Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
William Cobbett makes a distinction between everyday business and the murky world of Westminster lobbyists and financial speculation.
William Cobbett, MP for Oldham, was sometimes accused of being anti-trade because he criticised the cosy arrangement between Government, big banks and big business. He replied with his customary vigour, distinguishing clearly between two kinds of commerce, the free trade that promotes liberty and the cronyism that endangers it.
Oldham’s firebrand MP William Cobbett rips into the the City of London for blocking economic and political progress in India.
In 1813, the East India Company held a Government-sponsored monopoly over all trade between London and her colonies, but a history of scandals and mismanagement led to calls for free trade. The City of London objected strongly in a Commons debate in January 1813, and William Cobbett MP could hardly believe his ears.
Young Thomas Arne goes to extreme lengths to conceal his musical talent from his family.
Thomas Arne (1710-1778) remains one of England’s greatest composers, though overshadowed now by his contemporary George Frideric Handel. He wrote the music for the National Anthem and ‘Rule Britannia!’ and composed dozens of popular songs and operas, but if his father had had his way, Thomas would have been a bored London attorney.
James Hargreaves’s historic invention was not without its critics when it first appeared.
James Hargreaves (?1720-1778) was one of a number of eighteenth-century Lancashire inventors who transformed textile production from a cottage handicraft into a mechanised industry. His ‘Spinning Jenny’ of 1764 cleared a bottleneck in cloth production that proved the social benefits of automation and accelerated the industrial revolution.
Sir Humphry Davy pleads with Britain’s scientists not to be bought by Napoleon’s gold.
Soon after Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on his quest for a united Europe in 1803, Sir Humphry Davy gave a lecture in which he urged Britain’s scientists to support their country’s sovereignty and commercial freedom, rather than sell out their country in the expectation of funding from Napoleon’s Europe.
Adam Smith argued that the Bengal Famine of 1769 would have been much less of a tragedy under a free trade policy.
The Bengal Famine of 1769 was a humanitarian catastrophe and an ugly blot on Britain’s colonial record. Scottish economist Adam Smith, a severe critic of colonial greed and the East India Company, believed that it would have been no more than a manageable food-shortage had the Company pursued a policy of free trade.