Category Archives: World influence

The English sporting amateur

Top class sport is now so tied to money that it may seem quaint to his generation that for all of the nineteenth century and much of twentieth century the amateur played a major role in many of the more popular sports. This was due to the fact that most major sports originated in England, where the spirit of amateurism was very strong, and these became spread across the globe when Britain had the only world empire worthy of the name and was also the most industrial advanced and economically powerful state in the world. Other nations who took up the games had a natural inclination to imitate the English way in sport, because of where the games originated and because of England’s prominent position in the world.

There was also a strong class element. This was a time when class and status was still very much an issue throughout Europe and those parts of the world which were within the British Empire. Nor was the United States immune to the lure of class. As the amateur was associated with being a gentleman and a professional classed as a working man, it suited the better-off to support the distinction. It also provided in some games, especially cricket, the means by which, in even a very socially stratified society, people of very different social status could play together.

But there was more to it than that. The English elite of the 19th century was in thrall to an idealised version of the ancient world and from this came the prime amateur ideals of doing something praiseworthy for its own sake and behaving honourably in the observance of not only the laws but the spirit of a game.

Football, cricket and golf had professionals from their early days as public spectacles, but even within games those the amateur had a long run. Other major sports such as athletics, tennis and rugby union remained in theory at least amateur until well into the latter half of the twentieth century, although shamateurism, the paying of amateurs illicitly through devices such as inflated expenses or salaries for on-sporting jobs which were never actually performed, tainted most ajor sports. But even though this dishonesty went on there were still many genuine amateurs in top class sport until quite recent times. It is also true that the shamateurs were paid minute sums compared with the vast amounts many openly professional sportsmen get today.

The amateur had a prominent playing role partly because it was the upper and middle classes who developed and ran modern sport. Even the archetypal working class game, Association football, had at its foundations the public schools and innumerable worthies from the gentry and mercantile classes who founded many of the clubs which are now household names. The true amateur was also cheap because at worst he drew only expenses (shamateurs were a different kettle of fish, often being considerably more expensive to employ than an official pro).

But there was more to amateurism in top class sport than simple class dominance and cheapness. The middle and upper classes brought with them a rather noble ethos. Being an amateur was more than just being person who played without being paid. Games were seen having a moral purpose in the building of character. Team sports taught the individual to subordinate their own interests to that of the group, while individual competition forced a boy to confront their personal responsibility. Playing for its own sake was something pure, untainted by the crudity of commercialism.

That the amateur ethos was always battling with the vagaries of human nature which in many people invariably seeks to gain advantage unfairly is neither here nor there. The important thing is the existence of the ideal. Like most noble ideals it was followed to some degree and behaviour during play was as a general rule rather more sporting thanit is in a purely professional game. Moreover, even where a sport became at a fairly early stage overwhelmingly professional on the playing side, as was the case of football, the existence of people with the amateur spirit administering and controlling the game meant their mentality was reflected in the way professionals behaved – a prowho did otherwise would risk the end of his career. This was important because the behaviour of everyone who plays or watches a sport is influenced by the behaviour of those at the top.

The true amateur was also thought to bring a spirt of adventure to top class sport because he was not weighed down by the thought that he must perform if his employment in the sport was to continue. This was one of the most powerful arguments cited in support of the amateur captain in county cricket. It had a certain force to it.

I regret the virtual extinction of the amateur in the popular top level sports. In my ideal world all sport would be amateur. There is something constricting about all-professional sport. Players do have to consider the next contract. They do have to consider their performance if they wish to move to a bigger club or take part in international sport. The talented sportsman who is not a professional is simply excluded. Such a person may simply not be able to gain a professional opportunity or he may simply not want to be a full time professional sportsman. Either way he is lost to the top level of his sport. Cricket in particular has suffered from the abolition of theamateur/professional distinction, with few if any players who are not contracted to a county club having any chance to play for the county. Professional sport has too much of the closed shop about it to be healthy.

Attached to amateur ideal was that of the “allrounder”. For the gentleman the ideal was the scholar athlete, an ideal approached most famously by the Victorian Charles Burgess Fry, who won a classics scholarship to Oxford, set the world long jump record whilst there, obtained Blues for cricket, football, rugby and athletics and went on to play cricket and football for England.

But there was also a professional niche as a sporting allrounder. Many famous footballers played cricket professionally and many famous cricketers, football, perhaps most notably Denis Compton who played cricket for Middlesex and England while spending his winters from cricket tours speeding down the left wing for Arsenal. Sadly, the extension of the football season to ten months of the year has killed the professional footballer/cricketer. Phil Neal who batted for Worcestershire and played left back for Lincoln City in the 1970s and 1980s was the last of the breed.

Cricket – the first modern game

Cricket was the first team game to be a great spectator sport, indeed, one might argue that it was the first great spectator game of any sort as opposed to a sport such as horse-racing, running, boxing or the more disreputable pursuits of cock and dog fighting and bear baiting.

Cricket might also reasonably claim to have inaugurated the idea of international sport with the first cricket tour to North America in 1859.

The game is very old. It can be dated certainly from the 16th century, but as a pursuit it is reasonable to assume it was much older – before the age of printing little was recorded about any subject. There are some intriguing references in old manuscripts which may refer to cricket, for example, an entry in the wardrobe accounts of Edward I in 1300 which records a payment for the Kings sons playing at “Creag” (H S Altham p20 A History of Cricket Vol I).

The game probably became more than simply a rustic or boys’ pursuit towards the end of the 17th century. The gentry took it up – George III’s father, Frederick, was a very keen player and actually died from an abscess caused by being hit by a cricket ball – and teams were raised by great aristocrats such as the Duke of Dorset, Such men effectively created the first cricketing professionals by employing the best players on their estates, ostensibly to do other jobs, but primarily to ensure they played cricket for a particular team. Partly because of this and partly because the game grew out of a still overwhelmingly rural England with its much closer relationship between the classes than later existed, English cricket was always a socially inclusive game, with dukes literally rubbing shoulders with ploughmen.

