‘just fakery, India mimicking England, a hodgepodge of disappointed Gothic’ (The Elephant Suite (London: Penguin, 2008), 191). However, in his 1973 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, he was rather more flattering, describing it as ‘the most distinguished architecture the British Empire produced (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul’s Cathedral)’. Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (repr. London: Penguin, 2008), 140. 62. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897; repr. New York: Dover, 1989), 345. 63.


pages: 434 words: 128,151

After the Flood: What the Dambusters Did Next by John Nichol

British Empire, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, Ford Model T, friendly fire, IFF: identification friend or foe, the market place

You just do it.43 Having been specifically formed for that single op against the dams, it now appeared to pilots like Les ‘Happy’ Munro (also known as ‘Smiler’ – both nicknames were sarcastic, because he was famed for his dour demeanour) that ‘nobody knew what to do with us. There was a hiatus, a sense of frustration. What was 617 Squadron for? The powers that be couldn’t seem to make up their minds about what to do with this special squadron they’d created.’ Munro was a New Zealander, but had enlisted because of: a general feeling that we were part of the British Empire, and had an allegiance to King and Country. We were really aware, through radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels, of what Britain was facing and what they were being subjected to: the air attacks, the Blitz. It was a sense of duty for most of us young men in New Zealand to fight for ‘the old country’ against the Nazis, but of course I had no idea at all of what would happen to me or what was to come: the devastation, the dangers, the losses I’d see and experience.

‘My father and uncles had all fought in the Great War,’ he says: Indeed, things may have turned out very differently for me, as my mother’s then fiancé was killed flying in the RFC! She then met my father after the war. But no one really talked about their experiences and I certainly never considered the dangers. And when the second war started the whole of the British Empire was wound up in the war – it was the way of the world, everyone was in favour of the war effort. Joining up seemed natural.1 After training, Joplin’s was one of only a handful of novice crews sent straight to 617 Squadron. ‘I have no idea why they chose us, I suppose we must have impressed someone during training!’


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Tens of thousands of Indians were moved to East Africa as well to build the Uganda railway. Meanwhile, an estimated 20 million Chinese living in or around British coastal concessions such as Canton, Fujian, and Hong Kong shifted to Southeast Asia, where many married locals and deepened Southeast Asia’s multiethnic patchwork. The British Empire also had grand designs for Central Asia. With India and the kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan firmly under control, England sought a direct trade route to the Emirate of Bukhara. It also hoped to use the Ottomans (with whom England had allied to push back tsarist Russia in the 1850s Crimean War) and the Persians as buffers to prevent Russia from accessing the Indian Ocean.

Arabs have also assimilated well throughout Latin America, with Lebanese trading families establishing a succcessful presence from Mexico (the home of the billionaire Carlos Slim) to Colombia to Brazil. Indians, too, have circulated in the Caribbean and South America since the mid–nineteenth century, when they arrived as indentured workers of the British Empire in the East Indies. Indians make up the majority of the populations of Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, where Cheddi Jagan served as the premier in the 1960s and president in the 1990s. With its long history of Asian ties, South America’s largest economy, Brazil, has the biggest bilateral economic footprint with Asia as well, despite not having a Pacific coastline.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

John Stuart Mill, a childhood prodigy who by the age of seven was reading Plato, spelled this out in his book Principles of Political Economy, which appeared in 1848 and was for forty years the bible of British economics: “Laissez-faire, in short, should be the general practice,” Mill wrote; “every departure from it, unless required by some greater good, is a certain evil.” During the reign of Queen Victoria, who acceded to the throne in 1837, Mill’s prescription became the official doctrine of the British Empire. From Canada to the United Kingdom to India, free trade, limited government, and low taxes were the order of the day. Under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which Nassau Senior helped to devise, outdoor relief for paupers—a form of welfare that dated back to feudal times—was abolished. Henceforth, impecunious workers faced the choice of getting a job or entering the dreaded “workhouse,” a jail-like institution where they would be provided with bread and gruel, but little else.

Among the examples he cited were the crimes induced by the sale of alcoholic drinks; the damage done to road surfaces by private motor vehicles; the harm done to unborn babies caused by the practice of pregnant women working in factories; and the casualties suffered in military campaigns designed to protect a country’s foreign investments—at its height, the British Empire carried out many such exercises in “gunboat diplomacy.” By invoking these sorts of problems, Pigou was able to justify a whole range of government policies, such as temperance laws, zoning laws, progressive taxation, slum clearance, and state-financed maternity leaves. Almost a century after the publication of The Economics of Welfare, the clarity and ambition of Pigou’s vision remains striking.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, Chief of the Imperial British General Staff and military adviser to Lloyd George at the conference, wrote in his diary: ‘The Boches have done exactly what I forecast – they have driven a coach and four through our Terms, and then they have submitted a complete set of their own, based on the 14 points, which are much more coherent than ours.’17 General Smuts of South Africa went further, describing the treaty as ‘an impossible peace’, the territorial changes ‘full of menace for the future of Europe’ and the reparations clauses ‘unworkable’.18 As an Afrikaner, a former Boer commander who had thrown in his lot with the British Empire as a consequence of the remarkably conciliatory peace terms granted by the British after their victory in the Boer War, Smuts had some right to express an opinion on such matters. Many British and American delegates agreed broadly with Smuts. The diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, who had been in Paris throughout the negotiations, wrote gloomily, ‘if I were the Germans, I shouldn’t sign for a moment’.

America’s entry into the war on the Allied side in April 1917 was the deus ex machina that saved a financially exhausted Britain from running out of the cash it needed to pay for the American goods – food, raw materials and munitions – that were by now vital to the Allied war effort. In a splendid irony, Germany’s high-stakes switch to unlimited submarine warfare, pushed through by Ludendorff and the ultra-nationalists against the advice of cooler heads among the Reich’s elite, served as the casus belli. It was thus arguably the British Empire’s bitterest enemies in Berlin whose blunder, by tipping the USA into the Allied camp, managed to arrange Britain’s (and the Entente’s) salvation. As the German banker Max Warburg, a consistent opponent of unrestricted submarine warfare, had remarked in 1916: ‘If America is cut off from Germany, this means a fifty percent reduction in Germany’s financial strength for the war and an increase of a hundred percent for England and France’s.’10 Germany had financed her campaign mainly by domestic war loans, with some foreign borrowing from neutrals - she owed 1.5 billion gold marks to Holland by the end of the war and as much again to other neutrals - but she relied on foreign money far less than the Entente.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

It was the last decades of Utopia Victoriana, an era of faith in technological planning, applied science, and social conditioning that had seen the rise of eugenics, Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” socialism, and Darwinism, to name but a few disparate systematizing strains of thought. In those times, to believe in man’s ability to perfect communications was far from a fantastical notion. In a sense, Vail’s extension of social thinking to industry was of a piece with Henry Ford’s assembly lines, his vision of a communications empire of a piece, too, with the British Empire, on which the sun never set.4 Vail’s dream of a perfected, centralized industry was predicated on another contemporary notion as well. It may sound strange to our ears, but Vail, a full-throated capitalist, rejected the whole idea of “competition.” He had professional experience of both monopoly and competition at different times, and he judged monopoly, when held in the right hands, to be the superior arrangement.

In 1926, Eugene McDonald, president of both the National Association of Broadcasters and Zenith Corporation, accused the president of “one-man control of radio” and called Hoover a “supreme czar.” Deliberately flouting Hoover’s rules, McDonald began using frequencies reserved for Canadians, provoking a potential fight with the British Empire. Hoover had no choice but to order him to stop, but McDonald sued to challenge Hoover’s right to do so, and a federal district court found that Hoover, all along, had lacked any authority to assign radio frequencies.20 It was in the wake of Hoover’s defeat that, in 1927, Congress saw the need to create the Federal Radio Commission, a congressional agency of enormous importance in our broader narrative, as the only body dedicated to the problems of communications in the United States.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

Individual insurance companies created their own firefighting teams, which led to times when a brigade would lay down their tools and let a house burn if it was discovered the property hadn’t bought protection. The conversations that followed such actions can be imagined, though probably not re-created in full voice and vocabulary. *2 One of the earliest specialized lines of insurance bought and sold at Lloyd’s was coverage of the slave trade, a reminder of the extent to which the early British Empire formed a transatlantic market in humans. *3 In an investment where the interest compounds, each new payment calculates the interest owed on the starting investment—£100, say—plus all the previous amounts of interest due. So if the initial investment had commanded a 5 percent return, then £5 would have been due at the first interest date.

Shovlin, John. “Jealousy of Credit: John Law’s ‘System’ and the Geopolitics of Financial Revolution.” Journal of Modern History 88 no. 2 (June 2016): 275–305. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Oxford: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2011. Sinclair, John. The History of the Public Revenue of the British Empire. 3rd ed. London: A. Strahan, 1803. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Electronic ed.: Amsterdam: MetaLibri, 2007. Smythe, William J. Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.


East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, British Empire, card file, foreign exchange controls, nuremberg principles

He said this a little mischievously. “You don’t associate missionaries with being pretty, do you?” he added, wondering aloud whether she ever married (there was no record that she did). Eric recalled Miss Tilney at Sunday school, talking about Africa, an exotic subject on which the children knew little. “We had a map of the British Empire but knew nothing about African culture, the people, or Islam,” Eric explained. “Everything we knew we got from her, the pictures she brought and the pictures she painted.” She was “special,” passionate about Algeria. This was the mid-1930s. Dr. Codling accompanied me to the Surrey Chapel archives at the Norwich Records Office, where we spent an afternoon plowing through a great number of documents, looking for any sign of Miss Tilney’s activities.

“most colossal battle”: “Lemberg Taken, Halicz As Well,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1914. “What was a single murder”: Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. Anthea Bell (Pushkin, 2012), 451. “no personal files”: Austrian State Archives director to author, May 13, 2011. This was a quirk: Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed Sept. 10, 1919, signed by inter alia Austria, the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Article 93 provides the following: “Austria will hand over without delay to the Allied and Associated Governments concerned archives, registers, plans, title-deeds and documents of every kind belonging to the civil, military, financial, judicial or other forms of administration in the ceded territories.”


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

It is also a city of artifacts: one museum has examples of the fourteenth-century Malay currency that took the form of small but three-dimensional tin animals, such as crocodiles, crabs, and fish; and in a traditional Malaccan house I spot a dusty, jammed typewriter, its paper rest marked with british empire as ordinarily as the logo of a multinational corporation might be affixed to a businessperson’s laptop today. Malacca is a city of flowers, too—hanging in baskets, growing wild, painted into the tiles on the benches, and depicted in the glass panels of streetlamps—and of varied names, such as the Malay (written with Roman letters, or in the Arabic-derived Jawi script), Chinese, Dutch, or English ones inscribed on its grave markers.

Vann in Maritime Asia; “no trading port…” on page lxxiv of The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Books 1–5; and “whoever is Lord…” on page lxxv of the same. The tin-animal currency and paintings I describe in Malacca are in the History and Ethnography Museum, located in the Stadthuys building. The typewriter with british empire on its paper rest is in the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum. The photographs of the Malacca River are displayed at the Royal Malaysian Customs Department Museum. Examples of the characterizations of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon appear as follows: as a “miracle” in In-ho Park’s “Miracle of Cheonggyecheon Begins…Expecting 23 Trillion KRW Economic Impacts,” published by Herald POP on September 27, 2005; as an “oasis,” for example, in Kyung-min Kang’s “10-Year Anniversary of Cheonggyecheon Restoration…Becoming a ‘Cultural Oasis’ of the City,” published in the Hankyung on September 29, 2015; as “a kind of artificial fountain in which running water is pumped up and sent flowing along the course,” by Eunseon Park, quoted in “Story of cities #50: The Reclaimed Stream Bringing Life to the Heart of Seoul,” by Colin Marshall in the Guardian on May 25, 2016; as a “gigantic concrete fish tank” by Byung-sung Choi, in Hyuk-cheol Kwon’s “ ‘Concrete Fish Tank’: Cheonggyecheon’s Wrongful Restoration Will Be Repaired,” published in the Hankyoreh on February 27, 2012.


The Rough Guide to Cyprus (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Ford Model T, Google Earth, sustainable-tourism

Traces of the exotic and Levantine are never far away, from ruined Lusignan and Venetian castles and elegant Islamic minarets to cool mountain villages hiding sacred icons from the very first days of Christianity. No stranger to turbulence and strife, Cyprus has suffered waves of foreign invaders, from Mycenaean Greeks and Persians to sunburnt Crusaders, Ottoman pashas, and British Empire-builders. More recently, it has attracted numerous Russian expats. Internal division too has left its mark on the island. First, in the 1950s and 60s, came the struggle by Greek Cypriots for independence and union with Greece, then intercommunal violence prompted by fears among the minority Turkish Cypriots regarding what union with Greece might mean for them, and finally the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974 which resulted in its de facto partition between a Turkish Cypriot north and a Greek Cypriot south.

During the Ottoman occupation from the sixteenth century onwards, it settled back into obscurity, stymied by a swingeing harbour duty designed to concentrate trade in Larnaka. This trend was partially reversed under British rule, with road building and harbour improvements, and in particular by the huge growth in British Empire demand for the region’s wine. By the end of the nineteenth century Lemesos was established as a major port. Its importance has since been enhanced by the Turkish invasion, which not only denied the republic access to the port of Famagusta, but also created an influx of refugees from the north which more than tripled its population.


pages: 362 words: 134,405

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

It was Tom’s first encounter with the open sea, and he figured he would never make a sailor. Tom’ second deployment came in 1963 when his battalion of paratroopers were dispatched to Aden, the major port city at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. The capital of what was then the Federation of South Arabia, a protectorate of the British Empire (subsequently made part of Yemen), Aden was important for its role in protecting British shipping routes through the Suez Canal to India and the Far East. Anti-British guerrilla groups in South Arabia had coalesced into two militant organizations: the National Liberation Front (NLF), supported by Egypt, and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY), a Marxist paramilitary organization.

Not only did the two intrepid paratroopers-turned-mariners receive “a rousing welcome” wherever they went in Ireland; they received a “euphoric chaotic welcome home” upon their arrival back in Great Britain. Tom himself came to Heathrow Airport to congratulate them upon their arrival in London. Both men were presented the British Empire Medal personally from Queen Elizabeth II. “A few months later a bunch of us were chatting about Ridgway and Blyth in the barrack room at the Special Air Service HQ in Hereford.” Impulsively, Tom said, “I reckon one person alone could do it.” Even now Tom doesn’t really know what prompted him to say it.


pages: 1,497 words: 492,782

The Complete Novels Of George Orwell by George Orwell

British Empire, fixed income, gentleman farmer, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, pneumatic tube, the market place, traveling salesman, union organizing, white flight

‘Well, doctor,’ said Flory–the doctor had meanwhile thrust him into a long chair, pulled out the leg-rests so that he could lie down, and put cigarettes and beer within reach. ‘Well, doctor, and how are things? How’s the British Empire? Sick of the palsy as usual?’ ‘Aha, Mr Flory, she iss very low, very low! Grave complications setting in. Septicaemia, peritonitis and paralysis of the ganglia. We shall have to call in the specialists, I fear. Aha!’ It was a joke between the two men to pretend that the British Empire was an aged female patient of the doctor’s. The doctor had enjoyed this joke for two years without growing tired of it. ‘Ah, doctor,’ said Flory, supine in the long chair, ‘what a joy to be here after that bloody Club.

Do you suppose my firm, for instance, could get its timber contracts if the country weren’t in the hands of the British? Or the other timber firms, or the oil companies, or the miners and planters and traders? How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn’t the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English–or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.’ ‘My friend, it iss pathetic to me to hear you talk so. It iss truly pathetic. You say you are here to trade? Of course you are. Could the Burmese trade for themselves? Can they make machinery, ships, railways, roads?

The fact is that you like all this modern progress business, whereas I’d rather see things a little bit septic. Burma in the days of Thibaw would have suited me better, I think. And as I said before, if we are a civilizing influence, it’s only to grab on a larger scale. We should chuck it quickly enough if it didn’t pay.’ ‘My friend, you do not think that. If truly you disapprove of the British Empire, you would not be talking of it privately here. You would be proclaiming from the house-tops. I know your character, Mr Flory, better than you know it yourself.’ ‘Sorry, doctor; I don’t go in for proclaiming from the housetops. I haven’t the guts. I “counsel ignoble ease”, like old Belial in Paradise Lost.


pages: 232 words: 49,620

Ploughman's Lunch and the Miser's Feast: Authentic Pub Food, Restaurant Fare, and Home Cooking From Small Towns, Big Cities, and Country Villages Across the British Isles by Brian Yarvin

British Empire, haute cuisine

Over the years, they produced a small handful of pastes and concentrates that could be made in advance, easily stored, and recombined into a wide variety of dishes. When some of these fishermen immigrated to England, they found that selling those bases, and the food made with them, was a good business. In short, curry in Britain is an expression of the melting pot of the British Empire. I am constantly asked when curry became British, and my answer is, "At least fifty years ago." Britons have been making South Asian-inspired dishes for far longer, but that's when the full embrace began. * * * Chicken Korma Makes 4 servings With a mild and creamy yogurt-based sauce, chicken korma is curry house comfort food, and it's easy to make at home. 2 tablespoons unsalted butter or ghee (clarified butter) 3 bay leaves 2 teaspoons ground coriander 1 teaspoon chili powder ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon ½ teaspoon ground cardamom 4 whole cloves 2 teaspoons ground cumin 2 cups chopped onion 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger 6 garlic cloves, crushed and finely chopped 1 cup canned crushed tomatoes 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into 1-inch pieces ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup water ½ cup plain yogurt ½ cup fresh or frozen shredded unsweetened coconut 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro Basmati rice (optional), for serving Melt the butter in a skillet or wok over high heat and add the bay leaves, coriander, chili powder, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and cumin.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall beta-blockers Black, James “blind watchmaker” Boeing Boeing 737 airliner Boeing 747 airliner Boeing 777 airliner Boesky, Ivan bonuses Borges, Jorge Luis Borodino, Battle of Boston Consulting Group brain damage brain teasers Brando, Marlon Brasília Brave New World (Huxley) Brin, Sergey British empire brokerage firms Bruck, Connie Brunelleschi, Filippo Buffett, Warren Built to Last (Collins and Porras) Burke, Edmund Burns, Robert Bush, George W. BusinessWeek bus schedules Cambodia Cambridge University Canada Canberra capitalism capitalization Carnegie, Andrew Carré, Matt cash flow cathedrals central planning central targeting Chamberlain, Neville Champy, James Chandigarh chemicals industry chess chief executive officers (CEOs) children choice, freedom of Churchill, Winston S.


pages: 190 words: 50,133

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

Also in Bern, the Einstein Museum includes sections on his theories, relationships, the Holocaust and the atom bomb; for details see www.bhm.ch/en/exhibitions/einstein-museum. 4 Gandhi’s ashram, Gujarat, India ‘Generations to come’, Einstein said, ‘will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.’ Not a scientific genius, Mohandas K Gandhi, known as ‘Mahatma’ or ‘great soul’, experimented with truth. No other place tells the tale of the little man who defeated the British Empire with his philosophy of satyagraha (nonviolent civil resistance) better than the Sabarmati Ashram. Gandhi lived here from 1917 to 1930. The ashram houses the ‘My Life is My Message’ photo gallery, Gandi’s iconic charkha spinning wheel and 34,111 letters. Sabarmati Ashram is 5km from Ahmedabad, where travellers can get an auto rickshaw or bus. 5 Kahlo’s house, Mexico City, Mexico A place of pilgrimage for art lovers, Casa Azul (Blue House) is where Frida Kahlo was born, lived and died.


Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

"There can be no doubt that the most popular outlet now for commercial enterprise is to be found in the construction of submarine lines of telegraph," reported the Times of London in 1869. By 1880, there were almost 100,000 miles of undersea telegraph cable. Improvements in submarine telegraphy made it possible to run telegraph cables directly from Britain to out posts of the British Empire, without having to rely on the goodwill of any other countries along the route, and "intra-imperial telegraphy" was seen as an important means of centralizing control in London and protecting imperial traffic from prying eyes. The result was a separate British network that interconnected with the global telegraph network at key points.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Many were influenced by the brutal images of slavery portrayed by Romantic artists, including the artist and poet William Blake. His rendering of “A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows” horrified the British public. The Slave Trade Act, enacted by the British Parliament in 1807, banned the slave trade in the British Empire. In 1834, slaves were emancipated across the British Empire.95 The slave trade was inimical to the Romantic vision, which emphasized the goodness of human nature and put high store on love of one’s fellow human beings and living a compassionate life. The British also pioneered in the creation of the first civil society organization—the Friendly Societies—dedicated to relieving the burdens of the poor.

Blum, Harold bodily existence bodily experience Bond, Julian bonding book publishing Born to Buy (Schor) bourgeoisie Bouygues company (France) Bowlby, John Boyatzis, Richard brain damaged, and behavior mirror neurons and neocortex and resonance circuits and Brandon, S. G. F. Braun, Carol Moseley Breasted, James H. Bredvold, Louis Brissett, Dennis British Empire British Medical Journal British Petroleum (BP) British Psychoanalytic Society Broad, W. J. Brokeback Mountain (film) Brooke, Edward Brooks, Rechele Brosnan, Sarah Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Bruffee, Kenneth A. Brundtland Report Bruner, Jerome Buber, Martin Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) Buddhism Buhler, Charlotte Bulletin of Atomic Scientists bureaucracies Burke, Kenneth Burrow, Trigant Caesar, Julius Calvin, John Calvinists CAMBIA Campbell, Colin Canada Canetti, Elias capital flows capitalism Capra, Fritjof carbon dioxide Cartesian dualism Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger) categorical imperative Catholic Church birth of medieval worldview salvation in See also Catholics; Christianity; Protestant Reformation Catholics.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

KEY: Assyrian empire: 700, 665, 650 BCE; Egypt: 600 BCE; Median empire: 550 BCE; Achaemenid empire: 500, 450, 400, 350 BCE; Seleucid empire: 300, 250, 200, 150 BCE; Parthian empire: 100 BCE; Roman empire: 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 550, 600, 610 CE; Sasanian empire: 626; Roman empire: 630; Umayyad empire: 650, 700, 750, 800, 850; Tulunid empire: 900; Roman empire: 950; Fatimid empire: 1000, 1050; Seljuq empire: 1092; Fatimid empire: 1100; Fatimid empire (Rum Seljuq empire): 1150; Ayyubid empire: 1200; Mamluk empire (Mongol empire): 1250; Mamluk empire (Ilkhanid empire): 1300; Mamluk empire: 1350; Mamluk empire (Timurid empire): 1400; Mamluk empire: 1450, 1500; Ottoman empire: 1550, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900; Egypt: 1950, 2000. A similar pattern can be found on the Indian subcontinent. Once again we are able to identify four episodes of hegemonic empire, under the Maurya, the Sultanate of Delhi, the Mughals, and the British empire that eventually gave birth to the modern Indian state (figure 1.7). Compared to the MENA region, dominant empires were less durable and for much of history alternated with formations that claimed approximately half of the overall population of South Asia, alongside intermittent periods of more intense fragmentation.

KEY: Maghada: 500, 450, 400, 350 BCE; Nanda empire: 325 BCE; Maurya empire: 300, 250 BCE; Satavahara: 200 BCE; Shunga empire: 150, 100 BCE; Saka empire: 50 BCE, 1 CE; Kushan empire: 50, 100, 150, 200; Gupta empire: 300, 350, 400, 450; Gupta empire/Hephthalites 500; Harsha empire: 647; Chalukya of Badami empire: 650, 700, 750; Pala empire: 800; Pratihara empire: 850, 900; Rashtrakuta empire: 950; Chola empire: 1000, 1050; Chola empire (Western Chalukya empire): 1100; Chola empire: 1150; Ghurid Sultanate: 1200; Sultanate of Delhi: 1236, 1250, 1300, 1350; Vijayanagara empire (Bahmani Sultanate): 1400; Vijayanagara: 1450; Sultanate of Delhi: 1500; Mughal empire: 1550, 1600, 1650, 1700; Maratha empire: 1750; British empire: 1800, 1850, 1900; India: 1950, 2000. Dashed line: no entries for 250, 550, 600. Because of this, polities that were based in the northern reaches of South Asia such as the Saka, Kushan, and Gupta empires as well as the more ephemeral Harsha and Pala empires probably accounted for a somewhat larger share of the total population than shown in the graph (an adjustment indicated by the upward arrows in figure 1.7).

A more ambitious Napoleon—the real-life version—by contrast, was bound to undermine his successes through unsustainable overreach. Either way, the ascent of Britain—and thus of Europe, and the “West”—was not in danger. One might add as a coda that Hitler’s efforts were undone by similar constraints, most notably the fact that thanks to the Soviet Union, the British empire, and the United States—Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy”—the Europe-centered state system had by then became far too extensive to allow any European power to erect a durable empire. At that point, however, even such an unlikely outcome would no longer have made a difference—the modern world had long arrived.


The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes

Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Charles Babbage, glass ceiling, global village, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Journalism, Open Library, Republic of Letters, Suez canal 1869, wikimedia commons

It was expressed in the bestselling novel by George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking (1871), the first in a genre of ‘invasion literature’, which told the story of Britain’s conquest by a German-speaking country, referred to only as ‘The Enemy’.28 The British were reluctant to become involved in European politics. Confident that their free-trade values would spread through Europe, and concerned with keeping taxes down, Queen Victoria’s governments pursued a consistent policy of non-intervention on the Continent, unless of course the interests of the British Empire were at stake, as in the Crimean War, the only European war fought by Britain in this period. The idea that, as Europe’s greatest power, Britain had a moral or religious duty to champion righteous causes on the Continent seldom mustered much support from the public or the press.29 When they took an interest in a foreign cause – the nationalliberation movements of the Poles, Italians and Hungarians all received a sympathetic hearing in Britain – it was because they saw the nationality involved as the underdog, fighting against bullies and tyrants, and projected their own liberal values onto them.

They believed that Britain was the envy of the world because of its ancient liberties and traditions of parliamentary government and the rule of law. These ideas were central to their national identity. Their confidence was rooted in their country’s military victories against the continental powers, especially the French, in the conquests of the British Empire, and in Britain’s status as the first industrial society. Isolated from the Continent by their geography, the British had a strong sense of their special character, based upon their history as a long-unconquered island and, above all, on their Protestant religion, setting them apart from ‘Catholic Europe’, which in this myth was backward morally.33 It was a narrative encouraged by the great Whig historians of the Victorian age, such as Lord Macaulay in his History of England (1848–61), who presented the country’s history as a march of progress from the Magna Carta to the modern constitutional monarchy – the highest possible form of social and political evolution.

In Russia, too, we observe the state of villeinage and serfdom existing almost at this day, as it did with us in the feudal time of the Conquest; whilst, in Central Africa, we reach the primitive condition of nature – the very zero of the civilized scale – absolute barbarism itself.34 3 At the end of June 1871, Turgenev went with William Ralston, the British Russian scholar and Turgenev’s English translator, to visit Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. They spent two days at his house, a mock-Tudor mansion at Blackdown, on the Sussex and Surrey border. After a long walk, a game of chess and dinner, the two great men got down to talking literature. Turgenev did not much like the poetry of Tennyson – it smacked too much of the British Empire and Progress – but at least he had read it. He was also able to converse at length about Byron, Shelley, Scott, Swinburne, Dickens and Eliot, all of whom he had read in English. Tennyson, by contrast, showed little familiarity with European literature, and, to his guests’ surprise, had not the slightest contact with his Continental colleagues, despite his extensive travels in Europe.


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Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran

anti-communist, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, fulfillment center, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, old-boy network, phenotype, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, éminence grise

The struggle between East and West, he told the Nieman Fellows at Harvard in 1947, was a clash of visions fully as momentous as that between the Persians and the Greeks in the dawn of the West. Yet the aesthete in Joe was never eclipsed by the Cold Warrior—rather as though Oscar Wilde, at the height of the Yellow Book decadence, had been a staunch British Empire man, ready to throw some kindling into the bonfire after the relief of Mafeking. Alsop would emerge from his bedroom in the morning in a purple dressing gown piped with lilac, and his house at 2720 Dumbarton Avenue was an epicure’s delight, rich with Louis Quinze gilt, curious folios, jade and lacquer from Asia.

He had formed with Roosevelt a friendship not untinged with malice, and his first thought on learning of McKinley’s death was envy “of Teddy’s luck.” It was with decidedly mixed feelings that he watched the young president go down to Washington intent on making Americans conscious of the opportunities and the perils of the new century before them. Ten years before, as America’s coal output approached that of the British Empire, Adams held his breath at the nearness of what he had never expected to see, the “crossing of courses” and the “lead of American energies.” The courses had since crossed, and the United States was now the greatest economic power on earth. But could Roosevelt be trusted to manage so potent a machine?

But he thought it more likely that Germany, already the most formidable economic and military power on the Continent, would emerge victorious, with unpleasant consequences for the United States. “Do you not believe,” he wrote his friend Hugo Münsterberg in October 1914, “that if Germany won this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking the dominant position in South and Central America…? I believe so. Indeed I know so.” The difficulty was that Americans could not be made to see that the emergence of either Russia or Germany as a Eurasian superpower was likely to blight the fortunes of the United States.


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

It was assumed during the Second World War—to be precise, in the early years, 1939 to 1943—that the war would end with two major powers: Germany and the United States. Germany would be dominant in parts of Eurasia, and the United States would take over the Middle East, the Western hemisphere, and the former British Empire. That was supposed to be the Grand Area. As the war went on, by 1943 to 1944, it was obvious Germany was going to be defeated, and the Grand Area was then expanded to as much of the world as the United States could dominate. The goal was to create a liberal international order in which U.S.-based corporations would be free to operate.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

The Eloi are a sybaritic upper class living brainlessly on the industrial toil of the Morlocks, never guessing that these underground subhumans — seemingly their slaves — are in fact raising them for meat. In his News from Nowhere, William Morris dreamt up a post-industrial New Age — a pre-Raphaelite Utopia of honest workmanship, good design, and free love — from which he attacked the first great wave of globalization, the world market ruled by the steamship, the telegraph, and the British Empire: The happiness of the workman at his work, his most elementary comfort and bare health…. did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of “cheap production” of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all…. The whole community was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, the World-Market.


Pocket London Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, death from overwork, G4S, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, Skype

American Memorial Chapel Walk around the altar, with its massive gilded oak canopy, to the American Memorial Chapel, a memorial to the 28,000 Americans based in Britain who lost their lives during WWII. Crypt On the eastern side of the north and south transepts, stairs lead down to the crypt and OBE Chapel where services are held for members of the Order of the British Empire. There are memorials to Florence Nightingale, Lord Kitchener and others; the Duke of Wellington, Christopher Wren and Admiral Nelson are buried here, the latter in a black sarcophagus. Oculus The Oculus, opened in 2010 in the former treasury, projects four short films onto its walls. (You’ll need to have picked up the iPod audiotour to hear the sound.)


pages: 188 words: 9,226

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The rhetoric of the ‘romantic author’ provided a sympathetic figure whose creative genius could be mobilized to legitimate the need for a copyright monopoly. This formulation also glossed the inherent conflict between writers and publishers, and the asymmetrical power in their relationship; with rare exceptions, publishers held the whip. In the US, British Empire, and throughout Europe, this idea that copyright represented a reward for genius or an incentive for the production of knowledge useful to the public became the official rationale for a monopoly grant. Arcane as it may seem, this notion of authorship underwrites the logic of contemporary copyright law, and its assumptions are deeply implanted both in the functioning of the law and contemporary conceptions of creativity.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

The Quakers of London soon followed, and in 1787, they helped to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Their divestment strategy of avoiding an investment they found to be morally troubling, coupled with campaigning to bring awareness to the problem, had an impact and helped to bring about the eventual abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. During apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, student union and religious groups began campaigning for multinational companies with business activities in South Africa to pull out of a country that still segregated black and white people. In the UK, the National Union of Students put particular pressure on Barclays Bank, with their ‘Don’t Bank on Apartheid’ campaign.


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Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

“Hey, Peter, Alice, look—our hands high in prayer! What’s gonna happen in America?” A change of administration in Washington can send the price of beef soaring in Tehran. This influence always went far beyond our ability to impose our will. It’s strongest where no coercion is involved. Our culture has a pervasive reach beyond anything the British Empire or Soviet internationalism or the French mission civilisatrice achieved—this in spite of Americans’ unwillingness to live abroad. Gilbert and Sullivan did not catch on in India (though cricket did), Ethiopian Marxists weren’t converted to vodka and pirozhki, and a century of French culture in Indochina was overwhelmed by a few years of Motown and G.I. slang.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

In room: A/C, TV/DVD, CD player, fax, hair dryer, Internet (£20); minibar. EXPENSIVE Marylebone VERY EXPENSIVE The Langham After it was bombed in World War II, this well-located hotel languished as dusty office space for the BBC until the early 1990s, when it was painstakingly restored. The Langham’s public rooms reflect the power and majesty of the British Empire at its apex. Guest rooms are somewhat less opulent but are still attractively furnished and comfortable, featuring French Provincial furniture and red oak trim. The hotel is within easy reach of Mayfair and Soho restaurants and theaters, as well as shopping on Oxford and Regent streets. Plus, Regent’s Park is just blocks away.

Some even think it has surpassed New York for sheer energy, outrageous fashion, trendy restaurants, and a nightlife that’s second to none. But the cool youth culture that grabs headlines is not all there is to London today. What makes the city so fascinating is its cultural diversity. It seems that half the world is flocking here, not just from the far-flung former colonies of the once-great British Empire, but also from Algeria, Argentina, China, and Senegal. With their talent and new ideas, these transplants are transforming a city once maligned as drab and stuffy. In London today, where everything’s changing, only the queen appears the same. (After she’s gone, even the House of Windsor may be in for a shake-up.)

You first enter the nave, which contains the tomb of George V and Queen Mary, designed by Sir William Reid Dick. Off the nave in the Urswick Chapel, the Princess Charlotte memorial provides an ironic touch; if she had survived childbirth in 1817, she, and not her cousin Victoria, would have ruled the British Empire. In the aisle are tombs of George VI and Edward IV. The latest royal burial in this chapel was an urn containing the ashes of the late Princess Margaret. The Edward IV “Quire,” with its imaginatively carved 15th-century choir stalls, evokes the pomp and pageantry of medieval days. In the center is a flat tomb, containing the vault of the beheaded Charles I, along with Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour. 7 THE THAMES VALLEY: ROYAL WINDSOR & REGAL OXFORD Same hours and admission as Windsor Castle (see below). 239 10_615386-ch07.indd 23910_615386-ch07.indd 239 8/24/10 2:08 PM8/24/10 2:08 PM THE THAMES VALLEY: ROYAL WINDSOR & REGAL OXFORD Windsor & Eton 7 Of the apartments, the grand reception room, with its Gobelin tapestries, is the most spectacular. are open only from the end of George IV’s elegant Semi-State Chambers September until the end of March.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

For detailed documentation on the real purpose and consequence of contemporary trade agreements, see Korten, When Corporations Rule the World; International Forum on Globalization, ed. John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002); Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall, 3. Ibid., s.v. “Hernando de Soto.” 4. The Reader’s Companion to American History, s.v. “America in the British Empire” (by Richard S. Dunn), Houghton Mifflin College Division, online edition, http:// college.hmco.com/history/ readerscomp/rcah/html/ ah_003000_americainthe.htm (accessed October 22, 2005). 5. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003, deluxe ed. CD, s.v. “Privateer.” NOTES 368 Whose Trade Organization? Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (New York: New Press, 2003); and Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith eds., The Case against the Global Economy and for a Turn to the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996). 19.

., Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), includes copies of the official documents spelling out the punishments designated for these and other crimes. 3. Harvey Wasserman, America Born and Reborn (New York: Collier Books, 1983), 19. 4. The Reader’s Companion to American History, s.v, “America in the British Empire” (see chap. 7, n. 4); and Paul Boyer, “Apocalypticism Explained: The Puritans,” Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/apocalypse/ explanation/puritans.html. 5. Ibid. 6. Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), presents a detailed study of these early dynamics.


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The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

When crucial enterprises can function optimally only when they are organized on a large scale in an encompassing trading area, governments that expand to provide such a setting for enterprises under their protection may rake off enough additional wealth to pay the costs of maintaining a large political system. Under such conditions, the entire world economy usually functions more effectively where one supreme world power dominates all others, as the British Empire did in the nineteenth century. But sometimes megapolitical variables combine to produce falling economies of scale. If the economic benefits of maintaining a large trading area dwindle, larger governments that previously prospered from exploiting the benefits of larger trading areas may begin to break apart-even if the balance of weaponry between offense and defense otherwise remains much as it had been.

Ibid. 15. A. T. Mann, Millennium Prophecies: Predictions for the Year 2000 (Shafiesbury, England: Element Books, 1992), pp.88, 112, 117. 16. William Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes 0f the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed to Show How the Prosperity of the British Empire May he Prolonged (London: Greenland and Norris, 1805), p.79. 17. Guy Bois, The Transformation 0f the Year One Thousand: The Village ofLournard from Antiquity to Feudalism (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1992). 18. Ibid., p. 150. 313 19. Quoted in S. B. Saul, The Myth 0f the Great Depression (London: Macmillan, 1985), p.10. 20.


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Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Halford Mackinder, who first used the terms “heartland” and “geographical pivot of history” to describe the “grassland zone…of high mobility” from which domination of Eurasia was possible, worried that rail and communications networks could allow Russia to “fling power side to side” and challenge Britain’s global supremacy based on sea power.*20 Thus, as Russia pushed south, the British empire pressed north from India. During the ensuing Great Game (or the “Tournament of Shadows,” as the Russians called it), Britain and Russia mirrored each other’s maneuvers from Kashmir to Tibet to the Pamir Mountains, absorbing khanates and fighting through proxies in the Anglo-Afghan wars.†21 Younghusband, Yanov, and even the all-in-one Buddhist-Communist painter, mystic, and (perhaps) triple agent Nicholas Roerich were among the occult cast of characters active in high-altitude war plans, deceptive mapmaking schemes, and the many “sycophantic ways of Oriental diplomacy.”3 Russian conquest and assimilation led to total requisition of the region’s people and cattle for its World War I effort, forcing mass production of clothes and food that was returned to Russia along the Trans-Caspian Railway.

Whether under democracy or dictatorship, however, Pakistan’s citizens have become accustomed to corruption and underdevelopment. The cycle is likely to continue once Musharraf’s turn is up. Ultimately, despite their celebrity status in the West, Karzai and Musharraf are incapable of stabilizing their countries, both of which have been steadily disintegrating since the British empire withdrew. Western efforts have not been nearly enough. Will China do better? CONCLUSION: A CHANGE OF HEART THROUGHOUT HISTORY, WHENEVER the Silk Road has functioned properly, borders have been opened and prosperity has been shared. Blockage of its manifold passages leads to insecurity, escalation, and conflict every time.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

In mid-1941, while schoolchildren were memorizing the Four Freedoms and—soon after—the Atlantic Charter, the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, which included top government planners and members of the foreign policy elite with close links to government and corporations, explained privately that “formulation of a statement of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulation of one defining the true national interest,” recommending further that10 If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world, and will be vulnerable to Nazi counter-promises. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect. In accordance with this conception, Roosevelt spoke of Four Freedoms, but not of the Fifth and most important: the freedom to rob and to exploit.

It was clear by the early 1940s that the US would emerge from the war in a position of unparalleled dominance, initiating a period in which it would be the “hegemonic power in a system of world order,” in the words of an elite group 30 years later.51 The group developed the concept of the “Grand Area,” understood to be a region subordinated to the needs of the US economy. As one participant put it, the Grand Area was a region “strategically necessary for world control.” A geopolitical analysis concluded that the Grand Area must include the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire, then being dismantled and opened to US penetration and control—an exercise referred to as “anti-imperialism” in much of the literature. As the war proceeded, it became clear that Western Europe would join the Grand Area as well as the oil-producing regions of the Middle East, where US control expanded at the expense of its major rivals, France and Britain, a process continued in the postwar period.


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Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1833–34, abolitionist sentiment was given a further boost by Great Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade across the empire. But the cotton gin gave an ancient evil a new lease on life across the South. We will never know whether slavery might have been abolished peacefully, as happened in the British Empire, were it not for the invention of the cotton gin. But slavery and cotton production certainly advanced in lockstep, as Sven Beckert demonstrates: the proportion of slaves in four typical South Carolina upcountry counties increased from 18.4 percent in 1790 to 39.5 percent in 1820 to 61.1 percent in 1860.

John Maynard Keynes was the moving spirit behind the Bretton Woods meeting, and by far the most intellectually distinguished figure there, but America’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, and his deputy, Harry Dexter White, made the key decisions: the conference attendees bowed to Keynes but listened to Morgenthau and White. Keynes was so appalled by America’s ruthless determination to replace, rather than supplement, Britain as the world’s superpower that he complained that it wanted to “pick out the eyes of the British Empire.”9 America quickly moved from the hot war against the Axis powers to the cold war against the Warsaw Pact. This war added a dark hue to the country’s optimism: a people who embraced the future also worried about global annihilation. In March 1955, Dwight Eisenhower stated matter-of-factly that the United States might employ nuclear weapons “as you use a bullet or anything else.”10 In 1962, during the standoff over Russia’s deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba, the world came as close to Armageddon as it ever has, with John Kennedy personally calculating the chances of nuclear war at about 25 percent.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

The result could be a global infrastructure boom modelled on China’s own infrastructure boom, a modern equivalent of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan by which the USA sought to rebuilt war-torn Europe and so halt the spread of Communism. The new Chinese strategy represents a profound and ironic flip – historically, diplomatically and economically. Liverpool was once the most important port of the British Empire, an empire that in the nineteenth century had forced China to accept European control of its most important trading ports – the so-called Treaty Ports, which included Shanghai and Guangzhou. Now Liverpool itself is set to become the bridgehead of China’s new ambitions in Europe. And these ambitions go much further than the Atlantic Gateway.

Its main industry had been destroyed, its people had been starved of cash. The banking heart attack also destroyed the growth figures, miring Cyprus even more deeply in a man-made fiscal crisis. There seemed to be some method in this madness. UK officials were surprised that Berlin never asked for a contribution to the bailout of an old outpost of the British Empire. ‘There was a lot of discussion over whether to help Cyprus: not only a large number of expats, lots of Cypriots in Britain, and two sovereign military bases, so we did consider it several times,’ George Osborne told me. Cyprus did ask for help directly from other nations, but Berlin said that this would not reduce the amount of Cyprus› €7 billion ‘bail-in’.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

If by free market one means a market that is autonomous and spontaneous, free from political controls, then there is no such thing as a free market at all. It is simply a myth. With the persistence of this myth it seems that the nostalgia for the old Indian Bureau, where the great economists of the British Empire who circulated fearlessly between the Foreign Office and the Bank of England were trained, is still alive and powerful. Even the free market of British capitalism’s liberal heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, however, was created and sustained by state power, an articulated legal structure, national and international divisions of labor, wealth, and power, and so forth.

One of the most widely discussed arguments for unilateral U.S. power is Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). 6 Michael Hirsh, At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 254. Niall Ferguson, in contrast, celebrates the great benefits that the British Empire brought to the world and recommends that the United States today follow the British model. See Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 7 For a coherent and impassioned critique of U.S. global hegemony from a conservative European perspective, see John Gray, False Dawn (New York: The New Press, 1998).


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The Tswana were also inclusive, happy to bring other tribes into their system, which stood them in good stead when a collective army was needed to repel the Boers at the battle of Dimawe in 1852. This was a good start, but Botswana then had a stroke of good fortune in its colonial experience. It was incorporated into the British empire in such a half-hearted and inattentive fashion that it barely experienced colonial rule. The British took it mainly to stop the Germans or Boers getting it. ‘Doing as little in the way of administration or settlement as possible’ was explicitly stated as government policy in 1885. Botswana was left alone, experiencing almost as little direct European imperialism as those later success stories of Asia – places like Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China.

Abbasids 161, 178 Abelard, Peter 358 aborigines (Australian): division of labour 62, 63, 76; farming 127; technological regress 78–84; trade 90–91, 92 abortion, compulsory 203 Abu Hureyra 127 Acapulco 184 accounting systems 160, 168, 196 Accra 189 Acemoglu, Daron 321 Ache people 61 Acheulean tools 48–9, 50, 275, 373 Achuar people 87 acid rain 280, 281, 304–6, 329, 339 acidification of oceans 280, 340–41 Adams, Henry 289 Aden 177 Adenauer, Konrad 289 Aegean sea 168, 170–71 Afghanistan 14, 208–9, 315, 353 Africa: agriculture 145, 148, 154–5, 326; AIDS epidemic 14, 307–8, 316, 319, 320, 322; colonialism 319–20, 321–2; demographic transition 210, 316, 328; economic growth 315, 326–8, 332, 347; international aid 317–19, 322, 328; lawlessness 293, 320; life expectancy 14, 316, 422; per capita income 14, 315, 317, 320; poverty 314–17, 319–20, 322, 325–6, 327–8; prehistoric 52–5, 65–6, 83, 123, 350; property rights 320, 321, 323–5; trade 187–8, 320, 322–3, 325, 326, 327–8; see also individual countries African-Americans 108 agricultural employment: decline in 42–3; hardships of 13, 219–20, 285–6 agriculture: early development of 122–30, 135–9, 352, 387, 388; fertilisers, development of 135, 139–41, 142, 146, 147, 337; genetically modified (GM) crops 28, 32, 148, 151–6, 283, 358; hybrids, development of 141–2, 146, 153; and trade 123, 126, 127–33, 159, 163–4; and urbanisation 128, 158–9, 163–4, 215; see also farming; food supply Agta people 61–2 aid, international 28, 141, 154, 203, 317–19, 328 AIDS 8, 14, 307–8, 310, 316, 319, 320, 322, 331, 353 AIG (insurance corporation) 115 air conditioning 17 air pollution 304–5 air travel: costs of 24, 37, 252, 253; speed of 253 aircraft 257, 261, 264, 266 Akkadian empire 161, 164–5 Al-Ghazali 357 Al-Khwarizmi, Muhammad ibn Musa 115 Al-Qaeda 296 Albania 187 Alcoa (corporation) 24 Alexander the Great 169, 171 Alexander, Gary 295 Alexandria 171, 175, 270 Algeria 53, 246, 345 alphabet, invention of 166, 396 Alps 122, 178 altruism 93–4, 97 aluminium 24, 213, 237, 303 Alyawarre aborigines 63 Amalfi 178 Amazon (corporation) 21, 259, 261 Amazonia 76, 138, 145, 250–51 amber 71, 92 ambition 45–6, 351 Ames, Bruce 298–9 Amish people 211 ammonia 140, 146 Amsterdam 115–16, 169, 259, 368 Amsterdam Exchange Bank 251 Anabaptists 211 Anatolia 127, 128, 164, 165, 166, 167 Ancoats, Manchester 214 Andaman islands 66–7, 78 Andes 123, 140, 163 Andrew, Deroi Kwesi 189 Angkor Wat 330 Angola 316 animal welfare 104, 145–6 animals: conservation 324, 339; extinctions 17, 43, 64, 68, 69–70, 243, 293, 302, 338–9; humans’ differences from other 1, 2–4, 6, 56, 58, 64 Annan, Kofi 337 Antarctica 334 anti-corporatism 110–111, 114 anti-slavery 104, 105–6, 214 antibiotics 6, 258, 271, 307 antimony 213 ants 75–6, 87–8, 192 apartheid 108 apes 56–7, 59–60, 62, 65, 88; see also chimpanzees; orang-utans ‘apocaholics’ 295, 301 Appalachia 239 Apple (corporation) 260, 261, 268 Aquinas, St Thomas 102 Arabia 66, 159, 176, 179 Arabian Sea 174 Arabs 89, 175, 176–7, 180, 209, 357 Aral Sea 240 Arcadia Biosciences (company) 31–2 Archimedes 256 Arctic Ocean 125, 130, 185, 334, 338–9 Argentina 15, 186, 187 Arikamedu 174 Aristotle 115, 250 Arizona 152, 246, 345 Arkwright, Sir Richard 227 Armenians 89 Arnolfini, Giovanni 179 art: cave paintings 2, 68, 73, 76–7; and commerce 115–16; symbolism in 136; as unique human trait 4 Ashur, Assyria 165 Asimov, Isaac 354 Asoka the Great 172–3 aspirin 258 asset price inflation 24, 30 Assyrian empire 161, 165–6, 167 asteroid impacts, risk of 280, 333 astronomy 221, 270, 357 Athabasca tar sands, Canada 238 Athens 115, 170, 171 Atlantic Monthly 293 Atlantic Ocean 125, 170 Attica 171 Augustus, Roman emperor 174 Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony 184–5 Australia: climate 127, 241, 300, 334; prehistoric 66, 67, 69–70, 127; trade 187; see also aborigines (Australian); Tasmania Austria 132 Ausubel, Jesse 239, 346, 409 automobiles see cars axes: copper 123, 131, 132, 136, 271; stone 2, 5, 48–9, 50, 51, 71, 81, 90–91, 92, 118–19, 271 Babylon 21, 161, 166, 240, 254, 289 Bacon, Francis 255 bacteria: cross fertilisation 271; and pest control 151; resistance to antibiotics 6, 258, 271, 307; symbiosis 75 Baghdad 115, 177, 178, 357 Baines, Edward 227 Baird, John Logie 38 baking 124, 130 ‘balance of nature’, belief in 250–51 Balazs, Etienne 183 bald eagles 17, 299 Bali 66 Baltic Sea 71, 128–9, 180, 185 Bamako 326 bananas 92, 126, 149, 154, 392 Bangladesh 204, 210, 426 Banks, Sir Joseph 221 Barigaza (Bharuch) 174 barley 32, 124, 151 barrels 176 bartering vii, 56–60, 65, 84, 91–2, 163, 356 Basalla, George 272 Basra 177 battery farming 104, 145–6 BBC 295 beads 53, 70, 71, 73, 81, 93, 162 beef 186, 224, 308; see also cattle bees, killer 280 Beijing 17 Beinhocker, Eric 112 Bell, Alexander Graham 38 Bengal famine (1943) 141 benzene 257 Berlin 299 Berlin, Sir Isaiah 288 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 358 Berners-Lee, Sir Tim 38, 273 Berra, Yogi 354 Besant, Annie 208 Bhutan 25–6 Bible 138, 168, 396 bicycles 248–9, 263, 269–70 bin Laden, Osama 110 biofuels 149, 236, 238, 239, 240–43, 246, 300, 339, 343, 344, 346, 393 Bird, Isabella 197–8 birds: effects of pollution on 17, 299; killed by wind turbines 239, 409; nests 51; sexual differences 64; songbirds 55; see also individual species bireme galleys 167 Birmingham 223 birth control see contraception birth rates: declining 204–212; and food supply 192, 208–9; and industrialisation 202; measurement of 205, 403; population control policies 202–4, 208; pre-industrial societies 135, 137; and television 234; and wealth 200–201, 204, 205–6, 209, 211, 212; see also population growth Black Death 181, 195–6, 197, 380 Black Sea 71, 128, 129, 170, 176, 180 blogging 257 Blombos Cave, South Africa 53, 83 blood circulation, discovery of 258 Blunt, John 29 boat-building 167, 168, 177; see also canoes; ship-building Boers 321, 322 Bohemia 222 Bolivia 315, 324 Bolsheviks 324 Borlaug, Norman 142–3, 146 Borneo 339 Bosch, Carl 140, 412 Botswana 15, 316, 320–22, 326 Bottger, Johann Friedrich 184–5 Boudreaux, Don 21, 214 Boulton, Matthew 221, 256, 413–14 bows and arrows 43, 62, 70, 82, 137, 251, 274 Boxgrove hominids 48, 50 Boyer, Stanley 222, 405 Boyle, Robert 256 Bradlaugh, Charles 208 brain size 3–4, 48–9, 51, 55 Bramah, Joseph 221 Branc, Slovakia 136 Brand, Stewart 154, 189, 205 Brando, Marlon 110 brass 223 Brazil 38, 87, 123, 190, 240, 242, 315, 358 bread 38, 124, 140, 158, 224, 286, 392 bridges, suspension 283 Brin, Sergey 221, 405 Britain: affluence 12, 16, 224–5, 236, 296–7; birth rates 195, 200–201, 206, 208, 227; British exceptionalism 200–202, 221–2; climate change policy 330–31; consumer prices 24, 224–5, 227, 228; copyright system 267; enclosure acts 226, 323, 406; energy use 22, 231–2, 232–3, 342–3, 368, 430; ‘glorious revolution’ (1688) 223; income equality 18–19, 218; industrial revolution 201–2, 216–17, 220–32, 255–6, 258–9; life expectancy 15, 17–18; National Food Service 268; National Health Service 111, 261; parliamentary reform 107; per capita income 16, 218, 227, 285, 404–5; productivity 112; property rights 223, 226, 323–4; state benefits 16; tariffs 185–6, 186–7, 223; see also England; Scotland; Wales British Empire 161, 322 bronze 164, 168, 177 Brosnan, Sarah 59 Brown, Lester 147–8, 281–2, 300–301 Brown, Louise 306 Bruges 179 Brunel, Sir Marc 221 Buddhism 2, 172, 357 Buddle, John 412 Buffett, Warren 106, 268 Bulgaria 320 Burkina Faso 154 Burma 66, 67, 209, 335 Bush, George W. 161 Butler, Eamonn 105, 249 Byblos 167 Byzantium 176, 177, 179 cabbages 298 ‘Caesarism’ 289 Cairo 323 Calcutta 190, 315 Calico Act (1722) 226 Califano, Joseph 202–3 California: agriculture 150; Chumash people 62, 92–3; development of credit card 251, 254; Mojave Desert 69; Silicon Valley 221–2, 224, 257, 258, 259, 268 Cambodia 14, 315 camels 135, 176–7 camera pills 270–71 Cameroon 57 Campania 174, 175 Canaanites 166, 396 Canada 141, 169, 202, 238, 304, 305 Canal du Midi 251 cancer 14, 18, 293, 297–9, 302, 308, 329 Cannae, battle of 170 canning 186, 258 canoes 66, 67, 79, 82 capitalism 23–4, 101–4, 110, 115, 133, 214, 258–62, 291–2, 311; see also corporations; markets ‘Captain Swing’ 283 capuchin monkeys 96–7, 375 Caral, Peru 162–3 carbon dioxide emissions 340–47; absorption of 217; and agriculture 130, 337–8; and biofuels 242; costs of 331; and economic growth 315, 332; and fossil fuels 237, 315; and local sourcing of goods 41–2; taxes 346, 356 Cardwell’s Law 411 Caribbean see West Indies Carnegie, Andrew 23 Carney, Thomas 173 carnivorism 51, 60, 62, 68–9, 147, 156, 241, 376 carrots 153, 156 cars: biofuel for 240, 241; costs of 24, 252; efficiency of 252; future production 282, 355; hybrid 245; invention of 189, 270, 271; pollution from 17, 242; sport-utility vehicles 45 The Rational Optimist 424 Carson, Rachel 152, 297–8 Carter, Jimmy 238 Carthage 169, 170, 173 Cartwright, Edmund 221, 263 Castro, Fidel 187 Catalhoyuk 127 catallaxy 56, 355–9 Catholicism 105, 208, 306 cattle 122, 132, 145, 147, 148, 150, 197, 321, 336; see also beef Caucasus 237 cave paintings 2, 68, 73, 76–7 Cavendish, Henry 221 cement 283 central heating 16, 37 cereals 124–5, 125–6, 130–31, 143–4, 146–7, 158, 163; global harvests 121 Champlain, Samuel 138–9 charcoal 131, 216, 229, 230, 346 charitable giving 92, 105, 106, 295, 318–19, 356 Charles V: king of Spain 30–31; Holy Roman Emperor 184 Charles, Prince of Wales 291, 332 Chauvet Cave, France 2, 68, 73, 76–7 Chernobyl 283, 308, 345, 421 Chicago World Fair (1893) 346 chickens 122–3, 145–6, 147, 148, 408 chickpeas 125 Childe, Gordon 162 children: child labour 104, 188, 218, 220, 292; child molestation 104; childcare 2, 62–3; childhood diseases 310; mortality rates 14, 15, 16, 208–9, 284 Chile 187 chimpanzees 2, 3, 4, 6, 29, 59–60, 87, 88, 97 China: agriculture 123, 126, 148, 152, 220; birth rate 15, 200–201; coal supplies 229–30; Cultural Revolution 14, 201; diet 241; economic growth and industrialisation 17, 109, 180–81, 187, 201, 219, 220, 281–2, 300, 322, 324–5, 328, 358; economic and technological regression 180, 181–2, 193, 229–30, 255, 321, 357–8; energy use 245; income equality 19; innovations 181, 251; life expectancy 15; Longshan culture 397; Maoism 16, 187, 296, 311; Ming empire 117, 181–4, 260, 311; per capita income 15, 180; prehistoric 68, 123, 126; serfdom 181–2; Shang dynasty 166; Song dynasty 180–81; trade 172, 174–5, 177, 179, 183–4, 187, 225, 228 chlorine 296 cholera 40, 310 Chomsky, Noam 291 Christianity 172, 357, 358, 396; see also Catholicism; Church of England; monasteries Christmas 134 Chumash people 62, 92–3 Church of England 194 Churchill, Sir Winston 288 Cicero 173 Cilicia 173 Cisco Systems (corporation) 268 Cistercians 215 civil rights movement 108, 109 Clairvaux Abbey 215 Clark, Colin 146, 227 Clark, Gregory 193, 201, 401, 404 Clarke, Arthur C. 354 climate change 328–47, 426–30; costs of mitigation measures 330–32, 333, 338, 342–4; death rates associated with 335–7; and ecological dynamism 250, 329–30, 335, 339; and economic growth 315, 331–3, 341–3, 347; effects on ecosystems 338–41; and food supply 337–8; and fossil fuels 243, 314, 342, 346, 426; historic 194, 195, 329, 334, 426–7; pessimism about 280, 281, 314–15, 328–9; prehistoric 54, 65, 125, 127, 130, 160, 329, 334, 339, 340, 352; scepticism about 111, 329–30, 426; solutions to 8, 315, 345–7 Clinton, Bill 341 Clippinger, John 99 cloth trade 75, 159, 160, 165, 172, 177, 180, 194, 196, 225, 225–9, 232 clothes: Britain 224, 225, 227; early homo sapiens 71, 73; Inuits 64; metal age 122; Tasmanian natives 78 clothing prices 20, 34, 37, 40, 227, 228 ‘Club of Rome’ 302–3 coal: and economic take-off 201, 202, 213, 214, 216–17; and generation of electricity 233, 237, 239, 240, 304, 344; and industrialisation 229–33, 236, 407; prices 230, 232, 237; supplies 302–3 coal mining 132, 230–31, 237, 239, 257, 343 Coalbrookdale 407 Cobb, Kelly 35 Coca-Cola (corporation) 111, 263 coffee 298–9, 392 Cohen, Mark 135 Cold War 299 collective intelligence 5, 38–9, 46, 56, 83, 350–52, 355–6 Collier, Paul 315, 316–17 colonialism 160, 161, 187, 321–2; see also imperialism Colorado 324 Columbus, Christopher 91, 184 combine harvesters 158, 392 combined-cycle turbines 244, 410 commerce see trade Commoner, Barry 402 communism 106, 336 Compaq (corporation) 259 computer games 273, 292 computers 2, 3, 5, 211, 252, 260, 261, 263–4, 268, 282; computing power costs 24; information storage capacities 276; silicon chips 245, 263, 267–8; software 99, 257, 272–3, 304, 356; Y2K bug 280, 290, 341; see also internet Confucius 2, 181 Congo 14–15, 28, 307, 316 Congreve, Sir William 221 Connelly, Matthew 204 conservation, nature 324, 339; see also wilderness land, expansion of conservatism 109 Constantinople 175, 177 consumer spending, average 39–40 containerisation 113, 253, 386 continental drift 274 contraception 208, 210; coerced 203–4 Cook, Captain James 91 cooking 4, 29, 38, 50, 51, 52, 55, 60–61, 64, 163, 337 copper 122, 123, 131–2, 160, 162, 164, 165, 168, 213, 223, 302, 303 copyright 264, 266–7, 326 coral reefs 250, 339–40, 429–30 Cordoba 177 corn laws 185–6 Cornwall 132 corporations 110–116, 355; research and development budgets 260, 262, 269 Cosmides, Leda 57 Costa Rica 338 cotton 37, 108, 149, 151–2, 162, 163, 171, 172, 202, 225–9, 230, 407; calico 225–6, 232; spinning and weaving 184, 214, 217, 219–20, 227–8, 232, 256, 258, 263, 283 Coughlin, Father Charles 109 Craigslist (website) 273, 356 Crapper, Thomas 38 Crathis river 171 creationists 358 creative destruction 114, 356 credit cards 251, 254 credit crunch (2008) 8–10, 28–9, 31, 100, 102, 316, 355, 399, 411 Cree Indians 62 Crete 167, 169 Crichton, Michael 254 Crick, Francis 412 crime: cyber-crime 99–100, 357; falling rates 106, 201; false convictions 19–20; homicide 14, 20, 85, 88, 106, 118, 201; illegal drugs 106, 186; pessimism about 288, 293 Crimea 171 crocodiles, deaths by 40 Crompton, Samuel 227 Crookes, Sir William 140, 141 cruelty 104, 106, 138–9, 146 crusades 358 Cuba 187, 299 ‘curse of resources’ 31, 320 cyber-crime 99–100, 357 Cyprus 132, 148, 167, 168 Cyrus the Great 169 Dalkon Shield (contraceptive device) 203 Dalton, John 221 Damascus 127 Damerham, Wiltshire 194 Danube, River 128, 132 Darby, Abraham 407 Darfur 302, 353 Dark Ages 164, 175–6, 215 Darwin, Charles 77, 81, 91–2, 105, 116, 350, 415 Darwin, Erasmus 256 Darwinism 5 Davy, Sir Humphry 221, 412 Dawkins, Richard 5, 51 DDT (pesticide) 297–8, 299 de Geer, Louis 184 de Soto, Hernando 323, 324, 325 de Waal, Frans 88 Dean, James 110 decimal system 173, 178 deer 32–3, 122 deflation 24 Defoe, Daniel 224 deforestation, predictions of 304–5, 339 Delhi 189 Dell (corporation) 268 Dell, Michael 264 demographic transition 206–212, 316, 328, 402 Denmark 200, 344, 366; National Academy of Sciences 280 Dennett, Dan 350 dentistry 45 depression (psychological) 8, 156 depressions (economic) 3, 31, 32, 186–7, 192, 289; see also economic crashes deserts, expanding 28, 280 Detroit 315, 355 Dhaka 189 diabetes 156, 274, 306 Diamond, Jared 293–4, 380 diamonds 320, 322 Dickens, Charles 220 Diesel, Rudolf 146 Digital Equipment Corporation 260, 282 digital photography 114, 386 Dimawe, battle of (1852) 321 Diocletian, Roman emperor 175, 184 Diodorus 169 diprotodons 69 discount merchandising 112–14 division of labour: Adam Smith on vii, 80; and catallaxy 56; and fragmented government 172; in insects 75–6, 87–8; and population growth 211; by sex 61–5, 136, 376; and specialisation 7, 33, 38, 46, 61, 76–7, 175; among strangers and enemies 87–9; and trust 100; and urbanisation 164 DNA: forensic use 20; gene transfer 153 dogs 43, 56, 61, 84, 125 Doll, Richard 298 Dolphin, HMS 169 dolphins 3, 87 Domesday Book 215 Doriot, Georges 261 ‘dot-communism’ 356 Dover Castle 197 droughts: modern 241, 300, 334; prehistoric 54, 65, 334 drug crime 106, 186 DuPont (corporation) 31 dyes 167, 225, 257, 263 dynamos 217, 233–4, 271–2, 289 dysentery 157, 353 eagles 17, 239, 299, 409 East India Company 225, 226 Easter Island 380 Easterbrook, Greg 294, 300, 370 Easterlin, Richard 26 Easterly, William 318, 411 eBay (corporation) 21, 99, 100, 114, 115 Ebla, Syria 164 Ebola virus 307 economic booms 9, 29, 216 economic crashes 7–8, 9, 193; credit crunch (2008) 8–10, 28–9, 31, 100, 102, 316, 355, 399, 411; see also depressions (economic) ecosystems, dynamism of 250–51, 303, 410 Ecuador 87 Edinburgh Review 285 Edison, Thomas 234, 246, 272, 412 education: Africa 320; Japan 16; measuring value of 117; and population control 209, 210; universal access 106, 235; women and 209, 210 Edwards, Robert 306 Eemian interglacial period 52–3 Egypt: ancient 161, 166, 167, 170, 171, 192, 193, 197, 270, 334; Mamluk 182; modern 142, 154, 192, 301, 323; prehistoric 44, 45, 125, 126; Roman 174, 175, 178 Ehrenreich, Barbara 291 Ehrlich, Anne 203, 301–2 Ehrlich, Paul 143, 190, 203, 207, 301–2, 303 electric motors 271–2, 283 electricity 233–5, 236, 237, 245–6, 337, 343–4; costs 23; dynamos 217, 233–4, 271–2, 289 elephants 51, 54, 69, 303, 321 Eliot, T.S. 289 email 292 emigration 199–200, 202; see also migrations empathy 94–8 empires, trading 160–61; see also imperialism enclosure acts 226, 323, 406 endocrine disruptors 293 Engels, Friedrich 107–8, 136 England: agriculture 194–6, 215; infant mortality 284; law 118; life expectancy 13, 284; medieval population 194–7; per capita income 196; scientific revolution 255–7; trade 75, 89, 104, 106, 118, 169, 194; see also Britain Enron (corporation) 29, 111, 385 Erie, Lake 17 Erie Canal 139, 283 ethanol 240–42, 300 Ethiopia 14, 316, 319; prehistoric 52, 53, 129 eugenics 288, 329 Euphrates river 127, 158, 161, 167, 177 evolution, biological 5, 6, 7, 49–50, 55–6, 75, 271, 350 Ewald, Paul 309 exchange: etiquette and ritual of 133–4; and innovation 71–2, 76, 119, 167–8, 251, 269–74; and pre-industrial economies 133–4; and property rights 324–5; and rule of law 116, 117–18; and sexual division of labour 65; and specialisation 7, 10, 33, 35, 37–8, 46, 56, 58, 75, 90, 132–3, 350–52, 355, 358–9; and trust 98–100, 103, 104; as unique human trait 56–60; and virtue 100–104; see also bartering; markets; trade executions 104 extinctions 17, 43, 64, 68, 69–70, 243, 293, 302, 338–9 Exxon (corporation) 111, 115 eye colour 129 Ezekiel 167, 168 Facebook (website) 262, 268, 356 factories 160, 214, 218, 219–20, 221, 223, 256, 258–9, 284–5 falcons 299 family formation 195, 209–210, 211, 227 famines: modern 141, 143, 154, 199, 203, 302; pessimism about 280, 281, 284, 290, 300–302, 314; pre-industrial 45, 139, 195, 197 Faraday, Michael 271–2 Fargione, Joseph 242 farming: battery 104, 145–6; free-range 146, 308; intensive 143–9; organic 147, 149–52, 393; slash-and-burn 87, 129, 130; subsidies 188, 328; subsistence 87, 138, 175–6, 189, 192, 199–200; see also agriculture; food supply fascism 289 Fauchart, Emmanuelle 264 fax machines 252 Feering, Essex 195 Fehr, Ernst 94–6 female emancipation 107, 108–9, 209 feminism 109 Ferguson, Adam 1 Ferguson, Niall 85 Fermat’s Last Theorem 275 fermenting 130, 241 Ferranti, Sebastian de 234 Fertile Crescent 126, 251 fertilisation, in-vitro 306 fertilisers 32, 129, 135, 139–41, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149–50, 152, 155, 200, 337 Fibonacci 178 figs 125, 129 filariasis 310 Finland 15, 35, 261 fire, invention of 4, 50, 51, 52, 60, 274 First World War 289, 309 fish, sex-change 280, 293 fish farming 148, 155 fishing 62, 63–4, 71, 78–9, 81–2, 125, 127, 129, 136, 159, 162, 163, 327 Fishman, Charles 113 Flanders 179, 181, 194 flight, powered 257, 261, 264, 266 Flinders Island 81, 84 floods 128, 250, 329, 331, 334, 335, 426 Florence 89, 103, 115, 178 flowers, cut 42, 327, 328 flu, pandemic 28, 145–6, 308–310 Flynn, James 19 Fontaine, Hippolyte 233–4 food aid 28, 141, 154, 203 food miles 41–2, 353, 392; see also local sourcing food preservation 139, 145, 258 food prices 20, 22, 23, 34, 39, 40, 42, 240, 241, 300 food processing 29–30, 60–61, 145; see also baking; cooking food retailing 36, 112, 148, 268; see also supermarkets food sharing 56, 59–60, 64 food supply: and biofuels 240–41, 243, 300; and climate change 337–8; and industrialisation 139, 201–2; pessimism about 280, 281, 284, 290, 300–302; and population growth 139, 141, 143–4, 146–7, 192, 206, 208–9, 300–302 Ford, Ford Maddox 188 Ford, Henry 24, 114, 189, 271 Forester, Jay 303 forests, fears of depletion 304–5, 339 fossil fuels: and ecology 237, 240, 304, 315, 342–3, 345–6; fertilisers 143, 150, 155, 237; and industrialisation 214, 216–17, 229–33, 352; and labour saving 236–7; and productivity 244–5; supplies 216–17, 229–30, 237–8, 245, 302–3; see also charcoal; coal; gas, natural; oil; peat Fourier analysis 283 FOXP2 (gene) 55, 375 fragmentation, political 170–73, 180–81, 184, 185 France: capital markets 259; famine 197; infant mortality 16; population growth 206, 208; revolution 324; trade 184, 186, 222 Franco, Francisco 186 Frank, Robert 95–6 Franken, Al 291 Franklin, Benjamin 107, 256 Franks 176 Fray Bentos 186 free choice 27–8, 107–110, 291–2 free-range farming 146, 308 French Revolution 324 Friedel, Robert 224 Friedman, Milton 111 Friend, Sir Richard 257 Friends of the Earth 154, 155 Fry, Art 261 Fuji (corporation) 114, 386 Fujian, China 89, 183 fur trade 169, 180 futurology 354–5 Gadir (Cadiz) 168–9, 170 Gaelic language 129 Galbraith, J.K. 16 Galdikas, Birute 60 Galilee, Sea of 124 Galileo 115 Gandhi, Indira 203, 204 Gandhi, Sanjay 203–4 Ganges, River 147, 172 gas, natural 235, 236, 237, 240, 302, 303, 337 Gates, Bill 106, 264, 268 GDP per capita (world), increases in 11, 349 Genentech (corporation) 259, 405 General Electric Company 261, 264 General Motors (corporation) 115 generosity 86–7, 94–5 genetic research 54, 151, 265, 306–7, 310, 356, 358 genetically modified (GM) crops 28, 32, 148, 151–6, 283, 358 Genghis Khan 182 Genoa 89, 169, 178, 180 genome sequencing 265 geothermal power 246, 344 Germany: Great Depression (1930s) 31; industrialisation 202; infant mortality 16; Nazism 109, 289; population growth 202; predicted deforestation 304, 305; prehistoric 70, 138; trade 179–80, 187; see also West Germany Ghana 187, 189, 316, 326 Gibraltar, Strait of 180 gift giving 87, 92, 133, 134 Gilbert, Daniel 4 Gilgamesh, King 159 Ginsberg, Allen 110 Gintis, Herb 86 Gladstone, William 237 Glaeser, Edward 190 Glasgow 315 glass 166, 174–5, 177, 259 glass fibre 303 Global Humanitarian Forum 337 global warming see climate change globalisation 290, 358 ‘glorious revolution’ (1688) 223 GM (genetically modified) crops 28, 148, 151–6, 283, 358 goats 122, 126, 144, 145, 197, 320 Goethe, Johann von 104 Goklany, Indur 143–4, 341, 426 gold 165, 177, 303 golden eagles 239, 409 golden toads 338 Goldsmith, Edward 291 Google (corporation) 21, 100, 114, 259, 260, 268, 355 Gore, Al 233, 291 Goths 175 Gott, Richard 294 Gramme, Zénobe Théophile 233–4 Grantham, George 401 gravity, discovery of 258 Gray, John 285, 291 Great Barrier Reef 250 Greece: ancient 115, 128, 161, 170–71, 173–4; modern 186 greenhouse gases 152, 155, 242, 329; see also carbon dioxide emissions Greenland: ice cap 125, 130, 313, 334, 339, 426; Inuits 61; Norse 380 Greenpeace 154, 155, 281, 385 Grottes des Pigeons, Morocco 53 Groves, Leslie 412 Growth is Good for the Poor (World Bank study) 317 guano 139–40, 302 Guatemala 209 Gujarat 162, 174 Gujaratis 89 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden 184 Gutenberg, Johann 184, 253 Guth, Werner 86 habeas corpus 358 Haber, Fritz 140, 412 Hadza people 61, 63, 87 Haiti 14, 301, 315 Halaf people 130 Hall, Charles Martin 24 Halley, Edmond 256 HANPP (human appropriation of net primary productivity) number 144–5 Hanseatic merchants 89, 179–80, 196 Hansen, James 426 hanta virus 307 happiness 25–8, 191 Harappa, Indus valley 161–2 Hardin, Garrett 203 harems 136 Hargreaves, James 227, 256 Harlem, Holland 215–16 Harper’s Weekly 23 Harvey, William 256 hay 214–15, 216, 239, 408–9 Hayek, Friedrich 5, 19, 38, 56, 250, 280, 355 heart disease 18, 156, 295 ‘hedonic treadmill’ 27 height, average human 16, 18 Heller, Michael 265–6 Hellespont 128, 170 Henrich, Joe 77, 377 Henry II, King of England 118 Henry, Joseph 271, 272 Henry, William 221 Heraclitus 251 herbicides 145, 152, 153–4 herding 130–31 Hero of Alexandria 270 Herschel, Sir William 221 Hesiod 292 Hippel, Eric von 273 hippies 26, 110, 175 Hiroshima 283 Hitler, Adolf 16, 184, 296 Hittites 166, 167 HIV/AIDS 8, 14, 307–8, 310, 316, 319, 320, 322, 331, 353 Hiwi people 61 Hobbes, Thomas 96 Hock, Dee 254 Hohle Fels, Germany 70 Holdren, John 203, 207, 311 Holland: agriculture 153; golden age 185, 201, 215–16, 223; horticulture 42; industrialisation 215–16, 226; innovations 264; trade 31, 89, 104, 106, 185, 223, 328 Holy Roman Empire 178, 265–6 Homer 2, 102, 168 Homestead Act (1862) 323 homicide 14, 20, 85, 88, 106, 118, 201 Homo erectus 49, 68, 71, 373 Homo heidelbergensis 49, 50–52, 373 Homo sapiens, emergence of 52–3 Hong Kong 31, 83, 158, 169, 187, 219, 328 Hongwu, Chinese emperor 183 Hood, Leroy 222, 405 Hooke, Robert 256 horses 48, 68, 69, 129, 140, 197, 215, 282, 408–9; shoes and harnesses 176, 215 housing costs 20, 25, 34, 39–40, 234, 368 Hoxha, Enver 187 Hrdy, Sarah 88 Huber, Peter 244, 344 Hueper, Wilhelm 297 Huguenots 184 Huia (birds) 64 human sacrifice 104 Hume, David 96, 103, 104, 170 humour 2 Hunan 177 Hungary 222 Huns 175 hunter-gatherers: consumption and production patterns 29–30, 123; division of labour 61–5, 76, 136; famines 45, 139; limitations of band size 77; modern societies 66–7, 76, 77–8, 80, 87, 135–6, 136–7; nomadism 130; nostalgia for life of 43–5, 135, 137; permanent settlements 128; processing of food 29, 38, 61; technological regress 78–84; trade 72, 77–8, 81, 92–3, 123, 136–7; violence and warfare 27, 44–5, 136, 137 hunting 61–4, 68–70, 125–6, 130, 339 Huron Indians 138–9 hurricanes 329, 335, 337 Hurst, Blake 152 Hutterites 211 Huxley, Aldous 289, 354 hydroelectric power 236, 239, 343, 344, 409 hyenas 43, 50, 54 IBM (corporation) 260, 261, 282 Ibn Khaldun 182 ice ages 52, 127, 329, 335, 340, 388 ice caps 125, 130, 313, 314, 334, 338–9, 426 Iceland 324 Ichaboe island 140 ‘idea-agora’ 262 imitation 4, 5, 6, 50, 77, 80 imperialism 104, 162, 164, 166, 172, 182, 319–20, 357; see also colonialism in-vitro fertilisation 306 income, per capita: and economic freedom 117; equality 18–19, 218–19; increases in 14, 15, 16–17, 218–19, 285, 331–2 India: agriculture 126, 129, 141, 142–3, 147, 151–2, 156, 301; British rule 160; caste system 173; economic growth 187, 358; energy use 245; income equality 19; infant mortality 16; innovations 172–3, 251; Mauryan empire 172–3, 201, 357; mobile phone use 327; population growth 202, 203–4; prehistoric 66, 126, 129; trade 174–5, 175, 179, 186–7, 225, 228, 232; urbanisation 189 Indian Ocean 174, 175 Indonesia 66, 87, 89, 177 Indus river 167 Indus valley civilisation 161–2, 164 industrialisation: and capital investment 258–9; and end of slavery 197, 214; and food production 139, 201–2; and fossil fuels 214, 216–17, 229–33, 352; and innovation 38, 220–24, 227–8; and living standards 217–20, 226–7, 258; pessimistic views of 42, 102–3, 217–18, 284–5; and productivity 227–8, 230–31, 232, 235–6, 244–5; and science 255–8; and trade 224–6; and urbanisation 188, 226–7 infant mortality 14, 15, 16, 208–9, 284 inflation 24, 30, 169, 289 influenza see flu, pandemic Ingleheart, Ronald 27 innovation: and capital investment 258–62, 269; and exchange 71–2, 76, 119, 167–8, 251, 269–74; and government spending programmes 267–9; increasing returns of 248–55, 274–7, 346, 354, 358–9; and industrialisation 38, 220–24, 227–8; and intellectual property 262–7, 269; limitlessness 374–7; and population growth 252; and productivity 227–8; and science 255–8, 412; and specialisation 56, 71–2, 73–4, 76–7, 119, 251; and trade 168, 171 insect-resistant crops 154–5 insecticides 151–2 insects 75–6, 87–8 insulin 156, 274 Intel (corporation) 263, 268 intellectual property 262–7; see also copyright; patents intensive farming 143–9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 330, 331, 332, 333–4, 338, 342, 347, 425, 426, 427, 428 internal combustion engine 140, 146, 244 International Planned Parenthood Foundation 203 internet: access to 253, 268; blogging 257; and charitable giving 318–19, 356; cyber-crime 99–100, 357; development of 263, 268, 270, 356; email 292; free exchange 105, 272–3, 356; packet switching 263; problem-solving applications 261–2; search engines 245, 256, 267; shopping 37, 99, 107, 261; social networking websites 262, 268, 356; speed of 252, 253; trust among users 99–100, 356; World Wide Web 273, 356 Inuits 44, 61, 64, 126 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 330, 331, 332, 333–4, 338, 342, 347, 349, 425, 426, 427, 428 IQ levels 19 Iran 162 Iraq 31, 158, 161 Ireland 24, 129, 199, 227 iron 166, 167, 169, 181, 184, 223, 229, 230, 302, 407 irradiated food 150–51 irrigation 136, 147–8, 159, 161, 163, 198, 242, 281 Isaac, Glyn 64 Isaiah 102, 168 Islam 176, 357, 358 Israel 53, 69, 124, 148 Israelites 168 Italy: birth rate 208; city states 178–9, 181, 196; fascism 289; Greek settlements 170–71, 173–4; infant mortality 15; innovations 196, 251; mercantilism 89, 103, 178–9, 180, 196; prehistoric 69 ivory 70, 71, 73, 167 Jacob, François 7 Jacobs, Jane 128 Jamaica 149 James II, King 223 Japan: agriculture 197–8; birth rates 212; dictatorship 109; economic development 103, 322, 332; economic and technological regression 193, 197–9, 202; education 16; happiness 27; industrialisation 219; life expectancy 17, 31; trade 31, 183, 184, 187, 197 Jarawa tribe 67 Java 187 jealousy 2, 351 Jebel Sahaba cemeteries, Egypt 44, 45 Jefferson, Thomas 247, 249, 269 Jenner, Edward 221 Jensen, Robert 327 Jericho 127, 138 Jevons, Stanley 213, 237, 245 Jews 89, 108, 177–8, 184 Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan 25–6 Jobs, Steve 221, 264, 405 John, King of England 118 Johnson, Lyndon 202–3 Jones, Rhys 79 Jordan 148, 167 Jordan river 127 Joyce, James 289 justice 19–20, 116, 320, 358 Kalahari desert 44, 61, 76 Kalkadoon aborigines 91 Kanesh, Anatolia 165 Kangaroo Island 81 kangaroos 62, 63, 69–70, 84, 127 Kant, Immanuel 96 Kaplan, Robert 293 Kay, John 184, 227 Kazakhstan 206 Kealey, Terence 172, 255, 411 Kelly, Kevin 356 Kelvin, William Thomson, 1st Baron 412 Kenya 42, 87, 155, 209, 316, 326, 336, 353 Kerala 327 Kerouac, Jack 110 Khoisan people 54, 61, 62, 67, 116, 321 Kim Il Sung 187 King, Gregory 218 Kingdon, Jonathan 67 Kinneret, Lake 124 Klasies River 83 Klein, Naomi 291 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (venture capitalists) 259 knowledge, increasing returns of 248–50, 274–7 Kodak (corporation) 114, 386 Kohler, Hans-Peter 212 Korea 184, 197, 300; see also North Korea; South Korea Kuhn, Steven 64, 69 kula (exchange system) 134 !


