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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.
Posted February 6 2020
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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.
Posted September 21 2017
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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.
Posted October 8 2019
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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.
Posted January 20 2019
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The Foreign Office had a long tradition of regarding a strong Russian Empire as ‘not in the British interest,’ but John Bright saw only mutual benefit in it.
… We have India, and men tell you that India is in jeopardy from Russia … You persuade the people of India by the writings of the press and the speeches of public men in this country, that we run great hazard from the advance of Russia, and if you have enemies in India of course you feed their enmity by this language … The interest of this country with regard to Russia in connection with India is an unbroken amity …
In January 1878, John Bright MP addressed a meeting in Birmingham on the subject of Russia. Russia and Turkey were at war over Turkey’s treatment of Christians in the Balkans, and there were those in Parliament who said it was ‘in the British interest’ to support Turkey and clip Russia’s wings; but Bright thought that Russian aggression was a Foreign Office myth.
Posted April 25 2020
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Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake combined sailing round the world with really annoying the King of Spain.
… After touching on the California coast, and claiming it for the Queen under the name of ‘Nova Albion’, Drake struck out across the Pacific to Java and India …
Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake was only the second man in history to circumnavigate the globe, a feat he achieved in 1580 aboard the famous ‘Golden Hinde’. His attention was not, however, concentrated exclusively on making historic discoveries.
Posted December 29 2016