Posts Tagged ‘American Revolution’
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.”*…
In the 4th century BCE, Plato recounts (in the Phaedrus) Socrates’ thoughts on a “technology” that was then moving from specialized (administrative, commercial, religious) to broader (more literary and philosphical) use– writing. Socrates was not a fan. He worried that writing weakened the necessity (and thus, the power) of memory, and that it created the pretense of understanding, rather than real comprehension and mastery.
Still, of course, writing– and the reading that it enabled– became the dominant form of communication.
Today, reading (for anything other than business or formal study) is down. Way down. But not to worry, today’s champions of big tech argue: their streaming and AI will usher in a new golden age of learning and connectivity. Their critics, of course– in an echo of Socrates– suggest that they will do the exact opposite.
James Marriott (and here) puts the skeptic’s case…
… in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.
For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”
This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.
In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.
Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.
It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.
Even more importantly print changed how people thought.
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.
More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.
Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.
In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.
What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history…
[Marriott explores the impact and some if its implications…]
… This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.
As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points…
The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation…
Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.
These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet…
[Marriott explores what a return to an “oral” society might mean, then contemplates what he fears will be “the end of creativity”– If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. He turns then to its impact on civil society…]
… Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.
“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.
Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.
It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?
But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.
The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.
Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments…
… you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.
Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them…
… Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right…
… The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.
And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.
These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.
The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.
Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.
Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic…
… As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.
Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.
As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.
Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Welcome to the post-literate society…
The end of civilization? A sobering assessment of “The dawn of the post-literate society” from @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
FWIW, your correspondent would note that while Socrates was surely right that writing diminished the power of memory and at least partially right that text allowed its readers to appear more knowledgeable about things than perhaps they were, it was the development of writing that provided the foundation on which the the print revolution Marriott celebrates was able to emerge.
I’d also note that the earliest days of printing (before the 18th century “revolution in reading”) were pretty fraught: from the publication of Luther’s 95 Thesis (and the religious and civil turmoil– both ideological and “bloody”– they occasioned) on through more than a century of conflict that included the Thirty Years War, The English Civil War, and ultimately, the American and French Revolutions– indeed, also the American Civil War. As Ada Palmer notes, “Whenever a new information technology comes along, and this includes the printing press, among the very first groups to be ‘loud’ in it are the people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical voices”… very like the our current situation, as Marriott describes it.
Again FWIW, I find Marriott’s take all-too-resonant with my own (geezer’s) sense of loss (as the epistemological and civic superstructure in which I came of age dissolve). I find his pessimism-unto-despair much more plausible than I’d like. But I hold onto the hope that in this transition– as in the transitions from oral to writing, and then to printing/publishing– we will, as societies, find ways to manage the chaos and establish new foundations for reason, creativity, and coherent, constructive civic life.
It starts with us wanting– and working hard– to find that new, more solid ground.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
###
As we buckle up, we might spare a thought for George Grenville; he died on this date in 1770. An English politician who served as Prime Minister in the early years of the reign of George III, Grenville’s primary challenge was to solve the problem of the massive debt resulting from the Seven Years’ War. A centerpiece of his effort was a policy of taxing the American colonies more heavily, starting with his Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765– which began the train of events (much discussed in printed material of the time) that led to the American Revolution.
“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”*…
Hannah Frishberg, in Gothamist, on a labor of love…
Reno may be “the biggest little city in the world,” but it’s got some serious competition from the miniature New York City that hobbyist Joseph Macken built in his upstate New York basement over two decades.
“I sat down in my basement, turned the camera on on my phone and just started talking about my first section, which was Downtown Manhattan,” the Clifton Park resident said on a recent Thursday about his viral TikToks on his roughly 50-by-30-foot scale model of the city. “It just took off.”
The intricate model features what Macken says are hundreds of thousands buildings, landmarks and geographic elements across the five boroughs and their surroundings, including bridges, airports, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, Central Park, One World Trade Center and the original World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. The work consists of 350 handmade sections that are pieced together and can be taken apart and moved…
… Macken, a 63-year-old truck driver who grew up in Middle Village and has no formal carpentry or engineering training, said he dreamed of replicating the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” after an elementary school trip when he was a kid. He embarked on the endeavor in 2004, armed with little more than balsa wood, Elmer’s glue and Styrofoam. His first building was “the RCA building at Rockefeller Center,” he said, referring to 30 Rock, which was formerly named for its longtime tenant, the Radio Corporation of America.