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

The Puritans who fled to New England didn’t want an end to religious persecution, they just wanted to be the ones doing the persecuting; they ruthlessly drove out heretics in their new home, and nearby Rhode Island was founded by one such bad-thinker (in fact, in the mid-seventeenth century the New Englanders executed more Dissenters than the Cavaliers did). In contrast, the Friends allowed anyone to come to their colony, established by William Penn in 1681, and Philadelphia became the one city in the British Empire where Catholics and Jews could worship freely and even take part in politics. They also received huge numbers of German refugees and within a short while Quakers were a small minority there, although they still remained economically dominant. Quaker political ideology has also come to have an outsized influence on American liberalism, most prominently with the anti-slavery movement but even with twenty-first-century ideas such as open borders.

Norton, 1979). 25 http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2018/06/centrists-find-politics-boring-wish-it.html. 26 https://medium.com/@ryanfazio/politics-are-not-the-sum-of-a-person-378102f25334. 27 Burton Egbert Stevenson, The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (London: Macmillan, 1948) INDEX 28 Days Later (2002) 185 Abbott, Jack 121 abortion 166, 168, 202, 217, 241, 363 Abortion Act 217 Abramson, Lyn Yvonne 30 academia 7–8, 12, 16–17, 136–8, 319–26 activism 7, 316–17, 326 actors 186–7 Adam 33, 219 Adam, Corinna 18 Adams, Henry 90–1 Adams, John 281 Adams, Samuel 281, 331 Adorno, Theodor 135 The Authoritarian Personality 104–7, 143 Aesop’s Fables 260 Africa 15 Agamemnon 187 Agnew, Spiro 154 agnostics 216 agreeableness 108 Aids 125 Ailes, Roger 313, 346 al-Qaida 13, 125, 201 al-Sahaf, Mohammed Saeed 353 alcohol consumption 112–13, 133 Aldred, Ebenezer 61 Alexander, Scott 118, 315–16, 342–3 Allen, William 92 Allen, Woody 102 Alloy, Lauren 30 ‘Alt-Right’ 345, 347 Altemeyer, Bob 107, 333 American Beauty (1999) 106, 184 American Civil Liberties Union 201–2 American constitution 345 American independence 53, 55, 305 American National Election Studies 303 American Political Science Association 300 ‘American Religion’ 222 American Revolution 55, 280–1 Amnesty International 99, 201, 202, 212 ANC 16, 89, 189 ancien régime 178, 333, 358–9 Andrews, Helen 176 Anglicanism 13, 37, 64, 65, 202, 214, 222 Communion 220 High Church 50, 51 norms 79 supremacy 292 anti-apartheid movement 16 anti-Catholicism 232 anti-communism 22, 211 anti-humanitarianism 74 anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) 163 Antichrist 64 Antonia, Lady Fraser 42 apartheid 89, 174 Apollo 29 Aquinas, Thomas 326 Arabs 362 Arbuthnot, Norman 312 aristos 31 Arnold, Matthew 279 art, degenerate 98 Arts Council 197 Aryans 89 ASBOs see anti-social behaviour orders Ashley Madison website 107 Asquith, Robert 168 atheism 52–3, 214–16, 292, 294 see also New Atheism Athelstan, King 126 Athens 31 Atlantic magazine 341, 348, 366 Attenborough, David 195 Attlee, Clement 175 Attlee era 177 Augustine of Hippo 31–3, 35, 349 Augustine, St 110, 291 Auschwitz 98 authoritarian personality 104–7, 118, 334 authoritarianism 140, 148, 208, 262, 329–30, 333–4, 338, 350 autism 138 Ayres, Bill 236 Babeuf, François-Noël 60–1 baby boomers 44, 83, 131, 155 Bad Religion 102 bad-thinkers 144–5, 146, 150, 152 Baldwin, Alec 24 Balfour, Arthur 265 Bank of England 331 Bannon, Steven 152, 309, 347 Baptists 59, 145 barbarism 65, 66, 84 barbarians 12, 131 Bargh, John 115 Barlow, Joel 109 Baron-Cohen, Sacha 333 Barrès, Maurice 95 Basics, Baxter (Viz character) 86, 267 Bastille, storming of the 55, 59, 331 Batbie, Anselme 274 Batek 131 BBC 3, 149, 165, 186, 190–7, 265, 266, 313–14, 337 Beatles 166, 287 beatnik poetry 127 Becker, Ernest 115 Beeching Axe 285 Belgium 303 Belle Époque era 126, 175, 184–5 Benedict, St 373 Benedict XVI, Pope 218, 232, 233 Benn, Tony 18, 21, 42 Bentham, Jeremy 78, 92, 223–4 Berenger, Tom 110 Berlin 20–1, 23, 41–2 Berlin Wall 21, 22, 23, 86 Betjeman, John 285 Bevan, Nye 230 Beyoncé 24 Beyond the Fringe 191 Bible 50, 219, 229, 294 Bible Belt 228 Big Five personality traits 108–13, 137, 363 ‘Big Sort, The’ 295 Bill of Rights 305–6 biological determinism 139 birth control 364 birth rates 362–4 Bishop, Bill 295 Black Death 34–5 Black Lives Matter 338 Black Wednesday 154 Blackadder 331 Blair, Tony 21, 24, 79, 153, 156, 158–61, 163–4, 183, 189, 192, 213, 266–7, 270 Blair era 167, 203–4, 205, 281 ‘Blob, the’ 271 Bloom, Allan 98 Bloom, Paul 321 Bloomsbury 18 ‘blue wave’ 2006 274 Blumenberg, Hans 67 Boas, Franz 133–4 ‘Bobo’ (bohemian bourgeois) 244, 308 Bogart, Humphrey 24 Bolshevik Revolution 303 Bolshevism 226, 246 Borat 333 Bosnia 214 bourgeois 132, 246 bourgeoisie 9, 97, 127, 135 see also Ruling Class Boy Scouts 197 Bradbury, Malcolm 39 brain 116–17 Brando, Marlon 24, 341 Brazil 164 Brecht, Bertolt 186 Breitbart (website) 308, 309, 314, 315, 317–18, 347 Breitbart, Andrew 181, 308 Brennan, Mr 47 Brent, David 192 Brexit 4, 26–7, 103, 186, 195, 270, 346, 353–60, 365, 370 Brexit Referendum (2016) 3, 173, 222, 270, 275, 302, 354–5, 357, 359 Brief Encounter (1945) 162, 168 British Army 9 British Empire 57 British National Party 87 British Potato Council 203 ‘broken windows’ theory 69 Brook 241 Brooke, Heather 298 Brooker, Charlie 249 Brooks, Arthur 82, 191, 299 Who Really Cares 237 Brooks, David 244 ‘brotherhood of man’ 71, 100 Brown, Dan 213 Brown, Gordon 203, 265, 281 Brown era 203–4 Bruinvels, Peter 194 B’Stard, Alan 89 Buchanan, Pat 154–9, 313 Buckley, William F. 68, 295–6, 313 Bullingdon Club 267 Burke, Edmund 47, 53–5, 57–9, 61–3, 65, 66, 68, 70–2, 82, 89–90, 159, 163, 181, 190, 191, 198, 230, 274, 279, 280, 345, 365 Burleigh, Michael 88 Bush, George, Sr 86, 156 Bush, George W. 27, 201, 236, 248, 313 buttons 34–5 Byrne, Liam 266 C2DE social class 5 cable TV 311 Cafod 233 California 4, 320 Calvin, John (Jean) 48, 49, 293 Calvinism 45, 49, 64 Cambridge 49 Cambridge University 52, 55, 145, 151, 326, 348 Camden Labour Party 18 Cameron, David 237, 265, 266, 267, 270, 272, 359 Cameron faction 266, 270, 359 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 81 Campbell, Alistair 159–60 Camus, Albert 226 Canada 178, 201 capitalism 15, 64, 78, 93, 97, 280, 339 Caplan, Bryan 275 Capra, Frank 123 Captain America comics 237 Carlson, Tucker 365 Carlyle, Thomas 41, 75, 76 cars 285–6 Cash, Johnny 24 Cassandra 28–9, 62, 373 Catharism 254–5 Cathedral, the 202–3, 271 Catholic Church 48, 116, 212, 212–14, 217–18, 232, 233, 269, 333 Catechism 137 Catholic Emancipation Act 289 Catholic Herald (newspaper) 212, 213, 216, 219, 233, 241, 272, 307, 339 Catholicism 11–13, 33, 37, 41–3, 45, 49, 51–2, 54, 57, 62, 64, 75, 134–5, 142, 155, 158, 176, 199, 202, 211–13, 217–18, 222, 230–1, 241, 243, 272–3, 291–2, 294, 296, 339, 363 see also anti-Catholicism Cato Institute 324 Cavaliers 53, 57 Ceauşecu 46 censorship 148, 166, 188–9, 290, 331 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 61 ‘centrist dad’ 8 Chagnon, Napoleon 147 Change 3 Change UK 3 Channel 4 168, 232 charities 57, 199–202, 233, 237 Charles I 49, 55 Charles II 36, 37, 52 Charles-Roux, Fr Jean-Marie 210–11 Chartists 175 Chelsea FC 47 Chesterton, G.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

He succeeded in getting the scholarship that took him to Eton, but by this point he was already extremely distant. ‘Standing aside from things,’ a contemporary said when asked to describe him, ‘observing, always observing.’ Upon graduation, most of his fellow pupils went to university, but Orwell set off for Burma, a recent annexation to the British Empire, as part of the Indian Imperial Police. Here, too, his colleagues found him strange and removed. He spent much of the time alone, usually reading. Unlike most recruits, he took time to learn about Burma culture, including its cinema and folklore. He attended the church of the Karen ethnic group, learned the language fluently, and acquired some small tattoos on each knuckle which were favoured by rural Burmese to protect against bullets and snakebites.

He carried this outsider status with him wherever he went. But unlike Orwell, he was never on the edge of things. He was right in the heart of them. Even as a young child he was immensely popular. By adulthood, he was enjoying some of the most prestigious positions in British academia. He was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He dined and gossiped with the most powerful and influential people on earth. Unlike perhaps any other thinker in this book, he was profoundly contented. When asked about life, he said: ‘I wish it would continue indefinitely.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

He pored over his past work, wallowing in mementos from a lifetime of work with the creative partner he had lost. TWO MONTHS AFTER Jobs’s memorial service, Ive received a knighthood for his work in design. He was nominated by the Design Council, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting industrial design. The honor elevated Ive to Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or KBE, the most senior rank of the British Empire, making him Sir Jonathan Ive. On a sunny day in London in late May, Ive cinched a powder blue tie around his neck and donned a black tailcoat for the ceremony at Buckingham Palace. The formality of the occasion would have amused Jobs, who had chided Ive about Brits’ stuffiness, but it carried tremendous importance for the British designer and son of two teachers.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Such workers have often been both very poor and unfamiliar with the language and customs of the country, so that their prospects of finding their own jobs individually have been very unpromising. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vast numbers of contract laborers from Italy went to countries in the Western Hemisphere and contract laborers from China went to countries in Southeast Asia, while contract laborers from India spread around the world to British Empire countries from Malaysia to Fiji to British Guiana. In short, investment in human capital, as in other capital, has been made in the form of stocks as well as bonds. Although these are not the terms usually applied, that is what they amount to economically. INSURANCE Many things are called “insurance” but not all of those things are in fact insurance.

When European empires were at their zenith in the early twentieth century, Western Europe was less than 2 percent of the world’s land area but it controlled another 40 percent in overseas empires. {825}However, most major industrial nations sent only trivial percentages of their exports or investments to their conquered colonies in the Third World and received imports that were similarly trivial compared to what these industrial nations produced themselves or purchased as imports from other industrial countries. Even at the height of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, the British invested more in the United States than in all of Asia and Africa put together. Quite simply, there is more wealth to be made from rich countries than from poor countries. For similar reasons, throughout most of the twentieth century the United States invested more in Canada than in all of Asia and Africa put together.

Nor have the descendants of the peoples of the Mogul Empire or the Russian empire been particularly prosperous. Britain might seem to be an exception, in that it once had the largest empire of all—encompassing one-fourth of the land area of the Earth and one-fourth of the human race—and today has a high standard of living. However, it is questionable whether the British Empire had a net profit over the relatively brief span of history in which it was at its ascendancy. Individual Britons such as Cecil Rhodes grew rich in the empire, but the British taxpayers bore the heavy costs of conquering and maintaining the empire, including the world’s largest burden of military expenditures per capita.{937} Britain also had at one time the world’s largest slave trade in its empire.


pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

While in political asylum in Germany for two years, he came under the influence of Nazi doctrine and confused the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. His willingness to serve as a radio commentator for the Nazis and to help recruit Muslims in the Balkans to the German war effort no doubt stains his career. But he did not act any differently from the Zionist leaders in the 1930s, who themselves sought an alliance with the Nazis against the British Empire, or from all the other anticolonialist movements who wanted rid of the Empire by way of alliances with its principal enemies. When the war ended in 1945, the Mufti returned to his senses and tried to organize the Palestinians on the eve of the Nakbah, but he was already powerless, and the world he belonged to, that of the Arab Ottoman urban notables, was gone.


What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, lone genius, spice trade, women in the workforce

Anglo-French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle-Eastern states and societies. Some observers, both inside and outside the region, have pointed to the differences in the postimperial development of former British possessions—for example, between Aden in the Middle East and such places as Singapore and Hong Kong; or between the various lands that once made up the British Empire in India. Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism, and blaming “the Jews” for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic 153 WHAT WENT WRONG? societies experienced the normal constraints and occasional hazards of minority status. In most significant respects, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule, until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

The descent can be prolonged, and often is, but oblivion waits at the end. There seems to be no escape from the sigmoid curve. The only variable is the length of the curve. The Roman Empire lasted 400 years, but finally reached its end. Other empires lasted less long before they dipped, as the British Empire did and the American one surely will. Governments and dictatorships ultimately outstay their welcome. On a smaller scale, businesses used to last on average for 40 years before they collapsed or were taken over; now the average lifespan appears to have dropped to a mere 14 years. The speed of the curve seems to be accelerating although we humans seem to have stretched out our own personal curves to 90 years or more.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

By 1936, you could already see the beginning of the real result of this strategy: Palestinians were evicted from land purchased by the Zionist movement; Palestinians lost their jobs because of Zionist strategy to take over the labor market. It was very clear that the European Jewish problem was going to be solved in Palestine. All these factors pushed Palestinians for the first time to say, “We are going to do something about it,” and they tried to revolt. You needed the might of the British Empire to crush that revolt. It took them three years; they used the repertoire of actions against the Palestinians that were as bad as those that would be used later on by the Israelis to quell the Palestinian Intifadas of 1987 and 2000. FB: This revolt of ’36 was a very popular revolt; it was the “Falah,” the peasants, that took arms.


pages: 194 words: 59,488

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London by Richard Jones

Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Snow's cholera map, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, moral panic

The city’s commercial core, the West End, is laid out with broad boulevards and huge palaces, reflecting the city’s former status as the capital of a globe-spanning empire. When you leave the West End, however, you’ll immediately note how diverse London has become. The centuries have shaped it into a complex amalgam of communities—a collection of towns, each with its own tradition and spirit. The mix of cultures—a relic of what was once known as the British Empire—gives London a certain depth of character that has long kept it at the forefront of the world’s art, music, and fashion scenes. The ever-changing myriad of immigrant communities has constantly challenged and redefined London’s character. Though less important than it once was, the British class system stubbornly endures.


Rough Guide Directions Bruges & Ghent by Phil Lee

British Empire, gentrification, Kickstarter, place-making, spinning jenny, the market place

It was a wise decision: back in Spain his family had converted to Christianity, but even that failed to save them. His father was burnt at the stake in 1525 and his dead mother was dug up and her bones burned. P L A C E S Bruges: South of the Markt the event, these murals, whose theme was the splendour of the British Empire, ended up in Swansea Guildhall, though several of the preparatory sketches are displayed here in the Arentshuis. S T B O N I FA C I U S B R U G 02 Bruges Places 47-138.indd 67 12/20/07 1:08:40 PM 68 The Gruuthuse Museum Bruges: South of the Markt P L A C E S Dijver 17. Tues–Sun 9.30am–5pm; €6.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Although there are examples of the process developing like this, in many parts of the world the experience of industrialization was very different. For example, Bent (2017: 12) argues that large-scale industries were established in both Egypt and India under British imperial rule. This industrialization was deeply shaped by the exploitative relationships of the British Empire. Despite worker resistance, the industrialization that took place ‘was highly disruptive to existing social and economic systems … these changes resulted in the creation of working arrangements that were unstable, insecure, and contingent – in a word, precarious’ (Bent, 2017: 14). However, as Webster et al. (2008) have argued, in low- and middle-income countries, the majority of workers were excluded from stable employment, unlike high-income countries.


The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

This would be followed by another, even more confident wave of city building in the nineteenth century, with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong. These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change. 10 Mumbai and New York, so different in so many ways, have in common that their destinies came to be linked to the British Empire at about the same time: the 1660s. Although Giovanni da Verrazzano landed on Manhattan in 1524, the earliest European settlements in what is now New York State were built a long way up the Hudson River, in the area around Albany. It was not till 1625 that the Dutch built Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan island; this would later become New Amsterdam and then, when the British first seized the settlement in the 1660s, New York.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

I listened to half of it, that’s all. I got fed up with it and switched over to the fight . . . I was very disgusted with the result of the fight, the referee must have been ‘colour blind’. Ha! ha! ha! It wasn’t at all fair – & everyone else seems to think the same thing as well. The fight in question was the British Empire featherweight champion ship, at the Royal Albert Hall. Al Phillips of Aldgate won on points against Cliff Anderson from British Guyana – ‘an extremely unconvincing decision’, reported The Times, producing ‘a very mixed reception’.13 It is debatable, though, how much the government’s standing was fundamentally affected by the big freeze.

But Lessing, soon if not already aware of how the pervasive Cold War climate had sent many intellectuals running to (as she later put it) ‘The Ivory Tower’, was determined to keep a political edge to her life and writing.14 Walking in the Shade, Lessing’s compelling autobiography about her first 13 years in England, periodically includes brief sections on ‘the Zeitgeist, or how we thought then’. Included in the one relating to her early impressions is this quartet: Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all – best. The British Empire, then on its last legs – the best. Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts. In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism.

It was much the same in the financial domain, where the continuing existence of the sterling area, accompanied by sterling’s position as one of the world’s leading reserve currencies, likewise resulted in overstretch. The sterling area, operating in those parts of the world where the writ (whether formal or informal) of the British Empire still ran, had been a creation of the Bank of England during the 1930s, and although Keynes had bitterly observed in 1944 that ‘all our reflex actions are those of a rich man’, the conventional wisdom remained that it was desirable for sterling after the war to play a leading world role. ‘The Sterling Area, and the countries which were linked with it, included about 1,000 million people and could therefore be associated with the United States and the dollar area on a basis of equality’ was how Bevin saw it in July 1949 – notwithstanding that he was in the middle of a balance-of-payments crisis more or less directly caused by an overvalued pound.


pages: 965 words: 267,053

A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

Another group of leading British politicians was firmly committed to the scheme, and it was owing to their resolution that it was accepted. It has been said that the Foreign Office and military experts regarded Palestine as a territory ‘of the utmost importance to the future security and well-being of the British empire’.‡ Various committees were set up during the war to define British desiderata in Turkey-in-Asia, but their reports were never officially endorsed. In any case, the future of Palestine and Zionism were two distinct issues. The fact that a certain British statesman attributed considerable political or strategic importance to Palestine did not necessarily make him a supporter of Dr Weizmann’s projects - it could well have, as in Curzon’s case, the opposite effect.

The appointment of Churchill as prime minister was a source of encouragement to Weizmann, and Ben Gurion, too, became for a while more optimistic. He reported from London that three of the five members of the new war cabinet were friendly to the Zionist cause. In a letter to Lord Lloyd (‘a known pro-Arab but nevertheless an honest and sympathetic man’) he wrote that he was a convinced believer in the spiritual mission of the British empire, that it stood for something much greater than itself, for a cause wider than its own frontiers. But this interlude did not last. Two years later Ben Gurion bitterly attacked Weizmann for his one-sided pro-British stand which, he claimed, disqualified him from being the leader of the Zionist movement.

† Kongress Zeitung, 5 August 1937. * Ibid., 10, 11 August 1937. * Ibid., 11 August 1937. * Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 393. * Cmd. 5634, London, 1938; Sykes, Crossroads to Palestine, p. 229. † ESCO, vol. 2, p. 873. ‡ Cmd. 5893, November 1938. * Jüdische Weltrundschau, 20 March 1939. † ‘Palestine and the British Empire’, in In the Margin of History. * Quoted in Y. Yauer, Diplomatia vemakhteret, Merhavia, 1963, p. 31. * Ben Gurion, 12 February 1938, ibid., p. 28. † Bauer, Diplomatia vemakhteret, p. 32. * Ibid., p. 30. † Ibid., pp. 31, 37. * Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 410. † N. Noldmann to Ben Gurion, quoted in J.J.


pages: 1,056 words: 275,211

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, defense in depth, European colonialism, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869

The Western tour was the first major attempt by Japan’s ruling elites of the Taish era to manipulate Hirohito’s image, and defenders of Hirohito often cite it as a source of his alleged commitment to “constitutional democracy.” Hirohito’s outbound passage aboard the Katori took him through the Asian and European territories of the British Empire, starting from Hong Kong, where for fear of Korean assassins he went ashore only briefly. Accompanied by the British governor-general and guarded by the entire British police force on the island, they strolled through the city for about forty minutes, then had lunch aboard a British warship.47 Next he sailed to the island of Singapore, already a vital center of commerce for all of colonial Southeast Asia.

Six days later the warship arrived at the capital, Colombo. With neither Japanese nor expatriate Koreans living on the isolated island, the imperial party felt free of danger for the first time. After five days in Columbo, the Katori departed on April 1 for the warm waters of the Red Sea, their destination the Suez Canal, the famed “lifeline” of the British Empire. They reached the canal on April 15 and the next day began the hundred-mile journey through the sea-level waterway with barren desert sands stretching away on each side. After docking at Port Said, at the entrance to the canal, on April 17, they traveled to Cairo, the ancient capital of Egypt, then in its last year as a British protectorate.

Hirohito’s contained no such limitations since it had to mesh with the operations plans for two simultaneous surprise attacks: an air assault on the American fleet and naval facilities at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and a ground landing at Kota Bharu in British Malaya. From Kota Bharu, Japanese troops were to strike southward down the Malayan west coast, largely avoiding the rain forests and mountains, to seize Singapore—at the tip of the Malayan Peninsula—linchpin of the British Empire in Southeast Asia and gateway to the resources of the Netherlands East Indies. Japanese forces headed for Singapore needed to violate Thailand’s neutrality at Singora (Songkhla), a strategic port north of Kota Bharu on the Gulf of Siam, in the Kra Isthmus area of southern Thailand. The entire southern operation was thus premised on the violation of international law with respect to two major powers—the United States and Britain—and a minor but diplomatically active third power, Thailand.


pages: 1,117 words: 270,127

On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn

British Empire, business cycle, defense in depth, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, John von Neumann, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Suez crisis 1956, two and twenty, zero-sum game

On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century, all our great affairs in every part of the globe, all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended upon them. Open the sea-cocks and let them sink beneath the surface, as another Fleet was one day to do in another British harbour far to the North, and in a few minutes—half an hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling forward by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole Empires in themselves, drifting helplessly out of control and falling prey to others; and Europe after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.

Even in the full knowledge of facts such as those I have just described, the Government continued to rule early in 1938 that the three fighting Services between them should not be allowed to spend more than about £ 1600 millions over the five years 1937 to 1941—an average of little over £300 millions a year for all three Services; and this eighteen months after the Prime Minister, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had confirmed that he knew the Germans were spending £ 1000 millions a year on warlike preparations, a figure which by now, of course, was being greatly exceeded. Add to this the fact that, for a year after this, intelligent and really patriotic men were still opposing compulsory military service, and who can doubt that there is some special Providence that presides over the destinies of drunk men and the British Empire? 16 15 J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, New York, Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1948, pp. 158, 167; Copyright 1948 by John W. Wheeler-Bennett. The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II and Type HI Deterrence. These failures occurred because neither the British nor the French had the resolve to use their superior military power or their superior resources to check German aggression until it was too late.


George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, Defenestration of Prague, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fear of failure, invisible hand, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, one-China policy, one-state solution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Reacting to a navy proposal for a buildup in the Pacific, which was at odds with the “defensive” posture set forth in Plan Dog, Marshall pronounced the “Germany first” (or “Europe first”) strategic doctrine that he would advocate throughout the war. Writing to Stark, he said that as a first principle the United States must “resist proposals that do not have for their immediate goal the survival of the British Empire and the defeat of Germany.” As a critically important corollary, the U.S. must “avoid dispersions that might lessen our power to operate effectively, decisively if possible, in the principal theatre—the Atlantic.”59 In all of Marshall’s correspondence this is the clearest but least known exposition of his overall strategy for conducting the Second World War, as well as a precursor of his Cold and Korean War grand strategy.

“We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler had told his commanders, “and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down.”5 At the outset, Marshall and most of his colleagues in the military establishment agreed. They believed the Soviets would surrender or be conquered by Germany within a matter of a few weeks or months. And when that happened, Hitler would be free to turn to the conquest by arms, or threat of arms, of Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, the British Isles, and much of the British Empire. If one counted his previous conquests in Europe (thirteen countries), it was not unreasonable to surmise that he would come to control and enslave upward of a billion people. In Asia, matters appeared just as threatening. A few days before Marshall’s report was released, Emperor Hirohito presided over a conference with Japan’s military and political leaders.

As a stratagem to persuade Roosevelt to “back off”—that is, cease his and Johnson’s insistence that India be granted a measure of self-government—Hamilton asserts that Hopkins convinced Churchill to ditch his draft resignation letter, ignore the “President’s plea regarding India,” and instead promise Britain’s cooperation in carrying out the plan set forth in the Marshall Memorandum.66 Consequently, claims Hamilton, Churchill prematurely informed Roosevelt that he would support the Marshall Memorandum, not because he was wholly committed to it, but because he needed Roosevelt’s help in preserving complete military control over the jewel of the British empire. There is a certain plausibility to Hamilton’s version, though he cites not a single source. On Sunday afternoon, April 12, two days before his War Cabinet Defense Committee made it official, Churchill cabled Roosevelt. “I have read with earnest attention your masterly document,” meaning the Marshall Memorandum, “about future of the war and the great operations proposed.


pages: 240 words: 60,660

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

We typed articles and manifestos on waxed stencils and printed copies of songbooks, syllabi, and literary magazines on rotary Gestetner machines. I was deeply involved in Habonim for my entire life in South Africa. As a child I attended Sunday morning meetings of our local Shtilim group, where I learned classic Boy Scout British Empire skills: tying knots, pitching tents, making fires, building camp furniture out of felled saplings lashed together with string and rope, signaling with semaphore flags. We learned Jewish songs and Jewish history and Israeli geography. We attended outdoor camps for three weeks in the summer and indoor seminars in old up-country hotels for ten days in the winter, drinking hot cocoa boiled in a cauldron and singing around the campfire.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

Study groups of the Council on Foreign Relations (a major channel for business influence on foreign policy) and the State Department formulated the concept of what they called the “Grand Area,” a region that should be subordinated to the needs of the American economy and that was to include at a minimum the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire. It was to be expanded to a global system to the extent possible, surely including Western Europe and the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East, then passing into American hands. This documentary record of high-level planning is also excluded from sanitized history. These guiding geopolitical conceptions explain a good deal of what has been happening in the world; if they are not understood, what takes place will appear to be a series of random errors, confusions and inconsistencies, traceable to the failings of a political leadership that is, in fact, succeeding brilliantly in its assigned tasks, despite the occasional failures that are inevitable in a complex world.


pages: 226 words: 52,069

Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat by Heather Lauer

British Empire, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, if you build it, they will come, index card, Ronald Reagan

Other people prefer to leave this task to the professionals. Either way, the endgame for all of us is to gain access to as much bacon as possible. THE BACON REVOLUTION Like Americans, the British have long consumed bacon and eggs for breakfast. This is not surprising, as so much of our culinary tradition stems from our origins as an outpost of the British empire. The Brits, bless their hearts, were among the first to refine the process of curing bacon for commercial purposes. John Harris, a butcher in Wiltshire, England, in the 1770s, led this charge. The pig trade that existed at the time between Ireland and England made Wiltshire a stopover for pigs being herded from the port town of Bristol to London, where they were sold at Smithfield, an area of northwest London that has served as a meat market for more than 800 years.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

These were the principles formulated by high-level planners and foreign policy experts during World War II, as they developed the framework for the postwar world, which was largely implemented. The United States was to maintain this dominance in a “Grand Area,” which was to include at a minimum the Western Hemisphere, the Far East and the former British empire, including the crucial energy resources of the Middle East. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible. It was always understood that Europe might choose to follow an independent course—perhaps the Gaullist vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Governments ranging from Franco’s Spain in the 1940s to the dictatorships of Argentina in the 1970s and El Salvador in the 1980s engaged in programs of abducting children of supposed leftists and placing them for adoption.17 In the words of women’s studies professor Laura Briggs, Raising the “orphans” of colonized people is a very familiar practice. From the nineteenth century French orphanages in Indochina to U.S. children’s homes in Puerto Rico in the early years of the twentieth, managing children and raising youth to belong to a different culture from that of their ancestors has a history. Indeed the white settler colonies of the British empire—the United States, Canada, Australia—made acculturating native children in boarding schools as indispensable a part of their policies toward indigenous people as war and reservations.18 The American Association of Indian Affairs (AAIA) noted in the 1960s that an astonishing one in four Native American children in some states had been removed from parental care into adoptive, foster, or institutional homes.


pages: 210 words: 62,771

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

They are available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk). 9. The English use the term valve where the Americans use vacuum tube. 10. The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park has reconstructed a Colossus. Visitors can see the machine running. 11. OBE stands for the Officer of the Order of the British Empire. This is a couple of levels down from a knighthood. 12. Mauchly and Eckert went to court several times trying to obtain patents, but were never successful. 13. Andrew Hodges. Op. cit., p. 382. 14. George Dyson. Turing’s Cathedral, p. ix. 15. In 1990, Hugh Loebner pledged $100,000 in prize money and a gold medal for the first computer to pass the Turing test.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

One long-run impact of this thinking was the creation of purchasing price parity (PPP) measures of economic growth used by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund to measure national economies using market domestic exchange rates and national prices rather than expressing growth in dollar terms. The other major finding that stands out from the many Samuelson made on trade goes by the awkward name of the factor price equalisation theorem. Economists have known for some time that the free movement of capital and labour – as was seen during the British Empire and the mass migration to America – could equalise rates of return between the old and new worlds. But could trade in goods have the same impact? Samuelson proved that in theory trade between two countries with the same commodity prices and levels of technology would lead to prices of the output goods falling to the same level, which would lead to the prices of the factors of production (capital and labour) also equalising between the two countries.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

However accurate this scenario may or may not be, the virtual money debate is no longer about e-money versus digital cash, hash tables versus smart chips or proof of work versus proof of stake. It is all about global power. As a historian, it is natural for Ferguson to remind us that the countries which have forged the path in financial innovation have led in every other way, too (Ferguson 2019). He cites Renaissance Italy, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic and the British Empire, all the way through to post-1930s America. He goes on to note that once a country loses that financial leadership, it loses its place as a global hegemon. And that has some serious consequences. Rae Deng, a founding partner of Du Capital in Singapore, talks about the ‘digital migration’ of the economy, which I think is a nice term.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa and a third would water his horse with champagne.”6 That will surely give some of my former colleagues a few ideas. Hold on thanking me because here is the foreboding end of the story. By the beginning of the twentieth century, rubber seeds were smuggled and trees transplanted to Malaysia, where production became cheaper and more efficient. The British Empire seized control of the market; the Brazilian monopoly ended abruptly and so did the rubber boom. Manaus fell into poverty. Rubber plantations closed, mansions were sold or given to the local administration, and entrepreneurs packed up and left, many having lost their fortune and more than one declaring bankruptcy.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

She was longer than any previous ship and was the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic. You can still see her today fully renovated and preserved in the dry dock built in Bristol by Brunel for her original construction. Having conquered the Atlantic, Brunel turned his attention to the biggest challenge of all, namely, connecting the far-flung reaches of the burgeoning British Empire to consolidate its position as the dominant global force. He wanted to design a ship that could sail nonstop from London to Sydney and back without refueling using only a single load of coal (and this was before the opening of the Suez Canal). This meant that the ship would have to be more than twice the length of the Great Britain at almost 700 feet and have a displacement (effectively its weight) almost ten times bigger.

In 1914 the famous Scottish mapmaker John Bartholomew, cartographer royal to King George V, published An Atlas of Economic Geography, a wonderful collection of data and factoids about economic activity, resources, health and climatic conditions, and goodness knows what else concerning all known places across the globe.2 One of his unique illustrations was a world map showing how long it took to get to any general area on the planet. It’s quite illuminating. For instance, the boundaries of Europe were about five days’ journey apart, whereas today they have shrunk to a mere few hours. Similarly, the boundaries of the British Empire extended over several weeks in 1914, but today its ghostly remains can be traversed in less than a day. Most of central Africa, South America, and Australia required in excess of forty days’ travel, and even Sydney was over a month away. But travel time is just one manifestation of the extraordinary acceleration of the pace of life that has been enabled by the dizzying proliferation of time-shrinking innovations.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

Here, too, the insurgent power of revivalist Islam took observers by surprise. Some commentators, recalling Afghanistan’s history of resistance to foreign invaders, speculated that fanatical Muslims would prove a match for the Russians. But what loomed in their minds was the image of the romantic tribal fighters who had given the British Empire such difficulties in the nineteenth century. What no one foresaw was how the odd fusion of Islam and late-twentieth-century revolutionary politics—a formula whose mostly Sunni version in Afghanistan had much in common with the fervor stirred up by Khomeini’s Shiite followers—would combust into a strange new kind of global religious conflict.

The strategy of cultural resistance—the construction of alternate society, of “living in truth”—implied the same quality of “self-restraint” that later provided the basis for the “self-limiting revolution” of Solidarity and 1989. It is striking, indeed, that the most influential nonviolent activist movements of the twentieth century—notably Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for independence from the British Empire and Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign (both of which drew, in their turn, on the writings of that Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy)—had overtly religious origins. Their legacy can be traced in the 1980s through such diverse events as the uprisings against dictatorship in South Korea, the 1986 “People’s Power” revolution in the Philippines, and the “velvet revolutions” in East Central Europe.


The Companion Guide to London by David Piper, Fionnuala Jervis

British Empire, cakes and ale, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute couture, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Nelson Mandela, South Sea Bubble, V2 rocket

And there indeed, sombre, in an attitude of massive yet relaxed platitude with a book on his knee, sits under his Gothic umbrella that great, good, alarmingly unhumorous, devout and enterprising German princeling who worked himself to death in the interests of the spiritual and material prosperity of the British Empire. He was blackened in 1915, supposedly to render him invisible to German zeppelins, but in 1998, after a prolonged and comprehensive restoration of the memo174 12-chap12rev2.fm Page 175 Tuesday, August 22, 2000 9:04 AM Hyde Park rial, he emerged again in gold (from 1,800 books of gold leaf) and looks splendid.

Beyond this is Painters’ Corner, and it is here and not at Westminster that you will find the memorials to English artists, beginning with that excellent import from Flanders, Van Dyck; Reynolds, Lawrence, Turner, Constable and many others. At the east end under Old St Paul’s was the parish church of St Faith; the present chapel (1960) on the site is of the Order of the British Empire and a trifle genteel perhaps for its setting in its gilt, pearl grey and crimson pink. But the central presences, to the west and under the dome itself, are those twin conquerors whose triumphs in the early nineteenth century secured peace and prosperity for Victorian London and whom London in gratitude loved to celebrate: Wellington and Nelson.


pages: 604 words: 165,488

Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man by Jonathan Conlin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, banking crisis, British Empire, carried interest, cotton gin, Ernest Rutherford, estate planning, Fellow of the Royal Society, light touch regulation, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Network effects, Pierre-Simon Laplace, rent-seeking, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

‘Like all Londoners of humble background, in speaking he constantly struggled with that fatal letter “h”.’20 Writing in his 1945 memoirs, Gulbenkian remembered Lane as ‘a very eminent commercial genius and organiser’, ‘the father of the British oil industry’.21 Though its focus was the Russian rather than the British Empire, otherwise the Russian Industrial and Mining Company was not that different from the flashier ‘Institutes’ and ‘Trusts’ operated by Bottomley and Wright.22 The ostensible purpose was the same: to acquire small yet promising mining companies that had been founded abroad and inject new capital for development.

., Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) Kynaston, David, The City of London, Vol. 2 Golden Years, 1890–1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995) Kynaston, David, The City of London, Vol. 3 Illusions of Gold, 1914–45 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999) Lochery, Neil, Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–45 (New York: Public Affairs, 2011) Lodwick, John, Gulbenkian: An Interpretation of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (London: Heinemann, 1958) Longrigg, Stephen H., The Origins and Early History of the Iraq Petroleum Company (London: privately printed, 1969) Louis, William Roger, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–51 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) Mansel, Philip, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire (London: John Murray, 1995) Marguerat, Philippe, with L. Jilek, Banque et investissement industriel: Paribas, le pétrole roumain et la politique française, 1919–1939 (Neuchâtel: Université de Neuchâtel Press, 1987) McBeth, Brian S., Juan Vicente Gómez and the Oil Companies in Venezuela, 1908–35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Mejcher, Helmut, Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq, 1910–28 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976) Melkonyan, Ed.


Lonely Planet Sri Lanka by Lonely Planet

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, digital map, European colonialism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, off grid, off-the-grid, period drama, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

Naga Pooshani Amman Kovil, Nainativu | THOMAS WYNESS / SHUTTERSTOCK © Top Experiences Colonial Legacy Yes, the Brits were chased out at independence in 1948, but their legacy lives on in much more than an often impenetrable bureaucracy addicted to forms. The heart of Colombo, Fort, is where you’ll see the structures of the empire at its most magnificent. Along the capital's wide, tree-shaded streets, the National Museum building evokes the British Empire. You’ll find colonial legacies of the Dutch and Portuguese as well, not just in Colombo's popular Dutch Hospital but in old fortresses that ring the nation's coasts. T-Lounge by Dilmah | PETER STUCKINGS / GETTY IMAGES © Top Experiences Polonnaruwa's Stupendous Structures Arrayed around a vast grassy quadrangle like the chess pieces of giants, Polonnaruwa’s intricately carved buildings and monuments offer a visitor-friendly briefing on what was the centre of the kingdom some thousand years ago.

This document announces a major reason for the event: '…the cruelties and oppressions of the Malabar ruler'. Sri Wickrama Rajasinha was declared ‘by the habitual violation of the chief and most sacred duties of a sovereign’, to be ‘fallen and deposed from office of king’ and ‘dominion of the Kandyan provinces’ was ‘vested in…the British Empire’. The museum, along with four devales (complexes for worshipping deities) and two monasteries – but not the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic itself – make up one of Sri Lanka’s cultural triangle sites. Kandy Garrison CemeteryCEMETERY ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; h8am-6pm)F This well-maintained cemetery contains 163 graves from colonial times.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

But it also suggests we may want to qualify our condemnation of African economic policymakers for their countries’ poor performance. Well-trained economists without any political concerns aren’t quite sure what to do either. Historian Niall Ferguson claims that African governments have been worse for growth than were empires.32 If we take the continent of Africa (and do not limit ourselves to the British Empire) the picture actually looks more positive than that. In 1870, prior to the imperialist scramble for colonies, the continent’s average income per day was about $1.21. Toward the end of the colonial period in 1950, it had reached $2.33. In 1998, average income on the continent was $3.75. This suggests a postcolonial annual growth rate 0.2 percent higher than the colonial growth rate.


pages: 202 words: 8,448

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

Many centuries ago, Sun Tzu re ected on this idea when he told readers of The Art of War how important it is to always put your strong points against your enemy’s weak points. Now, I don’t know if Gandhi ever read Sun Tzu, but of all the nonviolent warriors I can think of, few have applied those ancient Chinese principles as well as Gandhi did. That’s because Gandhi understood from the beginning that military force was the strength of the British Empire. That’s what they were good at. Even if he hadn’t been a dedicated paci st, Gandhi surely would have realized that the British soldiers, armed with the most modern weapons in the world, would never be defeated in an armed con ict. But out in India, the British nevertheless su ered from a critical weakness: a lack of numbers.


pages: 223 words: 66,428

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith

British Empire, do what you love, North Sea oil, Philippa Foot, trolley problem

Yes, the first time she had heard him he had sung “Freedom Come All Ye” and she had sat at her table at the back of the pub with her friends, utterly arrested, unable to do anything but watch that curious rumpled figure and hear the words that cut into the air like the punch of a fist: “Nae mair will our bonnie callants / Merch tae wer when our braggarts crousely craw.” No more will Scottish boys march off to war to the skirl of the pipes. And at the end she had cried; she had been unable to say why, beyond feeling that what she had witnessed was a heartfelt apology for what Scotland had done to the world as part of the British Empire, for all the humiliation of imperialism. She was thinking of this when Dr. Norrie Brown came in. She knew it was him from the way he hesitated at the door, looking for someone he did not know; and he knew it was her from the way she sat there, waiting for somebody similarly unknown to her. “Isabel Dalhousie?”


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

We know it more commonly as jet. It was made fashionable in Britain in the nineteenth century by Queen Victoria, who mourned the death of her consort Prince Albert by wearing black clothes and jet jewelry for the rest of her life. There was subsequently such a popular demand for jet from the rest of the British Empire that overnight the population of the Yorkshire town of Whitby, where Bram Stoker later wrote his Gothic masterpiece Dracula, stopped using the large local deposits of jet for fuel and became famous for producing the jewelry of lament and sorrow. The idea that diamond has anything in common with coal or graphite was pure fantasy until early chemists started to investigate what happened when you heat it.


pages: 215 words: 72,133

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Neil Armstrong, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Suez canal 1869

He writes and presents television films—including a series on the final colonial years of Hong Kong and on a variety of other historical topics—and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program From Our Own Correspondent. Winchester also lectures widely—most recently before London’s Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow)—and to audiences aboard the cruise liners QE2 and Seabourn Pride. His books cover a wide range of subjects, including a study of the remaining British Empire, the colonial architecture of India, aristocracy, the American Midwest, his experience of the months spent in an Argentine prison on spying charges, his description of a six-month walk through the Korean peninsula, the Pacific Ocean, and the future of China. Most recently he has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling The Map That Changed the World, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Just a year after he completed his first working prototype, World War I erupted. The German U-boats roaming the North Atlantic now posed an even greater threat to maritime travel than the Titanic’s iceberg. The threat was particularly acute for Fessenden, who as a Canadian citizen was a fervent patriot of the British Empire. (He also seems to have been a borderline racist, later advancing a theory in his memoirs about why “blond-haired men of English extraction” had been so central to modern innovation.) But the United States was still two years away from joining the war, and the executives at the SSC didn’t share his allegiance to the Union Jack.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Ensmenger’s narrative denaturalizes the maleness and machismo of American programming, and as it tells a story that takes place mostly in America, at MIT and in the hallways of American corporations, it allows us to think of other ways it might have happened or will happen in the future. The pre-Independence India my parents grew up in served as a vast source of raw materials and ready market for finished goods produced by the British Empire. “Before Gandhiji’s movement,” my mother told me many times when I was a child, “you couldn’t even find a sewing needle that had been made in India. Everything came from there.” The factories over there—in Glasgow and Manchester—turned iron ore into steel, cotton into cloth, and sold it all back to the Indians, whose poverty was understood as a pre-existent fact that the current regime was attempting to alleviate.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Over the three decades after the American Revolution, all Northern states had begun to abolish slavery. In 1806, President Jefferson called for the criminalization of the international slave trade, and the next year Congress voted to make American participation in it a felony. Later the same month, Britain abolished slave trading in the British Empire. How far the climate of ideas had turned against slavery could be seen at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The victorious powers in the Napoleonic Wars, who were all fairly conservative and fiercely opposed to republicanism and revolution, declared that the slave trade was considered ‘by just and enlightened men of all ages, as repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’.9 Over the next decades almost every European country began to abolish slavery, as did their former colonies in Latin America.


pages: 228 words: 69,642

Among the Islands by Tim Flannery

British Empire, colonial rule, David Attenborough, European colonialism, Kula ring

The Kwaio ramo were the toughest of the tough, and by the early twentieth century they were killing blackbirders (labour recruiters for Queensland sugar plantations) and missionaries alike. As an anthropologist explained, at the time it was ‘tremendously dangerous for any European to land on Malaita or expose himself to attack in any way.’14 So it was that Malaita came to be the ragged edge of what was just about the most remote and forgotten part of the British Empire. Yet such attacks could not be tolerated for long. Sporadic, failed attempts were made to extend the Pax Britannica into Malaita’s mountains and by the mid-1920s things were coming to a head. The British colonial administration began collecting taxes in the area, and the ramo understood that this was a direct challenge to their authority.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

For instance, one good reason to integrate vertically is supply. When there are long, slow supply lines, or unsure supplies of key inputs, it makes sense to integrate vertically to make up for the lack of certainty. Put it all under your control to guarantee supplies, as Ford did with the River Rouge plant. The British Empire colonized much of the world to lock up the supply of raw materials (to feed their factories, and keep them out of French and German hands). But the reason a horizontal structure is the most efficient is twofold: price and pace. Prices are set by the marketplace. IBM was segmented in divisions that were supposedly independent, but one group would “sell” their output to the next at some phony transfer price, showing a “profit.”


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

About eight months after the stock market crash of 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley into law, sharply increasing already high tariffs on more than twenty thousand imported items to support struggling farmers and manufacturers who had just begun to learn how to collectivize their influence and to pressure lawmakers.6 Canada answered Smoot-Hawley’s import duties with tariffs of its own. The British Empire and other European traders followed suit. Between 1929 and 1934, the volume of both U.S. and global trade fell by two thirds. Some historians have argued that the collapse in international commerce and the hardships it imposed helped speed the slide into World War II. Over the past six decades, much of the growth that has lifted so many new players onto the global economic stage flowed from the willingness of governments to restrain the most potentially damaging of their protectionist impulses.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

The Bretton Woods agreement, negotiated in July 1944, established a new international system of fixed exchange based on a gold-backed dollar. Keynes had argued against the gold-backing – some contend to free economies from the constraints of gold-backing, others as a cynical ploy to maintain the power of the British Empire’s sterling trading block – but the American negotiators, who literally had the gold, insisted on it. One ounce of gold was set at $35. The U.S. dollar was now as good as gold and would become the world’s reserve currency. To grasp the profound nature of this arrangement, understand that the sale of oil by the Soviet Union to communist China was done in U.S. dollars.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Later, he practiced Theravada techniques at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, which gave him first-hand experience of modernist ideas from the Buddhist tradition. The Mindfulness-Only School The technique that Kabat-Zinn learned at the Insight Meditation Society had been imported from revival movements in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Under occupation by the British Empire, Theravada Buddhist monks had resisted conversion attempts by Christian missionaries by promoting vipassana, a form of “insight” meditation. Before the late nineteenth century, few laypeople meditated. However, led by reformers such as Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw in Burma, a large movement developed, which was globalized by Western students and influential teachers like S.N.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The overall homicide rate for the entire world, ignoring the division into countries, was estimated by the WHO in 2000 as 8.8 per 100,000 per year.67 Both estimates compare favorably to the triple-digit values for pre-state societies and the double-digit values for medieval Europe. The map shows that Western and Central Europe make up the least violent region in the world today. Among the other states with credible low rates of homicide are those carved out of the British Empire, such as Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, the Maldives, and Bermuda. Another former British colony defies the pattern of English civility; we will examine this strange country in the next section. Several Asian countries have low homicide rates as well, particularly those that have adopted Western models, such as Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

One exception was the 16th-century Spanish priest Antonio de Montesinos, who protested the appalling treatment of Native Americans by the Spanish in the Caribbean—and who was, in his own words, “a voice of one crying in the wilderness.”139 There were, to be sure, military codes of honor, some from the Middle Ages, that ineffectually attempted to outlaw the killing of civilians in war, and occasional protests by thinkers of early modernity such as Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. But only in the late 19th century, when citizens began to protest the brutalization of peoples in the American West and the British Empire, did objections to genocide become common.140 Even then we find Theodore Roosevelt, the future “progressive” president and Nobel Peace laureate, writing in 1886, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”141 The critic John Carey documents that well into the 20th century the British literary intelligentsia viciously dehumanized the teeming masses, whom they considered to be so vulgar and soulless as not to have lives worth living.

One “progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the decimation of Native Americans was necessary to prevent the continent from becoming a “game preserve for squalid savages,” and that in nine out of ten cases, “the only good Indians are the dead Indians.”257 Another, Woodrow Wilson, was a white supremacist who kept black students out of Princeton when he was president of the university, praised the Ku Klux Klan, cleansed the federal government of black employees, and said of ethnic immigrants, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” 258 A third, Franklin Roosevelt, drove a hundred thousand American citizens into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the Japanese enemy. On the other side of the Atlantic, the young Winston Churchill wrote of taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in the British Empire. In one of those jolly little wars, he wrote, “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill defended these atrocities on the grounds that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and he said he was “strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

The Dutch settlements gradually expanded at the expense of the indigenous Khoikhoi but only extended about 100 miles inland by the end of the eighteenth century. The strategic position of the Cape Colony meant that it became an important South Africa 11 prize in geopolitical competition. During the Napoleonic Wars, it was seized by the British first in 1795 and then again – this time conclusively – in 1806, and the colony was amalgamated into the British Empire. The British, like the Dutch East India Company, initially had no designs on the interior and were more concerned with the safety of the shipping routes to India and Asia. However, the colonial policies of the British alienated many of the Dutch settlers, who became known as Boers or Afrikaners.

