Quotulatiousness

January 31, 2025

Canada – sovereign nation or “post-national state” with “no core identity”?

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter retraces Canada’s history from British colony to self-governing Dominion to proud mover-and-shaker in the postwar world to whatever the heck it is today:

There is a map that shows up on social media from time to time, and it looks like this.

Sometimes it is followed by this one:

And then maybe this one:

What’s the point of these maps? Apart from noting the obvious, which is that Canada is sparsely populated, and much of the population is gathered in cities very close to the border with the United States, they raise important questions about the exercise of political power and its legitimacy, forms of governance, and, ultimately, sovereignty. By what methods did Canada come to be, and by what right does a small and relatively concentrated group of people, most of whom live down by the Great Lakes or along the St. Lawrence River, lay claim to almost ten million square kilometres of the Earth’s landmass?

It is easy to draw lines on maps. Anyone can do it. If you want those lines to represent some sort of generally accepted reality, two things must be true. First, the people inside the lines need to see those lines as legitimate, and be willing to take the necessary steps, up to and including the use of force, to assert them against outsiders. And second, enough outsiders of sufficient global importance also need to recognize those lines.

Any student of Canadian history knows that the borders of Canada are highly contingent. Rewind the tape of the past, and there are any number of moments where things could have turned out differently. In some scenarios, Canada ends up smaller than it currently is; in others, Canada ends up larger, perhaps substantially so. And in some alternative histories, Canada does not exist at all — or if it does, we’re all speaking French.

There’s nothing that is either sinister or celebratory in pointing this out. History is a bunch of stuff that happened, and in some cases, things might have turned out differently. But again, if you know your Canadian history, you know that the process by which Canada went from a French fur trading outpost to a collection of British mercantile colonies to a continent-spanning multinational federation and parliamentary democracy was made possible only through a rough admixture of ambition, cunning, scheming, coercion, violence, strong foreign support, and, between 1812 and 1814, war.

To get to the point: Canada’s sovereignty wasn’t something we just stumbled upon, nor is it something we were happily given. It was a thing we did. We did not do it alone, though; for most of the 19th century, the main ongoing threat to Canada’s sovereignty was the United States, while the ultimate guarantor of that sovereignty was Great Britain.

That dynamic shifted over the first half of the 20th century, when the British Empire went into decline, and the United States became the dominant world power. There was a short period after 1931, while British influence was ebbing and that of the Americans was flowing, in which Canada stood more or less independent and autonomous. This largely ended in 1940; Britain was on the ropes against Nazi Germany, Canada was in Hitler’s sights, and an increasingly anxious Franklin Roosevelt invited Mackenzie King down to Ogdensburg, New York, for a friendly chat about continental security.

January 26, 2025

Imperial reparations to India are not economically or historically realistic

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apparently the idea of demanding financial reparations from Britain has once again become a talking point among India’s chattering classes. In The Critic, Tirthankar Roy explains why the basis for the demands do not meet economic or historic criteria necessary for the demands to be justified:

The State Entry into Delhi – Leading the 1903 Delhi durbar parade, on the first elephant, “Lakshman Prasad”, the Viceroy and Vicereine of India, Lord and Lady Curzon. Their elephant was lent by the Maharaja of Benares. On the second elephant, “Maula Bakhsh”, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught representing the British royal family. Their elephant lent by the Maharaja of Jaipur. There were 48 elephants of the Main Procession, shown winding its way past the north side of the Jama Masjid.
Painting by Roderick MacKenzie from the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

Oxfam, in its report “Takers not Makers” claims that imperialist Britain “extracted” $85 trillion from India, “enough to carpet London with £50 notes” four times over. Oxfam took this number from calculations others have done before. The origin of the claim goes back to Dadabhai Naoroji writing 125 years ago, who called the outflow drain. Oxfam uses the number to support a modern movement: a case for reparations that Britain should pay India. With British public finances in a rut, the report’s timing is not ideal. But how good is the case?

[…]

Why did Chaudhuri say drain was “confused” economics? The figure of $85 trillion builds on three bases. First, in the 1760s, as the East India Company started sharing the governance of Bengal with the Nawab’s regime, a part of the taxes of Bengal was used to fund business investment (export of textiles). Second, in the nineteenth century, Indian taxes were used to fund an army that fought imperialist wars to no benefit of India. Third, India maintained an export surplus, which went to fund payments to Britain on mainly four heads: debt service, railway guarantees, pensions to expatriate officers, and repatriated profits on private investment. Naoroji said that these outflows were payment without benefit to India, a drain, and happened because India was a colony. Did he discount the benefits of these transactions?

The Company was a body of merchants who became kingmakers between 1757 and 1765, resulting in a government in Bengal where private and public interests often conflicted. No one knows how serious the conflict was since the Nawab was a partner in the rule. No matter, the case that tax was used for commerce is weak. Within a few years after the transition, the Parliament started taking control of Indian governance, which meant refusing to fund business with taxes. By 1805, the process was complete when Governor Cornwallis declared that “the duties of territorial government [would take] the place of buying and selling”. In between, public finance data are so patchy that it is impossible to find out how much of the Company’s commercial investment was funded by a budgetary grant, borrowings, and profits.