The game was early organised. Sides representing counties such as Kent, Hampshire and Sussex were competing with each other by the first half of the 18th century. Teams called England or the Rest of England were also got up to play either a strong county or, in the second half of the century, the Hambledon Club, a club based in a tiny Hampshire village. Hambledon were surprising modern in their thinking, having built the 18th century equivalent of the team coach – a great pantechnicon – to transport the team and its followers to away matches.

During its first century or so as a spectator sport cricket was bedevilled by betting. Important matches were played for very large purses, sometimes more than a thousand pounds, a fortune in the 18th century. Even more insidious was individual betting on results or the performances of individual players within the game – the nature of cricket absolutely lends itself to the latter. But although the game was always under suspicion of foul play, much as horse racing is today, betting must have greatly increased interest in the game.

With the coming of the railways cricket moved into the modern professional era with the formation of the All-England Eleven and its imitators such as the United South of England Eleven. These touring professional sides took cricket around England and laid the foundation for the modern county game. During the same period the county clubs as we know them today began to be formally established, with Surrey dating from 1845. By the 1870s the work of the travelling professional sides was done and county cricket became the mainstay of English cricket.

H.S.Altham entitled a chapter in his History of Cricket somewhat blasphemously as the Coming of W.G.Grace. This was not hyperbole. In the high Victorian age two people were known as the GOM (Grand Old man). The first was Gladstone, the second was Grace. It is a moot point who was the better known. It is no moot point who was the greater celebrity: W.G. won hands down.

Grace was the first great popular games playing hero. His first class career lasted an amazing 43 years (1865-1908). He made his first class debut at the age of 15. His Test career began in 1880 with a score of 152. He played his last Test at the age of 50 in 1899. At the age of 47 (1995) he scored a thousand runs in May, the first man to do so (only five other men have ever managed it).

About the only two organisational things seen in modern team sport which cricket did not invent are cup competitions and leagues – the honour for doing so rests with football, although an unofficial county championship existed before the formation of the Football League.

The mother of modern sport

“We [the Coca Cola Championship] are the fourth best supported division in Europe with nearly 10 million fans last season, after the Premiership [12.88 million], Bundesliga [11.57 million] and La Liga [10.92]. We are ahead of Seria A.” Lord Mahwinny, Chairman of the Football League – Daily Telegraph 28 7 2005.

The English have a most tremendous sporting culture. By that I do not mean that England is always winning everything at the national level – although they do far better than is generally realised – but rather that the interest in sport is exceptionally deep and wide. As the quote from Mahwinny shows, not only is the top division of English football (the Premiership) the most watched in Europe, the second division (the Coca Cola Championship) attracts more spectators than all but two of the top divisions in Europe, beating even the top division of that supposed bastion of football Italy.

The colossal support for football in England is all the more extraordinary because the country has so many other sports seriously competing for spectators, arguably more than any other country because England competes at a serious level in almost all the major international sports – gymnastics and alpine sports are the exceptions. This all round sporting participation resulted in England in the early 1990s coming within touching distance of becoming world champions in football, rugby and cricket. In 1990 England lost in the semi-finals on penalties to Germany in the football World Cup; in 1991 they lost the final of the Rugby World Cup and in 1992 they lost in the final the Cricket World Cup. No other country, not even Australia, could have shown as strongly in all three sports.

The intense English interest in sport at club level is carried through to the national sides. England’s rugby, cricket and football teams have immense support wherever they go, whether it be the amazingly loyal England football supporters or cricket’s Barmy Army, the special quality of their support is recognised by foreigners: “German fans want to be like the English fans. They want to be 100 per cent for their team, for their land.” (German supporter at World Cup 2006 Daily Telegraph 6 7 2006)

This wonderful English attachment to sport is not so strange when it is remembered that most important international sports were either created by the English or the English had a large hand in establishing them as international sports. In addition, other important sports are plausibly derived from English games, most notably American and Astralian Rules football from rugby, baseball from rounders and asketball from netball. In fact, all the major team games in their modern forms originated in Anglo-Saxon countries: cricket, football, rugby union, rugby league, American football, Australian rules, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, hockey.

Even the modern Olympic games were inspired by the Englishman Dr William Penny Brookes’ “Olympic Games” at Much Wenlock in Shropshire which he founded in 1850. A visit to the Wenlock gave the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, his idea for reviving the Olympic Games in Athens. Brookes was a tireless advocate of such a revival himself and only died in 1894 shortly before the first modern Olympic games was held in 1896. On the 100th anniversary of his death, the then president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch laid a wreath on Brookes’ grave with the words “I come to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brooks, who really was the founder of the modern Olympic games.” (Bridgnorth Information). It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the English invented modern spectator sport.

Of the games directly created, to the one game which deserves the title of a world sport – football – the English may add cricket, rugby (both codes), snooker, hockey, lawn tennis, badminton, squash, table tennis and snooker, Those who yawn at the likes of hockey, table tennis and squash should reflect on the fact that sports vary greatly in popularity from country to country. Hockey is the Indian Subcontinent’s second game: squash, badminton and table tennis are to the fore throughout Asia, while snooker is rapidly growing in popularity in the Far East.