Macken said it took him about 10 years to build Manhattan alone and 11 years for the rest of the boroughs. He completed his opus in April, and said he’s confident every building in the city is represented. (Gothamist could not independently verify this claim; the city has more than 1 million buildings, according to the Department of Buildings.)…
… Macken is now working on a mini Minneapolis: “‘Mary Tyler Moore’ was one of my favorite shows growing up,” he said, adding that he plans to eventually do Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago as well.
Macken said he’s still figuring out what he’ll do next with the model, but he’s in talks with the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan about an exhibit there. A museum spokesperson confirmed this, praising his “ingenuity, creativity and skill.”
“ I don’t wanna put it back in storage,” Macken said. “That’s for damn sure.”…
More– and more photos– at: “This trucker built a scale model of NYC over 21 years. It’s drawing museums’ attention” from @gothamist.com.
* “Theme from New York, New York” composed by John Kander, with lyrics by Fred Ebb; performed in the film by Liza Minnelli and famously covered by Frank Sinatra
###
As we get small, we might recall that on this date in 1776– in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the Revolutionary War– the “Great Fire of New York” raged on the West Side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan.
The fire destroyed from 10 to 25 percent of the buildings in the city, and some unaffected parts of the city were plundered. Many believed or assumed that the fire was deliberately set; British leaders accused revolutionaries– and used the pretext to declare martial law, to confiscate surviving uninhabited homes of known Patriots and assign them to British officers; to convert chuches (other than Church of England sanctuaries), into prisons, infirmaries, or barracks; and to billet regular soldiers with civilian families… all of which continued until the British evacuated the city on November 25, 1783.
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”*…
Why is the most dangerous political crisis in modern American history being met with emotional denial, moral distortion, and cultural distraction? Mike Brock, with a bracing essay…
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the United States is experiencing a constitutional crisis that threatens to end our democratic experiment.
That sentence—stark, unqualified, devoid of hedging—causes a peculiar form of discomfort. It demands we confront a reality most of us are psychologically unprepared to process: We are living through a slow-motion collapse of constitutional democracy in the United States, and most people—not just average citizens but intellectuals, journalists, and elected officials—are emotionally and cognitively incapable of grasping the scale of this threat.
This is not merely a political problem. It is a moral and psychological crisis of coherence—a collective failure to align our emotional response with objective reality. The distance between the magnitude of what is happening and our capacity to feel its significance represents one of the most dangerous disconnects in American history.
We treat an existential threat to self-governance as if it were merely another election cycle. We discuss the potential end of constitutional democracy in the same register we might debate tax policy or infrastructure spending. We have normalized what should never be normal, accommodated what should never be accommodated, and rationalized what should have provoked immediate, sustained resistance.
The gap between the emergency and our feeling of emergency is not accidental. It is the product of specific psychological defenses, media failures, and deliberate manipulation—all combining to protect us from the emotional and moral burden of confronting our situation honestly…
[Brock unpacks the nature of the emergency and then enumerates the “defenses against reality” that are in play: denial (disguised as normalcy), deflection, bothsidesism and cynicism, performative objectivity, and moral equivalence. Having explained each of these, he locates them in what he calls “The Arendtian Frame: The Banality of Complicity” and explains the ways in which they create a series of “collapses in coherence” that keep us from feeling the gravity of the situation…]
… In the face of this psychological and moral crisis, clarity becomes not just an intellectual virtue but a form of resistance. We must name what is happening, without euphemism, without equivocation, and without the false comfort of neutrality.
This is fascism.
I understand the reluctance to use this word. I acknowledge that it has sometimes been misused by the left, applied too broadly to policies they simply dislike rather than to genuine authoritarian movements. This overuse has created an understandable allergic reaction among many thoughtful people.
But the misuse of a term doesn’t invalidate its proper application. The fact that some have incorrectly diagnosed pneumonia doesn’t mean pneumonia doesn’t exist. And what we face now—the cult of personality, the manipulation of law to serve power, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of strength over principle, the explicit rejection of constitutional constraints—these are the defining features of fascism as a political form.
