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Post by Admin on Aug 26, 2013 15:33:09 GMT
British territorial disputes with Argentina and Spain are heating up, leading to demands that Washington support its foremost ally. The issue offers a reminder that military alliances should be directed at serious geopolitical threats, not used to accumulate international Facebook “friends.” George Washington was correct when he warned the United States against permanent foreign entanglements. Once the world’s greatest colonial power, Great Britain retains territorial oddities about the globe. The Falkland Islands and “the Rock” of Gibraltar (a peninsula) are causing particular difficulties with Argentina and Spain, respectively. No one is likely to go to war, but the disputes have gotten ugly. The Falklands lie near the coast of Argentina, which calls them the Malvinas. Buenos Aires began pressing its claim when it joined the United Nations in 1945, but negotiations foundered on the understandable desire of island residents to remain British. The Argentine military junta embarked upon what it thought would be an easy conquest in 1982, but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched a successful counterinvasion. The generals fell from power, and the two countries eventually restored diplomatic ties. But three years ago the prospect of energy exploration under British control triggered renewed claims from Buenos Aires and a campaign of harassment—blocking supplies for drillers, forbidding access to cruise ships which also visited the Falklands, boarding fishing vessels licensed by the island government. Argentina also sought support from other Latin American governments and earlier this year renewed its request for debate before the UN Security Council. Tensions between the UK and Spain over the Gibraltar, or “the Rock,” also have flared. Madrid ceded ownership of the Rock to London in 1713 after losing the so-called War of the Spanish Succession to Britain. Last year Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy urged talks over sovereignty. But these residents, too, wish to remain British. Thousands of Spanish work on the Rock, while Gibraltarians routinely shop on the mainland. In July the Gibraltar authorities blocked access by Spanish fishermen to surrounding waters. Spain retaliated with lengthy border inspections of the thousands of cars which pass each way every day. Madrid cited tobacco smuggling and tax fraud. The Rajoy government threatened to impose a hefty entry fee on islanders entering Spain, close Spanish airspace to planes landing on Gibraltar, and investigate islanders with Spanish investments. “The party is over,” said Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo. The UK considered going to the European Union, to which both countries belong. There also is talk of challenging Madrid’s actions in the European Court of Human Rights. The Rajoy government talked of going to the International Court of Justice at the Hague and plotted with Argentina to bring both issues before the United Nations. Both controversies have comic-opera aspects to them, but remain deadly serious. The Falklands war was short but costly in lives and money. Britain left a sizeable garrison on the islands should conflict again erupt. Although no one imagines Britain and Spain, both members of the EU and NATO, coming to blows, London recently sent several naval vessels to the Rock on what British authorities termed a “routine” exercise. Madrid responded by saying that it would take “all necessary measures” to protects its interests. On both territories the UK has history, law and practice on its side. London’s control may not be logical or fair, but that’s international relations. Even Spain retains odd historical possessions. America seized Texas and the American southwest from Mexico as the spoils of war more recently than Britain acquired Gibraltar. History can’t be easily “fixed,” at least at reasonable cost to everyone involved. However, neither issue concerns America. The United States is unlikely to be seriously affected, irrespective of which nation controls which territory. There’s certainly no reason for Washington to endorse the remnants of London’s colonial empire. nationalinterest.org/commentary/should-america-help-britain-hold-its-colonies-8936
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Post by Admin on Feb 5, 2014 5:50:47 GMT
Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history". In an interview with BBC History Magazine, Ferguson said there had been no immediate threat to Britain, which could have faced a Germany-dominated Europe at a later date on its own terms, instead of rushing in unprepared, which led to catastrophic costs. "Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914," he said before a documentary based on his book The Pity of War, which will be screened by BBC2 as part of the broadcaster's centenary season. The Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard University rejected the idea that Britain was forced to act in 1914 to secure its borders and the Channel ports. "This argument, which is very seductive, has one massive flaw in it, which is that Britain tolerated exactly that situation