The organisation of sport

The difference between sports before the modern era and those in the modern era is that the pre-modern sports were not organised or standardised. In pre-modern times sports lacked both a standard set of rules and governing bodies to enforce the common rules. The English changed all that and they began the process very early, most notably in cricket where a governing body, the MCC, and a generally accepted set of rules (known as laws) were established before the end of the 18th century. Some of major sports where England had the first national association and established the first generally accepted set of rules are:

Association Football – Football Association formed in 1863. The FA established the laws of the game

Cricket – First published Laws 1744, MCC formed 1787

Hockey – 1883 standard set of rules published by Wimbledon Club,

Hockey Association founded 1886

Lawn Tennis – Wimbledon championships established 1877 with first set

of rules resembling the game as it is now

Rugby Union – 1871 The Rugby Union formed and the first laws published

The dominance of England as a creator and organiser of sports is further illustrated by the existence of truly iconic sporting venues such as Lords (cricket), Wembley (football), Twickenham (Rugby Union) and Wimbledon (tennis), all of which have a resonance that stretches far beyond England.

International Sport

Anyone who wonders why the four home nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), are allowed to play as separate teams in major sports such as football and rugby even though they are not independent countries need wonder no longer. The answer is that the four home nations were the four original international players in these sports.

The Rugby Union arranged the first international rugby match between England and Scotland in 1871, while the first football international between England and Scotland kicked off in 1872.

Further afield cricket led the way. The first international cricket tour was in 1859 when a team of Englishmen toured North America. Further tours took place to Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. What was later recognised as the first cricket Test match was played between England an Australia in Australia 1877. The first Test match in England was played between England and Australia in 1880 at the Oval.

Of course it was not only formal efforts which spread English sports. Everywhere the English went they took their games with them. In the time of the Empire and Britain’s dominance as an economic and political power this meant almost the entire world. Most of the world was eager to adopt at least some English sports. Indeed, of the many cultural things England have exported, sports have a good claim to be the most eagerly received.

The games which England invented did not need to be forced upon others. The opposite was often the case. Within the Empire complaints were frequently made by the native populations that they were excluded from participation in games such as football and cricket.

Of what has England to be ashamed?

Of what has England to be ashamed? There are wars of aggression such as the Hundred Years War, but these are the common currency of history. As with the history of all peoples there are massacres, such as that of approximately 150 Jews at York in 1190 or the several thousand deaths which followed the storming of Drogheda in Ireland in 1649 , but they are precious few in England or abroad. Moreover, in the case of Drogheda, the killing took place after the town had refused to surrender and the convention at the time was that the lives of those who had refused to surrender were forfeit if the victor choose to take them. There is nothing to compare with the mass killings of men such as Genghis Khan or the frightful slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War.

England’s immediate Celtic neighbours have had on the whole a good deal from their association with England. Those Celts who imagine that England has exploited their countries in a peculiarly gratuitous, vicious and avaricious fashion should look at the general historical (and, indeed, present) fate of small countries faced with powerful neighbours. That general fate includes occupation by force, the reduction of conquered populations to a servile state, wholesale depredations, chronic legal disadvantages, the refusal of free trade – even with the occupying power, the absolute exclusion from government and, at the worst, genocide.

Compare such behaviour with that of England’s towards Scotland, Ireland and Wales for the past century and a half (at least). During that time all Celts have shared absolute legal equality with Englishmen, have enjoyed the immense benefits of free trade with England, had an inside track to the first industrial revolution, have been able to export their surplus populations to England, have received greater parliamentary representation than the English, have been given the privilege of national parliaments, a privilege denied England as I write, have benefited – particularly since 1945 – from preferential government spending paid for by the English, and, most important for small peoples, have received the protection of the British state which would be nothing without England. As for the Irish Famine, that most prized price of victimhood for Irish nationalists, it was caused not by deliberate British policy but by the administrative inadequacy of the British state to deal with such a calamity.

In truth, it is a very long time since the English behaved with gratuitous harshness or deliberate unfairness to even Ireland, despite the fact that Fenians remain to this day a source of provocation which would bring condign punishment in most parts of the world as it is now and which would have guaranteed such punishment everywhere at any time in history prior to the nineteenth century. If Celts had an ounce of intellectual and emotional honesty they would stand amazed at England’s moderation not shout their unreasoning hatred or bleat imagined wrongs.

As for the British Empire, although it is an obnoxious thing to be a subject people, it is reasonable to consider the condition of those who became imperial subjects before they were part of the empire. Apart from those taken forcibly to the colonies as slaves, all the native populations who came within the Empire lived either in despotic states such as those in the Indian sub-continent or in tribal societies where they were subject to the commonly brutal conditions of such a life. It is also true that many lived under foreign rule before they became subjects of the British Crown, most notably those living with the Mughal Empire. The fact that Britain was able to establish the Raj in India points to the fact that the native populations were far from happy with their rulers before Britain took control. That control was only established, as happened with the Spaniards and Portuguese in America, because sufficient of the native population was willing to support the would-be colonial powers.

On the plus side, Britain brought much of value to the Empire. Playing the “What did the Romans ever do for us” game, Britain can point to the rule of law, parliamentary government, large scale administration, modern armed forces, access to European intellectual life, organised education and modern technology. Most importantly, being ruled by Britain meant having an inside track to modernity. It is also true that from the second half of the 19^th century official British imperial policy was predicated on the principle of putting the interests of the native population first.

To modern eyes the slave trade is the grossest blot on England’s name. I am repelled by both the idea of slavery and the particular cruelties of the Triangular Trade, but then I am a man living in an advanced industrial state with all the conditioning and prejudices that implies. Placed in the context of human history it looks rather different. Forms of legal and customary bondage from full blown chattel slavery where the slave is simply property to the indentured labourer who binds himself to an employer for a legally set period, have been the norm rather than the exception everywhere at every time. Where formal bondage did not exist, informal bondage through economic circumstances has been the fate of most men and women who have ever lived.

