Britain's population was less than 8 million in 1780. France's population was 28 million. Moreover, thanks to the Sun King, it was more centralized. Quite naturally, the Brits feared for their future. They worried needlessly. Their society was more commercially advanced. Private capital, channelled through financial markets, supplied the sinews of war and enabled the subsidy system by which the Brits could gain foreign allies- like the doughty Prussians. However, it was French folly- first the Terror and then Napoleon's megalomania- which ensured the defeat of that country. Britain had panicked quite needlessly. It could proceed to reform its politics without fear of a Revolution from below. King Louis Phillipe was less fortunate.
Reviewing a book titled 'The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis' by Richard Whatmore, Stuart Jeffries writes in the Guardian-
Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed.
His attacks on Christianity and on George Washington made him unpopular in America. When he died in 1809, only 6 people attended his funeral. Meanwhile Britain continued to rise.
Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished.
It should have first destroyed itself so as to enable Napoleon to conquer it easily. He'd have appointed one of his brothers its new King.
Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise.
It would be a colony of France.
But how? In the 1790s, the revolutionary thinker and author of the bestselling Rights of Man was a member of the National Convention in Paris and advised republicans to invade.
So, the silly man helped France down the path to defeat, occupation, vast reparation payments and a return of the Bourbons.
Later, Paine presented a plan to president Thomas Jefferson to send gunboats to make Britain a republic.
No wonder the Guardian thinks well of him. Sadly, he failed miserably and died a pariah.
Sadly for egalitarians, anti-imperialists, anti-monarchists
i.e. people who wanted Britain to become the vassal of some Continental tyrant
and those who regard the rapacious East India Company
which laid the foundations for the modern democratic Indian state
and the transatlantic slave trade as Britain’s leading contributions
The US and Brazil continued that noxious trade after the Brits outlawed it
to the oxymoron that is western civilisation,
That oxymoron continues to attract the smartest immigrants from the rest of the world
neither happened. Had either been successful,
we'd be speaking French while dining on a turnip and half a potato
Britain’s history might have been very different and such recent exposés of our imperial disgrace as William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy
Dalrymple has lost his mind. He has turned into a jhollawallah.
and David Olusoga’s Black and British
Plenty of West African origin people are very successful in Britain
might not have made such harrowing reading.
Their books are full of howlers. Perhaps that is what makes them harrowing. Does being a historian make you stupid? Evidently.
Paine’s nemesis,
was his own ego. He shouldn't have attacked George Washington. Spitting bile at Mad King George was one thing but going after America's greatest man was folly.
the conservative thinker Edmund Burke, thought the Thetford-born firebrand was a traitor to his homeland,
He had settled in America. He did return to England but had to flee after he was sentenced for seditious libel.
but, like every intellectual worth their salt in the late 18th century, Burke conceded that Britain was a basket case.
No. Burke, like his contemporaries, was aware that France was much more populous. Had it followed sensible policies it was bound to dominate the Continent.
Contemporary intellectuals as varied as the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft,
who was ignored in her own life-time
the historians Catharine Macaulay
The vogue for her was brief. It turned out that chopping off the head of the King caused rivers of blood to flow. It was a terrible idea. Then she married a man half her age whose brother was a notorious 'sexologist'.
and Edward Gibbon, and the Scottish conservative philosopher David Hume, as well as Paine and Burke, were queasy about what Britain had become under its increasingly mentally troubled king, George III, and his corrupt advisers.
The Brits lost the 13 colonies. The fear was that they would lose their incipient Empire in the East. Defeat at Sea by the French would imperil the home islands.
In a class-ridden Britain run by plutocratic public schoolboys it is hard not to see the sick man of Europe in 1776 as similar to the 2023 version
Very true. Lord North was actually a Parsi from Bombay named Firdaus.
To understand what had gone wrong, they drew on Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations.
Burke was a long time admirer of 'Moral Sentiments' and commended 'Wealth' for being a comprehensive treatment of a subject he himself had little understanding of. However, the English were ahead of Scotland in economics and finance. Thus it was Malthus's riposte to Condorcet (his essay on population) and Ricardo's work which together laid the foundation for classical economics. Britain's superior ability to get the market to finance the War effort showed that its economic organization was more efficient and dynamic than that of much more populous France. Napoleon's dirigiste attempts to control the European economy drove potential allies into the arms of the Brits.
There, the great Scottish economist so beloved of neoliberal bruisers from Thatcher onwards damned a corrupt nexus of bankers, politicians and merchants for working to maximise their own profit, rather than the good of society.
They were acting in restraint of trade. Deregulation was the way to go. As markets become more open, rents disappear and rent-seeking is curbed.
Plus ça change.
If woke nutter make Labour unelectable, the Tories have a monopoly on power and thus have no incentive to curb rent extraction.
Across the ages, Smith’s words resonate.
Till you actually read his book and realize he was ignorant.
In a sclerotically class-ridden, increasingly inegalitarian Britain run by plutocratic public schoolboys it is hard not to see the sick man of Europe in 1776 as similar to the 2023 version. “We too live in a time when political structures we inhabit are fluid and perhaps on the cusp of great and potentially dangerous changes,” writes Richard Whatmore at the outset of this nuanced history of the manifold discontents of 18th-century Britain.