The executive branch of government consisted of officials appointed by the colonial office. The franchise for the legislature did not specifically disenfranchise people based on racial origins but, instead, adopted the British system of property and income restrictions (Thompson 1995, p. 65). The political balance between the British Empire and the Boer Republics was altered by the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold on the Witwatersrand in the 1870s. The labor relations in these areas quickly exhibited a pattern that would subsequently become known as “apartheid,” with blacks being unable to dig for diamonds, forced to carry passes to impede labor mobility, banned from desirable occupations that became reserved for whites, and forced to live in segregated communities and camps.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

NOTES INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL ENTREPRENEUR 1 Ved Mehta, Walking the Indian Streets, Little Brown & Co., 1961. 2 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories, Princeton University Press, 1995. 3 C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and Remaking of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 4 Simon Schama, Citizens, Knopf, 1989. 5 Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 6 Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, Blackpress, 2005. 7 Steven I.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY: OUR BIGGEST FIGHTS 1 Rajat Ray, “Two Decades of Left Rule,” Seminar, January 2001. 2 Sukanya Banerjee, “Mercury Rising: India’s Looming Red Corridor,” South Asia Monitor, CSIS, October 2008. 3 Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 4 Christophe Jaffrelot and Thomas Blom Hansen, BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India, Oxford University Press, 1998. 5 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton University Press, 1993. 6 C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 7 Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India 1920-47, Sage Publications, 1992. 8 Francine Frankel, “Caste, Land and Dominance in Bihar,” in Dominance and State Power in Modern India, Vol. 1, edited by Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao, Oxford University Press, 1989. 9 Zoya Hasan, “Patterns of Resilience and Change in Uttar Pradesh,” in Dominance and State Power in Modern India, Vol. 1, edited by Francine Frankel and M.S.A.


pages: 580 words: 194,144

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The Khan was greatly struck by the disparity in size between Britain and India, between conqueror and conquered, and also by how much larger the Tsar’s domains were than the two of them put together. To demonstrate his point to Burnaby he showed how it took both his hands to cover up Russia on the map, and only one to cover India. To this Burnaby replied that the British Empire was so vast that the sun never set on it, and that only part of it could be included on his map. Furthermore, a nation’s strength did not depend only on the size of its territories. India’s population, for instance, was three times that of the whole of Russia. Moreover, for all its apparent size and might, Russia had been defeated by Britain in one war, and would assuredly be beaten in any subsequent ones.

·33· Where Three Empires Meet Moulded in what Curzon later termed ‘the frontier school of character’, Lieutenant Francis Younghusband of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards seemed to possess all the virtues required by a romantic hero of those times. Indeed he might almost have been a model for such John Buchan heroes as Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot – men who pitted themselves single-handed and in lonely places against those threatening the British Empire. Born into a military family at Murree, a hill-station on the North-West Frontier, he was commissioned in 1882, aged 19, and sent to join his regiment, then serving in India. Early in his career he was spotted by his superiors as a natural for intelligence work, and while still in his twenties he carried out a number of successful reconnaissances on and beyond the frontier.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

London is a leading center for international finance where almost all the major players were American, European, Japanese, or Asian. A governor of the Bank of England suggested that this was precisely how things ought to be.5 London and the financial services sector became the engine for UK’s growth and prosperity, supplanting the commercial and trading activity of the British Empire. Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair and then prime minister, harbored secret dreams of a Scandinavian-style social welfare state with low taxes funded by the growth of the City. In 2007, he told bankers: “What you have achieved for...financial services we...now aspire to achieve for the whole of the British economy.”

On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”53 She echoed Pa in The Grapes of Wrath: “They’s a change a-comin’. I don’t know what. Maybe we won’t live to see her. But she’s a-comin’.”54 But unable or unwilling to change, policy makers modeled themselves on the English ruling classes during the twilight of the British Empire as captured by George Orwell: Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.55 Like F.


pages: 604 words: 177,329

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, rolodex, Silicon Valley, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The name Peshawar derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “city of flowers,” which it may have been during its Buddhist period, but it had long since sloughed off any refinement. The city sits at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, the historic concourse of invading armies since the days of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, who left their genetic traces on the features of the diverse population. Peshawar was an important outpost of the British Empire, the last stop before a wilderness that stretched all the way to Moscow. When the British abandoned their cantonment in 1947, Peshawar was reduced to being a modest but unruly farming town. The war had awakened the ancient city, however, and when Zawahiri arrived it was teeming with smugglers, arms merchants, and opium dealers.

“What is required is to wage an economic war against America,” he continued. “We have to boycott all American products…. They’re taking the money we paythem for their products and giving it to the Jews to kill our brothers.” The man who had made his name in combat against the Soviets now invoked Mahatma Gandhi, who brought down the British Empire “by boycotting its products and wearing non-Western clothes.” He urged a public-relations campaign. “Any American we see, we should notify of our complaints,” bin Laden meekly concluded. “We should write to American embassies.” BIN LADEN WOULD LATER SAY that the United States had always been his enemy.


pages: 611 words: 186,716

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

British Empire, clean water, dark matter, defense in depth, digital map, edge city, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Mason jar, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, the scientific method, Turing machine, wage slave

Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature because it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original Victorians-the ones who built the old British Empire- were actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by Dickens, their most popular novelist. The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few ractives showing what it was like to live during this time: generally not very nice, even if you selected the option that turned off all the diseases.

Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in pre-Victorian England over that any day. All of the foregoing set the stage for a three-pronged, parallel examination of the British Empire; pre-Vietnam America; and the modern and ongoing history of New Atlantis. In general, Mrs. Disher handled the more modern stuff and anything pertaining to America. Miss Stricken handled the big payoff at the end of each period and at the end of each unit. She stormed in to explain what conclusion they were being led to and to make sure that all of them got it.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

The argument has been between those, like Eichengreen, who argue that the gold standard was a cooperatively managed system, and those, like Kindleberger, who claimed that it was a hegemonic system, with Britain as the hegemon.40 Eichengreen is undoubtedly right to say that, as far as Europe is concerned, the system rested on central bank co-operation, made possible by the relative absence of political conflict. Despite all the tensions, there wasn’t a major war in Europe from 1871 to 1914, a period of forty-three years. However, Britain did play a leadership role, not just because of the global reach of the British Empire, but also – and connected with this – because of the dominant position of Britain in international trade, finance and migration. Over the course of this period, it provided around two-fifths of the world’s capital exports;41 in 1900, Britain took just under a quarter of the world’s imports; 42 the City of London was the world’s undisputed financial centre, ‘through which flowed all the transfers between borrowers and lenders, creditors and debtors, and buyers and sellers that were not internal to a single country’;43 and much of the New World was populated by emigrants from the British Isles.

., 342–3 Brash, Donald, 188 Bretton Woods system, 16, 139, 159, 374–3, 381 collapse of in 1970s, 16–17, 162, 164–5, 166–7, 184 Brexit vote (June 2016), 257, 316*, 373 Britain, xviii adoption of Keynesian policy, 141, 142–3 austerity policy see austerity policy: cost to British economy bullionist vs ‘real bills’ controversy, 44, 45–9 centralization of tax collection, 80 Currency School vs Banking School debate, 44, 49–50 debate on post-crash policy, 225–8 deficit and public sector borrowing statistics (1956–2013), 156 Employment White Paper (1944), 141, 142 463 i n de x Britain – (cont.) final suspension of gold standard (1931), 113, 125 First World War borrowing, 95 fiscal experience (1692–2012), 77 forced out of ERM (1992), 188 GDP per capita growth (1919–2007), 154 ‘Geddes Axe’ (1920s), 108 and gold standard, 9, 42, 43, 44, 45–50, 53, 57–9, 80, 101 and Great Depression, 97, 98, 110–13 growth Keynesianism (1960–70), 148–9, 150–51, 152 industrial relations system, 147, 167–8, 169 inflation peak (1975), 166 inter-war cyclical downturns, 107, 113 and mercantilism, 78–81, 82 monetarism in, 185, 186–8, 189, 192–3, 249 nationalization in post-war period, 142, 158 post-crash bank liquidity ratios, 364 pre-crash housing bubble, 304 ‘prices and incomes policy’ in, 147, 150, 151, 167–8 public finances before 2008 crash, 224, 225 Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR), 155–6 public spending and tax revenue (1950–2000), 157 rearmament in late 1930s, 113 recession of early 1980s, 186–7 recoinage debate (1690s), 40, 41–3 return to gold standard (1925), 102, 103, 107 sharp rise in inequality since 1970s, 288–9, 299–300, 300 slow recovery from 2008 crash, 241, 242, 243–4, 245, 273, 273–4 ‘stop-go’ in post-war period (‘fine tuning’), 142–3, 145–6, 150, 152 victories over France (eighteenthcentury), 43, 80, 81 see also Bank of England; Conservative Party; Labour Party British Empire, 57, 58, 80 Brittan, Samuel, 225 Brown, Gordon, 193, 220, 221–3, 354, 357 and 2008 crash, 220, 223, 224 declares era of ‘boom and bust’ over, 215 ‘prudence’ as watchword, 226 Bryan, William Jennings, 52 budget deficit see balanced budget theory Buchanan, James, 198 Buffett, Warren, 326 Bundesbank, 140, 154, 257, 275 Bush, George W., 242 business schools, financing of, 13 Cairncross, A.


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

It was perhaps no surprise that, having borne the brunt of colonialism’s abuses, the Kikuyu shouldered much of the burden of nationalism’s struggle and formed the core of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. That struggle was largely fought in highland valleys, and the abuses of the anti-insurgency campaign were largely felt by highland civilians. The movement, combined with the general dismantling of the British Empire, forced colonial authorities to reassess their position and eventually abandon Kenya. It was a Kikuyu, Jomo Kenyatta, who assumed the presidency of the new country, and the Kikuyu who assumed control over the nation’s economy. They also reclaimed their rich fields in the Central Highlands, although many wazungu farmers remain, and their huge plots can be seen stretching all along the highways between Timau, Meru and Nanyuki.

Lord Delamere first set foot on the African continent in 1891 to hunt lions in then British Somaliland; he is widely credited with coining the term ‘white hunter’. By the early 1900s, Lord Delamere owned more than 120,000 hectares of land and was one of Kenya’s most influential colonists. For more than 20 years, he doggedly farmed his vast country estates by mere trial and error, experimenting with various crop strains from around the British Empire. At the Norfolk Hotel, which still bears a bar-restaurant named in his honour, Lord Delamere once rode his horse through the dining room, wooing dinner guests with his ability to leap over banquet tables. In his later years, Lord Delamere established himself as a firebrand politician determined to protect British holdings in Africa.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Whispers of Us-ness with people trying to kill you.58 And then there is the even stranger world of differing feelings about the economic versus the cultural enemy, the relatively new enemy versus the ancient one, or the distant alien enemy versus the neighboring enemy whose miniscule differences have been inflated. These are the differing subjugations that the British Empire inflicted on the Irish next door versus on Australian aborigines. Or Ho Chi Minh, rejecting the offer of Chinese troops on the ground during the Vietnam War, with a statement to the effect of “The Americans will leave in a year or a decade, but the Chinese will stay for a thousand years if we let them in.”

The person was the Anglican cleric John Newton, born in 1725.54 Well, that doesn’t sound too exciting. He’s best known for composing the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Oh, cool; that, along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” always move me. Newton also was an abolitionist, a mentor to William Wilberforce in his parliamentary battle to outlaw slavery in the British Empire. Okay, getting better. Now get this—as a young man, Newton had captained a slave ship. Bingo, that’s the setup—a man overseeing and profiting from slavery, a flash of religious and moral insight, dramatic recategorization of Us and Them, dramatic expansion of his humanity, dramatic commitment to make amends for the savagery he had done.

., 52 Baumeister, Roy, 91 Baumgartner, Thomas, 517 Baumrind, Diana, 202–3, 208 BBC Prison Study, 467–68 BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), 129, 143, 195 beauty, 88, 443 Beckwith, Jonathan, 384 bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), 43, 102, 143 Begin, Menachem, 16n behaviorism, 8–9, 82–83, 188–90 Bell, George, 662 Belyaev, Dmitry, 377–78 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 653 Benchley, Robert, 387 Benedict, Ruth, 502 Berkowitz, David, 225n, 593n Bernhardt, Michael, 656–57 Berreby, David, 399 Better Angels of Our Nature, The: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker), 306, 309n, 616–19 Bible, 11, 624–25, 625, 660 Bingham, Hiram, 409 Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne, 161 Block, Ned, 242 Bloom, Paul, 484, 545, 546, 562 body, interoceptive information about, 90–92, 528, 529, 566 Boehm, Christopher, 322–25 Bok, Hilary, 599 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 367 Boko Haram, 631–32 bonobos, 111, 122, 317, 325, 365, 525, 614 Boroditsky, Lera, 558n Bouazizi, Mohamed, 652–53, 653, 660 Bouchard, Thomas, 235, 239, 244 Bowlby, John, 189–90, 222 Bowles, Samuel, 309, 321, 364, 405, 512 Boyce, Tom, 195 Boyd, Robert, 350 Brady, Joseph, 436 Braille, 144–46 brain, 6–8, 11, 21–80, 154, 679–706 amygdala in, see amygdala anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in, 46, 59, 516–19, 528–34, 547, 559–60, 569, 622 autonomic nervous system and, 22, 26–27 bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in, 43, 102, 143 changes in size of regions in, 150–52 conformity and, 459–61 damage to, 53, 149, 590–91, 597, 601–2, 609, 705 directions in, 54n frontal cortex in, see frontal cortex fusiform face area in, 80, 85–86, 88, 114, 122n, 388, 402 hemispheres and lateralization of, 30, 30 hippocampus in, see hippocampus limbic system of, see limbic system locus coeruleus in, 43 malleability of, 53 mesolimbic/mesocortical dopamine system in, see dopamine neocortex in, 23 neurons in, see neurons neurotransmitters in, see neurotransmitters nucleus accumbens in, 64–65, 103 obedience and, 459–61 periaqueductal gray (PAG) in, 41, 42, 59, 527 plasticity in, 137–53, 172, 188, 223 prefrontal cortex in, see prefrontal cortex premotor cortex (PMC) in, 47, 166–68, 535–36, 540 size of, and social group size, 429, 430 social rank and, 434, 475 temporoparietal juncture (TPJ) in, 55n, 114, 178, 275, 480, 527, 531, 533, 535 triune model of, 22–23 brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), 129, 143, 195 breast-feeding, 189n British Empire, 415 Brooks, Stephen, 656n Brosnan, Sarah, 484–87 Brown, Andrew, 381 Brown, Donald, 271 Brown, Stuart, 205 Brown v. Board of Education, 415 Bucy, Paul, 24 Buddhists, 19, 544–45, 551, 624 bullying, 199–200, 292–93, 431 Bush, George H. W., 632 Bush, George W., 403, 443, 454 bystander effect, 94–95 Cagots, 401 CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia), 215–18 Cajal, Santiago, 681, 684, 688 calcium, 140 Calhoun, John C., 285, 298 California Caverns, 160–61 California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT), 48n Calley, William, Jr., 656, 657, 658n Camp David Peace Accords, 16n Cantor, James, 597 Carnegie Medal, 520 Carrion, Victor, 195 Carter, Sue, 110, 112 Caspi, Avshalom, 254 catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), 256–58 categorical thinking, 5–9 causation, 599–600 compulsion and, 593 multifactorial, 602–3 cave paintings, 556, 556, 557 CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), 61 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 201 cells, 703, 703 red blood (RBCs), 680, 680, 681 Chagnon, Napoleon, 312–14 Champagne, Frances, 221 charitability, 115, 370, 548–50 Charlie Hebdo, 554 cheating, 324, 449, 492, 514–20 reciprocal altruism and, 344–53 Cheney, Dorothy, 337–38 Chestnut, Joey, 431 Chicago riots, 472 Chicago Seven, 396n childhood, children, 7, 8, 21, 174–222 adolescence, see adolescence class differences and, 207–9 in collectivist vs. individualist cultures, 206–7 compassion in, 527–28 culture and, 202–10 in cultures of honor, 207 developmental stages in, 174–87, 177, 479 empathy in, 179–81 hospitalization in, 189 marshmallow test and, 185–87 media violence and, 198, 206–7 neighborhood and, 205 parenting and, see parents, parenting peers in, 204 play in, 204–5 Us/Them-ing in, 391–92 childhood adversity, 194–201 abuse, 193–94, 254 by stepparent, 367–68 biology and, 194–97 bullying, 199–200, 431 observing violence, 197–98 poverty, 195–96 resilience and, 200 in Romanian institutions, 201, 201 serotonin and, 254–55 child labor, 508, 615 child soldiers, 156n, 630–31, 631 Chimpanzee Politics (de Waal), 444 chimpanzees, 111, 269–70, 270, 316, 317, 325, 365, 717 conformity in, 457–58, 470 observational learning in, 523–24 trust and, 393 Us/Them and, 389 yawning in, 457n China, 414, 415, 654 Chomsky, Noam, 384 chromosomes, 223 Chuck E.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

This is the patriotic party, because it is the people’s party.’ A speech he made during the election campaign was originally intended to contain, until it was deleted at the demand of Robin Cook, a more radical declaration still: ‘I am proud of the British Empire.’ (Blair was later to record that, as control of Hong Kong was passed to China, he felt at the handover ceremony ‘a tug, not of regret but of nostalgia for the old British Empire’.) The first Labour Party broadcast under Blair’s leadership ended with a suitably patriotic peroration – ‘We can change the course of our history and build a new confident land of opportunity in a new and changing world’ – as the sound of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ swelled on the soundtrack.

He’d already been to New York to express his solidarity with the USA as he remembered how his father’s generation had endured the Blitz: ‘There was one country and one people that stood by us at that time. That country was America, and the people was the American people.’ By the time the USA entered the Second World War, of course, the worst of the Blitz had long since passed, while the former dominions and colonies of the British Empire might have felt slighted by being overlooked yet again. But his comments went down very well with his hosts, and when George Bush mentioned Blair in an address to both Houses of Congress, the assembled politicians turned to give him a standing ovation. Whatever else resulted, the repercussions of those attacks were to change the public perception of Blair’s premiership, both at home and abroad.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

(Hall 2012) Hall started her career in hypermedia and hypertext at Southampton in 1984, and is now one of the world’s foremost computer scientists. She is founding director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009, due in no small part to her contributions to computing science. These systems were all pioneering in their own right, but they are (to my mind, at least) part of a different story: the commercialization of hypertext and the birth of network culture. That is a different book for a different time, and perhaps a different scholar.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Gregg Easterbrook: Let me start my response by saying that I do not think about demographics in quite the same way you do, Jim. It probably is inevitable that because of demographic vigor the United States will at some point not be the world’s dominant power as it is today. Is that necessarily bad? I don’t know. The United States will still be important. If England in 1950— when the British Empire had just crumbled, and there was a great sense of gloom among the English that they would no longer control the world—is compared with the England of today, 2006 is the best time ever to be a citizen of the United Kingdom. The place is wonderful, pollution is way down, pub- 2990-7 ch12 kurth 140 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 140 james kurth and gregg easterbrook lic housing is finally acceptable, the theater scene is the most vibrant it has ever been.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

We are now entering a systemic crisis of capitalism, he says, because profit levels are falling and they will almost inevitably keep on falling. The second part is a geopolitical crisis manifested in longer-term “hegemonic cycles.” Hegemony means domination. Crises come in the transition period between different hegemonic regimes. His examples are the transition from the hegemony of the Dutch Republic to that of the British Empire, and again from British to American hegemony. These geopolitical cycles tend to be of more variable length than the economic cycles. From the Netherlands to Britain spanned just over one hundred years, from Britain to the United States took fifty. American hegemony is now declining and will be soon ended, he says, after a reign of about seventy to eighty years.


pages: 279 words: 72,659

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, desegregation, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Islamic Golden Age, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, one-state solution, price stability, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail

Herzl added that both “the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” 5 Ethnic cleansing was also on the minds of the leaders of the second aliya, a kind of a Zionist Mayflower generation.6 Two means were used to alter the demographic and “ethnic” reality of Palestine, and impose the Zionist program on the local reality: the dispossession of the indigenous population from the land, and its repopulation with newcomers—i.e., expulsion and settlement. The colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international legitimacy, and therefore had to buy land and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet, from the very beginning of the Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement was a very long and measured process, which might not be sufficient to realize the revolutionary dreams of the movement and its desire to alter the realities on the ground, and to impose its own interpretation on the land’s past, present, and future.


pages: 246 words: 116

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The recent Indian boom came to Calcutta later than in other parts of India. The surrounding state of Bengal has had socialist and communist governments for a long time, and not to its advantage. Calcutta also appears to have a better developed "culture of begging," perhaps because it was the original capital of the British Empire in India. The very poor have had begging "targets" for a longer period of time than in, say, Bombay (Mumbai). Walking down the main street in front of my hotel meant being importuned a dozen times within the span of a minute. Children as young as six or seven will ask for money in the few words of English they have learned.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

One that is measurable and predictable. But what about measurement itself? We’ve explored one fact after another, but they can only really exist if we are able to quantify them. How measurement affects what we know is the subject of the next chapter. CHAPTER 8 Mount Everest and the Discovery of Error IN 1800, the British Empire conceived of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, also known as the Survey of India. After the British took control of the Indian subcontinent, they were in need of accurate and detailed maps. How could you properly rule a subcontinent if you didn’t really know what it looked like? So Colonel William Lambton, the surveyor general of India, began this massive project of determining the precise locations of places throughout the colony.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Global Governance Reform: Breaking the Stalemate. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2007. Bremmer, Ian, and Preston Keat. The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brendon, Piers. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Brenkman, John. The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought Since September 11. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Brest, Paul, and Hal Harvey. Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy. New York: Bloomberg Press, 2008.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

And this isn’t a solely retrospective opinion, either—people speculated about that possibility from the moment the Beatles broke up. When CBS News covered the group’s legal dissolution in 1970, the broadcaster only half-jokingly categorized the split as “an event so momentous that historians may one day view it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.” 22 This contrast is complicated by those who insist the Beatles were actually a pop band (as opposed to a rock band), based on the contention that the Beatles had no relationship to the blues (which is mostly true—John Lennon once described the track “Yer Blues” as a parody). But I’m not going to worry about this distinction here, since worrying about it might spiral into a debate over “rockism vs. poptimism,” an imaginary conflict that resembles how music writers would talk if they were characters on a TV show written by Aaron Sorkin. 23 What Good Are the Arts?


pages: 226 words: 75,783

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius by Arika Okrent

British Empire, centre right, global village, Johannes Kepler, PalmPilot, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, slashdot, software patent, Stephen Hawking

The number of projects, and the enthusiasm for them, began falling off in the 1930s, and by the end of the war the era of the international language was over. There were a few reasons for this. One was the rise of a new lingua franca, on a scale more global than any had been before—English. The era of the international language coincided with the greatest period of growth and consolidation in the British Empire. English was spread to every continent. And Britain's position at the center of the Industrial Revolution ensured that wealth, status, and power became associated with English. The rising power of the United States during this time added fuel to the English fire, and it soon took over as the primary engine of spread.


pages: 275 words: 82,640

Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman

Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, currency peg, double entry bookkeeping, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, German hyperinflation, income per capita, law of one price, Money creation, money market fund, oil shock, price anchoring, price stability, Savings and loan crisis, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

†Based on the Federal Reserve Board's "weighted-average exchange value of U.S. dollar against the currencies of 10 industrial countries." [back] *** † This section draws heavily on Friedman (1989). [back] *** * Such a currency board was the standard arrangement for British colonies during the heyday of the British Empire. [back] *** * For the first thirty years after the FDIC and the FSLIC were instituted, failures were few and far between, either of commercial banks or of savings and loan institutions. While depositors had nothing to lose from excessive risk taking by banks, equity owners did. Hence, so long as there was a substantial equity cushion, the owners (or, for mutual institutions, the managers) had ample incentives to avoid excessive risk.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

The last time Uganda had been in the news had been because of Idi Amin, the publicity-obsessed coup leader who, not content with being styled president, had also made himself a field marshal (or to give him his fuller title, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular). By the early 1990s Amin had been gone for over a decade, but most potential investors still thought he was president. There are fifty-eight countries in the bottom billion, and investors do not track them individually but think of them collectively as “Africa” and dismiss them.


pages: 224 words: 73,737

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

It was the first time living standards and wages had risen consistently and mass production, made possible by manufacturing machinery, wrought changes on industry as well as the emerging global economy. But nowhere was this change more tangible than in the lives of ordinary working people, which were fundamentally transformed by technology. This phase of growth, fuelled by imperial adventure, over-reached and inevitably slowed. As the British Empire receded from every corner of the globe after the First World War, the unforeseen social consequences of such rapid population growth began to find expression, not only in an economic depression, but more ominously, in the social conditions, health and behaviour of the lower classes. In Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire, successful industrial suburbs like the Gorbals, where native and immigrant populations had exploded in the 19th century, became culturally strained, diseased and unliveable.


pages: 266 words: 76,299

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, correlation coefficient, Drosophila, European colonialism, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, sexual politics, the scientific method, twin studies

Specimens from England and Eurasia are almost always fragmentary, and nearly all the fine specimens that adorn so many museums throughout the world come from Ireland. The giant deer evolved during the glacial period of the last few million years and may have survived to historic times in continental Europe, but it became extinct in Ireland about 11,000 years ago. “Among the fossils of the British empire,” wrote James Parkinson in 1811, “none are more calculated to excite astonishment.” And so it has been throughout the history of paleontology. Putting aside both the curious anecdotes and the sheer wonder that immensity always inspires, the importance of the giant deer lies in its contribution to debates about evolutionary theory.


pages: 317 words: 79,633

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

Unlike the ordered symmetry of honeybee comb, bumblebees store their provisions and brood in a haphazard collection of tiny wax pots. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. Later commentators expanded this model to include spinsters in rural English villages (who often kept cats), and sailors in the Royal Navy (who ate salted beef from cows pastured on clover), therefore tying the defense of the British Empire to the number of its cat-loving spinsters. This anecdote is often held up as an amusing early example of the food chain concept, but on Darwin’s part it also reveals a keen understanding of bumblebees. Sladen, Plath, and other authorities all confirmed that rodents do indeed prey on bumblebee colonies, particularly new ones like my Sitka nest, where only a few small workers were available for defense.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

It was flown at Waterloo, Trafalgar, Balaclava, Rorke’s Drift, on the Somme, at Gallipoli, on the beaches of Normandy and on to Goose Green in the Falkland Islands, Basra in Iraq and Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. It also flew over grandiose official buildings in capital cities around the globe, and in the backwaters of obscure regions in India, Malaya, Burma, Kenya, Sudan, Australia, Belize and so many other places where the map was coloured pink and the sun never set on the British Empire. Until eventually it did. Before that, though, across the world the sight of the flag of Great Britain was the representation of an island nation with an astonishing story. The flag stood for British sea power, empire, scientific progress and exploration. Simultaneously, to some it represented the evils of colonialism, and a player in a game of great power rivalry.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

On the contrary, they approved of this trade, just as they kept quiet about the issue of the cotton imported from the United States which British industries could not do without. In the latter case, their argument was that the slaves who produced American cotton were not under the authority of the British Empire and that, as far as they were concerned, no major exaction had been documented. According to Williams, the abolitionists seemed to overlook the fact that the chairs they sat on were made of mahogany from Cuba, just as their desks were made of rosewood from Brazil. But they apparently were not keen ‘to go round and inquire into the pedigree of every chair and table’ (Williams, 61 Sylla T02779 01 text 61 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal 1994 [1944]: 190).


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

These were exacerbated, and some were even provoked, by what was considered pretentiousness on my part. Little or none of that would have been possible had Colossus been known. One person who, of course, knew all about Colossus was Alan Turing. The end of the war meant that Turing had several options available to him. In June 1945, he received an Order of the British Empire for his war work, and then he accepted a position at the National Physical Laboratory with the goal of developing a general-purpose computing machine. The NPL was about thirteen miles southwest of central London, in Teddington. The primary work of the NPL was akin to what was then being done in the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in the United States—it established systems of measurement and standards of quality that would then form the basis for the systematic manufacture and production of goods.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

W. 153 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 125 Bush, George W 206 Brazil bustees 27, 56, 93, 130, 143 demolitions 108 gated communities 117-18 Cabinda 49 hazardous slum locations 122 Cairo incomes 156 agricultural land 135 land speculation 86, 91 child labor 186-7 poverty 157 environmental disasters 129 slum population 24 gated communities 115 urban New Deal 62 housing crisis 86 Brazzaville 4, 23, 53 human organ trade 190 Breman, J a n 179, 181, 185n40, land speculation 85, 87—8 189-90, 199 motorization 131 Brennan, Ellen 45, 84, 86, 90 population 4 British Empire 51-3 roof-dwellers 36 Brizola, Leonel 62 satellite cities 99 Cairo (Cont'd.) Chapin, Edwin 22 slum-dwellers 23, 27 ChapJin, Susan 140, 149 squatters 29, 33, 39, 43 Chatterjee, Gautam 18 state repression 110-11 Chatterjimitra, Banashree 100 traffic accidents 132-3 chawls 34, 36, 178, 202 urbanization 58 Chennai 170, 190 youth disaffection 202 Cheru, Fantu 148 Zamalek 115 Chicago 16 Calcutta see Kolkata children Caldeira, Teresa 118 abandoned 205 Cali 49 child labor 181,186-8 callejones 34 malnutrition 159, 160, 172 Cambodia 15, 54 mortality rates 25, 146, 148-9, Cape Town 60-1, 117, 146 capitalism 23, 50, 80, 199, 202 China 60 crony 92 161, 171, 172, 200 witchcraft 192, 196-8 Chile 109, 156, 157 China informal sector 179,181 agricultural land 135 structural adjustment programs automobiles 132, 133 153 Caracas 54-5, 59, 93 economic development 168-70 evictions 103 housing 176 illegal land speculation 88 riots 162 industrial growth 13 soil instability 122-3 informal sector 177, 178 squatters 38, 39-40 public housing 31, 62 Caribbean 148 rural migration 53-4 Carlos Alfredo Diaz 49 sewage 140 Casablanca 201, 202 slum population 24 Castells, Manuel 89, 176, 185n40 social struggle in 91 Castro, Fidel 61 urbanization 2, 6-7, 9, 11-12, 60 Ceylon 52 women 158 Chad 23 Chittagong 147 The Challenge of Slums 20-1, 22, 25, Choguill, Charles 74 153, 154, 163, 174-5 Chossudovsky, Michel 148 Chamoiseau, Patrick 174, 198 churches 195, 196-7 Chang, Ha-Joon 154 Cite-Soleil 92, 142 Chant, Sylvia 158, 184 Ciudad Juarez 16 civil society 76 housing 66 class see social class pollution 133 Clausen, Eileen 131-2 population 4 clientelism 57, 58, 76, 77 refugees 55—6 Cochabamba 25 satellite cities 99 Colombia 48, 49, 165, 200 sewage 340 Colombo 11, 32, 86, 136, 188 slum-dwellers 18, 23, 26 colonialism 51-3, 96, 97, 114, 139 Congo, Democratic Republic of (formerly Zaire) 16, 53, 191-8 urban/rural hybridization 10 Demarest, Geoffrey 205 democracy 68, 154 Connolly, Priscilla 17 Deng Xiaoping 103 corruption 88, 125-6, 150, 165 deregulation 15 Costa Rica 157, 160 desakotas 9n27, 10, 11 criminals 41, 49 Devas, Nick 68 Cuba 61, 62 development agencies 99 Czegledy, Andre 117 Devisch, Rene 191, 193-4, 195, 196 Dewar, Neil 97 Dhaka Dabu-Dabu 104-5 Dadaad 48 child labor 186 Dakar 46, 53, 74, 98, 102 disease 147 dalals 41 environmental disasters 129 Dar-es-Salaam 16, 51, 74, 134, 146, evictions 111 fires 128 155, 182 Darman, Richard 153 Grameen Bank 183 Darwin, Charles 182 hazardous slum locations 121 Das, Arvind 181 inequality 95-6 Das, P.K. 77-8 informal sector 177 Datta, Kavita 72 land speculation 86 Davis, Diane 55 population 4, 5 De Boeck, Filip 191-2, 194, 197 poverty 191 debt crisis 14, 84, 149, 152, 153-4, refugees 55-6 renting 43 159 deindustrialization 167 Delhi 33, 36, 356, 159, rickshaws 189 sewage 138, 139 slum-dwellers 23, 26, 27 evictions 100 urbanization 2 fires 128 water sales 145 Dhapa dump 47 Dharavi 92, 93 Diaz Ordaz, Gustavo 60 Dick, Philip K. 120 Dickens, Charles 23 disease 52, 142-50, 172 domestic service 188 Dominican Republic 105-6 Drakakis-Smith, David 10 Dublin 16, 31, 175 Diindar, Ozlem 85 Durand-Lasserve, Alain 91 Dushanbe 204 Dutton, Michael 112 earthquakes 126—7 East Asia 6-7, 12-13, 37 Eastern Europe 167-8 Eckstein, Susan 43 economic development 168-73 Ecuador 159 Edwards, Michael 35 Egypt land speculation 85 poverty 165 public housing 69 slum population 24 squatting 38 state repression 110 urbanization 9 El Paso 42 El Salvador 204 Elbasan 168 elites 69, 96, 119, 120, 149-50 see ako middle classes Eltayeb, Galal Eldin 21n3 employment 27, 29, 30, 4 6 - 7 child labor 181, 186-8 China 168-9 India 171, 172-3 informal sector 157, 159, 160^-1, 167, 175-94, 198 structural adjustment programs 157, 163-4 surplus labor 182, 199 women 158-9 see also unemployment empowerment 75 Engels, Friedrich 20, 23, 137, 138 England 137-8 entrepreneurs 41, 46, 80, 144-5, 179, 180, 182 environmental issues 121-50 epidemics 52 Escobar, Augustin 160 Estrada, Joseph 104 Ethiopia 23, 24 ethnic violence 185 Etienne, Yolette 184 Europe 31, 183 Evers, Hans-Dieter 65, 83, 183 evictions 98, 99-103 Bangkok 65 beautification campaigns 104-8 Delhi 66, 100 Manila 92, 99 excrement 137—42 exploitation 181, 186-90 Fabre, Guilhem 54 Faisalabad 145 Fakulteta 167 family separation 160,161 Fang, Ke 103 favelas 27, 34, 93, 202 demolition of 108 Gooptu, Nandini 52, 69, 97-8, 140n67, 178 hazardous locations 122 Gorky, Maxim 22 population growth 17 Goulart, Jao 62 regularization projects 81 Graham, Stephen 205-6 water contamination 136 GrameenBank 183 see also shantytowns grassroots groups 76, 77 Findley, Sally 14n41 Great Britain 137 fire 127-8 gross domestic product (GDP) 13 Firozabad 187-8 Guadalajara 159-60 Flight, Thomas 83 Guangzhou 16 flooding 123-6 Guatemala City 32, 126, 188 Gandy, Matthew 128-9 Guldin, Gregory 8 - 9 Guayaquil 16, 159 gated communities 115—20 Gauteng (Witwatersrand) 4, l l n 3 1 Haiti 16, 184 Gaviria, Cesar 165 Hanoi 135-6, 139, 145 Gaza 48 Harare 96-7, 102, 113-14, 160-1 Gazzoli, Ruben 77 Hardt, M. 201 GDP see gross domestic product Harms, Hans 109 gecekmdus Harris, Nigel 14 37, 38-9, 57, 85, 127, 136, 202 Hart, Keith 178 Geddes, Patrick 134 Haussman, Baron 64, 98 Geertz, Clifford 182 Havana 32, 61 gentrification 43, 73, 85 health issues 142-50,159 geology 122-3 see also sanitation Ghana 35, 141-2, 148 Hewitt, Kenneth 126 Ghannam, Farha 110-11 highways 118-19 Giddens, Anthony 119 Hilat Kusha 47 Gilbert, Alan 43, 50, 81-2, 90 HIV/AIDS 143, 149, 150, 153, GINI coefficients 157,165,166 160-1, 192, 196 Glasser, David 32 Hodges, Tony 102 globalization 11, 150, 163, 168, Hoffman, Kelly 180 174 Goma 48 homelessness 36-7 Hong Kong 3 1 , 3 5 , 3 6 Gonzalez, Mercedes 160 evictions 102 "good governance" 79, 82 gated communities 115 Hong Kong (Cont'd.) public housing 62, 63-4 Triads 41 Horton, Richard 147 middle class 150 sewage 139-40 slum improvement projects 78-9 slum population 24 House, William 180 surplus labor 199 housing 27-9, 30, 176, 200 urbanization 8, 9, 16, 55—6 Beijing 103 individualism 184 hand-me-down 31—4 Indonesia 10, 24, 26, 177 privatization 63, 71 Indore scheme 78-9 public 31, 61-7, 69 industrialization 13, 14, 16, 57, 147 Russia 167 inequality 7, 95, 154, 157-8 self-help 71, 72, 81-2, 90 Africa 96-7 Howard, Allen 97 Angola 164 human organ trade 190 China 168 Human Rights Watch 106,186,187 Colombia 165 Huntington, Samuel 56 India 97 Hyderabad 8, 56, 88, 128, 170 informal sector 181 Hylton, Forrest 201 Pakistan 166 hypercities 5 Russia 166 transport 131-2 IDPs see internally displaced people ILO see International Labour Organization infant mortality 25, 146, 148-9, 161, 171, 172, 200 informal sector 17, 157, 159, 160-1, IMF see International Monetary Fund 167, 175-94, 198 imperialism 76, 78, 174 see also street vendors India inner city poverty 31—7 agricultural land 135 inquilinatos British colonialism 52 insurgency 203-4 34 child labor 187-8 internally displaced people (IDPs) 48 economic development 168, International Labour Organization 170-3 exclusionary geography 97-8 (ILO) 17, 156, 189 International Monetary Fund (IMF) housing policy 34, 65-6, 69 14, 15, 18, 70, 84, 200 human organ trade 190 Congo 192, 193, 194 informal sector 177,178 protests against 161—3 interethnic solidarity 185 structural adjustment programs land ownership 84 62, 148, 152-3, 155, 193 taxation 68,155 Soweto 44-5, 142 involution 182-3,201 Jones, Gareth A. 72 Iran 24, 48, Jones, Gareth Stedman 82-3 Ishash al-Turguman 110 Josaphat, Lovly 142 Islamism 165 Joseph, Jaime 183-4 Israel 111 Istanbul 37, 38-9, 42, 57, 202 Kabul 48, 134, 204 earthquakes 127 Kakkar, Prahlad 140 Omerli forest 136 Kalle, Pepe 121 population 4 Kampala 137, 142 property investment 85 Kamwokya 142 Ivory Coast 156 Kanji, Nazneen 160-1 Kanpur 140n67 Jacquemin, Alain 68-9 Kaplan, Robert D. 202 Jakarta Karachi child labor 188 dalals 41 desakotas 10 informal sector 177 evictions 102 land speculation 84, 88 gated communities 116 military planning 204 land ownership 91 population 4, 5 motorization 131 refugees 55-6 NGOs 77 slum dwellers 18, 23, 26, 27, 31 pollution 129 waste disposal 134 population 4, 5 water sales 145 poverty 26 Kaunda, Kenneth 111 public housing 64 Keeling, David 39, 41 sewage 139 Kelly, Philip 10n30 state repression 112-13 Kenya 16, 18, 48, 87, 142 urbanization 1 Keyder, Qaglar 37, 57-8, 85 waste disposal 134 Khan, Akhtar Hameed 41 Jamaica 67 Khan, Azizur 168 Java 16, 182 Khartoum Jellinek, Lea 77 flooding 124 Jiang Zemin 168 growth of 16, 37 Johannesburg 33, 116-17, 118 Hilat Kusha 47 deindustrialization 13 informal sector 177 geology 122 refugees 48 Khartoum (Cont'd.)


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

The majority of those who cared to follow these tradition-prone and proud institutions—and there weren’t that many outside the rather small circle of monetary economists and policy wonks—saw them as consisting of highly conventional technocrats who quietly worked behind the scenes using complex technical instruments. The establishment of the first central bank goes all the way back to Scandinavia in the seventeenth century, a century that also saw the creation in 1694 of the Bank of England, which is widely viewed as the parent of modern central banking. Despite the demise of the British Empire, the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street,” as the bank is fondly referred to—after all, it has influenced the design of most other central banks in the world—is still one of the most influential members of this rather exclusive and enigmatic club. Yet its power and reach pale in comparison to two other institutions that feature prominently in this book: America’s Federal Reserve, the world’s most powerful central bank; and the European Central Bank (ECB), the issuer of Europe’s common currency (euro), which is currently used by nineteen member countries, and is the most advanced component of the region’s historic integration project.


pages: 314 words: 77,409

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

Chinoy, et al. (2014) “Phenotype Standardization for Statin-Induced Myotoxicity.” Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 96(4): 470–476. Anderson, N. L., and N. G. Anderson (2002) “The Human Plasma Proteome: History, Character, and Diagnostic Prospects.” Molecular and Cellular Proteomics 1: 845–867. Anker, P. (2001) Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bangs, E. (2005) “How Did Wolves Get Back to Yellowstone?” Yellowstone Science 13: 4. Barker, R. (2005) Blockade Busters: Cheating Hitler’s Reich of Vital War Supplies. South Yorkshire, England: Pen & Sword Books. Baxa, D. V., T.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

And immigrants and their children who aren’t European or American are treated as second or third class.’ Having greatly benefited from it themselves, Naveed’s parents had huge faith in the importance of education, and they sacrificed a lot to send him and his siblings to private schools. ‘Dubai was part of the British Empire, and you could still feel Britain’s influence and worldview in what we were taught, but the students hailed from everywhere: Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, the US,’ he recalls. This diversity made Naveed aware of a world beyond Dubai. ‘That awareness changed everything for me. I got a sense that my future lay elsewhere from a young age.’


pages: 261 words: 74,471

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

I sought to read everything I could find on the subject from every relevant discipline, including history, economics, philosophy, science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. What these disciplines had in common, I found, was that each explained how different social systems enhanced or diminished people’s well-being. I studied the ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval Scholastics, the Dutch Golden Age of freedom, the British Empire, and other major civilizations. As in the physical sciences, it became obvious that humans ignore at their own peril the fundamental principles of how to best live and work together. My readings covered the entire philosophical spectrum from “left” to “right” and everything in between. I discovered my own political orientation was much more nuanced than simply “conservative” or “liberal,” in the contemporary sense of those words.


My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

The department didn’t want a student there and actually stopped speaking to me. I enjoyed that immensely, often going up to the other teachers and telling them the whole psychedelic plot of a Michael Moorcock book I was reading while they attempted to ignore me. It involved a parallel 1970s earth where the British Empire spanned the whole globe with the aid of giant Zeppelins. The only guy who spoke to me was a predatory homosexual. I finally worked out the key phrase that would make him go away. It turned out to be, ‘I think that you are a predatory homosexual.’ So with nowhere else to finish the final placement, I got put into a primary school for a month or so.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

The NHS Medical Director at the time commented upon a serious shortage of intensive care beds but the government considered the facts far too sensitive to be made public. Of course, silence was a sure route to the honours list. Don’t rock the boat is the name of the game should you wish to represent the British Empire. Lessons learned during Cygnus were ignored and the public paid the price. Second hand shop health care. The predictions were borne out by the catastrophic failures of the Covid effort. In England we had just 4,123 NHS intensive care beds which amounts to 6.6 per 100,000 population, and half the European average.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

His intense eyes were set off by bushy brows and complemented by an equally bushy but always impeccably trimmed mustache turned up at the corners in the fashion of a British officer of the nineteenth century. He was an American statesman and he was also the Anglophile he looked. His father, the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, was of Scottish and Irish descent and had immigrated to Canada and been educated there at a time when English Canada prided itself on being part of the British Empire. His mother, of similar background, had been shipped off as a girl to be educated in England. At the age of twelve, Acheson had been sent from the family’s home in Middletown, Connecticut, to the Groton School when the place was a conscious replica of an English boys school. (Sophomore year, for example, was not sophomore year.

Now that it was their turn to lead, they were not, like the Europeans, going to lose the peace gained by their victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan through similarly weak behavior toward Stalin and the forces of “International Communism.” Acheson had in his cultural heritage the stabilizing model of the British Empire when the Royal Navy had dominated the seas and “Pax Britannica” had ruled nearly a quarter of the earth’s landmass and peoples. The “Pax Americana” that he and Truman and their associates intended to create was not, however, going to be an exploitative system akin to British and European colonialism.


pages: 677 words: 195,722

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, disinformation, Dutch auction, full employment, mandatory minimum

I'd made the mistake of trying to say goodbye to each girl individually, and been dismembered in the process. I'd found it impossible to thank them, and was astonished when some of them thanked me. When the question of their decorations arose I suggested to Heffer that they should all be made Dame Commanders of the British Empire. 'They'll be lucky if they get MBEs. Prepare a list but limit it to twelve.' Before I could protest he said that honours for members of technical departments like Signals were causing SOE problems. The difficulty was that outstanding performers could hardly be given honours higher than those awarded to their superior officers, and that to save embarrassment decorations would be awarded according to rank.

He added that it was just possible that one day the question of an honour for me might arise. I assured him that in that unlikely event there'd be no problem as I'd accept no honour higher than the ones SOE gave the girls. 'Just think what that would make me. I'd be the first male Dame Commander of the British Empire.' Although I'd have loved to enable my parents to dangle a bit of ribbon in front of the neighbours who'd sent their only child white feathers, I'd already been given the chance to shake hands with agents who'd returned from the field, and no other reward was comparable. A month later Churchill was ousted as Prime Minister in the July elections and was replaced by Attlee.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Prior to the full-scale United States invasion of South Vietnam, with its vast and unanticipated costs, it was quite reasonable to suppose that Japan would remain for some time a reasonably well-behaved junior partner in the American-dominated system. Perhaps a word might be added with regard to the commonly heard argument that the costs of the Vietnam War prove that the United States has no imperial motives (as the costs of the Boer War prove that the British Empire was a figment of the radical imagination). The costs, of course, are profits for selected segments of the American economy, in large measure. It is senseless to describe government expenditures for petroleum, jet planes, cluster bombs, or computers for the automated air war simply as “costs of intervention.”

The Grand Area was a region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was to be the region that is “strategically necessary for world control.” The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over ourselves. This is what is called “anti-imperialism” in American scholarship. The Grand Area was also to include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible.


pages: 845 words: 197,050

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

CHIVERS KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN JULY 2010 i Other older and more traditional rifles would displace the M-16 from second place if they were still in widespread service, but they fell from common use with the spread of assault rifles. The British Lee-Enfield line, for example, was manufactured in greater numbers than the M-16 during its many decades in use across the old British Empire. I ORIGINS CHAPTER 1 The Birth of Machine Guns An Invention of No Ordinary Character RICHARD J. GATLING WAS SEEKING BUSINESS. IN THE METICULOUS penmanship of a man born to a land-owning Southern family, he began a letter to President Abraham Lincoln. It was February 18, 1864, late in the American Civil War and an extraordinary period in the evolution of firearms: dawn in the age of the machine gun and yet a time when officers still roamed battlefields with swords.

Maxim maintained his sense of racial superiority, and his disdain for blacks, throughout his life.72 There were signs that some of Maxim’s contemporaries understood the role Maxim and his guns had assumed, and were not positively impressed at the ease with which he accepted it. In 1900, Lord Salisbury, Britain’s prime minister, attended a banquet of the British Empire League, where Maxim was being feted. The inventor was sixty now, white-haired and with a thick, jutting goatee. He had amassed wealth as his guns had been taken into service by armies across Europe. When Lord Salisbury’s turn came to compliment him, the prime minister was ready with his toast.


pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

The city that staked its existence and prosperity on the mining and export of gold now was receiving huge amounts of gold back with which to replenish ashen wreckage.1 Other factors contributed to unusual supply constraints on gold during this period, which increased the price of money. The first was the Boer War that Livermore mentions. Officially known as the Second Boer War, and waged between 1899 and 1902, it was a conflict fought between the British Empire and two independent Boer republics in present-day South Africa upon the discovery of massive gold deposits. Not only was money put to nonproductive use buying arms and other war supplies, but full gold production did not resume until 1905—dampening the influx of new capital at a time of feverish speculation and capital investment.

Although cotton was grown and traded in the Middle East, India and Africa in the earliest years of recorded his tory, it did not become part of an important manufactured good until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to mechanize cleaning in 1793, and factory-scale looms emerged during the Industrial Revolution in England. The British empire grew strong on textile exports, and while the crown merchants originally imported their cotton from India they later turned to their former American colonies due to the superior plant grown in the South and the low cost of slave labor. After emancipation during the Civil War and well into Livermore’s era, impecunious sharecroppers and small farm ers from east Georgia to west Texas continued to produce the cotton that provided lavish fortunes to traders on Wall Street by processing, pressing, and baling it at plantations, then shipping it north to textile mills on riverboats.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

She is remembered as founder of the Body Shop, an international chain of stores making and marketing natural products to “cleanse, polish, and protect the skin and hair.” Her entrepreneurial skills, along with her dedication to environmental causes and human rights, led the Queen of England to name her Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2003. Roddick was an unlikely candidate for the role of corporate executive and British dame. Her life story was anything but conventional; her autobiography reads more like the script for a soap opera than the résumé of the business pioneer she was. Born in an English bomb shelter during World War II to a dysfunctional family of Italian immigrants, she didn’t learn who her real father was until she was eighteen years old.

., xxvii Rockefeller, Nelson, 314 Roddick, Anita, xi, 342–60, 368, 372–73, 376, 388, 394, 404, 426, 427, 428, 433, 436, 464 background and personal life, 343–46 Body and Soul, 347, 355 Body Shop and, 346–59 Brazil’s rain forest and, 352 business mistake of, 348 business philosophy, 349–50, 353 as capitalist, 351 commitment to an ethical business, 347–48 criticism of stock speculators, 350–51 criticism of the cosmetics industry, 350 critics of, 354–57 death of, 359 effort to ban all animal testing in cosmetics, 349 on enlightened capitalism, 357 environmental and human rights initiatives, 349 influence of Semler, 353 named Dame Commander of the British Empire, 343 Nichols’s criticism countered by, 356 sale of Body Shop to L’Oréal, 357–59, 395, 403, 427, 436, 437 Social Venture Network and, 349, 451 Roddick, Gordon, 345–46, 347, 348, 351 Rohde, Gilbert, 228 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR) Bob Johnson and, 149, 151 Four Freedoms, 154 Lincoln’s system as alternative to social welfare, 111, 114 New Deal, 111, 147 Roosevelt, Theodore, xxxviii, 83 on business leaders and doing good, xliii criticism of Carnegie, xxxiii, 464 environmental issues, 157 “New Nationalism,” 157 Square Deal, 154 Rose, Stuart, 221–22 Rosenwald, Julius, 330, 431 Rothman, Howard, Companies with a Conscience, 497n29 Round Table Pizza, 406 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 430 The Social Contract, 9 Rowntree, Joseph, 77, 84 chocolate factory in New Earswick, 84 education of workers and, 84 employee benefits and, 84 living conditions of workers and, 84 working conditions and, 84 Royal Bank of Scotland, 133 Rykens, Paul, 65 S.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

Angola has a long way to go to catch up with South Africa. This will not be a military confrontation: South Africa’s dominance is near total. It has large, well-equipped armed forces comprising one hundred thousand personnel, dozens of fighter jets and attack helicopters, as well as several modern submarines and frigates. In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

This tiny speck of land, two miles long and less than a half mile wide, had originally been claimed by the English in 1603, just as the English and Scottish thrones were united—so it was the first British colonial possession anywhere in the world, and the first tiny step toward the formation of the British Empire. Eventually, in 1667, Run was relinquished to the Dutch under the terms of a Treaty of Breda, one of many peace treaties signed during the on-off Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As part of the 1667 deal, Britain received a small island in North America called Manhattan.


pages: 252 words: 85,441

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

We’re not all mothers or harlots, and some of us are both. Beard’s crime was to go on television as a 58-year-old woman and voice her opinions without first dolling herself up. I mean, who does she think she is?! The Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature? An Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to classical scholarship? Jesus. I don’t even think she got her split ends sorted out. What an utter disgrace. By the way, I talked about this in the second series of my BBC Radio 4 series. I was worried about offending Mary Beard, or saying something she didn’t agree with, but then I got a text saying she tweeted about it, and was so delighted that I stopped concentrating on where I was going, got my foot stuck in a hole in the road and suffered a Type 3 sprain to my ankle and a broken finger.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The Middlesbrough Tale The social justice rationale can be illustrated by the example of Middlesbrough, a decayed industrial town in north-east England.7 A nondescript hamlet in the 1820s, within a decade of the discovery of iron ore nearby, Middlesbrough and the surrounding Teesside area had become the hub of the industrial revolution and a hub of the British Empire. It was the site of the country’s first ironworks, later branching out into steel and chemicals. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was built with steel from Middlesbrough; Sydney Harbour Bridge was too, as was much of the Indian railway system. On a gate in the town is emblazoned: ‘Born of iron, made of steel.’


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

While neither PingIt nor Paym is close to being used by half the adult population of the United Kingdom, or to edging cash out of the way for the person in the street, across the North Sea MobilePay is playing a key role in bringing Denmark closer to cashlessness. Somaliland Somaliland gained independence, with Somalia, from Britain in 1960 (it became part of the British Empire back in 1888). It has a population of some 3.5 million and sits on the Horn of Africa. It announced its secession from Somalia in 1991 and has operated as a more or less independent country ever since. It has its own president, parliament and constitution. It even boasts a central bank that prints its own currency, the Somaliland shilling (Economist 2011), in contrast to Somalia, which has had no currency for twenty-five years.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

And even though the prices keep rising, the commuting distances get longer and longer, and the little unique culture left gets trounced on by chains and upscale restaurants that serve more of the same, people keep moving here, even though no one seems to enjoy living here. There’s an old semi-humorous line by a nineteenth-century historian about how the British Empire was not the result of some genius planning but instead was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, and I sometimes wonder if gentrifiers go about their day with a similar distracted destructiveness. In 2014, a listicle posted on MTV.com with the title “17 Ways New York City Makes You Want to Be Basic as Hell” went viral.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, praised smugglers like Hancock as popular heroes for defying mercantilist restrictions on trade and providing consumers with cheaper goods. A series of laws known as the Navigation Acts went a long way toward imposing British mercantilism on America; these laws were an important cause of the Revolution. To protect the British shipping industry from competition, the Navigation Acts prohibited any ships built outside the British Empire from engaging in trade with the colonies; ships involved in colonial trade were also required to employ a crew consisting of at least three-fourths British subjects.3 A second aspect of the Navigation Acts was a long and constantly changing list of “enumerated goods” produced in the American colonies (e.g., sugar, tobacco, indigo, furs) that could be shipped only to England.


pages: 287 words: 87,204

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Continuing his political activities, now as leader of the republican party Sinn Féin, de Valera was arrested and imprisoned once again, but escaped and took part in the Irish civil war of the early 1920s that followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, when those seeking full independence clashed with those seeking only home rule within the British Empire (Ireland did have its own parliament, but with limited powers). Like other civil wars, this one set brother against brother and produced bitterness which persists to the present day; de Valera’s republicans lost and he spent another spell in prison. After his release in 1924 he founded a new party, Fianna Fáil, dedicated to establishing an independent Irish republic through politics rather than violence, and was elected to the Dublin parliament, the Dáil, in 1927.


No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley

British Empire, Skype

Montgomerie’s “K” was for Karakoram. (He would log K1 through K32, and recorded K2’s height at 28,278 feet, only about 30 feet off.) K1 was later discovered to bear a local name and became fixed on the maps as Masherbrum. But K2 didn’t and so Montgomerie’s name stuck. Five years after Montgomerie’s visit, another tough, steely British empire builder, Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, came closer to K2, becoming the first European to ascend the Baltoro glacier. In recognition of his feat, in 1888 a motion was proposed about K2 at the Royal Geographical Society in London that “in future it should be known as Peak Godwin-Austen.” The motion was rejected but the name persisted, even into the middle decades of the twentieth century on some maps and in newspaper accounts.


pages: 287 words: 81,970

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

It was a prosperous period for Britain, during which the country gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and the tiny island nation established outposts around the globe: Africa, India, the Far East, Australia, the South Pacific, and North and South America. One fourth of the earth and its people were ruled by the British Empire. But as the Romans discovered and Americans will learn to their great sorrow, empires are unsustainable edifices. The British finally abandoned the discipline of the gold standard in 1914 to fight the First World War. That war, like America’s first Gulf War, was never allowed to end. Predictably, then, it flared up again in the Second World War.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Nearly a quarter of children died before their fifth birthdays and average incomes were a tiny fraction of European levels. Nkrumah promised that Ghana would become a paradise within a decade. Taking part in the independence celebrations was Nkrumah’s economic adviser, Arthur Lewis (1915–91), who’d been raised in a poor backwater of the British Empire, the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. As a teenager he’d hoped to become an engineer, but soon realised that the white-run sugar plantations would never employ a black engineer. After he graduated from London University in the 1930s, The Economist magazine turned him down on the grounds that he’d have to interview people who wouldn’t want to talk to a black journalist.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

But for immigration to work, each side has to adapt; each side has to give. A nationalist lack of social elasticity is what keeps too many societies from properly integrating newcomers. The settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which represent the most lasting legacy of the British Empire, are more open to newcomers. Yet even though their populations are almost entirely composed of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, they are not immune to social rigidity. The legacy of slavery continues to separate white from black in the United States; the legacy of colonization continues to estrange indigenous and non-indigenous in Canada and elsewhere.


pages: 309 words: 85,584

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

Among the people I spoke to were former Treasury Permanent Secretaries, former Cabinet Secretaries and assorted Foreign Office officials. Of all British institutions, the Foreign Office, or FCO, had been the most passionately pro-European. But as I was departing along the august corridors of the FCO’s palatial building – still very much a reminder of the days of the British Empire – a passing attendant broke the news that the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, had just made Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, one of the leading advocates of departure from the European Union, Foreign Secretary. Foreign Secretary! A leading Brexiter. What an insult to a hallowed institution! I was leaving the building with two students, one of whom was doing a course at King’s College, London, where I had been made a visiting professor.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Though still authoritarian, Vietnam today is pursuing Chinese-style market reforms with some success, while Angola and Zimbabwe are among the most corrupt and unequal nations in the world. The case of Tanzania garnered considerable sympathy, especially from the socialists of Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe. The newly independent country had been a neglected corner of the British Empire when Julius Nyerere took power in 1961 with talk of pan-Africanism, self-reliance, and socialism. Overseeing a rural, peasant country, he looked to Mao’s China for inspiration, but the ujamaa collectivist project he pushed in the countryside had genuinely participatory dynamics. Nyerere was ultimately not able to find an alternative path to development, and most of his reforms were rolled back after 1995.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The bridge was longer than previous bridges that Stephenson had designed but he tightened and reinforced it to help it cope with heavy loads without it moving too much. It was a classic step forward in engineering: take previous successful designs and make them do slightly more while using slightly less building materials. The Dee Bridge fulfilled both these criteria. It opened, and it worked fantastically. The British Empire was all about trains and British engineers prided themselves on their stiff upper bridges. In May 1847 the bridge was modified slightly: extra rock and gravel were added to keep the tracks from vibrating and to protect the bridge’s wooden beams from burning embers produced by the steam engines.


pages: 449 words: 85,924

Lonely Planet Maldives (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Masters, Tom

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, haute cuisine, income inequality, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, sustainable-tourism, trade route, women in the workforce

His replacement, the elderly Abdul Majeed Didi, retired to Ceylon, leaving the control of the government in the hands of his prime minister, Mohammed Amin Didi, who nationalised the fish export industry, instituted a broad modernisation program and introduced an unpopular ban on tobacco smoking. When Ceylon gained independence in 1948, the Maldivians signed a defence pact with the British, which gave the latter control over foreign affairs but not the right to interfere internally. In return, the Maldivians agreed to provide facilities for British defence forces, giving the waning British Empire a vital foothold in the Indian Ocean after the loss of India. In 1953 the sultanate was abolished and a republic was proclaimed with Amin Didi as its first president, but he was overthrown within a year. The sultanate was returned, with Mohammed Farid Didi elected as the 94th sultan of the Maldives.


pages: 244 words: 82,548

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, no-fly zone, satellite internet, Skype

And despite his serious approach to his craft and his tendency to intellectualize, Hetherington and Junger were happy to join in the fun. Hetherington, in particular, was known for cracking jokes in the middle of firefights, and more than once he had run up a hill and pretended to plant a small British flag, claiming it for the British empire. “He was a complete freak in some ways,” Junger said of Hetherington, with a laugh, “and he thought being British was kind of inherently funny. And he had no problem rolling with that and entertaining people with that, and in a place like Restrepo entertainment was, you know, in some ways as precious as ammo or food.


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

Nigeria, fused together out of imperial con venience a quarter of a century previously, should perhaps be decentralized, with each region becoming ‘a practically self-governing institution’, capable of managing its own affairs, but ‘forming an integral part of a federation of many common interests’. In his conclusion, the author slipped from English to French. It might be a case of ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, he said: that is, of ‘retreating in order to better make the leap’. After the Second World War – and the dismemberment of the British empire that followed – London’s worries about Nigeria grew more intense. In a July 1958 archive document, Sir Ralph Grey, W STARK HEREILLITERATES DUTY AND AND GLORY JUNKIES LEAD 43 deputy governor-general, recorded receiving a disturbing visit from Sir Tafawa Balewa, the country’s prime minister.


pages: 258 words: 85,971

Glasgow: The Real Mean City by Malcolm Archibald

British Empire, ghettoisation, joint-stock limited liability company, Red Clydeside, strikebreaker

When convicted prisoners were transported for a number of years, they did not always serve the full term of their sentence. There were different degrees of remission, from being allowed to leave the convict settlements to being permitted to live anywhere in the Australian colonies, or even allowed to settle anywhere in the world, except the British Empire. Thomas Daily had been convicted of assault in 1853. In company with a man named Neil Higney, he had attacked a seaman in Goosedub Street, garrotted him and stolen two shillings. The attackers were unfortunate, as they were caught literally in the act. With no possible defence, they still pleaded not guilty, but the jury decided otherwise and were each transported for fourteen years, sailing on the ship Adelaide.


pages: 263 words: 81,542

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

They began to wonder if natural beauty and the glories of the world at large might not be healthier intoxicants than the rum at the Green Dragon or the whiskey from a flask on the factory floor. More content with the world around them, they began to drink less. The new flowering also changed the American attitude toward all things foreign. The despised British Empire had been the colonies’ number one enemy in the eighteenth century. Colonists who were struggling to set up educational facilities tried to teach Greek and Latin—they had little use for German poetry, Italian literature, or the poems of Omar Khayyam. This huge shift toward appreciation and away from rigidity and fear was very much like the shift that happened in the 1960s, when the old rules were overthrown and a younger generation embraced the world.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

Over the next several centuries, European ships, guns, and money dominated the world and created the first global system, the European Age. Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire—there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on. The European nations exhausted themselves in endless wars with each other while they invaded, subjugated, and eventually ruled much of the world. There were many reasons for the inability of the Europeans to unite, but in the end it came down to a simple feature of geography: the English Channel.


pages: 309 words: 84,539

The Burning Shore: How Hitler's U-Boats Brought World War II to America by Ed Offley

Bletchley Park, British Empire, en.wikipedia.org, escalation ladder, operational security, trade route

On Tuesday, July 9, 1942, the area was a critical combat theater of World War II, as it had been for the past six months. A confluence of factors had made this intersection of land and ocean the fulcrum of the ongoing naval confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies, a vicious maritime clash now known as the Battle of the Atlantic. By July 1942, the combatants had expanded beyond the British Empire and Nazi Germany. America’s entry into the war against Germany on December 11, 1941, had thrown the US military into the fray. In turn, Hitler’s Ubootwaffe, or U-boat Force, initiated an all-out war against American merchant shipping. Vizeadmiral (Vice Admiral) Karl Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the U-boat Force, aimed to win a guerre de course against the Western Allies, sinking their merchant ships at a rate faster than new construction could replace them.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The British began angling for political control of the region and its vast crude reserves in 1908, when the Anglo-Persian Oil Company made the first discovery there. In the lead-up to the First World War, Persian supplies became vital to Winston Churchill’s plan to replace coal with oil as the fuel of the British Empire’s navy. In 1914, Churchill moved to secure the Royal Navy’s oil supply, gaining a 51 percent stake in Anglo-Persian through a £2.2-million investment that effectively nationalized the company. During the Second World War, Churchill then engineered the replacement of Persia’s pro-German ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, by his more British-friendly 21-year-old son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

However, they have stayed and have had an enormous influence within the neighbourhood, setting up Irish social clubs, and contributing to the two Roman Catholic churches on the estate. After the Second World War there was a new group of migrants in Nottingham, workers coming from the break-up of the British Empire from all over the West Indies. These migrant workers, like others, found the cheapest and most affordable places to settle, predominantly settling in St Ann’s, Radford, and The Meadows areas of Nottingham throughout the1950s until 1968, when the Immigration Act all but closed entry into the UK for West Indians.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Although the banks funded, through credit, the building of the nation’s infrastructure— notably the canals and railways—the lion’s share of financial investment went into overseas markets and a mix of speculative activity. The City funded world trade, organised large loans on behalf of the British government to pay for wars from the Napoleonic to the Boer War and funded economic expansion in the British Empire. Commerce was also exceptionally profitable. Despite Britain’s role as the pioneer of industrialisation, it was bankers, merchants and financiers who dominated the rich leagues at the end of nineteenth century. Non-landed wealth was more likely to be found amongst City financiers than amongst northern industrialists and manufacturers.139 After the First World War, the world’s financial centres—dominated by New York and London—continued to enjoy a pretty free hand.


pages: 294 words: 85,811

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid

Berlin Wall, British Empire, double helix, employer provided health coverage, fudge factor, Kenneth Arrow, medical malpractice, profit maximization, profit motive, single-payer health, South China Sea, the payments system

Our country spends too much on health care and gets too little in return; Japan gets lots of health care but probably spends too little to make its excellent system sustainable. SEVEN The UK: Universal Coverage, No Bills LORD WILLIAM BEVERIDGE AND NYE BEVAN CAME FROM opposite ends of the British Empire and opposite poles of the British class divide. Beveridge, the aristocratic social reformer, grew up in a Darjeeling mansion with seventeen rooms and twenty-six servants (not counting his nanny). Bevan, the pugnacious miner and union agitator turned politician, shared a four-room cottage in South Wales with nine siblings who would have loved to be employed as servants but were instead destined to a life of hard labor in the coal pits.


Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil

Abraham Maslow, airport security, British Empire, invisible hand, rent control, trade route

Since the Dalai Lama was now in exile, Younghusband brought the treaty to the acting Rinpoche and a hastily scrabbled together government counsel, who signed their agreement without pause. The troops were withdrawn from the country, but the siege would become an infamous chapter in the history of the British Empire. Younghusband would be remembered as the “last great imperial adventurer,” and soon after he returned to England would become Sir Francis Younghusband. Knighted, but suffering a bitter hangover from the 1904 invasion, Younghusband moved on to become the director of the Royal Geographic Society in 1919.


pages: 278 words: 84,002

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict by Max Brooks, John Amble, M. L. Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, British Empire, data acquisition, false flag, invisible hand, Jon Ronson, risk tolerance, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, The future is already here, Yogi Berra

Along these lines, it is interesting to contemplate whether the post-9/11 interventions—all in the name of eliminating terrorist safe havens and keeping U.S. and allied homelands safe—may have represented a moment of historical agency that has been squandered. Are U.S. missteps in these far-flung places around the globe a historical reflection of similar missteps by the British empire? Or the Dutch before them? Strategic Incoherence and Insufficient Intelligence Indeed, the first three episodes of Star Wars can also be construed as a meditation on the consequences of an inability to forge deeper purpose against a looming enemy. The movies are plagued by character missteps and betrayals of the values that undergird the peaceful and democratic Galactic Republic.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

For most of the twentieth century, it rightfully earned a reputation as one of the most innovative companies on the planet, gaining 150,000 patents on many life-changing inventions and discoveries. Commercially, it was also one of the most successful companies emerging from the UK, dominating the manufacturing and chemical industries. At its zenith, it was the largest manufacturing company in the British Empire. The ICI tradition was based on science and innovation. In 1990, its mission statement was to be the “world’s leading chemical company; serving customers internationally through the innovative and responsible application of chemistry.” Through the ’90s, the historical focus on chemistry first, profit and sales second, was overturned.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

This marshy, mosquito-infested island, with its 250 miles of coastline and its few hundred inhabitants of mostly pirates, was then occupied in 1819 by a British colonialist called Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles who, in the name of the East India Company, established what he called Singapore as one of the most strategically valuable possessions of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Our interest in the Singapore story begins in 1965—the same fateful year that Intel cofounder Gordon Moore invented his eponymous law—with the establishment of the Republic of Singapore by a Cambridge University–educated lawyer called Lee Kuan Yew. Like pre-1991 Estonia, pre-1965 Singapore was an impoverished, ex-colonial backwater without natural resources, legacy institutions, international influence, or regional standing.


pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

He was a big name, not only on the personal finance pages but also within the wider business and national news sections of the country’s broadsheet and mid-market newspapers. As his personal brand grew, an ever-larger army of savers entrusted him with their money. To cap it all off, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s birthday honours list, in recognition of his services to the economy. Woodford’s two main funds, Income and High Income, were each bigger than £10 billion – eclipsing the size of many small countries’ economies. They had grown so large that some financial advisers became concerned.


Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M. M. Blume

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Norman Mailer

Just two weeks after the Stimson article was released in Harper’s, Hersey and the New Yorker editors were informed that Penguin Books in the United Kingdom had sold out of its quarter million first printing within weeks and was preparing to release a new printing of 1 million copies. A year after Knopf first released the book in the United States, the publisher issued a press release summarizing the book’s worldwide reach: “Besides [the Knopf] American edition, and the British Empire’s Penguin Books edition, ‘Hiroshima’ has appeared in eleven languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, French, Czech, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Portuguese, and is scheduled to appear before long in Polish, in Spanish, and Hebrew. It is also likely that the book will appear in the Bengali and Marathi languages of India.”


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd rev. ed. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003. Wallace, Maurice O. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Walvin, James. Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. White, Shane. “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley.” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (1989): 68–75. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Williams, Sherley Ann.


Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

He learned knots and splices and marlinspike seamanship unchanged from the time of Nelson. He learned to navigate by sextant, as had Captains Cook and Bligh. He acquired his sailorly arts aboard ships running between London and ports in East Africa, India, and the Persian Gulf – ports that were still outposts of the British Empire, in spirit if no longer in fact. This was the classic POSH route taken by the Empire builders of the British raj, so called because the favoured, more expensive cabins were on the shaded side of the ship: port side going out, starboard coming home. But probably no place the young seaman sailed to preserved this vanishing world as authentically as aboard the insular, tradition-steeped ships of the British Merchant Marine, which produced sailors and officers as hidebound in their ways as Old Etonians.


When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, fixed income, full employment, large denomination, plutocrats, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, strikebreaker

The cost-of-living index, taking 1914 as 1, had risen from September's average of 15 million to 3,657 million in October and now, on November 12, was at 218,000 million. The women of Cologne, where there were nearly 100,000 workless, sent an emotional but hardly exaggerated appeal addressed 'To the Women of the British Empire': During the times of passive resistance we existed, not by industry, but through the paper money doles sent from unoccupied country. Now these have ceased and we face starvation. Industry cannot recover, and there are millions, literally, out of work … tens of thousands of our leading citizens have been banished or imprisoned … our newspapers have been suppressed … armed hordes of adventurers have now been let loose on our disarmed and helpless population in the name of separatism and Republicanism … Winter is before us, and we have no coal … 118 In fact the German government was preparing to leave the finances of the occupied zone to their own fate.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

In the eighteenth century, entrepreneurs realized that trees and parks could increase property values. The green quad was born. It rose to prominence most of all in Great Britain, where it was attributed in part to the influence of the grassy Cambridge and Oxford campuses. Developers built homes and businesses around rectilinear urban parkland. With the dominance of the British Empire, such quads started to spread. In 1733, they made their way to Georgia. Colonel James Oglethorpe planned the city of Savannah following English city planning principles. His egalitarian belief was that each homeowner should have access to open areas, which led to a city flush with green quads.


pages: 687 words: 209,474

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, European colonialism, friendly fire, Mount Scopus, open economy, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

The following year, 1954, undistinguished elsewhere in the world, was a Middle Eastern watershed. That year, the Soviet Union, having supported Israel since its creation, having recognized and armed it, switched its allegiance to the other side. The USSR indeed had nothing more to gain from Zionism—the British empire was dying—and everything to gain in terms of placating the new, post-colonial governments, securing its vulnerable southern border, and threatening the West’s oil supplies. “Deserving of condemnation [is]…the State of Israel, which from the first days of its existence began to threaten its neighbors,” declared Communist party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who further accused Israel of plotting with imperialism to “crudely ravage the natural treasures of the region.”

On the flight of Palestinian refugees, see also Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1948-1951 (London: Macmillan, 1988). Dan Scheuftan, Ha-Optzia ha-Yardenit: Ha-Yishuv ve-Medinat Yisrael mul ha-Mimshal ha-Hashemi ve ha-Tnua ha-Leumit ha-Falastinit (Tel Aviv: Yad Tabenkin, Machon Yisrael Galili, 1986). The best treatment of international diplomacy on the Palestine issue can be found in Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 381-574. 8. A similar observation was made by the Hebrew University historian J. L. Talmon immediately after the 1967 war: “The Jewish complex grows from a mixture of fear and distrust, on the one hand, and a feeling of power on the other…The mixture of hubris and fear is all pervading in Israel.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Indeed, even in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century, sectors that accounted for the majority of the labor force, and at least half the gross national product, were not affected by new industrial technologies.20 Furthermore, its planetary reach in the following decades more often than not took the form of colonial domination, be it in India under the British empire; in Latin America under commercial/industrial dependency on Britain and the United States; in the dismembering of Africa under the Berlin Treaty; or in the opening to foreign trade of Japan and China by the guns of Western ships. In contrast, new information technologies have spread throughout the globe with lightning speed in less than two decades, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, displaying a logic that I propose as characteristic of this technological revolution: the immediate application to its own development of technologies it generates, connecting the world through information technology. 21 To be sure, there are large areas of the world, and considerable segments of the population, switched off from the new technological system: this is precisely one of the central arguments of this book.

Time as repetition of daily routine, as Giddens proposes,9 or as “the mastery of nature, as all sorts of phenomena, practices and places become subjected to the disembedding, centralizing and universalizing march of time,” in the words of Lash and Urry,10 is at the core of both industrial capitalism and statism. Industrial machinism brought the chronometer to the assembly lines of Fordist and Leninist factories almost at the same moment.11 Long-distance travel in the West became organized by the late nineteenth century around Greenwich Mean Time, as the materialization of the hegemony of the British Empire. While, half a century later, the constitution of the Soviet Union was marked by the organization of an immense territory around Moscow time, with time zones arbitrarily decided at the bureaucrats’ convenience without proportion to geographical distance. Significantly, the first act of defiance of the Baltic Republics during Gorbachev’s perestroika was to vote for the adoption of Finland’s time zone as the official time in their territories.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Lonsdale-Bryans was one of the earliest writers to compare the curve of change to a hockey stick, and Fuller explored the implications in “Ballistics of Civilization,” an unpublished call for a predictive science to guide humanity’s “trajectory through the ages of space.” The tools included his charts and his air map, which revealed a northwest spiral of migration along the isotherm, a band of moderate temperature coinciding with the central line of world population. According to Fuller, it indicated that the headquarters of the British Empire was destined to move to Canada. He shared his theories with Henry Luce, who may not have known about Fuller’s past history with Clare—although one of her biographers later alleged that Fuller said that she had married her new husband “on the rebound from him.” Fuller took advantage of his access to the nation’s most influential publisher, for whom he wrote a speech on ephemeralization: “The sewing or calculating machines of this year, for instance, are far more able and easy to work than their predecessors, yet are but half the weight and volume of their prototypes of but three years ago.”

He was rewarded with his greatest success to date. The Life piece opened with a photo of Fuller—sporting a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses—displaying his assembled map, which was colored to indicate different temperature zones. Various configurations showed the planet from the perspectives of the North Pole, the British Empire, Germany, and Japan, encouraging wartime readers to see new patterns of continuity in the oceans and continents. Fuller saw children playing with the map on the street, and it made an impression on much higher levels. A set was prepared for President Roosevelt, while another was presented to Winston Churchill by Henry Luce.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

“But for me I had just one question,” says Gilbert, one of the Jamaican protagonists, who served in the British Army and arrived in Britain on SS Windrush, in Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island. “How come England did not know me? ... It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country’s defense when there was threat. But tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back before shrugging defeat.”


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

MICROCOSM To understand hypertext, I’ve turned to one of the brightest computer scientists in the world. Dame Wendy Hall is a garrulous, strawberry blonde Brit with a disarmingly warm manner and a busy calendar. We’re talking over Skype, nine hours apart. Wendy, who was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire—the female equivalent of being knighted—in 2009 for her contributions to computer science, is in a hotel room in London, dressed for dinner. I’m in my pajamas, drinking coffee, surrounded by index cards, in my office in Los Angeles. For reasons I don’t yet understand, she has chosen this moment to catch me up on medieval European history.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

He saw serious fund-raising potential in Great Britain and was ready and willing to set up Room to Read as a public charity. Dean laid out the business case. The country had over 60 million people and one of the strongest economies and incomes per capita in the world. The average citizen was well aware of the global condition, partly as a result of the glory days of the British Empire. There was a strong history of citizens donating to causes beyond the borders. I agreed that the British market was tempting, but asked whether it wouldn’t be logistically and bureaucratically complex to set up a charitable entity. Dean replied that he had already contacted the charity commission, studied the application process, and believed it was possible to get set up in less than two months.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Timely information provided by the telegraph, over even relatively short distances, evolved quickly from a novelty to convenience and, finally, into a competitive necessity in the financial capital. At least part of the London problem of overloaded lines and operator backlogs was solved by Josiah Latimer Clark, one of those scientific and engineering polymaths the nineteenth-century British Empire seemed to manufacture in surprising quantity, almost as if turning them out on an assembly line. Trained in chemistry, Clark switched to civil engineering on the railroads, then electricity. Later, he would develop his standard cell, which produced a little over one volt, to calibrate instruments.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

The aircraft that appeared in the sky over England’s eastern coast were not the sleek, fast-moving planes of later wars; such aircraft did not yet exist. Instead, the Germans sent zeppelins—battleship-size monsters, held aloft by lighter-than-air hydrogen gas. The January 19 raid killed four people and terrified millions more. Although of limited military value, the zeppelin strikes came as a psychological shock. Mighty as the British Empire was, it could not secure its homeland from air attack. The Germans planned to continue and even intensify their attacks. However, their efforts were frustrated by the problem of delivering the zeppelins to their targets. After traveling hundreds of miles, much of it over open water, the pilots were often hard-pressed to figure out where they were.


pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

Helen’s father, a general in Mao Tse-tung’s Red Air Force, calculated his family’s relocations based on military intelligence, but even those forewarnings couldn’t keep them safe from the mounting destruction. When he moved the family to Hong Kong, his nerves calmed. The city was a safe haven under the protection of the powerful British Empire. The empire had never surrendered a colony; surely they would never submit to Japan. These hopes shattered as the bombs rained down on the Pearl of the Orient. Helen’s mother was at a neighbor’s house. Trapped inside, she felt helpless to protect her children. When the thundering quieted, she raced home, shouting their names.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Karl Marx approved: “the question…is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.”2 While recognizing that the East India Company was exploiting Indian markets and labor, Marx argued that capitalism would transform the subcontinent. India would benefit from the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. It was a sentiment worthy of George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the fictional illustrious Victorian soldier Sir Harry Paget Flashman, who regarded the British empire as the greatest thing that ever happened to an undeserving world.3 The link between earthly power and spiritual glory provided justification for colonial conquest: “It amounted to a theory of cultural destiny—that the European maritime nations were destined to bring Christianity and civilization to a pagan and savage world, and their reward was to be the wealth and riches which the indigenous populations themselves were incapable of appreciating and valuing.”4 After World War II, many colonies gained independence.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Schoolchildren who lived in tenements did not thrive in school because they had neither quiet nor room to work in their crowded apartments; Wald prevailed on the New York City school board to create open study rooms in school buildings for them to use.61 Anna Julia Cooper, a supporter of the Colored Social Settlement (1902), wrote, “The Social Settlement, with its home life, its neighborhood visiting, its clubs, classes and personal service is endeavoring to bring higher ideals of life and character to many who are largely cut off from good influences and opportunities; to stimulate ambition, raise moral standards, strengthen character and develop capacity for self-help.”62 Admittedly, Cooper’s rhetoric is similar to that of functionaries in the British Empire who saw the people in the areas they colonized as lesser beings. Social settlement founder also tended to reject explanations of social inequality that might cause class conflict. But colonialist and conservative as they may have been, settlement workers proved their empathy for, and commitment to, the populations they served.63 In addition to founding settlement houses, middle-class reformist women promoted “child hygiene” as a way to equalize life chances for the poor.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

It was impossible to see it at the time, but Manchester—and indeed the entire Lancashire region—had planted itself at the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that would irrevocably alter the future of the planet. Manchester lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British Empire. The story of that convergence has been told many times, and the debate over its consequences continues to this day. But beyond the epic effects that it had on the global economy, the industrial takeoff that occurred in Manchester between 1700 and 1850 also created a new kind of city, one that literally exploded into existence.


pages: 297 words: 89,820

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

The BBC called him "the Armani of Apple." In 2004, fashion, film, media, and design experts polled by the BBC named him the most influential cultural figure in all of Britain. (He beat out J. K. Rowling and Elton John.) And the 2006 Queen's New Year's Honours List bestowed on Ive the title of Commander of the British Empire. But the best accolade comes from his boss: "Working with Jony is one of my favorite things here." As a child, Ive loved objects and especially enjoyed dismantling them. By his early teens, he understood that his future would be designing new things, and though he was never very good at drawing, he concentrated on art and design at school, matriculating at Newcastle Polytechnic.


pages: 310 words: 90,817

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown by Detlev S. Schlichter

bank run, banks create money, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, currency peg, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, inflation targeting, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, open economy, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, savings glut, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Excessive credit creation lead to the outflow of gold and in 1797 the Bank was asked to suspend redemption in specie. Britain remained off gold for 24 years and experienced unprecedented price inflation.13 In 1821, Britain returned to the gold standard. To fund the War of 1812 between the United States of America and the British Empire, the U.S. government issued substantial amounts of Treasury notes, borrowed heavily from the growing banking sector, and in 1814 allowed the banks to suspend specie payment. Resumption of specie payment took place in 1817, but it was again suspended in 1819.14 The next major experiment with paper money was initiated by the Civil War.


The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities by Violet Moller

Book of Ingenious Devices, British Empire, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, Johannes Kepler, Murano, Venice glass, Republic of Letters, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

A strange and captivating character, Dee was my constant companion for several years. He took me on an unforgettable journey through the intellectual world of the late sixteenth century. During his extraordinary career, he amassed the first truly universal collection of books in England, helped plan voyages of discovery to the New World, initiated the concept of a British Empire, reformed the calendar, searched for the philosopher’s stone, attempted to conjure angels and travelled all over Europe with his wife, servants, several children and hundreds of books in tow. He also wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects: history, mathematics, astrology, navigation, alchemy and magic.


pages: 295 words: 92,670

1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half by Stephen R. Bown

Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, charter city, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Peace of Westphalia, proprietary trading, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, two and twenty, UNCLOS

He laid out his argument that the sea, just like the land, formed a part of national territory, that there could be dominion over the water. “That the Sea, by the Law of Nature or Nations, is not common to all men, but capable of private Dominion or properties as well as the land . . . That the King of Great Britain is Lord of the Sea flowing about, as an inseparable and perpetual appendant of the British Empire.” In a fashion similar to Grotius in Mare Liberum, Selden marshalled his own pantheon of ancient philosophers to bolster his assertions of the closed sea—although he, like Welwood, was careful to preserve the validity of Grotius’s case against the Spanish and Portuguese. Both Welwood and Selden were particularly concerned about the flood of Dutch herring boats into “English” and “Scottish” waters.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In his speech at the 2013 TED conference, where his work was recognized with the one-million-dollar TED prize, he gave an account of when and why these skills came to be valued. I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire]. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures; those in bold indicate a Table. 11 September 2001 attacks 38, 41–2 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 A Abu Dhabi 222 Académie Française 91 accumulation by dispossession 48–9, 244 acid deposition 75, 187 activity spheres 121–4, 128, 130 deindustrialised working-class area 151 and ‘green revolution’ 185–6 institutional and administrative arrangements 123 ‘mental conceptions of the world’ 123 patterns of relations between 196 production and labour processes 123 relations to nature 123 the reproduction of daily life and of the species 123 slums 152 social relations 123 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 suburbs 150 technologies and organisational forms 123 uneven development between and among them 128–9 Adelphia 100 advertising industry 106 affective bonds 194 Afghanistan: US interventionism 210 Africa civil wars 148 land bought up in 220 neocolonialism 208 population growth 146 agribusiness 50 agriculture collectivisation of 250 diminishing returns in 72 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 ‘high farming’ 82 itinerant labourers 147 subsidies 79 AIG 5 alcoholism 151 Allen, Paul 98 Allende, Salvador 203 Amazonia 161, 188 American Bankers Association 8 American Revolution 61 anarchists 253, 254 anti-capitalist revolutionary movement 228 anti-racism 258 anti-Semitism 62 après moi le déluge 64, 71 Argentina Debt Crisis (2000–2002) 6, 243, 246, 261 Arizona, foreclosure wave in 1 Arrighi, Giovanni: The Long Twentieth Century 35, 204 asbestos 74 Asia Asian Currency Crisis (1997–98) 141, 261 collapse of export markets 141 growth 218 population growth 146 asset stripping 49, 50, 245 asset traders 40 asset values 1, 6, 21, 23, 26, 29, 46, 223, 261 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 200 Athabaska tar sands, Canada 83 austerity programmes 246, 251 automobile industry 14, 15, 23, 56, 67, 68, 77, 121, 160–61 Detroit 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 autonomista movement 233, 234, 254 B Baader-Meinhof Gang 254 Bakunin, Michael 225 Balzac, Honoré 156 Bangalore, software development in 195 Bangkok 243 Bank of England 53, 54 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 Bank of International Settlements, Basel 51, 55, 200 Bank of New England 261 Bankers Trust 25 banking bail-outs 5, 218 bank shares become almost worthless 5 bankers’ pay and bonuses 12, 56, 218 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 de-leveraging 30 debt-deposit ratio 30 deposit banks 20 French banks nationalised 198 international networks of finance houses 163 investment banks 2, 19, 20, 28, 219 irresponsible behaviour 10–11 lending 51 liquidity injections by central banks vii, 261 mysterious workings of central banks 54 ‘national bail-out’ 30–31 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 regional European banks 4 regular banks stash away cash 12, 220 rising tide of ‘moral hazard’ in international bank lending practices 19 ‘shadow banking’ system 8, 21, 24 sympathy with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ bank robbers 56 Baran, Paul and Sweezey, Paul: Monopoly Capital 52, 113 Barings Bank 37, 100, 190 Baucus, Max 220 Bavaria, automotive engineering in 195 Beijing declaration (1995) 258 Berlin: cross-border leasing 14 Bernanke, Ben 236 ‘Big Bang’ (1986) 20, 37 Big Bang unification of global stock, options and currency trading markets 262 billionaire class 29, 110, 223 biodiversity 74, 251 biomass 78 biomedical engineering 98 biopiracy 245, 251 Birmingham 27 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 168 Black, Fischer 100 Blackstone 50 Blair, Tony 255 Blair government 197 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 Bloomberg, Mayor Michael 20, 98, 174 Bolivarian movement 226, 256 bonuses, Wall Street 2, 12 Borlaug, Norman 186 bourgeoisie 48, 89, 95, 167, 176 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 Brazil automobile industry 16 capital flight crisis (1999) 261 containerisation 16 an export-dominated economy 6 follows Japanese model 92 landless movement 257 lending to 19 the right to the city movement 257 workers’ party 256 Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) 31, 32, 51, 55, 171 British Academy 235 British empire 14 Brown, Gordon 27, 45 Budd, Alan 15 Buenos Aires 243 Buffett, Warren 173 building booms 173–4 Bush, George W. 5, 42, 45 business associations 195 C California, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Canada, tightly regulated banks in 141 ‘cap and trade’ markets in pollution rights 221 capital bank 30 centralisation of 95, 110, 113 circulation of 90, 93, 108, 114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 158, 159, 182, 183, 191 cultural 21 devalued 46 embedded in the land 191 expansion of 58, 67, 68 exploitations of 102 export 19, 158 fixed 191, 213 industrial 40–41, 56 insufficient initial money capital 47 investment 93, 203 and labour 56, 88, 169–70 liquid money 20 mobility 59, 63, 64, 161–2, 191, 213 and nature 88 as a process 40 reproduction of 58 scarcity 50 surplus 16, 28, 29, 50–51, 84, 88, 100, 158, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 206, 215, 216, 217 capital accumulation 107, 108, 123, 182, 183, 191, 211 and the activity spheres 128 barriers to 12, 16, 47, 65–6, 69–70, 159 compound rate 28, 74, 75, 97, 126, 135, 215 continuity of endless 74 at the core of human evolutionary dynamics 121 dynamics of 188, 197 geographic landscape of 185 geographical dynamics of 67, 143 and governance 201 lagging 130 laws of 113, 154, 160 main centres of 192 market-based 180 Mumbai redevelopment 178 ‘nature’ affected by 122 and population growth 144–7 and social struggles 105 start of 159 capital circulation barriers to 45 continuity of 68 industrial/production capital 40–41 inherently risky 52 interruption in the process 41–2, 50 spatial movement 42 speculative 52, 53 capital controls 198 capital flow continuity 41, 47, 67, 117 defined vi global 20 importance of understanding vi, vii-viii interrupted, slowed down or suspended vi systematic misallocation of 70 taxation of vi wealth creation vi capital gains 112 capital strike 60 capital surplus absorption 31–2, 94, 97, 98, 101, 163 capital-labour relation 77 capitalism and communism 224–5 corporate 1691 ‘creative-destructive’ tendencies in 46 crisis of vi, 40, 42, 117, 130 end of 72 evolution of 117, 118, 120 expansion at a compound rate 45 first contradiction of 77 geographical development of 143 geographical mobility 161 global 36, 110 historical geography of 76, 117, 118, 121, 174, 180, 200, 202, 204 industrial 58, 109, 242 internal contradictions 115 irrationality of 11, 215, 246 market-led 203 positive and negative aspects 120 and poverty 72 relies on the beneficence of nature 71 removal of 260 rise of 135, 192, 194, 204, 228, 248–9, 258 ‘second contradiction of’ 77, 78 social relations in 101 and socialism 224 speculative 160 survival of 46, 57, 66, 86, 107, 112, 113, 116, 130, 144, 229, 246 uneven geographical development of 211, 213 volatile 145 Capitalism, Nature, Socialism journal 77 capitalist creed 103 capitalist development considered over time 121–4 ‘eras’ of 97 capitalist exploitation 104 capitalist logic 205 capitalist reinvestment 110–11 capitalists, types of 40 Carnegie, Andrew 98 Carnegie foundation 44 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 195 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 187 Case Shiller Composite Indices SA 3 Catholic Church 194, 254 cell phones 131, 150, 152 Central American Free Trade Association (CAFTA) 200 centralisation 10, 11, 165, 201 Certificates of Deposit 262 chambers of commerce 195, 203 Channel Tunnel 50 Chiapas, Mexico 207, 226 Chicago Board Options Exchange 262 Chicago Currency Futures Market 262 ‘Chicago School’ 246 Chile, lending to 19 China ‘barefoot doctors’ 137 bilateral trade with Latin America 173 capital accumulation issue 70 cheap retail goods 64 collapse of communism 16 collapse of export markets 141 Cultural Revolution 137 Deng’s announcement 159 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138 growth 35, 59, 137, 144–5, 213, 218, 222 health care 137 huge foreign exchange reserves 141, 206 infant mortality 59 infrastructural investment 222 labour income and household consumption (1980–2005) 14 market closed after communists took power (1949) 108 market forcibly opened 108 and oil market 83 one child per family policy 137, 146 one-party rule 199 opening-up of 58 plundering of wealth from 109, 113 proletarianisation 60 protests in 38 and rare earth metals 188 recession (1997) 172 ‘silk road’ 163 trading networks 163 unemployment 6 unrest in 66 urbanisation 172–3 and US consumerism 109 Chinese Central Bank 4, 173 Chinese Communist Party 180, 200, 256 chlorofluoral carbons (CFCs) 74, 76, 187 chronometer 91, 156 Church, the 249 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 169 circular and cumulative causation 196 Citibank 19 City Bank 261 city centres, Disneyfication of 131 City of London 20, 35, 45, 162, 219 class consciousness 232, 242, 244 class inequalities 240–41 class organisation 62 class politics 62 class power 10, 11, 12, 61, 130, 180 class relations, radical reconstitution of 98 class struggle 56, 63, 65, 96, 102, 127, 134, 193, 242, 258 Clausewitz, Carl von 213 Cleveland, foreclosure crisis in 2 Cleveland, foreclosures on housing in 1 Clinton, Bill 11, 12, 17, 44, 45 co-evolution 132, 136, 138, 168, 185, 186, 195, 197, 228, 232 in three cases 149–53 coal reserves 79, 188 coercive laws of competition see under competition Cold War 31, 34, 92 Collateralised Bond Obligations (CBOs) 262 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) 36, 142, 261, 262 Collateralised Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) 262 colonialism 212 communications, innovations in 42, 93 communism 228, 233, 242, 249 collapse of 16, 58, 63 compared with socialism 224 as a loaded term 259–60 orthodox communists 253 revolutionary 136 traditional institutionalised 259 companies joint stock 49 limited 49 comparative advantage 92 competition 15, 26, 43, 70 between financial centres 20 coercive laws of 43, 71, 90, 95, 158, 159, 161 and expansion of production 113 and falling prices 29, 116 fostering 52 global economic 92, 131 and innovation 90, 91 inter-capitalist 31 inter-state 209, 256 internalised 210 interterritorial 202 spatial 164 and the workforce 61 competitive advantage 109 computerised trading 262 computers 41, 99, 158–9 consortia 50, 220 consumerism 95, 109, 168, 175, 240 consumerist excess 176 credit-fuelled 118 niche 131 suburban 171 containerisation 16 Continental Illinois Bank 261 cooperatives 234, 242 corporate fraud 245 corruption 43, 69 cotton industry 67, 144, 162 credit cards fees vii, 245 rise of the industry 17 credit crunch 140 Credit Default swaps 262 Crédit Immobilièr 54 Crédit Mobilier 54 Crédit Mobilier and Immobilier 168 credit swaps 21 credit system and austerity programmes 246 crisis within 52 and the current crisis 118 and effective demand problem 112 an inadequate configuration of 52 predatory practices 245 role of 115 social and economic power in 115 crises crises of disproportionality 70 crisis of underconsumption 107, 111 east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 financial crisis of 1997–8 198, 206 financial crisis of 2008 34, 108, 114, 115 general 45–6 inevitable 71 language of crisis 27 legitimation 217 necessary 71 property market 8 role of 246–7 savings and loan crisis (US, 1984–92) 8 short sharp 8, 10 south-east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 cross-border leasing 142–3 cultural choice 238 ‘cultural industries’ 21 cultural preferences 73–4 Cultural Revolution 137 currency currency swaps 262 futures market 24, 32 global 32–3, 34 options markets on 262 customs barriers 42, 43 cyberspace 190 D Darwin, Charles 120 DDT 74, 187 de-leveraging 30 debt-financing 17, 131, 141, 169 decentralisation 165, 201 decolonisation 31, 208, 212 deficit financing 35, 111 deforestation 74, 143 deindustrialisation 33, 43, 88, 131, 150, 157, 243 Deleuze, Gilles 128 demand consumer 107, 109 effective 107, 110–14, 116, 118, 221, 222 lack of 47 worker 108 Democratic Party (US) 11 Deng Xiaoping 159 deregulation 11, 16, 54, 131 derivatives 8 currency 21 heavy losses in (US) 261 derivatives markets creation of 29, 85 unregulated 99, 100, 219 Descartes, René 156 desertification 74 Detroit auto industry 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 foreclosures on housing in 1 Deutsches Bank 20 devaluation 32, 47, 116 of bank capital 30 of prior investments 93 developing countries: transformation of daily lives 94–5 Developing Countries Debt Crisis 19, 261 development path building alliances 230 common objectives 230–31 development not the same as growth 229–30 impacts and feedbacks from other spaces in the global economy 230 Diamond, Jared: Guns, Germs and Steel 132–3, 154 diasporas 147, 155, 163 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 90 disease 75, 85 dispossession anti-communist insurgent movements against 250–51 of arbitrary feudal institutions 249 of the capital class 260 China 179–80 first category 242–4 India 178–9, 180 movements against 247–52 second category 242, 244–5 Seoul 179 types of 247 under socialism and communism 250 Domar, Evsey 71 Dongguan, China 36 dot-com bubble 29, 261 Dow 35,000 prediction 21 drug trade 45, 49 Dubai: over-investment 10 Dubai World 174, 222 Durban conference on anti-racism (2009) 258 E ‘earth days’ 72, 171 east Asia crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 labour reserves 64 movement of production to 43 proletarianisation 62 state-centric economies 226 wage rates 62 eastern European countries 37 eBay 190 economic crisis (1848) 167 economists, and the current financial crisis 235–6 ecosystems 74, 75, 76 Ecuador, and remittances 38 education 59, 63, 127, 128, 221, 224, 257 electronics industry 68 Elizabeth II, Queen vi-vii, 235, 236, 238–9 employment casual part-time low-paid female 150 chronic job insecurity 93 culture of the workplace 104 deskilling 93 reskilling 93 services 149 Engels, Friedrich 89, 98, 115, 157, 237 The Housing Question 176–7, 178 Enron 8, 24, 52, 53, 100, 261 entertainment industries 41 environment: modified by human action 84–5 environmental movement 78 environmental sciences 186–7 equipment 58, 66–7 equity futures 262 equity index swaps 262 equity values 262 ethanol plants 80 ethnic cleansings 247 ethnicity issues 104 Eurodollars 262 Europe negative population growth in western Europe 146 reconstruction of economy after Second World War 202 rsouevolutions of 1848 243 European Union 200, 226 eastern European countries 37 elections (June 2009) 143 unemployment 140 evolution punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 social 133 theory of 120, 129 exchange rates 24, 32, 198 exports, falling 141 external economies 162 F Factory Act (1848) 127 factory inspectors 127 ‘failed states’ 69 Fannie Mae (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 fascism 169, 203, 233 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 8 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 Federal Reserve System (the Fed) 2, 17, 54, 116, 219, 236, 248 and asset values 6 cuts interest rates 5, 261 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 feminists, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 248 fertilisers 186 feudalism 135, 138, 228 finance capitalists 40 financial institutions awash with credit 17 bankruptcies 261 control of supply and demand for housing 17 nationalisations 261 financial services 99 Financial Times 12 financialisation 30, 35, 98, 245 Finland: Nordic cris (1992) 8 Flint strike, Michigan (1936–7) 243 Florida, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Forbes magazine 29, 223 Ford, Henry 64, 98, 160, 161, 188, 189 Ford foundation 44, 186 Fordism 136 Fordlandia 188, 189 foreclosed businesses 245 foreclosed properties 220 fossil fuels 78 Foucault, Michel 134 Fourierists 168 France acceptance of state interventions 200 financial crisis (1868) 168 French banks nationalised 198 immigration 14 Paris Commune 168 pro-natal policies 59 strikes in 38 train network 28 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 168 fraud 43, 49 Freddie Mac (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 free trade 10, 33, 90, 131 agreements 42 French Communist Party 52 French Revolution 61 Friedman, Thomas L.: The World is Flat 132 futures, energy 24 futures markets 21 Certificates of Deposit 262 currency 24 Eurodollars 262 Treasury instruments 262 G G7/G8/G20 51, 200 Galileo Galilei 89 Gates, Bill 98, 173, 221 Gates foundation 44 gays, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 GDP growth (1950–2030) 27 Gehry, Frank 203 Geithner, Tim 11 gender issues 104, 151 General Motors 5 General Motors Acceptance Corporation 23 genetic engineering 84, 98 genetic modification 186 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 186 gentrification 131, 256, 257 geographical determinism 210 geopolitics 209, 210, 213, 256 Germany acceptance of state interventions 199–200 cross-border leasing 142–3 an export-dominated economy 6 falling exports 141 invasion of US auto market 15 Nazi expansionism 209 neoliberal orthodoxies 141 Turkish immigrants 14 Weimar inflation 141 Glass-Steagall act (1933) 20 Global Crossing 100 global warming 73, 77, 121, 122, 187 globalisation 157 Glyn, Andrew et al: ‘British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze’ 65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 156 gold reserves 108, 112, 116 Goldman Sachs 5, 11, 20, 163, 173, 219 Google Earth 156 Gould, Stephen Jay 98, 130 governance 151, 197, 198, 199, 201, 208, 220 governmentality 134 GPS systems 156 Gramsci, Antonio 257 Grandin, Greg: Fordlandia 188, 189 grassroots organisations (GROS) 254 Great Depression (1920s) 46, 170 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138, 250 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Greater London Council 197 Greece sovereign debt 222 student unrest in 38 ‘green communes’ 130 Green Party (Germany) 256 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 Greenspan, Alan 44 Greider, William: Secrets of the Temple 54 growth balanced 71 compound 27, 28, 48, 50, 54, 70, 75, 78, 86 economic 70–71, 83, 138 negative 6 stop in 45 Guggenheim Museu, Bilbao 203 Gulf States collapse of oil-revenue based building boom 38 oil production 6 surplus petrodollars 19, 28 Gulf wars 210 gun trade 44 H habitat loss 74, 251 Haiti, and remittances 38 Hanseatic League 163 Harrison, John 91 Harrod, Roy 70–71 Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism 130 Harvey, William vii Haushofer, Karl 209 Haussmann, Baron 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 Hawken, Paul: Blessed Unrest 133 Hayek, Friedrich 233 health care 28–9, 59, 63, 220, 221, 224 reneging on obligations 49 Health Care Bill 220 hedge funds 8, 21, 49, 261 managers 44 hedging 24, 36 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 133 hegemony 35–6, 212, 213, 216 Heidegger, Martin 234 Helú, Carlos Slim 29 heterogeneity 214 Hitler, Adolf 141 HIV/AIDS pandemic 1 Holloway, John: Change the World without Taking Power 133 homogeneity 214 Hong Kong excessive urban development 8 rise of (1970s) 35 sweatshops 16 horizontal networking 254 household debt 17 housing 146–7, 149, 150, 221, 224 asset value crisis 1, 174 foreclosure crises 1–2, 166 mortgage finance 170 values 1–2 HSBC 20, 163 Hubbert, M.


pages: 293 words: 89,712

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

The Zionist movement employed two means for changing the local reality in Palestine and imposing the Zionist interpretation on it: the dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its re-population with newcomers, that is, expulsion and settlement. The colonisation effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet from the very beginning of the Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement would be a very long and measured process, one which might not be sufficient to realise the revolutionary dreams of the movement and its desire to alter the realties on the ground and impose its own vision on the land’s past, present and future.


pages: 313 words: 95,361

The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn

Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Great Leap Forward, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

Their detailed plans would need to be executed with precision; they could even call up their army, if necessary. Indeed, they did so in the form of Lieutenant Colonel John Hunt, a competent climber with a solid background in military leadership. In the spring of 1953, buoyed along as if by divine right, the British pulled it off. John Hunt’s expedition delivered two citizens of the British Empire to the summit: Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay from India. It was a smashing coronation gift for Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned four days later. The 1952 Swiss team sent congratulatory messages to the British climbers. Magnanimously, Hunt replied with a telegram acknowledging that Switzerland had paved the way: TO YOU ONE HALF THE GLORY!


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

i I heard this trick done endlessly with Ralph Nader: during campaigns, there is almost no discussion or even description of his positions, but merely warnings that a vote for Nader is a vote for the Republican candidate. Afterward, his positions are treated as if they represented the opinions of 2.7 percent of the American public (the percentage of the popular vote he received in 2000). j I am simplifying. Imperial states, like the British empire or U.S. postwar system, tend to shift over time from being industrial powers to financial powers. What I say here becomes especially true in the latter phases. I discuss this below. k Keynes’s model for an international currency named the “bancor” would have led to a very different system where instead of the monetization of war debt, the international monetary system would be based on the recycling of trade surpluses.


pages: 325 words: 89,374

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

These subtle but significant changes in collective thinking were played out in the context of increasingly strident paternalistic fears of the threat posed by the slums. Victorian reformers feared their filth – that lack of cleanliness so far from Godliness. And they feared disease, particularly disease that failed to respect the proprieties of Victorian social divisions. By the turn of the century, as the might of the British Empire struggled to defeat a motley crew of Afrikaner farmers in the Boer War and the economic and military threat posed by a newly united Germany seemed daily more apparent, more existential dangers were perceived. ‘National Efficiency’, rooted in Social Darwinist notions of racial fitness and expressed in a eugenicist ethos that crossed the political spectrum, became the watchword.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

The abolitionist movement in England began in 1787 with a meeting of twelve people in a London bookstore and printing shop. The speed with which it accomplished its goals is, in retrospect, astonishing. In 1807 the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act made it illegal to trade slaves throughout the British Empire. On August 1, 1838, it also became illegal to own them, and approximately eight hundred thousand people throughout the world gained their freedom. In Jamaica, the end of slavery was commemorated by the burial of a casket containing a whip and chains. Most other European and Latin American countries abolished slavery around the same time as Great Britain.


pages: 335 words: 95,549

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Airbnb, British Empire, cashless society, credit crunch, Donald Trump, fulfillment center, mail merge, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Skype, zero day

He ended up as the only bidder and paid the full £40. The other set met the reserve of £50. In today’s inbox: Since leaving London for Australia in 1950 I have sporadically sought to identify the series of books I had to leave behind of illustrated histories of e.g. Prehistoric Britain, The British Empire, The Americas. I thought they might be Museum publications, perhaps quarto, soft cover, btw 100–200 pages illustrated with engravings from multiple sources scattered across the pages each with a short caption/note. Can you help? A publisher, some correct titles? Frankly, they could be any number of series of books.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

The fear of losing autonomy, or the realization that it has been lost already, is easily leveraged. In his book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, journalist Fintan O’Toole credits this fear as a major contributor to the UK’s exit from the European Union.50 Politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson understood how much many in England resented the collapse of the British Empire, the increase in immigrants, and their real or perceived loss of autonomy to the European Union.51 “Make Britain great again,” they said. “Don’t let those EU bureaucrats outlaw your favorite prawn cocktail-flavored potato chips!” Leveraging people’s desire to control their own destiny can be a powerful way to influence others’ behavior and thereby exercise power.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

City officials in 1989 banned… driving: Lucas W. Davis, “The Effect of Driving Restrictions on Air Quality in Mexico City,” Journal of Political Economy 116, no. 1 (2008): 38–81. smallpox… killed an estimated 300 million: Colette Flight, “Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge,” BBC, February 17, 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml. vaccination of 54,777 people: Ibid. Also David Brown, “The Last Case of Smallpox,” Washington Post, January 26, 1993, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1993/01/26/the-last-case-of-smallpox/46e21c4c-e814-4e2c-99b5-2a84d53eefc1/. Chapter 2: Problem Blindness Marcus Elliott: All quotes from interviews with Marcus Elliott, August and September 2019.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Even at Renaissance’s modest level of leverage—reported to be five to one—these trades may produce massive profits. But the profits do not contribute to the processes of entropic learning that constitutes all economic growth in an economy of knowledge. In his defense, Mercer appeals to the vital role of money markets and banks’ aggregation of available wealth in the rise of the British Empire, citing Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street (1873). There is a difference, however, between nineteenth-century London and today. Bagehot’s Britain operated under Newton’s gold standard and system of the world. The currencies that central banks manage today have no anchor in gold and thus suffer from the self-referential circularity of all logical systems not moored to reality outside of themselves.


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

These deforestation myths have cropped up again and again throughout history; deforestation has been blamed for the fall of several ancient Mesopotamian empires, Mycenaean Greece, the Mayan Empire, the Venetian Republic, and, most devastatingly, the collapse of civilization itself among the Rapa Nui of Easter Island. Perhaps the most frequently cited example of all is the foundation myth of the British Empire: that the construction of the Royal Navy destroyed the country’s great primeval oak forests. The truth is very different. We have certainly had a huge effect on the world’s forests: reducing forest cover and changing the composition of the forests that do remain. However, people have found ways of coping with the loss of forest, maintaining an adequate supply of wood while avoiding environmental collapse.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

If it is to be defeated, as it must—albeit a daunting and complex mission—its existence must first be acknowledged and labeled for what it is, the urgency of the moment must be realized, and the emergence of a unified, patriotic front of previously docile, divergent, and/or disputatious societal, cultural, and political factions and forces, which have in common their belief that America is worth defending, must immediately galvanize around and rally to the cause. We must rise to the challenge, as did our Founding Fathers, when they confronted the most powerful force on earth, the British Empire, and defeated it. Admittedly, in numerous ways today’s threat is more byzantine, as it now inhabits most of our institutions and menaces from within, making engagement difficult and complicated. Nonetheless, I fervently believe America as we know it will be forever lost if we do not prevail. I closed my book Liberty and Tyranny, which was published a short twelve years ago, with President Ronald Reagan’s fateful and prescient observation, which compels our attention especially now for it is more imperative than ever: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.


pages: 270 words: 87,864

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Nelson Mandela, white flight

They did so because, in the mid-1800s, in what had been written off as a near-worthless way station on the route to the Far East, a few lucky capitalists stumbled upon the richest gold and diamond reserves in the world, and an endless supply of expendable bodies was needed to go in the ground and get it all out. As the British Empire fell, the Afrikaner rose up to claim South Africa as his rightful inheritance. To maintain power in the face of the country’s rising and restless black majority, the government realized they needed a newer and more robust set of tools. They set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

The great and the good – aka the Protestant ascendancy – wanted big improvements, and they set about transforming what was in essence still a medieval town into a modern, Anglo-Irish metropolis. Roads were widened, landscaped squares laid out and new townhouses built, all in a proto-Palladian style that soon became known as Georgian, after the kings then on the English throne. For a time Dublin was the second largest city in the British Empire and all was very, very good – unless you were part of the poor, mostly Catholic masses living in the city’s ever-developing slums. The Georgian boom came to a sudden and dramatic halt after the Act of Union (1801), when Ireland was formally united with Britain and its separate parliament closed down.

Cork Butter MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %021-430 0600; www.corkbutter.museum; O'Connell Sq; adult/child €4/3; h10am-6pm Jul & Aug, to 5pm Mar-Jun, Sep & Oct, 11am-3pm Sat & Sun Nov-Feb) Cork has a long tradition of butter manufacturing – in the 1860s it was the world's largest butter market, exporting butter throughout the British Empire – and the trade's history is told through the displays and dioramas of the Cork Butter Museum. The square in front of the museum is dominated by the neoclassical front of the Old Butter Market, and the striking, circular Firkin Crane building, where butter casks were once weighed (it now houses a dance centre).

In 1919 British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown achieved the first transatlantic flight when they spotted the Marconi station's towers and switched off the engines, eventually crashing into the bog. Interpretive panels and interactive exhibits dot the route. Both aviators survived and were awarded the honour of Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) a week later by King George V. The wireless station operated until 1922, when it was attacked by Republican forces and compensation from the Free State government for its repair didn't eventuate. Clifden's Station House Museum also covers these two 20th-century technological advancements.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

As one who wishes my native land well—and would save her from disaster I hope that she will never have to undertake the task of suppressing the Dutch. It can’t be done. They are too much like the Scotch.”23 Carnegie’s solution was to offer the Boer republics the opportunity to “federate” with the British Empire for a certain number of years. “After that to be as Canada and Australia are. Free to go.”24 Campbell-Bannerman mildly questioned Carnegie’s rather preposterous suggestion that the Boers might agree to a trial membership in the British Empire. Lord Rosebery dismissed the “federation” idea by reminding Carnegie how the United States, thirty-five years earlier, had dealt with a secessionist movement: “You laid your country waste, spent hundreds of millions, and gave hundreds of thousands of lives to prevent that right.

Blackwood, William, II Blackwood’s Magazine, Blaine, Emmons Blaine, Harriet Blaine, James, G., Jr. Blaine, James, G., Sr. Blaine, Walker Blake, James Boer War bond trading Botta, Anna Braddock steelworks. See Edgar Thomson steelworks Brecher, Jeremy Bridge, James bridge building Brinkerhoff, Anne British Empire British Guiana, Venezuela and British Museum British Peace Society Brody, David Brooklyn Bridge Brooks, David Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Brown, John Brush, Jared Bryan, William Jennings Bryce, James Buchanan, James Burgoyne, Arthur Burns, Robert Bushnell, Cornelius Butler, Benjamin F.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

-Why, just now, In taking up this paltry sheet of paper, My bosom underwent a glorious glow, And my internal spirit cut a caper: And though so much inferior, as I know, To those who, by the dint of glass and vapour, Discover stars and sail in the wind’s eye, I wish to do as much by poesy.17 Banks’s conservatism showed in other ways. The end of the Napoleonic Wars had raised the question of the future role of science in the growing British Empire and colonies. What loyalty did science owe to the state? Officially in wartime Banks had taken a patriotic line when required, maintaining that national and commercial interests must lead, though producing scientific advantages. His enthusiasm for the Australian penal settlements around Sydney Cove was based on his belief that the tough colonial life would redeem their inhabitants, and ultimately benefit the Empire.

(Alexandre Charles’s ballooning assistant), 131-2 Roberts, Upton, 375 Robespierre, Maximilien, 247 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 348 Rodin, Auguste: The Thinker (sculpture), 404n Roget, Dr Peter Mark, 264, 302, 402 Romain, Pierre, 153-4 Romanticism: supposed hostility to science, xv-xvii; and science biography, 94n; and scientific discovery, 208, 318; wanderers in Italy, 425 Rome: Davy’s old age in, 432 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on Noble Savage, 3-4; on property and ownership, 16n; writes on South Seas, 46n Rowlandson, Thomas, 291 Royal Astronomical Society: founded, xix, 393, 407; awards Gold Medal to Caroline Herschel, 410-11 Royal College of Surgeons, London, 308-9, 317, 336 Royal Geographical Society: merges with Africa Association, 58, 212 Royal Institution: foundation, xix, 199, 285; Humphry Davy at, 241n, 272, 277, 285, 291, 294; finances improve, 291; Coleridge lectures on ‘Poetry and the Imagination’ at, 295, 299-300, 467; deterioration in conditions, 348; Faraday appointed to, 348-9, 358; Davy appointed Vice-President, 359; service to British industry, 362; and Davy’s development of miners’ safety lamp, 370, 372-3; Faraday appointed Director, 405; Faraday’s electromagnetic researches at, 453; Christmas Lectures for Children, 454; atomic clock, 467-8; author lectures on Coleridge at, 467; Proceedings, 467n Royal Navy: commissions Davy to investigate corrosion of ships’copper hulls, 411-12, 414 Royal Society: supports Endeavour voyage, 9-10, 190; honours Banks and Solander, 43; Banks elected President, 54-5; moves to Somerset House, 55; and Herschel’s discovery of Uranus, 98-100; Herschel elected to membership and awarded Copley Medal, 102-3, 105; members sceptical of Herschel’s accomplishments, 108; and early ballooning, 133, 134, 147, 155; elects Jeffries to Fellowship, 152-3; adopts Caroline Herschel’s Star Catalogue, 194; and scientific observation, 249; Beddoes applies to for financial support, 251-2; awards Copley Medal to Davy, 295; Davy delivers Bakerian Lectures, 295-9, 359; medical scientists in, 306-7; Davy reports to on safety-lamp investigation, 363-5; Davy’s prototype safety lamp presented to, 368; awards Rumford Medal to Davy, 369; Banks attempts to maintain pre-eminence and unity, 393-7; composition, 394; Davy succeeds Banks as President, 397-9; Davy’s unpopularity at, 412-13; Davy resigns presidency, 419; Davy sends late papers to, 431-2; Davy endows Medal, 434; role, 435; John Herschel’s presidential candidacy (1829), 436; elects Duke of Sussex President, 437; Babbage attacks, 438-9; fails to promote scientific endeavour, 438-9; Faraday delivers Bakerian Lectures, 453; John Herschel elected President, 465; Philosophical Transactions, 61, 100, 121-2, 152, 173, 198, 274, 286, 307, 413 Royal Zoological Society, 404 Rumford, Benjamin Thompson, Count: visits Herschel, 199; demonstrates heating effect of friction, 250; interviews Davy, 277; and founding of Royal Institution, 285; attends Davy’s Royal Institution lecture, 286; and finances of Royal Institution, 291; in Gillray cartoon, 292; second marriage (to Marie-Anne Lavoisier), 384 Rumford, Countess (formerly Lavoisier) see Lavoisier, Marie-Anne Rylands, Miss (of Bristol), 265 Sacks, Oliver: Uncle Tungsten, 298n Sadler, James, 144-5, 149, 156-8 Sadler, Windham, 158 Sage, Laetitia: makes first female balloon ascent, 141-3 Saint-Fond, Faujas de, 132, 196 Saint-Hilaire, Madame de, 129 Sandemanians, 352 Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th Earl of, 9, 43, 47, 50, 53 Sansanding, West Africa, 224, 226-7, 231 Satterley, John, 40 Saussure, Horace de, 12 Saxe-Gotha, Francis Frederick, Duke of, 168 Sceptic, The (anon. pamphlet), 273 Schelling, Friedrich, 315, 322, 329, 410 Schiller, Friedrich, 315; Wallenstein, 267 science: objectivity, xviii; dissemination of, xix; second revolution, xv-xvi; and error, 93, 94n; and biography, 94n; and observation, 249 & n; Coleridge defends, 267; Davy on philosophy and romance of, 288-90, 371; and religion, 312-13, 317-20, 449-50, 459; Davy writes on limits of contemporary knowledge, 355-6; rivalries and priority disputes in, 373 & n; application in British Empire and colonies, 386; and relations between master and apprentice researchers, 403 & n; debate on apparent decline in Britain, 435, 437-45; and feminism, 436n; Victorian expansion, 446, 468; and search for unifying laws, 458; continuation and global interest, 468-9 Science Museum, South Kensington, 404n scientific instruments, xviii scientist: as term, 253, 450 Scoresby, William, 455 Scotland: Davy honeymoons and holidays in, 346, 361 Scott, George: accompanies Park on second African expedition, 222; death, 224-5 Scott, Sir Walter: treated by Mungo Park, 221-2; Davy meets, 295; supposed authorship of Frankenstein, 325; friendship with Jane Apreece, 338; earnings, 344; entertains Davy and Jane on holiday, 398; on Davy’s decline, 414; depicted in Davy’s Salmonia, 417; reviews Davy’s Salmonia, 423; unsuccessfully urges Jane to publish account of Davy, 434 Scrope, Paul, 455 scurvy, 1 Sedgwick, Adam, 446-7, 449-50, 460 Sego, West Africa, 217, 224 Seven Years War (1756-63), 68 Seward, Anna, 50 Shakespeare, William, 429, 431, 443-4 Sheffield, William, 47-8 Sheldon, John, 146, 155 Shelley, Clara (Mary’s daughter), 327 Shelley, Harriet, 158 Shelley, Mary: on solitary scientific genius, xvii; told of James Lind, 121n; on Hypatia of Alexandria, 248; departs for Italy, 311; hears Davy lecture, 325-6; in Switzerland, 326-7; conceives science-fiction story, 327; pregnancy and birth of baby, 327, 331; and Vitalism, 327; and German origins of Frankenstein experiment, 329-30; and development of Dr Frankenstein’s Creature, 331-3; Frankenstein, 325-8, 456-7; stage and film adaptations, 334-5 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: taught by James Lind, 121n; and ballooning, 157-8, 162; on clouds, 160; and extraterrestrial beings, 167; treated by Lawrence, 311, 331; absent from Haydon’s ‘Immortal Dinner’, 318, 320; anti-Christian views, 320, 450; and authorship of Frankenstein, 325; speculative scientific/psychological essays, 326-7; in Switzerland, 326, 457; incorporates Davy’s ideas into work, 344; in Naples, 378-80; on Lac Leman with Byron, 383; revolutionary and atheistical ideas, 390-2; appends Notes to poems, 391; contracts ophthalmia, 407; drowned, 355, 408; obituary, 408; Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, 233, 311; ‘Epipsychidion’, 379-80, 425; ‘Essay on the Devil and Devils’, 391; ‘Essay on a Future State’, 311, 391; ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, 315n; ‘Mont Blanc’, 327; ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, 390; ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 356; ‘Ozymandias’, 404; Prometheus Unbound, 344, 391-3; Queen Mab, 344, 391 Shepherd, Antony, 168 Sheridan, Elizabeth (née Linley; RBS’s first wife), 76 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 76 Shortland, Michael and Richard Yeo (eds): Telling Lives in Science, 303n Silla, West Africa, 218 Simond, Louis, 292 Sir Lawrence (brig), 47 slave trade: Park’s influence on abolitionists, 233; Banks’s views on, 386-7 Slough: Caroline Herschel moves into rooms in, 188, 194-5; see also Grove, The smallpox: inoculation against, 285 Smiles, Samuel, 372 Smith, Adam: on property, 16n; Philosophical Enquiries, 172 Smith, Charlotte, 267 Smith, Robert, 61; Compleat System of Opticks, 74, 79, 88; Harmonics, 70, 74, 82 Smith, Sydney, 338, 341, 376 Snow, Stephanie J.: Operations without Pain, 284n Söderqvist, Thomas (ed.): The Poetics of Scientific Biography, 94n sodium: Davy discovers, 297-8 Soho Square, London: Banks’s house in, 54, 58, 381 Sokoto, West Africa, 230 Solander, Daniel: on Endeavour voyage, 1, 4, 9-10, 13-14, 23, 38n, 39; Banks nurses during illness, 40; advises Harriet Blosset to break with Banks, 42; celebrity on return from voyage, 42-3; journal appropriated, 44; helps Banks with publication of journal, 46; activities in London, 49; meets Omai, 50; in Parry portrait with Omai, 51; on Banks’s parting from Sarah Wells, 55; death, 56, 396 solar system: Herschel’s view of, 122 Somerset, Charlotte, Duchess of, 384 Somerset, Edward Adolphus, 11th Duke of, 393 Somerville, Mary, 179, 407, 447, 452, 454, 458; On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 394, 458, 459 Somerville, William, 447 Sotheby, William, 452 soul: concept of, 309, 311, 314, 316 South Africa: John Herschel sets up observatory in, 462-5 South America: Humboldt in, 406 Southey, Edith, 263 Southey, Robert: poems inspired by Bryan Edwards, 212; and Pantisocracy, 252, 259; edits Annual Anthology, 259, 269, 275; experiments with nitrous oxide, 263-5; describes Valley of the Rocks, 266; on difference between scientific and artistic temperaments, 274; believes Davy abandoning poetry, 275, 320; Davy corresponds with, 293; Davy climbs Helvellyn with, 295; Anna Beddoes requests to write biography of husband, 302; quotes Wordsworth’s ‘The Tables Turned’, 320; Davy introduces Jane to, 340; Thalaba the Destroyer, 232, 275 Southey, Thomas, 264 Spain: ship reaches Tahiti, 3 spectography, 440n Sporcken, General A.F. von, 70 Spöring, Herman, 10, 14, 40 Sprat, Mrs and Mrs (of Slough), 188, 195 Spufford, Francis: Cultural Babbage (with Jenny Uglow), 438n Staël, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de: Corinne, 338 Stansfield, Dorothy, 303n steam power: development, 382 Steffens, Henrick, 315 Steiner, George, 429n, 469n Stephenson, George: accuses Davy of plagiarising safety lamp, 371-5 Stock, John: Memoir on Beddoes, 302 Stowe, Misses (sisters), 182, 188 Strangelove, Dr (fictional figure), 465n Stukeley, William, xviiin, 456 Styria, 377 Success colliery, Newbottles, 361 Sumatra, 214 sun, the: Herschel believes inhabited, 199, 391; Herschel on effects on political revolutions, 204 Sun Fire Office (Guildhall), 376 surgery: without anaesthetic, 283, 305-6 Sussex, Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of, 436-7 Sydney Cove see Botany Bay Tabourai (Tahitian interpreter), 6 Tahiti (Otaheite): Banks visits, xxi, 1-7, 10, 13-14; thieving, 4-6, 16, 24, 27-8; Cook’s security measures, 15-16; sexual practices, 17-18, 25-6, 37, 42, 44, 46n; venereal disease in, 18; language, 19; trading, 19-20; grief practices, 22-3; surfing, 24-5; ceremonies and customs, 26-7, 32, 37-8; violations in, 27-8; differences and disharmony in, 28-9; food and cooking, 28; Cook and Banks circumnavigate, 29-32; evidence of cannibalism, 30; native structures, 31-2; tattooing, 32-3; Endeavour leaves, 35; Banks’s written accounts of, 36-7, 45; infanticide, 37-8; Parkinson’s published account of, 45; Omai returns to, 52, 54; as legend, 54; traditional ways destroyed, 59n Tambora volcano (Indonesia): erupts (1815), 383 Tarróa, Tahitian king, 212 Tasmania: exploration, 10 Tayeto (Tupia’s son), 40 Taylor, William, 275 telescopes: Herschel constructs, 60-1, 77, 83-5, 94; refractor type, 77-8; reflector type, 78; Herschel constructs forty-foot Newtonian form model, 163, 176-7, 181-2; forty-foot instrument put into operation, 190-1; management and maintenance problems, 191; forty-foot instrument dismantled, 465-6 Telescopium Herschelii (The Telescope; constellation), 409 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron: In Memoriam, 451n; ‘The Kraken’, 384; ‘Timbucto’, 227-9 Terapo (Tahitian woman), 22 Thelwall, John, 307, 316 Thénard, Louis-Jacques, 297 Thompson, Benjamin see Rumford, Count Thompson, John, 40 Thomson, James: The Seasons, 171, 172n, 243; ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, 440n Thornton, Dr Robert, 11, 41-2 Thrale, Susannah, 114 Ticknor, George, 359-60 Tierra del Fuego, 13, 15 Timbuctoo, 212, 215-16, 218, 220, 225, 227 Times, The: on Mungo Park’s return, 220; attacks Davy for accepting Prix Napoléon, 353; obituary of William Herschel, 408; on deaths of leading scientists, 435; reports on meetings of British Association, 447, 453 Tissandier, Gaston: Histoire des Ballons et Aeronauts Célèbres, 156 Tobin, James, 257, 431 Tobin, John, 431 Tonkin, John, 238-9, 241-4, 250, 253, 285 Tooke, John Horne, 307 Town and Country Magazine, 49 Trinity College, Dublin, 304 True Briton (journal), 220 Tuareg tribesmen, 227-8 Tupia (Tahitian priest), 34, 40 Turner, Joseph Mallord William: cloud paintings, 160 Uglow, Jenny: Cultural Babbage (with Francis Spufford), 438n; The Lunar Men, 246n ultraviolet light, 329 Underwood, Thomas, 272 universe (celestial system): Herschel’s views on, 11-12, 122-4, 204, 208-10 Uranus: Herschel discovers, 96-106, 207; name, 97 & n, 102n, 103; international acceptance of, 101; earlier sightings and recordings, 102; as symbol of Romantic science, 106 utilitarianism, 435 Venice, 380 Venus, Transit of (1768), 5, 10, 21-2, 91 Versailles: balloon ascents at, 126, 135 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (anon.), 451 Vesuvius: Davy visits, 356, 358, 378, 381 Victoria, Queen: takes chloroform during childbirth, 284 Vineyard Nurseries, Hammersmith, 11 Vitalism (Life Force), xix, 307, 309-18, 321-3, 325, 327, 354, 356, 421, 428, 431 Volta, Alessandro, 173, 295, 314, 355 voltaic batteries, 245, 273-4, 286, 295, 297, 299, 317, 328-9 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet: in Haydon painting, 319; Candide, 68; Letters on the English Nation, xviiin; Micromégas, 426 Voyager (spacecraft), 190 Wagner, Richard: Tristan and Isolde (opera), 242 Wakefield, Priscilla, 179 Wakley, Thomas, 336 Walker, William: Eminent Men of Science Living in 1807-8 (painting), 303 Waller, Edmund, 424 Wallis, Captain Samuel, 3, 17 Walls End colliery, Northumberland, 361-2, 368-9 Walmer Castle, Kent, 200 Walpole, Horace, 135-8, 140, 338 Walton, Izaak, 276; The Compleat Angler, 339 Wansey (musician), 265 Waterton, Charles, 232, 382; Wanderings in South America, 382 Watson, James: The Double Helix, 373n Watson, Sir William, 60-1, 101 Watson, Sir William, junior: friendship with Herschel, 60-2, 92-3, 98, 100-1, 108-9, 135, 164, 166, 178, 180; and Herschel’s marriage to Mary Pitt, 185-6; and philosophical significance of astronomy, 203 Watt, Gregory: friendship with Davy, 150, 263-4, 266, 275, 362; death, 293-4 Watt, James: recommends Beddoes to Banks, 235; son stays with Davy’s mother, 250; Beddoes seeks financial support from, 251; encourages Beddoes to recruit Davy, 252; Davy visits, 256; in Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments, 263; designs portable gas chamber, 269; letter from Banks on Beddoes’s project, 281 weather forecasting, 160n Webb, T.H., 87 Wedgwood, Thomas, 263, 281 Wedgwood family, 256 Wells, Dr Horace, 283 Wells, Sarah, 49, 53-6, 384 Whewell, William: and John Herschel, 387; supports Wollaston for presidency of Royal Society, 397; and John Herschel’s Study of Natural Philosophy, 441; and formation of British Association, 446-7, 449; and Bridgewater Treatises, 452; reviews Mary Somerville, 459; befriends Charles Darwin, 460; On the Plurality of Worlds, 209 White, Gilbert, 12, 48, 136, 146, 249n Whitehaven Collieries, 369 Wilberforce, William, 386 Wilson, Frances: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, 187n Windham, William, 140 Wiverou (Tahitian chief), 30 Wollaston, William Hyde, 369, 374, 397-9, 401-2, 417, 436, 438-9 Wollstonecraft, Mary: published by Johnson, 106, 271; earnings, 179; Godwin writes Memoir of, 267; Davy supports, 304 women: earnings and professional status, 179-80; Davy advocates scientific knowledge for education of, 304; and third British Association meeting, 447, 452; membership of British Association, 459 wonder: nature of, xx Woodford, Revd James, 136 Wooster, David: Paula Trevelyan, 460n Wordsworth, Dora (William’s daughter), 203n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 186n, 203n, 249n Wordsworth, John (William’s son), 203n Wordsworth, Mary (née Hutchinson), 186n Wordsworth, William: on Newton, xvi-xvii, 320, 469n; published by Johnson, 106, 271; marriage to Mary Hutchinson, 186n; regional roots, 236; Coleridge visits in Lake District, 267; influence on Davy’s poetry, 276; Davy visits in Lake District, 295; at Haydon’s ‘Immortal Dinner’, 318; in Haydon painting, 319; quarrel with Coleridge, 340; honoured with dinner, 348; on Davy’s decline, 414; John Davy acts as doctor to, 433; effect of poetry on John Stuart Mill, 441; Coleridge on poetry of, 449; Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge), 254, 275, 291; On Church and State, 449; Peter Bell, 162; The Prelude, 232, 320, 431, 469n; ‘The Tables Turned’, 320; ‘Tintern Abbey’, 316 Wright, Joseph (of Derby): paintings, xix; influenced by Priestley, 246 Wright, Thomas, 77; Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 91 Wynn, William, 265 Yansong, West Africa, 230 York, Edward, Duke of (George III’s brother), 75, 177 Young, Edward: Night Thoughts, 92 & n Young, Thomas, 436 Zoffany, Johann, 8, 47 ALSO BY RICHARD HOLMES One for Sorrow (poems) Shelley: The Pursuit Shelley on Love (editor) Gautier: My Fantoms (translations) Nerval: The Chimeras (with Peter Jay) Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin: A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs (editor, Penguin Classics) De Feministe en de Filosoof Dr Johnson & Mr Savage Coleridge: Early Visions Coleridge: Darker Reflections Coleridge: Selected Poems (editor, Penguin Classics) Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer Insights: The Romantic Poets and their Circle Classic Biographies (series editor) Copyright HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk Published by HarperPress in 2008 Copyright © Richard Holmes 2008 FIRST EDITION The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-34988-3 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

There's a word for such a continuum of policy. Empire. The American Empire. An appellation that does not roll easily off an American tongue. No American has any difficulty believing in the existence and driving passion for expansion, power, glory and wealth of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the British Empire. It's right there in their schoolbooks. But to the American mind, to American schoolbooks and to the American media, the history of empires has come to a grinding halt. The American Empire? An oxymoron. A compelling lust for political, economic and military hegemony over the rest of the world, divorced from moral considerations?


