British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
The future hero of Waterloo dealt with political ambush as comfortably as he dealt with the military kind.
Arthur Wellesley spent the years 1797 to 1804 in India. He went out as a Colonel in the British Army’s 33rd regiment of Foot, and was soon being addressed as General Sir Arthur. On 23rd September 1803, he secured a significant victory over the Maratha Empire at Assaye in the state of Maharashtra, western India.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden pleaded for Britain to set the world an example as a nation open for business.
Richard Cobden MP urged Queen Victoria’s Parliament to embrace a policy of global free trade, instead of the over-regulated, over-taxed trade deals brokered by politicians and their friends behind closed doors. It was, he said, nothing less than the next step in Britain’s destiny, and her Christian duty.
Samuel Sidney, a Victorian expert on Australian matters, explained how cutting tax and regulation on Britain’s global trade made everyone better off.
Writing for ‘Household Words,’ Samuel Sidney, a rising authority on Australia, was full of praise for William Huskisson MP and his then-unfashionable free trade policies. Sidney believed that by adding new trade partners far beyond Europe, British business had raised living standards, cut prices and created jobs for millions worldwide.
Within little more than half a century a British penal colony turned into a prosperous, free-trade democracy.
Australia is a partner to be proud of: a sovereign constitutional monarchy with our Queen as Head of State, a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, and a prosperous democracy built on and dedicated to free trade that gave us priceless support in two world wars.
The closure of slave plantations following the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 had a curious side-effect.
One might imagine that slave labour keeps prices down, but the break-up of the slave trade by the British Empire following the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 demonstrated just how mistaken that supposition is. Low prices come when free people do business together: more freedom, more business, lower prices.
The people of Penzance in Cornwall did not think an Algerian corsair much better than a French warship.
It may seem quaint that Cornish villagers ran home to lock up their daughters when they heard of shipwrecked sailors on the beach. But this was 1760, when everyone was braced for a French invasion in the Seven Years’ War, and when Algiers was the centre of a miserable human-trafficking industry which specialised in ‘goods’ from Christian Europe.