Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
William Cobbett recalls his first taste of classic literature, for which he had to go without his supper.
At eleven, William Cobbett’s (1763-1835) ambition was to be a gardener at Kew. It would be a step up from clipping hedges and weeding flower beds for the Bishop of Winchester back home in Farnham, but it meant walking all the way to Richmond, a distance of nearly thirty miles as the crow flies, and with threepence all his wealth.
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.
A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.
By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.
In an enduring fable from the Kathasaritsagara, an Indian merchant explains how he acquired his nickname.
Gunadhya, sixth-century narrator of this tale from the Kathasaritsagara, was in Pratisthana (Paithan) watching little knots of men in the city conducting their business. They included bookies promising treasure to gamblers, but among the merchants was a man who had a better way to become rich.
As Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon was rather more popular with the people of India than he was with some of his own civil servants.
When Lord Ripon took over as Viceroy of India in 1880, he at once set about including more Indians in Government, and allowing the local press to hold lawmakers to account. Many opposed him and it took a long time for his policy to bear fruit, but Ram Chandra Palit believed that it was Ripon, and not his critics, who was truly British.
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.