happening when Napoleon overran the European continent, and did not immediately send land forces to Europe. It wasn't until the peninsular war that Britain actually deployed ground forces against Napoleon. So strategically, if Britain had not gone to war in 1914, it would still have had the option to intervene later, just as it had the option to intervene after the revolutionary wars had been under way for some time." It was remarkable, he said, that Britain intervened on land so early in 1914, when quite unprepared. "Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses. And if one asks whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, my answer is no. "Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. Given the resources that Britain had available in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability." Ferguson is unequivocal: "We should not think of this as some great victory or dreadful crime, but more as the biggest error in modern history." He continued: "The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain's military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war. "We need of course to feel sympathy for the men like my grandfather who fought in the first world war, because their sufferings were scarcely imaginable. The death toll, which was greater than the second world war, was the most painful thing that Britain has ever experienced in war." But, he added, we should also feel dismay that the leaders, not just of Britain but of the European states, could have taken decisions that led to such an appalling slaughter. "Arguments about honour of course resonate today as they resonated in 1914, but you can pay too high a price for upholding the notion of honour, and I think in the end Britain did." He concedes that if Britain had stood back in 1914, it would have reneged on commitments to uphold Belgian neutrality. "But guess what? Realism in foreign policy has a long and distinguished tradition, not least in Britain – otherwise the French would never complain about 'perfidious Albion'. For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty." Ferguson, no stranger to controversy, is unlikely to worry about coming under fire for his views. Last year he managed to stir up a massive row over a long-dead economist when he suggested that John Maynard Keynes had no stake in the future because he was gay and childless – although he did later apologise, calling his remarks "stupid and tactless".
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Post by Admin on Feb 14, 2014 23:22:51 GMT
On the credit side, first of all, the British empire was a liberal empire. It was founded on principles classically enunciated by Edmund Burke, who maintained that colonial government was a trust. It should to be exercised for the benefit of subject peoples, who would eventually attain their natural right to self-rule. As Burke famously declared: "The British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other." More or less sincerely, Britons reiterated this claim over the next two centuries. The (Conservative) Primrose League took as its motto, Imperium et Libertas. In 1921, Lloyd George told the imperial conference that the British empire was unique because "Liberty is its binding principle." Whitehall mandarins said that the evolution of empire into commonwealth after the second world war completed the process whereby colonial territories came to stand on their own feet. It is not surprising that subject peoples seldom accepted that the empire aimed at their advancement. Yet even when the mother country spoke in offensive terms - inhabitants of white dominions as well as coloured colonies were deemed "children" being nurtured for the freedoms and responsibilities of maturity - she frequently felt obliged to put her principles into practice. In most cases, British empire-builders took their civilising mission seriously. Often they saw this as a matter of subduing "barbarism" and "savagery". Thus in India they did their best to eradicate thuggee and suttee, as General Sir Charles Napier rejected cultural relativism and promised to act according to the custom of his own country: "when men burn women alive we hang them." In Africa they endeavoured to put down slavery, Christian missionaries following the example of David Livingstone, who was said to have sacrificed his life "to heal this open sore of the world". In New Zealand they suppressed cannibalism and the traffic in tattooed Maori heads - traders had taken to bidding for them when they were still attached to shoulders. In Hong Kong they tried to stop foot-binding and infanticide. Bearers of the "white man's burden" also laboured to promote the positive welfare of their charges. At the top, for example, Lord Curzon worked indefatigably as viceroy to give India measures of justice, reform and social improvement. Taking to government (to paraphrase the Times) as other men take to drink, he aspired to give India the best administration it had ever had. He fostered commerce, expanded communications, developed irrigation, relieved famine, encouraged education, restored monuments, strengthened defence and promoted efficiency. He even ordered the removal of pigeon droppings from