It should also be remembered that the trade could not have been carried on without the cooperation of native Africans. Until the 19th Century European involvement in Africa was very limited, being mainly restricted to coastal settlements, many of which were no more than forts. Had the African not been so eager to sell his fellows, the trade could not have existed. The balance of power was unarguably with the African slavers not the European buyers.

England also made amends. Not only did Britain abolish the slave trade much earlier than most, she maintained an antislavery patrol for more than sixty years in the Atlantic. In the 1830s, She also ended slavery in the Empire at the immense cost to the British taxpayer of £20 million in compensation payments to slave owners at a time when UK GDP was only £453 million (http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/).

Put in the context of contemporary behaviour, at any point in her history, England’s behaviour, both domestically and abroad, will, at worst, stand comparison with that of any other nation or state and, at best, be seen as morally superior at most times and places. A first rate example of this is the fact that England was the first state to provide general support for the poor by the Poor Law Acts of 1597 and 1601. The operation of the Poor Laws may have bad reputation today, but they did provide the means of subsistence at a time when the common European experience was to depend on private charity or starve.

The only world empire ever worthy of the name

The British Empire was, like the industrial revolution, essentially an English phenomenon. It is a myth that the Empire was largely run by Celts, especially Scots. It was overwhelmingly staffed by the English, as the difference in population between England and the rest of the UK would suggest. The Celts may have been represented disproportionately to their proportion of the British population, but they were still very much in a minority amongst the British in the Empire.

Practically, there were two Empires. The first including the American colonies, ended in the first half of the nineteenth century and was primarily driven by trade and political competition between the major western European powers, all of whom lived in fear of the other gaining European ascendency through their passion of colonies which were seen as a source of wealth and hence power. The clichéd idea that Britain obtained an Empire in a fit of absent mindedness really will not stand up. England sought an empire consciously in the seventeenth century because they feared the power of other colonising nations, particularly Spain. The second developed from the 1830s and forties when colonisation began to be seen officially as primarily a duty rather than a political or commercial enterprise,

Trade not plunder was the engine of the early Empire. The American colonies became England’s largest overseas trading partner. England’s relations with India were primarily those of a trading nation until Clive’s victories in the mid eighteenth century. It was not until the second English empire that the imperial ideal became dominant.

As for overall material gain from the Empire, it is a moot point whether the Empire from start to finish turned a profit. The Boer War, for example, cost Britain £200 million pounds at 1900 prices when Britain’s GDP was approximately £2 billion. If the same proportion (10%) of today’s GDP (2010) was devoted to a war, the expenditure would be in excess of £147 billion.

David Landes in the “Wealth and Poverty of Nations” dismisses the claim that colonialism was the primary cause of the wealth of European powers or their cultural offshoots such as the United States, by pointing to inconvenient facts such as the experience of Spain, the greatest power in Europe between 1500 and 1650, and Portugal. Despite the immense wealth generated by their American possessions, as societies they remained poor even during their period of greatest material gain from the Americas. Nor did their rulers achieve financial respectability – the Spanish Crown managed to go bankrupt in 1557, 1575 and 1597. As for the slave trade, one may point to the wealth of Britain at the time of abolition and in the century which followed. In 1807 Britain’s GNP was approximately £200 million pounds. By 1914 in was over £2 billion pounds. (Prices in 1807 and 1914 were approximately the same as far as these things can ever be judged) At most, Mr Landes allows that the wealth received by Britain from the slave trade, India and the Americas may, but only may, have slightly accelerated the first Industrial Revolution.

Whether Empires are ever morally justified is a moot point. I must confess to veering instinctively towards Gibbon’s view of the matter, namely that great empires are to be regretted because they impose uniformity and allow a man no escape from +a government which he cannot either tolerate or be tolerated by. But my head tells me that in practice the harshest and most morally obnoxious societies are those which are based on Oriental despotism, dynastic kingship or primitive tribal association. The British Empire mainly ruled over peoples who before the British came behaved in a manner which would appal latter-day liberals..

What is certain is that compared with every other empire ancient and modern, the British Empire was a model of restraint and in its final century, of deliberately benign government. For those who would dispute the matter, let them consider the cruelty of the French in Algiers in the decade prior to Algerian independence or the Chinese now in Tibet.

The British Empire gave a great deal, both material and moral to those it ruled. The humane values to which the Commonwealth pays at least lip service to as the defining values of a civilised state, are English values. It may even be that in the long run the representative institutions which have been so perverted in many of Britain’s ex-colonies will bear the fruit of democratic rule. Political institutions do not guarantee democratic ways, but they do provide the opportunity if times become more propitious.

Perhaps the most amazing fact about the Empire is the small number of Britons who were involved in the administration of colonies. The subcontinent is perhaps the best example. At the height of the Raj, the 1921 census of the Indian Empire (which included Burma and the states which became Pakistan and Bangladesh) shows a total population of 318,492,480. The total British (white) population was 115,606. This represents 0.036% of the population or one white for every 275 Asians. The 2001 UK census shows approximately 2,083,759 residents of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi origin. (www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=273). This represents 3.6% of the official population of Britain in 2001, or one subcontinental Asian for every 28 whites. The British figures are understated because of illegal immigration and the fact that the census relied on self-reporting of racial type. In addition, the Asian population has grown since 2001. Nonetheless, using the 2001 census figures, If immigrants from the subcontinent were in Britain in the same proportion as the British were in the subcontinent, their numbers would be approximately 21,000 as opposed to the two million plus which are now resident. (These comparative figures also show how unreasonable it is to try justify sub-continental immigration to Britain on the grounds that Britons colonised the sub-continent. The British in India did not swamp the native population anywhere because they were in such tiny numbers. The numbers of sub continental Asians and their descendants in Britain is large enough to allow what is effective colonisation of parts of the country).

