the English, the English, the English are best.

[davywavy]

We've left in the hands of three unfriendly powers
Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot
You'll find he's a stinker as likely as not

The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

The Scotsman is mean as we're all well aware
He's boney and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And hasn't got bishops to show him the way

The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

The Irishman now our contempt is beneath
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth
He blows up policemen or so I have heard
And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third

The English are moral the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood

The Welshman's dishonest, he cheats when he can
He's little and dark more like monkey than man
He works underground with a lamp on his hat
And sings far too loud, far too often and flat

The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

And crossing the channel one cannot say much
For the French or the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch
The Germans are German, the Russians are red
And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed

The English are noble, the English are nice
And worth any other at double the price

And all the world over each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice before hand which spoils all the fun

The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad
It's just that they're foreign that makes them so mad
The English are all that a nation should be
And the pride of the English are ukmonty and me

The English the English the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest



Following the debate over on ksirafai, I decided to whip up a quick poll on the greatest of all Human Inventions, the British Empire. Basically, I'm curious to know which year you think the Empire was at it's peak.

[Poll #556800]

Comments

Moreover...

[applez.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting is what seems to me the strongest lesson from Empire - don't let existing reality get in the way of a shared idea stamped onto that reality.

This leads to everything from:

American political revolution...

...to utter ignorance of local ecology as sheep are introduced to Australia, or cattle to the American West or wheat to central African riverbanks.

Re: Moreover...

[(Anonymous)]

So what we need, obviously, is some fail-safe, history-proof Axiom to help us distinguish in future between "Reality" (eg 21st century ecological science) & an "Idea" (eg 19th century agricultural science) - so we don't make the same mistakes all over again!

Gosh, it's so simple when you think about it.

Hilary

Re: Moreover...

[applez.livejournal.com]

No Axioms - hardly adaptable enough for the world we are and will be living in. And no, I'm not a Fukuyama-head.

Re: Moreover...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

That's a fairly cheap shot at people of 150 years past without your advantages, and I expect better from you.
I trust that your ideas of 'reality' and 'ideas' will hold up to scrutiny in the heightened intellectual world of 2155. Or not.

Re: Moreover...

[applez.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you take this so personally.

The reality was a desert, the idea was a new paradise of known foods & animals; or if you prefer the reality that the new settlers cared about was the market for wool and mutton, nevermind what the local indigenous people had been successfully doing for centuries that no Briton was interested in shelling shillings for (e.g. "ewww...they eat that?" TM).

No cheap shot at all - just people acting rationally from information sources that did not reflect the world they were trying to live in. Those who didn't sufficiently adapt often died...or the consequences of their success wouldn't be felt for generations (e.g. New World, Australia, South Africa).

Or, if you prefer something more down-to-earth, consider what the proud settlers were thinking as their cattle herds died out on the Zambeze (sp?), whilst local herds remained healthy? Politics, Religion, Empire - nice concepts, but what about getting some steak on the table? That's something surely all people through time can understand.

----

Moreover, the primacy of the idea of Empire was definitely relevant to the people of that time. No different than Manifest Destiny for the US, really. People felt they had a RIGHT and DUTY to go overseas and SPREAD CIVILISATION (TM)...and getting rich in the process was also GOOD (TM). Granted, Britain and France practiced dumping their unwanted overseas, but that was the flip side of the same coin.

Re: Moreover...

[(Anonymous)]

Well, *I* don't call post-dated satire a workable axiom. How are we meant to apply it in future?

H

Re: Moreover...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

As H says elsewhere, you're confusing two separate memes; that of the Anglo-Saxon hegemony as represented by the British Empire in the 19th century, and that of Agriculture as represented by the cultivation of crops and animals since about 6000bc. Because the one (Empire) made use of the other (Agriculture), blaming the one for high profile failures in the other doesn't work.
if you want to point out a few failures, look at the successes - the potato is a pretty good one. Hurrah for teh British for bringing the Potato tot he world! But in my terms, it wasn't the British per se - it was the agriculture meme. The Empire simply happened to be the agent of that meme in that time and place.
If peopel didn't transport successful foodstuffs from one place to another, then Ur on the Chaldees would be damned crowded by now, and it's a meme which has been used by everyone. People had been searching for the Terra Australis for years, so if the French or Dutch had found it first, would they have had the foresight not to transplant agriculture there? of course not - because it's what people do. Agriculture is an 'idea' which is also 'reality', and your differentiating between the two is a false differentiation, at least in the immediate sense.
Why did I get irritated by that? Because criticising people for the sin of being nothing more than products of their time always winds me up. It's very easy to be wise after the event, but nothing I've seen of anyone who has ever doen the above has ever convinced me they'd do any better in identical circumstances. One thing I try to avoid doing is criticising people for doing what I would do myself under the same circumstances.