Calcutta's public library. Furthermore, Curzon resisted Britain's "Shylock" exploitation of India, writing to Whitehall as though he were the ruler of a foreign power. Similarly, at the bottom of the empire's administrative ladder, many British officials evinced a remarkable propensity to favour their black or brown charges at the expense of their white overlords. The unpublished memoir of an Irish lawyer, Manus Nunan, who was usually scathing about the English, contains nothing but praise for the district officers he met in Nigeria during the 1950s: "Their concern for the native people they governed was wonderful." ED Morel (1873-1924), that scourge of imperial wrongdoing, made the same point: such civil servants were "strong in their sense of justice, keen in their sense of right, firm in their sense of duty." They were honest, brave, responsible and, above all, industrious. The district officer, a model of omnicompetence, could hardly avoid dedication to his work. He collected taxes, presided in court, supervised the police, oversaw public works, advanced agriculture, promoted health, inspected schools, fostered sport, encouraged Boy Scouts, arbitrated in disputes and fulfilled endless social functions. Often he and his ilk were thin on the ground. Leonard Woolf, who in the first decade of the 20th century supervised Ceylon's huge pearl fisheries with a couple of other officers armed with walking-sticks, observed that the country was "the exact opposite of a ‘police state'." Usually, imperial civil servants had to operate on a shoestring. Yet in prosperous colonies such as Malaya, they took direct action, every Resident being, as one official put it, "a Socialist in his own state." They constructed roads and railways. They erected buildings and created enterprises, notably the tin- smelting industry. They invested in education, sanitation, irrigation and power generation. Even George Orwell, who had seen colonial dirty work at close quarters in Burma in the 1920s, acknowledged that the British empire was much better than any other. It was vastly superior, in moral terms, to the French, German, Portuguese and Dutch empires. And it bore no resemblance to the " empire" created by King Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo, which was responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths, let alone to the genocidal Nazi empire or to Japan's vicious and corrupt "greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere". Finally, nothing better became the British empire than its dissolution. Facing adverse circumstances almost everywhere after the second world war, the British lived up to their magnanimous professions. They fulfilled their duty as trustees, giving their coloured colonies the autonomy (mostly within the multi-racial commonwealth) long enjoyed by the white dominions. The process was by no means free of trouble and bloodshed - in Malaya, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, Suez, Aden and elsewhere. The partition of India caused horrifying convulsion and carnage. And there was a nasty epilogue in Rhodesia and the Falklands. But there was nothing to compare with the bitter wars that the French fought before extricating themselves from Vietnam and Algeria. Thanks to pragmatic policies formulated in London, the empire experienced what Ronald Hyam (in Britain's Declining Empire) called "a quiet and easy death". Macaulay had famously reckoned that the passing away of the imperial sceptre would be "the proudest day in English history". For he hoped his compatriots would leave behind an empire that was immune to decay, "the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws". Many pundits quoted him when praising or appraising the achievements of the empire. Wherever the map was painted red, Britain had disseminated its culture, language and technology, its ideals of democracy, good governance and free speech, its fondness for sport and fair play, its enlightened values and Christian civilisation. According to Allan Massie, writing after the handover of Hong Kong, the British empire had been "a force for good unrivalled in the modern world". Western Europe lived on the legacy of Rome, he said, and "our Empire leaves at least as rich a legacy to the whole world." www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/visions_reflections/british_empire
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Post by Admin on Feb 16, 2014 0:40:07 GMT