The Empire was a most remarkable phenomenon in its scope, disparate nature and, until the advent of the steamship, its utterly daunting lines of communication in vessels most men would not now trust for a trip across the Channel. At its height it covered approximately a quarter of the world’s population, drawn from the four quarters of the earth. It was the only world empire ever worthy of the name. It will probably be the last because the political, material and technological circumstances of the world are never again likely to be conducive to such dominion.

As a coda, I would add that the existence of the Commonwealth, which is a voluntary association of states, is unique. Never in the whole of history have the past members of an Empire so immediately and willingly associated themselves with their erstwhile imperial masters.

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States. The nonexistence of the United States would have made a colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and to the present day, not least because it is and has been for a century or more responsible for a tremendous proportion of global scientific discovery and technological development.

At this point I can hear the cry of many: why the English not the British? Was not the United States formed as much by the Scots and Irish as by the English? There will even be those who will press the claims of the Germans. A little careful thought will show that no one but the English could have been responsible, although many peoples and cultures have subsequently added to the considerable variety of American life.

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years. Even in 1776 English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain. This English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no – at least until the relaxation of immigration rules in the sixties – because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally adopt the social and cultural colouring of the native population. The only general exception to this well attested sociological fact is in a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will become integrated through intermarriage and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the original colonisers, namely the English. Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture.

America’s English origins spread throughout her culture. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

The Declaration of Independence is full of phrases and sentiments redolent of English liberty. The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in the British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange. The American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition.

The English influence is written deeply into the American landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to many Americans that the average Englishman probably finds it easier to understand most American forms of often affect not to understand English accents, but it is amazing how well they understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially but still remarkably and recognisably English.

When you go to the cinema think of how often English legends such as Robin Hood are used by Americans. Reflect on how, until recently at least, American universities would give as a matter of course considerable time to the study of writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. These things happen naturally and without self-consciousness because English culture and history is part of American history.

England and the only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution

Of all the social changes which have occurred in human history, none has been so profound as the process of industrialisation. The two previous great general amendments to human life – farming and urbanisation – pale into insignificance. Before industrialisation, man lived primarily from the land and animals whether from farming, husbandry or hunter-gathering. Even in the most advanced civilisations, the vast majority of populations lived outside large towns and cities. In England, the most advanced state, a majority of the population derived their living directly from the land as late as the 1830s. France did not become a predominantly urban nation until the 1930s.

With industrialisation came not merely a change in the material circumstances, but profound social alteration. There arose vastly greater opportunity to move from the small world of the village. The massive increase in wealth eventually made even the poor rich enough to have aspirations. Sufficient numbers of the wealthier classes became guilty enough about abject poverty existing beside great wealth that the condition of the poor was further mitigated by greater educational opportunity, welfare provision and legislation regulating the abuse of workers by employers. Political horizons were expanded by the extension of the franchise.

The industrial revolution altered the balance of power throughout the world. David Landes “In the wealth and Poverty of Nations” describes the effect succinctly: “The industrial revolution made some countries richer, others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor.” (p168). Prior to industrialisation, the disparity in wealth between states, regions and even continents was relatively small. Come the Industrial Revolution and massive disparities begin to appear. For Dr Landes, it is to the success or otherwise in industrialising which is the primary cause of present disparities in national wealth.

All of this tremendous amendment to human existence occurred because the one and only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution took place in England. Indeed, without England the world might have had no Industrial Revolution. Those who would scoff at such a proposition should consider the cold facts: even with England and Britain’s example to follow no other nation matched her industrial development until the 1870′s and then the first country to do so was a state ultimately derived from England, namely the USA. Moreover, England and eventually Britain did not merely produce an industrial revolution, they actively exported and financed it throughout the world. For example, most of the European railway building of the years 1840-70 was the result of British engineers and money.

Some may point to scientific advance in Europe from 1600 onwards as reason to believe that industrialisation would have been achieved without England. It is true that Europe advanced scientifically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but scientific knowledge is no guarantee of technological progress. Moreover, a good deal of that scientific advance came from England. Nor does scientific knowledge have any natural connection with the severe social upheaval required for a transformation from the land dominated pre-industrial state to capitalism. Indeed, the landowners of pre-industrial Europe had a vested interest in not promoting industrial advance. Moreover, in many parts of Europe, particularly the East, feudal burdens became greater not less after 1500. This was so even in as advanced a country as France. Consequently, the widespread social mobility which historians have generally thought necessary to promote a bootstrapped industrial revolution simply did not exist in Europe at the beginning of the British Industrial revolution. Even the country most like England in its commercial development, the Netherlands, became socially and politically ossified in the Eighteenth century, with a bourgeoise developing into an aristocracy and representative government narrowed to what was in effect a parliament of nobles.

There will be those – Scots in particular – who will chafe at the idea that the British industrial revolution was dependent upon England. The facts are against them.

Scotland before the union with England (1707) was a remarkably poor state. Nor, despite its much vaunted educational system – supposedly much the superior of England – had it produced many men of international importance. Read a general history of Europe, either old or modern, and you will find precious few Scots mentioned on their own account. The names John Eringa and Duns Scotus with perhaps a nod to John Knox are the best the reader may hope for, and the former two had to leave Scotland to make their names. If any other Scotsman who lived before the union is mentioned, he will be noticed only because of his connection with another country, most commonly England. It required the union with England to give Scots a larger platform to act upon. Without the union, the likes of David Hume, Adam Smith and even James Watt would in all probability have been roses which bloomed unseen in the desert air. That is not to decry the talents or contributions of Scots, which are considerable, merely to describe a necessary sociological condition for their full display.

Let us suppose that the union had never occurred. What then? All the evidence suggests that the first industrial revolution would still have occurred when it did, perhaps slightly slower or with a different emphasis.