What is the big deal anyway? The Company’s investment of $60 million around 1800 was a tiny 0.06% of India’s GDP. Its textile business generated employment and externalities in India. And the real drain was not the export, but the profits upon exports. We are dealing with an almost invisible transaction, so small it was.

Consider the criticism of the army. British Indian budget, the argument went, paid for the Indian army, which fought wars beyond Indian borders, a subsidy Indian taxpayers paid to the Empire. This claim misreads what the land army really did. The reason it was very big and funded by India was that it was a deterrent to potential conflict amongst the 550 princely states. Interstate conflicts claimed enormous human and economic cost in the late-eighteenth century. The army ended that and effectively subsidised the defences of the princely states. Similarly, the British state subsidised Indian naval capability. Until World War I, the deployment of the army beyond India caused little controversy. The army protected the huge diaspora of Indian merchants and workers. Without the empire’s military might, we would not get Indians doing business in Hong Kong, Aden, Mombasa, or Natal. The War changed the benefit-cost estimates, and in the 1920s, the arrangement ended.

The third point, that export surplus was drain, is the most bizarre. India normally had a commodity export surplus, in effect payment for services purchased by India from Britain. Naoroji thought this was a waste of money. His followers insisted it was. But these claims follow no economic logic. No economics in the world will tell us that an outflow makes a country poor. That assessment depends on what value the payment creates at home. In activist history, there is no discussion of the value, because there is no acknowledgement there could be a value.

January 12, 2025

Quebec within the British Empire after 1760

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fortissax, in response to a question about the historical situation of Quebec within Canada, outlines the history from before the Seven Years’ War (aka the “French and Indian War” to Americans) through the American Revolution, the 1837-38 rebellions, the Durham Report, and Confederation:

First and foremost, Canada itself, as a state — an administrative body, if you will — was originally founded by France. Jacques Cartier named the region in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America in Quebec City in 1608. This settlement would become the largest and most populous administrative hub for the entire territory. Canada was a colony within the broader territory of New France, which stretched from as far north as Tadoussac all the way down to Louisiana. It included multiple hereditary land-owning noblemen of Norman extraction.

Much of the original territory of New France

During the Seven Years’ War, on 8 September 1760, General Lévis and Pierre de Vaudreuil surrendered the colony of Canada to the British after the capitulation of Montreal. Though the British had effectively won the war, the Conquest’s details still had to be negotiated between Great Britain and France. In the interim, the region was placed under a military regime. As per the Old World’s “rules of war”, Britain assured the 60,000 to 70,000 French inhabitants freedom from deportation and confiscation of property, freedom of religion, the right to migrate to France, and equal treatment in the fur trade. These assurances were formalized in the 55 Articles of the Capitulation of Montreal, which granted most of the French demands, including the rights to practice Roman Catholicism, protections for Seigneurs and clergymen, and amnesty for soldiers. Indigenous allies of the French were also assured that their rights and privileges would be respected.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the war and renamed the French colony of “Canada” as “the Province of Quebec”. Initially, its borders included parts of present-day Ontario and Michigan. To address growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies and to maintain peace in Quebec, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. This act solidified the French-speaking Catholic population’s rights, such as the free practice of Catholicism, restoration of French civil law, and exemption from oaths referencing Protestant Christianity. These provisions satisfied the Québécois Seigneurs (land-owning nobleman), and clergy by preserving their traditional rights and influence. However, some Anglo settlers in America resented the Act, viewing it as favoring the French Catholic majority. Despite this, the Act helped maintain stability in Quebec, ensuring it remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolutionary War and Quebec was fiercely opposed to liberal French revolutionaries.

British concessions, from the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris to the Quebec Act of 1774, safeguarded the cultural and religious identity of Quebec’s French-speaking Catholic population, fostering their loyalty during a period of significant upheaval in North America. Following this period, merchant families such as the Molsons began establishing themselves in Montreal, alongside early Loyalist settlers who trickled into areas now known as the Eastern Townships. These merchant families quickly ingratiated themselves with the local Norman lords and seigneurs.

The Lower Canada Rebellion arose in 1837-1838 due to the Château Clique oligarchy (an alliance of Anglo-Scottish industrialists and French noble landowners), in Quebec refusing to grant legislative power to the French Canadian majority. The rebellion was not solely a French Canadian effort; to the chagrin of both chauvinistic Anglo-Canadians and French Canadians, who in recent years believed it was either a brutal crackdown on French degeneracy, or a heroic class struggle of French peasants against an oppressive Anglo elite. It included figures like Wolfred Nelson, an Anglo-Quebecer who personally led troops into battle.

In response to the unrest following the rebellions of 1837-1838, Lord Durham, a British noble, was sent to Canada to investigate and propose solutions. His controversial recommendation, outlined in the Durham Report of 1839, was to abolish the separate legislatures of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) and merge them into a single entity: the Province of Canada. This unification aimed to demographically and culturally assimilate the French Canadian population by creating an English-speaking majority.

However, the strategy failed for multiple reasons, and was given up shortly after. Lord Durham, having neither been born nor raised in the New World, underestimated the complexities of Canadian society, which was a unique fusion of Old World ideas in a New World setting. His assumption that French Canadians could be assimilated ignored their strong cultural identity, rooted in large families, which encouraged high birth rates as a means of survival. While Durham hoped unification would erode divisions, the old grievances between the British and French began to dissipate naturally.