So accustomed are we to the memory of Winston Churchill as a great statesman and war leader that it is easy to forget he was also once a nobody. The son of a failed, syphilitic politician and a promiscuous and penniless society beauty, Winston’s prospects in the 1890s looked unpromising. The only things he had to recommend him were his gift for language, his mother’s address book and his own astonishing ambition. In 1897, during the war on the borders of Afghanistan and India, he ruthlessly exploited all three to launch one of the most successful political careers in British history. Con Coughlin’s book does not pull punches about young Winston’s character. Weak of disposition, a plodder at school and a bully at Sandhurst, there are moments when like Flashman. His contemporaries loathed him. Fellow officers branded him a “self-advertiser” or “insufferably bumptious”, and mocked his inability to pass a mirror without inspecting himself or practising a speech. His involvement in the war that first made his name was not always glorious either. He only got to go to the Northwest Frontier by pulling strings. While there, he became a fan of the soon-to-be-banned dumdum bullet, and enthusiastically joined in with actions which today would be considered war crimes. And yet there is a sense of respect here, too. Yes, Churchill was a shameless self-promoter – but he was aware his efforts would be pointless unless he had something worth promoting. While fellow subalterns lazed around the polo field, Winston pursued a gruelling course of self-improvement, quickly catching up on squandered school years. As a staff officer to General Sir Bindon Blood he worked twice as hard as any other subaltern. Churchill’s First War: Young Winston and the Fight Against the Taliban by Con Coughlin 320pp, Bodley Head, t £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £25, ebook £9.53) On the battlefield he went out of his way to commit acts of bravery: he was mentioned in dispatches for rescuing comrades under fire, and single-handedly charged down a group of Pashtun warriors after they had killed a British officer. The way he wrote about his deeds may have been self-congratulatory – but it was damn good copy: his eloquent dispatches, for the Telegraph in 1897, were admired by almost everyone. The stories are professionally told, but Coughlin’s book feels like it’s lacking something. Churchill’s early life has been covered more comprehensively elsewhere, and more passionately. Some of the juicier details and quotes are repeated, partly because there are not quite enough of them; and some of the descriptions feel like padding. Coughlin is a talented writer, and as defence editor of this newspaper has become something of an expert on the modern conflict on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. The parts of the book where his expertise shines through are nothing to do with Churchill, but rather in the references to the way history has repeated itself. It is no coincidence, he writes, that the same tribes Churchill fought against also led the insurgency against Nato and the Pakistani government over a century later. Every now and then we get a glimpse of the layers of history and politics around his story, and the page springs to life. Had Coughlin perhaps given himself more time, and expanded this approach, it would have made for a more rewarding read.
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Post by Admin on Feb 18, 2014 0:33:53 GMT
Niall Ferguson is a glutton for exposure. From January to mid-February 2003 six one-hour television programmes, four lectures to substantial audiences in the University of London’s Senate House, and a large glossy book have been devoted to his theme of ‘empire’ or, as he also puts it, ‘how Britain made the modern world’. Elsewhere, for example in The Times (6-7 January 2003), there have been extracts taken from the book. What was the point of all this activity, including as it did a two year crash-course in selected reading from the recent subject literature and extensive globe-trotting? Was its upshot, as Ferguson asks of the empire itself, ‘a good or a bad thing’?
Considering the published output, as with ‘the empire’ of the past, this is in many respects a pointless question, for the answer depends on where questioners stand and what in particular they choose to look at. From the point of view of personal enrichment, Ferguson himself doubtless found the operation of the free media market a very good thing, as will his publisher. In terms of entertainment, pleasure, a measure of general interest or instruction, and stimulation, many of the 2.5 million viewers of Channel 4’s offerings will have felt themselves well rewarded, if two Daily Telegraph reviews (10 and 24 January 2003) and a column after the first episode by William Rees-Mogg in The Times are anything to judge by. Others, who as one might naturally expect received nothing from the proceeds, either were soothed by Ferguson’s Scottish lilts and burrs, or were driven to apoplectic outbursts. Among the latter was Jon Wilson in The Guardian (8 February 2003), condemning (with an alliteration worthy of Ferguson himself) what appeared to him a ‘glossy glorification of imperial violence’, possessing a tendency to ‘encourage policy based on a version of the history of empire that is simply wrong’.(1)
Such points about the reception of Ferguson’s work in their limited way parallel the historic experience and impact of empire itself. It was almost everywhere far too multi-faceted or ambiguous for the application of crude general labels, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, to do justice to the complex issues involved. This was from the start an insurmountable problem for a subject rightly treated as global in scope, which also demanded a chronological coverage from the late sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Although Ferguson devotes significantly more space to the period after circa 1800, the problem remains.