Let me demonstrate how much of an English enterprise the Industrial Revolution was by taking the Dragnet approach (“Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts”). Take steam power. It is the epitome of the industrial revolution. Contrary to many a schoolboy’s imagining, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. That was the province of Englishmen, The Marquess of Worcester may have produced a working steam engine on his estates in 1663. James Savery certainly did by 1698. This was improved by another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen. Their machines were crude beam engines, but the technological Rubicon had been crossed.

It is true that the Scotchman, Watt’s, improvements to the steam engine – the conversion of linear to rotary action and the introduction of a separate condenser – were profoundly important and provided the means to extend the use of steam engines from their limited applications in pumping water from mines. But it should be noted that he had to come to England to achieve his improvements through the patronage of an Englishman, Mathew Boulton, who in his Soho works in Birmingham had probably the best engineering facilities then in the world. Moreover, within a generation of Watt’s improvements, the English engineer, Richard Trevithick had greatly improved on Watt by producing a non-condensing high pressure steam engine,

But before steam could play its full role there had to be a revolution in iron production. This was accomplished by Englishmen. Until Abraham Darby began smelting iron with coke made from coal in the early 1700s, iron making was an expensive and uncertain business carried on in small foundries using charcoal to fire the kilns (an ironmaker named Dudley claimed to have used coal successfully for smelting as early as 1619 but died without establishing a business to carry the work on). Compared with coal, charcoal was in short supply. Worse, it did not produce the same intensity of heat as coal converted into coke. Darby and his son solved the basic problem of smelting with coke made from coal. Henry Cort’s puddling process allowed cast-iron to be refined to remove the brittleness. A little later Benjamin Huntsman improved steel making. In the middle of the next century the Bessemer revolutionised steel production to such a degree that its price fell dramatically enough to make steel no longer a luxury but the common material of construction. All these advances were made by Englishmen.

If a ready and cheaper supply of iron was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution, so was the very idea of large scale manufactories using machines. Undertakings employing hundreds of men on one site were not unknown before the 18th century – a clothier named Jack of Newbury had a factory employing 500 in Tudor times – but they very rare. In 18th century England such enterprises became if not commonplace, at least not extraordinary. By the next century they were the norm. Industry became for the first time geared to a mass market. Nor was this new method of manufacturing confined to the necessities and banalities of life. Factories such as Josiah Wedgewood’s at Etruria manufactured high quality and imaginative china directed deliberately at the growing middle classes. All the most successful 18 century machines for mass production were developed by Englishmen. Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, James Hargreaves spinning jenny.

Once the first blast of the industrial revolution had passed, the fundamental fine tuning was undertaken by Englishmen, with men such as Whitworth leading the way with machine tools and new standards of exactness in measurement and industrial cutting and finishing. All very boring to most, but utterly essential for the foundation of a successful industrial society.

Many vital industries since have originated in England. To take a few. George Stephenson produced the first practical railway (the railway probably did more than anything to drive the Industrial Revolution because it allowed a true national market to operate within England), Brunel issued in the age of the ocean going steamship. William Perkins laid the foundation for a vast part of the chemical industry by discovering the first synthetic dye. The first electronic computer was designed in Britain, after theoretical conception by the Englishman, Alan Turing. In the previous century another Englishman, Charles Babbage, designed but did not finished building the first programmable computer.

For much of the nineteenth century Britain remained utterly dominant as an industrial power in a way that no nation, not even the USA, has been since (the nearest approach was America’s position in the immediate post war years). To give an example: in the mid 19 century Britain produced two and a half times the iron produced in the rest of Europe. Even when Britain’s predominate position had gone she still dominated certain industries and trades massively. She built two thirds of the world’s shipping between 1890-1914 and possessed fifty per cent of the world’s carrying trade between 1890-1914

Along side the development of manufacturing ran that of agriculture at which England became the leader during the eighteenth century. The enclosure movement was already well advanced by 1700. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was effectively finished. Not merely feudalism but the peasantry were gone. The old, inefficient open-field system was a dead letter. With enclosure came agricultural innovation. In the eighteenth century we have Jethro Tull, whose seed drill greatly reduced the amount of seed needed for sowing, Robert Bakewell whose selective breeding greatly increased the size of sheep and cattle and “Turmip” Townsend who greatly increased crop efficiency by various means such as the marling of sandy soil. The importance of such developments cannot be overestimated because the population of Britain rose so dramatically in the next century.

Why did the first Industrial Revolution occur in England and not elsewhere? The short answer is that no one knows. The explanations given by historians comprise a melange of social development, scientific discovery, legal development, political stability, geographical position, historical circumstances and commercial advance. But the problem is that any of the circumstances can be found in other countries. Obviously it was a confluence of developments which made England unusual. For myself, I give greatest weight to intangibles such as intellectual development, political maturity, legally enforced respect for private property and a sound system of money and credit for without those state underwritten assurances, it is difficult to see how human beings may begin to build the necessary structures for a sophisticated commercial and industrial system.

David Landes sees the historical process of industrialisation as twofold. First, comes a pre-industrial preparatory period in which irrationality of thought is gradually replaced by scientific method and what he calls “autonomy of intellectual inquiry” (p 219), that is, thought divorced from unquestioned reliance on authority, irrationality, especially superstition. At the same time technology begins to be something more than by-guess-and-by-God. This gives birth to industrialisation by creating both the intellectual climate and the acquired knowledge, both scientific and technological, necessary for the transformation from traditional to modern society. It is as good a general explanation as any and fits the flow of England’s historical development.

England – the saviour of the Reformation

The Reformation is one of those very rare events which may legitimately be described as seminal. Whether it was, as has often been claimed, the engine which drove the commercial and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is debatable, even dubious. It may or may not have been responsible for the spirit of intellectual enquiry which began in the sixteenth century – I favour the spread of knowledge through the invention of printing. What is not in doubt is the fillip it gave to the development of Europe’s kingdoms and principalities becoming political islands unto themselves. After Luther and Calvin the ideal of a European unity called Christendom was done. The Protestant parts of Europe were faced with the forces of the Counter-Reformation. Princes and peoples were forced to decide where they stood. The map of modern Europe began to take shape.