To refuse this word is not moderation but evasion. It is not caution but complicity. It reflects not intellectual rigor but psychological denial—the desperate need to believe we remain within the bounds of normal politics when we have already crossed into darker territory.
Fascism doesn’t arrive announcing itself with swastikas and goose-stepping troops. It comes draped in familiar symbols, speaking the language of tradition, order, and national renewal. It maintains the forms of democratic governance while hollowing out their substance. It works through existing institutions rather than immediately abolishing them.
What makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how it combines traditional authoritarian features with technological capabilities for surveillance, propaganda, and control that previous fascist movements couldn’t imagine. The fusion of authoritarian intent with algorithmic power creates possibilities for sustained oppression that exceed historical precedents.
This is why clarity matters so urgently. Without the proper diagnosis, we cannot formulate the proper response. If we persist in treating an authoritarian movement as merely another iteration of conservative governance, we will deploy inadequate tools against an existential threat.
The appropriate response to fascism is not normal opposition but moral resistance. Not tactical accommodation but principled confrontation. Not private diplomacy but public witness.
This resistance begins with moral courage—the willingness to speak truth despite social costs, professional risks, or personal discomfort. It requires moral clarity—the capacity to distinguish between normal political disagreement and fundamental threats to democratic governance. And it demands civic resistance—the refusal to normalize or accommodate authoritarian consolidation.
In practical terms, this means:
Refusing to center the wrong stories. When media coverage focuses on trivia while constitutional violations go unremarked, we must insist on proper perspective. When commentators treat fascist rhetoric as merely “controversial” rather than dangerous, we must restore moral clarity.
Refusing to indulge fascist spectacles. The strategy of overwhelming our attention with constant outrages, contradictory claims, and manufactured controversies works only if we allow ourselves to be manipulated by it. We must maintain focus on the core threat rather than chasing each new distraction.
Refusing to treat a slow coup as normal politics. We must reject the pressure to discuss authoritarian consolidation as if it were merely another policy dispute. We must insist on the fundamental distinction between governance within constitutional boundaries and the systematic dismantling of those boundaries.
Most importantly, we must be witnesses—not passive observers but active participants in the maintenance of truth. When someone dismisses constitutional violations as mere politics, we must speak up. When someone equates democratic flaws with authoritarian assaults, we must correct them. When someone retreats into cynicism or bothsidesism, we must insist on moral distinction.
These acts of witness may seem small compared to the scale of our crisis. They may feel inadequate in the face of constitutional collapse. But they represent the essential foundation for any larger resistance. Without the maintenance of truth, without the preservation of moral clarity, no other form of opposition is possible…
… the center cannot hold through denial or deflection. It can only be held through clarity—through the painful but necessary acknowledgment of our true situation.
This clarity begins with saying what is true, even when others aren’t ready to hear it. It continues through the patient, persistent defense of coherence against the forces that would dissolve it. And it culminates in the courage to act on that truth, to align our response with the reality we face rather than the reality we wish existed.
The wire still holds—but only if we walk it. Only if we maintain the tension between truth and power, between principle and expediency, between the republic we’ve inherited and the responsibility to preserve it.
This is not about partisanship. It is not about policy preferences. It is about whether the American experiment in self-governance will continue or whether it will join history’s long list of failed republics—remembered not for what it achieved but for what it surrendered.
The emergency we cannot feel is no less real for our failure to feel it. The collapse we struggle to acknowledge is no less imminent for our reluctance to face it. And the responsibility to resist, to bear witness, to hold the center—that responsibility falls to each of us, whether we’re emotionally prepared for it or not.
Eminently worth reading– and contemplating– in full: “The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse” from @brockm.bsky.social.
See also: “Courage versus Complicity” from the estimable Larry Lessig, and “The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.“
And for an extraordinary series of conversations about democracy and authorianism in our moment (and what we can do), visit The Civic Forum, created and moderated by Rory Truex. (TotH to MKM)
Finally, a philosphical (indeed, almost cosmic) perspective on the (broadest understanding of) the context in which the issues above are unfolding: “Reality is evil- Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. It is our moral duty to strike back at the Universe”
* Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”
###
As we face reality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1775 that King George II of Great Britain issued the Proclamation of Rebellion (officially, A Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition), in repsonse to the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill at the outset of the American Revolutionary War. It declared elements of the American colonies in a state of “open and avowed rebellion” and ordered officials of the empire “to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion.”