However, doing justice to complex issues can also be understood in different ways. The demonstration of complexity may take the form of impressing audiences with inescapable detail, illustrating in the process the inadequacy of current generalizations and conventional views. Alternatively, it can entail the ruthless imposition of dominant themes on a heap of fact, winnowing and threshing until a mountain of factual chaff has been bagged and fairly stored in its proper – subordinate – place. Ferguson evidently wishes to do both of these things. Fond of phrases such as ‘most people assume’, ‘nowadays it is quite common to think’, he sees himself as a new radical, despatching to its resting place a tired conventional wisdom that holds empire to have been always either exploitative, or unnecessary, and everywhere thoroughly wasteful for both colonisers and colonised (pp. xviii-xix). This he does by drawing out the legacies of Britain’s empire. He offsets the brutality and destruction associated with slavery, piracy, and events such as the Morant Bay rebellion (1865) or the Amritsar massacre (1919), with factual information to illustrate the triumph of capitalism, the spread of parliamentary institutions, the growth of literacy, recognition of the virtues of the minimal state, and the rule of law (pp. xxiv-xxv). The dominant theme he wields in order to corral untidy detail is that of ‘globalization’, a process in which Britain’s empire more than any other agency promoted ‘the optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods in the world’ (p. xx). Ferguson has no doubt that Empire ‘enhanced global welfare – in other words was a Good Thing’.
In both cases, Ferguson metes out rough justice to complexity. It is easy to find examples of conventionally wholly critical or uncritical judgements on empire, but Ferguson is misguided in assuming that these persist in the absence of an historical literature providing material for more discriminating and nuanced assessments of empire’s record. The survival and persistence of those judgements reflect not persuasion but inadequate reading and thought, conditions unlikely to be disturbed by the appearance of a new set of no less conventional views. Ferguson’s own ‘on-balance-beneficial’ legacy of empire offers no new insight but rather the refurbishment of a much older conventional – some would say Whiggish – wisdom. Far from updating our view of empire, in highlighting the interplay of ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’, Ferguson looks backward to an outdated literature, and at times is consequently wide of the mark – as when assessing the significance of the Durham Report as ‘the book which saved the empire’ (pp. 111-13). As for ‘globalization’, now well-established as a fashionable resort for the conceptually starved, what does one make of the claim that it optimises the allocation of material resources? When one man’s optimum can so easily encompass another’s poverty, just as orthodoxy and heresy may be interchangeable, these can too easily become weasel words, traps for the unwary even if the statistics of measurement such as GDP are to be relied upon, which often they are not. Arrangements optimal for the continued working of a system of exchange may not necessarily be so when assessed in terms of individual or even communal wellbeing.
Inevitably there will be those who wonder whether such over-simplifications are not merely the product of a television producer’s requirements triumphing over the historian’s need for greater attention to the difficulty of presenting major historical problems in any visual format. After all, Ferguson’s book is very much the book of the film, a fleshier version of what is for the most part clearly spelt out on the screen. There is little evidence of an opportunity being taken to refine arguments rather than thicken narrative. For example, the movement from British abolition of the slave trade to the emancipation of the empire’s slaves was far less smooth and confident than is suggested here (p. 122). Sir Charles Dilke’s book Problems of Greater Britain (Macmillan; London, 1890) is mentioned, but not his earlier Greater Britain (Macmillan; London, 1868), presumably because that would upset an argument linking the term ‘Greater Britain’ to J. R. Seeley’s Expansion of England (London; Macmillan) published in 1883 (pp. 246-7).
That said, however, the visual aspects of the programmes and the illustrations in the book are often splendid and fresh to the eye. The programmes are certainly best seen well spaced. Consecutive videos are too likely to impress viewers with the limits to both the range of available visual devices and the film-maker’s budget. There are many suns setting, plenty of light on water, frequent shots of Ferguson in boats or canoes, the sound of his foot-fall on floorboards crossing to a window or to a mahogany table for displaying a document. Cuttings, for example from the same colourful Indian scene, provide the backdrop or continuity on more than one occasion. The book in one respect at least is more modest – readers are not treated to the screen’s many instances of full-frontal Ferguson poised to make eye contact with a key pronouncement about liberty or slaves. Nevertheless, precisely the same points are made on the page, decked out with the same catchy or demotic phraseology. Ferguson has a quick eye for the riveting analogy – New South Wales, ‘the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars’, where Australians ‘started out as a nation of shoplifters’ (pp. 103, 106). Arresting, yes, but not always apposite (for reasons which, in this case, Joseph Banks might have explained), and so at risk of disguising reality with cosmetic flippancy.