Read a general history of the Reformation and England will probably play a small role. This is a mistake for one very potent reason: England was the most important kingdom to go Protestant. Had she not embraced the Protestant cause, it is dubious whether the Reformation would have succeeded. Spain and France, the two most powerful continental kingdoms stayed loyal to the Catholic Church and wielded the Counter Reformation’s sword with enthusiasm and energy. The Emperor remained Catholic. Apart from England, the Protestant cause was alive only in the Netherlands, where it was ominously threatened by the Spanish, sundry German states all of which were too small to be of account on their own and in Scandinavia, peopled by few and on the periphery of Europe.

England preserved the Protestant Reformation firstly by simply being an important European power which was Protestant. While England was Protestant, the Catholic world knew that Protestantism was seriously alive. This knowledge also gave heart to continental Protestants. England’s second contribution was practical: in the vitally important years of the sixteenth century she gave aid in men and money to the fledgling Protestant States of the continent, particularly to the Netherlands, an irony which will not be lost on those with a knowledge of English/Dutch relations in the next century. Her third and last contribution was the American colonies. Protestantism was given a refuge across the sea. No longer could popes and Catholic monarchs dream of expunging the heresy by simply cleansing Europe.

Why did England turn so easily to Protestantism? The answer is threefold: John Wyclif, anti-clericism and a long history of Royal resistance to papal authority.

Wyclif and his followers actually embraced the theological and practical foundations of the Reformation in the second half of the fourteenth century, one hundred and fifty odd years before Luther pinned his theses on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg. Wyclif questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the authority of the pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a bible in English and either he or his followers, the Lollards, produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century. Lollardy was officially suppressed early in the next century, but their ideas lingered, both here and abroad.

Wyclif’s ideas had very wide appeal. This owed more to a deep-rooted English anti-clericism, than any theological niceties. (The English have never been a deeply religious race). Add in the long history of English kings resisting Papal meddling in the affairs of England and the mistrust of foreigners natural to the average Englishman, stir the mixture and one can readily see that when the Reformation came England was culturally predisposed to accept it.

The English and the rule of law

The English desire for freedom and their rights is given practical expression in their attitude towards the law throughout England’s history: it was respected out of all proportion to the justice it commonly delivered. It predated the Conquest. It survived Norman rule. When the jurist Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the laws of England” were published in the 1760′s they were immensely popular amongst the chattering classes of the day. It is difficult to imagine heavy works on the law being acclaimed by educated Englishmen and women of our own time, but for their eighteenth century counterparts it was not merely a work of law but a statement of English liberty and, indeed, of English superiority over foreigners. Were they wrong to so respect a very flawed system of justice? To answer that question one need only look at the alternatives. A system of justice as opposed to law is one of the most difficult of social plants to cultivate. Human beings have a natural inclination to act according to custom within the prevailing social hierarchy rather than according to an intellectual construct such as the concept of natural justice. Moreover, a system of law requires within it the need to apply the law equally to equals. This does not imply a general equality before the law, because a system of law which differentiated between people, for example on the grounds of social class, would be perfectly rational. However, it does mean that anyone who fell into a designated class would be treated equally.

What applies to a group based system of law applies with vastly greater force than where general equality before the law is concerned, ie where every person within a jurisdiction is equally subject to the law.

The difficulty in establishing meaningful systems of law can be all too readily seen in the present. Most of the world’s people live now as they have always done in societies which do not have legal systems worthy of the name of justice. The most unfortunate live in circumstances where they are at the mercy of competing warlords. There nothing better than the will of the warlord exists. Other people live in states where there is a formal system of law made worthless by political interference. Many societies have legal systems which lack any meaningful protection for the accused through an absence of forensic examination or concepts such as Due Process.

It is against this background that the English legal development must be seen. The English legal system is as fair as any in the world and arguably the fairest. It has an ancient unbroken tradition, formal equality before the law, habeous corpus, sub judice, well established principles of due process, widespread use of the jury, substantial provision for legal aid and above all the presumption of innocence. The whole is underpinned by the potent concept of natural justice.

These legal goods stand on the platform of an immensely strong strain of personal freedom in English history which has produced a general principle utterly at odds with continental systems of law, namely the idea that an Englishman may do anything legally which is not forbidden by law. Continental systems do the reverse: citizens are permitted to do what the law says and not what it doesn’t. That in itself makes those operating under continental law much more liable to prosecution simply because the variety of offences is multiplied.

This is not to say that the English justice system is perfect. Indeed, it is far from that. Its most general failure is the fact that it is tainted with money. The quality of legal advice and representation a man receives in either civil or criminal proceedings is largely determined by his wallet. In civil suits the size of his wallet frequently determines whether he may even go to court. Some laws, most notably that of libel, are only available in practice to the very rich or those backed by a rich patron or organisation. Patently, while law is not open equally to all, equality one may add the political involvement of the parliamentary law officers, the secrecy and incompetence of the prosecuting authorities and the overly restrictive rules of evidence.

But despite its many practical weaknesses, the English legal system does and has provided for centuries the basis for the sane and reasonable delivery of justice. The English have long recognised that a flawed system of law applicable to all is vastly preferable to a partial law which distinguishes between nobles and commoners or no meaningful law at all. Indeed, it is this attachment to the English Common law which is one of the primary themes of English history. It has had profound consequences, because those who respect the law are likely to be less violent in their personal lives (the idea of vendetta was never part of English custom). Men who can be sure of keeping their property will build for the future. Political chaos is made less likely where men believe there is a chance of perceived royal wrongs being ighted through parliament.

