133
Richard Cobden wondered how the architects of the British Empire had the nerve to accuse Russia of imperialism.
In 1854, British feeling was running high against Russia. That March, Britain had sided with Turkey in the Crimean War of 1853-56, and anxious journalists and politicians pointed accusing fingers at Russia’s military manoeuvres around the Baltic and the Black Sea, scolding her for her greed and disrespect for her neighbours’ sovereignty. Richard Cobden wondered if there was something amiss with his hearing.
Picture: By Rock Brothers and Payne (London), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted October 17 2023
134
Young inventor James Watt’s life in London was overshadowed by the perpetual fear of being snatched.
In 1756, James Watt was not yet the creator of the first commercial steam engine, but a lowly maker of scientific instruments in London. The Seven Years’ War was just getting under way, and Watt was so afraid of being scooped up for service at sea or in some colonial plantation that he dared not go out of his door.
Picture: Via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted March 16 2018
135
The Founder of Singapore established his city on principles of free people and free trade.
… In 1795, fourteen-year-old Thomas Stamford Raffles went out to clerk for the East India Company in their little enclaves at Penang and Bencoolen in the Dutch East Indies …
Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is well-known to anyone who has visited Singapore, the city he founded in 1819. Still held in honour there, he is much less widely remembered back in his own country, but deserves better from us for his pioneering campaigns against slavery in the Far East and for being a champion of free trade in a world dominated by gunboat diplomacy.
Picture: National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons. ? Public domain.. Source.
Posted February 6 2020
136
The unsung surveyor from Cheshire, who built railways and made friends across the world.
… As Britain’s ‘railway mania’ cooled, he turned to other projects, including a waterworks in Calcutta, London’s Victoria Docks, and the Victoria Embankment on the Thames, and to further railways abroad, from Australia and India to Austria …
The Victorian railway engineer Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) is not the household name that he perhaps ought to be, chiefly because he worked through agents and alongside partners. Nonetheless, his knowledge and business acumen lies behind much of the rail network in Britain, and helped start the railway revolution from France to Australia.
Picture: © Optimist on the run, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA-3.0.. Source.
Posted September 21 2017
137
Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.
To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.
Picture: Hastings County Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted October 8 2019
138
When Raffles Haw comes to sleepy Tamfield, his breathtaking generosity starts turning heads at once, and one belongs to Laura McIntyre.
The first visit of the McIntyres’ new neighbour, free-spending, blue-sky-thinking Raffles Haw, has impressed Laura deeply. He has been upstairs to her brother’s studio and bought two paintings, and even offered to move an unsightly hill for her convenience. Laura’s fiancé Hector, away at sea, is quite forgotten.
Picture: © Vadim Smalkov, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted January 20 2019