It is strange that someone such as Ferguson, well-acquainted with thinking about virtual history, other possible outcomes to any chance sequence of events, and alternative futures, should comprehensively ignore this analytical dimension in the case of empire. Occasional references are made, for instance, to the possibility of a French not a British victory in mid-eighteenth-century India. In calculating imperial Britain’s favourable legacy, the twentieth-century alternative empires of Germany, Italy and Japan are cited to provide horrific counterweights, had they managed to turn conquest into more than temporary colonial controls. At the same time, however, Ferguson seems to believe that for most areas of the world the experience of imperial rule offered the only way to the future. This begs many questions. Why, for example, should one assume that eighteenth-century India could not have evolved its own economic path, with distributions of capital, labour and goods ‘optimal’ in the eyes of its own elites however different from the criteria of liberal western political economists? The work of regional historians gives grounds for disputing such an assumption, and thus for questioning perceptions of backwardness and modernity conditioned in the west, but Ferguson does not pay it any attention.
After alternative histories, it is perhaps worth probing further Ferguson’s use of the term ‘globalization’. How is it to be understood, either in chronological terms, or functionally? His terminology refers to ‘modern globalization’ (pp. xix-xx), but also to earlier eras or phases of globalization. Sometimes these appear to be separated out and discontinuous, but he also knits them together in a single period and process. Should globalization be taken to mean little more than the far-flung existence of even limited economic activity involving a major power’s (e.g. Britain’s) nationals? Or is it to be understood as an active process of territorial integration into a world-wide market economy? In both cases, ‘globalization’ is apparently a continuing feature, albeit one, Ferguson seems to suggest, in which the phase 1850-1914 was characterised by the economic equalization of incomes, and the second half of the twentieth century was one of mounting economic divergence and inequality. There is a fuzziness here in the handling of globalization, whether as concept, descriptive category, or economic process, that needs to be cleared away.
This need for clarity is further indicated by Ferguson’s lack of sustained attention to the history of globalization stretching back well before 1815. There is much in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to support the view that a process of globalization was also then underway. Ferguson himself refers in passing to the seventeenth century’s ‘globalization with gunboats’ (p.18). Doubtless the balance of power and wealth among, and so the contribution made by, participating states was then different from that which developed later on; and ‘globalization’ had perhaps not yet become global in its reach. It may be debated whether there was a distinctly ‘early modern globalization’, or merely an earlier phase of a single process. It is more important, however, to recognise that the prominence of war and economic protection or monopolization meant that the characteristics of that earlier age were very different from, and the process of globalization was largely driven by forces unlike, those that Ferguson suggests operated during the British-dominated phase of globalization after 1850.
If it is accepted that there was an early modern globalization under way well before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, that its momentum owed much to war both internationally and on local colonial frontiers, and that the prominent role of Britain in the Caribbean, North America, and parts of Asia means that it too deserves the ghastly appellation of ‘Anglobalization’ (p. xxiii), then this has implications for Ferguson’s portrayal of the post-1850 period. From then onwards Ferguson seems to allow that the global accumulation of wealth was promoted only by an increasing absence of restraint on the movement of people (labour migration), the flow of capital (external investment), and produce from land (overseas commerce). This argument is unpersuasive because it ignores the role of war, economic protection, and strategic calculation, persisting from that earlier period, in the continuing growth of a global economy. Britain’s many colonial wars in the nineteenth century and beyond were an essential aid to the incorporation of new territories into her own empire, and to the expansion of free trade both within her colonies and into areas beyond the reach of her direct rule. Furthermore, in Ferguson’s contemporary age of ‘modern globalization’, echoes of the early modern period are to be found in the way in which world economic patterns are decisively shaped by the protectionist agenda of the United States and the states which have come to make up the European Union, notably in respect of their domestic agriculture.