The Province of Canada, whose unofficial capital was Montreal, where the two groups mixed

Despite Lord Durham’s intentions, French Canadians maintained their dominance in Quebec. Families averaged five children per household for over 230 years, a trend actively encouraged by the Catholic Church’s policy of La Revanche des Berceaux (the Revenge of the Cradles). This strategy aimed to preserve French Canadian culture and identity amidst the British short-lived attempts at assimilation. In Montreal, British industrialists expanded their influence by forging alliances with French landowning nobles through business partnerships and intermarriage. This blending of elites produced a bilingual Anglo-French upper class that became historically influential.

Such alliances drew on long-standing connections established as early as 1763 and later exemplified by the North West Company (NWC). The NWC in particular is interesting as a prominent fur trading enterprise of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in that it embodied this fusion of cultures. Led primarily by Anglo-Scots, the company’s leaders frequently formed unions or marriages with French Canadian women, fostering vital ties with the French Canadian communities crucial to their trade. Simon McTavish, known as the “father” of the NWC, maintained alliances with French Canadian families, while his nephew, William McGillivray, and other leaders like Duncan McGillivray followed similar paths. Explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie and David Thompson married French women. These unions strengthened familial and cultural bonds, shaping the broader Anglo-French collaboration that defined this period.

This relative harmony between Anglo and French Canadians continued with the formation of the modern Canadian state in 1867 during Confederation. Sir John A. Macdonald deliberately chose George-Étienne Cartier as his second-in-command. This collaboration contributed to the emergence of Canada’s ethnically Anglo-French elite, who have historically been bilingual. This legacy is evident in the backgrounds of many Canadian politicians, such as the Trudeaus, Mulroneys, Martins, Cartiers, and countless others who have both Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian roots.

In more recent history, this dynamic has been further solidified by the federal government, where higher-paid positions often require bilingual proficiency. Interestingly, about 20% of Canada’s population is bilingual, reflecting the ongoing influence of this historical coexistence.

    The last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.
    ~ George Etienne Cartier

December 21, 2024

QotD: Portugal’s early expansion in the Indian Ocean

Filed under: History, India, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At a cursory glance, the first arrival of Portuguese ships in India must not have appeared to be a particularly fateful development. Vasco da Gama’s 1497 expedition to India, which circumnavigated Africa and arrived on the Malabar Coast near Calicut consisted of a mere four ships and 170 men — hardly the sort of force that could obviously threaten to upset the balance of power among the vast and populous states rimming the Indian ocean. The rapid proliferation of Portuguese power in India must have therefore been all the more shocking for the region’s denizens.

The collision of the Iberian and Indian worlds, which possessed diplomatic and religious norms that were mutually unintelligible, was therefore bound to devolve quickly into frustration and eventually violence. The Portuguese, who harbored hopes that India might be home to Christian populations with whom they could link up, were greatly disappointed to discover only Muslims and Hindu “idolaters”. The broader problem, however, was that the market in the Malabar coast was already heavily saturated with Arab merchants who plied the trade routes from India to Egypt — indeed, these were precisely the middle men whom the Portuguese were hoping to outflank.

The particular flashpoint which led to conflict, therefore, were the mutual efforts of the Portuguese and the Arabs to exclude each other from the market, and the devolution to violence was rapid. A second Portuguese expedition, which arrived in 1500 with 13 ships, got the action started by seizing and looting an Arab cargo ship off Calicut; Arab merchants in the city responded by whipping up a mob which massacred some 70 Portuguese in the onshore trading post in full sight of the fleet. The Portuguese, incensed and out for revenge, retaliated in turn by bombarding Calicut from the sea; their powerful cannon killed hundreds and left much of the town (which was not fortified) in ruins. They then seized the cargo of some 10 Arab vessels along the coast and hauled out for home.

The 1500 expedition unveiled an emerging pattern and basis for Portugal’s emerging India project. The voyage was marked by significant frustration: in addition to the massacre of the shore party in Calicut, there were significant losses to shipwreck and scurvy, and the expedition had failed to achieve its goal of establishing a trading post and stable relations in Calicut. Even so, the returns — mainly spices looted from Arab merchant vessels — were more than sufficient to justify the expense of more ships, more men, and more voyages. On the shore, the Portuguese felt the acute vulnerability of their tiny numbers, having been overwhelmed and massacred by a mob of civilians, but the power of their cannon fire and the superiority of their seamanship gave them a powerful kinetic tool.

Big Serge, “The Rise of Shot and Sail”, Big Serge Thought, 2024-09-13.

December 16, 2024

The academic battle over the legacy of the British Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Washington Examiner, Yuan Yi Zhu reviews The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British Colonialism edited by Alan Lester:

… the story fitted awkwardly with the new dominant historical narrative in Britain, according to which the British Empire was an unequivocally evil institution whose lingering miasma still corrupts not only its former territories but also modern-day Britain.

When Kipling lamented, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” he was not being elegiac as much as describing a statistical fact. Contrary to modern caricatures, apart from episodic busts of enthusiasm, Britons were never very interested in their empire. At its Victorian peak, the great public controversies were more likely to be liturgical than imperial. In 1948, 51% of the British public could not name a single British colony; three years later, the figure had risen to 59%. Admittedly, this was after Indian independence, but it should not have been that hard. Proponents of the “imperial miasma” theory are right in saying that British people are woefully ignorant about their imperial past; but that was the case even when much of the world was colored red.