The case of the leveller leader, John Lilburne, shows how much part of English life respect for the law was even three and a half centuries ago. Lilburne by every account of him was a most difficult man – it was said that his nature was so combative that he would seek a quarrel with himself if he were alone – ‘Jack would fight with John’. Yet this man, who came from a very modest gentry background, remained alive despite challenging the authority of first the king and then during and after the civil war, Parliament, Cromwell and the Commonwealth. He thus carried on this mortally dangerous behaviour for almost a generation. To the end of his life in 1657, he was thought dangerous enough to imprison.

Lilburne first came to notice for seditious speeches and writings in the 1630s. For that he was whipped from the Fleet to the Palace Yard where he was stood in the stocks. Whilst in the stocks, he removed copies of the pamphlets which had caused his punishment and threw them to the crowd. That little episode will give a good idea of the Lilburne’s general mentality. He was an extreme example one of those necessary unreasonable men without whom nothing great gets done.

From the time of his flogging onwards, Lilburne’s career was one of studied defiance of authority. He was one of the most potent pamphleteers England has ever seen. For more than a decade. He produced a flood of writings guaranteed to inflame virtually anyone in public authority in the land. He faced down judges in the most powerful courts in the land. He controlled the London mob consummately. He treated the greatest men in the land as equals. In any other place on the planet at that time, he would have been dead meat before his career as an agitator began. But not in England. He might be flogged. He might be put in the stocks. He might be imprisoned. He might be tried twice for his life. But what England would not do was unreservedly murder him.

Perhaps one act from history epitomises the advanced legal state of England. In 1760 Earl Ferrers was found guilty and hanged for the murder of a servant, his steward. One cannot be sure, but I suspect that this was the first time an aristocrat was executed for the murder of a servant anywhere in the world. Two and half centuries ago, the ideal of equality before the law in England had become more than a pious hope.

The mother of modernity

Part of the problem for those who would define Englishness in terms of highly visible emblems is that so much of our general culture has become part of the general culture of the world, for example industrialisation, representative government and organised sports.

David Landes in his “The wealth and poverty of nations” is emphatic about England’s unique status. At a time when casual and gratuitous public insult of the English is commonplace, the book is a salutary reminder of how disproportionate an influence this country has had on the world. Two of the chapter headings will give a flavour of this: “Britain and the others” and “Pursuit of Albion”. In the latter Mr Landes is emphatic on England’s importance: “The Industrial Revolution in England changed the world and the relations of nations and states to one another…The world was now divided between one front-runner and a highly diverse array of pursuers. It took the quickest of the European “follower countries” something more than a century to catch up”. 1 In other words, without England industrialisation would have been at best greatly delayed and at worst have never occurred. (To that immense influence, may be added the Empire, the founding of the United States by involuntary proxy, the development of parliamentary government, the international success of the English language and the individual likes of Newton, Locke and Darwin.)

Before English readers get too bigheaded, it should be added that Dr Landes is distinctly critical of Britain’s failure to maintain the momentum of their initial industrialisation and cites as dreadful warnings to others such failures as Britain’s inability to keep the lead in the chemical industry in the nineteenth century and the dismal story of our car industry since 1945.

There is a curious tendency amongst academics these days to denigrate England’s status before 1500, to represent her as backward, weak, insignificant country on the cultural as well as geographic periphery of Europe, altogether a second or even third rate power. The problem with this view is that it puts its holder in a quandary not unlike that which afflicts those who argue for a general European inferiority vis-a-vis Ottoman, Chinese and Indian cultures in the late Middle Ages. The question is this, if England was so negligible in 1500, how was she able to meaningfully compete with supposedly vastly greater and more sophisticated powers, and compete so successfully that by 1760 she had replaced the Dutch as the leading commercial power, bested France and Spain in the colonial game and was on the doorstep of the first Industrial Revolution?

The only reasonable answer is that England was far from being a backward, third rate power in 1500. (One should not forget that she had spent much of the previous century and a half running riot in France during the Hundred Years war). Being divided from the continent by a channel only 22 miles at its narrowest point had ensured that England was never culturally isolated. Most importantly, it was a rich country. Visitors to England time and again over the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution remark on the county’s general prosperity and note particularly the superior material condition of the English poor compared to the continental poor.

To understand exactly how advanced England has been in comparison with all other states we need only consider the condition of the country which is generally considered to be her main competitor for the title of archetypal nation state, France. When the Bastille fell in 1789 no French national parliament had met for one hundred and seventy five years. Executive power derived both in fact as well as theory solely from the King. Political power such of it as was devolved from the crown remained overwhelmingly the prerogative of the higher aristocracy, while the notion of equality before the law was treated as a quaint absurdity with the French nobility both protected from the legal actions of commoners and granted privileges over them such as the lettres de cachet which allowed the imprisonment of Voltaire for insulting a nobleman. As for that perennial first bugbear of all pre-modern states, finance, France was renowned throughout the eighteenth century for her gigantic inability to balance her books. On the micro economic level, feudal dues and impositions were not merely maintained through the inertia of custom, but were actually enforced more severely in the eighteenth century as landowners sought to compete with the growing wealth of the bourgeoise. But revolutionary

France was no Britain dancing attendance upon an industrial revolution. She was and remained until the twentieth century, primarily a rural land. Not until the 1930s did fewer than fifty percent of Frenchmen and women derive their living directly from the land.

Consider what the world today would be if England had not existed. There would have be no USA. Approximately an quarter of the states represented at the UN would not exist. The English language would not dominate international communication, especially in the fields of science and technology and be the language of the Internet. Those things are certain. Others are probable, such as a failure to develop parliamentary government or an industrial revolution.