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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.
Picture: By the Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 22 2022
242
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.
Picture: By Francis Holman (1729–1784), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 22 2022
243
During his Welsh campaign, Henry II asked one of his allies what he thought the future of Wales would look like.
In 1157, Henry II of England opened a determined campaign to subdue Wales to the English crown. Resistance was strong: so much so that Wales was not finally subdued until 1282. According to Gerald de Barri (1146-1223), Bishop of St David’s, by 1163 Henry still felt sufficiently unsure of himself to ask one of his few Welsh allies what he thought of England’s chances.
Picture: © Eric Jones, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted July 22 2022
244
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.
Picture: By Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 16 2022
245
On the night when Edward IV won his crown back from Henry VI, he had to decide how to deal with those who had still been backing Henry during the day.
In 1461, Edward of York crushed Henry VI at Towton, and at just eighteen was proclaimed king of England. Henry was captured in 1465 and sent to the Tower. In September 1470, his supporters turned the tables and drove Edward onto the Continent, but their songs died on their lips the following April, when Edward IV came storming back, and the citizens of London welcomed him with open arms.
Picture: By Richard Burchett (1815–75), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 15 2022
246
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.
Picture: By Ary Scheffer (1795-1858), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 14 2022