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is a collection of essays edited by Alan Lester, an academic at the University of Sussex who has been at the forefront of the cultural conflict over British imperialism on the “miasma” side — though, like all combatants, he denies being a participant. Indeed, one of the book’s declared aims is to show that its contributors are not engaged in cultural warring.

Their nemesis, whose name appears 376 times in this book (more often than the word “Britain”) is Nigel Biggar, a retired theologian and priest at the University of Oxford. In 2017, Biggar began a project to study the ethics of empire alongside John Darwin, a distinguished imperial historian. The now-familiar academic denunciations then came along, and Darwin, on the cusp of a quiet retirement, withdrew from the project.

Lester was not part of the initial assault on Biggar but has since then emerged as his most voluble critic. He disclaims any political aims, protesting that he and his colleagues are engaged in a purely scholarly enterprise, based on facts and the study of the evidence.

Yet some of Lester’s public interventions — he recently described a poll showing that British people are less proud of their history than before as an “encouraging sign” — are hard to square with this denial. Biggar, by contrast, is refreshingly honest that his aims are both intellectual and political. I must add that both men are serious scholars, which is perhaps why neither has been able to decisively bloody the other in their jousts.

[…]

“What about slavery?” asks Dubow’s Cambridge colleague Bronwen Everill. Unfortunately, her four pages, which read like a last-minute student essay, do not enlighten us. The most she can manage is to point to an 18th-century African monarch abolishing the slave trade as evidence that the British do not deserve any plaudits for their abolitionist efforts across the world, whose cost has been estimated at 1.8% of its gross domestic product over a period of 60 years.

Meanwhile, Abd al Qadir Kane, Everill’s abolitionist monarch, only objected to the enslavement of Muslims but not to slavery generally, his progressive reputation resting mainly on the misunderstandings of Thomas Clarkson, an overenthusiastic English abolitionist. (Either cleverly or lazily, Everill quotes Clarkson’s misleading account, thus avoiding the need to engage with the historiography on Islamic slavery in Africa.)

Everill’s central argument is that abolitionism allowed Britain to rove the world as a moral policeman and to overthrow rulers who refused to abolish slavery. It is never clear, however, why this was morally bad. If anything, Britain did not go far enough: Well into the 1960s, British representatives still manumitted slaves on an ad hoc basis in its Gulf protectorates, when the moral thing would have been to force their rulers to abolish slavery, at gunpoint if necessary.

December 2, 2024

Mars? Yes, Mars.

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses the pros and cons of colonizing Mars:

… we’re on the good timeline now.

Not everyone appreciates the good timeline. A persistent current of discourse holds that we shouldn’t go to Mars, that it is a misbegotten ambition, unrealistic, unprofitable, and even counterproductive. “Antarctica would be easier”, they say, “We should start there if we start anywhere”. Mars is too difficult; the technology doesn’t exist; it’s fantastically expensive, with no conceivable profit to be derived from a frigid desert littered with dead rocks, where the clouds themselves are made of red dust, where the air is too thin and toxic to breathe, where nothing can possibly grow. Therefore, they pronounce, we shouldn’t go. We shouldn’t even try to go. We should use our limited resources to solve our pressing problems down here on Earth – climate change, poverty, racism, the gender pay gap, the refusal of the chuds to use the correct pronouns.

Leave aside that if Europeans had waited to solve Europe’s problems, they never would have left.

Leave aside that “we” aren’t doing anything. Some people will use their resources to try this audacious thing; others will use their resources to do other things. The oft-heard phrasing of “we” presupposes that “our” resources are a collective property, their usage to be decided on the basis of utilitarian calculations carried out, presumably, by panels of self-selected technocratic experts. That collective ownership and central planning has been calamitous every time it has been applied in earnest is no barrier to the appeal of the idea over a great many minds.

Leave aside also the economic case for Martian settlement. That case has been made, and made well, by Devon Eriksen in his essay “The Trillionaires of Mars“.

Briefly, Mars is valuable because its shallow gravity well and proximity to the asteroid belt provides an ideal planetary surface on which to build the industrial infrastructure necessary to refine asteroids into useful metals and finished manufactured products, which can then be sent back to the terrestrial market (or shipped elsewhere in the solar system). As to the comparisons to Antarctica, planetary scientist Peter Hague
has addressed this in detail.

As Hague points out, Antarctica’s geography means that it receives a vanishingly small amount of solar radiation (and during the winter, none at all). In contrast, while Mars’ greater distance from the Sun (an average of 1.5 Astronomical Units) means that it only gets about 44% of Earth’s irradiance, this is still a lot more than Antarctica. Growing crops is a lot easier on Mars than it is on Antarctica, where it can only be done hydroponically. Setting up shop on Mars means that we can use this solar energy not only to generate electricity, but also for agriculture. On Mars, in principle, one merely mixes human waste with the regolith (after removing the perchlorates) to turn it into topsoil, puts it in a transparent dome, fills the dome with air, and plants the potatoes.