Splitting Hairs

[applez.livejournal.com]

It's a fair point both you and H make, however...

So much of that agricultural expansion and distribution was to serve a specific Imperial purpose. I would argue the commodification of agriculture for enterprise is a distinctly Imperial concept, especially with its protected markets, state prices and monopoly interests that set it apart from conventional capitalism even. Consider: sugar, rum (and the gin response); corn (cheap calories for slaves); sheep & wool (Wool Board, for example).

Likewise, the pricing of territory in Australia was based off of an English model of productivity that frankly, Australia mostly cannot support - it is a pricing model that sets up shepherds for financial ruin.

These are certainly more artefacts of Empire and its policies than it is locally-informed capitalism or a mere agriculture meme. Indeed, going back to the cattle in Zambeze example, the speed of exploitation and expectation of rapid return is something wholely different from a mere agricultural settler who might have the time to observe local practices and mimic them.

Consider all the early colonial failures in Virginia, because the Crown and its representative companies had the colonists busy trying to pay their interest, digging for gold, rather than planting food crops or cultivating a new market for tobacco.

---

Incidentally, the potato is a decidedly problematic crop: both historically (Ireland?), and currently (very heavy pesticide need) - arguably the result of trying to make an alien species successful in an inappropriate land with high expectations of success.

---

As for criticising people as products of their time: fair enough - however, consider the rapacious need to exploit that was so much of Empire. Had they had longer timescales to properly settle, experiment; or more flexible attitudes towards local solutions that they might have learned from - both a different, and possibly more successful Empire might have resulted. Instead the 'forcefit' of Empire is wasteful of knowledge and has provoked great misery. Moreover, these were conversations of their day (e.g. the Papal intervention on Spanish & Portugese abuses of American natives; the Haitian revolution; the American revolution; Disraeli/Gladstone), not just a modern eye looking to the past.

I think criticism is fair to employ, so long as it is also employed against oneself in one's own time, which I happily do as well. :-)

Re: Splitting Hairs

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for replying. I do see what you're saying, but would dispute that agricultural protectionism is a prerogative of the British Empire - witness the performance of our rulers in Brussels! Perhaps it would be fairer to say that it is an economic meme that has been tested to destruction by some former Imperial powers, but not others.

Hilary

Re: Splitting Hairs

[applez.livejournal.com]

Not just the British Empire, in fairness. As for Brussels, they've simply latched on to that old idea, or rather, are trying to "harmonise" the shadowed echoes of that ancien regime in its member states. After all, how to defeat French agro subsidies & protections, why co-opt them, of course! ;-)

Also

[applez.livejournal.com]

Going back to my original statement...

What I find interesting is what seems to me the strongest lesson from Empire - don't let existing reality get in the way of a shared idea stamped onto that reality.

I would argue this is a very Imperial meme, and one that has provoked both positive and negative applications. Also, I do not dispute the benefits of Empire, but I think it's myopic to ignore its problems as well.

2155

[applez.livejournal.com]

As for 2155, I'm sure our blog discussions will be a trove for humourists. :-) I'm also sure we're making plenty of errors today, but I will join in the arrogance of believing I am right on those things I think are errors made today.

Moreover, where the concept of 'idea vs. reality' is as relevant today as any other time in the past - consider America's grapple with Iraq & terrorism; or Europe's attempts at Union, even with the rash of nationalist responses it has provoked; or the world's grapple with poverty, famine, and climate change.

There are a lot of ideas out there, some of them getting resources to do something with them, others no. Some hard realities are already making themselves felt, and it is unclear if the existing institutions have recognised and responded to them yet.

Re: 2155

[(Anonymous)]

Applez, having thought a bit more, if I was arguing in your shoes and looking around for an axiom, I think I would go for "fallibilism" - or, more specifically, a mutable but fairly stable environment in which instructive mistakes can be made. That seems to me a reasonable basis for providing a culture with some resilience to change. And I think the great success of the Empire/Anglo-Saxon meme generally is due to its providing many of the important properties of such an environment; a common language, free speech, rule of law. An analogy* in evolutionary terms might be, say, the possession of a spine, which allows for lots of experimentation, some unsuccessful, but none so far ultimately catastrophic to the core gene. Or meme.

The examples you quote of failed agriculture are really high-profile examples of failure of a much older, agricultural meme - the deliberate exportation and propagation of those species that benefit us. This meme has not been overthrown by the failures you cite, it is still broadly and globally in use. Your citing a few failures seems to me to be a bit like pointing to the dodo as an example of how being a flightless bird is a disastrously bad thing. Yes, okay, disastrous to the subjects themselves; but only in limited contexts, and not to the gene per se.

*in more ways than one, some might say

Hilary