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

In fact it was Theresa May who set out the classic case for international cooperation and arbitration like that embodied in the EU and the ECJ. In April 2016 she argued in a speech that no country or empire in world history has ever been totally sovereign, completely in control of its destiny. Even at the height of their power, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the Ottomans, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, modern-day America, were never able to have everything their own way. At different points, military rivals, economic crises, diplomatic manoeuvring, competing philosophies and emerging technologies all played their part in inflicting defeats and hardships, and necessitated compromises even for states as powerful as these.


pages: 300 words: 99,432

Godforsaken Sea by Derek Lundy

Apollo 11, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, the scientific method, William Langewiesche, Winter of Discontent

His head was cradled in a lap. He waved the stub of his severed finger at them, worried that someone might try to grab his hand. “You’ll be all right, mate. You’ll be all right!” Bullimore heard the Australian accents, so much like his own, on the far side of the earth from England. An inheritance of the British empire of the sea. They lifted the whole inflatable out of the sea and onto the ship’s deck with tackles, rather than trying to get Bullimore up a ladder. On deck, to Bullimore’s astonishment, Dubois stepped forward, grabbed his hand, and shook it. Bullimore, of course, knew nothing about the Frenchman’s ordeal.


Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

British Empire, delayed gratification, European colonialism, lateral thinking, microplastics / micro fibres, neurotypical, urban sprawl, wage slave

Street preachers took to self-flagellation and ranting about the Apocalypse, though they seemed disappointed: where were the trumpets and angels, why hadn’t the moon turned to blood? Pundits in suits appeared on the screen; medical experts, graphs showing infection rates, maps tracing the extent of the epidemic. They used dark pink for that, as for the British Empire once. Jimmy would have preferred some other colour. There was no disguising the fear of the commentators. Who’s next, Brad? When are they going to have a vaccine? Well, Simon, they’re working round the clock from what I hear, but nobody’s claiming to have a handle on this thing yet. It’s a biggie, Brad.


The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

WILD CARDS • 183 But peak oil is not the only wild card that might fundamentally alter the consequences of the revolutions that are under way in American energy. m m m In 1910, Norman Angell, an English journalist then living in Paris, published a book titled The Great Illusion.7 Europe had become so deeply integrated, he argued, that leaders would be mad to even contemplate war. The British Empire supplied one-fifth of German raw materials and food, and the transactions behind that trade were financed through London.8 Fully one-third of the rapidly growing foreign investment in Russia came from France.9 Only a fool would risk a major conflict. Four years later, the Continent was engulfed in a conflagration.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

They recognized further that “the foremost requirement” to secure these ends was “the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament”—then, as now, a central component of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.” At the time, these ambitions were limited to “the non-German world,” which was to be organized under the US aegis as a “Grand Area,” including the Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire, and the Far East. After it became fairly clear that Germany would be defeated, the plans were extended to include as much of Eurasia as possible.11 The precedents, barely sampled here, reveal the narrow range of the planning spectrum. Policy flows from an institutional framework of domestic power, which remains fairly stable.


pages: 357 words: 98,854

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

Since Professor Edwards received his early research training in Conrad Waddington’s lab, we can think of Azim Surani as Conrad Waddington’s intellectual grandson. Azim Surani is another of those UK academics who carries his prestige very lightly, despite his status. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Commander of the British Empire, and has been awarded the prestigious Gabor Medal and Royal Society Royal Medal. Like John Gurdon and Adrian Bird, he continues to break new ground in a research area that he pioneered over a quarter of a century ago. Starting in the mid 1980s, Azim Surani carried out a programme of experiments which showed unequivocally that mammalian reproduction is much more than a matter of a delivery system.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

It owes this reputation to the work of the Scottish reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who two hundred years ago delivered a crippling blow to his era’s burgeoning optimism about the prospects for human progress. In An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, published in 1798, the economist and demographer shook the self-confidence of the British Empire by arguing that the limited nature of the earth’s endowments would condemn humankind to poverty. Civilization would be kept in check by an inevitable scarcity of food. The process was straightforward: unable to control their reproductive urges, families would respond to any increase in their income by having more children.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

A first age of globalization had occurred from 1880 to 1914, roughly contemporaneous with the classical gold standard, while the period from 1989 to 2007 was really the second age of globalization. In the first, the wonders were not the Internet or jets but radio, telephones and steamships. The British Empire operated an internal market and single-currency zone as vast as the European Union. In 1900, China was open to trade and investment, albeit on coercive terms, Russia had finally begun to throw off its late feudal model and modernize its industry and agriculture, and a unified Germany was becoming an industrial colossus.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

The Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada and the East India Trading Company in India, for example, were some of the first corporate entities established on the stock market. Both these companies were granted trading monopolies by the British Crown, and were able to extract resources and amass massive profits as a direct result of the subjugation of local communities through the use of the British Empire’s military and police forces. The attendant processes of corporate expansion and colonization continue today, most evident in this country with the Alberta tar sands. In the midst of an economic crisis, corporations’ ability to accumulate wealth is dependent on discovering new frontiers from which to extract resources.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

We do not yet know, of course, just how much suffering global warming will inflict, but the scale of devastation could make that debt enormous, by any measure—larger, conceivably, than any historical debt owed one country or one people by another, almost none of which are ever properly repaid. If that seems like excessive hyperbole, consider that the British Empire was conjured out of the smoke of fossil fuels and that, today, thanks to that smoke, the marshland of Bangladesh is poised to drown and the cities of India to cook within just the span of a single lifetime. In the twentieth century, the United States did not establish such explicit political dominion, but the global empire it presided over nevertheless transformed many of the nations of the Middle East into oil-pipeline client states—nations now scorched every summer by heat approaching uninhabitable levels in places, and where temperatures are expected to become so hot in the region’s holiest mecca that pilgrimages, once the annual rite of millions of Muslims, will be as lethal as genocide.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

We could, it was thought, become an older, less populated and greener country. This has been turned on its head by immigration. For much of its recent history, and especially in the nineteenth century, Britain exported people (and Ireland more so). The displaced rural populations colonised the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and countries throughout the British Empire. It was the safety valve as mortality rates fell. Britain started the twentieth century with a population of around 25 million, and ended it with around 60 million. Nature was bound to suffer as a result, especially as the 60 million were many times wealthier than the 25 million. Immigration picked up as the Empire slowly wound down, with notable flows from the Caribbean and then Uganda and East Africa, and from India and Pakistan.


pages: 290 words: 98,699

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle by Phil Laut, Andy Fuehl

Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business process, buy and hold, declining real wages, fear of failure, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, index card, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce

Taking the observer’s view gave Gandhi the ability to create a win-win solution. Gandhi was so good at this process that he was able to do it even during conflicts. He could see perspectives and change his behaviors and strategy to gain a winning outcome. He moved an entire nation to defeat the British empire without violence. Now, that’s personal power! Remember these four key points when using perceptual positions: 1. To enhance positive experiences even more, take position #1 and be associated. You want to keep the positive emotions. 2. To neutralize or remove negative emotions from an experience, use position #2 as a dissociated observer.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Thanks in part to the legal arguments of a railroad industry lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, for example, the rights of local municipalities were subordinated to those of corporations that needed thoroughfare for their trains and cargo. Time and timing began to mean more than place. Transcontinental commerce required synchronized activity over great distances, leading to “standard time” and the drawing of time zones across the map. (Greenwich Mean Time’s placement in the United Kingdom represented the British Empire’s lingering domination of the globe.) Likewise, the telegraph emerged primarily as a communication system through which train crashes could be minimized. Directing the motion of trains with red lights and green lights was eventually applied to cars and ultimately to people navigating the crosswalks—all timed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and speed.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

The opportunity had been there to take, but the titans of the industry, IBM, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, had all hesitated at the prospect of a costly battle with the upstart.35 Again and again, we see Amazon moving quickly, losing money, struggling to cope with the demand it created, and in the end, dominating a market. Yet because of Amazon’s decisiveness and its tolerance for creating and then navigating an almighty mess, it left schwerfällig competitors outmaneuvered and gasping to catch up. • • • From Rommel’s half-formed expeditionary force against the might of the British Empire, to Bezos taking on Barnes & Noble, to Donald Trump targeting the Bush dynasty—the messy strategy has been embraced by the underdog. This is no coincidence. Maintaining momentum is exhausting; constantly improvising at speed is terribly risky. There is nothing in Boyd’s theory that says a strong force cannot act swiftly and confusingly, getting inside an enemy’s OODA loop.


pages: 301 words: 100,599

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, white picket fence

The lodge had turrets with round rooms and medieval doors, hand-carved from African olive wood, and the living room boasted an immense fireplace with a carved mantelpiece. The staff spoke very little English, but they were intent on maintaining English hospitality for the rare guest who might happen to show up. The Mount Elgon Lodge was a monument to the incomplete failure of the British Empire, which carried on automatically, like an uncontrollable tic, in the provincial backwaters of Africa long after it had died at the core. In the evenings, as the frost-tinged night came on, the staff built fires of Elgon olive logs in the fireplaces, and the food in the dining room was horrible, in the best English tradition.


pages: 359 words: 98,396

Family Trade by Stross, Charles

book value, British Empire, glass ceiling, haute couture, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, land reform, Larry Ellison, new economy, retail therapy, sexual politics, trade route

I figure with their social standing the Clan could push industrialization and development policies that would drag the whole Gruinmarkt into the nineteenth century within a couple of generations, and a little later it would be able to export stuff that people over here would actually want to buy. Land reform and tools to boost agricultural efficiency, set up schools, build steel mills, and start using the local oil reserves in Pennsylvania—it could work. The Gruinmarkt could bootstrap into the kind of maritime power the British Empire was, back in the Victorian period. As the only people able to travel back and forth freely, we’d be in an amazing position—-a natural monopoly! The question is: How do we get there from here?” Roland watched her pull her pants on. “That’s a lot to think about,” he said doubtfully. “Not that I’m saying it can’t be done, but it’s … it’s big.”


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Indeed, Plaid Cymru boasts of having more ethnic minority councillors than the other Welsh parties put together, while the first Asian elected to the Scottish Parliament was a member of the SNP. Central to the jingoist streak in English nationalism is the long, sordid history of Empire. 'It's not that long ago, certainly when I was growing up, when you had the map with all the red blocks of where the British Empire ruled,' trade union leader Billy Hayes notes. The centuries-old traditions of domi- nation over other peoples have left a very large imprint in the national psyche, which the BNP constantly manipulates. The far right have switched their targets of choice over the years: Jews, Irish, blacks and Asians were each the villains at various points.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Cheap land for agriculture was running out, but the land brought forth a new gift that would enable the United States to dominate the next stage of global industrialization. The transition from a nation of farmers to a nation of urban workers was lubricated with oil. In the nineteenth century, the British Empire ran on coal from the rich seams of Yorkshire, South Wales, and Lancashire. The twentieth century for the United States was fueled by the oil from Pennsylvania, Texas, and the American Southwest. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the United States produced as much as 65 percent of the entire world’s oil supply.14.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

The 1842 Treaty of Nanking also gave control in perpetuity over an area that British naval forces had seized, called Hong Kong, or Fragrant Harbour (Heung Gong in the original language, or Xianggang in Mandarin). The treaty also established other ‘treaty ports’, including Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Ningpo (Ningbo). Hong Kong, world-renowned and one-time symbol of the British Empire and British reach overseas, was returned to China in 1997 in a ‘handover’, the twentieth anniversary of which was celebrated in China in 2017. Some of its brick and stone buildings still speak to its colonial past, as do the names of its streets, such as Connaught Street and Wellington Street, and of some companies, such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the modern incarnations of the old Butterfield and Swire Group, and the subsidiaries of Jardine Matheson Holdings.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In fact, according to Quartz, which analyzed Academy Award acceptance speeches between 1966 and 2016, he actually tied with God for the total number of times each was thanked on Oscar night—thirty four. His films garnered over three hundred Oscar nominations. The Queen made him an honorary Commander of the British Empire. Weinstein hoarded his power and spent it like currency to maintain his vaunted position: he could make or break a star, he had huge personal capacity to green-light a project or sink it. He shaped the fortunes of an entire industry—and in turn that industry protected him even as he carried out a decades-long spree of alleged sexual harassment and assault.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He had inherited tens of millions of pounds and never needed to work. He could have dedicated his life to noble pursuits or simply settled into a life of leisure, sponging off his trust fund. But instead he chose SCL. Nix couldn’t help himself—he was intoxicated by power. Born too late to play colonial master in the old British Empire, he treated SCL as the modern equivalent. As Nix put it in one of our meetings, he got to “play the white man.” “They [are] just niggers,” he once said to a colleague in an email, referring to black politicians in Barbados. We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders.


pages: 332 words: 102,372

The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams

Beeching cuts, British Empire, Ford Model T, Google Earth, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, joint-stock company, Neil Kinnock, plutocrats, railway mania, Snapchat, tontine

It is hard to imagine the shock to Merseyside when it was shut down in 1956. We had not yet encountered Dr Beeching, but it indisputably ranks as one of the most traumatic British railway line closures of all time. Few railway systems have been so completely obliterated as this great transport artery of the once-second city of the British empire, with all signs of it almost entirely purged. Which is why I’m standing at a cold bus stop on Lime Street waiting for the number 82 to Toxteth, hoping I might find the vestiges of the terminus in the docklands streets where the line once began. No Maggie Mays or drunken sailors on today’s Lime Street, with its boarded-up shops, just a gaggle of Chinese university students passing by on their way to the halls of residence fronting Lime Street station – a sign of changing times.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

So it was that in 1923, when Labour finally achieved enough seats to form a minority government with Liberal support, MacDonald reassured both the King and the wider public that Labour would ‘not be influenced … by any consideration other than national well-being’.16 This had both domestic and colonial aspects. As colonial minister, former railway union leader J. H. Thomas offered assurances that he was there ‘to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire’, and duly proved his mettle in this regard by sending RAF bombers to Iraq.17 On the home agenda, MacDonald’s ministry kept its sights low, noting that a minority government could not be expected to achieve all that much. Such nugatory reforms as it did offer included improvements to housing and welfare provision, and some tax cuts paid for by a budget surplus – including cutting taxes on corporate profits.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Reflecting on feminism in Finland, Norway, Italy and Britain, He-Yin Zhen argued that the ‘ultimate goal of women’s liberation is to free the world from the rule of man and from the rule of woman’, not to sustain the rule of men by adding women to patriarchy. ‘[D]id such powerful female sovereigns as Queen Victoria of the British Empire or Empresses Lü Zhi and … Wu Zetian in the dynastic history of China ever bring the slightest benefits to the majority of women?’90 The goal of anarchist activism was non-domination, and direct action – active liberation – was the only possible means of its achievement. Contemporary anarchists often describe the alignment of means with ends that de Cleyre and He-Yin Zhen tied to direct action as ‘prefiguration’.


pages: 307 words: 102,477

The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep by Dr. Guy Leschziner

23andMe, Berlin Wall, British Empire, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

In the present day, the area around the observatory is dominated by the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, the main financial district of London, looming over the city from across the river. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the Thames below would have been chock-full of sailing ships, ferrying the lifeblood of trade through the British Empire. Hundreds of telescopes would have been focused on the time ball of the observatory, waiting for the ball to drop. This would be the sailors’ opportunity to reset the chronometer on board each ship to Greenwich Mean Time, crucial for the calculation of longitude on their journeys to the East Indies and beyond.


Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

The salvation of Europe in the eighteenth century, with its immense yields the potato quickly replaced all other vegetables to become the main source of food. The dependence became too great, however, and when blight hit the crops it caused massive famine in the nineteenth century, which devastated many areas and caused the mass migrations from Scotland and Ireland to the USA and other parts of the British Empire. One of the reasons the blight spread so quickly was the custom of using the previous year’s potatoes and swapping them with others. There are hundreds of varieties – both for new/earlies and main crops. They are very easy to grow and give excellent yields. Digging up the first potatoes of the year is always a great moment.


pages: 393 words: 102,801

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

As we saw in Chapter 1, from the time of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, many people in possession of this citizenship who had not been born in the UK did not actually have the right to live in the country of which they were nominally considered citizens. Going further back in history, before the 1948 Act came into force the only form of British legal status was that of the British subject. This ancient common law status applied to all, or at least most, residents of the British Empire. So, until the 1981 Act, it made no sense in legal terms to use the word ‘British’ to describe residents of Great Britain; all the available legal meanings of ‘British’ described a far, far wider group of people. To confuse matters further, there are other forms of British legal status, aside from British citizenship, that still exist today.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

In England, along with entailment and primogeniture, the key building block that the wealthy used for wealth transmission was the trust—perhaps the single greatest ownership invention of Anglo-American law. Scholars attribute a substantial measure of the economic dynamism and dominance of the British Empire, and now the American one, to the power of the corporate form, a close relative of the trust. Trusts are masterpieces of flexible governance. In simple terms, a trust separates legal ownership from practical benefit. Imagine a wealthy owner places stocks, bonds, art, and real estate in a newly created trust to benefit family members.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

As Postma wrote, with typical Dutch understatement, while the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Netherlands is generally remembered as an incubator for the arts, ‘for some half a million unfortunate Africans who were transported across the Atlantic, the Dutch must have been remembered in a more negative way’. In the UK, discussion of the British Empire in books, in schools or on television often retained a jingoistic flavour, but also generally acknowledged the negative consequences of empire and the heavy price paid by the inhabitants of many British colonies. When the Dutch slave trade ended, it was quickly forgotten and the darker side of the Golden Age was rarely acknowledged.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

There was no single cause behind the Industrial Revolution. It was prompted by a range of different technological advances, coupled with some unique historical and geographical circumstances. In the UK – usually regarded as the home of the Industrial Revolution – cotton was imported from the United States and the British Empire, and was processed in factories, mostly in the north of England. The empire provided not just the raw cotton, but also a large market for the finished goods, thus providing the economic conditions that enabled the UK textile industry to flourish. A series of technological advances in textile processing from the 1730s onwards made it possible to build larger, faster textile-processing machines which could manufacture fabrics of a consistently high quality and on a scale that was impossible in cottage industries.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

They engulfed Portugal and Spain, France and the Habsburg Empire, the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, France and England, among others—until two world wars and the prospects of nuclear annihilation sobered us up. The Cold War is one of the four exceptional cases that ended peacefully, mostly because the rising Soviet Union became a declining power, eventually collapsing from within. Another exception is the British Empire. The United States eclipsed the United Kingdom without a fight, in part because changing control posed no threat to the English language or its political and economic regime; and the United Kingdom needed the US support in both world wars. Those two exceptions do not provide much encouragement for the United States and China.


The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

Limited (1985–2001). Was chairman of panels of Textile Machinery Manufacturers’ Association. Holds a BE degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial engineering. S. Ramadorai 16 September 2009 Recipient of Padma Bhushan in 2006 and CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2009. Was CEO and MD of TCS (2004–09); thirty-two years of total work experience at TCS. Advisor to the prime minister in the National Skill Development Council. M. K. Sharma 25 October 2012 Inducted into the board of Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) in 1995 as a whole-time director. Vice chairman of HUL (2000–07).


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

There was only one place in which to express that self-determination. They had to go home.* * * * *This is the Jewish version of the same kind of faith-based views on land ownership that motivated the Muslim conquests of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent; the Crusades; the rise of the British Empire; Manifest Destiny and the “white man’s burden” in the United States; and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe after World War II. In other words, countless countries have engaged in what they understood to be divinely (or at least ideologically) sanctioned land grabs. *This gave rise to one of the strange ironies of American Jewish life: In order to compete with Christmas for the hearts and minds of Jewish kids, assimilated American Jews elevated Chanukah, a relatively minor festival, to major holiday status—even though it celebrates a military victory by religious extremists over not only an occupying power, but also fellow Jews who had adopted non-Jewish customs (that is, who had assimilated).


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

They could not, therefore, be the legal stewards. In contrast, the property owner ended their migrations, set up a house, tilled and sowed. They made the land productive rather than just harvesting Nature’s bounty. This work justified the privileges of landlord-ship. The Fundamental Constitutions became one of the original texts of the British Empire, based on the notion of improvement of the land as a definition of property rights: the world was thus enclosed. Where did this leave Mary, who clearly had no intention of getting her hands dirtied by work? Was the harvesting of rents a requisite definition of productivity, even if she did not actually produce anything at all?


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Glasgow grew around the religious site established in the 6th century by St Kentigern, better known as St Mungo (originally an affectionate nickname). It became an important bishop’s seat, but the cathedral that was built here is one of the few remnants of the medieval city. It was swept away by the energies of a new age – the age of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. Glasgow’s west-coast position led to it becoming an important port for trade with the Americas. In the 18th century much of the tobacco trade between Europe and the USA was routed through Glasgow, providing a great source of wealth. The tobacco barons were responsible for much construction around the city that remains today.

The cliched images that spring to mind when you say ‘Scotland’ – bagpipes, haggis, tartans, misty glens – owe much to the romantic depictions of the country developed at this time. The Industrial Revolution The development of the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Glasgow, deprived of its lucrative tobacco trade following the American War of Independence (1776–83), developed into an industrial powerhouse, the ‘second city’ of the British Empire. Cotton mills, iron and steelworks, chemical plants, shipbuilding yards and heavy-engineering works proliferated along the River Clyde in the 19th century, powered by southern Scotland’s abundant coal mines. The Clearances and the Industrial Revolution had shattered the traditional rural way of life, and though manufacturing cities and ports thrived in these decades of Empire, wealth was generated for a select few by an impoverished many.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Best Places to Eat A Ubiquitous Chip A Stravaigin A Mother India A Ox & Finch A Saramago Café Bar A Topolabamba Best Places to Sleep A Alamo Guest House A Grasshoppers A 15Glasgow A Hotel du Vin A Malmaison History Glasgow grew around the cathedral founded by St Kertigan, later to become St Mungo, in the 6th century. Unfortunately, with the exception of the cathedral, virtually nothing of the medieval city remains. It was swept away by the energies of a new age – the age of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. In the 18th century, much of the tobacco trade between Europe and the USA was routed through Glasgow, providing a great source of wealth. Even after the tobacco trade declined in the 19th century, the city continued to prosper as a centre of textile manufacturing, shipbuilding and the coal and steel industries.

Most clan tartans are in fact a 19th-century invention (long after the demise of the clan system), partly inspired by the writings of Sir Walter Scott. The Industrial Revolution The development of the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Glasgow, deprived of its lucrative tobacco trade following the American War of Independence (1776–83), developed into an industrial powerhouse, the 'second city' of the British Empire. Cotton mills, iron and steelworks, chemical plants, shipbuilding yards and heavy-engineering works proliferated along the River Clyde in the 19th century, powered by southern Scotland's abundant coal mines. The Clearances and the Industrial Revolution had shattered the traditional rural way of life, and though manufacturing cities and ports thrived in these decades of Empire, wealth was generated for a select few by an impoverished many.


The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, British Empire, citizen journalism, clean water, country house hotel, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, land reform, self-driving car, spice trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Commonwealth War Cemetery Lady Magdalene Drive • Daily 7am–4pm • Free • cwgc.org West of Kandy, the moving Commonwealth War Cemetery is set amid beautiful gardens tucked into a peaceful little hollow in the hills next to the Mahaweli Ganga. The cemetery is home to around 200 immaculately maintained graves of servicemen who died in Sri Lanka during World War II, including army, navy and air-force personnel from across the British Empire – Britain, Canada, India, East Africa, plus 26 Sri Lankans from the Ceylon Light Infantry, Ceylon Pioneers, Ceylon Engineers and other regiments. Peradeniya Botanical Gardens 6km southwest of Kandy • Daily 7.30am–6pm • Rs.1500 • A tuktuk to the gardens costs around Rs.400 one way from Kandy; alternatively, take bus #644 (every 10–15min) from the Clocktower Bus Stand Enclosed within a meandering loop of the Mahaweli Ganga, the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens are among the largest and finest in Asia, covering almost 150 acres and stuffed with a bewildering variety of local and foreign tree and plants (many of them labelled).

Trumpeting his new acquisitions with relentless advertising and a new slogan (“Direct from the Tea Gardens to the Teapot”), Lipton put Ceylon tea firmly on the world map and massively stimulated demand for it back in Britain. His was also the first company to sell tea in pre-packaged cartons, thus guaranteeing quantity and quality to hard-pressed housewives – while ensuring that the Lipton’s brand received the widest possible exposure. As a commercial expression of the might of the British Empire, Lipton’s tea was unparalleled. Lipton succeeded not only in establishing his brand as the number one tea at home and throughout the colonies, but also largely killed off demand for the traditional and more delicate but unpredictable China teas that had previously formed the mainstay of the trade, fostering a taste for the black, full-bodied and reliably strong blends that remain the norm in the UK right up to the present day.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples. The original exponents of the idea blamed Rousseau, but before long students of literary history were scouring the archives looking for traces of the ‘noble savage’ everywhere.

Anthropology, it must be confessed, did not play a stellar role here. For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists tended to describe the societies they studied in ahistorical terms, as living in a kind of eternal present. Some of this was an effect of the colonial situation under which much ethnographic research was carried out. The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men’s houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change – forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement – was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The countries that are comparably open—Canada, Australia—aren’t nearly as large; those whose economies are comparably large—Japan, unified Europe, eventually China or India— aren’t nearly as open. The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it. At the height of the British Empire, colonial subjects from the Raj to Malaya to the Caribbean modeled themselves in part on Englishmen; Nehru 07-2151-2 ch7.indd 154 5/20/13 6:55 PM A GLOBAL NETWORK OF TRADING CITIES 155 and Lew Kuan Yew went to Cambridge, Gandhi to University College, London. Ho Chi Minh wrote in French for magazines in Paris.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

In England these virtues are perceived as belonging to sailors rather than to soldiers. The English have not been exempt from the vice of military idolatry. A hundred years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an essay with the title “The English Admirals,” eloquently expressing the feelings of pride and glory which were then driving the worldwide expansion of the British Empire: Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these sayings and doings of the English Admirals.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

Instead she saw military units and anti-aircraft missile batteries. Even though she remembered every word of what she'd read of the Aubreys, she was still stunned at the sight of their mansion. After World War II they'd purchased an English manor house from one of the grand estates of central England--one that had gone bankrupt as the British Empire started to collapse. They'd had the house dismantled stone by stone and reassembled here in south Texas. A hundred-room neoclassical mansion done in solid granite blocks, replete with acres of ornamental gardens and statuary. It was as if Philips had just rolled up to Castle Howard in Regency-period England.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

Unlike the earlier gold standard, the Bretton Woods system set up at the end of World War II involved a two-tiered global system, with the dollar pegged to gold and other currencies pegged to the dollar. Since the dollar was the major international reserve asset (with sterling playing a smaller and diminishing role as the British Empire faded) the United States was guaranteed a steady increase in demand for its assets as the need for reserves expanded along with the global economy. In the view of the Europeans, the low cost of borrowing coming from this “exorbitant privilege” (in the words of then Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing of France) was being used to finance excessive fiscal deficits such as those used to pay for the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.


pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

And there are the illuminated manuscripts of cities and small places—the book they make of our lights under the dark-fallen hours, as if flight had been granted only to help us remember that there is a grace to the lights we place on the world; to remind us that everything we know is embowered by stars. — It was once said that the British Empire spanned so much of the globe that the sun would never set on it. An Indian-born professor of mine in college, when he found out I was moving to Britain, warned that after a few wintry weeks in the heart of the former empire I might find myself wondering whether the sun had ever risen on it. On the ground, sunset is often an unsatisfactory affair, affected or obliterated entirely by clouds, pollution, and weather, and further handicapped by the fact that, unless we are sailors or farmers, we rarely have a clear view both down to and along the horizon.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Surveying the fall of the Netherlands as a trading empire in the seventeenth century, he wrote: ‘Every capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial capitalism, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it [is] a sign of autumn.’30 Proponents of the ‘financial autumn’ theory point to the same pattern in the Genoese Republic – the main financial centre of the late Middle Ages – then the Netherlands, and then London towards the end of the British Empire. But in each of these examples, the pattern was for the dominant power to become lender to the world. Under neoliberalism, this has been reversed. The USA – and the West in general – have become the borrowers, not the lenders. This is a break in the long-term pattern. So, too, is wage stagnation.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Rome did the same for the Romans, as did Constantinople for the Byzantines and then the Ottomans. The British colonized and established a chain of cities that linked their empire together, including Cape Town (colonized in 1814), Singapore (1824), and Hong Kong (1842). Today these key cities serve as their respective countries’ and regions’ links to the world, much as they did for the British Empire. Cities are incubators of growth because they produce positive externalities, or spillover effects. They allow ideas, labor, and capital to flow rapidly and efficiently. Talent can be more effectively coordinated, and markets can become more specialized. The most important cities from an economic standpoint are so-called alpha cities, for example, Shanghai, London, New York, and Tokyo.


pages: 431 words: 106,435

How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher

British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, cotton gin, financial engineering, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, white flight, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

He had initially opposed the Stamp Act and fought successfully for its repeal a year after it was passed, but for him as well as the “Sons of Liberty,” a colonial group of nascent rebels riled by the hated tax, Parliament’s ameliorative gesture was too little, too late. Asked if the Crown should send military forces to suppress colonial dissent, he said, “They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.” The visionary apologist for an American union, initially within the British Empire, now saw no alternative to true independence. In 1772, Franklin forwarded to some Massachusetts firebrands letters that had been written by Thomas Hutchinson, the colony’s governor, in which he advocated “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in America. Scandal ensued on both sides of the Atlantic when the letters were published, although for different reasons.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

Its effect on the world rivals that of any other invention, including the printing press and the microchip. Dava Sobel, in her definitive history of Harrison’s creation, Longitude, notes (without endorsing) the theory that the chronometer “facilitated England’s mastery over the oceans and thereby led to the creation of the British Empire, for it was by dint of the chronometer . . . that Britannia ruled the waves.” Through the historical lens of Cook’s voyages, the impact of the chronometer is conspicuous. Cook’s first Pacific voyage opened the region to European exploration, even if just by affirming that the ocean existed as something more than a shipping lane; but his second voyage held the door open for others to rush in.


pages: 438 words: 109,306

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World by Adam Lebor

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute cuisine, IBM and the Holocaust, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, special drawing rights

The bond between Norman and Schacht, for example, lasted for almost thirty years, until Norman died in 1950. It outlasted the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, the stock market crash of 1929, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, Schacht’s trial at Nuremberg for war crimes, the disintegration of the British Empire, the onset of the Cold War, and the division of Germany. Such deep connections between powerful men were rare and potentially valuable. Even the BIS’s more nebulous mandate of central bank cooperation had its defenders. Economists and bankers had long argued that as the world economy became more sophisticated, and central banks became more powerful, there was a need for some kind of coordinating body to ensure financial stability.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

See also China Zhou Enlai (Chinese Communist leader), 40, 58, 78, 176n.35 on China’s hygiene campaign and accusations against U.S. of biological warfare use during Korean War, 201–3, 208 friendship with Joseph Needham, 94, 96, 99, 163, 201n.42, 234, 235 photos of, 209, 235 Zhuangzi, 164 Zhu Jingying, 81–82 Zhu Kezhen (scholar), book and manuscript collection donated to Joseph Needham by, 175–77 Zuckerman, Solly, 32 Zunyi, China, 175 About the Author SIMON WINCHESTER’s many books include The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa, and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these has been a New York Times bestseller and has appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by HM The Queen in 2006. He lives in western Massachusetts. www.SimonWinchester.com Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. Also by Simon Winchester A Crack in the Edge of the World The Meaning of Everything Krakatoa The Map That Changed the World The Fracture Zone The Professor and the Madman The River at the Center of the World Small World Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons Pacific Nightmare Pacific Rising Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles Outposts Prison Diary: Argentina Stones of Empire Their Noble Lordships American Heartbeat In Holy Terror Credits Jacket photographs: © Imagemore Co., Ltd.


pages: 321 words: 85,893

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, longitudinal study, McMansion, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, out of africa, peak oil, placebo effect, Rosa Parks, the built environment, vertical integration

It was his conclusion that cancer, one of the prime diseases of civilization, is caused by the foods of civilization: “far-reaching changes in bodily functioning and metabolism are introduced which, extending over many years, are the causes or conditions predisposing to the development of malignant new growths, and in part at least explain the observed increase in the cancer death rate of practically all civilized and highly urbanized countries.”173 British doctors gathered evidence from Asia as well. C.P. Donnison examined British Colonial Office medical reports, which compiled diagnoses from hospitals across the British empire. In his book Civilization and Disease, published in 1938, he wrote that many doctors encountered no diabetes in indigenous populations. But as the local people assimilated (whether forcibly or voluntarily) to civilized foods, “a great incidence is recorded.”174 At its 1907 conference, the British Medical Association organized a panel specifically on diabetes in the tropics.


pages: 482 words: 106,041

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

The Aberdares forest will pour through the deactivated fence, repossessing shambas and overrunning an old colonial relic below, the Aberdares Country Club, its fairways currently kept trimmed by resident warthogs. Only one thing stands in the forest’s way from reconnecting the wildlife corridors up to Mount Kenya and down to the Samburo desert: a ghost of the British Empire, in the form of eucalyptus groves. Among the myriad species loosed on the world by humans that have surged beyond control, eucalyptus joins ailanthus and kudzu as encroachers that will bedevil the land long after we’ve departed. To power steam locomotives, the British often replaced slow-maturing tropical hardwood forests with fast-growing eucalyptus from their Australian Crown colonies.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

Whereas France was one of the few European countries that did not have sizeable out-migration, Italy had sent wave after wave of its sons and daughters abroad.5 Migration into Europe, though not new, caught the European public by surprise. By the turn of the 1960s, the accelerating disintegration of the British Empire caused the U.K. to begin granting citizenship to its colonials, a process that had started on the Indian subcontinent after partition in 1947. At about the same time a labor shortage, largely resulting from Germany’s economic boom, fuelled that country’s need for immigrants. Swedish academic Therborn highlighted the unprecedented nature of these developments: “The shift from emigration to immigration represents an epochal change in European social history.


pages: 440 words: 109,150

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war by Michael Smith

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Etonian, haute cuisine, QWERTY keyboard, trade route

The name of the battle came from a speech made by Churchill in the House of Commons on 18 June in which he said that the Battle of France was over and the ‘Battle of Britain’ was about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ The role of Bletchley Park and signals intelligence in tracking the German bombers and fighters attacking the UK is not widely known but the Air Section, which had a dual role as a GC&CS section and as a section of Air Intelligence, AI4f, was able to break the low-level codes used by the Luftwaffe to control the German bombers flying from their airfields in France to attack the UK.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Certainly to those of us who read more novels than MRIs, the Internet—and especially the World Wide Web—looks like what we know: a fictional world made mostly of words. Philosophers and critics must only be careful, as we are trained to be careful, not to mistake this highly stylized and artificial order, the Internet, for reality itself. After all, cultural vocabularies that gain currency and influence—epic poetry, the Catholic Mass, the British Empire, photography—always do so by purporting to be reality, to be transparent, to represent or circumscribe life as it really is. As an arrangement of interlocking high, pop, and folk art forms, the Internet is no different. This ought to be especially clear when what’s meant by “the Internet” is that mostly comic, intensely commercial, bourgeois space known as the World Wide Web.


pages: 380 words: 111,795

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith

British Empire, Donald Trump, junk bonds, Malacca Straits

And look, Lou, the Lord Justice General is only thirty-sixth! And they put him below – below, Lou! – below the younger sons of dukes. Don’t you think that’s ridiculous! And what about this, Lou. The Lord Lyon, King of Arms, is seventy-first, which is not much better than the position of Commanders of the Order of the British Empire, who are eighty-first. Now they should be much, much higher, Lou. There’s no doubt about that. And the same goes for the Lord Lyon. He should be right up there near the top. Surprising that he isn’t, of course, given that he probably draws this list up. But there you have the difference, Lou.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Near the Mirage hotel, where a man-made volcano explodes every fifteen minutes then turns into a flickering-orange waterfall, the protesters called for magic of a different kind: $15 and a union. Why target McDonald’s? With a worldwide workforce of 1.9 million, it is the second-largest private employer in the world. Only Walmart employs more. In 2016, there were 36,899 McDonald’s restaurants in 119 countries, serving 69 million people a day. One McDonald’s CFO boasted that, like the British empire of old, the sun never sets on the Golden Arches. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued, only somewhat tongue in cheek, that the transnationalism of McDonald’s might bring world peace.4 Instead, the Golden Arches have come to symbolize all that is wrong with the twenty-first-century global economy.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Some of the most important technological, medical, economic, and artistic human achievements were invented during the era of the gold standard, which partly explains why it was known as la belle époque, or the beautiful era, across Europe. Britain witnessed the peak years of Pax Britannica, where the British Empire expanded worldwide and was not engaged in large military conflicts. In 1899, when American writer Nellie Bly set out on her record‐breaking journey around the world in 72 days, she carried British gold coins and Bank of England notes with her.11 It was possible to circumnavigate the globe and use one form of money everywhere Nellie went.


pages: 351 words: 108,068

The Man Who Was Saturday by Patrick Bishop

airport security, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, British Empire, collective bargaining, Etonian, pre–internet, Suez crisis 1956, Winter of Discontent

In middle age, he trained as a doctor and he ended up Physician of the Queen’s Hospital for Children in the East End of London. His interests were inherited by his son, Sheffield Airey Neave, born in 1879. After Eton, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. His speciality was entomology, the study of insects, the importance of which to public health and agriculture in the British Empire was starting to be appreciated.1 In the early years of the century, he worked for the Colonial Office on scientific surveys in Northern Rhodesia and served as an entomologist on a commission investigating sleeping sickness in the Congolese province of Katanga. In 1913, he was appointed assistant director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, and stayed in the post for thirty years before taking over as director.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

The internet has acronym’d some technical terms as well, like url, jpeg, or html, but a lot of what we’re writing is informal and conversational. A new kind of social acronym has come into use, based on common conversational phrases rather than technical jargon—less BAC (blood-alcohol content) and more btw (by the way), less OBE (Order of the British Empire) and more omg (oh my god), less LAX (the airport code for Los Angeles) and more lol (originally “laughing out loud,” though now a more subtle meaning, which we’ll get to in Chapter 3). I think it’s disingenuous to follow formal tradition at the expense of regular usage in a book that’s entirely about regular usage, so I’ve made the stylistic decision to write social, internet acronyms in all-lowercase, while often keeping technical acronyms in uppercase, because people on the internet primarily reserve LOL and OMG for when they’re SHOUTING.


pages: 361 words: 105,938

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

Brochant de, 236 virtue, divine, and placing of fossils, 36 vis plastica, 35 Voelcker, Augustus, 123 Wales, 90, 140, 142, 207, 208, 266 Walks Through Wales (Warner), 114n Wallace, Alfred, 106 Warner, Richard, 115, 253 writings of, 114, 147–48, 214 WS’s work plagiarized by, 148, 214 Watt, James, 17, 24n, 46 Watts, Billy, 31 Webb, Edward, 54–55, 57, 97, 141 Webster, Thomas, 234, 284 Wedgwood, Josiah, 17, 24n, 44 Wells Cathedral, 59 Werner, Abraham, 226, 227, 231 Wesley, John, 51 Westminster Abbey, 243 Westminster Palace, 296–99, 296 Whitehurst, John, 94 Wilkes, John, 22 Wilkinson, John, 18 Wilkinson, Robert, 144 William IV, King of England, 294 William Smith Award, 170n–71n Williamson family, 274 Wollaston, William Hyde, 281–82, 283 Wollaston Medal, 281–83, 283, 286–89, 293–94, 293 Wood, Searles Valentine, the Elder, 111 Woodward, John, 93–94 Woodward, Samuel, 113 Worcester & Birmingham Canal, 97 Wyon, Benjamin, 293 Yeo River, 232n York Asylum, 294n York Minster, 97–100 Yorkshire, 272, 276 Young, Arthur, 154 Young, George, 111–13 About the Author SIMON WINCHESTER’s many books include the New York Times bestsellers The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and The Man Who Loved China. He was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty The Queen in 2006, and he lives in western Massachusetts. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER The Man Who Loved China* A Crack in the Edge of the World* The Meaning of Everything Krakatoa* The Fracture Zone* The Professor and the Madman* The River at the Center of the World Small World Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons Pacific Nightmare Pacific Rising Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles* Outposts* Prison Diary: Argentina Stones of Empire Their Noble Lordships American Heartbeat In Holy Terror Copyright Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jonathan Cape (Random House) for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, copyright © 1998 by Roger Osborne.


pages: 387 words: 111,096

Enigma by Robert Harris

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Columbine, index card, invention of the printing press, sensible shoes, Turing machine

And a box containing thirty-six rounds of ammunition.' Jericho said nothing. Wigram looked at him for a while, as if he were making up his mind about something. 'No reason why you shouldn't know, I suppose. Trustworthy fellow like you. Come and sit down.' He patted the eiderdown again. 'I can't keep shouting the biggest frigging secret in the British Empire across your frigging bedroom. Come on. I won't bite, I promise.' Reluctantly, Jericho sat down. Wigram leaned forwards. As he did so, his jacket parted slightly, and Jericho glimpsed a flash of leather and gunmetal against the white shirt. 'You want to know who I am?' he said softly. 'I'll tell you who I am.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Some fled a lack of economic opportunity, while others fled various forms of political or religious persecution and, in some cases, prosecution. The New World offered an opportunity for freedom and a chance to start over. For others, the lure was adventure. Others saw themselves in service to the Crown, expanding the British Empire. Still others came to America involuntarily as indentured servants or were brought as slaves. The colonists under British rule gradually became more and more resentful of the political and economic constraints imposed by the Crown. More than a century after the first permanent settlements, the colonists revolted.


pages: 367 words: 109,122

Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action by Wael Ghonim

British Empire, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, digital divide, financial independence, Khan Academy, Mohammed Bouazizi, Skype, WikiLeaks

And through our pain we will make them see their injustice. And it will hurt, as all fighting hurts. But we cannot lose. We cannot. They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body—not my obedience!” I translated this entire scene and posted it on the page. Gandhi’s triumph in the face of the British Empire assured me that great battles could be fought and won without violence. Adopting a nonviolent and nonconfrontational approach was not the only theme that we consistently declared on “Kullena Khaled Said.” The page also relied on participatory democracy in making most of its decisions, particularly those that involved activities on the ground.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Once they had blazed a trail, there were many others on their heels: reasons to commute multiplied as the nineteenth century advanced. The temperance movement had revived the idea of zombie-like drunks, as pictured by Hogarth during the Gin Craze of the 1750s, as a real and present threat; there were more missionaries saving souls in the East End of London than all the rest of the British Empire; and filth, overcrowding and contagion were still endemic. In 1861, Lord Salisbury told Parliament that the state of the capital was ‘a scandal to our civilisation’. Over 135,000 people left its centre for the suburbs during the next twenty years. In the opinion of the historian Roy Porter, ‘rising real incomes, the expansion of white-collar occupations, reductions in hours of work, new opportunities to borrow money and a social competitiveness which expressed itself in the determination to buy the best property and most prestigious address possible’, gave further impetus to the exodus.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

As far back as 1908, he saw the establishment of “a strong, free Jewish state” as “a notable step toward a harmonizing c04.qxd 6/25/03 8:11 AM Page 34 34 c04.qxd 6/25/03 8:11 AM Page 35 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL 35 disposition of the world among its people.”4 When Britain was finally in a position to help bring about such a “harmonizing disposition,” Churchill was even more explicit: It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national center and a national home and be reunited and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine. . . . They shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.”5 It should not be surprising, therefore, that as the British government planned for victory over the Ottoman Empire, it announced through a letter from British Foreign Minister Lord Arthur Balfour that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”


Dear Fatty by Dawn French

affirmative action, British Empire, carbon footprint, clockwatching, Desert Island Discs, upwardly mobile

He is not afraid to fail, and learn from it. He drives too fast. He gets lost a lot. He leaves the cooker on. He leaves the back door open (burglars, ignore please). He gets lonely easily. He lives and breathes stand-up comedy. On occasion, he’s quite grumpy. He will help anyone. He’s a Commander of the British Empire. Sometimes we refer to him as ‘Commander’. He can ride a horse. He can play tennis. He will NOT swim until he’s ready. He’s curious. He loves Bootsy Collins. He loves Cerebus. He loves all things Neil Gaiman. He loves The Sopranos. And The Wire and Entourage. He fancies Judi Dench and Sinéad Cusack and Jessica Lange.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

By the beginning of the nineteenth century several were in existence. In 1840, Rowland Hill’s Uniform Penny Post was established throughout the UK, and soon afterwards postage could be prepaid with the adhesive stamp known as the Penny Black. In 1898, the Imperial Penny Post extended the rate throughout the British Empire. There are several candidates for the first true postal service. Egyptian pharaohs had an organised courier system as early as 2400 BC. The envelope was invented in Assyria around 2000 BC: both letters and envelopes were made of pottery. Cyrus the Great (568–528 BC), the founder of the Persian Empire, had a swift courier service that greatly impressed Herodotus.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

But the United States would not be prepared either—any more than the Soviet Union would be—to accept a postwar world that resembled its prewar predecessor. Finally, a word about British objectives. They were, as Churchill defined them, much simpler: to survive at all costs, even if this meant relinquishing leadership of the Anglo-American coalition to Washington, even if it meant weakening the British empire, even if it also meant collaborating with the Soviet Union, a regime the younger Churchill had hoped, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, to crush.17 The British would attempt to influence the Americans as much as possible—they aspired to the role of Greeks, tutoring the new Romans—but under no circumstances would they get at odds with the Americans.


pages: 398 words: 108,026

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

There are some people who interpret "proactive" to mean pushy, aggressive, or insensitive; but that isn't the case at all. Proactive people aren't pushy. They're smart, they're value driven, they read reality, and they know what's needed. Look at Gandhi. While his accusers were in the legislative chambers criticizing him because he wouldn't join in their Circle of Concern Rhetoric condemning the British Empire for their subjugation of the Indian people, Gandhi was out in the rice paddies, quietly, slowly, imperceptibly expanding his Circle of Influence with the field laborers. A ground swell of support, of trust, of confidence followed him through the countryside. Though he held no office or political position, through compassion, courage, fasting, and moral persuasion he eventually brought England to its knees, breaking political domination of three hundred million people with the power of his greatly expanded Circle of Influence.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

(illustration credit 1.2) With the tally-stick system finally abolished, the question arose of what to do with the vast archive of tallies left in the Exchequer. Amongst the partisans of reform the general feeling was that they were nothing but embarrassing relics of the way in which the fiscal accounts of the British Empire had been kept, “much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island,” and it was decided without hesitation to incinerate them.27 Twenty years later, Charles Dickens recounted the unfortunate consequences: It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof …28 The Houses of Parliament could be rebuilt, of course—and were, to leave the splendid Palace of Westminster that stands on the banks of the Thames today.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Though wince-inducing now, these sorts of views were not necessarily normal and not necessarily uncontroversial then, and we shouldn’t assume that these were universal British Victorian values. Racism pre-dated Empire, and these were the end times for slavery, which had peaked before Victorian times, even though the British Empire was still robust and proud. William Wilberforce had driven the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act through Parliament in 1807, which largely banned slavery, though only in 1833 was this extended throughout the whole Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act. The Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood family tree is an impressive canopy.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Then there are the tax havens in the United States, such as Manhattan, Florida and Delaware, as well as US-linked territories like the Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, Liberia and Panama. But by far the biggest and most powerful network of tax havens is organised around Britain – and was crafted by the once powerful British empire. There are the three British Crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. Then there are the fourteen British Overseas Territories, which include the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar. Finally, there are a number of territories that Britain no longer formally controls, but which used to be under its imperial power: Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Dubai, Ireland, Vanuatu and Ghana.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

Edgerton contends in his 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation that 1979 spelt the end of just that: the nation itself. He argues pugnaciously that modern Britain was born in 1945 out of the travails of war: The British nation, as I define it, was not a natural state of affairs. The British nation was created: it emerged out of the British Empire and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War … a British nation was created … This new self-made Britain was a rejection of the mouldy Churchillian imperialism that’s made a queasy return in the last few years. Instead this was the dawn of a new progressive country, self-reliant but outward-looking, requiring ‘economic development of unprecedented speed, of the creation of an economy more focused on industry than ever before, of a developmental state, a warfare and welfare state’.


The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The volume of the trans-Saharan slave trade before 1500 was massive, but it’s hard to pin down exact figures because there are no sources like those documenting the transatlantic slave trade. Because the ships that brought slaves to the Americas listed them on manifests, or passenger lists, historians have been able to calculate that 12.5 million slaves crossed the Atlantic between the start of the slave trade in the early 1500s and its abolition throughout the British empire in 1833. It is extremely difficult to estimate the number of slaves who moved on foot across the Sahara. The most heavily used trans-Saharan slave routes in 1000 ran from West Africa to the Mediterranean. The earliest road connected Zuwila, a town in modern Libya on the northern edge of the Sahara, to the Lake Chad region.


Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly by Evy Poumpouras

British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, fear of failure, Lyft, Ronald Reagan, uber lyft, Y2K

The Problem with Comparing In 1954, Englishman Roger Bannister and Australia’s John Landy were considered two of the world’s fastest runners. Earlier that year, Bannister was the first man to run the mile in under four minutes, with a time of 3:59:04. Less than two months later, Landy eclipsed Bannister’s mile time by 1.4 seconds to become the new record holder. Later that summer, both men met for the first time to compete in the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in a race that became known as the Miracle Mile. During much of the race, Landy held a commanding lead, but eventually Bannister closed the gap. As both men dashed toward the finish line, Landy, who was in first, did the unthinkable. He temporarily lost focus of his goal, turned his attention away from the finish line and toward Bannister.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Data is from Maddison, Historical Statistics. It may seem odd to speak of the “US economy” in 1700—it did not exist then. This is the case for other countries in the data set, too. In doing so, I am relying on Maddison’s own classifications. In the US case, this classification encompasses the British Empire’s colonial territories. 33.  Lawrence Summers, “The 2013 Martin Feldstein Lecture: Economic Possibilities for Our Children,” NBER Reporter 4 (2013). 34.  David Autor, “The Limits of the Digital Revolution: Why Our Washing Machines Won’t Go to the Moon,” Social Europe (2015), https://www.socialeurope.eu/. 35.  


The Fiume Crisis by Dominique Kirchner Reill

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, British Empire, business climate, COVID-19, financial independence, full employment, sexual politics

Reassured by the stable prewar Austro-­ Hungarian currency, Hungarian, Croatian, British, Austrian, Czech, German, Italian, and French businessmen took the bait. To sweeten the deal, Hungary also reduced tariffs and discounted transportation rates. Fiume welcomed ships from all over the world at cheaper prices than elsewhere, encouraging an influx of “colonial” goods from the Ottoman 80 the fiume crisis and British Empires and an outflux of poor Eu­ro­pean emigrants e­ ager to get to the New World. Factories (almost all benefiting from some sort of state subsidy) mushroomed in Fiume’s outskirts, pro­cessing what arrived in its ports and employing thousands of workers (many of them ­women) who had recently arrived in Fiume.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

It was vitally important, Hassabis said, for a game developer to establish a deep sense of trust with its publisher, and he felt he succeeded during this long meeting inside his offices in London. But as the meeting ended, the Eidos chairman—Ian Livingstone, a man who would later be named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the industry—noticed a foosball table across the room and challenged Hassabis to a game. Hassabis stopped to think about whether he should lose the contest, just to keep his publisher happy, before deciding he had no choice but to win. “Ian’s no mean player—he is rumored to have been Hull University doubles champion with Steve Jackson—but what a terrible situation to put me in,” Hassabis said.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

After Alan’s birth, his mother returned to Madras to join her husband, leaving Alan and his older brother, John, to be brought up by a foster family in the town of Hastings on the south coast of England. During the first eight years of his life, Alan Turing saw his parents two or three times when they came home on leave. Fostering one’s children in this way was common among the colonial classes—“accepted procedure for those who served the British Empire,” as Turing’s brother described it. Alan Turing never referred to this experience. Yet despite his lonely childhood, signs of his eccentricity and genius began to show. His primary school headmistress said of Turing when he was aged nine, “I have had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius.”


pages: 341 words: 107,933

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity by Guy Hands

Airbus A320, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deal flow, Etonian, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flag carrier, high net worth, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, traveling salesman

At the one meeting I attended, held in a dimly lit set of rooms in Oriel College (the last all-male Oxford college to admit women), an ex-Winchester boy, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, gave a forty-minute talk on an obscure aspect of eighteenth-century political history in a voice that sounded like that of a sixty-year-old lecturer. When he finished, glasses of port and plates of cheese and biscuits were handed out and we were all required to comment on what we’d just heard and ask a question. The others spoke volubly about the British Empire and the rise of the Whigs and Tories. They seemed to know an enormous amount about the past, perhaps because they were still living in it. I, by contrast, was tongue-tied, felt humiliated – and was never asked back. But I knew instinctively that my peers had no connection with or understanding of the contemporary world or what the past could teach us.


pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

affirmative action, British Empire, computer age, Deng Xiaoping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, information retrieval, invention of movable type, machine readable, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, QWERTY keyboard, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, transcontinental railway

A junk boat owner pulled off a stunt by dressing up as a mandarin and making his entrance into the opening procession. He shook hands with the Duke of Wellington and bowed before the queen, scamming his way in under the guise of a fake Chinese. The image of the mandarin was made into a joke, a perfect foil to the grand splendor of the British Empire that the exhibition was meant to flaunt. China was being painted into the world picture, regardless of its wishes. By the time America held its world’s fair in Philadelphia in 1876, China had come around, thinking it best to manage its own international image. Also, Chinese reformers had tried their hand at building their own shipyards and arsenals in the 1860s, but progress was slow and the results mixed.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

As the oft-repeated quotation attributed to the twentiethcentury cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead goes, “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Think about those twelve Quakers in England who, in 1797, decided to end slavery in the British Empire. It took them forty-one years, but they did it.2 Seventy-two years elapsed between the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified by Congress in 1920, giving women in the United States the right to vote.3 The Stonewall uprising took place in 1969 and same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized nationally until 2015.4 Vincent Harding, in his beautiful book There Is a River, links the twentieth-century civil rights movement to the centuries-old rebellions aboard slave ships during the terrible Middle Passage.5 Today’s digitized, commercialized culture is so pervasive and powerful that its influence on children’s values, learning, and relationships is a serious threat—not only to the wellbeing of the kids being targeted but also to the wellbeing of democracy and of the planet.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

“In my lifetime, all the problems”, Thatcher told the faithful at a Tory fringe event, “have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.”40 Now, on the eve of the new millennium, Thatcher was expanding her transatlantic thesis. She outlined for her American audience a vision for “a new international alliance”, a union of English-speaking people as a bulwark against “the ambitions of bureaucrats in Brussels”.41 The Anglosphere, an idea that first emerged in the dog days of the British empire, was back. Thatcher was not on a solo run. A few months earlier, the historian Robert Conquest, chronicler of Stalin’s purges and famines, told the English-Speaking Union that the European project was an “anti-American” scheme born of “extreme regulationism”. The only solution, he said, was to replace the “grotesque rigours of the European Union” with a new Anglophone alignment: It hardly needs saying that what comes to mind is some form of unity between countries of the same legal and political – and linguistic and cultural – traditions: which is to say an Association of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – as well as, it is to be hoped, Ireland and the peoples of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Even the diet of the Minorcans took on an English flavour with its gravy, or grevi, and a juniper-flavoured spirit based on London gin. The war cry of small Minorcan children, faitim!, is derived from the English ‘fight him!’39 The English did not take the defence of Minorca for granted. St Philip’s was one of the strongest fortresses in the British Empire, with a network of deep tunnels in which men could hide, or stores be kept dry, but there remained one overriding problem that could be resolved only by the government in London: a shortage of troops.40 This, and a lack of adequate naval support, would prove fatal to British rule (and, eventually, to himself) in 1756, when Admiral Byng realized he could not save Minorca from French invasion.

They could see that the time for the recovery of Constantinople by Orthodoxy had not come.14 Further disasters resulted in the sacking of Churchill from the Admiralty, but by then the troops were bogged down in impossible positions: Upon the margin of a rugged shore There is a spot now barren, desolate, A place of graves, sodden with human gore That Time will hallow, Memory consecrate. There lie the ashes of the mighty dead, The youth who lit with flame Obscurity, Fought true for Freedom, won through rain of lead Undying fame, their immortality.15 Total losses were 265,000 troops from Britain, the British Empire and France, and perhaps 300,000 on the Turkish side; but, despite their dreadful losses, it was the Turks who held the ground, and after less than nine months the attacking forces retreated. Gallipoli had some positive effects from the British perspective: the Turks were forced to withdraw many of their best troops from Palestine, taking pressure off Egypt and the Suez Canal.16 III During the Great War, large parts of the Mediterranean remained quiet.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

The new Wall Street was not geographically confined to the southern end of Manhattan. It was a North Atlantic system. The second node, detached from but integrally and inseparably connected to New York, was the City of London.17 In the nineteenth century, in the age of the gold standard and the British Empire, London had been the capital of global finance in its own right. From the 1950s, the City of London made a new role for itself as the main hub for offshore global dollar financing. III In the aftermath of World War II, the Bretton Woods monetary system had sought to restrict speculative capital flows.

What right, Boris Johnson demanded to know, did Obama have to suggest to Britain concessions of sovereignty that the United States would never accept? Why should Britain trust a president who had removed the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office? “Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender. Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen as less important than he once was. Perhaps his ideas were old-fashioned and out of date.” Johnson’s artfully placed dog whistle about the “part-Kenyan President” did the job. Johnson whistled and Farage came.


Scotland Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

agricultural Revolution, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, European colonialism, Ford Model T, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Piper Alpha, place-making, retail therapy, smart cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Best Places to Stay » Brunswick Hotel ( Click here ) » Malmaison ( Click here ) » Hotel du Vin ( Click here ) » Glasgow SYHA ( Click here ) » Blythswood Square ( Click here ) Best Places to Eat » Café Gandolfi ( Click here ) » Left Bank ( Click here ) » Ubiquitous Chip ( Click here ) » Stravaigin ( Click here ) » Mother India ( Click here ) Glasgow Highlights Gazing at the Glasgow Boys’ paintings in the Burrell Collection (Click here ), the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum (Click here ) and the Hunterian Art Gallery (Click here ) Catching a match in one of Celtic or Rangers’ massive cauldrons of football (Click here ) Showing your latest dance moves among Glasgow’s plethora of nightclubs (Click here ) where the country’s best DJs strut their stuff Deciding just which one of the West End’s excellent restaurants (Click here ) you are going to dine at next Discovering the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Click here ) – ‘genius’ is an overused word, but few would argue here Plunging into the legendary and diverse live music scene (Click here ) in one of the city’s legendary pubs Grabbing a bike for a leisurely exploration of Glasgow’s industrial heritage and green surroundings on one of the great cycle routes (Click here ) Immersing yourself in Glasgow’s friendly gay culture in one of the bars of the Pink Triangle (Click here ) History Glasgow grew around the cathedral founded by St Kertigan, later to become St Mungo, in the 6th century. Unfortunately, with the exception of the cathedral, virtually nothing of the medieval city remains. It was swept away by the energetic people of a new age – the age of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. In the 18th century much of the tobacco trade between Europe and the USA was routed through Glasgow and provided a great source of wealth. Even after the tobacco trade declined in the 19th century, the city continued to prosper as a centre of textile manufacturing, shipbuilding and the coal and steel industries.

Most clan tartans are in fact a 19th-century invention (long after the demise of the clan system) partly inspired by the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Glasgow, deprived of its lucrative tobacco trade following the American War of Independence (1776–83), developed into an industrial powerhouse, the ‘second city’ of the British Empire (after London). Cotton mills, iron and steelworks, chemical works, shipbuilding yards and heavy-engineering works proliferated along the River Clyde in the 19th century, powered by the coal mines of Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, Fife and Midlothian. Between 1904 and 1931 around a million people emigrated from Scotland to begin a new life in North America and Australasia.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

xiii According to an official count, writes Maia Ramnath, “only 6,656 South Asians entered the United States (legally) between 1899 and 1913,” a majority of the estimated 10,000 South Asians in North America in 1914. Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (University of California Press, 2011), 17. xiv A contemporary and rival of Karl Marx on the international revolutionary scene, Bakunin helped lead the anarchist faction, influencing, among others, Kropotkin, whose concept of “mutual aid” pushed anarchism further away from formal politics toward a form of being in the world.

The Ghadar Party itself included a future leader of the “Ad Dharm” anti-caste movement, Mangu Ram, as well as a future leader of the Hindu nationalist pro-caste movement, Bhai Parmanand. See Tim Harper, Underground Asia (Penguin Books, 2022); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (University of California Press, 2011); Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi (Haymarket Press, 2017). xvi In practice, this safety depended on the state’s whims, which changed as the United States shifted into long-term alignment (and international security cooperation) with the United Kingdom.


pages: 382 words: 115,172

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat by Tim Spector

biofilm, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, David Strachan, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, life extension, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, satellite internet, Steve Jobs, twin studies

As well as the nutrients and polyphenols, many real foods contain fibre that makes them tough to digest and give our microbes a good workout, and this we were told is good for us. 12 Fibre One pioneering Irish doctor called Dennis Burkitt had a major influence on our modern relationship with fibre. Burkitt was a legend, and probably the last of his breed of zealous explorer-scientists that the British Empire produced. After his training in medicine and surgery he was sent during the Second World War to East Africa. Later, in his forties, he answered ‘God’s call’ to go and work as a missionary and doctor in central Africa. There he spent several years, and covered ten thousand miles travelling around the country visiting small hospitals and health centres performing operations and preaching.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

But before the British left, they put in place a system of technocratic development that ensured a ready supply of command, control and money for the strong men to appropriate. Why did they do this? Lord Hailey, a retired colonial official, came up with this approach during the Second World War, when the success of Germany and Japan threatened British prestige and made pith-helmeted district commissioners seem less god-like. He argued that the British Empire should portray itself as a ‘movement for the betterment of the backward peoples of the world’. It would thus reinvent itself as a progressive force. And of course, this required ‘a far greater measure of both initiative and control on the part of the central government’. So Britain’s administration in its colonies suddenly became less about administering justice and much more about promoting economic development.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Nevertheless, God also belongs to the non-physical, and that is why Descartes is considered the father of dualism. 15Winter, A. (1998), Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 16Until a deeper level of reality is discovered; for example if string theory is shown to be experimentally correct. 17Except in the United Kingdom and the British Empire where the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph will persist. 18Dyson, G. (1999), Darwin Among the Machines. London: Penguin Books. 19McCorduck, P. (2004), Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. New York: A. K. Peters. 20‘You shall not make for yourself an idol’ under the Philonic division used by Hellenistic Jews, Greek Orthodox and Protestants except Lutherans. 21Around the seventh century BC. 22My discussion on the polar narratives about Artificial Intelligence focuses on Western civilisation; in Japan, for example, attitudes towards robots are not so polarised.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

In the late 1930s, it was rented to and then bought by the British government for its ambassador’s residence. Winston Churchill spent a night there in August 1941, after meeting President Franklin Roosevelt on the battleship Prince of Wales, where they sang hymns together and wrote the Atlantic Charter. According to the Iceland government, when “the war between the British empire and Hitler’s Third Reich was at its peak, Hofdi became the nerve center of British operations in Iceland,” such as they were. Marlene Dietrich also spent the night there. After the war, the British ambassador, John Greenway, came to believe he had company in Hofdi House since dishes fell off his shelves at night; framed pictures got twisted or tumbled down; walls cracked; and the whole house creaked.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

“We will be obliged to redirect our missiles at installations which we firmly believe pose a threat to our national security,” Putin warned: “I am obliged to say this openly and honestly today.”15 The U.S. determination to extend NATO to the east has other motives as well. From the 1820s, U.S. planners resolved to dominate the Western hemisphere, and during World War II, extended those aspirations to global dominance, intending to exercise control also over the Far East and the former British empire, particularly Western Asia’s energy resources. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, and it was realized that Germany would not survive the war as a great power, the goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, at least its economic core in Western Europe. In this “Grand Area,” as planners called it, the United States would hold “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy,” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he wrote.13 Implicit in that clever shorthand was a critique: The United States lacked a talented class of colonial administrators capable of refashioning failed states and preparing the local inhabitants for eventual self-rule. At first glance, it looks as if Boot’s post-9/11 wish has been fulfilled—and that the United States is finally creating the twenty-first-century equivalent of the British Empire’s Colonial Service. Over the 2000–2010 decade, a new class of nation builders has emerged: staffing Provincial Reconstruction Teams in cities in Iraq; constructing roads in rural Afghanistan; or training Kalashnikov-toting soldiers in Timbuktu. From West Africa to Central Asia, the old diplomatic cocktail-party circuit has given way to a new world of fortified outposts, where a new generation of diplomats, soldiers, and private contractors is working at the sharp end of U.S. foreign policy.