Mars is certainly the easiest extraterrestrial body in the solar system to settle, occupying a sweet spot with its combination of proximity to the Earth, low gravity, an atmosphere, and abundant local resources. It therefore makes perfect sense that it would be prioritized for colonization. It’s Level 1 in the game of becoming multiplanetary. Other bodies may offer much richer prizes in the long run, but they’re also far more challenging.

Still, pace Devon, it’s unlikely that Mars will be profitable in the short run. Even asteroid mining will, at least initially, be far more useful for in situ space manufacturing than it will be for the terrestrial market. As Eriksen points out, correctly, if you strip-mine a quadrillion-dollar asteroid of nickel, iron, and platinum group metals and ship them back to Earth all at once, you’ll just crash the value of those metals. Supply and demand 101. Then again, as Eriksen also points out, raw materials aren’t just numbers on a commodity exchange: they’re actual, physical stuff that you can use to build things, and when society has more of it, society is wealthier in real terms … something that we often forget in our hypothecated financial economy. This is a point I’ve made myself, in the context of a wider discussion about why we should fix our gaze upon the heavens, and ignore those who demand that we wallow perpetually in the mud.

November 24, 2024

How Newfoundland and Labrador lost their independence

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Geography By Geoff
Published Jul 16, 2024

Did you know that Newfoundland and Labrador were once an independent country in the same manner as Canada was? It’s true! It was called the Dominion of Newfoundland and due to a series of unfortunate events, it had to relinquish its independence. In today’s video, we cover the vast geography of the province, it’s very old history (including Vikings!) and how the country managed to lose its independence when it managed to survive on its own for decades. Oh … and we’ll also talk about why Labrador got included in the name upon confederating with Canada.
(more…)

November 17, 2024

Contrasting origin stories – the 13 Colonies versus the “Peaceful Dominion”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter outlines some of the perceived (and real) differences in the origin stories of the United States and Canada and how they’ve shaped the respective nations’ self-images:

The US had plans to invade Canada that were updated as recently as the 1930s (“War Plan Crimson”, a subset of the larger “War Plan Red” for conflict with the British Empire). Canada also had a plan for conflict with the US, although it fell far short of a full-blooded invasion to conquer the US, designated as “Defence Scheme No. 1”, developed in the early 1920s.

In perennial contrast to its tumultuous southern neighbour, Canada has the reputation of being an extremely boring country.

America’s seeds were planted by grim Puritans seeking a blank slate on which to inscribe the New Jerusalem, and by aristocratic cavaliers who wanted to live the good life while their slaves worked the plantations growing cash crops for the European drug trade. The seeds of America’s hat were planted by fur traders gathering raw materials for funny hats.

America was born in the bloody historical rupture of the Revolutionary War, casting off the yoke of monarchical tyranny in an idealistic struggle for liberty. Canada gained its independence by politely asking mummy dearest if it could be its own country, now, pretty please with some maple syrup on top.

America was split apart in a Civil War that shook the continent, drowning it in an ocean of blood over the question of whether the liberties on which it was founded ought to be extended as a matter of basic principle to the negro. Canada has never had a civil war, just a perennial, passive-aggressive verbal squabble over Quebec sovereignty.1

America’s western expansion was known for its ungovernable violence – cowboys, cattle rustlers, gunslingers, and Indian wars. Canada’s was careful, systematic, and peaceful – disciplined mounties, stout Ukrainian peasants, and equitable Indian treaties.

Once its conquest of the Western frontier was wrapped up, America burst onto the world stage as a vigorous imperial power, snatching islands from the Spanish Empire, crushing Japan and Germany beneath the spurred heel of its cowboy boot, and staring down the Soviet Union in the world’s longest high-stakes game of Texas Hold’Em. Canada, ever dutiful, did some stuff because the British asked nicely, and then they went home to play hockey.

America gave the world jazz music, rock and roll, and hip-hop; Canada contributed Celine Dion and Stan Rogers. America has Hollywood; Canada, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. America dressed the world in blue jeans and leather jackets; Canadians, flannel and toques. America fattened the people with McDonald’s; Canada burnt their tongues with Tim Horton’s, eh.2

The national stereotypes and mythologies of the preceding paragraphs aren’t deceptive, per se. Stereotypes are always based in reality; national mythologies, as with any successful mythology, need to be true at some level in order to resonate with the nations that they’re intended to knit together. Of course, national mythologies usually leave a few things out, emphasizing or exaggerating some elements at the expense of others in the interests of telling a good story. Revisionists, malcontents, and subversives love to pick at the little blind spots and inconsistencies that result in order to spin their own anti-narratives, intended as a rule to dissolve rather than fortify national cohesion and will. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is a good example of this kind of thing, as is Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tendentious 1619 Project.

Probably the most immediately obvious difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans don’t suffer from a permanent identity crisis. Demographic dilution due to decades of mass immigration notwithstanding, Americans by and large know who they are, implicitly, without having to flagellate themselves with endless introspective navel-gazing about what it means to be an American. The result of this is that most American media isn’t self-consciously “American”; there are exceptions, of course, such as the occasional patriotic war movie, but for the most part the stories Americans tell are just stories about people who happen to be American doing things that happen to be set in America. Except when the characters aren’t American at all, as in a historical epic set in ancient Rome, or aren’t set in America, as in a science fiction or fantasy movie. That basic American self-assurance in their identity means that Americans effortlessly possess the confidence to tell stories that aren’t about America or Americans at all, as a result of which Hollywood quietly swallowed the entire history of the human species … making it all American.