This is because everybody always lives in such times. Unless the current administration changes course there is a clear and present danger that the people will revert to cannibalism while Cats sodomize Dogs in the streets of Mayfair.
True, the parallel isn’t perfect, since much of Smith’s concern was Britain’s imperial folly.
What folly? The 13 colonies didn't need an Imperial garrison. Canada did. The West Indies did. Imperialism is merely the supply of a service in return for tribute or some geopolitical advantage.
Indeed, what makes Whatmore’s narrative particularly compelling is how Britain postured as a free state whose subjects enjoyed more rights and liberties than other European nations.
Which is why it received refugees from all over Europe.
But as the author puts it, echoing the worries of the thinkers he elegantly profiles here, “this free state amounted to a war machine that used individual liberty as a rationale for the destruction of other states and the subjugation of their peoples”.
No it didn't. Britain's standing army was relatively modest in comparison to its continental rivals. At its peak, the British Army was a quarter the size of Napoleon's forces.
For Smith’s close friend David Hume, near death in Edinburgh, Britain had fallen for new gods – mammon, Mars and that slippery deity, liberty.
He was a peculiar sort of Tory who hoped Britain would be defeated and shorn of its Empire so that the nouveau riche burghers of the City of London would be ruined and have to suck off hobos in order to get a bit of protein in their diet.
The previous century, fanatical Puritans had prosecuted civil wars in the name of religion.
there were no fanatical Catholics- right?
But for a few blissful years, Hume thought that bloodletting had ceased, replaced by an enlightened Britain with a moderate and pacific public culture. This was the notion of Enlightenment he cherished whereby religious fanaticism had been exorcised from public life.
Though he was too cowardly to come out as an atheist. Blasphemy was a criminal offence in Scotland till 2021.
Enlightenment today means something rather different.
It means nothing at all. European enlightenment was the notion that darkies- including the highly civilized Chinese- should be fucked over, if it was safe to do so.
It signifies humanity’s stirringly unstoppable march from the cave of unreason to the sun of wisdom,
and lots of slaves labouring under the lash in the Indies
and is associated with reason-venerating philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant.
Plato and Aquinas were against reason- right?
That Pollyanna view, though, has been challenged by later sceptical thinkers.
Nutters
Foucault associated the Enlightenment with the rise of the surveillance state typified by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.
Governmentality means that the State- which seeks to shove spiky things up your butt while the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, and the Sun King stand by laughing maniacally- is very meanly refusing to offer this delightful service to its citizens because of 'bio-politics' and 'neo-liberalism'.
Nothing came of Bentham's panopticon. Surveillance doesn't matter. If the workers prefer to wank rather than do their jobs then, under 'piece-work', they don't get paid.
John Gray blamed the Enlightenment for the evils of global capitalism.
He was wrong. Recent research has discovered that many men have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Environment was just hopping and skipping and fisting itself when suddenly Capitalism threw it to the ground and raped it using its DICK! That is why Globe is getting so hot under the collar.
And in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer reckoned the Enlightenment’s fetish for reason and calculation set humanity on the road to Auschwitz.
Why bother with gas chambers? The Rwandans showed that genocide is done more cheaply with agricultural implements. Still, the Frankfurt skool was undoubtedly German- i.e. as stupid as shit.
Whatmore thinks each of these conceptions is wrong.
He isn't German nor does he want the Pope to stick cacti up his bum while the Sun King stands by laughing maniacally.
Enlightenment, for him and the thinkers he so engagingly profiles, had an objective, namely to overcome superstition that had soaked 17th-century Europe in blood.
They failed. The Napoleonic Wars killed 6 million. Napoleon was plenty rational.
It ended with Britain’s project to subjugate much of the rest of the world for its own benefit,
the Brits colonized France after Waterloo- right?
or with the revolutionary terror unleashed in Paris after 1792. Or both.
The Bourbons returned in 1815.
Whatmore, history professor at St Andrews University, draws the contemporary resonance: “Once again we live in a world that has suffered an end of enlightenment as strategies formulated after 1945 to prevent civil and international violence,
that strategy was 'mutually assured destruction' based on ICBM's with H-bomb payloads.
fanaticism and chaos from breaking out have gradually failed or been abandoned.”
The War on Terror killed 1.3 million people- mainly Muslim. That failed sure enough.
The book’s leading lesson is that Britain, albeit today a rain-soaked rump of a post-imperial polity,
as it has been longer than I've been alive.
is, as in the 1790s, in thrall to graft, greed, folly and privately educated narcissists, not to mention deference to royal nonentities.
Only because Corbyn was utterly shit.
If Tom Paine had managed to get foreign gunships to invade,
the Guardian would be happy. Why are Britons not the slaves of some foreign despot? Don't we owe it to Mary Wollstonecraft to invite Hamas to take over the Government?
we might not need a new Enlightenment. But we do.
Why not drill a hole in your skull to let in the light? Oh. I see. It is the job of the Government to drill holes in everybody's skulls in a manner which promotes Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity and Environmental Sustainability within a framework of empathetic promotion of State funded instruction in Sodomy for all Senior Citizens of Colour.
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