K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts

British Empire, clockwatching, it's over 9,000, summit fever, trade route

In its own way, Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest in 1953 had a comparable impact on the British public, especially when (thanks to a brilliant system of couriers and coded messages organized by the Times reporter James Morris) the news arrived back in England just in time to be announced in the middle of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. (One wag later called it “the last great day of the British Empire.”) The 1950s were an intensely nationalistic decade, and the politics between countries inevitably crept into the world of sports. I wasn’t born until three years later, but some of my elders had vivid recollections of the 1956 Olympics, when the Russians and the Hungarians tried to kill each other in their water polo match.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Nevis is a gorgeous island to look at from the water, its gentle slopes rising ever-more-steeply towards a peak that is almost always hidden by white cloud. It looks snow-capped, which may be why the first Spaniards to see the island named it Nuestra Señora de las Nieves (Our Lady of the Snows), the term that was eventually shortened to Nevis. In the eighteenth century, this was a major sugar-growing and slave-trading centre for the British Empire. It was also the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury turned unlikely modern day pop culture icon. During the nineteenth century, when bigger colonies had easier transport links and larger populations, Nevis lost its prominence, which is when it was subordinated to St Kitts.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

In the thirty-six-years between 1970 and 2006, the poverty rate in East Asia descended to 1.7 percent. How did this happen? Pre-steads It started with Hong Kong. This tiny peninsula and group of islands on the southern coast of China was ping-ponged back and forth between various rulers; first as part of China; then a colony of the British Empire in 1842 after the First Opium War; then occupied by Japan during World War II; then reoccupied by the British, who would eventually cede control back to China in 1997. China, not sure how to reintegrate Hong Kong into its ancient nation, renamed it the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), promising it some measure of legal and economic autonomy.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

In June, Churchill announced to Parliament, “The battle of Britain is about to begin … Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” Churchill continued with what became one of the most famous lines of the twentieth century: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” In July, Hitler attacked. His generals anticipated that the Luftwaffe, which had twice as many planes as the British Royal Air Force (RAF), would achieve air superiority in two to four weeks, as it had across continental Europe.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Baltic states on Russia’s edge now appeared, in the British official’s words, a “vulnerable gray zone” that Putin would seek to destabilize. Soon after arriving at GCHQ at the end of 2014, Hannigan began pressing for more intercepts, more “implants” in the networks to which Britain had unique access, one of the last benefits of a dismantled British Empire. Every day came a torrent of new material: messages fleshing out Russia’s support for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, its maneuvers off Finland, its submarine runs. To Hannigan, it was all new and fascinating. His background wasn’t in intelligence; it was in the intersection of politics and national security.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Other bad (and golden) boys tied up in the land rush include Anthony “Chocfinger” Ward, whose Armajaro Holdings spectacularly cornered the world’s cocoa futures, allowing him to pocket $40 million in two months as prices soared; Guy Hands, ex–Goldman Sachs bond trader and chairman of Terra Firma; litigious Dan Gold and his QVT Financial hedge fund; and Zambia-born former England Test cricketer and spin bowler Phil Edmonds, of whom more later. The Wall Street Journal found forty-five private equity groups wanting to spend over $2 billion in African agriculture in 2010, with London their biggest center of operations. Or rather London and the cloud of tax havens that the last vestiges of the British Empire have bequeathed to the world: the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, and Channel Islands. I continued my tour of London’s land investors in a mews side street behind the rugby stadium in Twickenham, where I met the “Togo boys.” A group of smart city slickers with nice cars and stubbly chins got lucky with the West African government of tiny Togo.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

The rhetoric of colonialism too was all about helping people, albeit about bringing civilization and enlightenment to people whose humanity was far from fully recognized.41 This may have been little more than a cover for theft and exploitation. The preamble to the charter of the UN, with its ringing and inspiring rhetoric, was written by Jan Smuts, premier of South Africa, who saw the UN as the best hope of preserving the British Empire and the dominance of white “civilization.”42 Yet at its worst, decolonization installed leaders who differed little from those who preceded them, except for where they were born and the color of their skins. Even today, when our humanitarian rhetoric acts as a cover for our politicians to buy themselves virtue, and when aid is our way of meeting our moral obligations to deal with global poverty, we need to be sure that we are not doing harm.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The size of living organisms has been limited by gravity, chemistry, and the inability to keep anything much larger than a dinosaur under central-nervous-system control. Life on earth made it as far as the blue whale, the giant sequoia, the termite colony, the coral reef—and then we came along. Large systems, in biology as in bureaucracy, are relatively slow. “I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States,” wrote J. B. S. Haldane, “than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.”4 Life now faces opportunities of unprecedented scale. Microprocessors divide time into imperceptibly fine increments, releasing signals that span distance at the speed of light.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

But it took another 194 years for the British Royal Navy to enact new dietary guidelines. And it wasn’t until 1865 that the British Board of Trade created similar guidelines for the merchant fleet. That is a glacial adoption rate. “The total time from Lancaster’s definitive demonstration of how to prevent scurvy to adoption across the British Empire was 264 years,” Gillam says.28 Today, the adoption rate in medicine remains chronically slow. One study examined the aftermath of nine major discoveries, including one finding that the pneumococcal vaccine protects adults from respiratory infections, and not just children. The study showed that it took doctors an average of seventeen years to adopt the new treatments for half of American patients.


pages: 385 words: 119,859

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah

British Empire, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, gentrification, high net worth, illegal immigration, mass immigration, multicultural london english, out of africa, period drama, plutocrats, Skype, white flight, young professional

I’m looking at you,” and I’m thinking, “My watch is worth more than your car. And you know what, I’m no fucking fool . . .” I’m looking at that white Chelsea boy and I’m thinking, “You fucking smug cunt . . . I can read . . .” And I know that behind every rich family in London is a drug dealer . . . What was the British Empire fucking based on? Drugs: sugar, slaves and fucking opium . . . So don’t you ever, ever . . . ‘Give me any of dat moralizing shit.’ FORD FOCUS I need to live in the new London. This is why we have been looking for a doss house for days, first scrolling through the Romanian web listings, then calling up, one by one, the mobile numbers they post there.


pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

And, preferably, kept there. CHAPTER 4 THE ROPE Ultimately, anyone can be conned, if you have the balls to do it. —SIMON LOVELL Mervyn Barrett had been working for Nacro, a British charity dedicated to crime reduction, going on thirty years. In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) and by 2012 he had decided that perhaps it was time for bigger things: his time at the charity, as head of resettlement, was slated to end in June, and he needed to think ahead. What about running for police commissioner of his old home county, Lincolnshire, as an independent candidate?


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

These are the same tactics Putin has used, but they are also similar to the methods earlier military governments in Turkey had used against religious parties. Calling Erdogan a new Putin misses the very Turkish context of the battle he is waging. I suspect Erdogan would prefer to be seen as a Turkish avatar of Lee Kuan Yew, the legendary father figure of independent Singapore. In the early 1960s Singapore was a stagnating outpost of the British Empire, and Lee saw a merger with a common market of neighboring Malay provinces as a solution to the city-state’s economic woes. But the merger failed, owing to ethnic and racial tensions reminiscent of the current tensions between Turkey and Europe, and Malaysia tossed Singapore out on its own. Lee used these trying circumstances to justify the imposition of authoritarian rule dedicated to economic development, and he executed the model with strategic brilliance, becoming famous worldwide as a leader to whom neighboring states turned for guidance in moments of crisis.


pages: 360 words: 110,929

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

augmented reality, British Empire, business process, false flag, gravity well, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kuiper Belt, loose coupling, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, theory of mind

He smiles gnomically, and I take it all in, from his wrinkled pale pinkish skin and small eyes to his archaic, stiff-collared suit. He sits behind a desk patterned after the antique dendriform replicators called Mahogany, in a den paneled and carpeted to resemble an ancient club or social institution of the Third British Empire period. If he was of our Creator’s kind, he would be fifty years of age. The illusion is almost perfect; if the air-conditioning was working properly, I could have mistaken him for—I could have— “Please be seated,” he urges, and I collapse into the chair in front of his desk, gibbering and knock-kneed with the backwash of his primal aura.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

Raymond, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262680-92-0 [All] THE LAUNDRY Formerly SOE Q Department, spun off as a separate organisation in 1945 [UK] MI5 National Security Service, also known as DI5 [UK] MI6 Secret Intelligence Service, also known as SIS, DI6 [UK] NEST Nuclear Emergency Search Team (US equivalent of OCCULUS) [US] NKVD Historical predecessor organisation to KGB, renamed in 1947 [USSR/Russia] NSA National Security Agency (US equivalent of GCHQ) [US] NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--National Socialist German Workers Party, aka Nazi Party [Germany] OBE Order of the British Empire--awarded mainly to civilians and service personnel for public service or other distinctions [UK] OCCULUS Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations (UK/NATO equivalent of NEST) [UK/NATO] ONI Office of Naval Intelligence [US] OSA Official Secrets Act, the law governing official secrets [UK] OSS Office of Strategic Services (US equivalent of SOE), disbanded in 1945, remodelled as CIA [US] Q DIVISION Division within The Laundry associated with R&D [UK] QINETIQ See DERA [UK] RIPA Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the law governing communications interception [UK] RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary, the paramilitary police force deployed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles [UK] SAS Special Air Service--British Army special forces [UK] SBS Special Boat Service--Royal Marines special forces [UK] SIS See MI6 [UK] SOE Special Operations Executive (UK equivalent of OSS), officially disbanded in 1945; see also The Laundry [UK] TLA Three Letter Acronym [All]


pages: 335 words: 114,039

David Mitchell: Back Story by David Mitchell

British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, energy security, gentrification, Golden age of television, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry

(into answerphone) Could you leave the date and the time and a number we can contact you on, unless we’ve got it, in which case don’t bother. But, if in doubt – oh it’s run out of tape, I think that was too long. RAY: Colin, you should thank them for calling. It’s rude otherwise. You should thank them and say sorry we’re not in. It’s just thanks, sorry, goodbye – it’s like the end of the British Empire. COLIN: No, I know, let’s do a funny one – one, with music. No, no, just a funny one. Like I say, ‘Leave a message or Ray gets it,’ and you go (muffled) ‘Mmm. Don’t hurt me!’ in the background. RAY: We could do that, Colin. My only reservation is that we might then be mistaken for a couple of twats.


pages: 450 words: 114,766

Milk! by Mark Kurlansky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, clean water, Donner party, double helix, feminist movement, haute cuisine, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Koumiss was a basic part of the Mongol diet, especially after the late sixteenth century, when the Mongols converted to Tibetan Buddhism and the eating of fish and horsemeat was banned. The success of the Mongol conquest of most of Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in the largest empire in history until the twentieth-century British Empire, was basically achieved by mounted soldiers who could ride for long hours without stopping to eat or rest. They drew their sustenance from the koumiss, dried cow’s-milk curds, and powdered milk that they carried. Powdered milk, a common commodity today, was a curiosity for thirteenth-century Europeans.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

An army of workers maintained these cables and transmitted millions of messages. When World War II broke out, the British considered this telecommunications equipment so vital they rushed to build bomb-proof tunnels to keep it safe from German air raids. For a hundred years, it was through Porthcurno that people throughout the far-flung British Empire kept in touch. When electronic messages travel, they do not take the shortest path as the crow flies; they pass along whatever path the network permits, through switchboards, hubs, and clearinghouses, crossing borders and sometimes even continents. In the early days of telecommunications, their paths frequently ran through the hub of Porthcurno.


pages: 368 words: 115,889

How Not to Grow Up: A Coming of Age Memoir. Sort Of. by Richard Herring

British Empire, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

This was appropriate as not only had we both studied history at university, we had both wasted our education by mainly doing comedy and acting instead of going to lectures. I couldn’t even remember if the Saxons came before or after the Romans. But then it was early. And I was in my forties. We also saw loads of other cool stuff, stolen from foreign countries by the all-powerful raping British Empire. The place is packed with treasure that never belonged to us and I thought that as it was my birthday it would be a nice gesture if they had allowed me to take one item home with me. But none of the guards seemed to agree. It was all right for them to nick stuff, but they had a very different attitude if anyone did the same to them.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

A change that the fall-out from the Covid-19 crisis might reinforce. One way to honor dedicated caring work in the United Kingdom is through the official honors system. The kind of self-effacement that is often characteristic of care is, as Madeleine Bunting points out, not generally admired in mainstream culture. And in 2012 the British Empire Medal was reinstated specifically to recognize people, often volunteers, away from the public eye in places like hospices. If the honors system is about signaling what society values, then it should be used more overtly to reward the things that really matter. So should our system of measuring the economy.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

One was the vice foreign minister with responsibility for North America, a younger guy whom I recognized from times when we’d both been in enormous bilateral meetings with rows of silent staff flanking our bosses. He spoke in meticulous English with the faint trace of a British accent—vestiges of the nineteenth-century British Empire that became America’s twentieth-century hegemony, the expectation that Americans could communicate in our own language even in uncomfortable circumstances. The other man didn’t say a word. We took our seats and the vice foreign minister plowed into a presentation. President Xi and the Chinese people, he said, appreciated the “positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship” that President Obama had forged in office.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

Immediately Wellsted went to West Berlin and reported what he’d seen. Then he realized that it was the building of a barricade rather than preparations for an invasion that he’d witnessed. He grasped that “everything we saw, we were meant to see so that the message was unequivocal.” Wellsted, awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1961 New Year’s Honors list, believed the presence of BRIXMIS at that point might have helped to avert a Third World War. The same day, an RAF team from BRIXMIS took to the skies in one of their two-man de Havilland Canada DHC-1 Chipmunk planes, surveying Soviet activity within the BCZ.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

As Anita Say Chan has also noted, from the cover of a book by Walter Bender and colleagues (showing two children holding XO laptops by the handles while crossing a stream) to Negroponte’s OLPC presentations (showing children hunched over computers in fields and forests) to the imagery used by individual projects in Peru and Uruguay, laptops have been inserted into what appear to be timeless natural settings, evoking a narrative that erases the thorny marginalization that this chapter has demonstrated in favor of the simpler and much more charismatic narrative of easy, child-led cultural uplift through their “natural” technical curiosity.19 Thus, just as the British Empire did in Wolf’s account, One Laptop per Child at once asserted its assumed natural cultural dominance (“Of course children want to learn English and learn to program!”) and erased the historical interconnections and ongoing subjugations that had put Europe and European colonizers in a position of material power over much of the rest of the world.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

In 1775, for example, debates in Parliament over the American colonies’ rebellion were closed to reporters, while Spain, Russia, Bavaria, and Austria banned writings favorable to the French Revolution. In some cases, all books from France were banned.2 The events in France so rattled the British government that it jailed a printer for publishing the lyrics to a popular song celebrating the fall of the Bastille, and charged a lunatic with treason for prophesying the fall of the British Empire. Yet there were more similarities between the pre- and post-revolutionary orders than anyone would have admitted. In 1792, three years after freedom of speech and the press was guaranteed in France, censorship returned with deadly force: books were burned, and writers out of step with the regime were persecuted and killed.


pages: 372 words: 117,038

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

But here it seems Darwin could not shake off the Victorian cultural norms that characterized his time. From our more enlightened perspective, we can create an obvious alternative hypothesis: women are simply being held back by constraints imposed primarily by society rather than by their naturally inferior mental capacity. Although a woman was the head of the British Empire, women in Victorian Britain were generally not expected to get an education. The University of London had first admitted women (a small group of nine) only a few years before The Descent of Man. And even then, they received only a “certificate of proficiency,” not a proper degree. These days women have overtaken men in Darwin’s own discipline and are awarded the majority (by a slim margin) of PhDs in the life sciences.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In 1705, rich white men gave their white indentured servants a racial bribe: ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, fifty acres of land, and a gun.8 In exchange, these indentured servants were convinced to abandon their multiracial rebellions. Plantation owners also punished white servants if they allowed enslaved Black people to escape plantations, and offered rewards when they tracked down Black runaways and brought them back.9 Over time, the bonds between low-wealth white and Black people withered. Similar to how the British Empire used divide and rule to control its colonies, rich white American men used the racial bribe to create the false impression that working-class white people had more in common with wealthy white planters than they did with their Black neighbors. That legacy has never been overthrown, so it persists into the present.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Adding to this new perspective was the enthusiastic way in which, in 1884, the first president of a unified Argentina— General Bartolomé Mitre—celebrated the democratic republic as “the last rational form and the last word of human logic, which answers to the reality and to the ideal of free government,” but which, with each passing day, appeared to be losing steam.40 Also at work was the French defeat of 1871, which confirmed the military supremacy of the German empire that arose from it, together with the naval supremacy of the British empire, and signaled that all of neo-Spanish America was being threatened by a creeping decadence.41 Seen from that perspective, the issue considered to pertain specifically to Spanish America— which Bolívar thought he had found in the trauma of the conquest, while his positivist followers thought they had found in the biological and cultural heritage of the races that it had brought into contact with one another—found a new key explanation in the rivalry among the ancestors that fought to dominate in the Old World, such as the invasion of the barbarians, and spread overseas to the conquered lands.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

† Or, to be more accurate, a few pieces of software. Not even the most confident vendors of enterprise software proposed that one single system would suffice for everything a company needed to do. ‡ In recognition of his work literally inventing the web, Berners-Lee was dubbed Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 2004. Andreessen was one of the winners of the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013. § In recognition of his work, Kahneman was the first noneconomist to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. ¶ The labels “System 1” and “System 2” were deliberately neutral and bland, so as not to activate the long-standing disagreements and debates around other terms


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

One of my aims in Afghanistan was to understand the thinking of the private security contractors who worked there—to know what made someone join a company that was literally in the firing line. Soon after I arrived in Kabul, I went to one of the city’s few quasi-legal drinking holes, the Gandamack (shut down in 2014). It was an airless bar whose walls were covered with images of the British Empire, such as ships sailing off on the high seas to liberate natives. It was full of Americans, Asians, Russians, and South Africans drinking to The Doors’ “The End” and Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina.” Cigarette smoke swirled in the air. I talked to three South African men in their fifties who had all been in Afghanistan for about seven years, assisting the US forces with logistics and security.


pages: 454 words: 122,612

In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, British Empire, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Golden arches theory, Haight Ashbury, Maui Hawaii, McJob, McMansion, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

In 1948, Baldwin Park was on the verge of transmuting into yet another car-obsessed suburb of Los Angeles. Like the rest of Southern California, Baldwin Park was undergoing a rapid transformation fueled almost exclusively by postwar development. World War II was already receding into the past. New borders were being drawn and a new geopolitical landscape was being defined. The British Empire was in its twilight years; India and Pakistan were independent from both the United Kingdom and from each other. And the United States had quickly stepped out from behind England, establishing itself as the strongest, most influential, and most productive nation in the world. In something of a surprise, Harry S.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

There she encountered many similarly situated married women, who, she observed, were released only after having demonstrated themselves willing to be subservient to their husband’s will.13 Children have found themselves incarcerated, too. While America was not the penal colony that Australia was for the British Empire, after 1733 over eighteen hundred young paupers were sent to Georgia in its first decade, a practice evident elsewhere in the colonies since at least the early 1600s, when thousands of London children were sent to work in Virginia (anticipating the orphan trains of the Children’s Aid Society many years later).


pages: 399 words: 120,226

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John S. Burnett

British Empire, cable laying ship, Dava Sobel, defense in depth, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, North Sea oil, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Land lies on both sides, thunder squalls rest heavily on the Malaysian hills to the left and over the low-lying islands of Indonesia to the right. The channel these days is well outlined by markers, lights, and radar beacons. The last time I sailed through here the navigation aids, relics of the days of the old British Empire, were in a sorry state—lights extinguished, shifted positions—and one buoy was found on a beach. Things have changed in ten years; the nav aids have been upgraded or replaced by funds from the Nippon Foundation of Tokyo, a quasi-government charitable organization that has spent more than $100 million to beef up the navigational system.


pages: 419 words: 124,522

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Day of the Dead, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the telescope, Lao Tzu, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, trade route

Fifteen centuries ago, in its Buddhist days, its inhabitants were famously fierce and impetuous, and in time it grew to be a champion of Islam. To Europe it was barely known until the nineteenth century. Then, as tsarist Russia pushed south and east, Kashgar became a listening-post in the Great Game of imperial espionage, played out between the Russian and British empires beside an impoverished China. But the game was China’s now. Through the soft sprawl of the Uighur town, the Chinese roads pushed like knife-blades. The crossroads of People’s Road and Liberation Road, carrying their white-tiled banks and emporia among serried offices, lay like a crucifix on the old city.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

These tough anticommunists in faraway lands validated the conservatives’ most cherished fantasies of the sixties turned right side up. Their revolution was for real. Needless to say, conservatives had not traditionally cheered for rebellions or guerrilla movements. When the right cast its eyes overseas, it instinctively identified with the forces of law and (the old) order: the British Empire, the shah of Iran, whites-only regimes when in Africa, local oligarchies when in Latin America, generalissimos when in a pinch. It neither loved nor saw itself in any of these brutes. They were ugly regimes, doing ugly but necessary work. There was nothing particularly exalted about anticommunist insurgencies, either.


Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, diversification, diversified portfolio, eat what you kill, Elliott wave, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, global macro, hiring and firing, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They called it Higher Sodomy, and they believed future generations would regard them as pioneers, not criminals. It is intriguing to note that at the turn of the century, the time of ccc_biggs_ch21_285-304.qxd 11/29/05 7:19 AM Page 289 John Maynard Keynes 289 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, when the British Empire was beginning to fade, Britain was like so many other ancient dynasties; it was permeated with homosexuality. The Apostles were a Cambridge institution dating back to 1820. In 1904, a London offshoot, the Bloomsbury Group was formed, fertilized by new blood that had not attended Cambridge and even by some women members.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The rectilinear lines of their garrison towns, and eventually their basilicas, ran right over the circular gathering spaces of Lakeman’s ancestors in northern England. Thomas Jefferson convinced his fellow Founding Fathers of the American republic to adopt the Roman grid barely four years after their victory against the British Empire. The national Land Ordinance of 1785 set the grid as the approved form for all settlements west of the Ohio River. It was part of the tool kit of colonization and nation building. The grid was the fastest, simplest way to divide land so that it could be commodified. Rectangular units were easy to survey, buy, sell, and tax.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Postal banks were such a success in England that one contemporary called them “the greatest boon ever conferred on the working classes of this country.”22 In England, postal banks were geared toward “the humbler classes” and offered a low interest rate of 2 percent on deposits, below those of existing banks.23 Once the British system started, word spread internationally through the fastest means available at the time: the post office. The idea quickly spread across the British Empire to New Zealand in 1876, to Canada in 1868, and to New South Wales in 1871.24 After two decades, almost every Western country—plus Japan—had adopted nationwide postal banking.25 Germany was the only country that chose not to implement postal banking because it already had an extensive network of savings banks and credit unions.


pages: 1,203 words: 124,556

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

British governor Lord Charles Somerset made the biggest impact during his 1814–26 tenure. It was he who ordered the restyling of De Tuynhuis – first built as a guesthouse and later a summer residence for the Dutch governors of the Cape – to bring it into line with Regency tastes for verandahs and front gardens, and renamed it Government House. As the British Empire reached its zenith in the late 19th century, Cape Town boomed and a slew of monumental buildings were erected. Walk down Adderley St and through the Company’s Gardens and you’ll pass many, including the Standard Bank building, with its pediment, dome and soaring columns; the Houses of Parliament; and the Byzantine-influenced Old Synagogue, dating from 1863.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Crucially, as their forests shrank, Britons learned how to use coal as their primary energy source, a process that took a full century. As talented people were drawn to the cities and into business, agricultural markets expanded, pressuring agricultural productivity. Town records show common-field smallholders actively experimenting with plant varieties and crop rotation schemes to improve output. A British empirical, scientific style of thinking became a norm. And wages rose. By 1800, British wages, measured by both exchange rates and purchasing power, were the highest in Europe by a wide margin. Processes that moved at a glacial creep in the sixteenth century, coalesced and accreted in the seventeenth, and finally exploded in the eighteenth.j6 Cotton textile manufacture was the quintessential industry of the British Industrial Revolution.


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

The People of the Abyss is advocacy journalism in the guise of a minutely observed chronicle of institutionalized despair. Eric Blair developed his social consciousness from a relatively privileged perch. As the son of an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, Blair and his family (which he once described as being “lower-middle-upper class”) were inextricably linked to the British Empire and comfortably insulated from the deprivations of imperial India—even though the country’s contrasts of gilt-edged Raj opulence and squalor were plainly visible. Blair was inscripted into the usual educational career track—prep school at Sussex, then the prestigious Wellington and Eton secondary schools—and it stoked his desire to be a writer.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Some accounts place his birth in Guangdong, the Chinese province that abuts the South China Sea, possibly in the port city of Shantou. When he was still young his family relocated to Hong Kong, a short move but one that crossed the frontier between Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China and one of the last outposts of the British empire. From his start in Hong Kong, Pa travelled far and wide. Today he holds dual, possibly triple citizenship: Chinese and Angolan, as well as, according to the US Treasury, and perhaps on account of his roots in Hong Kong, British.3 He speaks English and, one of his business associates told me, Russian.


pages: 414 words: 123,666

Merchants' War by Stross, Charles

British Empire, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, East Village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, operational security, packet switching, peak oil, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

(All of whose souls were in any case bound for hell: the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.) And then there was the other book, and the description of the French occupation of Mesopotamia, which made the New British Empire look like a bastion of liberal enlightenment... What am I doing here? she asked herself. I can't live in this world! And is there any point even trying to make it a better place? I could be over in New York getting myself into the Witness Protection Program... On the second day, she gave in to the inevitable.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

In the post-cold war era, U.S. military/strategic theorists have used the advantage offered by the so-called revolution in military affairs, including pervasive surveillance technologies, network-centric command and control of military forces, and precision munitions, to undergird a new assertiveness in U.S. foreign policy. As Belloc remarked about the hegemony of Europeans over their colonies in the heyday of the British Empire: “We have the Gatling gun, and they have not.” In 1992, the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, formulated what has since become known as the Bush Doctrine in “Defense Planning Guidance 1994-99.” This strategic plan emphasizes three points: the primacy of U.S. power within the New World Order; the right of the U.S. to engage unilaterally in preemptive attacks when necessary to defend its interests; and, in the Middle East, the “overall objective” to remain “the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”24 The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 followed from these premises.


pages: 502 words: 125,785

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

The President turned the page and studied the report. Shipyards were turning out eight aircraft carriers every month. Before the war, America’s shipbuilding industry was minuscule. Now it was the biggest in the world. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Britain’s military was larger than America’s. Now the US fighting force was twice as large as the British empire’s and was making four times as many munitions. Production of raw materials was tremendous. Chromite—up by almost 700 percent. Aluminum—up 77 percent. Magnesium—up 220 percent. Molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium—these were the raw ingredients of modern warfare. Production of each was skyrocketing. Roosevelt was so pleased with Nelson’s production figures that he told Nelson to give them to the newspapers.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

The fall of the Wall presented Gorbachev with other political worries. By changing the character or even removing a frontier in Europe, a precedent would have been set with dire consequences for other parts of Europe. (How right he was to be proved when Yugoslavia finally erupted.) In stark contrast to the disposal of the British Empire, which was largely overseas, the Soviet empire was bolted on to its own land mass. Strategically, politically and geographically it was not an easy thing to give up. Furthermore, anything that exacerbated fears at home of a Fourth Reich emerging on their doorstep might presage the end for Gorbachev.


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

You could just take the limbs that suited what you needed them for.’ The oak’s very name in Latin, Quercus robur , resonates strength and until the middle of the nineteenth century shipbuilders relied almost entirely on oak, ‘the wooden walls of Old England’ carrying sailors around the globe, fuelling the expansion of the British Empire. The tree is saluted in the naming of eight HMS Royal Oak warships down the centuries, in the ‘Hearts of Oak’ march of the Royal Navy and even in a verse of ‘Rule, Britannia’. But beyond its historic associations, it is for biodiversity in the present day that Ted most bemoans its loss. ‘You never see crowns like these in woods,’ he said looking across at five or six trees, spaced generously apart, standing between us and the lake.


Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman

Admiral Zheng, British Empire, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, land bank, moveable type in China, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The Qing ceded the island of Hong Kong (which became a British colony for the next 150 years), opened five ports to British trade and residence (including Shanghai), ended the hong merchant monopoly, and agreed to pay $21 million in reparations over four years, a sum that greatly taxed the dynasty’s finances. Perhaps most importantly, the English imposed the European style of government relations on the Qing, something Macartney had tried a half century earlier. No longer would the British Empire be treated as a tributary state. Not only did the treaty award Queen Victoria the same status as the Qing emperor—whom the document called “Our Good Brother”—a clause also placed “the Subordinates of both Countries on a footing of perfect equality.”30 China was being dragged, with a gun pointed at the imperial head, into a new world of foreign affairs, in which the Son of Heaven was not above all, and China was treated as a nation-state, no different than any other.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

‘The market has been hypnotised by the conversion of Brierley, a professed old-economy investor, into a high-tech speculator,’ wrote Trevor Sykes, a GPG shareholder, in The Australian Financial Review in 2000.5 There was no stock more ‘old-world economy’ than threadmaker Coats. The company had been in existence since 1795 and business had boomed after 1806 when the Napoleonic Wars cut silk supplies to the British Empire. In 1879, a Coats thread was used in Thomas Edison’s electric lamp experiments. Coats had been the second-largest company in the world in 1900, and was a founding member of London’s FTSE 30 index of industrial companies in 1930. Decades later it still dominated the textile industry. Coats made 350 million balls of knitting yarn a year, while its threads held together 10 billion garments.


pages: 392 words: 124,069

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

air gap, Anthropocene, biofilm, British Empire, clean water, company town, Easter island, government statistician, Mason jar, New Journalism, Skype, trade route, zero-sum game

And yet trees were growing here, even if slowly, giving their all to fuel the recovery of the forest. It was the summer of 2017. We were at the Britannia Mine—forty-five kilometers north of Vancouver on the shores of Howe Sound on the unceded territory of the Squamish Nation—the largest mine in the British Empire, opened in 1904 to extract the ore bodies that had formed when volcanic pyroclast flowed onto sedimentary rock and the metamorphosed result came into contact with plutonic intrusions. The miners had quarried the faults and fractures where the rich ore lay, boring right through Britannia Mountain, from Britannia Creek on the northern flank to Furry Creek on the southern side, covering an area of about forty square kilometers.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

What all of these social reformers did was challenge the generally accepted idea that it was the fault of the poor if they became sick; the reformers viewed social poverty as the cause of disease and pushed the then radical and contentious idea that getting the state to intervene to improve sanitation and housing would give working people a fair chance in life but moreover would benefit society as a whole. Despite much laissez-faire opposition to change, several key pieces of transformative legislation came into force in the nineteenth century: the Reform Act 1832, which gave a vote to the middle classes; the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which immediately abolished slavery in most parts of the British Empire; the Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Act 1866, which allowed local authorities to buy land; the Reform Act 1867, which gave the vote to every male adult householder living in a town; the Education Act 1870 and the reforms that followed it, which made school free and attendance compulsory; the legalisation of trade unions in 1871 and ratification of their right to strike, which came in 1875; the Public Health Act 1875, which established local health authorities across England and made it compulsory for them to oversee decent sanitation; the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act 1875, which saw large slum clearance in England; and the Reform Act 1884, which gave poor farmers and labourers in the countryside a vote.


Frommer's Israel by Robert Ullian

airport security, British Empire, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Mount Scopus, place-making, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

Rival to the King David (see below), this newest luxury hotel in Jerusalem is architecturally interesting, lively, and offers excellent food services, including a great sushi bar. Most of the light, modern rooms offer Old City views. See p. 126. • King David Hotel (Jerusalem; & 02/ 620-8888): Built in 1930 during the British Mandate, the King David has outlasted the British Empire and continues to sail on; it’s elegant and 05_289693-ch01.qxp 16 10/28/08 9:31 AM Page 16 CHAPTER 1 . THE BEST OF ISRAEL, JORDAN & SINAI up-to-date in every way. The Nubian, fez-adorned lobby attendants of the 1930s are no longer here, but the King David is thick with atmosphere and ambience, and VIPs from Henry Kissinger to Barbra Streisand seem to pop up here.

A whole chilled salmon, rich and beautifully prepared, is often the centerpiece of the spread, but there are surprises each week, such as fresh calamari or Brittany mussels. This is a great place to dine after spending Saturday morning in the bazaars of the Old City. The ambience, simple yet mildly exotic, harks back to a romanticized British Empire. For other meals, the Arabesque Restaurant runs from average to interesting, with such unusual touches as curried banana soup or spicy South African ostrich stew. There is always a menu of fine traditional Middle Eastern dishes. Tip: For lighter (and lower-priced) meals in a similar atmosphere, try the moderately priced Courtyard Café, also in the American Colony Hotel.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

The main aim of the Circular was to oppose the proposal to separate the General Council from a Federal Council, which would act as the English branch of the Association. In defence of the existing position of the General Council, the Circular developed an ambitious speculative analysis of the downfall of the British Empire and the world market. It was stated that while revolution might begin in France, ‘England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic revolution’. It was a country in which the great majority of the population were wage labourers, and where class struggle and the organization of the working class by the trade unions ‘have acquired a certain degree of maturity and universality’.

Once the Irish church had been removed, Karl wrote to Dr Kugelmann in 1868, ‘The Protestant Irish tenants in the province of Ulster will make common cause with the Catholic tenants and their movement in the 3 other provinces of Ireland, whereas so far LANDLORDISM has been able to exploit this religious antagonism.’171 Through 1870, Karl persisted with this reading of Ireland as the key to the advent of social revolution, first in England and then, by extension, the world. In March 1870, he wrote to the Lafargues: ‘To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on the catastrophe of official England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That’s her weakest point. Ireland lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms. But England is the metropolis of landlordism and capitalism all over the world.’172 But without further evidence of the ‘pressure from without’, which had given some substance to the hopes of 1866–7, the analysis appeared abstract and doctrinaire.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Chapter 4 Tyranny Is Tyranny Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries.

In 1763, in the Boston Gazette, someone wrote that “a few persons in power” were promoting political projects “for keeping the people poor in order to make them humble.” This accumulated sense of grievance against the rich in Boston may account for the explosiveness of mob action after the Stamp Act of 1765. Through this Act, the British were taxing the colonial population to pay for the French war, in which colonists had suffered to expand the British Empire. That summer, a shoemaker named Ebenezer MacIntosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other objects.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht’s mastery of armored warfare gained Germany some great victories in the early stages of the Second World War that led to virtual domination of Europe. But the domination was never complete and in the end Germany lost. It was settled by the logic of alliance as much as military prowess. Germany was consistently superior in the field but in the end could not cope with the combined weight of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. That this would be the eventual outcome was hardly apparent in the spring of 1940, when only one of the “big three” was actually at war, and its situation appeared to be parlous. On May 10, 1940, the German army began an offensive that in ten days saw it move through Belgium and Holland to the French coast.

Many of these issues were addressed by the suffragette movement. The advance of democracy in Western capitalist states might have blunted the revolutionary ardor of the labor movement by offering constitutional means to redress grievances, but it also added to the sense of injustice felt by those denied democratic rights. The British Empire, with a liberal ideology at its beating heart but institutionalized suppression around its periphery, was rocked most by demands for political equality. Among these, including anti-colonial campaigns and agitation for Irish Home Rule, was a determined and eventually successful campaign by women demanding the right to vote.


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

On the opposite side of Singapore’s National Stadium, a human sea lifted their flash cards and showed Laura their monster. The Singapore “merlion,” in a bright mosaic of cardboard squares. Loud, patriotic applause from a packed crowd of sixty thousand. The merlion had a fish’s long, scaled body and the lion head of the old British Empire. They had a statue of it in Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid. East and West—like cats and fishes—never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish’s head off and stuck the lion’s on. And there you had it: Singapore.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The local housing ran from Tudor-style manses in Shaughnessy Heights, a neighborhood built on an eccentric garden city street plan, to stucco-coated Vancouver Specials, boxy working-class homes with low-pitched roofs and second-floor balconies. Coming from Toronto, Vancouver felt like the edge of the world, an outpost of the British empire experiencing a few timid blooms of alternative culture. This was the place I became a pre-adolescent urbanist, pacing out our block and building a model showing how, if you removed the cars, city streets could be made into parks. When I visit these days—my parents and sister still call Vancouver home—I barely recognize the place.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Dense vegetation cover was a persistent problem. It was one of the rebels’ greatest tactical advantages, allowing them to move people and supplies through neighboring Laos and Cambodia undetected and launch deadly raids deep in South Vietnamese territory. With Project Agile, Godel was determined to take that advantage away. The British Empire had pioneered the use of defoliants as a form of chemical warfare, using them against local movements that opposed colonial rule. In the fight against communist rebels in Malaya, Britain ruthlessly deployed them to destroy food supplies and jungle cover.5 British military planners described defoliants as “a form of sanction against a recalcitrant nation which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb.”


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

., 268 Blitz, xi–xii, 192–93 Bloomsbury Group, 5–8, 24, 34, 52, 66, 226, 301n Blum, Léon, 23–24 Blunt, Anthony, 87 Boehner, John, 278 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 48, 49–51, 74, 75, 91, 100, 103, 303n, 307n, 310n Bolshevik revolution, 9 Bolshevism, 9, 191 bonds: —corporate, 275 —government, 19, 41, 163, 284 “book credits,” 79 Bowley, Arthur, 306n “brain trust,” 158 Bretton Woods conference (1944), 56, 193, 198, 243, 255 British Airways, 259 British Empire, 44 British Library, 139 British Petroleum, 259 British school, 2, 48, 59, 61, 62, 65–66, 70, 87–89, 97–102, 120–22, 124–27, 138, 147–48, 178 Brooke, Rupert, 7 Brookings Institute, 231 Bryce, Robert, 108, 168 Budget Enforcement Act (1990), 277 building societies, 143–44 bureaucracy, 4, 159, 203, 278 Burgess, Guy, 87 Burke, Edmund, 35 Burns, Arthur, 232–33, 243, 255 Bush, George H.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Duffy, “Smallpox and the Indians in the American Colonies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1951;25: 324–41. CHAPTER 2: MILKMAID ENVY AND A FEAR OF MODERNITY PAGE 30 When naturally occurring: Collette Flight, “Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge,” BBC: British History In-Depth, n.d., http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/ empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml. 30 As soon as the immune system: William T. Keeton and James L. Gould, Biological Science, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). See Chapter 4, “Structure of the Cell Membrane,” 100–4; Chapter 13, “Internal Transport in Animals,” 344–50; Chapter 27, “Transcription and Translation,” 709–13. 31 One popular rhyme: R.


pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

Edgar Hoover, but suddenly the venerable president found congressional big hitters wading in. And some of this stuff was colourful. The bluff Texan Lyndon Johnson, Democratic leader in the Senate and soon to be vice president, for instance, chimed: “The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads. Later – when it moved to the sea – the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the communists have established a foothold in outer space …” And what had the House Speaker John McCormack had for breakfast the morning he declared that the U.S. was facing “national extinction”?


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

The first wave of V-1s was ineffective. Few made it across the sea. The German launch crews, trained as artillerymen, didn’t know how to handle this odd and novel “weapon of vengeance,” Vergeltungswaffe, or simply “V-weapon.” They learned fast. Soon the V-1s were being hurled against the capital of the British Empire from about fifty launch sites. More than seven thousand pilotless bombs were fired against London in total. The V-1 was immediately dubbed the “robot bomb” by the press. “Even though Allied troops have cleared the Calais coast of Nazis and their bomb launching platforms, the robot bomb threat is not ended by any means,” the Christian Science Monitor reported, proudly announcing that Ford would now be building “robombs” for the United States.70 By the summer of 1944, about five hundred guns, many of them equipped with the new radio fuses, were in place to counter the incoming buzz bombs.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

For that reason some have even called his Navy Colt Revolver ‘the very first product in history’.13 And mass-produced it certainly was. Over a quarter of a million revolvers were made, and they soon could be found from the plains of the US to the Russia steppes, from the far tropical reaches of the British Empire to the dusty plains of the Ottoman Empire. It was a design that launched the modern gun industry – enabling firearms to be made in their tens of millions. Colt alone has sold 30 million guns since its founder filed his first revolver patent.14 The number of guns produced today is disturbingly huge.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

. © Larry Towell / Magnum Photos Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. Preface to the 2015 Edition In a penetrating (and rare) analysis of what Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist calls “the Origins of European Genocide,” Richard Gott predicted that “the rulers of the British Empire will...be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.” In a no less rare acknowledgment of these monstrous crimes, British historian of imperialism Bernard Porter wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that with evidence accumulating, the conclusion “looks almost plausible.”1 A rather different picture was presented in the New York Review of Books.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies. As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive (status) government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England’s invisible exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.7 As in the case of Rome, when the repressive element of England’s mixed economy grew to become her dominant policy and turned her to statism, her empire fell apart.


pages: 666 words: 131,148

Frommer's Seattle 2010 by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence

The English Camp unit of the historical park is set on picturesque Garrison Bay, and, with its huge old shade trees, wide lawns, and white wooden buildings, it’s the epitome of British civility. There’s even a formal garden surrounded by a white picket fence. You can look inside the reconstructed buildings and imagine the days when this was one of the most far-flung corners of the British Empire. If you’re full of energy, hike the 1.25-mile trail to the top of 650-foot Mount Young for a beautiful panorama of the island. An easier 1-mile hike hugs the shoreline out to the end of Bell Point. The visitor center is open from June through early September daily from 9am to 5pm. Throughout the summer, various living-history programs are held here on weekends.


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

It is black and Bakelite, and answered by Percy Lane Oliver, a middle-ranking civil servant of middle age who is playing himself and who was about to become historic. Oliver, son of a Cornwall lighthouse keeper but a Londoner since childhood, worked for Camberwell council. He was an ardent volunteer and had been awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1918 for running four refugee hostels. In 1921, he was forty-three years old, married to Ethel Grace, and honorary secretary to the Camberwell Division of the British Red Cross. He wore glasses, was balding in a way that seemed that he had always been like that, and had a face that fitted the name Percy.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Eileen Orgintz writes in what is presumably intended as high praise (in the Los Angeles Times), “Disney World is an unreal place, and don’t expect reality to intrude. Everyone is happy and well-fed. Everything is clean. Everyone is courteous. Don’t be suspicious. Wait until you get home to feel guilty about all the world’s problems.”36 As once the sun never set on the British empire, so today, Disney can boast, “the fun now follows the sun around the globe.”37 Disneyland in Anaheim, template for all the models that followed, is approaching the half-century mark, Walt Disney World is over twenty years old, Tokyo Disneyland (with its new Splash Mountain), is over ten and in 1992 added another 16 million visitors to its 100 million plus in the nine previous years.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Although disruption sounds as though it is generally a flash in the pan, disruptive acts sometimes continue for years, if not decades. In the early twentieth century, the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, led the country in a multiyear strategy of noncooperation with the British Empire. During the Montgomery bus boycott, thousands of people had to find a way to get to work for a whole year without using the bus. Many forms of disruption are carried out to gather attention taking a stance, and to make a symbolic statement. On June 17, 2015, a young man opened fire on a prayer group in an African American church in South Carolina, killing nine people.


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

SW About the Author SIMON WINCHESTER is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, Pacific, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best-of and notable lists. In 2006, Mr. Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He lives in western Massachusetts. www.simonwinchester.com Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Simon Winchester Pacific In Holy Terror American Heartbeat Their Noble Lordships Stones of Empire (photographer) Outposts Prison Diary, Argentina Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles Pacific Rising Small World Pacific Nightmare The River at the Center of the World The Professor and the Madman The Fracture Zone The Map That Changed the World Krakatoa The Meaning of Everything A Crack in the Edge of the World The Man Who Loved China West Coast: Bering to Baja East Coast: Arctic to Tropic Skulls Atlantic The Alice Behind Wonderland The Men Who United the States When the Earth Shakes When the Sky Breaks Oxford Copyright THE PERFECTIONISTS.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

An infusion of government loans and grants paid off redundant dockers and financed completion of the new pier complex at Seaforth, including three terminals for containers. As the Royal Seaforth Docks opened in 1972, ten of Liverpool’s historic piers, some of them two centuries old, were abandoned for good. The great maritime center of the British Empire, the cosmopolitan city whose cotton trade fueled the Industrial Revolution and whose Cunard and White Star steamers dominated the North Atlantic, fell into an economic stupor that would last for three decades. The container contributed to a fundamental shift in the geography of British ports.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

We all talk about China aspiring to superpower status, and it very well may evolve into one in the fullness of time. However, in terms of projecting power and military dominance, no country will come close to the U.S. in the near future, and this fact plays heavily into the dollar’s role as a reserve asset. A historical parallel is the British Empire in the mid-1800s, which ran a very large balance of payments deficit with China from the opium trade. They ultimately resorted to military action, not entirely but largely to address this situation. I am not saying that will happen today, but the reality is that when you are a superpower, you can do what you like, and this should have some positive demand implications for the liabilities you issue as a sovereign entity.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

“Indeed,” he declares, it is a peculiar phenomenon of contemporary times that so many lands which had formerly been powerful and important seem obsessed with reducing the remnants of their own strength ... There is no logical reason that a Scotland which was proud to be considered part of the British Empire’s heart when the sun never set on it, from Calcutta to Capetown, is now increasingly eager to disengage from what is left of that grand tradition on an offshore European island. [Emphasis added.] Oh yes, there is a very logical reason why Great Britain is falling apart, but Mr. Sulzberger does not see it—just as he does not see what was grand about that old tradition.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Weill called the merger “the greatest deal in the history of the financial services industry” and “the crowning of my career.”1 It was a transaction that would allow the newly formed company to offer pretty much every financial service ever invented, from credit cards to corporate IPO underwriting, high-speed trading to mortgages, investment advice to the sale of any complex security you could imagine, in 160-plus countries, twenty-four hours a day. As with the British Empire in a former era, the sun never set on Citigroup. So it was quite a moment when, in mid-2012, the emperor had an ideological abdication. Weill, who stepped down as Citi CEO in 2003 and has recently undergone something of an existential crisis over his role in the worst financial crash in eighty years, went on CNBC and declared that pretty much everything he’d believed about the bank, and about finance, was wrong.


pages: 460 words: 130,053

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

A couple of days later I made my way to the Foreign Office building in London, an ornate and imposing neoclassical building on King Charles Street, just down the road from No. 10 Downing Street. After announcing myself at the reception area, I was escorted across a big courtyard to the main entrance. Inside were vaulted ceilings, marble columns, and Victorian imperial details. The place had been designed at the height of the British Empire to intimidate and awe visitors, and although I had met with many corporate CEOs, politicians, and billionaires, it had that same effect on me. Simon Smith arrived a few minutes later. He was about five years older than me with thick, graying hair and wireless glasses that framed a ruddy face.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The Roman cities of Western Europe—London, Marseilles, Trier, Tarragona—were marvels of the age that brought civilization to once savage places. Roman engineering made cities possible by delivering that great urban necessity, clean water. But while the Roman Empire had a good long run—far longer than the British Empire or, so far, the American republic—it did decline and ultimately fell to a wave of external invaders. In the fifth century, it still seemed possible that the barbarians who conquered Rome would leave its urban areas intact. Many of them, like Theodoric, saw the advantage of cities like Ravenna.


On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

The Malayan man RT52565_C003.indd 62 4/13/06 7:29:57 AM Capturing Mobility • 63 became a generic type framed by a grid of objectivity and universality. This grid could then be used to compare the Malayan man with other “types.” This, as Huxley put it, would enable “the formation of a systematic series of photographs of the various races of men comprehended within the British Empire.”19 It was in this spirit that Lamprey developed his photometric grid system in 1869; the grid quickly became one more technique in the state’s arsenal of surveillance and regulation, which increasingly allowed for the management of populations from the nineteenth century onward.20 The layout of Muybridge’s horse studies in a series of lines and columns effectively dissociate the horse from stable coordinates in time and space.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

It was no longer a question of whether Americans should declare independence, but how and when. As in Europe, the political debate often incorporated images from Newtonian physics. The language of astronomy was already being used to describe the relationship between Britain and her colonies; in 1764 the colonial governor Thomas Pownall described the British Empire as a celestial system in which colonies orbited in their “proper sphere.” For Pownall, the government, rather than the king, was now “the centre of attraction, to which these colonies . . . must tend.” But Americans had to confront a much more fundamental shift. What would happen when the gravitational core of the system were removed?