As Rammstein lamented, We’re All Living in Amerika …

Since we’re all living in Amerika, the basic background assumptions of political and cultural reality that we all operate in are American to their very core. Democracy is good, because reasons, and therefore even de facto dictators hold sham elections in order to pretend that they are “presidents” or “prime ministers” and not czars, emperors, kings, or warlords. Insofar as other countries compete with America, it’s by trying to be more American than the Americans: respecting human rights more; having freer markets; making Hollywood movies better than Hollywood can make them; playing heavy metal louder than boys from Houston can play it. It’s America’s world, and we’re all just along for the ride.

America’s hat, by contrast, is absolutely culturally paralyzed by its own self-consciousness … as a paradoxical result of which, its consciousness of itself has been almost obliterated.

Canada’s origin – the origin of Anglo-Canada, that is – was with the United Empire Loyalists who migrated into the harsh country of Upper Canada in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. As their name implies, they defined themselves by their near-feudal loyalty to the British Crown. Where America was inspired by Enlightenment liberalism, Canada was founded on the basis of tradition and reaction – Canada explicitly rejected liberalism, offering the promise of “peace, order, and good government” in contrast to the American dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

    1. Quebec very nearly left the country in a narrow 1995 referendum in which 49.5% of the province’s population voted to separate. It is widely believed in Anglo Canada that had the rest of the country been able to vote on the issue, Quebec would be its own country now.

    2. Well actually a Brazilian investment firm has Timmies, but anyhow.

November 6, 2024

QotD: “Colourism”

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A comment at The Guardian:

    which reinforce the inherently colonial practice of “colourism” – the discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone.

It’s not colonial, it’s classist. Dark skin means sun exposure. That is, someone who works for a living outside in the fields. Pale skin means someone rich enough to stay inside. Thus the bits in Jane Austem where the girls worry about their bonnets for they might get freckles.

This also changed, entirely, when work for poor people moved inside and only the rich could afford to get away for a tan. Suddenly, to have a tan – darker skin – became a mark of wealth, not poverty.

A change rather reflected in make up in fact, pre WWII (about, roughly) the aim was to powder or cream the face to be pale, pale, white. Post[-WWII] much foundation make up is to add colour, not take it away.

This also explains the popularity of sunbeds and fake tans, something which a century ago would have been quite literally unthinkable.

Colourism exists, most certainly, but that flip shows that it’s about class, not colonialism.

For the part about it that the colonialism reason cannot explain is why that flip.

That it’s about class also explains why colourism happens in places that never were colonies – Thailand say.

Tim Worstall, “Educashun”, Tim Worstall, 2020-01-12.

October 29, 2024

The slavery reparations grift – “it’s not possible for us to compensate a man for having made him better off”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The demands for reparations from Britain over the slave trade are not based on the actual history as much as emotion and selective blindness to the facts:

The Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society, by Josiah Wedgwood 1795.
British Abolition Movement via Wikimedia Commons.

No, no, stop squealing. Yes, slavery was appalling, vile, we’re all damn glad we don’t do it any more. But slave labour was not free.

We could — possibly should — look at the difference between that subsistence level that the slaves got and what free labour — not free as in at no cost, free as in free to choose — got at the same time. The answer being not much difference in fact. If we’re to believe Jason Hickel (which, of course, we shouldn’t) free labour in England got below subsistence incomes. To be Marxist, what was the expropriation from those slaves, from the value of their labour? And, well, not a hugely different amount from that of free labour at the time.

    While imperial Britain soared to sustainable economic development and global military superpower status, the enslaved and their descendants were left to this day with enduring pain, persistent poverty and systemic suffering.

This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Beckles is from Barbados. So, let us use Barbados numbers. And compare them to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The places that slaves not transported across to their servitude were freed into.

So, Hils, Matey, what is this poverty and pain you’re condemned to?

An obvious point — it’s not possible for us to compensate a man for having made him better off.

But we need to go further too. Britain did not benefit from this labour anyway. We did not then have a state controlled economy, we do not now have a state controlled economy. Britain didn’t own the slaves so it’s not Britain that — even if you can prove that there should be reparations — which should pay for owning the slaves it didn’t.

This does then rather leave the reparations argument being that Barbados — or whoever — needs to go around suing, individually, the estates of those who owned slaves. Good luck with that one.

    The so-called Slavery Abolition Act, the most racist legislation ever passed in the British parliament,

Aha, have you ever in your puff seen such a perfect perisher of an argument? That abolition of slavery itself was the most racist legislation ever?

Aha, aha, aha. Becks must have practised that one in the mirror a lot for no audience would be able to hear that without screaming in laughter.

    compensation of £20m in cash paid as reparations to the enslavers. The enslaved were valued at £47m, and the remaining amount was paid off with labour in kind for four extra years of enslavement after they were freed. They received no compensation for the theft of their labour or the denial of their human identity.