This last observation directs us not only to the compatibility of continuing globalization with partially-closed economies, but also to the limitations of free trade arrangements historically associated with the pursuit of an open global economy. Contrary to much current thinking, Ferguson wishes us to accept that the priority attached by Britain to free trade, free labour migration, and unfettered capital movements, was beneficial to Britain itself, to its empire, and to the world at large. The extension of her empire not least contributed to the global growth of GDP, because Britain was the ‘least protectionist’ of all the great powers. By this yardstick, the British empire was ‘a good thing’, British rule being largely supportive of economic growth. It can surely be argued that this simple standard requires a more critical consideration than Ferguson ever suggests that it might need.
Two points are fundamental. First, it is surely necessary to bear in mind that the pattern of free trade, particularly in the form of unlimited exchange of foodstuffs and raw materials for manufactured capital and consumer goods, generally operates over any significant period of time to the decided disadvantage of commodity producers. Free trade might become one of the pillars of ‘Anglobalization’ but at the same time was likely to restrict and impoverish the less economically ‘modernised’ party. The second follows from that: free trade cannot necessarily be equated with freedom of choice and opportunity. For example, the time at which any territory is drawn through the opening up of its trade into the globalizing economy can have a critical impact on its future development. The great variety of combinations of climate, geographical position, and natural endowment of resources, inevitably mean that each territory may be more or less well-placed to find its own niche in the range of economic openings prevailing at any one time. Hence, as Donald Denoon demonstrated in his Settler Capitalism (Clarendon; Oxford, 1983), temperate lands of white settlement, faced with exclusion from industrial and manufacturing options, not only evolved their own forms of capitalism but did so largely irrespective of their colonial or independent status. Moreover the distribution of any gains within individual states was often not directed to equalizing incomes. Ferguson is to be applauded for his realism in calling on historians at least to consider not ideal worlds but inescapably imperfect worlds, in which the option of ‘Anglobalization’ was if not the best, then perhaps the least worst course available. However, the reality of the imperialism of free trade that underlay this option was far more constraining and less benign than Ferguson seems to acknowledge. It was, of course, greatly to Britain’s own advantage as the world’s major industrial power for much of the nineteenth century that she should insist on the expansion of free trade, while at the same time facing little serious competition in the new markets she was exploiting.
A last comment relates still more directly to the persistent issue of costs and benefits. As befits any public performer, Ferguson is fond of catching his audience’s attention with striking juxtapositions of images and arguments. Stark intellectual polarities, however, can be a snare and delusion especially in the history of empire, so riddled as it is with complexities and ambiguity. In seeking to argue that the empire was not economically bad for both Britain and her colonies, Ferguson sets up an Aunt Sally no less grand and vulnerable than that constructed by some of the historians he criticises. Consider his inclusion in the bibliography to Chapter 5 of Robert Huttenback’s and Lance Davis’s Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge), a book extensively debated when it appeared in 1986. Its messages have nonetheless not been taken heed of here. Whatever the problems presented by that work (and they were numerous), Davis and Huttenback confirmed above all the need to ask of imperial commitments and colonial possessions who benefited, from what, and when. In demonstrating that fortunately-placed individuals, particular social classes and identifiable types of business, in both metropole and colonies, gained or lost in varying degrees and at different times, they argued convincingly for a more discriminating and modulated scrutiny of the empire’s political economy than was then available. They also proved beyond doubt the crucial incidence of taxation and the costs of defence to any assessment of costs and benefits. Ferguson, however, seems in effect to argue that the association of global economic growth with both the element of redistribution inherent in the workings of a free-market system, and the existence of Britain’s free-trade empire, were sufficient – as Lewis Carroll would put it – for all to have prizes. That surely represents a significant retreat from the ground so usefully opened up to debate some fifteen years ago.
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