“It is easy to show that the fears of the early 1770s about the East India Company in America were unfounded; it is not easy to show that they were also unreasonable”*…
Last Saturday was the 250th anniversary of The Boston Tea Party, a protest against the Tea Act (“no taxation without representation”) and an accelerant of colonial support for the American Revolution. But as Deb Chachra and Robert Martello explain, there’s more to the story than we typically hear…
It’s a familiar story to many Americans. On the evening of December 16th, 1773, Massachusetts patriots, including some disguised as ‘Mohawk warriors’, boarded three vessels in Boston Harbor and dumped thousands of pounds of tea into the sea. This act of civil disobedience in protest of heavy-handed British colonial policies, including taxation and monopoly protections, is what we now know as “The Boston Tea Party.”
But behind this story lies another, of where that tea came from and why. For the American patriots, the tea itself was tangible evidence of the British government’s willingness to put profit and imperial control over the well-being, and even the lives, of its colonial subjects.
That tea was the property of the British East India Company which, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, was a massive, highly profitable corporation that held trading rights all over south and east Asia, including what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and China. As Nick Robins describes in his book The Corporation That Changed the World, those rights were acquired by systematically undermining local governance, and were enforced by the East India Company’s huge private army, which it used to seize and control territory. In 1757, Company soldiers fought and won the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies. In its wake, they installed a series of rulers who implemented a treaty in which the East India Company was granted the diwani, the right to collect taxes, while the puppet-Nawabs nominally remained responsible for political and judicial oversight, called the nizamat.
In the 18th century, Bengal was a prosperous textile hub, and its skilled workers were producing a wide array of some of the finest fabrics in the world. Selling these valuable goods had already generated enormous profits for the East India Company, and now taxation provided another revenue stream. Then, in 1768, a severe drought led to crop failures. Even as the Bengalis began to go hungry, company officers continued to collect taxes – at the point of a bayonet if necessary. The East India Company made virtually no provision for famine relief, and after decades of weakened local authority and with tax monies sent off to fill company coffers in London, there was little on-the-ground financial and administrative capacity to address the crisis. Worse, company agents saw hunger and starvation as money-making opportunities, and bought up grain in order to sell it at an enormous profit. Had the available food been redistributed, more residents would have survived. Instead, farms went unplanted, the drought was followed by flooding, disease spread through the weakened populace, and the situation went from dangerous to disastrous. Contemporary estimates put the death toll of the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 at between seven and ten million people – between a quarter and a third of the population.
The enormous human suffering that resulted from the actions of the East India Company, and the Company’s depraved indifference to it, were so horrifying that, as historian William Dalrymple describes, they created the first whistleblowers. Employees wrote to publications in London to detail the atrocities they had observed in Bengal. Their accounts prompted an enormous outcry and ongoing news coverage, with magazines and newspapers carrying cover-to-cover stories on the actions of the East India Company and the response of the British government. And the uproar was not limited to England – print publications routinely crossed the Atlantic… By the time of the Boston Tea Party, the Massachusetts colonists had been discussing, for years, this brutal demonstration of what can happen when a community lacks a voice in their own governance. They learned that even in times of direst need, a colony’s domestically produced resources can be extracted by outsiders in the name of greater profits. Diwani without nizamat is, quite literally, taxation without representation.
The colonists had also begun to experience the economic fallout of this crisis. Two years into the famine, and as a predictable consequence of the humanitarian disaster they were largely responsible for creating, the East India Company’s tax and trade revenues had collapsed. This precipitated a credit crisis in British banks that reverberated across the Empire, including the American colonies. But the East India Company did have some ready assets it could sell to raise much-needed cash: its warehouses in London were full of tea from China.