A £20 million bribe and cheap at twice the price. For that’s what it was. A bribe. One we’re still paying off today — no, Osborne did not pay it off, he issued more gilts to pay off the old ones — and I’m wholly happy to be paying my mite of that amount. Absolute damn bargain, freeing 700k people from slavery for such a trivial sum. As to the slaves, well, they gained their freedom. Which is of value. Actually, that’s rather the point, freedom has value, no?

October 11, 2024

“[T]he past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Another recommended link from the “Your Weekly Stack” set of links to interesting posts on Substack. This, like the previous post, is from an author I hadn’t read before and thought was worth sharing with you.

This is from The American Tribune, making the case that modern Americans (and westerners in general) are in a similar situation to the white minority in Rhodesia:

We stand today in the ruins of civilization. Much as the 9th Century Anglo-Saxons looked at the stone works of the Romans and thought they must have been giants,1 or the Greeks of the post-Sea Peoples Dark Age saw the works of the Minoans and Myceneans and thought only Cyclopses could have constructed such structures,2 we stare at the achievements of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in near-disbelief.

The moon hasn’t been stepped upon since the 70s. Mars remains uncolonized. Municipal infrastructure like water treatment and provision is falling apart and the government either can’t or won’t respond to natural disasters.3 Whereas we once built beautiful buildings that lasted for centuries, structures such as Chatsworth and the Horse Guards Building of Whitehall, now we have ugly structures of concrete and steel that are falling apart already.4

The situation as regards crime and squalor is even worse. As Curtis Yarvin notes in “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”:

    If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean”. I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.

So whereas Guatemala was once clean, now America’s cities are towers of concrete surrounded by piles of refuse, mobs of zombie-like drug addicts living on the streets,5 and infested with criminals of both the petty and highly violent variety. As Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. More accurately, the past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there.

In short, we, like those in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left, live in an “Empire of Dust” where much of what remains is the ruin of a prior civilization destroyed not because it didn’t work, but because the demented ideology of the present conflicted with its continued, functional existence.6

What happened? A sort of decolonization inflicted upon the Great Powers themselves — namely America, Germany, Britain, and France — after the outlying colonies had long been destroyed. The decay of law and order, the promotion of anti-white hatred, the decay of infrastructure, and the filling of positions with corrupt thugs rather than honorable gentlemen,7 all of it is more or less what happened to the colonies in the ’50s and ’60s. Further, it is similar to what happened later on in South Africa, where a collection of communists, leftists, and NGOs with like mindsets and funded by those like George Soros turned a formerly thriving civilization into what now amounts to a land like Mad Max but with more murder.8

But while the South Africanization of America is certainly an issue that we face,9 it’s not the most accurate comparison to our present problem. South Africa was, when it fell, filled with decades of racial hatred sparked by decades of apartheid that ended only then (though was somewhat overblown), something that Europe never had and nowhere in America has had in over half a century. That unique circumstance created a degree of hatred that was overpowering and, though one with which we largely disagree, understandable. We, then, are somewhat different in terms of where we are and what is happening.

October 8, 2024

Hats off to the brilliant negotiators of the Mauritian government

Filed under: Britain, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu salutes the negotiators who managed to get an amazing deal from the British government for the Chagos Islands (which contain the strategic US naval base of Diego Garcia):

In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia, affectionately known to its friends as “Dodge” and civilized people will defer things on the island to Provisional Peoples’
Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.

Donald Trump likes to brag about his prowess as a negotiator, but he has nothing on the government of Mauritius, which pulled one of history’s great diplomatic heists yesterday, when it announced that the British government had agreed to give it the Chagos Islands, which have been sovereign British territory without interruption since 1814.

To add insult to injury, not only will Mauritius gain a new colony, but it will collect large rents from the Americans for the military base on Diego Garcia, while the British government will pay hefty financial support to Mauritius (Africa’s third richest country on a per capita basis) for the honour of handing over to Mauritius one of the world’s most strategically valuable territories.

In other words, not only is Mauritius having its cake and eating it too, it has also extracted from the British taxpayer a new cake, to be savoured while it smugly lectures the world about the importance of decolonisation.

Never mind that Mauritius sold the Chagos Islands to the United Kingdom in 1965 for the-then astronomical sum of £3 million and a valuable British security guarantee. Its prime minister had described the islands as “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew … which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”, so it was no big loss.

In the 1980s, a new government changed its mind and decided to get the islands back. It alleged the British had threatened to withhold independence from Mauritius unless it agreed to sell the territory. The small problem was that every single surviving Mauritian negotiator cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care about the Chagos, whose inhabitants they regarded as half-civilised savages.

And the blackmail thesis suffered from the fact that Britain in the 1960s could not get rid of its remaining colonies fast enough — Mauritius had to wait a few more years for independence because part of its population wanted it to remain a British territory.

Mauritius then decided to wave the bloody shirt of the Chagossians, who had been callously expelled by the British to make way for the air base and dumped on Mauritius. The fact that the Mauritian treated them terribly — so terribly, in fact, that thousands of them left for the UK, the country which had deported them in the first place — was but a minor detail.

In 2019, Mauritius managed to get the International Court of Justice to say that the islands should be given to Mauritius. The ruling was not even legally binding, but Mauritius was somehow able to convince gullible Whitehall functionaries that Britain had no choice but to give the islands to Mauritius.

