Britannia Inc. 1688-1786

Continuing my notes on the evolution of the political economy of Britain, again drawn from Simon Schama’s “A History of Britain 2: The British Wars, 1603 – 1776”. Rather than summarising Schama, I'm highlighting here those elements of the book that pertain to the topic of my PhD research: how British politics in general and foreign policy in particular came to be dominated by concentrations of socio-economic power.

Let's pick up were we left off last time, where William of Orange effectively deposed and replaced the last of the Stuart kings, James II, in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.

So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

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William III set about bringing the British Isles to heel, and ruthlessly. In less-than-pacified Scotland, the village of Glencoe was singled out to be made an example of, in a classic act of state terrorism. For the crime of pledging allegiance to the King a few days past the designated deadline, through no fault of the clan chief who had honestly endevoured to make the pledge on time, nearly eighty mostly unarmed men, together with women and children, were butchered by soldiers to whom they had unwittingly given 10 days of hospitality, in accordance with their traditions.

“[T]he dawn massacre in the heather floor of Glencoe, the ‘weeping valley’, anticipated the standard operating practices of the British Empire, to be repeated countless times over the next two centuries in America, Asia and Africa. ‘Backward peoples’ were to be given the opportunity to collaborate and, if they accepted, would be welcomed to a proper share of the spoils and to a partnership in the modernizing enterprise. Rejection – invariably characterised as unreasonable – would invite annihilation”

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A conflict was occuring, not just between English and Scots but between the old Scotland of the Highlands and the new Scotland of the Lowlands, as economic development in the latter region began to seperate it from the traditionalism of the former. The ambition of the Lowlanders was characterised by the attempt to catapult Scotland to the status of international economic power with the building of a canal at the isthmus of Darien in Central America, joining the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and thus opening a superior trading route.

“Ships from China and Japan could sail east and at New Edinburgh exchange cargoes with ships sailing west from Europe. With freight costs slashed, the goods thus shipped would become more cheaply available in their respective domestic markets. Demand would soar correspondingly, and the volume of trade increase exponentially. And sitting on top of the world’s newest and most prosperous exchange and mart would be the Scots, taking portage, marketing and banking charges off the top.”

Amsterdam had enriched itself in a similar way over the centuries, but in a time of mercantilism this new Scottish notion of a free trade area was a kind of heresy. Not just heretical, but commercially threatening, as the prospect of the Darien venture coming off caused shares in the English East India Company to tumble in fright.

They needn't have worried. The venture that consumed fully one quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital was to become an unmitigated disaster. The “Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies” carried not just the nations hopes but much of its wealth, a plethora of institutions and individuals having invested in the scheme. But, expecting a fertile, gentle and hospitable land into which to sink their money pump, the colonists instead found themselves marooned in malaria-invested swampland. Food rotted, colonists died by the score, the project collapsed. Their neighbours and rivals were less than sympathetic. The Governor of Jamaica prevented any English colonists, merchants or seaman from going to the aide of the Darienites and saving them from their tropical hell. The Spanish were little more help.

Scotland not only paid a heavy financial cost, it also lost a chance for national regeneration and to move out of England’s shadow. The years between Glencoe and the Darien venture had seen famines and now, for many Scots, union with England became an inevitable alternative to the lost chance of meaningful national independence.

“A large section of the nobility, especially those with cross border economic interests and property, and many of the commercial and professional classes of the Lowlands” were in favour of the union. And the benefits were not all one way. England would gain from being able to keep Scotland on board during the growing crisis of succession following William’s death in 1702. Despite some popular opposition, union was established in 1707, though not without a little lubrication. As well as the quiet greasing of palms necessary to ensure that the Scottish Parliament voted the right way, the English Parliament also offered £398,085 and 10s to Scotland as an above-board sweetener: exactly the sum lost in the Darien venture.

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Britain was becoming increasingly militarized during this period, during which it was involved in the Nine Years War and the War of Spanish Succession. Military spending almost doubled between 1660 and 1710, by which point it was consuming nearly 10 per cent of national income, adding £40m to the national debt and creating “another kind of army – which would not be demobilized once the fighting had stopped: bond-holders, tax-assessors and accountants; customs and excise men, thousands upon thousands of them...By the end of the wars, Britons were being taxed twice as heavily as their French counterparts, a burden that would only get heavier as the relentlessly martial eighteenth century rumbled on.”

The Whigs became closely aligned with this emerging military-commercial complex, while the Tories cast themselves as defenders of the overtaxed gentry. Political conflict, both between the two sides and more broadly, became increasingly bitter, with opposition to the replacement of the childless widow Queen Anne with George, Elector of Hanover, leading to a Jacobite rebellion in 1715 in Scotland and the North (which, absent serious backing from a war-weary France, was quelled with relative ease).

The political scene was fraught, and crying out for some kind of stability. Enter Sir Robert Walpole, the man who would do most at that time to help lead Britain away from factional stability and into a period of political calm. For Walpole, politics needed to move away from religious-moral antagonism and towards the happy equillibrium of a “healthy business environment” that would be conducive to the satisfaction of the mutual, material interests of all.

At a broader level, we can put it like this. The growing property-owning classes had a collective interest in putting the fratricidal violence of the seventeenth century behind them and getting on with the serious business of making money. Walpole was the personification of their willingness and capacity to do just that. The employment of William III as a preferred option over seeing the country thrown back into another round of civil strife on account of James II was an early sign that this new class was a serious force, able to influence the direction of the country in order to protect its interests. Now, under Walpole, they would cement their place at the top table, pending the final historic victory that was to come in the economic social and political revolutions of the nineteenth century.

