British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Thorold Rogers looks at how Governments have tried to make trade ‘fair’, and concludes that they would have been better ensuring it was free.
To Sir Francis Bacon, writing in 1625, it was self-evident that one man’s gain is always another man’s loss — that if Paul is doing well Peter must be doing correspondingly badly. He wanted Governments to step in and even things up, but Victorian economist Thorold Rogers warned that Bacon had fallen prey to a delusion which has nursed wars and corruption, but brought no justice.
Adam Smith contrasted the Government’s handling of the national economy with the way most families handled theirs.
By 1776, the long-standing policy of favouring British producers and blocking overseas competitors had raised prices, cost jobs, and only last year driven the American colonies to revolution. Adam Smith thought it both damaging and insulting, for the humblest tailor or cobbler could have told the Government that this was no way to run a budget.
Vige was the inseparable companion of swashbuckling Viking warlord Olaf Tryggvason, who picked him up in Ireland.
During the reign of Ethelred the Unready (r. 978-1016) the coasts of the British Isles were plagued by Viking warlords, none of whom was more trouble than Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason. In 988 he became a Christian and married Gyda, an Anglo-Irish heiress, but he did not settle down. Olaf and his Viking band continued to sail around the coasts, taking whatever they needed or wanted.
Richard Cobden told an Edinburgh peace conference that the biggest threat to the United Kingdom’s security was her own foreign policy.
In May 1853, Russia took military action to liberate Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from Turkey’s harsh rule. In England, the talk was of sending troops to defend poor Turkey, and of Russia’s secret designs on western Europe. That October, Richard Cobden told a peace conference in Edinburgh that our fears and economic hardships were all of our own making.
In January 1807, newspapers breathlessly reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe was at an end — but was it true?
In January 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies swept across the Continent building his French Empire, British newspapers printed a cheering story about how the Russians had inflicted a calamitous defeat on Napoleon. William Cobbett didn’t believe a word of it, and expressed his doubts in a masterly metaphor which made ‘red herrings’ into a household proverb.
Riding through Sussex, William Cobbett comes across a large family relaxing together in front of their charming cottage.
Radical MP William Cobbett was a man of strong emotions. Among them was a rooted objection to the Revd Thomas Malthus, who in a learned study on population begged Government to dampen the birth-rate among the working classes, or else the planet would soon be stalked by famine, war and pestilence. Cobbett faced the prospect of impending catastrophe without anxiety.