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

(Fukuyama), 362–5 End of Work, The (Rifkin), 312 Engels, Friedrich, 33, 36, 162, 206, 247, 256 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Enigma machine, 124–6 Enlightenment, 4, 5, 6, 13, 103, 154–60, 165–6, 195–6 Environmental Performance Index, 327 Ephesus, 45 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 38 Epicurus, 134–5 Epstein, Richard, 320 equality matching, 262–6, 267 Erasmus, 152 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 354 Ethiopia, 72, 130 ethnocentrism, 219, 271 Etruscan civilization (c. 900–27 BC), 43 Eubulus, 47 eugenics, 109 Euphrates river, 37 Euripides, 132 European Organization for Nuclear Research, 306 European Parliament, 325 European Union (EU) Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 common currency, 280–81 freedom of movement, 118, 343 migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 342–3, 358 subsidies in, 280 trade and, 272 United States, trade with, 19 Evans, Oliver, 203 Evolution of God, The (Wright), 249 evolutionary psychology, 14, 23, 225 exoticism, 84 Expressionism, 198 Facebook, 239, 309 Falwell, Jerry, 113–14 Farage, Nigel, 241 farming, see agriculture Fascist Italy (1922–1943), 105, 219 FedEx, 319 Feifer, Jason, 290–92 Fenway Park, Boston, 223 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 97, 98, 106 Ferguson, Charles, 314 Fermi, Enrico, 105 Ferney, France, 153 feudalism, 92, 194, 202, 208 fight-or-flight instinct, 15, 346, 348–9 filter bubbles, 239 financial crisis (2008), 10, 15, 62, 254, 333, 358, 359–60 fire, control of, 32–3, 76 Flanders, 208 fluyts, 100 Flynn effect, 109 Fogel, Robert, 276 folk economics, 258–62 football, 223–4, 245–6 Forbes, 274 Ford, Henry, 203 Fortune 500 companies, 82 Fox News, 82, 302, 354 France, 151 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 201 automation in, 313 Cathars, 94, 142 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 corruption in, 345 Dutch War (1672–8), 101 Encyclopédie, 154 free zones in, 180–81 Huguenots, persecution of, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 immigration in, 115 Jews, persecution of, 96, 97, 254 languages in, 289 Minitel, 313 Revolution (1789–99), 201, 292 Royal Academy of Sciences, 156 ruin follies, 287 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 Thököly Uprising (1678–85), 137 Uber in, 320 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 Francis I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, 178 Franciscans, 144 Franklin, Benjamin, 107 Franks, 92 free speech, 127, 131–2, 160, 163–5, 343 Chicago principles, 164–5 emigration for, 152–3 university campuses, 163–5 free trade, see under trade Fried, Dan, 289 Friedman, Benjamin, 253 Friedman, David, 284 Friedman, Thomas, 325 Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, 153 Fukuyama, Francis, 362–5 Fulda, Germany, 179, 180 Future and Its Enemies, The (Postrel), 300 Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 288 Galatia, 90 Galaxy Zoo, 80 Galilei, Galileo, 146, 150 Gallup, 164 game theory, 26 Gandhi, Indira, 326 gas lighting, 297 Gates, William ‘Bill’, 274, 277, 309 Gauls, 90, 91, 92 gay rights, 113, 336 Geary, Patrick, 288–9 gender equality, 113, 114 General Motors, 64 generations baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 generation X (1965–80), 340 immigration and, 106, 110–11, 113–14 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 nostalgia and, 291, 293–4, 296 genetically modified organisms (GMO), 299, 301 Geneva, Switzerland, 152, 153 Genghis Khan, 94–5, 96, 174 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 193 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 103, 193 George Mason University, 257, 258 Georgia, 365 Georgia, United States, 349 German Conservative Party, 254 Germany automatic looms, 179 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Bronze Age migration, 75 budget deficits, 60 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 guilds in, 190 immigration in, 114, 115 Jews, persecution of, 99, 104–6, 109, 220, 233 migration crisis (2015–), 342–3 Nazi period (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Neolithic migration, 74 protectionism in, 314 Reichstag fire (1933), 353 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 United States, migration to, 104, 107–8, 111 Weimar period (1918–33), 353 al-Ghazali, 139 Gholia, 89 Gibbon, Edward, 90 Gilder, George, 314 Gilgamesh, 38 Gillis, John, 291 Gingrich, Newton, 313 Gini coefficient, 273 Gintis, Herbert, 36 global history, 13 global price crisis (2010–11), 11 global warming, 75, 323, 325, 326–34 globalization, 4, 55, 270 backlashes against, 9, 14, 54, 57 cities and, 35 classical world, 43–50 conspiracy theories on, 323 disease and, 11, 77–9 United States and, 19 Westernization, 4 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 Goa, India, 146–7 golden nugget theory, 5 Golden Rule, 251–2 Golding, William, 219, 243, 244 Goldstone, Jack, 5, 133, 353 Goodness Paradox, The (Wrangham), 227 Google, 309, 311 Gordon, Thomas, 201 Göring, Hermann, 106 gossip, 229 Goths, 92 Gottlieb, Anthony, 135 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 56, 254 Great Enrichment, 167, 204 Great Recession (2007–9), 254–5, 358, 359–60 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 37 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Great Wall of China, 178 Greece, ancient, 127–32, 169 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131–2, 134 Axial Age, 129 cosmopolitanism, 87–8 golden nugget theory, 5 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 Mycenae, 88 philosophy, 13, 70, 127–32, 134–5, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44, 45, 46 science, 127–32, 136 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 trade, attitudes towards, 47, 54 xenophobia in, 90 Green New Deal, 302 Greene, Joshua, 216, 259 Greenland, 51 Gregorian calendar, 137, 152 Gregory IX, Pope, 142 Gregory XIII, Pope, 152 gross domestic product (GDP), 68–9, 257, 278–9 Grotius, Hugo, 147, 152–3 groupthink, 83 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 352 guilds, 190 Gutenberg, Johannes, 146 Haber, Fritz, 105 Habsburg Empire (1282–1918) anti-Semitism in, 254 Austria, 151, 179, 190 refugees, 99 Spain, 98–9, 208 Hadrian, Roman Emperor, 91 Hadrian’s Wall, 47 Hagley Park, West Midlands, 286–7 Haidt, Jonathan, 163, 229, 344, 348, 357 Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 72 Hamas, 365 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 173 Hanseatic League (1358–1862), 53 Hanson, Robin, 282 Hanway, Jonas, 298 Happy Days, 294 Harari, Yuval Noah, 38 Harriot, Thomas, 150 Hartsoeker, Nicolaas, 159 Harvard Business Review, 313 Harvard University, 116, 122, 137, 253, 309, 313 Haskell, Thomas, 206 Hässelby, Stockholm, 217–18, 245 Hayashi, Stuart, 370 Hayek, Friedrich, 1, 7, 29, 300, 325 Hebrew Bible, 248–50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 288, 365 Helm, Dieter, 328, 331 Henrich, Joseph, 36 Hercules, 87 Herodotus, 132 Hewlett-Packard, 304 Higgs, Robert, 337 Hill, Christopher, 182 Hinduism, 136, 149, 354 von Hippel, William, 24, 25, 262, 284 Hippocrates, 128 Hispanic people, 110–11 Hitler, Adolf, 104–5, 353 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 152, 226 Hofer, Johannes, 288 Holmgren, Pär, 325 Holocaust (1941–5), 109, 220 Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), 155, 181, 288 Homestead Acts, 171 Homo economicus, 34, 36 Homo erectus, 76, 267 Homo sapiens, 3, 21, 23, 30–33, 76, 259–62, 282, 371 homosexuality, 79, 113–14, 336 Homs, Syria, 82 Honeywell, 303 Hong Kong, 53, 235, 316 Hoover, Herbert, 55 horseshoes, 203 House of Wisdom, Baghdad, 136 Household Narrative, The, 297 housing, 375–6 Huguenots, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 human rights, 87, 147, 213 humanitarianism, 204–7 Hume, David, 151, 154, 194 Hungary, 105, 190, 235, 237, 354, 357 hunkering down, 121, 165 Huns, 93 hunter-gatherer societies death rate, 9 disease and, 78 division of labour and, 29, 32, 40–41, 57 equality matching, 262–3, 265 inbreeding and, 78 isolation and, 52 migration, 73–4, 78–9 physical fallacy, 268 race and, 232 trade, 265 tyranny of cousins, 230 Huntington, Samuel, 110, 362–3, 365–6 Hussein, Saddam, 345 Hussey, Edward, 287 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 165 Hutus, 230–31 Hypatia, 134 hyper-fast stars, 80 IBM, 305, 307, 319 Ibn al-Haytham, 156 Ibn Hayyan, Jabir, 156 Ibn Rushd, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 ice core drilling, 49 Identity & Violence (Sen), 231 identity politics, 241 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 137 immigration birth rates and, 115 crime and, 110, 119 culture and, 69–73, 116, 119, 120–23 disgust and, 336, 371 division of labour and, 117 empires and, 84–106 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 118, 342–3 exoticism, 84 GDP and, 68 innovation and, 81–4 Islam and, 112–14, 255 labour market and, 115, 116–19 opposition to, 69, 70, 114–23, 223, 254–5 productivity and, 68, 81, 117, 204 protectionism and, 66–7 self-selection and, 107, 112 skilled vs unskilled, 66, 82, 102, 116, 117 trade and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 tribalism and, 223, 235–6, 240, 243 urban vs rural areas, 114 welfare and, 118, 281 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 immigration in United States, 102–14 crime and, 110, 119 innovation and, 81–2, 202 overestimation of, 115, 223 tribalism and, 223, 240 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 In Defence of Global Capitalism (Norberg), 270 in vitro fertilization, 298–9 inbreeding, 78 India, 42, 45, 46, 56, 75, 129, 136, 140, 146, 270 Arabic numerals, 70, 137 engineering in, 269 Hindu nationalism, 354 industrialization, 207 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 national stereotypes, 235 Pakistan, relations with, 366 pollution in, 326 poverty in, 276, 326 Indo-European language, 75 Indonesia, 41 Industrial Revolution; industrialization, 5, 6, 13, 54, 132, 180, 339 in Britain, 182, 188–99, 202 in China, 169, 172–3, 207 climate change and, 326 in Dutch Republic, 101 in India, 207 in Japan, 71 in United States, 202, 291–2 in Vietnam, 207 inequality, 273, 349 Inglehart, Ronald, 339 ingroups and outgroups, 217–47 fluidity, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42 zero-sum relationships and, 252–5 Innocent III, Pope, 233 InnoCentive, 126–7 innovation, 4, 6, 10, 27, 80 ancient world, 32, 42, 44, 46 authoritarianism and, 318 bureaucratic inertia and, 318–21 canon and, 195 cities and, 40, 53, 79 creative destruction, 57, 179, 182, 190 cultural evolution, 28 immigration and 81–4 patent systems, 189–90 population and, 27, 51, 53 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 resistance to, 10, 179–81 zero-sum thinking and, 266–9 Inquisition, 150 France, 94, 143 Portugal, 100 Spain, 97, 98 intellectual property, 58 Intergalactic Computer Network, 307 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 117 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312, 313 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 Inuit, 22, 51 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 IQ (intelligence quotient), 109 Iran, 365 Ireland, 104, 108–9, 111, 112, 379 iron, 172 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 97 Isaiah, 46 Isaura Palaia, Galatia, 90 Isenberg, Daniel, 296 Isis, 89 Islam; Islamic world Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 365 conflict within, 365 efflorescence, 6, 53, 136–41 fundamentalism, 112, 134, 139, 351 Koran, 137, 250–51 migration from, 112–14 orthodox backlash, 148–9 philosophy, 5, 13 science, 70, 132, 136–41 values in, 112, 113 Islamic State, 351, 365–6 Islamic world, 5, 6, 13, 53, 70 Israel, 111, 365 Italy, 6, 151, 169 anti-Semitism in, 254 Fascist period (1922–1943), 105 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 guilds in, 190 Lombard League (1167–1250), 181 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Padua, 144, 146 Papacy in, 155, 181 Renaissance, 6, 150, 153, 169 United States, migration to, 104, 109 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Jacobs, Jane, 39–40, 79, 264 James II and VII, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 185–6 Jamestown, Virginia, 200 Japan housing in, 376 kimonos, 73 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 protectionism, 314 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 United States, migration to, 104, 236, 335 Japanning, 156 JavaScript, 310 jealous emulation, 154–7 jeans, 73 Jefferson, Thomas, 103, 184, 201, 205 Jenner, Edward, 296 Jerusalem, 87, 251 Jesus, 250 Jews in Abbasid Caliphate, 136 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Ashkenazim, 99 Babylonian captivity, 87, 249 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50 Black Death and, 355–6 in Britain, 101, 193 in Dutch Republic, 99, 100, 150 in Germany, 99, 104–6, 109, 111, 254 Inquisition and, 97, 98 in Israel, 111 Mongol invasion and, 95 Muhammed and, 251 Nazirites, 72 in Ottoman Empire, 98 persecution of, 11, 95–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 355–6 in Poland, 111, 220 in Roman Empire, 90, 93, 94 Sephardim, 99 in Song Empire, 170 in Spain, 97, 98, 99, 140 in United States, 102, 109 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Job Buddy, 375 Jobless Future, The (Aronowitz), 312 Jobs, Steven, 82, 304 John Chrysostom, 135 John III Sobieski, King of Poland, 237, 238 Johnson, Samuel, 191, 197 Johnson, Steven, 306 Jones, Rhys, 51 Joule, James Prescott, 196 Judaism, 46, 72, 93, 94, 96, 97 Jupiter, 145 Jurchen people, 172 Justinian I, Byzantine Emperor, 134, 224 Kahn, Robert, 307 Kandinsky, Wassily, 220–21, 289 Kant, Immanuel, 154 Karakorum, Mongol Empire, 96 al-Karaouine, Morocco, 137 Kearney, Denis, 109 keels, 44 Kenya, 21–2 Khayyam, Omar, 137 al-Khwarizmi, 137 Kiesling, Lynne, 328 Kim Jong-il, 314–15 kimonos, 73 King, Martin Luther, 19 King, Steven, 111 Kipling, Rudyard, 70 Klee, Paul, 220–21, 289 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Kodak, 319 Koran, 137, 250–51 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 37, 292 Krastev, Ivan, 342–3 Krugman, Paul, 309 Ku Klux Klan, 254 Kublai Khan, 174 Kurds, 136 Kushim, 37–8 labour mobility, 69, 374–7 lacquerware, 156 lactose, 75 Lao Tzu, 129 lapis lazuli, 70 Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 Lebanon, 43, 236 Lee, William, 179 leisure, 199 Lenin, Vladimir, 256 Lesbos, 141 Levellers, 183–4, 186 Leviathan (Hobbes), 152 Levinovitz, Alan Jay, 290 Levy, David, 205 Lewis, David Levering, 140 Libanius, 49 liberalism, 14, 183, 334–40 colonialism and, 214 disgust and, 335, 336 dynamism and, 301 economic, 185, 336 Islam and, 112–14 security and, 334–40, 378 slave trade and, 205 universities and, 163 Libya, 48, 89, 366 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett, 307 life expectancy, 4, 169, 339 light bulbs, 297 Lilburne, John, 183 Lincoln, Abraham, 203 Lind, Amanda, 72 Lindsey, Brink, 301 literacy, 15, 57, 168 in Britain, 188, 198 in China, 148 in Dark Ages, 50 empathy and, 246–7 in Greece, 128–9 in Renaissance, 146, 148 Lithuania, 238 Little Ice Age, 148 lobbying, 280, 329 Locke, John, 100, 152, 185, 186, 201 Lombard League, 181 London, England, 190, 193–4, 197 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 Long Depression (1873–86), 253–4 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 219, 243, 244 Lord’s Resistance Army, 365 Louis IX, King of France, 96 Louis XIV, King of France, 237 Louis XVI, King of France, 201 love, 199 Lucas, Robert, 167 Lucy, 24–5 Lugh, 89 Lul, 111 Luther, Martin, 150, 356 Lutheranism, 99, 356 Lüthi, Max, 351 Lysenko, Trofim, 162 Lyttelton family, 286 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Macedonian Empire (808–148 BC), 84, 87–9 Madison, James, 337 madrasas, 138 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Maduro, Nicolás, 354, 380 Magna Carta (1215), 5 Magris, Claudio, 219 Malacca, 100 Maltesholm School, Hässelby, 217–18, 245 mammoths, 76 Manchester United, 246 Manichaeism, 93 Mann, Thomas, 79 Mansfield, Edward, 271 Mao Zedong, 53, 162, 315, 316, 317, 355 Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, 91 Marduk, 87 de Mariana, Juan, 147 markets, 37 humanitarianism and, 204, 206 immigration and, 68 tribalism, 247 ultimatum game, 34–5 Marley, Robert ‘Bob’, 72 marriage, 199 Marshall, Thurgood, 335 Marx, Karl, 33, 36, 162, 169, 247, 255–6 Marxism, 33, 36, 162, 182, 256, 268 Mary II, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, 186, 193 Maryland, United States, 349 Maslow, Abraham, 339, 341 al-Masudi, 136 mathematics, 70, 134, 135, 137, 156 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mauss, Marcel, 71 McCarthy, Joseph, 335 McCarthy, Kevin, 108 McCloskey, Deirdre, 167, 189, 191–2, 198 McConnell, Addison Mitchell ‘Mitch’, 108 McKinsey, 313 measles, 77 media, 346–9, 370 Medicaid, 119 Medina, 251 Medusa, 88 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 Mencken, Henry Louis, 325, 353 Mercury, 89 Merkel, Angela, 343 Mesopotamia, 37–43, 45, 70, 292–3 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 142 Mexico, 73, 77, 257 United States, migration to, 110, 122, 223, 240, 255 Miami, Florida, 120 Micro-80 computers, 304 Microsoft, 305–6, 309 middle class, 60–61 Migration Advisory Committee, UK, 118 Miletus, 127 militarism, 214 Mill, John Stuart, 124, 160, 164, 176, 319 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 Milton, John, 150 Ming Empire (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 minimal group paradigm, 220–22 Minitel, 313 Mobutu Sese Seko, 187 Mokyr, Joel, 157, 195, 196–7 Molyneux, Stefan, 84 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 53, 84, 94–7, 138, 139, 173–4, 352–3 monopolies, 182, 189 Monte Testaccio, 48 Montesquieu, 89, 94 Moral Consequences of Growth, The (Friedman), 253 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 253 Moriscos, 97 mortgages, 375 Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, 304 most-favoured-nations clause, 53–4 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 Muhammed, Prophet of Islam, 251 Murray, William Vans, 104 Muslims migration of, 112–14, 170, 255 persecution of, 97, 106, 233, 355 Mutz, Diana, 271 Mycenae, 88 Myth of Nations, The (Geary), 288–9 Myth of the Rational Voter, The (Caplan), 258 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 167 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 288 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 126, 127 National Library of Medicine, US, 12 National Science Foundation, US, 313 National Security Agency, US, 313 national stereotypes, 235 nationalism, 9, 11, 13, 16 civic nationalism, 377–8 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 cultural purity and, 69, 70, 71, 352 immigration and, 69, 70, 82 nostalgia and, 287–8, 351 World War I (1914–18), 214 zero-sum thinking, 253, 254, 259, 272 nativism, 14, 122, 176, 223, 254, 349–51, 358 Natural History Museum, London, 124, 125 Naturalism, 198 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Nazirites, 72 Neanderthals, 30–33, 75, 76 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian Emperor, 46 neckties, 72 negative income tax, 374–5 Neilson, James Beaumont, 194 Nemeth, Charlan, 83 Neo-Classicism, 198 Neolithic period (c. 10,000–4500 BC), 74 Netflix, 309, 310 Netherlands, 99 von Neumann, John, 105 neurasthenia, 291 New Atlantis (Bacon), 147 New Guinea, 41 New Testament, 250 New York, United States crime in, 246, 334 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42 New York Times, 291, 297, 325 New York University, 223 New York Yankees, 223 Newcomen, Thomas, 196 Newton, Isaac, 158–9, 201 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 131 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 365 Nîmes, France, 73 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 230, 368 Nineveh, Assyria, 248–9 Nixey, Catherine, 134 Nobel Prize, 82, 105, 276 non-market societies, 34, 35 Nordhaus, William, 273–4 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 63, 64 North Carolina, United States, 102 North Korea, 54, 314–15, 366 North Star, 44 nostalgia, 14, 286–95, 313, 351 Not Fit for Our Society (Schrag), 107 novels, 188–9, 246–7 nuclear power, 301, 327, 328, 329, 332 nuclear weapons, 105, 290, 306 O’Rourke, Patrick Jake, 280 Oannes, 267 Obama, Barack, 66, 240, 329 obsidian, 22, 29 occupational licensing, 376–7 Ögedei Khan, 96 Ogilvie, Sheilagh, 179 Oklahoma, United States, 218–19 Old Testament, 46, 72, 248–50 olive oil, 48 Olorgesailie, 21–2 omnivores, 299 On Liberty (Mill), 160 one-year-old children, 26 open society, 6 open-mindedness, 35, 112 Opening of the mouth’ rite, 70 Orbán, Viktor, 354, 380 de Orta, Garcia, 146–7 Orwell, George, 230, 368 Osman II, Ottoman Sultan, 148 Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), 84, 94, 98, 148, 215, 220, 237, 353 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 overpopulation, 81, 160 Overton, Richard, 183 Pacific islands, 52 Paine, Thomas, 56, 158, 247 Pakistan, 70, 366 Pallas Athena, 89 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 150 Palmer, Tom Gordon, 15 Panthers and Pythons, 243–4 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178 Papin, Denis, 179, 180 Paris, France exiles in, 152, 153 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 parochialism, 216 patent systems, 58, 82, 189–90, 203, 314 in Britain, 179, 189–90, 203, 314 in China, 58 in France, 189 immigrants and, 82 in Netherlands, 189 in United States, 203 PayPal, 310 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 peer review, 127 Pence, Michael, 108 penny universities, 166 Pericles, 131 Permissionless Innovation (Thierer), 299 Perry, Gina, 243 Perseus, 87–8 Persia, ancient, 84, 86–7, 88, 95, 129, 215 Abbasid period (750–1258), 136 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88 Greeks, influence on, 129 Mongols, influence on, 95 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 Sasanian Empire (224–651), 134 personality traits, 7 Pertinax, Roman Emperor, 91 Pessimists Archive, 290, 297, 298 Pessinuntia, 89 Peters, Margaret, 66 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 60 Petty, William, 296 Philip II King of Spain, 98 Phoenicia (2500–539 BC), 43–6, 49, 70, 128–9 Phoenicia dye, 44 Phrygians, 89 physical fallacy, 267–8 Physics (Aristotle), 142 Pietists, 153 Pinker, Steven, 23, 243, 266, 324 Plague of Justinian (541–750), 77 Plato, 130, 131, 132, 134, 352 pluralism, 85, 129, 357 Plutarch, 45–6 Poland Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Dutch Republic, migration to, 99 Holocaust (1941–5), 220 immigration, 116 Israel, migration to, 111 United Kingdom, migration to, 120 United States, migration to, 108, 109 Polanyi, Karl, 37 polio, 293 pollution, 326, 347 Polo, Marco, 174 Popper, Karl, 6, 26, 127, 129, 130, 182–3, 237, 362 population density, 28 populism, 9, 13, 14, 16, 324, 379–82 authoritarianism and, 325, 350–51 complexity and, 324 nostalgia and, 295, 324, 351 trade and, 19 zero-sum thinking and, 254, 259, 274 pornography, 113, 336 Portugal Empire (1415–1999), 100, 146–7, 178 guilds in, 190 Inquisition, 100 Postrel, Virginia, 300, 312, 326 pound locks, 172 poverty, 4, 168, 213, 270 in Britain, 256 in China, 4, 316 immigration and, 66, 69, 81, 121 in Japan, 71 Jeff Bezos test, 275–9 Preston, Lancashire, 190 priests, 41, 128 printing, 146, 153, 171 Pritchard, James Bennett, 43 productivity cities and, 40 foreign trade and, 57, 59, 63 free goods and, 278 immigration and, 68, 81, 117, 204 programming, 8 Progress (Norberg), 12–13 progressives, 286, 300–302 Proserpina, 89 protectionism, 13, 15, 16, 54–5 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 immigration and, 66–7 Internet and, 314 Trump administration (2017–), 19, 57–8 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178, 237 Prussia (1701–1918), 153, 288 Psychological Science, 335 Puerto Rico, 80 Pufendorf, Samuel, 147 purchasing power, 59, 61, 63, 66, 198 Puritanism, 99, 102 Putin, Vladimir, 14, 353–4 Putnam, Robert, 121, 165 Pythagoras, 137 Pythons and Panthers, 243–4 al-Qaeda, 351 Qianlong, Qing Emperor, 153 Qing Empire (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179 Quakers, 99, 102, 206 Quarantelli, Enrico, 338 Quarterly Journal of Economics, The, 63 race; racism, 76–7, 206, 231–4, 358–9 railways, 53, 179, 202, 296, 297 Rammstein, 274 RAND Corporation, 307 Raphael, 137 Rastafari, 72 Rattlers and Eagles, 218–19, 236, 243, 252 reactive aggression, 227–8 Reagan, Ronald, 63, 111 Realism, 198 realistic conflict theory, 222 Reconquista (711–1492), 139 Red Genies, 236 Red Sea, 75 Reformation, 148, 155 refugees crime and, 119 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 281, 342–3 integration of, 117–18 German Jews (1933–45), 104–6, 109 Rembrandt, 99 reminiscence bump, 294 Renaissance, 5, 6, 132, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 215 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 Republic, The (Plato), 352 Republican Party, 164, 225, 238, 240, 301 Reynell, Carew, 184 Reynolds, Glenn, 308 Ridley, Matthew, 20–21, 80 right to work laws, 65 Rizzo, Frank, 334 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 325 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Robbins, Caroline, 200–201 Robertson, Marion Gordon ‘Pat’, 114 Robinson, James, 185, 187, 200 rock paper scissors, 26 Rogers, Will, 282 Roman Law, 5 Romanticism, 198, 287, 296–7 Rome, ancient, 47–50, 89–94, 132 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 assimilation, 91–2 chariot racing, 224 Christianity in, 90, 93–4, 133–4 citizenship, 91 cosmopolitanism, 89–91 fall of, 54, 94 gods in, 89–90 golden nugget theory, 5 globalization, 45–6, 47–50 haircuts, 72 Latin alphabet, 45 philosophy, 70, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44 Sabines, relations with, 89 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 trousers, attitudes towards, 92 Romulus, 89, 90 Rotterdam, Holland, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 226 Royal Navy, 205 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196 Rubin, Paul, 258 ruin follies, 286–7 rule of law, 68, 189, 269, 334, 343, 358, 379 Rumbold, Richard, 183–4 Rushdie, Salman, 73 Ruskin, John, 206, 297 Russia Imperial period (1721–1917), 154, 289–90 Israel, migration to, 111 Mongol period (1237–1368), 95, 352 Orthodox Christianity, 155 Putin period (1999–), 14, 15, 347, 353–4, 365, 367 Soviet period (1917–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 United States, relations with, 236 Yamnaya people, 74–5 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Rwandan Genocide (1994), 230–31 Sabines, 89 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 safety of wings, 374 Saint-Sever, France, 180 Salamanca school, 147, 150 Sanders, Bernard, 302 Santa Fe Institute, 216 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 3, 162 Saudi Arabia, 365 Scandinavia Bronze Age migration, 75 Neolithic migration, 74 United States, migration to, 104, 108 see also Sweden scapegoats, 11, 83, 253, 268, 349, 355–61 Black Death (1346–53), 352, 355–6 Great Recession (2007–9), 255 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 38 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 137 School of Salamanca, 147, 150 Schrag, Peter, 107 Schrödinger, Erwin, 105, 128, 129, 132 Schumpeter, Joseph, 277 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 science, 127–66 in China, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73 Christianity and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Enlightenment, 154–9 experiments, 156–7 Great Vanishing, 134–5 in Greece, 127–32 jealous emulation and, 154–7 in Islamic world, 70, 132, 136–41 Renaissance, 145–6 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 sclera, 25 Scotland, 101, 194 Scotney Castle, Kent, 287 Sculley, John, 304 sea peoples, 43 sea snails, 44 Seinfeld, Jerry, 224 Seleucid Empire (312–63 BC), 88 self-esteem, 372, 379 Sen, Amartya, 231 Seneca, 49, 91 Sephardic Jews, 99 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor, 91 Servius, Publius, 90 Seven Wonders of the World, 45 Seville, Spain, 91, 139 sex bonobos and, 226 encoding and, 233 inbreeding, 78 views on, 113, 336 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), 307 Shaftesbury, Lord, see Cooper, Anthony Ashley Sherif, Muzafer, 219, 220, 222, 243, 252 Shia Islam, 149 Shining, The, 335 shirts, 72 Siberia, 76 Sicily, 89 Sierra Leone, 365 Siger of Brabant, 143, 144 Sikhism, 149 Silicon Valley, 311 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 silver processing, 49 Simler, Kevin, 282 Simmel, Georg, 266 Simon, Julian, 81 Simple Rules for a Complex World (Epstein), 320 Singapore, 53 skilled workers, 36, 45, 66, 95, 97, 101, 117 Slater, Samuel, 202 slavery, 86, 156, 205–6, 232 in British Empire, 182, 199, 200, 205 in Mesopotamia, 40, 41, 43 in Rome, 47, 48 in Sparta, 54 in United States, 103, 106, 205, 232 smallpox, 77, 197, 293, 296 Smith, Adam, 21, 59, 192, 194, 205, 280 Smith, Fred, 319 smoke detectors, 234 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 snack boxes, 20 Snow, Charles Percy, 105 social media, 239, 347, 370 social status, 281–5 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 Socrates, 130, 131–2, 330 solar power, 328, 329, 331, 332 Solomon, King of Israel, 38, 45 Solyndra, 329 Song Empire (960–1279), 53, 169–75 Sony, 319 Soros, George, 323 South Korea, 314, 366 South Sudan, 365 Soviet Union (1922–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 Sovu, Rwanda, 231 Sowell, Thomas, 267–8 Spain, 97–101, 184, 207 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 amphorae production, 48 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Columbus’ voyages (1492–1503), 178 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 98–9, 101 Empire (1492–1976), 147, 178, 182 guilds in, 190 Inquisition (1478–1834), 97, 98 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 106, 140 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106 Reconquista (711–1492), 97, 138–9, 140 regional authorities, 152 Roman period (c.218 BC–472 AD), 48, 91 Salamanca school, 147, 150 sombreros, 73 Uber in, 320 vaqueros, 73 Spanish flu (1918–19), 77 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 Spencer, Herbert, 165, 214 Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 150, 153 Spitalfields, London, 190 sports, 199, 223–4, 232–3, 245–6 Sri Lanka, 100, 365 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 St Louis, SS, 109 Standage, Tom, 166 Stanford University, 307, 311 Star Trek, 246, 259 stasists, 301–2 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 steam engine, 179, 180, 189, 194, 203, 296 steamships, 53, 202 Stenner, Karen, 242, 343, 348, 350, 357 Stockholm, Sweden, 217–18 Stranger Things, 294 Strasbourg, France, 153 strategic tolerance, 86–96 Strindberg, August, 239 Suarez, Francisco, 147 suits, 72 Sumer (4500–1900 BC), 37–43, 45, 55, 292–3 Summers, Larry, 329 Sunni Islam, 148, 149, 238, 365 superpowers, 338–9 supply chains, 11, 62, 66 Sweden DNA in, 73 Green Party, 325 Lind dreadlocks affair (2019), 72 immigration in, 114, 115, 118, 281 manufacturing in, 65 Muslim community, 114 Neolithic migration, 74 refugees in, 118, 281, 342 United States, migration to, 107 Sweden Democrats, 281 swine flu, 3 Switzerland, 152, 153 Sylvester II, Pope, 137 Symbolism, 198 Syria, 42, 82, 342, 365, 366 tabula rasa, 225 Tacitus, 91 Taiwan, 316, 366 Taizu, Song Emperor, 170 Tajfel, Henri, 220, 221–2 Tandy, Geoffrey, 124–6 Tang Empire (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Tanzania, 257 Taoism, 129, 149 tariffs, 15, 56, 373 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Obama’s tyre tariffs (2009), 66 Trump’s steel tariffs (2018), 272 Tasmania, 50–53, 54 Tatars, 238 taxation in Britain, 72, 187, 188, 189 carbon tax, 330–31 crony capitalism and, 279–80 immigration and, 69 negative income tax, 374–5 in Song Empire, 172 in Spanish Netherlands, 98 Taylor, Robert, 306 TCP/IP protocol, 307 technology, 296–9 automation, 63, 312–13 computers, 302–14 decline, 51–2 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312 nostalgia and, 296–9, 313 technocrats, 299–300, 312, 313–14, 326–9 technological decline, 51–2 telescopes, 145–6 Teller, Edward, 105 Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, 45 Temple of Serapis, Alexandria, 134 Tencent, 311 terrorism, 10, 114, 229, 340–41, 363 Tetlock, Philip, 160 textiles, 172–3 Thales, 127 Thierer, Adam, 299 third-party punishment game, 35 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 72, 97, 148, 150 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 142–3, 144–5 Thoreau, Henry David, 203 Thracians, 130 Thucydides, 131, 132 Tiangong Kaiwu, 153 Tibetans, 85 Tierra del Fuego, 52–3 Tigris river, 37, 139 Timurid Empire (1370–1507), 139 tin, 42 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 Toledo, Spain, 140 tolerance, 86–114, 129 Tomasello, Michael, 25 ‘too big to fail’, 280 Tower of Babel, 39 Toynbee, Arnold, 382 trade, 13, 19–23, 28–9, 129, 140, 363, 373 backlashes against, 19, 54–67, 254 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Britain, 181–99 competitive advantage, 28–9 division of labour and, 28, 31, 57 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Greece, ancient, 47 humanitarianism and, 204–7 Mesopotania, 37–43 migration and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 morality of, 33–6 Phoenicia, 43–6 Rome, ancient, 47–50 snack boxes, 20 United States, 19, 57–8, 202–3 zero-sum thinking and, 248, 252–66, 270–72 trade unions, 64, 65, 272, 374 Trajan, Roman Emperor, 91 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 58 Transparency International, 381 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 354 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 353 Trenchard, John, 201 Treschow, Michael, 65 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 215, 356 tribalism, 14, 217–47, 362, 368–72 fluid, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42, 378, 379 media and, 348, 370 threats and, 241, 350, 370 Trollboda School, Hässelby, 218 Trump, Donald, 9, 14, 240, 313, 321, 322, 354, 365, 367, 380 immigration, views on, 223 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 stasism, 301, 302 steel tariffs (2018), 272 trade, views on, 19, 57–8 zero-sum attitude, 248 Tunisia, 45, 48 Turing, Alan, 124 Turkey; Turks, 70, 74, 136, 156, 354, 357, 365 turtle theory, 121–2 Tutsis, 230–31 Twilight Zone, The, 260–61 Twitter, 84, 239, 245 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 186, 201 tyranny of cousins, 229, 230 tyre tariffs, 66 Tyre, 45 Uber, 319–20 Uganda, 365 Ukraine, 75, 116, 365 ultimatum game, 34–6 umbrellas, 298 uncertainty, 321–6 unemployment, 62, 373–4, 376, 377 ‘unicorns’, 82 United Auto Workers, 64 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations, 327 United States, 199–203 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 America First, 19, 272 automation in, 313 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 China, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 citizenship, 103 Civil War (1861–5), 109 climate change polices in, 328 Constitution (1789), 102, 202 consumer price index, 277 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 crime in, 110, 119, 120, 346 Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 dynamism in, 301–2 Federalist Party, 103 free trade gains, 60, 61 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 254 gross domestic product (GDP), 257 Homestead Acts, 171 housing in, 376 immigration, see immigration in United States Industrial Revolution, 202, 291–2 innovation in, 53, 203, 298–9 intellectual property in, 58 Internet in, 306–14 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Ku Klux Klan, 254 labour mobility in, 374, 376–7 lobbying in, 280, 329 Manhattan Project (1942–6), 105 manufacturing, 62–6 McCarthy era (1947–57), 335 Medicaid, 119 middle class, 60–61 NAFTA, 63, 64 National Library of Medicine, 12 national stereotypes, 235, 236 nostalgia in, 290–92, 294 open society, 169, 199–203 patent system, 203 political tribalism in, 224–5, 238, 240 populist movement, 254 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 railways, 202 Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 365 Senate, 108 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 slavery in, 103, 106, 205 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 Supreme Court, 108, 335 tariffs, 66, 272 trade deficits, 60, 270 Trump administration (2017–), see Trump, Donald unemployment in, 373, 376 universities, 163–5, 241 Vietnam War (1955–75), 345 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 World War II (1939–45), 56, 64, 335 Yankees, 58 United Steelworkers, 64, 272 universal basic income (UBI), 374, 375 universities, 140 University Bologna, 140 University of California, Berkeley, 311 University of Cambridge, 140 University of Chicago, 165 University of Leeds, 357 University of London, 201 University of Marburg, 153 University of Oxford, 140, 144, 145, 328 University of Padua, 144, 146 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 University of Pennsylvania, 271 University of Salamanca, 140 University of Toulouse, 144 unskilled workers, 36, 66, 102, 117 untranslatable words, 288 Ur, 55 urbanization, see cities Uruk, Sumer, 39 US Steel, 64 Usher, Abbott Payson, 196 Uyghurs, 85, 174 vaccines, 12, 296, 299 Vandals, 92 Vanini, Lucilio, 150 vaqueros, 73 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 213, 261 Vatican Palace, 137 Vavilov, Nikolai, 162 Venezuela, 354 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Vermeer, Johannes, 99 Vespucci, Amerigo, 146 Vienna, Austria, 95, 237, 238 Vienna Congress (1815), 288 Vietnam, 171, 207, 270, 345 Virgil, 91 Virginia Company, 200 vitamin D, 74 de Vitoria, Francisco, 147 Vladimir’s choice, 221, 252, 271 Voltaire, 153, 193 Walton, Sam, 277 Wang, Nina, 315 War of the Polish Succession (1733–8), 289–90 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, 50 warfare, 216–17, 243 Warren, Elizabeth, 302 washing of hands, 10, 335 Washington, George, 103, 205 Washington, DC, United States, 280 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 Watson, John, 291 Watson, Peter, 79 Watt, James, 172, 189, 194, 274 Weatherford, Jack, 95 Web of Science, 159 Weber, Maximilian, 204 WeChat, 311 Weekly Standard, 312 welfare systems, 118, 281, 374 Wengrow, David, 42 West Africa Squadron, 205 Western Roman Empire (395–480), 94, 135 Westernization, 4–5 Wheelan, Charles, 20 Whig Party, 185, 201 White House Science Council, 313 white supremacists, 84, 351, 367 Whitechapel, London, 190 Who Are We?


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

Calling her parents in Leeds from a phone box at King’s Cross Station, there was a pleasant surprise. She had been accepted for a doctorate. On that bright morning, Grady had little sense of just how important her work would become in unraveling the possibility for ancient life on Mars. Well-regarded and fêted—awarded a Commandership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire—Monica Grady is today a professor of planetary science. She does not seem particularly bothered by media hoopla, as befits her no-nonsense Yorkshire heritage. Growing up the eldest of eight children, she was fascinated by the limestone scenery of the nearby moorlands. “I’d always liked rocks and was thrilled by their poetic side, you might say,” she says.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

The solution was to build a wall of secrecy around the banks – and then, when anyone asked about it over the years that followed, say it had all been down to the Jews. Between the wars, foreign wealth managed by Swiss banks increased tenfold. After 1945, banks like BSI started opening offices in strange places, often corners of the crumbling British empire. The City of London had for centuries run the business side of a colonial project that extended from the slave ships of the Atlantic to the gold fields of the Cape and the East India Company’s cargoes of teas, dyes and opiates. As British power waned, many of its smaller possessions remained bound to the City, only now in the service of other people’s empires.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

A secondary market of accessories serves individuals who desire not only luxury but personalization. One key accessory is the mandatory opaque white cube carrying case with self-generated spotlight illumination, highlighting the smoothness of the egg’s curve and accentuating speckles. The North American continent is absolutely lousy with egg knowledge. The Western British Empire is crazy with poultry experts. I hadn’t gotten any further than establishing setting when Adeline’s voice shattered the thunder of my typewriter. She sounded positively apoplectic, shouting: —Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out!


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

Manhattan offers tax havens, security, the good life. “In 1965 if I saw a friend from Paris, I would cross the street,” Jean de Noyer, owner of Manhattan’s fashionable La Goulue restaurant, told a reporter. “Now I just wave.…” Wealthy Europeans view their tax laws as confiscatory and the labor unions as too powerful. The British Empire is preserved in history books. France, where the rich can often avoid paying their share of taxes, is beset by political instability. The Left captured 49 percent of the vote in the 1978 elections, and many business leaders fear the deep divisions between classes—not to mention the divisions within the ruling Gaullist party.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In truth, globalization is the ongoing cultural westernization of the planet—at least in a superficial sense. In 2020 nearly eight billion diverse peoples dress, listen, talk, travel, and communicate in an increasingly homogenous manner that mostly follows the examples of those in the United States, Europe, many of the English-speaking former colonies of the British Empire, and the Asian democracies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Yet these societies’ popular commonality remains a quite thin veneer of civilization, easily exposed as such in times of war, plague, and famine. Globalization’s real transnational cultural and political harmony encompasses a group of a few million elite architects of pan-worldism.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Integration in Rothschild’s day went beyond the stock markets: global trade too was extraordinarily interdependent and sensitive to financial crises. Sadly, little changed in the intervening years. After panic seized the financial system in 2008, international trade helped spread the crisis around the world. Disease Vectors In the nineteenth century the British Empire was the reigning economic superpower, and whenever it spiraled into a financial crisis, its trading partners suffered collateral damage, as demand for raw materials and finished goods plummeted. In the twentieth century the United States inherited Britain’s mantle, accounting on the eve of the crisis for about a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Measured in fees, it was a big success, bringing in about $720,000, a huge amount in that era. That spurred the firm to set up a London office in hopes of landing more big clients. McKinsey opened an office on King Street, an address at the heart of the power structure of the rapidly fading British Empire. It was steps from the clutch of social clubs where matters of state were often decided and a short walk from the government offices and the Houses of Parliament. More important was the man McKinsey chose to lead the office: Hugh Parker, an American, who had graduated from Cambridge University, which along with Oxford has for centuries educated Britain’s elite.


pages: 1,108 words: 321,463

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

British Empire, collective bargaining, Easter island, laissez-faire capitalism, plutocrats, profit motive, the scientific method, yellow journalism

Keating found no trace of that joyous admiration with which she had always spoken of Toohey, which he had expected to see her display in his presence. There was something heavy and colorless about Catherine, and very tired. Toohey’s valet brought in the tea tray. “You will pour, won’t you please, my dear?” said Toohey to Catherine. “Ah, there’s nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization—this tea ritual and the detective novel. Catherine, my dear, do you have to grasp that pot handle as if it were a meat axe? But never mind, it’s charming, it’s really what we love you for, Peter and I, we wouldn’t love you if you were graceful as a duchess -who wants a duchess nowadays?”

In the future there will be no need for a dramatist. The critic will simply observe the life of the masses and evaluate its artistic points for the public. That’s what Jules Fougler said. Now I don’t know whether I agree with him, but he’s got an interesting fresh angle there.” “Lancelot Clokey says the British Empire is doomed. He says there will be no war, because the workers of the world won’t allow it, it’s international bankers and munition makers who start wars and they’ve been kicked out of the saddle. Lancelot Clokey says that the universe is a mystery and that his mother is his best friend. He says the Premier of Bulgaria eats herring for breakfast.”


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Try the coffee spiced with cardamom or fresh juices (£E7). Daily 24hr. Victoria Lounge Winter Palace hotel, Corniche el-Nil; map. For the princely sum of £E70/person you can enjoy being served cucumber sandwiches, fruit cake and tea, as if the sun had never set on the British Empire. Daily 4–6pm. BARS Luxor has a handful of decent bars. On the west bank, drinking mostly takes place in hotels or restaurants. Genesis Pub Restaurant New Karnak, near the Hilton Luxor Resort & Spa 095 373 032; map. If a swimming pool with a waterfall isn’t tempting enough – and you don’t mind a menagerie of ostriches, peacocks, a camel and a horse – this is the best place in Luxor for a fun night out, complete with bubble-blowers and clouds of dry ice, karaoke, HD sports TV, pool (£E20/hr), wi-fi and a bellydancer (Fri).

South of the tracks lies the European-style garden city built for foreign employees of the Suez Canal Company, which extends to the verdant banks of the Sweetwater Canal. Following careful restoration, its leafy boulevards and placid streets, lined with colonial villas, look almost as they must have done in the 1930s, with bilingual street signs nourishing the illusion that the British Empire has just popped indoors for a quick cocktail. North of the train tracks is another world of hastily constructed flats grafted onto long-standing slums, and a quarter financed by the Gulf Emirates that provides a cordon sanitaire for the wealthy suburb of Nemrah Setta (Number Six).


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, taxation was almost constantly becoming lighter and lighter, yet still the Exchequer was full. ...Those who uttered and those who believed that long succession of despairing predictions.... saw that the debt grew and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt.2 Anyone who imagines that the British national debt during this period was smaller as a proportion of GDP than the government debts of the current era should think again. The debt that was to bring down the British economy as it ascended to global dominance reached a pinnacle of more than 250 percent of GDP in the 1820s, when the British empire was still growing and flourishing, and until around 1865 it did not drop below 100 percent, which is where the United States stands today. The problem of the United States comes not chiefly from its liabilities, serious though they are, but from the suffocating webs of government regulations and subsidies, pettifoggery and litigation that is devaluing all the assets in our economy.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If we imagine picking 10 people randomly from the world’s population, the best predictor of their income or wealth would probably be their country of origin. If they’re from Norway or the US they’re probably richer than if they’re from Nigeria or Uganda, notwithstanding the inequalities within each of those countries. Why these geographical differences? As a youngster growing up at the time when some of the British Empire had yet to be dismantled, I remember a popular racist myth that people were poor in certain countries because they were lazy or unintelligent, while the British were enterprising and industrious, and hence richer. This of course is nonsense. If you think of virtually any occupation that is found in a wide range of countries – teacher, labourer, engineer, doctor, retailer, call centre operator – in most cases their pay is higher in rich countries than in middling or poor countries, though this has nothing to do with how hard they work or how intelligent they are.


pages: 537 words: 149,628

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914, the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world. “Some say we’re fighting, or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from. About a hundred years back, the British Empire faced a problem much like ours today: How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?” A montage of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in port appeared, the last shot a lingering image of CVN-80, the new USS Enterprise, still under construction.


pages: 417 words: 147,682

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, urban renewal

Lyndon Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, said that whoever controlled "the high ground" of space would control the world. This phrase, "the high ground," somehow caught hold. "The Roman Empire," said Johnson, "controlled the world because it could build roads. Later—when it moved to sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space." The New York Times, in an editorial, said the United States was now in a "race for survival." The panic became more and more apocalyptic.


pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

See “settler movement” Western Union (telegraph company), 348–51, 355 Westinghouse, George, 368–69, 374–75, 396, 410–11 Weston, William (canal engineer), 189, 193 Wheeler, George (military officer/surveyor), 112–13, 151 Whiteman Air Force Base (USAF), 26–29 Whitman, Narcissa (missionary), 93 Whitman, Walt (poet), 238 Whitney, Josiah (explorer), 95 Willard, Simon (explorer), 170 Williams, William “Bill” (explorer and suspected cannibal), 106 Winesburg, Ohio, 276 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 429 Winslow, Edward (explorer), 170 Winthrop, John (mathematician/astronomer), 30, 190 Wisconsin River, 175 women access to education, 255 missionary emigrants to the West, 93 Sacagawea, life and legend, 49–52 See also gender wood as one of five classical elements, v, xx importance in early America, 33 unifying role in America, xxi A Working Hypothesis for the Study of Migrations (Johansen), 72 World War I, 281, 283 World War II, 304 World Wide Web, 423–25 Wright, Orville (inventor), 316 Wyoming birth of incandescent lightbulb, 358–59 Cold War missile defenses, 27 pathway for western settlement, 96–100, 262 surveying expeditions, 132–33 the “Yellow Book” (General Location of National System of Interstate Highways Including All Additional Routes at Urban Areas), 305–9 Yellowstone National Park about location and wonders of, 130–32 exploration and survey, 132–37 preservation as national park, 137–39 York (slave of William Clark), 21 Youghiogheny River, 182–83 Young Men and Fire (Maclean), 57 Zapruder, Matthew (poet), 238 ABOUT THE AUTHOR SIMON WINCHESTER is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa. Those books were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. His most recent book is Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. In 2006 Mr. Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors. ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER Atlantic Skulls West Coast: Bering to Baja The Man Who Loved China A Crack in the Edge of the World The Meaning of Everything Krakatoa The Map That Changed the World The Fracture Zone The Professor and the Madman In Holy Terror American Heartbeat Their Noble Lordships Stones of Empire Outposts Prison Diary, Argentina Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles Pacific Rising Small World Pacific Nightmare The River at the Center of the World CREDITS Cover design by Richard Ljoenes.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Before the war, when he was a young university student in the UK, he found that the brightest minds of England were turning their backs on the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, in favor of lucrative careers in finance and banking. While the previous generation was creating wealth, in the form of electrical and chemical plants and inventing new electromechanical machines, the next generation was indulging in massaging and managing other people’s money. He lamented that it was a sign of the decline of the British Empire. England could not maintain its status as a world power if it had a crumbling scientific base. Then he said something that caught my attention. He remarked that he was seeing this for the second time in his life. The brightest minds at Princeton were no longer tackling the difficult problems in physics and mathematics but were being drawn into careers like investment banking.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

U.S. long-term interest rates period averages As with the graph on the previous page, the long-ternn rate is that on railroad bonds from1857 to 1917; after 1917, it's the average rate on long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. "Real" rate is computed by subtracting the yearly change in the consumer price index from the nominal rate. Periods are based on Angus Maddison's (1995): the period of high Victorian capitalism — of the gold standard, the British empire, and free trade and free capital flows (1870-1913); the periods of war, troubled recovery, depression, more war, and a less troubled recovery (1914-1949); the postwar Golden Age (1950-73); and the recent Bronze Age. I've divided the recent period into the years of inflation, labor and Third World rebellions, and U.S. imperial erosion (1974-81), and the period since, that of more assertive imperial power, consolidated financier rule, and free trade and free capital flows.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

With his usual realism, Lenin recognised this. His Imperialism, unlike some other Marxist works attempting to analyse the new phase of capital- ism after 1900,28 contains no reference whatsoever to the text of Marx and Engels except to two relevant passages from the Correspondence dealing with the effect of the British Empire on the British working class. However, in the period since 1917 a 378 The Influence of Marxism 1945–83 vast amount of Marxist writing about current developments in capitalism failed to heed this precedent, and devoted much time and effort to proving that Lenin’s (or, much more rarely, some other Marxist) text still constituted an essentially valid analysis of a phase of capitalist development which he had incautiously described as ‘the last’; or to making critical comments on it; or –when it was plainly out of date – to elaborating a casual phrase of his in 1917 into a theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ for the period since the Second World War.29 Outside the diminishing range of the old dogmatic orthodoxies, by 1983 most Marxists no longer felt the obligation to express their analysis of the current phase of capitalism in terms of texts which described phases which now belonged predominantly to the past.


Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

To get here, make the turn just before Croco Cun along the highway or snake your way back north from Puerto Morelos along the beach road that passes Motel Eden. Deserted beach. $$ Hotel Inglaterra (Av. Niños Heroes, % 987/1-04-18, michael@hotelinglaterra. freeserve.co.uk, 10 rooms, air or fans). A country isn’t a real country unless at least one person settles there to represent the former British Empire, where the sun never sets. Just ask Michael, the owner of this standard but attractive intimate hotel two blocks from the beach. Free coffee. $-$$ n Moderate Hotels Rancho Libertad (beachfront, south of the car ferry, US and Canada % 888/305-5225, Mexico, % 987/1-01-81, www.rancholibertad.com, 12 rooms with fans, prices include breakfast).


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The US Secretary of State Al Haig flew thousands of miles in every direction trying to find a means to prevent war. If American diplomacy had taken its normal course, it would have tilted in favour of the Argentinians. Successful US governments from Franklin Roosevelt onwards had treated the former British Empire as an anachronism that was not worth defending. The Reagan administration would demonstrate this the following year by sending US marines to overthrow the Marxist government of Grenada, in October 1983, without troubling to consult the British government, although Grenada was a former British colony and a member of the Commonwealth.


pages: 852 words: 157,181

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

This view of grand Iron Age Celtic origins on the Continent and progressive westward shrinkage since Roman times is still held by many archaeologists. It is also the epistemological basis of strong perceptions of ethnic identity held by millions of the so-called Celtic diaspora now residing in the former British Empire and America. Not all archaeologists see it that way. Dissidents include Colin Renfrew, who in his landmark Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, published in 1987, questioned the evidence for this whole perspective of invading ‘Celtic ethnicity’. In fact there is now a growing consensus view of the lack of evidence, both in the archaeology and in early historical documents, for any large-scale pre-Roman Iron Age invasions of the British Isles, apart from shared Belgic tribal names across the Channel (of which more below).


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In its structure, Michael Armstrong is a version of the slave rescue narrative, recounting the frustrated efforts of the heroine, the rich daughter of a factory owner, to liberate Armstrong from his villainous apprenticeship at an isolated factory and his ultimate escape.59 The metaphor of slavery for factory labor no doubt reflected the intense debate over slavery itself during the early decades of the nineteenth century, leading up to emancipation in the British Empire in 1834. Still, it was a measure of how horrifying factory labor was seen to be that so many observers equated it with chattel slavery. One self-described “Journeyman Cotton Spinner” wrote of the terrible heat in spinning rooms, where workers had no breaks: “The negro slave in the West Indies, if he works under a scorching sun, has probably a little breeze of air sometimes to fan him; he has a space of ground, and time allowed to cultivate it.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Whether such disdain is a good or bad thing (and for me it is mostly bad), it is not a unique problem of Singapore’s founder. In fact, under far more burdensome conditions than most mayors face, Lee was a remarkably successful founder who created a mixed economy in which socialist and market forces combined to lift Singapore out of rural poverty. Lee’s fledgling, British Empire–inflected regime took five million people representing rival ethnic backgrounds from waterside hovels and shacks to modern housing, from a poverty-stricken feudal economy to a global trading economy, from massive illiteracy to one of the highest literacy rates in Asia. Along the way, Lee laid the foundations for a democracy that, if rather too ponderously, has emerged with growing confidence as the world’s most important free city-state.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

Now powerless, compared to its earlier position, the firm was forced to call in British Army troops to save itself. The shocked British public seized on the company as a scapegoat. In 1858, the British government called in the firm's £100 million debt. It seized the company's territorial possessions as collateral payment. Thus the British empire's "Jewel in the Crown" was actually bought in a bankruptcy sale. The length of the charter companies' histories is striking, particularly when one compares them to the longevity of most states. The Dutch East India Company lasted 194 years; the Hudson's Bay Company, 200 years; and PRIVATIZED MIIITARY HISTORY the English East India Company, 258 years.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

After we landed, I showed Obama a dueling op-ed that had been written by Boris Johnson, the bombastic mayor of London and a chief proponent of Brexit. To counterprogram our trip and appeal to nationalist sentiment in the UK, the whole lead-in was an indictment of Obama for swapping out a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. “Some said,” Johnson wrote, “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.” “Really?” Obama said. “The black guy doesn’t like the British?” We were standing in the U.S. ambassador’s house in London, a stately mansion with a lawn so big, with grass so carefully cut that it resembled a football field without lines.


pages: 386

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

Among those present at Fuller & Horsey's auction was Ralph Heaton II, a Birmingham die sinker. Heaton was high bidder for most of the mint's equipment, including all of its Boulton & Watt screw presses, which he subsequently installed at his Bath Street shop. His timing couldn't have been better, for the British Empire was expanding, and the Royal Mint alone could no longer meet all its coinage needs. Coin orders were soon pouring into Bath Streetfrom Australia, from Chile, and finally from the Royal Mint itself, which started by ordering blanks and then, in 1852, offered Ralph Heaton & Sons a chance to supply finished regal copper coins.


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

During World War II, she and her running mate Queen Elizabeth were painted gray and converted into troop carriers able to carry fifteen thousand soldiers each. The Cunard flagship held the Blue Riband of the Atlantic from 1938 to 1952. The Mariners’ Museum. Figure 25. The first-class lounge aboard Queen Mary, decorated in a British interpretation of Art Deco. The Queen s boasted wood paneling from every colony in the British Empire. Such spaces were criticized for their “mild but expensive vulgarity.” Corbis Images. Figure 26. The delivery of a model of the United States Lines’ new flagship, America, completed in 1940. Neither large nor fast enough to be in the same class as the European giants, this medium-sized liner was Gibbs’s practice run for the much larger SS United States.


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

Some hunter-gatherers in especially rich environments, such as the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and the coast of Ecuador, also developed sedentary societies, food storage, and nascent chiefdoms, but they did not go farther on the road to kingdoms. A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support other full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats. Of most direct relevance to wars of conquest, it can be used to feed professional soldiers. That was the decisive factor in the British Empire's eventual defeat of New Zealand's well-armed indigenous Maori population. While the Maori achieved some stunning temporary victories, they could not maintain an army constantly in the field and were in the end worn down by 18,000 full-time British troops. Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justifica- tion for wars of conquest; artisans such as metalworkers, who develop swords, guns, and other technologies; and scribes, who preserve far more information than can be remembered accurately.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Yet it isn’t: many Europeans think Europe’s best days are behind it, and that their children will live worse than they do. A century ago, in 1914, Europe was marching towards four years of senseless massacre, mostly orchestrated by imperial elites who sent millions of ordinary people to their deaths. Ireland was part of the British Empire, while central and eastern Europe was carved up between the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian ones. Democracies were rare and limited: women generally did not have the vote and neither did all men.517 Societies were stratified along class lines. While a rudimentary welfare state existed in Germany and Britain, social protections were generally minimal.518 Compulsory education for all was a novelty and the school leaving age in Britain was twelve.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

That night, these expatriates – heat conservation engineers, a fork-lift truck repairer, a textile salesman, a cost accountant, and the rep for a small manufacturer from Lancashire – ate fish’n’chips and drank more British beer in the Dickens Inn, an ‘English pub’ near the river in old Philadelphia. In and around the city, the expatriates have a choice not only of two cricket teams, but also of a variety of other societies such as the Daughters of the British Empire, the English Speaking Union, the Royal British Legion, a British Officers’ Club, St George’s and St Andrew’s societies and a Pickwick Club. Most of the newly arrived Britons were workaday people seeking a prosperous and congenial environment in which to advance careers well launched before they arrived.


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

The rest of the seventeenth century saw a succession of East Indies political prisoners and Muslim holy men exiled here for opposing Dutch colonial rule. During the nineteenth century, the British used Robben Island as a dumping ground for deserters, criminals and political prisoners, in much the same way as they used Australia. Captured Xhosa leaders who defied the British Empire during the Frontier Wars of the early to mid-nineteenth century were transported from the Eastern to the Western Cape to be imprisoned, and many ended up on Robben Island. In 1846 those imprisoned included a whole range of the socially marginalized: vagrants, prostitutes, and the mentally and chronically ill.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“Tobacco Future Is Meeting Topic,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 29, 1945; Folder “Clippings,” Box 55, North Carolina Department of Agriculture Records (NCDA), North Carolina Division of Archives and History (NCDAH), Raleigh, N.C. Of course, tobacco farmers did not anticipate that India would very shortly be removed from the scope of the British Empire with its declaration of independence in 1947. See Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Research Department, Flue-Cured Tobacco: An Economic Survey (Richmond: Author, 1952), 48. 8. “The Price Outlook for Flue-Cured Tobacco,” Progressive Farmer, June 1947, 82. 9. James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 247. 10.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

Indeed, the geographical division of the capital stocks held by Europe’s two great powers in the post-1870 period shows that rather than competing with one another, they shared out the world among themselves (Table 7.2). Table 7.2 Division of global long-term capital markets by the United Kingdom and France United Kingdom By destination area (%) 1854 1870 1914 Europe 55 25 6 Latin America 15 11 24 British Empire 5 34 29 United States 25 27 29 Rest of the world — 3 12 Out of a total of (£m) 260 770 4,107 France By destination area (%) 1851 1881 1914 Europe 96 71 58 Middle East — 20 11 French colonies — 4 9 Americas 4 5 16 Rest of the world — — 6 Out of a total of (£m) 98 688 2,073 Source: Kenwood and Lougheed, Growth of International Economy, 1971.


The Rough Guide to Brussels 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Dunford, Martin.; Lee, Phil; Summer, Suzy.; Dal Molin, Loik

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, low cost airline, Peace of Westphalia, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning

They are, however, a rather jumbled bunch as they were plonked here unceremoniously when the original chapel was demolished in the nineteenth century to be replaced by the substantial building of today. Most of the plaques were paid for by voluntary contributions from the soldiers who survived – in the days when the British Empire rarely coughed up anything for all but the most aristocratic of its veterans. The battlefield – Le Hameau du Lion From outside the church of Saint Joseph, pick up bus #W or drive the 4km journey to the battlefield – a landscape of rolling farmland interrupted by a couple of main roads and punctuated by the odd copse and whitewashed farmstead.


Lancaster by John Nichol

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Louis Blériot, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Born in Natal Province at the end of June 1917, the grandson of an admiral, he trained as a naval cadet, then went on to serve in the South African Merchant Marine fleet before changing tack to work as a civil engineer. Combining a sense of duty with a thirst for adventure, like thousands of others from the Dominions of the British Empire,5 he joined the RAF in 1938. By 1941 he was a Squadron Leader with 44 Squadron, when the first Lancasters were delivered to RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Nettleton had led the Lancaster’s debut sorties early in March 1942 – largely ‘gardening’ exercises, the laying of mines (nicknamed ‘vegetables’) off the coast of Heligoland and Düne, two small islands in the North Sea, 45 miles north-west of Cuxhaven, used by the Germans as a fortress and harbour.


pages: 644 words: 156,395

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Easter island, Etonian, financial independence, ghettoisation, lone genius, plutocrats

People content to stay in one spot didn’t deserve to be alive – people like Jessica Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, who exemplified English insularity and hatred of Johnny Foreigner: According to my father, outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners, but also other people’s children, the majority of my older sisters’ acquaintances, almost all young men – in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking. Xenophobia was rife among the ruling classes. Lord Redesdale was not untypical of his generation, which had seen the expansion of the British Empire in lands beyond Europe, and which, from its lofty position as imperial ruler, regarded most foreigners as contemptible and indecent. ‘Abroad’ was ‘unutterably bloody’, a place fit only for perverts and pmkos; if you didn’t fall foul of the bad drains you were liable to be shot by anarchists or buggered by dagos.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Instead, contributors examine the stubborn humanity that persists in the private eyes that must be trained to train automated image-recognition systems on the most abhorrent images, on the dual pleasures of apprehension in facial recognition systems as well as the pleasure of workplace refusal and resistance. Other contributors also demonstrate that, under the guise of meritocracy, computing industry hiring practices have long, and likely will continue to, baked disturbing cultural traditions of sexism (on multiple ends of the British empire), racism (on both ends of Siri), Western backwardness in relationship to the Islamic and Chinese civilizations, and the faux beliefs in the generalizability of code into representations of the world. In the debates and conferences supporting this book, authors probed whether the category of the machine helps us rethink the human: How do we protect the content moderators behind every filter algorithm?


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I can scarcely imagine what someone looking upon the throngs of out-of-town arrivals must have thought in the years in which London seemed so clearly unable to sustain any more people, let alone the masses coming from other parts of the world and the many more being born into the already overcrowded city. Even the exodus to colonies in the Americas and Australia did nothing to stem the population explosion. By 1800, approximately a million people were living in London, and by the 1860s that number had tripled, unleashing dire consequences on the capital of the British Empire. Central London was a particularly hellish place. The mud and horse manure were often ankle deep in streets further littered by newspapers, broken glass, cigar ends, and rotting food. Dockworkers, factory workers, laundresses, and their families were packed into tiny hovels with dirt floors.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

One of Franklin’s goals, therefore, was to convert fear of colonial expansion into rejoicing that such expansion would further augment England’s imperial power.25 Edmund Morgan, one of Franklin’s leading biographers, writes that Franklin “took it as a given that the wealth of any country lay in the numbers of its people, and proceeded to show (before Malthus was born) that the growth of population was governed by economic opportunity, that economic opportunity in America would for a long time be almost unlimited because of the unique abundance of land, that population in America increased accordingly, by natural propagation, far more rapidly than population in England and more rapidly than English manufac- 20 chapter 1 turers would be able to supply. It was therefore unnecessary and unwise to restrain American manufacturing, unwise to do anything to discourage economic opportunity and growth within the empire.”26 Franklin is also well known for anticipating scientific racism and eugenics. He desired the preservation not only of the British Empire but also of an empire of Englishmen, a reactionary goal given the ethnic diversity of the colonies.27 Franklin disliked the immigration to the colonies of African slaves and also Germans (the latter with their “swarthy Complexion”).28 “This will in a few Years become a German Colony,” he lamented in 1749 after observing several thousand German immigrants arrive at Philadelphia’s docks.29 Like many in this era, Franklin assumed that human population growth followed the same biological laws as plants and animals.


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

In June 2012, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights published a survey on “Gender Equity in Education,” reporting that the gender gap between boys and girls in American schools still had not been closed: “Despite the enormous progress made in ensuring equal education opportunities since the passage of Title IX in 1972…much work remains if we are to achieve full gender equality among our nation’s students.” London, England “It’s become a way for people to dismiss sexism,” says Laura Bates, talking about the evolution of the notion that “girls are mean.” Bates heads the Everyday Sexism Project, a feminist website she founded in 2012, at the age of twenty-six. In 2015, she was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to gender equality. “When I start talking about sexism in schools,” she says, “people interrupt and say, Well, but girls can be mean to each other. Oh, but women are their own worst enemies. I don’t believe it. Of course there are instances of meanness in everyone, but we have bought into wholesale this idea of the bitchy, competitive woman who can’t bear other women’s success.


pages: 553 words: 153,028

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

The advance hadn’t gone that well for anyone, apparently. Together, they stumbled their conjoined feet across the camp threshold into a truly shocking scene. The place looked like a hotel. As it turned out, the Nazis courted anyone who could be considered an honorary part of the Aryan race—and if they could dismantle the backbone of the British Empire in the process, all the better. Decades earlier, German scholars parsed linguistic evidence that pointed to ancient migrations and technically made Indians the original Aryans. Indeed, that’s why the Nazis adapted the ancient Hindu symbol of the swastika to their own purposes. For Yahya and his compatriots, this meant the Germans treated Indian POWs with country club–level kid gloves.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Separate sections were established for naval and political cryptanalysis. Heading the former was A. G. Denniston, one of Ewing’s original four musketeers, who proved exceedingly skillful at cryptanalysis, who came back to do similar work in World War II, and who in recognition was made a Companion of St. Michael & St. George and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The chief of the political cryptanalysts was George Young, who had a background of diplomacy that included posts in Washington, Athens, Constantinople, Madrid, Belgrade, and Lisbon, whence he quit a sinecure to work in Room 40, and who later succeeded to a baronetcy. With the increase in traffic, Room 40 ceased simply passing edited intercepts to the Operations Division and began sending daily summaries that integrated the cryptanalytic with the direction-finding and other radio intelligence.

Finally, and most important, Germany lost the war, reducing all the Pers Z efforts in the final analysis to nullity. “As I am accustomed to say,” said Schauffler, “a bridge builder can see what he has done for his countrymen, but we cannot tell whether our life was worth anything.” Yet they read the secret communications of the British Empire, Ireland, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland; Egypt, Ethiopia; Turkey, Iran, China, Japan, Manchukuo, Thailand; the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Venezuela.

And when, on March 13, LIR sent a slow hand-keyed message on 11,220 kilocycles, an R.I.D. operator at Laredo, Texas, copied it with ease: From one of LIR’s first messages, R.I.D. had discovered that the group based its calls and its transposition cipher on Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele, using an edition excluded from the United States and the British Empire. The agent determined the page to be used by adding his personal key-number to the number of the month and the date. The last line of that page furnished the call letters that LIR was to use that day—the first three letters reversed for the station in Germany and the last three letters reversed for the agent post.


pages: 1,402 words: 369,528

A History of Western Philosophy by Aaron Finkel

British Empire, Eratosthenes, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, invention of agriculture, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Plato's cave, plutocrats, source of truth, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, William of Occam

.* To advocate complete independence for Greece, or any other small country, is now as futile as to advocate complete independence for a single city, whose territory can be seen entire from an eminence. There can be no true independence except for a State or alliance strong enough, by its own efforts, to repel all attempts at foreign conquest. Nothing smaller than America and the British Empire combined will satisfy this requirement; and perhaps even this would be too small a unit. The book, which, in the form in which we have it, appears to be unfinished, ends with a discussion of education. Education, of course, is only for children who are going to be citizens; slaves may be taught useful arts, such as cooking, but these are no part of education.

–1507), 499, 505–506, 507, 508, 762 Bosanquet, Bernard, English philosopher (1848–1923), 721 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, Bishop of Meaux (1627–1704), 689 Boston, 510 Boswell, James, Scottish lawyer, biographer of Samuel Johnson (1740–1795), 250 Boyle, Robert, British physicist and chemist (1627–1691), 536 Bradley, F. H., 405*, 585, 721 quoted, 417, 581 Brahe, Tycho, Danish astronomer (1546–1601), 529 Brahma, 757 brain, 797–798, 799, 808, 809 Bramhall, John, Bishop of Deny (1594–1663), 548 Brazil, 621 Britain, 260, 366, 382, 394, 436, 437, 558 British economics, 783, 784 British Empire, 193 British imperialism, 776 British Labour Party, 789 British legislation, 777 British philosophy, 595 and Continental philosophy, 643–647 empiricist, 564, 673, 701–703, 721, 784, 786 British policy, 777 British radicalism, 773, See also Philosophical Radicalism Bromios, 20 bronze, 6, 8 Brook Farm, 679 brotherhood of man, 231, 263, 264, 266, 282 Browne, Sir Thomas, English physician and author (1605–1682), 536 Brunichild, Queen of the Franks (fl. ca. 599), 384 Bruno of Cologne, St., founder of Carthusian Order (1030?


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

And in the minds of many, it offers every upside of urban life – burgeoning food, music and art scenes, neighborhoods with distinct personalities, copious parkland and maybe equally importantly, relatively affordable real estate. The older, preserved buildings in historic Philadelphia provide a picture of what colonial American cities once looked like – based on a grid with wide streets and public squares. For a time the second-largest city in the British Empire (after London), Philadelphia became a center for opposition to British colonial policy. It was the new nation’s capital at the start of the Revolutionary War and again after the war until 1790, when Washington, DC, took over. By the 19th century, New York City had superseded Philadelphia as the nation’s cultural, commercial and industrial center.

Mills House Hotel HOTEL $$ ( 843-577-2400; www.millshouse.com; 115 Meeting St; r from $189; ) This grand old dame (150 years young, merci) has had an $11- million facelift, and is now one of the most opulent choices in the area. Gilded elevators lead from an enormous marble lobby to 214 lushly upholstered rooms. The sun has still not set on the British Empire inside the clubby, wood-paneled Barbados Room restaurant. 1837 Bed & Breakfast B&B $$ ( 843-723-7166, 877-723-1837; www.1837bb.com; 126 Wentworth St; r incl breakfast $109-195; ) Like staying at the home of your eccentric, antique-loving aunt, 1837 has nine charmingly overdecorated rooms, including three in the old brick carriage house.


pages: 532 words: 162,509

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, Columbian Exchange, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Jones Act, planetary scale, Right to Buy, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty

And yet this percentage fails to convey the multiple ways in which slavery gave the Comanches the means to acquire horses and weapons and to use these as powerful levers to forge alliances, seek compliance, punish enemies, and secure their borders. In tangible ways, the Comanchería became a trading center with commercial networks that included many surrounding Indian nations and stretched into the Spanish, French, and British empires.24 Although the Comanches became preeminent suppliers of captives on the northern fringes of the Spanish empire, they were not alone. The Utes followed a somewhat different trajectory, but they too became active participants in the exchange of captives. The Utes were the ones who possibly gave the Comanches their first horses.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

The United States lost some 4,000 troops and killed some 20,000 insurrectionists, but the war had a generally devastating effect on the local population as a whole, with some 200,000 dying largely because of the spread of disease.18 At the same time the British were fighting the Second Boer War as the Afrikaner (Boer) South African Republic and the Orange Free State resisted incorporation into the British Empire. The British commander-in-chief, Herbert Kitchener, described his tactics as being to: flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly “bag” of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children… It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.19 Some 28,000 women and children died in the British concentration camps, not because of a deliberate policy of extermination but because cramped conditions and poor sanitation, along with inadequate supplies of food and medicines, meant that malnutrition and disease were rife.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Some of them are fairly certain—population growth and demographics, for instance, or for many years, technological trends like Moore’s Law—while others, such as political elections, technology innovation, and terrorist attacks, constantly surprise us. Even in the areas where we are surprised, in retrospect we often realize we could have seen changes coming. World War I followed what was widely regarded as “the perfect summer” at the height of the British Empire’s success. A mad assassin lit the fuse but the kegs of powder had been set in place by decades of bad decisions by the great powers. The near collapse of the world economy in 2008 as a result of financial industry excesses happened while Ben Bernanke, an expert on the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath, who should have known better, was chairman of the Federal Reserve.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

As soon as he took the throne, he ordered up a new official English translation of the Bible—the King James Version, which four hundred years later remains the most popular Bible in America. Its creation was under way when King James, supreme governor of the Church of England, chartered those two companies to start a British empire in America. So naturally the companies’ mission statements included evangelism—the “propagating of Christian Religion to such People as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance,” the native “Infidels and Savages.” By the early 1600s, most people in England (and a third of Europeans) were Protestant.


pages: 559 words: 174,054

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

Through coffee and the coffeehouse, caffeine has altered society and culture from the Middle East to Europe, America, and beyond, justifying the fears of Islamic clerics and sultans and Western kings and police chiefs that the institutions purveying caffeine would undermine the stability and insularity of social and political order and religious practice. Through tea, teaism, and the afternoon tea, caffeine has subtly shaped the spiritual and aesthetic ideals of the Orient and given the British Empire, the most extensive imperial realm the world has ever seen, a universal symbol of civility, restraint, refinement, and social order. Through caffeinated soft drinks, caffeine has perfected its conquest of humanity, extending its community of users to children. What powers or properties of caffeine have enabled it to exert such a broad influence on human history?


pages: 739 words: 165,366

Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944 by Max Hastings

Bletchley Park, British Empire, death of newspapers

Butcher wrote on 24 July, after visiting Southwick House for an hour when Eisenhower drove there to see de Guingand: Bill Culver, de Guingand’s American aide, in response to my pointed question as to what really stopped Monty’s attack, said he felt that Monty, his British Army commander Dempsey, the British corps commanders and even those of the divisions are so conscious of Britain’s ebbing manpower that they hesitate to commit an attack where a division may be lost. When it’s lost, it’s done and finished . . . The Commanders feel the blood of the British Empire, and hence its future, are too precious for dash in battle.20 With hindsight it may be easy to suggest that a more ruthless determination to break through on the British front earlier in the campaign would, in the end, have cost fewer lives. Tedder’s allegation that Second Army was not trying hard enough had some foundation, but it was much easier to take this sanguine view from the distance of SHAEF – or from the perspective of history – than for Montgomery and his commanders in Normandy, who had to watch their precious army take persistent punishment.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

In the first few hours of July 1, 1916 alone, in the Battle of the Somme, the British army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead, the bloodiest day in its history. The historian John Keegan says of their commander, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, whose statue today dominates Whitehall in London, once the center of the British Empire: “In his public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible.” At the Somme “he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation.”3 As the war wore on, shell shock increasingly compromised the efficiency of the fighting forces. Caught between taking the suffering of their soldiers seriously and pursuing victory over the Germans, the British General Staff issued General Routine Order Number 2384 in June of 1917, which stated, “In no circumstances whatever will the expression ‘shell shock’ be used verbally or be recorded in any regimental or other casualty report, or any hospital or other medical document.”


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

The fact has seldom been given prominence, in part because so many of the Loyalists simply fled, expecting, as one said, that if the rebels should gain independence “that unfortunate land would be a scene of bloody discord and desolation for ages.”44 “Palmer suggests that, unlike France, the American counterrevolutionary refugees never returned, creating an illusion of tranquility and unity in the postwar Republic.”45 Van Doren summarizes the exodus as follows: There are no accurate figures as to how many persons including women and children left the United States on account of loyalty to the British Empire, but it may have been as high as 100,000, of whom 35,000 may have gone from New York alone...The expulsion was so thorough that the next generation of Americans, with few former loyalists as reminders, almost forgot the civil aspects of the war and came to think of it as a war solely against England.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

Also Latin America Regional Reports Caribbean, Nov. 4, 1983; Michael Massing, Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1884, two sentences on an inside page. 63. Thomas, NYT, Nov. 1; editorial, NYT, Nov. 10, 1983. Appendix II 1. Addendum to p. 25. 2. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York, 1982, viiin), his emphasis; The Long Peace, 43. 3. Wm. Roger Lewis, Imperialism at Bay: the United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford, 1978, 481). On Grand Area planning, see Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust. For remarks on this and competing models, and applications in the Far East, see Bruce Cumings, introduction, in Cumings, ed., Child of Conflict (Washington, 1983). 4. Lewis, op. cit., 550; Christopher Thome, The Issue of War (Oxford, 1985, 225, 211). 5.


pages: 542 words: 163,735

The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke

AOL-Time Warner, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, hydroponic farming, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

His “Mysterious World,” “Strange Powers,” and “Mysterious Universe” TV series have been shown worldwide. His many honors include several doctorates in science and literature, and a host of prizes and awards including the Vidya Jyothi (Light of Science) Award from the President of Sri Lanka in 1986, and the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) from H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 1989. In a global satellite ceremony in 1995 he received NASA’s highest civilian honor, its Distinguished Public Service Medal. And in 1998, he was awarded a Knighthood “for services to literature” in the New Year’s Honours List. His recreations are SCUBA diving on Indian Ocean wrecks with his company, Underwater Safaris; table-tennis (despite Post Polio Syndrome); observing the Moon through his fourteen-inch telescope; and playing with his Chihuahua, “Pepsi”, and his six computers.


pages: 628 words: 170,668

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

When Valerie Anders finally gets a call later that day bringing news that their son had flown a successful and safe mission, it’s yet another chapter in three or more successive generations of Anders men going face to face with the enemy and making it back alive. The fact that Bill Anders was a member of the first crew to journey to the moon, with all its inherent risks, seems almost tame by comparison. William Alison Anders was born on 17 October 1933 in Hong Kong, at that time part of the British empire. His father, Arthur Ferdinand (“Tex”) Anders, had joined the U.S. Navy in 1922 and received his Annapolis commission as an ensign in 1927. He was stationed in Hong Kong as part of the neutral Yangtze River Patrol, designed to protect American nationals and shipping along the river, and to support its economic interests in China.


Frommer's Paris 2013 by Kate van Der Boogert

Airbnb, airport security, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, eurozone crisis, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, Les Trente Glorieuses, music of the spheres, place-making, retail therapy, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal

In a separate shop just around the corner, at 78 rue de Seine (same phone), there are displays of table settings, housewares, and gift items, each reflecting the bright sunshine and colors (usually ocher, cerulean blue, and a strong medium green) of the Midi. Open Monday to Saturday 10:30am to 7pm. 3 rue Lobineau, 6e. www.souleiado.com. 01-43-54-62-25. Métro: Odéon or Mabillon. Home Design & Furnishings Conran Shop This shop might remind you of an outpost of the British Empire, valiantly imposing Brit aesthetics and standards on the French-speaking world. Inside, you’ll find the latest contemporary furniture; articles for the kitchen and dining room; glass and crystal vases; fountain pens and stationery; reading material and postcards; and even a selection of chocolates, teas, and coffees to help warm up a foggy English day.


pages: 604 words: 161,455

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright

agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, Asian financial crisis, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Easter island, fault tolerance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Marshall McLuhan, Multics, Norbert Wiener, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, your tax dollars at work, zero-sum game

Of course, when people “choose” to work for such bosses, they’re doing so under some constraints—they need the job, and it may be increasingly hard to find jobs without these forms of oppression. “To say ‘love’ ”: Teilhard de Chardin (1969), p. 140. Gandhi and King: In Gandhi’s case the relatively nonviolent “transformation” I’m referring to is independence from the British Empire. Obviously, the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan (which Gandhi opposed) involved considerable violence. †mindless materialism: The concern here isn’t about “finite resources” per se. There is good reason to believe that world population will level off in the twenty-first century, as developing nations, having developed, adopt such bourgeois values as bearing fewer children.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Some of them became the basis for the kibbutz (a symbol of Zionism’s engagement with socialism), while others turned into modern, European-like cosmopolitan centers such as Tel Aviv. See Chapter 4: From a Dream to Glimmers of Reality. MAP 3. BRITISH MANDATE FOR PALESTINE, 1920–1948: Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Palestine came under control of the British Empire in what is called the British Mandate for Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917, stated that the British looked with favor upon “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” but it did not make explicit what the boundaries of that national home would be.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Birmingham also has 290 smaller mosques, serving a Muslim population of about two hundred fifty thousand, around one-fourth of the city’s total. The assorted mosques reflect an immigrant tendency to congregate with fellow nationals: Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian. Although most are Sunnis—as were the Islamic lands once ruled by the British Empire—the Central Mosque is nondenominational—“to promote thinking, not religious laws,” says its Indian-born founder, Dr. Mohammad Naseem. A slight man in his eighties in a high-button black pin-striped suit, Naseem has seen the number of Muslims here quadruple, a growth now slowing as immigration tightens.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

., 41–51; John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (2003), 159–160. 38. See McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism, 47. 39. On the East India Company, see H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1765–1833 (2006); Marguerite Eyer Wilbur, The East India Company: And the British Empire in the Far East (1945). On Elihu Yale, see Wilbur, The East India Company, 311. 40. On the East India Company’s finances, see Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots (2010), 13–23; Wilbur, The East India Company, 307–311. 41. Bowen, The Business of Empire, 30–31. 42. See Carp, Defiance of the Patriots. 43.


