- Austin City Limits Kevin Williamson, Claremont Review of Books
- Boredom and the British Empire Erik Linstrum, History Today
- The little-known war crime in Tokyo Hiroaki Sato, Japan Times
- China’s “Hundred Schools of Thought” Ian Johnson, ChinaFile
British Empire
Nightcap
- A good intuitive argument for authority Michael Young, Policy of Truth
- The Cold War’s killing fields Daniel Immerwahr, the Nation
- In defence of Jeremy Corbyn Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Deeds and ghosts (imperial twilight) Gavin Jacobson, Times Literary Supplement
Afternoon Tea: “Dividing Power in the First and Second British Empires: Revisiting Durham’s Imperial Constitution”
In his Report on the Affairs of British North America, Lord Durham proposed that “internal” government be placed in the hands of the colonists themselves and that a short list of subjects be reserved for Imperial control. Janet Ajzenstat maintains that Durham did not intend to formally restrict the authority of the new colonial legislature by dividing power. This paper argues otherwise: that Durham’s recommendation fell squarely within a tradition of distinguishing between the internal and external affairs of the colony. This was the imprecise but pragmatic distinction that American colonists invoked during the Stamp Act crisis as a means of curtailing imperial authority over internal taxation while maintaining their allegiance to the British Crown. It also was a division that Charles Buller relied upon in a constitution for New South Wales that he proposed prior to sailing to Canada as Durham’s principal secretary. Durham likely was drawing upon this tradition when he made his recommendation, a distinction that began to crumble away almost immediately. In the result, Canadians inherited a robust semblance of self-government, just as colonists during the Stamp Act crisis had desired, but without the need for revolution.
This is from David Schneiderman, a law professor at the University of Toronto. Here is the link.
Afternoon Tea: “Magna Carta for the World? The Merchants’ Chapter and Foreign Capital in the Early American Republic”
This Article examines the early modern revival and subtle transformation in what is here called the merchants’ chapter of Magna Carta and then analyzes how lawyers, judges, and government officeholders invoked it in the new American federal courts and in debates over congressional power. In the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1790s, a British creditor and an American State debated the meaning and applicability of the merchants’ chapter, which guaranteed two rights to foreign merchants: free entry and exit during peacetime, without being subjected to arbitrary taxes; and, in wartime, the promise that their persons and goods would not be harmed or confiscated, unless their own king attacked and confiscated English merchants. In other words, no harm to enemy aliens, except as retaliation. Tit for tat.
The idea that reciprocity was a fundamental mechanism of international (and interpersonal) relations became something like a social science axiom in the early modern Enlightenment. Edward Coke claimed to find that mechanism in the merchants’ chapter and publicized it to lawyers throughout the emerging British Empire and beyond. Montesquieu lauded the English for protecting foreign commerce in their fundamental law, and Blackstone basked in that praise. American lawyers derived their understanding of the merchants’ chapter from these sources and then, in the early Republic, stretched the principle behind it to protect foreign capital, not just resident merchants. The vindication of old imperial debt contracts would signal to all international creditors that, in the United States, credit was safe. Federalists then invoked the chapter outside of the courts to resist Republican attempts to embargo commerce and sequester foreign credit. For Republicans, doux commerce had become the Achilles heel of the great Atlantic empires: their reliance on American trade could be used to gain diplomatic leverage without risking war. For Federalists, economic sanctions threatened not just their fiscal policy but their entire vision of an Atlantic world that increasingly insulated international capital from national politics. They all agreed, however, that the role of foreign capital in the American constitutional system was a central issue for the new and developing nation.
This is from Daniel J. Hulsebosch, a historian at NYU’s law school. Here is the link.