A large proportion of the national debt had been traded for stock in the South Sea Company, which was to have a trading monopoly in the South Seas and West Indies; an ostensibly sure-fire money-spinner. A speculative bubble in the companies stock was inflated which enriched the few who sold at the right time, but wiped out many more when the bubble inevitably burst. It was Walpole who came riding in with a viable rescue plan for the company, thus calming the crisis and leaving the traumatised governing and wealthy classes very much in his debt. Walpole became ‘First Lord of the Treasury’, and set about building a web of connections and patronage across the new military-bureaucratic-commercial complex. With economic power consolidated and stabilised, all the right people, not least Walpole himself, settled into a life of getting very, very rich.

Laws were passed to protect the interests of the gentry. Most of the fifty new capital offences new to the statute book in 1723 dealt with poaching. Land taxes were kept low, and smallholdings were confiscated and re-sold for little or no compensation, with those who had relied on those plots for centuries forced to turn to wage-labour. The dark underbelly of the new Walpolean order was the crime, alcoholism and poverty that blighted the lives of many ordinary Britons, while Walpole and his friends basked in wealth that was astonishing even by today’s standards. This seedy popular decay was most famously depicted - with some exaggeration but far from untruthfully - by William Hogarth.

Gradually, a loose collection of Tories, independent Whigs and others began to form in opposition to the Walpole government. This included “lobbyists for colonial trade and the aggressive expansion of maritime power” who took particular exception firstly to Walpole’s “devotion to excise as a way of keeping the land taxes low” and their subjection to the extensive powers of his tax collectors, and secondly to Walpole’s perceived failure to protect British shipping from what they saw as an equally intrusive Spanish coastguard. On this second bone of contention, a jingoistic anti-Spanish fervour was whipped up by the opposition press, with petitions signed in large numbers, particularly in the port cities of Bristol and Liverpool. Walpole’s proposed compromise ‘Convention’ with Spain – his characteristic way of smoothing things over – was derided by the young William Pitt MP as “nothing but a stipulation for national ignominy...the complaints of your despairing merchants, the voice of England, has condemned it”.

Notice two things here. First, political debate breaks down according to which wealthy sector of the economy each political grouping is aligned to. In this case, those who make their money from tax collection are set against those who make their money from overseas trade. Propaganda, or 'public relations', is then used to mobilise the public behind one or the other sectional elite interest. Secondly, note the language used by Pitt, specifically the way he equates the special interests he was speaking for with the national interest as a whole. The merchants are not just speaking for themselves, they are elevated to the position of nothing less than the “voice of England”. A million business lobbyists down the ages would adopt the same technique, presenting their personal enrichment as something far loftier and noble than that, whenever political expediency demanded. This particular conception of the 'national interest' - i.e. as being the whatever serves the interests of the elites that dominate the nation - persists amongst policy makers to this day.

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In 1742 Walpole was forced from office. By now, Britain’s main international enemy was France, and would continue to be so for the next several decades. And still cultivated by France were the exiled supporters of the Stuart dynasty, the Jacobites, led now by one Prince Charles Edward Louis John Cazymyr Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, a.k.a Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II.

A Jacobite rebellion led by Charles Edward took advantage of George II having taken much of Britain’s military strength with him to war in Germany. First Scotland fell, then, with Charles Edward having won the internal debate amongst the Jacobites over whether to stop there and consolidate or move on to England to claim the whole of the Stuart birthright, the rebels headed south, taking the north-west and reaching as far as Derby before a serious force could be mustered and despatched from London to defend the Hanoverian monarchy. At this point, losing confidence in their ability to gain and hold power in Britain, and as their French backers prevaricated over whether to step in and attempt to tip the balance, the Jacobites turned and retreated north. The British army was now being reinforced from Europe almost by the day, harassing the Jacobites as they went, and finally routing the rebels with extreme brutality at Culloden in 1746. Charles Edward declared every man for himself and fled to Europe, leaving Scotland to bear the brunt of the reprisals. Villages suspected of collaboration, however tenuously, were burnt to the ground, with land and property confiscated in “a systematic exercise in state terror”. And the fist of the British state punched deeper still than this. The hereditary authority of the clan chiefs was broken up, the speaking of Gaelic banned, and Highland culture in general put to the Hanoverian sword.

But while some Scots fell under the boot of imperial Britain, others wielded its bayonet, conducted its trade and counted its money. “In the second half of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Highlanders were recruited into the British Army and saw action in its many theatres of war around the world from India to Canada.” Glasgow as a city, and many individual Scots, grew wealthy off the transatlantic trade, which monies were then re-invested in domestic manufacturing. The roads and bridges built for strategic power-projection in the post-Culloden crackdown became arteries of trade both within Scotland and accross the border. “By the end of the century, no country in the world was urbanizing or industrialising more swiftly than Scotland”. And it was in this context that the Scottish Enlightenment, a golden period of Western philosophy to rival that of ancient Greece, was born.

Principal within the Scottish Enlightenment pantheon were Adam Smith and David Hume. Hume rejected holy revelation as a source of knowledge, placing reason and human experience in its stead. Smith saw in man’s apparently natural drive for self-betterment, not a form of sin or a source of religious guilt, but the engine of collective well-being. In the eighteenth century, Scotland was not only beaten by the British empire, it also helped give birth to it. Because it was these Enlightenment values of material, moral and intellectual improvement that would be adopted (in however a dishonest and self-serving way) as the secular religion of the new imperial Britannia.