The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, long peace, South China Sea

Chinese Historical Review 19 (December 2012): 107−127. Liu, Xiaoyuan. A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941−1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Louis, Wm. Roger. Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941−1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Lutze, Thomas D. China’s Inevitable Revolution: Rethinking America’s Loss to the Communists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. MacKinnon, Stephen R., and Oris Friesen. China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS IN DE X 3D printing 56–7, 178, 329 4D printing 57 Ackerman, Spencer 396 acquisitions by tech firms 318–19 action, freedom of 164–5, 166–7, 184 digital liberation 169 predictive systems 176 adaptive law 107–10 additive manufacturing (3D printing) 56–7, 178, 329 Affectiva.com 382 affective computing 52–3, 229 affirmative action 261, 268, 292 affordances 169–71 Afghanistan 50 Agoravoting.com 415 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise 172, 403 AI see Artificial Intelligence Airbnb Decentralised Autonomous Organisations 47 guest acceptance/rejection 290 individual responsibility 346 reputation system 289–90 sharing economy 335, 336 Taiwan 234 airport security systems 120–1, 186 Ajunwa, Ifeoma 418 Aletras, Nicolaos 372, 393 algorithmic audit 355–6 algorithmic injustice 279–94 data-based 282 discrimination 281–2 neutrality fallacy 288–92 rough and ready test 280–1 rule-based 283–8 well-coded society 292–4 algorithms 266 and code 94–5 and distribution 266–70, 278 and information 268–9 and participation 268 and price 269–70 of recognition 260, 275–8 scrutiny 132–3 Al-Khwār izmī, Abd’Abdallah Muhammad ibn Mūsā 94 Allen, Colin 393, 394 Allen, Jonathan P. 336, 417, 419, 429, 430, 431 Alphabet 318, 319, 320 altruism, limited 365 Amazon acquisitions 318, 319 Alexa 293 book recommendations 66, 147 commons 332 concentration of tech industry 318, 320 ‘cyber’ and ‘real’ distinction, disappearance of 97 Echo 134, 135 Kindle 151 machine learning 35 order refusal 106 robots 54 rules 116 working conditions 310 ambient intelligence see smart devices OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 492 Index American Legal Realism 109 Amnesty International 148 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) 32 Anderson, Berit 410 Anderson, Elizabeth 118, 394, 401, 418, 420, 426, 429 Amazon’s working conditions 310 justice in recognition 273 Android 64, 359 Angelidou, Margarita 381 Anglican Church 159 anonymity 231–2 Anonymous ‘hacktivists’ 221 antitrust law 357, 358 Anwin, Julia 403, 422 apathy 349 Apollo Guidance Computer 38 Apple acquisitions 318 concentration of tech industry 320 founders 314 Guidelines for app developers 189 gun emoji 148 homosexuality ‘cure’ apps 235–6 inflexibility of operating system 359 iPad 38 manufacturers’ working conditions 151 refusal to unlock iPhone of San Bernadino terrorist 155 Siri 37, 47, 293 taxation 328 ‘Think Different’ advertisement 6 watches 44 Aquinas, Thomas 215, 409 AR see augmented reality Arab Spring 150, 221 Arbesman, Samuel 193, 406 arbitrariness, rule-based injustice 284 Arendt, Hannah 9, 72, 163, 237, 415 Aristotle 368, 403, 411, 418 democracy 215, 222, 224, 234, 249 justice and equality 259 man as a political animal 222 morality 176 objective failures of recognition 272 political theory 9 work paradigm 300–1 Armstrong, Neil 38 Arneson, Richard 308, 425, 426 Aron, Jacob 376 artificial emotional intelligence 53 artificial general intelligence 33 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 30–7 affective computing 53 AI Democracy 212, 213, 250–4, 348 algorithmic injustice 293 automation of force 119, 120 blockchain 47 bots see bots commons 332 Data Deal 337 data’s economic importance 317 degradation argument 361 Deliberative Democracy 232 digital law 108–9, 110, 113 Direct Democracy 240 facial recognition 66 future of code 98 increasingly quantified society 61 machine vision 51 perception-control 149 political campaigning 220 political speeches 31, 360–1 post-politics 362, 365–6 predictions 173 privatization of force 116 smart devices 48 software engineers 194 staff scrutiny 267 superintelligence 365–6 totalitarianism 177 usufructuary rights 330 Wealth Cyclone 322 Wiki Democracy 245 Asimov, Isaac 198 Assael,Yannis M. 371 Asscher, Lodewijk F. 400, 408 Associated Press 30 AT&T 20 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index Athens, classical 212, 214–15, 217, 222–3, 224, 228, 232 audit, algorithmic 355–6 augmented reality (AR) 58–9 mixed reality 60 perception-control 146, 149, 151–2, 229, 278 scrutiny 135 augmented things see smart devices Austria 235 authoritarianism 177–9 cryptography 183 state ownership of capital 329 authority 93 automated number plate recognition technology 49–50 automation of force 100, 119–21 autonomy 165, 167 Autor, David 428 Avent, Ryan 424, 425, 427 Azuma, Hiroki 247, 416 Babylon 77, 324 Bachrach, Peter 389, 391, 398 backgammon 31 Bailenson, Jeremy 407 Baker, Paul 422 Ball, James 428 Ball, Terence 368, 389 Baraniuk, Chris 432 Baratz, Morton S. 389, 391, 398 Barr, Alistair 421 Bartky, Sandra 126, 395 Bartlett, Jamie 388, 413, 417 Bates, James 134, 135 Baughman, Shawnee 407 BBC 373, 379, 381, 385, 405 Belamaire, Jordan 386 Belgium 129 Beniger, Andrew J. 369, 389 Benkler,Yochai 368, 370, 378, 398, 399, 400, 412, 416, 431 cooperative behaviour 45 networked information environment 145 smartphones 146 493 Bentham, Jeremy 126, 195 Berkman Center for Internet and Society 184, 405 Berlin, Isaiah 9, 166, 195, 368, 401, 403, 407 Berman, Robby 382, 384 Bernays, Edward L. 410 Berners-Lee, Tim 7, 48, 294, 367, 380 Bess, Michael 402, 434 Bhavani, R. 382 Bible 100, 124, 142, 257, 300, 317 BI Intelligence 428 Bimber, Bruce 369, 412 biometric analysis 52–3, 131, 186 Bitcoin 8, 46 Black Mirror 140 Blake, William 390 blockchain 45–7 automation of force 120 justice 264 smart contracts 106, 119 usufructuary rights 330 voting 240 Blue Brain project 33, 373 Bluetooth 48, 136 Bobbit, Philip 279 Boden, Margaret A. 373–4, 381, 382, 383 Bogle, Ariel 385 Boixo, Sergio 375–6 Bollen, Johan 416 Bolukbasi, Tolga 423 bomb-detecting spinach 51 Bonchi, Francesco 422 Booth, Robert 399 Borges, Jorge Luis 53 Bostrom, Nick 365–6, 372, 373, 379, 381, 382, 435 bots Deliberative Democracy 232–4, 235 network effect 321 Bourzac, Katherine 377 Boyle, James 331, 333, 430–1 Brabham, Daren C. 416 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 494 Index Bradbury, Danny 415 brain–computer interfaces 48, 169 Braithwaite, John 431 Braman, Sandra 389 Brazil 244 Brexit 4, 233, 239 Bridge, Mark 393 Bridgewater Associates 267 British Empire 18 British Library 66 Brown, Gordon 95, 96, 391 Brownsword, Roger 176, 403 Brynjolfsson, Erik 374, 382, 390, 393, 427, 431 capital 315, 316, 334 Burgess, Matt 379 Burke, Edmund 263 Byford, Sam 32 Byrnes, Nanette 392 Cadwalladr, Carole 410, 413 Calabresi, Guido 279 Cambridge Analytica 220 campaigning, political 219–20 Campbell, Peter 371 Canetti, Elias 29 capital 314–17 commons 331–4 sharing economy 335–6 state ownership 329–30 taxation 327–9 usufructuary rights 330–1 carbon nanotubes 40 Casanova, Giacomo 216, 409 Casey, Anthony J. 109, 112, 393, 394 Castells, Manuel 144, 394, 398 Castillo, Carlos 422 CBC 383 Cellan-Jones, Rory 371 censorship by Anglican Church 159 perception-control 143, 146, 148, 151, 156 private power 190 cerebral hygiene 170 CERN 65 Chan, Connie 428 charisma 349 Charles I, King 167–8 chatbots 30 checkers 31 Cheney-Lippold, John 132, 395 chess 31, 36 Chesterton, G.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

We will focus on the two largest emerging markets, China and India, partly to understand some of the challenges these countries face—including rebalancing the pillars in their own countries—and partly to understand how important it is for the world to engage these countries as responsible members of the community of nations. ARE CHINA AND INDIA AT ALL SIMILAR? The Communist Party took over China after the Second World War. At about the same time, India became democratic and independent from the British Empire. In India, every government has to fight periodically for a renewed mandate, which has meant that the government is more constrained in its actions, not just by the power of democratic protest and numerous civil society organizations, but also by institutions like the judiciary and the opposition.


Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

Jump in and you’ll learn more about the political scene than you ever would by reading a newspaper or guidebook. Of course, attitudes differ from place to place. Residents of the English- and Miskito-speaking Atlantic coast rarely consider themselves part of Nicaragua proper, and many would prefer to be returned to the British Empire than suffer further oppression by the ‘Spaniards’ on the other side of the country. The cattle ranchers of the central highlands resist interference from the federal government, while coffee pickers in Matagalpa or students in León are willing to walk to Managua to complain to the government if they perceive that an injustice has been done.


pages: 598 words: 169,194

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

So there was no record on the list of a Herald fund account in the name of William Foxton, a ruddy, ginger-haired man who was a retired major in the British army. As his son Willard Foxton later recounted in a moving BBC documentary, Major Foxton spent his life serving bravely in dangerous places. He lost a hand in combat and earned the Order of the British Empire. He later joined humanitarian aid missions and testified against war criminals. By all accounts, Major Foxton was a courageous, ethical, and very private man. His family’s research indicated that Foxton invested roughly $3 million in the Herald USA fund and the Herald Luxembourg fund, both sponsored by Bank Medici in Vienna, sometime in late 2004 or early 2005.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number-one’ countries,” Kennedy wrote, “that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.” Kennedy drew parallels between the United States today and the historical arcs of imperial Spain in 1600 and the British Empire in 1900, in the twilight of their power. Like the two earlier imperial powers, Kennedy observed, the United States “now runs the risk … of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch’: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”


pages: 589 words: 162,849

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

Chapman, The Price of Admiralty: The War Diary of the German Attaché in Japan 1939–1943, Lewes, Sussex, 1989, chapter 5. 48Ken Kotani, Japanese Intelligence in World War II, Osprey, Oxford, 2009, p. 102. 49Wenneker’s diary recalls: ‘[Vice-Admiral] Kondo repeatedly expressed to me how valuable the information in the [British] War Cabinet mem-orandum was for the [Japanese] Navy. Such a significant weakening of the British Empire could not have been identified from outward appearances.’ Rusbridger and Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, p. 212. 50Reiss, Total Espionage, pp. 203–04. 51Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 277. 52Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 3, p. 272. 53Sorge Memoir, Pt 2, p. 18. 54Hanako Ishii, Ningen Zoruge, pp. 100–01; Prange interview with Hanako, 7 January 1965, Target Tokyo. 55Viktor Anfilov, Doroga k Tragedii Sorok Pervogo Goda, Moscow, 1997, p. 195. 56Ovidy Gorchakov, ‘Nakanune ili Tragedia Kassandry’, Gorizont, No. 6, 1988, p. 31. 57Fesyun, Documents, No. 11.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, told colleagues that “the future of America’s dominance as the financial center of the world” was at stake in a 1999 vote to let large banks become financial supermarkets.43 Similar words were spoken against derivatives regulation. On the other side of the Atlantic, policy makers advanced similar arguments. The London Stock Exchange, the red-hot center of global finance during the glory years of the British Empire, had faded from prominence in the decades after World War II. Membership was restricted to British firms, which traded the shares of British companies. The brokerage firms, however, still were making a lot of money, in part because they had agreed not to compete with one another on the basis of price.


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

At that time, Calcutta’s police commissioner, Sir Charles Augustus Tegart, was notorious for torturing political prisoners (even young students) and for his uncanny ability to avoid assassination. But patriotic Indians viewed January 26 as the country’s show-your-colors day: were you an independent Indian or a pawn of the British Empire? Two years earlier the Indian National Congress had passed a resolution fixing the day for countrywide protests in support of complete independence. For khadi wearers, kowtowing in fear of British retaliation was ignoble and cowardly. For them, flying the flag separated the truly possessed from the poseurs.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

In fact, it had not been wholly inactive before then; as Gowers admitted, the UK had already ‘forged strong relationships with foreign patent offices, for example in China, to assist them with application procedures and enforcement policies’, and the Intellectual Property Office already had ‘good contacts with offices in developing countries’.69 But there was much more to be done; and, though Gowers envisaged ‘further joint working’, the steps that the UK government subsequently took were essentially unilateral. Its key innovation was to establish in 2011 an overseas network of IP attachés through the Intellectual Property Office. (Given the role of colonial ‘attachés’ in the administration of the British Empire, this had obvious colonial under-tones.) The fact that ‘UK businesses sometimes find it difficult to control the use of their IP overseas’ was the main rationale provided for the appointment of these attachés, who, ‘working with local IP rights enforcement agencies’, would ‘focus on promoting and protecting UK business interests within host countries’.70 The first attaché, to be based in China, was recruited in December 2011.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“Causal Spousal Health Spillover Effects and Implications for Program Evaluation.” American Economic Journal. Economic Policy 9, no. 4 (November 2017): 144–66. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20150573. Flight, Colette. “Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge.” BBC. Last modified February 17, 2011. www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml. “Florida Coronavirus Map and Case Count.” The New York Times. Accessed January 18, 2021. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/florida-coronavirus-cases.html. Florida, Richard. Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2019. “The Flu in Boston.” PBS.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

A few years later, Newton almost dies at sea, gets religion, becomes an Anglican priest, writes “Amazing Grace” (which has a very different prescription for what book you should study when you’re depressed), and finally renounces the slave trade and becomes a major player in the movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire. But back on Plantain Island, yes—he had one book along, Isaac Barrow’s edition of Euclid, and in his dark moments he retreated into its abstract comforts. “Thus I often beguiled my sorrows,” he writes, “and almost forgot my feeling.” Wordsworth’s appropriation of Newton’s geometry-in-the-sand story wasn’t his only flirtation with the subject.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

On 5 August 1931, Keynes wrote to Prime Minister MacDonald, at the latter’s request, to present a series of proposals for devaluation of the British pound and for the formation of a gold-based, fixed-exchange currency unit at least 25 percent below the current parity, which all member countries of the British empire, together with South America, Asia, Central Europe, Italy, and Spain – in fact, all countries – would be invited to join. The letter pointed out that if the British pound could not be successfully defended, it would be foolish to continue to borrow foreign currencies to support it.54 Loans of $400 million in addition to the $250 million were not enough, and the British stopped supporting the pound on 21 September.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914,27 the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world. “Some say we’re fighting,28 or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from. About a hundred years back, the British Empire faced a problem much like ours today: How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?” A montage of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in port appeared, the last shot a lingering image of CVN-80,29 the new USS Enterprise, still under construction.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

But by the end of it, they had created a planetary system of economic dominance. They built this system using colonies on land that they secured through the domination and elimination of Indigenous peoples, and which they made productive with the labour of enslaved and trafficked Africans, both on a historically unsurpassed scale. In the 1700s and 1800s, the British empire combined its network of colonies and slave labour with new coal- and steam-powered technologies to massively increase production and mechanize work, resulting in the Industrial Revolution. It is this same Industrial Revolution, and the changes in global energy use and thus carbon emissions it wrought, that scientists treat as the beginning of our era of anthropogenic climate change.


pages: 607 words: 168,497

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

Gross, D. R. 1975. “Protein Capture and Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin,” American Anthropologist 77: 526–49. Gunn, D. L.; P. M. Jenkin; and A. L. Gunn. 1937. “Menstrual Periodicity: Statistical Observations on a Large Sample of Normal Cases,” Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the British Empire 44: 839. Hall, K. R. L., and I. Devore. 1965. “Baboon Social Behavior,” in I. Devore, ed., Primate Behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 53–110. Halterman, Jill. 2001. “Iron Deficiency and Cognitive Achievement Among High School Aged Children and Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics 107(6): 1381–86.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This development was particularly essential for the United States, as the Middle East had proved through a series of discoveries in the interwar period to have a vast supply of cheap and accessible oil. In a 1945 US Department of State document, Saudi Arabia—a nation effectively constructed through the decisive intervention of the British Empire, US politicians, and oil companies—was deemed “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”51 Initially, the US strategic posture was to allow the empires to fold at their own pace, thus leaving them responsible for the deployment of military power and the maintenance of political order, while encouraging newly independent societies to adopt development strategies predicated on import substitution, in which countries would try to overcome their dependency on foreign imports by developing their own industrial base.


When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Pierre and Miquelon, off the island of Newfoundland. 188 WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE Now under British rule, the 65,000 French-speaking inhabitants of Canada had a single aim: to retain their traditions, language and culture. This endeavor continues today. When Britain lost her American colony, large numbers of English-speaking colonists sought refuge in Canada. Canada first existed as Upper and Lower Canada, then in 1848 as the Province of Canada with a measure of autonomy, but part of the British Empire. The country subsequently expanded westwards to the Pacific Coast. Canada played a substantial role in the Second World War and is the only nation to have taken part in all of the UN’s major peacekeeping operations. It is the eighth biggest economy in the world; only half a dozen countries enjoy a higher standard of living as far as quality of life is concerned.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Built as a military fort in the early 1800s, Kowloon’s walled settlement was the only piece of land that the Chinese refused to give up when the British leased the New Territories part of Hong Kong in 1898. At the time, Kowloon was home to a few hundred Chinese troops, who wanted to stay put in order to maintain a military stronghold amid the ever-expanding British Empire. Britain allowed the Chinese to keep Kowloon as long as their presence didn’t interfere with British rule of Hong Kong. This agreement didn’t last long. The following year, the British stormed the 6.5-acre settlement and captured it, finding only about 150 people inside. The British government let it sit idle for the next several decades.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Their attitude flies in the face of centuries of exploration and empire, dating to an era when the most valuable commodities were neither gold nor silver but Saharan salt and Indian pepper. Portuguese sailors rounded Africa seeking the latter, while the Dutch East India Company sought to corner it with cannon. The British Empire’s finest hour—high tea—was enabled by “tea clippers” racing home from China after exchanging opium. Refrigerated steamships turned bananas into America’s favorite fruit (and turned Central America into banana republics). To turn our backs on imported foods would be a rebuke to globalization itself.


pages: 614 words: 174,633

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Alistair Cooke, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, British Empire, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, haute couture, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

It was just that he knew that it was almost impossible for me to do that, because all the other mechanics was depending on the opening of the jaws that made everything work. And now he wants to see the lips still working, without the jaws opening. So they could snarl. He said, ‘I want to see them snarling.’ He was just pushing me, you know. I knew that.” The British Empire was built on the uncomplaining execution of orders from the higher-ups. Entire subcontinents had been subjugated on that basis. It took a stiff upper lip to redesign his man-ape’s lips after so much effort had been put in already, but Freeborn set to work on the problem. He devised a single tongue-operated acrylic toggle that functioned as an internal lever.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

While tariffs have sometimes increased during periods of economic downturn, Smoot-Hawley pushed tariffs to near-record levels.78 Soon the US faced a wave of retaliatory protectionist policies. The most impactful initial response came from the US’s largest trading partner, Canada, which at the time took in 20 percent of American exports. Canadian policy makers increased tariffs on 16 US goods while simultaneously lowering tariffs on imports from the British Empire.79 As similar policies piled up in the years that followed, they accelerated the collapse in global trade caused by the economic contraction. Restricting immigration (both legal and illegal), another common protectionist response to economic weakness, was also pursued by the Hoover administration in 1930.


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“In the 1930s, it was the common belief among the Harveys that as long as the Santa Fe remained viable, so would Fred Harvey,” recalled one of Byron’s grandsons. “‘People will always require rail transportation,’ they always said. Rather like the Pukka Sahibs’ belief in the same time period that the British Empire would be eternal—that it was too big and important to end.” BYRON HAD NEVER done anything at Fred Harvey but manage the dining cars, so his knowledge of the inner workings of the core family business was considered limited. Also, he was still viewed as too nice, too genteel, to be a hard-core top executive.


Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, credit crunch, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Skype, trade route, urban renewal

Putting together the missing pieces of the puzzle is what makes travel in Andalucía the glorious adventure it is, a never-ending mystery trail that will deposit you in places where you can peel off the checkered history in dusty layers. There’s edgy Granada, arty Málaga, vivacious Seville, sleepy Setenil de las Bodegas, rugged Ronda, brassy Marbella, and even a rocky rump of the British Empire named after an erstwhile Berber warlord called Tariq. A Cultural Marinade The fascination of Andalucía springs from its peculiar history, Christianity and Islam. For centuries the region stood on the porous frontier between two different faiths and ideologies. Left to slowly ferment like a barrel of the bone dry local sherry, these sometimes peaceful, sometimes battling kingdoms threw up a slew of esoteric cultural colossi: ancient mosques masquerading as churches, vast palace complexes strafed with stucco, a passionate musical genre bizarrely called flamenco, and a chain of lofty white towns that still dominates the arid, craggy landscape.


pages: 272 words: 19,172

Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Edward Thorp, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, hindsight bias, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jones Act, legacy carrier, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, oil shock, pattern recognition, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Assuming the U.S. entered its decline phase around 2008, your cyclical model implies the U.S. can remain in a general decline out to 2130. That is a pretty pessimistic outlook. Have there been any situations of countries in the decline phase of the long-term cycle where it hasn’t been extremely painful? The decline of the British Empire after World War II wasn’t cataclysmic because the adjustment process was spread out over many years. So was Japan’s deleveraging. Essentially a country’s conditions can stay about the same for a very long period. It doesn’t have to be terrible. But it can be terrible if it is badly managed. At Bridgewater, criticism is encouraged, including subordinates criticizing superiors.


What Makes Narcissists Tick by Kathleen Krajco

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, experimental subject, junk bonds, Norman Mailer, risk/return

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did it in campaign speeches to turn the tide and get elected. And guess whose favorite and constant characterization of Americans is as "arrogant?" You guessed it, the arrogant French. Projection. Again, for example, who accuses the liberator of nations of being imperialist? Imperial Europe, of course. Home of the Soviet Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Nazi-German Empire, and a dozen others — for, even small European countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have conquered primitive peoples that lack firearms in Europe's thousand-yearlong quest for dominion. Once you catch on to projection, you do recognize it in a vast amount of the badmouthing you hear.


pages: 559 words: 178,279

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

It marked the end of the era of détente, and the start of one of the Cold War’s most far-reaching proxy wars, whose consequences are still reverberating nearly 40 years later. Moscow’s interest in Afghanistan as a strategic prize went back to the nineteenth century and the battle for territorial influence between the Russian and British empires known as the ‘Great Game’. By the 1970s, the Soviet Union saw Afghanistan as a strategically useful pawn on the geopolitical Cold War chessboard. In 1978, in an attempt to maintain it as a Soviet foothold, Moscow threw its support behind a Marxist government, which had ousted and executed the previous pro-American regime in Kabul, and signed a friendship treaty pledging Soviet economic and military support to Afghanistan.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

French engineering suffered a humbling failure, investors lost their fortunes, and more than twenty thousand people died to no avail. We Must Go to the Orient In early 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, a twenty-eight-year-old general, had just defeated the Austrians in Italy. Now he was looking for his next big adventure, preferably one that would strike a blow against France’s public enemy number one, the British Empire. Realizing that French naval forces were too weak to support an invasion of Britain itself, Napoleon proposed instead to undermine British interests in the Middle East and open new trade routes to Asia. Besides, as he put it to a colleague, “We must go to the Orient; all great glory has always been acquired there.”


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

The leap in demand, however, was rather the consequence of economic factors than closet abstinence. Duty on tea had been reduced over the same period, and plantations of it had been established in India. Cheap, plentiful Indian tea flooded the home market. Not only was it of excellent quality, it also had the benefit of being produced within the bounds of the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, so that to drink a British Indian cuppa was an act of imperial patriotism. The merchant ships that carried tea from India to Great Britain were loaded with beer for the voyage out. Expatriate Britons in the subcontinent had prodigious thirsts for their native brews and paid the highest prices for any that reached them without spoiling.


pages: 653 words: 205,718

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman, Robert K. Massie

British Empire, George Santayana, trade route

.…” 18 Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral RISK WAS THE LEAST FAVORITE CONCEPT of the British Admiralty in 1914. Her fleet was Britain’s most prized possession. It was not, as Churchill had woundingly said of the Germany Navy in 1912, a “luxury fleet”; it was a vital necessity in the exact sense of the word “vital.” The British Empire could not survive naval defeat or even loss of naval supremacy through individual ship losses. Its tasks were enormous. It had to prevent invasion of the British Isles; it had to escort the BEF safely to the Continent; it had to bring home troops from India to add to the Regular Army and replace them with Territorials; above all, it had to safeguard seaborne commerce over all the oceans of the world.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The founders’ deep reservation was based on hard evidence, with the success of the EIC unmatched by any other corporation in history. Its equal will likely never reappear. Its political influence was founded firmly on its trading, especially opium wealth, and job creation that helped fund the entire British Empire for centuries—and I mean centuries. The world’s mightiest multinational ever, it is the only firm in world history to generate one-half of all world trade and to employ one-third of the entire non-farm UK workforce. Americans despised it as much as the British public admired it for its ability to extract wealth from colonists.


pages: 729 words: 195,181

The mote in God's eye by Larry Niven; Jerry Pournelle

British Empire, clean water, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Neil Armstrong, risk tolerance, the market place

But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters. There are hints all through MOTE that the structure of government is not a mere carbon copy of the British Empire or Rome or England in the time of William III. On the other hand there are similarities, which are forced onto the Empire by the technology we assumed. Imperial government is not inevitable. It is possible. The alternate proposition is that we of nineteen seventy-five are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days.


Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

British Empire, disinformation, invisible hand, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, place-making, price mechanism

So useless with their trickle of money-for all that the Brits complained about NORAID, O'Donnell knew that the PIRA had not netted a million dollars from America in the past three years. All the Americans knew of Ireland came from a few movies, some half-remembered songs for St. Paddy's Day, and the occasional bottle of whiskey. What did they know of life in Ulster, of the imperialist oppression, the way all Ireland was still enslaved to the decaying British Empire, which was, in turn, enslaved to the American one? What did they know about anything? But we can't offend the Americans. The leader of the ULA finished off his beer and set it on the end table. The Cause didn't require much, not really. A clear ideological objective. A few good men. Friends, the right friends, with access to the right resources.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Simpson explained that while the sailors’ lawyer was technically correct on the law, the verdict in the case had less to do with jurisprudence than with politics. The crown’s magistrates hoped to send the public a message that their authority had to be maintained even in the distant arteries connecting the British Empire. The story left me convinced that whether the scenario was a group of hungry and desperate men eating a cabin boy, or my hypothetical notion involving women diving into international waters to take abortion pills, government tolerance of extralegal behavior had its limits. * * * · · · Gomperts was well aware of the limits of Mexican tolerance for her mission, and so the offshore expedition I joined was launched largely under a cloak of secrecy.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Subtype C spread to southern Africa, probably via Lubumbashi, way down in the Congolese southeast. Seeping across Zambia, achieving rapid transmission in mining towns full of workers and prostitutes, subtype C proliferated catastrophically throughout South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland. It went on to India, which is linked to South Africa by channels of exchange as old as the British empire, and to East Africa. Subtype D established itself alongside subtypes A and C in the countries of East Africa, except for Ethiopia, which for some reason became afflicted early and almost exclusively with subtype C. Subtype G got up into West Africa. Subtypes H, J, and K remained mostly in Central Africa, from Angola to the Central African Republic.


pages: 705 words: 192,650

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

Yet the Post Office still holds (and undoubtedly trades off) a unique position in the British psyche. In the alleyway behind my house there is a wooden telegraph pole. Carved into the pole at just about head height are the initials ‘GPO.’ This stands for General Post Office – a brand which pre-dates the industrial revolution, the British Empire, and, indeed, Britain itself.1 There has been a Master of the Post since Henry VIII’s time, and in 1660, Charles II approved an ‘Act for Erecting and Establishing a Post Office,’ which created the role of Postmaster General, and ‘one Generall Post Office … soe that speedy and safe dispatches may be had.’


pages: 388 words: 211,314

Frommer's Washington State by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, transcontinental railway, white picket fence

The English Camp unit of the historical park is set on picturesque Garrison Bay, and, with its huge old shade trees, wide lawns, and white wooden buildings, it’s the epitome of British civility. There’s even a formal garden surrounded by a white picket fence. You can look inside the reconstructed buildings and imagine the days when this was one of the most far-flung corners of the British Empire. If you’re full of energy, hike the 1.25-mile trail to the top of 650-foot Mount Young for a beautiful panorama of the island. An easier 1-mile hike hugs the shoreline out to the end of Bell Point. The grounds are open daily from dawn to 11pm, and the visitor center is open from late May through early September daily from 9am to 5pm.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

For him, “faith” in government—as in the quote above—was not the citizens’ belief that the government will keep its promises, but simply that it won’t lie to them; that it would, like a good scientist, give them accurate information, and who wanted to see human behavior as founded in natural laws that—like the laws of physics that Newton had so recently described—were higher than those of any mere government. The real question is why the British government agreed with him and resolutely stuck to this position despite all the immediate disasters. Soon afterward, in fact, Britain adopted the gold standard (in 1717) and the British Empire maintained it, and with it the notion that gold and silver were money, down to its final days. True, Locke’s materialism also came to be broadly accepted—even to be the watchword of the age.83 Mainly, though, the reliance on gold and silver seemed to provide the only check on the dangers involved with the new forms of credit-money, which multiplied very quickly—especially once ordinary banks were allowed to create money too.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

He became involved in many of Governor Bowles’s socially progressive initiatives in civil rights and social welfare, including coping with an acute postwar housing shortage, which further awakened Logue to the looming urban crisis: “His housing program … was the most farsighted and the most effective in any state at that time,” Logue later recalled.41 Partners in a whirlwind pace of work in Hartford, Ed Logue and Chester Bowles forged a warm friendship that would last for four decades, with Bowles serving as another father figure whose political commitment, social compassion, and moral integrity won Logue’s admiration.42 The voters of Connecticut proved less smitten with Bowles and his liberal agenda, however, and they booted out the governor and his idealistic young crew after a two-year term. Soon thereafter, President Harry S. Truman appointed the defeated Bowles as ambassador to India and Nepal, the third American to serve since India had declared its independence from the British Empire in 1947. Bowles invited Logue to come along as his special assistant, and by January 1952, Ed and Margaret Logue were on their way to New Delhi for about eighteen months, until the newly elected Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, sent both Bowles and Logue packing in spring 1953.43 India beckoned as a great adventure to thirty-year-old Ed and twenty-five-year-old Margaret, the only damper being questions raised by the State Department under its Loyalty and Security Program that red-flagged Ed and his brother John’s political activities.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In the 19th century, after conquering several groups, the Zulu chief, Shaka, reorganized these age-sets so that they crosscut the many chiefdoms that were now united under his rule—thereby establishing an army composed of ritually-bonded young men drawn from diverse clans and tribes. This created the first state-level institution—the military—of the embryonic Zulu state. The powerful Zulu army struck terror into surrounding populations and would soon give the mighty British Empire much trouble.65 As state institutions multiplied and expanded, they often undermined the kin-based institutions of the lower strata, mostly by usurping some of their functions. For example, during Hawaii’s transition from a chiefdom to a state in the 18th century, the elite had accumulated so much ritual, military, and supernatural power that they took the ownership of land away from the clans of the commoners and reallocated it to suit their own political purposes.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

The Dutch—seeking spices that could help fund their military operations against Spain—had already spent the previous century and a half charting the north, south, and west coasts. The French, too, explored and charted the landmasses of the South Pacific. One thing is certain, though: absent the hegemonistic agenda of the British empire builders, nobody would have measured the 1769 transit of Venus. Before the International Meridian Conference of October 1884, and even for decades afterward, the world was in a muddle in the matter of determining time and place. Time had long served as the marker of distance, if not place.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

As one Spanish statesman predicted, the United States might have been born a “pygmy,” but soon it would be a giant, an “irresistible colossus” bent on territorial expansion. The Spanish government also worried about the economic and commercial implications of US independence. Already, the ties between Cuba and North America were formidable. What would happen now that the former British colonies were no longer tied to the British Empire and its Caribbean colonies? The Spanish already knew the answer. At the very least, the new country would be a rival for the profits of its colonies, Cuba prime among them.18 In August 1782, officials in Madrid wrote to Havana to inform them that foreign ships should no longer be welcomed. But Havana authorities ignored the directive.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Hence it has come that not the aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England emerging from his minority. This could serve as an equally apt description of the United States today, a country that has inherited England's power and wealth along with the spiritual torpor that already, in Emerson's day, foreshadowed England's decline. The vastness of the British empire, Emerson understands, contains "no vast hope." Englishmen enjoy all the requirements of a good life except appropriate outlets for their energy and ambition, which therefore aim only to become well educated, clever, and comfortable. It says a great deal about the reduced scale of this ambition, according to Emerson, that a "large family is reckoned a misfortune" and that even the "death of the young" presents itself as a blessing in disguise, since a "source of expense" is thereby closed. * A society that finds so little for young people to do cannot welcome new members with much enthusiasm—another sign, as Emerson puts it in another context, that England now "lives on its capital."


pages: 653 words: 218,559

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

In order to avoid misunderstandings, especially by Marxists or former Marxists who equate political intelligence with prophetic powers, I hasten to admit that Macdonald’s batting average for short-time predictions was not too good—a failing he shared with Karl Marx who, around 1858, was afraid that Das Kapital might not be finished before the outbreak of the revolution. Most of these “mistakes” were irrelevant—for instance, Macdonald’s belief in 1944 that the liquidation of the British Empire was “remote.” Some were more serious, especially his failure to understand the complex nature of the Second World War, which to him, as to the entire American Left, was simply an “imperialist” war. But this estimate belongs still to his pre-radical, ideological leftist period, and the chief reason he did not revise it after his break with Marxism was his new turn to pacifism, as well as his conviction that “the Soviet System was an even greater threat to what I believe in than Nazism was”—a very debatable statement because it identified the Soviet System with Bolshevism (Lenin’s one-party dictatorship) and Bolshevism with Stalinism.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Among them were local agents who, without the knowledge or approval of their home ministries, expanded their country’s claims; settlers in existing colonies who demanded protection and new opportunities to acquire land; the commercial interests of various local traders and chartered companies which, if not of vital economic interest to their home governments, nonetheless constituted powerful lobbies; and missionaries, who saw Africa as ripe for conversion and cultural conquest. It is said that the British Empire was created in a fit of absentmindedness; this was in fact true not just of that empire but also of those of many other Europeans. Thus, for example, Afrique Occidentale Française, one of the two large divisions of the French Empire in Africa, was created by a group of French officers who trekked into the upper Niger valley and ultimately into Chad in disregard of orders from Paris.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The English language was shaped by broad historical events that did not take place inside a single head. They include the Scandinavian and Norman invasions in medieval times, which infected it with non-Anglo-Saxon words; the Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth century, which scrambled the pronunciation of the long vowels and left its spelling system an irregular mess; the expansion of the British Empire, which budded off a variety of Englishes (American, Australian, Singaporean); and the development of global electronic media, which may rehomogenize the language as we all read the same web pages and watch the same television shows. At the same time, none of these forces can be understood without taking into account the thought processes of flesh-and-blood people.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As the historian Greg Grandin has put it, “In the realm of economics, the importance of slaves went well beyond the wealth generated from their uncompensated labor. Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.” In the eighteenth century, Caribbean sugar plantations, which were wholly dependent on slave labor, were by far the most profitable outposts of the British Empire, generating revenues that far outstripped the other colonies. In Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild quotes enthusiastic slave traders describing the buying and selling of humans as “the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves” and “the foundation of our commerce . . . and first cause of our national industry and riches.”11 While not equivalent, the dependency of the U.S. economy on slave labor—particularly in the Southern states—is certainly comparable to the modern global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels.I According to historian Eric Foner, at the start of the Civil War, “slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together.”


pages: 784 words: 229,648

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

A few minutes before the end, he went to the office of the director of medical services at Government Hospital to get his certificate of service. The director handed it to him with three words: "Here it is." That was all. No handshake, no thank-you, no goodbye, no "Good luck." For Fouad Tannous twenty-eight years of service to the British Empire had ended in that curt phrase. He went back to his lab to close up. Usually his last gesture was to lock the large iron cupboard containing almost a year's supply of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. This time, he slipped the key into the cupboard door and left it there. "What's the use?" he thought.


pages: 728 words: 233,687

My Boring-Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith by Kevin Smith

An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Burning Man, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fulfillment center, G4S, Kickstarter, mutually assured destruction, post-work, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Wall-E, Wayback Machine

Susanah joins us and I ask if she wants to send her kids to Madagascar with me, Harley, Jen, Chris Moore and his daughter Maddy, but Susanah declines, as she’s concerned the kids might not take to the flick well without her there. We head inside for another take, before which I ask Fiona if she’s a Dame yet. She admits that she’s halfway there, having received the CBE — the Commander of the British Empire honor. Naturally, everyone in the near vicinity fixates on this, and Fiona seems a little embarrassed by the sudden attention. Outside again, between set-ups, we continue our CBE discussion when Susanah joins us and states that she’s instituting a new rule: we can bullshit all we want between takes, but we’re not allowed to chit-chat on set right before a take.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The SANNC formed in reaction to the 1910 Union of South Africa, which brought together the former British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the Dutch-speaking Boer (Afrikaner) Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal after the conclusion of the Boer Wars. In the Cape, political rights were determined on the basis of wealth or property, not race. But the Boer Republics had a white-only franchise. The Union had been precipitated by the triumph of the British Empire in the Second Boer War which lasted from 1899 to 1902. During the war the British had criticized the Afrikaners’ harsh treatment of black Africans, creating hope that the postwar order might give black Africans more rights. So there was a window of opportunity for institutional change at war’s end.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

(This was the gap that Bin Laden’s vast desert camps of multinational immigrant workers helped fill.) Faisal sought to follow an Islamic version of the modernization drives championed by Nasser and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, but he lacked the educated classes of civil servants, military officers, and technocrats that the British Empire had bequeathed Egypt and India. For the foreseeable future, foreigners like Bin Laden and the Lebanese builder Rafik Hariri would play major roles, along with a few Nejdi families who were moving into construction. After six years of effort, Bin Laden at last finished the treacherous road between Mecca and Taif.


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Other destinations include Amiens (€10.50, 50 minutes, six to 12 daily), Calais-Ville (€18.70, 1¾ hours, 12 daily Monday to Friday, five daily Saturday and Sunday) and Lens (€3.80, 15 minutes, 23 daily Monday to Friday, eight to 11 daily weekends). * * * COMMONWEALTH CEMETERIES & MEMORIALS Almost 750,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors from Great Britain, Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and other parts of the British Empire died during WWI on the Western Front, two-thirds of them in France. According to the Commonwealth tradition, they were buried where they fell, in more than 1000 military cemeteries and 2000 civilian cemeteries now tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (www.cwgc.org). French, American and German war dead were reburied in large cemeteries after the war.

INDIAN MEMORIAL The fascinating and seldom-visited Mémorial Indien, vaguely Moghul in architecture, records the names of Commonwealth soldiers from the Indian subcontinent who ‘have no known grave’. The units (31st Punjabis, 11th Rajputs, 2nd King Edward’s Own Gurkha Rifles) and the ranks of the fallen – sepoy, havildar, naik (chief), sowar (mounted soldier), labourer, follower – engraved on the walls evoke the pride, pomp and exploitation on which the British Empire was built. To get there from La Bassée, take the northbound D947 to its intersection with the D171. South of Arras Some of the bloodiest fighting of WWI took place around the town of Albert. The farmland north and east of the town is dotted with scores of Commonwealth cemeteries. PÉRONNE Perhaps the best place to start a visit to the Somme battlefields is in the river port of Péronne (population 8400), at the well-designed and informative Historial de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War; 03 22 83 14 18; www.historial.org; Château de Péronne; adult/over 60yr/children 6-18yr incl audioguide €7.50/6/3.80; 10am-6pm, closed mid-Dec–mid-Jan).


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Amiens €11.90, 45 minutes, six to 12 daily Calais-Ville €21, two hours, 13 daily Monday to Friday, seven on Saturday, four on Sunday Lens €4.20, 20 minutes, 13 daily Monday to Friday, seven on Saturday, four on Sunday Lille-Flandres €10.50, 35 minutes, nine to 16 daily Paris Gare du Nord TGV €31 to €47, 50 minutes, 11 to 15 daily Battle of the Somme Memorials Almost 750,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors from Great Britain, Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and other parts of the British Empire died during WWI on the Western Front, two-thirds of them in France. They were buried where they fell, in more than 1000 military cemeteries and 2000 civilian cemeteries that dot the landscape along a wide swath of territory – ‘Flanders Fields’ – running roughly from Amiens and Cambrai north via Arras and Béthune to Armentières and Ypres (Ieper) in Belgium.

INDIAN MEMORIAL The evocative Mémorial Indien (Neuve-Chapelle Memorial), vaguely Moghul in architecture, records the names of 4700 soldiers of the Indian Army who ‘have no known grave’. The units (31st Punjabis, 11th Rajputs, 2nd King Edward’s Own Gurkha Rifles) and the ranks of the fallen – sowar (cavalry trooper), havildar (sergeant), naik (chief), sepoy (infantry private), labourer, follower – engraved on the walls evoke the pride, pomp and exploitation on which the British Empire was built. The 15m-high column, flanked by two tigers, is topped by a lotus capital, the Imperial Crown and the Star of India. This seldom-visited – and poorly signposted – memorial is 20km southwest of Lille. To get there from La Bassée, head north along D947 for 5km. LA GRANDE MINE Just outside the hamlet of La Boisselle, this enormous crater looks like the site of a meteor impact.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

He argued that the gas companies actually benefited from his work because the public, once accustomed to brightly lit streets, would burn more gas at home. A demonstration in London in 1880 led to the formation of a British affiliate to exploit the European market. Brush lights went up in India, Australia, and other corners of the British Empire. In 1882 the Brush Electric Company mounted a demonstration in Tokyo and won contracts there. That same summer the first central power station in the Far East went online in Shanghai. Throughout this rapid expansion Brush kept improving his system. The forty-light dynamos of 1880 gave way to sixty-five-lighters and then machines that powered 125 lights, which became the Brush standard and a widely used central-station unit.


pages: 916 words: 248,265

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, David Brooks, Etonian, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, loose coupling, low cost airline, oil shale / tar sands, period drama, pneumatic tube, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, work culture

In 1906 the annual death rate among this working grade was 2.7 per 1,000. Put another way, if a thousand goods guards had been recruited in that year and continued working under the same conditions for the full pensionable span of forty-five years, only 885 would have been left alive.* Cumulatively, this survival rate is not much better than that of British Empire service personnel during the six years’ duration of the Second World War. The impact of these losses was diluted also because fatalities came in small numbers – a shunter here, two gangers there and so on. Railway work produced no hecatomb headlines to match the pit disasters of the period, or ships lost with all hands.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

December Great Dickens Christmas Fair (throughout Dec; t 1-800/510-1558, wwww.dickensfair.com. Something like a Victorian-era version of a Renaissance Fair held at Cow Palace, this event offers unique wares from local artisans, as well as a chance to experience the music and dance of the period and fine foods from the British Empire. Walking around, you’re bound to run into characters such as Father Christmas, Ebeneezer Scrooge, and the three Christmas ghosts. Tickets $22. San Francisco Ballet Nutcracker (throughout Dec; t415/865-2000, wwww .sfballet.org) The city’s ballet company is the oldest in America, and still lavishly praised by critics.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

It was a poignant moment, as the Irish Army Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” and a sad folk song called “Flowers of the Forest,” with the young Irish American president standing silently next to frail, half-blind de Valera, who as a young rebel leader had also faced the hangman’s noose at Kilmainham Jail. Kennedy was fascinated by the story of little Ireland’s rising against the mighty British Empire, and he grilled de Valera during the trip about his role in the rebellion. How did de Valera escape the fate of his fellow rebel leaders, JFK wanted to know? Only because he was born in New York, explained the Irish president, and the British—eager to cajole America into World War I—were reluctant to offend their essential allies.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

McLoughlin established a mill and incorporated the first town in the Northwest in 1829, at Oregon City. He later built a house there, which today is a museum. The eventual decline of the fur trade, along with an influx of American farmers, traders and settlers from the east, all helped loosen the weakening British Empire’s grip on the Pacific Northwest. But it was the missionaries who probably played the biggest role. In 1834, New England Methodists Daniel and Jason Lee founded a mission just north of present-day Salem. Other missionaries arrived in 1836, establishing missions near today’s Walla Walla, WA, and Lewiston, ID.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Senator Robert Taft, whose father had joined Wilson to extol the League of Nations, denounced Roosevelt’s proposal as “an international W.P.A.” that would restrict American “freedom of action.”*27 Taft insisted that World War II be not construed as “any crusade for democracy, or for the Four Freedoms, or for the preservation of the British Empire.” Roosevelt knew from Wilson’s ordeal that it would be easier to get Congress to support a peace organization if it was prompted to take the lead in asking him for one. In September 1943, blessed by the White House, the Arkansas Congressman J. William Fulbright, a young, first-term ex–Rhodes Scholar, asked for “appropriate international machinery” to preserve postwar tranquillity, and prevailed by 360 to 29.


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Christ, Tressell delighted in reminding his audience, was ‘the Jewish carpenter’, a phrase designed to stick in the craw of the racially and socially intolerant so-called Christians that he despised; they would also just have to deal with the fact that the character in his novel most akin to Christ was Frank Owen, simul- taneously ‘suffering servant’ and socialist propagandist––and, at 32, the same age as Christ, as tradition has it, at the time of his crucifixion. Tressell saw the institutions of Church and Chapel as in practice political bulwarks against socialism and social change, inextricably woven financially and ideologically into the hierarchical and commercial establishment of the British Empire. If the Church of England (which had given its blessing to the Anglo-Boer War) was the Tory party at prayer, then the Liberal-inclined Nonconformists of the chapels promoted laissez-faire capitalist values (as Matthew Introduction xix Arnold had concluded in his Culture and Anarchy of 1868, and as the economic historians Max Weber and R.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

(Southern blacks were deprived of civil rights until the 1960s and subjected to a regime of legal segregation that shared some features in common with the system of apartheid that was maintained in South Africa until the 1980s.) This no doubt accounts for many aspects of the development—or rather nondevelopment—of the US welfare state. Slave Capital and Human Capital I have not tried to estimate the value of slave capital in other slave societies. In the British Empire, slavery was abolished in 1833–1838. In the French Empire it was abolished in two stages (first abolished in 1792, restored by Napoleon in 1803, abolished definitively in 1848). In both empires, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a portion of foreign capital was invested in plantations in the West Indies (think of Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park) or in slave estates on islands in the Indian Ocean (the Ile Bourbon and Ile de France, which became Réunion and Mauritius after the French Revolution).


Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The... by Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly, Mary G. Enig, Phd.

British Empire, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, out of africa, profit motive, the market place, the scientific method

It was the nickel under the foot of much of the early history of the New World. The Portuguese and Spanish empires rose swiftly in opulence and power. As the Arabs before them had crumbled, so they, too, fell rapidly into decline. To what extent that decline was biological—occasioned by sugar bingeing at the royal level—we can only guess. However, the British Empire stood by waiting to pick up the pieces. In the beginning, Queen Elizabeth I shrank from institutionalizing slavery in the British colonies as "detestable," something which might "call down the vengeance of heaven" on her realm. By 1588 her sentimental scruples had been overcome. The Queen granted a royal charter extending recognition to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England into Africa, which gave them a state monopoly on the African slave trade.


pages: 918 words: 260,504

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Because most of the city’s grain arrived in the relatively large units represented by canalboats and oceangoing vessels, there was less need for the break-in-bulk capabilities offered by elevators. New Yorkers also faced the special problem of matching their own business practices with those of traders in the British Empire, who strongly favored sale by sample rather than by grade. New York’s growing acceptance of the new elevator and grading technologies after 1870 corresponded with the increasing amount of grain entering the city in railroad cars. 70.Taylor, Chicago Board of Trade, 1:172–73, 189. 71.Colbert, Chicago, 49. 72.U.S.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Having determined that the solution to the Jewish question required relocating the Jews to the land of Israel, the Zionist leaders were thinking of the Jews in Europe. The state they envisioned was to be culturally a part of Europe, and when they traveled to European capitals asking for support, they promised a bastion of European culture in the Middle East. This was the image in which the Jewish state was built, under the auspices of the British empire. But the murder of Jews in the Second World War depleted the state’s potential population, and the Zionist movement began to look elsewhere for possible immigrants, to the Jews of Arab countries. Prior to the Second World War, they had aroused, at most, anthropological curiosity within the Zionist movement; they were not considered partners in the dream.21 Tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrahim (or Sephardim, or, as they were also then called, “members of eastern communities”) had plagued the Jewish settlement in Palestine since its inception and worsened upon the establishment of the state, as the balance of numbers changed.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Making statements about Mount Everest shareable involves more than just finding a snow-covered mountain; it involves creating a shared language.iv ‘Peak XV has snow and ice near its summit’ would have been an equally true statement, but one that would only ever have made sense to a small group of surveyors and cartographers; to anyone else it would have been meaningless. Or take today’s date. This isn’t just a linguistic convention. It is an institutional fact because contracts depend on the interpretation of dates. In Britain and the British Empire the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use now, was introduced by law in 1752. The day after Wednesday 2 September 1752 was Thursday 14 September. Over most of Continental Europe, Wednesday 2 September (British-style) was already 13 September. At the same time as the date was changed, the start of the year was moved from 25 March to 1 January, so 1 January to 24 March 1752 never existed.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

MAP 3.1 ETHNIC GROUPS IN AFGHANISTAN Persian, Arabic, and British writers gave greater attention to the Pashtun tribes than to other ethnicities, in part because the Pashtun tribes make up the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.5 Pashtuns have dominated the contemporary Afghan state since it was created in the eighteenth century. The British Empire’s conflicts with the warlike Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Durand Line also explain this emphasis. Pashtun resistance to the British became a part of British lore about their Indian Empire. British scholars and frontier officials studied the Pashtun tribes, learned Pashto, and translated Pashto literature and poetry into English.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

“Only these actions, these executions, caused the British to leave,” David Shomron said, decades after he shot Tom Wilkin dead on a Jerusalem street. “If [Avraham] Stern had not begun the war, the State of Israel would not have come into being.” One may argue with these statements. The shrinking British Empire ceded control of the majority of its colonies, including many countries where terror tactics had not been employed, due to economic reasons and increased demands for independence from the native populations. India, for instance, gained its independence right around the same time. Nevertheless, Shomron and his ilk were firmly convinced that their own bravery and their extreme methods had brought about the departure of the British.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

In foreign affairs as well as domestic, Gorbachev had huge accomplishments to his credit. He reduced the danger of a nuclear holocaust. He allowed East European countries to become their own masters. He dismantled an empire (or acquiesced in its dismemberment) without the orgy of blood and violence that has accompanied the breakup of so many others, including the British Empire—in India, Kenya, Malaysia, and elsewhere.1 Gorbachev was a master politician when it came to consolidating power and using it to transform the Soviet system and end the cold war. But the forces he let loose and the people he helped free both at home and abroad overwhelmed him in the end. He became “Gorbachev” with the help of his own native gifts: innate optimism and self-confidence, a substantial intellect, a fierce determination to prove himself, and his ability to maneuver to get what he wanted, charming people in the process.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

Roosevelt himself, a man whom the pamphleteers once thought “something of a progressive,” had now become a “reactionary” and even a “war-monger.” This transformation has happened because of the war in Europe. “It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out.” If Oppenheimer had anything to do with this second pamphlet, his rational style had abandoned him. Is it possible that he really thought of Roosevelt as a “war-monger”?


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

And in the minds of many, it offers every upside of urban life – burgeoning food, music and art scenes, neighborhoods with distinct personalities, copious parkland and maybe equally importantly, relatively affordable real estate. The older, preserved buildings in historic Philadelphia provide a picture of what colonial American cities once looked like – based on a grid with wide streets and public squares. For a time the second-largest city in the British Empire (after London), Philadelphia became a center for opposition to British colonial policy. It was the new nation’s capital at the start of the Revolutionary War and again after the war until 1790, when Washington, DC, took over. By the 19th century, New York City had superseded Philadelphia as the nation’s cultural, commercial and industrial center.

Mills House Hotel HOTEL $$ ( 843-577-2400; www.millshouse.com; 115 Meeting St; r from $189; ) This grand old dame (150 years young, merci ) has had an $11- facelift, and is now one of the most opulent choices in the area. Gilded elevators lead from an enormous marble lobby to 214 lushly upholstered rooms. The sun has still not set on the British Empire inside the clubby, wood-paneled Barbados Room restaurant. 1837 Bed & Breakfast B&B $$ ( 843-723-7166, 877-723-1837; www.1837bb.com; 126 Wentworth St; r incl breakfast $109-195; ) Like staying at the home of your eccentric, antique-loving aunt, 1837 has nine charmingly overdecorated rooms, including three in the old brick carriage house.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

American students selected Moses to represent their country because of his reputation as a debater. Previous speakers had pleaded for equality, for fraternity, for "immediate brotherhood." Moses' point of view was somewhat different. Immediate brotherhood, he said flatly, was "not practical." The "subject peoples" of the British Empire were simply not ready for self-government yet. Furthermore, he didn't see any time in the near future when they would be. As the audience realized what they were hearing, a certain restiveness began to develop. When Moses started explaining—quite clearly— why he didn't think the "subject peoples" would be ready for self-government for a long time, several subject people rose and charged at him.

And if you were talking to him on the phone, he'd just hang up on you. I remember talking to him on the phone and disagreeing with him about something and I was in the middle of a sentence and the damn phone was slammed down." Moses had always displayed contempt for people he felt were considerably beneath him, the colored "subject people" of the British Empire, for example, or civil servants who hadn't attended Oxford or Cambridge. At the Municipal Civil Service Commission, his irritation at having to interrupt his work for public hearings indicated a tendency to feel that the public he was serving was beneath him, that its suggestions about its own destiny were not worth listening to.


The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, demand response, disinformation, false flag, financial independence, flag carrier, Herman Kahn, index card, mandelbrot fractal, operational security, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment

That, he thought, was a sign of an uncertain man, and the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could not afford that, especially when he had an important guest. Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, he thought. Though the official name-change had not yet been approved, that was how his people were starting to think. That's the problem. The ship of state was breaking up. There was no precedent for it. The dissolution of the British Empire was the example that many liked to use, but that wasn't quite right, was it? Nor was any other example. The Soviet Union of old had been a unique political creation. What was now happening in the Soviet Union was also entirely without precedent. What had once been exhilarating to him was now more than frightening.


The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

Joseph White carried an official protest from the American Atlantic & Pacific Ship Canal Company to Washington (oddly, as the canal company was not involved). The United States government demanded an explanation from London, and dispatched the USS Saranac to Greytown. Newspapers across the country voiced anger, even a willingness to go to war with the British Empire. “The outrage upon the Prometheus demands the most ample apology and reparation,” proclaimed the New York Herald, “or it demands the application of the Jacksonian doctrine of retaliation and reprisals.”49 As luck would have it, the British cabinet was in a state of turmoil. On December 21, Lord Russell dismissed Palmerston from the Foreign Office; his replacement, Lord Granville, eventually wrote to Washington, “Her Majesty's Government have no hesitation in offering an ample apology for that which they consider to have been an infraction of Treaty engagements.”


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

City Hall Donegall Square North • Tours (45min) Mon–Fri 11am, 2pm & 3pm, Sat 2pm & 3pm • Free • belfastcity.gov.uk/cityhall • Access for tours is via the front entrance on the north side of the square, though on Sat it’s the back door on the south side The vast Neoclassical bulk of City Hall dominates Donegall Square and the entire centre of Belfast. Completed in 1906 and made of bright white Portland stone, its turrets, saucer domes, scrolls and pinnacle pots are all representative of styles absorbed by the British Empire. In front stands an imposing statue of Queen Victoria, the apotheosis of imperialism, while at her feet, sculpted in bronze, proud figures show the city fathers’ world-view: a young scholar; his mother with spinning spool; and his father with mallet and boat, the three representing “learning, linen and liners”, the alliterative bedrock of Belfast’s heritage.


Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

Restored Hawaiian Temples Puʻuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park, Hawaiʻi, the Big Island Piʻilanihale Heiau, Maui Puʻukohola Heiau National Historic Site, Hawaiʻi, the Big Island Ahuʻena Heiau, Hawaiʻi, the Big Island Captain Cook & First Western Contact Starting in 1778, everything changed. It was the archetypal clash of civilizations: the British Empire, the most technologically advanced culture on the planet, sent an explorer on a mission. The Hawaiʻi he stumbled upon was, to his eyes, a place inhabited by heathens stuck in prehistoric times; their worship of pagan gods and human sacrifice seemed anathema to the Christian world view. But Hawaiʻi's strategic geographic position and wealth of natural resources ensured these islands would quickly become a target of the West's civilizing impulse.


pages: 2,313 words: 330,238

Lonely Planet Turkey (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, James Bainbridge, Brett Atkinson, Steve Fallon, Jessica Lee, Virginia Maxwell, Hugh McNaughtan, John Noble

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Exxon Valdez, Kickstarter, megacity, Mustafa Suleyman, place-making, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Legend has it that at one point a piece of shrapnel hit him in the chest but was stopped by his pocket watch. His brilliant performance made him a folk hero and paved the way for his promotion to paşa (general). The Gallipoli campaign – in Turkish the Çanakkale Savaşı (Battle of Çanakkale) – resulted in a total of more than half a million casualties, of which 130,000 were deaths. The British Empire saw the loss of some 36,000 lives, including 8700 Australians and 2700 New Zealanders. French casualties numbered 47,000 (making up over half the entire French contingent); 8800 Frenchmen died. Half the 500,000 Ottoman troops were casualties, with almost 86,700 killed. Gallipoli (Gelibolu) Peninsula 1Sights 1Brighton BeachB1 2Çanakkale Şehitleri AnıtıB4 3Cape Helles British MemorialA4 4French War Memorial & CemeteryB4 5Gallipoli Historical National ParkC2 6Gallipoli Simulation CentreB1 7Lancashire Landing CemeteryA4 8Mehmetçiğe Derin Saygı AnıtıB1 9Nuri Yamut MonumentB3 10Pink Farm CemeteryA3 11Redoubt CemeteryB3 12Salim Mutlu War MuseumB3 13Sargı Yeri CemeteryB3 14Skew Bridge CemeteryA3 15Twelve Tree Copse CemeteryB3 16'V' Beach CemeteryA4 17Yahya Çavuş ŞehitliğiA4 4Sleeping 18Gallipoli HousesC1 5Eating 19Doyuranlar Aile Çay ve GözlemeC1 1Sights Gallipoli Historical National Park (Gelibolu Yarımadası Tarihi Milli Parkı; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; http://gytmp.milliparklar.gov.tr) encompasses 33,500 hectares of the peninsula.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

His lithographs of Palestinian villages and of Lebanon, of Tyre and the peninsula of Ras Naqourra, of the temples of Baalbek, are bathed only in the peace of antiquity, a nineteenth-century dream machine that would become more seductive as the decades saw the collapse of the Turkish and then of the British Empire. For today, Roberts’ delicate sketches and water-colours of Ottoman Palestine can be found in the hallways, bedrooms and living rooms of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon. In the dust of the great Ein Helweh Palestinian camp just east of Sidon, cheap copies of Roberts’ prints – of Nablus, of Hebron, of Jericho and Jerusalem – are hung on the cement walls of refugee shacks, behind uncleaned glass, sometimes held in place by Scotch tape and glue.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Sixty-eight days later, Lule would be overthrown and Uganda would spin into a cycle of short-lived and vengeful governments. It all began in 1971, when the Ugandan military overthrew the elected government of Milton Obote, putting a semi-literate, temperamentally violent man named Idi Amin in charge of the nation of some 18 million. Ten years earlier, Uganda had been considered one of the finest jewels in the British Empire’s crown; a rich cornucopia of agricultural wealth with a well-established infrastructure of colonial and missionary schools, hospitals, roads, and trade. But Obote’s government was also marked by corruption that fueled unrest and the 1971 military coup. Amin destroyed the nation’s prosperity and drove his country into a state of hellishness unlike anything it had previously experienced.


Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

★2063★ FORT KING GEORGE STATE HISTORIC SITE 1600 Wayne St Darien, GA 31305 Web: gastateparks.org/info/ftkinggeorge Phone: 912-437-4770 Size: 22 acres. Location: 3 miles east of I-95 exit 49, in Darien. Facilities: Historic buildings, museum. Special Features: From 1721 until 1736, Fort King George was the southernmost outpost of the British Empire in North America. His Majesty’s Independent Company garrisoned the fort for seven years, but after enduring hardships from disease, threats of Spanish and Indian attacks, and the harsh, unfamiliar coastal environment, they eventually abandoned it. The 18th century frontier fortification has been reconstructed from old records and drawings, and structures available for public tour include a blockhouse, officers’ quarters, barracks, a guardhouse, moat, and palisades

Russell: MT 679 Charles Pinckney: SC 67 Charlestown Navy Yard: MA 39 Charley Wild River: AK 379 Chatham Manor: VA 140 Chatooga River: SC 493 Chattahoochee River: GA 68 Chautauqua-Lake Erie Wine Trail: NY 1219 Chaw’se Regional Indian Museum: CA 1613 Cheaha Mountain: AL 565, 1282 Cheat Summit Fort: WV 1271 Cherokee Indians: GA 2055, 2058, 2091; IL 1170, 2312; MS 1120; MO 3051; OK 3754; SC 1243, 4143; TN 1247, 4272 Cherokee Path: SC 1243 Chesapeake Bay Bridge: MD 1186 Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve: VA 4535, 4535 Chesapeake and Delaware Canal: MD 1186 Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: MD 69 Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad: WV 4678 Chester William Nimitz: TX 4287 Chewelah Mountain: WA 478 Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area: KS 1176 Cheyenne Indians: OK 363, 3784, 3786; WY 4786, 4787 Cheyenne River Indian Reservation: SD 4195 Chicago History: IL 384, 1102 Chickamauga Creek: GA 70 Chickasaw Council House: MS 1199 Chickasaw Indians: OK 71 Chicken Island: AK 1353 Chief Cornstalk: WV 4698 Chief Joseph: ID 1065 Numbers cited after listings are entry numbers rather than page numbers. 997 11. Special Features Index Breaks Canyon: VA 2465, 4500 Brices Cross Roads: MS 1199 Bridal Veil Falls: OR 3818; WA 1232 Bridge Canyon: AZ 296 Bridger (Jim): WY 4783 Brigham Young: UT 1063, 4418, 4433 Bristol Bay: AK 632 British Empire: GA 2063 Brockway Mountain: MI 1188 Broken Bow Lake: OK 3748 Bronson Cave: IN 2359 Brown (John): WV 175 Brown v. Board of Education: KS 41 Browns Park: CO 658 Bruce Trail: ON 409 Bruneau Dunes: ID 2173 Bryce Canyon: UT 42, 488 Buchanan (James): PA 3983 Buck Island Reef: VI 43 Buckeye Trail: OH 3676, 3736 Buffalo Bill (William F.


pages: 1,199 words: 384,780

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

By those lights, Caroline—who was married in the sight of God to George Augustus, and who had been endowed by her mother with the incredible and priceless faculty of generating new Princes and Princesses—stood in the same wise, to the likes of Henrietta Braithwaite, as Hera to some dung-flecked shepherdess who had lately been rolling in the clover with Zeus. Caroline was expected to remind Mrs. Braithwaite of her inferiority from time to time, and Mrs. Braithwaite was expected to receive it meekly and submissively. As how could she not, for the grandchildren of Caroline would reign over the British Empire while the Braithwaites would spend their lives losing at cards and killing themselves with gin in mildewy London salons. “It is with the greatest pleasure that I shall read the next chapter of your royal highness’s faery-tale,” Mrs. Braithwaite predicted. “In this Household it is an oft-told tale that when your royal highness was stricken with the smallpox, two years after your wedding, his royal highness George Augustus spurned the counsel of the physicians, and placed his own life at risk to sit by his young bride’s bedside and hold her hand.”


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

And they marched, from freezing snow mountains to burning desert, and then, after twenty days of this unbelievable march through hell, they fought a great battle with the army of Prince Ayub Khan, and they defeated him. Roberts saved the British in the city, and from that day, even after he became the field marshal of all the soldiers in the British Empire, he was always known as Roberts of Kandahar.’ ‘Was Prince Ayub killed?’ ‘No. He escaped. Then the British put his close kinsman Abdul Rahman Khan on the throne of Afghanistan. Abdul Rahman Khan, also an ancestor of mine, ruled the country with such a special wisdom that the British had no real power in Afghanistan.


Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) by Fionn Davenport

air freight, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, centre right, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, McMansion, new economy, period drama, reserve currency, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

The great and the good – aka the Protestant Ascendancy – wanted big improvements, and they set about transforming what was in essence still a medieval town into a modern, Anglo-Irish metropolis. Roads were widened, landscaped squares laid out and new town houses were built, all in a proto-Palladian style that soon became known as Georgian (after the kings then on the English throne). For a time, Dublin was the second-largest city in the British Empire and all was very, very good – unless you were part of the poor, mostly Catholic masses living in the city’s ever-developing slums. For them, things stayed pretty much as they had always been. The Georgian boom came to a sudden and dramatic halt after the Act of Union in 1801, when Ireland was formally united with Britain and its separate parliament closed down.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Hanover 0511 / POP 522,700 Lacking the high profile of the Hanse city states Hamburg and Bremen to its north, Hanover (Hannover in German) is perhaps best known for its CeBit information and communications technology fair. Less well-known but buried deep within its identity is a British connection – for over 100 years from the early 18th century, monarchs from the house of Hanover also ruled Great Britain and everything that belonged to the British Empire. Perhaps it’s this paradox – of being an incredibly influential part of something much larger than itself – that makes Hanover’s character so difficult to pin down. Perhaps it belongs to the character of the Hanoverians and this lowlands region (the so-called Tiefebene ) to be so low-key about such a powerful history.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

The Bahamas’ new motto was Expulsis Piratis – Restituta Commercia (Pirates Expelled – Commerce Restored). Following the American Revolution, Loyalist refugees – many quite rich or entrepreneurial – began arriving, giving new vigor to the city. These wealthy landowners lived well and kept slaves until the British Empire abolished the slave trade. During the American Civil War the islands were an exchange center for blockade runners transferring munitions and supplies for Southern cotton. While Nassauvians illicitly supplied liquor to the US during Prohibition, Yankees flocked to Nassau and her new casinos. When Fidel Castro spun Cuba into Soviet orbit in 1961, the subsequent US embargo forced revelers to seek their pleasures elsewhere; Nassau became the new hot spot.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

A n d r e w e s , W i l l i a m J . H . , e d . 1 9 9 6 . The Quest for Longitude. Cambridge, MA: Coll e c t i o n o f H i s t o r i c a l Scientific I n s t r u m e n t s , H a r v a r d U n i v . A n d r e w s , K e n n e t h R 1 9 8 4 . Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire 1480-1630. C a m b r i d g e : Univ. Press. Annino, Antonio. 1 9 9 5 . " S o m e Reflections o n Spanish American Constitutional and Political H i s t o r y , " Itinerario, 19, 2: 2 6 - 4 7 . Anstey, R o g e r T . 1 9 6 8 . " C a p i t a l i s m a n d S l a v e r y : A C r i t i q u e , " Econ.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

According to Malay legend, a Sumatran prince spotted a lion while visiting the island of Temasek, and on the basis of this good omen he founded a city there called Singapura (Lion City). Raffles Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles arrived in 1819 on a mission to secure a strategic base for the British Empire in the Strait of Melaka. He decided to transform the sparsely populated, swampy island into a free-trade port. The layout of central Singapore is still as Raffles drew it. World War II The glory days of the empire came to an abrupt end on 15 February 1942, when the Japanese invaded Singapore.


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

He suggested that computers store a set of instruction tables that could be called as desired with the desired inputs. Turing had devised the art of programming an automatic electronic digital computer with internal program storage ! While at The National Physical Lab, the British government awarded Turing the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his war work. The OBE award had little impact on Turing. He was greatly relieved when the awards ceremony was cancelled due to the King’s illness. Having the letter painted on his office door only meant that he had to respond whenever someone asked him what he had done to win the award.