Nightcap
- Israel’s political balagan Michael Koplow, Ottomans & Zionists
- A summary of the rights of British America Thomas Jefferson, Avalon Project
- Studying Singapore before it was famous Frank Beyer, Asian Review of Books
- The mystic life of Hermann Hesse Philip Hensher, Spectator
Afternoon Tea: “Albert Venn Dicey and the Constitutional Theory of Empire”
In the post-1945 world, constitutionalism has transcended the nation-state, with an array of transnational arrangements now manifesting constitutional characteristics — so says a growing number of scholars. This paper reveals an earlier but largely forgotten discourse of transnational constitutionalism: the constitutional theory of the British Empire in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the work of Albert Venn Dicey, the paper shows that, when the Empire was at the height of its power and prestige, British constitutional scholars came to see the Empire as a constitutional order and project. For Dicey, a committed constitutionalist and imperialist, the central dynamic of the imperial constitutional order was balancing British constitutional principles with imperial unity. This paper focuses in particular on parliamentary sovereignty, a constitutional principle that for Dicey was both necessary for and dangerous to the Empire’s integrity. An exercise in intellectual history, the paper rethinks Dicey’s work and the constitutional tradition in which Dicey has played such an integral part, seeking to bring empire back into the picture.
This is from Dylan Lino, a legal theorist at the University of Western Australia’s Law School. Here is the link.
Afternoon Tea: “English Liberties Outside England: Floors, Doors, Windows, and Ceilings in the Legal Architecture of Empire”
We tend to think of global migration and the problem of which legal rights people enjoy as they cross borders as modern phenomena. They are not. The question of emigrant rights was one of the foundational issues in what can be called the constitution of the English empire at the beginning of transatlantic colonization in the seventeenth century. This essay analyzes one strand of this constitutionalism, a strand captured by the resonant term, ‘the liberties and privileges of Englishmen’. Almost every colonial grant – whether corporate charter, royal charter, or proprietary grant – for roughly two dozen imagined, projected, failed, and realized overseas ventures contained a clause stating that the emigrants would enjoy the liberties, privileges and immunities of English subjects. The clause was not invented for transatlantic colonization. Instead, it had medieval roots. Accordingly, royal drafters, colonial grantees, and settlers penned and read these guarantees against the background of traditional interpretations about what they meant.
Soon, however, the language of English liberties and privileges escaped the founding documents, and contests over these keywords permeated legal debates on the meaning and effects of colonization. Just as the formula of English liberties and privileges became a cornerstone of England’s constitutional monarchy, it also became a foundation of the imperial constitution. As English people brought the formula west, they gave it new meanings, and then they returned with it to England and created entirely new problems.
This is from Daniel J. Hulsebosch, a historian at NYU’s Law School. Here is a link.
Afternoon Tea: “‘Chief Princes and Owners of All’: Native American Appeals to the Crown in the Early Modern British Atlantic”
This paper uncovers these indigenous norms by looking at a little-studied legal genre: the appeals made by Native Americans to the British Crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These appeals show that they were aware of (and able to exploit) the complicated politics of the British Atlantic world for their own ends, turning the Crown against the settlers in ways they hoped would preserve their rights, and in the process becoming trans-Atlantic political actors. Focusing on three such appeals – the Narragansetts’ in the mid-seventeenth-century; the Mohegans’ which spanned the first three quarters of the eighteenth; and the Mashpee’s on the eve of the American Revolution – this paper explores the way that these Native peoples in eastern North America were able to resist the depredations of the settlers by appealing to royal authority, in the process articulating a powerful conception of their legal status in a world transformed by the arrival of the English. In doing so, it brings an indigenous voice to the debates about the legalities of empire in the early modern Atlantic world.
This is from Craig Yirush, a historian at UCLA. Here is a link.
Nightcap
- The criminal as entrepreneur Cedric Muhammad, American Affairs
- Did the British Empire depend on separating families? Sumit Guha, Not Even Past
- What does nationalism mean in a contested state? Daniel Solomon, New Republic
- ‘In the long run we are all dead’ Adam Tooze, London Review of Books
Nightcap
- Chinese view of Germany’s rise Francis Sempa, Asian Review of Books
- The lost kingdom of Kush James MacDonald, JSTOR Daily
- Purges and Paranoia in Erdoğan’s ‘new’ Turkey Ella George, London Review of Books
- The British Empire strikes back Colin Kidd, New Statesman
World War I: a pity
I will be dedicating many, if not most, of my columns at RealClearHistory to World War I over the next few months, mostly because it’s been 100 years since an armistice ended a war that was supposed to end all wars. Some of my thoughts will be heavy, but some, like this week’s, will be playful:
3. The Dervish state. This small state in the Horn of Africa was renowned throughout Europe and the Middle East for ably fending off challenges from Italians, the British, and the Ottomans during the roughly 25 years of its existence. The Dervish state openly resisted attempts at colonization during the Scramble for Africa and was recognized as a major ally by the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Being a small, independent state in the Horn of Africa, Dervish’s leaders played it smart and offered Ottoman and German troops assistance lightly, preferring instead to pay close attention to the realities of its allies’ war situation. When Istanbul and Berlin surrendered in 1918, no tears were shed by the Dervish. The state was conquered by the British Empire two years later, in 1920.