Rather than censure the East India Company, the British Parliament gave them a bailout. In addition to a government loan, the Tea Act of 1773 granted the struggling Company the monopoly right to sell their tea in the American colonies, cheaply and to a captive market, in order to quickly bring in some revenue and stabilize their finances. Parliament also took the opportunity to apply a three-pence tax on the tea to fund imperial oversight and control, including paying for customs inspectors, royally appointed governors, and occupying troops. If the New England colonists allowed this tea to leave the ships and enter the marketplace, this is what their labor would be paying for. No matter how cheap the tea was, it wasn’t worth this.
The Parliamentary response to the Bengali Famine demonstrated how the British Empire’s appetite for revenue could trump any amount of colonial suffering. What’s more, if it could happen in Bengal, what’s to say it couldn’t happen in Boston?…
Motivated by anger, outrage, and fear, the patriots took decisive steps on a moonlit December night in 1773, dumping the hated tea into the harbor while making a point of leaving the ships themselves and the other cargo untouched…
The wages of colonialism: “Tea and Famine,” @debcha
###
As we commiserate with the Irish, we might recall that the American colonist’s reaction to the East India Company was not the first. Prior to the establishment of the British behemoth in 1600, “companies” were formed and funded (in England, Holland, the Italian City-States, et al.) only for the duration of a single voyage and liquidated upon the return of the fleet– a very risky, all or nothing, proposition. The English East India Company demonstrated that pooling risk across a larger, ultimately open-ended series of voyages was a more bankable proposition.
Threatened with ruin, their Dutch competitors followed suit, forming their East India Company– United East India Company or VOC– in 1602. It was the first joint-stock company in the world; and as shares in the company could be bought by any resident of the United Provinces and then subsequently bought and sold in open-air secondary markets (one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange), it is sometimes considered to have been the first multinational corporation.
Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods and slaves. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the English (later British) East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly and slave trading activities through most of the 17th century. At its peak, VOC was worth almost $8 trillion dollars at current currency values.
On this date in 1603, its first fleet, under Admiral Steven van der Haghen, departed for the East-Indies.
“Without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive”*…
In the American Revolution, the number of privateers — estimated at more than 1,500 ships and tens of thousands of men — far exceeded the number of official navy ships– and were far more instrumental in the American victory…
While uncommon in the modern era, during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 the United States relied heavily on privateering, which was commonly referred to as “the militia of the sea.” In general, the term privateer refers to a privately-owned ship or sailor commissioned by a government to raid an enemy’s military and merchant shipping. Although controversial, there is a long history of privateering that dates back to the seventeenth century. The main difference between pirates and privateers is that privateers are commissioned by a specific government and can only attack ships that fly under an enemy flag, while pirates are not sanctioned by any government and can attack whomever they choose. While pirates keep the prizes themselves, privateers only receive a portion of the money generated from the sale of prizes, which is heavily taxed. Prizes refer to goods seized from a merchant or military ship. While both economically lucrative, privateers serve as a vehicle of war, pirates do not.
The Militia of the Sea
Many believed [during the American Revolution] and have believed since [then that] privateering was a sideshow in the war. Privateering has long been given short shrift in general histories of the conflict, where privateers are treated as a minor theme if they are mentioned at all. The coverage in maritime and naval histories of the Revolution is not much better, with privateering often overshadowed by the exploits of the Continental navy. As John Lehman, former secretary of the navy under President Ronald Reagan, observed, ‘From the beginning of the American Revolution until the end of the War of 1812, America’s real naval advantage lay in its privateers. It has been said that the battles of the American Revolution were fought on land, and independence was won at sea. For this we have the enormous success of American privateers to thank even more than the Continental Navy.’ Yet even in the face of plenty of readily available evidence, ‘the official canon of naval history in both Britain and the United States virtually ignores’ privateers…
An excerpt from Rebels at Sea by Eric Jay Dolin
Privateers and the Revolution, via @Battlefields and @delanceyplace; more at both links above.
* George Washington, in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette
###
As we seize the seas, we might recall that it was on this date in 1763 that final preparations were completed for the signing (the next day) of the Treaty of Paris. Marking the end of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War), France surrendered all of its North American possessions east of the Mississippi to Britain. This ended a source of insecurity for the British colonists along the Atlantic Coast. But the costs of the war and maintaining an army led the British government to impose new taxes on its colonists, with world-shaking results– the American Revolution.
You must be logged in to post a comment.