Political Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Political Extracts’
Economist Adam Smith so changed the conversation in Britain that most people take his groundbreaking insights for granted.
Adam Smith’s free market ‘Wealth of Nations’ had an immediate and highly beneficial impact on British economic policy, one whose ripples spread across the world. Yet as biographer Richard Haldane explains, so successful was Smith in changing the conversation that most people have now forgotten all about him.
John Buchan warned that the great figures of history are often beyond their biographers’ comprehension.
John Buchan had little time for the kind of historian who makes a career out of rubbishing reputations, pulling the great (if flawed) figures of history down from their pedestals in the hope of some scattered applause from his peers. Some giants of history are quite simply too big for their critics.
Herbert Bury distinguished two kinds of overseas investment, and only one was worthy of Englishmen.
Herbert Bury, whose duties as an assistant bishop to the Bishop of London took him all over Europe, came to believe that Britain’s place in the world depended not on bending other countries to our will or draining their resources, but on helping them to grow.
Herbert Bury believed that it was the British way to profit with another country, not to profit from it.
In 1912, the Lena massacre in Russia saw 250 gold miners shot during protests over low wages and harsh conditions in a mine backed by British money. Investors were ashamed when they learnt of the systematic exploitation, and Herbert Bury assured Tsar Nicholas II that decent Englishmen wanted Russia’s people to prosper.
During the Orlov Revolt of 1769, Greek islanders get their hands on a copy of Homer’s epic tale of Troy.
During the Greek Revolution of 1821-1829, against the Ottoman Empire, Irishman Edward Blaquière found his fund-raising in London hampered by doubts over whether today’s Greeks were worthy of their ancient forebears. Blaquiere showed them that the spirit of Achilles, wrathful hero of the Trojan War, lived on.
John Bright MP urged a critic of the British Raj to offer India more than fine words.
In 1883, Major Thomas Evans Bell, a former employee of the East India Company and a severe critic of the British Raj, was preparing for a lecturing tour in the United States. John Bright MP (who was not uncritical himself) wrote to remind him that what India needed most from Britain and America was not colonial guilt or blame, but free trade.