The piece is about some of the countries that played lesser roles in World War I. Please, read the whole thing. Any suggestions for next week’s column? (Bearing in mind that the theme is World War I.)
Empire effects : the case of shipping
I have been trying, for some time now, to circle an issue that we can consider to be a cousin of the emerging “state capacity” literature (see Mark Koyama’s amazing summary here). This cousin is the literature on “empire effects” (here and here for examples).
The core of the “empire effect” claim is that empires provide global order which we can consider as a public good. A colorful image would be the British Navy roaming the seas in the 19th century which meant increased protection for trade. This is why it is a parent of the state capacity argument in the sense that the latter concept refers (broadly) to the ability of a state to administer the realm within its boundaries. The empire effect is merely the extension of these boundaries.
I still have reservations about the nuances/limitations of state capacity as an argument to explain economic growth. After all, the true question is not how states consolidate, but how they create constraints on rulers to not abuse the consolidated powers (which in turn generates room for growth). But, it is easy to heavily question its parent: the empire effect.
This is what I am trying to do in a recent paper on the effects of empire on shipping productivity between 1760 and 1860.
Shipping is one of the industry that is most likely to be affected by large empires – positively or negatively. Indeed, the argument for empire effects is that they protect trade. As such, the British navy in the 19th century protected trade and probably helped the shipping industry become more productive. But, achieving empire comes at a cost. For example, the British navy needed to grow very large in size and it had to employ inputs from the private sector thus crowding-it out. In a way, if a security effect from empire emerged as a benefit, there must have been a cost. The cost we wish to highlight is the crowding-out one.
In the paper (written with Jari Eloranta of Appalachian State University and Vadim Kufenko of University of Hohenheim), I argue that, using the productivity of the Canadian shipping industry which was protected by the British Navy, the security effect from a large navy was smaller than the crowding-out from high-levels of expenditures on the navy.
While it is still a working paper which we are trying to expand and improve, our point is that what allowed the productivity of the Canadian shipping industry (which was protected by Britain) to soar was that the British Navy grew smaller in absolute terms. While the growth of the relative strength of the British Navy did bolster productivity in some of our tests, the fact that the navy was much smaller was the “thing in the mix that did the trick”. In other words, the empire effect is just the effect of a ramping-down in military being presented as something else than it truly is (at least partly).
That’s our core point. We are still trying to improve it and (as such) comments are welcomed.
An overview of India-China boundary disputes
I have a new paper that has just been published in Asian Affairs. Here is an excerpt:
Questions over the India-China border are not a new phenomenon. They are asked whenever there is a Sino-Indian state visit. Despite having close to $100 billion of trade between them, China and India have failed to bring their frontier disputes to an end. In the 1980s and 1990s it was thought that the increasing economic cooperation between the two countries would act as a prompt to resolve their political disputes, but it has not. Military stand-offs and confrontations between border guards from India and China occur at regular intervals. To address their boundary disputes, they have engaged in frequent dialogues (17 rounds of focused dialogues can be counted between 1988 and 2015), but nothing substantive has yet been yielded through such engagements.
The boundary disputes between India and China have their ultimate origin in the ‘Great Game’ played during the British Empire. At present, the two main areas of dispute along the Himalayan frontier are the western sector (Aksai Chin around 37,250 sq km/14,380 square miles) and the eastern sector (Arunachal Pradesh, around 83,740 sq km/32,330 sq mile). This article traces the roots of the boundary disputes between India and China and attempts to discuss sources of tensions and probable solutions.
The link to the whole paper can be found here [pdf].
Notes On Liberty 