So far as I am aware, there is no truth to the rumour that Spain and Argentina are in negotiation with Mauritius to take over their respective territorial claims on Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

September 17, 2024

QotD: “Megacorporations” in history and fiction

Filed under: Gaming, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think it is worth stressing here, even in our age of massive mergers and (at least, before the pandemic) huge corporate profits, just how vast the gap in resources is between large states and the largest companies. The largest company by raw revenue in the world is Walmart; its gross revenue (before expenses) is around $525bn. Which sounds like a lot! Except that the tax revenue of its parent country, the United States, was $3.46 trillion (in 2019). Moreover, companies have to go through all sorts of expenses to generate that revenue (states, of course, have to go about collecting taxes, but that’s far cheaper; the IRS’s operating budget is $11.3bn, generating a staggering 300-fold return on investment); Walmart’s net income after the expenses of making that money is “only” $14.88bn. If Walmart focused every last penny of those returns into building a private army then after a few years of build-up, it might be able to retain a military force roughly on par with … the Netherlands ($12.1bn); the military behemoth that is Canada ($22.2bn US) would still be solidly out of reach. And that’s the largest company in the world!

And that data point brings us to our last point – and the one I think is most relevantly applicable for speculative fiction megacorporations – historical megacorporations (by which I mean “true” megacorps that took on major state functions over considerable territory, which is almost always what is meant in speculative fiction) are products of imperialism, produced by imperial states with limited state capacity “outsourcing” key functions of imperial rule to private entities. And that explains why it seems that, historically, megacorporations don’t dominate the states that spawn them: they are almost always products and administrative arms of those states and thus still strongly subordinate to them.

I think that incorporating that historical reality might actually create storytelling opportunities if authors are willing to break out of the (I think quite less plausible) paradigm of megacorporations dominating the largest and most powerful communities that appear so often in science fiction. What if, instead of a corporate-dominated Earth (or even a corp-dominated Near-Future USA), you set a story in a near-future developing country which finds itself under the heel of a megacorporation that is essentially an arm of a foreign government, much like the EIC and VOC? Of course that would mean leavening the anti-capitalist message implicit in the dystopian megacorporation with an equally skeptical take about the utility of state power (it has always struck me that while speculative fiction has spent decades warning about the dangers of capitalist-corporate-power, the destructive potential of state power continues to utterly dwarf the damage companies do. Which is not to say that corporations do no damage of course, only that they have orders of magnitude less capability – and proven track record – to do damage compared to strong states).

(And as an aside, I know you can make an argument that Cyberpunk 2077 does actually adopt this megacorporation-as-colonialism framing, but that’s simply not how the characters in the game world think about or describe Arasoka – the biggest megacorp – which, in any event, appears to have effectively absorbed its home-state anyway. Arasoka isn’t an agent of the Japanese government, it is rather a global state in its own right and according to the lore has effectively controlled its home government for almost a century by the time of the game.)

In any event, it seems worth noting that the megacorporation is not some strange entity that might emerge in the far future with some sort of odd and unpredictable structure, but instead is a historical model of imperial governance that has existed in the past and (one may quibble here with definitions) continues to exist in the present. And, frankly, the historical version of this unusual institution is both quite different from the dystopian warnings of speculative fiction, but also – I think – rather more interesting.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

September 7, 2024

A Nation Divided, Part One

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Japan, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Sep 2024

Join us as we unfold the post-WW2 history of Korea that resulted in political escalation and eventually a military conflict in 1950. Stay tuned for the remaining parts of this mini-series!
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September 4, 2024

The History of Barbecue

Filed under: Americas, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published May 28, 2024

Slow-cooked molasses barbecued pork with a vinegary sauce

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1839 | 1879

“Barbecue” the cooking technique has been around for a lot longer than “barbecue” the word, but it has always been a delicious way to prepare meat. This is the earliest recipe I could find for something called barbecue, and I paired it with a sauce from 40 years later that seems to me to be a precursor to vinegar-based Carolina style barbecue sauces.

The meat is super tender and falls apart. I ended up needing to cook mine for about 12 hours, but it was worth it. You really don’t need anything besides a bit of salt to go with it, but the sauce is a delicious pairing. It packs a spicy, flavorful punch, but it’s surprisingly not too vinegary.

    To Barbecue Shoat.
    Take either a hind or fore quarter, rub it well with salt, pepper, and a small portion of molasses, and if practicable, let it lie for a few hours; then rinse it clean, and wipe it dry with a cloth, and place it on a large gridiron, over a bed of clear coals. Do not barbecue it hastily, but let it cool slowly for several hours, turning it over occasionally, and basting it with nothing but a little salt-water and pepper, merely to season and moisten it a little. When it is well done, serve it without a garnish …”
    — The Kentucky Housewife by Lettice Bryan, 1839.

    As the housekeeper is sometimes hurried in preparing a dish, it will save time and trouble for her to keep on hand a bottle of meat-flavoring compounded of the following ingredients.
    2 chopped onions. 3 pods of red pepper (chopped). 2 tablespoonfuls brown sugar. 1 tablespoonful celery seed. 1 tablespoonful ground mustard. 1 teaspoonful turmeric. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. 1 teaspoonful salt. Put it all in a quart bottle and fill it up with cider vinegar.
    — Housekeeping in Old Virginia edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, 1879.

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